Closed-toe shoes? Check. Bags on the ground? Check. Phone in airplane mode? Check. Why all this prep? I took a ride on the Goodyear Blimp, y’all, and hung out with a pilot who dressed like one.

On Wednesday, Goodyear and Spirit Halloween dropped a new collaboration for 2026: the Goodyear Blimp is officially a costume option this season. While you could make a DIY version if you want (we love cosplayers over here), you should pop up at a party in this $80 inflatable that has Goodyear’s stamp of approval. No papier-mache, metallic tape, glue gun or sewing machine needed. 

I had a chance to preview the new costume a few weeks ahead of launch, and along with that, climbed aboard the actual blimp when it stopped in Atlanta. I joined a few other members of the media who were invited to float in the clouds to celebrate the rollout, because for the first time ever, the famous airship is now a retail-ready Halloween costume. Designed with a battery pack and cooling fan, it comes with a cap and a one-piece, one-size-fits-all ensemble for adults. 

Tethered to the ground at a local airport, the Goodyear Blimp looked massive up close, where a crew held the levitating ladder for us as we climbed inside one by one. Two pilots, Jeff Capek and Fayth Rascon-Ryn, were seated at the controls, ready to fly us around the outskirts of the city. Like on an airplane flight, we were instructed to buckle our seat belts for takeoff. Slowly and steadily, the airship ascended upward, and then we began our ride, hitting a maximum speed of around 35 miles per hour. Outfitted with windows all around, the gondola allowed for some great shots of the skyline, local scenery below and even the little propellers on the blimp.

Our guide and crew member, Jensen Kervern (who’s also a pilot), hit the runway — on the tarmac and inside the ship’s gondola — to model the costume while sharing history and facts about the ubiquitous blimp with us passengers. What you may recognize as the helium-filled “big part” of the blimp is called the envelope, and its pressure is maintained by two ballonets that also keep the ship level and upright. If you’re curious about helium refills, she shared that it’s replenished over time and filtered when grounded at home base.

“When we’re at home, we’ll hook it up to a big machine — a purifier — that operates a lot like a dialysis machine. It’ll pull out all the impurities and put the helium back inside. We try to reuse it; it’s a finite resource that’s very expensive,” said Kervern. She also graciously snapped a few photos with us.

As you may imagine, your Spirit Halloween costume won’t come equipped with any helium for added drifting effect, but it does have a battery-operated fan to keep it aloft. I hope the visuals and details I’ve shared from my experience can lend a little razzle-dazzle to your creative Halloween aspirations. And yeah, it really does feel like you’re floating on air.

Check out the Goodyear Blimp costume at Spirit Halloween’s website.

Kourtnee Jackson

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Kourtnee covers streaming services and entertainment. She previously worked as an entertainment reporter at Endgame 360, where she wrote about film, television, music, celebrities and streaming platforms.

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Kepler also says it has improved the density of SRAM using ferroelectrics, which can read and write data at lower voltages than the mechanisms typically used to process and store data in semiconductors. The startup did this by developing a new, low-voltage, composite material that works with this ferroelectric approach.

Sasi Manipatruni, a Kepler cofounder and its chief technology officer, says the Kepler team went through 35 iterations of composites before they landed on a material class that they thought would make memory chips easier and cheaper to make.

“Once we found a way to solve the physics problem—as in the physical limitations for HBM—we came up with a material innovation that helps with the amount of memory you can have between chips,” he says.

In its early build-outs with GlobalFoundries, Kepler says it was able to convert a fab into a “next-generation” fab in just eight months, compared to a typical 24-month timeframe.

“Out goal is to take the fabs and architectures already built, and push them to the limits of physics,” Olaosebikan says.

Basically Kepler is betting that any additional costs that come from new materials or retooling existing fabs would far outweigh the $20 billion to $40 billion it costs to build new ones and outfit them with equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Waiting to Scale

Kepler Computing still has a long road ahead before it reaches full-scale production—assuming it gets there. To date, the company has run its technology on around 2,000 wafers. The startup says it’s planning to ship its first samples of HBM chips later this year, ramp up production out of Singapore next year, and start chip production in the US in 2028.

