If you own an LG smart TV, there’s a chance one of your harmless-looking apps has been moonlighting as an internet relay for someone else’s traffic. According to a report from KrebsOnSecurity, LG says it’s finally stepping in to stop this menace. This week, the company confirmed it plans to suspend any webOS app that turns a TV into what’s called a residential proxy node.

The move follows a report from security firm Spur, which found that more than 42 percent of apps on LG’s webOS store include SDKs that quietly reroute internet traffic through your TV, indefinitely. Samsung isn’t spared either, with over a quarter of Tizen apps carrying similar code.

What is a residential proxy, and why should you care?

It’s like renting out your TV’s internet connection without fully realizing it. Companies pay app developers to bundle these SDKs into their software, and in return, your TV’s IP address gets used by paying customers elsewhere. Spur found this hidden in everything from simple games to screensavers and file utilities, not just obscure or sketchy apps.

What is LG doing about it?

LG Senior Vice President John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity that developers who don’t strip out the proxy feature will have their apps pulled entirely. He added that LG’s review of its app catalog is already underway, and the company plans to tighten how it evaluates submissions going forward.

Bright Data, the proxy network behind most of the SDKs in the report, defended its practices, saying users opt in through a dedicated screen and that customers go through a vetting process. Spur isn’t convinced, arguing that a single consent prompt buried inside a TV app isn’t real transparency, especially when anyone in the household, including kids, could be the one tapping agree.

LG cleaning house is a welcome move, though it comes right after the company faced backlash for bundling McAfee promotions into its monitor drivers through Windows Update, with zero warning.

Apple receives a lot of criticism for taking too long to approve apps on its App Store, a problem significantly exacerbated by the deluge of video-coded app submissions. And while some of the criticisms are warranted and Apple has let some shady apps on its App Store, I would rather have a secure App Store than something like what LG’s offering.

After selling out the entire stock in 11 minutes in March, the US Mint’s commemorative Steve Jobs coin was briefly back on sale on Thursday.

It still only vaguely looks like Steve Jobs, but it’s intended to be him and to commemorate American innovation. But stop us if you’ve heard this one before, as the coin was released in May 2026.

The US Mint’s listing at the time said that it was a limited pressing, and the release schedule page still says that. It’s conceivable that part of the initial pressing was held back for some reason, but that would be the first time that was done in the American innovation line.

The original US Mint listing from May 2026, showing the coin as a limited edition – image credit: US Mint

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Regardless of how it’s happened, it was briefly possible to buy the Steve Jobs commemorative $1 coin. You had to be quick though.

The coins were initially being offered in 25-coin rolls and 100-coin bags. The rolls sold out in around ten minutes, the bags took about 20.

Those rolls were again priced at $61, while the bags are $154.40, both plus shipping. While stocks lasted, the coins were on sale through the US Mint’s online store.

The coins still feature “a young Steve Jobs sitting in front of a quintessentially northern California landscape of oak-covered rolling hills.”

“Captured in a moment of reflection,” continues the US Mint listing, “his posture and expression reflect how this environment inspired his vision to transform complex technology into something as intuitive and organic as nature itself.”

This $1 coin is inscribed with “United States of America,” “California,” and also both “Steve Jobs” and “Make Something Wonderful.” On the opposite side to Jobs, the coin has a stylized Statue of Liberty.

How limited the offer really is

The US Mint did not publicize the number of coins being pressed when they were first released, it only marked the offering as limited. The CoinNews collectors’ site, however, said that a total of 1,233,750 were being produced between the Denver and Philadelphia minting facilities.

If correct, then regardless of whether the new offering represents a second pressing or not, more Steve Jobs coins are being produced than for any previous American Innovation releases. According to Coin Mintages, the program’s previous largest pressing was in 2019 when between Denver and Philadelphia, a total of 952,725 coins were made to commemorate the first US patent.

Clearly, then, the US Mint expected the Steve Jobs coin to sell more than previous ones. It remains correct on that matter, based on how quickly they sold out to the walls the first time and now, how the rolls of them have sold out.

But a greater number of coins, coupled with how the limited release now appears to not have been limited, will reduce the appeal to numismatists.

While any stocks remain, though, it is possible to specify that you want coins from the Denver or Philadelphia pressing plants. According to Coin Week, the Denver press is more precise, while the Philadelphia plant produces coins with more errors than Denver does, which may appeal to a certain type of collector.

We reached out to the US Mint to find out if this is a second pressing, or remnants from the first. A representative from the mint got back to us, and while there was some confusion on if the coins were available or not, they did confirm that there was not nor will there be a second stamping.

However, the coin will be included in the Reverse Proof Set that will go on sale later in 2026, which will be the only remaining unreleased product to feature the coin.

