Apple’s fifth developer beta of iOS 27 has just arrived, and with it, redesigned icons for several key apps, and a lot more than normal than this late in the beta cycle. Here’s what’s new.

On Monday, three weeks after the release of iOS 27 beta 4, Apple made the fifth developer beta available for download. iOS 27 beta 1 introduced the long-overdue Siri AI, while the second beta included improvements to the Apple Home and Apple Wallet apps.

The third beta brought additional voice customization options for Siri AI, in the form of pace and expressivity sliders, albeit only for American English voices. Monday’s iOS 27 developer beta, however, expands these settings to British English voices.

Still, the new settings aren’t available across all devices running iOS 27. Advanced Siri AI features require at least 12GB of RAM on iOS 27, hence the restriction, meaning the new voice sliders can only be found on an iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, or iPhone Air.

As with most beta updates, visual tweaks are also present in iOS 27 beta 5. Icons for the Preview, Remote, Safari, Settings, and Siri applications have been updated, as has the Orders icon in the Apple Wallet app.

The Siri icon now features a more prominent Liquid Glass look, while the app icon for Safari now has a dot in the center. Apple has also included new update screens when the Apple Wallet, Apple Music, App Store, and Photos apps are launched for the first time.

iOS 27 beta 5 features a new ‘Before Searching’ option in the Settings app.

In the Settings app itself, under the Search Settings section, Apple has added a new option labeled Before Searching. This lets users choose how many apps appear as suggestions during searches, among other things.

Additionally, the Settings app now also shows when the most recent iOS update was installed. This detail could be useful for those who rely on automatic software updates.

Apple has also tweaked the Control Center with iOS 27 beta 5. Cellular network types are no longer displayed, so you won’t see “5G” or “LTE” when your phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network. However, the Control Center and Status bar do feature new cellular icon bars.

Meanwhile, when a screenshot is taken on Monday’s beta, the the annotations toolbar will now shrink and hover. It’s a neat visual modification, but nothing groundbreaking.

Overall, the fifth developer beta of iOS 27 is a relatively light release. Aside from the updated app icons, Siri voice settings, and Before Search settings, the beta doesn’t offer anything the average user would notice.

I was recently digging through my Instagram settings, trying to disable Meta’s now-defunct feature that allowed anyone to create AI deepfakes of me without consent. Anger bubbled up inside as I tapped through the Kafkaesque opt-out process.

Rather than throwing my phone across the room, I blurted to my partner that we should leave San Francisco behind and be off-grid sheep farmers. Something analog. In that moment, anything sounded better than this ongoing, generative-AI-induced hell.

Many Americans are having similar reactions to the growing prevalence of generative AI in daily life. “The AI revolution has happened, and everybody hates it,” says Meredith Broussard, a data journalism professor at New York University and author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. In a recent Gallup poll, Americans’ increased familiarity with generative AI coincides with negative attitudes about the technology. This is especially true for young people between 18 and 29, where almost half see generative AI as doing more harm than good.

While this AI backlash has been brewing for the last few years, more companies appear to be directly addressing these concerns. LinkedIn added a “seems like AI slop” button for reporting AI-generated content on the platform, despite still hosting plenty of generative AI tools. Snapchat announced that fully AI-generated videos would no longer be eligible for its discovery feed. Substack recently added an AI detection tool to police writers.

The backlash’s “why” is simple at its core. Many Americans feel like they never consented to any of this. I had no idea that my online interactions would one day be scraped en masse for AI model training. I didn’t ask for Instagram to enable deepfakes on my account. I didn’t want Google to push AI-generated answers at the top of search results. I woke up one day, and generative AI features were stuffed into every corner of all the software I rely on without my consent.

Whether it’s AI models scraping your data or noisy data centers popping up in your backyard, the AI revolution seems to be an event happening to us without making us feel like active participants.

“Consent is really important,” Broussard tells WIRED. “We can connect that to the way that women, queer people, people of color, and minorities get exploited and abused online. Tech companies have never really been sensitive to issues of consent.”

