It did so in just five years.

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Today is Juneteenth, a U.S. federal holiday marking the end of slavery in the United States. 

About 10 years ago, there was a lot of chatter about who was winning the self-driving car race. One of the problems with that debate — besides assuming there would be just one winner — was that no one had a reliable way to measure it. This was an early era filled with a lot of demos and capital, but little substance — at least what the public, and folks like myself, had access to. 

Advisory and research startup Autnmy AI has developed a generative AI platform to create a benchmarking system that evaluates and ranks autonomous vehicle companies in an effort to answer that question in real time. And this week, the startup released its Road to Autonomy Index, which searches relevant global public databases, including federal and state reports, SEC documents, public exchanges, and other data. The system weighs the company’s operations, scale, revenue, commercial partnerships, manufacturing, and safety record based on that data and provides an update every 12 hours. There are four indices that rank robotaxis, autonomous driving licensing companies, autonomous trucks, and delivery bots.

One important note, per Autnmy AI co-founder Rob Grant, the AI platform doesn’t just scrape information off the internet. “We agreed early on, we don’t scrape information,” he said. “If it’s publicly available or if it’s available under a Creative Commons license, we will use that information. We do have some license data that we pay folks for, and under that agreement too.”

The indices take a global approach, which produces some interesting results. One of the initial takeaways that made an impression on Grant was China’s stronger ranking across multiple categories.

As of Friday, the robotaxi leader was not Waymo. It was China’s Baidu Apollo Go program — just barely. Waymo was in the secondary position, followed by Chinese companies Pony.ai and WeRide. Tesla was in the fifth position. 

A little bird

I was reminded recently by a little bird to keep an eye on the Texas automated vehicle tracker tool that launched in May. And I am glad they did; looks like Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox are building up their respective fleets in the state. Reminder: This doesn’t mean every one of these are being used commercially. Zoox, for instance, cannot operate commercially until it receives an exemption from the federal government. It currently has the ability to give rides in its custom-built robotaxi but cannot charge customers.

As of May 28, Waymo had 577 autonomous vehicles registered in the state. It now has 620 of them, about a 7.5% increase in less than a month. Tesla now has 69 registered autonomous vehicles, a 64% increase from the 42 it had on May 28. Zoox, which had 35 registered autonomous vehicles last month, now has 43.

Avride, Nuro, and Volkswagen subsidiary MOIA are holding steady at 317, 47, and 12, respectively. 

Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, or email Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com.

Deals!

Cargofy, a logistics company that uses AI to automate freight operations, raised $11 million in a Series A funding round led by u.ventures, Toloka, and Movens Capital. Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom, and several angel investors, also participated. 

Carro, the Singapore-based online car marketplace, acquired Australian used-car platform CarPlace, Reuters reported. Terms were not disclosed.

Gatik, a startup that has developed self-driving trucks for short hauls, announced a multi-year partnership with PepsiCo. The companies wouldn’t share the value of this deal, but it does signal PepsiCo’s commitment to Gatik, which is already operating driverless trucks for the food and beverage giant across Arkansas, Arizona, and Texas. 

QuantumScape announced a joint research agreement with Honda R&D Co. to accelerate solid-state battery development and associated manufacturing processes.

Automaker Stellantis, self-driving startup Wayve, and ride-hailing giant Uber struck a deal to jointly develop and deploy driverless robotaxis.

XDOF, a startup focused on robot training data, raised $70 million from Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, a16z, Lux, and WndrCo.

Notable reads and other tidbits

A video posted on Reddit showed a driver running a stop sign and hitting an autonomous vehicle in Dallas. TechCrunch confirmed it was an Avride robotaxi, which was hailed via the Uber app. An Avride spokesperson said no injuries were reported and that data from the incident is being reviewed “to continuously refine our technology and processes, as part of our standard procedures.” When asked about the reaction of the self-driving system and the human safety operator who was behind the wheel, Avride said, “Our safety review is currently ongoing, so we cannot provide more precise details at this time.”

Tesla owners in China have discovered a workaround to the vehicle’s distracted driving monitor: tiny plastic heads.  

Over on X, folks spotted a Tesla with an authorized limousine permit sticker for San Francisco County and the San Francisco International Airport. A spokesperson for SFO told TechCrunch that “Tesla has been issued a limousine permit to operate at SFO. This is for traditional limousine operations, meaning the vehicles have a human driver. Tesla has not been issued a permit for any autonomous operations at SFO.”

