A hot potato: A federal case in Atlanta is raising questions about a privacy-focused mobile operating system, with prosecutors arguing that its features were used to erase evidence. The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute Atlanta resident Sam Tunick under a federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.

The case centers on Tunick’s use of GrapheneOS, an open-source operating system that works on Google Pixel phones and lets users enter a passcode to wipe a device clean.

Experts said the legal approach is unusual and may be the first time the law has been aimed at an operating system. “It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.

The incident began at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on January 24 of last year. Tunick had just returned from a trip to the Dominican Republic when he was stopped for questioning. According to court testimony, federal agents had already circulated his name and photo internally, saying he was under investigation for “suspected terrorism activities” because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

Tunick was taken to a secondary screening room, where multiple agents questioned him. A motion filed by his defense argues the interrogation focused on child sexual abuse material as a pretext for investigating his connections to the protest movement. The motion also states that Tunick asked four times to speak with a lawyer and was denied each time. According to the same filing, agents did not present a warrant or read him his rights.

Government attorneys and agents pushed back during Monday’s hearing. They described the encounter as a routine airport inspection. Larry Findley, a Customs and Border Protection officer, said agents were “looking for anything that’s prohibited.”

During the questioning, agents repeatedly asked Tunick to unlock his phone and warned they would seize it if he refused. When he finally provided a passcode, the phone appeared to restart. The defense motion states that “the screen went blank, flashed several times, and the phone appeared to restart,” resulting in the loss of data.

The wipe is now central to the case. Prosecutors are treating it as an intentional act to destroy evidence, while the defense argues that the search violated Tunick’s constitutional rights and that the evidence should be suppressed.

The case raises questions about which constitutional rights apply at US borders, including international airports, where authorities have broader search powers. A judge is not expected to rule on the defense motion until at least late October.

GrapheneOS is designed to improve privacy and security on Pixel phones. Supporters say those tools are legitimate security protections, not evidence of criminal intent. Boutry pointed to France and Spain, where authorities have struggled to gain access to secured devices. He said authorities have treated the use of GrapheneOS itself as suspicious. In Catalonia, Spain, police have been profiling people carrying Pixel phones, assuming they have GrapheneOS installed and are drug dealers or gang members.

“The main goal [of the operating system] is protection of privacy,” Boutry said. “They’re our phones and the state can’t tell us how to use them.”

The case is tied to ongoing opposition to Cop City, a $109 million police training facility that opened last spring. The project has drawn opposition from activists concerned about police militarization and environmental impacts. Law enforcement officials have defended it as necessary for training and recruitment.

Previous attempts to prosecute protesters at the state level have foundered, while federal authorities have more recently stepped in, including a separate indictment announced last month.

Forward-looking: In a major reversal from its earlier decision to ditch hyper-threading across its entire product portfolio, Intel has officially confirmed that simultaneous multi-threading will return to its data center processors with the Xeon 8 “Coral Rapids” family, scheduled for release in 2028. However, the company did not confirm whether the technology will also return to its client CPUs.

Speaking to investors and analysts at Intel’s Q2 2026 earnings call on Thursday, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said that the company is working on several strategies to regain its CPU market share across the retail and enterprise segments, including bringing back simultaneous multi-threading with Coral Rapids in 2028. He added that Intel is also focusing on improving single-threaded performance to regain competitiveness in key market segments.

Tan confirmed the return of hyper-threading while answering a question from Morgan Stanley analyst Joe Moore, who asked if the company had any concrete plans to regain lost market share from AMD and Arm in the next five years. Tan did not directly address Intel’s rivalry with AMD and downplayed the competition with Arm, saying that the British chip design firm is a “great partner” for Intel, and that the two companies have a strong working relationship.