Public backlash appears to be working, at times, in getting unwanted AI features shut down. “They just roll them out and see what sticks, because nobody really knows what this is for,” says Nick Seaver, an associate professor of anthropology at Tufts University focusing on technology and society. Google recently rolled back the ability for people to use generative AI to tweak satellite images on Google Earth almost immediately after launching it, following reporting from 404 Media. Additionally, Meta turned off the aforementioned deepfaking tool for Instagram users after three days of public outcry and viral videos with millions of views criticizing the feature.

There’s also a growing rejection of generative AI in marketing materials. Many people online reacted negatively to major brands, like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, incorporating generative AI visuals into their ad spots. Even local shops see backlash for promoting events using AI-generated posters.

Beyond online outcry, more people are starting to protest against the building of data centers that power these AI tools. “There’s a lot of pushback coalescing around data centers,” says Emily Bender, coauthor of The AI Con. “Data centers are important because they are focal points of environmental and economic damage.” Americans across the political spectrum have recently united in these data center protests.

A financially motivated threat actor previously associated with the Medusa ransomware operation is now deploying a new ransomware strain called StormEncryptor.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence is tracking the actor as Storm-1175 and says the recent attacks were likely preceded by exploitation of an authentication-bypass vulnerability (CVE-2026-18577) in the N-central remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool.

Storm-1175 is believed to be a China-based threat actor. It was previously linked to Medusa ransomware, targeting systems via zero-day and n-day flaws in various products, including GoAnywhere MFT, SmarterTools SmarterMail, Microsoft Exchange, Invanti Connect Secure, and JetBrains TeamCity.

“Storm-1175’s deployment of StormEncryptor marks the threat actor’s first activity observed by Microsoft Threat Intelligence since April 2026, and a shift away from Medusa ransomware, which the threat actor had previously been known to use,” Microsoft states.

The researchers found that StormEncryptor is a C++ malware that appends encrypted files with the “.encrypted” filename extension and drops a ransom note named ‘!!!README_FIRST!!!.txt’ into every scanned directory.

The ransom note gives victims three days to reach out to the attacker and negotiate a ransom payment. Alternatively, the stolen data would be leaked online.

After gaining access to the target network, the attacker used AnyDesk or SimpleHelp for remote management, Advanced IP Scanner for network discovery, and the Mimikatz tool to dump credentials from the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process.

Microsoft says that Storm-1175 moves quickly from initial compromise to stealing data and deploying the locker, urging system administrators managing self-hosted N-central servers to take immediate action to secure the systems.

“This threat actor is known to rapidly move from initial access to data exfiltration and ransomware deployment, often within a few days,” warned Microsoft.

“Organizations are urged to monitor for Storm-1175 activity and apply security patches as soon as possible.”

N-able addressed the CVE-2026-18577 vulnerability via a hotfix (2026.3 HF1/build 2026.3.1.7) released on August 2, urging customers to install the patch immediately.

N-able previously recommended admins to check for signs of compromise such as an svchost.exe file in the Documents folders of users’ device, a registered service named Cloudflared, and inbound connections from the IP addresses listed in the advisory.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

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Market rumors claim TSMC is holding onto a billion-dollar stockpile of Apple chips due to not having enough memory to complete packaging. However, a prominent analyst doubts it to be the case.

The persisting memory supply crisis has caused problems with the supply chain, in both sourcing chips for products and in paying high prices for them too. While there is certainly a crisis at hand, not every major supply chain-related claim will be completely true.

On August 10, TF Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote about market rumors that TSMC had a stockpile of 2-nanometer chips made for Apple. Valued at $1 billion, the pile was supposedly made of processor wafers for semi-finished products.

The apparent reason was due to a DRAM supply shortage, because Apple has memory attached to the System on Chip (SoC) for its Apple Silicon chips. Since there’s not enough memory available, those chips couldn’t be packaged.

Kuo adds that the apparent evidence for the claim was TSMC’s Q2 2026 earnings call, which mentioned “increased inventory days” due to the ramp-up of production of 2-nanometer chips.

However, Kuo disagrees with the claims, because Apple and TSMC’s working relationship involves intense planning. Something that couldn’t realistically cause this to happen at all.

