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Forward-looking: Despite what some enthusiasts claim, smartphones have never been the best device for enjoying a quality listening experience. Motorola is now trying to change the status quo by asking a well-known audiophile company to contribute its engineering and design expertise.

Motorola recently announced a multi-year partnership with Bang & Olufsen, the Danish company best known for its luxury consumer electronics and audio products. The Lenovo-owned smartphone maker wants to create premium audio experiences for its flagship phones, with the first device expected to arrive in the US and other markets worldwide soon.

The new partnership will apparently treat audio components as an integral part of the flagship smartphone experience. Bang & Olufsen’s acoustic engineers are expected to work closely with Motorola’s designers, helping define the audio hardware, test it, and fine-tune the sound experience for devices across different models and form factors.

Bang & Olufsen is already working with external brands through its “Audio by Bang & Olufsen” program, which was created to bring the company’s acoustic expertise to products designed to deliver high-quality audio to customers. Motorola wants to use B&O’s appeal among audiophiles to reinforce its new business strategy, which focuses more on lifestyle choices than “simple” technology-related consumer solutions.

The partnership is expected to bring high-quality audio experiences to several mobile devices, with Motorola teasing new announcements over the next few months. Most certainly, B&O’s audio expertise will contribute to Motorola’s high-end smartphones, which were going to carry some serious MSRPs anyway.

The first device equipped with B&O’s audio solutions should be the Motorola Signature 27, a flagship phone expected to pack several premium hardware components alongside the newly introduced audio technology.

First and foremost, what Motorola describes as the company’s most advanced smartphone is based on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 SoC platform. Additional hardware features of the new device include a 200MP Sony LYTIA camera and Dolby Vision capture. The Android phone is also designed to integrate Google’s Gemini AI service for hardware-accelerated chatbot interactions.

Unlike most phones Motorola has developed over the past few years, the Signature 27 and its B&O-designed audio experience are expected to arrive in the US as well. The company said it will share additional information about the new device’s features and availability at a later date.

In a busy month for tech, Beats has added a new pair of headphones to its ever-growing range – the Beats 360.

With a promise of Beats’ best ever ANC, sound and comfort from a pair of headphones, it’s fair to say the Beats 360 sounds impressive. But how do the headphones look set to compare to the four-star Beats Studio Pro?

Ahead of our Beats 360 review, we’ve compared its specs to the Beats Studio Pro and noted the differences between the over-ear headphones below.

For more options, check out our best headphones guide.

Price and Availability

The Beats 360 is available to order now, with an RRP of £299.95. The headphones come in a choice of four colours – Sky, Cloud, Pink and Black – and will come with colour-coordinated earcup and headband cushions. 

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You can also purchase different coloured earcups and headband cushions separately with Cushion Kits. At the time of writing, you can purchase the Cushion Kits for just £9.95 directly from Apple. Just note this price will rise to £49.95 eventually.

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Following the Beats 360’s launch, the Beats Studio Pro is now cheaper than before, with a new RRP of £249.95. 

Beats 360 promises 1.75x better ANC

Beats explains that the 360 benefit from “1.75x better” ANC than the Studio Pro. Hailed as the brand’s most powerful ANC technology to date, Beats explains the 360’s acoustic system, combined with the technology means the 360 delivers a “powerful, immersive listening experience”. 

The Beats 360 is also fitted with Transparency mode that allows some external noise into the headphones.

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But how does this compare to the Studio Pro. During our time with the headphones, we found the Studio Pro offered a very strong noise-cancelling performance and managed to remove ambient and noisy public transport sounds effectively. While we did note the Studio Pro struggled to suppress wind, we were left impressed with its natural sounding Transparency mode.

With this in mind, we expect the Beats 360 to offer an even stronger ANC performance to the Studio Pro. We’ll be sure to update this versus once we review the headphones.

