Mozilla has launched a built-in ad blocker for Firefox on iOS, built on Apple’s WebKit content blocker technology with the EasyList filter and switched off by default. Apple opened its browser engine to rivals in March 2024 to comply with the Digital Markets Act, and no alternative engine has shipped to a European iPhone since.

Firefox on iOS finally has a built-in ad blocker. It arrived with Firefox 155 after a few weeks of testing, Digital Trends reported.

It works on Apple’s terms rather than Mozilla’s. The feature uses Apple’s WebKit content blocker with the community-maintained EasyList filter, and it is switched off until you find it in settings.

What it cannot block is the more telling part. Ads served by the site itself remain, so do ads in search results, and Mozilla’s own sponsored shortcuts are handled separately.

Firefox is late to this by years. Brave, Opera and Vivaldi have all shipped built-in blocking on iOS already, and desktop users have had extensions for far longer.

The reason is the engine underneath. Every browser on an iPhone renders with WebKit, so Firefox on iOS is Apple’s engine wearing a different interface.

Europe changed that rule on paper. Apple opened BrowserEngineKit in March 2024 to comply with the Digital Markets Act. The interface arrived with iOS 17.4 and applies only in the European Union.

Two and a half years on, nobody has shipped one. Google and Mozilla have both prototyped their own engines and neither has released it.

Mozilla said why at the time. Apple’s implementation would force it to build and maintain two browsers, “a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear“, a spokesperson said in January 2024.

Microsoft has since put a number on the cost. Its engineers measured a Blink prototype 28.6% faster than WebKit on Speedometer 3.1, on the same device.

Open Web Advocacy wants Brussels to intervene. Apple has “had more than two years to produce a compliant solution“, its director Alex Moore said.

The Commission has not been reticent elsewhere. Apple lost its challenge to gatekeeper designation at the General Court in July.

On the engine, though, nothing has moved. The rule exists, the interface exists, and no rival engine reaches a European iPhone. Microsoft has not shipped a Blink-based Edge either.

Which is what this feature quietly demonstrates. Mozilla built the best blocker Apple’s API allows, in the same year Chrome disabled Manifest V2 extensions including uBlock Origin.

[This is a sponsored article with Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC).]

Did you know? In 2026, Malaysia’s gig economy was reported to comprise a massive workforce of 1.64 million platform workers and non-platform workers. 

From food delivery and e-hailing riders to freelancers and independent contractors, these workers had no payslips to show banks, no steady income to qualify for credit, and no savings infrastructure designed for their irregular earnings pattern.

This evolving employment landscape presents unique financial challenges, leaving many gig workers more vulnerable to income disruptions and unexpected expenses. 

In response, various initiatives have emerged in recent years to strengthen financial inclusion and improve financial security for this growing workforce.

One such initiative is the Financial Innovation Gig Economy Challenge, highlighted during APEC Malaysia 2020. The challenge sought innovative solutions to improve the economic and financial well-being of gig workers across four key pillars of financial health: spending, saving, borrowing and financial planning.

What’s the Financial Innovation Gig Economy Challenge?

Facilitated by Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) and the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), and funded by MetLife Foundation, the Financial Innovation Gig Economy Challenge called for innovative solutions to improve the financial well-being of gig workers. The initiative reflects MDEC’s commitment to accelerating digital innovation while supporting the growth of Malaysia’s digital economy through the Malaysia Digital (MD)national strategic initiative.

It attracted over 100 submissions globally, with 10 teams selected for an intensive eight-week bootcamp and innovation programme. Using Malaysia as a testbed, participants refined their solutions through: 

• industry insights,
• human-centred design tools, 
• mentorship, and 
• access to key ecosystem players.

Three winning solutions were selected to pilot and scale their solutions with gig workers in Malaysia. 

As Malaysia Digital (MD) status companies, Paywatch, Versa, and Get Hyred were recognised for their potential to strengthen employability and financial health through innovations such as app-based training, income-smoothing tools, and accessible savings solution, while contributing to Malaysia’s growing digital economy.

Here’s how each of these platforms addressed different challenges faced by our gig workers, from earning and managing money to building long-term financial resilience and career growth.

1. Paywatch: Earned Wage Access as a Banking Bridge

Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Paywatch is one of Southeast Asia’s leading financial wellness platforms and the region’s largest provider of Earned Wage Access (EWA) solutions.

