Back when Googlebooks were first unveiled, Google confirmed that some Chromebooks would eventually get the chance to become Googlebooks. Except one person decided that they didn’t want to wait. Reddit user u/mawitime has successfully booted Googlebook OS on an existing ASUS Chromebook Plus.

This gives us one of the earliest looks at how Google’s new Android-based laptop operating system might behave on current Chromebook hardware. Surprisingly enough, the initial verdict is pretty positive. The user says it runs extremely smoothly and can occasionally seem even faster than ChromeOS. The machine isn’t running some brand-new flagship processor either. It has a 12th Gen Intel Core i5-1235U, 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage.

Don’t wipe your Chromebook just yet

Keep in mind that this is a homemade solution and not an official installation. The Reddit user described this project as “Frankensteined.” Wi-Fi, sound, and Pixel integration don’t currently work, and getting this far took several days. They relied on Google’s Antigravity coding agent during the process and have since been looking into making the setup more repeatable.

So no, this isn’t secretly an easy way to save yourself from buying a new Googlebook. What it does offer is an interesting proof of concept. Googlebook OS can at least boot and provide a responsive desktop experience on hardware several generations behind the laptops Google is currently selling.

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Google has plans to do this properly

Google officially says many of its newest Chromebook devices will be eligible to transition to Googlebook OS, although it hasn’t announced the full compatibility list or consumer migration process. Existing Chromebooks will continue receiving ChromeOS updates through their supported lifetimes, while qualifying newer hardware will eventually get migration options.

Back in May, we reported that Google VP John Maletis discussed letting existing Chromebooks move toward the new Googlebook experience rather than forcing everyone onto brand-new hardware. This unofficial installation doesn’t tell us which models Google will support. It’s also unclear how polished the official transition will be or whether every Googlebook feature will survive the move. Still, the recent experiment shows that Googlebook OS doesn’t need bleeding-edge hardware to run well.

Design platform Figma announced a new Markdown-based editor to help define a company’s design, bring in design and code libraries, and integrate with the Payload headless content management system during the company’s first Config event in India. Through some of these features, the company aims to provide a definition for its own and third-party agents to adhere to a brand’s design rules better while creating with AI.

The company debuted a new feature called Figma Specs, which is a markdown editor that lets users define their design language in a simple way. The document can serve as a reference for teams and agents while designing in Figma. Specs can exist as a standalone file in Figma or can co-exist within the canvas. Apart from acting as a text editor, users can reference other Figma elements, such as elements on the canvas and embed FigJam diagrams, code layers, and designs. 

What’s more, teams can bring in more context about design, including design libraries, code libraries, and guidelines to manage context for the design system. Agents can also refer to this centralized system to adhere to rules.

In the past week, the company made its agent on canvas available to a wider user base. However, given the non-deterministic nature of AI, the company is providing tools to steer it towards more predictable outcomes.

Figma also made its code layers feature, which adds coding to designs on canvas for more interactive prototypes. The company announced this feature in private beta back in June. At its India event this week, the company is making the function available in public beta to let more users test it out. Users can also ask the agent to turn a design into code or change a part of the code to iterate on a prototype.

“We see Figma as the place where software teams come to decide what they build and ship. And so for that, I think one of the key things to keep in mind about what AI has changed and what it made available is the ability to build,” Figma’s chief design officer Loredana Crisan told TechCrunch. “There are 17-times more lines of code being produced today than in the past. But when you’re looking at releases, only 1.3-times more releases. A lot of that code actually is not necessarily built to ship, but really built to discover what the product is. It’s built to design.”

The company said it is also supporting over 20 new tools with its MCP, including Open Code, Dia, Grok Bot, and Indian AI startup Sarvam.

Last year, Figma acquired open-source headless CMS Payload. Now, the company is integrating it with its Figma Make product for generating dynamic websites and directly managing content. The company said that Payload’s downloads have increased sixfold in the last 12 months.

The company opened its first office in India late last year with sales, partnership, go-to-market, and product support functions. Figma said that the country is its biggest market in terms of users outside the United States. The company noted that the platform works with 40% of India’s top 100 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Every fall, teachers ride a wave of opening day energy into the new school year, and then that wave breaks. Educators have a name for the slump that follows: the October Blues. It can hit new teachers hard enough to make them question whether they belong in the profession at all. The harder question is whether anything can soften the landing, or whether every teacher simply has to wait it out.

