Stoke Space’s Nova Pathfinder upper stage flight article No. 1 sits at the company’s factory in Kent, Wash. (Stoke Space Photo)
Stoke Space says it has raised roughly $1 billion to get ready for the first launch of its fully reusable Nova rocket — and to scale up the rocket’s design for even bigger payloads.
To accommodate its grander ambitions, the Kent, Wash.-based startup is also scaling up its rocket test facility in Moses Lake, 175 miles to the east.
“We have confidence in the foundation that we’ve laid today, and now it’s time to scale,” Stoke Space CEO and co-founder Andy Lapsa told GeekWire.
The newly announced Series E financing round was co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, with participation from General Innovation, Glade Brook Capital, US Innovation Technology, Washington Harbour Partners, Woven Capital, Y Combinator and other investors.
The final figure will be “within rounding error” of a billion dollars, Lapsa said. “Not quite, or a little more,” he said. “The speed with which this has come together is very fast.”
Lapsa said that scaling up the Nova rocket’s design was always part of Stoke Space’s game plan, but that the timeline is being accelerated in response to the growing demand for launches and the shrinking availability of launch opportunities.
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The timing of Stoke’s pivot to a bigger launch vehicle wasn’t sparked by a single event, Lapsa said. “The pressure has been growing over the last couple of years,” he said. “It certainly hasn’t slowed down recently.”
From Pathfinder to Block 2
This infographic compares the designs for Nova Pathfinder and Nova Block 2. (Stoke Space Illustration)
The revised plan calls for Stoke to begin launching missions with the initially designed rocket, now known as Nova Pathfinder. Pathfinder’s first stage will be powered by seven of Stoke’s Zenith engines, and the upper stage’s Andromeda engine will have a ring of 24 thrust chambers integrated into an actively cooled metallic heat shield. The rocket will be capable of putting 3 metric tons of payload into low Earth orbit, or LEO.
Pathfinder’s first launch is now scheduled for early 2027 — a slight slip from earlier expectations. It will carry a spacecraft for AstroForge, a California-based asteroid mining company. “We’re going out to the asteroid belt, and yeah, Astroforge is our partner for that one,” Lapsa said. “They’re looking to prospect and ultimately mine asteroids, and bring back rare earths and other important materials.”
The super-sized version of Stoke’s rocket, known as Nova Block 2, is due to make its debut in 2029. Its first stage will have twice as many Zenith engines as Pathfinder. Its upper stage will have 12 independent engines, each with two thrust chambers. That will increase Nova’s lift capability by a factor of five, enabling up to 15 metric tons of payload to be delivered to LEO. More than 4 tons can be sent to geosynchronous transfer orbit, or GTO.
Both versions of the Nova rocket are designed to be fully reusable, with the first-stage booster flying itself down to a recovery ship and the upper stage making a separate re-entry. Stoke is only the second company in the space industry to pursue that strategy. SpaceX has designed its Starship launch system for dual-stage reusability but hasn’t yet reached that goal.
Stoke is developing an active-cooling system for upper-stage reusability. Some of the rocket’s cryogenically cooled liquid hydrogen propellant is circulated through channels in the upper stage’s metallic heat shield to absorb the intense heat of atmospheric re-entry. SpaceX has been experimenting with different heat shield strategies for Starship, but some experts have expressed doubts about SpaceX’s approach.
Both versions of Stoke’s rocket are designed to fill a market niche that’s different from Starship’s. The Nova rockets’ capabilities fall close to both ends of the medium-lift spectrum, while SpaceX’s super-heavy-lift Starship is designed to loft 100 to 150 tons of payload to LEO.
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Expanding the infrastructure
Stoke Space tested its Zenith rocket engines and Nova Pathfinder’s first stage in Moses Lake in June. (Stoke Space Photo)
Stoke Space’s 168,000-square-foot factory and headquarters facility in Kent was designed from the beginning to manufacture rockets that are bigger than Nova Pathfinder.
“We bring in raw sheet metal, we build our core and we ship a rocket,” Lapsa said. “We can use the same methods and effectively the same tooling to build larger diameters and larger lengths, and that’s very intentional.”
The company’s rocket test facility in Moses Lake is being expanded from 75 to 550 acres to accommodate work on two types of rockets simultaneously.
