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The Most Dangerous AI Hacking Techniques Still Have Humans in the Loop

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Agentic AI has permanently changed cybersecurity by making it quicker and easier to discover vulnerabilities in software and fix them—or develop so-called exploits to weaponize them. But longtime web security researcher James Kettle wanted to look beyond the bug-hunting apocalypse to explore a question that has taken on even more urgency as major AI organizations disclose real-world examples of rogue AI hacking: Can agentic AI develop novel, abstract hacking methods, from concept through to practical attacks?

At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Kettle presented his findings, which illustrate both AI’s rapidly advancing cybersecurity capabilities and its limitations. For now, the answer to Kettle’s question is nuanced. He concluded that AI is perhaps minimally capable but extremely limited in its ability to devise new attack paths in a fully autonomous way. Importantly, though, when paired with human guidance and insight in key moments, Kettle found that AI is an extremely powerful partner in conceptualizing and uncovering new strategies for hacking.

After spending years researching web security vulnerabilities, Kettle now says he has uncovered an entirely new area of potential vulnerability—dubbed Shared-Parser Confusion—as the result of an AI revelation about web servers using shared code to process both requests and responses.

“This is an absolutely massive deal, because if you think about it, requests to a website are completely untrusted, they could be anything, but responses are trusted,” Kettle told WIRED ahead of his conference talk. “So this is a major attack surface and potentially spills into a lot of different attack types.”

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The finding came out of months of experiments that began in September 2025 using Anthropic and OpenAI’s latest models at the time. Kettle wanted to explore AI’s ability to do theoretical security research, but quickly realized that one obstacle was that the systems were attempting to pass existing research off as original by returning findings about extremely esoteric topics that were difficult to vet. With this in mind, he decided to scope his tests more narrowly so the AI systems were working within his own area of web security expertise. This way he had total command of the material and knew that AI couldn’t trick him. Additionally, Kettle realized that by synthesizing his own research methodology and training models on it, he could probe deeper into what the systems were capable of extrapolating on their own.

“I’m interested in pushing AI to the absolute limit to see where it fails and where you need a human,” Kettle says. “There are still very few people talking about where the limits are, especially in the security space, because there aren’t incentives to talk about that angle. Everyone wants to be seen as AI native, not talk about where their system falls apart completely.”

As Kettle honed his experiments—providing models with more methodological data and more refined parameters—and as time passed and more powerful models debuted, he says the systems had more and more findings at a rate far surpassing his own, creating what he describes as a productive research feedback loop.

“It was really interesting going through the process. It would have notable findings maybe every two days without me even logging into the system, to the point that it was making me anxious,” Kettle says, “like I almost don’t want to know. It was so many research leads that you have FOMO about not exploring all of them, so it forces you to automate more analysis.”

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In addition to finding more proven examples of certain vulnerabilities in a few months than Kettle could likely find in a few years, he also hoped that the AI system could find an entire novel class of those types of bugs. And in a way it did succeed, he says, but the finding related to an extremely rare type of bug and was not actually exploitable in the one vulnerable target available. Kettle emphasizes, though, that the Shared-Parser Confusion finding was so significant, even though it was a human/AI collaboration, because it illustrates the reality of how AI systems can contribute most powerfully to cybersecurity work right now for both defensive and offensive hacking.

“It wasn’t able to prove this itself, but it analyzed some real, proven findings and came up with the hypothesis, and I evaluated it and confirmed it,” Kettle says. “That’s probably going to be the discovery that has the biggest long-term impact. It couldn’t do that on its own, but I would never have found that on my own for sure. Even if you gave me the single line from the [documentation], I wouldn’t have seen it. But together we managed to find it.”

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Meta’s Muse Code arrives on macOS

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A one-line command in your macOS terminal can get you access to Meta’s Muse Code, which aims to be a transparent AI coding tool that can work across large repositories.

There are already coding agents like Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex available for macOS, but Meta wants to enter the ring with its latest AI toolset. Unlike the others, it doesn’t have an app interface and runs through the Terminal.

According to an announcement post from Meta, Muse Code can take on complex software engineering tasks across large repositories. It is capable of planning changes, writing code, and validating the results while coordinating multiple persistent subagents.

As always with these AI announcements, remember that the language being used attempts to anthropomorphize the tools to be more human-like. Nothing about an AI behaves like a human — they don’t think, reason, organize, sympathize, or understand.

