Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
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‘Severe’ Stress On Oceans As Rate of Sea Level Rise Doubles In 10 Years, UN Warns
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world’s oceans are under “severe and accelerating” pressure from human activities, with the rate of sea-level rise double that of a decade ago, according to a damning assessment from the United Nations. The “intensifying” stressors, which include pollution and large-scale industrial fishing, are cumulative, said the report, resulting in widespread biodiversity loss and putting ocean systems under “severe strain.”
The UN’s third World Ocean Assessment, which reflects the work of nearly 600 scientists from 86 countries, looked at the oceans’ health from 2021-25. The previous report, that covered up to 2018, found persistent degradation of the marine environment. Five years on, scientists know more about the cumulative impacts of anthropogenic pressures on the ocean, and the latest report shows just how much of the damage has been done in the past few years. The scientists’ key findings include:
– Sea levels continue to rise at an increasing rate, from 2mm a year prior to 2015 to 4.3mm a year in 2023.
– 16% of the increase in global ocean heat since 1955 occurred after 2018.
– The greatest relative warming has been observed in the Atlantic Ocean and the southern parts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
– Large gaps in knowledge persist — with only 27% of the ocean floor mapped by 2025, deep-sea ecosystems remain poorly understood. Lukas Meus, Greenpeace’s global ocean campaigner, said: “We are calling on governments to create fully protected ocean sanctuaries that will close vast areas of the ocean off from extractive human activities. Governments have promised to protect 30% of the world’s ocean by 2030 — the minimum scientists say we need for the ocean to be able to recover.”
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Meet ArchAstro: Ex-Stripe, Microsoft and Meta vets assemble powerhouse team for cross-company AI agents
ArchAstro just emerged from stealth with an artificial intelligence network designed to automate complex, cross-company software deployments and integrations.
Founded earlier this year by a team of veteran engineers from Microsoft, Stripe, Statsig and Meta, the Seattle-area startup is tackling a complex problem — the prolonged period it often takes for corporate clients to integrate newly purchased software into custom enterprise environments.
ArchAstro is led by co-founder and CEO Vivek Sharma, a former Microsoft distinguished engineer who most recently worked in technical leadership roles at Meta and Stripe.
GeekWire first got wind of the new startup back in January, when we noted Sharma’s departure from Stripe. At the time, he simply offered a cryptic message that they were using “AI’s potential to fundamentally change how people work.”
Now, more details are coming to light, including pre-seed funding of $6.2 million from a marquee list of investors.
In a blog post announcing the new company, Sharma said “even the simplest B2B software requires hand-to-hand combat to properly integrate.”
Hand-to-hand combat may be an apt description of the challenging business problem that ArchAstro is looking to tackle, an endeavor that Sharma admits is “a very difficult problem.”
Traditional artificial intelligence agents tend to operate entirely within a single organization’s firewall, while ArchAstro’s agents are designed to work across distinct corporate boundaries.
Securely connecting these disparate systems is no easy task. That’s why the company says its “privacy-aware” AI agents — what it calls Forward Deployed Agents— are designed to handle cross-company integrations, migrations and bug fixes quickly and securely.
“The key thing we’re enabling is a continuous connection enforced with code, built off the most current context across both companies,” Sharma tells GeekWire.
Of course, there is always the concern of possible data leakage between two entities — a potential showstopper for any corporate chief information security officer. But Sharma said they are addressing that concern.
Since customers control their own agents and how they operate, they choose how they interact.
“Instead of moving data between companies and managing leak risk, you’re just adhering to shared ‘acceptance tests’ that ArchAstro hosted agents create and maintain across both,” Sharma said. “Code is also easy to evaluate and check for correctness. This is how engineering systems have always worked, and we’re extending that discipline between companies rather than within one.”
Sharma said the ArchAstro system also could be used to help answer cross-company questions, like a custom agent assisting account managers with their customers.
“Either way, we work with the customer to share only what’s appropriate, and our runtime enforces that with additional safeguards layered on as needed,” he said.
In that regard, ArchAstro acts as a secure, automated translation layer, allowing two entirely different corporate systems to speak the same language and verify each other’s work instantly based on a shared set of rules. That seamless, secure flow of collaboration between companies translates directly to dollars saved.
