A Cincinnati man says that if the fall detection feature of Apple Watch hadn’t called 911, he would have died from undiagnosed blood clotting.

Back in 2023, it was the Apple Watch heart rate monitor that saved a Cincinnati woman’s life by alerting her to a dangerous condition. Now the device’s fall detection has done the same for Mohammad Islam in the city, according to local station WKRC.

Islam was at home and taking out the trash when he said he turned around and “just collapsed.”

“I don’t know how long I was there,” he continued. “Suddenly my eyes opened up and I was on the ground and sweating like crazy.”

“I tried to get up, but couldn’t. There was a chair so I held it…,” he said. “Then I heard the sirens coming.”

Emergency medics took him to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center where he has been diagnosed with blood clots in his lungs. The cause has not yet been identified, but he has been sent home with medication.

The Apple Watch he wore was given to him by his daughters, and even before the incident, they reportedly pressed him about wearing it. “[Also they] gave a gift to their mother… an Apple Watch,” said Islam, “and every day they call me, they say ‘Are you wearing your Apple Watch?’”

“They’re overjoyed that their gift saved me,” he said.

Islam had not intentionally turned on the fall detection feature, but he is aged over 55, so it was enabled automatically. He says that he was aware of it because of getting occasional false alarms, but he did not know the extent of what the feature can do.

“Because when I work in the yard or something and I bang my hand, it says, ‘Hey, did you fall down? Should we call SOS or something?’” he said. “So, it was in the back of my mind, but I did not know that it was going to call 911.”

Apple Watch keeps saving lives

Apple and just about every smartwatch maker is currently being sued over fall detection and an allegation that it infringes on patents owned by UnaliWear. But in the meantime, it has directly saved countless lives since its introduction with the Apple Watch Series 4 back in 2018.

Fall Detection settings on Apple Watch.

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At times, that detection has been when the wearer has been involved in a car crash and the Apple Watch messaged the driver’s family. It’s helped injured mountaineers, too.

Then across its multiple health features, the Apple Watch has also alerted many users to conditions that, if not immediately life-threatening, were extremely series. It was AppleInsider managing editor Mike Wuerthele’s Apple Watch that warned him about a potential atrial fibrillation after his daughter’s passing.

It’s events like these that Tim Cook has said he is most proud of from his time as CEO.

“I remember getting the very first Apple Watch note from a user who told me that the watch saved their life,” he said in April 2026. “Now, of course, I get these on a daily basis, but that first one hit me particularly hard. It caused me to just stop in my steps.

The Clop ransomware gang (also tracked as Cl0p) is targeting Internet-exposed PTC Windchill and FlexPLM instances in a new data theft extortion campaign.

Clop has reportedly been exploiting a critical improper input validation vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-12569, which allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable Windchill and FlexPLM instances.

As cybersecurity company ReliaQuest reported on Thursday, Clop operators have been deploying JSP webshells that allow them to exfiltrate sensitive data from targeted companies’ compromised PLM platforms.

“ReliaQuest has observed threat actors actively exploiting CVE-2026-12569, a critical unsafe deserialization vulnerability (CVSS 9.3) affecting PTC Windchill and FlexPLM. Exploitation enables unauthenticated remote code execution and JSP web shell deployment for remote command execution and sensitive product data exfiltration,” the company said.

“The actor behind these attacks remains unconfirmed. however, the observed tradecraft shares characteristics with previous Cl0p campaigns targeting enterprise applications and high-value data repositories.”

Clop’s Windchill and FlexPLM attacks were also confirmed yesterday by the Ransomware Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (Ransom-ISAC), a non-profit organization dedicated to the tracking and defense against ransomware threats.

Ransom-ISAC’s Brandon Parsons from Ascent Solutions told BleepingComputer that Clop is using what appear to be previously compromised email accounts to send extortion messages to multiple employees of targeted organizations.

“The extortion emails appear to originate from randomly compromised accounts, are sent to hundreds of users within an impacted organization and include Cl0p’s latest contact information,” Parsons said. “This extortion approach is consistent with what we observed with the Oracle EBS campaign last year, except for the use of new email addresses.”

As BleepingComputer has learned, it is a common tactic for this cybercrime group to change email addresses before launching a new extortion campaign.

Flagged as actively exploited in attacks

PTC began releasing security patches for the CVE-2026-12569 flaw on June 17 and, while it didn’t confirm in-the-wild exploitation, it released remediation guidance in a private advisory and urged customers to review their environments for indicators of compromise (IOCs).