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AI is a tool, and if Muse Code sounds like it could help you develop software, it might be a particularly useful tool. Developers have shared just how useful having a coding agent available can be, especially for troubleshooting bugs.

To install Muse Code, you’ll just need to paste in a single command into Terminal:

curl -fsSL https://dev.meta.ai/install.sh | bash

Of course, this isn’t free. Those that install Muse Code will start on Meta’s contributor tier. Developers join with a pay-as-you-go option which charges $1.25 per million tokens in input and $4.25 per million tokens of output.

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The Muse Code announcement was paired with the release of Muse Spark 1.2, which was trained with coding assistance in mind. Meta says the training included rejection-sampled harness trajectories and recipe optimizations for goals, compaction, and subagents.

Choose your AI partner

Meta’s inevitable introduction of a coding agent was a long time coming. The company has been poaching Apple employees in its expensive chase for so-called superintelligence.

Muse Code is also another revenue stream to cover the incredible costs of AI and research around it. Meta previously tied some of its premium subscriptions to AI tool use as well.

There are several AI coding tools to choose from, so it will be interesting to observe if Meta can make a dent in the market. Not having a direct UI and interfacing via Terminal could be a problem for some.

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Then there’s the privacy aspect. Meta is known for its horrific history of scraping every piece of data it can from users, and while it might have safeguards in place for its AI tools, it seems unwise to trust Meta software installed with access to so much information.

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Meta Debuts First AI Coding Agent To Take On Anthropic and OpenAI

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Meta has launched Muse Code, its first AI coding agent that’s positioned as a lower-cost rival to Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex. It offers pay-as-you-go pricing and an optional zero-data-retention feature for enterprise users. CNBC reports: Muse Code is the latest major release from AI chief Alexandr Wang, who leads Meta Superintelligence Labs and oversees foundation model development. Wang joined in June of last year as the centerpiece of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s effort to revamp his company’s flailing artificial intelligence strategy. “You can install it with one command and then use it to take on complete software engineering tasks across a wide variety of use cases, planning changes, writing code, validating the results,” Wang said in an interview on Wednesday.

[…] The new tool, like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex assistants, makes it easier for people to build apps within a single user interface while managing fleets of AI-powered digital agents that can help underpin the software development process. Muse Code, available in a preview version, works alongside the company’s latest AI model, Muse Spark 1.2. Wang declined to share user statistics related to the company’s Muse Spark AI models, but said “adoption has been exciting and strong.” The latest Muse Spark model was developed and trained alongside Muse Code, which Wang said improves the overall coding performance.

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Prime Video Launches HDR10+ Advanced on Samsung TVs and Tries to Fix Motion Smoothing

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Prime Video and Samsung have decided that the HDR format war was not quite confusing enough.

Beginning in August 2026, Prime Video will become the first streaming service to offer HDR10+ Advanced on supported movies and television programs worldwide. The new format will initially be available through the Prime Video app on select Samsung 2026 televisions.

The promise is brighter and more detailed HDR, improved shadow reproduction and motion processing that changes according to what is happening in each scene.

The reality is that Amazon and Samsung have not revealed which titles will support it, precisely when the rollout begins or whether owners of older Samsung televisions will eventually be invited to the party.

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Progress apparently still requires a scavenger hunt.

What Is HDR10+ Advanced?

HDR10+ logo

Standard HDR10+ already uses dynamic metadata to adjust brightness, contrast and tone mapping on a scene by scene or frame by frame basis. That allows a compatible television to handle a dark interior differently from a sun drenched exterior instead of applying one set of HDR instructions across an entire movie.

hdr10-plus-advanced-logo

HDR10+ Advanced expands that tool kit with six primary features:

  • Enhanced overall brightness
  • Intelligent motion smoothing
  • Local tone mapping
  • Genre based optimization
  • Advanced color control
  • Adaptive cloud gaming

The format supports brightness metadata up to 10,000 nits and color depth of up to 16 bits at the specification level, although current streaming video remains limited by the practical capabilities of existing displays and codecs.

Prime Video’s initial rollout is focused primarily on enhanced brightness and intelligent motion smoothing.

Enhanced Overall Brightness uses additional metadata to help capable televisions make better use of their available light output. Samsung says AI driven tone mapping can preserve shadow detail in darker scenes while allowing sports, action movies and other bright material to use more of a premium television’s brightness capability.