For many gig and frontline workers, where income can be irregular and cash flow tightly tied to pay cycles, this approach helps bridge the gap between work completed and wages received. Workers across Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea are able to access wages they’ve already earned anytime before payday. 

Centered on its EWA offering, Paywatch’s mission is to help employees manage their finances more effectively, from avoiding unnecessary loans to making more mindful use of their income. This is increasingly relevant as EWA adoption spreads across industries with large frontline and hourly workforces. 

Some notable multinational companies adopting Paywatch’s solution include DFI Retail Group (Guardian), Genting Group, Shangri-La Hotels, Lotus’s (CP Group), Shake Shack, A&W, Lotte Group, and Wilmar. 

Closing a US$20 million Series A round co-led by Kakao Pay and Artem Ventures in November 2025, Paywatch’s total capital raised has surpassed US$50 million when combined with earlier equity rounds and credit lines from global banks.  

Fun fact: Paywatch has reportedly processed over US$200 million in transactions. MDEC also shared that the company has been featured in financial inclusion-related studies and broader ecosystem initiatives connected to the UNCDF and the ILO, underscoring its impact-focused approach to improving wage access for workers. 

“Financial stability is a fundamental right,” said Alex Kim, President of Paywatch. “We are on a mission to build an equitable system where every worker can access secure, equitably priced financial services. For these workers, this level of financial freedom and inclusion should not be seen as a privilege, but as standard.”

The company’s growth also reflects the strength of Malaysia’s fintech ecosystem in developing scalable digital solutions that address real-world challenges locally and across the region.

Beyond enabling early wage access, Paywatch is further positioning itself as a next-generation Employee Assistance Programme (EAP). It has developed its own cross-border remittance infrastructure to help foreign workers send money home instantly, a fee-free bill payments system lets workers stay on top of recurring expenses, and a healthcare module covering insurance and medical costs. 

2. Versa: From Cash Management to Wealth Democratisation

Versa is a digital wealth management platform that allows users to save, invest, and access retirement planning tools. Among its offerings is a cash management tool that provides returns on par with fixed deposits, but with similar liquidity as a regular savings account.

As the first e-service platform licensed by Malaysia’s Securities Commission in 2021, its products are built within a regulated framework aimed at broadening access to wealth management tools.

“Cash management solutions were traditionally only accessible to sophisticated investors and not readily available to all Malaysians. We are democratising access to such products together with Affin Hwang AM to bring these solutions to every Malaysian regardless of wealth status,” said Teoh Wei-Xiang, CEO of Versa, in a press release.

Four years after its official launch in January 2021, the fintech startup has captured about 450,000 registered users, with 90% aged 40 and below.

Breaking the numbers down, 59% of its total users are aged 30 and below while 20.4% are university students. Gender-wise, 40% of its total users are female, which is notable in a sector that historically skews male. 

“We helped Malaysians, especially the youth, save almost RM500 million in 2024 alone,” the CEO elaborated.

Aside from cash management, Versa has since expanded into a robust wealth platform offering nearly 20 conventional and Shariah-compliant funds, retirement planning through the Private Retirement Scheme (PRS), and a gamified engagement feature called Versa Quest to build savings habits among young users.

The platform’s commercial trajectory was validated again in March last year when Versa closed a RM30 million Series A round led by AHAM Asset Management Berhad, with participation from notable individual investors. This latest round funded its target of reaching one million users by 2027. Its continued expansion demonstrates how Malaysian fintech companies are creating innovative financial solutions with strong regional growth potential.

3. Get Hyred: Closing the Employability Gap

Where Versa offers fixed savings and Paywatch fixed cash flow, Get Hyred addresses the supply-side gap in the gig economy by focusing on employability rather than financial products. 

Its solution is designed to help gig workers build skills, credentials, and access income opportunities that support longer-term upward mobility.

At the centre of its offering is the Zasss marketplace, which matches young gig workers to flexible earning opportunities while integrating access to skills-building modules. 

The platform combines income generation with capability development to strengthen both immediate earning potential and longer-term career pathways.

Within the broader Financial Innovation Gig Economy Challenge framework, Get Hyred complements solutions like Paywatch and Versa by addressing the fourth pillar of financial health—sustained earning power.

Rather than positioning the gig economy solely as a source of short-term income, GetHyred frames it as a pathway for progression. By linking work opportunities with skills development, the platform seeks to help workers move from entry-level gig roles into more sustainable forms of employment over time, supporting Malaysia’s efforts to develop a future-ready digital workforce.