Kaste, the GlobalFoundries executive, says he’s confident that the “fundamental breakthroughs have happened. What remains is getting good results on thousands of wafers and millions of devices.”

He points out that one of the challenges with a material system like the one Kepler is using is that it includes iron in its composite. “Iron is a tough contaminant to introduce into a production facility. So Kepler’s solution has to run on dedicated equipment, or be fully encapsulated so that it can’t escape,” he says.

“The art is in keeping that material really well isolated through our production flow,” Kaste says.

Automated wafer-handling equipment used by Kepler in its dedicated test fab.

Photograph: Courtesy of Kepler Computing

WTF?! An investigation by YouTube channel Gamers Nexus has found that LG’s smart OLED TVs track users’ viewing patterns across streaming platforms, cable, and local media. The televisions also reportedly scan users’ home Wi-Fi network, collect information about connected devices without permission, and transmit the data to LG Ad Solutions to push targeted advertising.

The investigators found that LG was using Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology to track not only users’ viewing habits but also any content played through the TVs’ HDMI, USB, RJ45, optical, RCA, and coaxial ports. However, using ACR to track content is not just a problem limited to LG but an industry-wide practice used by almost all major smart TV manufacturers globally.

The investigation, which was conducted in collaboration with fellow tech YouTubers Level1Tech and multiple independent security researchers, also found that the TVs have a major security loophole that can be used by hackers and other malicious actors to surreptitiously record audio through the built-in microphone, even when the device is switched off.

Alarmingly, unplugging the TV from the power socket and shutting off the internet don’t automatically delete the recordings or prevent the data from being transmitted. According to the researchers, the recorded audio files can be safely stored on the TVs’ local storage and sent to third-party servers once it’s powered on and reconnected to the internet.

As if the risk of hacking and unauthorized data harvesting aren’t troubling enough, the researchers also found the TVs harbor critical remote-code-execution vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited to steal user data. The report did not reveal details about the RCEs as the researchers are still in the process of reporting them to LG in accordance with industry practices.

It is worth noting that this is not the first time Gamers Nexus has called out LG for unsavory business practices. Earlier this year, the channel reported that several popular LG monitors were automatically installing a sketchy Windows app without permission. The monitors were also reportedly collecting user data and displaying pop-up ads for McAfee antivirus and other software.

Microsoft’s executive VP of Windows and Devices, Pavan Davuluri, later confirmed that Redmond had to intervene and force LG to remove the controversial app from the Windows Store after a massive outcry from users complaining about the pop-up ads and automatic app installations.

LG has since denied most of the claims. In a statement to Tom’s Hardware, it said:

The claims made in the recently published video are not true. LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held, or when a wake word such as ‘Hi LG’ is recognized after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature. Other than these instances, the TVs do not collect or record ambient conversations. (If the wake word is not recognized, no voice data is transmitted to the server; the audio processing for wake word detection is performed locally on the device and is immediately deleted.)

Additionally, to provide smart TV functionalities, LG TVs feature the ability to scan for and connect to nearby devices on the same network. This is a standard function commonly provided by smart TVs and smart home devices.

This week, two educators trace what happened after a student said something that could have been dismissed as attitude but turned out to be something else entirely. One teacher heard it in the middle of a lesson on irony. The other heard it in a planning meeting for a brand new program. Neither could shake it, and both went looking for what it actually meant.

Skipping the Struggle: What “I Used ChatGPT” Really Meant

Melinda Medina has taught English and special education in Brooklyn for over a decade, and she knows what it sounds like when a student is struggling with a text. What she heard instead was a student who wasn’t struggling at all, just skipping the struggle altogether. She explains why that distinction matters more to her than plagiarism ever did, and what she now asks her students to do to counter the seemingly simpler path offered by AI.

Looking for Answers at a Coding Summit

An eighth grader’s question about the point of learning didn’t have an easy answer, so Beth Yirga went looking for one somewhere she didn’t expect, a room full of software engineers and tech executives who had never met a K-12 teacher. What she found there reshaped how she thinks about equity, identity, and what her students actually need heading into an AI-driven future.

