As communications, computing, virtualization, software development, and AI converge, smaller technology firms face customers who need expertise across multiple layers at once. Synchresis Solutions works across all of them. Its SynchresisVM project provides a management plane for KVM and bhyve with a REST API, standard disk formats, shared storage, and a migration wizard for organizations moving from Proxmox, Hyper-V, or VMware, all without per-socket pricing or proprietary lock-in.
As organizations become increasingly dependent on interconnected digital systems, the boundaries between communications, computing infrastructure, virtualization, software development, and artificial intelligence are becoming less distinct. For smaller technology firms, that environment can create an unusual challenge: customers may need expertise across several technical layers at once, while the systems themselves continue to become more specialized.
Synchresis Solutions, a technology company founded as a commercial business in 2023, operates within that broader shift. Its work spans communications infrastructure, server environments, virtualization, web development, technical support, infrastructure as a service, and AI-related technology. Rather than being defined by a single product category, its development reflects the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of managing modern IT environments.
The company’s origins predate its commercial formation. Founders Nick Giannak III and David Quinn Ebert initially connected through technology and volunteer internet-radio projects. Their collaboration expanded into web products and an internal telephone system between 2018 and the pandemic, eventually developing into work for paying customers. Doron Beit-Halahmi, known as Doc, later joined the group through connections formed in internet-radio and audio communities.
That background helps explain the breadth of technical interests within the company, but it is distinct from Synchresis Solutions’ formal operating history. The founders brought years of individual experience in areas including broadcasting, telephony, server administration, hosting, corporate IT, and systems engineering before the company began serving customers commercially.
For Giannak, that experience has reinforced the value of understanding technology beyond its individual components. “We’ve always been people who enjoy figuring out how things work,” he says. “Our culture at Synchresis has been built through years of hands-on experimentation and shared projects.” His background includes technology, audio engineering, broadcasting, and projects examining the relationship between technology and society.
Ebert’s background includes telephony, data centers, hosting, Linux, Windows, UNIX-derived systems, and IT infrastructure. His perspective similarly emphasizes the relationship between technical systems and the organizations using them. “The customer is where the technical conversation has to begin,” he says. “You have to understand the problem they’re trying to solve before you can decide what the technology should do.”
That approach becomes particularly relevant as infrastructure becomes more interconnected. A voice system can depend on networks and servers. A virtual machine can depend on storage and networking. Software development can depend on the infrastructure underneath it. As those relationships multiply, technical decisions in one area can affect systems elsewhere.
Virtualization is one example. The founders’ experience with virtual-machine environments extends back more than 15 years, predating the establishment of Synchresis Solutions itself. That distinction matters as organizations evaluate how much of their virtualization strategy should depend on particular platforms, operating systems, or management layers.
The company’s SynchresisVM project addresses that question through a management plane for KVM and bhyve. It provides a common interface and REST API for managing virtual machines across Linux and FreeBSD environments. Guests can be created, assigned disks and networks, started, and moved between nodes through API calls, allowing administrative processes to be incorporated into scripts and operational runbooks.
The underlying approach is also notable for its reliance on standard technologies. SynchresisVM uses qcow2 disk images, VirtIO devices, and Linux bridges, without placing proprietary components in the data path. It can operate on Linux or FreeBSD hosts that organizations already administer, with KVM or bhyve managed through the same interface.
The platform also supports shared storage, centralized guest definitions, and automated placement across a cluster. These capabilities address practical questions that arise as organizations manage multiple hosts, including where workloads should run, how they can be moved, and how much manual configuration is required when infrastructure changes.
That architecture reflects a broader discussion in infrastructure management: how much control organizations should retain over the systems they operate, and how portable their workloads should remain when technology requirements change. SynchresisVM is designed as software that organizations can run on their own infrastructure, without per-socket pricing or a separate vendor appliance.
Migration is another consideration. Organizations moving from platforms such as Proxmox, Hyper-V, or VMware may need to account for existing virtual machines, disk formats, networks, and configurations. SynchresisVM includes a migration wizard intended to assist with that process, while its use of standard disk formats is designed to keep virtual-machine storage accessible outside the management platform.
The same infrastructure perspective extends into communications. Synchresis works with cloud PBX systems, enterprise SIP infrastructure, cloud fax, and VoIP environments, alongside conventional server and network infrastructure. In practice, these systems frequently overlap. A problem that appears to involve voice service, for example, can also involve networking, server configuration, virtualization, or hosting architecture.
AI represents another emerging layer of that environment. The founders’ earlier technical work included software and language-related applications, but that history should not be conflated with a long-standing track record in today’s large language models. More recently, AI tools have become part of the team’s software-development and experimentation processes, alongside broader work in automation and technical systems.
For a small technology company, this breadth can create both opportunities and constraints. Maintaining expertise across several infrastructure layers requires continuous learning as platforms, standards, and development methods change. It also places greater importance on understanding how individual systems interact, particularly when organizations are maintaining infrastructure assembled over many years.
Synchresis Solutions therefore offers a window into a broader development in the technology sector. Smaller firms are increasingly operating in an environment where communications, virtualization, software, infrastructure, and AI cannot always be considered separately. The technical challenge is not simply adding another tool, but understanding how those tools fit within systems that organizations already depend on.
For Synchresis, that process began with hands-on experimentation among its founders and has developed into commercial work spanning several areas of infrastructure. As technology environments continue to evolve, questions surrounding portability, interoperability, ownership, and operational control may remain relevant well beyond any single platform or company.