Before you ship your college kid back to campus, you might consider the quality of water coming out of their dorm or apartment taps. In partnership with ZeroWater, Culligan has released the first-ever ranking of US college towns based on tap water quality, grading the largest college towns in each state on a scale of A to F for lead and PFAS (“forever chemicals”). The timing is notable with back-to-school season approaching and water quality a growing concern for college-aged adults.

The Best Water Filter Pitchers, Tested by CNET

This year’s incoming class is shaping up to be the most health-conscious yet — nearly 30% of Gen Z and Millennials surveyed say wellness matters more to them now than it did a year ago.

Results suggest most college towns have work to do

PFAS concerns: Roughly one-third of towns scored a “C” or worse on PFAS contamination.

Widespread water contamination: Nearly all college towns evaluated by Culligan — 92% — showed at least one harmful contaminant in their water supply. New York City was the sole town to receive an “F” for lead levels.

Alarming lead levels: Just 8 of the 50 college towns had water quality meeting EPA lead standards.

College towns with the best water (Overall)

• Albuquerque, NM — University of New Mexico
• Blacksburg, VA — Virginia Tech
• Boise, ID — Boise State
• Durham, NH — University of New Hampshire
• Morgantown, WV — West Virginia University

College towns with the worst water (Overall)

• Columbia, SC — University of South Carolina
• Tempe, AZ — Arizona State
• Newark, DE — University of Delaware
• New York City, NY — NYU
• New Brunswick, NJ — Rutgers

See the full list here.

Why it matters

Nearly 30% of Gen Z and millennials noted that wellness matters more to them this year than last, including water quality. The ranking gives incoming students a simple way to check what’s really coming out of the tap in their new college town and decide if some form of filtration is necessary.

Why testing is important

CNET spoke to a water-quality expert while testing countertop filters earlier this year. Dr. Eric Roy explained that the most harmful contaminants, including lead and PFAS, rarely affect the taste or smell of water, underscoring the importance of having your local water tested, especially if it comes from a well. TapScore is one of the leading at-home water quality services with lab testing for around $299.

Testing methodology

Culligan ZeroWater analyzed public water quality data for the largest university’s water system in each state (per 2024 IPEDS enrollment data), grading lead levels against the EPA’s 10 ppb action threshold and five PFAS chemicals (PFOS, PFOA, PFHxS, PFNA, GenX) against UCMR5 monitoring data collected from 2023 to 2025.

David Watsky

Managing Editor / Home and Kitchen

David lives in Brooklyn where he’s spent more than a decade covering all things edible, including meal kit services, food subscriptions, kitchen tools and cooking tips.

David earned his BA from Northeastern and has toiled in nearly every aspect of the food business, including as a line cook in Rhode Island where he once made a steak sandwich for Lamar Odom.

Right now he’s likely somewhere stress-testing a blender or tinkering with a toaster. Anything with sesame is his all-time favorite food this week.

See full bio

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Jensen Huang travelled to Monterey this week to give the US Navy a machine that most defence contractors would have had to sell it.

Nvidia’s founder helped commission a DGX GB300 AI supercomputer at the Naval Postgraduate School, the first system of its kind installed anywhere in the American military, and the company donated it rather than route it through a procurement contract.

The hardware is a single liquid-cooled rack that packs 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs alongside 36 Grace CPUs, wired together as one memory domain and running Nvidia’s Mission Control orchestration software.

It is the rack-scale configuration Nvidia sells for inference and reasoning workloads, and by the standards of the DGX line it is the top of the range. NPS now runs what is, for the moment, the most powerful supercomputer the Pentagon has.

One estimate put the value of the system at roughly $15m, though neither Nvidia nor the school confirmed a figure publicly.

The donation went to the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation rather than through a defence procurement contract, a route that sidesteps the usual competitive-bid machinery.

DDN, VAST Data, and Vertiv supplied the storage, data infrastructure, and cooling wrapped around the rack.

NPS is the Navy’s graduate research university, and the machine is meant for teaching and research rather than live operations.

Faculty and students plan to point it at weather prediction, ocean modelling, cybersecurity, and disaster-response planning, and to build maritime digital twins through Nvidia’s Omniverse platform.

The school also wants to train its own foundation models, including an internal system it is reportedly calling NPS GPT for handling sensitive data.

The rack lands on a campus that stood up a dedicated AI research centre the previous year, so the compute arrives with somewhere to go.

The pull is partly in the resolution. Owen has described being able to forecast conditions for very localised operations rather than working from the coarse grids, roughly 50km across, that most models settle for.

For a Navy that plans amphibious landings and small-boat movements around weather it cannot control, tighter prediction is not an abstraction.

