Communities across California are rushing to prepare for the imminent arrival of the so-called “Kelvin wave,” a massive underwater band of warm water threatening to inundate swaths of the vast North American shoreline. The wave is nearing southern California and expected to reach the San Francisco Bay Area by early October, as it crawls toward Alaska. Waters could rise by a foot along the California coast, according to scientists, who have warned that this could dramatically double the 8-12in rise in sea levels already caused by climate change over the last century.

The Kelvin wave doesn’t climb and crash like a typical ocean wave; rather, it swells the tides from beneath the surface. It’s effectively a massive slosh of warm water, driven by El Nino conditions, that moves across the Pacific before colliding with the South American coastline and surging north. It also won’t transport water in the way a tsunami might, but creates conditions that enable higher sea levels to linger. On their own, Kelvin waves aren’t always hazardous, according to Mike Jacox, a research oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service, though they can reduce the growth of phytoplankton that form the base of the marine food web. “But when there are very high tides or storm surges, their effects can be amplified,” he said.

If the rising waters coincide with other climatic events, such as rainstorms and high tides, the phenomenon could swallow beaches, chew away bluffs and coastlines, and submerge streets, homes and businesses. “This coming Kelvin wave is just the beginning,” said Dr Jonathan Warrick, a research geologist at the US Geological Survey. “The thing to look out for is what will happen in January, February and March — that’s when we get the biggest storms, we get our largest waves and we have some very large tides.” If these events align, their effects will compound, setting the stage for a tumultuous winter. Together, Warrick said, the systems will pack a far bigger punch. “When it comes to these storms and the tides,” he said, “we really are kind of rolling the dice.”

Amazon says [the Kindle Click is] meant for reading under the covers, on a treadmill, or on an airplane tray table. It’s available for preorder and ships Oct. 28. It recharges over USB-C, includes side buttons for adjusting brightness, and works with Kindles released in 2024 or later. The company cited BookTok as an inspiration, Bloomberg reported, a reference to the community of readers on TikTok who post book recommendations, reviews and their reading setups. Kindle fans there have been showing off third-party clickers for years.

Amazon is also bringing back physical page-turn buttons, which disappeared when the company discontinued the Kindle Oasis in 2024. This time they come in a separate $79.99 magnetic cover, which works only with the new Signature Edition versions of the Paperwhite and Colorsoft. The new Kindles have screens that sit flush with the edges, colors that wrap around to the front, and optional aluminum housings. They also have user-replaceable batteries to comply with European Union rules, Amazon told The Verge.

The base Kindle starts at $149.99, or $189.99 in aluminum. The Paperwhite starts at $199.99 and the Colorsoft at $289.99, with Signature Editions at $249.99 and $319.99. Those prices match what Amazon has charged since August, when it raised Kindle prices by $40 to $50, citing memory and storage costs. The base Kindle is available now. The Paperwhite and Colorsoft ship Oct. 28.

British police forces, including specialist units within the Metropolitan Police, have used Oxygen Forensics software to break into the phones of suspects during live investigations, public documents show. The Virginia-based company behind the software has been accused in the US of having hidden its Russian ownership to avoid sanctions, before it was awarded government contracts. Its American chief executive and a Russian national were arrested last week after a US investigation found the company had sought to hide its ownership in an alleged attempt to avoid sanctions and scrutiny.

[…] By September 2024, the US Secret Service had awarded Oxygen a five-year contract for its software. In December 2022, and in October 2023, Oxygen’s chief executive told the US government that Oxygen Forensics had “no immediate or highest-level owner.” By September 2024, the US Secret Service had awarded Oxygen a five-year contract for its software. In March, Mr Reiber allegedly told the US government that there had been no Russians involved in developing the software and that no one in Russia had access to the environment in which it was built. US prosecutors say this was false. If convicted, both Mr Reiber and Mr Davydov could face a sentence of 20 years in prison.

For starters, Clef has an LLM backbone. According to Cloudflare, Clef uses specially post-trained, frozen versions of Qwen3.8-27B and Qwen3.5-9B for Clef and Clef-flash, respectively, with the Qwen backbone performing a prefill-only pass during inference. Clef is still fast - faster than Jev, to be fair - and scores choices in parallel after that prefill-only pass. It’s not clear what Jev’s underlying architecture is, as TypeSafe has kept that a secret.

