Considering how important it is for everything from navigation to keeping clocks in sync, satellite navigation systems are surprisingly vulnerable to a variety of attacks, ranging from simple jamming to more sophisticated spoofing attacks. This may be changing, though, as Galileo, Europe’s GNSS, recently demonstrated its first cryptographically-secured position fix under spoofing conditions.

Most GNSS systems, including GPS, have no verification measures to keep an adversary from transmitting a false signal at a higher power and hijacking a receiver; since GNSS signals are extremely weak by the time they reach the ground, this presents no great difficulty to a moderately well-equipped attacker.

Galileo’s Signal Authentication System (SAS) aims to fix this. The Galileo ground station pre-selects signal spreading codes, which it then encrypts with a regularly-changing secret key and publishes. A receiver which anticipates needing a verified signal can then download these encrypted codes ahead of time and store them. Galileo satellites then transmit on the E6-C pilot signal, and the receiver records the signal. After transmitting a message block, it then transmits the decryption key on a separate signal, which the receiver uses to recover the spreading codes. The receiver then correlates these spreading codes with the recorded signal to find the satellite’s pseudorange.

It’s a rather complicated system, but it works: earlier this month in Andøya, Norway, the annual Jammertest GNSS testing event took place. For one week, a wide range of organizations tested the resilience of their GNSS systems against various attacks, including jamming, delayed retransmission, and spoofing. Using five Galileo satellites, the European Space Agency was able to obtain a stable lock on their receiver even during spoofing.

In principle, this method could be extended to other GNSS systems. There’s certainly motivation to do so; very large-scale attacks have been demonstrated recently.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei seems to be everywhere this weekend: He was lampooned on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, and tonight, he’s set to have dinner with President Donald Trump at the White House.

Axios first broke the news of Amodei’s dinner plans, which TechCrunch subsequently confirmed with a source familiar with his plans.

This will be the first one-on-one meeting between the two men, who recently found themselves on opposite sides of the AI safety debate. Amodei released a plan to slow AI development (or at least proceed with more caution), while Trump has insisted, without evidence, that the AI backlash is a Democratic hoax; he also wants to rebrand the technology as “super intelligence.”

Even before the current back-and-forth, Amodei and Anthropic have to had a fraught relationship with Trump’s administration. Earlier this year, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk in response to the company’s attempt to put guardrails around the use of its technology (Anthropic has been fighting the designation in court), although other administration officials have been friendlier.

In this week’s Sunday Reboot, the Apple Watch is better for your health, but maybe the rumored screen-free wearable could be better for your peace of mind.

Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get next week underway with a good first step.

Keeping customers alive with simplification

The September event schedule usually covers the key portable touch points Apple has with its customers. That is, iPhone, AirPods, and the Apple Watch. This year was no different, and for the wearable side, that meant new wrist-mounted models.

There’s a lot to talk about, including things like Audio Intelligence and the privacy implications, as well as Siri‘s overhaul. But health is a big thing here, too.

It is a bit for me too, on a personal note. After attending a funeral earlier in the week, it certainly makes you think about your life and about doing something that stops you from being the perennially overweight guy. But I digress.

Apple’s added a new health-sensing system with an expanded electrode surface area, more electrodes, and a better photodiode array. It’s now checking your heart every five seconds, so you know how your heart varies throughout the day.

So many electrodes…

The new Readiness score also sounds like a decently simple way to measure your capacity to work out, or quite frankly, to deal with the day ahead. It’s a fairly clear signal to anyone that they need to care more about themselves.

It’s not quite the Apple Watch screaming “Get more sleep!” or “Work out more!” but it’s going to be helpful to some of its audience.

This all plays into Apple’s changes in the Health app on iPhone and iPad, with a greater use of Apple Intelligence. Though I fear many will look at Health Age with some trepidation.

Some people will see Apple Intelligence comparing them to someone five years younger and think they’re extremely fit for their age. Others will see a Health Age that’s added a few too many years, and quietly laugh it off if it’s brought up by anyone.

I fear that if I check that figure out, I’ll face questions from Apple Intelligence asking how I’m not dead yet.

Would you just stop already?

These notifications and metrics also tie into something else that came up this week. There were rumors that Apple was prototyping a new fitness and health tracker.

Specifically, a tracker that isn’t intended to be a mini iPhone on your wrist, but more a collection of sensors that hands off the data to your iPhone. Something similar to trackers like the ones sold by Whoop, which collects data on your activity and nothing else.

You may consider it to be a dumb Apple Watch, and you’re right. It’s not going to provide you with information directly, but that is the point.

I have been a long-time user of the Apple Watch Series 4, specifically the Nike Edition one. As if the swoosh will make me do more exercise.

The Apple Watch Series 4, still working on my wrist. It’s more scuffed now, though.