“The question is not whether these technologies will exist,” said Captain Michael Owen, the school’s vice provost for warfare studies.

“The question is whether future military leaders understand them well enough to evaluate their limitations, apply them ethically and employ them responsibly.”

That framing matters, because unlike the Department of Defense’s existing supercomputing centres, which run operational workloads, the NPS system is pitched at research and innovation.

The idea is to let the school refine the models that the wider joint force might one day depend on, rather than to fold the rack into day-to-day command.

Huang, who attended the commissioning alongside Admiral Samuel Paparo, the head of US Pacific Command, described AI as a coming “backbone of America’s defense.”

It is not an entirely neutral observation from the man whose company now supplies much of that backbone.

The event caps an arrangement that started quietly in December 2024, when NPS and Nvidia signed a cooperative research and development agreement.

The Pentagon’s appetite for Nvidia silicon has grown conspicuously over the past year, and the company has spent much of that time selling similar systems to national governments.

The Monterey donation lands the hardware inside a military institution for the first time, which is a different kind of foothold.

A school full of serving officers is also, in effect, a training ground for the customers who will one day write the requirements.

Paparo told the audience that officers would increasingly command in settings where response times compress and advantage goes to whoever can act faster than an adversary.

Vice Admiral Ann Rondeau, the school’s president, put the pitch more plainly. “Education remains our greatest strategic advantage,” she said.

Whether a rack of GPUs counts as education or as infrastructure is, for now, a question the Navy seems content to leave open.

The arrival of Samsung’s latest crop of foldable flagship and ultra-flagship devices came with a $100 price increase across the board. My reaction, perversely, was relief that the figure wasn’t higher, given how badly the AI bubble has severed the link between component pricing and value. My relief isn’t just for the wallets of my fellow consumers, but the health of the industry overall.

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the rumor mill, you’re expecting to see every major handset maker follow Samsung’s lead. Google is thought to be adding at least $100 onto the price of the new Pixel handsets. That wouldn’t be ideal, but if you care enough about getting a brand new phone and can afford it, it won’t be the end of the world. Especially if it’s split across the length of your contract, burying the bad news across the next 12 or 24 months.

Meanwhile, Apple’s outgoing CEO Tim Cook has already laid the groundwork for iPhones to get more expensive, too. Not long after uncharacteristically saying the company couldn’t hold prices at their current level, it bumped up the prices on almost all of its product lines. It doesn’t take a genius to know that similar rises will be applied to the new iPhones when they launch this fall.

There’s a wild theory that Apple is going to split the launch of the iPhones 18 in two as part of this price strategy. It proposes that the (rumored) ultra-flagship iPhone Fold will debut alongside the more lucrative Pro models, with their higher price and higher markup, in the fall. Only after the holiday buying season would the regular iPhone 18 make its debut, perhaps alongside an even more “affordable” iPhone 18e.

The industry-wide price rises have certainly been tough to swallow, and it’s clear it’s made a lot of people reconsider purchases. It’s not as if this is limited to the technology industry, either, as the US Department of Labor says the price of energy has risen by 15.7 percent in the last 12 months.

As budgets get stretched, it’s clear people are hoping to make do with what they’ve got.

There’s already hints that the rises are having a chilling effect. In May 2026, Valve withdrew the entry-level Steam Deck, which was priced at $399. The mid-range and premium tier models, meanwhile, saw their prices rise from $549 and $649 to $789 and $949, respectively. A BoilingSteam report believes the price increases caused sales of the popular gaming handheld to drop by a whopping 82 percent.

Similarly, 9to5Mac polled its readers on how the price rises would affect their behavior, with 38 percent saying they would hold onto their hardware for longer. Industry analysts IDC believe the rises will cause a hefty drop in sales across the rest of the year and across 2027. Similarly, it says the smartphone industry should expect to see a “record low” as the memory crunch bites.

So while a $100 price increase certainly isn’t the gift we’d all like to see, it could have been a hell of a lot worse. It may just shake out that the monthly cost of all these phones, which was already more than some people would be willing to pay, is even more out of reach.

Ultrahuman is rolling out Emerald today, its biggest platform update in four years. If you own an Ultrahuman Ring Air, Ring Pro, or any of its other health devices, your app is about to look and feel very different.

What is UltraSphere, and why does it matter?

The big update is the UltraSphere, a decision engine Ultrahuman claims is a first for a smart ring. Instead of throwing another chart at you, it sits front and center on the home screen and hands out more than 60 Next Best Actions based on your sleep, recovery, HRV, stress, movement, and even glucose data if you use the M1 or M2 CGM.

These suggestions change depending on where you are, the weather, and your circadian rhythm, so a jet-lagged traveler and a new parent will not get the same advice. Examples Ultrahuman shared include a nudge to step outside soon after waking to reset your body clock, or a heads-up that caffeine past a certain point will mess with your sleep later.

