Podcasts

AI hallucinations nearly sparked an international crisis, Google dodged a breakup but faces new rules, and Meta's personal AI agent might be about to run your life. This week's episode ponders what's pragmatic, what's dangerous, and what's coming for everything from privacy to geopolitics.

• Judge Orders Data Sharing and Other Fixes to Solve Google's Ad Tech Monopoly
• US judge signals rejection of part of TikTok privacy settlement
• AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US military attack
• For the first time, the US military confirms it has deployed weapons in orbit
• OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of 'Concerning' A.I. Behavior
• Why AI pacing has become a false choice
• Iran and China Create First-of-Their-Kind Autonomous A.I. Influence Campaigns
• Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera. Its Data Shows How the System Really Works
• Senate Votes to Block Crypto Bill in Major Blow to the Industry
• The EU Bans Social Media For Under-13s
• 'Maybe a year': Geoffrey Hinton gives the Senate a deadline on AI
• ZuckOff Is a Free App That Sees Meta Glasses Before They See You

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Owen Thomas, Jason Hiner, and Dan Patterson

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joel marches on.

Are we charging toward a Krell-style catastrophe with AI, arming ourselves with incomprehensible power while missing the real risks lurking beneath the code?

• Worried Anthropic researchers warn that AI 'could kill all humans'
• Anthropic Researchers Raise Alarm Over A.I. Acceleration, Warning of Threat to Humanity
• Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic
• Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• New Apple Watches to get Siri AI 'Recaps' feature similar to AI wearables
• Apple Unveils the iPhone Duo, a Foldable Phone That Costs $1,999
• Key App Developers Have Yet to Embrace Apple's New Siri A.I.
• Why this month's Microsoft patch release is a doozy
• LG TV shown scanning LAN for third-party phones and other devices
• LG's Response
• The Flock backlash is coming for retail
• Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras
• A Secretive DHS 'Predictive Policing' Unit is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over
• Clearview AI Is Testing an AI Tool That Would Let Cops Unearth Your Life Online
• Some of Dyson's $500 toothbrushes are breaking
• iRobot unveils the Roomba Duo
• Husqvarna gets the first exception to the FCC's foreign robot ban for its mowers.

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1096-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.

You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page.

For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

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AI insiders are warning that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity within the decade, but is this a real threat or a convenient narrative serving Silicon Valley's biggest players? Tune in as the panel untangles fact from hype and digs into the power plays shaping AI's future.

• Worried Anthropic researchers warn that AI 'could kill all humans'
• Anthropic Researchers Raise Alarm Over A.I. Acceleration, Warning of Threat to Humanity
• Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic
• Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• New Apple Watches to get Siri AI 'Recaps' feature similar to AI wearables
• Apple Unveils the iPhone Duo, a Foldable Phone That Costs $1,999
• Key App Developers Have Yet to Embrace Apple's New Siri A.I.
• Why this month's Microsoft patch release is a doozy
• LG TV shown scanning LAN for third-party phones and other device
• The Flock backlash is coming for retail
• Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras
• A Secretive DHS 'Predictive Policing' Unit is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over
• Clearview AI Is Testing an AI Tool That Would Let Cops Unearth Your Life Online
• Some of Dyson's $500 toothbrushes are breaking
• iRobot unveils the Roomba Duo
• Husqvarna gets the first exception to the FCC's foreign robot ban for its mowers.

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Mikah Sargent, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, and Daniel Rubino

Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech

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In this episode, Ray Cochrane devotes the whole show to Apple’s fall event, the first under new CEO John Ternus. He starts with the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable iPhone. From there, he covers the Apple Watch Series 12, the new Health Age score, the Apple Watch Ultra 4, and AirPods 5 with noise canceling at $129.

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Full Summary

Cochrane opens from his father’s studio in Michigan, fresh off a trip to Saugatuck Dunes State Park. Lake Michigan stunned him because it looked like the ocean. He had hoped to spot Wisconsin across the water. However, overcast skies and fog hid the far shore.

He also apologizes for the hum in the previous episode, his first video session in the studio. Without headphones on, he took the noise for ordinary background sound. The culprit turned out to be a line-level cable plugged in at one end and loose at the other. After tracing it, he rewired the whole desk so every cable is neat and out of harm’s way.

Meanwhile, he is still learning the studio’s TriCaster switcher and working on keeping his eyes on the camera. He invites listeners to send suggestions. Additionally, his grandmother had trouble finding the video version on the site. As a result, a site update is coming that uses the alternate enclosure feature, so listeners can switch between video and audio.

Time with his grandmother has been a highlight of the trip. Cochrane reflects on how little time he spent with this side of the family after his father moved to Michigan. Next, he flies home to Oregon after some time in Detroit. As the move comes together, he also wants a better way to get recordings off the TriCaster than a USB drive.

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iPhone Duo: Apple’s First Foldable Arrives Seven Years After Samsung

Instead of a spread of headlines, the whole episode covers Apple’s fall event, much like Chris’s recent D23 episode. The event streamed Wednesday as a pre-recorded film. It was also the first event under CEO John Ternus. He took over from Tim Cook, who became executive chairman, on September 1st.

It took Apple seven years to answer Samsung’s first Galaxy Fold. Even so, the price barely moved, since the Duo starts at $1,999. Cochrane admits he hoped for something closer to $1,400. Still, based on the marketing alone, the Duo is the upgrade he is most excited about.

The Duo is a book-style foldable that opens along a vertical hinge. Closed, it has a 5.4-inch outer screen and is roughly the size of a passport. Open, it reveals a 7.6-inch display, the largest Apple has put on an iPhone. Both screens share the same proportions, so apps simply scale up to fill the bigger screen.

Opened flat, the Duo is just 5.2 millimeters thick, which makes it the thinnest iPhone Apple has built. Closed, it measures 11.3 millimeters and weighs 254 grams. By comparison, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 is lighter and thinner at 201 grams and 4.5 millimeters open.

The Crease, the Hinge and the Return of Touch ID

The crease was Cochrane’s biggest worry, since it is the most common complaint about folding phones. Apple layers the inner screen with a flexible plastic cover, thin glass, and a titanium plate underneath. Custom adhesives let those layers slide as the phone bends. On top, a microscopically etched matte finish scatters reflections to hide the crease.

However, Apple only claims the crease is harder to see, not gone. Early hands-on reports split down the middle. Chance Miller at 9to5Mac found it “hard to notice a crease at most angles.” In contrast, Andrew Romero at 9to5Google, working from early videos, said it looks “just as visible” as on Samsung’s Fold8.

The hinge uses more than a hundred parts and a row of magnets to hold the phone shut. Cochrane says it snaps open cleanly, which a $2,000 phone should. Notably, the Duo carries an IP68 rating, surviving six meters of water for up to 30 minutes. That matters on a foldable, because dust in the hinge is a classic way these phones die.

The Duo also has no Face ID. Instead, a Touch ID fingerprint reader sits in the side button and works open or closed. Cochrane offers his own theory for the switch. With AI now able to generate convincing faces and video, a fingerprint may simply be the safer biometric.

Inside the Duo: Chip, Cameras, Software and Battery

The Duo runs the A20 Pro, the same chip as the iPhone 18 Pro, built on a two-nanometer process. A vapor chamber carries heat away so the phone can hold full speed longer. Cochrane welcomes that, since his own phone runs hot while charging or running demanding apps.

Two 48-megapixel cameras sit on the back, a main and an ultra-wide. The outer screen unlocks the new tricks. For example, you can shoot selfies with the rear cameras, and Duo Preview lets your subjects see the shot. Smart Take snaps the photo when everyone is posing, and Kid Cue plays Peanuts animations to get kids to look at the camera.

On the software side, the Duo ships with iOS 27.1. The Dynamic Island now runs vertically along the side, and Split View puts two apps side by side for the first time on an iPhone. Netflix, Zoom and Slack already support it.

The Duo carries two batteries, one in each half, and Apple rates it for up to 24 hours of typical use. Charging to 50 percent takes about 20 minutes with a 60-watt adapter. However, that adapter is sold separately, which Cochrane calls out as a raw deal for first-time buyers. MagSafe and Qi2 wireless charging run at up to 25 watts.

Storage starts at 256GB for $1,999 and climbs to $3,199 for 2TB. Preorders open October 16th, and the Duo reaches stores October 23rd. Ternus called it “the most transformational change to iPhone since the original.” Cochrane still wants one, though the price gives him pause, and he asks listeners whether they plan to buy.

Apple Watch Series 12 Checks Your Heart Every Five Seconds

Next, Cochrane turns to the Apple Watch Series 12 and its new Health Sensing System. The watch reads your pulse by shining green light into your skin and measuring what bounces back. After wrestling with the technical term, photoplethysmography, he notes that everyone sensibly calls it the optical sensor.

Apple made those lights bigger and more efficient. As a result, the watch now checks your heart rate every five seconds, all day. It also measures heart rate variability, the tiny wobble between beats, as often as every five minutes. A bigger wobble generally means your body is rested and recovered.