Mobileye, which has pitched itself as an autonomous vehicle technology supplier, is now making moves to become a robotaxi operator. The company plans to launch a robotaxi service in an unnamed U.S. city in 2027. History lesson: Mobileye founder and CEO Amnon Shashua told me back in 2020 that to crack the holy grail of passenger car autonomy, you needed to pursue robotaxis first.  

Uber plans to launch a premium robotaxi service in Houston by mid-2027, making it the second U.S. market under its partnership with EV maker Lucid and autonomous vehicle startup Nuro.

Waymo recalled its fleet of nearly 4,000 robotaxis to stop them from driving into highway construction zones. Waymo took its robotaxis off the freeways weeks ago and has identified at least 13 instances of its robotaxis driving into highway sections that were closed for construction. Here is a detail worth noting: The software fix is “under development,” which means this issue is not resolved.

Mosquitoes turn pleasant summer nights into itchy ordeals for anyone spending time outdoors. One inventor refused to accept the usual sprays, candles, and frantic swatting as the only options. Instead he created a full-body electric grid that delivers a direct shock to any insect that gets too close. Russian maker Dani Cruster, who runs the DiWHY YouTube channel, drew inspiration from ordinary bug zappers. Those devices use two layers of mesh or grid with high voltage running between them. When a mosquito flies into the space, it completes the circuit and ends its life with a sharp crack. Cruster simply asked what would happen if someone wore that same grid.

He began with heavy-duty construction mesh, which is commonly used on construction sites. The metal netting turned out to be two electrode layers. Use a centimeter-thick PVC foam board to build the frames that hold the mesh in place. A heat gun, similar to the one used to warm up paint or drywall during a renovation, is used to soften the plastic, allowing it to be twisted into curved panels that fit around the torso, arms, and legs. The finished design resembles a jumble of old Roman armor cobbled together from materials available at any hardware store.

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To deliver the electricity, he used six miniature high-voltage converters made from inexpensive shock guns found in markets. Each is powered by two regular 1.5 volt alkaline batteries and can produce an output of around 10,000 volts. Each module’s wires link to the panel’s inner and outer meshes. The builder meticulously checked all of the connections before placing the modules directly into the PVC frame. The distance between mesh layers is far more significant than anything else. High voltage can jump through the air, and the builder had worked out that a whole centimeter of space would keep sparks from reaching the person inside the suit. If it’s too small, you risk burning a hair or giving the wearer a painful shock. As long as the spacing is just right, the electricity will remain between the layers and zap any insects that pass through.

Things became a little more tricky when he decided he wanted to create an entire suit. He had to measure and cut eighteen individual pieces of PVC, heat and shape each one separately, and then stretch mesh across both sides of the frames. The inner mesh layers are all electrically linked, therefore electricity cannot easily reach the skin. Six units are connected in parallel to power the whole costume. The battery packs will last for approximately an hour before needing to be replaced with new cells.

When testing the suit, he began with only one arm panel. Testers felt a small tickle and saw hairs stand up on their arms, but the gap prevented any serious shocks. Throughout the live tests, the builder donned dielectric gloves and goggles. He made it a point to underline how dangerous high voltage is and how you should never try to reproduce it unless you have been properly warned about the dangers.

The real trial was a facility in the deep forests outside Tarkov in Russia’s Tver Oblast, an area infamous for swarms of mosquitoes and ticks. When the user of the expensive outfit stepped out into the thick of it all, flipped on the modules, and started making their way through the woods, as the results were rather swift. Any insects that came into contact with the mesh screen simply did not survive.
[Source]

NETWORKS

Members aren’t RIPE for a new charging scheme, though

Europe’s internet registry is abandoning its cloud migration plans over geopolitical risk, but reversing course now means rebuilding the resilient, secure infrastructure it needs. 

The RIPE Network Coordination Centre – which oversees the regional internet registry (RIR) for Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia – had, like many organizations, adopted a “cloud-first” strategy that involved moving move core services and databases to cloud providers.

But, as with many European organizations, the arrival of the Trump administration delivered a wake-up call, prompting it to reassess the risks of relying on US-based hyperscalers for parts of its infrastructure.

In a blog post, RIPE Managing Director Hans Petter Holen says returning to the previous status quo is no longer an option – stakeholder expectations about the security, stability, and resilience of services have risen, among other things. 