A doubtful stockpile

In discussing the rumor, Kuo admits that his industry research shows Apple’s hardware shipments have been downgraded in 2026 due to memory shortages.

The key problem with the rumor is that Apple’s processor orders with TSMC are planned about three months in advance. They’re also based on the amount of memory available, meaning TSMC wouldn’t be put into a position where it produces massive quantities of chips without the memory to go with it.

TSMC certainly can produce and stockpile half-made products in advance. But, since the bottleneck isn’t TSMC, Kuo says Apple has “little reason” to pay TSMC to make the stockpile in the first place.

Memory supply is tight, Kuo adds, but he insists that he hasn’t heard of any “dramatic development” like a billion-dollar chip stockpile that’s awaiting more memory to arrive. “It’s hard for such dramatic developments to occur,” he states.

As for the call commentary as proof, Kuo points out that it couldn’t be directly attributed to an Apple chip stockpile for a few reasons. Partly because TSMC’s inventory includes finished goods, raw materials, supplies, and spare parts as well as semi-completed items.

TSMC also increases its “inventory days” in tandem with production ramp-ups for new advanced processes. This is not a phenomenon that’s new to TSMC at all.

Lastly, TSMC isn’t just supplying 2-nanometer chips to Apple. It also supplies to other firms, including AMD and MediaTek, meaning any such stockpiling would affect multiple companies.

Evidently, rumors aren’t just limited to supposed specs and colors of iPhones.

from the it’s-Comcastic dept

There are so many shitty U.S. companies across tech, energy, and AI that criticism of our massively-unpopular telecom monopolies has fallen out of fashion. It’s easy to forget, for example, that Comcast routinely used to make headlines for setting peoples homes on fire, torturing pets, or at times killing people (most of the stories I used to write about this at DSLReports.com have been deleted after the owner abruptly and unceremoniously shut the website down).

So it feels like a bit of a throwback for Comcast to be under fire once again, this time for hitting low-performing employees in the face with pies. The company is facing a new lawsuit by employees who say one store manager made pies-to-the-face a tradition at a local company store. And encouraged everybody to videotape it:

“A lawsuit against Comcast’s cable division alleges that a store manager humiliated the lowest performing salesperson each month with a strange ritual in which a cream pie was smashed into the employee’s face. The lawsuit claims the store manager took videos of the assaults and ordered employees to participate in the assaults and record their own videos.”

Good times! Very on brand!

The full complaint makes for interesting reading, and includes paragraphs like this one:

“Specifically, for the entire time Plaintiff was employed by the Defendant, Defendant had a policy that the highest-ranked Retail Sales Consultant for the prior month was instructed by his or her supervisor-Ms. Peterson, the Comcast Store manager-to tie the lowest ranked sales consultant for the prior month to a chair in the back office and thereafter assault that person by violently smashing a cream pie in their face.”

In addition to wisely having employees videotape the harassment, the store manager also made sure to document the pies-to-the-face employees received on a store whiteboard.

This is, as somebody who spent decades writing about Comcast for various websites, child’s play when it comes to the width and breadth of poor judgement that can be found at this particular company.

Filed Under: cable, face, motivational, pies, telecom

Companies: comcast

Meta is putting its money (and AI models) where its mouth is. The company said Monday that its latest model is built specifically for AI agents. Meta Glimmer is out now and is built to run on your laptop or PC.

Meta Muse Glimmer is a 30-billion-parameter model, which sounds big, but it’s actually built to run more efficiently than other big AI models. (By comparison, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model, which approaches the capabilities of top models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, has 2.8 trillion parameters.) It can run on a single GPU, so you can run it on a newer MacBook or another computer with a relatively recent chip. The model is meant to help you orchestrate an army of AI agents, the newest wave of generative AI tech that lets you outsource tasks to bots known as agents.