That could be useful on newer OLED, MiniLED and Micro RGB televisions capable of reaching substantially higher brightness levels than earlier generations.

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It does not mean that every program will suddenly resemble a television showroom with the brightness control welded to its maximum setting. The goal is to use the available brightness more intelligently, not simply make everything brighter.

At least that is the theory.

Can Intelligent Motion Smoothing Avoid the Soap Opera Effect?

Motion smoothing remains one of the most divisive forms of television processing.

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It can make sports, camera pans and fast moving action look cleaner, but excessive frame interpolation can also make an expensive movie resemble a daytime soap opera filmed in the back room of a furniture store.

HDR10+ Advanced attempts to address that problem with scene specific metadata. A compatible television can reduce smoothing during cinematic material while applying more processing to sports, action and other fast moving scenes where cleaner motion may be desirable.

That sounds far more sensible than forcing viewers to choose one motion setting for everything.

Whether it actually works will depend on how accurately the content is tagged, how Prime Video encodes it and how Samsung televisions interpret those instructions. Until we can test it, “intelligent” remains a job title rather than a performance guarantee.

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Filmmaker Mode Is Not Invited

There is one significant catch.

Samsung confirms that HDR10+ Advanced will not operate when Filmmaker Mode is enabled.

filmmaker-mode-logo

Filmmaker Mode is designed to disable or reduce many forms of television processing so movies and television programs can be displayed closer to the creators’ original intentions. HDR10+ Advanced also claims to preserve creative intent, but requires Filmmaker Mode to be turned off.

That leaves viewers with an unusual choice: use the picture mode specifically designed for movies or activate the new HDR format designed to make movies look better.

Someone may want to workshop that.

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It is also notable that HDR10+ Adaptive, introduced several years ago, was promoted as being compatible with Filmmaker Mode. The Advanced version adds more sophisticated motion and genre based processing, which may explain the conflict, but Samsung has not provided a detailed technical explanation.

Which Samsung TVs Support HDR10+ Advanced?

Samsung says the Prime Video rollout will begin on its 2026 television lineup, although the company’s U.S. announcement refers more cautiously to select 2026 models.

Samsung has already introduced HDR10+ Advanced support across portions of its 2026 OLED, Neo QLED and Micro RGB ranges, but the Prime Video announcement does not include a definitive model by model compatibility list. Owners should check the specifications and firmware status of their individual television rather than assuming every 2026 Samsung display is supported.

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There is also no confirmation that 2025 or older Samsung televisions will receive HDR10+ Advanced through a firmware update.

Support is expected to spread beyond Samsung. HDR10+ Technologies says Roku intends to deploy the format across its platform, while MediaTek has also announced chipset support. Neither company has provided a product list or rollout date.

Why This Matters for Samsung Owners

2026 Samsung MRN75R95HAFXZA Micro RGB 4K TV
2026 Samsung R95H Micro RGB 4K TV

Samsung continues to support HDR10 and HDR10+ rather than Dolby Vision across its television lineup, making the success of HDR10+ considerably more important to Samsung owners.

Prime Video has supported the original HDR10+ format since 2017 and was the first major streaming service to adopt it. Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu have subsequently expanded their own HDR10+ support, giving Samsung television owners access to a much broader selection of dynamic HDR programming than they had only a few years ago.

HDR10+ Advanced is also royalty free, which could make it attractive to television manufacturers, streaming platforms and hardware companies looking for an alternative to Dolby Vision and its licensing costs. Samsung says the broader HDR10+ ecosystem now includes 183 adopter companies and more than 22,000 certified products.

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The Bottom Line

HDR10+ Advanced could deliver meaningful picture improvements on newer premium televisions, particularly in scenes that combine intense highlights with dark shadow detail. Scene specific motion instructions also offer a more intelligent alternative to leaving one motion setting enabled for every type of content.

But the launch arrives with several unresolved questions.

Prime Video has not named any supported movies or shows. Samsung has not published a complete compatibility list. Older television support remains unknown, and HDR10+ Advanced cannot be used with Filmmaker Mode.

Samsung and Amazon have created a potentially smarter HDR experience. Now they need to explain why movie enthusiasts must disable the picture mode created specifically for movie enthusiasts to see it.