“We’ve done, I would say, an extremely efficient job at leveraging the 75 acres that we use today,” Lapsa said. “The expansion across the street is going to enable us to test again at rate. … Certain of our facilities have an overlapping blast radius, so they interfere with each other. A big advantage of being able to spread our wings a little bit, and get a little bit more space, is that those test stands can operate in full independence of each other.”
Stoke’s launch facilities at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida can also accommodate a dual-track approach. A new payload processing facility at the Cape is intentionally sized to support both Nova Pathfinder and Block 2.
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In June, Stoke Space’s Moses Lake facility completed what the company called proto-qualification testing of the first-stage booster for its first Nova Pathfinder rocket. “The second stage will ship out pretty soon,” Lapsa said. “That goes to Moses Lake. … This will be acceptance testing of the structure, and then we’ll do a static hot-fire test out there to fully shake down the second stage, and then it ships out to Cape Canaveral.”
The booster is being prepared for shipping to the Cape as well. “We’ll repeat the wet dress rehearsals that we did in Moses Lake, but we’ll do it on the launch pad itself,” Lapsa said. “Then we’ll do the same thing: static fire test on the first stage down there, and then the two stages go together, and we go to space.”
Stoke Space has built a facility at Space Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. (Stoke Space Photo)
Lapsa said Stoke currently has about 400 employees. “It’s approximately 50 in Moses Lake, 50 in Cape Canaveral. We have a handful of remotes, and then everybody else is in Kent,” he said.
Even though Stoke Space hasn’t yet launched a rocket, the startup’s steady progress toward that milestone — and its long-term vision for total rocket reusability — have been impressive enough to keep investors on board.
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“Having supported Stoke through multiple stages of its growth, we believe this company has demonstrated both the exceptional technical progress and the ambition to build a launch system capable of serving the market at industrial scale,” Chris Morales, partner at Point72 Ventures, said today in a news release.
“Full reusability is the inevitable end state of the market, providing an order-of-magnitude cost and service advantage over partially reusable rockets,” said Clay Fisher, general partner at Spark Capital. “Stoke had the right thesis seven years ago and has paired that prescient vision with a blistering pace of execution. As a result, they stand uniquely positioned to give customers more choice and capacity when they need it, and to unlock an enormous new economy in space.”
Lapsa said he’s grateful for the vote of confidence.
“We’re humbled by the investment, having great partners behind us,” he said. “It’s an incredibly critical and important moment for us as a civilization to get right. I think space development is really, really important for our ability as a civilization to continue to scale and continue raising the quality of life that we enjoy — and we’re thrilled to be part of it.”
While smartphones won’tstop getting bigger, e-readers seem to be getting smaller. Boox has been at the forefront with one of the most popular small e-readers, the Boox Palma, and now it is adding an even smaller model.
Boox announced the Picco, with preorders opening today. Its screen is just under 4 inches (3.97 to be exact), making it about the size of a playing card. It’s even smaller than the Xteink X4 Pro I tested earlier this year, which has a 4.3-inch screen (but just slightly larger than the 3.7-inch Xteink X3), and considerably smaller than the upcoming Boox Palma 3’s 6.19-inch screen. I liked the size of the Xteink in my hand, but navigating the interface and getting books were challenging, so I’m excited to see another option in that smaller size from a maker with more accessible ebooks (though still not as convenient as a Kindle or Kobo with their built-in stores).
The Picco will cost $100 and is expected to ship in November. I’ll be testing it soon, but in the meantime, here are the details if you’ve been eyeing a tiny e-reader.
An E-Reader for Productivity
Courtesy of Boox
The Boox Picco has a monochrome screen with a resolution of 235 pixels per inch and an adjustable front light that switches between warm- and cool-toned lighting. The microSD card slot supports up to 2 TB of flash memory storage (a 16 GB card is included). There are both a touchscreen and physical page-turning controls, thanks to the buttons on the side of the device. The case has a magnetic ring so you can attach it to the back of a smartphone, though I’ll have to see how well it fits when I test it, as I had mixed results attaching an Xteink to my phone due to both fit and magnet strength.
