Deep Robotics just released a video showcasing the enhanced skills of their DR02 humanoid in public. The machine is seen darting across an uneven field of grass, leaping over minor obstructions, bounding up massive concrete steps with little loss of steam, and even standing upright while carrying a fire extinguisher behind it.

The DR02 was created from the ground up by the company’s engineers to be a durable piece of equipment, and it shows. It’s a behemoth, standing 175 centimeters (5′ 7″) tall and weighing 65 kilos (143 pounds). One of the most notable aspects of this design is its IP66 waterproofing, which means it can endure dust and water. So, if you need a robot that can operate in situations that would send a human running for cover, this one has you covered. It can readily withstand rain, humidity, and dusty conditions that would be inconvenient for even the toughest humans, and to give you an idea of how durable it is, the DR02 can function in temperatures ranging from -20 to +55 degrees Celsius.

Unitree R1 Humanoid Robot (Red, R1 Air)

• Three models, one lightweight platform R1 Air (20 DOF, monocular camera), R1 (26 DOF, binocular camera, head+waist joints), and R1 Edu (26 DOF…
• Easy setup – no coding required for basic use Unbox, power on, and start. Manual teaching feature: physically pose the robot, and it replays the…
• More DOF = more expressive movement 26‑DOF models (R1 / R1 Edu) add head and waist articulation for smoother dance and running. For safety reasons…

The DR02 walks at a constant 1.5 meters per second (3.4 miles per hour), but it can quickly accelerate to 4 meters per second (8.9 miles per hour) for a short sprint. The robot can also navigate steep slopes of up to 20 degrees and operate well on uneven terrain. When it comes to lifting, each arm can manage 10 kilograms (22 pounds), which is very respectable, especially when you see it smoothly carrying a decent-sized mounted fire extinguisher.

The DR02 is powered by a small 275 TOPS computer on board that can read data from a LiDAR sensor, depth sensors, and a variety of wide-angle cameras. This enables it to develop real-time maps of its surroundings and change leg placement on the fly, whether it’s switching from grass to concrete or avoiding an unexpected impediment. The machine also features Deep Robotics’ J60, J80, and J100 joints, all of which are totally custom-built to provide a ton of torque and precision while keeping balanced even while carrying a load or scrambling over rough terrain.

One of the DR02’s most appealing features is its modularity, as the arms, legs, and forearms are all simply removable, allowing you to rapidly replace them if a problem arises. There is no need to transport the entire system back to the workshop for repairs; field personnel can do the job on the spot, and as a result, Deep Robotics is eyeing DR02 for real-world applications, including checking high-voltage lines, responding to emergencies, hauling gear in difficult terrain, and mapping out security patrol routes.

Even while it is still a prototype, and a very costly one at $200,000, it’s clear where this thing is going; with each tweak, it progresses from a lab toy to a legitimate tool you can use to get serious work done in places where you wouldn’t want to send a human. We still need to hear back from Deep Robotics on a few critical issues, such as how long the battery will survive and how customizable the design is.
[Source]

Having entered the consumer PC silicon market at Computex 2026 with the RTX Spark superchip, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has confirmed the platform extends well beyond its first chip, with successor architectures already in planning under the internal codenames N2X and N3X.

Huang confirmed this during a Q&A session with Tom’s Guide at Computex 2026, where he also clarified that the current chip carries the N1X designation because a smaller companion variant, referred to internally as N1, is also in Nvidia’s product pipeline.

The RTX Spark platform itself launched with considerable hardware ambition, combining up to 20 Arm CPU cores with a Blackwell GPU carrying 6,144 CUDA cores and up to 128GB of unified LPDDR5X memory, a specification that Nvidia has positioned against Apple Silicon and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platforms in the premium Windows on Arm segment.

If they don’t get you online, they’ll try in person. A data-theft and extortion gang has targeted “dozens” of banks, law firms, and other professional services companies in the US from January through May, using fake help desk calls and other social-engineering techniques to gain access to corporate IT environments, according to Google’s Mandiant incident response team. 

