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Why Does The F-16 Fighter Jet Have A Reclined Cockpit Seat?

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Unlike airliners, fighter aircrafts routinely experience multiple times the force of gravity, especially while maneuvering aggressively. These intense G-forces place enormous strain on the human body, making even simple tasks increasingly difficult. At the same time, success in a dogfight requires maintaining constant visual contact with an opponent, often while the aircraft is banked steeply through tight turning maneuvers. The Viper’s reclined seat was designed to help pilots withstand those extreme forces of air combat, while also improving their ability to keep an adversary in sight. Two advantages that contributed directly to the Viper’s success.

Since entering service on August 17, 1978, the F-16 Fighting Falcon (nicknamed the Viper by those lucky enough to work with them) has earned its reputation as one of the world’s most successful multirole fighter aircraft, due to features like the aforementioned reclining seat. A product of the USAF’s Lightweight Fighter Program, the Viper’s strengths and weaknesses were designed around one primary goal: Dominate the within-visual-range combat domain through exceptional maneuverability, supreme energy management, and an unbeatable sustained turn rate. It’s superior in many ways over F-4E fighter jets, with its design focused relentlessly on creating a small, agile dogfighter that gave pilots every possible advantage in a post-merge, turning dogfight.

This philosophy was ultimately realized across a number of design choices. Relaxed static stability, a blended wing-body design, and long leading-edge extensions gave the Viper its exceptional dogfighting performance. That performance was complemented by the introduction of several unconventional cockpit features that were revolutionary for the time, including a side-mounted control stick, a frameless bubble canopy, and, perhaps most noticeably, a cockpit seat reclined at 30 degrees. While unusual compared to almost every other fighter aircraft, all of these components and design choices were the result of extensive research into both pilot physiology and combat effectiveness.

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Surviving the forces of air combat in a fighter jet

High-G maneuvering is one of the greatest physical challenges a fighter pilot faces. Throughout the aggressive turning and banking of a dogfight, a pilot’s body experiences extreme G-loading; forces attempt to pull blood away from the brain and towards the lower body, blood pressure in the head drops, and vision begins to narrow. This escalates to gray-out, before eventually progressing to total G-LOC, or G-induced loss of consciousness. In the fast-paced, high-stakes competition that is an aerial gunfight, losing consciousness for even a few seconds can have catastrophic consequences.

The Viper’s 30-degree reclined seating position helps reduce this risk by changing the direction in which G-forces act on the body. Rather than pulling blood almost directly from the head to the feet, the reclined posture shifts more of the force through the pilot’s chest and back. This shortens the vertical distance between the heart and the brain, making it easier for the cardiovascular system to maintain blood flow to the pilot’s head during those high-G maneuvers.

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The benefits of this seating design extend beyond improved G tolerance. Supporting more of the pilot’s weight across the back also reduces strain on the neck and spine during prolonged patrols or ferry flights, particularly when wearing a heavy flight helmet or night optic device. Today, pilots rely heavily on anti-G suits and specialized straining techniques to remain conscious under high G-loads, but only Viper drivers have that deep, reclined sitting position providing another layer of mitigation to the dreaded grasp of G-LOC. That extra layer of protection, perhaps an few more seconds of useful consciousness, may be what separates victory, defeat, or UFIT (Uncontrolled Flight Into Terrain).

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Keeping an eye on enemy fighters

A key aspect of both basic and advanced fighter maneuvering is maintaining tally, or keeping the enemy within your field of vision. This allows a pilot to determine how and where they should maneuver to gain an advantage, or how an enemy may be counter-maneuvering. Lose sight of your opponent and you lose situational awareness, or, as the old saying goes, “lose sight, lose fight.”

Fighter maneuvers therefore prioritize positioning the aircraft to pull the reticle up and onto the target, a technique known as lag pursuit. This generally results in the target aircraft being held slightly above the horizontal focal plane of the pilot, and is where an adversary will naturally be positioned within one and two circle flow dogfights. This requirement to constantly look up and around through the higher aspect of the canopy demands enormous amounts of stamina in a fighter pilot’s neck and upper back muscles.

By leaning the pilot backwards by 30 degrees, the Viper’s seating position naturally positions the head and eyes to look higher through the canopy with less neck extension. This reduces muscle stress without reducing visibility across those critical vision sectors. Although this reclined seating position does sacrifice some comforts (particularly during use of the in-flight bladder release system) and reduces forward visibility during routine straight-and-level flight, those compromises were considered worthwhile.