In a presentation at last month’s RIPE NCC General Meeting, Holen said much of the organization’s infrastructure needs an overhaul, requiring a jump in capital expenditure (capex) to levels not seen in years, before the cloud-first strategy was adopted.

“To start with, we will need to replace hardware that has reached, or in some cases passed, the end of its lifecycle. This is the result of trade-offs between capex and opex over the period in which we were focused on cloud deployments, as well as various assumptions and decisions about how this balance would evolve over the long term,” he said.

RIPE needs to consider its datacenter footprint – the number and location of facilities – while minimizing interdependencies between them to allow for expansion into additional sites as needed.

Geographically redundant storage and backups are also needed, Holen said, along with a decision on future virtualization platforms that limit vendor lock-in risks.

Despite these challenges, the organization expects to complete a migration to a greenfield deployment by 2028 at an additional cost of €5 million, effectively returning capital spending to levels last seen before 2020.

To fund this, RIPE will need to balance internal cost savings against membership fees. Holen said he is aware that some members are concerned about the fees they’ve paid in recent years and don’t want to see further rises.

Yet despite this, a vote on the membership charging scheme at the General Meeting went the opposite way from what was expected: rather than switching to a sliding scale – under which 74 percent of members would have paid less – members opted to keep the existing flat fee.

Clearly discombobulated by this turn of affairs, RIPE dedicated a blog to picking over the reasons why the membership voted the way it did.

It’s worth noting that of 19,415 eligible members, only 3,421 registered to vote and 3,049 actually cast ballots, resulting in a 15.7 percent turnout. Yet this was described as one of the highest turnouts on record, falling only slightly short of the May 2020 peak.

The result was close, with 51.1 percent voting for the status quo and 48.9 percent voting for the alternate sliding-scale charging scheme. RIPE claims a swing of just 35 votes would have delivered a different outcome.

Both schemes generate the same total income, but the new one would have shifted the burden so that members with more internet number resources pay more.

In the end, RIPE wonders if mixed messages may have contributed to the result. The organization says it communicated repeatedly with members through various channels to encourage participation.

But during the lengthy process of preparing the charging scheme options, RIPE published consultations on different ideas for the base fee and various additional fees – some of which were later abandoned following member input, though not everyone may have realized it.

Misconceptions also persisted, including the belief that paying more would mean greater voting rights – an idea that was strongly opposed.

“Perhaps our initial assumption that many of you would prefer a tiered model was inflated. It is true there was a long-standing demand for it,” the blog concludes. “But we also hear from people who believe in equality over equity when it comes to financial contribution. To them, the varying amounts of resources members hold shouldn’t be a reason for them to pay accordingly.” ®

The Last Salvage Squad

Developer: Sunfish Kumano
Publisher: Waku Waku Games
Platform: Steam (Windows; Steam Deck verified; demo available), Nintendo Switch, Switch 2
Price: usually $10, with a 10 percent discount on Steam until July 1

It feels right that The Last Salvage Squad is landing on Switch and Switch 2 as well as Steam, since the striking red and black visuals seem very much inspired by the Virtual Boy. This is a 2.5D shooter in which you’ll use an array of firearms and swords to defeat enemies, some of which look like the Martian Tripods from The War of the Worlds.

I’m tempted to check this out, perhaps on Switch 2 since that version supports Joy-Con 2 mouse controls and runs at up to 120fps. I’ve never used a Virtual Boy and this might be about as close as I’ll ever get, largely because I don’t particularly feel like paying $100 for the Switch 2 accessory.

Copa City

Developer and publisher: Triple Espresso S.A.
Platforms: Steam (Windows; playable on Steam Deck), PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Price: usually $40, with 10 percent off on Steam until June 30

Copa City is a soccer game that doesn’t really have much to do with controlling or managing the action on the pitch in the style of EA Sports FC or Football Manager. This is all about the other side of the beautiful game, which is ensuring matches go off without a hitch. You’re in charge of managing the entire matchday experience across a city. Among other things, you’ll recruit volunteers, cater to different groups of supporters by setting up fan zones for both teams and place players in hotels.

I’ve played around an hour of Copa City and haven’t really found it engaging. It’s very rough around the edges and feels like it was rushed out to capitalize on World Cup hype. The interface is clunky, the game doesn’t explain its systems very well and, as others have noted, essential items are sometimes gated behind a nonsensical progression system. Worst of all was something I noticed about 15 minutes into the tutorial: Loren Ipsum placeholder text on a menu screen. Yikes.

