Meta One went live today as a paid layer across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Meta AI, grouping more than 50 extras that sit on top of the free apps. Plans already collected 15 million subscriptions and trials during earlier tests, and Meta says later waves will reach Edits and AI glasses. Everyday feeds, chats, and basic Meta AI stay free.

WhatsApp Plus costs $2.99 per month, while Instagram and Facebook Plus cost $3.99 each. Core packages those three Plus subscriptions with additional AI capabilities for $7.99. Premium grants you access to the most AI allowance for $19.99. On top of that, you have your Creator and business tiers, which begin at $14.99 for Essential, $49.99 for Advanced, $149 for Expert, and a staggering $499 for Max. Keep in mind that these charges vary by location and account, and if you run a business on Instagram or Facebook, you may receive separate bills for each unique profile.

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Instagram Plus offers a really great deal: you can stretch your Stories to 48 hours (before they disappear), use custom fonts in your DMs and Stories, receive notifications everytime someone views your Story, and even look at someone else’s Story without being added to their viewer list. Facebook Plus, on the other hand, provides personalized app icons, super hearts, additional Reels stats, and larger reactions in both the Feed and Reels. WhatsApp Plus offers exclusive themes and icons, some fancy effect stickers, and the ability to pin up to 20 chats. Backup storage and scheduled Focus Schedules are also on the way.

Core and Premium upgrade the Meta AI with additional functionality and greater limits. You can generate more photographs and videos with the Muse models, experiment with Restyle on more Instagram Stories, and utilize in-app creative tools like voice effects more frequently. People that joined up for testing used both the AI tools and the style extras rather regularly, and it turns out that Restyle and voice effects were the two most common causes.

Advanced is where all of the scheduling and operations magic occurs. You can queue up Stories up to 30 days in advance, schedule posts and Reels even further ahead of time, include clickable links in your organic posts and Reels, access exportable analytics, deeper audience insights, team seats without revealing your password, additional linked WhatsApp devices, and a slew of broadcast credits. Expert and Max push those boundaries even farther for larger teams and more corporate traffic. One thing to look out for is edits. Plus, it will include cloud project storage and an assistant that will read your Instagram analytics and make suggestions.

It’s worth noting that subscription does not remove ads completely, as Meta continues to run the same ad-supported core for its 3.6 billion daily visitors. Instead, they’re positioning these subscription tiers as a method to assist big hitters that use a lot of AI, while also providing power users and organizations with a single location to manage everything rather than having to fragment among a variety of third-party schedulers, link pages, and analytics tabs. To keep track of the rollout, the feature list will vary depending on your location, app, and account, so you’ll need to look inside the applications to see what’s available to you.

Helen Ma, Meta’s VP of subscriptions, told reporters that people who want specialized work out of apps built for billions now have a paid lane, and that free creator tools will not be cut to force a sale. Essential adds an enhanced profile with website and location slots, a bolder follow button on Reels, automatic follow invites to people who already engage, more Meta Business Agent replies on WhatsApp around the clock, a verified badge and WhatsApp Business channel after checks pass, plus impersonation monitoring.

Looking for the most recent NYT Strands puzzle answers? CNET publishes daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Strands is like a word find game, but without the list of words to find. Sometimes I see the theme and begin recognizing the answers right away. But for those times when I can’t seem to manage this, there’s a loophole: Strands lets you make as many words of four or more letters as you want. For every three of those words you find, the puzzle will highlight one of the answers. You’re still going to have to unscramble that answer, though, which can be very tough.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. 

Today’s puzzle has a fun category, with some lively words. They’re pretty easy to unscramble once you pick up on the theme. Read on for hints and all the answers.

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Hard not to notice.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Showy or glitzy.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints, but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• CASE, CHIN, STIR, SHACK, HACK, LACK, LACE, LACY, TRICK, RICE

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the “spangram,” a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight, but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• JAZZY, VIVID, BRIGHT, FLASHY, VIBRANT, STRIKING

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is EYECATCHING. To find it, start with the E that’s the first letter on the top row, and wind down, over, and then down again.

CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the ’70s and ’80s,” as well as “The Totally Sweet ’90s.” She’s been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She’s Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she’ll be first in line.

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There is a particular kind of question that families postpone for years. It is difficult not because the answer is secret, but because the question is too large: Tell me about your life.

Faced with it, even a willing storyteller may retreat into generalities. A childhood becomes “happy”. A marriage was “good”. A migration, a war, a career, a grief, all reduced to a few durable adjectives. The trouble is not necessarily memory. Often, it is form.