“Product teams ship fast, but customers take months, sometimes years, to deploy what they buy,” Sharma noted. He added that delayed deployments result in revenue loss, customer churn and engineering burnout spent debugging individual setups rather than building what is next.
The system is designed to plug directly into existing developer workflows, including Cursor, Claude and Codex.
Given the complexities involved, Sharma’s founding engineering team includes veterans who previously worked on some thorny technical challenges: Microsoft Exchange Server and Office 365, Stripe Billing and Connect, and engineering platforms at Meta, Atlassian and Statsig.
The team includes:
- Tore Hanssen, who was a founding engineer at Statsig, the Bellevue, Wash.-based startup acquired last September by OpenAI. He previously worked at Meta.
- Robert Masson, a senior staff data scientist in Meta’s Seattle office, who spent nearly 11 years with the company before going to Atlassian early last year.
- Calvin Grunewald, who spent nine years as a Facebook director of engineering, based in Seattle. He was most recently at Stripe.
- Rafael Brandao Lobo, a founding engineer who previously spent more than a decade building brand advertising and gaming products at Facebook/Meta.
- Bruno Garcia, an open source startup founder who previously worked at PlayCo and Sega.
Rakesh Parida, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at Stripe, said utilizing AI agents to create strong technical connections between companies is a major strategic advantage.
“ArchAstro is making that model repeatable at scale, enabling continuous integrations, deployments, and migrations across companies, with the security, (forward deployed engineering) oversight, and judgment that serious software partnerships require,” Parida said. “The future of software partnerships isn’t just about going live together. It’s about staying live together.”
Two Fortune 500 companies have already begun utilizing the platform as design partners, though Sharma declined to say who they are. There’s also the potential threat of Microsoft, Google, Amazon or others entering the market, given their interests in making sure B2B customers are satisfied in deploying agentic AI systems.
Sharma said they are fully expecting competition in the nascent sector, and in some cases they are already speaking to the big players.
“But their demand is so high that they don’t have the time or the focused energy to build a solution like ours,” he said. “We think we can accelerate their revenue and help these larger companies scale even further.”
ArchAstro is backed by venture capital firms 20VC — the London-based firm led by Harry Stebbings — and Kyber Knight — whose investments include Cruise, SpaceX and Anduril. Its angel investors include a who’s who of technology leaders:
- Will Gaybrick (President of Technology & Business at Stripe)
- Claire Hughes Johnson (Former COO, Stripe)
- Vijaye Raji (Statsig founder, now CTO of Applications OpenAI)
- Vlad Fedorov (CTO, GitHub)
- Karandeep Anand (CEO, Character.ai)
- Deb Liu (Former VP Meta, Ancestry CEO)
- Ash Jhaveri (SVP at Meta)
- Akin Babayigit (Co-founder, Tripeldot Studios)
Based in Seattle, the company employs seven people. Sharma said they are deliberately “staying lean,” adding that a smaller team forces them to be “extremely nimble and invent a path to value.”
He’s also excited to build the startup in Seattle, which he says has “some of the best engineers anywhere.”
“If you want to be a serious B2B company, at some point you have to venture up to Seattle,” he said.
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You may not think of early summer as the best time to upgrade your tech. Many big-box electronics stores and popular websites offer great sales in late summer for Back-to-School sales, during major holidays like Christmas and just after Thanksgiving, and around big sporting events like the Super Bowl. If you’ve been contemplating a new TV, headphones, or laptop, Best Buy is offering deep discounts this June.
Shoppers have endless options when it comes to electronics retailers, but Best Buy offers a few perks that other stores may not. Depending on the product, you may be able to view a demo in-store, rather than simply reading specs and user reviews online. Best Buy also offers a price match guarantee, matching prices from both local and online competitors. The Geek Squad can help you select, set up, or troubleshoot your new electronics, and even provide repair services down the line if necessary. You can also look for open box deals, though these may not be included in other sales, and trade in your old devices for a Best Buy gift card that you can use on a new purchase. Here are four of the best deals at Best Buy this June.