Beats 360 has interchangeable ear and headband cushions

Like the Beats 360, the Beats Studio Pro comes in a choice of four colour options, including Black, Deep Brown, Navy and Sandstone. However, the Beats 360 not only offers a more eye-catching range of colours as standard (Sky, Cloud, Pink and Black), but you can also swap the earcup and headband cushions too.

So, although the Beats 360 comes with colour-matched cushions as standard, you can choose to buy knit Cushion Kits in six colours – Black, Cloud, Pink, Sky, Navy and Volt (which is a vibrant yellow), or choose UltraPlush Kits in either Black and Cloud. The latter is the same engineered leather that’s found on the Studio Pro.

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Beats 360 has an IPX4 rating

Not only does Beats state the 360 headphones offer its best ever ANC, sound and comfort, but the cans are the first over-ears from the brand to sport an IPX4 rating. That means the headphones can withstand splashes of water, rain and sweat without causing harm to the product.

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Beats 360 introduces a wireless-first design

The Beats 360 has a wireless-first design which frees up room in the headband for a lighter and more comfortable pair of headphones. This means the earcups each have their own separate chip and separate battery antenna with a connecting cable between them just for charging, resulting in a more lightweight pair of headphones.

That’s not to say the Studio Pro isn’t a comfortable pair of headphones. However, although generally we found the Studio Pro to be comfortable, our reviewer noted that earpads were slightly too small for his ears. With that in mind, it’s advisable to check the sizing before you buy.

Beats Studio Pro offers longer battery

We were impressed with the Beats Studio Pro’s battery life. Although Beats claims a pretty solid 40 hours of battery life with ANC off, we found in our tests that actually the Studio Pro could provide 40 hours with ANC on – meaning Beats underestimated the headphone’s power. 

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In comparison, the Beats 360 promises up to 32 hours of battery life and a five-minute charge results in an hour of audio playback too. We’ll have to wait until we review the headphones to see how well they really perform.

Early Verdict

Thanks to its improved ANC, comfortable and lightweight design and the inclusion of an IPX4 rating, the Beats 360 look set to be a brilliant pair of headphones that’ll likely suit most users well. However, if you’re sporting the Studio Pro pair, then we’d argue that there’s perhaps no reason to upgrade just yet. 

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On the other hand, if you’re torn between the two and want a more affordable pair of Beats that still offers a solid listening experience, then the Studio Pair is a great choice thanks to its recent price drop.

We’ll update this versus once we review the Beats 360.

The update to Siri AI will eventually reach the HomePod line. While that is a certainty, it may not be available on the models that are currently in homes.

The HomePod and HomePod mini were left out of the Siri AI party at WWDC, and the updated digital assistant hasn’t yet become available on the smart speaker. However, it is still something widely expected to be on the way.

A leaker known as “pdfu” posted to X about Siri AI on HomePod. The account shares that Linwood, the in-house name for the new Siri AI project, is included as part of audioOS 27 also known as HomePod Software 27, but it’s not being used.

The account shares a look at the new status lights that will closer match how Siri AI appears on other platforms. It looks generally whiter in construction, rather than the colorful swirl of the existing Siri.

It also adds that Siri AI may require new hardware to function properly. The HomePod is apparently “accepted” as a Siri AI-capable device, but activation is currently blocked.

Water is wet

It is a given that Apple will be adding Siri AI support to the HomePod in the future. As such a Siri-centric device, it would be extremely hard to imagine Apple leaving off that update from the smart speaker range.

Some form of spec-bump update to the HomePod mini will happen in the future. So far, that is thought to consist of a chip update to the S9 or S10 SIP instead of the S5 currently in use.

Support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread is also anticipated, as well as a second-generation Ultra Wideband chip.

There is speculation that Apple is preparing a wider update than the HomePod mini, with a new Apple TV and a frequently rumored Home Hub also on the horizon. Apple Stores are also allegedly preparing for the smart home catalog overhaul with changes to a few Avenue segments.