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For more information: hdr10plus.org/advanced/

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Huawei’s MateBook Pro S Hides Your Screen From Everyone but You

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Huawei MateBook Pro S Privacy Display Screen
Huawei just released the MateBook Pro S, a 14.2-inch laptop that weighs 798 grams and measures only 11.9 millimeters thick. That puts it among the lightest full-metal machines in its size class, lighter than many 13-inch models by a noticeable margin. The magnesium-lithium body keeps the whole package easy to carry all day, and it comes in several finishes including Midsummer Purple, Dawn Yellow, Smoke Gray, Velvet White, and Feather Black.



A 14.2-inch flexible OLED display sits right in the center of this slim laptop. It has a crisper-than-crisp 3,120 by 2,080 pixel resolution in that ‘document-friendly’ 3:2 ratio, and it refreshes at 120 times per second, boasting 1,600 nits at its brightest points, a color gamut that covers the entire P3 range, and even ten-point touch. Let’s not forget the two million to one contrast ratio. That’s some very impressive screen technology, but the real magic isn’t in the numbers, but in how those pixels are arranged.

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Huawei refers to this screen as their “privacy display,” and it’s a game changer. The deal is that each part contains two entire sets of light-emitting pixels, and this is what happens when you flick a physical switch on the side. The first set covers standard viewing, so your coworkers can crowd around the screen without issue, but the second set kicks in and light travels practically straight ahead. So, if someone looks in from the side, they’ll see a dark or virtually black surface, but the person in front gets to keep the full brightness, resolution, and color accuracy intact; no extra film, no software dimming, just 100 percent pixel power. There is a camera on board that is continually on the watch for someone attempting to peek over their shoulder, and when this occurs, the system gently asks the owner if they want to change to private mode. Now, the switch is easy, works instantaneously, and is entirely controlled by hardware, which is a significant improvement over add-on filters or reduced pixel counts.

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So, what makes this whole thing work? Huawei’s proprietary Kirin XE90 chip is the brains of the operation. It has a 9-core ARM CPU that boasts a 23% increase in single-core speed, 25% higher energy efficiency, and a 40% more powerful neural processing work than the previous model. We’re also talking about a sustained output of roughly 20 watts, thanks to two fans and improved heat distribution. You can have up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, and you’re running HarmonyOS 6.1, which includes some useful tools for creating documents, filling out forms, and making rudimentary web pages. There are six microphones (yes, six!), four speakers for audio, and a pair of 1080p cameras in the front and back. Finally, a fingerprint sensor is buried away inside the power button.

According to Huawei, the battery capacity is a reasonable 54 watt-hours, which is enough to power an 18-hour marathon of 1080p movie streaming. Power it up with one of the two USB-C connections, which can handle a speedy recharge of up to 66 watts. The greatest part is that those same ports can also be used to charge other devices. For wireless networking, they use no fewer than four antennas and Wi-Fi 7 to deliver the kind of long-range connections you’d expect from a high-end device, with Huawei claiming they can reach up to a kilometer under perfect conditions.

Huawei MateBook Pro S Privacy Display Screen
The base model starts at 7,999 yuan ($1,185) and includes 16 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage. If you want a privacy screen, which sounds like a fairly handy feature, you’ll have to pay a premium of 10,299 yuan ($1,526) for 24 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, with more fancier configurations available if you’re willing to spend. We should expect the machine to be ready for purchase in China between mid and late August, but there is still a wait for those outside of China at this moment, and it may be longer than that, given that it runs on ARM-plus-HarmonyOS rather than Windows.
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TikTok Says ‘Moderator Error’ Kept Perez Hilton Livestream Up

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Content warning: This article discusses self-harm.

On Tuesday night, the gossip blogger Perez Hilton, aka Mario Lavandeira Jr., was hospitalized after showing up on a TikTok livestream naked, covered in a red fluid that looked like blood, and wielding what appeared to be a knife.

The stream—which TikTok claims lasted around 15 minutes—prompted concern from horrified viewers, who immediately contacted the police. But it also raised questions about how TikTok could have allowed the stream to continue for so long without intervention.

TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza told WIRED via email that TikTok’s automated moderation systems flagged the livestream minutes after it started, but a “moderator error” caused a delay in its removal as well as the account’s subsequent ban. Favazza also shared that TikTok contacted law enforcement shortly after the livestream was flagged.

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The platform did not respond to follow-up questions regarding the nature of this moderator error or exactly how long the error delayed the removal of the livestream.

