Anthropic and the Gates Foundation have committed $200 million over four years to fund AI programmes in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility. The partnership will use Claude to accelerate vaccine research for neglected diseases, build literacy tools for sub-Saharan Africa and India, and release public benchmarks and datasets. It is four times the size of OpenAI’s $50 million Gates Foundation deal announced at Davos in January.
TL;DR
Anthropic has committed $200 million over four years to a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest deal of its kind between an AI company and a global philanthropy. The money, a mix of grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support, will fund programmes in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility, with partners in the United States and developing countries. Anthropic’s contribution takes the form of engineering staff time and API credits; the Gates Foundation provides grant funding, programme design, and field expertise.
The partnership is the most substantial indication yet that Anthropic, which is approaching a $900 billion valuation, intends to build a meaningful non-commercial operation alongside its enterprise business. The company’s Beneficial Deployments team, which leads the work, already offers nonprofits and educational institutions discounted access to Claude. But the Gates Foundation deal represents a step change in scale: it dwarfs the $50 million partnership that OpenAI struck with the same foundation at Davos in January to deploy AI in African healthcare clinics.
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The largest share of the $200 million will go toward improving health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, where roughly 4.6 billion people lack access to essential health services, according to the World Health Organisation. The programmes span three broad areas: accelerating drug and vaccine development, helping governments use health data for faster decision-making, and supporting frontline health workers.
On the research side, scientists will use Claude to screen potential vaccine and drug candidates computationally before moving into pre-clinical development, a process that could shorten early-stage timelines for diseases that pharmaceutical companies have little commercial incentive to pursue. The initial focus is on polio, HPV, and eclampsia and preeclampsia. HPV alone causes roughly 350,000 deaths annually, according to the WHO, with 90% occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
Anthropic will also work with the Institute for Disease Modelling, a research group within the Gates Foundation, to make epidemiological forecasts more accessible. The institute builds models that determine where and how treatments for malaria and tuberculosis are deployed; an integration with Claude aims to make those models usable by practitioners who are not modelling specialists. The broader ambition is to create public goods, connectors, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks — that allow any researcher or government to assess how AI systems perform on healthcare-related tasks.
The partnership’s education component will fund AI-powered tutoring tools for K-12 students in the United States, alongside literacy and numeracy apps for children in sub-Saharan Africa and India. The latter effort is part of the Global AI for Learning Alliance, or GAILA, a coalition that Anthropic and the Gates Foundation are building with other partners. The first public goods from this work, model benchmarks, datasets, and knowledge graphs designed to ensure AI tutoring tools are effective, are expected later this year.
A notable element of the education programme is a commitment to improve how AI models handle African languages. AI systems have performed poorly at writing and translating dozens of languages spoken across the continent, and Anthropic and the foundation intend to support better data collection and labelling that will be released publicly to benefit the broader AI industry, not just Claude.
The economic mobility programmes are more varied. In agriculture, Anthropic will make crop-specific improvements to Claude and release datasets of local crops and evaluation benchmarks as public goods, targeting the roughly two billion people whose livelihoods depend on smallholder farming. In the United States, the partnership will develop portable records of skills and certifications, career guidance tools for new workforce entrants, and systems that link training programme data to employment outcomes.
The partnership sits at an interesting intersection of Anthropic’s commercial and public-interest ambitions. The company has spent the past year building a $1.5 billion joint venture with Wall Street, acquiring a biotech startup for $400 million, and committing $100 million to a partner network dominated by major consulting firms. The Gates Foundation deal is, in financial terms, smaller than any of those. But it is the most visible commitment Anthropic has made to the argument that AI should serve people who cannot afford enterprise software licences.
Whether the programmes deliver measurable impact will depend on execution in environments where infrastructure, connectivity, and institutional capacity are far more constrained than in Anthropic’s core markets. The Gates Foundation’s field expertise is the asset that makes the partnership plausible, it has decades of experience deploying health and education interventions in the countries where this work will happen. Anthropic’s contribution is the technology and the engineering hours to adapt it.
