Inside a vast exhibition hall in Bologna, one student stepped onto a platform three meters above the floor and gave the aircraft a firm push. The wings extended farther than a city bus is long, yet the structure left the edge cleanly and settled into a steady glide. It traveled 59 meters before its nose met a line of columns at the far end of the space. That single launch secured the Guinness World Record for the largest paper airplane ever built and flown. Engineering students from the University of Pisa created the aircraft, known as ICARUS. It spans 20.04 meters from wingtip to wingtip, measures 7 meters in length, and weighs 28.49 kilograms at completion.

The previous record, held since 2013 by a team from Germany’s Braunschweig Institute of Technology, was a real beast, with 18.21 meters of wingspan and an official flight distance of 18 meters, but this latest plane absolutely exploded the old mark, flying more than triple the distance while meeting all official requirements. You know what was really crazy? The whole thing was made entirely of paper and glue. The students utilized stronger 120-gram stock for the major pieces and lighter 40-gram sheets for the covering, then laminated many layers on top of each other in a smart honeycomb design that provided the necessary stiffness without adding bulk. That meant that the wings retained their shape well even under flying loads, and they managed to keep the overall weight low.

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Fifteen engineering students built the entire thing from scratch, by hand. They included lengthy spars that run the length of each wing, as well as ribs to maintain the proper airfoil curve and a tail section to keep things stable. They even ran computer simulations of airflow around the shape to help refine the design before cutting out any large pieces, and they built smaller prototypes to test and tweak the balance and control, which began with some simple paper airplanes they folded during class breaks. That began out as a joke, but when the team decided to go for the record, science communicator Jakidale stepped in to help them out, sort of coordinating resources and sharing updates as they built the thing.

One of the most difficult challenges they faced was determining the appropriate humidity. Paper does not like wetness because it expands and compresses, wreaking havoc on surfaces and glued parts. They had to keep a constant check on the working conditions while assembling all of the separate sections, and every millimeter counted because excess weight or being even slightly off would reduce their lift and make it difficult to stay airborne.

Guinness World Records required a launch from a platform no higher than three metres and a minimum flight distance of 15 metres. ICARUS breezed past that with ease, and even had an official judge and an engineer on hand to inspect the wingspan and other dimensions during the We Make Future event at BolognaFiere.
[Source]

Every June, after Apple wraps up its annual WWDC keynote, I install the latest iOS beta on my iPhone, watch the progress bar crawl to completion, and wait for the inevitable restart. For years, picking up my phone afterward felt almost identical to how it did before the update. 

I saw the same grid of icons, the same Control Center, and the same version of Siri until iOS 26 finally broke that pattern in 2025.

iOS 26 raised the bar. iOS 27 didn’t clear it

It was the first major update in years that made compatible iPhones feel genuinely different, and I’d give most of the credit to Apple’s Liquid Glass design language. With the redesigned Control Center and plenty of customization options (including the Clear Look for the Home Screen), iOS 26 actually felt substantial.

iOS 27, on the other hand, didn’t impress me quite as much. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s bad. The new Apple Intelligence features, especially the revamped Siri experience (first promised in 2024), along with the new Photos features, are impressive enough that I’ve written entire pieces about them

But if you ask me whether iOS 27 fundamentally changed how I use my iPhone 17 every day, despite the arrival of Apple Intelligence, the honest answer is no. And that’s a little surprising, at least for me. 

To Apple’s credit, the AI features are real, functional, and occasionally delightful. The catch is that their value depends almost entirely on whether they slot naturally into your routine.

The problem isn’t Siri AI; it’s me

Over the last couple of years, I’ve tried pretty much every major AI service to figure out which one works best for me, and most of them have already secured a place in my workflow. I pay Claude a monthly fee because it’s become my go-to for research, fact-checking, and crunching numbers. 

Gemini, on the other hand, is great at generating images and summarizing emails inside Gmail, while AI Mode has all but replaced Google Search for me.

Despite Siri AI’s conversational and agentic capabilities, I still haven’t found a compelling reason to use it every day. 

Yes, I asked the assistant to fetch photos using natural language, and it did a commendable job (for the most part). The Extend feature in Photos also impressed me. But neither is the kind of feature I return to regularly. Most of the AI I use is actually on my MacBook, and not on my iPhone.

So what else is actually new?

But what about the rest of the iOS 27 changelog? Respectfully, it feels like Apple is running out of room to reinvent the core iPhone experience or introduce a new one that doesn’t revolve around AI. 