“Without this manual, nobody will really succeed in deploying autonomous AI that we can trust to make decisions and understand how we actually work,” UiPath founder and CEO Daniel Dines said on Wednesday.

Dines used his keynote at FUSION, UiPath’s annual conference at the Wynn Las Vegas, to make the case for that manual. He then introduced the product UiPath built to write it: UiPath Cartographer, which builds what the company calls a “Map of Work”.

The event marked ten years since UiPath’s first, held in London in 2016 for about a hundred people, Dines said. The company then had around $3 million to $4 million in annual recurring revenue and a few dozen customers. He told the audience it is now crossing $2 billion, with more than 10,000 customers.

Three things LLMs cannot do

Dines said he wrote a book, The Work That Remains, with AI. He used Claude and ChatGPT side by side, one as ghostwriter and sparring partner, the other for editorial review. Every attendee will get a copy.

Writing it, he said, led him to three limits of large language models. The first is consequence. An LLM does not bear the consequences of its actions, and he said most enterprise actions have them. The second is learning.

“LLMs don’t learn. They have memory, and memory is a very different thing from learning,” Dines said.

The third is what he called exactness. LLMs are probabilistic, he said, while a payment has to be right every time. Dines said he sees no technology on the horizon that fixes these three limits.

For an LLM to work inside a company’s processes, Dines said, it needs a complete, detailed manual of that work. No company has one, he added, and consultants’ versions go out of date within weeks.

How Cartographer builds the map

Cartographer takes in process charts, process-mining diagrams, documents and standard operating procedures. It can also question a subject-matter expert, ask them to record their screen and ask why they took a different path. From that, it produces a first Map of Work. Dines called that first map “inevitably incomplete”.

Coding agents then build automations from the map. When an agent handles a case, a human reviews its suggestion and makes corrections. UiPath stores those corrections in what it calls a Decision Ledger and feeds new exceptions back into the map, Dines said.

According to UiPath’s announcement, its coding agents are now generally available. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and Antigravity can also work natively on its platform. Cartographer is available now, and the company did not give pricing.

SMBC: 73% is not enough

Kei Yamamoto of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMBC), which Dines called one of UiPath’s largest customers, said the bank has automated more than six million hours since 2017. That freed roughly 3,000 employees for other roles, he said. This year, an accounting agent built with UiPath received more than 10,000 reimbursement requests in one month.

“If a process has three steps and each is 90% accurate, end-to-end accuracy drops to about 73%, not acceptable for accounting,” Yamamoto said.

SMBC now combines rules, historical data, generative AI and human checkpoints, so exceptions go to people. Yamamoto said the bank plans to test Cartographer next.

Customers on caution

On a customer panel, Nikki Harper of Mayo Clinic said teams first have to understand a process end to end. William Abrams of Medline said production at 73% accuracy is “unthinkable” for his company, because its hospital customers expect 99%. He added that agents running across the business seem like more autonomy than Medline or its customers are comfortable with yet.

A second panel covered UiPath Test Cloud and what UiPath calls a “dark testing factory”, where testing runs autonomously. Forrester analyst Diego Lo Giudice said the goal should not be full autonomy for its own sake.

“The dark testing factory has a future if it builds trust,” Lo Giudice said.

“Keep hiring juniors”

Dines closed on the workforce. He said AI cannot provide initiative or will, and that people give AI its goals. He called the decline in hiring juniors the wrong approach, a view he has voiced before. He has also told bosses not to cut jobs too fast because of AI.

Junior hires now have to learn from the people around them, not by writing simple functions AI can already write, he said. Senior staff, in turn, need to mentor them.

Streaming is getting more expensive again. Disney is the latest media giant to raise prices for its streaming services, adding to a growing pattern across the industry. The increases come roughly a year after Disney’s last major streaming price hike.

Disney is raising the price of its ad-free Disney+ and Hulu bundle to $21.99 a month, up from $19.99, whereas the ad-free stand-alone plans are each rising to $21.49 per month, up from $18.99. The company is also increasing the price of its stand-alone ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu plans to $12.49 a month. 

