Mozilla has launched a built-in ad blocker for Firefox on iOS, built on Apple’s WebKit content blocker technology with the EasyList filter and switched off by default. Apple opened its browser engine to rivals in March 2024 to comply with the Digital Markets Act, and no alternative engine has shipped to a European iPhone since.

Firefox on iOS finally has a built-in ad blocker. It arrived with Firefox 155 after a few weeks of testing, Digital Trends reported.

It works on Apple’s terms rather than Mozilla’s. The feature uses Apple’s WebKit content blocker with the community-maintained EasyList filter, and it is switched off until you find it in settings.

What it cannot block is the more telling part. Ads served by the site itself remain, so do ads in search results, and Mozilla’s own sponsored shortcuts are handled separately.

Firefox is late to this by years. Brave, Opera and Vivaldi have all shipped built-in blocking on iOS already, and desktop users have had extensions for far longer.

The reason is the engine underneath. Every browser on an iPhone renders with WebKit, so Firefox on iOS is Apple’s engine wearing a different interface.

Europe changed that rule on paper. Apple opened BrowserEngineKit in March 2024 to comply with the Digital Markets Act. The interface arrived with iOS 17.4 and applies only in the European Union.

Two and a half years on, nobody has shipped one. Google and Mozilla have both prototyped their own engines and neither has released it.

Mozilla said why at the time. Apple’s implementation would force it to build and maintain two browsers, “a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear“, a spokesperson said in January 2024.

Microsoft has since put a number on the cost. Its engineers measured a Blink prototype 28.6% faster than WebKit on Speedometer 3.1, on the same device.

Open Web Advocacy wants Brussels to intervene. Apple has “had more than two years to produce a compliant solution“, its director Alex Moore said.

The Commission has not been reticent elsewhere. Apple lost its challenge to gatekeeper designation at the General Court in July.

On the engine, though, nothing has moved. The rule exists, the interface exists, and no rival engine reaches a European iPhone. Microsoft has not shipped a Blink-based Edge either.

Which is what this feature quietly demonstrates. Mozilla built the best blocker Apple’s API allows, in the same year Chrome disabled Manifest V2 extensions including uBlock Origin.

[This is a sponsored article with Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC).]

Did you know? In 2026, Malaysia’s gig economy was reported to comprise a massive workforce of 1.64 million platform workers and non-platform workers. 

From food delivery and e-hailing riders to freelancers and independent contractors, these workers had no payslips to show banks, no steady income to qualify for credit, and no savings infrastructure designed for their irregular earnings pattern.

This evolving employment landscape presents unique financial challenges, leaving many gig workers more vulnerable to income disruptions and unexpected expenses. 

In response, various initiatives have emerged in recent years to strengthen financial inclusion and improve financial security for this growing workforce.

One such initiative is the Financial Innovation Gig Economy Challenge, highlighted during APEC Malaysia 2020. The challenge sought innovative solutions to improve the economic and financial well-being of gig workers across four key pillars of financial health: spending, saving, borrowing and financial planning.

What’s the Financial Innovation Gig Economy Challenge?

Facilitated by Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) and the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), and funded by MetLife Foundation, the Financial Innovation Gig Economy Challenge called for innovative solutions to improve the financial well-being of gig workers. The initiative reflects MDEC’s commitment to accelerating digital innovation while supporting the growth of Malaysia’s digital economy through the Malaysia Digital (MD)national strategic initiative.

It attracted over 100 submissions globally, with 10 teams selected for an intensive eight-week bootcamp and innovation programme. Using Malaysia as a testbed, participants refined their solutions through: 

• industry insights,
• human-centred design tools, 
• mentorship, and 
• access to key ecosystem players.

Three winning solutions were selected to pilot and scale their solutions with gig workers in Malaysia. 

As Malaysia Digital (MD) status companies, Paywatch, Versa, and Get Hyred were recognised for their potential to strengthen employability and financial health through innovations such as app-based training, income-smoothing tools, and accessible savings solution, while contributing to Malaysia’s growing digital economy.

Here’s how each of these platforms addressed different challenges faced by our gig workers, from earning and managing money to building long-term financial resilience and career growth.

1. Paywatch: Earned Wage Access as a Banking Bridge

Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Paywatch is one of Southeast Asia’s leading financial wellness platforms and the region’s largest provider of Earned Wage Access (EWA) solutions.

For many gig and frontline workers, where income can be irregular and cash flow tightly tied to pay cycles, this approach helps bridge the gap between work completed and wages received. Workers across Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea are able to access wages they’ve already earned anytime before payday. 

Centered on its EWA offering, Paywatch’s mission is to help employees manage their finances more effectively, from avoiding unnecessary loans to making more mindful use of their income. This is increasingly relevant as EWA adoption spreads across industries with large frontline and hourly workforces. 

Some notable multinational companies adopting Paywatch’s solution include DFI Retail Group (Guardian), Genting Group, Shangri-La Hotels, Lotus’s (CP Group), Shake Shack, A&W, Lotte Group, and Wilmar. 

Closing a US$20 million Series A round co-led by Kakao Pay and Artem Ventures in November 2025, Paywatch’s total capital raised has surpassed US$50 million when combined with earlier equity rounds and credit lines from global banks.  

Fun fact: Paywatch has reportedly processed over US$200 million in transactions. MDEC also shared that the company has been featured in financial inclusion-related studies and broader ecosystem initiatives connected to the UNCDF and the ILO, underscoring its impact-focused approach to improving wage access for workers. 