1. Beats Studio Pro Wireless Over-the-Ear Headphones
Earbuds are having a moment right now, but many people still prefer traditional over-the-ear headphones for comfort, superior sound quality, and better noise cancellation. Beats is a popular brand compatible with both Apple and Android devices. Currently, these Beats Studio Pro Wireless Noise Cancelling Over-the-Ear Headphones – Black are more than 50% off at Best Buy, on sale for $169.99. Buyers will save $180, making this a hard-to-beat deal!
The Beats Studio Pro headphones offer active noise cancellation, a built-in microphone, and Bluetooth wireless connectivity with a maximum range of 100 feet. You can also connect via USB-C or a 3.5mm audio input. They have a battery life of up to 40 hours and a charging time of two hours. The headband is adjustable for maximum comfort, and these headphones also come with a carrying case. Beats promises an “immersive listening experience” with personalized spatial audio and dynamic head tracking for 360-degree audio. These headphones come with a one-year limited warranty covering both parts and labor, and currently have a user rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars on Best Buy’s website.
2. LG 77-inch OLED TV
If you missed Project Hail Mary or another blockbuster on the big screen and want to upgrade for a similar experience at home, you should consider this 77-inch LG Class B5 Series smart TV. It may be a hit to your wallet at $1,499.99, but buyers who take advantage of this deal will save $1,500 off its normal price of $2,999.99.
If you buy this television, be prepared to welcome AI into your living room. This OLED LG TV has a special processor that uses AI to automatically improve the picture and sound quality of whatever you’re watching, from sports games to your favorite binge-worthy show. It also has Perfect Black and Perfect Color technology for deeper black tones, richer colors, and enhanced contrast. The TV runs on webOS and works with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Home. Gamers will appreciate the 0.1ms response time and 120Hz refresh rate, with four HDMI ports and Bluetooth-enabled connectivity. It also supports Dolby Atmos surround sound. The TV is well-rated by customers for picture quality, setup, and size, though some experienced connectivity issues. This LG comes with a stand and has a one-year limited warranty.
3. Ring outdoor camera
Outdoor cameras at home may feel invasive, but they offer more perks than simple security. They may deter a package thief or a home intruder, but they may also give you a break on your insurance premium, help you keep an eye on your children or pets, monitor traffic on a busy street, or simply give you peace of mind when you’re away from home. If cheaper security cameras simply don’t do the job, this sale at Best Buy on the Ring outdoor stick-up camera may be the deal you’ve been waiting for.
Currently $40 off and on sale for $39.99, this Ring camera from Amazon is weather-resistant and wireless. It has 1080p HD video, and buyers can activate a live view anytime from the app on their phone or tablet. This camera also has a two-way talk function. Additionally, users can receive real-time notifications when the camera detects motion. Privacy features include customizable privacy zones and audio privacy. An optional Ring Home Plan subscription offers 180 days of video event history, a search feature, and more detailed alerts. The camera comes with everything required for installation. It uses a removable, rechargeable battery pack, and you must have high-speed internet.
4. Dell 15.6-inch Touchscreen Laptop
If you’re in the market for a new laptop, this 15.6-inch Dell is on sale for $649.99, a savings of $450. With a near-perfect user rating on Best Buy’s website, this laptop has a 13th Generation Intel Core processor, express charge capabilities, a built-in camera, and an LED-backlit display with a touchscreen. Buyers should note that Dell describes the laptop as built for “everyday computing,” and it is not a gaming machine. It comes with 16 gigabytes of memory, an Intel UHD graphics card, and 512 gigabytes of storage capacity. It also has three USB ports, a headphone jack, and Bluetooth capability.
The keyboard has an ergonomic design for maximum comfort and includes a separate numeric keypad and a calculator hotkey. Additionally, the Dell ComfortView software is designed to reduce blue light emissions and ease eye strain during extended use. This laptop comes with Windows 11 Home installed and has a one-year warranty.
Apple’s Spatial Reframing tool in Photos for iOS 27 is an interesting use of Apple Intelligence, but don’t push it too far just yet.
WWDC 2025 included a neat feature for Spatial Photos that lets users convert flat images into 3D scenes. By moving the iPhone around, you could temporarily re-angle your shot and explore the scene.
It was a neat trick, but it wasn’t that much of a major feature for photographers. It did, at least, give you an idea of how a Spatial Photo would look on something like an Apple Vision Pro.