The new prices are reflected on Disney+’s support page. Bloomberg was the first to report the changes. 

Disney+ and Hulu are hardly alone. Streaming companies have spent the past several years steadily increasing prices. Peacock and Apple TV also raised prices in August, while Netflix increased prices earlier this year.

When Disney+ launched in 2019, its basic monthly subscription cost $6.99. Since then, the service has gradually moved further away from that intro price as Disney has tried to turn streaming into a profitable part of its entertainment business.

The latest increases come as streaming remains an increasingly important part of Disney’s overall business. In its third-quarter 2026 results, Disney said entertainment streaming revenue from Disney+ and Hulu rose 11% to $5.5 billion, driven by subscriber growth and the impact of previous price increases.

At the same time, Disney appears to be exploring new ways to expand its streaming business beyond simply raising subscription prices.

The company has reportedly explored the possibility of introducing a free tier for Disney+. This could put the company in more direct competition with platforms such as YouTube and Tubi, which have been capturing a growing share of consumers’ viewing time.

Earlier this month, Disney+ also introduced “Playlists,” a new feature designed to help users discover and continuously watch curated selections of content.

The company is making changes on the technology side as well. Disney recently hired Karandeep Anand as its first-ever chief technology officer. Anand is the former CEO of Character.AI, a company Disney previously accused of infringing on its intellectual property.

• Cybersecurity company OPSWAT found a login bypass and a crash bug in TP-Link’s Tapo C200 cameras
• TP-Link has extended that to include its C120 offering too
• Anyone on the same network could get admin access, live video, and recordings without requiring the owner’s credentials

Security researchers at OPSWAT have detailed two high-severity flaws in TP-Link’s Tapo C200, a pan-and-tilt indoor camera listed on Amazon for $26.99 and sold as a baby monitor and pet camera.

The more serious issue is that someone on the same network can log in as the camera’s administrator without the password, accessing the live feed and stored recordings.

from the hey-boss dept

When Elon first took over Twitter with grand plans to “bring back free speech,” I tried to help him run through the standard content moderation learning curve that basically every site created by a clueless tech bro runs through. They all start with “we’re the free speech site, we allow everything!” and very quickly someone points out that “everything” includes blatantly illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM). I’ve since been told by multiple former X employees that Elon definitely saw that article and… absolutely hated it.

Anyway, soon after that Elon announced that “removing child exploitation is priority #1,” though also suggested people point out CSAM in replies to him if they saw it (which is not how that should be done at all, since it would just point more people to CSAM).

There was also little to no evidence that stopping CSAM was actually “priority #1” seeing that he fired most of the trust & safety team so that at one point there were fewer than 10 specialists working on CSAM. This caused X’s attempts at stopping CSAM to completely fall apart, with experts in the space seeing plenty of evidence that the problem was growing on the platform, rather than shrinking. It probably didn’t help that Musk personally intervened to reinstate the banned account of a conspiracy theorist he really liked after that conspiracy theorist posted one of the most infamous, and most horrifying CSAM images known to authorities.

Of course, that was in the early days. One would hope that a few years further up the learning curve, he’d have learned something. But this is Elon we’re talking about. Last year there was a report that one of the major tool providers for CSAM detection, Thorn, had cut off X, because Elon refused to pay the bill. At the time, X responded angrily to anyone asking about the Thorn situation by claiming that they had put in place their own, better technology to spot CSAM.

How’s that going? Not too well, according to the NY Times, which worked with the Canadian Center for Child Protection to scan X for known abuse imagery. The report covers two separate findings, both of which are alarming. First, there have been obviously lots of reports (and a growing number of lawsuits) regarding claims of Grok producing CSAM. Much of the early reporting, though, didn’t clearly distinguish between actual CSAM and images that are still horrifying and problematic, but probably don’t legally qualify as CSAM.

