Australia and Turkey will face off in a pivotal World Cup 2026 Group D clash at BC Place in Vancouver, Canada, with both sides eyeing a strong start in one of the tournament’s most open groups. Alongside the United States and Paraguay, both teams will believe qualification is a possibility, and so we can expect high intensity from the opening whistle.

Turkey head into the match as slight favourites thanks to their wealth of European talent. Vincenzo Montella’s side boasts exciting stars such as Arda Güler, Kenan Yildiz, and Kerem Aktürkoğlu, and arrives on the back of a five-match winning streak in competitive qualifiers.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

If you have a British royal family obsession, like me, today’s NYT Strands puzzle will be a royal breeze. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. 

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Peer group

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Titles

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• SOUR, MARE, RANT, RANTS, DIRT, DIRTS, LEAR, COUNT, QUID, QUIDS

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• EARL, LADY, DUCHESS, LORD, VISCOUNT, BARON, MARQUESS

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is NOBILITY. To find it, start with the N that is three letters to the right on the top row, and wind down.

Networks

Honey, I flattened the datacenter network

Amazon has developed a new networking topology that’s up to a third faster and up to 40 percent more energy efficient than traditional hierarchical network designs.

The novel architecture, called Resilient Network Graphs (RNG), is based on random graph theory.

“Traditional networks have always been hierarchical,” explained Matt Rehder, VP of global network engineering at AWS, in a recent interview. “They’re sort of like an org chart where one network device will talk to the boss network device which will talk to the next boss network device and you gotta go up the chain of command in order to talk to someone else in another department.”

There are reasons for that, Rehder said. Hierarchy creates structure and makes data routing rules simpler. “You don’t have to know how to talk to everyone in the organization, you just talk to the person above you,” he said.

But that creates inefficiencies. The tree-like structure creates points of contention where data flow bottlenecks can occur. At the same time, other parts of the network may be underutilized. 

Rehder said that academics in 2012 proposed a random graph topology for networks. 

But that design, as detailed [PDF] by Amazon researchers, had issues. The reimagined network structure, dubbed Jellyfish, relied on truly random graphs and called for removing routers from server racks and locating them centrally to simplify cabling. But that approach ended up increasing latency between servers within a rack.

Rehder said no one has been able to put that design into production. 

“It requires much more complicated routing rules to figure out how to program every device – you can’t just program every device to know who everyone is, they have limited memory space,” he said. “And then the other [issue] is that the cabling actually is very complicated. Part of that hierarchy is about simplifying how you build the network in the datacenter and with a random graph it’s literally random and you can’t just have cable spaghetti all over a datacenter. So you could build it in a lab but you could never really do it at scale.”

Nonetheless, said Rehder, AWS has been solving these problems over the past few years.

“The only reason we were able to even think about tackling them is that 15-year history of iteratively improving our hardware development and software ownership of our network,” he said. 

Less random

Inspired by other academic networking research, AWS managed to succeed with random network topology by making it not entirely random. RNG relies on a flat graph where routers interconnect through a mix of deterministic and randomized cabling.

RNG began taking shape three years ago when Seshadhri Comandur, an Amazon Scholar and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, answered an internal Slack message from Ratul Mahajan, a fellow Amazon Scholar, datacenter networking expert, and professor at the University of Washington, who was looking for an expert on graph theory and routing.

With help from AWS principal applied scientist Giacomo Bernardi and other colleagues, AWS has become the first company to deploy a flat datacenter network at scale. AWS expects the technology will offer better performance and reliability for Amazon customers while also saving billions of dollars in hardware and reducing CO₂ emissions.

The reimagined network structure was referred to as Penrose internally because the original design involved Penrose tiles. But as the project evolved, AWS settled on Resilient Network Graphs “to reflect the customer benefit and that primarily is a more resilient and performant network,” as a company spokesperson put it.

RNG relies on a routing algorithm called Spraypoint to identify node paths and an optical device called a Shufflebox for mixing connections between routers. 

Rehder said the Shufflebox is one of the pieces of magic that makes RNG work.

