Vintage computing history A fully working Apple-1 motherboard autographed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is expected to fetch up to $800,000 at an auction in New York City later this year. The Apple-1 was launched in 1976, and only around 75 original models are known to be in existence today, with just six of them verified to be still in working condition.

The motherboard will be auctioned online by Bonhams’ New York as part of its History of Science, Technology & Computing sale between October 4 and 14. It carries an estimated price tag of $500,000 to $800,000, but experts believe it could attract much higher bids, given its status as an important piece of personal computing history.

According to the Bonhams listing, the Apple-1 motherboard is labeled “Apple Computer 1 / Palo Alto. Ca. Copyright 1976,” with an “NTI” stamp underneath, indicating that it’s from the second batch. The motherboard houses a MOS Technology MCS 6502 / 2977 microprocessor, 8KB of RAM, and 3 original Sprague capacitors.

The motherboard also comes with a number of ports and sockets, offering a wide array of connectivity options used during the 1970s. They include a keyboard interface and connector, an expansion connector, a cassette board connector, and an original Apple cassette interface board labeled “Apple 1 Cassette Interface Copyright 1976.”

The motherboard is accompanied by a wide range of documentation, including an original Apple-1 operation manual, original preliminary Apple BASIC user manual with a green cover sheet bearing Apple’s original Newton logo, an original Apple-1 Cassette Interface manual, and an original typed invitation to join the “Apple-1 Owners Club.”

Alongside the motherboard and the manuals, the lot includes a typed letter signed by Steve Jobs in his capacity as the vice president of Apple Computers. Dated January 18, 1978, the letter is addressed to the original buyer, Fred Hatfield, who worked at Computer Data Systems in Columbus, Ohio, authorizing a trade-in toward an Apple II 4k board for $400.

Several other hardware components and peripherals are also part of the same auction lot. They include a 1977 Koyo TMC-9M monitor, a custom power supply, a Panasonic RQ-2102 Portable Cassette Recorder, and two ASCII keyboards – an original model from Apple and another from an unidentified brand.

Interestingly, this is not the first time this particular Apple-1 has gone under the hammer. In May 2013, the device sold for €516,461 (around $671,000 at prevailing exchange rates) at an auction in Cologne, Germany. It was originally purchased in 1976 by Hatfield for around $700.

Contrary to what you might think, the best-selling cameras of the past couple of years haven’t been made by Canon, or Nikon, or Sony, or Fujifilm. They haven’t been professional mirrorless models costing thousands of dollars. They have, in fact, been a pair of ultra-cheap point-and-shoot compacts from the oldest name in photography – Kodak.

Yes, the Kodak PixPro FZ55 and PixPro FZ45 have been selling like absolutely gangbusters throughout 2025 and 2026. Simple, streamlined and in my opinion quite cutely designed, these little point-and-shoots give you genuine optical zoom lenses – 4x in the case of the FZ45, and 5x for the FZ55 (pictured above) – and 16MP stills for ridiculously low prices. And this Labor Day weekend, one of those prices is more ridiculous than ever, as you can grab the Kodak PixPro FZ45 at Amazon for $89.99 — that’s 31% off the original asking price of $129.99.

There’s a number of reasons why these little compacts have proven so popular — and it’s not just that they’re so cheap. Kodak is one of the most recognizable names in photography, with its roots dating back to the early years of the medium. So, while cheap compacts have been a thing forever, the trust in the Kodak name has definitely been a factor for casual buyers, as our Cameras Editor Tim Coleman has discussed in his piece looking more closely at the PixPro success story.

Younger generations have also been embracing the look of lo-fi digital compacts, enjoying them both for their Y2K nostalgia factor and the fact that they offer a tangibly different imaging experience to using a smartphone. The cute, attractive design of the PixPro FZ45 certainly doesn’t hurt either — it’s available in a range of colorways, from austere black to hot pink.

Shop more of today’s best Labor Day sales

• Amazon: 45% off TVs, AirPods, air fryers & vacuums
• Apple: iPads, AirPods & MacBooks from $99
• Appliances: up to $1,200 at Samsung
• Best Buy: 60% off appliances, TVs, laptops & more
• Casper: up to 30% off mattresses
• Dell: laptop deals from $249.99
• DreamCloud: up to 60% off mattresses, 66% off bundles
• Home Depot: 40% off appliances, furniture, grills & tools
• Lowe’s: $1,000 off appliances, patio & tools
• Nectar: up to 50% off mattresses, deals from $349
• Saatva: up to $625 off luxury mattresses
• Samsung: up to $2,000 off 4K, QLED & OLED TVs
• Target: 45% off clothing, tech & furniture
• Walmart: 58% off back-to-school, furniture, & clothing

OS PLATFORMS

The Ubuntu Pastebin went in June, IRC gets demoted next

Canonical is closing off some of its older tools and communications channels for users, although some may remain – just unofficially.

