• The world’s largest digital camera begins recording the changing universe every night
• Giant Chile observatory discovers thousands of hidden asteroids during early testing already
• A new sky survey captures fresh cosmic images every forty seconds overnight

A camera roughly the size of a small car has begun the most ambitious astronomical survey ever attempted from Earth.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, perched atop Cerro Pachón in northern Chile, officially started its Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

Bezos is reportedly set to invest $2bn into the company himself.

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is reportedly nearing closing a $10bn funding round that would value the space company at around $130bn. This would be the first time Blue Origin is opening itself up to outside investors since being found in 2000.

Bezos is set to invest $2bn into the company himself, while Coatue Management – which has close ties to Bezos Expeditions – is committing $4bn, reports suggest.

The remaining $4bn has seen significant demand, sources told news publications, mirroring recent investor appetite around major tech IPO listings.

“We finally have enough visibility into our future and our financial success,” Bezos told CNBC in May. “It’s a good time actually to start thinking about the future and bring on some other outside investors.”

The reported funding into Blue Origin comes weeks after its biggest rival, SpaceX, raised a record-breaking $85.7bn in its IPO listing (including the underwriters’ option).

The Elon Musk-owned company has filed for a satellite constellation of up to 1m with major plans for orbital AI data centres. The company currently has more than 10,000 active satellites in orbit.

Earlier this year Blue Origin launched ‘TeraWave’, a new communication network with a planned constellation of nearly 5,500 satellites. The constellation is set to be deployed from Q4 2027, the company said in January. Blue Origin claims that TeraWave will deliver connection speeds of up to 6Tbps anywhere on Earth.

Plans, however, suffered a setback this May after one of Blue Origins’ New Glenn rockets exploded on the launchpad during a hot-fire test. The US Federal Aviation Administration ordered the company to investigate a previous malfunction during a failed launch test in April.

Meanwhile, Bezos’s other big venture, Amazon, purchased satellite telecommunications provider Globalstar to better compete with Starlink.

The $11.6bn deal, announced this April, sees Amazon acquire Globalstar’s existing satellite operations, infrastructure and licences. According to Reuters, Globalstar has 32 planned active low-Earth orbit satellites.

The e-commerce giant plans to integrate Globalstar’s assets into its own space internet service Leo, which aims to have more than 3,200 satellites in space. Currently, the company has more than 375 satellites in space already, and is planning several launches over the course of the year.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

OpenAI unveiled its newest family of models on Thursday, introducing a new set of heavyweight programs into an increasingly crowded field of AI offerings.

GPT-5.6 comes in three variants: Sol (considered its workhorse), Terra (a more intermediate option), and Luna (its budget friendly option). These models expand what users can do across a variety of fields — with the company promising powerful capabilities in enterprise work, coding, and even scientific research.

CEO Sam Altman has promised that his company’s newest models are orders of magnitude more efficient and cost-effective than previous versions, recently telling CNBC that Sol is 54% more token efficient when it comes to AI coding tasks.

Most notably, the company calls 5.6 its “strongest cybersecurity model yet, achieving frontier performance with significantly fewer tokens.”

Indeed, much hubbub has been made about the model’s cyber capabilities, as the Trump administration previously sought to restrict its rollout, ostensibly due to fears of how the model could be misused. GPT-5.6 supports defensive activities, including threat modeling, code review and patching, and blue teaming (simulating an attack on your own systems to find weaknesses before real hackers do).

OpenAI also released a new tool called ChatGPT Work, which — just as it sounds — is designed as a workplace companion for enterprise teams, running on desktop, web, and mobile, that can help with daily clerical tasks, like drafting documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

OpenAI’s newly announced family of models follows on the heels of similar releases this week from competitors SpaceXAI and Meta.

However, GPT-5.6 and its attendant marketing seems most designed to take aim at OpenAI’s primary opponent, Anthropic. Anthropic has managed to make itself the likable underdog of the AI race, focusing fixedly on enterprise customers and winning a growing share of support as a result.

Not to be outdone, OpenAI cites the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, a notable benchmarking metric, to claim that its latest family of models outshines Anthropic’s models at every turn.

OpenAI calls Sol its “best coding model yet,” and has explicitly compared it to Anthropic’s recently released (and much hyped) Fable. Using the Coding Agent Index, OpenAI claims that Sol “sets a new state of the art at 80, 2.8 points above Fable 5, while using less than half the output tokens, taking less than half the time, and costing about one-third less.”

It adds: “That advantage extends across the family: Terra performs just above Fable 5, while Luna outperforms Opus 4.8.”