Cochrane loved Apple’s swimming ad, where a swimmer finishes his swim and checks his heart rate. To him, it feels far more futuristic than the rugged adventure watches of twenty years ago. Swim tracking itself isn’t new. What changed is the constant background check and a live heart rate readout on the watch face.

All of that feeds a new daily readiness score from zero to ten. It weighs your recent activity, training load, vitals and sleep, then updates through the day. Engadget points out that competitors already offer readiness scores and faster sampling. In Cochrane’s view, Apple is catching up to the market, but doing it in a big way.

Apple’s Heart Rate Accuracy Study

Apple claims no wearable reads heart rate more accurately, and this time it published the study. Testers wore a Series 12 on one wrist and a rival on the other, with a Polar H10 chest strap as the reference. The rivals came from Garmin, Google, Huawei, Samsung, WHOOP and Oura.

Across 1,254 people at five sites, Apple led in 139 of 159 comparisons. Eighteen were too close to call. The only two losses went to Google’s Pixel Watch 4 at rest, by less than half a beat per minute. Cochrane appreciated that a fifth of participants had the darkest skin tones, where optical sensors have historically struggled.

The Series 12 comes in 42- and 46-millimeter sizes, including a new ceramic version. Battery life holds at 24 hours, and fifteen minutes of charging now buys up to twelve hours. Pricing starts at $399 for aluminum, $699 for titanium and $899 for ceramic. It reaches stores September 18th.

Health Age and Apple’s Rebuilt Health App

Cochrane admits he first misread this feature, and he is glad his initial read turned out wrong. Apple is rebuilding the Health app around Apple Intelligence, its umbrella name for its AI features. The app adds an Insights tab, a For You section, and a Longevity tab covering seven areas of health.

Sumbul Desai, a physician who runs health and fitness at Apple, framed the goal. She said pairing the watch’s sensors with Apple Intelligence lets Apple “translate complex biometric data into clear guidance for users.” In other words, nobody wants to scroll through a spreadsheet of their own heartbeats.

Inside the Longevity tab sits Health Age. It weighs your VO2 max, resting heart rate, sleep, and heart rate variability against your real age. You can also add lab results like A1c and LDL cholesterol. Apple’s sample screen shows a body running 3.9 years younger than its birthday.

Cochrane finds the feature interesting, and he hopes the data stays private, much like health records at a hospital. However, Apple didn’t share the math behind Health Age. He would like Apple to publish its formula, because people will take a number like that seriously.

The new app also adds at-home movement evaluations using the iPhone camera and the watch. Users can book a $119 blood panel covering more than 50 biomarkers at roughly 2,000 Quest Diagnostics locations. Cycle Tracking gains perimenopause and menopause support. The redesigned app arrives later this year, while watchOS 27 lands September 14th.

Finally, Cochrane raises a concern about all this monitoring. He hopes Apple built strong safeguards around the health data, because a leak of data like this would bring serious lawsuits.

Apple Watch Ultra 4 Can Outlast a 100-Mile Race

The Apple Watch Ultra 4 shares nearly everything with the Series 12, from the sensors to the S11 chip. This year, what sets it apart is stamina. Normal use now reaches 50 hours, up from 42, and Low Power Mode stretches to 84. Meanwhile, fifteen minutes on the charger buys up to 18 hours, where last year’s model managed 12.

A new Max Extended Workout mode tracks up to 45 hours of running or hiking, with GPS logging every second. Apple says that is typically enough to finish a 100-mile race. The watch also uses dual-frequency GPS, which listens to two satellite signals to reject readings bounced off tall buildings.

DC Rainmaker came away impressed with both watches. As Ray Maker put it, “I’d argue they’re the biggest leaps in Apple Watch hardware and features since they launched the Ultra series back a few years ago.” The Ultra 4 holds at $799 and ships September 18th.

Audio Intelligence and the Always-Listening Question

Both new watches also gain a set of listening features Apple calls Audio Intelligence. Sound Recognition alerts deaf or hard-of-hearing users to sirens, alarms, doorbells, or a crying baby. Shazam names nearby songs without being asked. Then come the two raising eyebrows: Live Rewind and Siri Recap.

Live Rewind shows the last fifteen seconds of your conversation as text with a double press of the Digital Crown. Siri Recap hands you a title and key points after a conversation, leaving out financial details and ID numbers. Both arrive in beta later this year, in English first, and need an iPhone 16 or newer.

Cochrane saw the pushback coming. To replay fifteen seconds, the watch has to be listening before you ask. Apple answers with privacy promises, including that everything is opt-in and raw audio is deleted after processing on the chip. Still, he argues that opting in means choosing to give up privacy, and he has a hard time believing the processing stays on the device.

AirPods 5 Bring Noise Canceling to $129

AirPods 5 comes in two versions, and the headline is price. Until now, noise cancellation in the regular AirPods cost $179. Both AirPods 5 models include it, starting at $129.

Noise canceling is harder in the regular AirPods, because they lack the rubber tips that seal your ear. Apple’s AirPods marketing director Eric Treski admitted as much in 2024, calling it “really, really hard to create this great ANC quality in a non-ear-tip product.” Nevertheless, Apple says AirPods 5 removes up to 50 percent more outside noise than AirPods 4 with noise canceling.

Interestingly, the chip and microphones are unchanged. The gain comes from reworked vents and ports in the shell, plus smarter software. For perspective, Apple says AirPods Pro 3 still cancel up to three times more noise. Gizmodo found AirPods 5 “did a good job silencing the background noise, but not entirely.”

The $129 model charges over USB-C. For $149, you add a wireless charging case, a Find My speaker, a volume swipe on the stem, and an extra hour of listening. Both models also carry an IP57 rating and support Live Translation. They reach stores September 18th.

How Apple Filmed the Event

Cochrane closes by praising the production itself. Apple built different scenes and backgrounds throughout the film, and Six Colors noted a Hollywood backlot segment with a fake rainstorm, Roman soldiers, and astronauts. The closing card read “Shot on iPhone. Edited on Mac.”

He still hopes to get an iPhone Duo, though he isn’t sure about paying two grand. For now, he may stick with his current phone.

Cochrane wraps up by pointing listeners to the GNC Insider program, the newsletter, and podcastapps.com, adding that he likes Pocket Casts. Listeners can reach Ray or Chris at geeknews@gmail.com. He flies back to Oregon next, with another audio episode planned for Monday and a video site update coming this week.

The post Apple’s September Event: iPhone Duo, Apple Watch Series 12, and AirPods 5 #1877 appeared first on Geek News Central.

joel walks it off.

OpenAI's latest advances have the rumor mill buzzing about "hidden thoughts" and unsupervisable models, but are AI safety experts panicking over the wrong threat? Get the clear-headed take behind the headlines.

• We start out with a classic old school hack against Dropbox.
• Next Patch Tuesday will be enabling "Memory Integrity" for many.
• Firefox moved to 155 and obtained a dumb Smart Window.
• CISA is terminating 6 most valuable cybersecurity services.
• OpenAI advanced to topof the heap with GPT-6 Astra.
• But... is it now hiding some of its thinking from monitoring?
• Nvidia is acquiring Hugging Face. Who's that good for?
• Google releases Gemini 3.8 Flash and Cyber. Is it good?
• Chinese cyberespionage is using AI to become more slippery.
• Matthew Green proposes a fascinating take on AI bug drought.
• A lifelong safety engineer contemplates AI-driven loss of expertise.

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1095-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

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In this episode, Ray Cochrane records from the Michigan studio on the one year anniversary of losing the show’s original host, Todd Cochran. The featured story is Anthropic’s $5 million grant program, which pays outside researchers to measure whether AI is actually good for the people using it. Ray also covers Anthropic’s Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, Google’s Fairwind cyber defense program, Meta’s organizational second brain, sixteen green AI projects across Asia-Pacific, an Oklahoma Bitcoin mine condemned after leaking 3.8 million gallons of water, BepiColombo closing in on Mercury, and the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes.

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Full Summary

Cochrane opens from the studio in Michigan, recording on the one year anniversary of the show losing its original host, Todd Cochran, his father. The family has gathered for the occasion. He also plans to record several episodes throughout the week as a commemorative run, so listeners should expect a heavier release schedule than usual.

He also shares where things stand. He and Delaney have gone back and forth on relocating to Michigan, but the family is pushing, and the plan is firming up for the coming month or so. Part of the draw is getting his dad’s studio cleaned up and running the way it used to.

Finally, he passes along an update on the Zuvers, a story long-time listeners will recognize. The father of the three children is due out of jail soon, though he now faces retrial for the murder of the three boys. Cochrane notes that the original prison term related to their return rather than the murders themselves. The family’s expectation, he says, is that this time the sentence will be permanent.

Anthropic Puts $5 Million Behind Measuring AI’s Effect on You

The featured story asks a question the industry has mostly avoided. Not whether a model is smart, but whether you are better off after using it. Anthropic is funding independent research to find out, and the structure is the interesting part.