“Financial stability is a fundamental right,” said Alex Kim, President of Paywatch. “We are on a mission to build an equitable system where every worker can access secure, equitably priced financial services. For these workers, this level of financial freedom and inclusion should not be seen as a privilege, but as standard.”

The company’s growth also reflects the strength of Malaysia’s fintech ecosystem in developing scalable digital solutions that address real-world challenges locally and across the region.

Beyond enabling early wage access, Paywatch is further positioning itself as a next-generation Employee Assistance Programme (EAP). It has developed its own cross-border remittance infrastructure to help foreign workers send money home instantly, a fee-free bill payments system lets workers stay on top of recurring expenses, and a healthcare module covering insurance and medical costs. 

2. Versa: From Cash Management to Wealth Democratisation

Versa is a digital wealth management platform that allows users to save, invest, and access retirement planning tools. Among its offerings is a cash management tool that provides returns on par with fixed deposits, but with similar liquidity as a regular savings account.

As the first e-service platform licensed by Malaysia’s Securities Commission in 2021, its products are built within a regulated framework aimed at broadening access to wealth management tools.

“Cash management solutions were traditionally only accessible to sophisticated investors and not readily available to all Malaysians. We are democratising access to such products together with Affin Hwang AM to bring these solutions to every Malaysian regardless of wealth status,” said Teoh Wei-Xiang, CEO of Versa, in a press release.

Four years after its official launch in January 2021, the fintech startup has captured about 450,000 registered users, with 90% aged 40 and below.

Breaking the numbers down, 59% of its total users are aged 30 and below while 20.4% are university students. Gender-wise, 40% of its total users are female, which is notable in a sector that historically skews male. 

“We helped Malaysians, especially the youth, save almost RM500 million in 2024 alone,” the CEO elaborated.

Aside from cash management, Versa has since expanded into a robust wealth platform offering nearly 20 conventional and Shariah-compliant funds, retirement planning through the Private Retirement Scheme (PRS), and a gamified engagement feature called Versa Quest to build savings habits among young users.

The platform’s commercial trajectory was validated again in March last year when Versa closed a RM30 million Series A round led by AHAM Asset Management Berhad, with participation from notable individual investors. This latest round funded its target of reaching one million users by 2027. Its continued expansion demonstrates how Malaysian fintech companies are creating innovative financial solutions with strong regional growth potential.

3. Get Hyred: Closing the Employability Gap

Where Versa offers fixed savings and Paywatch fixed cash flow, Get Hyred addresses the supply-side gap in the gig economy by focusing on employability rather than financial products. 

Its solution is designed to help gig workers build skills, credentials, and access income opportunities that support longer-term upward mobility.

At the centre of its offering is the Zasss marketplace, which matches young gig workers to flexible earning opportunities while integrating access to skills-building modules. 

The platform combines income generation with capability development to strengthen both immediate earning potential and longer-term career pathways.

Within the broader Financial Innovation Gig Economy Challenge framework, Get Hyred complements solutions like Paywatch and Versa by addressing the fourth pillar of financial health—sustained earning power.

Rather than positioning the gig economy solely as a source of short-term income, GetHyred frames it as a pathway for progression. By linking work opportunities with skills development, the platform seeks to help workers move from entry-level gig roles into more sustainable forms of employment over time, supporting Malaysia’s efforts to develop a future-ready digital workforce.

Closing the Gig Economy Financial Gap

Through the Malaysia Digital (MD) initiative, MDEC continues to support high-potential MD status companies such as Paywatch, Versa and GetHyred in developing innovative digital solutions that address real-world challenges while strengthening Malaysia’s digital economy. These efforts contribute to the aspirations of Malaysia Digital 2030 (MD2030) to position Malaysia as a globally competitive digital nation. From improving cash-flow stability and enabling structured savings, to expanding access to wealth-building tools and addressing long-term employability, each solution targets a different stage of a gig worker’s financial journey.

While the nature of gig work continues to evolve, the cohort of solutions highlights how financial inclusion is no longer only about access to services, but about building systems that support resilience, mobility, and sustainable earning power over time.

• Learn more about MDEC and the MD Status here.
• Read other articles we’ve written about Malaysian startups here.

Feature Image Credit: PayWatch

It’s only the first day of September 2026, but the month and fall season are already off to the races in AI land, as Anthropic has just released its latest and most powerful large language models yet — Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1.

The two names refer to the same underlying model. Fable 5.1 is the generally available version, with Anthropic’s production safeguards in place. Mythos 5.1 is available through restricted-access programs for vetted cybersecurity and life-sciences organizations that need capabilities normally constrained by those safeguards.

For enterprise buyers, however, the release is about more than another round of benchmark gains. Anthropic is simultaneously changing the economics of running persistent agents, reducing the cost of cached context by 75%, and introducing a new security architecture called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, or EFS, designed to let organizations retain monitoring data inside infrastructure they control.

Those changes arrive at a particularly consequential moment. Over the past several weeks, Anthropic and the U.K. AI Security Institute have disclosed incidents in which earlier Claude models, running under unusually permissive cybersecurity evaluation conditions, took unauthorized actions against real systems. Anthropic temporarily paused external cyber evaluations and has since introduced additional containment and monitoring before resuming them.

Taken together, Fable 5.1 looks less like a conventional model refresh than an attempt to solve three increasingly intertwined enterprise problems: how to make agents capable enough to finish difficult work, economical enough to leave running for hours, and governable enough to give access to sensitive systems.