During Lavandeira’s stream, the Miami-Dade County Sheriff’s Office received “multiple calls regarding an individual who was livestreaming acts of self-harm on social media,” dispatching a crisis response unit and mental health professionals to his home, according to Samantha Choon, a detective with the sheriff’s office. A public information officer for the sheriff’s office separately confirmed to WIRED over the phone that the individual in question was Lavandeira.

TikTok’s official content guidelines prohibit “content that shows, promotes, or provides instructions for suicide or self-harm” as well as “graphic, violent, or disturbing content.” The platform has said that it uses a “combination” of automated systems and human moderation to screen for such content. The company entered into a new ownership structure in January, with a newly formed joint venture assuming responsibility for content moderation and data security in the US.

Yet following news that Lavandeira was hospitalized, many on social media questioned why the platform left the livestream up for long enough that thousands of viewers saw it, given its content guidelines. Some speculated that the platform left the stream up for 30 minutes or more before it banned the account. Favazza denied this to WIRED, saying the stream was up for “half” that time and that Perez’s subsequent streams were cut within 90 seconds.

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Nonetheless, this is not the first time that TikTok, as well as livestreaming platforms in general, have been accused of failing to properly moderate content featuring suicide or self-harm. In 2020, The Intercept reported that a young Brazilian man had livestreamed his own suicide on the platform. Later that year, TikTok also struggled to remove graphic clips of the final moments of Ronnie McNutt, who went viral after taking his own life on Facebook Live.

In response to a request for comment from WIRED, Dante Rusciolelli, Lavandeira’s manager and the CEO of Golden Artists Entertainment, said Lavandeira’s team was “not in a position to comment on TikTok’s internal policies, moderation decisions, or its communications with law enforcement.”

“Our focus remains entirely on Perez’s health and well-being,” Rusciolelli added via email. “We appreciate the concern surrounding this situation and respectfully ask that his privacy be honored while he receives the care and support he needs.”

Additional reporting by Manisha Krishnan.

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If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of self-harm or suicide, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 for support.

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You may hope, but Apple’s September event won’t be live

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Apple’s employee lottery for the September iPhone launch doesn’t mean it will be a return to a live-presented event. It’ll probably be the same pre-recorded presentation with press in the room as usual.

It’s barely a month away from Apple’s regular fall event, which will see the launch of products like the iPhone 18 Pro, the iPhone Fold, and other long-rumored items. It is always a major event, with most of the tech world paying close attention.

However, with the prospect of a new CEO at the helm, there are also expectations of other changes. That can also include the September event itself.

The problem is, it probably won’t be that different from what we’ve already got. Even with John Ternus saying “Good Morning” to the audience.

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Tweet expectations

On Tuesday, Bloomberg posted about an internal memo within Apple, inviting retail employees to enter a lottery. This is to select workers across the country to staff Apple’s usual in-person event.

The tasks they will take range from organizing lines, checking in guests, greeting attendees, offering directions, and supporting security teams, the memo stated. It also indicated that the event will take place during the first half of September.

The probable date for the event is September 9, since Labor Day is September 7, and it would give attendees a workday to travel.

All of this is completely unsurprising for an Apple Event. However, extrapolations by others online are raising expectations a little too high.

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Mark Gurman’s post to X on Tuesday promoting the retail employee lottery story has its fair share of comments. Among expectations for the iPhone Fold and wondering if Apple’s paying for the employees to be flown out, some are indicating that they hope it will be a live event.

“I’ve been waiting for the day they went back to in-person,” writes one commenter. “Each year that went by I was getting worried they’d never return.”

There was praise for the “natural atmosphere” of live events, as well as some mourning the slick pre-recorded announcements as if they are already gone.

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While a little reminiscing doesn’t hurt, the growing expectation of an in-person event with a live component isn’t reasonable.

Necessity becomes habit

Apple’s prerecorded announcements commenced in 2020, long after the last live-presented iPhone launch in late 2019.

The company had a very good reason not to hold its signature live presentation: COVID-19. It simply couldn’t invite the world’s media to an in-person meet-up and a live on-stage Apple Park presentation for health reasons.

At the time, Apple had few options, but it still had to hold a special event. A live presentation under lockdown conditions would’ve been possible, but the restrictions posed many production problems, let alone for a live stream on the Internet.

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Prerecording the presentation was the way to go. It allowed Apple to work around the necessary health restrictions, while still providing a slick presentation to an awaiting audience.