Researchers say they recently found Google ads delivering a sophisticated tech support scam that freezes the screens of both Windows and Mac devices and displays messages urgently instructing them to phone a bogus call center.
The ads were displayed all over the web, including on high-traffic maps, weather, real-estate, document-hosting, and sports sites. Users who called the number were then urged to pay hefty fees, grant remote access to their devices, or divulge personal information. From August 31 to September 14, security firm Netskope observed users from 619 customer organizations click on the malicious ads, although none of them were actually scammed because Netskope blocked the content.
Roughly 62 percent of the organizations were based in the US, with Japan and Australia accounting for the Nos. 2 and 3 spots. Since the firm has visibility into only a tiny sliver of Internet activity, the number of people exposed to the ads—including those who fell victim to it—is likely much higher. Netskope tracked more than 250 Google Ads campaign IDs across at least 284 legitimate publisher sites.
“For the victim, that tradecraft turns an ordinary ad click into a browser that appears to seize up on a fake security warning,” Netskope said. “The locker fills the screen, hides the cursor, swallows the usual exit keys, and lags the browser, all to manufacture the sense of a broken machine and pressure the person into calling the number on the screen. Nothing on the computer is actually locked, but in the moment it is convincing enough to push people toward the scam.”
By now, many people, including a fair number of readers of this site, ridicule and shame people who fall for such scams. These criticisms fail to account for a sizable portion of Internet users who have little or no understanding of how computers and the Internet work. Combined with their need to get things done quickly and the growing difficulty of navigating the web, this lack of awareness makes a sizable portion of users prime targets. There’s little doubt that some critics have close friends and family who are among those who simply don’t know enough to be wary.
The move comes as parent company Microsoft continues to cull its gaming divisions.
Candy Crush developer King has signed a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) to cover its Swedish employees. The Microsoft-owned company inked the deal with Unionen and Engineers of Sweden on Thursday. It comes only a day before workers were scheduled to strike and two days after the latest round of Xbox layoffs. The agreement takes effect on April 1, 2027.
Talks had been underway since May 2025. According to Kotaku, the sudden removal of a private doctor benefit in 2024 led employees to form a union club and discuss how they could have a greater say in their conditions. The long process eventually led to a strike notice on September 15, followed by mediation.
Before this week’s agreement, King said it would not enter into a CBA. It argued that its existing benefits were already better for employees and that restructuring it under the CBA could leave workers worse off. Similar messaging has been used in the face of organizing by the likes of Apple, Amazon and Activision Blizzard. King management had reportedly described its existing model as “the right fit.”
The unions say the agreement gives King employees more influence over their working conditions and advance information about changes that affect their work, including reorganizations. While the agreement won’t prevent layoffs — something that must loom large for all Microsoft gaming workers right now — it does give staff more formal influence.
The deal also brings King closer to Sweden’s norms. Engineers of Sweden says nearly nine out of 10 employees in the country already have basic job security through collective bargaining agreements.
“This is an important step for King, the gaming industry and for the Swedish model,” Camilla Frankelius, head of negotiations at Engineers of Sweden, wrote in a press release. “We look forward to good cooperation with the company going forward and to the employees receiving the basic job security that almost nine out of 10 employees in Sweden have through collective bargaining agreements.”
LG’s C6 OLED TV series for 2026 is a marked departure from the company’s previous OLED lineups. Buyers of last year’s LG C5 series OLED models, for instance, could expect 55-inch and larger sets from that series to have the same OLED panel type and feature set. This year, however, LG’s C-series OLEDs have been split into two camps: the C6 and C6H.
LG C6H OLEDs are only available in 77- and 83-inch screen sizes, while the C6 models range from 42 to 65 inches. But screen size is only part of the story here, as the C6H models feature a new RGB Tandem OLED display panel with Hyper Radiant Color Tech — the same one used in the flagship LG G6 and W6 OLED TVs (regular C6 models use a standard W-OLED display panel). It’s a substantial upgrade for LG’s mid-range C-series and one that makes it well worth upsizing to the 77-inch C6H, the subject of this review.
The LG C6H is an upper-midrange OLED TV packed with features for the price. The 77-inch C6H was initially priced at $3,699.99, while the 83-inch model launched at $5,299.99, but those prices have since dropped to $2,699.99 and $4,299.99, respectively. Compare that with the flagship LG G6 OLED, which currently sells for $3,799.99 for the 77-inch model and $5,799.99 for the 83-inch version.
Aside from having the same RGB Tandem OLED display panel with Hyper Radiant Color tech and Brightness Booster Pro features found in LG’s flagship OLED TVs, the C6H series uses the same Gen 3 α11 AI processor as those models. This allows for all sorts of AI magic to happen, including AI-based 4K picture upscaling and 11.1.2-channel audio upmixing. AI is also used for the TV’s custom sound and picture options, which guide you through the process of creating presets based on your own audio and visual preferences.
A key feature found in LG’s 2026 flagship OLED TVs that the C6H models lack is Reflection Free Premium tech, which eliminates screen glare when viewing in bright rooms. The C6H instead has a standard glossy screen surface, though in my testing, it didn’t suffer from the same strong, mirror-like reflections I’ve seen on some glossy screens.
The C6H supports the Dolby Vision, HDR10, and HLG high dynamic range formats, but not HDR10+. LG also has not announced an upgrade to provide Dolby Vision 2 support for the C6H or any of its other TVs — a shame, given that Dolby Vision 2 can provide a substantial picture quality upgrade even for legacy Dolby Vision content. LG’s implementation of Dolby Vision on the C6H includes Dolby Vision Filmmaker Mode, and it also features Filmmaker Mode with Ambient Light Technology, which uses the TV’s light sensor to adapt the picture for different room lighting conditions without sacrificing picture accuracy.