A model built for work that does not finish in one prompt

Anthropic is positioning Fable 5.1 primarily around sustained problem-solving.

On Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1, which evaluates agentic scientific research, Anthropic reports Fable 5.1 scoring 52.6%, compared with 24.7% for Fable 5, 29.0% for Opus 5 and 22.4% for GPT-5.6 Sol in its evaluation setup. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, Fable 5.1 scores 55.8%, versus 42.0% for Fable 5 and 52.3% for Opus 5. Mythos 5.1 reaches 60.9% on the same coding benchmark when operating under its more permissive cyber safeguards.

The gains extend beyond coding. Anthropic reports a GDPval-AA v2 score of 1,853 for knowledge work, versus 1,824 for Opus 5 and 1,723 for Fable 5. On AutomationBench, intended to measure business workflows, Fable 5.1 scores 31.4%, compared with 17.1% for Fable 5 and 26.9% for Opus 5. On CursorBench 3.2.0, it reaches 73.4%.

Those numbers should be read as vendor-reported results rather than independent proof of superiority. Anthropic also notes qualifications around several evaluations: production safeguards can affect scores, and its August 2026 OSWorld task release is not directly comparable with some previously published results.

The more useful signal for enterprise teams may therefore come from the kinds of failures early-access partners say the model can resolve.

Investment firm Millennium told Anthropic that Fable 5.1 traced an extremely rare software crash to a bug inside an external vendor library after the problem had resisted explanation for four to five years.

Corporate expense management provider Ramp described an unattended 38-hour machine-learning run in which the model re-evaluated a previous result, launched six experiments and returned with findings and proposed next steps.

Browserbase said Fable 5.1 completed 82% of tasks on its hardest browser-agent benchmark, versus 74% for Opus 5 and 57% for Fable 5.

These are customer testimonials supplied as part of Anthropic’s launch, not independently reproduced benchmarks. But they illustrate the direction Anthropic is pursuing: moving the unit of AI work from an answer or code snippet toward an entire investigation.

That changes deployment architecture. A model that can operate for hours needs durable context, tool access, checkpoints, logging, permission boundaries and reliable recovery from errors. Model intelligence becomes only one component of the system.

Pricing: Fable 5.1 remains premium, but caching changes the equation

The most immediately measurable enterprise change is pricing.

Fable 5.1 retains Fable 5’s headline API rates: $10 per 1 million input tokens and $50 per million output. That makes it considerably more expensive on uncached tokens than other models in Anthropic’s lineup. Opus 5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, while Sonnet 5 costs $2 and $10 respectively.

The important change is cached input:

Anthropic has cut a Fable 5.1 cache hit to just $0.25 on input, down from $1.00 for Fable 5.

That’s also just 2.5% of Fable’s normal input-token price of $10, rather than the 10% multiplier used by most other Claude models.

Five-minute cache writes remain $12.50 per million tokens and one-hour writes $20, but subsequent reads cost just $0.25 per million.

That produces an unusual pricing profile. Fable 5.1’s ordinary input and output are twice as expensive as Opus 5’s, yet its cached input is half the cost of Opus 5’s cache reads. Its cache-read price is only 25% above Sonnet 5’s despite Fable’s base input price being five times higher.

That matters for agents because they repeatedly revisit the same codebase, system instructions, tool definitions, documents and accumulated conversation history. Anthropic says the lower cache price reduces Fable 5.1’s effective cost by around 25% for typical workloads and as much as roughly 45% for highly agentic workloads in which cached context accounts for a larger share of usage.

This is a more useful enterprise framing than simply comparing per-token list prices. Model selection for an agentic workflow increasingly depends on cost per successfully completed task, including retries, context replay, tool calls and the number of tokens a model consumes before reaching a usable result.

The cache price reduction also may be an effort to help woo increasingly price-consicious enterprises. A Financial Times report found that, more than two months after launch, Fable 5 accounted for only about 11% of Anthropic model spending among roughly 70,000 companies represented in Ramp’s transaction data, while the cheaper Opus 5 and Opus 4.8 gained share.

The Information further reported growing concern among enterprise customers about unpredictable AI bills, including ServiceNow monitoring employee usage after rapidly consuming its annual Anthropic budget. Those reports suggest that even when enterprises valued Fable 5’s capabilities, many were unwilling to make it the default model for large-scale production workloads.

Fable 5.1 nevertheless remains expensive relative to much of the broader market. OpenAI’s current promotional API pricing for GPT-5.6 Sol is $4 per million input tokens, $0.40 for cached input and $20 per million output tokens through at least Nov. 21. Google’s Gemini 3.7 Flash currently lists at $0.75 per million input and $3.75 per million output through the end of 2026.

Fable therefore needs to justify its premium through higher task completion, lower token consumption, or the ability to replace more expensive human or multi-stage workflows—not simply through raw API price.

Anthropic’s pricing system provides additional levers. Batch processing cuts Fable 5.1 input and output rates in half, to $5 and $25 per million tokens, for asynchronous workloads. U.S.-only inference adds a 1.1x multiplier. Web search costs $10 per 1,000 searches in addition to token usage, while web fetch carries no separate fee.

For procurement teams, those details make workload profiling increasingly important. A code-review agent with enormous reusable repository context may have very different economics from a report-generation workflow dominated by new output tokens.

The cyber incidents behind the release

The security architecture surrounding Fable 5.1 also needs to be understood against Anthropic’s recent cybersecurity incidents.