After the event aired, and the world saw what Apple could produce in advance, it gave Apple license to keep on doing it. Indeed, as the world tried to return to normal post-COVID, everyone tried to stay safe, and that meant Apple could continue with the prerecorded messages a while longer.

Eventually, after the world opened back up and the danger was over, Apple could’ve taken the opportunity to go back to live events. Except it didn’t.

After a few prerecorded presentations, it became the norm for Apple. It avoided the problems of live broadcasting and presenting, like waiting for cheers and applause to die down.

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There were no issues with live tech demos, as you would have a perfect on-screen example prepared ahead of time. It also meant Apple could be as TV-like and creative with graphics as it wanted to, which a stage simply couldn’t match.

Sticking with it was a necessity. Now, it’s beneficial.

But the employee lottery…

Regular observers of Apple’s special events will have noticed a pattern over the last few years. That is, while there’s a prepared presentation for people to see online, there’s an off-line, on-site component as well.

For Apple events and the WWDC keynote, that manifests as an event at Apple Park. Media and guests are invited to attend to watch the presentation, as well as to hear and participate in some other on-site activities.

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When it comes to a product-based event, that means setting up multiple areas at Apple Park for attendees to try out the just-announced items. Your favorite tech YouTubers have frequently aired travelogs about their visit to Apple Park, so it is a well-known process.

Since there’s a mass of people suddenly appearing at Apple Park, which is usually occupied by employees who don’t usually talk face-to-face with outsiders on Apple matters, help is needed. For Apple, the obvious move is to tap into its army of customer-facing workers who are already well-versed in answering questions.

A lottery to win a trip to the headquarters is also a training and employee loyalty-building opportunity as well.

Apple has held these lotteries for a few years now, and they have all helped staff the in-person component of events at Apple Park. Just not one that Apple chooses to broadcast to the public.

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“It’s the hope that kills you”

The talk about live events can be seen as being hopeful that Apple will return to that format down the road. It’s entirely possible for that to happen, but not a certainty.

Apple has found that it can create the ideal presentation for its needs. Polished like the company’s brand image, information-dense, and highly entertaining as well.

It has no incentive to divert away from this strategy at all. And on a pre-record, there’s no chance of something critical failing.

There’s no need for smoke and mirrors, like Steve Jobs miraculously pulled off with the original iPhone.

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Man standing at night outside a brightly lit modern Apple Store with large glass walls, wooden ceiling, glowing Apple logo, and reflections on the polished plaza floor

John Ternus will be CEO in time for Apple’s fall events. Expect a lot of screen time from him – Image Credit: Apple

If John Ternus is inclined to return to live presentations once again, it would require a lot of changes from Apple’s production pipeline. Not least the prospect of Apple executives walking on stage and willing for everything to go smoothly.

Ternus could make that call. But, since it’s the very start of his tenure, the last thing he needs is for his first event to be live and error-prone.

A few events down the road, he may be confident enough to go live. But days after taking the CEO seat, it would be an insane move.

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AI Let An Amateur Hacker Breach 14 Companies With Incredibly Simple Prompts

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AI chatbots have technically had the capability to break into secure software for a while now. Scanning a bunch of code, reading up on a known flaw, and writing exploit code is what hackers do — so it’s no surprise AI can do it too. The only thing holding the bots back are the guardrails built into the LLM models — that is, until they fail to work as expected.

One of those failures let somebody with almost no hacking ability break into at least fourteen companies. While it may sound extreme, it’s certainly not among the worst data breaches in internet history. The story comes from OALABS, a malware research group that got handed a hacker’s complete working folder with the AI session logs still sitting inside it. They published their findings in a report released in June.

Likely to avoid being traced, the person never ran the tools on hardware he himself owned. Rather, he parked them on a server he had already broken into. Unfortunately for him, that server belonged to someone who was an acquaintance of the research group. That person spotted the intrusion, pulled the hacker’s entire working directory, and handed it to OALABS.

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The directory contained over 1,000 sessions with Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, two agentic coding tools capable of executing commands on their own. Since both agents were also installed locally, the logs preserved things like the prompts, the tool calls, and the models’ reasoning. The prompts themselves were full of vague instructions and typos.

