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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What are we gonna do about the deluge of AI music slopping up all of our streaming platforms? Deezer has an idea. It’s adding a toggle to filter out AI-generated tracks. This simple on/off switch will be available on the app by the end of the year.

“We’ve seen a clear user demand for the ability to filter out AI-generated music,” said CEO Alexis Lanternier. “We are now giving everyone the option to remove this content completely from their streaming experience on Deezer, and focus only on human creators and creations, if they wish.”

Do you want to avoid fully AI-generated music completely in your streaming experience? Today, we’re announcing a new toggle for music fans who want to do just that. https://t.co/XjhljXFJPb#Deezer @Deezer

— Deezer News (@DeezerNews) October 13, 2026

I have a feeling many people most definitely wish to focus only on human creators. I know I do. Deezer conducted its own study that suggested nearly half of all music streaming users would like to see AI-generated music completely gone from their feeds. NPR recently reported on a study that indicated that listeners have soured on AI-generated music, and that only gets worse the more these platforms become flooded with slop.

And, boy oh boy, have these platforms become flooded. Deezer reported last year that around 18 percent of tracks uploaded to the app were AI-generated. That number has since risen to more than 50 percent. The company says that 90,000 fully generated tracks get uploaded each day, which has added up to more than 42 million slop songs.

These “artists” are playing a numbers game in the hopes that one of the hundreds of tracks they upload every day will catch on in some capacity and, in turn, they’ll get paid. There’s also the matter of fraud. The platform has reported that up to 85 percent of all streams generated by AI-generated songs were fraudulent.

Deezer is perfectly positioned for this kind of feature. It launched one of the industry’s first AI music detection tools, which it has since offered to loan out to rival streaming platforms. The toggle is the natural next step here. The detection system isn’t foolproof but the company says any risk of a false positive is “very low.”

As for these other platforms, YouTube Music just launched a label that will accompany AI-generated tracks. Spotify does something similar on AI artist pages.

CDs were supposed to be finished, vinyl was supposed to be a fad, and streaming was supposed to make owning music unnecessary. The latest RIAA numbers tell a very different story. In this episode, eCoustics Editor-in-Chief Ian White joins Podcast Producer Mitch Anderson to unpack why U.S. CD revenue surged 58.6% in the first half of 2026, vinyl revenue climbed another 17.7%, and physical music revenue overall jumped 25.9%. They also dig into why Gen Z is buying physical media, rising vinyl prices, the resurgence of used CDs, collectibility, ownership, and why listeners are still spending money on records and discs when nearly everything is available to stream.

Sponsor: Thank you SVS for sponsoring this episode

This episode was recorded on October 9, 2026.

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Humanoid robots have begun to show real capability in ball sports, but preserving a professional athlete’s motion style while maintaining reliable task performance is still an unresolved problem. This guide examines an adaptive motion planning and tracking framework that learns tennis serving and rally styles directly from broadcast video and motion-capture data. A hierarchical design separates a planner, which generates stylistic kinematic motion, from a tracker, which executes that motion with minimal interference. Because tracking performance inevitably degrades when a policy trained in simulation moves to physical hardware, the framework trains its tracker on randomized execution speeds and conditions its planner on a learned motion-speed representation, reducing the compounding errors introduced by autoregressive planning and noisy perception. The paper documents real-world validation on a research humanoid platform and transfer to a full-size humanoid robot, including serving in an uncontrolled environment without motion capture, and closes with practical, transferable lessons for engineers building future humanoid ball-sports systems.

This finding was the starting point for further research that asked: Would it be possible for small models to create self-replicating infections that run themselves on IoT devices the way traditional IoT worms, like Mirai, install DDoS code and other payloads? Unlike Mirai, these AI worms could pose a much higher threat, since the models could tailor exploits and payloads dynamically, depending on the target. Once such an infection chain began, it might also be harder for defenders to stop it.

“Such an ‘AI worm’ could carry its model weights with it as it reproduces (or re-download them from a public hub), and then run inference directly on compromised hardware,” Anthropic said. “Effectively, the weights would become part of the malware payload.”

