Reuters reported Sunday that sources familiar with the matter identified the arrested suspect as Ed Dubrovsky, a Canadian cybersecurity executive whose career has focused on helping clients negotiate with ransomware attackers. Court documents from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania show Dubrovsky is facing two criminal charges: conspiracy to threaten to impair the confidentiality of information with the intent to extort money, and interference with commerce by threats. The allegations have not been proven in court.

“For the cybersecurity community in general, I think that there’s a sense of shock,” Toronto-based tech and cybersecurity analyst Ritesh Kotak told CBC News on Monday. Kotak says Dubrovsky is “very popular” and has spoken at numerous conferences, but stressed that the charges “are clearly just allegations” and that it is not yet known “what exactly has happened.” “This is an individual that was for the most part respected when it came to ransomware negotiations,” he said. “A lot of people are familiar with his work as well.”

The device’s square shape makes it feel less imposing than larger smart displays like Google’s Nest Hub Max or Amazon’s Echo Show 11, and I can see it fitting nicely on my kitchen counter — though it might be a hair too big for my bedside table. The HomeView is the centerpiece of Apple’s new push into the home. It costs $299 and launches alongside a new collection of cameras, thermostats, and a door lock designed for Apple Home.

As a smart home hub, Matter controller, and Thread Border Router, the HomeView can orchestrate these and other Apple Home and Matter smart home devices. It’s available in eight countries at launch: the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and India. Pre-orders are open now, with devices shipping November 13th.

Microsoft has debuted its latest AI chip, the Azure Maia 300, as it looks to reduce its reliance on third-party processors from the likes of Nvidia and AMD. Unveiled at the OCP Global Summit 2026 in San Jose on Monday, the Maia 300 will join Microsoft’s Maia 200 and Maia 100 chips as part of what the company said will be multigigawatt deployments beginning next year. The Windows maker said that will make its Maia chips the “primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services.”

The company said Maia 300 provides 40% more tokens per megawatt than “leading GPU-based systems,” a clear swipe at Nvidia, and that a 96-chip rack offers seven times the rack-scale token throughput of Microsoft’s Maia 200. […] The Maia 200 chip currently powers its Microsoft production workloads, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as OpenAI models, Microsoft’s MAI models, and open-source models. That provides 1.7 times more tokens per watt for AI capabilities in Microsoft’s Teams, Copilot, and Cowork software versus other GPU-based systems, the company said.

It will run on devices as far back as the iPhone 11 and the third-generation iPad Air. No Man’s Sky might not have the most cutting-edge AAA graphics (though they’re still strong, and they’ve come a long way since launch via updates), but the game’s uncommon method of generating galaxies of incomprehensible scale on device consistently for all players from a single-seed happening on a phone is remarkable for those of us who remember phones performing far behind consoles or desktop PCs.

This version of the game includes all of the content and systems updates to the game that have been added over the years — the expansions that famously took the game from a rocky launch reception to a widely beloved redemption story. There are a couple of compromises, though, and it’s similar to what we saw with No Man’s Sky on the Nintendo Switch. Hello Games says the ability to build and explore player-made planetary settlements is limited to the iPhone 15 Pro and later, and multiplayer is not supported on any iOS device. “We are excited to see player feedback on iOS, and will support it appropriately based on how many folks are playing,” the company says, leaving the door open to perhaps not supporting all future content updates if the player base isn’t there to justify it.

Instead of wood pulp’s larger, disordered fibers, the researchers used cellulose nanocrystals here. Cellulose is the main structural material in plants, and in nanocrystal form, it can act as a microscopic strengthening agent for other materials, including ice — essentially stopping cracks from spreading easily. The protein used here was called CBM3a-AFPIII, a combination of an antifreeze protein (AFP) and a carbohydrate-binding module (CBM). Its job was to act like glue, keeping the cellulose nanocrystals and ice bonded together.

It’s a clever approach, and the researchers think that by tweaking their ingredients and methods, they might be able to improve their ‘super ice’ even further. “Optimizing solidification kinetics and freezing protocols, alongside developing diverse AFP-CBM variants, could yield even higher-strength composites,” write the researchers. Besides further tests of the durability of the material, the researchers are also keen to take a closer look at how cracks propagate through BioPykrete, to confirm that the underlying strengthening mechanisms are what they think they are.