Closing the Gig Economy Financial Gap

Through the Malaysia Digital (MD) initiative, MDEC continues to support high-potential MD status companies such as Paywatch, Versa and GetHyred in developing innovative digital solutions that address real-world challenges while strengthening Malaysia’s digital economy. These efforts contribute to the aspirations of Malaysia Digital 2030 (MD2030) to position Malaysia as a globally competitive digital nation. From improving cash-flow stability and enabling structured savings, to expanding access to wealth-building tools and addressing long-term employability, each solution targets a different stage of a gig worker’s financial journey.

While the nature of gig work continues to evolve, the cohort of solutions highlights how financial inclusion is no longer only about access to services, but about building systems that support resilience, mobility, and sustainable earning power over time.

• Learn more about MDEC and the MD Status here.
• Read other articles we’ve written about Malaysian startups here.

Feature Image Credit: PayWatch

It’s only the first day of September 2026, but the month and fall season are already off to the races in AI land, as Anthropic has just released its latest and most powerful large language models yet — Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1.

The two names refer to the same underlying model. Fable 5.1 is the generally available version, with Anthropic’s production safeguards in place. Mythos 5.1 is available through restricted-access programs for vetted cybersecurity and life-sciences organizations that need capabilities normally constrained by those safeguards.

For enterprise buyers, however, the release is about more than another round of benchmark gains. Anthropic is simultaneously changing the economics of running persistent agents, reducing the cost of cached context by 75%, and introducing a new security architecture called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, or EFS, designed to let organizations retain monitoring data inside infrastructure they control.

Those changes arrive at a particularly consequential moment. Over the past several weeks, Anthropic and the U.K. AI Security Institute have disclosed incidents in which earlier Claude models, running under unusually permissive cybersecurity evaluation conditions, took unauthorized actions against real systems. Anthropic temporarily paused external cyber evaluations and has since introduced additional containment and monitoring before resuming them.

Taken together, Fable 5.1 looks less like a conventional model refresh than an attempt to solve three increasingly intertwined enterprise problems: how to make agents capable enough to finish difficult work, economical enough to leave running for hours, and governable enough to give access to sensitive systems.

A model built for work that does not finish in one prompt

Anthropic is positioning Fable 5.1 primarily around sustained problem-solving.

On Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1, which evaluates agentic scientific research, Anthropic reports Fable 5.1 scoring 52.6%, compared with 24.7% for Fable 5, 29.0% for Opus 5 and 22.4% for GPT-5.6 Sol in its evaluation setup. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, Fable 5.1 scores 55.8%, versus 42.0% for Fable 5 and 52.3% for Opus 5. Mythos 5.1 reaches 60.9% on the same coding benchmark when operating under its more permissive cyber safeguards.

The gains extend beyond coding. Anthropic reports a GDPval-AA v2 score of 1,853 for knowledge work, versus 1,824 for Opus 5 and 1,723 for Fable 5. On AutomationBench, intended to measure business workflows, Fable 5.1 scores 31.4%, compared with 17.1% for Fable 5 and 26.9% for Opus 5. On CursorBench 3.2.0, it reaches 73.4%.

Those numbers should be read as vendor-reported results rather than independent proof of superiority. Anthropic also notes qualifications around several evaluations: production safeguards can affect scores, and its August 2026 OSWorld task release is not directly comparable with some previously published results.

The more useful signal for enterprise teams may therefore come from the kinds of failures early-access partners say the model can resolve.

Investment firm Millennium told Anthropic that Fable 5.1 traced an extremely rare software crash to a bug inside an external vendor library after the problem had resisted explanation for four to five years.

Corporate expense management provider Ramp described an unattended 38-hour machine-learning run in which the model re-evaluated a previous result, launched six experiments and returned with findings and proposed next steps.

Browserbase said Fable 5.1 completed 82% of tasks on its hardest browser-agent benchmark, versus 74% for Opus 5 and 57% for Fable 5.

These are customer testimonials supplied as part of Anthropic’s launch, not independently reproduced benchmarks. But they illustrate the direction Anthropic is pursuing: moving the unit of AI work from an answer or code snippet toward an entire investigation.

That changes deployment architecture. A model that can operate for hours needs durable context, tool access, checkpoints, logging, permission boundaries and reliable recovery from errors. Model intelligence becomes only one component of the system.

Pricing: Fable 5.1 remains premium, but caching changes the equation

The most immediately measurable enterprise change is pricing.