Anthropic called these autonomous worms small weight-based replicators. The models ran agents that had access to common exploitation tools, like reverse shells. The flow of the attacks was (1) finding targets, (2) gaining code execution, (3) establishing inference, and (4) propagating to new hosts. A key benefit over traditional worms is what Anthropic said is the agents’ ability to learn on the job. Each time an AI replicator fails to compromise a specific platform device, it can leave a list of prompts, code, and notes to future replicators so they don’t waste time reusing the same ineffective steps.

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Anthropic said the dynamic inference setup is the least studied and likely most challenging stage in the replication cycle. It requires a long sequence of decisions based on the specific hardware and software of each target and involves selecting compatible inference software, installing dependencies, and debugging platform-specific bugs.

“These steps are serially dependent, and failures are difficult to recover from,” Anthropic said.

The experiment shows that small models are becoming increasingly capable at solving those problems autonomously. At the moment, however, none of the light-weight models tested are able to mount end-to-end replication, meaning discovering new devices, using an exploit to gain access to them, infecting them with a payload, configuring an inference server, and repeating the process. The process is also painfully slow; Gemma4-26B-A4B, distributed over the 15 Android TV boxes, performed at just 0.39 tokens per second. That translates to a full-inference setup time of 71 to 150 hours for an unoptimized Gemma4-26B-A4B and 29 to 51 hours for Qwen3.5-9B. (The researchers said that the large model GLM-5.2 appears to be able to do so reliably.)

The climate just got its annual checkup, and the results aren’t looking so hot.

“If Earth were a patient coming in for an annual physical, I would say its condition is serious and getting worse,” Oregon State University researcher Bill Ripple says.

Ripple is the lead author of a new paper chronicling the state of the climate, published on Wednesday in BioScience. The findings show that seven of the 16 planetary vital signs tracked by the researchers have never been in a more extreme state.

That includes the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is 50 percent higher than preindustrial levels due to burning fossil fuels, as well as symptoms of burning all that oil, coal, and gas. Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have shrunk to record lows, while ocean heat has soared to record highs.

Climate change has already quickened the pace of warming from about 0.05 degrees Celsius per decade from 1880 through 1970 to 0.36 degrees Celsius per decade since 2010, according to the analysis. While the global average temperature, including land, isn’t at a record extreme, that may change by the end of the year as El Niño strengthens. The natural climate pattern is characterized by a hotter-than-normal Pacific Ocean, but it also boosts global heat levels by pouring more energy into the atmosphere. This year’s El Niño is shaping up to be one for the record books.

“A strong El Niño could temporarily push global temperatures even higher, while bringing additional heat and drought to vulnerable regions,” says Ripple. He adds that “El Niño is a natural phenomenon, but it’s now occurring on top of a much warmer planet. That makes its impacts potentially more dangerous.”

Of particular concern are ecosystems such as coral reefs and tropical forests. The spread of ocean heat is likely to fuel a mass coral die-off, known as coral bleaching. With each successive wave of bleaching, reefs become less resilient. Corals are among the ecosystems most threatened by climate change; if the planet warms beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, most of the world’s coral will be unlikely to survive.

Tropical forests also face pressure from El Niño. This is especially true of the Amazon, which tends to see dry weather during this climate pattern. The timing couldn’t be more dire: The region, dubbed “the world’s lungs,” is already under intense pressure from logging and mining interests and the possible return of a right-wing government in Brazil that prioritizes extraction and land clearing over conservation.

The new report also warns that the Amazon is among the ecosystems at risk of crossing a tipping point—that is, reaching a threshold where it shifts from a tropical rainforest into something more resembling savanna. It’s highly unlikely that crossing that tipping point is imminent, let alone something that will happen this year. But this year’s blast of El Niño–influenced weather will edge it closer.

“Warming, drought, and deforestation could push the Amazon toward widespread forest degradation,” Ripple says. “My concern is that these changes could interact, making them increasingly difficult to stop.”

The report is an avalanche of bad news for the climate, though it does note that carbon-free forms of energy are playing a bigger role in the power grid. The report calls it a sign we’re in the “Age of Electricity.” Despite that, annual greenhouse gas emissions are at record highs. In other words, the world is still smoking a pack a day, even at the risk of losing a lung.

