Technology

A woman wearing dark Wayfarer-style sunglasses walks across a marked pedestrian crossing in hard sunlight, photographed in black and white, with other pedestrians blurred in front of and behind her.

Meta's Answer to the Camera Problem Is a Pair of Glasses With No Camera

Meta opened pre-orders on Wednesday for Ray-Ban Meta Audio, a $349 pair of smart glasses with six microphones and no camera, shipping 13 October. It arrives two weeks after Hamburg's data protection regulator published a final report finding that the recording light on the camera models is effectively invisible outdoors and does not illuminate at all on Gen 2 when the assistant is looking at your surroundings. The camera-free pair has no light because, under Meta's own definition, the light is for photographs.

By Alison Acosta 27 hours ago

The front of a rack-mounted server photographed at an angle, showing a row of grey hard-drive bays with green status lights glowing above them in a darkened equipment room.

Google Knew for Seven Weeks. Its Customers Found Out From a Newspaper.

Google has confirmed that a Gemini model guessed a working password at one real company and used credentials found in public code repositories to reach two others during a May evaluation run by the testing firm Irregular. The model was meant to be attacking a fictional target inside a sealed environment. Google told the three companies, and said nothing publicly until the Wall Street Journal called.

By Alison Acosta September 23, 2026

An open-plan office seen down a corridor, with rows of white desks behind frosted glass partitions and most of the chairs empty.

Xbox Is Three Quarters of the Way Through Its Reset. Halo Changed Hands on the Way.

Microsoft eliminated 268 more roles in its games division on Tuesday, moved development of the next Halo to Activision, folded Obsidian into Bethesda and began consultation on closing Ninja Theory after two sale agreements collapsed. Xbox's chief content officer said the restructuring announced in July is now roughly three-quarters done.

By Margaret Holloway September 23, 2026

An Apple Watch lying on its side on a grey surface, its screen showing the grid of app icons, including Activity and Workout.

Apple's Second Round of Cuts Went After the Content It Has to Keep Making

Apple has laid off a handful of Fitness+ employees, Bloomberg reported, a month after it cut about 200 jobs in its Siri and Vision Pro groups. The numbers are small against a workforce of 166,000. What the two rounds have in common is more telling: in both, Apple cut people who make content, not products.

By Alison Acosta September 22, 2026

A person holding a smartphone, its screen lit in a darkened room

What Happens When the Advertiser's Own Agent Joins the Conversation?

Sponsored Agents, announced Wednesday, are brand-funded units that open a labelled conversation with an advertiser's own agent inside ChatGPT, wired to commerce systems so the purchase never leaves the window. Wayfair is a pilot partner. The advertising business reached a $1bn annualised run rate in under 200 days.

By Alison Acosta September 17, 2026

Orange industrial robot arms arranged along an automated factory assembly line

A Factory in Liuzhou Now Builds a Humanoid Robot Every Ten Minutes

UBTECH opened a plant in Liuzhou on 12 September that it says will produce more than 10,000 humanoid robots a year, one every ten minutes. Some of the assembly is done by the company's own Walker S units. The interesting number is not the robots. It is the throughput.

By Alison Acosta September 16, 2026

A long aisle of server racks in a data centre lit by rows of indicator lights

OpenAI Is Sounding Out a $1.5tn Valuation and Putting Off the Listing

Reports put OpenAI in early talks over a share sale valuing it near $1.5tn, roughly double the $730bn of its last round, while the company signals an IPO is not imminent. Staying private is the point: the number is easier to sustain when nobody trades it daily.

By Cory Chamberlain September 16, 2026

Server racks with dense cabling lit green in a dark room.

The Patch Waited Six Weeks on Half the Servers. The Attackers Waited Four Days.

Wiz says attackers exploited three JFrog Artifactory flaws between 15 August and 8 September, chaining two of them to turn an unauthenticated request into an administrator token. All three had patches. Six weeks after one fix shipped, 59 percent of organisations were still vulnerable. Exploitation of the most serious flaw began four days after it was disclosed.

By Alison Acosta September 14, 2026

A code editor open on a laptop screen in a darkened room.

