Electric vehicles are now common on the road, but charging still remains one of the biggest friction points. Even when you find a fast charger, stopping can easily add 30 minutes or more to a trip, which makes long distance travel feel less convenient compared to refueling a gas car.

At BYD’s charging facility in Beijing, the company is already demonstrating a system that aims to remove that delay. Vehicles are pulling in, plugging in, and charging using BYD’s second generation Blade Battery and flash charging setup, giving a clearer picture of how the technology works outside a controlled prototype environment.

Charging speeds are being pushed far beyond current standards

BYD’s pitch is centered on how quickly usable range can be added rather than how fast a battery can reach full charge. The company describes the experience in terms of a short stop, suggesting that a vehicle could gain a significant amount of range in the time it takes to grab a coffee.

The charging setup reflects that approach. The cable is suspended from an overhead rail instead of resting on the ground, which makes it easier to handle and allows it to move freely based on the position of the vehicle. It also supports connections from either side, which reduces the need to reposition the car in a busy charging area.

The battery is where most of the change is happening

While the charger itself draws attention, BYD is positioning the second generation Blade Battery as the core of the system. The company says the battery has been redesigned to handle higher charging speeds while addressing common bottlenecks such as heat buildup and performance in low temperatures.

According to BYD, the system can charge from 10 percent to 97 percent in around 12 minutes even at temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius. The company also states that the battery passes simultaneous nail penetration and charging tests, which are intended to simulate severe failure conditions.

How it compares to current fast charging

Most widely available fast chargers today operate at around 350 kilowatts, while some newer vehicles can reach closer to 500 kilowatts under peak conditions. Even in those cases, charging from 10 percent to 80 percent typically takes between 20 and 30 minutes.

BYD says its flash charging system can deliver up to 1,500 kilowatts through a single connector, which would place it well beyond current charging infrastructure. Under those conditions, the company claims the system can move from 10 percent to 70 percent in about five minutes and up to 97 percent in roughly nine minutes.

This is already in use, with plans to scale quickly

The system at BYD’s Beijing site is not being presented as a prototype, as vehicles are already using the charging stations on site, which provides a more practical indication of how the technology performs outside a controlled demonstration environment.

BYD positions this as an early stage of deployment and says it plans to build up to 20,000 of these charging stations by the end of 2026, with the network expected to expand beyond China as part of a broader global rollout, a scale that will ultimately determine whether the system remains limited to specific locations or becomes part of everyday charging infrastructure

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

Capcom’s long-awaited sci-fi action game is finally landing on PC in 2026, and with several storefronts competing for your purchase, choosing where to buy it can make a meaningful difference to both what you pay and what you get alongside your copy.

Pragmata

Pragmata places players in a near-future lunar setting where the rules of physics have broken down, casting them as an armoured Cosmonaut tasked with protecting a mysterious girl named Diana who holds the key to humanity’s survival across a world of collapsing environments and digitised threats.

With that premise in mind, the first question most buyers will ask is whether to go official or shop around, and Steam answers the former convincingly, offering direct launcher integration with mod support, cloud saves, and community forums, though its pricing holds firmly at retail outside of seasonal sale windows.

Where to buy Pragmata on release

G2A.COM stands out as the ultimate destination for smart buyers who want the best balance of price and features. Unlike traditional stores that stick to a single retail price, G2A is a global marketplace where multiple independent sellers compete, often resulting in much better deals. It is widely considered one of the best places to buy digital games because it offers incredible flexibility, including various regional options and digital delivery that is both fast and secure. What truly sets G2A.COM apart is its role as a comprehensive content hub. Beyond being a place for a simple purchase, it provides users with editorials, guides, and lore pieces that help you get the most out of your game. You can track Pragmata through your wishlist and receive instant alerts when prices drop. Furthermore, G2A Plus subscribers enjoy extra discounts across a massive catalog. With a transparent seller review system and a user-friendly interface, it is easily the most feature- rich option for anyone looking for where to buy PC games online.

Epic Games Store takes a similarly official route and goes a step further by carrying both the Standard and Deluxe editions of Pragmata, with its Epic Rewards cashback programme offering a modest return on spend, though fixed publisher pricing means meaningful savings are rare without a site-wide coupon event.

For buyers who want that official retailer assurance without committing to a specific launcher ecosystem, Green Man Gaming is a reasonable middle ground, working directly with publishers to supply licensed keys and offering occasional XP-based loyalty discounts, though its prices tend to shadow Steam’s retail levels fairly closely.

Eneba operates on a marketplace model rather than a traditional storefront, which opens up more competitive pricing through independent sellers, and its refund policy for unverified keys adds a layer of reassurance for anyone cautious about third-party key sites.

Loaded takes a leaner approach still, stripping the experience back to instant key delivery with minimal friction, which suits buyers who want a fast transaction above all else, though the absence of seller feedback tools or community features makes it a bare-bones option by comparison.

Nvidia has laid a new brick in its AI empire. NVentures, its corporate VC fund, has backed Legora, reportedly its first legal AI investment.