Back in May, Canonical’s Aaron Prisk announced on Discord that the company was closing the Ubuntu Pastebin at the end of June. Now a comment from a different Aaron, Aaron Rainbolt, says that the IRC channels will follow.

The official Ubuntu chat channels are now on Matrix – there’s an introductory site and under Step 3: Join the Ubuntu space there’s a Matrix link to Ubuntu’s area: you can either type /join #community:ubuntu.com or follow a Matrix link. (Note: the preceding link will only work if you have a Matrix client installed, and your browser can open it.) This isn’t unprecedented: the Linux Mint project did much the same back when Mint 22 came out a couple of years ago.

For the record, the Ubuntu Wiki still lists all the for-now-still-official IRC servers and channels. As The Register reported at the time, they are hosted on Libera Chat, which was set up in 2021 after the widely used Freenode imploded. For the time being, the IRC channels should remain open – but they will no longer be official methods of communicating with the company, and users shouldn’t expect any staff to be present, whether that is to help, or to moderate, or anything else.

This vulture is crossing all available extremities that Canonical doesn’t also see fit to close down the Ubuntu mailing lists, from which he’s extracted a great deal of value and entertainment over the last 22 years — as well as giving a lot of advice and tech support. That was the Reg FOSS desk’s entrance into the FOSS community. Back when Ubuntu started, Debian was famously unwelcoming to newbies, and it was around the time that Red Hat pulled the plug on its original community distro.

If you’ve never encountered a pastebin, you may be one of those lucky folks who rarely need to venture into Linux troubleshooting. This often involves reading long screensful of text. This is pain to read aloud, and novices miss critical details. The idea of a pastebin is that you can just copy-and-paste the text into a website, then send a handy short link instead. The snag is that such reams of verbiage can include condfidential info, and the very newbies that might need help most are least skilled at spotting and censoring that.

The orignal pastebin.ubuntu.com disappeared a while ago. There are plenty of alternatives, from the original Pastebin.com – albeit behind Cloudflare protection, which as we reported last year blocks some legitimate accesses. For something less transient, even including revision tracking, Microsoft offers Github Gists.

This has led to a new field of encrypted pastebins. One is the AGPL3 CloakBin, whose developer emailed us to tell us about it. You can host your own with tools such as PrivateBin, or its progenitor ZeroBin. As we quickly discovered, there are many others:

This, of course, is the real value in having an official one: users not only know where to go, but if they’re already using software from that vendor, they can also have some reassurance that they can trust an official tool. Not that we needed one, this could be seen as another demonstration of the problem predicted by Xkcd 927.

IRC and its pastebin are merely the latest examples of older tech Canonical has been phasing out in recent years. Last year, it officially deprecated its old revision control system, the GNU-endorsed Bazaar. The Breezy fork is still somewhat active, although the site has a worrying number of dead links. ®

The takeaway: SpaceXAI is offering half-price Starlink service to people living near its Memphis data centers, while the company continues to face criticism over the generators used to power its AI operations. The promotion could lower connectivity costs for households without reliable fiber access, but it offers limited practical advantage where affordable high-speed cable or fiber service is already available.

With roughly 2,000 reported subscribers since the offer was announced in July, compared with more than 250,000 households across Memphis, the discount appears unlikely to ease broader concerns about the company’s unpermitted power generation and its environmental impact.

The deal applies to residents of Memphis and Southaven, Mississippi. SpaceXAI is also waiving the upfront rental fee for Starlink’s new V5 hardware kit, which can otherwise cost up to $349. In a post on X, SpaceXAI Memphis said thousands of people had signed up.

The discount cuts the price of Starlink’s entry-level residential plan from $55 a month to $27.50. Its 200 Mbps plan falls from $85 to $42.50, and the Max plan drops from $130 to $65.

– SpaceXAI Memphis (@SpaceXAIMemphis) September 2, 2026

For some households, the deal could be useful. Residents in parts of Memphis and Southaven still lack fiber service, and some commenters in the r/memphis subreddit said the discounted satellite service could fill that gap. Others said it could serve as a backup connection for people who work from home or need internet service that is less dependent on local cable infrastructure.

The offer may be less appealing to households that already have access to fiber. AT&T and Xfinity plans often start at about $35 to $40 a month and can provide speeds of up to 300 Mbps. Starlink’s lower price may help customers watching their bills, but its 100 Mbps entry plan would not necessarily be faster than an available fiber connection.

SpaceXAI is running the same Starlink promotion in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, where SpaceX plans to build a $100 billion spaceport.