I have written before about how the Apple Watch is great at data collection, but also that it is also insanely good at nagging you. Every so often, your wrist dings as yet another notification comes in, and you’re too lazy to keep looking at your iPhone for once.

The amount of dings I get every day on my wrist is infuriating at times. On many occasions, I have wanted to punt the Apple Watch through a window because I hear the chime and immediately do Pavlov proud by looking at my wrist.

I have, in recent months, started wearing the Apple Watch with Do Not Disturb enabled. It has certainly helped me become less wound up and more relaxed because I’m able to ignore those wrist pings, but it doesn’t stop me from checking.

This is a problem that Apple has partially solved. With the introduction of the fitness tracking capability in the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2, it does mean I can do some workouts and exercise without the Apple Watch at all.

However, if I want to check my health from throughout the day, that’s not an option. I still have to stick with the Apple Watch and live with the potential auditory distraction.

At least the Whoop-like tracker will be there for keeping tabs on my day.

It’ll still be silently judging me, but that’s the point.

Last week’s Sunday Reboot discussed the Battersea Power Station Apple Store, and how it should be a more-used design in Apple’s retail landscape

What just happened? It appears that Russia has followed in Iran’s footsteps and decided to target data centers in its hostilities. A Russian drone hit a business centre in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Friday, killing four people and damaging a data center, which Russia later confirmed had been a target.

The September 25 attack struck Kyiv’s Solomianskyi district. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said seven people were injured, including a child, while three of those killed were found in a parking lot outside the building. The blast damaged the facade and shattered windows.

The facility belonged to Ukrainian telecommunications company Datagroup. It said none of its employees were injured and customer data remained safe. Services continued operating from backup sites, with specialists assessing the damage and working to restore the infrastructure.

“All this affects people’s ability to stay connected, study, work,” said Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in a social media post. He also wrote, “The Russians are constantly expanding their escalation operation: American and other businesses, data centers, internet providers – for Russia, all ordinary life is simply a target. It is important that the world responds to all of this and that Russia feels the response to its terror.”

Russia’s defence ministry acknowledged the strike, claiming the data center processed and transmitted intelligence for Ukraine’s armed forces. Moscow also claimed attacks on facilities operated by New Telco, United DC, Kyivstar, and Parkovyi earlier in the week.

Ukraine’s digital transformation ministry said around 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region experienced internet problems following Wednesday’s attack, which damaged infrastructure belonging to providers Pavutyna and UTELS.

Some companies are already moving data from damaged servers to facilities outside Ukraine, according to the BBC, helping businesses keep their digital infrastructure beyond the reach of Russian strikes.

Losing connectivity in a war zone is obviously more serious than being unable to stream Netflix. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the strikes disrupted access to mobile air raid warnings. Banks, online payments, businesses, and government services also depend on the infrastructure now coming under attack.

There is some reassurance, however. The Institute for the Study of War’s September 25 assessment cited Ukrainian officials reporting no indications of damage to military or state communications. Providers also said Ukraine’s extensive, distributed networks make a complete internet shutdown unlikely, although repairs could push up customers’ bills.

Data centers are becoming a common target in conflicts. It was reported earlier this month that Iran’s attacks on Amazon’s Middle Eastern infrastructure left AWS unable to recover resources and data hosted exclusively in its Bahrain region. Resources in one UAE availability zone were also destroyed. Datagroup’s backups appear to have prevented a similar data-loss disaster in Ukraine.

Back in July, Iran claimed it had destroyed Amazon’s main data hub in Bahrain with cruise missiles. Tehran had also threatened the Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi, backed by OpenAI and Nvidia.

Image credit: DSNS Kyiv

Mitxela wanted noise. Years of fluid simulations on LEDs had given him mercury-like sloshing on screens and a tiny wearable pendant, yet every version stayed silent. Flip-dot panels solve that problem by themselves. Each pixel is a physical disk with magnets that slaps from black to yellow and back, and a few thousand of those slaps at once sound like water moving in a shallow tray. The name sealed it. FLIP already stood for Fluid Implicit Particle. Putting that algorithm on flip dots was too cool to ignore.

Commercial high-speed flip-dot walls from places like Breakfast Studio may cost a whopping $50,000, and they simply do not bother with smaller budgets. In contrast, Mitxela struck gold when he discovered eight excess Hanover panels from 2007, the most of which had been given after sitting idle in a friend’s stash of antiquated technology. Each panel is 13 dots tall by 28 broad, and 8 of them set up in a 2 by 4 grid provide a reasonable 3000 pixels and a square meter of display space. Mitxela had originally planned a truly massive setup with 18 panels and a giant gimbal system that visitors could use to physically flip the entire thing, but with only two weeks until Electromagnetic Field 2026, he scaled the design back down to 8 panels on a static plywood frame so that the local hackspace’s laser cutter could handle the parts in one go.