“In a random graph network you don’t have that hierarchical structure where you can have all the cables neatly aligned,” he explained. “So how do you do that? How do you basically make a random network feel more structured? Well, you have the Shufflebox and the idea is that you plug fiber in here and inside of this it will randomize or basically scramble the fiber. So the ports you plug in get scrambled around and come out on some random port around the other side.”

RNG is AWS’s new network for its core database servers. Machine learning hardware uses the company’s UltraServer network, because the machine learning workloads need full bandwidth. 

“The core server networks can be oversubscribed more efficiently,” said Rehder. “Everyone’s not talking to each other at the same time.”

RNG has been rolled out in Ireland, Germany, and Spain, and the plan is to deploy it in the majority of company datacenters by the end of the year. ®

This month saw the release of Vim Classic 8.3, the first stable version of a new long-term support fork of Vim maintained without generative AI tools. Linuxiac reports:

The release is based on Vim 8.2.0148 and includes selected bug fixes and patches backported from later upstream Vim releases. Vim Classic was first announced by [SourceHut’s CEO/founder] Drew DeVault in March 2026 after he objected to LLM-assisted development in Vim and Neovim. In his announcement, DeVault said he no longer wanted to use software developed with LLM assistance and introduced Vim Classic as a fork for users who want to continue using Vim without that involvement… Vim Classic follows Vim’s charityware model and continues to direct users toward Bram Moolenaar’s long-running support for children in Uganda. The release is distributed as a signed source tarball from SourceHut, while future important announcements are expected through the project’s mailing list.

“Vim is important to me…” DeVault wrote in March. (DeVault even tattooed “hjkl” on his right arm.) “[A]lmost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I’ve written, emails I’ve sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim.”

But DeVault wrote that he also cares about AI’s impact on air pollution, fresh water supplies, global supply chains, and the working conditions of miners in African companies:
And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies… All this to enrich the few, centralize power, reduce competition, and underwrite an enormous bubble that, once it bursts, will ruin the lives of millions of the world’s poor and marginalized classes.

I don’t think it’s cute that someone vibe coded “battleship” in VimScript. I think it’s more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don’t understand how awful all of this is. I don’t want to use software which has slop in it. I do what I can to avoid it, and sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software… To keep my conscience clear, and continue to enjoy the relationship I have with this amazing piece of software, I have forked Vim…

Since forking from this base, I have backported a handful of patches, most of which address CVEs discovered after this release, but others which address minor bug fixes. I also penned a handful of original patches which bring the codebase from this time up to snuff for building it on newer toolchains…

I invite you to use Vim Classic, if you feel the same way as me, and to maintain it with me, contributing the patches you need to support your own use cases.

A roundup of recent reviews published by Engadget.

Motorola Razr Ultra

AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

Honor Magic V6

Daniel Cooper for Engadget

Marshall Milton ANC

James Trew for Engadget

Logitech Mobi Fold

Sam Rutherford for Engadget

2027 Rivian R2 first drive

Tim Stevens for Engadget

After WIRED reported last week that Meta’s smart glasses app contained code that would enable the company to activate face-recognition features on the devices, the company removed the code this week without commenting on why or whether it plans to add such functionality back into the app later. Another WIRED investigation this week found that xAI’s Grok is still hosting sexualized deepfakes, including “nudified” images and videos, of celebrities and at least one prominent US politician.

After limiting the release of its new Mythos-class AI model over concerns about its potential impacts on cybersecurity, Anthropic announced a model upgrade for partners in its limited-access group this week and launched a “safe” version of the model to the public with guardrails meant to keep the system from being used to fuel cyberattacks. Meanwhile, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a new directive to federal agencies this week in reaction to new AI threats that includes a requirement to fix the most urgent software vulnerabilities in as little as three days.

As Europe looks to separate and insulate itself from US Big Tech, WIRED created a timeline that tracks all the ways EU governments, companies, and other organizations are moving away from US tech. A new open-source project dubbed Encrypted Spaces could be used to make countless mainstream collaboration apps more private and surveillance-resistant with end-to-end encryption. And illegal pharmacy and scam websites hijacked Spotify’s search rankings using fake podcasts, according to a new joint US Congressional report.