The timing has drawn attention because SpaceXAI’s Memphis data-center operations remain under scrutiny over their power supply. The company has been criticized for installing turbines without permits to support the facilities’ growing electricity needs.

SpaceX Is Offering Half-Off Starlink Residential Internet Service In The Memphis Area~~~Since we are all discussing cable and internet extremely high costs~~~May I ask if anyone is well versed in Xfinity’s high speed internet vs Starlink? Pros & Cons? Please no politics or hate.
by u/Southernms in memphis

The Southern Environmental Law Center said the Starlink discount does not address residents’ complaints about pollution. “Communities in Memphis and North Mississippi aren’t asking for discounted internet service,” SELC Senior Attorney Amanda Garcia told PCMag. “They’re asking xAI to shut down its illegal, unpermitted power plant that continues to pump out staggering amounts of harmful pollution, including smog-forming nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter, and hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde.”

SpaceXAI has said it will remove all 69 unpermitted generators. However, the company expects the process to take about a year as it brings a 1.2-gigawatt power plant online. The new plant is intended to replace the temporary generation used to keep the data centers running.

The company’s claim of 2,000 local subscribers is notable, but Memphis has more than 600,000 residents and more than 250,000 households, based on the census figures cited in the provided material. That means the promotion has attracted subscriptions from fewer than 1% of households in the city.

Hate cleaning windows? Me too, which is why Winbot cleaning robots are some of my all-time favorite smart home gadgets. These bots use strong suction to grip your windows, and roll across the surface on soft rubber treads. They spray a fine must of cleaning solution onto the glass in a fine mist, then buff away dirt using a microfiber cloth. They’re very effective, capable of removing even stubborn grime, and better yet, they’re going cheap in Amazon’s Labor Day sale.

I’ve used two Winbot robot window cleaners, each of which suits a different type of home. The Ecovacs Winbot Mini 2 is now $189 at Amazon (was $239.99), and is ideal for apartments. Its compact design means it has a much smaller turning circle than most robot window cleaners, and it fits easily onto narrow panels.

The Ecovacs Winbot W2 Pro Omni, which is now $399 (was $499.99), is great choice for larger homes. It comes with a rechargeable power pack that you can carry around indoors and out, so the robot itself doesn’t have to be plugged in while it works.

I was surprised to find there’s also a $100 discount on the Ecovacs Winbot WS2 Pro Omni, which is now $499.99 (was $599.99). This model launched at the IFA tech show in Berlin this week, and has three spray nozzles per side rather than the usual two for more even coverage when pre-treating the window, and fewer passes with the microfiber cloth afterwards for faster cleaning.

Today’s best Winbot deals

Shop more of today’s best Labor Day sales

• Amazon: 45% off TVs, AirPods, air fryers & vacuums
• Apple: iPads, AirPods & MacBooks from $99
• Appliances: up to $1,200 at Samsung
• Best Buy: 60% off appliances, TVs, laptops & more
• Casper: up to 30% off mattresses
• Dell: laptop deals from $249.99
• DreamCloud: up to 60% off mattresses, 66% off bundles
• Home Depot: 40% off appliances, furniture, grills & tools
• Lowe’s: $1,000 off appliances, patio & tools
• Nectar: up to 50% off mattresses, deals from $349
• Saatva: up to $625 off luxury mattresses
• Samsung: up to $2,000 off 4K, QLED & OLED TVs
• Target: 45% off clothing, tech & furniture
• Walmart: 58% off back-to-school, furniture, & clothing

Edifier is marking its 30th anniversary at IFA 2026 with a strong audio range spanning studio, home and personal listening.

Founded in Beijing in 1996, Edifier has evolved from a single wooden multimedia speaker into a global audio brand, with products sold across more than 80 countries and regions. Today, its portfolio spans personal, portable, home, Hi-Fi, studio, premium, and gaming audio

Rather than centre its Berlin stand on one flagship product, the Beijing-founded audio brand has built its anniversary showcase around their new,range of devices that each target a different listening scenario.

At IFA, the stand splits into five distinct areas covering personal audio, home entertainment, professional studio monitoring, premium Hi-Fi and gaming, and that split mirrors how Edifier organises its wider product catalogue. Visitors move between those zones to see the new products alongside Edifier’s existing S3000 MKII and AIRPULSE ranges.

Studio monitoring and home audio

The XR6 professional studio monitor pairs an onboard DSP with dedicated PC software to calibrate room acoustics, while a full aluminium enclosure and three-way acoustic design minimise resonance and cabinet coloration. Edifier tunes the monitor for a flat on-axis and off-axis frequency response and targets professional studios and home creators who need accurate playback.

