In a phone call with The Desk on Friday, a Roku executive said the company made the tough decision to raise prices on its streaming hardware to address shortages in computer memory and other components caused by the artificial intelligence rush. […] Still, the executive who spoke with The Desk on Friday said the company believes its hardware is still competitive against other streaming TV hardware because Roku devices are still priced aggressively compared to the Apple TV and other expensive streaming hardware, and the company remains focused on looking at ways to add value to its Roku platform before and after it enters a customer’s home. “We are doing our best to have great deals like what we have going on right now,” the executive said.

They wrote that open-weight models strengthen competition and ensure that the benefits of the technology are “broadly shared rather than concentrated in a few hands.” “Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect,” the letter said. “And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk.”

Elon Musk, who runs an AI business under his rocket company SpaceX, also applified the letter on social media, writing that it has his “full support” in a post on X. SpaceX did not officially sign the letter. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said Thursday that the company believes in broad access, and that he has not been involved in any conversations with the Trump administration about potentially banning Chinese open-weight models in the U.S.

“I think that, that fundamentally, AI and AI usage is something that is actually very important to democratize,” Brockman told reporters during a briefing in New York City. “And so, for me, at a sort of deep level, I think that having more models, more usage, that is a good thing.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed the letter in a post on X on Friday, writing that he wants the U.S. to win with both open-weight and proprietary models, and that he is “glad to see this.”

[…] In the letter on Friday, the U.S. tech companies said that concerns about unlawful distillation should be addressed through “targeted legal and commercial frameworks” instead of with “sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation.” “Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector,” the letter said. “This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country.”

One important distinction between Opus 5 and Mythos, which is currently only available to a limited number of vetted organizations through Anthropic’s Project Glasswing initiative, is that the company has specifically avoided training the new model on cyber-related tasks. Due to more its powerful capabilities, Opus 5 is broadly better at those tasks than its predecessor, making it more useful for finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, but the company says Opus 5 is “substantially behind” its flagship model at exploiting those vulnerabilities.

[…] Anthropic says “Claude Opus 5’s safeguards are designed to allow beneficial uses of the model in both cybersecurity and biology.” The company has strengthened some of the model’s cyber-related guardrails, but notes it did so along a “narrow range” of specific tasks. “Based on our testing, we expect the classifiers to intervene around 85 percent less often than they do for Fable 5,” Anthropic said. With Opus 5, Anthropic also isn’t including it in its recently announced 30-day data retention policy, which the company introduced alongside Fable and Mythos 5.

As for pricing. Anthropic says API costs for Opus 5 will remain at $5 per one million input tokens and $25 per one million output tokens. Anthropic has also added an “effort” menu for Opus that users can tweak to tell the model whether they want it to be more thorough or fast and efficient to conserve tokens.

Aric Mackey writes, “Widely recognized for his profound impact on the technology industry, John’s career spanned decades of rapid digital evolution. He was perhaps best known for his influential, long-running column in PC Magazine and his groundbreaking work on the No Agenda podcast. Through his prolific writing, broadcasting, and distinct public voice, he helped shape critical conversations around both technology and political analysis, guiding generations of readers and listeners with his unique perspective.

“To those who knew him personally, John was far more than his public work. He was a beloved husband, devoted father, proud grandfather, and a loyal friend. Those closest to him will remember a man defined by his strong convictions, his exceptionally sharp wit, and an enduring curiosity about the world around him.”

Stripe is in talks to buy OpenRouter, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that could sell for roughly $10 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The move would mark a significant step outside payments for a company that processes transactions for much of the internet. It also lands while Stripe pursues a far larger target: a bid for PayPal that would value the payments giant at about $53 billion.

The Journal reported Thursday (July 23) that a transaction could be announced soon, though the talks could still collapse or another buyer could step in. The exact price under discussion could not be learned. Several other large technology companies had also been weighing deals for OpenRouter. The startup was valued at $1.3 billion in May, according to PitchBook, meaning a sale near $10 billion would represent a steep markup in a matter of months. Its backers include Menlo Ventures and CapitalG, the growth fund of Google parent Alphabet.

OpenRouter sells software that lets customers reach AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, along with open weight alternatives anyone can download and run. The Journal described the company’s position this way: “OpenRouter is part of an emerging crop of startups that have found a lucrative niche between AI developers and the companies that want to use them.” The platform lists hundreds of large language models and lets developers compare and switch between them.

The star CD-35 2722 is located around 73 light-years away and has around half the mass of the sun. It is orbited by a “failed star” or brown dwarf. These stellar bodies get their unfortunate nickname because they form like other stars but fail to gather enough mass to trigger the fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores. In terms of mass, brown dwarfs are more massive than the largest gas giant planets, but smaller than the smallest stars, usually with around 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, or around 0.013 to 0.08 times the mass of the sun.

