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Tech News
A new device called Minimal Phone 2 is being positioned around statistics showing people average 186 phone pickups, 4.5 hours of screen time, and 152 notifications daily. The product's messaging frames modern smartphones as engineered to maximize engagement through feeds and alerts rather than genuine utility.
Telstra's mobile network suffered widespread disruption on 8 July 2026 after a single GPS receiver in a Melbourne chassis, restarting from maintenance, reverted to believing the year was 2006 and spread that false timestamp across the network. The failure knocked out voice calls, texts, and even emergency number access, while also disrupting trains, payment terminals, ticketing systems, and EV chargers. An independent review by Technology Audit Partners found no cyberattack, cut cable, or power failure was involved—just a corrupted time reference.
Wispr Advanced Interfaces Lab has released Canto, a new speech recognition model built specifically for real-time dictation in noisy, everyday conditions rather than clean studio audio. In tests using 10 hours of real Wispr Flow dictations from over 2,300 speakers, Canto posted the lowest word error rate compared with models from Google, OpenAI, AssemblyAI, and Deepgram.
A leadership analysis describes how a weekly meeting created to resolve one unusual cross-functional issue kept growing as new exceptions were added to its agenda, even after the original problem was solved. When the team tried canceling it, the standard process had no way to handle non-standard issues, so the work simply returned to the meeting.
Businesses are tracking rising leads, engagement, and sales quotas alongside faster customer service response times, yet customers remain dissatisfied despite these positive indicators. The disconnect suggests that standard departmental metrics are failing to capture the actual customer experience.
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel told the BBC his company would consider adopting default daily time limits for teenage users, echoing measures Meta agreed to in a recent $12.7bn settlement with US states. Meta had pledged two-hour daily caps, muted school-hours notifications and nighttime blocks for teens, and offered to pay an extra $5.3bn if rivals like Snap, TikTok and YouTube adopt similar restrictions.
Amazon has discounted the recently released Garmin Vivoactive 6 fitness smartwatch by 23% off its list price, marking the lowest price the device has seen since launch. The deal applies to Garmin's latest wearable, which tracks fitness and health metrics.
Apple has officially launched iOS 27 alongside an iOS 26.7 update for users who haven't upgraded, both shipping the same day with over 120 security patches. iOS 27 introduces new photo editing tools, adjustable Liquid Glass visuals, simpler location sharing, weak-password replacement, revamped Screen Time controls, and an AI-driven version of Siri that can converse and complete tasks like ChatGPT or Gemini.
Voicemod has released the Key Pocket, a USB-C hardware dongle that lets Android and iOS users apply real-time voice changing and sound effects during calls, streaming, or mobile gaming. It works as an external audio bridge, routing microphone input through Voicemod's app before passing it to other apps like Fortnite, Discord, or calling apps, sidestepping mobile OS restrictions on altering live mic audio. It costs $99.90 alone or $129.90 bundled with a lifetime Voicemod Pro license.
Apple's newly released 2027 operating system updates add a broader set of Screen Time and parental control tools tied to Child Accounts, which are mandatory for users under 13. New capabilities include simplified account setup, an 'Ask to Browse' option for requesting access to blocked websites, contact approval requirements, and customizable daily time limits and schedules for app categories like Games and Social Media.
Apple's built-in Screen Time feature lets iPhone users restrict access to distracting apps through two main tools: Downtime, which blocks all but selected apps and contacts during set hours, and App Limits, which caps daily usage for specific app categories or individual apps. Users can customize schedules by day, receive warnings before restrictions kick in, and sync these limits across all Apple devices tied to their Apple Account.
In May 2003, UW-Madison discovered its public NTP time server was being hit by a massive, sustained flood of hundreds of thousands of packets per second from hundreds of thousands of hosts worldwide. Investigation revealed this wasn't a DDoS attack but a design flaw in a popular vendor's cheap consumer routers, which mistakenly hardcoded UW-Madison's server as a time source and queried it far too aggressively.