The C6H has a basic 2.2-channel down-firing speaker array that supports Dolby Atmos, but not DTS. Sound quality is very good, especially when the AI Sound Pro mode with virtual 11.1.2-channel upmixing is enabled. Dialogue is consistently clear, explosions have decent bass impact, and Atmos height and surround sound effects extend above and beyond the screen. A WOW Orchestra feature lets you combine the TV’s speakers with a compatible LG soundbar system for a more immersive effect, and there’s also Dolby Atmos FlexConnect support for LG Sound Suite wireless speakers.
LG’s C-series OLEDs have long been serious gaming TVs, and the C6H is no different. It has a native 120Hz display and supports Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium VRR up to 165Hz across all four HDMI 2.1 ports. Other gaming-related features include a Game Dashboard pop-up menu and Game Optimizer, while the apps available through the TV’s webOS 26 smart interface include Xbox, Nvidia GeForce Now, Amazon Luna, and more.
When I tested the C6H’s input lag with Game Optimizer active using a Bodnar 4K meter, it measured 12.8ms — an average result, but also relatively high compared with other LG TVs I’ve reviewed in the past, which clocked in at under 10ms.
The C6H’s design may lack the glamour of LG’s W6 Wallpaper TV, which uses the company’s Zero Connect box for a wireless hookup, but it still has a slim and appealing look. The bezel surrounding the screen is vanishingly thin, and the set comes with an aluminum pedestal stand. While the stand itself is made of sturdy enough material, I found that the TV wobbled a bit after I had it set up.
Connections are all located on a side panel on the back, and they include four HDMI 2.1 ports, an optical digital audio output, and an antenna input for the TV’s ATSC 1.0 tuner. Two USB Type-A inputs are provided, along with an Ethernet port and IR blaster output.
LG’s webOS 26 serves as the C6H’s smart TV platform and, simply put, it seems more cluttered and difficult to navigate than previous versions of webOS. A large, ad-driven preview window occupies the top half of the screen. Below it are tabs for directly accessing Sports, Gaming, Music, and other types of content, along with an extended row of apps that you’ll definitely want to edit, since it’s packed with many offerings you’ll likely never use.
One app you may want to use is Gallery+, a subscription-based service that lets you display artwork on the TV when it’s in standby. A selection of free images is also available, and LG offers a free two-month Gallery+ trial. In this respect, the C6H is actually superior to Samsung’s S95H OLED TV. Even though the Samsung S95H supports Samsung’s gallery, there is currently no automated way to make that TV display art when in standby mode. Art Mode must be manually turned on in the TV each time you want to use it.
While webOS 26 is somewhat cluttered by default, LG does provide menu options to turn off sponsored previews and remove the large number of suggested content categories that appear as you scroll through the interface. Many of the controls and UI modifications available in the TV’s Setup menu can also be carried out in the LG ThinQ app, which you’ll need to download and create an account for when you first set up the TV.
I can’t say I found much need for the app, but it could be useful if you plan to use the TV as a smart home control hub to operate LG appliances like refrigerators and washer/dryers.
Like many other new TVs, the C6H uses an AI assistant for content searches and control, in this case Google’s Gemini AI and Microsoft’s Copilot. You can also ask either of those bots questions like, “When do trees start to show fall colors in the northeastern U.S.?” and then use that as a jumping-off point for planning a weekend getaway.
Unlike many other new TVs, using AI to generate screensaver art requires a subscription, in this case to LG Gallery+, which is a disappointment.
The LG Channels app serves as a portal to an extensive array of free, ad-supported streaming content. You can also view free channels in a grid format by selecting the Guide icon at the top left of the webOS 26 homepage. This view also includes any broadcast TV channels received through a connected antenna.
LG’s Magic Remote has now become the AI Magic Remote with the addition of a button that calls up the TV’s onscreen AI assistant. You’ll need to enable voice control to use this function, though during setup you’ll have the option to limit voice recognition to the remote rather than use the TV’s built-in far-field microphone.
The Magic Remote design, which combines a point-and-click cursor with traditional navigation controls, has its detractors. I find it easy to use, however, and in some ways it’s superior to other TV remote designs. LG’s Magic Remote even has an Input button — an endangered feature on smart TV remotes — though pressing it doesn’t toggle through inputs. Instead, it takes you to a Home Hub screen, where you’ll need to click another button to call up a list of selectable inputs.
LG has taken knocks in the press recently for the privacy controls on its smart TVs. Automatic Content Recognition is a main bone of contention, as are network security and voice recording. You can get a good overview of what all the fuss is about here. Although LG is in the spotlight for this at the moment, their use of user information for marketing purposes is anything but unique.
During initial setup, you’ll likely end up agreeing to a bunch of disclaimers simply to get the TV up and running as quickly as possible and, in the process, open yourself to a range of privacy-related vulnerabilities. In this case, it’s a good idea to visit Settings > Support > Privacy & Terms > User Agreements in the TV’s menu afterward to see exactly what you’ve signed away during setup.
