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.

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.

Spyglass: “Aside from That, Mr. Cook, What Did You Think of the Movie?”

While Cook was enjoying his popcorn and champagne with the likes of Mike Tyson, Tony Robbins, and other “VIPs”, it was complete and utter chaos on the streets of Minnesota. Just hours earlier, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by ICE agents. Maybe, just maybe, postpone the movie premiere?

Of course, President Trump was never going to do that because the official White House stance is that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” and the agents were acting in self defense. And never mind that this was the second such murder in the past 17 days, the show must go on!

But it didn’t have to for Cook. He could have, and should have, backed out of the event. Obviously. The fact that he didn’t either suggests horrible judgement on his part or worse, cowardice. This is a man and leader of one of the biggest and most important businesses in the world who had long been thought to have a great moral compass.

He has lost his way.

M.G. Siegler

I’ve heard the same point about Tim Cook’s ‘moral compass’ in a podcast the other day and I couldn’t roll my eyes hard enough. It takes an incredible amount of naivete – or rather self-delusion – to think the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation has any guiding principle aside from his own wealth and status. This whole concept that Apple and by extension its leadership is somehow more moral or righteous than its competitors can only be explained, I suspect, by Apple fans retroactively constructing this narrative to justify their unflinching loyalty to the brand.

Boom FlyBy: “AI needs More Power than the Grid can Deliver. Supersonic Tech can Fix That”

I was reading post after post about the power crisis hitting AI data centers—GPU racks sitting idle, waiting not on chips, but on electricity. I texted with Sam Altman—who confirmed power was indeed a major constraint. I pinged our engineering team—and found that they already had the outline of a plan to build a power turbine based on our Symphony supersonic engine.

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Today, we’re announcing Superpower, our new 42‑megawatt natural gas turbine, along with a $300M funding round and Crusoe as our launch customer. And most importantly: this marks a turning point. Boom is now on a self-funded path to both Superpower and the Overture supersonic airliner.

Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO, Boom Supersonic

Speaking of companies sidestepping their founding mission and jumping into short-term diversions to make a quick buck, here is the supposed trailblazer in supersonic aviation pivoting to energy generation for AI data centers. The tone of the announcement feels frantic, almost desperate for an ounce of relevance in a time when almost every company under the sun is scrambling to fit AI into their strategy – or at least their investor reports. The bit about the engineering team already having plans for a power turbine strikes me as quite odd as well: so, you’re telling me as a CEO you had no idea what your main engineers were working on!? And they were in fact not working on the airplane that should be your core product!?

The New Yorker: “The Dire Wolf is Back”

Science journalists were more cautious. They took issue with the fact that Colossal had used analogous genes from mice, not woolly-mammoth DNA, to achieve the effect of long, thick hair. A professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Buffalo did tell the Associated Press that the work was technologically pretty cool. But Nature noted that a Maine research facility has been offering its own long-haired mouse strain, named Wooly, for sale to scientists for the past twenty years.

Lamm was irritated when I mentioned the response to him. We are the most advanced multicellular-synthetic-biology company on the planet, he told me. The science behind the woolly mouse had been extraordinary, he reiterated—researchers had successfully made multiple gene edits on a living organism at the same time, a precursor to the quadruple-axel gene editing used in re-creating the dire wolf. It was the most unique germ-line edit in any animal to date, he said.

I asked Lamm if perhaps some overpromising by the Colossal brand had tamped down the applause. The word “de-extinction” appears nearly five hundred times on the company’s website; ordinary people could be excused for thinking that the word referred to creating an exact genetic replica of a once alive animal. Lamm responded, I was warned when I started this business that some of the scientific community will be, if we are successful, jealous and somewhat frustrated. He added, You would think spending half a billion on deëxtinction and conservation would get them excited.

D. T. Max

I rolled my eyes pretty hard when first reading the headlines about this company bringing back an extinct canine species. It was fairly obvious this was nowhere close to the Jurassic Park-like vision of recovering ancient DNA and recreating a live animal based on this genetic blueprint. Instead, the company spliced in a limited set of genes using CRISPR to mimic the visual appearance of a dire wolf and spun this into a massively overblown narrative. They essentially created a new wolf breed and sold it to the public as reviving an entire species…

Windows Central: “Mozilla says Firefox will evolve into an AI browser, and nobody is happy about it”

Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable, says Enzor-Demeo. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off … Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.