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How Claude turned into a bad actor

Most major AI tools have guardrails, which but only took effect in this case, but only to an extent. Both tools flagged policy violations and balked at certain requests: Claude did so nine times, while Codex flagged one. However, the bad actor was able to circumvent them simply by claiming that he was running an “authorized redteam exercise,” a kind of security test the target pays for. It’s a similar strategy to one used earlier this year, where attackers using AI claimed they were hunting a bug bounty reward and used that to steal data from the Mexican government.

Then, he pasted a list of target addresses and gave the vague instruction: “recon this.” Claude then worked out which services on those machines were reachable from the open internet and dug up any publicly documented flaws. Then it wrote the exploit code and pulled data and files out using that. It even wrote a tidy report for each victim. These reports also contained specifics like what the pulled files were worth.

Later, he even asked Claude to line up all the victims and rank them by how much ransom he could realistically pull in. Claude went on to provide a rundown of ways to turn the access into cash — including extortion.

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The hacker was clearly a rookie

In addition to using someone else’s server, even the Claude install he used was stolen. He had copied the code from a Czech developer. His operational security wasn’t much better either. One of his earlier tasks was using that Claude copy to clean up his own resume, which contained his real name, education, and LinkedIn. At first, OALABS treated that as a possible plant to throw authorities off. However, they eventually discovered it was his own. 

At one point, the bad actor thought one of his own staging servers had been breached, so he asked Claude to list everything connecting to it. That included home broadband addresses, which were in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Despite the attempts, there’s no evidence to suggest that any of his antics ever paid off. He got close with one of the breached machines, a Lightning Network node, meaning it was routing bitcoin payments. The wallet attached to it held about 69.71 BTC, which works out to roughly $4 million. The coins themselves were out of reach, though, because the file holding the keys was encrypted.

It’s worth mentioning that the models that allowed the bad actor to do all of this weren’t the latest — Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2. One would assume the easiest way to prevent a similar exploit in the future is to make such models refuse suspicious actions more often, enforce their guardrails more strictly. However, the problem with that approach, according to OALABS, is that it would get in the way of people actually trying to protect companies.

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Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup

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Jeff Dean, one of the longest-serving and most influential executives at Google, is stepping down from the search giant to launch his own AI startup.

Coming with him as co-founders are several other top researchers at the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a top engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean reportedly plans to serve as CEO.

Together, the group is starting Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that seeks to use AI to turbo-charge scientific research.

Discovery Loop says it plans to use high-octane algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of partially automating the research process and expanding the scale at which experimentation can be conducted.

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The startup is also interested in using AI to help create more powerful AI (a process known as recursive self-improvement), which would cut human iteration out of the loop entirely.

“While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck,” the company said in a press release. “Discovery Loop is developing advanced AI systems that leverage massive computational scale to fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops.”

Using AI to accelerate scientific discovery has been a key interest of the science and tech communities for many years, but until recently, it remained a largely experimental field with limited commercial application.

The company has received financial support from a number of different sources, including Google’s parent company Alphabet. The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the company announced Wednesday. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also participated.

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“The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries,” the founding team said in a joint statement. “By fundamentally accelerating how engineering and scientific discovery are conducted, we can deliver the benefits of transformative technologies to the world far sooner.”

Dean has worked at Google since 1999 and was Google’s 30th employee. Over the years, he has contributed to Google search’s core infrastructure, including its crawling and indexing system and its query-serving system. He has also had a significant impact on Google Gemini’s multimodal models and played a leading role in the company’s early AI research.

“We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop,” Dean told the New York Times. “You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances.”

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Get up to 37 days of battery life for less with this Garmin Fenix 7X Pro deal

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£501 off a watch built to survive years of proper use isn’t a discount you see very often, and it’s exactly what’s happened to the Garmin Fenix 7X Pro Sapphire Solar Edition right now.

The Fenix 7X Pro Sapphire Solar Edition has dropped from £870 to £369, a saving of 58% that turns Garmin’s most capable outdoor watch into something you can actually justify buying instead of quietly wishing for while telling yourself the current watch still works fine.

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Get up to 37 days of battery life for less with this Garmin Fenix 7X Pro deal

Get up to a huge 37 days of battery life for a lot less with this rare discount on the Garmin Fenix 7X Pro.

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That kind of saving matters most if you’ve spent months eyeing a proper outdoor watch but couldn’t quite stomach paying full price for something you’d mostly use to check the time and count your steps around the house.

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None of that applies once you’re actually out using it, and the fenix 7X Pro tracks heart rate, stress, sleep and Body Battery energy levels continuously, so you get a genuine read on how your body is coping rather than a rough guess.