Further down the line, this approach could open up a whole new landscape for materials used in packaging, construction, and more: Using a custom protein to bring two unlikely compounds (ice and cellulose) together. “By bridging the gap between recombinant protein design and structural engineering, we have developed a high-performance material specifically engineered for the rigors of the world’s most extreme environments,” write the researchers.

Many open-source developers still dislike AI. The latest example is System76 banning AI-generated content from its COSMIC desktop. At Open Source Summit Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds offered a different take: "I actually really like using AI,” Torvald told Dirk Hohndel, his good friend and head of Ericsson Software Technology, in their latest discussion. […] Torvalds said, “I think that you need to be very careful using AI when you’re doing something real and important.” Torvalds explained he hadn’t always felt that way about AI programming. “I used to think it was just not very good — but now I’m at the point where I actually really like using AI.”

“To be fair,” he continued, “I don’t do a lot of kernel programming. I’m a maintainer. The Linux kernel is a project where other people do the real work, and I act as the collection point. But I still enjoy programming immensely. I think AI is a wonderful tool if you use it correctly and treat it as a tool, and I find it makes programming much more enjoyable.” Torvalds recalled, “I started programming in 1981 or so, and back then computers were much simpler, and you could understand what they were doing, and also the programs you compared your own programs to were much simpler.”

“It’s a different story today,” Torvalds said. “The bar in software engineering has grown so high that it’s hard to see your own small efforts as worth anything, because you’re used to all these polished, professional programs. […] A lot of people make fun of vibe coding, but I think it’s a wonderful way to find joy in programming. It makes you feel like you’re doing something relevant. It allows you, as a new programmer, to do things that you would otherwise have a really hard time with.”

He continued: “I love the concept of AI as a gateway drug because I was working on my own toy project, the guitar pedal, and I knew what I was doing. I had a user interface that I had written myself in C that was running on a microcontroller that was running on this small screen, and I was like, “This is just stupid. It looks like something from the ‘80s; I wanted it to look like something from this century. But I don’t do Java. I do kernels.” “So, I use AI to do the things that I’m bad at,” Torvalds went on, “I’d seen all the same YouTube videos you have. Give AI a prompt, and it will do it. So I gave it a prompt, and it did it, and it was horrendous. Then I said, ‘Hey, look! I already did this in C. I did it the right way. It’s just ugly.”

At long last, Firefox 158 is ready to go with JPEG-XL image support as an alternative to the likes of WebP, JPEG, PNG, and GIF. The default HTTP Accept header for image requests also now supports “image/jxl” for the JPEG-XL image format. Prior releases of Firefox had JPEG-XL gated by an experimental option.

Firefox 158 also now supports filling forms faster in Smart Window when clicking into a form field or selecting Fill from sources. On the developer side, CSS typed arithmetic are now supported to use functions like calc() to divide two values of the same data type even if of different units.

Epic Games delayed the release of an upcoming video-game collaboration with Walt Disney and told its developers to use more artificial intelligence tools to finish the game, according to people familiar with the project. The title had been slated for release in March, but is now delayed with no new date communicated, said the people familiar, who asked to not be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

Developers on the game, a shooter featuring characters from the Marvel and Star Wars franchises, were instructed to implement an “AI first” production model using tools such as Anthropic’s Claude. Humans will then manage and guide that work. “No more hand-written code,” one of the game’s directors told staff in an internal message reviewed by Bloomberg. The director added that all art for the game would be “generated with full AI workflows.”

Even before this announcement, the maker of the popular Fortnite game had been pushing hard for the use of AI across all of its divisions. But this is the first time a major video-game company has attempted to build a title primarily with AI. “We’re embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do,” said Jake Jones, communications director at Epic Games, in a statement to Bloomberg News.

Speaking with the FT as Meta releases its Muse Wonder AI model on Monday, the billionaire chief executive claimed the new system was “going to allow much more sophisticated behaviours that are at the frontier of what is being done in the AI field.” […] “Getting to this point both required a large amount of compute and investment, and a lot of very rigorous scientific work by the group working on it over an extended period of time,” said Zuckerberg. […] Meta said Muse Wonder outperforms Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra on some technical benchmarks. It said the new model can be used to carry out complex tasks from “understanding a lease to making sense of financial or health information.” However, Muse Wonder will also be “closed,” with its best versions sold directly to businesses. That pits it against Anthropic and OpenAI for corporate AI contracts in a serious test of its ambitions. Zuckerberg signaled further spending as Meta was “already working on the next step up,” adding that its model development would “probably feel like it’ll go quite a bit faster from here.”