And when those remote-deception methods don’t work, the criminals sometimes show up at victims’ physical offices, posing as IT technicians, and attempt to steal sensitive files using thumb drives.

Google’s threat hunters track the extortion threat group as UNC3753, while other analysts call it Luna Moth, Chatty Spider, and Silent Ransom Group. The crew has been around since 2022, originally using fake software renewal emails and other billing lures, typically with PDF attachments containing phone numbers for attacker-controlled call centers, as their means of gaining initial access to corporate networks.

Beginning around March 2025, the crims shifted tactics and started posing as IT help desk staff.

“While UNC3753 primarily relies on digital vectors, GTIG assesses that associated threat actors have also attempted direct data theft using physical, in person access,” Google incident responders and researchers Chad Reams, Tufail Ahmed, Keith Knapp, Ashley Frazer, and Tyler McLellan said in a Friday blog.

The authors also pointed to a May FBI alert to corroborate this in-person tactic. 

According to the feds, Silent Ransom Group crooks have been walking into law firms’ physical offices as recently as this spring. Once they are on-site, they claim to be IT support staff needing to image a device or create local backups for security reasons. If that line works, they plug a thumb drive into the victim’s computer and steal data the old-fashioned way.

“Although limited forensic evidence and the absence of a subsequent extortion attempt prevent formal attribution, GTIG assesses that these physical intrusions are likely associated with UNC3753 based on structural, timeline, and targeting overlaps,” the blog said.

Google won’t say how many dozens of firms have been targeted in these attacks, or how many ended in the data thieves paying a visit to the victims’ locations. 

“While we can’t share additional details regarding specific investigations, Mandiant CTO Charles Carmakal notes that this tactic has been observed over the years,” a spokesperson told The Register. “Mandiant has investigated various matters where adversaries planted insiders, bribed employees, or physically entered buildings to facilitate cyberattacks.”

Another noteworthy thing about UNC3753’s attacks: they are very fast. In many of Mandiant’s investigated incidents, the entire operation from initial contact to data extortion occurred in just one day. “Recently, Mandiant observed data searches, staging, and theft initiated in under an hour,” the threat analysts warned. 

These intrusions typically begin with an invoice-themed email – but these don’t usually contain any malicious links or attachments. The email’s sole purpose is to give the miscreants a plausible reason to follow up via phone, so that the recipient is more likely to believe the call is legitimate.

Most of the crew’s entry mechanisms involve voice-phishing, using a method that has worked so well for other groups like ShinyHunters and Scattered Spider over the past few years. 

UNC3753 calls organizations’ employees directly and purports to be a help desk worker or member of the security team. The criminals say they need the target’s help addressing a security issue or aiding with a corporate data migration project, and convince the individual to join a screen-sharing session via Zoom, Microsoft Terminal Services, Microsoft Teams, or Quick Assist. 

In one such intrusion, using Teams to gain access to the victim’s computer, the attacker jumped on five separate calls with the same target over a three-day period, we’re told.

And in more than one incident that Mandiant responded to, UNC3753 established Zoom sessions directly on targets’ personal laptops, using these machines to access corporate virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) using native client platforms, such as Windows 365 or Citrix clients. 

Once they’re in the corporate systems, the intruders map local directories and network drives, and target specific legal and document storage repositories. The crooks also use very-specific keyword searches to find sensitive folders containing tax logs (Forms W-2, W-9, and 1099), audit files, corporate client agreements, and Social Security numbers, before staging this data for exfiltration.

UNC3753 uses several methods to sneak the data out of the corporate IT environment without setting off any security alarm bells, including using portable versions of free Windows file manager WinSCP or another open source filesystem like Rclone. 

The crew has also been known to log into a file-sharing account from the victim’s browser and upload the stolen files that way – or even instruct the victims to send the files to an attacker-controlled email address.