Even with the confirmation that AI features will be optional, the internet is not pleased. Users online have expressed their disappointment in Mozilla focusing on AI features and capabilities. One post on X says This is a good example of how management doesn’t understand its own user base, which has amassed over 380K views so far.

Another post says I’ve never seen a company so astoundingly out of touch with the people who want to use its software, highlighting how a lot of people choose to use Firefox to get away from the AI obsession that other browsers such as Edge, Chrome, Opera, and Brave have endured over the last year.

Zac Bowden

I’ve been meaning to harp on Mozilla’s penchant for chasing the hype cycle of the broader tech landscape for the past decade or so, never quite managing to deliver a compelling addition to Firefox. Browsing through my posts, I was amused to rediscover the same plans for AI in Firefox from March 2024 – evidently nothing has moved forward yet, another sign of the terrible management at Mozilla. The potential silver lining I see here is that usually Mozilla joins the hype train late in the cycle when much of the enthusiasm has already drained away and people are looking for the next shiny mirage to sell to naive investors.

Ars Technica: “The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop”

Google has updated Android’s Quick Share feature to support Apple’s AirDrop, which allows users of Apple devices to share files directly using a local peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection. Apple devices with AirDrop enabled and set to “everyone for 10 minutes” mode will show up in the Quick Share device list just like another Android phone would, and Android devices that support this new Quick Share version will also show up in the AirDrop menu.

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But earlier this year, the EU adopted new specification decisions that required Apple to adopt new interoperable wireless standards, starting in this year’s iOS 26 release. If you don’t want to wade through the regulatory documents, this post from cloud services company Ditto is a useful timeline of events written in plainer language.

The rulings required Apple to add support for the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Wi-Fi Aware standard instead of AWDL—and in fact required Apple to deprecate AWDL and to help add its features to Wi-Fi Aware so that any device could benefit from them. This wasn’t quite the imposition it sounded like; Wi-Fi Aware was developed with Apple’s help, based on the work Apple had already done on AWDL. But it meant that Apple could no longer keep other companies out of AirDrop by using a functionally similar but private communication protocol instead of the standardized version.

Andrew Cunningham

I didn’t pay much attention to the initial reports about this – AirDrop always struck me as the type of feature Apple fanboys incessantly fawn about while everyone else shrugs off because there are many alternatives to share files between people that aren’t confined to Apple devices – but this angle of reporting is certainly intriguing. This would not be the first time Apple was compelled by regulation to relax its tight control on its devices and users, the most famous being the forced adoption of USB-C on iPhones.

Windows Latest: “Meta just killed native WhatsApp on Windows 11, now it opens WebView, uses 1GB RAM all the time”

WhatsApp on Windows 11 has just got a ‘major’ upgrade, and you’re probably going to hate it because it simply loads web.whatsapp.com in a WebView2 container. This means WhatsApp on Windows 11 is cooked, and it’s back to being absolute garbage in terms of performance.

WhatsApp is one of those Windows apps that went from being a web wrapper to a native app and then back to the web again after all these years of investment.

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An app can use a lot of memory, and it does not necessarily mean it’s a performance nightmare, but the issue with the new WhatsApp is that it feels sluggish. You’re going to notice sluggish performance, long loading time, and other performance issues when browsing different conversations.

We also noticed that it does not work well with Windows notifications. It also struggles with Windows 11’s Do Not Disturb mode or Active Hours. And there are delayed notifications problems as well.

Mayank Parmar

While reading about this update I initially doubted it was as bad as people feared, since people do tend to exaggerate things online for dramatic purposes. But after the update reached one of my devices, I get what everyone was complaining about, and I feel compelled to join in!

Engadget: “Everything Apple revealed at the iPhone 17 launch event”

As expected, Apple announced a new member of the iPhone family during the event. The iPhone Air is the thinnest iPhone yet, measuring just 5.6mm thick, and made of spacecraft-grade titanium. Ceramic Shield 2 surrounds the iPhone Air on both sides, which helps make it more durable than any previous iPhone. The Air’s always-on screen measures 6.5-inches, and it supports ProMotion and up to 3,000 nits of brightness.

Valentina Palladino

Not sure how you can get away with claiming this as the thinnest iPhone yet when its upper quarter is thicker than many past iPhones. No longer the inconspicuous camera bump from 10 years ago, this is a full-blown bulge, with a camera bump on top.