The company says that 5.6 is now available across ChatGPT, Codex, and the OpenAI API. Availability per million tokens is priced as follows: Sol is $5 input / $30 output, Terra is $2.50 input / $15 output, and Luna is $1 input / $6 output.

ai and ml

Searching for work sucks; AI combs the internet and sucks it all up. Combine the two and let ‘er rip with this Python project

Combing through job postings and company help wanted pages for a position that matches your resume is the very definition of drudge work. Now, there’s an AI designed to suck up information from the web, do the search for you, and even help you apply.

Software developer Tarun Gupta created just such a tool in the form of Autopilot-Jobhunt. When configured with a profile of the user and their desired jobs (and what they absolutely won’t accept in an opening), A-J will scan the web while users sleep, take stock of the positions that are a good match, and then send a Telegram message to its user.

That message includes all matching openings, scored against the user’s resume and ranked according to the AI’s assessment. Users can ask A-J to format a resume and cover letter tailored to the position, which it’s up to the user to review and send – the bot won’t do so automatically.

You might be thinking that an AI-crafted resume and cover letter would be a bad strategy for getting your foot in the door at a company you’re keen to work for, but that might not be the case, actually. As we reported last year, researchers found that some AI hiring bots, often the first line a company uses to separate the wheat from the chaff, favored applications generated by the same AI model they used for screening – suggesting the human touch may be worth less than you think in the modern job market.

A-J is designed to be free to use (what hard-up developer can afford to do hundreds of AI API calls a night, after all?), and relies on free models to comb the web for jobs. TinyFish’s AI web agent is used to crawl for jobs, while OpenRouter provides the API for one of several default free AI models that A-J will run through, starting with Llama and falling back to free versions of Nvidia’s Nemotron, Google’s Gemma 4, and Alibaba’s Qwen3 when all else fails, or quotas run out. 

Claude Code and the Anthropic API can be used in place of OpenRouter if you’ve got tokens to spare.

For those concerned about A-J broadcasting personal details to the web, Gupta writes that it’s designed to be private, providing an entire privacy readme as part of the project’s GitHub documentation. 

As mentioned above, A-J never applies for a job on a user’s behalf, and the config file where users link to their locally stored Markdown-formatted resume and set other options is gitignored so it won’t ever be committed by accident. 

That said, resumes do get routed to the LLMs OpenRouter is configured to use. Gupta said those who want to avoid sending that data through OpenRouter can use Claude Code instead, provided they have an Anthropic subscription that supports it.

As for who could make use of the tool, it’s configured by default for software developers, and for good reason: According to Hiring Lab data published on Wednesday, the number of job openings for software developers has risen by 15 percent since Anthropic released Claude Code in February 2025, while openings for all other jobs have fallen by seven percent over the same timeframe. 

Still, young college graduates in a variety of career fields report not being able to find a job, so the tool could be of use to anyone with the willingness to reconfigure it for a different career field. AI companies, fintechs, and Silicon Valley heavyweights might be programmed into A-J by default, but they can be freely added, removed, and reconfigured as desired.

It’ll probably take some work to get Autopilot-Jobhunt configured for your particular needs, but if you’re having trouble landing a role, giving it a shot can’t hurt. ®

The OpenMandriva Linux project announced that it was the target of an attempted act of internal sabotage after a dispute among contributors.

The attempted destructive action extended from wiping GitHub repositories to pushing an empty package that could have damaged users’ systems.

OpenMandriva is an independent, community-run Linux distribution, forked from Mandriva Linux in 2012 and maintained by the OpenMandriva Association.

The distro stands out for building most of its components with the LLVM/Clang toolchain instead of GCC, which is commonly used by most Linux distributions.

According to a post on the project’s forum from long-time OpenMandriva developer and maintainer AngryPenguin, the sabotage attempt occurred after a contributor’s abusive behavior “towards certain users and members of the distribution,” which caused some of them to leave the project.

Following these events, Davide Beatrici, the leading developer of the instant messaging app Mumble and a friend of the attacker, decided to delete part of a repository the OpenMandriva team had been working on for almost a decade.

AngryPenguin stated that Beatrici had administrative privileges because he previously helped migrate and mirror project repositories to his private OneDev instance.

Apart from the data wipe, Beatrici also published an empty package in the Cooker repository that obsoleted the packages for the Gnome and Cosmic desktop environments.

The OpenMandriva team says it is currently restoring the deleted repositories and packages and is conducting a full system audit to determine any other unauthorized changes.