I made a basic set of color and brightness measurements of the LG C6H using Portrait Display’s Calman Color Calibration software. Measurements were made in the Filmmaker and Standard picture presets with adjustments left at the default settings with the exception of Energy Saving Step, a setting that automatically adjusts picture brightness based on room lighting, which was turned off for the tests.
| Brightness (HDR) | 10% window | Fullscreen | |||
| Filmmaker Mode | 2,059 nits | 308 nits | |||
| Standard Mode | 1,979 nits | 341 nits | |||
| Brightness (SDR) | 10% window | Fullscreen | |||
| Filmmaker Mode | 485 nits | 418 nits | |||
| Standard Mode | 456 nits | 424 nits |
At 2,059 nits, the 77-inch C6H’s measured peak HDR brightness is notably higher than the Samsung S90H, a midrange OLED TV that uses the same W-OLED panel as the LG C6 series. That model topped out at 1,553 nits in Filmmaker Mode when we tested it. The C6H’s peak brightness is also below the Samsung S95H, a flagship model that measured 2,526 nits in Filmmaker Mode in our tests.
The highest brightness level I measured from the C6H was 2,210 nits on a 2% window, also in Filmmaker Mode. The C6H also delivered high SDR brightness for an OLED TV, making it a good option for watching sports in rooms with high ambient light levels.
BT.2020 coverage
DCI-P3 coverage
83.4%
99.6%
At 83.4%, the C6H’s BT.2020 color space coverage lands between the Samsung S90H (75.8%) and S95H (89%) OLED TVs, while its DCI-P3 coverage measured 99.6%. Those are impressive results for an OLED TV and help explain the rich color reproduction I noted with everything from movies to sports.
At 4.4, the C6H’s average grayscale Delta E — the margin of error between the test pattern source and what’s displayed onscreen — came in somewhat higher than the maximum threshold of 3 we look for in testing, but it was easily reduced to 0.9 with basic calibration. Color point accuracy averaged 1.4 with the default Filmmaker Mode settings and improved to 0.5 post-calibration.
Starting my subjective viewing tests with the trusty old Spears & Munsil Ultra HD Benchmark 4K Blu-ray discs, full-field white and gray test patterns showed a degree of brightness drop-off at the outer edges of the screen. The same patterns also revealed a slightly bluish tint at extreme off-axis viewing positions. Neither effect was visible with regular content, however, including black-and-white movies.
Reference scenes from the James Bond movie No Time to Die (on 4K UHD Blu-ray) revealed good overall motion handling, though I did note a degree of judder in a tracking shot of Bond traversing a hillside cemetery — something easily fixed by setting both Judder and Blur to +3 in the TV’s TruMotion menu.
Another reference disc, The Green Knight, revealed no sign of banding artifacts in shots of Sir Gawain diving to retrieve Winifred’s skull from its underwater tomb, and the same held true in dark, misty shots of Paul Atreides walking with his mother, Lady Jessica, early on in Dune: Part One.
The C6H’s excellent AI 4K picture upscaling can make high-definition images look strikingly clean and 4K-like. It had been years since I last watched Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, and when I streamed it on the Criterion Channel, the gritty New York City street scenes looked wonderfully detailed and alive on the LG’s 77-inch screen.
Blacks in the movie looked rock solid, and there was also a satisfying level of detail in the shadows. I only wish the Criterion Channel would start streaming at least some movies in 4K, but then again, that might interfere with the company’s 4K Blu-ray business, and we don’t want The Criterion Collection going anywhere.
OLED TVs like the C6H have long been a go-to choice for movie fans, but it’s only recently that OLED has become a popular option for sports as well. My testing of the C6H coincided with the start of the NFL season, and I can confirm that this is a great TV for watching football.
The jerseys worn by Kansas City Chiefs fans in the first game of the season against the Denver Broncos came across as a rich sea of red in wide shots of the stadium. Even when watched in Filmmaker Mode, the C6H’s picture looked sufficiently bright with my room’s overhead lights on, and the TV’s accurate color made the green turf look natural and the white of the Denver players’ uniforms look subtle and balanced, as opposed to a blistering, bluish white.
At $2,699, the LG C6H is a no-brainer if you’re looking for a 77- or 83-inch OLED TV that offers the best performance characteristics of OLED tech, such as deep blacks, powerful contrast and rich color, combined with the high brightness levels that you’d typically expect from the best Mini-LED TVs. It’s priced substantially lower than LG’s flagship G6 and W6 series models, while offering many of the same features, including an RGB Tandem OLED display panel with Hyper Radiant Color tech, the Gemini and Microsoft Copilot AI assistants and four HDMI 2.1 ports with 165Hz support for gaming. The C6H is also priced around the same as its main midrange competitor, the Samsung S90H, while delivering higher brightness than that model.
Opting for the LG C6H over the G6 flagship means you’ll lose out on the latter’s Reflection Free Premium tech for glare-free daytime viewing and its elegant, wall-hugging design. In both cases, however, you’re buying a TV that won’t be getting Dolby Vision 2 Max support via a future upgrade, and a LG Gallery+ app that requires a subscription to unlock its most useful features. Both of those issues aside, the LG C6H is an OLED that should be at the top of your shopping list, and is an excellent value at its current price.
★★★★★★★★★★ Picture Quality
★★★★★★★★★★ Sound Quality
★★★★★★★★★★ Design
★★★★★★★★★★ Features
★★★★★★★★★★ Usability
★★★★★★★★★★ Value
Crusoe, a Denver-based AI data center startup that recently raised $3.9 billion, has ended plans to use a new line of stationary power plants developed by fellow Denver company Boom Supersonic.
Founded in 2018 as a bitcoin miner that ran on excess natural gas from oil fields, Crusoe has since become one of the biggest builders of AI data centers, including a massive campus in Abilene, Texas, that supplies computing power to OpenAI.