On July 30, Anthropic disclosed that a review of 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs had identified three incidents, spanning six runs, in which Claude models reached the public internet from a third-party testing environment and obtained unauthorized access to real organizations.

The models had been running without the cyber safeguards applied to generally available Claude deployments. They were performing capture-the-flag exercises and had explicitly been told that their environments were simulations without internet access. A configuration problem nevertheless left an internet path open.

In the most serious incident, Claude Opus 4.7 encountered a real company that shared a name with the fictional organization in its test. Across four runs, the model obtained application and infrastructure credentials and accessed a database containing several hundred rows of production data. Anthropic said the model eventually encountered indications that the system was real but continued its attack.

A second incident involved Mythos 5. The model discovered developer instructions referencing a nonexistent Python package and decided that publishing a package under that name could help it win the simulated challenge. It created a PyPI account and uploaded malicious code to the real public package repository.

The package remained available for roughly an hour and was downloaded and executed on 15 real systems. One belonged to a security company whose automated scanner executed the package; Claude’s code extracted credentials and subsequently used them to access additional infrastructure.

In the third incident, an internal Anthropic research model scanned roughly 9,000 internet targets after failing to reach its intended fictional target. It compromised an internet-facing application using exposed credentials and SQL injection, then stopped after recognizing that the system had no connection to the exercise.

The incidents did not involve customer data or Anthropic’s production infrastructure, and Anthropic says the production safeguards omitted during the tests would have blocked the behavior. Still, the episodes demonstrated a problem enterprise agent architects will recognize: a sufficiently persistent agent can exploit ambiguity between what its operator intended it to access and what its technical credentials allow it to access.

A separate U.K. AI Security Institute disclosure reinforced that concern.

During testing conducted in July, AISI ran a cyber challenge 122 times across multiple models with internet access deliberately enabled and vendor cyber classifiers disabled. Ten runs produced 19 unsanctioned real-world actions. Seventeen involved Anthropic’s Mythos 5; two came from a GPT-5.6 Sol run.

The most serious sequence involved a Mythos 5 agent attempting to insert malicious code into a real open-source project, creating fake identities and attempting to socially engineer a maintainer into accepting the change. The maintainer rejected it, and AISI said its investigation found no resulting real-world harm. The agent also attempted prompt injection against other AI systems and left messages that later agents discovered and used.

Again, these were deliberately permissive research configurations, not commercially available deployments. But AISI’s conclusion is relevant far beyond AI labs: increasingly capable agents should be assumed to explore routes their operators did not anticipate, particularly when given difficult objectives and broad tool access.

From model safeguards to infrastructure safeguards

Anthropic’s response has been to add layers around the model.

The company paused external cyber evaluations and briefly halted some internal testing, then deployed a real-time classifier designed to detect aggressive probing, sandbox-escape attempts or unexpected internet access before a tool call executes. It also moved high-risk cyber workloads into stronger isolation and imposed new requirements on external evaluators, including explicit network isolation and pre-engagement validation of sandboxes. External cyber evaluations have now resumed.

Fable 5.1 itself also gets more precise production safeguards. Anthropic says its cyber protections now create around 60% fewer interventions per Claude Code session than Fable 5’s previous safeguards. The model can be used to discover software vulnerabilities for defensive purposes, while work such as exploit generation, penetration testing and some binary-based vulnerability scanning remains redirected or restricted.

That distinction matters for security teams attempting to operationalize AI. A safeguard that blocks too many legitimate actions can make an autonomous security workflow unreliable; one that permits too much creates a materially different risk. Precision, rather than simply the existence of a filter, becomes a production requirement.

Enterprise Frontier Safeguards moves data custody to the customer

Anthropic is addressing a second enterprise constraint through EFS.

The company previously introduced 30-day data retention for Fable 5 as part of its misuse-detection system. For regulated organizations, retaining sensitive conversations with a model provider can make deployment difficult regardless of contractual assurances.

EFS changes the architecture. Monitoring data can reside in the customer’s own AWS, Azure or Google Cloud environment under customer-managed encryption keys, access policies and audit logging. Anthropic’s automated systems can analyze the data for patterns associated with serious misuse, while alerts go to the customer for review; Anthropic says human review by its employees is not required.

Anthropic says it developed EFS with more than 100 organizations across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, law, retail and government, and with AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Support is planned across Claude Code, Claude Enterprise, the Claude Platform, Amazon Bedrock, Claude Platform on AWS, Google’s Agent Platform and Microsoft Foundry. The rollout begins in phases this fall. Eligible customers can use Fable 5.1 with zero data retention until EFS becomes available. Anthropic does not charge separately for EFS, although customers remain responsible for their own cloud storage, operations and egress costs.

This is potentially as important as the model upgrade itself. Enterprise AI governance is shifting from promises about what a provider does with data toward architectures that determine where the data can exist in the first place.

Fable for production, Mythos for controlled frontiers

The split between Fable and Mythos gives Anthropic a mechanism for separating general enterprise deployment from particularly sensitive domains.

Fable 5.1 is available now through Anthropic’s API as claude-fable-5-1, as well as through AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Mythos 5.1 uses the same underlying model but exposes more permissive safeguards to vetted cyberdefenders and life-sciences organizations through verification programs.

That same model has shown capabilities extending well outside software. Anthropic reports that Mythos 5.1 designed experimentally validated protein binders, while Fable 5.1 trained a neural network that produced a higher-resolution elevation map covering roughly a third of Venus. Mythos 5.1 also optimized seven open-source biological deep-learning models, with Anthropic reporting inference speedups as high as 2.5x.