Fable 5.1 retains Fable 5’s headline API rates: $10 per 1 million input tokens and $50 per million output. That makes it considerably more expensive on uncached tokens than other models in Anthropic’s lineup. Opus 5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, while Sonnet 5 costs $2 and $10 respectively.

The important change is cached input:

Anthropic has cut a Fable 5.1 cache hit to just $0.25 on input, down from $1.00 for Fable 5.

That’s also just 2.5% of Fable’s normal input-token price of $10, rather than the 10% multiplier used by most other Claude models.

Five-minute cache writes remain $12.50 per million tokens and one-hour writes $20, but subsequent reads cost just $0.25 per million.

That produces an unusual pricing profile. Fable 5.1’s ordinary input and output are twice as expensive as Opus 5’s, yet its cached input is half the cost of Opus 5’s cache reads. Its cache-read price is only 25% above Sonnet 5’s despite Fable’s base input price being five times higher.

That matters for agents because they repeatedly revisit the same codebase, system instructions, tool definitions, documents and accumulated conversation history. Anthropic says the lower cache price reduces Fable 5.1’s effective cost by around 25% for typical workloads and as much as roughly 45% for highly agentic workloads in which cached context accounts for a larger share of usage.

This is a more useful enterprise framing than simply comparing per-token list prices. Model selection for an agentic workflow increasingly depends on cost per successfully completed task, including retries, context replay, tool calls and the number of tokens a model consumes before reaching a usable result.

The cache price reduction also may be an effort to help woo increasingly price-consicious enterprises. A Financial Times report found that, more than two months after launch, Fable 5 accounted for only about 11% of Anthropic model spending among roughly 70,000 companies represented in Ramp’s transaction data, while the cheaper Opus 5 and Opus 4.8 gained share.

The Information further reported growing concern among enterprise customers about unpredictable AI bills, including ServiceNow monitoring employee usage after rapidly consuming its annual Anthropic budget. Those reports suggest that even when enterprises valued Fable 5’s capabilities, many were unwilling to make it the default model for large-scale production workloads.

Fable 5.1 nevertheless remains expensive relative to much of the broader market. OpenAI’s current promotional API pricing for GPT-5.6 Sol is $4 per million input tokens, $0.40 for cached input and $20 per million output tokens through at least Nov. 21. Google’s Gemini 3.7 Flash currently lists at $0.75 per million input and $3.75 per million output through the end of 2026.

Fable therefore needs to justify its premium through higher task completion, lower token consumption, or the ability to replace more expensive human or multi-stage workflows—not simply through raw API price.

Anthropic’s pricing system provides additional levers. Batch processing cuts Fable 5.1 input and output rates in half, to $5 and $25 per million tokens, for asynchronous workloads. U.S.-only inference adds a 1.1x multiplier. Web search costs $10 per 1,000 searches in addition to token usage, while web fetch carries no separate fee.

For procurement teams, those details make workload profiling increasingly important. A code-review agent with enormous reusable repository context may have very different economics from a report-generation workflow dominated by new output tokens.

The cyber incidents behind the release

The security architecture surrounding Fable 5.1 also needs to be understood against Anthropic’s recent cybersecurity incidents.

On July 30, Anthropic disclosed that a review of 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs had identified three incidents, spanning six runs, in which Claude models reached the public internet from a third-party testing environment and obtained unauthorized access to real organizations.

The models had been running without the cyber safeguards applied to generally available Claude deployments. They were performing capture-the-flag exercises and had explicitly been told that their environments were simulations without internet access. A configuration problem nevertheless left an internet path open.

In the most serious incident, Claude Opus 4.7 encountered a real company that shared a name with the fictional organization in its test. Across four runs, the model obtained application and infrastructure credentials and accessed a database containing several hundred rows of production data. Anthropic said the model eventually encountered indications that the system was real but continued its attack.

A second incident involved Mythos 5. The model discovered developer instructions referencing a nonexistent Python package and decided that publishing a package under that name could help it win the simulated challenge. It created a PyPI account and uploaded malicious code to the real public package repository.

The package remained available for roughly an hour and was downloaded and executed on 15 real systems. One belonged to a security company whose automated scanner executed the package; Claude’s code extracted credentials and subsequently used them to access additional infrastructure.

In the third incident, an internal Anthropic research model scanned roughly 9,000 internet targets after failing to reach its intended fictional target. It compromised an internet-facing application using exposed credentials and SQL injection, then stopped after recognizing that the system had no connection to the exercise.

