When Focal and Naim announced support for another high-resolution streaming service this week, my first reaction was probably the same as that of a lot of North American audiophiles: What exactly is Presto Music?

I spend an unreasonable amount of time using TIDAL and Qobuz, reviewing network amplifiers and streamers, and wondering why some streaming apps can locate a recording in four seconds while others behave as though you’ve requested the Dead Sea Scrolls. My Bubie could probably find those faster; they’re in the dining room, third drawer down, behind the Chanukah cards from 1983. Somehow, Presto Music had still managed to stay off my radar.

That might be about to change. Focal and Naim have added native Presto Music integration to supported streaming products, giving owners access to a service built specifically around classical music, jazz and audiophile recordings. Presto currently advertises more than 200,000 albums, over 34,000 hi-res releases, more than 70,000 digital booklets and playback up to 24-bit/192kHz.

Those numbers are interesting, but they are not the real reason this announcement deserves attention. Naim already supports the major streaming platforms and has spent years developing one of the better software ecosystems in high-end audio.

Why would Naim bother adding a comparatively obscure British streaming service unless it believed its customers might actually care?

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What Exactly Is Presto Music?

Presto isn’t a startup that appeared last Tuesday with a logo, an AI recommendation engine and $40 million in venture capital. The company began as a record shop in Royal Leamington Spa, England, in 1986 and eventually developed into a major online retailer specializing in classical and jazz recordings, downloads, sheet music and related products. Its streaming service launched in 2023.

That history helps explain the service.

Spotify, Apple Music and TIDAL are built around enormous catalogs and broad mainstream discovery. Presto concentrates on classical music and jazz, where metadata can matter just as much as the album title. Classical listeners frequently care about the composer, orchestra, conductor, soloist, label, recording date and specific performance, while jazz collectors can be equally particular about personnel, session dates and mastering.

Presto leans heavily into that kind of information, along with reviews, curated editorial content and digital booklets. More than 70,000 albums include booklets, which should immediately make sense to anyone who spent decades buying CDs and actually read the liner notes instead of using the jewel case as a coaster.

Presto Isn’t Trying to Beat TIDAL at Being TIDAL

Presto’s catalog is much smaller than TIDAL or Qobuz, and pretending otherwise would miss the point.

TIDAL offers a massive mainstream catalog, hi-res FLAC and Dolby Atmos, while Qobuz combines more than 100 million tracks with extensive hi-res content, editorial material and broad hardware integration. For someone whose listening jumps from Miles Davis to Radiohead, Mahler and Black Sabbath before lunch, either service remains a far more comprehensive single-subscription option.

Presto’s argument is different: be exceptionally good at classical and jazz rather than merely having them buried inside a gigantic catalog.

Its standard streaming plan is currently $10.99 per month, while Streaming Plus costs $14.99 and adds discounts on purchases from Presto’s retail business. Both offer the same streaming catalog and audio quality up to 24-bit/192kHz.

The question isn’t whether Presto has more music than Qobuz. It doesn’t. The better question is whether a smaller, more focused service can offer classical and jazz listeners a better experience.

That is a much more credible fight.

It Also Pays Differently

Presto has another unusual distinction: its royalty model.

The company uses what it calls a pay-per-second system rather than treating every stream as an equivalent unit. That matters particularly with classical music, where a single movement can run for 20 or 30 minutes while a pop album might divide the same listening time among numerous tracks.

Presto argues that paying according to listening time avoids penalizing longer works simply because they generate fewer individual track plays. There are important caveats: comparisons with competing services rely partly on industry estimates, and payments still initially go to labels and rights holders before reaching individual performers.

Even so, the logic is easy to understand. A 28-minute symphonic movement shouldn’t be commercially disadvantaged simply because somebody else released 11 songs during the same amount of listening time.

Why Would Naim Bother?

This is the part that interests me most.

Naim does not need another streaming logo to make its spec sheets look fuller. Streaming integration has been central to the company for years, from the Uniti Atom and Uniti Nova through newer products such as the CI-Uniti 102. Focal, meanwhile, has increasingly moved the same ecosystem into products such as the Mu-so Hekla.

We’ve reviewed enough Naim hardware to know that its customers are not generally buying these products because they were the cheapest boxes on the shelf at Costco.