Boom Supersonic, which is developing a supersonic passenger jet called Overture, launched a new business last year to sell a version of the engine it’s developing for that jet as natural gas-fired stationary power plants. Its Superpower turbine shares about 80% of the same parts with that airborne engine, called Symphony.
Crusoe had signed on to be the first customer for this business, agreeing to spend $1.25 billion on 29 of Boom’s 42-megawatt Superpower turbines. The first deliveries were supposed to begin in 2027. But that deal has since fallen apart, according to Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl.
Friday, in a post on X, after congratulating Crusoe founders Cully Cavness and Chase Lochmiller on the company’s recent raise, Scholl said the companies are no longer moving forward with the turbine launch partnership. Although he did note that other customers were in its pipeline.
“The TL/DR is that turbines are no longer part of Crusoe’s near term primary power mix at Abilene/etc., so a launch partnership just didn’t make sense,” he wrote in the post. “Boom will be delivering about 250MW of Superpowers next year to other sites, and we’re targeting 1GW in 2028. We’re grateful for the help Crusoe gave us in shaping Superpower and continue cheering for their successes. The future is long, and we look forward to potentially teaming up if/when turbines become part of their primary power mix.”
Crusoe confirmed to TechCrunch that it is no longer doing business with Boom.
“We build AI factories from the power up, and we’re bringing new campuses online across the country, powered by innovative energy sources,” spokesperson Andrew Schmitt said in an email. “As our portfolio grows, we stay flexible, choosing the energy solutions that are right for each site as its needs evolve – including turbines, along with wind, solar, batteries and the grid. While Boom has been a great partner, the partnership isn’t the right fit today. We wish them well.”
Crusoe’s initial 1.2 gigawatt data center in Abilene that was built for Oracle and OpenAI is powered by the grid, according to the company. There is also a gas-turbine power plant that is used for backup power only. Crusoe is also building a 900 megawatt data center in Abilene for Microsoft, which will be powered on-site gas turbines.
Losing its launch customer is seemingly a setback for Boom, which raised $300 million last year, largely to commercialize the new business. The idea, Scholl told TechCrunch at the time, was to use profits from the stationary power plant business to fund the development of Overture.
Scholl could not be reached for comment before publication; TechCrunch will update this article if he responds.
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If I were buying luggage for the first time in a long time or replacing an old set, I’d choose Quince. You’re getting polished, durable suitcases with reliable features, and without paying a premium for the brand name. At $270 for both an expandable carry-on and a large checked bag, it’s an excellent value.
Away doesn’t offer a comparable bundle, but its Large Flex ($425) and Carry-On Flex ($325) are almost identical to Quince’s Expandable Large Check-In ($220) and Expandable Small Carry-On ($140). All four are polycarbonate hard-shell suitcases with similar exterior and interior dimensions, capacity, and weight, though Quince’s are both slightly lighter. They also have similar features: 360-degree spinner wheels, a Travel Sentry combination lock, a removable laundry bag, and, crucially, a lifetime warranty. After traveling with both, I found them to be equally sturdy. I was also able to pack the exact same clothes in both sets, and the Quince Large Check-In actually gave me more room once expanded.
Even the designs are quite similar. Take away Away’s emblem, and it would be tough to tell these suitcases apart. Quince’s branding is even more minimal; there are no flashy logos, which I aesthetically appreciate, but it does make the bags harder to spot on a baggage carousel. Both brands offer a solid range of colors, so that’s mostly a matter of taste. For me, the more important distinction is the price. Quince gives you essentially the same experience for less money, so why pay double for Away?
To further sweeten the deal, the bundle knocks another $90 off the combined price. And Quince’s value isn’t limited to its advantage over Away. It’s significantly less expensive than comparable luggage from popular brands like July, Monos, Travelpro, and Briggs & Riley. Quince also gives customers 365 days to return unused products, which is a much more generous window than competitors.
I’m sold on Quince’s luggage, and I’m already eyeing its Eco Compression Packing Cubes ($46) and Italian Leather Pouch Travel Set ($72) for my next trip. At this point, Quince has earned a suspicious amount of my trust.
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None of this weekend’s picks had a massive marketing push, or watched by many in theaters and that’s exactly what’s make them so underrated. One turns a two-minute glitch on a cafe TV into a tiny sci-fi marvel, another follows a drifter who’s hilariously bad at vengeance, and the third gave Brie Larson her best role long before anyone knew her name. All three movies are streaming on Prime Video right now.
We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best free movies, and the best movies on Amazon Prime Video.
Genre: Comedy, Sci-Fi
IMDb rating: 7.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 99%
A cafe owner named Kato discovers that the television in his cafe can show him exactly two minutes into the future. Once his employees and neighbors catch wind of it, the fun experiment becomes complicated after they start using it to make money and end up drawing the attention of dangerous people.
What makes the movie so much fun is how far it takes a simple idea. I really like how the characters constantly test the limits of the two-minute window and come up with ideas to create a chaotic infinite loop. Another impressive aspect of this Japanese indie movie is that it was shot to look like one continuous take, with clever, seamless hidden cuts to maintain the illusion of uninterrupted action.
You can watch Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes on Prime Video.
Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
IMDb rating: 7.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 96%
Dwight, a quiet drifter living out of his car, learns that the man who killed his parents is being released from prison. He decides to kill the murderer. The problem is Dwight has no idea what he’s doing, and his amateurish attempt at revenge drags his estranged sister and her family into a spiraling blood feud with the killer’s own relatives. It’s a revenge thriller about what happens when an ordinary man tries to play executioner.