The commitment to releasing benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation tools as public goods is perhaps the most structurally significant element. If those resources are genuinely open, they could improve the performance of every AI system applied to global health and education, not just Claude. That would make the partnership’s value larger than the sum of its parts, a rare outcome in a technology industry that tends to treat philanthropy as a branding exercise.
A hotel check-in system left more than 1 million customer passports, driver’s licenses, and selfie verification photos to the open web after a security lapse. The data is now offline after TechCrunch alerted the company responsible.
The hotel check-in system, called Tabiq, is maintained by the Japan-based tech startup Reqrea. According to its website, Tabiq is used in several hotels across Japan and relies on facial recognition and document scanning to check guests in.
Independent security researcher Anurag Sen contacted TechCrunch earlier this week after discovering that the system was leaking the sensitive documents of hotel guests from around the world. Sen said this was because the startup set one of its Amazon cloud-hosted storage buckets, which the check-in system uses to store customer data, to be publicly accessible. The data inside could be viewed by anyone using a web browser, without needing a password, by knowing only the bucket name: “tabiq.”
Sen alerted TechCrunch in an effort to help notify the company. Reqrea locked down the storage bucket after TechCrunch reached out to both the company and Japan’s cybersecurity coordination team, JPCERT.
This latest lapse underscores a recurring problem of companies exposing or spilling their customers’ personal information and sensitive documents — not through sophisticated attacks, but by failing to follow basic cybersecurity practices. Aside from a recent buzz of AI-discovered vulnerabilities and new cybersecurity capabilities, oftentimes sizable security incidents stem from human error, misconfigurations, or failing to adhere to cybersecurity best practices.
In an email acknowledging the exposure, Reqrea director Masataka Hashimoto told TechCrunch: “We are conducting a thorough review with the support of external legal counsel and other advisors to determine the full scope of exposure.”
Reqrea said it does not know how the storage bucket became public. By default, Amazon’s cloud storage buckets are private. After a spate of exposed customer storage buckets a few years ago, Amazon added several warning prompts to customers before data can be made public, making this kind of lapse increasingly hard to do accidentally.
Hashimoto told TechCrunch that the company plans to notify affected individuals once it has completed its investigation.
It remains unclear whether anyone other than Sen accessed the exposed data before it was secured. Hashimoto said the company is reviewing its logs to determine if there had been any authorized access prior to securing the bucket.
Details of the exposed bucket were also captured by GrayHatWarfare, a searchable database that indexes publicly visible cloud storage. The bucket listing contains files dating back to early 2020 up to as recently as this month, and included identity documents of visitors from countries around the world.
The hotel check-in system lapse follows other incidents involving sensitive government-issued documents. Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported on the exposure of driver’s licenses, passports, and other identity documents uploaded by customers of money transfer service Duc App. A data breach at car rental service Hertz last year saw hackers make off with driver’s license information belonging to at least 100,000 customers.
These incidents come at a time when governments are increasingly rolling out age-verification laws and private businesses are using “know your customer” checks to verify a person’s identity. Both rely on adults uploading sensitive documents, often to a third-party company, for verification, despite criticisms from cybersecurity experts. Data lapses can put people whose information was taken at greater risk of identity fraud or having their likeness misused as age-verification requirements take hold around the world.
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This week was a big one for software as we got official (and unofficial) teases for the next iteration of Android and iOS.
We also heard that the seemingly ill-fated Trump Phone might actually be coming after all, though we wouldn’t be surprised if it gets delayed again by the time you’re reading this.
Last week, we highlighted reports that the Trump Phone looked to have cemented itself in the vaporware category — with its new terms of service suggesting that a device may never actually ship, and that preorders don’t guarantee you a product. That now seems to have changed as the company announced “Phones start shipping this week!!!”
Now, until devices are in the hands of the people who bought one you’ll forgive us for remaining skeptical — the device’s release date has been shifted a few times now, and some people with preorders have been told shipping deadlines previously that have then been missed.