One year later, Apple has decided to try and get the feature to be more practical to iPhone users. That comes in the form of Spatial Reframing.
Fixing the imperfect shot
One of the problems with photography is regretting not lining up the shot perfectly. Frequently, you’ll look back at what you’ve just taken, and the background isn’t in quite the position you wanted it to be.
If you were to edit it traditionally, you would try to cut around the subject and move it over, then fill in the new empty pixels with a clone tool or something else. An expert image editor can do this, and most people won’t tell that an edit has taken place at all.
That requires time and skill, which the average photo-taker doesn’t really have or wish to invest.
Spatially reframing an image in iOS 27
Spatial Reframing is a blend of the previous Spatial Photos feature and generative AI smarts. The idea is that you can select an image, the iPhone will analyze it, and then you can alter the angle of the camera’s view to a new one.
In theory, that would be a quick and relatively painless process, and with no issues at all. Depending on the photo you throw at it, you may just get that, but with some massive caveats.
Background filling
You can find the Reframe feature under the editing section of an image, under Tools.
Once you tap it, the screen fills up with a multi-colored filter, as it scans the shot. Once scanned, you’re instructed to touch and drag to adjust the perspective.
You can also use a two-finger pinch to pan, zoom, and rotate the image.
Dragging the picture around gives you a similar effect to the Spatial Photos, but to a more extreme degree. You can move the angle far enough to one side or the other that you can uncover sections of the background that simply aren’t visible in the original shot.
Reframing a portrait of a kitten works well. Original on the left.
In the preview, this is filled in with a minimal generative graphic that won’t be used in the final picture. This is especially the case for the edges, which appear blurred because it’s a lot to generate on the fly, and that’s not necessary in a preview.
Once you have set your new angle, hitting the Reframe button sets the processing in motion. After a few seconds, you have your reframed image.
In the short time we have played with the feature, we tried it out with a pair of images, to see how it works with a close-up portrait and with a wider scene.
The portrait, which we used an old image of a kitten, was handled pretty well. It was a minor shift of the camera to the right, with a small amount of deformity to the cat’s image.
More apparent is the background, as the left-hand side of the image was completely generated by the tool. It did pretty well in its blurry state, and if I showed anyone who didn’t know the room’s layout, they wouldn’t tell.
Our second test was with a wide touristy photograph of the Colosseum in Rome. It’s a difficult structure with many archways, and the subjects are a distance away from the camera in the middle of the frame.
When lining up the shot, we could tell that it was trying to make a vague-but-acceptable background for the preview, which is fine.
The final image has some plusses, but also some minuses.
Reframing a tourist scene initially looks OK. Original on the left.
On the plus side, it handed generating the background really well. Arches and road that were not visible in the original shot were created and put into place in the back quite well.
Less well done are the subject faces. You can tell that, as part of the reframing, the bodies and heads are taken into account, and are similarly adjusted to match the rest of the image.
This can sometimes work well, but the resulting warp to the faces is unflattering, to put it mildly.
Caveat Emptor
Spatial Reframing, as a concept, makes perfect sense. If you have a camera system and processing that can take apart a scene, move elements around, and smartly generate missing bits, there’s no reason not to do it.
This would be a massive task for a human to undertake, so what it’s coming up with is pretty phenomenal for a first try.
Close-ups of the original [left] and the warped faces of the reframe [right]
That said, we are talking about a feature that is in a developer beta, that is months from release, and the first real attempt too. It’s expected that there will be hiccups and foibles here.
Expect more improvements in the future.
As it stands, it’s a nice feature that could make for some fun shot changes. Content altered by the feature is not going to make the cover of Vogue anytime soon, so professional editors can breathe a sigh of relief.
If you don’t push it too far, it’s decent enough to make your Instagram cat photos a bit better.
Open Media: After years of development, an industry consortium has published the first major release of AV2. The next-generation video encoding standard has ambitious goals, including improved compression efficiency and broader industry adoption, while remaining royalty-free.
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) recently released version 1.0.0 of the AV2 specification and reference code. The finalized AV2 specification provides a baseline framework for software and hardware developers, who can now begin integrating the new video codec into products across the media and technology industries.
