from the needless-deaths dept

Last year, as decades of work by RFK Jr. to undermine vaccines with false links to deaths and autism culminated in his appointment to lead HHS, America saw the largest resurgence of measles cases in something like three decades. Three people died, including two children, all unvaccinated. Kennedy mostly ignored the outbreak from the beginning and has since only mustered the ability to say that people should get the MMR vaccine out of one side of his mouth while reminding everyone that he thinks vaccines are bad out of the other. Measles continued to roar into 2026, with Kennedy and HHS officials attempting to downplay case counts and deaths the entire time. We’ve already eclipsed 2025’s record-breaking case count here in 2026 and we still have months to add to that total.

And now we have our first two deaths from measles in 2026, as well. Both occurred in Pennsylvania and, while health officials aren’t releasing many details due to privacy concerns, it was noted that both of the deceased were unvaccinated for measles.

They are the first measles deaths reported in Pennsylvania in 35 years and the first deaths reported in the US in 2026. Last year, the US saw three measles deaths: two in otherwise-healthy but unvaccinated school-age children in Texas and one in an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico. Prior to those deaths, the US had not seen a measles death since 2015, when a woman with underlying conditions became severely ill.

Citing privacy, health officials in Pennsylvania are not providing information on the people who died beyond that they were unvaccinated and were residents of Lancaster County. Officials noted that the deaths are among 393 confirmed cases reported this year across 28 counties in the state.

As we talked about recently, due directly to the decades of work Kennedy has taken to undermine vaccines, vaccination rates for school children have and are continuing to fall. These deaths, and the vast majority of the case counts, are completely needless. We have the solution to preventing them. The MMR vaccine is safe and effective for those that are not immunocompromised. There is no scientific reason to believe it causes autism. And, importantly, if 95% of us get vaccinated against measles, we achieve herd immunity which protects those that can’t get vaccinated, as well as very young children who haven’t been vaccinated yet.

And that last category is one that is likely to grow, thanks to the Trump administration’s blatantly stupid executive order attempting to curtail how childhood vaccines are delivered and when. Not to mention the constant muddy waters Kennedy himself creates as to whether vaccines are good or bad, when they are so, what risks they carry, and so on. It is not an overreach to say that this administration, and Kennedy’s decades of bullshit in particular, got these people killed.

Still, anti-vaccine rhetoric, misinformation, and disinformation have shaken confidence in the vaccine, driving down vaccination rates. Some of that damaging discourse has come from Trump administration officials, most notably ardent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is currently the US health secretary. But President Trump has also contributed, falsely claiming in a White House press event two weeks ago that the MMR vaccine can be “quite lethal.” The MMR vaccine has never been linked to a death in a person with a competent immune system (it’s not recommended in those who are immunocompromised).

One hundred percent correct. People look to their leaders for guidance on things like public health. Or they used to, at least. For some non-insignificant percentage of the country, they really do think Trump and Kennedy know what they’re talking about when it comes to matters of medicine. They don’t, of course. Not even close. But enough people are listening to them that it puts all of us in danger.

This has to end. Outbreaks of infectious diseases at the level of the measles tend to grow exponentially if not addressed. That’s why we’re already past last year’s case count. The project for getting back to herd immunity and proper vaccination rates will not be a short one. It will take years.

And I very much doubt that we won’t pass the death count here before the end of the year as well.

Filed Under: anti-vaxxers, health & human services, measles, mmr, pennsylvania, rfk jr., trump administration, vaccines

Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and to make changes to Facebook and other online services, all to settle a federal lawsuit alleging teenagers are being harmed by social media.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has been dealing with a trial concerning the mental and social effects of social media for a while, but it’s seemingly no longer a problem. The social giant has managed to hammer out a settlement with some functional concessions as well as a hefty fine.

The settlement is with 48 state attorneys general across the entire United States, including four jurisdictions, reports the Wall Street Journal. The exceptions are New Mexico, which won in a similar trial in the spring, and Florida, which didn’t take part in the settlement.

Under the settlement’s terms, Meta will pay a maximum of $18 billion, but only if TikTok and YouTube also play nice. Otherwise, Meta will only have to pay 70% of the figure.

TikTok and YouTube would each have to pay a combined $5.3 billion between the two companies and abide by the same service changes as Meta. In exchange, Meta would also have to pay the remaining 30%, which is also $5.3 billion.

The settlement funds will be provided to the states in annual payments over ten years, with per-state amounts varying by population.

