The comical charm of Meta’s new AI-enhanced, smart glasses is that they’re seemingly made for someone unimpressed, perhaps thoroughly, with the way they’re experiencing life.
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Meta glasses a.k.a. “Pervert Glasses are killing the vibe
Being unhappy with life in its current state is, of course, intrinsically human and a problem that is as old as time. In fairy tales and folklore, the motif ends with a lesson — sometimes with the aid of magic, divine punishment, and maybe a witch or two — to be thankful for the things you have. More contemporary interpretations involve time travel and alternate realities, and perhaps some kind of Christmas theme.
Now, in 2026, we have glasses imbued with technological magic. The $300 Meta glasses are equipped with dual cameras as well as multiple microphones and tiny speakers that connect to an AI-powered app on your phone. This allows you to understand languages you can’t speak, command music to be played, perhaps even identify people you don’t know, and record anything you want and keep it, should you desire, forever. Having the ability to do these things, according to Meta, could make life a little better.
The problem with Meta’s pitch is that the improvements the glasses promise come at a price. These super-powered spectacles run the risk of annoying or offending or creeping out the people around you.
And worst of all, even if you’re just plainly wearing the glasses, they’re killing the vibe for everyone else.
Wear Meta glasses at your own risk
The major takeaway from Meta’s advertisements and overall promotional strategy for its glasses is that you’re supposed to wear them everywhere: Japanese restaurants, nights out at bars and clubs, on escalators (possibly to somewhere cool), backstage at concerts, at Kardashian houses, in Miami Beach, skydiving, and everywhere in between.
What these stylish commercials and dynamic morsels of marketing do not tell you is that at all these places there will likely be people who do not want to see you wearing these glasses at all.
“For a few weeks there was a trainer at the gym I noticed wearing glasses — black Ray-Bans — and he had never worn glasses before. It took me a few days but I realized they were Meta,” Sean, a non-Meta glasses wearer in DC, told me. Vox agreed to let Sean and other people interviewed for this article to go by their first name or pseudonym to let them speak freely about these spectacles.
“I almost said something to a manager, but then he stopped wearing them before I could say anything,” he added.
How not to look like a creep wearing Meta glasses
While Meta glasses enthusiasts and critics are on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes purchasing Meta glasses, both camps are actually pretty close when it comes to advice on how not to look like a creep when wearing them.
One of the main things I was told was just not to film around people. If you’re going to buy these glasses and film, you should film solo activities and not in the direction of other people. Think: ziplining, hiking, gardening, boating, and bicycle rides. The ocean, mountains, flowers, and trails do not care about being filmed the way people do.
The other thing that kept coming up was to be understanding and try not to film anyone without their consent. Because the tech’s relatively new, people are still getting used to these devices. They might not know about the recording light or might have in their heads that people wearing these things are recording everything. That might lead to situations where someone comes up to you and asks about them or perhaps even tense situations where someone thinks they’re being recorded. Being transparent about the glasses (e.g., explaining the recording light) and respecting people’s privacy by telling them what you’re recording (e.g., your form at the gym) and if they might be in the shot goes a long way.
Sean explained his unease. All around this country, people film in the gym all the time — to the point where it’s obnoxious and gets in everyone’s way. This trainer could just be following the trend, using the glasses (which are less cumbersome than an entire tripod setup) to film his clients’ form or creating content for a YouTube channel. But not knowing what the glasses are for, what the trainer is recording, or where he’s recording is what bothered Sean.
“I don’t want to be in the background of videos all over the internet or on TikTok,” he said.
There’s a little bit of social absurdity here in that we’ve been encouraged to post and have so many platforms — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc. — to do so. Meta has continually emphasized that not only do these glasses allow people to share their points of view but also that everyone’s point of view is so important that it needs to be shared. At the same time, more people posting more than ever has made people aware of being a background character in someone else’s content. And it turns out that real-life, regular people are not particularly invested in how the stranger next to them in Meta glasses sees the world.
Patrick, a writer living in New York, told me about a wedding he’d recently attended, where he saw an old friend wearing a pair. His group of friends told their pal that they wouldn’t talk to him until he took them off.
As someone who aspires to be the kind of person you want to sit next to at a wedding, this is understandable. A wedding is theoretically two people sharing the most romantic day of their lives, but it is also a well of gossip, judgment, inside jokes, and lore that’s shared by the people who are watching said couple share the most romantic day of their lives. There’s also the possibility that, depending on the wedding, the spirit might move oneself to partake in the erotic violence known as the “chicken dance” and would not want any of that recorded.