After stealing the data, they send the extortion email, usually within 30 minutes of exiting the victim’s environment, and set a three-day deadline to respond and begin the negotiation process. “We hope to find a financial solution that will be acceptable for both parties,” reads one such extortion email.

It continues:

In case of ignorance or no agreement, We will notify your employees, partners and customers, after which We will publish your data. You will receive claims from individuals, and legal entities for information leakage and breach of contracts, your current deals will be terminated. Journalists and others will dig into your documents, finding inconsistencies or violations in them. Your organization will lose its reputation, shares will fall in price, and your organization will be forced to close.

Stay safe, friends

In the Friday report, Google’s threat hunters list IP addresses and other indicators of compromise, including these phishing domains that UNC3753 uses in its social-engineering attacks, all designed to look like the target organization’s help desk: -itdesk[.]com, -it[.]com, and -helpdesk[.]com.

The security shop also suggests a range of things companies can do to avoid falling victim to this group and other voice-phishing scams or physical office intrusions.

Some of the physical controls include requiring visitors to display official credentials and photo identification, and mandating front-desk staff log all visitor IDs before granting access. Also, check pre-scheduled work orders to ensure the “technician” at the front desk is who they say they are, and make sure any visiting technical service workers are always accompanied by a corporate, in-office supervisor.

Because the bulk of these intrusions occur without any physical entry into the office, however, companies should also implement remote access conditional access policies to ensure only corporate-owned devices can authenticate to any VDIs or VPNs. Plus, block the installation and execution of unauthorized remote monitoring and support utilities. ®

Its new gameplay trailer gives us a glimpse of Anakin Skywalker.

Are you on the hunt for the perfect tech-related gift for your dad ahead of Father’s Day? Annoyingly, this year’s big day (June 21st) falls just before one of Amazon‘s biggest sales of the year.

I’m of course talking about Amazon Prime Day, which has just been officially announced for June 23-26. The annual sale is sure to feature everything from discounts on own-brand devices to cheap laptops, TVs, iPads – you name it.

legal

The bill awaits Gov. Hochul’s signature after passing the state legislature

New York lawmakers have approved a bill imposing new labor, energy, environmental, and community-benefit requirements on datacenters, including a one-year moratorium on certain permits for facilities drawing 20 MW or more.

The bill now heads to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for a signature. A spokesperson for the governor told the New York Post she would review the legislation, but gave no signal as to whether she would sign it. Hochul has previously said she hoped to leave regulating datacenter construction to the local communities. 

“Today we face an unprecedented wave of proposed large-scale data center development across New York,” the bill’s sponsor Assemblymember Anna Kelles wrote in a statement posted to Instagram. “My legislation seeks to provide New York with the time necessary to fully evaluate the environmental, energy, water, and ratepayer impacts of these facilities and to develop appropriate regulatory safeguards before additional projects move forward.” 

The Assembly approved the bill on Thursday, the same day Anthropic, the AI giant behind Claude, called for a pause on LLM development sprints as developers believe the models could soon be capable of building themselves. In light of that possibility, researchers at Anthropic said the world would benefit from a slowdown in the race to make models more powerful. 

In New York, lawmakers hope to protect consumers from higher energy bills by creating a special classification for datacenter electrical customers and mandating that all necessary infrastructure upgrades, administrative expenses, and operational costs be assigned entirely to the datacenter. 

The bill also outlines electricity-sourcing requirements for datacenters with a peak load of at least 5 MW, requiring a phased shift toward renewable energy, with one-third of electricity coming from renewable sources between 2030 and 2034, two-thirds between 2035 and 2039, and 90 percent from 2040 onward.

For trade workers who are employed to build the facilities and maintain the buildings later, the bill requires the datacenters to meet prevailing wage requirements, unless the workers are operating under a collective bargaining agreement. Additionally, it demands datacenter companies help host communities with renewable energy initiatives, and mitigate the strain on local wastewater treatment facilities. 

