On July 22, a Google DeepMind engineer, Vidy Thatte, shared a snippet of a browser he built that “treats every URL as a prompt and generates a site from scratch” on his X account. Just a few days later, he shared a TestFlight link to let iPhone users try it for themselves. The browser he launched is called Gem, and it’s a browser that doesn’t really…browse.

Instead of fetching a webpage from a server the way Chrome or Safari would, Gem hands whatever URL you type over to Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite model and asks it to generate a webpage on the spot. If you enter a real address, it builds its own interpretation of that site rather than loading the actual thing. If you enter an address that doesn’t exist, Gemini simply invents a website to fill the gap. In other words, you’re not visiting the internet so much as browsing one the model dreams up as you go…

Thatte’s reasoning was that with a model as fast and cheap as Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite, there’s almost no practical difference anymore between loading a website and generating a brand-new one on the fly… Given that this tool is powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite and it’s just a side project rather than a full-fledged tool, it doesn’t come with Gemini access baked in. Gem requires you to bring your own Gemini API key to get it working. Every URL you enter fires off a request to the model, so Gem needs a key linked to your Google account to actually generate anything, with the usage billed to you. You can grab a key for free from Google AI Studio, paste it into Gem’s settings, and you’re ready to start typing URLs. While you can get started for free, I ran into the limits within two minutes of playing around. So, I did need to enable billing on my API key and decided to load $10 into it.

Champions of the switch often insist workers will be able to hit the ground running and get the same or even more work done from the get-go in the new unfamiliar environment because it’s ‘more productive’, a conclusion often shaped by conventional wisdom or their ‘gut’ feeling. Decision makers may also mistake their own ‘light-user experience’ for universal experience and believe all platforms are fungible.

And while it’s one thing for a business to delay their delivery dates and increase costs of by introducing a switch in computing environments that’s of unquantified and possibly dubious value, how about when a switch in computing environments is made that affects schoolchildren’s ability to learn for a period of time?

While a MacBook Neo is indeed cute, what might be the possible consequences of a decision to move 25,000 students off Windows and onto MacBook Neos…? Or even the impact on a single kid who moves from a MacBook school to a Windows or Chrome school (or whose home computing environment isn’t aligned with their school). Or students whose teachers decide learning in their classrooms should now additionally require an understanding of the Minecraft computing platform/UI (used in over 40,000 school systems.). Learning Management Systems and now various AI Edtech tools used by schoolkids are also subject to change.

I’ve been working really diligently for the last few weeks on a new distro called Spaced Linux that is exactly what I want to use. It’s heavily focused on the [zoom-friendly 3D] Compiz desktop, very efficient using the rolling Devuan Ceres backend, and avoids dependency hell by promoting mostly Flatpak usage.

It’s still early, but it’s already working great for me, it’s been my daily driver for a few weeks now.

The company had evaluated the agent, Astra, and found “significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity”, which had moved to a “critical” threshold… OpenAI stated that the model was not involved in an incident in which one of its AI agents went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a startup, Hugging Face… The reports have increased concerns about advancements in AI models and humans’ ability to control them.

Still, critics of the AI industry have warned that such disclosures from OpenAI and its competitors Anthropic and Meta could be designed to generate hype about the technology’s power and thus spur additional interest from investors.

To prevent potential rogue behavior from AI agents, OpenAI is “implementing stricter security controls for higher-capability models and associated activities, including isolated testing environments, restricted network and tool access”, the company’s blogpost stated. It will also install “enhanced model weight protections and encryption, additional monitoring and detection capabilities”. The company will pause internal activities involving Astra that do not meet these new requirements.

Under our Preparedness Framework, a model reaches the Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal. While we continue to benchmark and assess this model, our preliminary evaluations indicate strong enough performance that we cannot rule out Critical capability level at this time… Accordingly, we have scaled up robustness testing of our safeguards and security controls so that they are appropriate for a deployment of these capabilities…

- We are implementing stricter security controls for higher-capability models and associated activities, including isolated testing environments, restricted network and tool access, enhanced model weight protections and encryption, additional monitoring and detection capabilities, and sandboxed execution.