After PTC warned customers of “heightened threat activity” on June 26, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and ordered U.S. federal agencies to secure their PTC Windchill and FlexPLM instances within three days.

According to German news outlet Heise, CVE-2026-12569 also prompted emergency action from German authorities, with the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) emailing and calling PTC customers in the middle of the night and warning them to patch their systems as quickly as possible.

German authorities reacted with the same urgency in March after reports that a similar critical Windchill and FlexPLM flaw (CVE-2026-4681) may be exploited or was likely to be exploited soon.

On Thursday, ReliaQuest advised PTC customers to patch Windchill and FlexPLM systems and place them behind VPNs or trusted access gateways if possible. Additionally, if they suspect compromise, they should isolate the affected servers, collect forensic artifacts, and rotate any exposed credentials before restoring service.

A PTC spokesperson was not immediately available for comment when contacted by BleepingComputer earlier this week.

PTC Windchill and PTC FlexPLM are enterprise software platforms in a category known as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and used to track, design, and manage products from original idea to final manufacturing.

The two PLM systems are widely popular among engineering, manufacturing, quality, and supply chain teams across high-profile companies in the aerospace, defense, automotive, heavy machinery, retail, and medtech sectors. PTC says that its products are used by more than 30,000 customers globally, including over 1,500 brand and retail customers using FlexPLM.

Clop’s data theft campaigns

The Clop extortion gang has a long history of breaching enterprise platforms in data theft attacks, with previous campaigns targeting Accellion FTA, GoAnywhere MFT, SolarWinds Serv-U FTP, Cleo, and MOVEit Transfer file-sharing servers, the latter affecting more than 2,770 organizations worldwide.

Most recently, it exploited an Oracle EBS zero-day flaw to steal sensitive files from many organizations since early August 2025, including Harvard University, The Washington Post, GlobalLogic, the University of Pennsylvania, Logitech, Estée Lauder, Korean Air, and American Airlines subsidiary Envoy Air.

After breaching their systems and exfiltrating sensitive documents, Clop publishes the stolen data on its dark web leak site, making it available for download via Torrent if victims refuse to pay a ransom.

The U.S. Department of State now offers a $10 million reward for information that could link this cybercrime gang’s attacks to a foreign government.

Update July 24, 07:42 EDT: Added more info on the attacks from Ransom-ISAC.

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While OpenAI continues to sit pat on whatever device it is planning to build with Jony Ive, it is embarking on a journey that Google began years ago with the launch of the Android and Chrome OS operating systems followed by its own Pixel devices.

Long before anyone had heard of ChatGPT, Google CEO Sundar Pichai made clear that AI was a primary driver behind Google’s device push. Now, the company’s journey is about to take a turn with the launch of Googlebooks.

The Insta360 X6 looks set to arrive sooner as a fresh round of leaks reveals not only its key specs but also an apparent global launch date.

The latest images include what appears to be the camera’s retail packaging. This offers the clearest look yet at what Insta360 has planned for its next flagship 360-degree action camera.

According to the leaks, the Insta360 X6 is expected to launch globally on July 30. It will replace the current Insta360 X5 with a handful of hardware and software upgrades.

The biggest headline appears to be battery life. Packaging images shared online claim the X6 can deliver up to 140 minutes of recording when capturing 8K video at 30fps in 360-degree mode. This represents a notable endurance boost for creators shooting high-resolution footage.

Fareed Zakaria opened with the question everyone is circling. Are we in an AI bubble, and has it begun to deflate? OpenAI has promised to spend hundreds of billions while making a fraction of that, he noted. The maths does not add up.

Nadella did not push back. He reframed the question as a test AI has to pass.

“This is a new general-purpose technology that is going to drive productivity,” he said on CNN’s GPS. “That productivity has to translate into very broad-based economic growth that is economy-wide in terms of GDP growth.”

Then the condition. “If we don’t see that, then we are going to have a problem. So unless we see that broad economic growth, we’re not going to have this movie end well.”

It is a striking thing for the man who spent $190bn this year to say two days before his earnings call.

Who gets the chips

The other Nadella showed up the same weekend, in his own executives’ account of the company. Microsoft cannot build capacity fast enough. The shortfall has forced it into triage, Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reported. Its own AI products eat first. Azure customers get the remainder.

Chief financial officer Amy Hood said as much on January’s earnings call. Microsoft solves first for M365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot, then for research and development.

