from the prime-time dept

With the streaming world turning into a wild, chaotic, fractured mess, there is no better example of how terrible this can all be than with live sports. We’ve already seen all kinds of issues among streaming services when it comes to sports. Buffering live games piss people off. Exclusivity deals worked out among several services for a single league can make finding where a game is being showed a Sherlock-ian experience. Local blackout rules abound and suck for the consumer.

But if there is one thing a streaming service cannot do, it’s got to be buying the exclusive rights to important games and then throwing “technical difficulties” at the viewer. And that’s exactly what happened during part of an overtime period in an NBA playoff game between the Hornets and the Heat. For several minutes at the start of the overtime period, the stream simply cut out.

As reported by ESPN, Prime Video started showing a message that read “technical difficulties” seconds after cutting off the game’s commentator in the middle of a sentence. Viewers missed a Hornets possession that included a score by LaMelo Ball. By the time the stream came back online, 22.1 seconds of playing time had passed, per ESPN, and viewers were dismayed.

“Tell me the game didn’t just cut off?!!? Am I trippin?? WTH,” LeBron James, a Los Angeles Lakers player who previously won two championships with the Heat, said, adding a face-planting emoji, on X.

Prime Video’s fumble is made worse by the fact that the streaming service had exclusive rights to air the game. The only other way to experience the game was in person or by listening to select radio stations.

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Imagine someone signed up for Prime because of this deal with the NBA. Sure, that isn’t going to be a huge percentage of the viewership, but it won’t be zero percent of it, either. To have the stream cut out in the opening minutes of overtime is going to be incredibly frustrating.

It’s also worth noting that more traditional broadcasts also have had equipment failures, but they don’t have the resources Amazon has. And, frankly, Amazon’s streaming service doesn’t have the best reputation to begin with.

The latter point is especially concerning because, after four years of this, viewers are still complaining about audio-syncing problems on Prime Video this season. We’ve experienced this firsthand at Ars Technica and have heard commentators announce a completed three-point shot before the stream shows it happening.

“The entire year the audio has been a split second ahead of the video on half of the Amazon games we’ve watched,” Bill Simmons, a former sportswriter and current host of The Bill Simmons Podcast, said in today’s episode: “The three-pointer’s halfway toward the basket. It’s like, ‘BANG! It’s good!’ And you hear the crowd, and it’s, like, the ball hasn’t even gone in yet. How have we not figured this out yet? You guys, [Amazon], have 8 kajillion dollars.”

At some point, the NBA itself is going to have to step in here, because its reputation is going to take a hit along with Amazon’s. The league risks alienating fans that are pissed off that the league foisted broadcast partners that apparently can’t deliver a product of the quality of cable TV, of all entities. And I refuse to believe that these streaming contracts don’t come with contractual requirements for quality of service.

Streaming is both the present and the future. It isn’t going away. Neither are live sports. This has to be figured out and delivered in a way that fans don’t completely miss important parts of games. The alternative is lost fans for the leagues and I can promise you that won’t be stood for.

Filed Under: amazon prime, basketball, live sports, streaming, technical difficulties

Companies: amazon, nba

SpaceX said it has struck a deal with Cursor to develop a next-generation “coding and knowledge work AI,” which includes a surprising provision — an option to buy the popular software development platform for $60 billion later this year.

Partnering with and potentially purchasing a leader in the hottest AI product category can only be seen in the context of SpaceX’s much-anticipated public offering. Investors seeking more value in the IPO might see its engagement with Cursor as another way to extract value from Elon Musk’s increasingly sprawling tech conglomerate.

The deal won’t shock those who follow the industry closely. Last week, it was reported that xAI would begin renting computing power from its data centers to Cursor, with the coding startup using tens of thousands of xAI chips to train its latest AI model. And last month, two of Cursor’s most senior engineering leaders, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, left the company to join xAI, where both report directly to Musk.

SpaceX described the partnership as a project combining Cursor’s “product and distribution to expert software engineers” with SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, which the company claims has the equivalent compute power of a million Nvidia H100 chips.