Listen to the episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

Protecting Student Cognition in the Age of AI by Melinda Medina

The K-12 Silo Won’t Survive AI, But Our Relationships Might by Beth Yirga

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.

For years, security teams have been making account takeover harder. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) added crucial protection to password-only authentication, while conditional access and device trust add further checks before users can reach sensitive systems.

However, these controls give attackers a reason to look for another route. Some attacks that are becoming increasingly common target the processes around authentication mechanisms, in particular account recovery. After all, why steal a user’s second factor if you can convince someone with the rights to manage it to replace it for you?

That makes the service desk more than a support function. It makes it part of the organization’s identity security boundary.

MFA Has Raised the Cost of Account Takeover

Even if an attacker captures a user’s credentials, MFA means a second authentication factor still stands between them and the account.

Further strengthening that barrier is the fact that many organizations are moving away from weaker factors such as SMS and toward authenticator apps, FIDO security keys and passkeys. Phishing-resistant authentication can make credential theft considerably harder to turn into account access, while conditional access and device trust add further checks based on factors such as the device, location and context of a login.

None of this means that MFA has failed. In many cases, the opposite is true: MFA works well enough that attackers have an incentive to find ways around it rather than attack it head-on.

That can mean stealing session tokens, abusing existing authenticated sessions or targeting authentication processes that sit outside the normal login flow. And one of the most important processes is account recovery.

Every strong authentication system still needs an answer to a routine problem: what happens when a legitimate employee loses access to it? At that point, the security of the account may depend less on the MFA technology protecting it and more on the process used to reset it.

When the Recovery Path Becomes the Attack Path

Employees replace phones, lose security keys, change numbers, damage devices, and forget credentials. Sometimes an authenticator simply becomes unavailable.

When self-service recovery is no longer possible, the service desk typically becomes the route back into the account.

Depending on the organization and the user’s privileges, an agent may be able to reset a password or MFA, remove an existing authentication method, issue temporary credentials, approve registration of a new authenticator, or otherwise restore access.

While these are necessary support functions, from a security perspective, they are also sensitive identity-management actions. That makes the verification step before the reset critical. If a user normally must satisfy multiple authentication factors to access an account but only has to answer a handful of questions to replace those factors, the recovery process can become the weaker path to the same identity.

This is increasingly being treated as an identity assurance problem rather than a conventional help desk problem. Microsoft, for example, now describes account recovery in Entra ID as a “high-assurance” process and contrasts traditional question-based help desk recovery with stronger identity verification designed to re-establish trust before access is restored.

The principle is simple: the process used to replace an authentication method should provide confidence that the person requesting the change is the person who owns the account. If it doesn’t, the recovery path can quickly become the attack path.

Recent Attacks Highlight the Risk

The tactics employed by hacking collective Scattered Spider are a clear example of the challenge service desks face. A joint advisory from CISA, the FBI and international partners say the group has posed as employees to persuade IT and help desk staff to reset passwords and transfer MFA to attacker-controlled devices.

The same advisory notes that attackers may spend several calls learning about an organization’s password-reset process before attempting the takeover.

The 2025 attack on Marks & Spencer shows how damaging sophisticated impersonation can be. Scattered Spider impersonated an employee to trick a third-party contractor into resetting their password to gain access. From there, the group compromised more accounts and eventually deployed ransomware across the retailer’s network.

M&S chairman Archie Norman told Parliament that the incident was expected to reduce profit by around £300 million before recoveries, underlining how a successful identity-focused social engineering attack can become a major business incident.

Make Identity Verification Part of the Service Desk Workflow

Closing this gap means moving the service desk away from questions such as “Does this person sound legitimate?” or “Can they answer our verification questions?” and toward a stronger one: Can this person securely prove they are the employee associated with the account?

That is where Specops Secure Service Desk fits. It makes identity verification a required part of sensitive service desk workflows, helping reduce reliance on easily guessed or phished information and judgement that a social engineer may be able to manipulate.