The decision to integrate Presto therefore feels more meaningful than another routine service announcement. There is an obvious overlap between the people spending real money on Naim hardware and listeners who care about recording provenance, mastering quality, metadata, liner notes and finding a particular performance rather than asking an algorithm to “play some classical.”

That doesn’t mean every Naim owner spends Sunday morning comparing Karajan and Klemperer recordings while drinking Rooibos from a Salisbury-approved mug. But the demographic overlap isn’t exactly difficult to see.

Naim already has access to the big streaming platforms. Adding Presto suggests that the company believes specialist streaming services can have real value when they understand their audience better than the giants do.

How Does It Work?

There is an important technical distinction here.

Focal and Naim have not announced a separate “Presto Connect” protocol equivalent to TIDAL Connect or Qobuz Connect. Instead, Presto is integrated directly into the Focal & Naim ecosystem. Users update the Focal & Naim app and compatible product firmware, sign into Presto, and stream directly through supported hardware.

That still provides the important benefit: the streamer receives the service directly rather than relying on Bluetooth or another compromised workaround.

Naim isn’t the first high-end manufacturer to embrace Presto. Eversolo already supports the service, while its integration with BluOS opens it to compatible products from Bluesound, NAD, PSB, DALI, Monitor Audio, Cyrus, Roksan and others. Audirvāna also supports Presto on the software side.

What makes the Focal and Naim announcement interesting is that another major audiophile ecosystem has now decided this specialist classical and jazz service deserves native support. Presto isn’t suddenly arriving because Naim discovered it; it has been quietly building a legitimate hardware footprint while a lot of North American audiophiles still have no idea what it is

There is, however, a firmware wrinkle.

Newer Naim platforms have begun receiving the required updates, but some Uniti and Classic streamers are still waiting for firmware 3.13 as of August 9, 2026. First-generation Naim streamers are excluded from Presto support entirely.

So if your Uniti refuses to display Presto this morning, repeatedly rebooting it while questioning British engineering probably isn’t going to help. The update may simply not be available for your model yet.

Is This Really a Threat to Qobuz?

Not exactly.

Qobuz remains the most obvious comparison because both companies emphasize high-resolution audio, editorial content and listeners who care about sound quality. Qobuz, however, offers a vastly broader catalog and much deeper support across the hi-fi industry.

Presto’s advantage is specialization.

Its classical orientation, jazz focus, digital booklets and more granular metadata give it a distinct identity. There is also something increasingly refreshing about opening a music service that doesn’t immediately attempt to convince you that whatever went viral twelve minutes ago while someone made a sandwich should become the center of your listening universe.

Whether that’s enough to persuade an existing Qobuz subscriber to pay for a second service is the more interesting question.

We’re Going to Find Out

eCoustics has covered Naim and Focal extensively, and we have reviews of the Focal Mu-so Hekla and Naim CI-Uniti 102 coming this month. That gives us an obvious opportunity to do more than repeat the announcement.

We’re going to try Presto on the hardware.

How good is the search function when you’re looking for a specific classical recording? How deep is the jazz catalog? Do the digital booklets materially improve the experience? How reliable is hi-res playback through the Focal & Naim platform? And if you’re already paying for TIDAL or Qobuz, is there enough here to justify another subscription?

Because streaming subscriptions are starting to resemble cable television packages. Everybody promised us freedom from bundles, and somehow we ended up paying six companies every month again.

At least this one comes with Mahler.

The Bottom Line

Presto Music isn’t going to replace Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL or Qobuz for most listeners, and its smaller catalog makes that fairly obvious. What it offers instead is specialization: classical and jazz, hi-res playback, meaningful metadata, extensive digital booklets, human editorial curation and a royalty model designed around the realities of longer musical works.

The more significant part of this story may be Naim’s decision to integrate it. Naim already supports the major players; it didn’t need Presto simply to make the feature list longer. Adding it suggests that specialist streaming services may have a legitimate place alongside the giants when they understand their audience well enough.

Presto Music has been streaming since 2023. A lot of us are only noticing it now.