However, he also shrugged off mounting fears that the technology was advancing at a rate that will soon surpass human control. […] The Meta chief declined to be drawn on his figure for “P(doom)" — a much-discussed Silicon Valley term to describe the probability that AI will lead to mass destruction. Instead, he argued that responsibility should fall on the individual lab to ensure model safety. “I’m much closer to the belief that AI is a technology that can be engineered with normal guardrails and built responsibly than the anthropomorphic vision of AI, which is that it is just going to go do its own thing,” he said. Zuckerberg has previously rejected calls by the heads of AI labs such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman for an industry-wide “slowdown” in AI development. He also played a key role in crafting US President Donald Trump’s White House “Accord on Super Intelligence,” setting out principles for self-regulation of the industry, which critics say falls far short of a formal global AI governance regime.

The Edge has a user-replaceable battery, a Fitbit first, aligning with Google’s efforts to make its Pixel Watch more repairable. (Likely also due to new battery regulations set to take effect next year in the European Union.) Repair options will vary by region and availability. If you find the Pixel Watch’s round face too bulky, the Edge’s capsule-shaped alternative might suit smaller wrists better. If the Charge 6’s 1.04-inch display was too small, the Edge upgrades it to a larger 1.34-inch screen. The difference is noticeable, and that extra real estate could make a real impact when glancing at your metrics mid-workout.

The Edge borrows a few more attributes from the Pixel Watch, including an altimeter that uses atmospheric pressure to measure elevation changes. That means it can record elevation gain and loss during outdoor activities, track floors climbed, and add more context to your outdoor stats. It also has a far-field skin temperature sensor, replacing the standard device temperature sensor found in other Fitbits. By bringing some of the Pixel Watch’s more advanced hardware to a fitness-first wearable, Google is giving the Edge a compelling middle-ground position in its lineup at a Fitbit-friendly price.

The Edge inherits the Fitbit Air’s improvements while restoring several Charge 6 features the screenless tracker lacks, including built-in GPS and electrical sensors that work with the electrocardiogram (ECG) app. You can also control music playback on a connected Bluetooth device, as you could with the Charge 6, and Google Maps turn-by-turn directions will arrive later this year. […] With a Google Health Premium subscription, the Edge can track blood pressure trends without manual calibration and insulin resistance trends without requiring a blood draw. Google first announced these capabilities alongside the Pixel Watch 5’s debut, but they only became available at the end of September. They’re also available on the Air, keeping Google’s screenless tracker up to date as its lineup expands.

When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia’s digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days. Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine’s decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia’s system if the countries continue trading such blows.

Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine’s power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks. But Ukraine soon began striking back at data centers owned by the Russian company Yandex, also known as “Russia’s Google,” in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described as a “symmetrical response.”

[…] More importantly for Russian society, the damage to Yandex’s data centers has reportedly caused interruptions or outages to popular Russian payment apps and digital banking services, email, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, ride-hailing and food delivery apps, and navigation and map services. Yandex’s search engine also accounts for about 70 percent of the market share in Russia. The disruptions are even more widespread, because the data center damage also impacts Yandex’s cloud computing service, which counts some of Russia’s largest companies as customers, according to The Moscow Times, an independent newspaper. These include large grocery and fast-food chains as well as a household appliance retailer.

Supermarket cold aisles are typically run by control panels that manage an entire store’s fridges and freezers and can be accessed over the internet, which lets maintenance companies adjust them from anywhere. The source close to Lecornu said ANSSI had identified a vulnerability in software supplied by Danish company Danfoss.

Danfoss said it was “aware of incidents in France affecting a limited number of refrigeration management systems.” The affected units “were running outdated firmware,” Danfoss said, adding that it had “long advised customers to keep supported systems updated with the latest firmware and to migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions.”

On August 9, cybersecurity firm Claroty’s Team82 published research detailing vulnerabilities in the Danfoss AK-SM 800A controller. According to the report, software updates issued by Danfoss addressed issues that could have allowed attackers to bypass authentication controls and execute code on compromised devices.