Mohit Kumar, CEO of Ultrahuman, explained the thinking behind the shift. “All wearable trackers generate data. Data is empowering, but people need something more than a number, they want to know what to do. The Emerald Update is focused on making data actionable, adding layers of biointelligence that finally answer the question of so what with context and insight at every layer.”

What else changes with this update?

Ultrahuman is also adding an essential feature for frequent flyers and anyone stuck without signal. It can now process everything on the device, so your recovery score, stress rhythm, and Next Best Actions keep working with zero connectivity.

Workout tracking also gets an upgrade, with better automatic detection and heart rate accuracy validated against gold standard devices. If you prefer an Apple Watch, Garmin, WHOOP, or even AirPods Pro Gen 3 for workouts, you can now pair that data directly into the app instead of relying on the ring alone.

VO2 Max, one of the best predictors of long-term health, also got smarter. Ultrahuman says its updated algorithm lands within 5 mL per kg per min of real lab results, tested across more than 100 athletes.

There is plenty more packed in too, including a new Longevity tab for markers like UltraAge and Brain Age, a Sleep Screener that bundles your nightly signals into one report, and the option to finally share cycle and ovulation data with a partner.

Should you update?

The Emerald update is rolling out globally starting today, so there is really no reason to skip it. What I like most is that none of this costs extra. It’s a free update, and it genuinely makes the whole experience feel better.

Alphabet went into its second-quarter results on Wednesday carrying one question louder than the rest: whether the tens of billions it is funnelling into AI infrastructure has started to earn its keep. Judged by the after-hours share price, the answer was not yet.

The company reported revenue of $119.8bn for the three months to June, up 24% from $96.4bn a year earlier and comfortably ahead of forecasts.

Google Cloud did the heavy lifting, with revenue climbing 82% to $24.8bn, operating income more than tripling to $8.8bn, and its margin widening to about 36%. Group operating margin edged up to 34% from 32%.

That extends a streak that had Alphabet closing in on Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company, and it slots into a Big Tech capex cycle now running past $650bn a year. Cloud backlog, the contracted work Google has yet to book, rose to $514bn from $490bn.

Going in, the pressure was explicit. Bloomberg framed the quarter as a test of whether the spending pays off, and Alphabet was hardly alone in facing it, with investors weighing the same question at Tesla and across the rest of the Magnificent Seven the same week.

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The spending, not the growth, is what rattled them. Alphabet lifted its full-year capital-expenditure guidance to as much as $205bn, up from a prior range of $180bn to $190bn, and said quarterly capex had roughly doubled from a year earlier to $44.9bn.

Even $205bn does not cover it. Alphabet said it would keep expanding rented, third-party capacity as a bridge while its own data centres come online, a measure of how quickly demand is outrunning what it can build.

The bill pushed free cash flow to negative $5.9bn, the first quarterly outflow in nearly two decades.

Shares fell about 5% in extended trading despite the revenue beat, part of a now-familiar rhythm this earnings season of clean beats undone by capex lines that land heavier than expected.

The scale is the story. Alphabet is on course to spend more on capital investment in a single year than it books in net income over a comparable stretch, funding the build largely from a search and advertising business growing far more slowly. Analysts have started asking when, exactly, that gap closes.

The backlog is the counterargument the bulls reach for. A book of $514bn in contracted, not-yet-recognised revenue suggests the capacity being built already has buyers waiting; the bearish read is that it is a promise Alphabet still has to fund and deliver while the meter runs.

What both sides agree on is that the answer hinges on cloud becoming self-sustaining before the capex wave crests.

The headline profit figure did not settle the argument. Net income came in at $112.1bn, close to quadruple a year earlier, but roughly $98bn of that was an unrealised paper gain on Alphabet’s stake in SpaceX. Strip it out and the underlying number looks a good deal more ordinary.

The core ad engine held. Search revenue rose 17% to $63.3bn and YouTube advertising 13% to $11.1bn, while the Gemini app reached 950 million monthly active users and Alphabet’s first-party model APIs processed some 22 billion tokens a minute.

Sundar Pichai said AI features in Search were driving incremental queries while still sending billions of clicks to websites each week, and that AI Mode had passed 1 billion monthly users.

To pay for the build, Alphabet has already leaned on a record $85bn equity raise and a debut yen bond. CFO Anat Ashkenazi told investors no further equity offerings were planned beyond a $40bn at-the-market programme starting this quarter.

For all the noise, the results left open the one question they were meant to answer. The AI spending is clearly producing growth.

When it begins paying for itself, and how much more Alphabet is willing to spend while it waits to find out, is still unresolved.