BleepingComputer has contacted Beatrici directly, as well as through the Mumble team, requesting his side of the story, but we have not heard back as of publishing.

However, Beatrici rejected the sabotage claims in a statement for The Lunduke Journal, saying that his goal was never to harm the OpenMandriva community or the distribution’s users.

“Let me state right away that this was by no means a ‘sabotage.’ I’m not the kind of person to do something like that,” Beatrici stated.

“The objective was not to harm the distribution I cared for and contributed to for the past 3 years. I carefully deleted all Cosmic and GNOME repositories from GitHub, the corresponding packages on Cooker (development branch) and pushed a package obsoleting them.”

As Beatrici says, this action was triggered by a few members of the project who did not agree with OpenMandriva’s focus on KDE and LXQt.

“The same members, who notably don’t care about security nor a clean Git commit history, decided to delete the “.onedev-buildspec.yml” file from several repositories without asking/informing me or anyone else first,” the developer said.

AngryPenguin stated on behalf of the OpenMandriva team that although Beatrici’s actions constitute a criminal offense, they have decided not to pursue legal action against the former contributor.

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.

Advertisement

Get the whitepaper

The complaint reads:

On September 12, 2025, Allstate informed VMware’s consultant that it had “removed VMware from all devices,” and therefore Allstate was no longer able to “execute the Scripts provided by Broadcom as the scripts are dependent on having VMWare components running in the environment.”

Allstate reportedly followed up in October to tell VMware that “all VMware instances have been terminated and removed from Allstate’s VMware ELA environment” and that its audit obligations were fulfilled, per VMware’s complaint.

Allstate’s story differs. In the June filing, Allstate claimed that after it decided not to renew its VMware and CA contracts, Broadcom “simultaneously and unreasonably initiated four separate audits of Allstate’s use of its licensed CA and VMware software.”

“With respect to VMware, Allstate substantially and in good faith complied with the audit and reporting requirements set forth in its contracts with VMware, and Plaintiff’s claims to the contrary are unfounded,” the statement reads.

Broadcom has a separate case against Allstate under CA Technologies (PDF). In the lawsuit filed in May 2025, CA accuses Allstate of copyright infringement and breach of contract by selling Allstate’s Employer Voluntary Benefits business and the Symantec products that the business used to Oregon-based insurance company StanCorp Financial Group. CA alleges that Allstate initially “sent a letter to Symantec (a company no longer in existence)” about the decision, but “did not send a similar notice letter addressed to CA.”

In both cases, the parties have until May 17, 2027, to file dispositive motions seeking to resolve each case without a trial.

The cases demonstrate Broadcom’s litigious side and a willingness to battle disgruntled VMware customers. Allstate hasn’t said how reliant it was on VMware or what virtualization tech it uses now. But it’s notable that the insurance firm has joined a growing list of known, enterprise-size firms that have decided to move away from VMware and dispute its owner’s business practices in court.

ai and ml

One in four long-form social media posts appear entirely AI-generated, with nearly half of those on Microsoft’s and Elon’s platforms involving AI in some form

No surprise here. A study from AI detection platform Pangram suggests that social media posts are teeming with AI-generated slop, particularly if the posts are long and especially if they live on LinkedIn or X. If you’re sick of reading non-human prose, we’d recommend getting off the platforms altogether.

Along with offering your typical AI-content detection services, Pangram released a Chrome extension at the end of April that, with a $20/month subscription, will automatically scan a user’s LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, X, and Reddit feeds to check for AI-generated or assisted content. With more than one million posts analyzed from users who opted in to share data through the extension since its launch, Pangram has concluded that, while AI slop is flooding social media, it’s hitting longform content particularly hard. 

With longform content defined in its study as any post over 250 words, Pangram found that a full 25 percent of such posts across all the platforms it studies were fully AI-generated. Fully, mind you, meaning that doesn’t include posts in which users got the assistance of an LLM to gussy up their bland prose. That average across platforms was hardly evenly distributed, though. 

Leading the way was LinkedIn, where 41 percent of longform content was fingered by Pangram as being AI-generated. That’s likely unsurprising to anyone who’s ever bothered to read a lengthy professional diatribe from the Microsoft-owned slop shop, or for El Reg readers – a prior story we reported on in late 2024 from AI detection outfit Originality.ai found that 54 percent of LinkedIn longforms were AI-generated. Originality’s definition of Longform was a bit looser, however, with anything over 100 words counting in its analysis. 