We write ICYMI on Friday, so it’s very possible that by the time you read this on Saturday morning, the Trump phone situation will have shifted yet again, but hopefully, this is the end of the Trump Phone saga. Though we can’t shake the feeling, this might merely be the close of act one.
Smart lighting doesn’t just come with added convenience; it can also be a home entertainment immersion booster with gadgets like the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K — though if you’re after something more budget-friendly, Philips just debuted a non-Hue sync box.
The Philips Smart Lighting HDMI Sync Box 2.1 comes in two sizes — one for 55 to 65-inch TVs, and one for 75 to 85-inch TVs — and, instead of working with the HUE system, it integrates with WiZ-branded tech.
At under half the launch cost, this lightning solution could be perfect for the more budget-conscious amongst you who still want the immersion factor offered by TV sync tech once it starts rolling out in June.
A Bitcoin owner who believed he had permanently lost access to nearly $400,000 worth of cryptocurrency says Anthropic’s Claude AI helped recover the funds after more than a decade. The user had originally bought 5 Bitcoin when the cryptocurrency was worth around $250 each, but later changed the wallet password while in college and forgot it. After years of failed attempts — including trying trillions of password combinations — the owner uploaded files from an old computer into Claude as a final attempt.
It was able to locate an older wallet backup file that existed before the password change happened. Combined with an old mnemonic phrase the user had recently rediscovered, the recovered wallet file finally allowed access to the Bitcoin again.
This week, we saw the wackiest camera kit of 2026 so far: a Retro bundle of the Go 3S.
The action cam is ideal for when you need something tiny — it can slot in just about any small space, much easier than its rivals — but this kit makes it resemble an old Polaroid. You’ll get a viewfinder dock to help you compose shots (it doubles as a selfie mirror), but no LCD screen.
If you want a more modern feel and easier composition, the camera can still be paired with a smartphone via the Insta360 app.
The Go 3S Retro Bundle costs $300 / £279 / AU$470 for the 64GB version or $320 / £299 / AU$500 for the 128GB version. The latter feels like the obvious pick — you’ll want as much internal storage as you can get because there’s no card slot.
What’s better than one Ninja Slushi? How about two side-by-side so that you can make dual-flavored, multicolored iced drinks at home? This week, Ninja released the Slushi Twist, which makes two different types of slush at the same time, then dispenses them in an attractive swirled pattern. Having two freezing chambers means it has a much larger capacity than the original Slushi, making it perfect for parties.
The Slushi Twist is on sale now in the US for $399.99, and although we don’t have international release dates yet, I’m sure it won’t be too long before it’s available worldwide. It certainly proved popular, and the first batch of stock sold out within hours. Don’t worry, though, you can sign up on Ninja’s website to be notified when more arrive.
Siri 2.0 has been a long (long!) time coming, but Apple’s revamped voice assistant finally looks set to debut in iOS 27 – and this week, we got a better idea of what it might actually look like.
According to Bloomberg’s resident Apple tipster Mark Gurman, Siri 2.0 will largely live within the Dynamic Island and display transparent results cards in response to your queries. If you need to go deeper into a query, you’ll be able to swipe that results card to bring up an iMessage-like chat interface, and there will also be a dedicated Siri app, where you can access your conversation history or upload images and documents.
Other rumored iOS 27 features include an updated, AI-powered Spotlight Search tool and a redesigned Image Playground app, so it sounds like Apple could finally be about to take its seat at the AI table.
Just a week before Google I/O kicks off, the Android team dedicated an entire show to debuting new features set to drop with Android 17, a boatload of Gemini integrations, and an entirely new platform.
In terms of Android 17 is set to bring a lot, including a new take on curbing screen time and easing phone addiction called Pause Point. Rather than just locking you out of an app, it might show photos or suggest a breathing exercise. There’s also an easy way to film screen recordings with your own talking head in the corner, which might be really handy for content creators.
Gemini Intelligence is set to make AI even more useful and helpful across a whole barrage of tasks, and honestly, it sounds pretty close to what Apple promised with Apple Intelligence. This new suite of AI functionality that’s integrated at the system level of the OS will also be found on forthcoming Googlebooks. Essentially, these new laptops run a combination of Android and ChromeOS. And while this is a ton, it’s likely we’ll hear even more about it at Google I/O.