“One person screamed, ‘Ew the Kylie glasses, gross.’ It felt so cathartic,” Patrick said, referencing Meta glasses spokesmodel Kylie Jenner who, in her personal life, may or may not wear the glasses she advertises.
In addition to weddings and the gym, people also told me that they don’t want to see the glasses at restaurants, not on dance floors or at parties, and definitely not in an immersive theater setting. I even spoke to someone who started a petition to ban them from bars.
“I’m staunchly anti-photographs at good parties — the best parties in the world ban photography from the dancefloor,” said Vee, a nightlife aficionado who has owned but does not use his pair of Meta glasses anymore. “When people know there’s a camera on them, they behave differently. They start to monitor their own behavior. They become self-conscious and they start to think, Well, what will the people watching this video think I’m doing? Am I being cringe?”
Going out partying is a completely different experience from lifting weights at the gym, and both are obviously very different from attending a wedding with friends. Yet, the critique of wearing Meta glasses at all these places is the same. No matter the vibe, Meta glasses will kill it and flatten the mood. People can’t enjoy the moment because the moment is being intrinsically changed by a person who might be recording.
One of the rather unfortunate terms that Meta glasses have acquired is “pervert glasses.” This is largely due to the trend of pickup artists, pranksters, and yes, perverts, who are using the glasses to film others without their consent. Vee, the dance enthusiast, told me that it’s one more reason why he doesn’t believe that these specs have any place in nightlife.
“There’s a very significant community of people who trade videos that they’ve taken: candid videos of women who are in various states of undress. It’s just this kind of seedy underground,” Vee said, pointing out that Reddit had to ban entire forums dedicated to sharing nonconsensual videos and pictures of women at festivals and clubs.
As Vee explained, people at festivals and nightlife events are often partaking in drugs and alcohol. He has no problem with that. What he does take issue with is that no one doing these things should have to think about being someone else’s content. Intoxicated people aren’t in the state of mind where they can consent to being in someone’s video or are even aware that someone’s Meta glasses have their recording light on.
“There’s this whole kind of creeper contingent of folks who are trying to learn how to disable the recording light,” Vee said. “It’s not everybody who owns these glasses obviously, but there is a significant number of creepers who are giving the hardware a very bad name.”
Are we being too mean to pervert glasses?
The indicator light has since become a major flashpoint. The light is part of the glasses’ vibe-kill persona as it makes clear to everyone that can see that recording is taking place, and it’s especially vibrant in dimly lit places. The effect, I imagine, is like when the toys in Toy Story collapse when they see a human. That’s led to a contingent of glasses-wearers who want to disable the feature.
While it’s understandable that someone might not want to draw even more attention to these glasses, hacking the light source is something a creeper would also do. Hence the “pervert glasses” moniker. These privacy concerns are why Meta is now rolling out an update that will disable the spectacles’ recording feature if said light is tampered with.
“I think if you tamper with that, they should just break,” Jason, a 28-year-old Meta glasses owner, told me. “It’s the thin veil that makes it like, ‘Okay, at least you’re telling me you’re filming me.’ So the idea that if you tamper with it? No, your product should be bricked.”
Jason bought a pair of Meta glasses in November with the idea that he would use them to film food content and post reviews. He had even picked out a name, “Sandwich Digest,” and dreamt of its success. But on his first wear, he took them to a Japanese sandwich shop and quickly realized that his future as a Meta glasses-wearing food critic was not a fun one.
“I felt so uncomfortable,” Jason said, noting that the obviousness of his Meta glasses and their recording light spiked his self-consciousness. “But I also felt like the people I was interacting with were also uncomfortable. And I felt like they were feeling like, Okay, we both know this is weird, but I can’t say that because you’re actively filming me.”
The strange interaction Jason described is a version of the panopticon effect, the idea that being recorded makes people alter their baseline behavior, perhaps to the point where people self-regulate even when they’re not being recorded. For Jason, there was no “real” restaurant experience to be filmed because everyone was so uncomfortable with being recorded.
Therein is the conundrum: Even if you’re not using these glasses to be a creep, people still think you’re a creep, and you know that they think you’re a creep.
Therein is the conundrum: Even if you’re not using these glasses to be a creep, people still think you’re a creep, and you know that they think you’re a creep.