The Agent Asks If You Trust the Repository After It Has Already Run It

A Git setting called core.fsmonitor holds a command, and Git runs it whenever the index refreshes — on git status, on git diff. Read it out of a cloned repository's own config and the repository executes code. On some coding agents the payload fires before the workspace-trust prompt is shown.

By Alison Acosta September 12, 2026

A control room lined with monitors and empty operator chairs.

The Clause That Matters Is the One Sending Data Back

Contracts obtained through litigation describe four frontier labs each holding Defense Department agreements worth up to $200m, with bidirectional data exchange including model benchmarks and engineers embedded with the military. Procurement usually buys a product. This buys a relationship in both directions.

By Alison Acosta September 9, 2026

Equipment racks strung with orange and blue patch cables, indicator lights lit.

Eight Hundred Billion a Year Is Not a Boom. It Is a Run Rate.

PwC puts annual data centre capital expenditure at roughly $800bn in 2026, rising toward $1.8 trillion a year by 2050. A boom has a peak somewhere in it. A run rate that roughly doubles over 24 years is a description of infrastructure, and infrastructure is financed, sited and regulated differently.

By Alison Acosta September 8, 2026

Network switch ports and patch cables.

Installing a Package Runs Its Code. That Is the Design, Not the Attack.

CrowdStrike has started intercepting npm install and pip install at the endpoint, blocking a package before its embedded scripts can run. That the defence has moved to the last moment before execution is an admission about everything upstream of it.

By Alison Acosta September 5, 2026

Stacked shelving in a storage warehouse.

Everybody Audits the Package. Nobody Audits the Shelf It Sits On.

A flaw in JFrog Artifactory rated 9.8 lets an unauthenticated attacker on the network take administrative control under default configuration — minting admin tokens, forging credentials, reading the whole access topology. Disclosed on 28 August, observed being exploited in the wild by 1 September.

By Alison Acosta September 3, 2026

A press brake on a factory floor.

Apple's New Chief Gets the Products. The Outgoing One Keeps the Governments

John Ternus took over Apple on Monday. Tim Cook moved to executive chairman and, by several accounts, kept the company's relationships with Washington and Beijing. The handover says less about two men than about a job that no longer fits inside one post.

By Alison Acosta September 1, 2026

An overhead view of a container terminal, stacked shipping containers in rows with gantry cranes between them.

When You Cannot Audit the Code, You Audit the Vendor

Buyers have stopped asking whether a supplier's software is secure, because they cannot find out. They have started asking who owns the supplier, where it builds, and what it would have to disclose.

By Alison Acosta August 30, 2026

Close-up of a green printed circuit board with relays, resistors and a terminal block.

Firmware Is the Part of the Supply Chain Nobody Audits

Procurement has learned to ask what open-source components a vendor ships. It still rarely asks what is running on the controller beneath the operating system, where the code is older, the provenance is thinner and the update path frequently does not exist.

By Alison Acosta August 29, 2026

a close up of a computer with green lights

The Status Page Is a Legal Document Now

Incident communication began as courtesy and has become evidence. The wording of a status update now determines credits, contract remedies and whether anyone believes the next one.

By Alison Acosta August 27, 2026

The Alabama State Capitol building in Montgomery, seen from the front steps.

The Unemployment System Works Until Everyone Needs It at Once

State unemployment insurance runs on software and staffing calibrated to a low claim rate, which is exactly the condition that stops holding in a downturn.

By Cory Chamberlain August 27, 2026

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Every Company Is Building the Same Internal Platform

Engineering organisations are building the same abstraction over the same infrastructure, independently, because the alternative is asking every team to learn all of it.

By Alison Acosta August 27, 2026

Computers, medical equipment, testing and treatment devices, St Francis Hospital, Federal Way, Washington, USA

The Hospital Bought a Device With a Software End Date

Imaging systems and infusion pumps are capital assets depreciated over a decade or more, running software the manufacturer stops supporting long before the hardware wears out.

By Thomas Gutierrez August 25, 2026

Yellow designer flat lay desk

Getting Email Delivered Became a Full-Time Job

Authentication requirements that were optional for years are enforced, and organisations that never thought about their sending domain are discovering their mail has quietly stopped arriving.