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Courtesy of Boox
Boox says the Picco will have a streamlined operating system focused on reading and digital utility tools. It’s also the first in what Boox calls its Tiles lineup, which is how you’ll access ebooks on this device. You can also use web and USB-C file transfers (the Picco has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity) to get ebooks onto the Picco. The Picco also has the Pomodoro, Todo, and Countdown apps, so you can use it as both an e-reader and a productivity gadget—handy, and a bigger motivation to keep it attached to the back of your phone even when you aren’t reading.
I’m intrigued to see it in action. Boox’s most popular e-reader could become the Picco over the Palma 3, but we’ll have to wait for both devices to become available to see which is the better buy. Stay tuned for my reviews of both when they come out.
But a Chromium-based design means it can only be so efficient.
Discord
Discord is working on a new mode for its social platform that it says might be less resource-intensive. Screenshots of an option called Game Mode began circulating on social media over the weekend. The description shown for the Game Mode toggle states that it will “Reduce Discord’s CPU and GPU usage while a game is running.” By making the chat platform less resource-intensive, concurrently running software should be able to run more smoothly.
Today, the company confirmed on X that this experimental mode will begin rolling out to its users next week. The brief official announcement about Game Mode added that Discord is “aiming to add more resource-saving features over time.”
Discord is based on the Electron web app framework, which uses Javascript and Chromium for creating software. The open-source Chromium, which is the basis for Google’s Chrome and several other browsers, is not known as the most efficient tool for web development. A feature like Game Mode could offer some performance improvements, especially while also running a beefy AAA game on the same machine, but there may only be so far that Discord will be able to streamline on its current architecture.
Six of the nine independent experts on the advisory board of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism—a consortium run by several of the biggest US tech companies—resigned on Monday, according to a letter seen by WIRED and interviews with three of the people.
The tensions between the independent advisory committee and the GIFCT date back to an email the counterterrorism and free speech experts received in July from Meta’s Nell McCarthy, a vice president overseeing content policy. For years, the group had advised the GIFCT on how to prevent platforms from becoming havens for the radical organizations and individuals blamed for some of the world’s worst mass violence.
But McCarthy wrote that while the consortium welcomed the experts’ insights on violent trends, it no longer desired their scrutiny on the effectiveness of Big Tech’s efforts to curtail violence. Meta and other leaders wanted to “refresh” the 6-year-old independent advisory committee the experts sat on, she wrote. Meta currently serves as chair of GIFCT’s operating board, giving it outsized influence over policy changes, though other companies on the panel must ultimately approve.
New additions to the rotating advisory committee had previously been elected by current members; under the plan laid out in July, they would instead be picked by tech companies. The committee would be barred from weighing in on key topics such as the consortium’s performance and making recommendations together as a group. Its role as a watchdog would be neutered, advisers believed.
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In their resignation letter, the departing members of the committee wrote that their appeals against the plan had been “ignored” and that, in turn, they had “lost confidence in the GIFCT’s ability to deliver effectively on its founding mission” to prevent terrorists from exploiting online services. “We all know that a body that cannot scrutinise, take a position, or evaluate is not an advisory body at all,” the letter stated. “It is decoration and accountability theatre.”
Meta deferred comment on the resignations to the GIFCT. An unsigned statement sent to WIRED by a GIFCT spokesperson on behalf of the consortium’s leadership and the Meta-chaired operating board says the proposed changes have been “informed by several rounds of feedback” and are not yet final. They came out of discussions on “how to more effectively engage civil society and governments for substantive input” as “multi-stakeholderism is a core principle” for the GIFCT.
The consortium has about 35 members; other long-time board members include Microsoft and YouTube. A small staff alerts members to violent content, helps them exchange threat intelligence, and commissions research on countering extremism. While the coordination has helped some platforms combat problematic content, critics believe the group isn’t living up to its potential.
A WIRED investigation in 2024 uncovered several issues with GIFCT, including Meta delaying TikTok’s membership bid and poor relations between the companies at the helm and the unpaid independent advisory body. It also revealed failures in the tip-sharing database the consortium oversees to coordinate takedowns of problematic content.
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The dismantling of the advisory group threatens to deteriorate the organization’s work further at a time when balancing free expression and online safety has become more challenging. Generative AI tools have simplified content creation but imposed limited guardrails.
The experts who resigned include university researchers and representatives of civil society organizations. They had agreed with McCarthy on the need for changes to improve the results of the decade-old anti-terrorism consortium. But they believe the proposal, which could be finalized soon, amounts to a step backward.