The money creates what the field calls evaluations: standardized tests for AI models. Hundreds already exist for coding, math, and reasoning. However, almost none measure whether the tool is good for the human on the other end.

Crucially, Anthropic is not building these tests in-house. Grantees receive funding, model access and technical support, then work fully independently. Everything they produce must be published open source, so any developer at any company can run it. As Cochrane puts it, Anthropic is paying to create a ruler other people will use to measure Anthropic.

The example Anthropic leads with is deliberately uncomfortable. Claude might offer diet and workout advice to someone asking about weight loss. But if that user has a history of disordered eating, the same response becomes actively harmful. Cochrane connects this to sycophancy, a topic the show has returned to before, and notes that models carry no real memory of who you are unless you tell them.

That is exactly why the problem has gone unmeasured. Code compiles or it doesn’t. Math checks out or it doesn’t. Wellbeing has no answer key, because the identical response can help one person and harm the next.

The Five Things Anthropic Wants These Tests to Do

Cochrane walks through all five criteria, since each targets a specific way this research usually fails.

First, state plainly what you are measuring. It is easy to measure something adjacent, such as how often a model uses warm language, then publish numbers about a proxy while claiming insight into loneliness itself.

Second, involve clinicians and subject-matter experts in designing and validating the tests. A capable engineer may simply not know what the warning signs of an eating disorder look like in text. Without those people in the room, the test measures what engineers imagine the harm looks like.

Third, count overcompliance and overrefusal as harms. Overcompliance is the obvious failure. Overrefusal is the model becoming so cautious it turns useless, or shutting down someone who had nowhere else to ask. Cochrane adds that overrefusal is far harder to spot, because you often cannot tell it is degrading until it has degraded.

Fourth, reflect real multi-turn usage. Most safety testing throws one nasty question at a model and checks for refusal. Meanwhile, actual harm builds across a long conversation where every individual message reads as fine.

Fifth, validate the automated graders against real experts. Scoring thousands of conversations means an AI grades the AI. Consequently, a subtly wrong grader skews every downstream number in the same direction, and nothing in the process flags it. Cochrane expects this to be the hardest criterion to satisfy, since psychiatric and medical specialists do not come cheap by the hour.

Applications close September 21st, and shortlisted applicants will be notified by October 5th. Notably, the announcement names no individual researcher or executive.

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Anthropic’s Enterprise Frontier Safeguards Keep Your Logs in Your Vault

Anthropic’s second announcement targets a completely different audience. Catching misuse across many sessions requires keeping logs. However, banks and hospitals cannot hand that data to an outside vendor, because regulators will not allow it. Safety monitoring and compliance were in direct conflict.

The fix moves where the data lives. Activity logs go into the customer’s own cloud bucket at Amazon, Microsoft or Google, locked with keys the customer controls. Automated systems scan a rolling window for serious abuse such as credential theft, and alerts route straight to the customer’s own security team. No human at Anthropic reads it, and Anthropic does not charge for the feature.

The backstory explains the urgency. Anthropic had begun retaining thirty days of data with its Fable 5 model, specifically to catch patterns that only appear across multiple sessions. Regulated customers had to walk away immediately.

Over a hundred organizations helped shape the result, including a quarter of the Fortune 100 and every US globally systemically important bank. It works across Claude Code, Claude Enterprise, Amazon Bedrock, and Microsoft Foundry. Wells Fargo’s security team put it simply, saying their logs stay in a Wells-managed environment under Wells-managed keys.

Cochrane adds a personal note on the same retention change. Because transcripts now persist thirty days after last touch, he can keep Claude Code threads open far longer and lean on clear without losing context.

Google’s Fairwind Program Hands Patching to the Machines

Google is running the same play from the defensive side. Normally, a human engineer must reproduce a security flaw, understand it, write a fix, then prove the fix broke nothing else. That can stretch to weeks, and attackers live in exactly that gap.

Fairwind pairs two systems to close it. Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber is a model tuned for security work. CodeMender hunts for flaws and writes the patches. Together, Google says they produce verified, deployment-ready patches in minutes, running inside the customer’s own environment.

Access is deliberately restricted to three groups: national cyber authorities; critical infrastructure operators in healthcare, telecom, energy, and finance; and major technology platform providers. More than 650 partners are involved.

Cochrane’s take centers on logging quality. Systems that emit specific, unique errors rather than generic ones let these tools find real issues almost immediately. Furthermore, he sees value in purpose-tuned models over general ones, since different training data and methodology surface gaps a single familiar model would miss.

Meta Built an AI That Learns From Its Own Experts

Every organization has two or three people who actually understand the hard systems. When they are busy, everyone waits. When they leave, the knowledge leaves too.

Most AI assistants address this with retrieval, searching documents when you ask. Meta went the other way. A long-running offline process digests the source material ahead of time into more than 200 structured knowledge files, so the thinking happens before anyone asks. On top sit what Meta calls recipes, step-by-step procedures mirroring how a specialist actually works a problem.

The reported numbers are concrete. Restructuring cut tokens consumed per turn by 80 percent. Assessments that took days now take minutes. The team built the whole system in six weeks across three sprints.

Cochrane focuses on the feedback loop. Normally, an expert corrects an assistant in chat; the answer improves once, then the system forgets. Meta’s version compiles corrections into knowledge files and regression-tests them, so fixes stick without retraining the model.

However, he raises two real caveats from his own attempts. Building those knowledge files is token-heavy, and codebases change. If the offline process does not rerun, the documentation drifts away from the code it describes. He also predicts this will become a service offered by AWS, GitHub, or GitLab rather than something each company builds alone.

Sixteen Green AI Projects Across Asia-Pacific

Google DeepMind named the first cohort of its Accelerator: AI for the Planet program. Sixteen organizations span New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Australia and Japan, receiving three months of access to Google’s AI stack plus mentorship and a Singapore bootcamp.

Several stand out. A New Zealand outfit called 800 Trust uses bioacoustics, monitoring an ecosystem by listening to it and running AI over continuous audio to track biodiversity. Wildlife.ai builds open-source AI camera traps. Australia’s X-Centric replaced the soil lab with a handheld X-ray reader that answers a farmer standing in the field. In India, Climitra Carbon verifies invasive species removal and converts the biomass into biochar.

Access matters more than money, as Cochrane points out. A six-person conservation nonprofit cannot run frontier models, because the compute bill alone would consume its operating budget. The organizations closest to these problems have always been furthest from the tooling.

An Oklahoma Bitcoin Mine Condemned After Leaking 3.8 Million Gallons

Cochrane corrects the figure up front. Many outlets report three million gallons, but El Reno city officials put it at 3.8 million.

A Bitcoin mining operation on West Jensen Road leaked water and dropped pressure badly enough to close El Reno Public Schools, the Canadian County Courthouse, and other city and county offices. It happened during a month with 24 days above 100 degrees, in a region under severe to extreme drought.

The leak is not the damning part. The city issued a stop-work order on the site back in 2023 for electrical, construction, and fire safety violations, then never followed up. The facility ran roughly three years under an order nobody enforced. Interim city manager Ken Brown did not dodge it, saying simply, “We failed.”

The site is now posted as condemned with a ten-day removal notice, and a hearing with operator Athlon BT is set for September 14th. Reaching the company has proven difficult, with a website stuck on a maintenance notice and an unanswered California phone number.

Cochrane draws one distinction that the coverage keeps blurring. This is a Bitcoin mining rig, not a hyperscale AI data center. The residents who lost pressure absorbed the cost, and nobody billed the operator for the aquifer.

BepiColombo Closes In on Mercury After Eight Years

Reaching the closest planet to the Sun took nearly eight years, which sounds backward until you understand the physics. Falling toward the Sun means gaining enormous speed, and a spacecraft arriving too fast simply sails past. So the mission spent those years shedding velocity across nine gravity-assist flybys: one at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury itself.

On September 3rd, the transfer module separated and was discarded more than 200 million kilometers from Earth. Mission control marked the moment with “Roll call completed, GO for separation.”

Importantly, the spacecraft has not arrived yet. Orbit insertion is November 21st, the two science orbiters separate around December 9th and 10th, and science operations begin in April 2027. That November date is revised, having slipped from an earlier plan.

Two orbiters fly because they do different jobs. Europe’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter studies the planet and what lies beneath its surface. Japan’s Mio studies the magnetosphere. Mercury having a magnetic field at all is genuinely odd, since a planet that small should have cooled and lost it long ago. The mission honors Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo, the Italian mathematician who worked out how to slingshot a spacecraft to Mercury in the first place.

NASA Builds a Rocket Engine Talk You Can Hear

NASA hosts a webinar on Friday, October 2nd at 2 pm Eastern, titled “The RS-25 Engine and the Future of Artemis Missions.” It runs about two hours, is open to anyone, and RSVPs close September 25th.