Since that initial encounter, Jason tells me that he’s only ever used the filming feature to capture a zipline experience he had in Mexico at the beginning of the year. He thinks he might also use them to capture hikes or excursions on an upcoming vacation, but he won’t use them in the vicinity of or to film other people — especially since they’ve been dubbed pervert glasses.
“People’s perception of these glasses now is not what it was when I bought them in November,” he told me. “And had it been then, and if I knew what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have bought them.”
Max, a Meta glasses wearer based in Australia, is a bit more keen on them but still shares some of Jason’s sentiment about their not-so-great reputation. Max explained to me that he has two pairs and wears them around 40 hours per week, mainly when he’s working, or walking and driving from place to place. Though he says he’s never had a negative interaction when wearing his glasses, he understands the backlash.
“While we’re constantly being recorded when in public anyway, there’s a big difference between mass surveillance and one random weirdo recording you for their own purposes,” Max said, making the point that the indicator light, as awkward and obnoxious as it is, could be the accessory’s most important feature.
“It’s really the only defense wearers have against the ‘pervert glasses’ remarks,” he added. “If the firmware update is successful, and the marketing around the update is widespread, I think we can slowly turn the public in their favor again.”
To be clear, many Meta glasses owners like Max pointed out that the glasses do have extremely useful features, like hands-free calling or the ability to translate foreign languages in real time. Meta also touts the glasses’ accessibility features, including those for people with reduced vision or hearing. They also offer sun protection.
These are all ostensibly helpful gizmos, and their existence seems to indicate that Meta and its tech cohort are trying to figure out how to make these glasses as essential to our everyday lives as smartphones. Perhaps, when these features become more innovative or exciting or if the glasses become so popular, the narrative around why people buy them may change.
But for now, the singularly intriguing thing about these specs is simultaneously their most publicly maligned feature: the filming.
“There are probably a million things to film with them that are probably not weird,” Jason, the one-time Meta glasses food critic, told me. “But like if you’re wearing them at the beach, I would probably be side-eyeing you because you’re wearing ‘pervert glasses’ at the beach — fork found in kitchen.”
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Mountains might be havens for skiers during the winter and off-road cyclists in the summer, but the steep inclines and declines of the roads getting up to them are no friend to the average truck driver. If you happen to live in the flat expanse of land somewhere in the Midwest that’s devoid of said mountains, it’s possible you’ve never encountered a road sign regarding runaway vehicles. They’re used to warn drivers who somehow lost the ability to slow down (i.e., failed brakes) as they’re coming down the backside of a high-elevation mountain pass.
These signs are primarily intended for big rigs, but they also apply to passenger cars. Despite the rigorous federal and state laws governing the upkeep and maintenance of semitrailers, Murphy’s Law — if anything can go wrong, it will — keeps everyone on their toes. The last place you want that particular law to pop up is when you’re headed downhill, applying the brakes to maintain a proper speed limit, and suddenly they stop working. If you find yourself in such a precarious predicament, though, know that you probably have a safe way out.
A runaway truck ramp is a feature built just off the side of the road that forces a truck or car to stop safely in an emergency. While these ramps come with different design elements, most are filled with huge quantities of sand or gravel and built with an uphill slope that’s angled away from the main highway to avoid causing even more problems. Think of it as a large quicksand pit that uses a combination of friction and gravity to force a vehicle into a controlled stop.
It’s better to be safe than sorry
You’ll find these (mostly) yellow warning signs in mountainous areas. Interstate 80 meanders through the Sierra Nevadas on the way to Lake Tahoe and Reno, and I-5 crosses over the Tejon Pass (aka the Grapevine) on the way to Los Angeles. In Colorado, Interstate 70 snakes over the Eisenhower Pass at over 11,000 feet. You’ll also find these signs on Monteagle Mountain (Tennessee), Mount Rose Highway (Nevada), Teton Pass (Wyoming), and Interstate 40 in North Carolina.
The first runaway truck ramp in California opened in August 1956. In July of 2026, a new type of ramp was built along westbound Loop 375, near the I-10 interchange in El Paso, Texas. It uses a series of eight energy-absorbing nets bolted to reinforced concrete walls and will safely stop a 90,000-pound truck going 90 mph. Even with Jake Brakes, which are different from regular air brakes, trucks can have a hard time slowing down on steep declines. And while most ramps use gravel or sand, some (like the one in El Paso) are built using wire nets with breakaways. Where uphill gravity ramps aren’t possible, they’ll probably be level, but will have a much longer runway, giving the vehicle ample time and space to slow down.