Specops Secure Service Desk can use existing identity data in Active Directory or Entra ID and integrate with authentication services such as Duo, Okta, PingID and Symantec VIP. With support for more than 15 MFA factors, service desks can verify different types of users without introducing a separate enrollment process.

Crucially, verification sits directly in front of high-risk actions. Agents can reset passwords, unlock accounts and require a password change at the next logon only after the caller has been successfully verified. Verification events can also be exported to SIEM and analytics platforms to support audit and SOC workflows.

Secure Your Service Desk with Specops

Strong authentication only works if the process used to reset or recover it is just as secure. Treating service desk verification as part of the identity security process helps reduce the risk of social engineering without making legitimate support harder.

Specops helps organizations put stronger identity verification in front of high-risk service desk actions such as password resets and account unlocks.

Contact Specops today to see how you can strengthen identity verification and secure your service desk

Sponsored and written by Specops Software.

Samsung spent countless hours stretching book-style foldables taller and slimmer. Galaxy Z Fold8, priced at $1,649.99 (was $1,900), goes the other direction, folding into a short, wide slab that sits in a pocket like a passport and opens into a 7.6-inch screen built for movies, books, and two apps at once. Folded, the phone measures 123.9 by 81.9 by 9.7 millimeters and weighs 201 grams, light enough that reviewers keep comparing it to a regular flagship rather than a hinge-and-glass experiment. Opened, the body thins to 4.5 millimeters. Armor aluminum, Gorilla Glass Victus Ceramic 3 on the cover, and an IP48 rating (dust over 1 millimeter, 1.5 meters of water for 30 minutes) keep the package from feeling fragile after a month of daily carry.

A 5.5-inch Dynamic LTPO AMOLED 2X panel with 1248 by 1972 resolution, 428 pixels per inch, and a refresh rate of 1-to-120 Hz takes care of the cover duty. That outer screen is wide enough for two-thumb typing and social feeds, short enough that some testers shrink fonts to see more at once. Most people continue to rely on it for 80 percent of their daily needs. When unfolded, you’ll find a 7.6-inch inner panel with a resolution of 1848 by 2448, approximately 403 ppi, HDR10+, and a peak brightness of 3,000 nits.

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Flex Titanium has flattened the crease into a line that is only noticeable if you look for it. The aspect ratio is close to 4:3 in portrait and 16:10 in landscape, which is suitable for documents and video without the skinny-book cut that older Folds imposed on everything. Apps still stretch or letterbox from time to time, but One UI 9 on Android 17 improves on that with split view, pop-up windows, and DeX for desktop access. Seven significant OS updates are promised.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Samsung Galaxy, which uses the same 3-nanometer CPU as the S26 series, drives 12 GB of RAM on the 256 GB and 512 GB variants, and 16 GB on the 1 TB version. Everyday tasks, games, and three-app setups remain zippy. Sustained loads continue to produce heat and some throttling after half an hour, therefore many owners leave the performance profile set to lighter. The battery is a 4,800 mAh silicon-carbon cell, up from 4,400 mAh last year. Mixed use across both displays results in a full day, with video playback testing lasting more than 21 hours and Samsung claiming up to 26. Wired charging is 45 watts, or approximately 63% in 30 minutes. Wireless has a power output of 20 watts, whereas reverse wireless has 4.5 watts. The cycle rating spans from 1,200 to 80 percent, making it shorter than prior Folds, which is a minor trade-off for thinner cells.

Cameras are the standout feature. The rear duo has a 50-megapixel f/1.8 main camera with OIS and in-sensor 2x, as well as a 50-megapixel f/1.9 ultrawide camera with 120-degree coverage. Both 10-megapixel selfies are at f/2.2, one on the cover and one inside. Daylight stills and 8K or 4K footage appear clear. Ultrawide attention is advantageous. There is no dedicated telephoto lens, so zooming beyond 2x is digital, and the main sensor is smaller than the 200-megapixel units on the S26 Ultra and Fold8 Ultra. This Fold is not suitable for long-range photography. The speakers are stereo, but they only fire from one side when the phone is in landscape mode, causing movies to lose breadth. The remaining features include a side fingerprint scanner, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, UWB, and dual eSIM.