AOMedia introduced AV2 as a next-generation video coding standard built on the same foundations as AV1. Both codecs are royalty-free, open-source solutions for streaming, transcoding, and other media-related workloads, offering an attractive alternative to royalty-bearing formats such as AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, and the newer Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard.
The final AV1 specification was released in 2018, while AV2 took longer than initially anticipated to reach completion. AV1 has since gained significant traction across the industry, with Netflix and other major players adopting the royalty-free codec at an accelerating pace. AV2 was originally expected to arrive in 2025 and promises substantial improvements over its predecessor in image quality, feature support, and compression efficiency.
Early testing suggests that AV2 can deliver roughly 30% better compression efficiency than AV1, while significantly outperforming older codecs such as VP9 and H.264. According to AOMedia, AV2 has been engineered to provide “superior” compression efficiency compared to AV1, enabling media companies to deliver high-quality video streams at substantially lower bitrates. Alternatively, they can maintain similar bitrates while offering higher video quality.
AV2 was designed to meet the evolving needs of the video industry, including streaming, broadcasting, and real-time video conferencing. The new format also introduces improved support for mixed-reality applications, split-screen delivery of multiple video streams, and a broader range of visual quality options.
AOMedia was founded in 2015 by major technology companies to develop open video standards capable of succeeding Google’s VP9 codec. The non-profit consortium includes industry giants such as Amazon, Google, Intel, Nvidia, and Microsoft, alongside smaller technology organizations such as Mozilla.
AOMedia created AV1 to reduce the substantial licensing costs associated with patented video standards such as AVC and HEVC, and the strategy appears to be paying off. Modern graphics processors from Nvidia and AMD fully support hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding and decoding, alongside older formats, while support for VVC remains largely absent despite the codec having been available since 2020.
In contrast, VVC’s adoption has been hindered by a complex licensing landscape, leading some industry observers to question its long-term prospects. While it may take years for AV2 support to arrive in GPUs and other hardware devices, software adoption is already moving forward. The VideoLAN community has released dav2d, its portable AV2 decoder, featuring architecture-specific optimizations for x86 (AVX2), ARM (AArch64 NEON), and RISC-V processors.
Expeditors International, the Seattle-area logistics company known for never laying off employees, cut about 230 technology-related jobs in the region on Monday, ending a tradition that had been a point of pride for much of the company’s history.
The layoffs hit software developers, quality-assurance testers, project managers, business analysts and others across Expeditors’ offices in downtown Seattle, Bellevue, Lynnwood and Federal Way, according to laid-off employees and others with knowledge of the situation.
Company officials did not respond to messages from GeekWire seeking comment Monday afternoon and evening. The reasons for the layoffs were not clear.
The cuts in the Seattle area represent about 15% of the company’s global tech workforce. Posts on Reddit and LinkedIn indicate that there may have been some additional job cuts outside the region. Expeditors employed about 1,500 people in information systems worldwide as of March 31, up from about 1,360 a year before, according to its first-quarter financial report.
Expeditors was founded in Seattle in 1979 as a single-office ocean freight forwarder and went public on the Nasdaq in 1984. Its stock now trades on the New York Stock Exchange. The company has about 20,000 employees worldwide and posted $11.07 billion in revenue in 2025, with profits of $810 million.
Under Peter J. Rose, a co-founder who served as CEO from 1988 to 2013, it built a reputation for not laying off employees. It held to that practice through the 2008-09 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, and even as a wave of layoffs swept the technology industry in 2022 and 2023.
The cuts follow major leadership changes. Daniel Wall, who started in 1987 as a messenger and worked his way up over nearly four decades, became CEO in April 2025, succeeding Jeffrey Musser. The tech organization is run by Courtney Hawkins, senior vice president and CIO, who joined Expeditors in 2024, after roles at Starbucks, Nike, Nordstrom and Zulily.
One former employee said there had been hints about the possible cuts for several months, including discussion of a restructuring plan and new job titles in the technology organization.
Another clue, in retrospect, was a change to the company’s website: As recently as January of this year, Expeditors’ online corporate history page credited “our no layoff policy” for making 2010 the company’s best year ever, according to a version of the page captured by the Internet Archive.
