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The war in Iran has been raging for a month now, and the resulting energy crisis has hurt the world, as oil and gas prices surged in response to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s energy travels each year.
Much of Asia, as well as countries in the Pacific, have been badly affected, as many of them depend on Gulf shipments of oil and LNG (liquified natural gas) for electricity generation and transportation.
We’ve seen reports of petrol stations closing due to a lack of fuel, airlines cancelling flights, people forced to work from home to conserve energy and a threat of another wave of inflation fuelled by the rise in costs of moving goods.
Singapore was not spared the consequences, but the situation here is far better than in the worst-affected countries. With diversified sources of both oil and natural gas, as well as ample reserves, Singapore has little to fear other than higher-than-usual bills for filling up your car.
There’s no fear of blackouts, pumps running dry or businesses unable to carry out their operations. Electricity prices may not have jumped yet, but the government has the means to put a cap on them.
It’s mostly an inconvenience—and one which may even produce benefits for the country.
Singapore is the world’s largest and most developed transhipment port.
Disruptions in other areas of the planet do not affect it directly, because no matter what happens, cargo has to travel through here to its destination.
If Hormuz cannot be used, then the endpoints may change in response to the closure. But Singapore is still the bridge between the West and the Far East. Shipping companies have already begun rerouting traffic to ports in Oman and the UAE, located on the coast of the Arabian Sea, with cargo then trucked overland to their final destination in the Middle East.
No matter where they are heading, though, their pit stop is still in Singapore.
And while higher prices may hurt the pockets of regular Singaporeans (although the government has already announced readiness to help), higher fuel and shipping costs make those companies operating here more profitable, with a share of their income ending up in the national budget through taxes.
In other words, not only is the trading activity unlikely to be meaningfully affected (just like it was not during the COVID-19 pandemic), but Singapore’s large shipping industry is probably going to benefit in many ways from the war-induced disruptions.
An even more meaningful win for Singapore is the uncertainty that the war has introduced about the future of the developed and thus far very peaceful Gulf Arab countries.
For decades dependent on oil and gas, they have in recent years invested heavily to diversify their economies by appealing to wealthy immigrants.
It’s no secret that cities like Dubai or Abu Dhabi in the UAE (with Qatar and Saudi Arabia following in its footsteps) entered competition with Singapore to attract the richest people in the world, encouraging them to move to the Gulf and park their wealth there.
According to Henley & Partners, the UAE has been the leading destination for millionaires in the past decade. Just last year, nearly 10,000 of them, commanding US$63 billion in assets, moved to the Emirates, compared to only 1,600 and US$8.9 billion headed to Singapore.
Their offer has been quite appealing to many, since Arab nations don’t charge any income taxes, while other levies tend to be lower than in Singapore.
What’s more, they have far more land than the city-state and have been investing heavily in property development, building clean, modern cities offering some of the best living conditions in the world, at very competitive prices.
Their strategy, however, has always been underpinned by the promise of absolute safety, which the war with Iran has left a big crack in.
As missiles and drones target them every day, it has made some question their commitment to the Gulf, even if little damage is done.
Singapore, in comparison, is an oasis of calm, with a very robust military, in a region which doesn’t show any appetite for war—at least not one that would affect the city directly.
All of a sudden, the higher cost of living—the pricier apartments, the more expensive cars—feels worth the extra expense because it’s far less likely that a rogue neighbour is one day going to start bombing Singapore the way Dubai, for example, is.
Within a week, reports of anxious Asian residents trying to leave the Gulf hit the news headlines. They weren’t happy with the paradise bubble being popped so violently by the war they weren’t expecting to erupt.
The war may be bound to end within a few weeks or months at most, and it’s quite likely that a period of calm is going to follow it in the Middle East, but the damage done will take some time to fix.
Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Doha are not going to suddenly implode or become abandoned by panicked expats. Nevertheless, any future calculation made by the wealthy—especially those very rich—will include the potential for another military conflict.
This is where Singapore has gained a strong competitive advantage over its desert rivals.
The city does quite well at all times, of course, but when the international situation is peaceful, both companies and individuals are more open to taking risks.
It’s when a crisis strikes that everybody seeks to escape to a safe haven—such as Singapore.
During the pandemic, it was one of the critical logistical hubs, as cargo had to move even if people could not.
GDP per capita dipped slightly at first, to just over US$60,000, only to be catapulted by around 50% to over US$90,000 two years later, thanks to both how much Singapore’s economy has to offer and how trusted the Singapore dollar is.