As for its speed and capability, Clef moves fast. Cloudflare ran it against Jev and some other open decision models using the Jev Decision Index available on Hugging Face, and the company’s own ranking suggests Clef is slightly slower than other open models, but more accurate, with Clef-flash just as accurate as most of the others, but far faster.

To be fair to the competition, Cloudflare self-reported its own scores against the benchmark, and they have yet to be reproduced for ranking on the official Decision Index. Cloudflare also ran Clef against TypeSafe’s own benchmarks, and claimed it beat Jev in three out of four areas, only losing out on agent trace observability. Even if it were a bit slower or less accurate, Clef has another major leg up on Jev: It’s not limited to classifying text — it can also handle images and video. Additionally, Clef supports a 64k context window. Jev can also handle up to 64k tokens across a request, although its state plus longest individual question is limited to 32k.

“Ryan leaves the organization in a strong position,” says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an internal memo. “Over the past year, Ryan’s team has done critical work bringing together the product, engineering, and design foundations that have made this next phase possible.”

Roslansky is leaving a week after Microsoft announced its new Copilot, which the company is positioning as “the OS for work.” He’s also leaving around a month after calling fully AI-generated documents “a doom loop” for workers. “If we’re not careful, we’ll end up with a very expensive way to avoid writing and reading in an ocean of sameness, genericness,” said Roslansky in his LinkedIn post.

Microsoft is now moving the teams behind Office and Microsoft Teams over to Charles Lamanna, as part of the Copilot, Agents, and Platform (CAP) organization. […] Microsoft’s chief design officer, Jon Friedman, is also moving to report to Copilot chief Jacob Andreou. Microsoft appointed Dan Shapero as its LinkedIn CEO earlier this year, and he will continue in this role and report directly to Nadella.

The memory and storage industry is not holding back on increasing production, though, with Micron saying that NAND and DRAM shipments are expected to grow in the low-to-mid 20s percentage range for the next two years. However, it seems that this is not enough to match growing demand, as it expects “the industry to remain supply constrained in both years.” Still, it seems that manufacturers are prioritizing HBM demand for AI data centers, with the company expecting shipments of these chips to grow faster than conventional DRAM.

Micron and other chip manufacturers are bringing new factories online to increase output, but it’s going to take years before they can start producing chips. But even as we’re amid an unprecedented multi-year memory chip shortage, Micron also announced record financial guidance. It forecasted a record $61.5 billion FQ1 revenue and a gross margin of 86.25%, implying a gross profit of more than $53 billion. After accounting for an estimated $2.06 billion in operating expenses and a tax rate of around 15.5%, the company said its earnings per share sit at $38.15, plus or minus $1.00, for approximately 1.15 billion shares.

A company that makes phone hacking devices claims to have developed a solution that freezes iPhones in a state that lets cops more easily access sensitive data inside them, according to a video obtained by 404 Media. […] The new technology to get around inactivity reboot was developed by Magnet Forensics, the company behind GrayKey, a popular tool sold to law enforcement agencies that allows them to unlock and access data stored in iPhones and Android smartphones. Magnet has developed a new device called GrayKey Preserve and a feature for its regular GrayKey devices called Evidence Preservation Mode, according to the video.

“This is an absolute game changer for iOS forensics and a function that I wish we had years ago,” a Magnet employee says in the leaked video, specifically mentioning that the solution is targeted at the iPhone’s inactivity reboot feature and the data it makes unavailable. GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode are also designed to combat another iPhone feature that automatically deletes certain data — such as cached locations, and recently deleted photos and iMessages — after a certain number of days. “We’re gonna be able to preserve that data for an infinite amount of time.”

[…] 404 Media shared a transcript of the video with Jiska Classen, a researcher at the Hasso Plattner Institute who studies iPhone security. While Classen said that it’s impossible to know for sure how Magnet’s new feature works based on the video, she posited some theories and agreed that it is “quite a game changer” or “at least puts things back to where they were before inactivity reboot.” She thinks Magnet has found a way to manipulate the iPhone’s clock, effectively “slowing down time” or even “stopping the clock from ticking, even after a reboot.” Most likely, according to her, the GrayKey may disable the iPhone tasks that set data to expire.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced the creation of a new military command that would be dedicated to building and providing autonomous and robotic capabilities across the U.S. military. The command, which Hegseth said would be called “Autonomous Warfare Command,” highlights the rapidly changing nature of warfare and the need to make progress on systems like drones and the use of artificial intelligence.