“Then what you end up with is the remainder going towards serving the Azure capacity that continues to grow in terms of demand,” she said. Had those chips gone to Azure instead, she added, growth would have topped 40% rather than 39%.

That admission is not new to readers here. A Michigan pension fund sued Microsoft in June over precisely this. The suit alleges the company hid the diversion before a January drop erased $357bn of market value.

What is new is that insiders say it has got worse. “All of the supply is gone once you solve for frontier labs and our internal businesses like M365 and Microsoft AI,” one executive told Business Insider.

Selling what you cannot deliver

Here is the part that reads oddly. Microsoft is raising quotas for its Azure salespeople despite the crunch. Some quotas rise by 30% this year, according to people familiar with the change.

Meanwhile it is buying capacity from its rivals. Amazon bailed Microsoft out after a run of GitHub outages. It explored leasing Oracle cloud infrastructure and walked away over security and compliance concerns. It is now evaluating Amazon and Google.

“We are shopping for capacity everywhere,” one person familiar with the talks said.

Inside the company, the logic is understood and the messaging is not. One executive framed the trade-off bluntly: why would Nadella prioritise growing Adobe, an Azure customer, over growing M365?

“I have no idea how we’re going to land that message with customers,” the person added.

The trap Microsoft is actually in

The dilemma is real, and Microsoft is not obviously handling it wrongly. Serving Azure customers lifts revenue now. Serving its own products is a bet that they eventually win.

Starve the first and Azure growth disappoints, which hits the share price immediately. Starve the second and Microsoft slips further behind in the race that justified the spending in the first place.

What makes the choice urgent is that customers have somewhere else to go. Google Cloud keeps posting large numbers. Meta and SpaceX are now selling compute too. Microsoft’s customers may not wait to find out what it decides.

The ecosystem argument

Zakaria’s second question was about China. Most firms are not using AI to solve Fermat’s theorem, he pointed out. They are rationalising inventory systems. So will the world simply take the cheaper Chinese open-weight models, like Moonshot’s Kimi?

Nadella’s answer was that provenance matters less than plumbing. “Even take the Chinese models. Guess where these models run? They run on a lot of the hyperscalers that are American, all over the world.”

Because the weights are open, he argued, American firms can monitor, test and post-train them. If a US lab post-trains a Chinese base model and ships it, he asked, whose model is that?

“As long as that remains, we will absolutely be competitive and we will win,” he said. China will have a role, he added, but this is not a zero-sum game.

He has been making a version of this case all week. His pinned post asks how to ensure “frontier benefits are diffused across the entire ecosystem” now that software has real marginal cost for the first time. Diffusion is the theory. Triage is the practice.

Three businesses in the blast radius

The strain is not only physical. Three core businesses now sit in AI’s path at once.

Microsoft 365 is the first. Knowledge workers used to open Word, Excel and PowerPoint to start the day. Increasingly they start inside an AI tool instead. Gartner predicted this year that AI would threaten to dethrone traditional productivity suites in a $58bn shakeup.

GitHub is the second. It had its best month ever, an executive told staff. It has also suffered dozens of major outages this year as AI usage surged. Cursor and Claude Code have taken millions of engineers in the meantime.

Azure is the third, and it is the one being asked to wait its turn.

The billy club

Nadella has pushed the pressure downwards. He has dismantled the senior leadership team structure and handed the commercial business to Judson Althoff. He also put a 33-year-old ex-Snap executive in charge of Copilot.

The churn continues. Rajesh Jha has retired, Yusuf Mehdi is preparing to leave, and Charlie Bell has moved to an individual contributor role. Hayete Gallot, recruited back from Google, is seen internally as Althoff’s long-term successor.

Microsoft also overhauled performance reviews this year, cutting ratings to five categories and sharpening the distinctions between them. Executives say it feels like a return to the stack ranking of the Ballmer era. Managers have been told to thin out the higher-level engineering ranks.

“It’s almost like the old era of Microsoft is back,” one former executive said. “The old Windows era where you lead with a lot of fear and a billy club in your hand.”

Wednesday’s test

Microsoft reports fourth-quarter results on Wednesday. Amazon follows on Thursday. Between them the two will spend roughly $400bn on data centres this year, Fortune reported, with Microsoft near $190bn.

Investors are already twitchy. Alphabet’s stock fell 7% last Thursday after it raised capital-expenditure guidance and posted negative free cash flow. Microsoft shares are down about 19% this year, and roughly 25% over twelve months. That is the worst of the Magnificent 7 by some distance. Meta is next, down almost 17%.