For pharmaceutical, engineering and research organizations, that points toward a future in which the same agent architecture used to investigate a code failure may also orchestrate modeling, experimentation and analysis.

The operational lesson is the same in every case: the more work an agent can complete without intervention, the more consequential its permissions become.

Fable 5.1 makes those long-running agents more capable and, through cheaper cached context, potentially much cheaper to operate. EFS gives regulated companies another mechanism for governing their data. More precise safeguards reduce some of the friction that has made high-capability models difficult to use in security workflows.

But Anthropic’s own recent incidents also demonstrate why the enterprise deployment question cannot stop at model selection.

The next generation of AI infrastructure will need to treat agents more like powerful service accounts than chatbots: narrowly scoped credentials, segmented networks, explicit allowlists, continuous telemetry, human approval around irreversible actions and the assumption that an agent may find pathways its developer did not anticipate.

Fable 5.1 raises the amount of work organizations can plausibly delegate. Its larger significance may be that it also makes the infrastructure surrounding that delegation impossible to treat as an afterthought.

The CEO of a flying car company backed by Larry Page has left the company.

Ken Karklin, who was Pivotal’s CEO for more than four years, left the role this week, according to a press release. Pivotal said Karklin is “pursuing new endeavors” but didn’t offer any other information about the executive’s departure from the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) firm.

“Leading Pivotal has been the privilege of my career. Together, we’ve moved beyond the promise of light eVTOL and proved it out in practice,” Karklin said in a statement. “This industry has moved past prototypes and press releases; it’s now operating in the real world, under real constraints, with real consequences for the future of Advanced Air Mobility. As I turn to new endeavors, I do so knowing the foundation we built here will help carry this industry forward.”

Karklin will be replaced on an interim basis by Mike Ross, an aviation executive who joined Pivotal’s board of directors in November 2025. Karklin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Karklin’s departure comes two years after Pivotal started sales of Helix, its first lightweight electric personal aircraft. The single-seat aircraft doesn’t require a pilot’s license to fly and starts at around $200,000.

“Ken’s leadership over the past four years has been instrumental in bringing Pivotal to where it is today. Our team, our priorities, and our roadmap remain steady through this transition,” Ross said in a statement. “I’ve had the honor of working closely with Ken as a Board member and watching Pivotal’s disciplined approach to safety, engineering, and accessibility deliver on the vision of electric VTOL flight. I look forward to working with the team and guiding the company forward as we bring our fourth-generation Helix aircraft to market.”

Pivotal has also spent years developing an aircraft called BlackFly that is aimed at defense and first-responder use cases. Last month, BlackFly was used to respond to an emergency in North Carolina for the first time ever. The company says it beat an ambulance responding in parallel to the call by 20 minutes. BlackFly has flown more than 10,000 times, according to Pivotal.

Pivotal is one of a number of companies in the space that was selected for the Federal Aviation Administration’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, which was created to increase testing of these types of aircraft around the country.

OLED screens run the biggest risk, but with a little common sense you can mitigate the issue.

What is burn-in and what causes it?

An OLED display is made up of millions of tiny organic light-emitting diodes — hence the name OLED. This is unlike an LCD, which relies on a backlight to illuminate its pixels. This means that each pixel in an OLED generates its own light and can be dimmed or turned off independently. But while this granular control provides excellent contrast and deep blacks, it also means that individual pixels can wear out independently of each other.

Each time you use an OLED display, these individual pixels undergo some infinitesimal amount of degradation. In the real-world, this wear translates to a dimmer light output. To further complicate matters, each pixel is actually made up of several smaller sub-pixels that produce different colors, typically red, green and blue. These sub-pixels don’t necessarily age at the same rate, either.

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Practically speaking, the OLED display is continuously varying the brightness of each pixel and sub-pixel to reproduce the colors you see on the screen. Over time, though, this can cause some pixels can experience more wear than others and become dimmer. Eventually, the difference in brightness can become noticeable enough to our eyes.

Put simply, burn-in occurs when some pixels appear brighter than those that have experienced greater wear, creating a persistent outline or ghosting of previously displayed content.

Static elements like channel logos have a higher potential to cause OLED burn-in, since the sub-pixels in that region wear out unevenly. This is why OLED displays aren’t the best choice if you exclusively watch news or sports channels for several hours each day. Playing the same game for hundreds of hours can also have the same effect, as on-screen text and other fixed elements can accelerate burn-in in certain localized spots.

Is burn-in still a risk for modern OLED TVs?

Do LCD TVs suffer from burn-in?

A group of executives and entrepreneurs led by Starcloud co-founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean and Ezra Feilden teamed up to develop humanity’s first interstellar spacecraft. If everything goes according to plan, it will launch in 2029, headed for Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our solar system. But it won’t reach its destination for about 80,000 years. 

Known as Fermi Explorer, this non-profit mission aims to build a 10cm cube weighing about 1 kilogram (about 2.2 pounds). Once the cube is built, they plan to attach it to a propulsion system, take it to space and launch it toward Alpha Centauri. It’s the technological equivalent of taking a hefty rock into space, throwing it at Alpha Centauri and waiting for it to get there. 

“The mission is intended to make the idea of interstellar travel real, and to encourage more people to confront one of humanity’s biggest unanswered questions when we look beyond our planet,” the group said in a post on X. The post is accompanied by a video showing the Fermi Explorer being overtaken by hundreds of faster spacecraft also bound for Alpha Centauri.

