• India is replacing the Su-30MKI’s ageing Russian radar with Virupaksha
• The new radar could detect conventional fighters 300 to 400 kilometres away
• Virupaksha is expected to detect stealthier aircraft beyond 200 kilometres

India’s Su-30MKI fleet, built on a Russian airframe design, is now getting a distinctly homegrown upgrade to its detection system.

The Defence Research and Development Organisation is developing a new radar called Virupaksha to replace the aircraft’s ageing Russian-origin unit.

It used to be a rite of passage to build some sort of AM radio receiver. Many people started with a crystal radio, of course, but you’d graduate to maybe a TRF or superhet design. FM radio projects were not as common, because demodulating an FM signal was harder, as was making things work in the 100 MHz range. These days, though, you can get everything on a chip like the TEA5767, and [turtushig22-blip] has an open design that uses that device on a breakout board, a display, a knob, and an external amplifier. An ESP-32 pulls it together. You can see two videos about the project below.

Unlike older FM radio designs, the TEA5767 doesn’t require any adjustments. RF goes in, and stereo audio goes out. You can control the device through I2C or a 3-wire serial interface.

Software-wise, you send a five-byte control word and the chip sends back five status bytes. You don’t set the frequency directly, but provide a PLL divisor. For example, with a 32 kHz reference crystal, setting 100.1 MHz would be: 4*(100.1 MHz + 0.225 MHz)/0.032768 MHz = (about) 12247.

The radio uses a 225 kHz IF and can autonomously seek stations. You can select whether the search is up or down, and the minimum acceptable signal strength. One unusual feature: the TEA5767 can select the positive or negative mixer output, which might be useful for image rejection in some cases.

The output is purely analog, and there’s no RDS/RBDS decoder. So don’t expect station information on the OLED display. Still, a nice, easy FM radio build. Naturally, not the first TEA5767 build that we’ve seen. Or even the second.

Dario Amodei wrote on X that the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that they have not yet delivered on their promises, and that only genuine breakthroughs will win public trust. It lands as Anthropic prepares a listing that backers expect to value it at $2trn.

Dario Amodei has conceded the case against his own industry. “The most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world,” Anthropic’s chief executive wrote on X on Saturday.

His prescription is blunter than the admission. “At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive,” he wrote. “The thing that will work is actually curing cancer.”

The timing gives it weight. Anthropic is weeks from a listing its backers expect to value the company at $2trn in October, a price that rests almost entirely on what the technology will do rather than what it has done.

The public evidence supports his premise. Pew found half of American adults more concerned than excited about AI in daily life, against 10% who were more excited, up from 37% concerned when the question was first asked in 2021.

He does not accept that his own warnings caused it. “I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative,” he wrote, pointing to Machines of Loving Grace, his 2024 essay arguing that AI could transform the world for the better.

His explanation is broader and harder to test. Public distrust of AI companies, he argued, reflects decades of scepticism towards corporations generally, and “AI is just the latest iteration of it.”

Others were unconvinced that breakthroughs are enough. An OpenAI employee replied that the pharmaceutical industry delivers advances constantly and remains among the least trusted sectors there is.

People will judge AI companies on more than results, she wrote, listing pricing, access, lobbying, opacity, how the gains are shared and who ends up holding the power.

Yann LeCun made the argument Anthropic is least comfortable with. The only way forward is AI that is “widely available, shared, and open,” the former Meta chief AI scientist wrote, a position Anthropic rejects for its frontier models while Meta presses Washington the other way.

Amodei ended with a schedule. Anthropic hopes for “incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months,” which puts the listing comfortably ahead of the glimmers.

Google has added some smart theft-detection features to Android in recent years.

How to Enable Anti-Theft Features On Android?

How Can You Prevent Thieves from Turning Off Your Device?

photoschmidt/Shutterstock

Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter, according to a new report in Bloomberg.

OpenRouter helps customers to select different AI models to perform different tasks, depending on their specific needs and budget. The company announced in May that it had raised a $113 million Series B, at a reported $1.3 billion valuation. (Investors include Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Alphabet’s Capital G.)

At the time, OpenRouter CEO Alex Atallah described the company as the equivalent of Stripe for AI, because it provides customers with a single access point for different systems and prevents lock-in. The startup also claimed to have 8 million global users and to provide access to more than 400 models.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Stripe and OpenRouter were in acquisition talks. Now, Bloomberg said those discussions have led to a deal price of more than $7 billion.

A Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.

When Disney announced back in May that Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run in both Disneyland and Hollywood Studios was getting an update with new missions, it was widely viewed as a welcomed but fairly minor update to the popular attraction. At its D23 conference this weekend, Disney Imagineers are offering a deep dive into how that update happened and a peek behind the curtain at all the tools used to make that update a reality.