Eighteen48 Partners has closed EUR175 million for the first tranche of its inaugural private equity fund, targeting EUR350 million. The London-based firm backs European mid-market buyouts sourced through independent sponsors and has deployed more than EUR200 million in the strategy since 2020. The raise comes as the independent-sponsor model gains traction in Europe after a decade of growth in the US.
TL;DR
Eighteen48 Partners, the London-based alternative asset manager co-founded by Julien Sevaux, Tarek AbuZayyad, and Edward Clive, has closed €175 million for the first tranche of its inaugural private equity fund. The fund is targeting €350 million in total and will back mid-market buyouts across Europe, sourced exclusively through independent sponsors, dealmakers who find and negotiate acquisitions before raising the capital to complete them, rather than investing from a pre-committed pool.
The first close was backed by a mix of existing Eighteen48 clients, institutions, family offices, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. The firm has deployed more than €200 million into independent-sponsor transactions since 2020, making this fund a formalisation of a strategy the team has been executing for six years rather than a debut in the conventional sense.
Independent sponsors occupy an unusual niche in private equity. Unlike traditional buyout firms, which raise a blind-pool fund and then go looking for deals, independent sponsors identify a specific acquisition target first and then approach capital providers to finance it. The model gives investors visibility into exact deal terms before committing money, rather than trusting a general partner to deploy a fund over several years with limited oversight.
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For the sponsors, the trade-off is that they carry deals without guaranteed financing, a risk that limits the model to experienced operators with strong networks. For capital providers such as Eighteen48, the opportunity is access to off-market transactions that never enter the competitive auction processes where most mid-market private equity deals are priced. Oliver Mayer, Eighteen48’s head of private equity, described the structural advantages of these relationship-driven deals as a key driver of the firm’s returns.
Independent sponsors have been a well-established feature of the American private equity landscape for more than a decade, but the model is relatively new in Europe. A combination of factors is driving adoption: experienced dealmakers leaving established firms to operate independently, family offices seeking more direct exposure to private companies, and a broader reconfiguration of European capital markets that is pushing investors toward more flexible structures. The EU’s own efforts to overhaul its startup funding architecture have further normalised the idea that European companies need access to a wider range of capital providers, not just traditional fund managers.
According to IPEM, the private equity industry body, Europe now has a growing ecosystem of independent sponsors, and more deals of this type are expected in 2026 as the broader fundraising environment for traditional blind-pool funds remains challenging. Nearly 70% of European private equity professionals surveyed by the organisation said they plan to deploy more capital this year, and 87% described 2026 as a good year for dealmaking, the most bullish sentiment in five years.
Eighteen48’s peers in the independent-sponsor-focused segment include Kartesia, which manages nearly €6 billion in private credit strategies, and Idinvest Partners, a pan-European mid-market investor. The distinction Eighteen48 draws is that it has been investing directly in independent-sponsor deals for six years before launching a formal fund, giving it a track record that most first-time fund managers lack.
Sevaux, the firm’s founding partner and chief executive, previously co-founded Stanhope Capital in 2004. He and his co-founders established Eighteen48 in 2019 as what they described as a “next-generation private investment office”, a platform that manages capital across public and private markets for families and institutions. The private equity fund is the first vehicle Eighteen48 has raised externally, a step that reflects both the growth of its independent-sponsor deal pipeline and the increasing institutional appetite for European mid-market exposure.
The fund’s target of €350 million is modest by global private equity standards but substantial for the independent-sponsor segment, where deal sizes typically range from €10 million to €150 million. If fully raised, it would make Eighteen48 one of the larger dedicated capital providers for independent sponsors in Europe, a position that, if the current momentum in European dealmaking holds, could prove well-timed.
Sevaux said the fund “formalises a highly differentiated strategy” the firm has been running for several years. In a market where most private equity firms compete for the same auctioned assets, Eighteen48 is betting that the deals no one else sees are the ones worth paying for.