From weekly prompts to voice

Storyworth began as a family project. Nick Baum recorded his 82-year-old father’s answers; in 2013, he and Krista Baum founded the family-owned company. Its established format is deliberately incremental: a storyteller receives regular questions, responds over time, and eventually turns those responses and photographs into a hardcover book. Rather than demanding an autobiography all at once, the service divides a life into scenes small enough to enter.

The original Storyworth model centered on written responses. A storyteller could answer a weekly prompt by replying to an email or using a Storyworth account. That route remains available.

With its newer voice features, however, Storyworth is adding a technological layer between memory and the finished memoir: software can now record, transcribe, prompt and help structure the recollection before it reaches the page.

Story Calls, Magic Interviews and Family Calls

The first step in that shift came in 2024 with Story Calls. Storyworth first enabled phone recording in 2013, initially relying on human transcription. In 2024, the company added automated transcription. Today, Story Calls lets a storyteller answer by phone, including on a landline, with the call transcribed word for word.

The distinction matters. A verbatim transcript preserves the loops, digressions and idiosyncratic phrasing of speech, even when the result is less orderly than conventional prose. The storyteller can later revise the text or add photographs, but the initial record begins with the spoken answer rather than a rewritten version of it.

In early 2026, Storyworth added two more conversational formats. Magic Interviews guides a storyteller through a phone conversation and asks follow-up questions. When the call ends, the exchange is shaped into a written narrative and added to the memoir.

Family Calls brings another person (a relative or friend) into the conversation, allowing that person to ask questions, contribute memories and help direct the story. The recording preserves both voices, while Storyworth adds a cleaned-up transcript of the conversation to the memoir.

These are small product distinctions, but they produce different kinds of documents. Story Calls privileges fidelity to speech. Magic Interviews privileges structure. Family Calls introduces relationship itself as a source.

A daughter may remember the name of a neighbour her father has omitted. A grandchild may ask why a detail mattered, rather than merely what happened. One person’s recollection can become more specific when another person is present to recognise the gaps.

Every question is a frame

That does not mean guided conversation produces a deeper or truer memory. Interviews are never neutral containers. Every question places a frame around the past, and every follow-up makes one path more visible while leaving others unexplored.

A polished narrative is also not the same object as a verbatim transcript. The first may be clearer and more readable; the second may preserve more of the speaker’s manner.

Storyworth’s expanded system is interesting partly because it makes those choices visible. Families are not simply deciding what to preserve. They are deciding how much shaping should occur between speech and page.

The more consequential shift is that Storyworth is no longer only giving families a place to store finished recollections. In Story Calls, software transcribes; in Magic Interviews, it asks follow-up questions and helps shape the conversation into a polished narrative; in Family Calls, it preserves a two-person conversation as a cleaned-up transcript. The product is beginning to mediate the act of remembering, not merely preserve its result.

Remembering is uneven. People contradict themselves, circle back, pause, misplace dates and discover the meaning of an event halfway through describing it. A useful family archive cannot eliminate that instability; it can only decide what to do with it.

A book with a second record behind it

Storyworth’s answer is layered preservation. Stories can be edited and supplemented with photographs after a call. Friends and family with access to the project can listen through a private podcast feed.

In the finished hardcover, a QR code takes authorised readers to the Memoir project page, with stories and available recordings; a downloadable audiobook is included. The result is neither simply a book nor simply an audio archive. It is a printed narrative with a second record behind it: the actual sound of the person speaking.

That hybrid model also creates a distinctly digital dependency: the book is physical, but access to the linked recordings is mediated through Storyworth’s platform.

Voice carries information that transcription cannot fully absorb. It contains pace, accent, hesitation and emphasis. It reveals where someone laughs before reaching the end of a sentence, where certainty weakens, where a familiar story still catches in the throat.

None of this guarantees intimacy. A recording can be formal, guarded or repetitive. Yet it preserves the physical event of telling: breath passing through a particular body at a particular moment.

Why the telephone works

That quality makes the telephone an unexpectedly apt instrument for family history. It is ordinary enough not to feel ceremonial. It does not require a studio, specialised equipment or, in Storyworth’s system, even a smartphone.

The same device used for routine check-ins can become the site where a memory is prompted, questioned, recorded and transferred into a more durable form.

The limits of a designed archive

There is a tension here that Storyworth cannot entirely resolve. The service turns private recollection into a designed process, and design always influences outcome.