To their credit, the developers say they’re listening to players’ concerns and working to fix the issues. I like to give developers the benefit of the doubt as much as possible. We’re all aware of games that have been completely turned around after a poor initial reaction. But with there being far more games to play than I have time for, I can’t see myself returning to Copa City. This one’s going on the transfer list, sadly.

Thank You For Your Application

Developer: IceLemonTea Studio
Publishers: IceLemonTea Studio, No More Robots
Platform: Steam (Windows and Mac; playable on Steam Deck; demo available)
Price: usually $20, with a 15 percent discount until July 3

In Thank You For Your Application, you review candidates for jobs and decide whether to bring them on board depending how well they fit a company’s requirements. You’ll check their resumes and other documents, such as internship reports and even emotional evaluations. In addition, you’ll manage your own life by paying bills and managing your mental health.

This game — which echoes both No More Robots’s own Not Tonight series and Papers, Please — seems like a timely commentary on late-stage capitalism, particularly given how tough many people are finding it to land work right now. It even seems like your character is trapped in a company town, as they can only spend their earnings from the company within Aeropolis.

The Quiet Things

Developer and publisher: Silver Script Games
Platform: Steam (Windows; demo available)
Price: Usually $25, with a 10 percent discount until June 25

The Quiet Things was in the news recently as BAFTA pulled a trailer for the game from its game awards ceremony at the last minute. The organization claimed it was “not in a position to sufficiently warn” attendees about “themes that may be a trigger for some.” BAFTA added in a statement to Kotaku that it fully supports “games that engage with difficult subjects.”

Indeed, the Steam page for The Quiet Things warns that it “contains discussion of self-harm, suicide, sexual assault/non-consensual sex and childhood abuse.” It’s an autobiographical game that’s based on the developer’s own story and explores important issues from the perspective of a survivor. That makes it more than worthy of attention.

Apple’s industrial design studio, once the most influential product design operation in the technology industry, has been gutted. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the team no longer has a true seat at the executive table, has less influence and credibility than at any point in decades, and has become a service bureau where other teams come to get what they need and get out.

Incoming CEO John Ternus, who takes over from Tim Cook on September 1, knows the problem. He is preparing a major shake-up of the design organisation and is getting ready to put his firm imprint on the team, according to Gurman’s reporting.

The decline started roughly a decade ago. In 2015, Jony Ive stepped back from day-to-day management to become chief design officer, a move Apple framed as a promotion but which began a slow erosion of the design-first culture that had defined the company since Steve Jobs’s return. Ive left Apple entirely in 2019 to form LoveFrom, a design firm that today works with OpenAI.

For a few years, Apple managed to hold things together. Evans Hankey, who had managed the studio under Ive, took over as head of industrial design. But Apple chose not to give Hankey a seat on the executive team, signalling that design’s role within the company had diminished.

Instead, Hankey reported to Jeff Williams, the chief operating officer, who had no design background.

The arrangement meant Apple had replaced one of the most influential designers in history with its top supply chain executive. That decision, according to Gurman, spoke volumes about how priorities had evolved under Cook.

When Ive’s consulting deal ended in 2022, Hankey left too, triggering a wave of departures that saw nearly every designer from the Ive era defect to LoveFrom, start their own firms, or retire. Bart Andre, Apple’s longest-serving designer who had been with the company since 1992, retired in February 2024. Colin Burns, Peter Russell-Clarke, and Shota Aoyagi all left around the same time.

Hankey went on to cofound io, an AI hardware startup with Ive that OpenAI acquired for $6.5 billion in 2025.

Williams, tasked with stopping the bleeding after Hankey left, chose not to hire a new design leader. He took direct control of the group instead, fearing that elevating one designer over another could trigger even more departures. The exits continued anyway, and at an even faster pace.

The situation became what Gurman describes as a full-blown crisis: morale declining, the studio’s influence shrinking, the historic innovation hub becoming less relevant and powerful. When Williams retired in November 2025, Apple had to confront a question it had long avoided.

The answer was Molly Anderson, an industrial designer known for her work on Apple Watch and her relationship with Hankey. Apple added Anderson to its leadership page as vice president of industrial design in March 2026. The problem, according to Bloomberg, is that Anderson had never managed a team before taking the role, and Apple prioritised continuity over searching for the most accomplished design leader available.