It was similar after the 2008 financial crisis. A temporary and mild slowdown was followed by an economic surge.
Or last year, when Trump’s tariffs hit the world, Singapore’s economy recorded one of the highest growth rates in recent history. GDP jumped by 5% on increased trading activity amid global uncertainty as businesses were adapting to American actions.
Singapore is the essential trade node bridging Asia with the rest of the world. Economic crises don’t really freeze trade—they redirect it, and the reliable middleman always earns a premium for his services.
It’s no different this time.
Featured Image Credit: adwo@hotmail.com/ depositphotos
A Reddit user writes that they experienced this unwelcome scenario: an NZXT Kraken AIO allegedly leaked onto an Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090, damaging the flagship card and motherboard. It led to a months-long warranty dispute that, according to the post, may now end up in court, with the owner…
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For years, existing consumer platforms have tried to keep users within their app by offering more services. After the rise of the AI chatbot, the trend is to have people use the assistant for both queries and actions without leaving the conversational flow. With its latest update, Yelp is letting people ask questions, get restaurant reservations, order food delivery, and book service professionals, all through its updated AI assistant.
The company debuted the AI assistant in 2024 to help people search for different services based on their problem. It is now using the platform data paired with an AI assistant to let users do more tasks.
In a demo seen by TechCrunch, the company’s SVP of product, Akhil Kuduvalli Ramesh, searched for hiking places to go with a dog without a leash; looked for takeout places along the way, with an option to place an order on Doordash; looked for restaurant recommendations for a weekend plan, with an option to check out availability and book a table; and queried about painting a friends’ new Victorian house without leaving the chat.
“We would really like consumers to reconceive Yelp as a place where they can ask questions and get answers, not just that, but also complete the action. That’s Yelp reconceiving from a review platform to an answers and action platform,” he told TechCrunch over a call. “Some of the investments we’re making will be in that lane.”
Users can select a specific page for a restaurant or service when they tap on it, or ask more questions about the business. Yelp said that as the knowledge is grounded in details of the business on the platform, the business’s website, and user reviews, there is a scant chance of getting wrong answers.
The company is hosting the assistant in a new tab in the app, which is now placed in the center of the bottom navigation bar, so users are likely to visit it more often. The assistant will be available on iOS and Android at launch and will work with all businesses, including restaurants, retail shops, and attractions. The company said that the desktop version and rollout across all kinds of businesses are slated for later in the year.
Apart from fetching information, Yelp also announced integration with external providers to complete an action, like place an order or appointment. Users can now order food through DoorDash and Grubhub, book fitness or beauty appointments through Vagaro, a doctor’s appointment through ZocDoc, and a car repair through Repairpal. Plus, it also offers a Calendly integration for other kinds of businesses that allow appointment booking.
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Notably, all these actions will lead you to a specific provider’s app or page, meaning this is not “agentic” in nature, where the entire transaction is completed within the chat window. Kuduvalli mentioned that while the redirections are the way Yelp is set up now, it might not “remain that way” in the future.
However, it’s hard to say how agentic pipelines might work with other services for cases when the user doesn’t specify whether they want to order food through DoorDash or Grubhub.
Besides the new AI assistant, Yelp is rolling out a few quality-of-life updates to the app. Last year, it launched the ability for people to scan a menu and see what dishes look like through photos other users posted. Now, users can look at those dishes within the app as they are scanning a menu.
What’s more, Yelp said that users will be able to search the media gallery of a business using natural language queries instead of keywords. Plus, the company will offer an AI-powered tagging and grouping feature for before and after photos to business owners to avoid manual work.
Electron Impressions encountered a problem that every aluminum foundry is all too familiar with: hydrogen gas seeping into molten aluminum and forming small gaps as the metal cools and hardened. Most people strive to remove those bubbles, but he chose to put them to good use instead.
Liquid aluminum absorbs hydrogen in much the same manner that water absorbs carbon dioxide. Water vapour in the air reacts with the hot metal surface, forming aluminum oxide and free hydrogen. At that point, the liquid metal breaks down the hydrogen molecules into individual atoms, which then dissolve directly into the melt. Sieverts’ law describes how much hydrogen is allowed in, and it all boils down to the square root of the gas pressure above it. So, if you boost the pressure slightly or keep the metal hot long enough, a lot of hydrogen will flow in.
However, once the melt begins to cool, solubility plummets dramatically. The gas in the solution just leaves and creates bubbles. And then, as the metal hardens, every last bit of hydrogen is pushed back out. The surrounding solid then retains the bubbles, making them permanent voids. Foundries typically consider this as a fault and attempt to eliminate it, but Electron Impressions saw a chance to intentionally create the holes and then fill them with something far superior.