“There won’t be critical voices raising concerns about what GIFCT is doing or is not doing,” one of the departing experts says. “It may seem politically convenient for them to abolish the independent advisory committee, but they are going to regret it in the longer term.”
The successful mission also deployed 26 of SpaceX’s latest Starlink satellites.
SpaceX
For its 14th flight, SpaceX’s Starship powered by its Super Heavy megarocket has entered low-Earth orbit for the first time. SpaceX kicked off this major undertaking early Monday morning but had to deal with some hiccups on the way, including losing one of its six Raptor engines. Ultimately, SpaceX decided to push on with the mission and successfully reached orbit albeit with some compromise.
SpaceX originally planned to have Starship orbit Earth six times over a span of nearly 10 hours for the Flight 14 mission. With one of the engines offline, the plan changed to only spend approximately three hours in orbit before reentering the Earth’s atmosphere and landing in the Pacific Ocean. As part of the same mission, SpaceX managed to deploy 26 of its Starlink V3 satellites into orbit. SpaceX said that its Starlink team has made contact with all newly-deployed 26 satellites in orbit, which will eventually be used to improve Internet speeds for customers. While previous Starship missions also carried several V3 satellites, they only remained in suborbital space and served as test flights to see if the new satellites would connect to the existing Starlink constellation.
While Starship’s flight 14 marked a major milestone of reaching orbit, the mission also served as a test of the reusability of its Super Heavy rocket. After providing the necessary boost to Starship, Super Heavy landed in the Gulf of Mexico, where it will eventually be retrieved, but not by a launch tower‘s “chopsticks” as previously demonstrated.
Mipmapping is a good way to add a lot more detail to a 3D scene without overburdening the rendering hardware with detail that won’t be seen by the user. This level-of-detail rendering technique was demonstrated on the N64 console hardware a few years ago by [James Lambert] with [Michael Biggins], also known as [PhonicUK], now demonstrating it on the ESP32-S3 using his own Jet rendering engine.
Although level-of-detail rendering really speeds things up, it does also require far larger texture sizes, with [James]’s N64 demo taking up 40 MB of a 64 MB cartridge. To fit it on an ESP32-S3 with 16 MB of PSRAM and no SD card expansion or such the textures were further compressed to use 8-bit indexing, resulting in a mere 5.01 MB of textures.
There’s a demonstration video over on the associated Reddit thread, which shows the camera moving through the scene. Even if not as exciting as the Wipeout port by [Michael] that we previously covered, it does make clear that even without a proper 3D GPU the ESP32-S3 is already a pretty capable gaming machine that can go toe-to-toe with some 1990s consoles.
There are five weeks left until the midterm elections, and extremism is on the ballot in much of the US. A WIRED review of candidates running for statewide and federal positions in November, along with exclusive data on candidates running for state-level positions, reveals hundreds of Republican candidates who openly express virulently hateful ideologies, share racist content online, have close ties to white supremacist and antisemitic figures, and are members of far-right groups online. President Donald Trump and his administration have openly embraced, endorsed and defended many of these candidates.
At a local level, over 500 candidates running for state legislator positions in November are members of far-right groups on Facebook that promote militias, gun rights, and Christian nationalism, according to data collected by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights and shared with WIRED.
“The candidates are taking a page out of the Trump administration’s playbook,” Luke Baumgartner, a former research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, tells WIRED. Baumgartner claims that many of the candidates running in November have been inspired by those in the White House. “In essence, the executive branch has handed them a permission slip to say and do what would have been unthinkable during the George W. Bush, McCain, or [Mitt] Romney eras of the GOP,” he says.
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Extremist rhetoric has led to real world political threats. In 2025, terrorism and targeted violence incidents rose 19 percent compared to 2024, according to researchers at the University of Maryland; the US Capitol Police reported an increase in “threat assessment cases” against members of Congress for the third year in a row, with a 58 percent increase from 2024; and the US Marshals Service documented threats against almost 400 judges, a roughly 5 percent increase from the previous year.
Here are five races involving candidates who have shared extremist ideologies or have close ties to extremist figures, that WIRED is watching ahead of the November midterms.
The Texas Railroad Commissioner Race
Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images
Bo French, the GOP candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner, is so extreme that Republican strategist Karl Rove has said he would vote for a Democrat rather than supporting a “bigot.”