By Alison Acosta August 25, 2026

A view of the refrigerator manufacturing plant's fully automated side panel forming line.Translation: "Warning:Danger Prohibit reach into;elecric shock;must connect an earth terminal to the ground"

The Machines on the Factory Floor Are Running Software Nobody Supports

Industrial equipment outlives its control software by decades. Patching it means stopping production, and the vendor that wrote it may no longer exist.

By Alison Acosta August 25, 2026

A server room with rows of black and white cabinets under blue cables

Where the Data Sits Becomes an Architecture Problem

Companies used to satisfy data residency with a paragraph and a regional bucket. The requirements have grown teeth, and satisfying them is now a question about how the software is built.

By Alison Acosta August 25, 2026

A laptop open on a wooden desk showing a browser window.

The Browser Becomes the Place Security Actually Happens

Work moved into the browser years ago and the security stack did not follow. Enterprises are now treating the tab, rather than the device or the network, as the place controls belong.

By Alison Acosta August 22, 2026

Viewing the SumUp website on a laptop, highlighting tools for small businesses, including payment systems and financial management solutions.

The Free Tier Quietly Disappears

Software companies spent a decade giving away a usable product to build a funnel. The economics of that giveaway changed when the marginal cost of a free user stopped rounding to zero.

By Alison Acosta August 21, 2026

A computer monitor having source code on the screen with dark mode editor and a warm yellow light in the background

Open Source Maintenance Becomes a Procurement Question

Companies have always known their software sits on components maintained by volunteers. Insurers, auditors and regulators are now asking which ones, who maintains them, and what happens when that person stops.

By Alison Acosta August 19, 2026

Data Servers

Companies Are Paying More to Watch Their Software Than to Run It

Logging, metrics and tracing bills have grown faster than the infrastructure they monitor. Engineering teams are discovering that the instrumentation is now a line item that needs its own budget review.

By Alison Acosta August 19, 2026

A padlock icon overlaid on a laptop, representing digital security

Cyber Insurers Have Become the De Facto Regulators of Corporate Security

Companies that ignored security consultants for years are now doing exactly what their insurance carriers demand, because the alternative is being uninsurable.

By Alison Acosta August 13, 2026

The Slack application open on a computer monitor

Software Buyers Discover They Own Too Many Tools

A decade of frictionless departmental purchasing produced portfolios nobody inventoried. The consolidation now underway is being run by procurement, not engineering.

By Alison Acosta August 12, 2026

A weathered metal keypad with numbered buttons on a rusted door frame

The Password Starts to Disappear, Slowly and Unevenly

Passkeys work, are broadly supported, and are being adopted at a pace that has frustrated everyone who built them. The obstacles are almost entirely organizational.

By Alison Acosta August 5, 2026

A man in uniform typing at a vintage computer terminal

The Trillion-Dollar Rewrite Nobody Can Postpone

The systems running banks, insurers, states and hospitals are older than the people maintaining them. The modernization wave has finally started, forced by retirements rather than ambition.

By Thomas Gutierrez August 1, 2026

Close-up of cooling fans in a data centre server rack

Companies Start Moving Workloads Back Off the Cloud

Repatriation was dismissed for years as a vendor talking point. It is now a line item, driven less by ideology than by workloads whose usage stopped being unpredictable.

By Alison Acosta July 28, 2026

A bundle of blue network cables patched together at a connection panel

The API Economy Enters Its Utility Phase

The scramble of a thousand developer-tool startups is resolving into something duller and more durable: infrastructure priced, regulated and consolidated like the utility it always was.

By Daniel Okafor July 25, 2026

A framed iPhone 4S disassembled beside its schematic diagram

Repairable Tech Goes Mainstream, and Profitable

Right-to-repair laws opened the door, but what pushed repairability into the mainstream was simpler: customers started paying for it.

By Margaret Holloway July 23, 2026

A clinician consulting a patient by video call on a laptop

Telehealth Finds Its Second Act in Specialty Care

The pandemic-era video visit flattened. What is growing instead is narrower and more durable: virtual clinics built around single conditions and long-term protocols.

By Alison Acosta July 18, 2026

A customer paying by smartwatch at a payment terminal

The Checkout Is Disappearing, and Retailers Are Ambivalent

Stored credentials, agent-driven purchasing and pay-by-bank rails are dissolving the traditional checkout page, along with the merchant's last moment of control.

By Alison Acosta July 12, 2026