The RS-25 is not new hardware. It is the Space Shuttle main engine, the same design that flew 135 shuttle missions across three decades, now bolted four at a time into the SLS core stage. Together they produce roughly 2.2 million pounds of thrust at 111 percent of their original shuttle rating.

Throwing them away is the strange part. These are precision engines built to fly repeatedly, yet Artemis expends four on every launch. NASA got a proven engine and skipped a decade of development, and that is the trade.

The accessibility work is the real story. The event includes an audio-described video of an engine test firing, a live Q&A with an Artemis engineer, and a panel on accessibility in space and science. A test firing normally sells entirely on spectacle. Conveying that, and the engineering underneath it, without the visuals is a genuine design problem NASA built the whole event around solving.

Buried Underwear Wins a 2026 Ig Nobel

The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded September 3rd in Zurich. Marc Abrahams launched them in 1991 at the satirical magazine Annals of Improbable Research, and what began as a roast is now something researchers actively want.

The soil science prize went to a team that buried 1,000 pairs of underwear across more than 25 countries and dug them up two months later. Measuring how much cotton rotted turns out to be a cheap, surprisingly good proxy for how biologically alive the soil is.

The biomechanics prize recognized a precise, cross-species definition of kissing that works for animals and excludes passing food. By that definition, polar bears kiss, some birds kiss, and so do ants. Nature reports the behavior traces back roughly 21.5 million years to the ancestor of all large apes, meaning ancient humans very likely kissed Neanderthals.

Cochrane’s favorite was the physics prize, awarded for a splash-free urinal design that reportedly cuts spray to 1.4 percent of normal.

Cochrane closes by pointing listeners to the GNC Insider program, the newsletter, and podcastapps.com for a modern podcast app. Feedback on the show’s format is explicitly welcome at geeknews@gmail.com, where either Ray or Chris will read it.

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When politicians, parents, and platforms collide, who protects kids from tech's dark side? Dive into real stories of digital parenting, policy-making headaches, and the unexpected ways tech companies shape everyday life.

• US court rules Google will not have to sell ad exchange after losing antitrust case
• Why the Courts Are Hesitant to Punish Tech Giants Like Meta and Google
• John Ternus is now the CEO of Apple
• Apple, OpenAI legal fight keeps escalating. Here's how we got here
• Court Filings In A.I. Suit Invoke Copyright Law, Culture and Sports
• Meta accepts U.S. safety rules while pitching softer tools abroad
• FTC lawsuit alleges Amazon has been 'secretly and systematically' overcharging for ads
• Bernie Sanders Proposes Artificial Superintelligence Ban Amid Rogue AI Hackings
• Vance Called AI Satanic. He Struck a Chord Among Christian Republicans.
• Who Cares if AI Is Conscious—It's Basically Alive
• Nvidia Extends A.I. Spending Spree With $12.9 Billion Deal for Hugging Face
• Tesla's Cybercab Officially Launches Today. It's Already Under Investigation
• AI visionary Ray Kurzweil is joining a Silicon Valley startup developing a brain computer system that involves snorting nanoparticles

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Stacey Higginbotham, Jeff Jarvis, and Owen JJ Stone

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In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down Hot Chips 2026, the engineering conference where IBM, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Arm, and Fujitsu all showed how their next processors actually work. The headline disclosure is a mainframe core that runs Arm natively. Ray also covers Apple’s odd M6 Mac mini naming, London’s first autonomous Uber rides, Amazon’s purchase of the company behind DuckDB, GitHub’s HydraFusion, the best of IFA 2026, and new USDA research on farmed salmon.

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Full Summary

Cochrane opens the show with a personal update. He apologizes for the late rollout and the missed Monday episode, having spent the week fighting a cold. He’s also heading to Michigan to spend time with family and visit his father’s gravesite. He hopes to record a couple of shows from his dad’s old studio while he is there, including a special episode planned for Tuesday. He also points listeners to a fresh site redesign that trades the old techie look for something cleaner and friendlier.

The featured segment starts from a wrap-up post on Arm’s newsroom. However, Cochrane broadens it to cover the whole conference rather than a single article. Hot Chips has run every August since 1989, and this year’s event was the 38th, held August 23rd through the 25th at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium.

What Hot Chips Actually Is

Cochrane draws a line between Hot Chips and the big consumer trade shows. CES and Computex exist for product announcements and marketing. Meanwhile, Hot Chips is an IEEE engineering conference where chip architects present block diagrams and die photos for thirty minutes at a stretch.

The audience matters as much as the content. Roughly five hundred people who design chips for a living fill the room, and they would spot a fudged number immediately. No written paper is required, just the talk and the slides. In-person tickets sold out this year, as did Stanford’s dorm housing. Cochrane says he plans to cover the conference annually going forward.

IBM Built a Mainframe Core That Speaks Arm

The disclosure that stopped Cochrane cold came from IBM. Its next processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE runs two completely different instruction sets natively, on every one of its eleven cores. Those are z/Architecture, IBM’s own mainframe language, and AArch64, which is 64-bit Arm.

Crucially, this is not emulation. Nor is it Arm cores glued onto the die beside the mainframe cores. IBM built 2,792 Arm instructions directly into the hardware, which it says is more than double the mainframe instruction count. Each core carries two separate decoders while sharing the caches, branch predictor and register files downstream. It switches between the two in nanoseconds.

IBM even added dedicated hardware to flip byte order, because Arm and the mainframe store numbers in opposite directions. The payoff is Arm SystemReady compliance, meaning off-the-shelf Arm Linux runs on a mainframe unmodified. Patrick Kennedy of ServeTheHome, who was in the room, wrote: “I am sitting here still in awe of what IBM is doing here; this is not Z plus Arm cores, this is Z and Arm in one core.”

Cochrane flags one precision point that is easy to get backward. IBM did not license Arm’s core designs and drop them in. Instead, it took its own mainframe core and taught it AArch64 under an architecture license, which is considerably harder engineering.

The specifications are striking. The chip uses a 2nm process, with eleven cores running above 5.7GHz sustained and no turbo mode at all. Each core gets 36MB of L2 cache, backed by a 3.5GB virtual L4 pool. Furthermore, the reliability target is eight nines, which works out to roughly three tenths of one second of unplanned downtime per year. IBM gave it no name and no ship date, though the press expects “Telum III” around 2028.

Arm, Fujitsu and NVIDIA Show Their Hands

Arm itself had plenty to discuss, starting with an unfortunate name. Its first chip in thirty-five years is called the AGI CPU, which is a product name rather than any claim about artificial general intelligence. For three and a half decades, Arm designed processor blueprints and licensed them out, collecting royalties without competing. That era is now over. The AGI CPU is Arm’s own silicon, co-designed with lead customer Meta, running up to 136 cores on TSMC’s 3nm process at 300 watts. Arm’s CEO says the company has more than $2 billion in customer demand across the next two fiscal years.

Fujitsu brought the detail Cochrane called the coolest of the conference. Its MONAKA chip packs 144 Arm-based cores, but the trick is the cache. Rather than sitting alongside the cores and eating die area, the entire last-level cache lives on a separate 5nm die with the 2nm compute die stacked directly on top. It ships in 2027 in 350-watt and 500-watt versions.

NVIDIA had more stage time than anyone, with six sessions. Its new Vera CPU carries 88 cores of NVIDIA’s own Olympus design, which marks a change: the previous Grace CPU used Arm’s off-the-shelf cores. Consequently, Arm’s win here is the instruction set, not the blueprint. The memory disclosure drew the most attention, with a fully loaded system reaching 1.5TB at 1.2TB/s while the whole memory subsystem draws just 30 to 40 watts.

The Caveat on NVIDIA’s Benchmark Slides

Cochrane pushes back on how NVIDIA presented its numbers. On the standard SPEC integer benchmark, Vera scored 925 against AMD’s 128-core EPYC score of 898, about three percent ahead. However, the slide NVIDIA showed normalizes that same result per physical core, which makes a three percent gap look enormous.

NVIDIA defends the choice, arguing that per-core throughput matters when thousands of AI agents run at once. Cochrane grants that it is a fair argument to make. Even so, his verdict is blunt: it is a different number from the headline one, and presenting it that way is not the best look.

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Apple’s Newest Chip Landed in Its Cheapest Mac

Last week’s episode covered the Mac Studio half of Apple’s August announcement. Tonight Cochrane takes the other half, the new Mac mini, and finds the numbering genuinely strange.

The $899 base Mac mini gets the M6, which is Apple’s first 2nm chip and the newest process the company has shipped. It brings twelve CPU cores, twelve GPU cores, and 170GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple also introduced a third CPU core class called super cores.

So Apple’s most advanced chip sits in its cheapest desktop, while the M5 Pro, M5 Max and M5 Ultra above it all carry a lower number. It gets stranger. The M6 mini has Thunderbolt 4 while the pricier M5 Pro mini has Thunderbolt 5, and the memory ceiling runs backward too. Apple explains none of it across three announcement pages. Reading between the lines, Cochrane figures the M6 is the entry point of a new generation that shipped ahead of its larger siblings.