However, the Canadian Center for Child Protection is certainly able to determine what is actual CSAM, and they were able to find dozens of images that Grok created that appeared to qualify:

In December and January, Grok’s X account produced millions of images of people with their clothing removed in response to prompts from users. After a public outcry, X said it would halt the account from producing those images.

Later, the Canadian center found 65 instances in which Grok created sexualized or exploitative images of children before X halted the bot. During that time frame, users also prompted the chatbot to edit clothed photos of known victims of childhood sexual abuse and depict them in lingerie or bikinis.

Equally as concerning, though, was that the NY Times was able to use PhotoDNA, the baseline tool that many web services use to identify known CSAM via hash matching, and found even more examples this year:

The Times conducted its own scan for child sexual abuse material on X by writing an automated computer program that searched for related terms without displaying the images, which are illegal to view. Links to the images were sent to a Microsoft service that checked whether they were included on lists of known abusive material compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other child safety groups. Matches were verified by analysts at the Canadian Center for Child Protection.

The Times found more than 75 images between January and June. The program The Times wrote reported the images to the authorities. The images were removed, but some had been viewed hundreds of times.

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This matters because stopping CSAM is a never-ending game of whac-a-mole when it comes to new material. But, for the most part, that’s not true for old material. PhotoDNA and a few similar offerings have gotten quite good at catching the set of “known” images that circulate over and over, and blocking those before they ever hit a site is baseline competency in trust & safety. These images should never have made it to the site, let alone “viewed hundreds of times.”

One explicit photo The Times’s automated program found on X, which has been known to authorities for at least seven years, showed a young girl with fluid on her face being raped orally. The post of the photo, which advertised the sale of similar illegal content, was publicly available for over an hour in March and received 16 likes and nine reposts from other users before The Times found and reported it.

The person depicted in the image, now an adult, said in an interview that she believed X profited from her abuse and further victimized her by not stopping the image from being shared.

“They’re getting benefits from my abuse, and it just feels like it’s never going to stop,” the woman said of X. She spoke on the condition of anonymity because she has been stalked by people who viewed images of her abuse online. “I get angry that I’m still having to go through this decades later, and that there doesn’t seem to be real-life consequences for people.”

The whole joke in that speedrun piece from four years ago was that Level One lasts about five minutes. You announce that anything goes, someone points out that “everything” includes CSAM, and you quickly learn how to start fighting CSAM — because that’s the one bit of content moderation that everyone agrees on. And the easiest version of that, catching the known images via hash-matching, has had obvious battle tested tooling for years. Elon chose not to use them, insisting he’d built something better himself (perhaps with Grok?). Yet, what he built appears to have been outperformed by a NY Times reporter with a script and access to the PhotoDNA API.

Four years in, and Elon still hasn’t cleared Level One of the curve. Yikes.

Filed Under: csam, elon musk, photodna

Companies: spacex, twitter, x, xai

As concern over AI safety and rogue agents continue to make headlines, it’s no surprise that cybersecurity stocks are rising, or that investors are pouring massive amounts of capital into startups trying to build the next generation of security for an AI-native world. We’re even seeing companies like Instinct and Simile bring in nine-figure checks and valuations that wouldn’t have made sense a few years ago. 

With a front row seat to it all is Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures who’s spent nearly two decades investing in cybersecurity and enterprise software — including six consecutive rounds in cloud security startup Wiz, which Google acquired for $32 billion earlier this year in one of its largest acquisitions ever. 

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Shah joins Rebecca Bellan to break down why he thinks periodic, human-in-the-loop security can’t keep up anymore, and why Index continues investing in AI-native security companies at stages that once required much more proof. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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If you have kids, they’re probably back in school right now after the summer break. Mine are too.

My kids range from 9 to 20 years old, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what their future careers are going to look like.

Some schools are embracing AI in the classroom. Others are banning it completely. I’m not sure either side has figured out the right answer yet—I’m not sure any of us have.