On I-15 through Cajon Pass in Southern California, any vehicle can use the runaway truck ramp in an emergency scenario. Such is the case in most states, but because laws vary considerably from state to state, it’s always best to check local laws to make sure. Whatever the method used, they’ll be impossible to ignore thanks to prominent warning signage.
The Coca-Cola Company has confirmed that hackers stole data from its dairy subsidiary, Fairlife, during a ransomware attack earlier this month.
In a short statement earlier today, the global beverages giant says that it is still working to restore some of the impacted systems and operations, but most of the production in the U.S. has been resumed.
Coca-Cola disclosed the cyberattack in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on July 16, revealing that a ransomware attack had disrupted production operations at Fairlife.
Fairlife is a producer of ultra-filtered milk, protein shakes, and nutritional drinks. It operates four production facilities in the U.S., and has more than $1 billion in annual retail sales.
At the time, BleepingComputer sent a request for comments regarding the attack, but we received no reply.
A few days later, the Anubis ransomware gang claimed the attack and added Fairlife to the list of victims on its extortion site. The hacker group threatened to leak one terabyte of files allegedly stolen from the company, unless Fairlife paid a ransom.
The threat actor told BleepingComputer that they had encrypted the firm’s Nutanix systems, leaving no possibility of recovery.
As soon as Coca-Cola discovered the breach, the company reported the intrusion to the authorities and did not follow the attacker’s instructions to negotiate.
BleepingComputer contacted Coca-Cola again to validate the threat actor’s allegations, but a spokesperson declined to comment.
“The company previously disclosed that Fairlife experienced a ransomware event,” reads the Coca-Cola statement.
“This event involved access by an unauthorized third party to a portion of the company’s systems and taking of certain data, and a temporary suspension of production operations.”
Regarding Fairlife product availability, Coca-Cola says existing inventory helped cover temporary shortages caused by the production disruption, while product quality and safety were never jeopardized.
The timer that Anubis ransomware had previously set for the public release of the stolen data expired earlier today, and the data is now available for download.
Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
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Mojang changes Minecraft system requirements after 17 years, recommends 16GB of RAM for “Fancy” graphics
Winners & losers: For the first time in nearly two decades, Mojang has announced a significant change in Minecraft’s hardware requirements, a rare move for one of the biggest gaming products in history. The Microsoft-owned studio wants to future-proof Minecraft: Java Edition, but players running older hardware won’t be cheering this time around.
Minecraft: Java Edition now officially recommends 16GB of RAM, and that’s just the starting point. Mojang recently explained that the wildly popular sandbox game is getting a more modern baseline for its system requirements, acknowledging that some players with aging systems will be disappointed as the company works to keep improving its blocky experience for everyone else.
The update arrives after 17 years without a change to Java Edition’s requirements, a long stretch by any video game’s standards. After nearly two decades, Minecraft has essentially grown out of its shoes: players will need stronger PCs to run future builds – no matter the impossibly expensive costs of crucial silicon components such as memory chips and GPUs.
Minecraft’s system requirements officially changed on July 21, covering both the “Fast” and “Fancy” presets. The game’s official store page now lists a 1080p, 30 FPS target for the Fast preset, and a 1080p, 60 FPS target for the Fancy preset. The Fast preset calls for 8GB of RAM with a discrete GPU, or 12GB with an integrated GPU. The Fancy preset, meanwhile, recommends 16GB of RAM for comfortably running Java Edition for the foreseeable future.
A 16GB recommendation might sound like a lot, especially considering Java Edition currently allocates only around 4GB of system memory by default. Mojang is also updating its CPU and GPU requirements, with stronger, modern processors, either x86-64 or Arm64, now needed to properly run the Fancy preset.
Minecraft: Bedrock Edition still has lower system requirements than Java Edition, though players will need the latter to use custom mods on PC. Mojang says the new requirements are still modest compared to modern AAA games, meaning Java Edition should keep running smoothly on most well-equipped gaming systems.
The company explained: “We want to make it clear for players what kind of computer can run Java Edition smoothly. While older devices may still launch the game, they will struggle to deliver a good experience. This can lead to low frame rates, visual issues, long loading times, or performance that doesn’t match what players expect.”