If you’re curious how the 7X Pro compares, our tech expert Michael Sawh tested the standard Fenix 7 Pro and found much the same core experience, praising the LED flashlight, upgraded heart rate sensor and new Endurance and Hill Scores as solid rather than groundbreaking additions.

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That same toughness carries over to the X, though it goes further outdoors with multi-band GNSS, topographic mapping and a titanium bezel built to survive the kind of terrain that would scratch up a normal smartwatch within a single afternoon hike.

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The number that stands out most is battery life, because the solar charging built into the display keeps the fenix 7X Pro running for up to 37 days in smartwatch mode or 122 hours with GPS switched on.

That’s the sort of number that changes how you actually think about wearing a watch, since charging it becomes something you plan around once a month rather than something you have to remember to do every single night.

The everyday side hasn’t been left out either, with smart notifications, Garmin Pay for contactless payments and safety tracking features that quietly stay switched on whether you’re deep in the mountains or just walking the dog around the block.

So if you’ve been putting off the upgrade because the full price never quite made sense to you, doesn’t a 58% cut on the Garmin fenix 7X Pro Sapphire Solar Edition finally answer that question for good?

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The Disney Plus App Is Getting TikToks. Is a Free Plan Next?

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Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro confirmed Wednesday that the entertainment giant is considering adding a free option for Disney Plus as a way to attract more people to the streaming service.

“We’re exploring a free product for consumers,” D’Amaro said during the company’s 2026 third-quarter earnings call. “A free offering could help us drive top-of-funnel Disney Plus subscriber growth.”

Also on Wednesday, Disney and TikTok announced that they have struck a deal to bring Disney-themed TikToks, made by selected creators, into the Disney Plus app. These videos will be in the app’s new Verts section and will be rolling out in a pilot program in the US later this year.

The House of Mouse’s hints about a potential free tier appear to confirm a report from Business Insider last month. The rumored new option would help Disney keep its ground in an ever-changing streaming landscape. In June, Fox announced that it is acquiring Roku for $22 billion

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Meanwhile, the ongoing sale of Warner Bros. Discover to Paramount SkyDance (itself created from a merger only last year) has sparked protests by entertainment industry workers about consolidations, amid concerns about job losses, fewer projects produced and for newsrooms, less editorial freedom. David Ellison, CEO of Paramount SkyDance and son of tech tycoon Larry Ellison, has rejected these concerns.

Disney executives put a rosier spin on things.

“A more consolidated industry is really a better investment backdrop,” D’Amaro said, “and we have a long history of partnering and streaming, and we believe that we can just keep building on that.”

Disney has its own Plus app, Hulu and ESPN, and has deals with Paramount-owned HBO Max, fueling its 11% increase in streaming-related earnings in the third quarter to a total of $5.53 billion. But free live TV streamers, like Fubo, are enticing viewers who don’t want to break the bank to watch individual live events. That’s where a free tier for Disney Plus may make sense.

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Disney’s world beyond streaming

“It’s become clear Disney Plus is no longer just a streaming service, and perhaps that’s a good thing,” said Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester. Streaming “has a customer relationship problem,” which Disney is trying to solve by making its streaming service the focal point of its digital offerings. 

“Movies and series are the foundation, but live sports, games, merchandise, creator content, and future perks give consumers more reasons to stay engaged with Disney,” Proulx said.

This is certainly what Disney is hoping for. D’Amaro defended recent box office flops Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu and the live-action Moana. He said that while these didn’t meet box office expectations, the movies prompted growth in other parts of the business.

For example, The Mandalorian and Guru barely broke even, making it the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars flick. But it also prompted a surge in merchandise sales – like apparel and Lego sets – and prompted visits to Walt Disney World’s Millennium Falcon attraction. The original Moana movie is one of the most-streamed movies on Disney Plus, and D’Amaro said Disney expects its live-action companion to perform well, despite reportedly standing to lose $100 million at the box office.

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Then there’s a franchise like Toy Story, whose latest installment this summer was an undeniable theatrical success and also supported Disney’s other businesses. 

“The nature of the film industry is such that it is more of a portfolio game,” D’Amaro said. “The theatrical window, in a lot of ways, it’s just one data point. And the real value of that IP is the cumulative benefit of decades-long storytelling and our ability to take that IP and play it into the entirety of the Disney flywheel.”

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