The incidents did not involve customer data or Anthropic’s production infrastructure, and Anthropic says the production safeguards omitted during the tests would have blocked the behavior. Still, the episodes demonstrated a problem enterprise agent architects will recognize: a sufficiently persistent agent can exploit ambiguity between what its operator intended it to access and what its technical credentials allow it to access.

A separate U.K. AI Security Institute disclosure reinforced that concern.

During testing conducted in July, AISI ran a cyber challenge 122 times across multiple models with internet access deliberately enabled and vendor cyber classifiers disabled. Ten runs produced 19 unsanctioned real-world actions. Seventeen involved Anthropic’s Mythos 5; two came from a GPT-5.6 Sol run.

The most serious sequence involved a Mythos 5 agent attempting to insert malicious code into a real open-source project, creating fake identities and attempting to socially engineer a maintainer into accepting the change. The maintainer rejected it, and AISI said its investigation found no resulting real-world harm. The agent also attempted prompt injection against other AI systems and left messages that later agents discovered and used.

Again, these were deliberately permissive research configurations, not commercially available deployments. But AISI’s conclusion is relevant far beyond AI labs: increasingly capable agents should be assumed to explore routes their operators did not anticipate, particularly when given difficult objectives and broad tool access.

From model safeguards to infrastructure safeguards

Anthropic’s response has been to add layers around the model.

The company paused external cyber evaluations and briefly halted some internal testing, then deployed a real-time classifier designed to detect aggressive probing, sandbox-escape attempts or unexpected internet access before a tool call executes. It also moved high-risk cyber workloads into stronger isolation and imposed new requirements on external evaluators, including explicit network isolation and pre-engagement validation of sandboxes. External cyber evaluations have now resumed.

Fable 5.1 itself also gets more precise production safeguards. Anthropic says its cyber protections now create around 60% fewer interventions per Claude Code session than Fable 5’s previous safeguards. The model can be used to discover software vulnerabilities for defensive purposes, while work such as exploit generation, penetration testing and some binary-based vulnerability scanning remains redirected or restricted.

That distinction matters for security teams attempting to operationalize AI. A safeguard that blocks too many legitimate actions can make an autonomous security workflow unreliable; one that permits too much creates a materially different risk. Precision, rather than simply the existence of a filter, becomes a production requirement.

Enterprise Frontier Safeguards moves data custody to the customer

Anthropic is addressing a second enterprise constraint through EFS.

The company previously introduced 30-day data retention for Fable 5 as part of its misuse-detection system. For regulated organizations, retaining sensitive conversations with a model provider can make deployment difficult regardless of contractual assurances.

EFS changes the architecture. Monitoring data can reside in the customer’s own AWS, Azure or Google Cloud environment under customer-managed encryption keys, access policies and audit logging. Anthropic’s automated systems can analyze the data for patterns associated with serious misuse, while alerts go to the customer for review; Anthropic says human review by its employees is not required.

Anthropic says it developed EFS with more than 100 organizations across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, law, retail and government, and with AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Support is planned across Claude Code, Claude Enterprise, the Claude Platform, Amazon Bedrock, Claude Platform on AWS, Google’s Agent Platform and Microsoft Foundry. The rollout begins in phases this fall. Eligible customers can use Fable 5.1 with zero data retention until EFS becomes available. Anthropic does not charge separately for EFS, although customers remain responsible for their own cloud storage, operations and egress costs.

This is potentially as important as the model upgrade itself. Enterprise AI governance is shifting from promises about what a provider does with data toward architectures that determine where the data can exist in the first place.

Fable for production, Mythos for controlled frontiers

The split between Fable and Mythos gives Anthropic a mechanism for separating general enterprise deployment from particularly sensitive domains.

Fable 5.1 is available now through Anthropic’s API as claude-fable-5-1, as well as through AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Mythos 5.1 uses the same underlying model but exposes more permissive safeguards to vetted cyberdefenders and life-sciences organizations through verification programs.

That same model has shown capabilities extending well outside software. Anthropic reports that Mythos 5.1 designed experimentally validated protein binders, while Fable 5.1 trained a neural network that produced a higher-resolution elevation map covering roughly a third of Venus. Mythos 5.1 also optimized seven open-source biological deep-learning models, with Anthropic reporting inference speedups as high as 2.5x.

For pharmaceutical, engineering and research organizations, that points toward a future in which the same agent architecture used to investigate a code failure may also orchestrate modeling, experimentation and analysis.