The bench has weakened in parallel. The team is now filled with more junior staffers from school or smaller companies, lacking the depth of globally recognised design leaders it once possessed.

Then came arguably the biggest blow: Alan Dye, who had run user interface design since 2015, left for Meta in December 2025 to become its chief design officer. Several software designers followed him.

The consequences are visible in the products. While Apple has continued updating devices on schedule, the pace of new designs and major form factor changes has slowed. Until last year, the iPhone looked largely the same for about half a decade.

The Apple Watch, AirPods, and Mac have retained essentially the same industrial designs for roughly a decade, with only occasional exceptions like the Watch Ultra and MacBook Neo.

In the Jobs and Ive era, going that long without a significant redesign would have been unthinkable.

Ternus, who comes from Apple’s product engineering and design ranks, has already spent considerable time with the industrial design group since taking oversight of the team in late 2025. He told employees in a recent internal meeting that the company is “going to keep focusing on design, because design is core to what we do at Apple.”

Gurman’s reporting is clear about what needs to happen next: Apple must find a leader capable of restoring the design studio’s prowess, give that person a genuine seat at the executive table, and empower them to rebuild the organisation and deliver breakthrough designs. Getting the right cultural fit will be difficult, but that should not be an excuse to avoid recruiting the best person available.

The challenge for Ternus is that design leadership is just one item on a very long list. Apple trails its competitors in AI, faces enforcement actions under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, and must deliver a foldable iPhone this September alongside the regular lineup. Rebuilding a design culture takes years, and Ternus has weeks before he takes the CEO title.

Whether he can restore design to its former position at Apple while managing everything else will be the defining question of his early tenure. The company has the money, the brand, and the distribution to attract the best designers in the world. What it lacks, for the first time in its modern history, is the internal culture that made those designers want to stay.

A previously undocumented malware botnet named AryStinger has compromised more than 4,000 outdated routers to turn them into proxies for malicious traffic.

Researchers at Qianxin’s XLab threat intelligence team say that the malware converts infected devices into remotely controlled “executors” that can perform scanning, proxying, tunneling, command execution, and other activities on behalf of the attacker.

“The attacker can split a massive scanning task into multiple small chunks and distribute them to different Executors for parallel execution,” XLab researchers note.

“With this distributed-like design, the attacker can efficiently complete the early “footprinting” activities, thereby providing strong assurance for the smoothness and success rate of subsequent intrusion operations.”

Apart from using compromised routers as a springboard for malicious operations, XLab warns that the malware can also tamper with DNS settings, hijacking the user’s browsing, and silently monitor and potentially steal all inbound and outbound network traffic.

AryStinger exploits older flaws such as CVE-2013-3307, CVE-2016-5681, and CVE-2025-11837, targeting primarily D-Link DIR-850L, D-Link DIR-818LW routers.

The two router models were previously targeted by the AVrecon malware botnet that Lumen communications services provider Lumen disrupted in 2023.

Qianxin’s telemetry data shows that almost half of all infections are located in South Korea (48.5%), followed by China (31.8%), Sweden (6.4%), Malaysia (3.5%), and Singapore (2.5%).

XLab researchers found two variants of the AryStinger malware: a C-based version targeting mostly outdated routers, and a Go-based one that focuses on NAS systems, but currently with a far more limited reach.

The NAS version is the most advanced of the two, featuring additional capabilities such as IP and DNS scanning, command execution, payload execution, and internal network reconnaissance through the integration of open-source penetration testing tools.

The researchers noted that AryStinger’s distributed DNS-scanning infrastructure could potentially be repurposed to generate large volumes of DNS queries against resolvers, although they did not observe any such attacks.

Regarding the NAS version’s code execution capabilities, XLab says there’s support for Shell commands, as well as Go, Java, and Python source code.

However, there are some limitations to using source code instead of compiled binaries, as compilation requires language runtimes on the host, and the process as a whole introduces noise that can break stealth.

The researchers did not attribute AryStinger to any known activity cluster, stating that “many mysteries surrounding AryStinger remain to be solved.”

Owners of end-of-life (EoL) routers should replace them with new, actively supported models, apply the latest available firmware updates, change the default administrator account password, and disable remote management panels.

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

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