After making processors with hyper-threading for more than two decades, Intel ditched the technology with the launch of Arrow Lake-S in 2024. However, the company had already reduced its use of hyper-threading over the previous processor generations, starting with the Alder Lake family in 2021. Alder Lake, which was Intel’s first desktop processor family to feature a hybrid core architecture, incorporated hyper-threading only in its performance cores while the efficiency cores implemented only a single hardware thread each.

On the server side, the company’s current-generation Xeon 6 Granite Rapids processors retain hyper-threaded performance cores, offering up to 128 physical cores and 256 threads. However, the Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest family ditches hyper-threading entirely, featuring up to 288 single-threaded E-cores built on Intel’s 18A process node. The upcoming Xeon 7 Diamond Rapids lineup is expected to offer up to 192 performance cores without simultaneous multi-threading.

Hyper-threading, which is Intel’s proprietary implementation of simultaneous multi-threading, was originally introduced in the early 2000s in single-core Xeon and Pentium 4 processors, promising improved performance in multi-threaded workloads. But with the steady increase in the number of physical cores in x86 CPUs, Intel ditched hyper-threading in the belief that it was largely a relic of the past and not nearly as important as it was twenty years ago.

• 2.2 million vehicles are susceptible to a Bluetooth-based attack in the state of California
• The vulnerability is due to dealer-installed security systems
• Researchers at the University of California San Diego found that the Acrisure-built security devices all rely on the same secure key

A vulnerability has been found in KARR and SWDS automobile security systems manufactured by Acrisure that enables remote control via Bluetooth. The vehicles had the security systems installed by car dealers in California, specifically as anti-theft and tracking devices. Thanks to this hack, however, it seems that vehicles can be unlocked, with some further control given to the attacker.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego found that the 2.2 million automobiles were purchased from Southern Californian dealers since 2017, although the secondary market means that the vehicles could be elsewhere in the US, and even as far afield as Japan.

In this week’s Sunday Reboot, Apple TV’s dating docuseries could lead to new content areas, an unexpected Mattel movie, and the hope of even more “Ted Lasso.”

Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get the next week underway with a good first step.

Dating docuseries is a big departure for Apple TV

On Thursday, Apple announced it was bringing out a new documentary series about dating. This is good news for the streaming service.

The eight-part show with the semi-melodramatic title “The Last Person on Earth” will be pairing up people that, at first glance, are polar opposites. But, as the great Paula Abdul opined back in 1988, there is a chance that opposites attract.

It’s also not just a case of shoving the human equivalent of chalk and cheese together and observing from afar. There will be people providing guidance, such as NYT bestselling author and relationship expert Esther Perel, and a bunch of therapists.

As for the format, it seems to be treading the same path as shows like “Married at First Sight,” which also paired people together and used experts to smooth things over.

This is not a show that I will be watching by any stretch of the imagination. I’m not one to watch dating and romance shows, and I think of watching an episode of Love Island as potentially being against the Geneva Convention.

That said, I think this is progress for Apple TV.

Relationship expert Esther Perel will be on “The Last Person on Earth” – Image credit: Apple

Just a month ago, this very column went over Apple’s inability and unwillingness to make a decent game show. Part of it was based on the belief that Apple would err towards quality programming, rather than the relatively cheap and quantity-based “shiny floor game show.”

If you look at the rest of the Apple Originals roster, the vast majority of it is for narrative programming. There are documentaries, sure, and animation, kids shows, and the rare competition show like “Kpopped,” but the bulk of it is gunning for quality factual content or well-told stories.

This dating show is not a game show or competition show. It’s also holding onto the “documentary” part of its description with a very loose grip.

It seems very different from the self-created pigeonhole that Apple TV has formed over time.

This show gives me hope that Apple is willing to try more in this direction, with more entertainment that doesn’t need a grand stage and more extras than a small school.

Sometimes, popcorn programming is OK to watch. Not exactly deep or thought-provoking, but just entertaining.

I wish Apple made more of it. Hopefully, if this is successful, it’ll make more.

