9to5Google: “Galaxy S26 Ultra’s Privacy Display is the best new feature in years”

When Samsung invited us out to San Francisco to check out the Galaxy S26 series, my first stop was a beeline for the Privacy Display demo. Available solely on Galaxy S26 Ultra, this is one of those features that is just impressive from the first time you use it. When activated, Privacy Display changes how the pixels in your display emit light, making it harder or near-impossible to view the display at an off-angle. At its default setting, it definitely works, but the contents of the display are visible at less-sharp angles. Samsung has a “maximum” setting that takes this up a notch, and that setting makes it even harder to see the contents and narrows the field-of-view even further.

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First and foremost, Privacy Display doesn’t kick in all of the time. You can toggle it on and off as you wish, but you can also have that process automated. If you want your messaging app, or a social app, or really anything you want to be hidden, you can select it through the settings and Privacy Display will automatically kick in when you open that app. Samsung’s demo had this set up with Google Messages, and it works really well, kicking in immediately as the app opens up.

A bigger deal, though, is that Samsung has built Privacy Display with the ability to only apply to small portions of the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s display. Specifically, it can hide your notification pop-ups.

Ben Schoon

I was equally excited when this feature was announced a couple of months ago. I never cared for screen protectors, neither for the actual screen protection (I use a case with raised bevels that should protect the device better than a flimsy plastic sheet in case I drop it), nor to shield the display from prying eyes, but I would definitely use this native implementation at the hardware level. Having the option to selectively obscure certain apps, like online banking, dating, and messaging, and incoming notifications is convenient and very impressive — the sort of feature Apple fanboys would endlessly gush over, and ironically Samsung, as a leading manufacturer of displays, can deliver.

Axios: “SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought”

The big picture: It’s expected to be the largest IPO ever, and could make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

• But the prospectus shows just how much the IPO depends on expectations for future growth and investor servility to Musk — as opposed to the current underlying business.

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By the numbers: SpaceX is wildly unprofitable, reporting a $4.9 billion net loss on $18.67 billion in consolidated revenue for 2025.

• For context, 200 companies in the S&P 500 had more revenue last year than did SpaceX. This includes Tesla, whose sales were five times higher.
• SpaceX said that the AI unit containing X and xAI generated only $818 million in Q1 2026, about a third less than Twitter alone generated in the quarter before Musk took it over.

Dan Primack

Brief article, but it gets the point across in a concise way. As we have seen time and again with Tesla, Musk is counting less on his businesses being solid, and more on his public ‘aura’ as tech entrepreneur to drive up valuations and keep making money. Another signature move is making his somewhat successful ventures bail out hopelessly unprofitable ones: just as Tesla rescued SolarCity a couple of years back, now it’s SpaceX’s turn to pick up the bill for xAI.

Wired: “Ikea’s New Lineup of Smart Home Gear is quietly Changing the Game”

Ikea announced last year that its new lineup of smart home gadgets would be entirely Matter-compatible. That's a big deal, as the open source interoperability standard has Amazon, Apple, and Google signed up, meaning these devices will play well with Alexa, Siri, and Google's nameless voice assistant. While some of this gear has been available for a little while, much of the lineup—like the newest light bulbs and smart plugs—is new. These are now some of the most affordable smart home gadgets available, and from my experience, they also some of the best when it comes to ease of setup and price.

Ikea is still using its Dirigera Hub ($110) that launched a few years ago, so if you're already an Ikea smart home user, you won't need a new hub to start using these gadgets. But new users should pick one up if they don't have a Thread-enabled, Matter-compatible smart home hub in their home.

Nena Farrell

I have also been excited to try Ikea’s new line of products, partly because over the past couple of years I’ve had a lot of fun tinkering with smart home gadgets and routines (lots to write about this topic, sadly not enough time and drive to get down to it), partly because they’re so much cheaper than most of the competition. I have also been aiming to prioritize Matter devices whenever I add something new to my setup, for local control, speed, and future proofing, which is another point in Ikea’s favor. They seem to be rather popular as well, as here in Romania one or several of them are regularly out of stock.