The underlying business is not weak. Microsoft disclosed nearly $627bn of remaining performance obligations, almost double a year earlier. It is funding roughly $35bn of building a quarter from operating cash flow rather than new debt. Azure and other cloud services are forecast to reach $148.9bn in fiscal 2027.

Nadella has heard doubts before. “I remember when I became CEO, everybody said, oh my God, isn’t it too late man?” he recalled at a Morgan Stanley conference in March. Microsoft built anyway, and the public cloud turned out to be multiplayer.

At that same conference he described the plan. “We have OpenAI book, we have Anthropic book, but we want to also have the long tail of enterprise IT,” he said. The long tail is the part now waiting at the back of the queue.

columnists

Trump’s unpredictability is pushing governments and businesses toward open source while Britain remains glued to US tech

OPINION Sick of relying on proprietary programs and American software giants and hyperclouds? Join the digital sovereignty revolution.

It really is the smart thing to do. Honestly, with Donald Trump calling the shots, who knows what he’ll do next? Demand that American companies stop providing services to European companies unless Denmark surrenders Greenland? Order Microsoft to disable Windows 11 unless the International Criminal Court is dismantled? Force Anthropic to lock down Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for international users? Oh, wait. They already did the last one.

Wake up, sheeple! You can’t trust American tech, and I speak as a US citizen whose ancestors first arrived in the States in the 1770s. Finnish MEP Aura Salla put it well at February’s Open Source Policy Summit: “The EU runs on Microsoft. The US could turn us off inside one hour.”

The same is true for the UK and pretty much every country in the world. If that doesn’t scare you, it should.

Some people get it. When I was at the United Nations Open Source Week recently, it wasn’t just European Union countries beating the drum for digital sovereignty. Speakers from Tanzania, Vietnam, Morocco, and elsewhere argued for greater control over their technology futures.

Many of them aren’t just talking a good game. They are actually doing something now. Finally!

For example, the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is dumping Microsoft SharePoint for Nextcloud and OpenProject. Bavaria is also moving toward digital sovereignty. Neither state is jumping from Windows to desktop Linux yet, but, hey, baby steps.

Ireland was preparing to pull the trigger on a Microsoft procurement potentially worth €1 billion when the government called a halt. Opposition politicians then asked why open source alternatives had never made it onto the shopping list.

Ireland’s Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalization, Frankie Feighan, said the agreement for Microsoft software and services had been canceled after “matters of concern were raised by an interested party.”

At the UN Open Source Week, Ireland’s Government CIO, Louise McKeever, said that as far as she was concerned, digital sovereignty is “the ability of a government to maintain control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technologies” in a world of cross‑border data flows, AI, and geopolitical risk – and that makes it “a national security concern” as much as a tech one.

Cian O’Callaghan, deputy leader of Ireland’s opposition Social Democrats, would agree. He said that, for value-for-money reasons and to avoid US technology dependency, Ireland should at least consider alternatives including “LibreOffice, Linux, Thunderbird, and Open-Xchange.”

It’s not just governments getting into the sovereignty act. Airbus is migrating its most critical applications from AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway. Why? For much the same reason as governments. Scaleway made a competitive commercial offer, and, as Catherine Jestin, Airbus’s executive vice president of digital, said: “I need a sovereign cloud because part of the information is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective. We want to ensure this information remains under European control.“

Makes sense to me!

In the United Kingdom, however, it’s a different story. A House of Commons Library briefing published in March put it plainly: “The UK Government does not have an overarching policy on digital sovereignty. It has set out its approach to building ‘sovereign capability’ in key technologies.”

The closest thing Britain has is the UK Compute Roadmap. It states that the government wants “sovereign, secure, and sustainable capability,” and directs the UK Sovereign AI Unit to treat compute as a priority area. Back in 2025, which is prehistory by AI standards, Labour wanted to pour £2 billion into sovereign AI. Now? Who knows? Stay tuned.

I might add that, in AI business terms, £2 billion is less than the American companies throw at AI in a week. Believe it or not, the biggest US tech companies are projected to spend about $700 billion on capex this year – roughly $13.5 billion a week.

Yes, I agree. Those are insane numbers. Welcome to the wild, wonderful world of AI bubble spending.

Leaving aside the crazy AI numbers, some people in the UK get that digital sovereignty must be a priority. The Open Rights Group has a petition: Demand UK Digital Sovereignty. I suggest you sign.