That’s because the Viper was never intended to be optimized for cruise efficiency. It was built to win a knife fight in a phone booth, and almost every aspect of the aircraft represents that dogma. From its size, weight, and wing profile to its blended fuselage, bubble canopy, and reclined seating position, every aspect of the Viper reflects the uncompromising design philosophy behind one of the greatest rate fighters ever built. It’s no surprise the F-16 Fighting Falcon would go on to make history.

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How to watch Australia vs Japan: Free streams & TV channels

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Watch Australia vs Japan live streams as the Wallabies look to follow up their hard-fought 35-32 victory over the Brave Blossoms with a more comprehensive victory on home soil in Townsville, Queensland.

The first game in the post-Joe Schmidt era proved to be a tough one for Australia as they were forced to hang on for a narrow win in Osaka. Surviving a first-half red card for Miles Amatosero and a second-half onslaught from Japan, new head coach Les Kiss would have been nervy on the touchline. He’ll hope for a more convincing display on home soil and has opted for Carter Gordon at fly-half instead of Declan Meredith.

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OpenAI CFO tells shareholders enterprise revenue has overtaken ChatGPT

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OpenAI’s enterprise business now generates more revenue than its consumer business, finance chief Sarah Friar told shareholders on Friday, months earlier than the company had forecast. Its annualised run rate has reached $40bn, roughly double a year ago.

OpenAI now makes more money from businesses than from ChatGPT subscribers. Finance chief Sarah Friar told shareholders on Friday that the two lines have crossed, according to a person at the meeting. “We entered the year at 60-40, but enterprise has accelerated much faster than expected,” she said.

That is early. Friar had said earlier this year that the two sides of the business would reach parity by the end of 2026.

The underlying numbers are moving quickly. OpenAI’s annualised run rate has reached $40bn, roughly double a year ago, and July revenue rose 20% month on month, with business customers up 32%.

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More interesting is what enterprise buyers have started doing. “Enterprise customers have moved from tokenmaxxing to focusing on cost per unit of intelligence,” Friar said, meaning companies have stopped letting staff run up open-ended AI bills without showing what came of them.

OpenAI is answering on price rather than resisting. Friar pointed to recent cuts across its model range and to the newest model being 54% more efficient on agentic coding tasks.

Advertising has quietly become a business too. It is approaching a $1bn run rate, six months after OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT in February.

The meeting itself was scheduled before the week went wrong. It came a day after revenue chief Denise Dresser left after eight months and three days after longtime executive Brad Lightcap announced his departure.

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President Greg Brockman thanked Dresser for building the enterprise foundation, the attendee said. He also praised her replacement, Dali Rajic, who was introduced to OpenAI by Thrive founder Josh Kushner, according to a person familiar with the recruiting.

Asked about Chinese open-source models, Brockman was dismissive. There is a misunderstanding that open source is cheaper, he said.

On the listing, nothing. Executives told shareholders they could not discuss timing because of the confidential filing with the SEC.

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Talks to sell PayPal to Stripe and Advent are heating up

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PayPal CEO Enrique Lores’ turnaround plan for the fintech company could include a sale — of itself.

The prospect first popped in July when Stripe and private equity giant Advent offered to buy PayPal for $60.50 a share in a deal that would have valued it at $53 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

PayPal balked. But apparently, negotiations never stopped and a deal could come together in the coming weeks, according to new reporting by the WSJ, which cited unnamed sources.

PayPal declined to comment on the report. A Stripe spokesperson said the company doesn’t “comment on rumors or speculation.”

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The negotiations are taking place as Lores attempts to save the company from its lagging trajectory.

Lores joined PayPal in March, after spending years at HP. In April, Lores made the first moves in his turnaround plan, including an executive shuffle and splitting the business into three operating models: checkout solutions and PayPal, consumer financial services (and Venmo), and payment services and crypto. A month later, Lores told investors that PayPal would recommit to the fundamentals,” which included “becoming a technology company again.”

PayPal’s turnaround will also include a cost-saving plans, which is expected to reduce its workforce by 20% over the next two to three years.

PayPal was founded in 1998 by a number of men who went on to be Silicon Valley luminaries, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, and others. The company has struggled in recent years, after ballooning during the pandemic due to an e-commerce boom.