Anyone who’s worked with even a 1 mm bit knows that while a drill press is all but essential, it isn’t proof against broken bits. Working with a 0.1 mm drill bit seems, therefore, all but impossible, which is why [Mike] of Chronova Engineering built this mechanism to simplify such drilling.
The mechanism is an attachment for a milling machine, and in principle it just needs to move the rotating drill bit up and down. It needs to be extremely precise, though. For context, a good-quality chuck normally has a runout of 30 to 50 microns, which is approaching half the diameter of the drill bit. The mechanism has a collet mounted in the milling machine’s spindle, which transfers rotation to a second spindle. The second spindle is mounted to a runout-compensating drill chuck, and is connected to a lever and counterweight which allow the user to make small, low-force movements. A dial indicator lets the user see how far the bit’s descended.
Most of the parts were machined out of steel or brass, with the handle being made of titanium for lower weight. When the finished device was mounted to the milling machine, the measured runout was severe. After much investigation and reworking, however, the problem turned out to be a damaged collet locating pin, not an issue with the drilling mechanism. As a first test, [Mike] drilled a 0.1 mm hole 1.8 mm deep, then as a challenge drilled six 0.1 mm holes in the end of a thin steel wire. The results weren’t quite as uniform as he wanted, but it took a scanning electron microscope to even see the imperfection.
It won’t help much with very fine drill bits, but if you need a very precisely-placed hole, check out this periscopic drilling camera. If you do break a drill bit in the workpiece, you might be able to dissolve it with alum.
On-prem
BYO power for AI bit barns may be the best way to ease the problem, says energy watchdog
Prices in the United States’ largest wholesale power market have nearly doubled in the past year thanks to demand from datacenters. And an independent watchdog predicts things will only get worse without some serious changes.
The PJM Interconnection serves all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia in the eastern US, including Northern Virginia, that’s got the densest cluster of datacenters in the world. The surge in wholesale power costs across PJM was outlined on Thursday by Monitoring Analytics, a firm that serves as the official market monitor for the Interconnection, in its Q1 2026 state of the market report.
According to the report, the total cost per megawatt-hour (MWh) of wholesale power rose from $77.78 in the first three months of 2025 to $136.53 in the same period this year, an increase of 75.5 percent year over year. Monitoring Analytics didn’t mince words in its report, identifying datacenter load growth as the main driver of recent capacity market conditions and rising prices in PJM.
“Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply and demand balance, and high prices,” the report reads. “But for data center growth, both actual and forecast, the capacity market would not have seen the same tight supply demand conditions.”
As for what might come next, the report doesn’t ignore the likely outcome of the current situation, either.
“The price impacts on customers have been very large and are not reversible,” the report states, but the bad news doesn’t stop there. “The price impacts will be even larger in the near term unless the issues associated with data center load are addressed in a timely manner.”
Based on the rest of the report, a timely resolution to the datacenter load issue shouldn’t be expected, at least not in a way that’ll benefit locals.
For starters, Monitoring Analytics found that – like pretty much everywhere right now – power grids aren’t ready for the datacenter boom. PJM has taken steps to upgrade its power commitment and dispatch software to better operate its grid, but planned upgrades have been delayed multiple times with no planned implementation date on the calendar, per the report.
“The current supply of capacity in PJM is not adequate to meet the demand from large data center loads and will not be adequate in the foreseeable future,” Monitoring Analytics asserted.
PJM has been planning a one-time backstop auction to procure new power generation for datacenter projects in the region at the request of the Trump administration and the governors of the states it serves, but Monitoring Analytics isn’t convinced the Interconnection is going about the process in the right way.
The currently proposed auction structure, says the watchdog, would “generally shift significant risk to other PJM customers,” which is a temptation the group says “should be resisted.”
“Other PJM customers, whether residential, commercial or industrial, should not be treated as a free source of insurance, or collateral, or financing for data centers,” the report continued. “Yet that is what most of the proposals related to a backstop auction actually do.”