The deal has Meta agreeing to set a default one-hour time limit per day for underage users. It also agreed to introduce a “night mode” to block apps between midnight and 6 A.M., and a “school mode” to disable push notifications between 8 A.M. and 3 P.M.

The case still needs to be approved by a federal judge before it is finalized.

As a byproduct, the settlement stops an ongoing trial involving the state attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. The quartet alleged that Meta had violated state consumer protection laws as well as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA).

More to come

When it comes to the actual amount of cash Meta will have to pay for the settlement, it will be viewed as the company avoiding a much bigger penalty.

The state AGs collectively wanted around $200 billion in damages for the lawsuit. The resulting settlement is less than 10% of that figure, if Meta has to pay the full amount.

In the New Mexico trial that Meta lost, it was ordered to pay $375 million in civil penalties and create a $567 million abatement fund to rectify harms toward New Mexico youth, as well as app changes.

This may not be the entire end of the matter for Meta, either. It still has to deal with lawsuits from school districts and individuals claiming to have been wronged by the design and utility of social media apps.

All but a few of our very youngest readers are surely familiar with music formats that rely on optical disks. When we say [RobDevBuilds] made a MOD tracker that uses an optical disk, then, you might be forgiven for thinking he stuck a bunch of MOD files onto a CD– MOD files being a format of electronic music that was conceived of on the Commodore Amiga that is still used to this day. A dedicated MOD-CD player might be a fun project, but it’s not what [Rob] did; his project is far more impressive and impractical, as he’s come up with a way to encode the MOD files on paper for optical playback. This way the Amiga’s legacy can be preserved longer than the paltry thousand years promised by the optical M-disk format.

Zooming way, way in on the disk reveals that he’s actually printing the patterns of the MOD file row by row, just like you’d see playing it in a ‘tracker’ program. A MOD file, you see, does not encode music like a WAV or MP3; rather, like with MIDI, it lists the notes the software reading the file– traditionally called a tracker–is to recreate. Unlike a MIDI file, though, you don’t have to store the same notes more than once: repeating sections are stored in patterns. So most of the disk is just a long list of hexadecimal numbers: several columns worth, one for each ‘voice’ or instrument playing in the song. Another difference with MIDI is that MOD files are self-contained in that they are supposed to contain the samples, which isn’t in evidence until you flip over the disk.

There’s no B-side to [Rob]’s album; instead a QR-code like series of barcodes is used to encode the samples used in each track on the disk, as well as other information needed to recreate the MOD file, including metadata like title and artist, and the sequencing of the patterns on the front. Of course this means he needs two cameras on his physical mod player, one on each side, and steppers to slide them across the disk like a linear tracking turntable. The front is read via OCR of his modified Amiga “Topaz” font, while the rear holds the first 1084 bytes of the MOD file in a QR-inspired format [Rob] produced specifically for this project.

Unlike the last time we saw someone store music in QR codes, the more modest size requirements of modfiles– something that led to their use in keygens— means this player can store the music’s 8-bit sound samples without the OPUS compression [Rob] is using affecting fidelity. He’s working on another video to give the details of the player– as he works out the bugs, right now it can’t jump betwixt patterns on the disk as fast as some modfiles need–but we’re willing to hazard a guess he’s got a Raspberry Pi in there, and that it’s probably not running the Amiga-inspired AROS operating system.

A critical vulnerability chain in the popular Avada theme for WordPress can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary PHP code on the server.

The exploit chains six security issues into a zero-click attack. The flaws are collectively tracked as CVE-2026-18431 and received a 9.8 critical severity score.

The attack comprises exploits for authorization, input-validation, trust-boundary, and file-handling weaknesses, which must be executed in a specific order to enable arbitrary PHP code execution on a target server.

Hackers who successfully exploit these vulnerabilities could fully compromise websites for malicious activities ranging from planting malware and accessing databases to redirecting visitors to malicious sites or adding rogue admin accounts.

CVE-2026-18431 affects Avada versions up to 7.16 and Fusion Builder plugin versions up to 3.16, researchers at Defiant’s Wordfence team say in a report on Tuesday.

While ThemeFusion, the developer behind Avada and Fusion Builder, fixed the vulnerability, Wordfence is not sharing complete technical details to give administrators sufficient time to install the latest updates and has only provided the following attack chain overview:

1. Exposing attacker-controlled input through a public request
2. Passing that input to functionality restricted from anonymous users
3. Invoking a privileged component outside its intended context
4. Using request data to influence trusted state
5. Accessing an insufficiently protected administrative operation
6. Bypassing file-handling restrictions on what could be written and where

Exploitation requires a vulnerable version of both the Avada theme and the Fusion Builder plugin to be active on the target website.