Safari now auto-groups tabs by topic, while Notes lets you link to specific sections within a document. AirPods finally get a proper EQ slider in iOS 27, and Apple Wallet can scan loyalty cards. 

They’re useful under-the-hood additions that work in the background to improve your experience. The problem is that I’ve already moved on from several of these apps because they fell behind the curve for so long.

The little things are genuinely better

It’s not like there aren’t changes I appreciate. AirDrop, for instance, feels much faster in iOS 27. App launches are noticeably quicker, and switching between mobile data and Wi-Fi is much smoother. Apple’s Continuity features are all intact and arguably better thanks to the under-the-hood refinements (even if they still decide to throw a tantrum every now and then).

However, after willingly putting my iPhone 17 through beta duty and installing iOS 27 with both excitement and nervousness, I came away feeling less rewarded than I’d initially hoped. 

Maybe this is peak iOS

The more mature way to look at this might be that iOS has already reached a near-perfect state, both in terms of how it looks and the features it offers, and once we get there, every new feature or experience risks upending what already works.

I guess I need to re-evaluate my expectations for Apple’s annual updates. iOS 26 only felt so exciting and different because so many earlier versions looked exactly the same. 

While I wouldn’t call iOS 27 only a fresh coat of paint, it also doesn’t feel like the kind of leap it might appear to be, at least not if Siri AI and Apple Intelligence aren’t already central to how you use your iPhone.

New leaks about the iPhone 18 Pro seem to be annoying Apple, while the guessing game continues over whether the iPhone Fold is coming in September, plus why we should not believe that the iPhone is the end of civilization, on the AppleInsider Podcast.

Among the more than 630GB of data taken from a Tata iPhone plant in India this week, were documents concerning plans for the iPhone 18 Pro. They included how the US is currently expected to continue using Qualcomm modems in this next iPhone, while the rest of world will get Apple’s own C2 one.

Then there are also a few but tantalizing details of camera updates, which hint at the possibility of a variable aperture system finally coming to the iPhone.

It’s unusual to see such a volume of leaks that are seemingly accurate and where the provenance is known. Perhaps that’s why Apple has been unusually active in pursuing it, including getting sites to take down certain materials.

There have, though, also been less substantiated reports this week that Apple has increased its order for the iPhone Fold. Then an arguably even less substantiated report takes the fact that the US birth rate is declining, and has a good go at blaming the iPhone.

Plus it is true that there is a genuine security problem with AirDrop, but wait until you hear just how contorted a situation you’d have to be in for it to be an issue.

BONUS: Subscribe via Patreon or Apple Podcasts to hear AppleInsider+, the extended edition. This time, as Elon Musk either does or does not show off an iPhone killer (it depends when you ask him), what possible AI devices could ever take the place of our phones?

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Loewe has launched Loewe Systems GmbH, a new Berlin-based division dedicated to designing high-end integrated audio and audiovisual systems for automotive, marine and residential projects worldwide.

That venture focuses on fully integrated high-end audio and audiovisual solutions for automotive manufacturers, luxury residences, super yachts and recreational vehicles, with its scope reaching well beyond the television and audio products that built Loewe’s reputation.

That expanded reputation follows Loewe Technology’s acquisition of French acoustics specialist Cabasse in April 2026, a deal that significantly strengthened the group’s capabilities in premium loudspeaker technology, acoustics and audiovisual engineering.

That engineering strength now sits behind a senior leadership team at Loewe Systems, with Alexander Meisen serving as managing director, Ajan Hannemann as director of acoustics and Robert Schletze as director of automotive engineering.

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Meisen said “exceptional sound should not be confined to a single environment,” and added that the goal is to build experiences spanning homes, roads, the sea and future mobility concepts.

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Integrated systems rather than individual components

That mobility-spanning approach carries through to how Loewe Systems builds its projects and develops complete audiovisual ecosystems that combine acoustic architecture, loudspeaker integration, DSP calibration, user interfaces, display technologies and projection systems rather than individual components.

Aslan Khabliev, CEO of Loewe Technology GmbH, said the market increasingly demands holistic solutions rather than standalone products, and the new venture combined with Cabasse’s knowledge gives the group the expertise, technology and engineering capabilities to deliver integrated premium environments.

Alongside that expertise, global football icon Kylian Mbappé has joined Loewe Systems as both shareholder and global brand ambassador, a move that extends his existing relationship with the Loewe Group and lends high-profile support to the company’s international growth ambitions.