For the uninitiated, there’s quite a bit of sleight of hand involved in how Smuggler’s Run works. Each version of this ride has multiple cockpits that rotate around on a massive set of plates, so more people can quickly get on and off the ride. This means there are 28 iterations of the same ride environment inside both the California and Florida versions of the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge attraction. According to Disney Imagineers Asa Kalama and Angela Jay, each one of those 28 cockpits is powered by five 4K projectors driven by eight graphics cards to make the whole thing work.

Read More: The Biggest Star Wars Announcements from D23 2026

The upgrade to Smuggler’s Run back in May added a lot of complexity to the ride, allowing riders to choose between different worlds to travel to for your unique adventure. To make something like that possible, every single one of the 224 graphics cards was upgraded to a new Nvidia Blackwell card and the whole game was updated to Unreal Engine 5. This allowed the platform as a whole to be more flexible, but it also allowed the testing environment to get an upgrade as well.

Advertisement

A big part of the Imagineering Pavilion at D23 this year is dedicated to a live demo of the developer console used to test Smuggler’s Run and its many new updates. This includes virtual buttons to simulate all the functions in the cockpit, screens dedicated to all the readouts you see while on the ride and, of course, multiple perspectives of the game itself.

Some testing is done within virtual reality headsets so they can see the same way you would by sitting in the ride, while other times people are sat in an office with a phone or tablet that has all the buttons laid out. Nearly all of it happens on a computer just like the one in the ride to make sure everyone gets the same experience.

One other important thing to know about Smuggler’s Run is how incredibly popular it is. If you’re a regular in either theme park, you know this ride always has a line, and nobody likes it when a popular ride is offline, even if it’s for very cool upgrades. That’s why Imagineers set off working overnight for weeks to successfully update the hardware and the software for this ride, and the result was zero downtime.

It’s clear from the way Kalama and Jay talked about the work on Smuggler’s Run in 2026 that more is coming for the most famous hunk of junk in the galaxy. It’s clear this work wasn’t just for helping the Mandalorian and Grogu take out Imperials, as made clear by a new partnership with Fortnite where your gameplay in Smuggler’s Run will carry over. This ride has now not only been future-proofed for more upgrades later on, but the success of what seemed at first like a fairly minor update to the software likely means Smuggler’s Run will be able to feel new and interesting for years. If you’re not sure why that’s important, remember that Indiana Jones in Disneyland is still running Windows XP.

Russell Holly is a Managing Editor on the Commerce team at CNET. He works with all of CNET to assemble top recommendations as well as helping everyone find the best way to buy anything at the best price. When not writing for CNET you can find him riding a bike, running around in Jedi robes, or contributing to WOSU public radio’s Tech Tuesday segment.

See full bio

Advertisement

The ShinyHunters extortion group stole personal information from 1.6 million RingCentral accounts after hacking the company in July, according to the data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.

RingCentral is a cloud-based collaboration and communication platform used by over 600,000 businesses for services such as calling, messaging, and voicemail.

The company disclosed the incident on July 28, revealing that its systems were compromised following what it described as a “sophisticated social engineering campaign.”

“We have not seen any new unauthorized activity since taking these remediation efforts. To date, this incident has affected data for a limited portion of RingCentral customers, and we are communicating with affected customers directly,” it noted.

“If you are not contacted by RingCentral, you are not affected. This incident did not impact the core RingCentral platform, and our services continue to operate without disruption.”

Although RingCentral has not attributed the breach to a specific threat actor or hacking group and has yet to share further details on the incident, the ShinyHunters extortion gang claimed responsibility on July 27, claiming they had stolen 623GB of data.

​After the company refused to pay a ransom to have the stolen data destroyed, the cybercrime group leaked a compressed archive containing 280GB worth of files on their dark web leak site.

While a RingCentral spokesperson didn’t immediately reply when contacted by BleepingComputer to confirm ShinyHunters’ claims, Have I Been Pwned confirmed the link after analyzing the leaked data and said on Thursday that it contained records for 1.6 million accounts, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses.

“In July 2026, the cloud-based business communications platform RingCentral was the target of a ShinyHunters ‘pay or leak’ extortion campaign,” it said.

Although RingCentral has yet to share exactly how the threat actors gained access to its systems, ShinyHunters has claimed breaches at hundreds of Salesforce customers over the past year, saying they’ve stolen over 1.5 billion records in Salesloft Drift and Salesforce Aura campaigns.

The extortion group was also linked to security breaches at more than a dozen Snowflake customers, as well as various other third-party integration providers.

Most recently, ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for a new series of breaches at over 100 organizations following data-theft attacks that exploited an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day flaw.

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

Get the report