Macon Blair’s lead performance is the whole engine here – awkward, terrified, and utterly convincing as a man completely unequipped for the violence he’s chosen to unleash. Director Jeremy Saulnier skips the slick choreography entirely in this movie, leaving violence that is tense, ugly, and far more honest about what vengeance actually costs.
You can watch Blue Ruin on Prime Video.
Genre: Drama
IMDb rating: 7.9/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 98%
Grace Howard (Brie Larson) supervises a foster care facility for at-risk teens. She’s funny, patient, and able to reach kids most adults have written off, like Marcus (LaKeith Stanfield), who’s about to age out of the system. When a new resident, Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), arrives with a story that cuts uncomfortably close to Grace’s own unspoken past, she’s forced to finally confront the trauma she’s spent years outrunning.
Long before Captain Marvel, Brie Larson delivered what I still consider her finest performance right here. She makes Grace warm and tough without ever tipping into sainthood. The film treats these kids with respect without turning their pain into cheap melodrama. It reminded me that the people holding everyone else together are often the ones who need help most.
You can watch Short Term 12 on Prime Video.
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.
The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.
Part II — When They Still Understood Us
Part I looked at the slow transformation taking place beneath the daily controversies surrounding Big Tech. This second part goes back to the beginning, asking what these companies originally understood about people and how the metrics that once measured their success gradually became the definition of it.
It has become fashionable to tell the story of Big Tech as though it were always destined to end here. In retrospect, it is easy to portray the rise of the major platforms as the inescapable march of surveillance capitalism, monopolistic ambition, and unchecked technological power. That narrative is emotionally satisfying because it offers clear villains and a comforting sense of inevitability. It also happens to be incomplete.
Cory Doctorow has given this deterioration a memorable name: “enshittification.” His argument is that platforms initially serve users well, then, once users and business customers are locked in, progressively shift value away from both toward shareholders, degrading the service in the process. It is a powerful account of how platforms become extractive. But it is not quite the argument here. The deeper problem is not simply that Big Tech has learned to extract more from us but that it has become increasingly convinced that because it can measure and predict our behavior, it understands us and, by extension, the societies it has come to mediate. The failure is therefore not only economic; it is also epistemic. The metric has become a substitute for the mission.
One cannot understand why these companies now appear increasingly disconnected from the societies they helped shape without first acknowledging that, for a remarkably long time, they understood those societies exceptionally well.
Technology succeeds when it solves technical problems. It changes the world when it solves human ones.
That was the genius of the first generation of internet platforms. Their founders did not invent friendship, curiosity, creativity or community. They simply recognized that the internet had reached a stage where these deeply human instincts required new forms of expression. The web of the late 1990s was exhilarating, but it was also fragmented, uneven and, for many people, intimidating. Finding information often required patience. Discovering interesting websites depended on chance as much as design. Publishing demanded a degree of technical literacy that excluded far more people than it empowered. The internet was open, but openness alone does not necessarily produce accessibility.
The great platforms emerged not because they sought to replace the internet but because they made it intelligible. Google transformed an expanding wilderness of information into something navigable. Wikipedia demonstrated that knowledge could be organized through collaboration rather than hierarchy. YouTube lowered the barriers to publishing so dramatically that expertise escaped universities, broadcasters and production studios. Facebook addressed an even more fundamental challenge. It recognized that the internet was no longer simply about information; it had become about people. Until then, maintaining relationships online had been surprisingly cumbersome. Email was too formal, instant messaging too ephemeral, personal websites too static. Facebook reduced social interaction to something almost frictionless. Its success lay not in technological sophistication but in psychological intuition.
This is easy to forget because the platforms that dominate our lives today bear only a partial resemblance to the ones that first captured our imagination. Facebook did not begin as an endless stream of algorithmically selected content. It was, in essence, a digital address book enriched by photographs, conversations, and the ordinary rituals of everyday life. It became valuable because it mirrored existing relationships rather than attempting to manufacture new ones. There was comfort in discovering former classmates, following the lives of distant relatives, or organizing gatherings that would otherwise have required dozens of emails and phone calls. The platform expanded social life without yet attempting to redefine it.
YouTube offered a similarly modest promise. It was not originally designed to maximize engagement or optimize watch time. It functioned more like an immense public archive whose value derived from its unpredictability. One could arrive searching for a lecture on astronomy and leave having discovered a forgotten jazz performance, a documentary on Greek history, or a repair manual for a washing machine. Recommendation existed, but it remained subordinate to curiosity. Users still felt as though they were exploring rather than being guided.
Even Twitter (now X), before it became a battleground for politics, culture wars, and performative outrage, captured something important about the changing nature of public conversation. It collapsed distance between journalists, academics, politicians, and ordinary citizens in ways that would have seemed extraordinary only a few years earlier. For all its imperfections, it suggested that expertise and authority might become more accessible rather than less.
Looking back, what united these companies was not simply technological innovation but a particular philosophy of the internet. They assumed that openness generated value. The more people connected, the richer the network became. Every new participant increased the possibilities for everyone else. Economists describe this as a network effect, but the phrase barely captures its cultural significance. Participation itself became the source of optimism. The internet appeared to be validating one of the oldest liberal ideas: that societies flourish when individuals are free to exchange ideas, collaborate voluntarily, and build institutions from the bottom up.