As Trump has shown time and time again, “his” US has no “special relationship” with anyone. Just ask Israel or Canada. If the new PM, Andy Burnham, so much as sneezes at Trump, the President could take offense and apply pressure for the UK to lose its access to American tech resources.

To me, there’s no longer any question about it. Everyone, including companies and people in the States, must reduce their reliance on American software and services. Linux and open source alternatives that are not beholden to Washington offer the clearest way forward. ®

Apple’s insurance for multiple devices including iPhones, Watches and MacBooks, is finally expanding a year after launching in the US. AppleCare One is now available in four additional countries: the UK, France, Germany and Australia. The service is set to arrive in those regions on August 4th this year. 

“With AppleCare One, customers in the UK can now enjoy the trusted protection of AppleCare+ in a way that’s simpler and more flexible than ever before — one plan, one price, and the peace of mind that comes with knowing all their eligible products can be covered,” the company said in an article on its UK newsroom. 

In the UK, the service will cost £16.99 per month for three devices, with the ability to add more at any time at £4.99 per month per device. In France, it will cost €20.99 per month and €5.99 per month for the same coverage, respectively, according to 01net.com. That compares to $20 a month for three devices and $6 per month for additional devices in the US. 

AppleCare One provides the same coverage as AppleCare+ with theft and loss, “including fast and unlimited repairs for accidental damage, battery replacement service, and 24/7 priority access to Apple experts,” Apple UK wrote. It also includes theft and loss coverage for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. You can use AppleCare One to not only insure brand new devices, but also ones you already own — provided they’re no more than four years old and in “good condition.” 

Along with AppleCare One, Apple is also bringing theft and loss coverage for iPad and Apple Watch to AppleCare+ in the UK. Those devices join the iPhone, which already has the theft and loss option. The price for that for a base iPad model will start at £4.99 per month in the UK (£49.99 per year), compared to £3.49 for current AppleCare+ coverage without theft and loss. For the base iPhone 17, AppleCare+ with theft and loss is £9.49 per month, compared to £6.49 per month for regular AppleCare+. 

Whether or not you’ll save money on AppleCare One compared to AppleCare+ depends on your devices and coverage. Apple notes that “a customer protecting their iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch together can save up to £11.48 per month compared to maintaining separate AppleCare+ with theft and loss plans for each device.” 

However, if you purchased the most basic versions of those devices with AppleCare+ but no theft and loss coverage (£6.49 + £3.49 + £2.49 = £12.47), individual coverage would be cheaper. AppleCare One is therefore best if you have higher-end devices or were planning to ensure them for theft and loss on top of accidental damage repairs. The benefits also accrue if you add a fourth or fifth device, particularly if it’s on the expensive side. 

In the US, AppleCare One looks like an even better deal since AppleCare+ prices just went up for Macs and iPads. The increase is due to higher prices for those devices ranging from $100 for a basic iPad to $500 for an M5 Max MacBook Pro. 

The launch of the latest AI model from a Chinese company — Moonshot AI’s Kimi — reignited debates around American competitiveness and open versus proprietary AI.

While there was plenty of conversation on social media, it seems the debate is also happening behind the scenes in Washington, D.C., where OpenAI and Anthropic have reportedly lobbied regulators with concern about open Chinese models.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed why this seems to be such a hot button issue. Beyond suggesting that certain folks should “touch grass” rather than spending their weekends arguing on X, Sean noted that in many ways, this “feels like we’re seeing repeats of prior freakouts,” with everyone in Silicon Valley “expecting that something is going to arrive and blow everything else away.”

And Kirsten noted that putting heavy restrictions on Chinese AI models could primarily benefit a handful of companies: “Are we accelerating and ensuring that Americans win the AI race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs do better than others?

Keep reading for an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Ha: For folks who have followed the discourse around Chinese AI, this will probably be very, very familiar from the launch of DeepSeek, where basically a Chinese model comes out; on some benchmarks, it does as well, or at least seems competitive with some of the frontier models; and a certain portion of the tech industry loses their mind. 

Some of this [debate] got extra scrutiny because one of the people posting about it was [an executive] at OpenAI. But in general, there [is] this recurring question of: Can Chinese companies beat US companies, at least in some aspects, and do it much more cheaply and in a much more open way?

Sean O’Kane: Yeah, there are many elements of this that feel like we’re seeing repeats of prior freakouts. I think one of my favorites is: Everybody is so ready [for] and so expecting that something is going to arrive and blow everything else away. And I think my favorite example of that this past week was people showing off that “My gosh, Kimi made in 30 minutes an entire replication of macOS.” And yeah, it made a pretty impressive graphical reproduction of what macOS looks like, but it’s not an OS.