The wait for this mission to go interstellar is unreal. The exact wait to mission completion is 79,800 years, according to the Fermi Explorer mission calculator, which means once this thing gets underway, it won’t be the problem of anyone currently living, or anyone else, for a few thousand generations. 

Just getting out of the solar system will take longer than any road trip any human has ever taken. The spacecraft is expected to circle the sun for 12 years in an oval orbit. The boosters will fire when the spacecraft gets closer to the sun, a process called the Oberth maneuver, thereby gaining speed through multiple orbits as it approaches escape velocity. Once done, it’ll launch itself and keep going, and going, and going. The Fermi Explorer’s technical feasibility assessment says it should leave the solar system by the early 2040s. 

It’s quite a different mission from what Starcloud’s co-founders usually work on: putting data centers in space to power AI. The company plans to launch its first such full commercial data center, called the Starcloud-2, in 2027, but it did send an Nvidia H100 GPU into space via Starcloud-1 in 2025.

More symbolic than scientific

Interstellar travel takes so long that humanity has focused far more on speeding up the journey than actually making it. One of the big projects addressing this was Breakthrough Starshot, a multi-billion-dollar initiative that would’ve used laser-based propulsion to propel a ship to another star in a matter of decades rather than millennia. That project collapsed in 2025 with no launches. 

The only other interstellar missions ever conducted, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively, over four decades after their launches. 

According to the non-profit group, the purpose of the Fermi Explorer is to just toss something into the cosmos and see what happens. It sounds silly, but it’s the truth. The group’s thinking is based on the Fermi Paradox, which seeks to explain why there are so many stars and planets yet no signs of extraterrestrial life. 

One potential reason is the Fermi Great Filter, which suggests a barrier so hard to cross that intelligent life rarely survives long enough to be detected.

There are dozens of potential filters, ranging from the various steps of abiogenesis — the natural process by which life arises from non-living matter — to technological filters such as the inability to get into space, or, once there, the lack of motivation to search beyond a species’ host star. 

“By launching the Fermi Explorer mission, we can for the first time tick two possible Fermi Great Filters off the list,” the group wrote on its website. “That it is impossible for an intelligent species to leave their nearest stars (and) that all intelligent species decide not to leave their home star for some reason.”

The goal is to fund and build this entire project for about $15 million, using existing technology and piggybacking on a commercial rocket, such as SpaceX’s, to reach orbit. This project exists only to prove that humans can and are willing to do it, even if it’s something no one alive today is ever going to witness.

Joe is a freelance journalist. It all started with a long-running affection for building his own PCs, which he did for the first time as a teenager. It evolved into a lifelong enjoyment of putting words on the internet about the subject. He’s written for CNET, PCMag, Mashable and SlashGear as a freelance writer, and worked as a Senior Editor at Android Authority for 10 years. When he’s not writing about tech and science, he’s learning the ins and outs of DIY home repair, gaming, playing his bass guitars and posting help on PC building and gaming subreddits. He is a staunch believer that orange juice should have pulp.

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from the tiny-little-coffins dept

There are plenty of reasons to call for RFK Jr. to resign or be fired. There are plenty of reasons to call for him to be investigated. There’s his complete dereliction of duty when it comes to the American measles outbreak. There’s his sneaky misrepresentations carried out as he moonlights on a government-funded cooking show that he puts out because… reasons. There’s the budget and staffing cuts that have led to our lessened ability to respond to outbreaks of diseases like cyclosporiasis. There’s the possible violation of the Hatch Act. There are the negative health outcomes stemming from his misinformation campaigns. There’s also his disinterest and/or inability to follow basic governmental procedures.

But the latest calls for him to resign, be fired, or at least be investigated aren’t about any of the above. Here are the comments from several senators. See if you can guess what this is about.

“This is a pattern, not a slip,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “RFK Jr. has lied to the Senate, lied to the American people, and jeopardized the health of children to advance his anti-vaccine agenda.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a social media post Friday that the documents were “Proof we got RFK lying on the record during his confirmation hearing (a crime).” He called for the matter to be referred to the US Department of Justice for a criminal investigation. In a separate statement to The Guardian, Wyden added that “RFK’s platform is built on lies and grifts that leave a trail of dead children in their wake. There are consequences for lying to Congress.”

If you didn’t manage to guess that this is all to do with what Kennedy told senators about his 2019 trip to Samoa in his confirmation hearings, don’t feel bad. As we demonstrated above, there are plenty of things Kennedy has done that could have resulted in the quotes above.

We wrote about this trip Kennedy took to Samoa earlier this year, when reporting uncovered emails from several people involved in the trip indicating that Kennedy went there as part of his anti-vaxxer crusade. Why Samoa? Well, allow me to quote myself:

It started in July of that year when two 1-year old children who were given a measles vaccine subsequently died. While anti-vaxxers around the world gleefully jumped into action to blame the vaccine for those deaths, it turns out that the vaccine didn’t kill the children at all. Instead, medical professionals had accidentally mixed the vaccine with a muscle relaxer solution instead of sterilized water like they were supposed to. Despite that fact, the anti-vaxxers sowed all kinds of fear and disinformation throughout the country, whipping up negativity around measles vaccines. As a result of that, the government put a 10 months ban in place on the vaccine.