The operational lesson is the same in every case: the more work an agent can complete without intervention, the more consequential its permissions become.

Fable 5.1 makes those long-running agents more capable and, through cheaper cached context, potentially much cheaper to operate. EFS gives regulated companies another mechanism for governing their data. More precise safeguards reduce some of the friction that has made high-capability models difficult to use in security workflows.

But Anthropic’s own recent incidents also demonstrate why the enterprise deployment question cannot stop at model selection.

The next generation of AI infrastructure will need to treat agents more like powerful service accounts than chatbots: narrowly scoped credentials, segmented networks, explicit allowlists, continuous telemetry, human approval around irreversible actions and the assumption that an agent may find pathways its developer did not anticipate.

Fable 5.1 raises the amount of work organizations can plausibly delegate. Its larger significance may be that it also makes the infrastructure surrounding that delegation impossible to treat as an afterthought.

The CEO of a flying car company backed by Larry Page has left the company.

Ken Karklin, who was Pivotal’s CEO for more than four years, left the role this week, according to a press release. Pivotal said Karklin is “pursuing new endeavors” but didn’t offer any other information about the executive’s departure from the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) firm.

“Leading Pivotal has been the privilege of my career. Together, we’ve moved beyond the promise of light eVTOL and proved it out in practice,” Karklin said in a statement. “This industry has moved past prototypes and press releases; it’s now operating in the real world, under real constraints, with real consequences for the future of Advanced Air Mobility. As I turn to new endeavors, I do so knowing the foundation we built here will help carry this industry forward.”

Karklin will be replaced on an interim basis by Mike Ross, an aviation executive who joined Pivotal’s board of directors in November 2025. Karklin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Karklin’s departure comes two years after Pivotal started sales of Helix, its first lightweight electric personal aircraft. The single-seat aircraft doesn’t require a pilot’s license to fly and starts at around $200,000.

“Ken’s leadership over the past four years has been instrumental in bringing Pivotal to where it is today. Our team, our priorities, and our roadmap remain steady through this transition,” Ross said in a statement. “I’ve had the honor of working closely with Ken as a Board member and watching Pivotal’s disciplined approach to safety, engineering, and accessibility deliver on the vision of electric VTOL flight. I look forward to working with the team and guiding the company forward as we bring our fourth-generation Helix aircraft to market.”

Pivotal has also spent years developing an aircraft called BlackFly that is aimed at defense and first-responder use cases. Last month, BlackFly was used to respond to an emergency in North Carolina for the first time ever. The company says it beat an ambulance responding in parallel to the call by 20 minutes. BlackFly has flown more than 10,000 times, according to Pivotal.

Pivotal is one of a number of companies in the space that was selected for the Federal Aviation Administration’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, which was created to increase testing of these types of aircraft around the country.

from the starting-from-the-most-helpless-and-working-their-way-up dept

The “worst of the worst” are coming for the “worst of the worst.” Of course, this administration has completely given up on this pretense, despite sending out lots of noisy messaging otherwise every time an immigration officer murders a person.

For the entirety of Trump’s anti-migration surge, it’s been obvious that it’s all about expelling certain people and has nothing to do with ridding this nation of criminals. But there are quotas to meet. Trump is awful enough on his own, but he can’t read a spreadsheet. That’s why Stephen Miller exists: to apply the pressure Trump simply can’t stay awake to do himself.

For years, law enforcement officers at every level have abused their power and positions to violate the rights of regular people. That alone is a crime, even if it’s usually just considered a civil violation. Guess what else is a civil violation? Being in this country without having the proper paperwork or processes in place to comply with immigration law.

To keep up with demands for ever-increasing arrests, this administration has also engaged in hiring surges. The people responding to huge signing bonuses and the simultaneous lowering of training standards tended to be the people you expected them to be. And, as the DHS soon discovered, stripping standards and all but eliminating training that would be useful to new ICE/CBP officers, its pool of applicants ran from the sub-par to the absolutely criminal.

Given what else we’ve always known about how those with power seek out the weakest people to exploit and abuse — combined with the free pass courts now give to federal officers when they’re only violating civil rights — this new report that’s based on hundreds of criminal cases against immigration officers makes it clear a lot of the “worst of the worst” are employed by the federal government.