The Avada theme is quite popular, with more than 1 million sales, so CVE-2026-18431 threatens a sizable pool of sites.

“Fusion Builder is a required plugin for the Avada theme. Therefore all sites running the Avada theme will also be running the Fusion Builder plugin,” Wordfence told BleepingComputer.

“[That being said…] the prerequisites don’t narrow the pool of potential targets. Any site that has the Avada theme installed is going to be exploitable.”

Wordfence discovered the six-step vulnerability chain using an internal agentic framework called Argus, which also developed proof-of-concept exploit code, all in about two hours.

Argus found and successfully reproduced the flaw on July 30, and the researchers shared the full details to the vendor on August 5. ThemeFusion acknowledged the report on August 10 and released fixes in Avada 7.16.1 and Fusion Builder 3.16.1 yesterday.

Update 27/08 – Removed wrongful claim that the exploitable pool of sites is smaller than the total of Avada installations after receiving clarifications from the Wordfence team that the two plugins are automatically installed together.

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

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A week ago, a mystery model called Ox Alpha showed up on OpenRouter — one more entrant among more than 400 models, with roughly 10 new ones launching every week. What made it stand out wasn’t just the free price tag; it was quietly good. Hobbyists and indie developers noticed fast, pushing several trillion tokens through it daily, with community estimates for the week ranging from single digits to over 20 trillion.

AI enthusiasts spent the next six days doing forensics and speculating who could have built it, and who could have the infrastructure to serve that many tokens for free. First the guess was a U.S. lab: the long-awaited Gemini, or Anthropic shipping a good-enough middle tier, or Elon sitting on so much capacity he dropped Ox Alpha (note the naming). People ran tokenizer traces and networking analysis. A real Sherlock Holmes mystery week.

On August 26, Z.ai put its name on it. Ox Alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash. They’d been running it on public traffic on purpose, but the real surprise was not how good the model was (it’s really good). It was served entirely on Chinese chips and infrastructure. List price is 15 cents / 50 cents per million tokens. OpenRouter’s launch promo is 50% off that, 7.5 cents / 25 cents, through September 9. The weights are open (MIT), and inference is hosted by Z.ai as well as GMI Cloud, Cloudflare, and other US-based inference providers.

Artificial Analysis put the model on their intelligence-versus-cost chart the same day. GLM-5.3-Flash lands at 57 on the index for about nine cents a task. A US mid-tier like GPT-5.6 Sol (max) sits around 59 at 67 cents, meaning for two points of intelligence you are paying about 7.4x more. Take it further and Grok 4.6 is at 61 at 94 cents a task, or about 10x for a four-point gain. At this point the token economics heavily influences the consumption calculus. At the top end the curve has flattened. If we take this open-weight bait, what happens to the heavy infrastructure circular investments we made that never accounted for a strong Chinese inference contender?

American enterprises are already feeling the cost pressure. Take Uber. CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information in April he was going “back to the drawing board because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already”: the company’s full-year 2026 coding budget gone in four months, with Naga personally burning $1,200 in a single two-hour demo. By June, Uber had put a $1,500-per-person-per-tool cap in place. The tools were useful — but usefulness and value aren’t the same thing. Uber’s COO, Andrew Macdonald, still couldn’t draw a line from those dashboards to “25% more useful consumer features.”

McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI survey says 80% of people say they’re faster, 37% of companies see some EBIT, and 32% skipped at least one software purchase because they could build that feature in-house with coding agents. Organizations want to cut the bill. They cannot afford to abandon AI. The task now is to optimize usage across the org.

We cannot avoid Chinese model makers like Zhipu, Qwen, DeepSeek, and the rest. Time and again they have brought their own ingenuity to challenge SOTA labs and cut costs. On OpenRouter, Chinese models passed US token share in early June, and the top of that board is still mostly Chinese labs. The indie developer world already looks like GLM Flash, DeepSeek Flash, MiniMax, Kimi, and sometimes Grok or Claude if they already paid for a heavy subscription. If you are already subscribed to Grok or OpenAI through your company, that is now a sunk cost. Finance will start asking whether those seats still make sense if pay-as-you-go gets this cheap.