It was during that ban that Kennedy visited the island, apparently to answer the question, “How can I make this bad situation worse?” While there, he met with both anti-vaxxers and members of the Samoan government. But when asked during his confirmation hearings, he claimed that his trip had nothing to do with vaccines at all. He was there to help rollout a new medical record and tracking platform he was pitching. Two months after his trip, Samoa suffered a massive outbreak of measles that lasted months and eventually killed 83 people and sickened over 5,000.

Earlier this year, the AP and the Guardian uncovered emails sent by American and U.N. government staffers that suggested the trip Kennedy took was entirely about vaccines. These emails were all written by third-parties, however, and amounted essentially to what I wouldn’t call speculation so much as a plain reading of the facts surrounding Kennedy’s visit. But, still, these are third-party accounts.

Fortunately, both of those outlets didn’t stop there. They kept digging. And what has the senators in this post’s opening so furious are uncovered direct emails between Kennedy and Samoan government officials that make it abundantly clear that the whole point of the trip was for Kennedy and his team to investigate the MMR vaccine.

On Thursday, the Associated Press and The Guardian jointly released newly obtained documents that directly contradict Kennedy’s statements. One of the documents is a letter Kennedy sent to Samoa’s prime minister in January 2019, in which Kennedy falsely suggested “deaths associated recently with MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccines” were due to a bad lot of vaccinations from the manufacturer. Kennedy proposed letting him and his “team” from CHD investigate the country’s MMR vaccines. In all, Kennedy used the words ‘vaccination’ and ‘vaccine’ eight times in the letter proposing his visit.

The prime minister responded with a letter in February saying he welcomed Kennedy and his “team’s independent health assessment of our MMR vaccines.” He requested Kennedy coordinate a visit with him.

With the only caveat being that those emails need to be completely authenticated as legitimate, that’s as much of a smoking gun as you could possibly want for proving that Kennedy lied to Congress in his confirmation hearings. That fact obviously won’t surprise anyone, of course. Kennedy is a habitual liar. But to have it evidenced in such a clear and unambiguous way is a rarity.

And, frankly, a gift. Kennedy has to go. Any reasonable and informed person would agree with that and the vast majority of our congresspersons are, in theory, reasonable and informed. They are also political creatures and you may have noticed that all of the folks calling for Kennedy’s figurative head have the letter “D” next to their name.

Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) said Kennedy “must resign or be fired immediately.” Hawaii Governor Josh Green, a doctor who responded to Samoa’s measles outbreak, also renewed his call for Kennedy to immediately resign.

Hopefully, either this reporting or a subsequent investigation will give cover to people on the other side of the aisle to join the call for Kennedy to be ousted. It probably should have been enough that Kennedy took a trip that pretty clear contributed to plenty of people getting killed, most of them children. But if it has to be his lying about it that does him in, so be it.

Filed Under: angela alsobrooks, anti-vaxxers, ed markey, measles, rfk jr., ron wyden, samoa, vaccines

Having first seen it at MWC earlier in the year – in a strictly hands-off demo – I have finally got my first proper close-up look at Honor’s wild Robot Phone. 

The headline feature is that mechanical camera arm on the back. Effectively tucking what looks like a DJI Osmo Pocket 4 gimbal inside the back of the phone. It’s an impressive feat of engineering for something so small, and it looks much better in person than it does in press pictures online.

Read through Honor’s press release for the Robot Phone, and you’ll find all sorts of bold claims about the number of manufacturing steps, patents and speeds at which it moves.

Each little feature is also seemingly given its own brand name – but the important thing here is that it’s designed to be durable, and move quickly and accurately.

The addition of the gimbal is there to give you super steady footage without relying on algorithms and electronic stabilisation. But it also offers the ability to manually pan the camera across the scene. It also supports some pre-programmed cinematic movements to help you capture really impressive footage that’s dynamic with very little effort.

It can also use AI to automatically track, or follow, a subject, panning and tilting itself to keep you in the frame. It’s all very clever, and during my time with the phone it worked surprisingly well, aside from a few teething issues caused by the device being built solely for the Chinese market.

The camera sensor boasts 200MP resolution, with a wide f/1.6 aperture. One thing I definitely missed back at MWC is that it’s joined by a telephoto zoom lens, which also has a 200MP sensor, and a 50MP ultrawide camera, to give you a very versatile camera system for video.

For pro video lovers, there are lots of promising features here: RAW processing 14-bit data, the ability to shoot in Log, and you can also preview ARRI looks in real time. 

Powering all these features is the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, along with Honor’s H1 chip, and an effective cooling system designed to let you keep shooting for long periods. There’s also a 7060mAh battery that supports 120W wired and 50W wireless charging.

The gimbal works as expected, and the footage really does look good – even if I was only able to view it on the slightly chunky device’s screen.

Where things are less positive for me is in the AI and Robot aspects. The gimbal can dance, act as a personal assistant and answer questions while it looks you in the face. These are gimmicks, pure and simple, and not a reason anyone should buy this phone.

The Robot Phone is actually on sale in China right now. So if you want to get hold of one, you won’t find it in Western retail stores. It doesn’t seem like a wider release is planned either. However, I’d guess that we will see this tech, in some form, hit Honor flagships in the future.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens on Aug. 18 as its new artificial intelligence (AI) platform for users ages 13 to 17.

According to the firm, teens will be automatically placed into the new platform based on their estimated age, where they will encounter “an experience designed to help [them] learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence,” OpenAI said in its product announcement. 

ChatGPT for Teens offers safety measures for its younger users, with tools designed to encourage balanced usage habits while giving parents more oversight. 