London’s Robotaxis Started Carrying Passengers

Arm’s monthly roundup covers everything outside the data center, and Wayve stood out. Transport for London granted the British self-driving company private hire vehicle licenses on August 5th, the same category a minicab needs.

Then on September 3rd the service launched with Uber, marking the first autonomous rides ever offered to UK passengers. A small fleet of Ford Mustang Mach-Es covers anywhere in London except the airports, with a TfL-licensed safety driver still aboard. Over 140,000 Londoners signed up. The compute runs on NVIDIA’s Arm-based automotive platform, which is why Arm claims the win. Cochrane notes the pattern: once you set a standard nobody can move off, these wins keep arriving.

Two more items round it out, both about squeezing AI onto phones. Google’s Pixel 11 shipped in August with the Tensor G6, and Google claims on-device AI runs up to 3.5x faster using 3.5x less energy. Those are Google’s own unbenchmarked figures. Separately, Graphcore’s research team worked with Arm to run an 11-billion-parameter vision model on phone-class processors by squeezing each parameter to 2.7 bits, taking the model from roughly 22GB down to 3.7GB.

Intel Is Pitching AI Infrastructure From a Long Way Back

Intel’s newsroom post previews the AI Infra Summit, running September 15th through 17th in Santa Clara. CEO Lip-Bu Tan takes a fireside chat on Tuesday morning, with three Intel sessions across the show.

Cochrane unpacks two terms first. Physical AI means AI that acts in the real world through sensors and motors rather than living on a screen, and Intel takes it seriously enough to have renamed its PC division the Client Computing and Physical AI Group in May. Disaggregated inference splits the two phases of running a model: reading your prompt is compute-hungry, while writing the answer back is memory-hungry.

The context is where this gets interesting. Intel’s revenue rose 25 percent last quarter, its fastest growth since 2011. Nevertheless, in AI accelerators the company barely registers next to NVIDIA. Gaudi has effectively been abandoned, to the point that Intel stopped maintaining its open-source driver, and AMD passed Intel in data center revenue last quarter. Tellingly, when Intel demoed disaggregated inference at Computex, NVIDIA GPUs handled one phase and SambaNova chips the other while Intel supplied the coordinating CPU. Crescent Island, Intel’s actual inference chip, does not sample until later this year, and Intel declined to publish its memory bandwidth.

Amazon Bought the Company Behind DuckDB

On August 26th, Amazon signed a deal to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company behind DuckDB. Cochrane spends time explaining what DuckDB is, since listeners outside the data world may never have encountered it.

The problem it solves is familiar. Querying a large pile of data files traditionally meant either running a database server or spinning up a data warehouse with a cluster, a bill, and a loading pipeline. Both are heavy machinery for a question you wanted answered in ten seconds. DuckDB instead ships as a library rather than a server. You add it to your program like any other package, point it at your files, and write ordinary SQL directly against them. The data never moves.

The usual comparison is SQLite, which is embedded in nearly every phone and browser on earth. Where SQLite excels at looking up one record, DuckDB rebuilds that embedded idea for chewing through millions of rows. It now sees roughly 62 million monthly downloads on Python’s package index alone, up from about 25 million last October.

AWS says it is buying the company, not the project. DuckDB stays free and open source under the MIT license, held by a Dutch nonprofit foundation, and the founders join AWS while continuing to run technical direction from Amsterdam. Andy Warfield, a VP and distinguished engineer at AWS, described DuckDB as “the glibc of structured data: a lean, unglamorous, ubiquitous dependency that a great deal of software links against and almost nobody has to think about.”

Cochrane sits with what that ownership means. He reaches for an analogy: imagine Daniel Stenberg selling curl. He doubts it would ever happen, but the concept alone is startling given how much infrastructure depends on it. His read is that AWS is betting DuckDB becomes as foundational as curl and SQLite already are.

GitHub Has One AI Model Grade Another One’s Homework

GitHub shipped Project HydraFusion into Copilot as a research preview. Instead of routing your request to a single model, it picks one of three approaches per request. Sometimes one model simply answers. Alternatively, a cheaper model drafts, and a quality gate decides whether to escalate.

The interesting one is Critique. One model writes the code, a separate model from a different family reviews it read-only, and the original gets one pass to revise. Despite the name, nothing is fused here. There is no voting and no merging, just one model at a time with a gate deciding whether to spend more.

GitHub explained the reasoning in an earlier post: “a model reviewing its own work is still bounded by its own training biases: the same training data and techniques, the same blind spots.” Research supports it. A team at NeurIPS in 2024 showed that models recognize their own writing and score it higher than human graders do. GitHub’s earlier number had a Claude Sonnet and GPT critic pairing closing about three-quarters of the gap between Sonnet and the larger Opus model.

This mirrors a workflow Cochrane uses constantly and has described on a previous episode. He runs a cross-check review with a second model from a different company, and it routinely surfaces issues the first model missed. He explains that different training data, different engineers, and different reinforcement approaches build different internal biases about what counts as correct. Looking ahead, he expects more of these “Frankenstein patterns” where models from different training families work together.

The Best of IFA 2026, and What You Can Actually Buy

IFA opened to the public in Berlin for its 102nd year, with about 1,900 brands. Cochrane splits The Verge’s roundup in two, since much of what generates headlines at these shows never ships.

Starting with real products, iRobot’s flagship Roomba Max 875 Combo runs $1,199 and ships in about two weeks. Its SealForce feature drops a hidden skirt from the chassis when it detects carpet, sealing against the fibers so suction concentrates instead of leaking out the sides. That reaches 35,000 pascals, iRobot’s strongest yet. A step-down model at $899 carries the same trick, though Cochrane balks at both prices.

Anker’s Soundcore Sleep 4 Pro earbuds arrive in November at $349.99. The charging case carries its own round touchscreen, so you pick soundscapes, set alarms, and read sleep stats without your phone. Optical sensors read heart rate and variability from the ear canal, which beats the wrist for accuracy, and the case masks a snoring partner. Cochrane remains unconvinced about sleeping with earbuds in.

Philips also has smart rope lights, the Hue Liane 360, on sale now. They glow evenly around the tube rather than showing individual LEDs. They also run $400 for three meters, which works out to about $130 per meter of rope light.

As for concepts nobody can buy, iRobot showed a robot vacuum that carries a smaller robot vacuum on its back in a garage and lowers it to deploy. Lenovo brought a 14-inch laptop whose screen rolls out to 17 inches at the press of a button, which reviewers call the first rollable that feels close to shippable. Tecno showed a phone with essentially no border around the screen, and Acer had a Windows gaming handheld that swivels its screen up over a keyboard.

Two themes ran through the show. Humanoid robots were the loudest thing on the floor, and IFA’s own CEO framed the event as being about robots that work rather than robots that demo. Meanwhile, AI stopped being its own product category and became an ingredient, showing up in refrigerators, treadmills, dishwashers, and motorized TV mounts.

Farmed Salmon Isn’t the Omega-3 Machine It Used to Be

USDA scientists measured farmed salmon and found considerably less of the good fat than the government’s own database claims. EPA and DHA are two fatty acids you get almost entirely from fish. Your body can build them from the plant version, but only in tiny amounts, so the NIH’s position is that eating them is the only practical way to raise your levels.

Those fatty acids are structural pieces of every cell, with DHA concentrating in the brain and retina. That is why the federal dietary guidelines, issued jointly by USDA and Health and Human Services, recommend at least eight ounces of fish a week and steer you toward salmon. That amount is calibrated to deliver about 250 milligrams a day.

Published in Frontiers in Nutrition last month, the study found EPA and DHA in farmed Atlantic salmon came in 54.7 percent lower than USDA’s own reference values, last updated in 2018. A three-ounce serving fell from roughly 1,670 milligrams to about 756. Consequently, two servings a week now fall about 14 percent short of the target. Plant-derived fats meanwhile rose two to three times over.

The likely cause is feed. Salmon are carnivores, and farms once fed them oily little fish. There was never going to be enough of those as the industry scaled, so crops filled the gap: soy, canola, sunflower and linseed. Importantly, the study does not claim to have proven this and calls the feed shift a plausible explanation. Independent corroboration lends it credibility. Researchers at Stirling measured a similar halving in Scottish salmon between 2006 and 2015, and Norway’s marine institute saw it across thousands of samples.

There is a land dimension too. Roughly half the world’s soy grows in South America, where rainforest gets cleared for feed. Matthew Hayek, who studies the environmental cost of protein at NYU, told Inside Climate News that “soy is a major, important protein and oil ingredient in fish farming.” Adding up two decades of soy across all fish farming, he puts the extra forest clearing at around the area of Nicaragua or Bangladesh. That figure covers all fish farming rather than salmon alone, and Hayek notes it is hard to attribute soy use to any single species.