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Figuring out how to connect the dots proved to be a far greater problem than finding them. The original manufacturing electronics can refresh an entire panel in roughly a second, which is simply too sluggish for the fluid animation Mitxela desired. So he created his own driver boards, which sit on top of the original PCB and are crammed with H-bridge chips, shift registers, and a cheap CH32V003 microcontroller to monitor things via an RS485 link. It took a long time to get all of the solder joints to function on each panel, which there were over 400 of. The copper traces had to be carefully cut with a Dremel and diamond wheel, and the capacitors went through several iterations, from tiny ceramics that kept failing to 47-microfarad electrolytics, and finally to banks of eight 1000-microfarad cans per panel, just to get the 12-volt supply to cope with the massive 50-amp inrush when all the coils fired at the same time. Eventually, the whole device was able to pull more than 10-15 amps from a reworked 40 amp supply. A few dead coils had to be unwound and resoldered, short circuits on the standoffs had to be repaired, and at one point, one of the panels was erected upside down and had to be broken down and rebuilt.

A two-panel prototype was already chugging along smoothly at about 40 frames per second using a Raspberry Pi Pico 2, but the final motherboard is an STM32H7R3 running at 600 MHz and connected up to all eight of the decoder boards, it talks to a throwaway joystick Mitxela picked up from AliExpress (aptly labeled GRAVITY CONTROL) and even listens out for any movement from an accelerometer so the whole thing can respond properly to being physically tilted, and the whole frame weighs in at a quite substantial 15 kg. Viscosity, of course, was adjusted to zero, so the energy just sort of… dribbles away as the particles knock into the walls, and the display eventually settles into all sorts of bizarre, beautiful patterns that look like they belong in an art gallery.

The finished piece sat four days in the EMF lounge tent before anyone began to play with the joystick, and at nite, when the tent was quiet and nobody was troubling the item, the fluid would simply drift into those zero-gravity formations. A handful of the dots proved to be fragile and died owing to dust or over-enthusiastic fiddling by curious observers, but the most were easily repaired. Overall, the parts and boards cost less than five hundred pounds, or a few penny per dot, assuming you ignore the donated panels and the months of sweaty evenings Mitxela spent sweatily soldering it all together. When you consider the time and work required to create it, the commercial price tag appears much more acceptable.
[Source]

First look: External graphics cards have so far been limited by their need for high-bandwidth ports such as OCuLink and Thunderbolt 5. WiCi aims to address the issue by transmitting a GPU’s horsepower over Wi-Fi. The company claims that multiple devices on a network can share an eGPU’s compute for gaming and AI workloads.

WiCi recently began inviting interested parties to sign up for updates about the WiCi One, which aims to become the first successful wireless external graphics card. The device, sponsored by Nvidia’s Inception Program, aims to support popular AI tools, games, tablets, laptops, and phones.

A few companies have floated eGPUs as a way to achieve desktop-class GPU performance on smaller devices such as laptops and mini PCs. However, to maintain the bandwidth a desktop GPU normally uses over PCIe, eGPUs have so far required the latest cable technologies such as OcuLink, Thunderbolt 5, and USB4, which many devices still do not support.

WiCi believes that Wi-Fi 7 networks can support GPU instructions across multiple devices. In one demonstration, the eGPU appears as a Wi-Fi network that a user logs into on a modest-looking laptop. Although the video does not show the exact graphics settings used, the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark can be seen running at over 90fps. The firm says the WiCi One also handles various AI models and tools such as Hugging Face, Ollama, Blender, Unreal Engine, CapCut, OBS Studio, and more, all without modifications.

The WiCi One is expected to begin shipping in the fourth quarter of 2026 with two available models. The cheaper variant, which uses an Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti, starts at $2,000 for early birds but carries a $2,600 MSRP. Pricing information for the other version, equipped with an RTX 5090, will be available closer to launch.

According to WiCi’s internal benchmarks, the 5060 Ti edition handles Cyberpunk 2077 at approximately 80fps and Black Myth: Wukong at 60fps in 4K at ultra settings using DLSS. Meanwhile, the 5090 variant achieves 110fps in Cyberpunk and 90fps in Wukong.

Regarding LLM throughput, the 5060 Ti edition runs DeepSeek V4 Flash at 8 tok/s and Gemma 4 at 140 tok/s, while the premium model reaches 20 tok/s in DeepSeek and more than 500 tok/s in Gemma. Meanwhile, CapCut can export to 4K at 75fps on the 5060 Ti and 90fps on the 5090, while Adobe Premiere Pro can output 4K H.264 videos at 70fps and 90fps, respectively.