For more information: prestomusic.com

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Megelin Duo-Lux Laser & LED Light Therapy Mask for $799: My biggest issue with this mask is the unpleasant chemical odor. It reminded me of formaldehyde, and because the silicone sits against your face without a mouth opening, the smell is impossible to ignore and left me feeling a bit dizzy. For me, that alone is enough to make it hard to recommend, especially considering it costs about $450 more than my top pick. Also, I found plenty of customer complaints on Reddit that weren’t reflected in the reviews on the company’s site.

LED Esthetics Glotech Minis for $229: Skip these, especially if your skin is reactive. At first glance, these Glotech Minis look like they’re designed to target your under-eyes, but they can technically be used anywhere: chin, smile lines, even above your brows. They emit red and yellow light and promise visible results after four weeks of daily nine-minute sessions. In theory, they’re meant to be a convenient, travel-friendly LED option. In practice, they’re more trouble than they’re worth. The patches rely on adhesive stickers to stay in place, which is a total nightmare for anyone with sensitive skin. My eczema flared after one use, and peeling them off only made it worse. Even beyond that, the fit is awkward. The MemoryContour design doesn’t really hug your face, so you’ll likely find yourself pressing down or lying still just to keep them from sliding off. It’s a clever concept with poor execution.

Pro by Déesse Pro for $1,700: This is a hard-shell LED mask with six treatment modes and four light wavelengths. The lights are intensely bright; even with the included tanning-bed-style goggles, I had to keep my eyes shut. It requires a power outlet, and the cord is short, so don’t expect to be walking around. It’s not particularly comfortable, either. At $1,700, it’s one of the priciest options out there, and it doesn’t even come with a display stand or storage case.

CISA confirmed today that ransomware gangs have begun abusing a high-severity Microsoft SharePoint remote code execution vulnerability, which has been flagged as actively exploited since early July.

Tracked as CVE-2026-45659, this security flaw stems from a deserialization of untrusted data weakness and allows attackers with low privileges to execute arbitrary code on unpatched SharePoint servers.

It can also be exploited in low-complexity attacks because (as Microsoft explained in May when it released security updates for SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016, SharePoint Server 2019, and SharePoint Server Subscription Edition) “an attacker does not require significant prior knowledge of the system and can achieve repeatable success with the payload against the vulnerable component.”

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog (KEV) on July 1, ordering Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to secure their servers within three days.

“This type of vulnerability is a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and poses significant risks to the federal enterprise,” the U.S. cybersecurity agency warned at the time.

In a subsequent advisory, the cybersecurity agency also urged security teams to monitor affected servers for signs of exploitation, apply Microsoft’s latest patches, verify successful installation, and shorten patching cycles.

It also recommended enabling Windows Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI integration for SharePoint web applications and using Microsoft Defender Antivirus (MDAV) detections to detect and remediate compromise.

Internet security watchdog group Shadowserver currently tracks over 8,500 Microsoft SharePoint servers exposed online, with over 200 of them unpatched against the CVE-2026-45659 vulnerability.

While Microsoft has yet to update the CVE-2026-45659 advisory to tag it as exploited, CISA has now also flagged it as abused by ransomware gangs in a Tuesday update to the KEV Catalog.

Since November 2021, the cybersecurity agency has flagged 14 actively exploited Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities, with eight of them also exploited in ransomware attacks.

In June, CISA also confirmed that ransomware gangs now exploit a high-severity Microsoft Defender privilege escalation vulnerability (dubbed BlueHammer), which was also targeted as a zero-day to access the Security Account Manager (SAM) database, which contains password hashes for local accounts.

The security flaw (tracked CVE-2026-33825) was leaked by a security researcher known as “Nightmare Eclipse” in early April, together with proof-of-concept exploit code.

However, as with CVE-2026-45659, Microsoft has yet to confirm that the CVE-2026-33825 security flaw is being exploited in the wild.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

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A software update, sent across 13 billion miles, gives it one more year of operation.

Jeff Bezos is reportedly attempting to join the club of very rich Americans buying stakes in U.K. soccer teams.

Bezos, alongside others including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, is looking to buy at least a 30% stake in the English soccer team Liverpool at a £1.35 billion valuation (around $1.8 billion), The Guardian reports. If the deal closes, it will be the first sports investment for the billionaire, although he reportedly previously looked at buying a stake in a U.S. football team.

Liverpool is one of the most notable sports teams in Europe and is worth about $6 billion, reports Forbes. Arguably, this team has the kind of brand recognition in the U.K. as the Dallas Cowboys has in the U.S.