It is difficult to overstate how persuasive this vision became. Most governments celebrated the digital economy as an engine of innovation. Investors poured unprecedented sums into technology because the opportunities seemed limitless. Civil society organizations embraced online platforms as tools for democratic participation and global advocacy. Even critics of globalization often regarded the internet as an exception, a domain where openness appeared to distribute power rather than concentrate it.
For a brief historical moment, these interests aligned. What was good for technology companies often appeared to be good for users, for markets, and, in many respects, for the internet itself. The incentives reinforced one another. Companies grew by making the network more useful. Users benefited from larger communities. Developers built new services on open standards. The web expanded because success depended on drawing people further into its richness rather than confining them within a single destination.
History, however, has an inconvenient habit of changing the problems that institutions are asked to solve. The sociologist Robert K. Merton once observed that organizations often become prisoners of their own success. Practices that were rational under one set of conditions gradually harden into routines, and routines into orthodoxies. Institutions continue refining the solutions that once made them indispensable even as the environment around them evolves. Success breeds confidence; confidence breeds certainty; certainty eventually makes adaptation more difficult than persistence.
There is no reason to believe technology companies are exempt from this pattern. If anything, their extraordinary success may have accelerated it.
The platforms that once competed to help users navigate an open internet eventually found themselves managing ecosystems of unprecedented scale. Their priorities changed almost imperceptibly. The models they developed during the internet’s age of expansion proved astonishingly effective at connecting people, organizing information, and lowering the costs of participation. The metrics through which they evaluated success, such as growth, engagement, scale, and network effects, were not arbitrary inventions of venture capital. They reflected a period during which connecting more people genuinely created more value for everyone involved. The problem is that the world changed while the metrics remained stable. A measure that once indicated success gradually became the definition of success itself.
There is an obvious parallel here with Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The principle, first articulated by economist Charles Goodhart in the context of monetary policy, describes what happens when an indicator that works as a proxy for an underlying objective is turned into the objective itself. But the problem here is slightly different. The issue is not simply that platforms began gaming their metrics, or that users learned to optimize for them. It is that the metrics gradually became so deeply embedded in the companies’ understanding of success that the distinction between the measure and the mission was lost. The metric did not merely distort the objective; it quietly became the objective.
None of this happened because a group of executives gathered in a boardroom and decided to undermine the open internet. Institutional change is rarely so theatrical. More often, it emerges from countless rational decisions made in pursuit of perfectly reasonable objectives: improve the user experience, reduce friction, personalize recommendations, increase safety, remove inconvenience. Each adjustment appears modest in isolation but collectively they alter the character of the system itself.
This is where history becomes quietly ironic. The companies that had once understood the internet better than anyone else slowly began to forget what had made the internet exceptional in the first place. They continued to believe they were connecting the world, even as they increasingly replaced the world with carefully curated representations of it. They accumulated unprecedented quantities of information about human behavior while becoming progressively less attentive to the human condition.
The distinction is subtle, but it may prove to be the defining story of this technological era. To observe behavior is not the same as understanding experience. A platform can know how long we hesitate before clicking a link, which videos hold our attention for an extra seven seconds, or what sequence of images is most likely to keep us scrolling late into the night. It can infer preferences with astonishing accuracy. It can predict patterns that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Yet prediction, however sophisticated, remains an impoverished form of understanding. It reveals what people do. It says far less about why they do it, what they fear, what they hope for, or what kind of society they are trying to build together.
That difference, almost invisible at first, is where the story begins to change.
Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.
Filed Under: big tech, enshittification, goodhart’s law, history, metric not mission, open internet
Anthropic now allows you to run Claude Code via cloud sessions without signing up for the research preview, and it’s offering up to $250 in free promotional credits.
Cloud sessions run Claude Code on Anthropic’s infrastructure instead of your own computer, so you can start a task, leave it running remotely, and return later to review the work.
“Cloud sessions run on Anthropic-hosted infrastructure, so the work keeps going even without your computer running,” Anthropic explained.
In our tests, we observed that you can start a cloud session from claude.ai/code, the Code section of the Claude mobile app, the desktop app, or the CLI using claude --cloud.
Claude Code’s cloud sessions have been available to some users via research preview, but now they’re officially available to eligible subscribers, and Anthropic is offering free usage credits to encourage existing subscribers to try them.
Anthropic is giving eligible Pro users $100 in promotional cloud-session credits, while Max subscribers get $250.
However, it is worth noting that the credits are separate from normal Claude usage limits and are applied automatically when you start a cloud session.
“If you hit a limit locally, keep going in the cloud until your credit runs out,” Anthropic said.
If you like the idea of Claude Code’s cloud sessions, you can claim the offer from Claude’s website by October 7, and any remaining balance expires on November 4.
Once the promotional balance is exhausted, cloud sessions go back to counting against your normal plan limits. There’s no separate charge for the cloud container itself.
The offer is limited to individual Pro and Max subscribers who had an active subscription when the promotion began on September 23.
Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.
When Hacktron AI recently disclosed its months-long libheif research, the researchers reached for a familiar picture that also, to some degree, hints at what let them break into OpenAI in the first place.
They pointed readers to xkcd #2347, Randall Munroe’s 2020 iconic web cartoon of all modern digital infrastructure balanced on a single load-bearing block that some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining.
The comparison is relatively easy to follow, and it has a bonus easter egg that one can take as pre-empting the hack.
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The easter egg in question is one you have to look for; if you hover over the original comic, you get the alt text “Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good, and we’ll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble.”
The irony is that six years after the comic was originally posted, ImageMagick was sitting in the exact spot the breach ran through, making its teaser something you could call an unintended prophecy bound to fruition.