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Manus splits from Meta after China orders reversal of $2bn deal

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Last December’s acquisition faced near immediate scrutiny from Chinese authorities.

AI start-up Manus is going back to being an independent business after Meta’s $2bn-plus acquisition of the company was ordered in April by Chinese authorities to be unwound over national security concerns.

“We must take this step to comply with regulatory requirements in specific parts of the world,” Manus said in a blogpost yesterday (11 August). As part of these changes, it said that some of its users may lose the data they generated using Manus’s AI.

As we look to the future, we’re already preparing a series of new features that will push the boundaries of what’s possible for general AI agents once again.”

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Meta acquired the Singapore-headquartered Manus (developed by China’s Butterfly Effect) late last December as part of its continued push into agentic AI.

The acquisition faced near-immediate scrutiny from Chinese authorities, who launched a probe shortly following the deal’s announcement. Meta said that the deal “complied fully with applicable law”.

“Manus has built one of the leading autonomous general-purpose agents that can independently execute complex tasks like market research, coding and data analysis,” the Facebook parent said at the time of its purchase. Manus’s general-purpose AI agent, previewed last year, offered users capabilities similar to those of the likes of OpenAI’s Deep Research.

In February, Manus launched personal agents in messaging apps, allowing users to conduct research, structure data and make requests entirely through chat. It launched the agents on Telegram despite being owned by Meta at the time, but said that it planned to expand to WhatsApp, Line, Slack and Discord “very soon”.

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The acquisition deal was formally struck down in April by China’s National Development and Reform Commission, which said that the deal was not in accordance with state laws. The country is increasingly protective of its AI technology and talent, and has been making concerted efforts to build out its own infrastructure to back the technology.

Reversing the acquisition was difficult for Meta, which had reportedly already assimilated Manus employees, executives and technology with its own at the time of the ruling.

Investors – including Tencent Holdings, ZhenFund and Hongshan – had also received their proceeds from the acquisition by the time the two companies proceeded to break up. Tencent is now reportedly set to become Manus’s largest external shareholder.

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

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Marvel’s Wolverine arrives complete on disc, just as physical gaming fades

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In a nutshell: Marvel’s Wolverine is scheduled for release in a month’s time, and X-Men fans are eager to play Insomniac Games’ new title on their PlayStation 5 consoles. According to the project’s director, Wolverine will also be one of the last PS5 games designed as a complete experience that works out of the box.

During a recent interview, Insomniac’s Senior Project Director Jess Reiner-Reed confirmed that Marvel’s Wolverine will bring a pleasant surprise to fans of physical game releases. The upcoming action game will be fully playable from the disc, meaning user will be able to enjoy the experience straight out of the box with no mandatory day-one download.

Marvel’s Wolverine will come in both physical and digital editions, Reiner-Reed said. Insomniac developers are working on a day-one patch designed to further polish the experience, but there appears to be no requirement to download the update before customers can start playing the game from the get-go.

While confirming that the game will offer a complete on-disc experience, Reiner-Reed is encouraging gamers to download the patch anyway. Insomniac’s perfectionistic approach to development means the update could tweak and improve the game considerably, as the developers are still busy polishing it just a month before its official release.

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Physical releases are suddenly all the rage among gamers after Sony shared plans to stop making physical games starting in 2028. A few studios have expressed their support for disc-based gaming, and even major corporations such as Amazon are apparently willing to throw disc lovers a bone with specific campaigns.

Asked about Sony’s decision to abandon the disc format for future game releases, Insomniac representatives chose to avoid the question altogether. Insomniac’s head of technology, Mike Fitzgerald, said the studio simply wanted to talk about the game it had been working on for years, leaving other concerns to its owner, Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Wolverine will retell the story of the eponymous Marvel character during his amnesiac phase. While trying to regain his long-lost memories, Logan will help Jean Grey and other characters from the X-Men mythos free mutants abducted by Trask Industries.

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The game will be significantly more violent than the PS5 Spider-Man series Insomniac has worked on in the past, which seems like an apt choice considering Wolverine’s traditionally brutal ways of dealing with threats and enemy forces. Despite featuring many recurring characters from the franchise, Marvel’s Wolverine will not include a proper rendition of the X-Men collective just yet.

