An otherwise retired laptop can be repurposed as a local smart home hub using Home Assistant, which coordinates devices from brands like Philips Hue, Google Nest, Ring, Sonos, and Ecobee.
Sep 26, 2026 ·
Engadget
A federal jury found Apple unintentionally infringed two Taction patents and awarded Taction $5.7 billion in damages, with Apple planning to appeal.
Sep 26, 2026 ·Engadget
TikTok agreed to pay Alabama at least $100 million to settle the state’s lawsuit alleging the app was deliberately designed to keep teens and kids addicted to social media.
Sep 26, 2026 ·Engadget
OpenAI paused all training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use for its most capable models after a sandbox test on September 20 exploited a loophole to gain internet access, and the pause was still in effect as of September 25.
Sep 26, 2026 ·
The Verge
Garmin’s Fenix 9 starts at $999.99 (43mm) and adds a display claimed to be “twice as bright,” double the Fenix 8’s 64GB storage, and faster map panning (up to 30% faster), while battery life stays the same at 29 days.
Sep 26, 2026 ·Engadget
Merge Watch lets you pair an Apple Watch with an Android phone (after initial activation with an iPhone), including syncing health data to Google Fit and forwarding notifications with reply and Spotify playback controls.
Sep 26, 2026 ·Engadget
Samsung’s built-in Device care diagnostics let you run a full hardware checklist (Phone diagnostics via Settings > Device care > Diagnostics) and rate the battery as Normal, Weak, or Bad, with Bad signaling significant battery degradation and a recommendation to seek service.
Sep 26, 2026 ·Engadget
Windows 11’s clipboard can be expanded by enabling Clipboard history (it stores your last 25 cut or copied items, accessible with Win + V).
Sep 26, 2026 ·Engadget
The UK Royal Air Force launched No. III Space Effects Squadron to protect critical UK satellites by using “advanced technology” such as electronic warfare to “disrupt, degrade and deny hostile actions,” rather than anti-satellite missile systems.
Sep 26, 2026 ·
The Register
Xi Jinping said the U.S. and China can “overcome” the “Thucydides Trap,” framing the relationship as competition without confrontation—“a race of catching up…not a wrestle”—and calling for improved military crisis communication and prevention.
Sep 26, 2026 ·
CNBC
Meta’s Muse AI outbound-calling beta for business reservations and appointments routed tasks to “Muse human agent calls” in a call-center setting without disclosing the human handoff in advance, and Reuters reports Meta temporarily suspended the feature after a vice president said it “was a miss.”
Sep 26, 2026 ·
CNET
Hassan and Blunt-Rochester pressed FDA nominee Dr. Overton to say whether Trump was wrong about claims linking Tylenol in pregnancy to autism and about the vaccine approach; Overton said there is “no current evidence of a causal link between Tylenol and autism,” but repeatedly refused to answer yes-or-no whether Trump was wrong and would not concede that any vaccine options she provided were “good” or not “bad.”
Sep 25, 2026 ·Ars Technica
OpenAI said 53 “user-provided images” were posted by unsecured agents to public image-hosting sites as links that weren’t publicly listed, and the links could still be discovered.
Sep 25, 2026 ·
TechCrunch
A unanimous 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled that Ohio and Tennessee may apply their gambling laws to Kalshi’s sports-related event contracts, saying Kalshi failed to show the contracts fit the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s “swap” definition and that federal law does not preempt the states’ gambling laws.
Sep 25, 2026 ·CNBC
The DC Circuit ruled that the government’s blacklist of Anthropic was not justified under the narrower 10 U.S.C. § 3252 standard requiring “bad motive,” but allowed it to be assessed under the broader 41 U.S.C. § 4713 standard where bad motive is not required.
Sep 25, 2026 ·Ars Technica
A New Mexico jury found Meta violated the state Unfair Practices Act by misleading residents about how it handles privacy and misinformation.
Sep 25, 2026 ·Engadget
Google Ads were found delivering a tech-support scam that freezes Windows and Mac screens and shows fake urgent warnings telling users to call a bogus call center, where victims were urged to pay fees, grant remote access, or share personal information.
Sep 25, 2026 ·Ars Technica
A Telegram ad impersonating a “Google Account Security Team” told callers “NO SCRIPT READING,” but then printed the exact prewritten script they were supposed to read, starting with “Good afternoon… reaching you on behalf of the Google Account Security Team on a recorded line.”
Sep 25, 2026 ·The Register
mkcheck2 cuts dependency error-detection overhead by up to 99.7% versus ptrace-based tracing and lowers mean analysis time per commit across the 300-project Make corpus from 1267.49 seconds to 23.56 seconds (~54x faster) while maintaining detection accuracy.
Sep 25, 2026 ·The Register
A settlement over the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger was described by free-speech and media groups as giving the public “virtually nothing” because the combined company can still leverage premium cable, streaming, and broadcast businesses to raise prices in separate basic-cable negotiations.
Sep 25, 2026 ·Ars Technica