- We are pausing internal activities involving Astra that do not yet meet these strengthened security control requirements.

- We have implemented universal monitoring for risky actions and misalignment across all agentic applications of Astra, including training and evaluation. Monitors evaluate the model’s Chain of Thought and trigger a security response to review and interrupt high risk activity.

- We will work with relevant government agencies and select AI safety organizations to test the capabilities for this model…

We believe advanced cyber-capable models should help defenders identify and address vulnerabilities before attackers do. We’re committed to working alongside governments, safety institutes, and civil society to ensure that the frontier capabilities of models like Astra, and those that follow, are deployed responsibly and broadly for the benefit of all humanity.

Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children’s tunes, then imagined the melodies of subsequent bars before humming their imagined melodies. Brain activity from the patients carried information about relative pitches within the imagined melodies. Combining note-level pitch predictions over time allowed the research team to recreate melodic changes that reflected the structure of the imagined songs…

“The model we created decodes relative pitch classes — such as do, re, mi, fa, sol, and la — rather than exact, absolute pitches,” [said tudy co-lead Jii Kwon of Seoul National University]. “This is useful because people often recognize melodies by the relationships between notes, even when the same melody is played in a different key.”

I have been contributing to GNOME design as a volunteer for several years… I believe that it’s essential for a free and democratic society to ensure free and independent access to these technologies. To achieve this goal, end-user devices based on free and open-source software are key, and the GNOME desktop and its app ecosystem offer a powerful alternative to proprietary platforms… This two-year fellowship is a great honor and marks a significant change in my life. It is a unique opportunity for me to devote my skills and experience entirely to a project I strongly believe in.

During my two-year fellowship, I will support GNOME maintainers and developers with design feedback and reviews, create mockups, and coordinate efforts to standardize design patterns. My other activities focus on lasting improvements through two strategic initiatives: expanding the design community to increase capacity and enhancing our design tooling to reduce overhead and simplify onboarding… To attract new contributors, I will increase the visibility of design work by writing regular blog posts, giving presentations, and running workshops at conferences and hackathons. New contribution opportunities for newcomers will be created with clear instructions for independent activities such as collecting state-of-the-art examples, running accessibility and user tests, and creating mockups. Design reviews will be used as mentorship opportunities, pairing regular design contributors with experienced designers for peer review and knowledge sharing…

If you’re interested in contributing to GNOME design, check out the Design Team page on the Welcome to GNOME website, familiarize yourself with the Human Interface Guidelines, and join our Matrix channel. If you’re a GNOME developer feel free to reach out to me via Matrix and involve me in design reviews.

All eight cameras were taken August 1, according to the Winona Police Department. A patrol officer first noticed the cameras had not sent any alerts in 24 hours. When officers checked the locations, they found the cameras had been cut from their poles and taken. The poles were left behind. Two additional Flock cameras on the Mississippi River Bridge, owned by Buffalo County, were also stolen in the same manner…

The thefts are part of a broader national trend. Flock cameras have been vandalized and cut down in communities across the country.

“Couldn’t have been him — we were out counting blades of grass,” said one of the 29,000 commenters on a post about the arrest from the local news station WDTV. Others attested that the man, Wesley Jackson, had been helping them “replace the roof on a homeless shelter,” “playing halo 2,” “changing the tires” on their car or giving their “doggie a treat” at the time the cameras were destroyed.

“We have a camera system that can do facial recognition technology and can start building a data set on what our citizens are doing on a day-to-day basis,” Teeple told supervisors. “That, in my training and experience, is a huge Fourth Amendment violation.”

It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said… He said he’d already started compiling profiles on their vehicles, spouses vehicles, children’s vehicles, and planned to combine that data with Bluetooth signals, advertising IDs, and commercial data sources, “so our authorized users can replay the movements of every government official and their immediate family,” he said. Local businesses would be invited to join the network, to “protect” officials while they shop, eat at restaurants, and move around the city.

From major cities like Los Angeles canceling its Flock contract to towns wrapping Flock AI cams in plastic bags because Flock won’t take them down, it’s a wild time for surveillance and questions about government accountability.