So what choices remain? Consider your coding and agentic work in three buckets, split by share of tasks and tokens run through each tier — not dollars, since GLM-5.3-Flash’s much lower per-token price means an even dollar split would already send most of your volume there. At the very top you have Fable and Opus. If you need to analyze a complex strategy or write a detailed execution plan, the extra points of intelligence matter and you should spend top dollar, but only for those rare tasks you cannot skimp on — probably 5% of the task volume. The mid tier is Kimi K3, Gemini 3.7 Flash, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Grok 4.6, all sitting around 60 on the intelligence index. Kimi is a heavy hitter for coding and a fan favorite; then Grok 4.6 is a close second, though its smaller context window holds it back. Put about 50% of the volume here. For the last 45%, strongly consider GLM-5.3-Flash as the volume workhorse. Your harness, your mix (coding vs content vs marketing), and your evals will draw your own frontier. Chinese open-weight models will save you money — and they need to be in your cost calculus.

September is shaping up to be a deluge of new models — Google, xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepSeek all have releases expected. The Pareto frontier might move again. But the direction is set: more intelligence for less money. Labs that can’t get their serving costs down will lose the volume — and with it, the audience that volume creates.

Before September, some homework:

1. Count your tokens. Can you attribute spend to a top-line metric like customer or revenue growth? If not, at least development velocity or productivity? Without clear goals, it is going to be hard to defend the spend.

2. Build your AI budget again. Org by org, what is planned AI spend? Can those leaders come up with a proposal and defend it?

3. Define your model strategy by team. Write the three tiers. High for irreversible decisions and strategies. Mid for the paid seat and everyday coding. Low (GLM-5.3-Flash) for volume.

Next month the models get cheaper again. Your teams get hungrier. The companies that come out of this will place their bets intentionally, and they won’t let those agents think on Opus or Fable unless the task is really worth it.

Parvez Syed Mohamed is a product executive who has built API integration and agent platforms at Salesforce (MuleSoft), Oracle and at AgentPaaS.ai. He works on production agentic systems. Some of his thoughts on building software with Agents is here: https://github.com/parvezsyed

Welcome to the VentureBeat community!

Our guest posting program is where technical experts share insights and provide neutral, non-vested deep dives on AI, data infrastructure, cybersecurity and other cutting-edge technologies shaping the future of enterprise.

Read more from our guest post program — and check out our guidelines if you’re interested in contributing an article of your own!

Apple

Apple’s next event, which it’s calling “Surprise and shine,” is set for Sept. 9. Historically, Apple has used its September event to announce new hardware, particularly the newest models of iPhones. That means we only have a few weeks left to see if Apple will release the rumored foldable iPhone. 

You can catch the Apple event on Apple’s website, Apple TV, the Apple Developer app and the company’s YouTube channel on Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. BST). We expect to hear from Apple’s incoming CEO, John Ternus, for the first time in his role after he takes up the mantle on Sept. 1. 

Here’s what Apple could announce at the event.

A foldable iPhone

Whether Apple calls it the iPhone Fold, iPhone Ultra or the iPhone Flip, the company could show off a foldable iPhone at its September event. Leaks and supply chain reports suggest the foldable iPhone will be a squat, book-style foldable, similar to the Samsung Galaxy Fold 8.

Those same leaks also suggest the price of the iPhone foldable could be between $2,000 and $2,500, which could price many people out. According to a CNET survey, US adults are only willing to spend an average of $781 on a foldable iPhone, which is less than the price of the base model iPhone 17 ($799).

Patrick Holland, CNET’s director of content, said that foldable phones remain a niche interest among most shoppers, but that Apple is likely to price the device to reflect its expensive manufacturing costs.

New iPhone 18 Pro models 

According to Bloomberg, Apple could unveil the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max at its September event, too. Those iPhones could also see a price hike, with prices starting at $1,200, up from the iPhone 17 Pro‘s starting price of $1,100.

You might notice that entry-level iPhone 18 models are missing from that lineup. That’s because Bloomberg suspects Apple will split the iPhone launch this year. That means we could see the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max in September before Apple rolls out the iPhone 18, iPhone 18E and potentially a refreshed iPhone Air in the spring.

New Apple Watches

Apple is also reportedly preparing to announce an Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 at its September event. According to Bloomberg, the new watches could include faster chips and new health and fitness features. However, the new watches likely won’t receive a design change.

There’s no solid information about how much these watches will cost. However, Apple has raised a lot of hardware prices this year, so while the starting price of the Apple Watch 11 is $399, the Apple Watch 12 could cost more at launch.