The newly discovered object in CD-35 2722 is certainly moon-like, but rather than orbiting a planet as the moons in the solar system do, it orbits the system’s brown dwarf. “This system is somewhat hard to define using solar-system-based words like ‘planet’ and ‘moon.’ The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star, though it orbits an object that orbits a star,” team leader Kevin Hoy of the Universidad Diego Portales and the Millennium Nucleus of Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS) in Chile, said in a statement. “Being the third wheel in this system makes us want to call it a moon, even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system.”

The team currently isn’t able to definitively claim this object in CD-35 2722 is an exomoon, because that would require really nailing down a new definition of what a moon is. “The satellite we report is a giant gaseous body orbiting a highly massive companion, itself several times the mass of Jupiter. We have a clear delineation between the planets and the sun in the solar system, so defining things like moons is simple,” team member Alice Zurlo of the Universidad Diego Portales said. “In the CD-35 2722 system, where we are blurring the lines between stars, planets, and moons, the whole thing becomes more complicated to describe.” Zurlo and colleagues can, however, confidently claim this is an exosatellite, meaning it is a first-of-its-kind detection no matter what the future holds for its classification.

A study published in PLOS One in 2021 by researchers from Durham University in the UK showed that with 10 weeks of training, both blind and sighted people could learn to echolocate using verbal clicks. While the technique is already used by a number of people with impaired vision — sometimes using the taps of a cane instead of clicks made by their mouth — those findings suggest that many of us can learn the necessary techniques.

Some of the same researchers who made that discovery are part of the team behind a follow-up study published in Cerebral Cortex, looking at how the 10 weeks of training that the 26 participants went through actually changed the physical structure of their brains. Specifically, the team analyzed brain scans of the V1 (the primary visual cortex, processing visuals), and the A1 (the primary auditory cortex, processing sounds). Strikingly, the scans showed that the V1s of both blind and sighted people had developed sensitivity to sound echoes during echolocation training.

According to the manufacturer Corpower Ocean, it is the first DNV prototype certificate for a wave energy converter. The certificate confirms that Corpower’s technology meets DNV’s requirements for structural strength, reliability, and safety, Corpower Ocean announced. The certification process began in the design phase and lasted seven years. DNV oversaw the process from concept development through design, manufacturing, and assembly, to dry-running tests and subsequent operation.

This is an important step, said Patrik Moller, CEO and one of the founders of Corpower Ocean. With the certification, wave energy is no longer just a promising technology, but a proven and financially viable one. This opens up new opportunities for project financing, insurance, and investments in commercial applications. The Corpower C4 wave power plant looks like a normal buoy: It consists of a 19-meter-long floating body with a diameter of 9 meters and a weight of approximately 11 tons. The system is anchored to the seabed. A mechanism inside the buoy converts its up-and-down movements in the waves into a rotary motion. This, in turn, drives a generator that produces electricity.

You’ll now be able to use selfie videos to log into your Google account. It has long been possible to log into Google using your face, via your phone’s face unlock or if your passkey login uses biometrics for verification. This is yet another option to get into your account using your face to authenticate your identity, which could be especially useful if you don’t have access to the phone or computer you typically use or if you got locked out of your account and none of the other log-in options are working.

[…] Google will ask you to turn your head in certain ways during the verification and every time you use the option to log in. The company says it’s to fend off impersonation attempts, such as deepfake videos, and prove you’re currently in front of the camera. It will, of course, have to save your selfie video and use it for comparison for future logins.The company says it will encrypt your video and only use to help you sign in, but if you ever change your mind, you can delete it from your Google account.

The contract covers the use of Oracle software in on-premises data centers for branches of the military, the U.S. intelligence community and the Coast Guard, according to a statement. The Central Intelligence Agency was Oracle’s first customer. A five-year base period for the contract includes perpetual and subscription-based software licenses, maintenance and consulting, according to one description.

Kirsten Davies, the Department of Defense’s chief information officer, said in the release that the agency is saving at least $441 million for taxpayers “by fundamentally improving how we procure on-premises Oracle capabilities.”

Following Gamers Nexus’ video, a Microsoft representative stated that the LG Monitor App Installer will no longer show pop-up ads for McAfee. In response to a social media post about the app, Pavan Davuluri, EVP of Windows and devices at Microsoft, said this week: “We’ve connected with the team at LG and as an immediate next step, they have agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up from their app. We appreciate LG working with us toward a shared goal of a better experience for our mutual customers. We will keep improving here with our ecosystem partners.”