Face deadly new twists on familiar foes, including the Rocket Ogre, Demo Dog, Blood Shambler, and more. Each variant introduces lethal new behaviours — from overwhelming firepower to explosive death traps — forcing you to rethink every encounter. Expand your arsenal with brutal variants inspired by classic Quake expansions, including the Super Axe — unleashing lightning on successive strikes — and the Laser Cannon, firing ricocheting projectiles that tear through enemies from every angle… Reality is never stable. Shift between dimensions to solve puzzles and navigate the world, or find hidden secrets scattered throughout the realms. Face enemies that rise again or transform after death, and experience encounters where the rules change without warning — forcing you to adapt or be overrun.

This is part of a series of new campaign chapters, all developed by MachineGames “in collaboration with id Software.” MachineGames is best known for making the games in the relatively recent Wolfenstein reboot series, as well as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The Quake maps are made by a team dubbed “Quake Club,” which includes several MachineGames employees who work on Quake maps in their spare time.

The ambition and scope of some of these maps is beyond what was typical for Quake maps back in the late ‘90s, thanks in part to the team’s use of TrenchBroom, a newer map editor that works well on modern systems and is easier to work with and more capable than what folks were using in those days. There are 19 new levels, and they have several new gameplay gimmicks, like a time loop mechanic and a disorienting-but-cool teleportation system that makes it look like the levels are changing on the fly — kind of similar to the multi-time-period levels we saw in Titanfall 2 or Dishonored 2, though in these Quake maps the time shifts happen without player input. There’s also new music… The new maps have been added to the campaign list in the remastered version of Quake, and like that remaster, they’re available free to anyone who already owns Quake on Steam, as well as Quake on current and last-gen PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo consoles.

[A] new report suggests that all three memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have collectively sold through their 2027 memory manufacturing capacity to, you guessed it, AI companies.

According to a report from Digitimes and spotted by TweakTown, all DRAM and HBM capacity has been sold through for 2027, with no further supply planned. (The companies themselves have not yet confirmed this to be the case.) Of course, that only means that retail prices are going to go up even further in the near future. Selling through all the capacity for next year would be bad enough for consumers, but the problem is that most of the companies buying up this capacity have done so through long-term purchasing agreements, essentially pre-ordering memory that hasn’t even been manufactured yet over a five-year term. Unless more capacity opens up somewhere in the next few years, it’s hard to imagine that RAM will become more affordable and less scarce any time soon.

It’s not just memory that’s affected. According to that Digitimes report, NAND storage is growing in demand too. Luckily, NAND capacity hasn’t been completely absorbed, because there are more companies supplying the stuff. But it’s not exactly hard to see that SSDs have been growing steadily more expensive over the last six months or so.

The group adds that “independent ownership” of Chrome “would open the distribution channel Google controls and allow Chrome to serve browser users when it makes privacy decisions and determines how to integrate search and (artificial intelligence)…”

In September 2025, [U.S. District Court Judge] Mehta issued a remedies order that requires Google to share some data about users’ searches with “qualified” competitors and to provide syndicated search results and ads to those competitors. The order also prohibits Google from entering into exclusive distribution contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app for six years, but allows the company to continue to make payments for search-ad revenue or distribution to Apple, Mozilla and others…

Google recently appealed Mehta’s order. The company argued in its written brief that it “prevailed in the marketplace fair and square,” adding that Apple and Mozilla “sensibly chose” Google as the default search engine “because it gave their users the best experience,” and because Apple and Mozilla would earn the most ad revenue through the deals. The [U.S.] Justice Department and states countered to the appellate court last week that the liability finding should stand, and also argued that Google should have been banned from paying Apple and Mozilla for placement as the default search engine on their browsers.