We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
Roborock Qvero 2 Pro: 30-second review
The Qrevo 2 Pro is the latest robot vacuum and mop combo cleaner from Roborock and includes detachable mop plates to help ensure it doesn’t get carpets wet while cleaning.
Cleaning performance is a match for some of the most expensive options on the market with its mopping being as good as I have ever tested making it a fantastic pick for the price.
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It is relatively tall so it can’t clean under low furniture and its hard floor cleaning isn’t flawless but it is an excellent option, especially when on sale.
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Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro: price & availability
List price: $799.99 / £649.99 / AU$1,199
Launch date: August 2026
Availability: worldwide
The Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro sits right on the line between premium and mid-range robot vacuums, with a list price $799.99 / £649.99 / AU$1,199. However, almost immediately after launch I have already seen it get a significant discount to $549 / £549.99, tipping it firmly into the more affordable category — especially considering the features and performance.
Even at full price it sits below the Roborock’s Curv models and produces similar results (although it doesn’t have the AdaptLift chassis for getting over higher thresholds between rooms) making it an excellent value pick. If you’re looking to spend less, the Roborock Q7 is a good alternative although it has much lower suction power and doesn’t have an auto-empty dock.
A branded floor cleaner compatible with the Qrevo 2 Pro is available on Roborock’s website but they don’t push this hard and after testing it without it, it’s definitely not required.
You don’t have to use Roborock’s own floor cleaner, but you will need to buy disposable dust bags (Image credit: Future)
What you will need to buy are disposable dust bags as these are thrown away once full. A three-pack costs $39.90 in the US, and a six-pack is £31.99 in the UK, so this needs to be considered in the running costs. I have tested Roborocks with cheaper unbranded dust bags in the past and not encountered problems, but check model compatibility before ordering.
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You can also buy replacement brushes, mop pads, filters and other parts in case anything breaks.
Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro review: design
Smart-looking robot and dock
Can’t get under low furniture
Smart home integration
Available in all white or black (currently only available in white in the UK and Australia) it is pretty unfussy in terms of design with the dock a bit squarer than the slightly bulbous base stations of Roborock’s Curv series.
The robot is circular, measuring 14 inches wide with a 6-inch cleaning opening underneath for picking up dirt.
The lidar scanner the robot uses to navigate sits in a cage on top of the robot, increasing its height and reducing its clearance so it won’t be able to vacuum under low furniture like a sofa, unlike Roborock’s Qvrevo CurvX with its retractable lidar scanner.
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The robot’s lidar scanner doesn’t retract, so it can’t fit under low furniture
(Image credit: Future)
The dock is easy to set up, provided you have sufficient space
(Image credit: Future)
Setting the dock up is easy, involving just attaching the ramp to the front of the dock, filling the clean water tank and plugging it in. The more difficult part may be finding a place for it as it needs to sit on a hard floor with at least 1.5 inches either side and 27.5 inches of clear space in front of the dock. It also needs to be within reach of a power socket and somewhere you won’t trip up over it or mind looking at it everyday.
Set up is simple, you will need to find an appropriate spot for the dock on a hard floor with plenty of space either side. You then download the app, pair the robot and then you can send it on a discovery run around your house to build a map.
Once it has scanned the space you can then edit the map to combine or divide spaces into rooms, mark areas as no-go zones, manually designate floor types and mark things like curtains and furniture. I found that aside from ensuring the rooms are divided correctly I didn’t have to make any changes to get it to work well, with the carpeted areas successfully detected.
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The robot has detachable mop pads, which it leaves in its dock after mopping your floors (Image credit: Future)
After setup you can use the app to kickstart cleans of the whole map, one or more selected rooms or a designated zone clean you can mark on the map. As well as ad hoc cleans you can set routines for different types of cleans from deep intensive cleans, to specific after dinner cleans of smaller zones or light maintenance vacuuming without mopping.
As the Qrevo 2 Pro has detachable mops, rather than vacuuming and mopping room by room it first goes around the carpeted areas of the whole space you are cleaning first. Once that is complete it returns to the dock to reattach the mop heads before cleaning the rest of the hard floors.