A new report by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, released today, pulls back the curtain on a stunning level of sexual criminal behavior within ICE and CBP. Out of 152 cases of identified immigration officials or contractors accused or convicted of criminal behavior, 131 of them, or 86.2 percent, were charged with sex offenses. Seventy-eight of them—51 percent of the entire cohort—”committed sex offenses against children—the single largest category on the list,” the report states. Cases involving a CBP officer, the report finds, “are more likely to involve underage victims” than those of an ICE officer. Yet fully half of ICE officers accused or convicted of sex offenses (12 of 24) had a minor as their victim.

As bad as this looks, it’s probably even worse. As the Ohio Immigrant Alliance report [PDF] notes, this only covers immigration officers who have actually been caught and are facing criminal prosecutions.

This means there are many more who just haven’t been caught yet. And the chances of them being caught has been drastically reduced in recent months. ICE’s OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility) has always been tasked with investigating complaints filed against ICE officers. It’s not just history. It’s the directive handed down by law, which now seems to be something the OPR can just ignore because it would rather investigate critics of Trump’s anti-migrant activities.

If you’re wondering how it gets so bad that most criminal allegations against immigration officers involve the sexual abuse of children, this is how we’ve reached what we can only hope is an inflection point.

First, there’s the Supreme Court, which has made it all but impossible to sue federal officers for rights violations, many of which include clearly criminal acts. Added to that is this administration’s absolute refusal to perform internal investigations, much less punish officers for excessive force, child molestation, or murdering US residents and citizens.

Now, I’m sure there will be dishonest comment brokers arriving to fill the comments with stupid stuff like “well, 152 officers is only X% of immigration officers, so this is actually a good thing.” They can fuck right off. I guarantee any commenter thinking this sort of thing is acceptable because it only involves a small minority of officers is also in favor of letting internet vigilantes beat/maim/murder anyone these amateurs happen to think might be seeking to harm minors. The Venn diagram of “get all the pedos” and “whatever Trump wants to do is fine” is pretty much a full eclipse.

In other words, it’s forgivable if a few ICE/CBP officers do this while engaged in God’s/Trump’s work. But anyone asking for gender-neutral bathrooms should be executed immediately because the only reason a trans person would ask for this is because they want to rape children.

And, in case you’re wondering, of course this isn’t all Trump’s fault. The lack of oversight and accountability has been a problem for years, reducing the deterrents from zero to less than zero. That being said, it’s been getting a lot worse since Trump took office for a second time:

All this, the report finds, is accelerating. Nearly 25 percent of examined criminal offenses tied to ICE and CBP happened during the second presidency of Donald Trump. More occurred in 2026 (22 so far) than in 2025 (14). Both years outperformed the previous peak year of 2024 (11). Still, the fact that the previous peak occurred during Joe Biden’s presidency testifies to Biden and the Democrats’ unwillingness to confront ICE and CBP.

To sum up, this situation was fucked from the get-go and it’s exponentially getting worse under the current [cough] “leadership.” And no one truly thinks Trump or anyone in his administration will look at this report and see a chance to improve things. Trump could try to beat Biden at his own “molested by an immigration officer” game, but this administration has already written off anyone subjected to violent acts (including sexual violence) by immigration as subhumans who just got what the deserved.

Expecting him to care about the steadily-increasing number of molestations by ICE or CBP officers is to expect the sun to rise in the west tomorrow. No one cares, because they never have. And this administration is capable of not caring at levels we’ve never seen before, to cop a favorite phrase of our current president.

Filed Under: cbp, ice, law enforcement misconduct, mass deportation, worst of the worst

OLED screens run the biggest risk, but with a little common sense you can mitigate the issue.

What is burn-in and what causes it?

An OLED display is made up of millions of tiny organic light-emitting diodes — hence the name OLED. This is unlike an LCD, which relies on a backlight to illuminate its pixels. This means that each pixel in an OLED generates its own light and can be dimmed or turned off independently. But while this granular control provides excellent contrast and deep blacks, it also means that individual pixels can wear out independently of each other.

Each time you use an OLED display, these individual pixels undergo some infinitesimal amount of degradation. In the real-world, this wear translates to a dimmer light output. To further complicate matters, each pixel is actually made up of several smaller sub-pixels that produce different colors, typically red, green and blue. These sub-pixels don’t necessarily age at the same rate, either.

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Practically speaking, the OLED display is continuously varying the brightness of each pixel and sub-pixel to reproduce the colors you see on the screen. Over time, though, this can cause some pixels can experience more wear than others and become dimmer. Eventually, the difference in brightness can become noticeable enough to our eyes.