We keep seeing these things happen over and over again, where everybody’s so jumpy in the tech industry. And I think in particular, with some of the Chinese models that come out, there’s this expectation, and I think this gets to the core of why people reacted the way they reacted last weekend. (Also, by the way: Go outside, touch grass, it’s the weekend. Everybody in the industry was trading barbs on Twitter all weekend.) But this jumpiness is really interesting to me because we’re now a week out and I don’t think anybody’s feeling like the end is nigh like they were a week ago.

Kirsten Korosec: We have a really great story by one of our reporters, Tim Fernholz, who tries to unpack the psychosis around this here in the United States. He points to a number of reasons. And concludes — and I don’t want to conclude it for him, but I think that there’s one that rises more to the top than others. 

There’s concerns that these Chinese open weight models might have an implicit bias towards China, there’s another worry about security risks and guardrails. But there’s also a pretty big idea here, which is protectionism, and who is going to quote-unquote “win the race”? Is it going to be the US or China? And that seems to be driving a lot of what the fear is. 

I don’t know, Anthony, if you agree with that?

Anthony: I completely agree. I think the China aspect always adds this certain level of hysteria. And that’s not to say that people shouldn’t be concerned about how the U.S. stacks up against China across different industries. But it gets so amped up.

The other thing this reminds me of is the discussion around TikTok a few years ago. And again, it wasn’t that I thought that the concerns around TikTok were totally made up, but that the level of how panicked people got — it seems as soon as you add the word China to any discussion, things just ramp up dramatically.  And then in this case, it’s linked to this discussion about open [weights] and this idea that AI is so powerful and so dangerous that the only way we can control it is with these proprietary models from these American frontier companies. 

Obviously, most people saying this [have] reasons why they want to say that. David Sacks, who was the AI czar for the Trump administration [and] now has a different role in the Trump administration, was shouting on X about how, “I can’t believe people are opposing data centers, we’re tying ourselves in knots, there’s too much regulation.” And so it’s a way to argue for the positions that they already had around AI. “My gosh, if China beats us, that’s unthinkable, so you have to do what I want to do anyway.”

Kirsten: Right, and if you were to put across-the-board bans on Chinese open weight models — I’m not saying that there aren’t real concerns here, but let’s just play that out. If we were to do that, it would benefit models created by OpenAI, for instance, and it would force enterprises to use those as opposed to using models like Kimi.

So you really have to ask the question: Are we accelerating and ensuring that Americans win the AI race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs do better than others?

Sean: At this point, we should say a lot of this discussion really got kicked off by the head of strategic futures at OpenAI, Dean Ball, who was the first one to come out with this really long post mentioning some of these concerns.

Part of me thinks the reaction to this was because people disagreed with what Dean wrote. Part of me also thinks the reaction was driven by the fact that he kind of just said the thing out loud. He basically said the US should create regulatory FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — and muck up the ability for these open weight models to compete with the US. [Ball later backed away from this argument.]

And to me, I think you can read in some of the responses from folks, like, “You’re not supposed to say that out loud, Dean.”

The cyclospora outbreak affecting produce from Taylor Farms de Mexico has sickened over 1,600 people across five states, including Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. It’s one in a long line of severe produce outbreaks, but this time, I’m reconsidering how I approach food safety, given that the greens meant to nourish us continue to pose contamination risks. 

Over the last year and a half, I’ve used my Gardyn Studio, a hydroponic growing system, to grow my own produce in my small NYC apartment. I’ve harvested arugula, kale, lettuce, peppers, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, herbs and edible flowers, even throughout the winter — and, more importantly, I’ve had full control over the safety of my produce.

What to know about the 2026 cyclospora outbreak

Cyclospora is transmitted through food and water contaminated with the parasite, with symptoms typically manifesting approximately 1 week after exposure, though cases can range from two to 14 days or longer. The 2026 numbers represent a significant increase from the 249 cases reported in the US during the same period last year.

According to The Cleveland Clinic, symptoms of cyclospora infection often include sudden watery stools and even explosive diarrhea. Other common symptoms include:

• Stomach cramps 
• Bloating, increased gas and burping
• Nausea
• Unintentional weight loss
• Loss of appetite
• Extreme fatigue or weakness

While home-growing your produce doesn’t eliminate all food safety risks, it can eliminate the specific contamination risks present in mass industrial distribution systems and exposure to pesticides. Given these risks, many are looking for ways to bypass mass distribution entirely. This is why I started using the Gardyn Studio.