Paul Kedrosky: “Honey, AI Capex Keeps Eating… Everything”

There is so much that is unprecedented about the current AI capital expenditure wave that I'm going to break from my usual format and collate it, with some (mostly amazed) analysis. Consider this an update to my two recent pieces on this topic, here and here.

By way of preamble, the overarching point is that AI spending is eating everything, like a golden retriever left unsupervised in a room full of food bowls. You can shout LEAVE IT! all you want, and the food will still be gone before you can get the door open.

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Why did the WSJ think the report so strange? Because imports collapsed (tariffs), exports picked up (tariffs), some capital spending went nowhere (rates smashed real estate), and other capital spending jumped (IT). It was a mess of conflicting forces that somehow worked out, like a tornado passing over a junk yard and whirling out a reasonable facsimile of the Kohinoor diamond. How did that happen?

I'm going to focus on one weird detail of the report, but ignore tariffs, which had a huge impact, but about which I wrote at length earlier this week. The key data point is IT spending, as the following table shows.

Paul Kedrosky

The topic of capital expenditure on AI infrastructure has emerged over the past month largely as a warning signal. In an earlier article, Paul Kedrosky notes that current AI datacenter spending is already larger than peak telecom spending (as a percentage of GDP) during the dot-com era, essentially acting as a massive private sector stimulus program, masking weaker sectors of the US economy (flat consumption, weak job growth, declining housebuilding). Other sources have pointed out that AI capex (information processing equipment plus software) has added more to GDP growth than consumers’ spending over the first two quarters of 2025. And Nvidia, arguably the largest beneficiary of this massive spending, now has the biggest weight in the S&P 500 of any individual stock since 1981 and the highest P/E as the index’s top stock since Microsoft in 1999.

Reuters: “Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with children”

An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual, generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are dumber than white people.

These and other findings emerge from a Reuters review of the Meta document, which discusses the standards that guide its generative AI assistant, Meta AI, and chatbots available on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the company’s social-media platforms.

Meta confirmed the document’s authenticity, but said that after receiving questions earlier this month from Reuters, the company removed portions which stated it is permissible for chatbots to flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children.

Jeff Horwitz

Despicable, even by Facebook’s abysmal standards. I was browsing my blog to link to examples of their horrible past behaviors, and the list just kept getting longer and longer!

Sky & Telescope: “Alpha Centauri might have a Planet, Webb Telescope finds”

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers may have directly imaged a Saturn-mass gas giant in the habitable zone of a star in the solar system next door. While the planet itself isn’t habitable to life as we know it, moons around it could be.

Alpha Centauri is a triple-star system, made up of a pair of close-orbiting, Sun-like stars (A and B) as well as the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun.

Astronomers have already found three planets swirling around Proxima Centauri, but now they may have spotted one circling Alpha Centauri A as well. The results are reported in two papers that will appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (paper 1, paper 2).

Colin Stuart

Fascinating discovery, particularly because α Centauri AB is a pretty tight binary, with the minimal distance between the stars about the same as the distance between Saturn and the Sun in our own solar system. Finding a planet in a stable orbit around one of these stars would further support the idea that planets can form in challenging stellar configurations and so are basically ubiquitous in the universe. As of now though, the papers are based on a single visual detection – and two negative follow-up observations – correlated with another 2019 sighting from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, so the uncertainty remains high and we can expect the results to be revised considerably based on future observations of the system.

The Verge: “Instagram adds a reposts feed and rips off Snap Maps”

Starting today, users will have the ability to repost public Reels and grid posts from other accounts. And similar to TikTok, reposts will be collected in a designated tab on your profile and sprinkled into the feeds of people who follow you. It’s a small but meaningful shift from how Instagram currently operates: until now, the most efficient way to share other users’ content was to repost it on your Instagram Story. Now, you can essentially reblog it.

Instagram is also pulling from Snapchat and adding an opt-in location map that lives in your private messages. The map shows the last active location for friends who have opted in to the feature; it also pulls content from specific locations, such as a music festival, where many people are posting from. It’s the Snap Map but redesigned for Instagram.

Mia Sato

I first rolled my eyes reading about this update – yet another feature nobody asked for added to the pile of bloat on Instagram. And yet after I saw it in the app, I instantly liked it. Maybe because I spend so much time on Twitter – who initially introduced this idea, despite the tech press going out of their way to ignore that fact nowadays – it felt instantly familiar and natural.