He chose to work with an aluminum-copper alloy because it responds well when cooled. The combination reaches a temperature where one phase, known as theta or Al2Cu, begins to form first. So, by keeping the hydrogen-rich melt molten for a little longer, he ensured that the gas was absorbed thoroughly and uniformly. A steady steam of water vapor bubbled in through the crucible, providing both the necessary reaction and fresh hydrogen. Every single bubble left behind a thin layer of aluminum oxide. However, the majority of the action occurred within the liquid itself.
Once the alloy had absorbed enough hydrogen, he reduced the cooling rate. As the gas left the solution, the first huge voids appeared. Inside those enclosed regions, the theta phase could expand without influence from the surrounding liquid. Crystals began to form on the walls of the hydrogen bubble gradually, while the remainder of the alloy remained liquid for a little longer since its composition had not yet reached the final eutectic point. Then he poured out the remaining liquid, leaving the crystals in their own hollow chambers.
What you get resembles a metal geode. Slice it open to reveal a cavity lined with shiny metallic crystals looking back at you. These crystals only formed in the reducing environment provided by the hydrogen, thus they remained clean and free of any excess oxide layers. The amount and size of crystals vary depending on the copper content and cooling speed. More copper yields fewer thicker crystals. Less copper yields many smaller ones. Slow cooling favors the hydrogen-bubble approach, whereas quicker cooling is useful when you merely want to get the liquid out of the way and drain it out quickly.
[Source]
A new research paper from Nvidia describes how an in-development update to ReSTIR (Reservoir Spatiotemporal Importance Resampling) path tracing addresses several of its flaws. While the technology is not quite ready for implementation in commercial games, it could enhance path tracing performance by 100% to 200%.
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Every business seems to think that its customers want more AI. Yelp is the latest to add more artificial intelligence tools. The review site has upgraded its Yelp Assistant, an agentic AI chatbot, to work across all of Yelp’s categories. Yelp Assistant was initially launched in 2024 with a limited scope and then expanded in 2025.
With the latest update to its chatbot, Yelp Assistant can handle natural language queries for finding a specific local business. It can also be used to take some additional actions, such as making a restaurant reservation or ordering takeout. Yelp’s spring product updates introduced new third-party integrations with Vagaro, ZocDoc and Calendly. Yelp Assistant can also use these integrated services for booking appointments in related fields. The chatbot now has a dedicated Assistant tab in the iOS and Android apps, and it can also be accessed directly from business pages for certain fields, such as restaurants and retail shops. Support for all business types and a desktop version are planned for later in 2026.
Other AI features coming to Yelp include a personalized home page on mobile and extra photo discovery tools.
41-year-old Angelo Martino, a former employee of cybersecurity incident response company DigitalMint, has pleaded guilty to targeting U.S. companies in BlackCat (ALPHV) ransomware attacks in 2023.
Together with two other Sygnia and DigitalMint ransomware negotiators (33-year-old Ryan Clifford Goldberg and 28-year-old Kevin Tyler Martin), Martino was charged with conspiracy to interfere with interstate commerce by extortion, interference with interstate commerce by extortion, and intentional damage to protected computers.
Martino was initially identified only as “Co-Conspirator 1” in an October 2025 indictment, but was named in court documents unsealed in March. Martin and Goldberg also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct commerce by extortion and are facing up to 20 years in prison each.
According to court documents, while working as a negotiator for five victims, Martino shared confidential information about the victims’ negotiation positions and insurance policy limits with BlackCat ransomware operators, helping the cybercriminals extort the maximum possible amount.
Between April 2023 and April 2025, he was also involved in BlackCat ransomware attacks alongside accomplices Kevin Tyler Martin and Ryan Goldberg.
While operating as BlackCat affiliates, the three defendants demanded ransom payments and threatened victims to leak data stolen before encrypting their systems. Prosecutors added that the three accomplices paid the BlackCat administrators a 20% share of all ransoms proceeds for access to the ransomware and extortion portal.
Their victims included at least five U.S. organizations, among them a financial services firm that paid $25,660,000 and a nonprofit that paid a $26,793,000 ransom, as well as law firms, school districts, medical facilities, and other financial services companies.
DigitalMint CEO Jonathan Solomon told BleepingComputer that the company condemned the previous malicious conduct and noted that Martin and Martino were fired after their actions were discovered.