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Lenovo Idea Tab Delivers Everyday Utility Without the Premium Price Tag

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Lenovo Idea Tab 2026 Tablet
Students and casual users looking for a basic Android tablet are usually forced to choose between bare-bones devices that seem limiting and more expensive models filled with capabilities they may never use. Lenovo’s Idea Tab, priced at $149.99 (was $218), sits squarely in the middle of that range, offering a useful combination of screen quality, battery life, and accessories that make it functional right out of the box.



At almost 10-inches across and just shy of an inch thick, the metal-bodied tablet feels reassuringly sturdy without adding bulk. It weighs more than a pound, so it fits neatly into a backpack or can sit comfortably on a desk all day. Available in Luna Gray or Polar Blue, the simple and robust external design is great for daily use, and the IP52 classification provides some basic resistance to dust and mild water exposure, making it ideal for a school or a kitchen setting.

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The 11-inch IPS panel is one of the tablet’s most notable features. With a resolution of 2560 by 1600, it produces a sharp 2.5K image that comes to life owing to a 90Hz refresh rate that ensures scrolling and video playback go smoothly. The screen’s peak brightness of 500 nits is more than adequate for any lighting circumstances, and the anti-fingerprint coating eliminates the possibility of smudges disturbing your view. In addition, it has TÜV Rheinland certifications for low blue light and flicker-free operation, which is important for anyone who watches a lot of video. Color coverage is a reasonable 72 percent NTSC, and the 16:10 aspect ratio is ideal for maximizing vertical space for papers and multimedia. If that wasn’t enough, four Dolby Atmos-tuned speakers lie around the edges, producing far superior sound than you’d expect at this price. Even in busy situations, dialog sounds clear as a bell, and the overall volume is adequate for a small room without adding too much distortion.

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Power comes from a reasonably powerful MediaTek Dimensity 6300 CPU, which is paired with 4GB of LPDDR4X memory and a handy 128GB of UFS storage – all of which are very normal for the price. In reality, it effortlessly handles online browsing, note-taking apps, video calls, and light multitasking. Try pushing it with hard games or intensive creative work, and it will begin to struggle. It is completely responsive for normal college or home tasks, and if you need more storage capacity, a microSD slot allows you to add cards up to 2TB, making it ideal for anyone who collects a large number of PDFs, lecture recordings, or offline media. Connectivity is uncomplicated, with Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.2 on board, as well as a regular USB-C connection and headphone jack.

Lenovo Idea Tab 2026 Tablet
According to Lenovo, the battery can last up to 12 hours of YouTube viewing or 14 hours of online browsing, assuming optimal conditions. In practice, it’ll probably last you the entire day, even if you’re switching between courses and study sessions. Charging supports 20W input, but be aware that the adaptor is not always included, depending on the location or merchant package. Android 15 lies on top of Lenovo’s interface, with promised compatibility for two major OS upgrades and security patches to 2029. Circle to Search, which allows you to highlight text or images for quick lookups and translations, and a slew of preloaded tools like Lenovo AI Note, Squid, Nebo, and MyScript Calculator support handwriting, diagram sketching, and equation solving. There is also Smart Connect, which allows you to smoothly transfer jobs between this tablet and other Lenovo or compatible devices.

Lenovo Idea Tab 2026 Tablet
This bundle includes two valuable extras: a folio case and a Lenovo Tab Pen. The cover not only protects the screen and body, but it also serves as a handy stand, allowing you to put it up at almost any viewing angle you like – and it even includes a small pocket for the pen. The pen itself is very slick, with 4096 distinct levels of pressure sensitivity, tilt recognition, and a palm rejection feature that ensures you don’t lay your hand on the screen while writing.

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Ex-Cambridge Professor At Center of Plagiarism Row Found Dead

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Former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who resigned last week amid allegations of plagiarism and questions about his academic record, has been found dead at age 41 in London. The BBC reports: Jason Arday was found “unresponsive” at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon, emergency services said. Metropolitan Police officers were called by the London Ambulance Service. A 41-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene and his next of kin have been informed, the force said.
Arday resigned as a Cambridge professor of sociology of education last week after allegations of plagiarism and questions about some of his achievements. He had denied the claims.

In a statement, the Met Police said: “At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious.” The 41-year-old academic had denied any plagiarism – but admitted errors in his work – and last week said the recent furore had led to “an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack.” The row first erupted after another academic — self-defined “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, who was sacked from his Cambridge role in 2024 — said he found numerous instances of plagiarism in Prof Arday’s work and questioned some of his stated achievements.