Nasha Addarich Martinez/CNET

Why I switched to the Gardyn Studio

The Gardyn Studio is a compact, 4.5-foot hydroponic tower with 16 growing slots, LED grow lights and a mobile app that manages your growing from start to finish. Having used it for over a year, I have a clear sense of its benefits and shortcomings.

I appreciate how self-sufficient the device is: You insert the pods, set the lighting schedule, add water and plant food, and refresh the tank every few weeks. Other than that, the plants pretty much grow on their own. Not every pod is a success, though. In every cycle, at least two pods fail to grow. While Gardyn will send replacement pods, you will need the Gardyn Nursery (a separate $80 device) to grow the sprouts before you can insert them into the Studio.

I’ve found the harvesting time to be quick. My arugula reaches maturity in about three to four weeks. The Kale takes about five weeks. In both cases, the taste and quality are unsurprisingly better than store-bought greens.

The Gardyn Studio costs $579 and is great for small spaces. If you have a larger home, you can also consider the Gardyn Home ($899), which fits 30 growing slots, compared to the 16 on the Studio.

There’s also an optional membership that costs between $25 and $39 a month or $259 a year, which includes monthly credits you can use to buy more plants and access to Kelby, the AI gardener that will automate watering cycles and lighting based on your specific plants’ life cycles and the local environment. It also sends push notifications to the Gardyn app to alert you when to add water, add plant food or harvest.

Last year, a CNET Survey found that US adults who shop for groceries waste an average of $125 a month on food that’s not cooked or eaten. That’s $1,500 a year. I rarely waste food grown in the Gardyn since I harvest it as needed, so I rarely end up with excess greens wilting away in the fridge.

Gardyn specs at a glance

The pros and cons

While I use my Gardyn year-round, there are things to consider before committing to it. The upfront cost of $579 puts the Gardyn Studio in the same category as high-end kitchen appliances, but the benefits of growing my own produce at home and no longer having to buy it make it worth it to me.

Pros:

• Eliminates contamination risks
• Compact design that fits in small spaces
• Minimal maintenance (no soil or gardening skills required)
• Responsive customer service for pod replacements
• Reduced pesticide exposure

Cons:

• High upfront costs
• Some pods fail to grow
• Ongoing pod and nutrient costs
• No ability to grow root vegetables

For those without access to hydroponic systems

Nasha Addarich Martínez/CNET

Growing your produce at home is still valuable, even at a smaller scale. Windowsill herb gardens require minimal equipment and investment. My first home garden was in a 10-inch planter, where I grew cilantro, basil and parsley, which I put on my windowsill.

Buying from local farms and building relationships with local farmers’ markets establishes direct supply chains from the source, without the middlemen (distribution centers). Inquiring about produce sourcing at your local supermarket creates incentives for transparency and regional cultivation. These approaches won’t prevent every outbreak, but they reduce dependence on centralized supply chains and create accountability between producers and consumers.

Food safety doesn’t (and shouldn’t) have to be a luxury. It does, however, require deliberate choices about where food originates and who controls its cultivation. The Gardyn Studio is one option among many, and the one that works for my lifestyle and home. What matters most is recognizing that alternatives to mass food systems exist.

Nasha Addarich Martínez

Managing Editor

Nasha is a Managing Editor for CNET, overseeing our sleep and wellness verticals. She is a nutrition, mental health, fitness and sleep science enthusiast. Her passion for mindful and holistic practices transcends her personal life and profoundly influences her editorial approach, as she weaves evidence-based insights with practical advice to inspire readers to lead healthier, more balanced lives. Throughout her career, she’s covered various topics including financial services, technology, travel and wellness.

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The European answer to TBPN is here and ready to go live five days a week, starting June 27. 

Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers first launched the London-based European Technology Network (ETN) last October, breaking down tech trends and news during a two-day-a-week live stream. Right now, the show is live-streamed on X and YouTube and has garnered more than 5 million views.

On Monday, the network announced a $1.6 million seed round from top players in the media ecosystem, including Powerhouse Capital, Axel Springer SE (which owns Business Insider and Politico), the popular media publication LadBible, and angel investors from OpenAI and DeepMind. With this fresh capital, the network is announcing its largest expansion yet. 