Leveraging AI to help lawyers streamline their work, the Swedish-born legal tech startup is competing with U.S. player Harvey.

Alongside Atlassian and other new financial investors, NVentures joined Legora’s cap table as part of a $50 million Series D extension that comes a month after the startup’s $550 million Series D. 

In the interval, this Y Combinator alum crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) — a milestone that contributed to its new $5.6 billion post-money valuation. 

This brings Legora’s valuation just a tad closer to Harvey’s, which reached $11 billion last month when Sequoia tripled down on its investment. Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Conviction Partners, Elad Gil, Matt Miller’s Evantic, and Kleiner Perkins also participated in that round.

Legora, too, is backed by high-profile VCs, but it puts even more emphasis on the big names it secured as clients, such as Bird & Bird, Cleary Gottlieb, and Linklaters. According to the company, the platform it launched only 18 months ago is now used by more than 1,000 law firms and in-house legal teams across 50 markets.

Harvey has game in that area too. It claims 100,000 lawyers across 1,300 organizations as customers, ranging from global law firms like Hengeler Mueller and Latham & Watkins to corporate legal teams at companies like T-Mobile and Bridgewater.

With global leadership as the end goal, the Harvey v. Legora rivalry is one they intend to play on each other’s home turf. Legora has opened multiple offices around the world with the U.S. a key focus for its expansion. Conversely, Harvey is pushing into Europe.

With plenty of capital to spend on both sides, that battle has moved to mindshare. Not long after Winston Weinberg’s company Harvey signed a brand partnership with actor Gabriel Macht, who plays a high-powered lawyer in the TV series “Suits,” Legora launched an advertising campaign featuring movie star Jude Law under the slogan “Law just got more attractive.”

Both companies may be right to bet heavily on marketing. Rivalry aside, they are built on top of large language models made by AI giants that could well become their competitors. When Anthropic launched a legal plug-in for Claude not long ago, several publicly listed legal software companies saw their stocks drop.

Legora CEO Max Junestrand says he isn’t concerned.

“Foundation models are improving quickly, but the real value is in how they’re applied,” he wrote in a statement. It also shows how the startup instills FOMO among its target users, stating that “the legal teams that embed AI effectively today will shape how the industry evolves.”

NVentures’ investment is also a signal that Legora might have enough of a moat to protect them from the model makers, and its bigger rival.

However, Nvidia is also known for hedging its bets — after all, it invested in both Anthropic and OpenAI before deciding it has probably had enough.

• Trusted email platforms are now the easiest entry point for attackers
• Spam is no longer noise; it actively drives successful phishing attacks
• Phishing links dominate because they blend into everyday communication flows

The primary delivery method for commercial spam is compromised accounts and free email services like Gmail, but many users place a lot of trust in these platforms, allowing the spam to thrive.

VIPRE Security Group’s Q1 2026 Email Threat Trends Report claims commercial spam now accounts for 46% of all spam observed globally, with 33% delivered through compromised accounts and another 32% originating from widely used free email hosting services.

A new phishing kit named Bluekit offers more than 40 templates targeting popular services and includes basic AI features for generating campaign drafts.

Available templates can be used to target email accounts (Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, ProtonMail), cloud services (iCloud), developer platforms (GitHub), and cryptocurrency services (Ledger).

What makes the kit stand out is the presence of an AI Assistant panel that supports multiple models, including Llama, GPT-4.1, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, which helps cybercriminals draft phishing emails.

This reinforces the broader trend of cybercrime platforms integrating AI to streamline and scale their operations. Abnormal Security recently reported about ATHR, a voice phishing platform that leverages AI agents to conduct social engineering attacks.

Cybersecurity company Varonis analyzed a limited version of Bluekit’s AI Assistant panel and notes that the generated outputs featured placeholder content, suggesting a feature in an early, experimental stage.

“The [generated] draft included a useful structure, but it still depended on generic link fields, placeholder QR blocks, and copy that would need cleanup before use,” Varonis says.

“Bluekit’s AI Assistant looked more like a way to generate a campaign skeleton than a finished phishing flow.”

Apart from the AI aspect, BlueKit integrates domain purchase/registration, phishing page setup, and campaign management into a single panel.

Varonis reviewed templates for iCloud, Apple ID, Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, ProtonMail, GitHub, Twitter, Zoho, Zara, and Ledger, featuring realistic designs and logos.

Operators can select domains, templates, and modes in a unified interface, configure the phishing page behavior, such as redirects, anti-analysis mechanisms, and login process handling, and monitor victim sessions in real-time.

Based on the options in the dashboard, users have granular control over the behavior of the phishing pages and can block VPN or proxy traffic, headless user agents, or set fingerprint-based filters.

Stolen data is exfiltrated via Telegram, on private channels accessible by the operators.

The post-capture session monitoring includes cookies, local storage, and live session state, showing what the victim was served after login, helping operators refine their attacks for maximum effectiveness.