Put simply, burn-in occurs when some pixels appear brighter than those that have experienced greater wear, creating a persistent outline or ghosting of previously displayed content.

Static elements like channel logos have a higher potential to cause OLED burn-in, since the sub-pixels in that region wear out unevenly. This is why OLED displays aren’t the best choice if you exclusively watch news or sports channels for several hours each day. Playing the same game for hundreds of hours can also have the same effect, as on-screen text and other fixed elements can accelerate burn-in in certain localized spots.

Is burn-in still a risk for modern OLED TVs?

Do LCD TVs suffer from burn-in?

A group of executives and entrepreneurs led by Starcloud co-founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean and Ezra Feilden teamed up to develop humanity’s first interstellar spacecraft. If everything goes according to plan, it will launch in 2029, headed for Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our solar system. But it won’t reach its destination for about 80,000 years. 

Known as Fermi Explorer, this non-profit mission aims to build a 10cm cube weighing about 1 kilogram (about 2.2 pounds). Once the cube is built, they plan to attach it to a propulsion system, take it to space and launch it toward Alpha Centauri. It’s the technological equivalent of taking a hefty rock into space, throwing it at Alpha Centauri and waiting for it to get there. 

“The mission is intended to make the idea of interstellar travel real, and to encourage more people to confront one of humanity’s biggest unanswered questions when we look beyond our planet,” the group said in a post on X. The post is accompanied by a video showing the Fermi Explorer being overtaken by hundreds of faster spacecraft also bound for Alpha Centauri.

The wait for this mission to go interstellar is unreal. The exact wait to mission completion is 79,800 years, according to the Fermi Explorer mission calculator, which means once this thing gets underway, it won’t be the problem of anyone currently living, or anyone else, for a few thousand generations. 

Just getting out of the solar system will take longer than any road trip any human has ever taken. The spacecraft is expected to circle the sun for 12 years in an oval orbit. The boosters will fire when the spacecraft gets closer to the sun, a process called the Oberth maneuver, thereby gaining speed through multiple orbits as it approaches escape velocity. Once done, it’ll launch itself and keep going, and going, and going. The Fermi Explorer’s technical feasibility assessment says it should leave the solar system by the early 2040s. 

It’s quite a different mission from what Starcloud’s co-founders usually work on: putting data centers in space to power AI. The company plans to launch its first such full commercial data center, called the Starcloud-2, in 2027, but it did send an Nvidia H100 GPU into space via Starcloud-1 in 2025.

More symbolic than scientific

Interstellar travel takes so long that humanity has focused far more on speeding up the journey than actually making it. One of the big projects addressing this was Breakthrough Starshot, a multi-billion-dollar initiative that would’ve used laser-based propulsion to propel a ship to another star in a matter of decades rather than millennia. That project collapsed in 2025 with no launches. 

The only other interstellar missions ever conducted, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively, over four decades after their launches. 

According to the non-profit group, the purpose of the Fermi Explorer is to just toss something into the cosmos and see what happens. It sounds silly, but it’s the truth. The group’s thinking is based on the Fermi Paradox, which seeks to explain why there are so many stars and planets yet no signs of extraterrestrial life. 

One potential reason is the Fermi Great Filter, which suggests a barrier so hard to cross that intelligent life rarely survives long enough to be detected.

There are dozens of potential filters, ranging from the various steps of abiogenesis — the natural process by which life arises from non-living matter — to technological filters such as the inability to get into space, or, once there, the lack of motivation to search beyond a species’ host star. 

“By launching the Fermi Explorer mission, we can for the first time tick two possible Fermi Great Filters off the list,” the group wrote on its website. “That it is impossible for an intelligent species to leave their nearest stars (and) that all intelligent species decide not to leave their home star for some reason.”

The goal is to fund and build this entire project for about $15 million, using existing technology and piggybacking on a commercial rocket, such as SpaceX’s, to reach orbit. This project exists only to prove that humans can and are willing to do it, even if it’s something no one alive today is ever going to witness.

Joe is a freelance journalist. It all started with a long-running affection for building his own PCs, which he did for the first time as a teenager. It evolved into a lifelong enjoyment of putting words on the internet about the subject. He’s written for CNET, PCMag, Mashable and SlashGear as a freelance writer, and worked as a Senior Editor at Android Authority for 10 years. When he’s not writing about tech and science, he’s learning the ins and outs of DIY home repair, gaming, playing his bass guitars and posting help on PC building and gaming subreddits. He is a staunch believer that orange juice should have pulp.

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