SpaceX also said that at some undisclosed point later this year, it will either pay Cursor $10 billion for its work or acquire the company for $60 billion. Last week, TechCrunch reported that Cursor was eyeing a $50 billion valuation in an upcoming private fundraising round. That figure itself reflects an astonishing series of leaps. Cursor was valued at just $2.5 billion in January of last year, climbed to $9 billion by last May, and was assigned a $29.3 billion post-money valuation when it closed on $2.3 billion in Series D funding in November.

Either figure would represent a significant expense for SpaceX, which is widely seen to be losing money following the acquisition of xAI and the social media network X and is planning extensive capital investment. The brief statement did not say if either deal could be paid in SpaceX stock.

In the meantime, the move could shore up weaknesses at each company, but it also reveals them. Neither Cursor nor xAI has proprietary models that can match the leading offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI — the same companies now competing directly with Cursor for the developer market.

Cursor still uses and sells access to Claude and GPT models even as both firms roll out their own coding tools, an awkward arrangement that this new SpaceX partnership may be designed to eventually escape.

CATL held its Super Technology Day in Beijing, and if you care about EVs at all, this one is worth paying attention to. As reported by PR Newswire, the company unveiled several new battery technologies, and the headline act is the third-generation Shenxing Superfast Charging Battery.

The numbers are pretty incredible. Charging from 10% to 80% takes 3 minutes and 44 seconds. Charging from 10% to 98% takes 6 minutes and 27 seconds. Even at minus 30 degrees Celsius, the battery can charge from 20% to 98% in about 9 minutes. 

For context, that is faster than BYD’s blade battery and Geely’s fast charging technologies. Hell, most people take more time to fill a gas tank and grab a snack than this battery needs to charge.

CATL is also promising that the battery will retain over 90% of its capacity after 1,000 full charging cycles, which addresses the usual trade-off between fast charging and battery longevity.

What else did CATL announce?

CATL did not stop at one announcement. The third-generation Qilin battery targets premium EVs with a cell energy density of 280 Wh/kg and a claimed range of 1,000 km. That should remove any range anxiety EV owners experience. 

The entire battery pack weighs 625 kg, which is 255 kg lighter than comparable systems. According to the company, the weight reduction alone improves braking distance, acceleration, and even tyre life by over 30%.

For hybrid drivers, the second-generation Freevoy Super Hybrid battery extends pure electric range to up to 600 km, with total vehicle range exceeding 2,000 km. And for those in extreme climates, the new Naxtra Sodium-ion battery is finally moving into large-scale production by the end of 2026.

What does this mean for you?

Charging and range anxiety have always been the biggest arguments against switching to an EV. CATL is making it increasingly harder to use that excuse. With fast-charging times approaching gas-station speeds and batteries that can go 1,000 kilometers on a single charge and handle extreme cold, the gap between EVs and traditional cars is getting smaller fast.

CATL plans to build 4,000 integrated charge and swap stations across China by the end of 2026. China has come to the forefront of EV technology advancements, and it’s no wonder US customers want access to their cars.

Charging is done via the same type of power adapter that the Sora 70 uses: a proprietary, blocklike connector that slides into a hatch on the rear of the device. A hinged port cover opens automatically when you slide the adapter into it and snaps shut when it’s removed. It’s not as convenient as a plugless charging dock, but it’s close, obviating the need for screw-on port covers or other waterproofing systems that have to be manually manipulated.

ScreenshotBeatbot app via Chris Null

In the water, the unit offers a scant three operational modes—floor mode, standard mode (which handles floor, wall, and waterline), and eco mode (which runs a floor-only cleaning for 45 minutes every 48 hours). Both floor and standard mode offer three running-time options: two hours, three hours, or max (i.e., run until the battery’s almost dead). These can all be selected through the Beatbot app, which is available via Bluetooth or either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz Wi-Fi. You’ll also need to set up Wi-Fi for firmware updates.

A Capable Cleaner

I spent the better part of a week testing the Sora 30 with both organic and synthetic debris and found the robot to be quite capable. Contrary to expectations, I encountered no issues with even heavier debris days, and the Sora 30 was able to suck up leaves and dirt with an average 95 percent coverage rate. It worked reasonably well on steps and platforms and is rated to run in water as shallow as 8 inches. Note that there’s no artificial intelligence or a camera that can detect debris on the fly here. This robot just goes back and forth the best it can, which turns out to be pretty good.