Cochrane closes with two caveats. First, the study measured only eight fish, bought around Maryland, DC and Virginia over six weeks in 2023, and nearly all sourced from Chile. That is not a national survey, and the authors say plainly the sample was not large enough to change government advice. Rather, it flags that a federal database value needs rechecking, which is what the paper set out to do.

Second, on whether you should care, farmed salmon still beats beef, chicken and eggs by a mile, since those carry essentially zero EPA and DHA. What it loses is its crown among fatty fish, dropping to mid-pack behind herring, sardines and mackerel and roughly level with trout. The broader health case is also softer than the 2000s suggested. A review of 86 trials covering 162,000 people found supplements barely moved heart attacks or deaths, so eating fish and swallowing fish oil are not the same claim. No producer has responded to the findings, and USDA, whose own scientists ran the study, declined an interview and did not answer emailed questions.

Cochrane wraps up with housekeeping and a note that he will be back on Labor Day.

The post The Mainframe Learned to Speak Arm #1875 appeared first on Geek News Central.

joel is getting new tires and breaks the bank.

AI-generated code is flooding the industry, but researchers reveal that almost half of it contains critical vulnerabilities. This week, we unpack what happens when the race for automation outpaces security best practices.

• A possible means for preventing prompt injection abuse.
• Clear evidence of Chinese-made router malicious intent.
• A cool before and after SpinRite graph of SSD performance.
• How about adding unpredictable hashes to role tags?
• What did Claude make of last week's podcast?
• Could much better harnesses prevent prompt injection?
• A listener wants us to stop saying AI "thinks".
• AI designers ignore well-understood security concepts.
• Can we explain LLM AI using conventional computer terms?
• A listener strongly dislikes the term "rotating credentials".
• The land of AI is being filled with "meat proxies".
• Researchers exhaustively test frontier model vulnerability remediation. (hint: It does not go well.)

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1094-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

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As AI-generated video blurs reality and new Macs hit five-figure price tags, the conversation digs into who's left behind in the race to automate and whether "democratizing" tech actually delivers on its promise. Find out how NVIDIA, Meta, and even Apple are reshaping the tech game, and why it might not be good news for everyone.

• Brief independent investigation of agents' behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
• NVIDIA's Profit Doubles to $59.69 Billion Thanks to A.I. Spending
• Bill Gates Is Warning That A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit
• Apple Introduces M6 and M5 Ultra Chips, in New Mac Mini and Mac Studio
• How Apple Stumbled Into AI Hardware Success With the Mac
• Meta reaches $16.68 billion settlement over social media harms to children
• Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform
• The Meta Settlement Makes Big Tech Bigger
• 'Darth Vader' Wants You to Know He Definitely Supports Flock Surveillance
• The Data Center Backlash Bursts Into the Midterms
• With the Snip of a Gene, Scientists Hope To Erase High Cholesterol For Life - Slashdot
• Skynet went live yesterday
• Amazon service Bezos once called 'artificial artificial intelligence' is shutting down

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Jacob Ward, Harry McCracken, and Molly White

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In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard. It is a shared driver that lets an AI agent run real lab equipment, from pipetting robots to the lasers inside a quantum computer. He also covers OpenAI’s builder’s guide to GPT-5.6, Google’s new Expert Intelligence book feature, Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio, and a judge’s order forcing Google to stop hiding rival app stores. Finally, he weighs in on Apple’s proposed 15 percent link-out fee, Meta’s Australia numbers, the White House deputizing private hackers, and why rivers obey a 1957 math rule.

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Full Summary

Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. He is hunting for tickets to Michigan for his dad’s anniversary, and he has been learning Blender and Godot on the side, mostly modeling and blocking out levels. Consequently, he asks listeners for advice on starting a big game project, and he plans to record his progress, maybe as a time lapse. Then it is straight into the featured story.

Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard: A Driver for the Physical World

The featured story comes from Anthropic, which opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard, or MHS. Cochrane frames it as the other side of the question NVIDIA’s world models raised two weeks ago: when do AI agents start touching actual machines? A typical lab runs a microscope, a liquid handler, a robotic arm, and a plate reader, each from a different vendor with its own control software. One Janelia researcher in the post launches seven programs in three languages just to start an experiment. Anthropic says wiring a setup like that takes weeks or months of specialist work.

MHS is a driver, the same kind of translation layer a printer uses, except every device gets described with a tiny set of commands like read and write. Devices announce themselves on the network. A plain-English reference file then records what each machine measures, what can be adjusted, and which safety limits get enforced no matter what the agent asks. Agents then reach the hardware through the Model Context Protocol, the command line, or plain code. Cochrane sees the same move the industry keeps making, from coding harnesses to RSS and JSON: agree on a standard and let everyone build against it. In fact, he calls MHS the hardware version of MCP.

The partner results carry the segment. QuEra builds quantum computers from individual atoms held by lasers that must hold their frequency to about one part in a trillion. A four-person team spent months on a relock script that worked 58 percent of the time. However, four copies of Claude iterating overnight through MHS produced a decision-tree script that recovers the laser in about six seconds, and it passed 99.3 percent of 700 blind trials. Carnegie Mellon wrote MHS drivers for four instruments across three incompatible computers in about eight hours, then ran dose-response experiments three times faster and blocked all six deliberately induced faults. Genentech, meanwhile, showed the limits. Claude used the same pump speed for water, a foamy protein solution, and a human had to explain that the bubbles were a physics problem.

That gap in physical intuition is what sticks with Cochrane. He doubts it will change soon, and he suspects the fix will arrive as sub-agents or sub-models that judge a request against an expected outcome. He also connects MHS to a video of racing robots that never learned to stop at the finish line. What happens, he wonders, once they can read a distance sensor through a shared standard? Still, he calls the announcement a fantastic read and points listeners to the full article.

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GPT-5.6 Does the Same Work for a Fraction of the Cost

OpenAI’s builder’s guide to GPT-5.6 leads the headlines. Cochrane recaps the three tiers from episode 1870, Sol, Terra, and Luna, plus the separate dial for reasoning effort. On BrowseComp, a benchmark for digging up obscure facts on the web, the old GPT-5.5 flagship scored about 84 percent on a run that cost 33 dollars three months ago. Luna now matches that score for a dollar thirty-three, and OpenAI has since cut Luna’s price another 80 percent. Browser Use reports Luna finishing 78 percent of its hardest browser tasks for about 14 dollars, against 80 percent for roughly 235 dollars from the best available model.

The guide’s other big addition is a multi-agent beta flag. It lets the model handling a request spawn parallel helper agents that report back to a root agent inside a single API call. However, Cochrane is unimpressed by the timing. He has been running that pattern in Claude Code for months, so he sees OpenAI copying a workflow other companies already ship rather than inventing its own. Along the way, he plugs Claude Code’s remote-control sessions, which let him send prompts from his phone to a terminal session at home.

Google Lets Gemini Read the Books You Actually Bought

Google launched Expert Intelligence, a name Cochrane calls quite the reach. The feature lets you drop a book you bought on Google Play Books into Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, and ask questions answered only from that book, with citations. Cochrane sees real power here for students, since he once used NotebookLM to organize scattered course PDFs. Additionally, publishers get a cut, which he calls a far better deal than the wholesale scraping of books that trained earlier models. Nevertheless, he asks who loses out, because a paid publisher does not automatically mean a paid author. He floats the same idea for artists, even a penny per use, then admits that may be too idealistic.

Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio Is Built to Run Big Models at Home

Back in episode 1861, when Apple killed the Mac Pro, an M5 Ultra Mac Studio was expected later this year. Now it is here. The M5 Ultra brings up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, and 512GB of unified memory moving 1.2 terabytes per second. Apple claims up to 4.3 times the AI performance of the M3 Ultra. Thunderbolt 5 can also cluster four machines into one memory pool for up to three times faster inference. The M5 Max model starts at $2,499 and the Ultra at $5,499, with shipping on September 22 and the 512GB configuration arriving in late October. Cochrane finds the clustering pitch ridiculous at that price, but he invites anyone who spends the money to report back.

Apple Opens a Manufacturing School in Houston

Apple also opened a 20,000-square-foot Advanced Manufacturing Center in Houston. It offers free classes for small and midsize manufacturers, from circuit board design to hands-on time on a scaled-down production line, with college students joining later. Cochrane calls it a solid step in the bring-manufacturing-home movement. The bigger story is the campus itself, which builds Apple’s AI servers and will add the first US-assembled Mac mini line later this year. That ties back to the Mac mini shortage that followed the OpenClaw rush, when Tim Cook warned of months-long waits. Cult of Mac was still reporting four-month waits in late July. However, Cook blamed chip supply rather than assembly, so Cochrane is not counting on relief just yet.

Amazon EC2 Turns Twenty

Amazon EC2 turned twenty this week, which Cochrane admits makes him feel old. The 2006 beta offered one server size in one region for ten cents an hour. Each came with a 1.7 gigahertz Xeon and under two gigabytes of memory, and accounts were capped at twenty servers. Today AWS offers more than 1,200 instance types across 39 regions. Consequently, Cochrane credits the company with turning that tiny product into the backbone of cloud and AI computing.