It’s now moving into a big studio in Kings Cross (where all the hot London AI startups are situated), expanding the team (right now of just eight), launching a newsletter, and is, starting today, moving into a five-day-a-week live show schedule, which will soon see Knight and Chambers interview the likes of George Robson (a partner at Sequoia) and Rishi Sunak (former UK Prime Minister and senior advisor to Anthropic and Microsoft). 

Speaking to TechCrunch, Knight and Chambers said ETN has already become a hot stop on the press tour for European startups — they’ve spoken to the founder of Syntheisa, the CFO of Legora, the founder of Granola, and Kanishka Narayan, the UK’s first AI Minister. They’ve even had American investors stop by the show when they are in town, including one from Andreessen Horowitz.

“ETN was born out of a gaping hole in the industry,” Chambers told TechCrunch. “It’s centered around pace.” He said the current media ecosystem in the UK cannot keep up with how fast the tech scene is moving. For example, so far this year, London startups have raised $14.7 billion according to Dealroom. Six companies have raised more than $500 million: Wayve, Superintelligence, ElevenLabs, Recursive, Ineffable Intelligence, and Isomorphic Labs, the latter three of which were founded by DeepMind alumni.

“These are things that have never happened in Europe before,” Chambers continued, referring to the speed at which capital is flowing through the ecosystem. As the show became more popular, Chambers said they were getting around 70 pitches a week from guests looking to come on the show. They would try and cram 12 interviews into two hours, twice a week, but eventually it got too much. “We needed an outlet that could move at the pace of that,” he said of both the interest in the show and how fast Europe’s tech ecosystem is moving, “which is the reason we’re going from two days a week to five days a week.” 

The five-day format will look quite similar to the two-day format. There will be a live show from 12 p.m. UK time to 3 p.m., breaking down trending stories, and then for two hours, they will have guests on the show talking about whatever they want. Chambers said they also want to start hosting debates, roundtables, and a Shark Tank-style pitching session on the show.

“We want to make it as useful as we can for the ecosystem,” Chambers said. “There needs to be more discourse around AI in Europe. There needs to be more discourse around venture capital and cash flowing into the ecosystem. There needs to be more discourse around the amazing things that are happening in the tech ecosystem, and our role is to be the stage in which people can shout about all the amazing things they’re doing.” 

The show makes its money from ad dollars, like most media publications, and big-name sponsors already include prediction market Polymarket, blockchain company Base, and the AI audio darling ElevenLabs. 

When asked about the influence TBPN has had on them, Knight and Chambers said they indeed do look at John Coogan and Jordi Hays, founders of TBPN (which recently sold to OpenAI for what some say was a nine-figure sum), as pioneers of this new tech media ecosystem. The show became a place for tech guests to appear and chat with friendly faces, announcing new product releases, hires, or funding news. “My thinking was, if we can have an ITV and a BBC, why wouldn’t we have a regional version of this?” Chambers continued. 

Europe is a big place, though, with more than 40 different countries and over 200 languages spoken (24 of which are recognized by the European Union). Chambers said that although ETN will report from London, he and Knight are making an effort to bring on guests from across the continent. Aside from bringing guests into the studio, they also travel to the hottest tech conferences around Europe. For example, they’ve broadcast from the Panathenaea Conference in Athens and from inside the Louvre in Paris for the RAISE AI Summit. 

“You have all these different cultures, these different minds coming together and creating different products,” Chambers said. “You get a taste of what makes [Europe] a superpower.” 

With all this, they said they would never turn an American founder away should they want to come on the show. “It’s a European technology network, but we think there’s massive [global] opportunities,” Chambers said. Knight added to that, noting how often conversations pit the European tech ecosystem against that of the U.S. 

“We are globally optimistic,” Knight said. “We are pushing global prosperity from Europe. Wherever you want to go and build your company, wherever is the best place to go and build that company, go and do that, and we will shout for you to go and do that.” 

He and Chambers also don’t necessarily see themselves as journalists; rather, they consider themselves tech insiders curious about what is going on and why. They also don’t see themselves as replacing traditional media and instead intend to work in tandem with those publications. “We rely on traditional media,” Chambers said, adding that is how they find much of the news that they to talk about on ETN. 

Overall, the duo hopes to help document the stories coming from the new wave of European success, from ElevenLabs in London to Lovable in Stockholm, to help the upcoming generation understand that technology is one way to drive a nation forward.

Discussing the impact of European success stories, Chambers said, “It riles up the next generation to the point where it’s no longer cool to finish university and go into banking or consulting. People want to leave university and go straight into building a startup, and I think that’s an amazing thing.”