Open-weight AI lets anyone, including researchers and cybersecurity defenders, see how an AI model operates. It isn’t fully transparent – open-source advocates say that to be truly open source, we’d need to know what’s inside the black box of training data used by Meta and other companies – but it’s less opaque than the closed-weight models offered by other major US developers. You can check out the model’s documentation on Meta’s website and HuggingFace. Meta also plans to release the weights of its newest model, Spark 1.2.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been one of the biggest proponents of open-source, or open-weight, AI. He writes in an essay published Monday that the way to secure our future is to ensure that access isn’t limited to a few institutions, including tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. (It’s worth noting that Zuckerberg doesn’t have the same open philosophy when it comes to his social media platforms, which are run by black-box algorithms.)

“The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.”

The company is also introducing a $1 billion fund to “support each community” where it opens data centers. Data centers are the controversial facilities tech companies need to keep AI running, but towns across the US have fought hard to keep them out due to environmental concerns, noise, higher electricity prices and more. New York recently became the first state to pass a moratorium on data center construction. A billion dollars is a drop in the bucket for the $1.5 trillion company, but Meta says its investment in the area can include giving teachers bonuses, funded by tax revenue.

Meta spent billions of dollars over the last few years to staff up its Superintelligence Labs with some of the biggest names in the AI field, and it seems the group is now finally showing progress. The company has released a slew of new models recently, including the closed-weight models Meta Spark 1.1 and Spark 1.2, which power its Meta Code tool that competes with Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. It also dropped an AI image tool that let anyone create deepfakes on Instagram, which was pulled less than a week later amid intense public backlash.

Meta is one of the only big tech companies to release open-weight AI models. OpenAI released a family of them in 2025, called GPT-OSS. Anthropic’s Claude models are all closed, which means we have little insight into how they operate.

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Katelyn Chedraoui

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Katelyn is a reporter with CNET covering artificial intelligence, including chatbots, image and video generators. Her work explores how new AI technology is infiltrating our lives, shaping the content we consume on social media and affecting the people behind the screens. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in media and journalism. You can reach her at kchedraoui@cnet.com.

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Magnets: how do they work? Pretty much the same regardless of brand name.

Qi2 charging is the open version of Apple’s MagSafe

Max Miller for Engadget

MagSafe and Qi2 are the same, as long as you shop carefully

Max Miller for Engadget

The original Minimal Phone built its entire identity around an E Ink screen that made scrolling annoying on purpose. The black-and-white E Ink screen intentionally made watching videos or scrolling through social media posts look less colorful or appealing to the human eye.

So, when The Minimal Company announced its successor with an AMOLED display that supports a higher refresh rate, I was a bit surprised. I wasn’t expecting the company to walk back the hardware choice that made it quite interesting. But that doesn’t mean that the Minimal Phone 2 isn’t worth a look. 

Why ditch the display that defined the brand?

The Minimal Phone 2 trades its e-reader-style E Ink panel for a 3.92-inch 90Hz AMOLED screen. While E Ink displays are slow, sluggish with animations, and genuinely painful for anything beyond text, the AMOLED display gives the phone a modern look and appeal. 

Isn’t it ironic: Minimal Phone with an AMOLED panel? Anyway, the rest of the redesign feels quite necessary, at least to me. The blocky, sharp-edged shell is gone, and in its place, the company has used a curved aluminum body. 

It ships in Black or Silver colors. The physical QWERTY keyboard sticks around as well, with a tactile QWERTY layout that uses metal dome switches, remappable keys, and long-press shortcuts. For use in darker environments, the keys are backlit as well.

Does 5G change the calculus?

Buyers also get a physical silent switch at the top, alongside a 3.5mm headphone jack, which goes with the overall old-school vibe and feel of the phone, which, to be honest, reminds me of classic BlackBerry. 

Unlike the original Minimal Phone, the latest iteration gets 5G support, which also implies that the company has used a new chipset inside. Although it’s not confirmed yet, a tipster claims that it could be the Dimensity 8300, paired with 8GB of RAM and either 256GB or 512GB of storage space. 

Although the company mentioned that more details about the phone will be revealed on August 10, 2026, the Kickstarter landing page suggests the crowdfunding will remain active for another 29 days. The project has already reached its goal, though, which means that it’s almost certain that the brand will move forward with a commercial launch.