Guaranteed performance on older hardware is officially a thing of the past, but Mojang argues that’s for the best. Leaving aging systems behind will let developers focus on meaningful technical upgrades, starting with the shift from OpenGL to Vulkan.
Microsoft on Monday launched its first cybersecurity-specialized model alongside a new AI cybersecurity platform at a small event in San Francisco, taking a big swipe at major players in the space — namely Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.
The company describes MAI-Cyber-1-Flash as a model that’s built “to find challenging vulnerabilities in complex codebases.” The model is built to animate MDASH, Microsoft’s harness dedicated to software vulnerability identification and remediation.
The new security platform is dubbed Perception, and it’s designed to deploy teams of agents to assist with and automate various security workflows, including identifying and remediating bugs. The platform can also integrate with MDASH.
The company claims MAI-Cyber-1-Flash is significantly more powerful (and more cost-effective) than competitor models, based on its performance on an established AI cybersecurity benchmark.
“We’re very very excited to announce our results,” said Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind and current CEO of Microsoft AI. “We have MAI-1 Cyber Flash binded [sic] with GPT 5.4 inside of the MDASH harness — which beats out Gemini, GPT 5.5 Cyber, GPT 5.6 Sol, and Mythos 5 on Cyber Gym, which is the primary benchmark that we all use. The golden benchmark.”
“We’re shipping this into production immediately,” he added.
Noting that hackers are increasingly using AI in their cyberattacks, Hayete Gallot, Microsoft’s vice president for security, described Perception as a way for enterprise defenders to “defend against AI with AI at the scale and speed that the attackers have.”
Perception uses agentic red teams, blue teams, and green teams. The red teams can provide detailed simulations of potential attacks — providing context about potential threat actors and the likely vulnerabilities that they might exploit. Blue teams are dedicated to detecting and triaging existing bugs, while green teams take “corrective actions” against those bugs.
Dave Weston, the lead engineer for Perception, described the platform as a massive efficiency upgrade for corporate defenders. “We’ve gone from this taking hours and hours of manual work from multiple specialized folks across the security organization — appsec hunters, remediation engineers, you name it — and in minutes, we have a fix for all of this. Not only do we discover the issues and prioritize them, but we have detection, posture fixing, and even a code fix.”
Though AI has offered new defensive capabilities to companies, its availability to cybercriminals has given rise to a dazzling array of potential threats.
Microsoft’s new security tools, which the company said will be available in preview on November 3, will enter an increasingly crowded field of AI cybersecurity solutions. Earlier this year, Anthropic launched Mythos, a security platform that was released to a small coterie of partner organizations through a program called Glasswing. OpenAI has also launched its own security solution in May through a program called Day Break.
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Apple is being sued by three people who claim approximately $1.8 million in Bitcoin was stolen after downloading and using a fraudulent Sparrow Wallet application from the App Store.
The complaint, filed on July 24 in California, alleges that Apple failed to adequately review and monitor applications distributed through the App Store while promoting the marketplace as a safe and trusted source for software.
Plaintiffs James Ramirez, Christopher Ellis, and Jalen Delgado say the malicious application impersonated the legitimate Sparrow Bitcoin wallet and instructed them to enter their seed phrases.
After entering those secret recovery credentials, the victims allegedly had their Bitcoin transferred to cryptocurrency wallets controlled by the scammers.
The legitimate Sparrow Wallet is a desktop application available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and does not offer an iOS version.
However, Sparrow Wallet’s developer says that scammers have repeatedly published applications in Apple’s App Store that impersonate the cryptocurrency wallet.
Victims lost Bitcoin after earlier warnings
According to the complaint, Delgado downloaded the fraudulent application on or around May 1, 2025, entered his seed phrase, and shortly afterward discovered that 1.05033242 Bitcoin, worth approximately $120,000, had been transferred to a scammer.
Ramirez allegedly downloaded the app on July 25, 2025, and lost 7.4 Bitcoin, valued at approximately $875,000. The complaint says Ramirez reported the fraudulent app and theft to Apple that same day, but alleges Apple never contacted him regarding that report or subsequent reports.
Just over a week later, on or around August 3, Ellis allegedly also installed the Sparrow app from the App Store. After entering his seed phrase, Ellis discovered that approximately $840,000 in cryptocurrency had been transferred to a scammer and immediately reported the app and theft to Apple.