[…] Announcing his resignation last week, Arday said the “personal cost” of the scrutiny had become “too great.” He said: “While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. “The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.” He stressed that his resignation should not “be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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JSW MG Hector Tomahawk Teased in India: 7-Seater EV Launching August 26

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MG Motors has quietly been doing great in the EV space with its Windsor, which is now one of the best-selling EVs in India. And to further bite into Mahindra and Tata’s share, JSW MG Motor India has teased its upcoming 7-seater electric SUV, which is expected to launch in India as the Hector Tomahawk. The company has confirmed that the SUV will be the first product based on its new ADAPT (Advanced Drive Architecture Platform Technology) platform and will make its India debut on August 26.

According to reports, the upcoming SUV is based on the Wuling Eksion, which is already sold in Indonesia. The Hector Tomahawk will initially launch in India as a fully electric model, with a plug-in hybrid version expected to follow at a later date. JSW MG has also opened pre-reservations for the SUV. Customers can reserve it on the company’s website for ₹21,000.

JSW MG Hector Tomahawk Design and Interior

The latest teaser reveals several design details of the upcoming SUV while keeping most of its exterior hidden. The Hector Tomahawk features rectangular LED headlamps with twin-element LED DRLs, along with prominent fenders, roof rails, pull-type door handles, and wraparound LED taillamps. The SUV also gets two-tone alloy wheels, black cladding along the lower doors, and a relatively flat roofline leading to a roof spoiler. The charging port appears to be positioned on the rear-left side.

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Some India-specific design changes are also expected compared with the Wuling Eksion. These include different artwork on the C-pillars and a knurled finish on the front grille. Based on the dimensions of the Indonesia-spec Eksion, the Hector Tomahawk could measure around 4,745mm in length, 1,850mm in width, and 1,755mm in height, with a 2,810mm wheelbase. However, JSW MG has not yet confirmed the final dimensions for the Indian model.

The teaser also confirms a seven-seat layout with a bench-style second row. The cabin shown in the teaser features a beige color theme and a panoramic sunroof. More details are yet to be confirmed, but the India-spec SUV could share several features with the Eksion. These may include a powered tailgate, powered and ventilated front seats, a 12.8-inch infotainment display, an 8.8-inch digital driver’s display, wireless charging, automatic climate control with vents for the second and third rows, a 360-degree camera, an electronic parking brake, six airbags, and ADAS.

Expected Powertrain & Pricing

The ADAPT platform can support different powertrain configurations, including strong-hybrid, range-extender, and plug-in hybrid systems. In India, however, the Hector Tomahawk will be an EV first. While the specific details are still under wraps, the Indonesia-spec Wuling Eksion makes 201hp and 310Nm of torque with a single front motor. Everything is powered by a 69.2kWh LFP battery and has a claimed CLTC range of up to 530km. A plug-in hybrid version is also expected to arrive later.

The JSW MG Hector Tomahawk is expected to be priced between ₹18 lakh and ₹25 lakh (ex-showroom), although the company has not announced the official pricing yet. If true, it’ll go head-to-head with the Mahindra XEV 9S and the Harrier EV.

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Nubia Z70 Ultra Smartphone Gets Transformed Into Desktop PC with Two Coolers, Runs The Witcher 3

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Nubia Z70 Ultra Smartphone Desktop PC Mod
Photo credit: ntsnow
Reddit user ntsow started with a straightforward question. How far can a smartphone go once it stops living as a phone? The answer arrived in the form of a Nubia Z70 Ultra clamped between a pair of full-size desktop CPU coolers inside a clear acrylic case. What began as curiosity about sustained performance became a working desktop that still runs Android, boots a full Linux environment, and plays Windows games at settings most phones never attempt.


Nubia Z70 Ultra Smartphone Desktop PC Mod
The handset is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite, which has prime cores that can max out at 4.32 GHz, 24 GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a whopping 1TB of UFS 4.0 storage. While newer phones in this family have achieved even faster clock speeds, the folks at ntsow purposefully chose to stick with this older technology. To be honest, that was no error, because the goal was not to outdo whatever the latest boosted variation was; rather, the experiment was simple: what happens when you don’t have to worry about thermal restrictions at all?

