At Meta Connect 2026, Meta detailed its first VR glasses, a 100-gram, tethered headset priced at $1,300 and slated to launch next spring. The device uses a magnesium alloy frame, pancake lenses, a 5K display, full-color passthrough, and runs on Qualcomm's Snapdragon Reality Elite chip housed in a separate puck that also holds battery and storage, offering up to three hours of playback. It launches with 75 games, compatibility with existing Quest titles via Touch Plus controllers, Xbox Cloud Gaming streaming, PC/Mac productivity features, and holographic avatar video calling on apps like WhatsApp and Zoom.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-24
Alibaba Cloud has launched Qwen Image 2.1, an open-weight image generation model with only 7 billion parameters, small enough to run on older consumer GPUs like the RTX 3090. The model adds native transparent-background generation and can combine up to 10 reference images into a single consistent output, and Alibaba's own benchmarks claim it outperforms closed models including Google's Nano Banana 2.0. Unlike its predecessor, the new licensing terms bar commercial resale without a separate agreement from Alibaba.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-23
Cryptomator is an open-source tool that creates encrypted vaults on a user's device, encrypting individual files and their filenames with AES-256 before they sync to services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, pCloud, Nextcloud and ownCloud. It also works offline for local drives, USB storage and network folders, and has apps for Android and iOS. Users can create a recovery key to reset a lost vault password, since Cryptomator itself cannot decrypt files or recover passwords.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-23
Apple Music users encountering grayed-out songs are often dealing with either an offline device or a track that has been pulled from the catalog due to licensing changes, according to a troubleshooting guide. The music industry's territorial licensing system means labels and artists can remove songs or restrict them by region, leaving no option for users or Apple to restore access. The guide recommends checking a track's Cloud Status in Apple Music or iTunes, which flags songs as 'No Longer Available,' showing a sync exclamation mark, or 'Waiting' if syncing is incomplete.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-22
Verda, a Finland-based AI cloud infrastructure company, closed an oversubscribed $189 million Series B round led by Emergence Capital, with backing from MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance, Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders, Tesi, and several angel investors. The round pushes Verda's total funding past $450 million in combined equity and debt, and values the company at unicorn status, making it one of Europe's newest billion-dollar startups.
verda.com
· 2026-09-22
Alibaba shares rose about 3% in Hong Kong after the company revealed its next-generation Zhenwu V900 AI chip, claiming triple the performance of its predecessor released in May. At its Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba also outlined plans to grow its cloud unit's global data center capacity beyond 20 gigawatts by 2032 and confirmed its Qwen 4 model is currently in training.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-22
Weather modification startup Rainmaker has secured $100 million in Series B funding from investors including NOA VC, Upfront Ventures, DCVC, Lowercarbon Capital, and Dream Ventures. The company, led by founder Augustus Doricko, uses drones for cloud seeding to generate rain and snow, and plans to expand operations to new locations following successful test flights in Alaska.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-21
Apple's overhauled Siri AI, rolling out as a beta through a waitlist in iOS 27, promises richer answers, personal context search through messages and notes, and onscreen awareness. Despite these upgrades, users on social media report recurring problems including network errors that produce a vague 'Sorry, something went wrong' message and failures to locate reminders, lists or alarms that the older Siri handled without issue.
9to5mac.com
· 2026-09-20
A screenshot circulated online showing the US Federal Register's search interface offering Alibaba Cloud's Qwen3:0.6B language model as a search option alongside the default semantic search. About a day after the screenshot spread, the Qwen options disappeared from the site, though an archived snapshot from September 16 confirms they existed.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-20
Security researchers warn that attackers can gain lasting access to SaaS and cloud accounts simply by tricking a logged-in user into approving a malicious OAuth application, sidestepping passwords, malware, and multifactor authentication entirely. Once granted, these app permissions can let attackers read email, browse files, pull source code, or touch CI/CD systems through legitimate API access until the tokens or grants are revoked.
darkreading.com
· 2026-09-18
A Wire survey found that 61% of security leaders say access to shared files in Microsoft 365 often stays active far longer than intended, while more than a third struggle to even identify who currently has access to sensitive shared content. The report points to routine sharing habits—like adding freelancers to SharePoint folders or inviting new members into Teams channels—as common ways access quietly persists beyond its original purpose.
bleepingcomputer.com
· 2026-09-18
In a discussion moderated by Fast Company's Harry McCracken, CoreWeave cofounder and CEO Mike Intrator explained why traditional cloud computing, built to handle diverse general-purpose workloads, is insufficient for AI's demands. He outlined how CoreWeave has approached infrastructure and software design from scratch to meet AI's unique computational and physical requirements.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-17
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