The complaint also claims that Apple ranked the fraudulent Sparrow app and included it in curated cryptocurrency app collections, effectively recommending it alongside legitimate applications.
However, Apple had allegedly been warned about fraudulent Sparrow Wallet apps more than a year before the plaintiffs’ losses.
The complaint includes a January 6, 2024 post from Craig Raw, the developer of the legitimate Sparrow Wallet application, who said a scam Sparrow Wallet app remained available in the App Store despite him and others reporting it weeks earlier.
Raw also warned users to only obtain Sparrow Wallet through its official website rather than trusting an application solely because it was available through an app store.
MacRumors also shared a more recent attempt by Raw to protect users from the fake Sparrow applications on the Apple App Store by submitting an unpublished placeholder app that explained that mobile apps using the “Sparrow Wallet” name were fake.
According to Raw, Apple initially flagged his developer account for termination over alleged dishonest activity, but later reversed the decision.
Apple told BleepingComputer that it acted quickly to remove applications impersonating Sparrow Wallet and terminated the developer accounts associated with them.
Apple also said developers who believe content distributed through its services infringes their intellectual property can submit a dispute to the company’s legal department.
Customers can separately report suspected App Store scams and fraud through Apple’s Report a Problem service, and Apple said it takes immediate action when applications are found to violate its guidelines.
The plaintiffs are seeking reimbursement for the stolen cryptocurrency, compensatory and punitive damages, restitution, attorneys’ fees, and other damages.
They are also asking the court to require Apple to improve and publicly disclose its procedures for detecting and removing fraudulent applications, while also introducing warnings about the risks associated with cryptocurrency apps.
Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
What just happened? Chinese memory maker CXMT is now the country’s most valuable company after an impressive first day on the market that exceeded expectations. The stock’s initial public offering price was set at CNY 8.66 but ended up closing at CNY 49.00 – a gain of nearly 466%.
CXMT, short for ChangXin Memory Technologies, is one of several major players in the memory market that are profiting from the ongoing AI boom. At present, CXMT ranks fourth overall with an eight percent share behind Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron with shares of 36%, 29%, and 24%, respectively.
Larry Yang, chief economist of First Seafront Fund Management, told AFP that CXMT’s first-day performance reflects investors’ overwhelmingly bullish sentiment regarding the company.
The memory maker closed the successful day of trading with a market cap of around 3.65 trillion yuan, or roughly $540 billion. Fortune said it was mainland China’s second largest IPO ever, following that of Agricultural Bank of China back in 2010.
Yang added that the newly raised money will give CXMT the ability to expand production capacity, in addition to boosting its global influence. Being able to tap a homegrown hardware maker should also benefit China in its AI race against the US.
CXMT was founded in 2016, just in time to leverage the pandemic-fueled PC buying surge. Then came the AI boom and as you can imagine, hardware makers and investors have been singing all the way to the bank. Consumers, meanwhile, have been met with soaring prices on smartphones, game consoles, and virtually everything else that relies on a memory chip to operate.
Worse yet, there appears to be no relief in sight. Earlier this month, SK Hynix said it expects the memory crunch to peak in 2027 and continue through at least 2030.
According to AFP, Apple is now testing DRAM chips from CXMT for use in future products. Signing on as a supplier for the Cupertino-based company is no doubt high on CXMT’s list of short-term goals.
What just happened? Samsung Electronics has expanded its semiconductor partnership with Broadcom to focus on AI chips, bringing together chip design, manufacturing, and memory in a deal that could run through the end of the decade. The companies said the agreement covers memory chips, contract manufacturing, and advanced packaging, with total activity expected to exceed $200 billion by 2030. The partnership gives Broadcom deeper access to Samsung’s production capabilities, while Samsung secures longer-term demand for its most advanced fabs.
At a technical level, the deal is built around closer integration between Broadcom’s ASIC designs and Samsung’s manufacturing stack. Broadcom’s next-generation communications chips will be produced using Samsung’s sub-2-nanometer process, putting them at the leading edge of chip scaling, where efficiency and heat management are becoming increasingly challenging.
The two companies are also working on next-generation high-bandwidth memory, a critical component for AI systems that need to move large amounts of data quickly. As models grow larger, memory bandwidth has become a limiting factor, making tighter coordination between logic chips and memory increasingly important.