As for what PJM ought to be doing, you probably won’t need to rack your brain to figure that out: Monitoring Analytics says datacenters ought to be required to bring their own power. Such a rule, says the group, should include fast-track options for interconnection for BYOP datacenters, and otherwise a queue that would only connect datacenters when there is adequate capacity to serve them.
“This broad bring-your-own new generation solution to the issues created by the addition of unprecedented amounts of large data center load does not require a continued massive wealth transfer through ongoing shortage pricing,” the analysts argue.
When asked for its response to the problems raised by the Monitoring Analytics report, PJM told us that it was fully aware of the impact of electricity cost increases on its customers.
“PJM is working with states and member companies to address these consumer impacts on multiple fronts, including extending market caps put in place since the 2025/2026 auction, authorizing multiple transmission expansion projects that are now in development, and reforming wholesale electricity market rules,” the Interconnection told us. Monitoring Analytics didn’t respond to questions.
Americans have become increasingly hostile to new datacenter projects driven by the AI boom, with 71 percent of respondents to a Gallup survey saying they opposed DC projects in their neighborhoods. Projects in multiple states have been abandoned recently due to pushback from locals, many of whom are concerned not only with electrical price increases, noise, and eyesores, but environmental harm as well. ®
Starbucks announced Friday that is laying off 300 additional corporate employees and closing several regional offices after earlier this week providing details on the elimination of 61 tech roles in Seattle.
The cuts aim to “further sharpen focus, prioritize work, reduce complexity, and lower costs,” a spokesperson said by email. The company axed nearly 2,000 corporate roles last year, according to past reports.
Starbucks did not announce any new store closures, but will shutter offices in Atlanta, Burbank, Chicago and Dallas while maintaining its Seattle headquarters and offices in New York, Toronto and Coral Gables, Fla. The company is also opening a new office in Nashville.
The moves are part of the company’s “Back to Starbucks” strategy, launched by CEO Brian Niccol to bolster performance and refocus attention on its coffeehouses and customer service.
On a quarterly earnings call last month, Niccol highlighted several tech innovations aimed at improving coffeehouse efficiency and productivity:
Starbucks, which has 41,129 coffee shops worldwide, previously reported revenue growth of 8% compared to the same period last year.
Anthropic has launched a small business offering, signalling a new front in the AI platform rivalries.
Anthropic, the AI company best known for its Claude models, has unveiled a dedicated product for small businesses – a move that seems to mark a deliberate pivot beyond the large enterprise customers that have driven its success to date.
Claude for Small Business is a toggle-on feature within Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s task-automation platform. Once activated, it gives paying users access to 15 pre-built agentic workflows across finance, operations, sales, marketing, HR and customer service, and can be connected to software that many small businesses already use. Partner integrations include QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
It is a strategy that makes sense, particularly in the massive US market. Small businesses account for 44pc of US GDP and employ nearly half the private-sector workforce, according to Anthropic, which added that their AI adoption has lagged behind larger enterprises.
“Small businesses make up nearly half the American economy, but they’ve never had the resources of bigger companies,” said Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic.
“AI is the first technology that can finally close that gap, which is why we’re launching Claude for Small Business, alongside training and partnerships to make sure AI shows up for the entrepreneurs and communities who need it most.”
The launch may signal that the battleground for AI user acquisition is shifting. While Anthropic has had significant success taking on its major rival OpenAI in the enterprise market, the latter is well ahead when it comes to small business, having released an Enterprise ChatGPT tier that included a small-team option back in 2023.
As part of the launch, PayPal and Anthropic have co-created ‘AI Fluency for Small Business’, a free online course teaching owners how to integrate AI into their operations.
“Together, we are equipping business owners and entrepreneurs with the tools, expertise, and trusted infrastructure they need to compete and thrive,” said Amy Bonitatibus, chief corporate affairs officer at PayPal. The course is available on demand; on completion, learners receive a shareable certificate.
In a bid to drive adoption of Claude for Small Business in the huge US market, Anthropic is taking the offering on the road with a 10-city US tour offering free, half-day AI training workshops for small businesses, kicking off in Chicago yesterday (14 May).