The 2026 World Cup is in full swing, and WIRED looked at the surveillance technologies, from anti-drone tech to face recognition, that are being used in US, Canadian, and Mexican stadiums. We also mapped every Flock license plate reader near a US World Cup stadium. More broadly, Amnesty International said this week that it has concluded fans in all three host countries—both local residents and visitors—face potential human rights violations as a result of the FIFA tournament.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing two Florida police departments over its use of FACES, one of the longest-running face recognition tools in the US, after its alleged misuse led to the wrongful arrest of a Fort Myers man. Donald Trump, meanwhile, jeopardized the future of a key surveillance authority after selecting Bill Pulte, who’s been described as “deeply unqualified,” as the acting director of national intelligence. (Trump has since selected an alternative nominee for the permanent role.)

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

As difficult as digital anonymity has become in the modern world, obtaining a phone number without revealing almost any identifying information—whether by buying a temporary burner phone or registering an account with a privacy-preserving phone carrier—has remained entirely legal in the US. Now the Federal Communications Commission wants to change that.

Late last month, the FCC released a proposal for a new rule that would implement know-your-customer requirements for cellular networks, requiring that cellular providers “at a minimum, obtain and retain the name, physical address, government issued identification number, and an alternate telephone number of any new and renewing customer before granting access to its services.” The proposal is described as a measure akin to money-laundering laws designed to make it more difficult for scammers to exploit the phone networks. But privacy advocates argue it also threatens a last conduit of anonymity for those seeking to evade phone surveillance—whether that’s journalists, whistleblowers, activists, or simply people seeking to avoid mass data collection in yet another facet of their communications.

With delivery by Father’s Day and a 90-day low price, you’ll want to grab Amazon’s weekend Mac mini deal before inventory runs out.

With increased demand for a headless machine to run AI agents and a budget-friendly price tag, Apple’s M4 Mac mini has been sold out for much of Q2 2026. But Amazon has the 16GB/512GB configuration back in stock, and it’s on sale for $769.99 (a $30 discount off retail).

Buy M4 Mac mini for $769.99

Now priced at a 90-day low, Amazon has repeatedly shown stock levels of 20 or fewer units left today, indicating stock is limited.

You can also find early Prime Day deals on dozens of Apple devices, including $299 iPads, $499 AirPods Max 2, and 2026 MacBook Airs from $949 in our early Prime Day Apple deals roundup.

Additional early Prime Day Apple deals

If you have a Bambu Labs printer and aren’t keen to send your files to Bambu’s servers with each print job, then check out Bambuddy, an open-source, self-hosted, cloud-free central command that offers a local alternative for managing Bambu Labs printers. It acts as a replacement for the official cloud services, allowing you to slice, print, and monitor with full local control and zero reliance on Bambu Labs’ servers.

To use it, one installs Bambuddy, then puts their printer(s) into LAN-only mode. Doing this disables cloud functionality, including remote access. Then one enables Developer Mode, which allows external software to control printer functions via a machine API. Once that’s done, the printers can be added to Bambuddy.

Bambuddy then acts as a full-featured control panel and management center for anywhere from one to forty printers. It runs on Linux, macOS, or Windows, and a Raspberry Pi is a common install target.

Bambu Labs makes indisputably high-quality printers, and using their software and official app is certainly convenient. But the fact that every print job goes through Bambu’s servers, and a software architecture that frustrates home-grown solutions? Not so much. Add AGPLv3 violations and some heavy-handed legal behavior to the mix, and it’s easy to understand the motivation for an alternative to the factory software.

Bambuddy has a huge number of features — including an integrated slicer and proxy mode for remote access — and it may look a little intimidating at first. Fortunately, the project’s website offers a live sandbox demo with simulated printers, which should be right up the alley of those who prefer to learn by clicking around in a consequence-free environment.