[Antitrust enforcers had originally asked the judge to order Google to divest Chrome, but he’s already rejected that request.] The government did not argue in its appellate papers that Google should be forced to sell Chrome. But Public Knowledge independently contends in its friend-of-the-court brief that divestiture would benefit consumers… “Divestiture would place those decisions with an institution whose success depends on serving browser users primarily....” The group is calling the appellate court’s attention to Google’s April 2025 decision to preserve tracking cookies — a reversal from its earlier plans to block third-party cookies by default. “Google is in the position of both deciding Chrome’s tracking rules while running the advertising business affected by them,” Public Knowledge writes. “An independent Chrome could make those decisions on behalf of users alone.”

Federal and state antitrust enforcers recently asked the appellate court to reverse the portion of Mehta’s order that allows those payments to continue. But Mozilla counters in its new friend-of-the-court brief that Mehta’s decision regarding those payments was supported by the evidence —including a study it conducted concluding that its revenue would “decline dramatically” if forced to replace Google with Bing as Firefox’s default search engine… Google is expected to file new arguments with the appellate court next month.

The app hashes the file, signs the hash using a dedicated identity stored in Apple Keychain, and publishes the witness to Nostr relays while keeping the photo inside the app unless the user chooses to export it.

Rather than trying to determine whether a scene was genuine, the app — named Veridenz — answers a narrower question, by verifying whether a photo file matches the one that was originally witnessed. Users do not need a Nostr account because the app creates its own signing identity, keeping private documentation separate from a public Nostr profile.

The Orleans Parish Communication District (OPCD) is currently testing out the new tool designed to reduce the volume of calls human dispatchers must handle, which is over a thousand emergency calls a day. New Orleans implemented AI in April to answer 311 calls for non-emergencies. The AI was trained and programmed to provide information to callers, as the OPCD says 50% of 311 calls are for information, according to GovTech. AI is now answering 911 emergency calls in Louisiana’s largest city and one of the cities with the highest call rates in the U.S.

The OPCD is using Carbyne’s AI Emergency Call Triage, with triage being the process of analyzing and prioritizing emergency calls. The AI system assesses incoming calls and can provide immediate feedback to callers. This is intended to handle the increase of calls that are related to one incident, so callers get automatically routed to an AI agent who asks if they are calling regarding the incident. If the answer is yes, then callers can receive information or updates, and if it’s no, then the callers are transferred to a human. This combats multitudes of calls piling up and taking longer time to potentially answer an emergency call. The OPCD said the AI will not be used to handle emergency calls, only to direct such calls to a human dispatcher.

All six cases are also under independent criminal investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation… Investigators found that employees were running searches on personal acquaintances and family members. One officer was found to have given someone from an outside law enforcement agency access to SPD’s Flock Safety system, which they weren’t authorized to do.

It is not just local police in small communities who are creating policies designed to obfuscate Flock usage. Earlier this year, we reported that police in multiple states were being told to be “as vague as permissible” about why they were using Flock because their searches could be obtained using public records requests, and that warning was being shared by the FBI and Department of Justice…

In the [Iowa county] public records request, Sheriff Don Phillips said “there is no need” to tell people about the use of Flock… “because the information is verified by the deputy running the license plate. It is common practice for law enforcement to refrain from disclosing investigative methods and sources to prevent criminals from learning how to circumvent them.”

The 183,000-square-foot plant, representing a $71 million investment, will produce up to 4 gigawatt-hours of storage annually when production begins in early 2027. That is enough output each year to serve nearly four million homes, and it signals that sodium-ion technology has moved from laboratory promise to commercial reality… Peak Energy, founded in 2023 by former engineers from Tesla, Enovix, and Fluence, announced its Sacramento site selection on July 8, 2026, after a nationwide search that ultimately chose California over Texas… The factory is designed as a system assembly plant rather than a cell fabrication facility. Peak will receive sodium-ion cells, manufactured to its specifications by Chinese suppliers, and assemble them into complete 30-foot-long, 100,000-pound containerized storage systems. Each GS1.1 unit stores 3.1 megawatt-hours, enough to fully charge more than 40 electric vehicles…