The only performance struggles I witnessed were in a single sharp corner area near the pool’s steps, where debris seemed to be pushed aside, unable to be effectively collected. In fact, all of the uncollected material in my test runs would inevitably end up in this one location. (The good news is that this was in the shallow end, making it easy to scoop up with a net.) It’s tough to say whether truly massive amounts of debris or larger items like twigs and branches would impact its operation to the degree the box suggests, but nothing I saw suggested this poolbot was significantly less powerful than most other devices on the market, especially in its price band.

Photograph: Chris Null

In 2021, I was a demoralized educator: not burnt out, but demoralized. As I shared in my first article for EdSurge, demoralization occurs when teachers “encounter consistent and pervasive challenges to enacting the values that motivate their work.”

That year, the pervasive challenges seemed obvious and communal. We were all navigating online platforms, figuring out how to replicate student services virtually and struggling to make up for lost time in instruction, social-skill development and relationship-building for when students returned to in-person schooling.

When I think about what feels most pressing now, it seems those challenges persist but are perhaps less obvious to society at large. As the authors of “Going the Distance: The Teaching Profession in a Post-COVID World (2024)” wrote:

Right now, I believe teaching is the most important thing we can do. When the world is on fire, what feels most pressing is teaching students to claim their humanity and helping educators understand how much the communal learning experience matters. Five years later, I have come full circle.

This time, I return to that same claim with a broader and deeper understanding of what makes a school. We use that old adage, “It takes a village…” More and more, I see that we, as school communities, are the village and the villagers that we need right now. What really makes a school more human is not just the principals and teachers, but the child welfare staff, paraeducators, campus supervisors, guidance counselors, cafeteria workers, coaches, librarians, custodians and secretaries. The list is long, but it feels necessary to name the people on campus who make students feel like they belong, support them and have their backs when students need it. These are the colleagues who have shown me what it is like to truly model humanity to our students.

The truth is that the onus is on all of us to create an environment in which mutual respect and empathy are the baseline expectations. So, as an instructional coach, as a leader and as a voice of change in this context, what can I do? How do I communicate to teachers that, while they have been beaten down and blamed for society’s ills, they also have the herculean task of helping students learn how to be human together?

In 2021, I said that I was demoralized. In 2026, I am revitalized and committed to my role as an educator, instructional coach and teacher advocate.

Since participating in the inaugural cohort of the Voices of Change fellowship, I have contributed essays to The California Educator, Edutopia and EdSurge. I have joined podcast panels to talk about social-emotional learning, culturally responsive teaching and civil discourse in the classroom.

This fellowship showed me the power of personal writing for representation and advocacy. I have started to write children’s books about my own neurodivergent children. I have presented at local and state conferences and will continue to use my voice and my words to advocate for students, for educators, for quality professional development and schools that model the best of humanity. Writing for the Voices of Change fellowship has helped me claim my voice, my humanity and my power.

Oppo has just unveiled its flagship smartphone that’s “engineered to be your next camera”.

The Oppo Find X9 Ultra is fitted with “groundbreaking” lenses and “industry-leading hardware”, but how does it compare to the 4.5-star Oppo Find X9 Pro? Considering we concluded that the latter delivers a top-notch camera experience and has a spot on our best camera phones list, how does the X9 Ultra look to compare?

We’ve assessed the specs of the Oppo Find X9 Ultra to the Find X9 Pro, and highlighted the key differences between the two below. 

Otherwise, visit our round-up of the best Android phones and best smartphones to see our current favourites. 

Price and Availability

The Find X9 Ultra is the first of Oppo’s Ultra models to launch globally.

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The Find X9 Pro is available to buy now, and has a starting price of £1099. However, we have seen the phone’s price drop over the last few months, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for deals. 

Oppo Find X9 Ultra has five rear lenses

Oppo explains that the Find X9 Ultra is fitted with a new-generation Hasselblad Master Camera System, which promises to deliver a versatile and high-quality framing that spans from 14mm to 460mm. 