Business leaders are urging Hochul to reject the bill, saying it was rushed through at the end of a legislative session and presented without appropriate debate. 

In a statement provided to The Register, Julie Samuels, president and CEO of Tech:NYC, which promotes the state’s technology industry, said a blanket moratorium on datacenters would slow investment in the next generation of infrastructure projects.

“Energy usage, grid capacity, and the community impact of data centers must be addressed, and the Governor’s Public Service Commission is already pursuing the right approach by ensuring data centers pay their fair share for grid upgrades and energy usage,” Samuels wrote in a statement.  

Republican Assemblymember Phil Palmesano argued that datacenters were being unfairly targeted when other technology companies were given tax incentives to build, pointing to the recent groundbreaking of the Micron chip fab in Clay, New York, which is expected to create 50,000 New York jobs throughout construction, and up to 90,000 nationally. 

The bill, approved by the Senate on Friday, includes carve-outs for certain industrial computing applications, including manufacturing.

“If we told Micron they had to power their energy demands strictly using renewable resources, they wouldn’t be here,” Palmesano said, according to the NY Post. 

One of the first drafts of the bill had called for a three-year pause on datacenter construction. ®

Google may have just accidentally shown everyone where Gemini is headed next. According to TestingCatalog, a new Troubleshooting mode has quietly appeared inside the Gemini model picker menu for some users.

It sits alongside existing options like Gemini 3.5 Flash and 3.1 Pro, which are the standard AI models you already switch between in the app.

What does the Troubleshooting mode in Gemini actually do?

Rather than giving you a wall of text to read, the Troubleshooting mode guides you through a problem step by step using a mix of text responses and interactive widgets.

For example, if you tell Gemini your car will not start, it might identify common causes like a dead battery and then present you with symptom options to tap, such as “clicks or silent,” to help narrow down the issue faster. It is a more structured, guided experience than asking Gemini a question in regular chat mode.

How is this different from just asking Gemini normally?

That is a fair question, and the answer comes down to how the mode is tuned under the hood. Redditors who got early access suggest it runs on a lower temperature setting, which means it sticks closely to the problem at hand and skips the conversational filler.

Its responses are reportedly focused on diagnosis and practical fixes rather than general information. Google has not officially announced the feature, and it remains unclear whether this is a planned rollout or an internal test.

For now, the Troubleshoot feature appears to be an unintended release, meaning Google likely flipped it on by mistake, and could pull it back at any time. More details are expected in the coming weeks.

If you find Gemini’s new Troubleshooting mode exciting, there is a lot more happening with the assistant right now. Google just unveiled Gemini Spark, a 24/7 AI agent that handles your tasks in the background. On the flip side, free users may soon face stricter weekly usage caps.

Asking venture capitalists for investment is a rite of passage for tech founders. This has led to another universal experience: the VC pitching horror story. A massive conversation sharing such stories has taken place all week on X, with the comments both funny and infuriating. We read through them all to find the most interesting ones so you don’t have to.

Greg Isenberg, a startup podcaster, newsletter writer, and founder of Late Checkout Studio — a holding company whose previous ventures include a company acquired by WeWork — got the conversation started with a story about a VC falling asleep during a pitch meeting. Isenberg has a large following on X, and his post clearly struck a nerve.

“I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A. 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going,” he shared on X.

VCs sleeping through pitch meetings was far and away the most common horror story shared. Not just drowsing, but full on zonked.

Zynga founder Mark Pincus told his VC-asleep story. “I looked at my friend who set up the meeting and asked if i should keep presenting and she said yes. It was ‘weekend at bernies’ meets Silicon Valley,” he wrote.

Interestingly, falling asleep didn’t mean the VC wouldn’t invest. Multiple founders reported receiving term sheets from partners who’d dozed off during the pitch.