As mentioned, some LG monitors appear to have been installing LG Monitor App Installer onto Windows computers for months. Publication Windows Latest noted that the app recently got an update, “and its changelog mentions McAfee as an additional app,” which could be what prompted more people to see the ads… and then complain about them. However, the removal of McAfee doesn’t address the problem of a peripheral installing ad-pushing software onto people’s computers.

Users have been finding LG Monitor App Installer and its ads on their systems without LG ever showing a prompt or asking for permission. LG has some of the most expensive computer monitors available. Paying, in some cases, over $1,000 for a monitor that ends up forcing ads onto Windows is disruptive and a privacy concern. Once the app is installed, “LG technically possesses permission to use ‘all system resources,’" as well as to “collect geolocation, device data, online activity, contacts, user credentials, transactions, and more,” [editor-in-chief of Gamers Nexus, Steve Burke] said.

Google had recently lost its appeal of a $4.5 billion antitrust fine imposed by the EU for throttling competition and reducing consumer choice through the dominance of its mobile Android operating system. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch and highest antitrust enforcer, said it was acting in the interest of consumers after an investigation of Google.

“The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine. And European consumers have a right to be told by app developers where to sign up to the best offers, even when the app store owner does not get a cut,” said Teresa Ribera, the commission’s Executive Vice President for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition.

Google’s President of Global Affairs Kent Walker blasted the fine as “product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants” that will have a negative impact on European businesses and consumers. He said that the EU’s Digital Markets Act forces Google “to strip away real-time search features Europeans love — like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights, and restaurants — and dismantle safety protections on Google Play.”

With this move, Amazon is hoping games can turn Prime Video into a one-stop entertainment destination, borrowing a strategy from Netflix, which has increasingly embraced party games over the past several years. Since Amazon already operates a gaming service, it makes sense for the tech giant to integrate it into its streaming platform. […] Amazon says its vision is to remove the barriers to gaming and make it accessible to anyone regardless of their experience or budget. The tech giant says Luna is designed to bring gaming to a much broader audience by removing the need for expensive consoles or gaming PCs and making games as easy to access as movies or TV shows.

Many gamers have been lamenting Sony’s recently announced decision to halt sales of physical game discs in 2028. However, new data revealed by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella highlights how years of stark economic trends helped lead Sony to that decision. In a social media thread Thursday morning, Piscatella shared insights into Circana’s tracking data on physical game sales in the U.S. dating back to 2003. A graph of those trends shows physical sales peaking in the 12 months ending June 2009, when 297 million units were sold across the US. Those physical unit sales have been on a steady downward trajectory since then, leading to just 37 million physical units selling in the U.S. in the last 12 months.

The newly revealed data follows on an earlier post from Piscatella highlighting that only seven PlayStation games had sold over 100,000 physical units so far in 2026. Today, Piscatella followed up on that stat with a graph showing how this baseline used to be common; 100 PlayStation games sold at least 100,000 physical units in 2008. The ceiling for physical PlayStation game sales isn’t all that impressive these days either; Piscatella shared that the top-selling physical PlayStation game has only sold a paltry 275,000 units in the U.S. so far this year.

There are some small signs of hope for the physical game market, if you squint. Piscatella noted that aggregate spending on physical video games in the U.S. was actually up 4 percent year-to-date, compared to the year before. But that small increase is a mere blip following 16 straight years of sizable declines in physical game spending in the US, reducing a peak of $11.5 billion in physical spending in 2009 to a mere $1.6 billion for the 12 months ending in May. And Piscatella attributed the recent growth in physical spending to “the Switch 2 and physical sales growth on Nintendo platforms,” while other platforms (such as PlayStation) were still seeing “percentage drops from the teens to the mid 30s” in that spending.

Ford CEO Jim Farley said the new EVs will redefine advanced technology as simple, useful, and at a price point that is attainable for most people. “We’re proud to embed Apple Maps’ navigation and mapping technology directly into our Universal Electric Vehicle Platform, giving customers the ultimate navigation experience alongside our Ford app, a full suite of software, and next-generation BlueCruise, all enabled by a new zonal architecture,” Farley said in a statement. “Apple Maps has delivered a world-class product, and we’re honored to be among the first to embed it directly into a vehicle, helping define intuitive, capable driving.”

In a joint statement, Apple and Ford said the integration will deliver a “beautiful and easy-to-use navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle’s displays. Road-level Maps information will also enable Ford’s Latitude AI team to build a seamless hands-free driving experience.” Ford said it will use that road information to develop its next-generation BlueCruise hands-free highway driving capability. Also, by leveraging Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK, Ford’s UEV Platform will offer drivers turn-by-turn directions using natural language, real-time traffic information, intuitive search and routing options for the best route. The system will give drivers EV routing functionality to help drivers with the warming and cooling process of the vehicle’s battery before driving or fast-charging.