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Made up of five rear lenses, the Find X9 Pro sports dual Hasselblad 200MP lenses. The first of the two is the Ultra-Sensing main lens which features the new 1/1.12-inch Sony LYTIA 901 sensor while the second is a 3x ultra-sensing telephoto which boasts the largest sensor of its type (1/1.28-inch), and doubles as a macro lens.

The two 200MP lenses are supported by two 50MP cameras: an ultrawide and a 10x Ultra-Sensing Optical-Zoom telephoto. In fact, the latter benefits from an industry-first 20x optical zoom too. 

Finally, the four lenses are flanked by a new-gen True Color Camera which promises natural colour rendition.

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In comparison, the Find X9 Pro is equipped with a 50MP main lens which, sure sounds pretty measly when compared to a 200MP alternative, but is able to capture plenty of detail and offers an impressive low-light performance too. 

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This is paired with a 200MP telephoto lens that can reach up to a whopping 120x zoom. While this will come at the expense of detail, using Oppo’s Hasselblad Teleconverter attachment aims to fix this issue – and we’ll explain more below. 

Both have supporting teleconverter attachments – but there’s a difference

Both the Find X9 Ultra and X9 Pro can be equipped with their own teleconverter attachments. With the Pro, the Teleconverter twists onto the 200MP telephoto lens and enables impressive zoom without compromising on quality. While it’s certainly not the most subtle of accessories, we were still impressed by its performance.

Oppo has also created a similar 300m Teleconverter lens for the X9 Ultra edition, that mounts to the 200MP, 3x telephoto sensor. According to Oppo, this attachment will allow photographers to retain sharp detail at “30x and beyond”. That’s a bold claim, and one we’re keen to try out for ourselves.

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Oppo Find X9 Ultra runs on Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

Photography ability aside, one of the key differences between the Find X9 Ultra and X9 Pro is with their respective chips. While the latter Pro model runs on MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500, the Ultra is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. 

We found during our review of the Find X9 Pro that its Dimensity 9500 chip, combined with Oppo’s Luminous Rendering Engine, enabled the flagship to fly through everyday use while feeling rapid and responsive too. In addition, although it isn’t a dedicated gaming phone, it still had no issue running titles such as Call of Duty Mobile.

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However, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is a tough competitor to beat. The chip is not only behind many of the best Android phones, but it can handle everything from casual tasks to generative AI tasks and gaming with ease. Having said that, we’d argue that most users will be unlikely to notice much of a difference between the chips in everyday use.

Oppo Find X9 Pro has a larger battery

With a mighty 7500mAh cell, the Find X9 Pro has one of the largest batteries found in any smartphone. This translates to comfortably being a two-day handset, although remember this will depend on your own usage. For example, we found that on days where we really pushed the phone’s limits, the handset couldn’t quite make it through a full second day.

Although it’s not quite as large, the Find X9 Ultra is still fitted with a whopping 7050mAh battery, which promises to ensure “reliable, all-day content creation”.

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It’s worth pointing out that, although the Find X9 Pro’s battery is larger than the X9 Ultra’s own, both do boast pretty generous capacities. Considering the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and Google Pixel 10 Pro XL max out at 5000mAh and 5200mAh respectively, Oppo’s Find series are certainly not to be sniffed at.

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Oppo Find X9 Ultra comes in a familiar orange shade

Although both only come in a choice between two shades, they differ with their exact offerings. While the Find X9 Pro comes as Titanium Carbon or Silk White, the Find X9 Ultra is available in either Tundra Umber or Canyon Orange.

Regardless of the colour you choose, both the X9 Ultra and X9 Pro sport IP66, IP68 and IP69 ratings which means the handsets can withstand water submersion and even high pressure and high temperature water jets too.

Early Verdict

Although the Oppo Find X9 Pro is easily one of the best camera phones we’ve reviewed, the Find X9 Pro looks like a promising alternative for those who need even more versatility and shooting modes to play with. With a whopping five rear cameras and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip at play, the Oppo Find X9 Ultra is undoubtedly a promising handset for the keen photographer.

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Microsoft has released out-of-band (OOB) security updates to patch a critical ASP.NET Core privilege escalation vulnerability.