Per Pangram, shortform content on LinkedIn isn’t much more likely to be human authored – they found 30 percent of posts between 50 and 250 words were fully written by AI. 

For LinkedIn thought slop leaders, it’s generally all or nothing when it comes to using AI to write posts, with a mere 4.3 percent of longform content written with AI assistance. On the other hand, only 55.2 percent of longform posts on the platform, Pangram concluded, are actually written by humans. 

While LinkedIn may take the cake in terms of the volume of full-slop longform posts, Elon’s X has it beat when adding partially-written AI garbage into the mix, but not by much, honestly. A quarter of posts on X are fully AI authored, and an additional 23.2 percent are believed to be written with AI help. That leaves 52.7 percent of Twitter posts attributed to humans. In effect, you’re roughly batting .500 on either site. 

Pangram found that Medium isn’t that much better, with roughly one in three posts likely to have been written by, or with the aid of, an AI. Substack was far and away the least likely place to find AI slop in disguise, but even then, nearly a quarter (21.9 percent) of posts analyzed by the Chrome extension were written by or with AI. 

Reddit is a slightly more complicated situation, with comments on posts making up a large portion of Reddit content. According to Pangram, 11.6 percent of Reddit posts are AI authored or assisted; 98.1 percent of comments were found to be human authored, and the sheer quantity of comments vs. top-level posts meant that Reddit appears to be the place to go if you want to avoid an intrusion of AI thinking. 

All said, Pangram concluded from its data that AI writing is flooding social media, just like it’s flooding websites and basically everywhere else online. 

“An internet that is completely flooded with undisclosed AI content is bleak, but we don’t believe it’s inevitable,” Pangram CEO Max Spero said of his company’s findings in the report. Pangram believes letting internet users know what’s been AI-generated so they can ignore it is a solution to the problem, but you’ll have to pay $20/month if you want the Chrome extension to provide that service. It’s still usable without paying, but content has to be manually input, and the daily limit is just 4,000 words. 

In other words, unless you want to pony up and see who’s bullshitting you on social media, you’ll have to just assume everyone is. Like we suggested up top, maybe it’s time to disconnect from those feeds entirely. ®

Vinyl collecting has entered the spreadsheet era, which sounds terrible until you realize how much money some of us have sitting in crates, shelves, jackets, inner sleeves, outer sleeves, and the occasional box set that required a small act of financial self-deception.

Secret Chord Analogue’s new Vinyl Record Tracker, or VRT, is not another record cataloging tool trying to out-Discogs Discogs. The company is pitching it differently: cataloging tools tell you what you own, but VRT tells you what is happening to your collection. That distinction matters. VRT tracks plays, cartridge hours, stylus wear, record cleaning, Record Restore treatments, playback history, and maintenance reminders from a phone, tablet, or desktop.

For collectors who already obsess over pressing plants, deadwax, mastering engineers, and whether a record was cut from the original analog tapes, the next logical step might be knowing whether your stylus is quietly turning your favorite Blue Note into floor polish.

Related Reviews:

Vinyl Is Bigger, More Expensive, and More Worth Protecting

This product lands at the right moment because vinyl is no longer a niche physical format reserved for audiophiles arguing with strangers in Facebook groups and Reddit threads about deadwax, pressing plants, and whether their copy of Aja was handled by the correct mastering engineer.

According to the RIAA, U.S. vinyl revenue surpassed $1 billion in 2025, marking the format’s 19th consecutive year of growth. Vinyl also remained the dominant physical format, selling 46.8 million units compared to 29.5 million CDs.

That is not nostalgia anymore. That is a growing, financially viable segment, and the music labels are not about to toss vinyl back into the dumpster bin of history now that people are willingly paying $35 to $150 for records they already bought three formats ago.

Luminate’s 2025 Record Store Day data also shows how deep this has become. During the week of Record Store Day 2025, U.S. independent record stores sold 1.2 million albums, just over 1 million of them on vinyl. It was the fifth consecutive year that Record Store Day week exceeded 1 million album sales.

Record Store Day 2026 kept the machine moving with more than 365 exclusive or limited-edition releases and participation from thousands of stores around the world. The first official Record Store Day took place in 2008, but in 2026 it is no longer a niche holiday for crate diggers with elbow pads and coffee. It is a global retail event with real economic weight.

We know how strong Record Store Day has become because we have spent years standing outside in the rain before sunrise next to collectors clutching wantlists, coffee, and the faint aroma of poor life choices.