The details are unglamorous but worth considering as AI safety continues to take center stage in public discourse, including recent addresses by the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic at the UN.
Hacktron found that OpenAI’s community forum, community.openai.com, runs on Discourse. The latter’s usual image checker, FastImage, doesn’t understand HEIF and quietly hands tasks to ImageMagick’s magick command for conversion, which in turn calls libheif, the library that actually decodes the format.
The version shipped to the forum was deployed via Debian and had a heap buffer overflow issue that was fixed the previous year without being labeled a potential security risk, allowing it to serve as a doorway for the Hacktron team.
The team then chained multiple exploits in an elaborate hack that culminated in leveraging a secondary SSO (Single Sign-On) misconfiguration at OpenAI’s end, which essentially allowed the forum to serve as a gateway to ChatGPT and Codex accounts for anyone with a community account who signed in through the forum.
This allowed them access to ChatGPT’s internal GitHub, where they made what they describe as a harmless pull as a proof of concept and notified OpenAI. OpenAI patched it 14 hours later, awarded the team a $6,500 bug bounty, and Discourse patched it after rating the underlying image bug 8.8 on the CVSS scale and adding sandboxing around image processing as a defense-in-depth measure.
The exploit is not exclusive to OpenAI: the same libheif and libde265 decoders reach production through ImageMagick, libvips, Sharp, standard distribution packages, and prebuilt container images. Hacktron traced them across Slack, Meta, GitHub Enterprise, Ruby on Rails, and Node.js frameworks, including Next.js, Astro, and Gatsby, suggesting that potential fallout, if not patched, is far broader than one AI company.
Hacktron’s approach involved using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 before switching to Opus 5, spending under $3,000 in tokens across a three-person team, and having an exploit ready in just two months. To its credit, the team had to trick Anthropic’s AI into doing the task by framing their own test forum as a capture-the-flag challenge, and it eventually acquiesced.
The exploit itself wasn’t something that couldn’t be done without AI, but it let a much smaller team work at a pace normally expected of a much larger one. Apparently, asking your AI chatbot nicely with a bit of trickery in tow can deliver exceptionally good results in some cases.
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Not too long ago, we could easily replace the battery on many smartphones. All one had to do was take off the back cover, take out the existing battery, add the new one, and put the panel back in place. It usually took less than a minute. But those days are long gone, with most smartphones now sealed shut with glue, making simple repairs and part replacements incredibly difficult at home. You need a solid understanding of the hardware side of things and the required tools before you can attempt something like that. Even then, a small mistake can damage other components and render the phone completely unusable.
This doesn’t mean every smartphone on the market is unrepairable. But leading smartphone brands don’t generally fare well. According to the US PIRG “Failing The Fix” 2026 report, Apple ranked last for smartphone repairability with a D- grade, Samsung right above it with a D grade, and Google with a C-. Motorola, on the other hand, bagged the top spot with a B+ grade. If we look at iFixit’s repairability scores, two smartphones, Fairphone 5 and Fairphone 6, earn a perfect 10/10.
That brings us to the more important question: what changed in the past few years that many smartphones now have poor repairability? It all comes down to new design choices manufacturers prioritize and the push to encourage users to upgrade sooner.
In the past few years, smartphone brands have achieved slimmer designs. The iPhone Air is one example, with a thickness of just 5.64 mm. That’s impressive for a smartphone packed with features. But these sleeker, slimmer smartphones can come with a downside: they are not as easy to repair. Smartphones now have components packed more closely together, making at-home repairs difficult, if not outright impossible. Newer designs rely heavily on adhesives to hold everything together, whether it’s the battery, display, or back cover. Even iFixit highlights this use of adhesives as a major drawback on most of the newer smartphones, including those from Apple, Samsung, and Google.
Adhesives do have benefits, especially when it comes to improving smartphones’ structural integrity and making them slimmer and more waterproof. But unlike screws, adhesives also make at-home repairs incredibly challenging. As for doing away with removable batteries and using adhesives to hold them in place, companies generally cite similar reasons, including stronger, slimmer designs and improved water resistance. Apart from that, even the screws used in smartphones aren’t that straightforward. iFixit notes that some modern iPhones have four to five different screwhead types, which complicates repairs.
If you haven’t guessed it already, foldable phones are more difficult to repair because of their complex designs. This added complexity can also increase repair costs. So, you may end up spending more in the long run.
All that said, it’s not like every smartphone on the market scores poorly on repairability. Some newer brands are making highly repairable phones, with Fairphone and HMD being notable examples. Fairphone, for instance, boasts of streamlined repairs and replacement across its smartphone lineup, with over 40 easily replaceable components. More importantly, these companies incorporate repair-friendly designs and provide clear guides and instructions to allow for common repairs to be performed at home.
Even Apple is moving in a similar direction, although it has links with associations lobbying against Right to Repair. With the launch of Repair Assistant, Apple has made repairs and replacements much easier. For example, professionals, or users themselves, can swap the battery on an iPhone without contacting Apple, as the Repair Assistant handles the calibration. This has, to an extent, addressed the problem of parts pairing. However, you still can’t officially repair or replace every part on every iPhone model. Newer Samsung phones, too, are relatively easier to repair, although it’s still not at the same level as Fairphone.
So, if you are planning to buy a smartphone, you know which brands or models to steer clear of, or at least what you need to check before finalizing one. Better repairability doesn’t just save you money on repairs. It also ensures that your smartphone lasts longer and, at the same time, helps reduce e-waste, a major problem the world is facing right now.
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