By last month, the page had been changed to call it “our short-term no layoff policy.”
macOS Tahoe threw an icon on every menu item, making them impossible to distinguish at a glance. macOS Golden Gate has rectified that design taboo with blessedly iconless menus.
In Disney’s 2004 animated film The Incredibles, a very basic concept of “when everyone is special, no one is” is explored. Alan Dye must not have seen that movie or the many like it.
Well, now that he’s gone, so is his team’s decision to frustratingly place icons next to every menu item. Apple announced macOS Golden Gate on Monday, and it has fixed this problem.
macOS Tahoe introduced the controversial Liquid Glass design, but that may not have been the most hated change to the platform. Oh, the weird Finder icon was a problem Apple fixed immediately, but I’m talking about menu icons.
For some reason, Apple went against its own age-old design guidelines to add special little SF symbols to every menu item. Every single item in the menu got these little pictures of cogs, squares, and pencils.
The problem is, when every menu item has a little picture next to it, your brain stops distinguishing between them. They’re treated as another letter in a line of text and may as well not exist.
Well, someone got the memo because macOS Golden Gate ditches the icons again. Here’s a side-by-side of the new menu next to the previous one.
The left menu shows a lack of icons in macOS Golden Gate and the right menu shows the icons in macOS Tahoe
Apple spent a lot of its keynote addressing user complaints. Even the corner radii being mismatched was addressed directly.
WWDC 2026 is underway and AppleInsider is digging through all of the betas for every small change. Even though Apple spent most of its keynote address talking about Apple Intelligence, there are many new features and updates across every operating system.
For years, Apple has been accused of being one of the biggest stragglers in the AI arms race. Doubters have argued that Apple’s lack of a clear AI strategy have cost it its edge, and Wall Street analysts have worried that the gap could start hurting iPhone sales.
Now, the company has unveiled what it is billing as its biggest AI launch to date: Siri AI, which embeds new automated capabilities (fueled by a partnership with Google Gemini) into the very spine of its software.
Is it enough to get people to stop saying that Apple is “losing” the AI race?
To be honest, nobody really knows. But the question itself may be the wrong one. A better one might be: are Apple customers actually going to use these features and, if they do, will it help Apple’s business?
Before we address that question, we should note that Monday’s announcements also came with an interesting comment from Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering.
“Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people — all of us — that it’s ultimately meant to serve,” Federighi said during his remarks. “At Apple, our mission has always been to turn the potential of advanced technology into helpful and intuitive products for everyone.”
The not-so-veiled defiance on display here seems like both a response to Apple’s “behind-on-AI” criticism and an effort to acknowledge the deeply ambivalent — and, according to some polls, increasingly negative — sentiments that many consumers have about the AI industry. It’s also a shrewd message at a moment when Americans are worried that AI will take their jobs and rot their brains. Apple is positioning itself as the AI company that’s actually on your side.
Judging by Monday’s demos, that positioning has some substance behind it. Siri can now surface information buried deep in your inbox or text history and surface helpful information and offer helpful suggestions based on it. It can use what Apple calls onscreen awareness to give you context about what you’re looking at. And — using Gemini — it can pull near-instantaneous up-to-date information from the web and deliver it right to your device.
Siri is also designed to work seamlessly across Apple devices, giving users increased flexibility and, like other AI chatbots, it stores chat histories so users can revisit past conversations.
By building AI functionalities into its disembodied, ethereal assistant, Apple also has the potential to eat into the advantages of competitors whose apps can only reach users through its own App Store. For those competitors, having Apple’s AI embedded at the operating system level is a meaningful threat to their distribution advantage.
The keyword here is “potential” since this version of Siri won’t be available to consumers until later this year, as a beta.
A final verdict will have to wait, but what’s already clear is that Apple is doing its best to court its audience — whether they end up going for it or not. Apple is obviously a hardware company, and these updates are designed to make that hardware incrementally more user-friendly and convenient, keeping users glued to their devices a little while longer.
The contrast with its competitors is instructive and maybe the most important signal in Monday’s announcements for anyone watching where the AI industry is actually headed. Take OpenAI, which, despite shipping updates at a relentless pace, has struggled to define who it’s actually selling to, oscillating between consumers and enterprises. Or Meta, which is pouring gargantuan sums into AI without a clear explanation of how it connects to the company’s core advertising business.