In the United States, Peak Energy has emerged as the most advanced grid-scale player. It has secured more than 6 GWh of customer commitments, including a landmark deal with Jupiter Power for up to 4.75 GWh through 2030, valued at up to $500 million. Energy Vault has committed to 1.5 GWh of sodium-ion storage for AI data center applications, and RWE Americas has already deployed Peak’s first grid-scale system on the MISO grid in Wisconsin, energized in March 2026. General Motors is codeveloping sodium-ion cells with Peak at its Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center in Michigan, testing 170- and 190-amp-hour cell formats with domestic production targeted for 2028. China, however, remains the global heavyweight. CATL, the world’s largest battery manufacturer, unveiled its TENER Sodium energy storage system in June 2026 with a rated cycle life of 15,000 cycles and a projected 25-to-30-year service life. In April 2026, CATL signed a 60 GWh supply agreement with HyperStrong, the largest sodium-ion deal announced to date. BYD, HiNa Battery, and Farasis are also shipping commercial sodium-ion products, including batteries for a $400 electric scooter already on sale in China…

Peak Energy’s first commercial shipments from Sacramento are slated for the first quarter of 2027, with contracted deliveries to Jupiter Power, Energy Vault, and RWE Americas following shortly after. The company has publicly stated it needs to deploy over $100 million in product in 2026, up from roughly $10 million in 2025, and the Sacramento facility is sized to meet that demand. At the system level, sodium-ion grid storage is already operating. Peak’s pilot installation at the SolarTAC testing facility in Watkins, Colorado, stores 3.5 MWh and has been running since 2025. The RWE Americas deployment in Wisconsin, energized in March 2026, marks the first time sodium-ion batteries have backed up the MISO grid, which serves 15 central U.S. states and the Canadian province of Manitoba…

According to the International Energy Agency, sodium-ion manufacturing capacity announcements have accelerated sharply since 2024, with global pipelines now exceeding 400 GWh annually… Researchers are also pushing the technology forward. In May 2026, a team at the National University of Singapore published a breakthrough in all-solid-state sodium batteries that could further reduce costs and eliminate the flammable liquid electrolytes found in both lithium-ion and current sodium-ion designs.

Independent testing by the ISO-accredited Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Battery Development Center revealed something surprising. UNIGRID’s 210Ah cells displayed endothermic behavior during charging. This means the chemical reaction actually absorbs heat rather than dumping it into the environment. Coupled with a 97.9% cell-level round-trip energy efficiency and remarkable thermal stability under abuse testing, the battery stays cool on its own.

The 210Ah sodium-ion cells deliver up to 218Ah of discharge capacity. It demonstrated exceptional durability, retaining over 99% of its capacity after 1,000 full discharge cycles, as well as heat-absorbing behavior during charging. These validated strengths allow Syntropic to optimize its product designs, enabling platforms like GridSpan [its modular DC platform designed for large-scale energy applications with flexible discharge durations ranging from 20 minutes to 20 hours] to operate safely and efficiently at grid scale without needing complex mechanical cooling systems…

Commercialization kicks off with Tenet, a safety-focused, wall-mounted system for residential, light-commercial, and virtual power plant uses… Relying on abundant and widely distributed raw materials like sodium and chromium — rather than lithium and cobalt — protects manufacturers from geopolitical price spikes and material shortages. Apart from offering an alternative to lithium, a successful rollout will demonstrate that the most durable energy storage is the kind that could stay cool entirely on its own.

Unlike trees, hesperaloe can be grown on dry, low-quality farmland unsuitable for most food crops and harvested much more quickly. Kimberly-Clark said it had tested more than 70 potential materials before settling on hesperaloe. Earlier candidates included wheat straw, corn waste, seaweed, algae and chicken feathers. The US consumer goods giant will now develop the fibre at a pilot factory in Yuma, Arizona, working with local growers to determine whether the crop can be cultivated for commercial use in its tissue products. “This represents an exciting moonshot for Kimberly-Clark and the culmination of more than two decades of materials and plant science expertise,” said Craig Slavtcheff, who is helping develop the new toilet paper.

However, the company said products made from hesperaloe remained years away from supermarket shelves, with further research needed before the fibre could be produced at the scale required for global manufacturing. The US-based company has invested about $250m (£190m) in the project and filed more than 30 patents linked to the technology.