“There are some encouraging signs, especially the growth of renewable energy, but they aren’t yet enough to reverse the overall deterioration,” Ripple says. “The climate emergency is not something waiting for us in the future. We are already living through it.”

AI tools can now generate a lesson in seconds, and the result usually sounds convincing. But teachers and district leaders still lack a reliable way to confirm that generated content aligns with state standards or what research says about how students learn. Learning Commons, a nonprofit backed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, believes it has built that missing foundation through a newly launched open platform. More than 70 partners, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have joined the effort. But as open infrastructure enters the classroom, some educators are asking a critical question: who gets to lay the groundwork for K-12 AI?

Who Gets to Build the Tracks?

Sandra Liu Huang, president of Learning Commons, spent years building product teams at Google, Facebook, and Quora before she turned her attention to K-12 education. She joins EdSurge editorial director Ira Apfel to explain how the platform’s open knowledge graphs and AI evaluators work, and why some districts are choosing to build their own custom tools on this infrastructure rather than waiting for commercial vendors. Ira also presses her on governance, on who decides what goes into these models, and how open platforms can prevent a few major players from dominating school technology.

What Should Districts Ask Vendors?

Sandra also shares the essential questions she believes every district leader should ask an AI vendor claiming state standards alignment — from data origin and update frequency to whether state standards serve as the core foundation for their tools.

Disclosure: Learning Commons is a financial supporter of EdSurge. This episode was produced independently by EdSurge and Learning Commons had no editorial role or influence over its recording, production or editing.

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The U.S. Department of Justice is warning that hackers working for the North Korean regime are increasingly relying on Americans to facilitate the hacking of U.S. companies.

In an announcement on Tuesday, prosecutors said they have indicted and arrested at least two people, and conducted searches across dozens of suspected “laptop farms” in Texas. The computers were allegedly used by North Koreans to remotely hack into American companies and steal sensitive data.

According to the DOJ, federal authorities seized over 180 computers that they believe American companies had shipped out to their newly hired employees, not realizing that they were sanctioned North Korean spies who had used stolen identities of U.S. citizens to gain employment. The DOJ said that it raided over 40 laptop farms across Texas, the largest disclosed number of homes and residences used for facilitating North Korean hacks, which were owned by at least two American facilitators.

CrowdStrike, which helped the FBI investigate and disrupt the latest North Korean operations, said that laptop farms are “vital” to North Korea in helping its hackers overcome physical, financial, and legal challenges of not physically being in the United States.

The prosecutors said at least 70 U.S.-based companies had been infiltrated by the hackers, who are believed to have generated around $3 million in stolen funds. The DOJ did not name the affected companies, but described them as healthcare, cyber support, retail, communications, and manufacturing sectors across Ohio and 16 other states, including the District of Columbia.

“Increasingly, North Korean IT workers are turning to recruiting American facilitators to counter improved private sector detections and law enforcement actions. These workers are hiring facilitators to complete a wider variety of tasks, and in some cases subcontracting entire jobs to third-party foreign nationals,” the Justice Department said. 

Oftentimes, North Korean hackers use real-looking email addresses, spoofed LinkedIn profiles, and extensive online and social media accounts as cover for their activities.

In a separate public service announcement, the FBI said that there are “thousands” of North Korean-state controlled IT workers working at Western companies, which “pose a significant national security and intellectual property theft insider threat.”

This is the latest wave of arrests, indictments, and enforcement action targeting North Korean activities in the United States in recent years. The breakaway regime has used this “remote IT workers” scheme to allow North Koreans to gain employment with U.S. and European companies, earn a wage, and then steal sensitive information and intellectual property while as employees. The victim companies are then extorted into paying the hackers further. 

The remote IT workers’ scheme is one of several strands of illicit revenue that the North Korean regime aims to generate, including hacking crypto exchanges and open-source developer projects, with the aim of funding its internationally sanctioned nuclear weapons program. The regime is thought to have stolen at least $2 billion in crypto during 2025 alone.