That same emphasis on tuned acoustics carries into the M90 bi-amped speaker system, which delivers 100W RMS output with both Hi-Res Audio and Hi-Res Audio Wireless certification and connects via HDMI eARC, Bluetooth 6.0 with LDAC, USB-C and optical inputs.

The matching MW6T subwoofer adds 210W RMS output, dual 6.5-inch woofers and room acoustic compensation that adjusts bass to suit the room it sits in. Together, the pair forms a two-piece home audio system built for music, film and gaming.

Personal audio and availability

Moving from home to personal audio, the WH950NB Pro over-ear headphones pair adaptive hybrid active noise cancellation across eight microphones with dual dynamic drivers and spatial audio that tracks head movement. A six-microphone AI call system and Bluetooth 6.1 support up to 70 hours of battery life with noise cancellation switched off.

Edifier’s STAX SPIRIT headphones sit at the premium end of that same personal audio range and rely on planar magnetic driver technology more commonly found in dedicated audiophile equipment than mainstream wireless headphones. Edifier pairs that technology with wireless convenience and premium craftsmanship, aimed at creators and listeners who want reference-quality sound.

None of the new products have confirmed UK pricing or release dates so far, with Edifier expected to detail availability for each model in the months following its IFA 2026 stand in Berlin.

The anniversary showcase also includes the flagship S3000 MKII and AIRPULSE Hi-Fi lineup within a dedicated Premium Hi-Fi area. That sits alongside a HECATE gaming zone, and together they round out a stand built around three decades in audio rather than one new release.

After reporting last week that the surveillance company Flock Safety is building an AI search tool for law enforcement, WIRED reconstructed Flock’s latest search tool from code that the company sends to a police officer’s browser and uncovered key details about how the tool works.

OpenAI said this week that its Astra model, which will have a private release soon, is its first model with cybersecurity-related capabilities that the company defines as posing a “critical” risk in public release. Meanwhile, the AI chatbot platforms Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok all suffered outages on Thursday at nearly the exact same time. But while xAI said the Grok outage resulted from issues at a Memphis data center, the causes of OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s outages are unclear.

The US has been using a high-energy laser to shoot down drones near the Mexico border as part of an initiative to adopt new-generation directed-energy weapons capable of detecting, tracking, and destroying drones with a concentrated beam of light. And as part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement inquiry into the identities of protesters who entered a Minnesota church in March, Homeland Security Investigations agents have subpoenaed the outdoor retailer REI for information about every customer who bought a specific green beanie over the past two years.

Plus, research that revealed nine vulnerabilities with impacts on ATM encryption points to broader weaknesses in the software supply chain.

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

OpenAI agents on an unauthorized tear hijacked a German website beginning in May to use it as a message board for communicating and collaborating with other agents, according to new research. The incident is reminiscent of the now infamous Hugging Face debacle in which OpenAI agents in a test environment went rogue and developed a vibrant message board for collaborating on attempting to escape their containment, before ultimately breaching the open source AI platform Hugging Face in July. The revelation of the May episode is particularly significant because OpenAI reportedly learned about it weeks ago but did not disclose it. Meanwhile, last week, the company finally released a long-promised postmortem of the Hugging Face incident that raised as many questions as it answered.

This week, a new dark-web service called Nexus started selling around 153 million driver’s licenses from the US and Canada, along with 10 million ID cards and millions more travel documents and international IDs, according to Brian Krebs, a longtime independent security reporter. Krebs was first alerted to the service after cybercriminals posted an example of the files and included his license. The tens of millions of records—which reportedly increased by 400,000 over 24 hours—appear to have come from an ID verification service, with the criminals behind the trove saying they have access to a “major” verification company. While it’s unclear which company exactly that may be, according to Kreb’s report, the Nexus service was taken offline shortly after he reported that FBI officials were investigating.

The US military has begun disabling the advertising identifiers that apps and advertising companies use to track phones and computers in an attempt to make it harder for foreign adversaries to use commercially available location data to track American forces overseas, Reuters reported Friday.

The changes follow years of disclosures that US forces deployed abroad have been targeted using commercially available location data. In 2024, a joint WIRED investigation with Germany’s Bayerischer Rundfunk and Netzpolitik.org obtained an advertising dataset that identified thousands of devices appearing at US military and intelligence sites, including an air base where US nuclear weapons are believed to be stored. At the time, Defense Department spokesperson Javan Rasnake told WIRED that the Pentagon was aware geolocation services could put personnel at risk and said service members in Europe were reminded to follow operational-security practices.

Now, the Air Force, Army, Navy, and US Special Operations Command say they have disabled advertising IDs on at least some military devices, with several of the changes taking effect only this year. It is still unclear exactly how these protections are being enforced. US senator Ron Wyden and Representative Pat Harrigan are now asking the Pentagon to investigate whether its safeguards are adequate.