The new direction comes at a time when Anthropic is in discussions with investors to raise between $30bn and $50bn in new funding at a valuation of up to $950bn, a deal that would see the Claude maker surpass rival OpenAI as the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence start-up.
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The release of 2026 NFL team schedules on Thursday night marked the return of the “social media Super Bowl” — and the actual Super Bowl champs were might in the mix.
The Seattle Seahawks used a fun play on perfume ads to spritz their opponents in the face. Tight end AJ Barner — sporting the fur coat and cowboy hat he wore during the team’s championship parade — said Parfum De Seahawks smells of “emotion, power, and Lombardi.”
The ad features cameos by actors/Seahawk fans Josh Lucas, Joel McHale and Pierson Fode. Play-by-play announcer Steve Raible and Seahawks legend Marshawn Lynch also appear, as well as current players Julian Love and Nick Emmanwori. Taima the Seahawk also flies in.
The video was made in collaboration with Packrat, a creative studio involved in the Seahawks 2025 schedule release video. The studio was featured in an episode of the GeekWire Podcast earlier this year.
The fake ad takes shots at all of the teams the Seahawks will be facing this season, with assorted insight on what perfumes for those teams might look and smell like.
The New England Patriots, who the Hawks beat in Super Bowl LX, have a fragrance that smells like autumn leaves, Boston baked beans, clam chowda and tears.
The Los Angeles Rams fragrance is called Conversion No. 2 — a nod to the controversial 2-point conversion Seattle registered in a comeback win against the Rams last season.
“It smells of melancholy and what the hell just happened,” McHale says. “When you put this cologne on, you don’t even know you’ve already lost.”
Amazon also announced the scheduled of games for “Thursday Night Football” on Prime Video. The company said last year ranked as the most-watched season ever across the 20-year history of “TNF,” averaging 15.33 million viewers throughout the 15-game campaign.
See the Seahawks’ complete schedule here.
On Thursday, Microsoft shared mitigations for a high-severity Exchange Server vulnerability exploited in attacks that allow threat actors to execute arbitrary code via cross-site scripting (XSS) while targeting Outlook on the web users.
Microsoft describes this security flaw (CVE-2026-42897) as a spoofing vulnerability affecting up-to-date Exchange Server 2016, Exchange Server 2019, and Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE) software.
While patches aren’t yet available to permanently fix the vulnerability, the company added that the Exchange Emergency Mitigation Service (EEMS) will provide automatic mitigation for Exchange Server 2016, 2019, and SE on-premises servers.
“An attacker could exploit this issue by sending a specially crafted email to a user. If the user opens the email in Outlook Web Access and certain interaction conditions are met, arbitrary JavaScript can be executed in the browser context,” the Exchange Team said.
“Using EM Service is the best way for your organization to mitigate this vulnerability right away. If you have EM Service currently disabled, we recommend you enable it right away. Please note that EM Service will not be able to check for new mitigations if your server is running Exchange Server version older than March 2023.”
EEMS was introduced in September 2021 to provide automated protection for on-premises Exchange servers, securing them against ongoing attacks by applying interim mitigations for high-risk (and likely actively exploited) vulnerabilities.
EEMS runs as a Windows service on Exchange Mailbox servers and is automatically enabled on servers with the Mailbox role. The security feature was added after many hacking groups exploited ProxyLogon and ProxyShell zero-days (which lacked patches or mitigation information) to breach Internet-exposed Exchange servers.
Admins with servers in air-gapped environments can also mitigate the flaw by downloading the latest Exchange on-premises Mitigation Tool (EOMT) version and applying the mitigation by running the script via an elevated Exchange Management Shell (EMS) with one of the following commands:
However, it’s important to note that applying the mitigation measures on vulnerable servers will cause issues, including:
Microsoft plans to release patches for Exchange SE RTM, Exchange 2016 CU23, and Exchange Server 2019 CU14 and CU15, but says that updates for Exchange 2016 and 2019 will only be available to customers enrolled in the Period 2 Exchange Server ESU program.
