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.

The Hollywood Reporter: “Brandon Sanderson’s Literary Fantasy Universe ‘Cosmere’ picked up by Apple TV”

The first titles being eyed for adaptation are the Mistborn series, for features, and The Stormlight Archive series, for television.

The latter already has producers involved: Blue Marble, run by former WME agent Theresa Kang, is attached to executive produce The Stormlight Archive television adaptation.

The deal is rare one, coming after a competitive situation which saw Sanderson meet with most of the studio heads in town. It gives the author rarefied control over the screen translations, according to sources. Sanderson will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals. That’s a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoys.

Borys Kit

This announcement was met with widespread enthusiasm online, both because of the popularity of the ‘Cosmere’ and the level of control Sanderson is supposed to have over the final adaptation, in theory ensuring a faithful result. Me, I was more skeptical when reading about this, though perhaps this has more to do with my apprehensions around Sanderson, and Apple TV to a lesser degree.

The Hollywood Reporter: “Heavy is the Crown: George R.R. Martin on His Triumphs and Torments”

Last year, Martin sat down with one of his idols, Robert Redford, who was a fellow executive producer on Dark Winds. Redford came out of acting retirement to film a brief cameo in the show with Martin. In the scene, the two are sitting at a chessboard, and Redford ad-libbed a line: George, the whole world is waiting, make a move. It was a meta joke about how long it’s taken Martin to finish Winter. Then Redford died, too. His chess scene with Martin — like something out of The Seventh Seal — was his final performance.

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Martin says he has around 1,100 manuscript pages finished. He’s also said the number for a while. He long has blamed the endless distractions that have come from shifting from a full-time author to a producer and celebrity. The success of Thrones was both the best thing that could have happened to Martin and the worst thing that could have happened to the greatest story he ever wrote.

James Hibberd

I have long surmised that Martin’s inability – or unwillingness – to finish his magnum opus was down to the fact that he was already making more than enough money off the various TV adaptations and side projects to ever bother completing a series that became overstuffed with characters and marred by the poor reception of its on-screen conclusion. But reading through this article makes me think that he doesn’t even acknowledge the issue to himself. He keeps talking about wanting to finalize it, but other projects constantly getting in the way.