Interested parties can also win a WiCi One for free by submitting ideas for use cases, with prizes going to the 10 most interesting concepts.

The Velvet Underground spent its first two albums demonstrating how much noise, distortion, drones, sexual unease, drug references, and general discomfort could be squeezed onto a record without causing the pressing plant to call the authorities. Then, in 1969, Lou Reed and company did something arguably more surprising: they turned the volume down.

The band’s self-titled third album, The Velvet Underground, traded much of the confrontation of The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat for something quieter, more melodic, and considerably more intimate. More than five decades later, UMe’s Vinylphyle series is returning to the album using one of its most interesting original sources: Lou Reed’s 1969 “Closet Mix” stereo master, cut AAA by Joe Nino-Hernes and pressed at RTI on 180-gram black vinyl. The new pressing sells for $39.98 and is available exclusively through uDiscover Music.

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Why The Velvet Underground Matters

Released in March 1969, the album was the group’s first after co-founder John Cale departed, with Doug Yule joining Reed, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker. It was also the first Velvet Underground album produced and arranged by the band itself.

Anyone expecting another “Sister Ray” was in for a fairly substantial shock.

Songs including “Candy Says,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Jesus,” “I’m Set Free,” and “After Hours” revealed a far more vulnerable side of Reed’s songwriting, while “What Goes On” and “Beginning to See the Light” proved the Velvets had not suddenly misplaced their guitars. “The Murder Mystery,” meanwhile, made it clear that normality was never going to become a permanent condition.

The stylistic shift was significant. Instead of trying to make White Light/White Heat louder, uglier, or stranger, Reed pushed the band toward spare arrangements and intensely personal songs. That quieter approach anticipated a substantial part of his later solo work while offering another blueprint for subsequent generations of alternative and indie musicians who discovered that emotional directness could be every bit as subversive as distortion.

Naturally, the album failed to become a major commercial success at the time. The Velvet Underground were extremely good at influencing musicians who would eventually sell far more records than they did.

What Exactly Is the “Closet Mix”?

The Velvet Underground exists in two principal stereo mixes from 1969.

MGM/Verve engineer Val Valentin created the version that ultimately became the more widely distributed mix. Reed also prepared his own version, placing greater emphasis on the vocals and reducing the prominence of some of the instrumentation. Guitarist Sterling Morrison dubbed it the “Closet Mix” because he thought it sounded as though the album had been recorded in a closet. Not exactly the type of testimonial a modern record label would put across the top of an advertisement, but the name stuck.

The differences are not merely subtle EQ adjustments. Most notably, the two mixes use different performances of “Some Kinda Love” from the original recording sessions. Reed’s mix also creates a more intimate, vocal-forward presentation that fits particularly well with the inward-looking character of the material.

The Closet Mix appeared on some of the earliest U.S. LP pressings before the Valentin version became more common. It later resurfaced digitally on the 1995 Peel Slowly and See box set and again as part of the extensive 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition in 2014, so this is not some previously unheard tape discovered behind Lou Reed’s sofa.

What is notable about the new Vinylphyle edition is the source and production chain.

AAA From the 1969 Stereo Master

UMe specifies the source as the 1969 “Closet Mix” stereo album master, with Joe Nino-Hernes handling the new all-analog cut. The finished record is pressed at RTI on 180-gram black vinyl. No digitally reconstructed master, mystery file, or creatively worded “mastered from the original recordings” language is required here: this one is AAA.

The packaging is appropriately traditional as well. Buyers get a tip-on wrapped gatefold jacket with a satin-matte finish, an archival poly-lined sleeve, and a four-panel insert containing newly commissioned liner notes from four-time Grammy nominee and author Scott B. Bomar, along with scans of the source tapes.

This also continues UMe’s Vinylphyle series, which launched in November 2025 and previously tackled The Velvet Underground & Nico. eCoustics has also examined the series through its restoration of Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, where the available source material required a very different mastering approach.

And that is part of what makes Vinylphyle potentially interesting. The label is not forcing every album through precisely the same process simply so somebody can slap “audiophile” across the shrink wrap in 36-point type.

The Bottom Line

Forty dollars is hardly bargain-bin vinyl, but this is also refreshingly free of colored-vinyl gimmicks, enormous box-set architecture, or dubious anniversary arithmetic. What you are paying for is much easier to understand: Lou Reed’s original 1969 mix, the original stereo master, an all-analog cut, and an RTI pressing of one of the Velvet Underground’s most important albums.

Price & Availability

The Vinylphyle edition of The Velvet Underground is $39.98 and currently available through uDiscover Music in the United States. Orders are limited to four copies per customer, and the title is excluded from the retailer’s sitewide discounts.

Where to buy: $39.98 at uDiscover Music (ships on September 30, 2026).

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