It seems no billionaire portfolio is complete these days without a mega yacht and a sports team, so Bezos’ interest is not surprising. There’s also something very romantic these days about owning an English soccer team after the success of TV shows like “Ted Lasso” and Ryan Reynolds’ FX show “Welcome to Wrexham” about his experience owning that English team. 

Other American billionaires in this club include Todd Boehly and Mark Walters (who also own the LA Dodgers and LA Lakers) buying Chelsea; New York Jets co-owner (and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.K.) Woody Johnson buying Crystal Palace; Dan Friedkin taking a stake in Everton; and Bill Foley leading a group that also included Michael B. Jordan buying Bournemouth.

For that matter, owning a stake in a U.K. sports team has also become a celebrity cultural phenom. Besides Reynolds and Jordan, Tom Brady purchased a minority stake in Birmingham City. Will Ferrell has a minority stake in Leeds United, alongside Russell Westbrook and Michael Phelps.

Sky Sports had a story earlier this year mapping out why so many Americans seem to be taking over U.K. football. It found that 13 out of 20 Premier League clubs (the top football league in England) had American shareholders.

Soccer has become increasingly popular in the U.S., and many of the top sports franchises, like the NFL and MLB, are either too expensive or closed off to new buyers. It’s much more possible to buy into a Premier League team.

Owning a share in such a team also buys access and proximity to some of the most bankable and recognizable sports icons on Earth. Bezos over the past few years — especially since he married former news anchor and TV show host Lauren Sánchez — has become seen as more of a cultural figure, rather than solely a tech mogul.

So, with a net worth currently sitting at around $280 billion, perhaps it’s actually more than time that Bezos got himself a sports team. Amazon has also streamed some European soccer leagues in the past — and Bezos has growing interests in the U.K. As we previously reported, his new AI company Prometheus is reportedly looking to sign a lease to move into London’s AI hub King’s Cross.

Sounding off: A lot of people are worried about the number of AI agents that have gone rogue recently, including Bernie Sanders. The Vermont senator has now called on the top AI firms to pause development of their top models, warning that lawmakers will step in if no action is taken.

In a letter to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, Sanders writes that almost every day brings a new story about how these companies are losing control of their AI agents.

The senator also highlighted the story of AI being used for the first time to create new viruses, something he says could, if the technology ended up in the wrong hands, lead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.

“Yoshua Bengio, the most cited living scientist in the world, said these incidents ‘should serve as a wake-up call,’ I agree,” Sanders wrote in the letter.

Sanders adds that despite these incidents, the companies are still investing tens of billions of dollars into a technology that nobody can fully understand, predict, or control, contradicting their own commitments to responsible AI development.

“Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development. It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control,” Sanders writes.

– Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 10, 2026

The letter finishes with a stark warning for the tech giants: “Let me be very clear: If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.”

There have been calls for a halt on the development of advanced AI models for years now, including a request for a six-month pause in 2023. Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of J. Robert Oppenheimer, was one of the signatories of a 2024 letter calling for global action on AI and other existential threats.

But previous warnings have resulted in little or no action. This was illustrated last year when the US and UK refused to sign an AI safety declaration at a Paris summit. Vice President JD Vance cautioned against “overly precautionary” regulations on AI, emphasizing the US commitment to maintaining its dominance in the technology.

The situation has taken a worrying turn recently. First came news that an OpenAI model went rogue and hacked several services online, including Hugging Face. An Anthropic model followed suit – it even tried to deceive real developers into approving malicious code. Meta then became the third company in two weeks to admit its model went rogue.

Sanders isn’t the only one responding to the incidents. More than 1,300 employees from the world’s leading tech companies just signed an open letter asking governments to regulate the pace and safety of artificial intelligence development.

OpenAI said last week that it was slowing the release of its new Astra model because it has “critical” cyber capabilities.

Cisco warned of two high-severity vulnerabilities affecting the Secure Endpoint Connector that allow threat actors to crash the ClamAV scanning process in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

The security flaws (tracked as CVE-2026-20337 and CVE-2026-20338) were found in the ZIP archive parser of ClamAV (Clam AntiVirus), the open-source and cross-platform engine used to scan files for malware.