Speaking in front of hundreds of junior officers and enlisted personnel at Quantico, Virginia, in a speech peppered with attacks on the media, Hegseth said the command would be led by a four-star officer. “The pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it,” Hegseth said in a speech called the “State of the Force,” in which he announced other changes, including the creation of the office of religious affairs. “Cheap compute, superintelligence, and advanced commercial manufacturing have enabled the proliferation of low-cost, high-precision strike,” Hegseth added.

[…] The United States has long relied on its vast military budget to field some of the world’s most expensive weapons systems. But there is an increasing realization within the Pentagon that this is not sustainable. “Today we need both quality and quantity,” Hegseth said.

OpenAI stunned the industry in July when it disclosed that its agents broke out of a testing environment and hacked into open-source platform Hugging Face. […] Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei rocked the tech sector by urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models and calling for stronger government oversight. He published a three-step proposal aimed at tempering the pace of development without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”

CEO Jensen Huang, argued that individual companies should be responsible for ensuring the safety of their products. President Donald Trump convened top executives from Alphabet, Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI and other companies on Tuesday to discuss the issue. The group signed a short voluntary, nonbinding accord, which says that “every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public.”

The OmniBook 5 14 can be configured much higher, with up to a Core 7 350 chip, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, but all models include a 1080p webcam, dual speakers, HDMI, 3.5mm audio jack, and just two 10Gbps USB-C ports. And while the inclusion of OLED across the range is a major draw to the new OmniBook, the base config only has a passable 1920 x 1200 resolution and 300 nits of max brightness on its non-touch panel. A touchscreen version will be available when the OmniBook 5 launches in October, but a version with a 2560 x 1600 resolution OLED and 400 nits of brightness isn’t coming until March 2027.

While the OmniBook 5 14 doesn’t seem poised to best the MacBook Neo in raw processing power (based on our other reviews of Wildcat Lake laptops) or screen brightness, it’s quite thin, light, and colorful. HP even gave it the nicer, sleeker lid logo usually reserved for pricier models. It starts at just 2.56 pounds, and it’s as thin as 0.46 inches / 11.7mm. That’s slightly lighter and thinner than a Neo. And I’d expect its Wildcat Lake chips to offer some good-to-great battery life. But we’ll have to see how it delivers in actual testing.

For a long time, PC gamers could access many PlayStation 5 games only if the publisher invested in a bespoke port (something Sony has recently said it will be scaling back). Now, though, rapid advancements in PS5 emulators and other tools are making recent PlayStation titles increasingly playable on generic PCs. SharpEmu was the first of these emulators, advancing from a "very early alpha stage" in May to a current state that can “load the eboot.bin of real games, execute native CPU instructions, and partially handle GPU-related functionality.” The most recent release boasts 10 tested games that reach a “playable” state, including six that developer CursedIfElse says are “fully playable at 60 fps.” That includes simple 2D games like Tetris Forever but also 3D titles like Astro Bot and the PS5 Demon’s Souls remaster running at playable frame rates.

[…] Amid that SharpEmu progress, fellow PS5 emulator KytyPS5 launched its first public version last week. The major expansion of PS4-focused emulator Kyty “can boot 2D games and a selection of 3D games, including titles built with Unreal Engine 4/5, Unity, and custom engines,” according to its GitHub page. An extensive compatibility list for KytyPS5 already shows 134 titles with “controllable gameplay” on the new emulator, though many of those still include reports of persistent, game-breaking bugs. But you can already find YouTube footage of PS5 titles like Astro’s Playroom and Demon’s Souls running quite capably under the emulator.

On top of those more traditional emulators, AnyPS5 might be the most interesting effort to get PS5 games running on PC. The self-described “tool for automatic executables porting” works kind of like Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, relinking a PS5 game’s original x86 game code directly to native executable instructions that can run on PC. That puts the effort somewhere between direct static decompilation of a game’s source code and more complete emulation of the entire PS5 environment.