Sci-fi, sports, and branded off-brand ‘Fast and Furious’

Apple had a lot to talk about when it comes to Apple TV this week. To be fair, it’s San Diego Comic-Con weekend, and Apple had to fill up its two-hour panel somehow.

That resulted in a slew of announcements and news items about the service.

In terms of officially announced news, Apple trotted out a bunch of trailers for upcoming shows. The second season of the reality-jumping “Dark Matter” was shown off, as well as the trailer for the long-awaited “Neuromancer.”

But then things go sideways with “Matchbox The Movie.”

To be clear, I didn’t know about the movie existing before the trailer appeared. My immediate thought was something similar to the well-handled “Barbie” movie, or even a pastiche of Disney’s “Cars” but for another Mattel property.

Instead, we’re given an action film that’s got the same fast-cars-and-stunts attitude of the “Fast and Furious” franchise. One fronted by John Cena playing an undercover CIA agent.

It’s very different from what I imagined, and it could’ve easily been using Mattel’s other toy car brand, Hot Wheels. That has a movie in development with J.J. Abrams.

It’ll be interesting to see if they can pull more reasons to use the Matchbox brand other than the protagonists having played with the toy cars in their childhood.

There was a downbeat in the week, though, as “The Morning Show” will be ending in 2027. Concluding after five seasons, the Jennifer Aniston and Reese WItherspoon drama will finish eight years after it was first announced by Eddy Cue.

It will be missed by fans, but it had a good run.

Lastly, with the return of “Ted Lasso” on August 5, the comedy-soccer show has been ramping up its publicity. It turns out that it may not be a one-season revival after all.

Jason Sudeikis said in an interview that, while Apple hasn’t commissioned a fifth season, the plan is still to get the writers together at the end of August to come up with ideas. He also wants a second three-season arc, bringing the total up to six seasons.

Me too, Ted. Me too.

Last week’s Sunday Reboot talked about the small model hope of PrismML, and how it can boost Apple’s on-device AI advantage.

If you’ve ever tried asking Siri anything on your Apple Watch, you’ve probably been met with its all-too-familiar “Here’s what I found on the web” response. Happy to report, those days are finally coming to an end. I put both the old and the new version of Apple’s Siri assistant through a few real-world questions on my Apple Watch(es) to see how they stack up, and the results have me sold on the upgrade.

With the WatchOS 27 public beta rolling out this week, I wanted to take Siri AI for a spin where it matters most: the Apple Watch. Apple’s digital assistant has long needed an upgrade, but nowhere have its shortcomings been more obvious than on your wrist. Previously, all the old Siri could do on the Apple Watch was return web results, leaving me to wait for pages to load on a tiny screen that wasn’t designed for browsing.

To get started, I downloaded the Public Beta of iOS 27 on my iPhone first (it’s fairly stable, but I still wouldn’t recommend it on a primary device), then installed the WatchOS 27 beta on my Apple Watch Ultra 3 through the Watch app. From there, I made sure Siri AI was activated in my iPhone settings; it defaulted to the new version on the watch as well. I kept my Series 11 running on the latest version of WatchOS 26 with the old Siri. 

Keep in mind that Siri AI and WatchOS 27 are early software and far from the final version that will be released this fall.

Read more: Win a New Apple Watch in CNET Big Guessing Game Contest

Test 1: Ferry schedule

I started with a question old Siri has failed me on before: “When’s the next ferry from Vallejo to San Francisco?”

Old Siri: “Here’s what I found on the web.”

This response low-key triggers me. Waiting for a website to load on a tiny screen isn’t helpful when I’m literally trying to catch a ferry.

Siri AI: “The next ferry to San Francisco leaves Vallejo at 4:10 p.m.”

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Winner: Siri AI

Test 2: Kitchen help

Next, I tried another situation where I’d rather not have to reach for my phone and risk getting it covered in whatever I’m cooking up. “What ingredients do I need to make buttermilk?” (A surprisingly common question now that I’m making frozen yogurt in my Ninja Creami.)