The security flaw (tracked as CVE-2026-40372) was found in the ASP.NET Core Data Protection cryptographic APIs, and it could allow unauthenticated attackers to gain SYSTEM privileges on affected devices by forging authentication cookies.

Microsoft discovered the flaw following user reports that decryption was failing in their applications after installing the .NET 10.0.6 update release during this month’s Patch Tuesday.

“A regression in the Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection 10.0.0-10.0.6 NuGet packages causes the managed authenticated encryptor to compute its HMAC validation tag over the wrong bytes of the payload and then discard the computed hash in some cases,” Microsoft says in the .NET 10.0.7 release notes.

“In these cases, the broken validation could allow an attacker to forge payloads that pass DataProtection’s authenticity checks, and to decrypt previously-protected payloads in auth cookies, antiforgery tokens, TempData, OIDC state, etc.

“If an attacker used forged payloads to authenticate as a privileged user during the vulnerable window, they may have induced the application to issue legitimately-signed tokens (session refresh, API key, password reset link, etc.) to themselves. Those tokens remain valid after upgrading to 10.0.7 unless the DataProtection key ring is rotated.”

As Microsoft further explained in a Tuesday security advisory, this vulnerability can also enable attackers to disclose files and modify data, but they cannot impact the system’s availability.

On Tuesday, senior program manager Rahul Bhandari warned all customers whose applications use ASP.NET Core Data Protection to update the Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection package to 10.0.7 as soon as possible, then redeploy to fix the validation routine and ensure that any forged payloads are rejected automatically.

More information regarding affected platforms, packages, and application configuration can be found in the original announcement.

In October, Microsoft also patched an HTTP request smuggling bug (CVE-2025-55315) in the Kestrel web server that was flagged with the “highest ever” severity rating for an ASP.NET Core security flaw.

Successful exploitation of CVE-2025-55315 enables authenticated attackers to either hijack other users’ credentials, bypass front-end security controls, or crash the server.

On Monday, Microsoft released another set of out-of-band updates to address issues affecting Windows Server systems after installing the April 2026 security updates.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

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Invincible season 4 episode 8 has landed on Prime Video — and, hoo boy, if Mark Grayson thought he had it bad already, nothing can prepare him (or you, for that matter) about what’s to come after that decision he’s just made.

If you’re here, I’m guessing you’ve seen the Amazon TV Original’s latest finale and have big questions about what you just watched. Luckily for you, I’m a huge Invincible nerd, so I’m perfectly placed to answer them.

A group of unauthorized users has reportedly gained access to Mythos, the cybersecurity tool recently announced by Anthropic.

Much has been made of Mythos and its purported power — an AI product designed for enterprise security that, in the wrong hands, could become a potent hacking tool, according to the company. Now Bloomberg has reported that a “private online forum,” the members of which have not been publicly identified, has managed to gain access to the tool through a third-party vendor.

“We’re investigating a report claiming unauthorized access to Claude Mythos Preview through one of our third-party vendor environments,” an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch. The company said that, so far, it has found no evidence that the supposedly unauthorized activity has impacted Anthropic’s systems in any way.

The unauthorized group tried a number of different strategies to gain access to the model, including using “access” enjoyed by the person who was interviewed by Bloomberg. That person is currently employed at a third-party contractor that works for Anthropic, the outlet reported.

Members of the group are part of a Discord channel that seeks out information about unreleased AI models, the outlet reported. The group has been using Mythos regularly since gaining access to it, and provided evidence to Bloomberg in the form of screenshots and a live demonstration of the software.

Bloomberg reports that the group, which supposedly gained access to the tool on the same day it was publicly announced, “made an educated guess about the model’s online location based on knowledge about the format Anthropic has used for other models.” The group in question is “interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them,” the source told the outlet.

Mythos was released to a select number of vendors, including big names like Apple, as part of an initiative called Project Glasswing. The limited release of the model was designed to prevent its use by bad actors. The tool could be weaponized against corporate security instead of bolstering it, Anthropic said.

If true, unauthorized use of Mythos could spell trouble for Anthropic, which provided the exclusive release to allay the company’s concern for enterprise security.