Weekly prompts encourage continuity, but they also divide a life according to the questions selected. Guided interviews can draw out detail, but they may also smooth the disorder from which a person’s way of remembering becomes visible.

A family memoir is not the whole life. It is a sequence of chosen entrances.

Still, that limitation belongs to every archive. Photographs exclude what stood outside the frame. Letters preserve what someone was willing to write. Home videos favour occasions when a camera was present. Storyworth’s voice tools add another kind of partial evidence: not merely what a person remembered, but how the memory emerged in conversation.

The phrase “family legacy” is often used as though inheritance were a finished object passed intact from one generation to the next. In practice, it is usually assembled from fragments: a name written on the back of a photograph, an anecdote repeated at dinner, a voicemail no one meant to save.

When software joins the act of remembering

Storyworth’s newer features show how consumer software can move from storing memory to participating in how it is elicited and organised. A question is asked, a voice is recorded, a transcript is generated, and a conversation can be reshaped into narrative. Each step adds convenience, but each also adds another layer of design between the remembered event and the archive that survives it.

That makes Storyworth interesting beyond the family-memoir market. It points to a larger question for consumer technology: what happens when software becomes an active intermediary in human acts that once seemed too personal to automate? In this case, the act is remembering.

The inheritance is still human. The system helping to produce it increasingly is not.

The cybersecurity start-up aims to fight AI hackers using AI-powered innovations.

Exein, an Italy-headquartered cybersecurity start-up that protects smart, connected devices from hackers, has joined the global collection of unicorns post a $270m funding round that brought the company to a $1.7bn valuation. The round was led by Headline, with participation from Sofina, Goldman Sachs and others.

Established in Rome in 2018 by CEO Gianni Cuozzo, Exein has additional offices in Germany, Taiwan and the US. The company builds technology to secure hardware at the processor level and that is embedded in 2bn chips globally. Consumers include Nvidia, AWS and Mediatek, among others. 

Cuozzo told the Financial Times that the new investment is necessary, in part, to enable the organisation to compete on a global scale for limited cybersecurity and computing professionals.

The cybersecurity start-up aims to fight AI hackers using AI-powered innovations. Additionally, Exein intends to release its own foundational model for physical AI security in 2027.

Cuozzo explained: “We are moving from having security software to having a secure model that is running constantly on the device and will automatically react to attacks.”

He added: “Right now, I think the hackers have the edge.” Exein’s plan is to use embedded AI technology to combat threats and provide “machine-based protection in a world of machine-based attacks”. 

As the world becomes more digitally connected and advanced, the risk of cybersecurity breaches is increasing. 12 Irish account holders are among the 680 global consumers with Revolut who recently had their sensitive data exposed. 

Late last week, OpenAI’s Sam Altman announced that the company will not be launching its initial public offering this year. “Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,” he said. 

He added that there is much to be done in the way of safety, alignment and showing how the industry and governments can work together on AI regulation before OpenAI is ready to go public. 

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Photo credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has released one of its largest public views yet, a near-infrared mosaic of IC 348, a star-forming region 1,000 light-years away in Perseus. Cold molecular hydrogen in that cloud is still collapsing into new stars, and Webb’s NIRCam turned the scene into a wide, crowded field of young suns, leftover dust, and objects so small they sit uncomfortably close to the planet side of the ledger.

A thousand light-years apart, you can see the difference, since Webb has the resolution to detect not just the luminous cluster but also the faint stragglers lurking in the filaments. The smallest proper stars will have a mass of about 8% that of the Sun. If you have anything smaller than that growing in the same manner that our sun does, by gravity dragging a cloud in on itself, you have a brown dwarf: it can’t get hot enough internally to fuse hydrogen properly, though many of them do burn deuterium for a short time in the beginning. A 2022 hunt in this same region with Webb found brown dwarfs with masses 3 to 4 times that of Jupiter, followed by some deeper NIRCam imagery in 2024 and NIRSpec spectra in 2025 under General Observer program 4866, which lowered the floor even further. Several of the objects were discovered to weigh around twice Jupiter’s mass, or 0.19% of the Sun’s mass, making them the least massive brown dwarfs on record. That effectively negates what many of the formation models have to say on the subject.

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The researchers behind this hunt, Kevin Luhman of Penn State and Catarina Alves de Oliveira of the ESA, undertook the legwork. They selected the candidates based on color and brightness in the NIRCam frame, then weighed them using spectroscopy. One of the lightest new objects also appears to have a disk surrounding it. That leads to a simple but scary thought: planets may be developing around an object with the same mass as a planet. The spectra of the lightest brown dwarfs also revealed another surprise, which the team believes is an unnamed hydrocarbon composed only of hydrogen and carbon. This signal is only found in the most extreme objects, prompting the scientists to consider assigning these brown dwarfs their own spectral class.