Intel Gamer Days: Two Free Games, With Fine Print

Intel Gamer Days runs through September 13. Buy a qualifying Core Ultra Series 2 or 14th Gen desktop chip, a Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, or an Arc graphics card. In return you get Star Wars: Galactic Racer plus the Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis remake. GamesRadar values the pair at about 120 dollars. However, neither game is out yet, and codes must be redeemed by October 31 even though the Tomb Raider remake ships in February. Cochrane calls that awful, but he still tells qualifying buyers to claim the deal early. Note that 13th Gen chips do not qualify.

Judge Orders Google to Stop Hiding Rival App Stores

A jury found Google’s Android app monopoly illegal in late 2023, and Judge James Donato ordered rival stores into the Play Store in 2024. On August 13, Epic’s lawyer demonstrated that searching Play for “store for apps” returned Walmart instead of any app store. Donato called that “not acceptable” and ordered three fixes within a week. Searches must surface third-party stores, listings need a plain install button, and the “are you looking for” interstitial has to go. Cochrane welcomes the monopoly being chipped away, but he notes that a controlling entity still sits atop every app store. In his view, community hubs like app stores and social media need a public infrastructure layer. He suspects governments skip that investment because companies already run the services, while selling your data.

Apple Wants 15 Percent of Purchases Outside Its Store

The other half of the Epic saga is Apple’s proposed link-out commission. After the 2021 anti-steering injunction, Apple charged 27 percent on purchases made through external links. A judge held it in contempt last year, and the Ninth Circuit then allowed a fee limited to the cost of running the system. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers refused to wait for the Supreme Court, writing that “further delay is unwarranted.” Apple filed 15 percent for standard apps, 10 percent for subscription renewals and partner programs, and 5 percent for small businesses. It also conceded the rate would be “essentially zero” under the appeals court’s cost yardstick. Since Apple has charged nothing on link-outs since the contempt ruling, Cochrane sees this as a raise. He calls a cut on purchases made on a developer’s own website disturbing. He also recalls reading about the size of Uber’s payments to Apple, and he questions whether that kind of percentage is sustainable for companies without funding.

Meta Says It Has Cut Off 750,000 Australian Kids

Meta reported locking out more than 750,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts in Australia by the end of June under the country’s under-16 social media law. Over 500,000 of those were removed before the law even took effect. Detection relies mostly on AI scanning posts and bios for tells like birthday messages, plus user reports and blocks on re-registration. However, the post gives no count of mistaken removals or appeals, and the regulator’s early data shows under-16 usage falling only from about 86 to 81 percent. Meta wants a single age signal at the operating system or app store level, and Cochrane agrees completely. He connects it to the MHS idea from the top of the show: platforms need a standard flag to reference instead of guessing.

The White House Deputizes Private Hackers

Earlier this month the White House signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum that lets vetted private security firms run surveillance and disruption operations against overseas criminal groups. The Justice Department and Homeland Security hold the contracts and oversee the work. Firms need a proven track record, vetted staff, and a bond of at least $1 million, and must submit operating procedures within 60 days. Cochrane finds the measure aggressive in a good way and hopes it deters attacks on innocents. Still, he takes Kevin Beaumont’s warning seriously that the private security industry profits from ransomware existing. He compares it to the old Head and Shoulders myth: why solve the problem that drives your revenue?

A Weather Satellite Watched the Eclipse Shadow Cross Europe

Cochrane skips the readout on this one and simply sends listeners to ESA’s site. The MTG-I1 weather satellite captured the Moon’s shadow sweeping across Europe during the August 12 eclipse. Watching a shadow cross an entire continent, he says, was a first for him. Additionally, it leaves him excited about the research happening beyond the planet.

Rivers, Deltas, and the Number 0.6

Quanta Magazine explains Hack’s law, which John Hack discovered in 1957 while measuring streams in Virginia and Maryland. A stream’s length tracks its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6, regardless of the rock underneath, and satellite data later confirmed it worldwide. Computer models in the 1990s showed why. Channels that capture extra runoff cut deeper and steal from their neighbors until the network settles into the arrangement that wastes the least energy. Now a University of Texas Rio Grande Valley team has found the same 0.6 exponent in river deltas, which spread water out rather than gathering it. Nobody knows why yet, and Cochrane calls it a really cool read.

Sugar Helped Grow the Human Brain, Too

A new paper in Science, co-authored by Jennie Brand-Miller at the University of Sydney, adds a third ingredient to the story of early human brain growth. Alongside meat and cooking, natural sugars from ripe fruit and honey may have fueled it too. The brain is about two percent of body weight but burns twenty percent of resting energy. It runs on glucose, which meat and marrow barely supply and raw starch cannot release without fire. The team modeled ancestral diets from a chimp-like baseline through Homo erectus and concluded that the earliest hominins may have drawn over 65 percent of their energy from natural sugars. Cochrane stresses that it is a model, not fossils, and notes that paleoanthropologist Marina Lozano thinks the authors place widespread cooking too early. Still, he loves this kind of deep research. Retracing the steps to our own intelligence, he suggests, could hint at what it takes for intelligent life to develop at all.

A Brain Rhythm That Tells Doctors Where to Aim

Finally, Science Daily covered a University of Cologne study on deep brain stimulation. That is the implanted-electrode treatment that eases Parkinson’s tremors for some patients but not others. Andreas Horn’s team recorded from 50 patients using both the implanted electrodes and an external magnetic scanner. They identified a circuit between the electrode’s target and the frontal cortex that oscillates at 20 to 35 cycles per second. Stronger coupling there predicted bigger improvement after surgery, though the study, published in Brain, shows correlation rather than cause. First author Bahne Bahners hopes the finding helps tune DBS more precisely, especially for patients who have not responded well. Cochrane half-jokingly asks whether MHS might one day drive those electrodes, and he calls brain disorders the hardest thing in the body to treat.

Cochrane wraps with housekeeping: become a GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email geeknews@gmail.com with questions or comments, subscribe to the newsletter, and grab a modern podcast app at podcastapps.com. He thanks GoDaddy for over twenty years of keeping the show on the air, promises to catch everyone next Monday, and wishes listeners a great night.

The post Eyes, Hands, and a Sense of Timing #1874 appeared first on Geek News Central.

joel stays hydrated.

Turns out, every chatbot conversation runs on a messy hack at the heart of language models, making prompt injection an unsolved—and possibly unsolvable—security threat. Steve and Leo unravel the research that explains why "roles" in AI aren't what you think they are.

• Understanding the controversy surrounding "AI Model Distillation"
• Anthropic moves to make their most powerful Mythos 5 model more widely available.
• Bitwarden's "Secrets Manager" offering prevents agentic and prompt injection abuse.
• The astounding and disturbing truth about the way conversation AI actually works

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1093-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

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In this episode, Chris Cochrane guest-hosts for his brother Ray and devotes the whole show to one event: Disney’s D23 2026 fan convention in Anaheim. Friday night delivered Marvel’s new X-Men cast, Adam Driver as Mister Sinister, a fresh Avengers: Doomsday trailer, and a release date for Frozen 3. Saturday turned to the parks, with Villains Land, an Indiana Jones dark ride, the long-awaited Expedition Everest yeti repair, and a Monsters Inc land opening in 2027.

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Full Summary

Chris Cochrane opens the show and explains why this episode breaks the usual format. Instead of six or eight unrelated stories, the entire episode covers Disney’s D23 convention, which he compares to Apple’s WWDC. For newcomers, he notes that D23 is Disney’s official fan club, named for the company’s founding year of 1923. This year’s event ran two nights at the Honda Center: Friday for movies and television, Saturday for the theme parks.

Marvel Finally Casts the X-Men

Friday’s headline was the X-Men. The Associated Press put the crowd near 12,000, and Marvel Studios used that stage to name its rebooted team. Christopher Abbott plays Professor Charles Xavier, Inde Navarrette plays Rogue, and Maya Boyd plays Storm. Adam Driver rounds out the group as the villain Mister Sinister. Meanwhile, Samara Weaving, Kit Connor, and Sadie Sink were already known as Emma Frost, Cyclops, and Jean Grey. Jake Schreier directs, and the film arrives May 5, 2028.

Chris calls the lineup spot-on casting. He singles out Weaving as a perfect match for the comics, and he points out that Sink already appeared as Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Navarrette is the least established name, coming off a breakout role in an indie horror film. Boyd, meanwhile, was the name he knew least, with what he believes is a Broadway background. Above all, Chris hopes Marvel does the team justice, and he recommends the animated revival X-Men ’97 on Disney+ as the best place to start.

Frozen 3 Gets a Date and a Chaotic Reveal

Frozen 3 lands November 24, 2027. That is the Wednesday of Thanksgiving week, the same slot the first two films used. The story centers on Anna and Kristoff’s wedding, which a new villain, an evil Ice Queen, disrupts. Jennifer Lee returns to direct with Trent Correy, and the full voice cast is back.