A Rookie Who Never Saw It Coming

Mike Anderson is an educational consultant, a former classroom teacher and the author of Rekindle Your Professional Fire.” He knows the slump from the inside, because his own first year of teaching came with a schedule that would have flattened almost anyone. At 22, he taught fourth grade all day, then raced off to coach two swim teams, with weekend meets on top. He was working more than 100 hours a week, and he never put a name on why he felt so run down.

He later watched a group of struggling teachers in Fairfax County, Virginia, and returned the following fall to find the teachers looking like different people. Their explanation caught him off guard. Later, a year-long tally of lost minutes forced him to rethink what was really wearing him down.

Start Small, Then Ask for Help

Mike’s advice for anyone in the thick of it is to skip the big overhaul. Name the one thing dragging you down, then pick a single bite-sized step that fits. Low on energy? Drink a tall glass of water before the morning coffee. Feeling alone in a building full of people? Commit to a 10 minute walk and talk with a colleague a few afternoons a week.

A slump that lingers is a different story. If the low feeling lasts more than a couple of weeks, Mike says it’s time to reach out to a mentor, an administrator, or a trusted colleague.

What School Leaders Can Do Beyond Snacks and Thank Yous

After a year of logging every drill, meeting and assembly that cut into his teaching time, Mike found he had lost more than 30 instructional days, about a sixth of the school year. He emailed the numbers to his superintendent and got a polite note of appreciation in return. Even so, the exercise showed him that his sense of falling behind was not a personal failing.

For school leaders, Mike points past one-time gestures like a staff appreciation breakfast. He encourages them to build autonomy, competence, purpose, belonging, curiosity, and fun into the daily and weekly rhythm of the school. Opening a staff meeting with a few minutes for teachers to share successes is one small place to start.

Listen to the episode.

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

The “October Blues” Are Coming. Here’s How Teachers Can Beat Them, by Ira Apfel

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.

The lawsuits cover everything from the design of ChatGPT to the company’s recent issues with rogue agents.

Trump White House aides see almost no paths to Republicans keeping control of the House in the midterm elections and are more focused on redoubling their efforts to save the Senate majority.

That has been the takeaway for officials in GOP groups who have been discussing the state of play with White House aides in recent weeks, according to three sources familiar with the situation.

It all comes as the White House moves into damage-control mode after contemplating for the first time earlier this month, as Inner Loop previously reported, that Republicans could possibly lose both chambers of Congress.

The general expectation is that the House has become a lost cause. Races that Republican congressional leadership once thought they could flip in order to offset Democratic gains are no longer considered attainable.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Speaker Mike Johnson, has now pulled ad buys in Democratic districts in Michigan and Ohio they were hoping to flip, as well as in the Republican seat being vacated in Nebraska by the retiring Don Bacon. The fund also started canceling remaining ad reservations in two House races where Republicans are seeking reelection in New Jersey and Iowa.

White House aides have shifted their focus to pushing an all-out defense of the Senate majority, which is also looking problematic but to a lesser degree than the House, the sources say. (Polling models and prediction markets agree.)

The aides see the Senate as still in play in large part because early returns for mail ballots have been relatively strong and comparable to 2024 presidential election levels in key Senate battleground states, sources say.

Trump officials at MAGA Inc. have also privately discussed how if Republicans can win some combination of senate seats in Alaska, Iowa, and Ohio, that would form a firewall that complicates Democrats’ path to snatching control of the Senate.

Still, Trump officials appear to have conceded they are unlikely to win in North Carolina. Senate Republicans’ campaign arm has paused ad spending in North Carolina since the start of October, mirroring pullbacks by other outside groups.

“President Trump is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in both the House and Senate,” says White House spokesperson Liz Huston in a statement.

The state of play—retreating from a state like North Carolina, where Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chair is on the ballot—would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.

​Students who have had contact with Child Protective Services (CPS) by age 15 are at greater risk of missing school for both excused (health-related) and unexcused (truancy) reasons than students with no CPS contact, according to research published last month in Children and Youth Services Review. 

Some estimates suggest that over one-third of children in the U.S. undergo a CPS investigation by the age of 18. The study did not conclude why youth with CPS contact accumulated more absences, saying additional research is needed.

​​“Absenteeism is such a complicated issue because kids miss school for so many reasons and for unique combinations of reasons,” says lead researcher Arya Ansari, an associate professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University.

One factor the study examined is whether “school connectedness” mitigates the link between CPS contact and high absenteeism. While school connectedness interventions did not benefit kids with CPS contact more than others, the study found all children did benefit. 