Experts on North Korea have put the number of hacked companies and the amount of stolen crypto as likely much higher than reported.

Earlier this year, CrowdStrike said in a separate report that North Korean hackers were behind around half of all documented “hands-on-keyboard” intrusions over the past year, referring to hacks that are carried out by humans and not automated tools or AI. 

In this current era of vibe coding — using AI to create mobile and desktop apps — it was probably only a matter of time until someone made free versions of popular apps. That happened this month when a Reddit user announced that he did so with popular but expensive Adobe and Microsoft programs.

The person behind the project is Brandon Thomas, a software engineer who uses the handle “u/ai_art_is_art” on Reddit, where the tools first caught AI enthusiasts’ attention. Thomas has released 13 free, open-source apps on his website, called ArtCraft. These apps aim to replicate the core functionalities of Adobe and Microsoft programs, including Photoshop, Word and PowerPoint — or, as Thomas calls them, PhotoCraft, WordCraft and DeckCraft.

Vibe coding has taken off for software developers and AI enthusiasts, leading to AI-made apps flooding Apple and Google’s app stores. However, significant concerns persist about the overall usefulness, security and long-term viability of vibe-coded apps. Apple removed some apps that help people vibe code this year because the apps didn’t comply with Apple’s developer rules.

But in the US’s current affordability crisis — and with legacy tech companies constantly raising their prices — a cheaper, AI-created alternative to Photoshop or Microsoft Word can be an attractive option for a subscription-weary consumer.

This certainly isn’t the first time a startup has tried to compete with legacy software companies like Adobe and Microsoft. Canva, Affinity and CapCut are extremely popular Adobe alternatives for content creation and editing. Google and Apple each have their own versions of Microsoft’s core business apps. 

But ArtCraft’s vibe-coded apps and other potential AI-made apps allow individual users to avoid handing over their cash and data to a major tech company. Using an open-source AI model on your own device, for example, gives you more control over your data than using a cloud-based app through a subscription.

As with all apps, CNET recommends you inspect the privacy and safety policies before using them. This is especially important for vibe-coded apps.

“Vibe coding can make it super easy to swap out old software tools, but it’s legally questionable,” said CNET’s Blake Stimac, a vibe coding expert. “What works great for you as a quick fix could easily turn into a legal battlefield the second you try to share it with the world.”

Representatives for ArtCraft and Adobe did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Microsoft declined to comment.

Will vibe coding kill legacy software?

It’s unlikely that vibe-coded apps will be the sole downfall of legacy software companies like Adobe and Microsoft. But they do highlight the growing frustration with those companies, particularly as subscriptions become even more expensive and their programs become bloated with AI features.

In March, Adobe reached a $150 million settlement with the US government to resolve a federal lawsuit alleging that the software giant trapped consumers in subscription plans with hidden fees and an intentionally convoluted cancellation process. Under the terms of the agreement, Adobe will pay a $75 million civil penalty and provide $75 million in free services to affected users, though the company continues to deny any wrongdoing.

Microsoft has embedded its Copilot AI throughout its software ecosystem, despite notable user backlash. While the company recently removed a few Windows AI features due to negative feedback, it is still plowing ahead with billions of dollars in AI development.

The appeal of ArtCraft and other open-source vibe-coded apps is their ability to let individuals customize programs and avoid hefty subscriptions. The pitch is tailor-made for tech enthusiasts: If you only need limited access to these programs and can set them up yourself for free, why would you pay for Adobe Creative Cloud or Microsoft Office?

But that certainly won’t be the case for everyone. For one, many folks won’t want to take the time to figure out how to download and configure an open-source AI app. Meanwhile, businesses and professional creators will likely prefer the safety and privacy guarantees that Adobe and Microsoft offer, even if they aren’t always ironclad. Better the devil you know…

Katelyn Chedraoui

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Katelyn is a reporter with CNET covering artificial intelligence, including chatbots, image and video generators. Her work explores how new AI technology is infiltrating our lives, shaping the content we consume on social media and affecting the people behind the screens. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in media and journalism. You can reach her at kchedraoui@cnet.com.

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