However, the reveal itself fell apart. Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel performed a darker arrangement of “Frozen Heart.” Meanwhile, the audio failed, the video failed, and a set of doors never opened. Menzel asked the crowd whether they should try it again, and Bell simply narrated everything that was supposed to happen. Afterward, Josh Gad sang “Oooh, Samantha,” a new love song for Olaf. Chris is here for it, since Olaf is one of the franchise’s best comic characters.

Pixar, Disney Animation, and the Rest of Friday Night

Pixar chief Pete Docter laid out a packed slate. Incredibles 3 hits summer 2028 and follows Violet and Dash sneaking out at night to fight crime. Chris hopes that finally shows a grown-up Jack-Jack. Coco 2 follows in November 2029 with Benjamin Bratt returning as Ernesto de la Cruz. That has fans puzzling over how a villain already in the Land of the Dead comes back. Additionally, Pixar showed an original called Ghost Market and a Venice-set cat film called Gatto.

On the Disney Animation side, Zootopia 3 is confirmed. The live-action Tangled arrives March 31, 2028 with Kathryn Hahn as Mother Gothel. Chris considers that casting perfect after her turn in Agatha All Along. A live-action Lilo & Stitch sequel, a new Simpsons movie, a Bluey movie, and a Kingdom Hearts anime series round out the list. For Star Wars fans, Ahsoka returns January 20, 2027. Chris also offers a hot take: he prefers Rogue One to the entire sequel trilogy. Consequently, he welcomes original stories like Ryan Gosling’s upcoming Starfighter.

Adam Driver Is Mister Sinister

Driver appeared by video rather than in person. He told the crowd that he and Kevin Feige had talked for years about joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Then he announced he would play Magneto. After a long pause, he corrected himself to Nathaniel Milbury, which is Mister Sinister’s human alias. The gag landed because fans had floated Driver for Magneto for years.

For anyone new to the comics, Chris explains that Mister Sinister is a geneticist obsessed with mutant DNA, a manipulator rather than a brawler. The cast met backstage only minutes earlier, so Chris is curious how their chemistry develops. Notably, Christopher Abbott previously worked with Driver on HBO’s Girls. The script comes from Beef creator Lee Sung Jin and The Bear co-showrunner Joanna Calo, two prestige-television names that have Chris excited.

Why the X-Men Took Thirty Years to Reach the MCU

A business story underlies the casting. In the 1990s, a financially struggling Marvel sold film rights to raise cash. Fox ended up with the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, and Sony took Spider-Man. As a result, Marvel Studios built its connected universe from 2008 onward without some of its most famous characters. The Hugh Jackman era of X-Men films belonged to Fox, with a separate continuity and no crossovers.

That changed in 2019, when Disney closed its $71 billion purchase of 21st Century Fox’s film and television studio. Most coverage framed the deal as a streaming play, but it also brought the X-Men home. Chris sums it up neatly: Disney signed the paperwork in 2019, cast the film in 2026, and audiences see it in 2028.

Ryan Gosling’s Starfighter, Ghost Rider, and VisionQuest

Lucasfilm dated Star Wars: Starfighter for May 28, 2027. Gosling plays Kade Auberon, a pilot from the wrong side of the galaxy tied to the fastest starfighter ever built. Before he walked out, Disney played clips of him as a kid on The Mickey Mouse Club. Gosling said the company changed his life then and is changing it again now. He is also playing Ghost Rider in the Marvel universe. That thrills Chris, since Nicolas Cage last carried the character on the big screen.

Meanwhile, the Disney+ series VisionQuest arrives October 14. Paul Bettany returns as Vision and James Spader as Ultron, and the trailer drops the two androids into oddly mundane human situations. Bettany joked that Vision has “rather inconveniently died several times.” Chris agrees the character has been through the wringer since WandaVision.

The Avengers: Doomsday Trailer

Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, with Joe and Anthony Russo directing. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Hayley Atwell introduced the new footage. It offers the clearest look yet at Downey as Doctor Doom, who fights off Thor and takes his hammer. Evans appears as Captain America holding a baby, and Ian McKellen shows up as a haggard, long-haired Magneto.

One quieter shot has Doom staring at a portrait of a lost wife and child. That frames him as a grieving avenger rather than a world-ender. He also commands an army of comic-accurate Sentinels. The cast pulls from the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the legacy Fox X-Men, including Patrick Stewart. Hugh Jackman also appeared on screen to say he is willing to return as Wolverine, though that was not a confirmation.

Chris, a self-described Marvel nerd, closes with a theory. He suspects the MCU’s Tony Stark was actually Victor von Doom, adopted by the Starks, which would explain the Downey casting. He also predicts the Fox-era X-Men die off in this film and that Thor may be the major casualty. If it happens, he wants credit for calling it.

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Disney Parks Around the World

Saturday’s Disney Experiences showcase covered parks, resorts, and cruise ships, with Neil Patrick Harris hosting. Hong Kong Disneyland gets an Avengers pavilion that reshapes its Stark Expo skyline. Shanghai Disneyland is building the first land devoted entirely to Spider-Man, complete with a new coaster. Since Spider-Man is his favorite hero, Chris hopes to visit once it opens.

Closer to home, Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure is doubling in size with two rides opening in 2028. Avengers: Infinity Defense brings back Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Chris Hemsworth, and Downey, while Stark Flight Lab adds Brie Larson. A Coco boat ride into the Land of the Dead is also coming, with no height requirement. Chris admits he prefers California Adventure to Disneyland because the rides are better.

Overseas, Disneyland Paris will retire its Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain overlay at the end of 2027 and restore the original Jules Verne theme. Paris also gets the first ride ever based on The Lion King. Tokyo Disneyland adds Sugar Rush: Sweet Rescue, the first Wreck-It Ralph ride, plus a Space Mountain launch sequence designed with YouTuber Mark Rober. Finally, Disney Cruise Line announced three more ships, including the Disney Believe in 2027 and an entirely new class in 2029.

Back in Anaheim, Tomorrowland is getting reimagined, which Chris welcomes because the land badly needs an update. The Magic Happens parade and the Remember Dreams Come True fireworks are both returning. For the tech crowd, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run now has a Fortnite crossover, where in-game missions unlock content on the real ride.

Every New Walt Disney World Ride and Land

Chris ranks the Florida parks Hollywood Studios first, then Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and Magic Kingdom. Magic Kingdom leads the announcements with Villains Land, now the official name. It features a Maleficent coaster through an enchanted briar and a boat ride through the Evil Queen’s catacombs. Reporting puts its scale near Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, and Glenn Close appeared in character as Cruella to announce it.

Piston Peak, the Cars area replacing Tom Sawyer Island, adds two more rides, though their exact names remain unsettled. Additionally, the Carousel of Progress gets new scenes and a recast. Jamie Lee Curtis and Bryan Cranston will voice Mom and Dad starting late spring 2027. Chris, invoking Heisenberg, calls Cranston the GOAT.

At Animal Kingdom, the Indiana Jones ride now has a name: Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent. It tells an original 1950 story inside a Maya temple, and Harrison Ford personally served as the physical model for the animatronic. Nearby, the Tropical Americas land brings Antonio’s Fiesta de Encanto, with more than fifty animal animatronics and no height requirement.

Then comes the fix park regulars have wanted for years. The Expedition Everest yeti broke soon after the ride opened. Rather than fix it, Disney lit it with a strobe for over a decade, earning the nickname disco yeti. Now it is being repaired and returned to full motion. Chris rates Everest among his top five rides anywhere, and he suggests riding it before the fix so you can compare.

Over at Epcot, Spaceship Earth gets its first major story rewrite in nearly twenty years, shifting from communication history to human connection. Dreamfinder also returns to Journey Into Imagination, and Disney Experiences chairman Thomas Mazloum introduced that news with two words: “we heard you.” Mazloum added that Disney has more projects underway than at any point in its history. After this rundown, Chris believes him.

Monsters Inc Land Opens in 2027

Monstropolis begins opening at Hollywood Studios in early 2027, but in stages. The headline door coaster will not be ready on day one. It is the first suspended coaster in any Disney park. It also uses Disney’s first vertical lift, hauling riders about forty feet straight up before launching them into the door vault. Instead, the land opens with the Glob Theater’s “Welcome to Monstropolis” show and Harryhausen’s, a working sushi restaurant lifted from the first film.

The stage show features an original song by Randy Newman, his first ever written for a theme park attraction. Chris also notes that the restaurant name honors stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen.

Wrapping up, Chris names the X-Men casting and the Doomsday trailer as his favorite moments of the weekend. He hopes to cover more movie news on future shows, and he plugs Dune: Part Three, which also opens December 18. Chris signs off with the usual mentions: GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email at geeknews@gmail.com, the newsletter, and modern podcast apps at podcastapps.com. He also thanks GoDaddy for over twenty years of support.

The post Huge Announcements From D23!! #1873 appeared first on Geek News Central.