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  • SMOOTH, POWERFUL, IMMERSIVE – The MediaTek Dimensity 6300 processor is more powerful than ever, with the AI-enhanced multitasking you need to stay…
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Nubia Z70 Ultra Smartphone Desktop PC Mod
The phone hardware was fitted between the two large heat sinks, resulting in contact plates covering the major components on both sides. The original chassis, camera modules, and mobile radio components were then removed to free up space and let heat to circulate more freely. The display was left in place but relocated to the acrylic container for good measure. Plug in some external power, a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse, and what you get looks nothing like a phone, and more crucially, it refuses to throttle in the manner that a sealed up phone would.

Nubia Z70 Ultra Smartphone Desktop PC Mod
The operating system of choice remained Android, as Termux provides a native XFCE4 Linux desktop that employs the Turnip driver to enable some real Vulkan action. From there, the system can launch Linux software directly and access Windows titles via Wine, as well as some extra translation layers, Box64 and Hangover, to ensure that everything works together properly. So no dual-booting, no separate Windows installation, and no custom bootloader; Android serves as the basis, with the desktop and games running on top of it. The nicest thing is that you can copy and paste, manage your files, and use the browser without any of the limitations that come with container-style emulators.

Nubia Z70 Ultra Smartphone Desktop PC Mod
Benchmark results showed the cooling payoff clearly. In the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test the setup held 99 percent stability across twenty loops. The best loop scored 6,980 and the lowest 6,910, a gap of only seventy points. That’s a ranking score of 10,533, which puts the upgraded Z70 Ultra just ahead of a Galaxy S25+ with the same processor. Now, I know some people will be like, “Oh, look at me, I got a good score!” but, honestly, it’s not about that as much as it is about proving that the silicon can just keep trucking at those boundaries for lengthy periods of time, rather than just dropping off a cliff after a few minutes.

Nubia Z70 Ultra Smartphone Desktop PC Mod
Gaming was where things got serious, as The Witcher 3 ran at 1920 x 1080 with the Ultra graphics setting enabled, and frame rates hovered between 20 and 30 much of the time, with the Adreno GPU operating at around 99% usage. Some scenes did register a little higher. Granted, this isn’t quite the same as having a dedicated gaming PC, but the idea that you can achieve these kinds of settings from a phone chip in the first place is simply incredible. What about other titles, such as Dofus? They launch directly from the XFCE desktop, bypassing Android mirroring.
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Autonomous AI attacks pose ‘clear and present danger’ to critical infrastructure

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In early July, attackers used open source AI agents to autonomously hack government systems and energy companies, signaling to defenders that AI-powered attacks against critical infrastructure are no longer theoretical.

“There is a clear and present danger,” Tom Kellermann, TrendAI VP of AI security and threat research, told The Register.

“As the geopolitical tension boils, systemic destructive cyberattacks launched by autonomous AI will occur,” he said. “Weaponized AI will disable the safety systems of critical infrastructure,  thus leading to kinetic disasters. Just like we see autonomous strike vehicles operating on the battlefield in Ukraine, we should expect autonomous weaponized AI.”

In fact, the prospect of attackers using AI against critical infrastructure was the top concern of every national security adviser, law enforcement official, and private-sector threat analyst The Reg spoke with at last week’s Hacker Summer Camp conferences.

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“It’s the targeting of critical infrastructure for us,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, told us during an interview at Black Hat.

“We’re very focused on the downstream impact targeting of critical infrastructure,” Leatherman said. “That is where cyber becomes kinetic, and whether it is our water and wastewater treatment plants, whether it’s the electric grid, whether it’s the high-frequency trading networks and the financial networks, all of those, if the integrity of those are compromised, will have significant impact to communities and national security. So that’s what keeps our teams up at night. How are we moving to secure critical infrastructure?”

Where cyber becomes kinetic

During the first four days of July, suspected Chinese operators aimed an attack framework built on Hermes and OpenClaw AI agents at targets in Taiwan.

Across 12 “attack waves,” the “near-autonomous” system deployed up to eight sub-agents, each assigned its own targets and techniques, and broke into a Taiwanese government website. Ultimately, they compromised a government email system, the country’s nuclear safety agency, IT supply chain vendors, and at least seven energy sector companies, finding and exploiting misconfigurations and vulnerabilities while stealing sensitive data, credentials, and other secrets as they moved across the network.

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The Taiwanese government intrusion also followed a series of cyberattacks against water and wastewater utilities in the United States. While the Trump administration hasn’t attributed these to a particular government or group, private sector threat hunters – including Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director – blame Iran for these intrusions. 