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Those growth ambitions draw on the wider Loewe Group, a company rooted in more than a century of German engineering and recognised as a pioneer of television technology, now paired with Cabasse’s expertise in advanced acoustics and loudspeaker design.

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Consumer and B2B business remain separate

While Loewe Technology continues to lead the group’s consumer-facing television and audio business, Loewe Systems will operate exclusively in the B2B space, serving automotive OEMs, hospitality groups, luxury property developers and yacht builders worldwide.

Loewe has not named specific automotive, hospitality or residential partners for the venture yet, though it already offers scalable system and IP platforms structured around curated automotive partnerships and bespoke installations.

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Loewe has also not confirmed a timeline for when the venture will announce its first commercial partnerships, though the appointment of its leadership team and Mbappé’s involvement mark its opening moves across automotive, hospitality, marine and residential markets.

NETWORKS

Online emporium’s Starlink rival says it will start service later this year as another 29 birds reach orbit

Amazon says it is preparing to roll out satellite broadband this year after the latest rocket launch brought its Leo constellation up to 396 units.

The digital bazaar and cloud computing giant reports that an Atlas V rocket launch on July 2 successfully propelled 29 satellites into low Earth orbit for the Amazon Leo network, formerly known as Project Kuiper until November last.

Amazon hasn’t finished flinging its hardware into orbit just yet, but said it is planning to begin providing an actual service through the network sometime this year.

“With hundreds of flight-ready satellites standing by at the Cape and a new, dedicated vertical integration facility ready to support Leo Vulcan 1 and subsequent missions, we have a clear path to increase launch and deployment cadence, helping us quickly expand network coverage following an initial service rollout later this year,” said director of Launch Systems Melissa Wuerl.

Amazon Leo was originally conceived as a broadband-from-space setup, just like its main rival, Starlink. According to the Bezos-founded biz, it will offer download speeds ranging from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, depending on which of three antenna options customers choose.

But in April this year, Amazon agreed to pay more than $11.5 billion to acquire Globalstar and its constellation of 24 satellites. Globalstar provides the satellite network used for Apple’s satellite services, introduced with the iPhone 14 in 2022, which would give Amazon a foothold in direct-to-device satellite communications as well.

With 396 satellites in low Earth orbit, Amazon has far fewer than Starlink, which boasts about 10,400 in operation at the moment. The firm has plans to loft more than 7,700 of its own eventually, but currently has a licence from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a cluster of 3,232.

The terms of that licence required Amazon to have 50 percent of its planned constellation in orbit by July 30, 2026 – a deadline it is clearly going to miss. The company sought an extension in January, and this was granted last month, but with strings attached.

Whether Amazon will be able to compete against Starlink, which has a significant head start, depends on a number of factors, such as the quality of service on offer. Its top-tier offering of 1 Gbps has a higher advertised maximum download speed than Starlink’s current residential tiers, although real-world performance has yet to be established.

Amazon has also yet to disclose what price tag its service will carry. Starlink’s US residential plans cost up to $130 a month, with equipment charges varying by plan and location.

UK telecoms regulator Ofcom granted Amazon Leo a license to beam its broadband down to Brit consumers over a year ago. ®

Multiple weaponized proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits on GitHub were found delivering a Python-based remote access trojan (RAT) named ChocoPoC that can execute commands and steal sensitive data in a campaign believed to target cybersecurity researchers.

Hiding malware in PoC exploits for various vulnerabilities is not new, as there are examples of threat actors posing as real security researchers and taking advantage of trending vulnerabilities to target vulnerability and penetration testers or low-skilled hackers.

However, ChocoPoC stands out for not embedding the malware directly in the exploit file but for adding malicious Python packages to the PoC’s dependency list.

According to researchers at cybersecurity companies Sekoia and YesWeHack, the packages are hosted on the Python Package Index (PyPI), a platform used by Python developers to source and share code.

Once the victim clones a malicious repository, a trojanized package named ‘frint’ is automatically fetched and installed on their systems.

During installation, the package pulls a malicious dependency package, ‘skytext,’ which contains a compiled native Python extension.

When the PoC executes, the extension runs automatically and decrypts additional embedded Python code that triggers a downloader to retrieve the final payload, ChocoPoC, from a Mapbox dataset.

The ChocoPoC RAT has the following capabilities:

• execute arbitrary shell commands and arbitrary Python code
• upload files and directories
• collect browser passwords, cookies, autofill data, and browsing history
• search for text files, markdown documentation files, and database files
• gather shell history from the host
• collect network configuration
• enumerate running processes

Mapbox datasets are also abused for data exfiltration, though larger file uploads are handled separately via an HTTP server.