Apple’s more measured approach is starting to look optimal by comparison — and more financially sound. For the most part, Apple hasn’t needed a gangbusters AI strategy. It posted historic iPhone sales last quarter. And as questions mount over AI’s profitability and real-world utility, Apple is spending significantly less than its competitors — roughly $14 billion in capex planned this year, against a cumulative $900 billion being committed by other tech giants — while still earning huge amounts of revenue. That revenue has come from the AI industry itself via taxes on AI companies that use its App Store to platform their apps.
In short, Apple is spending less, making more, and now launched a suite of AI features that — for many iPhone users — will feel indistinguishable from the other AI applications already available to them through the App Store. If that doesn’t exactly count as “winning the AI race,” it may be the smartest way to run it.
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Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the feature a year ago.
Instagram has made it easier to pull off that grid design and aesthetic you want to achieve. The Meta-owned app has finally rolled out the ability to rearrange your grid, almost a year after Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that the feature was coming. According to USA Today, you will be able to move posts around regardless of when you made them starting today, anywhere you are in the world. “We know this is long overdue, but we wanted to take the time to get it right,” Meta told the publication. We can confirm that we already have access to the feature.
The ability to rearrange the Instagram grid continues to be one of the most requested features on the app, and Meta has been planning to introduced it way before Mosseri announced its arrival last year. Alessandro Paluzzi, who was known for reverse engineering apps and finding unannounced tools, discovered an “edit grid” option in the Instagram app way back in 2022.
If you’re tired of seeing your posts in chronological order and want to move things around, simply go to your profile and long press any post. Along with “Pin to main grid” and “Archive,” you’ll now see an option that says “Reorder grid.” Tap on it to be taken to another window, where you can drag posts to rearrange your content until your profile looks exactly the way you want it to. Take note that any post you pin will remain at the top of your profile and will be blacked out in the “Reorder grid” window.
Tech
Zepto’s IPO filing reveals fast growth, bigger losses, and a valuation question nobody’s answered yet
Indian quick-commerce startup Zepto has unveiled plans for an initial public offering that could be valued at about $1 billion, putting one of Y Combinator’s biggest bets outside the U.S. on the path to public markets.
The filing, released Monday, offers a rare look at how one of India’s most closely watched startups plans to sustain its breakneck growth after listing. Zepto’s advertising revenue rose more than 151% year-over-year to ₹16.4 billion (about $171 million) in fiscal 2026, outpacing the company’s 104% increase in operating revenue to ₹115.5 billion (around $2.4 billion).
While grocery deliveries remain Zepto’s core business, the faster growth of its advertising arm points to a broader shift in how the startup makes money — a strategy Amazon pioneered, turning its marketplace into one of the world’s most profitable ad businesses by selling visibility to the same merchants competing on its platform.
Founded in 2021 by Stanford dropouts Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra, Zepto has grown into one of India’s fastest-growing startups, competing with Zomato-owned Blinkit and Swiggy’s Instamart in the country’s fiercely contested quick-commerce market. Amazon and Walmart-backed Flipkart have also intensified their efforts in the segment in recent months.
Despite the intense competition, Zepto has continued to add customers and orders at a rapid clip. The startup processed more than 640 million orders in fiscal 2026, per the draft prospectus, nearly double the previous year, while the annual transacting users rose to almost 48 million. Even as it expanded its network to 1,139 stores, orders per store continued to increase, suggesting demand is growing alongside its footprint.
That growth comes at a cost, however. Zepto remains loss-making, reporting a net loss of ₹59.1 billion (about $617.36 million) in fiscal 2026, compared with ₹47.0 billion (around $492.45 million) a year earlier. The startup acknowledged in its filing that it may continue to incur losses and may not be able to sustain its historical growth rates, a standard but telling disclosure that highlights the tension facing venture-backed companies seeking public-market investors before reaching profitability.
Zepto plans to raise up to ₹80.1 billion (about $837.41 million) through a fresh issue of shares. The IPO will also include an offer-for-sale of up to 113.5 million shares by existing investors including Nexus Venture Partners, Contrary, and Razor Ventures, with the final size of the sale dependent on the eventual pricing of the offering. The startup also said it may raise up to ₹16.02 billion (about $167 million) from investors in a pre-IPO placement ahead of the listing.