Ansari’s study found that students affected by CPS investigations reported lower levels of school connectedness than their peers, and that lower connectedness was associated with higher absenteeism. 

The study recommends fostering a strong sense of connection to school as “one key strategy” to increase attendance. Effective connectedness approaches include creating inclusive environments, offering extracurricular activities and supporting teachers to form strong relationships with students, the study says. The findings come amid efforts by schools across the country to reduce absenteeism, which has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, and underscore how challenging it can be to bring some students back to the classroom. 

The study also finds that students with CPS contact were more likely to have their teacher discuss their school absences with their families. 

Ansari says the average impact of early warning systems that inform parents about kids missing school is small and does not increase attendance for kids missing up to 40 days of the year and who may be facing issues like household instability and food insecurity. CPS becomes involved with a family to investigate an allegation of child abuse or neglect. CPS involvement often indicates a high-risk home environment characterized by poverty, substance abuse, domestic violence and other systemic barriers such as health issues that undermine school attendance.

For the study, Ansari used data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which tracked 3,334 adolescents born between 1998 and 2000 across 20 cities from birth through age 15. The study used student and parent reports on attendance and student surveys about their school connectedness, which researchers defined as “feeling close to people at school, feeling like they were a part of their school, feeling happy to be at school and feeling safe at their school.”

Impact of CPS Investigations on Attendance Needs More Study

​CPS investigated almost 3 million children in 2024, according to a report on child maltreatment from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Students who had contact with CPS were more likely to be born to Black, U.S.-native and English-speaking mothers. Additionally, their mothers also tended to be younger and in poorer health and were more likely to have a history of substance use during pregnancy.

“Some families, when they’ve had contact with CPS, might become more disengaged because there’s, s a fear of institutions and systems,” Ansari says. They might blame the school for contacting CPS or distrust institutions in general, including the education system. On the flip side, he notes, some families become more engaged to prevent surveillance.

​Students who have experienced CPS contact, especially when referrals originate from school personnel, might feel less connected to their school environment and are therefore less likely to show up. Ansari adds that contact with CPS is linked to students experiencing fewer positive feelings about their schools.

How Building Relationships Can Help

The study emphasizes the role of school connectedness as a protective factor for all students, including those who have experienced a CPS investigation. “Fostering school connectedness may be critical for improving attendance among this population of students,” Ansari writes. “Ultimately, understanding how school connectedness interacts with CPS contact can help educators develop more targeted strategies that support the attendance and overall well-being of these students.”

The study points to resources that schools can use to bolster their connectedness with students. A 2023 study published in Applied Developmental Science found that engaging in extracurricular activities can help students feel like they belong.

The study also recommends enhancing the school’s connections with family members and support for teachers. For example, children placed in foster homes may have new guardians with whom the school can build bonds, and some parents who take CPS intervention seriously may be motivated to become more involved in their children’s education.

“The foundation of where schools can start is with relationships. If a kid feels safe at school and knows that a teacher cares, they’re going to be more willing to come,” says Ansari.

“The key to improving attendance is developing relationships, since strong, caring relationships help motivate all students, including those in contact with CPS, to show up,” agrees Hedy Chang, president and CEO of Attendance Works. She adds that it is through relationships that adults can discover the underlying barriers to school attendance and then partner with students and families to address them.  

Karen Mapp, a professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, emphasizes the need for proactive communication. When “an attempt to communicate with a family only happens after there’s an incident, or when the student is chronically absent,” it signals a problem, she says. Schools instead should have “an active strategy to communicate with families regularly, to build relationships with families, and to get to know them.” 

​Reducing absenteeism also requires comprehensive, school-based and out-of-school strategies that remove barriers to regular attendance. “We need to provide wraparound services or help families build these connections with community resources,” says Ansari.

Ansari adds that prioritizing support can help educators and students show up and engage meaningfully, fostering a sense of community in schools that both students and teachers deserve.

“AI agents give attackers a fresh set of connections to walk across,” Douglas McKee, director of vulnerability intelligence at Rapid7, told Ars. “Someone plants text in content, an agent will read it then pass it along to another agent as a normal delegated task, and that second agent runs it because it trusts whoever handed it the work. Every piece in that chain did exactly what it was designed to do, which is what makes this so tricky to catch. Each protocol was built assuming it lived on its own, so each one checks its own front door while nobody watches the hallway in between.”

CVE-2026-97228, the vulnerability Syed found in Rapid7’s network, carried a severity rating of only 2.7 out of 10. Rapid7 fixed it last month.