A recent study (PDF) of actual coding practices across hundreds of firms finds that human code review forms a significant “bottleneck” for the overall efficiency of AI coding tools, resulting in “little evidence that firms increase software output or reduce employment” by using them. Any efficiency increased during the actual coding phase, the study authors find, is “absorbed by downstream constraints in the production process”; as “the code review process significantly increases in length, pull requests are more likely to require revisions, and reviewers leave more comments.”

[…] In terms of raw code being produced, the results are clear and stark. The introduction of AI coding agents at a firm leads to a 30 percent increase in total lines of code generated, a 20 percent rise in the number of total commits, and a 23 percent increase in pull requests on average, the researchers write. But all that extra code doesn’t translate directly into improved software output on the firm level. On the contrary, the resolution rate for Issues and Epics (i.e. wholesale software features) tracked by tools like Jira did not change in a statistically significant way after AI tools were introduced (the researchers also found no “compositional shift” in the size or complexity of those Jira-tracked issues across the AI introduction).

The reason for that discrepancy can be found directly in the code review process, which takes markedly longer on average after the introduction of AI coding agents. Overall, the average “review process” time between a pull request getting submitted and it being merged into the codebase balloons 49 percent on average after AI agents are introduced. That effect can be seen in more granular data, too, with “the share of pull requests with changes requested nearly doubl[ing], and the number of comments per pull request increas[ing] by 35%" following the AI agent shift, the researchers write.

In response to this change, the researchers found a 14 percent increase in the share of workers performing code reviews after AI agents’ introduction. They also write that they “cannot attribute significant employment changes to AI” after looking at total active workers across Jellyfish and cross-referencing with LinkedIn data at those firms. While AI could also theoretically help with this review process, the researchers found that, so far, that impact has been marginal. Although 80 percent of measured firms used some form of AI code review by March 2026, AI agents were only responsible for 23.3 percent of all review comments and 10.8 percent of all pull requests, suggesting humans were still responsible for the vast majority of this work.

The company has developed software called DOS, which can help developers to speed up AI training and inference workloads by optimizing their neural networks to run on a specific processor. In most AI workloads, developers must optimize a neural network for the chip they plan to run it on. This process used to take months, but with DOS, the workflow necessary to do this can be compressed into just a couple of weeks. As a result, companies can use Decart’s software to shift AI workloads to different processors if their requirements change, or if chip availability becomes an issue.

In addition to DOS, Decart is also a model developer, responsible for creating the Lucy and Oasis world models, which are designed to generate and simulate realistic three-dimensional environments for video games, robotic training and other use cases. It’s still possible another suitor could emerge and outbid Amazon. Last month, Anthropic PBC was reportedly engaged in talks to buy Decart, according to a report by Bloomberg. However, it ultimately pulled out of a reported $6 billion deal after conducting due diligence on the startup. It’s not clear what ultimately dissuaded Anthropic from pursuing a deal.

“If looking at all quarters, then we have seen other quarters in recent years with larger declines, such as 2022Q4, which was -28.2%, and 2023Q1, which was -28.7%. Both were coming off pandemic highs,” IDC Director Jitesh Ubrani told PCMag in an email. The numbers aren’t a great sign, since third-quarter PC shipments usually outpace those in the second quarter as vendors introduce new products ahead of the holiday shopping season. Instead, PC shipments were at 62.7 million units, down 9.1% from the previous quarter.

[…] Of course, the downturn isn’t a surprise. IDC and other research firms have warned that the ongoing AI-driven memory shortage threatens to sap demand for PCs and phones due to soaring memory and storage costs. “What we’re seeing is the result of the strong first half pull-in. Vendors and channels loaded up on inventory early in the year to get ahead of [memory-related] price hikes, and that has thrown off the usual seasonality, where Q3 is typically larger than Q2,” Ubrani said in a report covering IDC’s preliminary estimates for the quarter.

In one bright spot, Ubrani said vendors and retailers might cut prices to generate interest and clear out products they have in stock. “Channels are now worried about carrying too much inventory into a market where high prices are suppressing demand. That could translate into promotions and some short-term relief for consumers, but we don’t expect pricing anywhere near what it was a year ago. Prices will remain elevated,” he added.