BleepingComputer also reached out to Microsoft with questions about the attacks, but a response was not immediately available.
In October, weeks after Exchange 2016 and 2019 reached the end of support, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) released guidance to help IT admins harden Microsoft Exchange servers against attacks.
Over the last 5 years, CISA has added 19 Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities to its list of actively exploited security flaws, 14 of which were also abused in ransomware attacks.
Automated pentesting tools deliver real value, but they were built to answer one question: can an attacker move through the network? They were not built to test whether your controls block threats, your detection rules fire, or your cloud configs hold.
This guide covers the 6 surfaces you actually need to validate.
One of the cornerstones of the automotive enthusiast community today is a true manual transmission. Several types exist, ranging from traditional manuals to computerized DCTs that function as de facto automatics. What we’re discussing here is the former, either a classic manual transmission with a third pedal or an automated manual transmission with a computerized clutch. These transmissions are well-regarded for their simplicity and ruggedness, finding use in everything from sports cars to big rigs. But let’s suppose you’ve bought a used, high-mileage example; how much life is left in the transmission?
Generally, more than you’d expect. The average life expectancy for your typical passenger car manual transmission (not counting the clutch or transmission fluid, for instance) is commonly held to be around 150,000 to 200,000 miles. This translates to a real-world lifespan of around a decade of daily driving before anything major might happen, assuming it’s maintained well.
Proper maintenance applies to all transmissions, of course; it goes without saying that following the recommended service interval of any transmission will extend its lifespan. However, the driver’s involvement in gear shifts on a manual gearbox means that there’s more variability than simply keeping on top of fluid changes. Driving habits also play a crucial role in extending transmission life. Let’s dive in and discuss how to maintain and treat these transmissions, and what symptoms might present if one is about to fail.
Manual transmissions have a reliability advantage over automated transmissions, and that’s just pure arithmetic. There are no computers, solenoids, or hydraulic systems required to change gears. The car doesn’t have to “think” about what gear to be in; that’s your job as the driver. Their inherent simplicity can work to your benefit, provided you don’t regularly strain the transmission components. Therein lies the problem, though, as driver error can shorten a transmission’s lifespan.
To illustrate driver error more clearly, let’s discuss how a transmission synchronizer works. A manual transmission contains two shafts: an input and an output shaft. Those shafts will spin at different speeds depending on what gear you select, and the synchronizers will synchronize one shaft with the other. In older vehicles, these synchronizers can be made of soft metals like brass. If you shift harshly and put a lot of stress on delicate components like these, your transmission could eventually stop shifting properly and need a rebuild.
The occasional stall or mis-shift, however, generally won’t damage your transmission unless you do it constantly. Beyond that, smooth shifting and not abusing your components is key. Basic practices like not riding the clutch pedal when driving, not forcing your car into gear, and shifting into neutral during extended stops help extend your transmission’s life. Moreover, all transmissions have a specific torque rating, and staying away from that limit helps keep the strain to a minimum.
Suppose you just bought a high-mileage used manual car. and don’t have an idea of how the car felt when it was new. Do you have to worry about the transmission failing? Generally, no, or at least it’d be pretty obvious if it were. Transmissions are mechanical devices that feature several gears constantly spinning and meshing, which can be both a good and bad thing in this case. The good news is that problems very rarely appear suddenly, and your transmission will tell you if something’s going wrong.
There are several common manual transmission problems, each with its own implications. A slipping or rough-feeling clutch might only require a replacement clutch and not indicate a problem with the transmission itself. Strange noises or difficulty shifting may be due to old transmission fluid. Your car may get stuck in gear or suddenly jump out of a gear, the latter of which is usually a sign of worn-out synchros. These issues don’t necessarily require a rebuild, and you may only need new fluid. And yes, manual transmission fluid does, in fact, have regular service intervals.
Like anything with frequent metal-on-metal contact, however, symptoms such as heat buildup, spontaneous malfunctions, and metal flakes in the fluid indicate serious problems. If these do show up, though, then it’s time to visit the shop and take a closer look.
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