The vulnerability affecting Google was more severe, with a rating of 8. It stemmed from an MCP toolbox for databases (googleapis/mcp-toolbox) initializing its HTTP client with no use of a CheckRedirect policy, a series of settings that control how a server is to handle cases of a URL either returning an error or redirecting to a different URL. Google’s HTTP client also failed to validate target IP addresses.

“A crafted path parameter could make the toolbox follow a redirect to an internal endpoint and send requests on the attacker’s behalf,” Syed explained. Google’s fix involved applying an allow-list of IP ranges and block lists. “It rejects an unsafe base URL at startup instead of on first request. That is what a real SSRF guard looks like. It is also more work than most MCP servers have done.”

Syed is calling the class of attack “protocol pivoting,” because the exploits work when an app or server uses MCP to assign a task to an agent and the agent then forwards malicious instructions to another agent using a different communication method, like Google’s Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, used for inter-agent delegation, or emerging standards like the Agent Network Protocol. Often, he says, trust or authorization gets effectively lost in translation. He described protocol pivoting as “a multi-step attack in which an adversary gains initial access through one protocol, exploits trust assumptions between protocols, and escalates to capabilities only accessible via a different protocol.”

Deezer wants to give you a direct way to say no to AI-generated songs cluttering your feed. The music streaming platform has announced a new toggle feature that will let users exclude fully AI-generated tracks, albums, and related artists from search results. The feature is set to roll out globally before the end of 2026, and you can always flip the toggle if you change your mind.

How will Deezer’s AI music filter work?

Deezer’s new toggle will only target content that is fully AI generated, and not those songs where AI played a limited role along with human creative process. So a music artist who uses AI to assist with part of a production would not automatically fall into the same category as a track generated entirely by artificial intelligence.

CEO Alexis Lanternier says the company has seen clear demand from listeners who want more control over what they hear. The need arises as AI-generated music continues to flood streaming platforms. Earlier this year, Deezer revealed that AI-generated songs accounted for 44% of its daily music uploads, highlighting the growing scale of the problem.

A survey conducted by Deezer and Ipsos showed that nearly half of respondents wanted the option to filter out fully AI-generated music. The same survey also found that 97% of participants couldn’t tell AI-generated songs apart from human-made ones in a blind test, and 80% wanted clearer labeling.

How does Deezer already identify AI-generated music?

Deezer has been detecting AI-generated songs on its own platform since 2025. In June 2026, it expanded those efforts by launching a free online AI music detector that scans playlists across 20 major streaming platforms.

The company is also licensing its detection technology to other streaming services, hoping to help the wider industry fight back against the flood of synthetic music before it gets worse. Deezer says its detection system has helped it exclude more than 42 million AI-generated tracks from recommendations and tag over 14 million albums.

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Every time a turntable is announced, there’s a remark about the ‘vinyl renaissance’, and sure vinyl is back on vogue but there’s been much chatter about customers who only buy just the vinyl. But of course, to listen to it, you need something to play on.

We’ve seen Sony re-enter the vinyl player market with its two excellent options, and now Cambridge Audio has made a return with Spira.

The London-based brand is pushing the new turntable as being “everything you need straight out of the box”, with an Audio-Technica cartridge pre-fitted and aligned so you don’t have to mess about with that. A built-in phono stage that reduces the need for external amplification and Bluetooth support that allows you to fling the sound of your vinyl to your wireless headphones or Bluetooth speakers.

But if you want to make adjustments, you are able to. The head shell can be removed, making it easier to replace the cartridge (Cambridge recommends Audio-Technica’s 3600LE) if you want to improve the tracking, and if you feel as if you can get better sound through an external phono stage, Cambridge has a few in either the Alva Solo and Alva Duo.

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The aluminium alloy tonearm features an adjustable counterweight and anti-skate, with the chassis of the Spira built around a solid wooden plinth to reduce vibrations. A felt and vibration-absorbing feet help to keep any rumbles from affecting the signal. And if you want to protect your records from dust as they’re playing (you’ll be surprised as to how much dust gets picked up), an hinged dust cover is included.

Record speeds include 33.3 and 45RPM, and the Spira comes in a variety of colours to match your space (black, white, blue, green and orange), matching Cambridge’s own L/R speakers if you want to pair the Spira with those wireless speakers.

The Cambridge Audio Spira is available now, with pricing at £329 / €349 / $499. Is it good enough to make it to our best turntable list? Hopefully we can get a review sample in and find out.

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