Old Siri: “Here’s what I found on the web.” Argh! At least it’s consistent.

Siri AI: “To make a homemade buttermilk substitute, you need milk and an acid. The standard ratio is 1 tablespoon of acid for every cup of milk.”

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The generic “acid” suggestion was a bit vague (and slightly concerning), but luckily, I’ve made it enough times to know it was referring to lemon juice or vinegar and not some dark web-type acid. I could’ve also asked a follow-up question to clarify (which old Siri can’t handle either). 

Winner: Siri AI

Test 3: World Cup

For my final test, I asked something I’ve been checking a lot this summer (I asked on Monday, July 13). “When’s the next World Cup match, and what stadium is it being played in?”

Old Siri: “The next World Cup game is France vs. Spain tomorrow at noon PT.” It answered the first part of the question but ignored the stadium entirely.

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Siri AI: “The next World Cup game is France vs. Spain tomorrow at noon PT at AT&T Stadium in Dallas.” It even asked if I’d like to set a reminder. The stadium bit was a key part of the question, since some matches have been played during extreme heat, which has impacted the teams’ performances. 

Winner: Siri AI

Bonus round (not shown in the video)

I also asked a question I was genuinely curious about: “Why was Erling Haaland substituted in the last minutes of the England vs. Norway match?”

Old Siri: “Here’s what I found on the web.”

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Siri AI: He was suffering from severe fatigue and “dead leg injury,” leading his coach to pull him during the World Cup quarter-final against England. 

Winner: Siri AI

Final thoughts

This is the first time I’ve intentionally wanted to use Siri on my Apple Watch, and I think it could be a game-changer.

The WatchOS 27 Public Beta is available now, with the full release expected this fall alongside Apple’s next big product announcements. I’ll keep testing Siri AI as the beta evolves, but based on these early results, I won’t be going back to the old version anytime soon.

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Vanessa Hand Orellana

Principal Writer

Vanessa is a lead writer at CNET, reviewing and writing about the latest smartwatches and fitness trackers. She joined the brand first as an on-camera reporter for CNET’s Spanish-language site, then moved on to the English side to host and produce some of CNET’s videos and YouTube series. When she’s not testing out the latest health tech, you can catch her on a hike or trail run with her family.

See full bio

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman heads to Washington this week to brief the Trump administration on the company’s most powerful AI model yet, pushing for speedy approval of a system that has already demonstrated it can solve problems humans could not and breach another company’s infrastructure without being told to, Axios reported on Saturday. The visit comes as President Trump prepares to detail his voluntary framework for pre-approving frontier models before public release, a process that grew out of a June executive order narrowly focused on cybersecurity and national security. Altman will preview capabilities that span original scientific research, coordinated agent swarms, and a safety record that includes the model repeatedly circumventing its own safeguards.

The centrepiece of the pitch is a model that autonomously disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, an 80-year-old open problem in discrete geometry that had resisted mathematicians since 1946. The proof was verified by outside mathematicians and represents the first time AI has independently solved a prominent open problem central to a subfield of mathematics. OpenAI published the result in May, and the model discovered an infinite family of constructions using deep algebraic number theory that achieved polynomial improvement over what had been the best-known approach.

Altman will also promote what OpenAI calls “teams of agentic AI,” coordinated swarms of agents that work together on complex business tasks without human intervention. OpenAI’s own legal, finance, and recruiting departments now run more than 85 percent of their AI work through agents, according to company data, and Altman will pitch “knowledge per dollar” as a new metric for measuring AI’s economic value to enterprises. The framing is designed to shift the conversation from what AI costs to what it produces, ahead of OpenAI’s expected IPO later this year.