The problem is that the more vinyl grows, the more casual some of the ownership becomes. People will spend $40, $50, $75, or more on a new pressing, slide it into a cheap paper sleeve, play it with a dirty stylus, forget when it was last cleaned, and then act shocked when surface noise arrives like a letter from your ex reminding you that Langdon’s lacrosse camp payments are due.

What Secret Chord Analogue VRT Actually Does

Secret Chord Analogue VRT is a web-based vinyl tracking and care system built around the Play Log. Each listening session can be recorded with the album played, cartridge used, turntable and tonearm configuration, and play duration. From there, VRT tracks cumulative cartridge hours, stylus wear, cleaning status, record treatment history, and playback activity.

The system also supports barcode scanning, Discogs lookup, album management, play-count history, storage tracking, and QR-code location tools for collectors who need to remember whether a record lives in the main listening room, the office, the overflow shelf, or that pile they keep pretending is temporary.

Secret Chord Analogue says VRT can track Record Restore treatments, fluid levels, stylus tip cleaning reminders, cartridge service thresholds, and recent playback history. The dashboard shows cartridge health, Record Restore readiness, recent plays, and system configuration.

That makes VRT less of a “collection database” and more of an analog maintenance dashboard.

Core vs. Pro

VRT is available in Core and Pro versions. According to Secret Chord Analogue’s official product page, current pricing is:

• VRT Core Annual Licence: AU$39
• VRT Core Lifetime Licence: AU$99
• VRT Pro Annual Licence: AU$65
• VRT Pro Lifetime Licence: AU$179

Core includes play logging, dashboard, album management, equipment setup, Record Restore tracking, playback history, and backup. Pro adds analytics, data exports, and advanced playback-history tools.

One note: some early reporting lists slightly different Pro annual pricing, so regional pricing should be checked before ordering. The official Secret Chord Analogue product page currently lists Pro Annual at AU$65, while SoundStage Australia lists AU$99.

Why This Is More Interesting Than Another Vinyl App

There are already ways to catalog a record collection. Discogs remains the default for many collectors because it handles pressing information, marketplace value, wantlists, variants, and buying/selling behavior. That is not what makes VRT interesting.

VRT is aimed at the part of vinyl ownership that usually lives in someone’s head, on a Post-it note, or nowhere at all.

When was this record last cleaned?
How many times has this cartridge been used?
How many hours are on this stylus?
Did I already treat that used copy of Kind of Blue, or did I just think about doing it while holding a drink?
Which records get played constantly and which ones are basically expensive wall insulation?

That is the gap Secret Chord Analogue is trying to fill.

The company also frames VRT as part of a broader vinyl-care ecosystem that includes its Record Restore treatment system and VSS sleeves. HiFi Pig also reports that VRT is designed to work alongside compatible hardware, including the AFI FLAT.DUO, and can support dealers or resellers using Record Restore as an ongoing monitoring service.

Who Should Consider It?

VRT is not for someone with 24 records, a suitcase player, and a copy of Rumours purchased because TikTok had a moment. That listener has bigger problems, some of them structural.

This is for collectors with serious money invested in records, cartridges, and cleaning gear. If you own hundreds or thousands of records, rotate multiple cartridges, buy used vinyl regularly, run a record-cleaning routine, or care about stylus hours, VRT starts to make sense.

Secret Chord Analogue is positioning VRT as more than a collection database. It is part of the company’s broader vinyl-care ecosystem, including Record Restore, VSS sleeves, and compatible hardware such as the AFI FLAT.DUO, with potential use for collectors, dealers, and resellers who want to track cleaning history, cartridge use, and record-care status over time.

The Bottom Line

Secret Chord Analogue VRT is niche, but it is the right kind of niche. It does not promise to make your records sound better by magic, and it does not physically measure groove wear with sensors. Based on the available information, it tracks usage, maintenance, cartridge hours, stylus wear estimates, Record Restore treatments, and playback history from the data users log into the system.

That distinction matters.

VRT is not replacing good record cleaning, cartridge alignment, stylus inspection, or common sense. It is trying to make all of that easier to remember and harder to ignore.

For casual listeners, this might feel like turning vinyl into homework. For serious collectors, it might be the missing maintenance layer between buying records and actually protecting them.

Secret Chord Analogue lists VRT through its official Australian site, with North American shoppers directed to the company’s Record Restore store for local pricing and shipping.

Because at this point, vinyl is not cheap, cartridges are not disposable, and nobody needs to discover that their stylus crossed the danger line three months ago while playing a $125 reissue with the confidence of a man backing into a swimming pool.

For more information: secretchordanalogue.au

Related Reading