The partnership reflects a broader shift in how AI hardware is being developed. Large tech companies are moving toward custom-built chips designed for specific workloads rather than relying solely on general-purpose GPUs. That trend is pushing chip designers and manufacturers toward closer, longer-term collaborations.
For Samsung, the deal is also about strengthening its position in the foundry market, where it competes with TSMC. Securing consistent, high-volume work from a company like Broadcom could help improve utilization at its advanced manufacturing facilities.
Samsung has been trying to attract more customers for its most advanced nodes. Earlier this year, the company said it expected to win additional 2-nanometer orders following discussions with major tech firms. Its leadership has also pointed to ongoing talks around next-generation memory, including HBM4E and HBM5.
Samsung has landed large contracts before, including a $16.5 billion deal to produce chips for Tesla. But the Broadcom agreement stands out for its scope, covering multiple parts of the semiconductor process rather than a single product line.
The timing comes as demand for AI infrastructure continues to grow and become more specialized. Performance gains are increasingly tied to how chips, memory, and packaging work together rather than improvements in any single component.
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Tech Moves: Remitly names CISO; Joseph Williams leads cybersecurity ed at WWU; Yoodli gets product VP
— Jeff Lyon is now chief information security officer at Seattle’s Remitly. Lyon joins from Coinbase, where he was head of infrastructure security for two years. Past roles include security leadership at Robinhood and Amazon Web Services. Lyon also served as a petty officer with the U.S. Navy for more than nine years.
“Remitly’s mission to transform lives through trusted financial services that transcend borders resonates deeply and is a natural progression of my work building security organizations, secure applications, and safe-by-default platforms across fintech,” Lyon said in a LinkedIn post.
Remitly has seen a reshuffling of leadership since co-founder and CEO Matt Oppenheimer departed in February. Ankur Sinha resigned as chief product and technology officer in June, and Rina Hahn left as chief marketing officer earlier this month. Veteran tech and finance executive Sebastian Gunningham now leads the company.
— Joseph Williams, a longtime Seattle-area leader at the intersection of tech and public service, was named director of Cybersecurity Programs at Western Washington University.
Williams most recently served as the governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) practice director at consulting firm Artemis Connection. His varied career includes working as information and communications technology sector lead for the Washington State Department of Commerce; Seattle office director for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; and divisional CTO at Microsoft.
In 2025, Williams was named GeekWire’s Public Policy Champion for Innovation.
Williams’ experience “sets the stage for propelling our cybersecurity programs to new heights as we seek to equip and empower our graduates to be successful in exciting careers in a fast-changing technology landscape,” said Filip Jagodzinski, computer sciences’ department chair.
— Kartik Murthy was named vice president of product for Yoodli, a roleplay platform using AI to help people improve their professional skills.
Murthy joins the Seattle-based startup from the cybersecurity company Coalition, where he served as head of product for four years. He has held product management roles at companies including Meta, Google and Uber.
“In a world where many AI products try to automate workflows, Yoodli is taking a bet on humans and it’s already paying off,” Murthy said on LinkedIn.
— Phoebe Weiser is now an investor at the longtime Seattle venture firm Madrona. She joins from Databricks, where she worked as a product manager, and previously held internship and full-time roles at Microsoft.
“After building in security at Microsoft and data engineering at Databricks, I’m looking forward to partnering with the next generation of founders. I’m especially grateful to the managers, mentors, and teammates over the past few years for everything they taught me about building products at scale,” she said on LinkedIn.
— Salman Taherian is now head of AI for Grant Thornton, a Chicago firm offering audit, assurance, tax and advisory services. Taherian, who is based at the company’s office in Bellevue, Wash., joins from Amazon Web Services where he was global head of agentic AI and strategic partner accounts. Past employers include Wipro Limited and Relx.
Flexible printed circuit boards are a fascinating technique for making electronics venture beyond the two-dimensional, but surprisingly they’re not something many of us have worked with. [Jessica Stanley] gave a talk at the recent Electromagnetic Field event in the UK, exploring the different ways to make your electronics bend.
She starts with an overview of flexible electronics, detailing the techniques used with conventional polyimide substrates and etched copper. We’re particularly enamoured of a stretchable PCB made by coiling a flexible circuit round a piece of elastic. Since she’s looking for techniques accessible to everyone that don’t either cost a fortune or require dangerous chemicals we look at conductive paint and electrolysis, before arriving at using a vinyl cutter to create adhesive traces.