Obstacle detection was generally good, though the Qrevo 2 Pro did get caught on a USB charging cable (Image credit: Future)
Cleaning performance is OK on hard floors, although it can lead to some spreading of larger debris as the edge cleaning arm sent rice grains skittering across the floor. It did better with fine particles, although there was still some tea visible on a pass on the standard cleaning settings.
It handled larger particles much better on carpet, picking up almost every single grain of rice, although there was some tea left after the first pass.
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As with most robot vacuums, its edge cleaning wasn’t great on carpet, but the sweeping brush does well to move material into the vacuum’s path on hard floors..
During the obstacle avoidance tests it did well to identify the shoe and sock, staying clear as it cleaned around them but it did go over the charging cable, getting it stuck in the cleaning brushes and needing me to rescue it before it could continue cleaning.
During my mopping tests on first pass it did a reasonable job taking up a fair bit of the ketchup although there was a hint of the soy sauce remaining. Trying a second clean on maximum water flow and cleaning settings it did a fantastic job cleaning off even the dried on patches of ketchup.
While the most intensive cleaning took some time and left the floor relatively wet, it was some of the best mopping I have ever seen from a robot. You do need to delve into the settings to get the best performance and it probably is only practical for small zone cleaning but it’s still a lot less effort than getting out a mop and bucket.
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On regular cleaning settings it can manage around five regular rooms before needing recharging so depending on your home it may need to recharge before completing a full clean. Recharging takes around four hours.
It’s not loud in operation, registering around 60db while cleaning on carpet. The dock emptying is a little louder, topping out at 69db (around the level of normal conversation), although this is pretty brief so shouldn’t be too disruptive.
The Qrevo 2 Pro uses dust bags so emptying it of dirt is quick and neat, although that does add ongoing costs to using it. You will also need to empty the waste water and refill the clean water tanks regularly which is easy to do (as long as you leave enough clearance room above the robot) as these lift out of the dock and then can be unclipped open for emptying or filling.
Smart home integration worked well for starting a whole house clean but I did have a little trouble using the room clean function for custom named rooms. Naming a room one of the default names such as Kitchen or Living Room worked fine, but a custom name such as Utility Room sparked a whole house clean instead.
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While custom room names would be helpful, even getting default room cleaning to work is not a guarantee with any of the robot vacuum cleaners I have tested so, relatively, this is a success.
Performance score: 4.5 out of 5
Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro: app
Easy setup
Clear house map
Can set frequent types of clean and schedule cleans
The app is simple to use, although I did find it can sometimes get a little lost if you select your cleaning mode too quickly, meaning you have to move to another mode and back again before getting the options you need.
Once you select the robot you are shown the map of your home and have four tabs to select the type of clean you want, ‘Full’, ‘Room’, ‘Zone’ and ‘Routine’. ‘Full’ starts a clean of the whole map and to the left of the play button there is a button for adjusting the type of clean including whether you want to vacuum and mop, just vacuum or just mop. There are also controls for the level of suction, waterflow, amount of times you want the robot to clean the area and the intensity of the cleaning pattern.
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The app is simple to use provided you don’t hop between modes too quickly
(Image credit: Future)
Select your robot to see a map of your home
(Image credit: Future)
You can adjust the settings for the vacuum and mop independently
(Image credit: Future)
The ‘Routine’ option allows you to schedule different types of cleaning
(Image credit: Future)
Room allows you to select one or more rooms to clean, while Zones lets you pick multiple rectangular sections of your chosen size on the map for it to clean, allowing you to spot clean specific sections of floor.
‘Routine’ is the final option and allows you to create shortcuts for regular types of clean that will then be available from the opening screen on the app. This is useful for setting up things like zone cleans that focus around a dining table following a meal or if you want a predefined deep clean compared with a light maintenance clean.
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Despite the name, ‘Routine’ doesn’t include any scheduling functionality by default. That is hidden somewhat in the settings menu, but can be used with scheduled cleans (if your home doesn’t regularly have bits of Lego on the floor like mine does).
Should you buy the Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro?
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Attribute
Notes
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Score
Value for money
Even at full price the Qrevo 2 Pro represents good value and at a discount price it is a fantastic deal. You will need to consider the price of disposable dust bags in the running costs but you’ll be hard pressed to find these features and performance for less.
5/5
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Design
The design is more focused on function than form but it is unfussy and designed to fit into most homes. The tall mounting of the lidar scanner will stop it from cleaning under low furniture.