CNBC: “IBM is the latest AI casualty. Shares tank 13% on Anthropic programming language threat”

Shares of IBM closed the day lower by nearly 13.2%, at $223.35 per share, after Anthropic on Monday said Claude Code could be used to automate the exploration and analysis work that drives most of the complexity in COBOL modernization, a key IBM business. IBM has long sold mainframe systems that are optimized for large-scale transaction processing, where COBOL has often been used.

Short for Common Business-Oriented Language, COBOL is a dominant code system developed in the late 1950s often used in business data processing, such as payment processing and retail transaction systems. An estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the U.S. use COBOL, according to Anthropic, making it a prime target for cost-efficient AI disruption.

Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government. Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year, Anthropic wrote in a Monday blog post. AI excels at streamlining the tasks that once made COBOL modernization cost-prohibitive.

Pia Singh

Anthropic and its Claude chatbot have been making quite a lot of headlines lately — and I haven’t even gotten to the most consequential yet. In an ideal world, what Claude promises here would be a genuine improvement, enabling fast modernization and optimization of antiquated systems.

Windows Central: “Microsoft revamps the Start menu in Windows 11 — scrollable layout, new views, and fewer clicks”

The new Start menu offers a larger layout that adapts to the screen resolution, but you don’t have an option to set its size.

Given how large the new design is, I can already hear the complaints about not being able to resize the layout manually.

Since this new layout unifies the interface, it only provides one experience divided into three sections, including “Pinned”, “Recommended”, and “All”.

You will also notice that if you have a mobile device connected to your computer, then the Start menu will also show a toggle to show or hide the mobile sidebar.

Mauro Huculak

This updated layout has slowly made its way to my devices, first appearing on my work laptop sometime in December, and now on my personal laptop earlier this week. It looked like a rather underwhelming update at first. While I started using the Phone Link integration more often and generally find it useful — save for the instances when it stubbornly refuses to connect to my phone for no apparent reason — I don’t see the need for a dedicated panel in the Start Menu, so I immediately disabled this new feature. This aside, nothing much seemed to have changed in the Start layout.

The Verge: “The DJI Romo robovac had security so poor, this man remotely accessed thousands of them”

Sammy Azdoufal claims he wasn’t trying to hack every robot vacuum in the world. He just wanted to remote control his brand-new DJI Romo vacuum with a PS5 gamepad, he tells The Verge, because it sounded fun.

But when his homegrown remote control app started talking to DJI’s servers, it wasn’t just one vacuum cleaner that replied. Roughly 7,000 of them, all around the world, began treating Azdoufal like their boss.

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On Tuesday, when he showed me his level of access in a live demo, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Ten, hundreds, thousands of robots reporting for duty, each phoning home MQTT data packets every three seconds to say: their serial number, which rooms they’re cleaning, what they’ve seen, how far they’ve traveled, when they’re returning to the charger, and the obstacles they encountered along the way.

I watched each of these robots slowly pop into existence on a map of the world. Nine minutes after we began, Azdoufal’s laptop had already cataloged 6,700 DJI devices across 24 different countries and collected over 100,000 of their messages. If you add the company’s DJI Power portable power stations, which also phone home to these same servers, Azdoufal had access to over 10,000 devices.

Sean Hollister

Speaking of AI coding bots taking down AWS, this story is in several ways the opposite: on one hand evidently human programmers can and have also delivered applications riddled with bugs and security holes — and rather serious ones in this case, as the article later mentions another vulnerability so bad it won’t even detail it until DJI has time to fix it. The other aspect is that here Azdoufal used Claude Code to reverse engineer DJI’s protocols, thus exposing the first issue described in the paragraphs above.

Financial Times: “Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot”

Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.

Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the “outage” of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services.

Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.

Rafe Rosner-Uddin

Not surprising that these kinds of outages happen when you hand over operations to unreliable systems without proper controls. Having invested astronomical amounts in AI technologies, management is all too eager to expand their use and to demonstrate tangible return-on-investment — beyond the cost reductions from constant layoffs. The rapid and uncontrolled push for AI in critical software infrastructure has been blamed for the multiple bugs in Windows updates over the past year as well; Microsoft even officially admitted some of the issues and committed to working on fixes.