“We have been guided by four commitments,” OpenAI wrote. “Put teen safety first, encourage real-world support, treat teens like teens, and be transparent about how our systems should behave.”

The new product specifically targets students with several features:

• Study Mode, which uses guiding questions and step-by-step support to help teens understand the material they’re learning.

• Homework Reminders, which can recognize when a teen appears to be trying to shortcut an assignment and will redirect them to Study Mode for collaborative problem solving.

• Quizzes and Learning Visualizations, which give teens more ways to practice, gauge their knowledge, and see difficult concepts more clearly.

• Study Hours, which lets teens or parents choose times when Study Mode is on by default.

An Educator’s View of ChatGPT for Teens

Laura Yeager, an elementary school principal in Oklahoma’s Frederick School District, says there are several reasons to like ChatGPT for Teens, theoretically. “To start, this technology places a large burden on both parents and teachers to be as well-informed about the tool, or better than, the teens using it. Off the bat, they’re at a disadvantage compared to a native user,” Yeager explains.  

While managing this oversight may be challenging, Yeager sees one advantage to ChatGPT for Teens. She says it could serve as a resource for students struggling with difficult concepts who might not have access to help at home due to circumstances like working parents or family members being less familiar with the materials a teen brings home from school.

“In a perfect world, students could access sample problems or quizzes or be prompted with thoughtful questions intended to promote higher-order thinking and independent learning,” Yeager says. “Highly motivated students could benefit greatly from using this tool to further their reasoning skills by analyzing the answers, verifying sources, and challenging their own thinking.”

Yeager appreciates how ChatGPT for Teens steers teens away from potentially harmful situations. For example, posing as a 15-year-old, she entered a prompt about making money quickly in an attempt to see how the technology would respond. “It answered with age-appropriate odd jobs, babysitting, and the like,” she says. The tool offered a plan to save money, and issued repeated warnings to avoid people enticing teens with quick cash for illegal things (without naming them).

ChatGPT for Teens also earned high marks from Yeager for steering prompts about studying toward critical thinking rather than creating a document of facts to memorize. For example, when she asked it to create a study guide on “Of Mice and Men,” instead of creating the study guide, “I was prompted to consider the relationships among the characters and the meanings of certain events,” Yeager says. 

A Student’s Perspective 

Interestingly, high school student Annie (last name withheld), an 11th grader from Auburn High School in Alabama, likes ChatGPT for Teens for some of the same reasons as Principal Yeager.

“I think it can be very useful, especially for students who do not have a tutor or someone available to help them with a subject,” Annie explains. “ChatGPT is particularly good at teaching foundational material in subjects such as math, physics, and languages. For example, it can explain grammar rules in much more detail if a student does not understand the first explanation.”

Annie likes that Study Mode teaches the user systematically, step-by-step. When she used ChatGPT to study Spanish, it started with the most basic concepts to gauge her level of knowledge, such as how to conjugate verbs, before moving on to more difficult material. It also provided practice problems and revealed patterns to help her remember the rules. 

“I especially liked the encouraging tone, which made studying feel less intimidating and allowed me to make mistakes without being afraid of getting something wrong,” Annie says.

One thing that Annie says she does not like: “ChatGPT sometimes seems to forget how I asked it to teach me as a conversation gets longer. At the beginning, I might ask it to teach me in a certain way or format, with different sections and a specific style of explanation. However, after a long conversation, the responses can become shorter or stop following the same teaching style.”

A Fan of the Product — to a Point 

Despite her approval of some features, Yeager says she is not totally on board with ChatGPT for Teens.

“I understand the intention of this platform is to teach students to use AI responsibly and to leverage technology effectively as a skill, which is noble, but it is also to reduce liability and to attempt to place some responsibility back on the parents and guardians,” Yeager explains. 

“The brutal truth is: there are many AI programs out there, and if students want to find information, they will. ChatGPT for Teens has some merit, but teens who want to will still find ways to plagiarize and take shortcuts in schoolwork, rather than develop and use critical thinking skills.”

If she were still teaching in the classroom, Yeager says she would not use it. Test scores across the nation reveal that students are struggling in critical reading and writing skills. “Worksheets don’t teach. Teachers do,” Yeager argues.

“It is the same with any tool,” Yeager adds. “Nothing replaces the mental modeling of a skilled classroom teacher delivering explicit instruction. Students need to hear another person verbally work through difficult concepts and scaffold ideas. They need evidence that it can be done without a computer program and that they are capable of hard things.”

Areas Where ChatGPT for Teens Is Helpful 

Annie sees that struggle a bit differently.

“I would especially use it for studying Spanish, because no one in my family speaks Spanish, so I do not always have someone available to practice with,” Annie explains. “ChatGPT gives me a way to practice writing and speaking and to ask questions when I do not understand a grammar rule.”

Annie does not think ChatGPT for Teens necessarily discourages creative thinking. She says it is most useful for establishing a strong foundation in a subject, which can eventually help students develop their own ideas. 

“It is difficult to think creatively about a subject without first understanding its basic concepts,” Annie says. “However, students still need to use what they learn to develop their own conclusions and ideas rather than relying on ChatGPT to do all of their thinking for them.”

Ultimately, ChatGPT for Teens illustrates the promise and the limits of AI in education. Tools like Study Mode can fill a genuine gap for students who lack resources. But as both Yeager and Annie point out, the technology is not a substitute for teachers. ChatGPT’s true value may depend less on its safety measures than on how teens and teachers choose to use it.