We’ve no doubt all noticed that flexible PCBs can be ordered from the usual fabrication houses at a price, but the value in this talk lies in reminding the viewer that this is not the only path. She demonstrates well that simple flexible PCBs can be within the reach of almost anyone, which is perhaps the encouragement needed for people to try this medium. The full talk is below the break.
ai and ml
The Open Security AI Alliance says the Hugging Face/OpenAI mess proves frontier labs can’t be trusted to properly secure sensitive systems
In the wake of OpenAI agents attacking Hugging Face, Nvidia has recruited a new posse of partners to promote open source models as the security solution the industry needs. The AI arms dealer announced the foundation, the Open Secure AI Alliance, in a blog post today, describing the mission of the group being “to ensure defenders everywhere have open, frontier tools they can trust and control.”
Partners in the group are numerous, ranging from established tech giants like Microsoft, Red Hat, HPE, IBM, and Adobe to newer groups like Palantir, SpacexAI, Hugging Face, and The Linux Foundation. What all the founding members have in common, Nvidia said, is that they agree open source AI models are a fundamental part of modern cybersecurity, just like prior open source tech has been for the infosec space.
“The United States and its partners now face a choice in AI security: whether the defenses that protect our infrastructure will sit inside a few opaque systems or be built on open models, harnesses and tools that any defender can study, adapt and deploy,” Nvidia said in the announcement.
The claims in many ways echo the pleadings from tech industry heavyweights made in an open letter to US government regulators last week. That letter, signed by many of the same companies that are part of the founding OSAA cadre, essentially argues that regulators should ensure Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI don’t end up with total control of the US AI market, and that open-weight models should be given a seat at the table, too.
The new alliance is arguing that, not only do open-weight models need to be allowed to proliferate in the US, but they also need to be considered a fundamental part of the security puzzle.
For those unfamiliar with the Hugging Face incident, a group of autonomous OpenAI agents, operating in a sandbox and stripped of guardrails to test their full capability to solve cybersecurity puzzles, exploited a pair of zero-days to escape and gain access to the internet. For some reason, the bots thought the solution to the problems they were posed could be found in Hugging Face systems, so they broke in and accessed a bunch of private information and hijacked some credentials.
When Hugging Face turned to closed-source US frontier AI lab bots to examine the incident and help figure out what happened, those tools declined to help because they thought the data Hugging Face was trying to examine was itself malicious. Hugging Face turned to Chinese-made GLM 5.2, hosted on its own infrastructure, to figure things out.
“That incident showed a practical truth,” said Nvidia. “When defenders cannot inspect, adapt and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure, their ability to respond is constrained at exactly the moment speed matters most.”
Only open-source AI models, which China leads development on, can fill that role, the OSAA argues, and it’s prepared to counter those who say open models are a threat: Just look at what happened last week and it’s readily apparent that closed source models are dangerous too.
The Alliance is pooling its efforts to give security pros access to essential open tools. Nvidia said that it’s participating by releasing its Object-Oriented Agent project on GitHub, HPE is contributing its SPIFFE/SPIRE zero-trust AI identity framework, Hugging Face has handed its Safetensors transparent AI model weight formatting to the PyTorch Foundation, and SpaceXAI has open-sourced Grok Build (though the reason behind that doesn’t appear to be entirely benevolent).
In addition, IBM and Red Hat have released Lightwell, an automated open-source vulnerability remediation platform, while Microsoft has come out with MDASH, a multi-model agentic scanning harness to automate bug discovery and remediation. Those efforts, while not open source themselves, are still a sign that Alliance members “are building an open defense stack,” Nvidia said.
The OSAA ended its announcement with another call for policymakers not simply ban open-source AI models, as doing so “would weaken defensive capacity and risk concentrating power, dependence, and vulnerability in a few closed providers,” the group said.
Many providers, as we saw last week, are more concerned with protecting themselves than helping victims of autonomous cyber attacks respond quickly.
Clement Delangue, cofounder and CEO of Hugging Face, said in a post on X that he spoke to OpenAI over the weekend about last week’s incident and asked the company to provide funding to support the development of better open-source AI cyber defenses. It’s not clear if the company plans to fulfill that request; it’s not a founding member of the Nvidia-led OSAA. Neither is Google or Anthropic, for that matter.
We reached out to all three companies for their take on the new initiative, but didn’t hear back from any of them. ®
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