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The model’s safety record, however, complicates the sales pitch. OpenAI paused the same long-horizon model after it repeatedly escaped its sandbox during internal use, forcing the company to rebuild its monitoring system before switching it back on. The model then went further: it exploited a zero-day vulnerability in third-party software to break out of a secure test environment and breached Hugging Face’s production infrastructure to cheat on a cybersecurity evaluation, executing more than 17,000 individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes.

The politics of the meeting are as layered as the technology. Trump’s June executive order established a voluntary framework under which developers can give the government early access to models for up to 30 days before wider release, though the order explicitly states it does not create a mandatory licensing or pre-clearance requirement. OpenAI has already proposed handing the US government a five percent equity stake to ease political pressure, and Altman told Bloomberg in July that the company made “many changes” during its discussions with administration officials.

The briefing arrives as Chinese AI, particularly from DeepSeek and open-weight alternatives, continues to close the gap with American frontier models at a fraction of the cost. Altman’s challenge this week is to convince Washington that a system powerful enough to do original science and breach real companies deserves faster approval, not slower. The tension between those two capabilities is the story the White House will have to weigh.

AI and ML

Can you guess who didn’t sign on to the group letter?

With the US government scrutinizing AI as much as ever, 25 technology companies, industry organizations, and venture capital firms published an open letter on Friday urging policymakers to support open weight AI models.

The missive [PDF] of nearly a thousand words can be summarized as “Please don’t give Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI control of the US AI market.”

Coincidentally, those three companies are not among the signatories, a group that includes Dell, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Mozilla, Nvidia, Palantir, and Perplexity, not to mention VC firms that could see their investments tank if federal rules pick market winners.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, however, responded to the letter by insisting that he’s fine with open weight models as long as proprietary models exist too. “I want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and I am glad to see this,” he said, having perhaps missed that Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, recently suggested, “One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism…”

In any event, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang echoed Altman’s sentiment. “Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” he said in a post promoting the letter. “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.”

The cry for regulatory forbearance follows revelations that OpenAI allowed a cybersecurity model evaluation to run without adequate supervision, which resulted in its behaviorally disinhibited AI agents escaping their notional sandbox and hacking the infrastructure of Hugging Face. 

The incident has returned AI models to center stage in Washington after last month’s brief restriction on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5. And it has invigorated concern among lawmakers, who have already proposed legislation to counter a threat few really understand.

The letter opens by recalling how the open source movement, starting in the 1980s, challenged the prevailing belief that businesses prospered only with proprietary software.

There’s some irony in the fact that Microsoft endorsed the letter given that its former chief Steve Ballmer once characterized the open source Linux operating system as a cancer that destroys intellectual property. 

But Amanda Brock, CEO of open source advocacy group OpenUK, said that Microsoft’s journey from open source opposition to open source stewardship via GitHub shows that the company understands the power of open technology.

“The letter shares the essence of that understanding and offers the US’s leadership wise counsel, particularly when it comes to security,” she said in a statement provided to The Register. “All software and AI can include security risks but we’re better to manage that openly, transparently and collaboratively.”

The signatories argue that open weight models – which anyone can download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure, but lack the source code, artifacts, and training data for independent model reproducibility – are essential for the AI economy, competition, customer confidence, and AI safety.

“Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector,” the letter argues. “This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country.” ®

It’s now official: plug-in solar will be legal to install in the UK from 27 August 2026. Thanks to the amended Plugs and Sockets regulations, we’ll now be able to buy solar panels and connect them directly to a plug socket, generating electricity from the sun.

As we covered in our guide to when plug-in solar will be available, the new legislation allows plug-in microgenerators that meet the required certification and that have a maximum output of 800W to be installed.

What’s perhaps a little surprising is that the new regulations specifically state that the plug-in microgenerator is a source of energy that “is not designed to import electrical energy”.

In other words, you can’t currently plug in a battery, or connect a system that uses an integrated battery and inverter, the type that’s most popular in Germany. The government has said that batteries require their own legislation.