NIRCam pieced together this mosaic using filters F162M, F182M, F360M, and F444W during observations on August 30th, 2024. The resulting product is a pretty enormous image, 16 by 20 arcminutes, which ranks as one of Webb’s largest releases to date. With tens of thousands of pixels to work with on each side, it’s no surprise this image is so detailed. Because we’re gazing in near-infrared light, the dust clouds become transparent rather than obscuring the view. As a result, young stars appear all over the place, faint outflows can be seen speeding through gas, and embedded sources glow brightly from within thicker knots of gas and dust. Even more intriguing, the mosaic’s background includes spiral galaxies and a gravitational lens, indicating that Webb is seeing not only into the clouds, but also back at the nursery.

The heavy lifting is taking place in the upper right corner of the building site. A dense cluster of protostars is hard at work right there, with many of them spewing out jets that collide with remaining gas and dust, illuminating the vicinity as Herbig-Haro objects. One such object, HH 797, extends out in a long, thin horizontal line before separating into two protostars with parallel outflows. Right next to it, HH 211 has a rather unusual propeller form, with a narrow jet paired with a larger wind. Both of those objects appeared in previous Webb releases, but this new mosaic places them in context: two bright patches in a much larger factory that is still producing stars, dead stars, and possibly the building blocks of planets orbiting objects only slightly larger than Jupiter.

• Salesforce has revealed Ace, a new AI agent for the TSA
• Ace should take the pressure of answering basic questions off human agents
• Ace has already resolved 96% of basic inquiries so far

Salesforce has built the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) a new AI agent to try and help streamline travel for passengers everywhere.

Ace, a new AI agent built with Salesforce’s Public Sector Solutions platform, has been live for several months now, helping the TSA deal with traveller requests and inquiries.

Most homes collect dust, crumbs, and pet hair faster than anyone wants to admit. Roborock’s Q7 M5, priced at $149.98 (was $230), is all around vacuum-and-mop combo aimed at that daily drift, pairing 10,000 Pa of HyperForce suction with a detachable mop pad so floors get a pass without you dragging out a stick vac after dinner.

This vacuum performs best under suction. Independent tests have placed this model at the top of the market when it comes to sucking up fine debris and carpet, particularly minute particles. The inclusion of a comb on the main roller and a tangle-resistant side brush has greatly reduced hair tangles, which tend to coil around this device and force you to flip it over every time it runs. Pet hair still likes to wrap around the roller every now and again, but the dual system is intended to remove as much of it as possible before it becomes a major maintenance headache. When it detects a rug, Carpet Boost activates more power, and then reduces the volume on hard floors to avoid blasting through the entire home.

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LiDAR sits on top, mapping the room all at once before beginning to clean. It doesn’t merely bounce off furniture until the battery runs out; instead, it follows a grid, and when you move to a new floor, it remembers the previous configuration, so you can simply carry it upstairs and let it go to work. The Roborock app allows you to configure a variety of custom jobs, including no-go zones, one-room jobs, scheduled runs, and even suction and water flow settings. If you don’t want to use your phone, simply tell Alexa or Google Assistant to start it. The only catch is that object avoidance is just infrared, so you’ll still have to pick up the occasional sock or charging wire before letting it go.

The mopping side of this combo is fairly quiet, and it’s very clear about what it can and cannot accomplish. The stationary microfibre pad simply drags behind the body, while the water tank, similar to a luxury coffee maker, calculates out the appropriate amount of water at low, medium, or high settings. Kitchen tile and sealed wood receive a pleasant wet treatment that removes any debris left by the vacuum. The tank carries around 270ml of water and a 400ml dustbin in one of those convenient side-mounted modules. That’s enough for a typical single-story clean, but don’t expect a week of hands-off service.

The 3,200 mAh battery pack’s runtime ranges from 150 to 180 minutes, depending on how you use it. In actual life, a typical mixed vacuum-and-mop run will cover around 1,000 square feet before returning to its small port to recharge. The body measures 12.8 inches across and 3.9 inches tall, and weighs only 7.28 pounds, making it easy to transport between floors or tuck under a sofa or two. Noise levels are fair, ranging from the mid-60s to low-80s dB; the mopping setting is your best bet if someone is still working in the adjacent room.