Military conflicts spilling into cyberspace are nothing new, but these cyberattacks in America brought the war with Iran to more than 30 small-town water systems in Minnesota and targets across nearly a dozen other states.

To be clear, there’s no evidence that attackers used AI to hack these water utilities. Most were small, community systems that left programmable logic controllers (PLCs) directly exposed to the internet using default or weak passwords.

Still, these breaches expose “40, 50 years of tech debt,” former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis told The Reg during an interview at Black Hat. 

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This technical debt – deferred maintenance, unpatched or end-of-life systems, and delayed security updates – expands the attack surface and gives intruders more ways into critical systems, threatening operations and potentially disrupting services people rely on every day.

“The water sector attacks – regardless of who is doing them – is taking advantage of unpatched vulnerabilities in the PLCs,” Inglis said. “We’ve known about these particular vulnerabilities for years now, and yet we’ve not done anything about them because they’re low-level, not easily accessible.”

Inglis added that there’s no indication the digital intruders used AI to exploit these PLCs.

‘There’s an alligator in the boat’

However, AI systems allow attackers to cash in on tech debt, and they don’t need access to frontier models to do it. Free, open-weight models also excel at finding bugs in software and configurations, chaining these together, and abusing them to break software and systems.

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Earlier this summer, University of Toronto researchers used an unnamed publicly available open-weight model, released in 2025, to develop a computer worm that they claim spread through an enterprise test network.

The self-propagating code adapted on the fly to identify known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations on target systems, then generated and executed attacks to move laterally through the network and compromise additional machines.

“Commodity models can do that, and many of the vulnerabilities they find do not require access to the source code – it’s in the configurations, and configurations change over time,” Inglis said.

When it comes to attackers abusing AI systems, “I wouldn’t be worried about the frontier models,” Inglis said. “Worry about the models that are already on the street. Turns out there’s an alligator in the boat, and it’s the commodity models.”

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Plus, as we’ve seen in previous breaches, both government-backed goons and criminal groups increasingly use AI to automate reconnaissance. Security analysts worry that the technology could also help attackers acquire expertise in industrial control systems (ICS).

When OT knowledge becomes a commodity

“What protects ICS? More than anything, it’s obscurity,” said John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, during a press briefing at Black Hat. “It is an obscure, esoteric, knowledge set that a handful of people – I call them uber nerds – have, and that attackers rarely have the necessary knowledge to carry out. That’s no longer the case. That knowledge is simply on tap.”

AI tools mean miscreants don’t need to be ICS or operational technology experts to carry out destructive cyberattacks on critical networks and facilities. They just have to ask an agent to learn everything about these systems and do the dirty work for them.

“There have been threat actors who are capable of this at the top level, like China and Russia,” Hultquist said. “But now I’m afraid the actors who are just a couple steps down – North Korea, Iran – who don’t have the same focus on that technology are going to have far greater success. They’re going to have the tools necessary to be as aggressive as they want to.”

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During what was probably the most talked about Black Hat briefing of the week, OpenAI employees provided more details about how their models escaped their training pens, went rogue, and hacked Hugging Face to complete a security evaluation.

We learned the AI agents spent months asking other agents for help, building message boards, developing their own communication protocols – essentially creating a hive mind to carry out the attack. 

“In the near future, we should expect that threat actors will intentionally deploy, optimize, weaponize, and use offensive agent collectives in the manner that we have just described here,” OpenAI technical staffer Michael Dalton said.

Retired general and former NSA chief Paul Nakasone, speaking to reporters at DEF CON, called the Hugging Face attack “an inflection point in terms of AI-generated, autonomous cyberattacks.”

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“This is the challenge: that we have to, over the next several months, get the defensive side much quicker and much better than they are today,” he added.

Therein lies the challenge: offensive uses of AI appear to be advancing faster than autonomous defenses, and attackers don’t face the legal and ethical constraints imposed on defenders.

“I think we’re still a ways out from having swarms of autonomous, defensive agents fighting attacks,” Ryan Whelan, global head of Accenture Cyber Intelligence, told The Reg at Black Hat. “That’s probably over a year out over the horizon. But I do think we’re going to see it first on the adversary side, because they don’t care if they break things.”

Kellermann quoted Victor Hugo: “Not all the armies of the history of the world can stop an idea whose time has come.”  

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“That idea,” he said, “is weaponized AI. Shields up.” ®

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