Varonis comments that Bluekit is yet another example of an “all-in-one” phishing platform, giving lower-tier cybercriminals fully fledged tools to manage the entire phishing attack lifecycle.

However, the kit currently appears to be under active development, receiving frequent updates and evolving quickly, making it a good candidate for growing adoption.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

Claim Your Spot

Publicly released exploit code for an effectively unpatched vulnerability that gives root access to virtually all releases of Linux is setting off alarm bells as defenders scramble to ward off severe compromises inside data centers and on personal devices.

The vulnerability and exploit code that exploits it were released Wednesday evening by researchers from security firm Theori, five weeks after privately disclosing it to the Linux kernel security team. The team patched the vulnerability in versions 7.0, 6.19.12, 6.18.12, 6.12.85, 6.6.137, 6.1.170, 5.15.204, and 5.10.254) but few of the Linux distributions had incorporated those fixes at the time the exploit was released.

A single script hacks all distros

The critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-31431 and the name CopyFail, is a local privilege escalation, a vulnerability class that allows unprivileged users to elevate themselves to administrators. CopyFail is particularly severe because it can be exploited with a single piece of exploit code—released in Wednesday’s disclosure—that works across all vulnerable distributions with no modification. With that, an attacker can, among other things, hack multi-tenant systems, break out of containers based on Kubernetes or other frameworks, and create malicious pull requests that pipe the exploit code through CI/CD work flows.

“‘Local privilege escalation’ sounds dry, so let me unpack it,” researcher Jorijn Schrijvershof wrote Thursday. “It means: an attacker who already has some way to run code on the machine, even as the most boring unprivileged user, can promote themselves to root. From there they can read every file, install backdoors, watch every process, and pivot to other systems.”

Schrijvershof added that the same Python script Theori released works reliably for Ubuntu 22.04, Amazon Linux 2023, SUSE 15.6, and Debian 12. The researcher continued:

The entry level desktop DAC and headphone amp category is not short on competition, and iFi Audio knows it. With established options from Schiit Audio, FiiO, and Topping setting a high bar under $200, iFi’s new $129 ZEN Air DAC 2 arrives as a direct response. It builds on the original Zen Air with a revised DAC stage, higher output power, a balanced 4.4 mm headphone output, and a cleaner midnight blue design, all aimed at listeners who want a simple and affordable desktop upgrade without stepping into mid-tier pricing.

Designed Around A New DAC 

The ZEN Air DAC 2 uses a bit-perfect DAC from Cirrus Logic that iFi has deployed across a range of its portable products. The focus here is on stable, low noise decoding rather than shaping the sound. This is the first time that implementation has been used in one of its entry level desktop units, and any gains in clarity, dynamics, and distortion are likely to be incremental rather than dramatic. Support for high resolution formats includes PCM up to 384 kHz and DSD256, which is standard for this category.

Balanced Headphone Output 

The ZEN Air DAC 2 adds a balanced 4.4 mm headphone output, a feature previously limited to the standard ZEN series. It allows use with compatible balanced headphones, which can help lower noise and crosstalk depending on the setup. For conventional headphones, a 6.3 mm single ended output is also included.

Increased Power Output

With the addition of balanced circuitry, the ZEN Air DAC 2 offers higher output than its predecessor. iFi claims up to three times more headphone drive, which should provide better control with a wider range of headphones, especially when using the balanced output.

Rated output is ≥5.57 V / 484 mW at 64 ohms via the 4.4 mm connection, and ≥3.02 V / 286 mW at 32 ohms through the 6.3 mm single ended output.

XBass+ and PowerMatch

To provide more support for increased power output when needed, the ZEN Air DAC 2 includes two of iFi audio’s favorite analog audio features, which can be instantly toggled via the dedicated buttons on the front panel. 

• XBass+: This feature enhances low frequencies for additional energy and excitement, and is essential for restoring the bass often lost in open-backed headphones.
• PowerMatch: This features provided an additional 6dB of gain to bring hard-to-drive headphones to life.

Refined Design

Alongside the updates and added features, the ZEN Air DAC 2 includes a few practical refinements that improve day to day use, including a new midnight blue finish with a metal front panel that feels more consistent in a desktop setup, and a dedicated power button added in response to user feedback that makes it easier to control without having to disconnect cables or power sources.

Comparison

The Bottom Line 

The iFi ZEN Air DAC 2 sticks to its role as an affordable, no-nonsense entry point into desktop audio, but adds enough to stay relevant in a crowded field. The move to a revised DAC implementation, higher output power, and the addition of a 4.4 mm balanced headphone output are meaningful upgrades at this price, especially for users with harder to drive headphones or balanced cables.

At the same time, the removal of MQA support signals a shift in priorities that not everyone will miss, but some might notice. This is aimed at listeners who want a simple, compact DAC and headphone amp that can also double as a basic preamp for powered speakers, without stretching beyond a modest budget or overcomplicating the setup.

Pricing & Availability 

For more information: ifi-audio.com

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