The AirPods 5

Bloomberg also reports that Apple could debut the AirPods 5 at the September event, releasing an updated version of the company’s entry-level headphones. Apple released the AirPods 4 almost two years ago, in 2024. Apple isn’t expected to show the rumored camera-equipped AirPods at the September event. We could see those later this year, or in 2027.

The AirPods 4 had a starting price of $129 at launch, but given Apple’s other price increases, the AirPods 5 could also see a higher starting price. 

Apple did not immediately respond to CNET’s request to comment.

For more Apple news, here’s what to know about the new M6 Mac Mini and when you might be able to preorder an iPhone 18.

Zachary McAuliffe

Senior writer

Zach began writing for CNET in November, 2021 after writing for a broadcast news station in his hometown, Cincinnati, for five years. You can usually find him hanging out with his wife, son and dog. You can reach him at zmcauliffe@cnet.com.

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After a series of GTA 6 leaks revealed everything from gameplay footage and the game’s Leonida map to Jason wandering into a nudist town, Rockstar Games has remained on track with its plans for a first-of-its-kind exclusive extended look on Netflix.

GTA 6: An Extended Look will premiere on Netflix on August 27 at 3pm ET / 8pm BST / August 28 at 5am AEST, giving Netflix members an extended look at Rockstar’s most anticipated game. While Rockstar hasn’t confirmed exactly what will be shown, there’s plenty of speculation that it could finally include official gameplay and even Trailer 3.

September is a big month for PlayStation owners, with Marvel’s Wolverine leading the pack when it comes out on Sept. 15. For PlayStation Plus subscribers, however, the monthly lineup is a little less exciting. Baseball fans should get plenty of mileage out of MLB The Show 26, while Sniper Elite: Resistance offers a solid option for players who enjoy slower, more methodical action. Wobbly Life and Chained Echoes round out the lineup, but despite having some worthwhile games, September 2026 isn’t exactly the most thrilling month to subscribe to PS Plus.

PS Plus, which is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, offers a large, constantly expanding library of games. Subscribers can choose from the Essential, Extra and Premium tiers, each with unique perks and benefits. Starting at $11 per month, the plans give subscribers access to monthly games and rewards, and each month, all subscribers can access a handful of games at no additional charge.

If you subscribe to PlayStation Plus, here are the games you can play at no additional cost starting on Sept. 1.

Sniper Elite: Resistance

Built around precise sniping, stealth and tactical third-person combat, Sniper Elite: Resistance puts you behind the rifle of Harry Hawker as he infiltrates Nazi-occupied France. Open-ended missions let you scout enemy positions, find alternate routes, set traps and complete objectives your way, while realistic ballistics account for wind, gravity and heart rate. Customize weapons with new scopes, barrels and ammunition, then tackle the campaign cooperatively. Propaganda missions, Axis Invasion and competitive multiplayer add extra ways to test your skills.

MLB The Show 26

MLB The Show 26 delivers a deep and authentic baseball experience, with revamped hitting and pitching systems that give players more control in crucial moments. Build your career from high school and college to the majors and potentially the Hall of Fame in Road to the Show, or manage every aspect of a franchise with an overhauled trade system and smarter roster logic. For those looking for a longer-term challenge, Road to the Show lets you build a career from high school through college and the major leagues.

Wobbly Life

There isn’t much structure to Wobbly Life, and that’s exactly the point. You can roam its open world, pick up odd jobs, earn money and spend it on houses, vehicles, clothes and pets, or ignore all of that and just cause trouble either by yourself or with up to four players online or local co-op. The physics-based sandbox makes nearly everything interactive, so even simple activities can turn into ridiculous accidents. There’s also a surprising amount to uncover through story missions, puzzles, hidden secrets and mini-games.

Chained Echoes 

Chained Echoes blends old-school JRPG traditions with a few ideas of its own, following a group of heroes caught up in a war between three kingdoms. Battles are turn-based, but the Overdrive system skill use mechanic forces you to carefully manage your attacks and abilities to keep your party in a beneficial zone without overheating. Outside of combat, you can explore Valandis on foot, travel by airship and eventually climb into mech suits for both exploration and combat. With no random encounters, a deep equipment system and plenty of side content, it offers a modern take on the 16-bit RPG formula.

For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the gaming service and a rundown of PS Plus Extra and Premium games added in August. You can also check out the latest and upcoming games on Xbox Game Pass.

Oscar Gonzalez

Contributing writer

Oscar Gonzalez is a Texas native who covered video games, conspiracy theories, misinformation and cryptocurrency.

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