The listing is set to provide a closely watched outcome for some of Zepto’s early backers. The startup was valued at $7 billion in its last funding round in October and counts Y Combinator, Lachy Groom, Nexus Venture Partners, StepStone, Glade Brook, and Lightspeed among its investors.
Several prominent shareholders — including Y Combinator-affiliated funds, Lightspeed, StepStone, Groom, and Glade Brook — are not participating in the IPO’s offer-for-sale, opting to retain their stakes as the startup prepares for its market debut. That’s worth pausing on: Zepto’s public-market valuation remains uncertain, and some mutual funds and family offices that reviewed the company ahead of the IPO have indicated valuations well below its last private round, according to people familiar with the matter.
Zepto’s founders, the filing revealed, received summonses from India’s anti-money laundering agency, the Enforcement Directorate, in April, seeking information related to foreign investments, the company’s shareholding structure, and other matters under the country’s foreign-exchange laws.
The two subsequently appeared before the agency and provided the requested information and documents. Zepto said it has not received any further communication from the regulator since, but cautioned that it could not rule out future inquiries, investigations, or penalties.
The proposed listing marks the culmination of a years-long effort to prepare the startup for a domestic market debut. Zepto relocated its legal home from Singapore to India last year, joining a growing number of startups restructuring their holding companies as local public markets become increasingly attractive for tech listings.
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New variants of the NFCShare Android malware are being distributed as fake updates for legitimate banking apps hosted on GitHub.
The malware has evolved and is now targeting customers of multiple banks and financial institutions across Europe in a phishing campaign aimed at stealing payment card data.
After tricking victims with a fake verification screen to place the cards near the mobile device’s near-field communication (NFC) chip, NFCShare reads the information using Android’s IsoDep interface and EMV commands.
The malware steals the card number, type, expiry date, and a 4-digit PIN entered by the victim under the pretense of a security step, and exfiltrates it to the attacker’s command-and-control (C2) host over a WebSocket channel.
The information collected this way can then be used in NFC payment relay schemes, as documented in the NGate, SuperCard X, and RelayNFC malware attacks.
Source: D3Lab
NFCShare was first documented by D3Lab researchers in January 2026, who have been tracking its activity and evolution.
D3Lab researcher Andrea Draghetti told BleepingComputer that, despite similarities to other Android malware that exploit NFC chips for data theft, NFCShare uses distinct code, libraries, architecture, and implementation details.
Draghetti noted, though, that it could still be an evolution of the same ecosystem, driven by the same threat actors.
Recent NFCShare attacks observed starting May 14 begin with the victim visiting a phishing site that impersonates a real bank and asks for banking credentials.
Victims are then urged to update their banking app and are redirected to a GitHub repository hosting a malicious APK file.
Source: D3Lab
The researchers note that SMS messages or phone calls from fake bank representatives may also be used as part of the social-engineering process, as seen in similar attacks, although D3Lab researchers did not observe these methods directly.
Since its creation on April 10, the GitHub repository used for distributing NFCShare has hosted 56 unique APKs that impersonated mobile apps for banks primarily from Italy and Spain:
- Intesa Carte.apk
- Sella Carte.apk
- Banca Sella Carte.apk
- Nexi Carte.apk
- Fideuram Carte.apk
- Mooney Carte.apk
- CaixaBank.apk
- CaixaBankNfc.apk
- CaixaReactivaTarjeta.apk
In January, D3Lab reported that the malware targeted only Deutsche Bank in Germany, which may suggest an extended targeting scope.
One interesting aspect of the new version of the malware is the introduction of malformed APK packaging to hinder automated analysis, and potentially also security tools.
The APK is still a ZIP archive, but the newer samples include poisoned/malformed file paths within that ZIP, causing some extraction tools to wrongly interpret internal relative paths as filesystem paths and trigger errors.
However, D3Lab notes that this trick does not prevent manual analysis or code recovery; rather, it disrupts static analysis in certain tools.
Android users are advised to source banking apps only from Google Play, enable Play Protect, and be cautious of “verification requests” that prompt NFC card scans.
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