“I once pitched a partnership in 2015 for our Series A where one partner (famous Midas lister) fell asleep & another couldn’t stop scowling. Got a call 2 hrs after the IC that they were sending a term sheet over,” wrote Liz Wessel. Wessel, who co-founded and sold HR startup WayUp and is now a partner at First Round Capital, said her team didn’t take the money — and that the VC was shocked.

There were so many stories about VCs sleeping that former a16z partner Arianna Simpson wrote, “Are VCs ok?? Narcolepsy appears to be running rampant.”

There were, of course, more than a few stories about VCs signing term sheets then pulling out last minute, or ghosting, never wiring the money. The even more galling part? Some of these VCs apparently went on to treat the founders like portfolio companies anyway, asking for company updates or to serve as a reference. One founder said the VC even wanted a share of the post-acquisition proceeds.

Travis Kalanick, the Uber co-founder renowned for his determination, told a story about discovering that a VC was attempting to ghost the meeting and leave the building. Kalanick said he followed the VC to his car and pitched from the passenger’s seat.

Not everyone had bad experiences to report. Some founders said they’ve never had anything but great experiences with VCs, with a few even sharing love stories about specific investors. Yes, most VCs are hardworking, genuinely try to be helpful, and don’t take naps during meetings. But poor experiences are so common that Pincus exclaimed, “I f*cking love this moment, when founders no longer have to be afraid to call out VCs for dumb behavior.”

The most stunning stories

Still, the stories that truly stunned were the ones posted by Cloudflare founder Matthew Prince. “A Sequoia partner passed on Cloudflare because he didn’t think a woman could lead a security infrastructure company,” Prince wrote. The woman in question is Cloudflare’s co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn. Given that Cloudflare is now an $87 billion market cap company, with expected annual revenue of $2.8 billion in 2026, the judgment hasn’t aged well.

Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, no stranger to controversy over his remarks himself, replied that he’s always admired Zatlyn, and asked Prince to spill the name of the partner who said that. Prince punted, “Maybe over a drink one day. But I bet you have a good guess already.”

But wait, Prince dished more!

He told a story about prominent investor Vinod Khosla, who offered to invest and then, according to Prince’s recollection, suggested that the founder “fire” his co-founders and take their stock. “I think the charitable read was it was a test of my character. But I was so offended that we never spoke again. Literally blocked his number.”

Prince was quick to add nuance about Khosla: “He’s extremely smart/clever. Has been an incredible investor — can’t argue with his track record. Just not the personality I’d choose to work with.”

It’s worth noting that recollections of conversations tend to vary, and we don’t know what Khosla actually said, meant, or remembers. But eyes popped at such open talk about one of the Valley’s most successful, powerful VCs. Many people called Prince’s candor an example of having “FU” money. Prince, of course, is a billionaire these days.

Not all of Prince’s stories cast VCs as the villains. Specifically, he thought he had lined up a simple meet-and-greet on a Monday with Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of venture firm a16z. Instead, Andreessen showed up with his whole investment team, ready to be wowed. The ill-prepared Prince did not impress. “I framed the rejection letter they sent,” he said of the result. Others told similar stories of meetings with Andreessen and his firm.

Perhaps the funniest story came from Julie Fredrickson, a founder-turned-investor, who received a call from a VC associate before arriving at a firm’s office — warning her about a rock formation visible outside the window that, apparently unbeknownst to the investors inside, was shaped like male genitalia. “The firm will forever in my mind be Dickrock Ventures,” she wrote.

While the Valley’s VCs got roasted most heavily, founders shared incidents involving international VCs, too. Some VCs also dished about pitching to limited partner investors.

The threads are worth reading not just for the laughs, but for what they reveal: The fundraising process is opaque, the power dynamic is real, and the experiences that founders whisper about privately are a lot more common than the industry tends to acknowledge publicly.

Perhaps Isenberg explained the moral behind all of these stories best. “If you’re raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird,” he wrote.

A second lesson may be: If Andreessen agrees to meet with you, he means business.

Playtonic is shifting the Yooka-Laylee series from platforming to familiar-looking arcade racing.