KaribuKit, a hotel booking system built by the operator of Mara Hilltop lodge, discovered that a misconfigured 'pgbouncer=true' setting in Prisma's Supabase connection had forced every database query to make four network round-trips instead of one since March. Fixing the setting cut the availability check on the booking page from 8.06 seconds to 1.88 seconds. The discovery came the same night the team also fixed an unrelated crash caused by an image preloader overwhelming memory on mobile Safari.
Analyst Mark Gurman reports Apple's roadmap through early 2027 includes three new iPhones—the iPhone 18, iPhone Air 2, and budget iPhone 18e—all built around an A20 chip, with the Air 2 gaining a second ultra-wide camera. The plans also cover refreshed iPads, including an OLED iPad Air and a budget model for students, new Apple Pencils, updated MacBook Air laptops, and a MacBook Neo successor.
Italian startup Exein raised $270 million led by Headline, valuing the Rome-based cybersecurity firm at $1.7 billion. The company, which secures over 2 billion connected devices across sectors like aerospace, automotive and healthcare, is expanding its focus from IoT to protecting physical AI systems such as robots, drones and self-driving cars.
Microsoft's .NET 11 release delivers another round of performance engineering across the runtime and core libraries, building on prior years' optimization work. The improvements include eliminated bounds checks, reduced allocations, and other low-level fixes aimed at making applications run measurably faster without requiring code changes from developers.
The Verge's podcast Version History kicked off its fifth season with an episode tracing how The Oregon Trail became a staple of classroom computing for decades. Host David Pierce spoke with gaming journalist Chris Grant and Philip Bouchard, who led design on the game's most well-known edition, about its academic roots and cultural staying power. The season will continue with episodes on other educational tech touchstones like the TI-84 calculator, One Laptop Per Child, Chromebook, LeapPad, and overhead projectors.
Apple's newest Watch models introduce Live Rewind and Siri Recap, two audio-intelligence tools that use the device's microphone to transcribe missed dialogue and summarize conversations. Because they capture speech from everyone nearby, not just the wearer, the features could run afoul of two-party consent laws in several US states, even though Apple says no audio is stored or made replayable to other people.
In late 2003, Tesla cofounder Martin Eberhard borrowed AC Propulsion's tZero electric roadster from Alan Cocconi to demonstrate its performance to Silicon Valley investors, including a staged event at Buck's restaurant in Woodside. Eberhard would have VCs try to touch the dashboard as he floored the accelerator, showcasing acceleration so forceful that riders were pinned back in their seats, leaving some doubting the car was truly electric.
OpenAI and Anthropic executives have begun publicly urging caution about AI's risks even as their companies pursue trillion-dollar valuations, prompting MIT Technology Review to examine what a real slowdown would look like and whether the industry's own calls for restraint can be trusted. The publication is also hosting a subscriber roundtable discussing the credibility of AI extinction fears, once considered fringe but now voiced by researchers within top labs.
Cindy Cohn and Bruce Schneier trace how post-9/11 mass surveillance infrastructure, originally justified for counterterrorism, has expanded into routine domestic policing, immigration enforcement by ICE, and private security systems like facial recognition and license plate readers. They highlight that government agencies increasingly rely on private companies' data—including purchasing information directly from data brokers, as confirmed by FBI Director Kash Patel—rather than going through traditional legal channels.
A new State of Open Source AI report from Mozilla, shared with Ars ahead of its September 15 release, finds that top open-weights models from Chinese developers now perform nearly on par with closed frontier models from US firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. It cites Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 scoring only three points below Anthropic's Fable 5 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, despite costing roughly 30 percent as much to run.
Director Eugene Kotlyarenko's new film, screened at TIFF 2026, follows a disgraced influencer played by Cole Sprouse who travels to Tokyo to sell rare vintage Levi's and gets tangled up with yakuza scammers. The movie stands out by constantly showing characters' phone screens and livestreams onscreen, mimicking the experience of being perpetually online while blending comedy with bloody, Miike-style violence.
A new CDC report finds that roughly 72% of American adults regularly experience fatigue, making it one of the most widespread health complaints nationwide. Researchers link this fatigue to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and cognitive difficulties among those affected.
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