“We strongly condemn these former employees’ criminal behavior, which violated our values, ethical standards, and the law. When we learned about the conduct, we immediately terminated both individuals,” Solomon said.
The BlackCat ransomware operation has been linked by the FBI to more than 60 breaches between November 2021 and March 2022. In a separate advisory, the bureau added that the cybercrime gang collected at least $300 million in ransom payments from over 1,000 victims through September 2023.
AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.
At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.
Rooms come alive as thousands of LEDs illuminate in perfect time over a large 50×50 panel. Chris Maher took on this task by converting regular light strips into that massive display without breaking the bank or requiring several controllers. His finished presentation plays well on a single 12-volt power supply and some pretty tiny gear, offering professional-looking animations, text, and patterns.
Chris purchased 18 5-meter rolls of 12-volt SK6812 strips, each with 30 LEDs per metre, so obtaining the necessary components was simple. He then sliced each roll into three 50 LED portions, for a total of 54 segments, plus a few spares for safety. To provide support, he built a simple wooden frame out of one-by-two boards and some board-and-batten panels. The rest of the kit consisted of a few short sections of 18-gauge silicone wire, lever-style connections, rubber grommets, and a Gledopto 4D-EXMU controller loaded with WLED firmware, as well as a standard 12-volt power supply.
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First, he had to get the strips ready to go, so he carefully removed the connections from the ends, soldered the exposed pads, stripped, tinned, and prepared all of the wires for connection. This preliminary work made the final assembly a lot simpler. Next came the frame, which he built by stacking and screwing the boards together to form a solid rectangle the same size as the finished grid. He added some board-and-batten panels to the front to provide a firm surface to screw the strips to. He painstakingly wrote out the places of each strip, ensuring that they were perfectly spaced from edge to edge. He then placed the strips down in a zig-zag pattern, alternating direction row by row, to form a single long continuous data channel.
Holes were drilled above and below each strip, and rubber grommets were inserted to allow the wires to pass through to the back side while keeping the front of the display neat and free of connections. At several spots, lever-style connectors were utilized to connect the power and data lines, and separating the grid into four distinct data runs ensured that everything remained in sync.
The wiring was rather simple, as you just connect the voltage, ground, and data wires in that order. He utilized colored wire markers to keep track of which was which during assembly. The controller and power supply were fastened to the back with simple clips and wooden blocks. A French cleat system on the back makes it simple to mount the complete panel to a wall. Once he had everything configured inside the WLED interface, it was only a matter of selecting the SK6812 type, validating the 12-volt system, and specifying the 50×50 pattern with a vertical zig-zag orientation. Some brightness limitations were set to protect the power supply, and four data outputs were allocated to each block of LEDs. Once everything was saved, the display would respond promptly to requests for colors, effects, or scrolling messages.
[Source]
Getting to try snippets of new games without having to spend extra money at your local rental store was awesome, and it was doubly cool for PC games, since rental outlets for such titles weren’t a thing. Some of my earliest PC gaming memories involved demo discs, and now thanks…
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is reportedly developing smart glasses that could be used to collect intelligence on immigrants and US citizens, journalist Ken Klippenstein reported. The devices would help ICE agents identify “illegal aliens” from a distance by capturing video and comparing it to biometric data like facial recognition and walking gait, according to budget documents seen by Klippenstein. The DHS wants to deploy the “ICE Glasses” by September 2027.
“The project will deliver innovative hardware, such as operational prototypes of smart glasses, to equip agents with real-time access to information and biometric identification capabilities in the field,” the document states. The glasses could allow agents to compare observed subjects against existing biometric databases and identify them in real time during interactions.
Such devices could help make surveillance of US residents “ubiquitous,” according to the report. “It might be portrayed as seeking to identify illegal aliens on the streets, but the reality is that a push in this direction affects all Americans, particularly protestors,” a DHS lawyer speaking on the condition of anonymity told Klippenstein.
The deployment of such devices is worrying to civil liberty groups, particularly in light of recent law enforcement activities under the Trump administration. The FBI was reportedly directed by the Department of Justice to “compile a list of groups or entities” who demonstrate “anti-Americanism,” according to a previous Klippenstein investigation.
It’s not the first time smart glasses have come up in reports about the DHS. An investigation by The Independent last month found that ICE and Border Patrol agents in six states were using Meta’s AI smart glasses of their own accord, in possible violation of DHS rules. Congress has reportedly been notified of the DHS’s Ice Glasses project but has yet to comment publicly.
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