Google is not claiming that Gemini 4 Argon wins every benchmark. But across the benchmark table disclosed in the company’s embargoed materials, Argon posts the highest score, or ties for the highest score, in more categories than GPT-6 Astra or Claude Opus 5.5. Across the 18 benchmarks Google disclosed, Argon leads outright on 12 and ties for first on one. GPT-6 Astra leads outright on three and ties Argon on one. Claude Opus 5.5 leads outright on two. That makes Argon the leading frontier model by total number of benchmark leads or top scores in Google’s comparison set, even though the results show a still-close race in which OpenAI and Anthropic retain advantages in several important technical categories.

[…] The result is a more nuanced claim than “best model across the board.” Argon appears to have the broadest top-score profile among the three frontier models in Google’s disclosed comparison, but GPT-6 Astra remains ahead in several software, science-terminal and computer-use tasks, while Claude Opus 5.5 remains ahead in terminal-agent and post-training workflows. For enterprise buyers, that means model choice is still workload-dependent, even if Argon now gives Google its strongest claim yet to overall frontier leadership by benchmark count. […] Argon also expands Google’s output ceiling. The company says the model supports an industry-leading 1 million output tokens, up from a previous 64,000-token limit. That is a notable distinction for agentic software engineering, audit, migration and legal-review workloads where the value of a model often depends on how long it can sustain a chain of work before handing control back to a human.

Microsoft’s vast layoffs across the summer have hit Xbox in their thousands, with studios like Ninja Theory on the path to being closed, and others like Double Fine being divested completely. Microsoft has effectively shut down Halo Studios itself and handed off the franchise to Call of Duty showrunners instead, as Xbox aggressively seeks to restructure for its next decade.

[…] The NYT interviewed (paywall) Sharma recently covering the Xbox layoffs generally. The outlet said that Asha “did not stall” in declaring Xbox not-for-sale. “Xbox is not for sale. […] We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that. […] We’ve got a long way to go with Microsoft and we’re going to take the long-term view.”

The NYT quite patronizingly called the comment a “bob and weave” seemingly unwilling to let go of the idea of divestiture. It’s great shareholder bait; Xbox has long been an aspirational type of product, and it has been a loss leader in some regards. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has remarked in the past about how, despite the fact Xbox isn’t a huge profit generator, fandom of the brand has led to lucrative deals for Azure on the business side of things. Yet, shareholders would love nothing more than for Microsoft to quit the difficult and risky game industry to dive all-in on AI psychosis products instead…

The DMDC may not be widely known to the general public, but serves as one of the Department of Defense’s records-keeping units. The DMDC maintains over 60 million records for U.S. military and civilian staff and their family members to help determine benefits and entitlements, such as healthcare and retirement. The unit also provides a critical service as the military’s “leading identity management provider,” which links active service members, employees, and contractors to credentials, such as smart cards and passwords. These are used to access Pentagon computer systems, buildings, and bases.

“We make sure that the right people get access and the wrong people don’t: security of identity information is paramount,” the DMDC’s website reads. The Department of Defense, which oversees the DMDC, said it does not have any indication that the information was misused, but did not say how it reached that conclusion. TechCrunch contacted a Pentagon spokesperson to ask if officials had any communications from the hackers, whose identities are not known, but we did not hear back.

Once a publisher joins the “AI contribution pilot,” they receive an extra AI earnings widget via their Search Console dashboard. This displays a monthly earnings number (with some history), though no other detailed information on how payouts are calculated currently. Payments are based more on value than raw usage, meaning Google only pays when it judges that a piece of content has meaningfully contributed to an AI-generated response. Publishers can opt out at any time.

[…] Digiday has learned that at least dozens of publishers have been approached by Google for the AI contribution pilot, though the program has been more appealing to small and mid-sized, rather than large publishers and has widened far beyond news publishers. Digiday couldn’t get final confirmation of the number. Screenshots from Google Search Console, seen by Digiday, show an “AI contribution” panel that appears once a publisher opts into the program. The interface lists the program name and a monthly payout figure.

“It’s quite black box,” as one exec with knowledge of the matter told Digiday. “Do I wish they were more transparent? Definitely,” said one publisher exec who is in the program. “But I’m hopeful that the fact that they’re setting a precedent for exploring paying publishers directly for content through this is meaningful,” they added.