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Tech News
At BlizzCon, Blizzard VP Dan Hay announced a new StarCraft game arriving in 2030, reimagined as an open-world shooter rather than a real-time strategy title. A cinematic trailer centered on the United Earth Directorate's clash with the Zerg was shown, with the Protoss barely featured, depicting propaganda-driven soldiers confronting the grim reality of war.
IBM is running the technical backbone of the U.S. Open's digital platforms, feeding real-time data and AI analysis into the tournament's app and website. Features like the Serve Quality metric track 21 data points per player 50 times a second, producing over 1.2 billion data points across the tournament, while an AI chatbot answers fan questions about the sport. Engagement has surged, with 14 million unique devices and nearly 47 million visits in 2025, a 19% jump from the prior year.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told CNBC he opposes any regulatory crackdown on AI model distillation, even suggesting U.S. open-weight labs should distill from American frontier labs the way Chinese firms reportedly do. His comments come as Anthropic released a report accusing Chinese labs of illicit distillation attacks using stolen credentials, with CEO Dario Amodei calling for regulators to intervene.
The Honey Deuce, a vodka-and-lemonade cocktail sold at the US Open since 2007, has become a viral social-media fixture every fall, prompting other beverage brands to try to engineer similarly buzzy signature drinks. Its staying power predates modern platforms like Instagram and TikTok, yet it continues to dominate seasonal online chatter tied to the tennis tournament.
A new open-source project called Algo-Trading-Skills packages 501 reference implementations covering algorithmic trading engineering, spanning 16 technical domains and five regulatory/exchange frameworks. Each skill is backed by unit tests (over 20,000 total) and follows the agentskills.io SKILL.md standard, making it usable by Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex CLI, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and similar tools. It's released under Apache 2.0 and explicitly framed as engineering guidance, not financial or compliance advice.
Amazon has cut the price of SHOKZ's OpenDots ONE open-ear earbuds by 30% off their retail price, saving buyers $60. This matches the lowest price the earbuds have hit since launch.
Arthur Ashe Stadium, home of the US Open, has developed a reputation as the loudest Grand Slam venue, with fans talking, moving and cheering throughout points rather than observing the hushed decorum typical of Wimbledon or Roland Garros. Contributing factors include the arena's party-like atmosphere, popular concessions like the Honey Deuce cocktail, and a younger, more casual crowd that treats matches as social events. Tournament organizers and players are now grappling with whether to preserve this energetic vibe or push for stricter etiquette enforcement.
Carlos Alcaraz and Ben Shelton played into the early morning hours at the U.S. Open, with the contest wrapping up at 3:33 a.m. and setting a new record for the latest finish in the tournament's history. Fans who stayed to watch the entire match faced the prospect of getting little sleep before work or other obligations the next day.
A public disagreement has broken out over credit and validation claims tied to an OpenAI mathematics model achievement, with researchers and commentators contesting how the results were presented and verified. The clash highlights tension between traditional academic norms of open peer review and the competitive, secrecy-driven culture increasingly surrounding commercial AI labs.
Golfer Shane Lowry has teamed up with medical technology company Stryker after caring for his father, Brendan, through hip and knee replacement surgeries using Stryker devices. The partnership aims to highlight the often-overlooked role of caregivers and support families navigating similar journeys, according to Stryker's Joint Replacement division president Katherine Truppi.
Switzerland's Federal Chancellery is spending 9 million Swiss francs to move 3,000 government workstations off Microsoft 365 tools like Outlook and Teams, adopting the open-source openDesk suite instead. The decision follows a successful pilot program called PoC BOSS, which tested the software with 172 federal employees who found it workable for standard office tasks, though large-scale video conferencing showed some limitations. The rollout is planned to be complete by the end of 2027, with potential to expand further across the federal workforce.
Asus' Cetra Open wireless gaming earbuds are on sale for $22 off at Amazon and Best Buy, dropping the price to $206.99. It's the first discount the open-style earbuds have received since launch.