4/5
Performance
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Vacuuming performance is good and mopping is excellent although It did have trouble picking up on a charging cable in our object avoidance tests leading it to get stuck.
4.5/5
App
The app makes it easy to control, with simple options for choosing the type and location of cleans as well as a clear map of your home.
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5/5
Buy it if
Don’t buy it if
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How I tested the Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro
I tested the Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro over a period of over two weeks, using it as an everyday cleaner of a busy household.
As well as day to day use I put it through a series of tests, assessing its performance picking up fine particles and larger debris on carpet and hard floor by having it clean an area with a set amount of rice and tea sprinkled on the surface. Edge cleaning was also tested using tea on the edge of a carpet and hard floor area.
Mopping performance was tested by having the robot clean up a spill of soy sauce, as well as tackling a patch of dried ketchup. After an initial pass on regular settings, this was then retested with cleaning settings set to maximum.
The forthcoming iPhone Duo has more features than Apple has revealed, including a whole series of faces for its StandBy mode. Here’s what to eventually look for.
While pre-orders for iPhone Duo don’t start until October 16, and the Xcode betas still don’t show developers everything, one has found many new options coming to iOS 27 for this device.
Developer pdfu reports that the Xcode 27.1 simulator is lacking Rushmore, an app that is for displaying the new StandBy faces. But despite that, they have managed to get certain of the new faces running.
Here’s a deep dive into StandBy mode on iPhone Duo.
Rushmore, the app meant to host the redesigned faces, is missing from the iOS 27.1 simulator.
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But its localization strings reveal unreported faces, and I got some new faces running in the current renderer. pic.twitter.com/lDQHOy5R0e
These working ones are variants on familiar clock and calendar faces as used on the iPhone‘s current StandBy mode. But code references describe several more options.
Here’s a deep dive into StandBy mode on iPhone Duo.
Rushmore, the app meant to host the redesigned faces, is missing from the iOS 27.1 simulator.
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But its localization strings reveal unreported faces, and I got some new faces running in the current renderer. pic.twitter.com/lDQHOy5R0e
Just because something is referenced in code, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will launch immediately. But those code references show five more faces:
Home Camera: up to nine camera views
Home Module
Flow
Fade
Snoopy
There are no details for Home Modular, Flow, or Fade. But the code for Flow also includes the term ResponsiveArt, which suggests that it will at least be an animated face.
Face editor
The iPhone Duo will also feature a revised editor for customizing these StandBy faces. It’s very similar to the existing one on iPhone and is perhaps more like the Apple Watch face editor.
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Users can swipe left and right to adjust, for instance, the style of an analog clock, its numerals, light mode and dark mode, plus the color of the face and the hands.
Some of these clock faces also have room for two widgets. Then some more are digital instead of analog and there pdfu has found code references for five layouts:
StandBy
Stacked
Top
Middle
Bottom
The presumption is that all but the StandBy one may actually be intended for when the iPhone is opened like a book.
Developer pdfu has a strong track record for examining beta code. They confirmed that the iPhone Duo would use Touch ID, for instance, and most recently uncovered that Siri could be replaced by Claude or ChatGPT.
The JadePuffer ransomware operator is targeting Azure tenants with agent-driven attacks that conduct reconnaissance, steal credentials, and destroy core components.
The malware emerged in July, with researchers at cloud security company Sysdig highlighting that it uses AI agents to automate the entire attack chain, from reconnaissance, credential theft, and lateral movement to persistence and data encryption.
Shortly after, the company noted that JadePuffer expanded its focus to AI assets, training datasets, and vector databases, using a tool called EncForge.
Microsoft Security Research observed two JadePuffer attacks in June that mapped cloud resources, retrieved storage account keys, and deleted Azure Storage accounts.
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The destructive stage lasted seven minutes and targeted more than 100 storage accounts, as well as Key Vaults, Function Apps, Virtual Machines, and App Services.
Although the threat actor was able to delete most of the targeted Azure Storage accounts, some remained unaffected because of Azure resource locks and storage account-level protections.
Microsoft tracks the JadePuffer threat actor as Storm-3168 and says it used two compromised service principals – security identities that enable applications, hosted services, and automated tools to authenticate to Azure and access assigned resources.