As Cisco explained in a Friday advisory, the two vulnerabilities are due to improper boundary checks and memory handling, respectively, and can be exploited by unauthenticated, remote attackers.

The company’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) added that proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code is already publicly available, but said that it has no evidence the flaws have been exploited in the wild.

“An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by submitting a crafted zip file for scanning. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the ClamAV scanning process to terminate, resulting in a DoS condition on the affected software,” it said. “The Cisco PSIRT is aware that proof-of-concept exploit code is available for the vulnerabilities that are described in CVE-2026-20337 and CVE-2026-20338.”

Cisco added that the flaws’ security impact is high only for Windows platforms since they’re the only ones that “run the ClamAV scanning process in a privileged security context.”

These two vulnerabilities affect ClamAV 1.5.0 through 1.5.3, and they were patched in version 1.5.4 released on August 7.

While there are no workarounds for CVE-2026-20337 and CVE-2026-20338, the company plans to release software updates later this month to address them in affected versions of Secure Endpoint Connector for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

On Friday, Cisco patched five other ClamAV security flaws that can also be exploited to trigger denial-of-service conditions by submitting malicious XAR, Mach-O, PDF, GPT, and PESpin files for scanning.

It patched another ClamAV DoS vulnerability with PoC exploit code in January 2025, warning that attackers could abuse it to terminate the ClamAV antivirus scanner, preventing or delaying further scanning operations.

Since November 2021, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has tagged 95 Cisco vulnerabilities as actively exploited in attacks, six of them abused in ransomware attacks.

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If you’ve been holding out on buying Valve’s ludicrously expensive home console, you may have saved yourself from more than an empty wallet. European customers who ordered a Steam Machine or Steam Controller may be the victims of a personal information data breach after one of Valve’s hardware distribution partners was hit by a cyberattack.

CEVA Logistics, the company that helps organize Valve’s European supply chain, informed its partner of the data breach on Aug. 7. A Valve spokesperson told CNET that the company spent the weekend assembling a list of at-risk customers, notifying them about the attack via email on Monday morning.

“Though CEVA is still investigating the attack, we wanted to at least send out messaging to all customers we can assume were affected based on what we currently know,” the spokesperson said.

What Valve currently knows is that the personal information revealed by the cyberattack is likely all delivery-related. CEVA told Valve that the breach revealed customers’ names, countries, street addresses, phone numbers and email addresses. According to Valve, “payment information, passwords and Steam Guard codes” are all safe, since CEVA doesn’t have access to this data.

Because phone numbers and email addresses linked to Steam accounts are openly circulating, Valve warned against phishing attacks that may be looking for additional personal information in the coming days.

Read more: Best Data Removal Services of 2026: Reduce Your Online Presence

“Expect fake messages – email, SMS or phone – that mention your hardware order and appear to come from Steam, Valve or a delivery company,” Valve wrote in its email to affected customers. “They may quote your address back to you to prove they’re genuine. They may ask you to confirm a delivery, pay a small customs or redelivery fee or sign in somewhere to ‘verify’ your order. Treat all of them as fake.”

Valve reminded customers that Steam’s support team only handles issues on the official help page and never sends messages over Steam chat or through third-party services. Company employees will also never ask for a customer’s password or Steam Guard codes.

The finer details of the attack currently remain unclear, as there’s no official information available on how many customers were affected, how much data was stolen or how the cyberattack infiltrated CEVA Logistics’ systems. In its statement, Valve said it is “pressing CEVA for the full scope” of the breach.

Alongside CEVA’s internal investigation, authorities in the Netherlands are looking into the attack. A spokesperson for the Dutch data protection authority told TechCrunch that the agency has received data breach reports from at least 10 companies in relation to the hack.

In addition to the data breach, FreightWaves reported operations at eight of the company’s warehouses have been affected by the cyberattack, causing potential delays or cancellations to customer orders in the coming days.

CEVA Logistics did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tyler is a writer for CNET covering laptops and video games. He’s previously covered mobile devices, home energy products and broadband. He came to CNET straight out of college, where he graduated from Seton Hall with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. When Tyler’s not asking questions or doing research for his next assignment, you can find him in his home state of New Jersey, kicking back with a bagel and watching an action flick or playing a new video game.

You can reach him at tgraham@cnet.com.

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