Apple revised its App Review Guidelines to add explicit protections against AI-generated nonconsensual intimate imagery, anonymous bullying, and apps that disguise their true function to evade review—such as gambling platforms masquerading as games. The update follows reports from the Tech Transparency Project, San Francisco officials, and 9to5Mac documenting nudify apps, hidden betting platforms, and the Grok chatbot controversy involving nonconsensual sexualized images.
The KDE project has released Plasma 6.8, its latest desktop environment update, timed to coincide with the project's 30-year milestone. The release includes VRAM usage optimizations, dwell clicker support on Wayland, Wayland commit-timing protocol support for KWin, multi-GPU and multi-monitor improvements, server-side drop shadow support, a new kscreenctl tool, and better remote desktop handling. KDE also released a free documentary on YouTube chronicling the project's history as an open-source alternative to proprietary desktops.
Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf told CNBC the company grew strongly under the Biden administration and said its contract wins are based on merit, not political ties. The comments follow scrutiny of co-founder Palmer Luckey's appointment to the Pentagon's Project Meridian group days before Anduril secured a shipyard contract worth up to $2.9 billion, on top of a $20 billion DOD deal won in March.
A robotics project has secured $9 million in funding to develop a small robot designed to survey sewage infrastructure. The device is intended to inspect pipes and detect problems in underground sewer systems without extensive excavation.
NorthPoint Development's planned Amazon Web Services data center campus, dubbed 'Project Hazelnut,' includes an offer of $10,000 in direct cash to every resident of Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. Despite the payout, residents are organizing against both the data center and the associated transmission lines needed to power it, according to PennLive reporting.
Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led development of the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions at MIT, has died aged 90. She is widely credited with coining the term 'software engineering' and later founded companies building programming systems used in aerospace, defence and other industries.
CedarDB, a Munich-based database startup spun out of Technical University of Munich research project Umbra, builds a database engine designed to handle both transactional and analytical workloads in one system. The company, led by cofounder and CEO Moritz Sichert, built CedarDB to be compatible with PostgreSQL to minimize switching costs for enterprise customers.
Xbox has pointed to recent community projects, including jailbroken PlayStation 5 units and a browser port of Halo, as evidence of consumer interest in modding. The company suggests this trend could become a relevant use case for its Project Helix initiative, though specific product plans were not detailed.
Satlyt, a startup founded by former Google and SpaceX engineer Rama Afullo, has raised an $8 million seed round and is launching its satellite-based AI software on a SpaceX rocket this Thursday. The same launch carries the first prototype for Google's Project Suncatcher, its own orbital data center initiative. Satlyt doesn't build its own satellites; instead it makes software that lets AI models run across other companies' spacecraft, using fewer ground-based flight controllers.
Google has started a wider rollout of its Gemini 4 Argon model in the Gemini app and Antigravity coding tool, restricting access to paying subscribers, with lower-tier plans not getting full capabilities. The company says the model's reasoning and safety features, including a misalignment monitor, remain unchanged from benchmarks published last month. Google cited internal uses, including efficiency gains on YouTube's comment system and bug discoveries in Project Wing's drone simulator, as evidence of Argon's capabilities.
Mind Robotics, the secretive robotics spinoff founded by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe in 2025, has named Doug Field as its president. Field previously led Apple's Project Titan car effort, served as Tesla's chief vehicle engineer during Model 3 development, and most recently ran Ford's electric vehicle and software division until earlier this year. Mind Robotics has raised over $1 billion and says it is building robots intended for use in Rivian's factories and other applications.
A report examines whether open-weight AI models pose greater security risks than closed models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. It notes that closed models are also frequently misused despite stronger built-in defenses, while open models can be more easily scrutinized by outside researchers and used for cyber defense, as seen when Hugging Face relied on an open model to investigate a hack after closed models' security filters blocked its queries.
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