Both service principals belonged to the same tenant. One was used for reconnaissance and resource discovery, while the other “performed discovery, destructive operations, and credential collection.”
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Timeline of observed attacks Source: Microsoft
The attacker removed backup and recovery protections (Azure Site Recovery locks), indicating an effort to make restoration more difficult.
This operational pattern could further support ransomware extortion, although Microsoft did not report anything about financial demands and didn’t confirm data theft in the observed cases.
According to the researchers, attempts to delete Azure SQL databases failed because the attacker used an unsupported API version. Attempts to remove recovery protection locks also failed.
“The parallel targeting of Azure SQL databases and storage accounts suggests an effort to broaden the destructive impact across different data services rather than concentrating on a single resource type,” Microsoft said.
Roughly half an hour after the wipe attempts, Storm-3168 returned to perform more than 30 requests for storage account keys, most of which succeeded.
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Microsoft could not determine exactly how the initial access occurred, but noted that credentials for one service principal appeared in a public GitHub issue before the attacks.
The researchers recommend several mitigation steps and guidance for system administrators, including activating cloud workload protections, checking for secrets in public repositories, and evaluating Azure RBAC permissions against least-privilege principles.
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Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii, has come and during the show, Qualcomm (who paid for my travel and accommodations) announced two new top tier phone processors. They are the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. The former is the successor to last year’s flagship while the latter is a new even more premium tier of performance.
Both chips run off of two 5GHz prime cores and six 4GHz performance cores built on a 2nm process. The key differences between the two include Matrix cores included in the Extreme’s GPU, additional video processing (8K/60fps) on the Extreme, and more. For the average consumer, you probably won’t notice a ton of differences between the two in day-to-day tasks, but when it comes to gaming, AI (agentic AI was a key theme at the conference), and sustained performance, that’s when you’ll notice the difference.
According to Qualcomm, the reason for the two premium tiers stems from phone maker demand. Consumers have been vying for more premium options in the smartphone space, and these chips are designed to address that need. Speaking of phones, there were two major phone announcements at Snapdragon Summit. The Xiaomi 18 Pro and Pro Max will run the Elite and Extreme processors respectively. The Motorola Signature 27 will also run the Extreme chip, and both of those phones are exciting for different reasons.
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Motorola Signature 27 brings Motorola back into flagship territory
Adam Doud/SlashGear
Motorola’s Signature series of smartphones have typically been reserved for overseas sales only, with no presence in the U.S. That looks to change with the Signature 27, which will get a North American release. The Signature 27 is peak Motorola flagship material — Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, a six-antenna design, a 200-megapixel telephoto lens, and Bang & Olufsen audio, which was recently announced.
Those specs all sound great, but it’s mostly just great to see a Motorola flagship on U.S. shores again. Motorola has been doing very well with its flip phones and midrange candybar phones, but it’s been a while since a real flagship came to the States, so that alone is worth celebrating. That’s especially true in light of OnePlus’s exit from the U.S. market — there’s another premium flagship taking its place, and it looks like a real beast. Stay tuned to SlashGear for more news about the Motorola Signature coming — hopefully — soon.
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Xiaomi 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max split the difference
Adam Doud/SlashGear
Xiaomi is a phone that will not come to the U.S., though it will likely be relatively easy to import if you so choose. The 18 Pro series brings a boatload of great specifications to the table, and it also represents the diversity that Qualcomm was talking about. Both phones have similar specifications and capabilities, and they also bring a couple of neat features to the lineup as well.
The first is the rear-facing screen. Picture an iPhone 18 Pro, and replace the camera island with a rear facing screen. You can use this for taking selfies with the main cameras, but Xiaomi will also bring some apps and functionality to the rear screen as well. The options we could play with were limited to things like answering calls, playing music, and some AI-generated animals, which were admittedly pretty cute, but not terribly functional.
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The other cool thing, and honestly the thing that excites me the most, is the privacy display. This works basically the same as the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra’s display with pixels that turn off, and software that runs the whole thing. Xiaomi re-did the subpixels a bit, which is supposed to give better color even with the privacy display on, and it was not terribly noticeable, but it’ll take more experimentation to determine. But I mainly like the idea that someone else beyond Samsung is making this feature. Hopefully it’s only a matter of time before it catches on with more phone makers.
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