Sekoia has identified at least seven PoC repositories on GitHub that distribute ChocoPoC and host exploits for FortiWeb (CVE-2025-64446), React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182), MongoBleed (CVE-2025-14847), PAN-OS (CVE-2026-0257), Ivanti Sentry (CVE-2026-10520), Check Point VPN (CVE-2026-50751), and Joomla SP Page Builder (CVE-2026-48908).

The researchers found that skytext was downloaded 2,400 times, mostly on Linux-based systems.

The downloads surged following the disclosure of a popular vulnerability, which served as a lure to draw unsuspecting researchers into downloading and testing PoCs from the repositories.

Sekoia also reports that before frint and skytext, the campaign used two different packages, named ‘slogsec’ and ‘logcrypt.cryptography’, with very similar source code, and delivered the same ChocoPoC payload.

It is unclear who is behind this campaign, but researchers found several email addresses associated with GitHub committers linked to another PoC exploit trojanizing activity in late 2025.

Sekoia found that credentials for two of the emails used in the campaigns appeared in leak databases, and the login for another one “highly likely originates from an infostealer compromise.”

“According to these findings, we assess with high confidence that the attacker primarily employed compromised accounts to publish malicious PyPI packages and PoCs,” Sekoia researchers say.

Researchers warn that the new malware delivery technique allows keeping the exploit intact by assigning the malicious behavior to packages that seem harmless on their own.

Since vulnerability and penetration testers are attractive targets because they often run malicious or untrusted code, they are recommended to never blindly trust GitHub repositories and only execute unverified code in isolated environments.

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

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In this day and age, it can be a tough sell to convince someone to watch a slow-burning detective series on a streamer when there are so many fast-paced programs vying for your attention. I get it; I do. But sometimes a show comes along that breaks free from the preconceived notions that can come with a genre, while also celebrating it. There’s one series, particularly, that comes to mind that ticks those boxes — and it’s currently streaming its second season on Apple TV.

Sugar stars Oscar and Emmy nominee Colin Farrell as private investigator, John Sugar. On the surface, it looks and operates like a modern-day noir detective show, but something supernatural is happening if you look a bit deeper.

I am going to spoil something about the series right now. It needs to be done if I’m going to discuss the new episodes with you. So, if you’re not caught up on season 1, you’ve been warned.

Read more: New on Apple TV in July 2026: Pickleball Comedy ‘The Dink,’ Anya Taylor-Joy in ‘Lucky’ and More

John Sugar is an alien: a blue extraterrestrial, a bright-eyed being not from this planet. And yep, he still looks better in a suit than I do. 

This sci-fi story twist was revealed in 2024, when the show’s first season was brand new. While this creative swing disrupted expectations of the noir genre, it didn’t overshadow the story or the case he was striving to solve in those episodes. It added to it, like icing on a cake that didn’t necessarily need it but benefited from the sweetness nonetheless.

Through the show’s initial run, Sugar was searching for his missing sister, and his need to find her and reconcile that grief fueled his work as a private eye. Season 2 opens by closing that storyline, and follows Sugar, who, after the events of the first season’s finale, is allegedly the only member of his clan left on Earth. Without family or community, Sugar returns to the work that gives him purpose: finding missing people.

His doorway into our culture was movies — old Hollywood black-and-white movies, to be specific — and it’s through that glamorous, dramatic, stylized lens that he sees our world. However, this perception is regularly disrupted by the harsh, violent, brutal realities that accompany his work.

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Episode 3 drops on Apple TV on Friday, which means Sugar is still very much focused on this season’s missing person case. The man he’s looking for is Ji (Raymond Lee), the criminal-minded brother of a promising boxer, Danny Moon (Jin Ha). His investigation puts Sugar in all sorts of precarious situations, including gang territory, which pivots the series into familiar turf for those who miss shows like The Shield or The Wire. 

This tidbit adds a new layer to the series and is a nice reminder that Los Angeles is an important character in the show. Like another LA-based show, The Lincoln Lawyer, Sugar regularly features sequences in which Farrell is dressed to the nines, driving his classic convertible through the city’s streets, where the landscape toggles from tourist-crowded spectacle to crumbling and disheveled wasteland, and back again, much like it does if you drive around these parts regularly — which I do.

Season 1 introduced the voice-over narrative, with Farrell delivering an inner monologue to inform the story. Stylistically, it’s a common tool used in the detective noir genre and could easily plummet the show into cheeseball territory, but it worked in its first run of episodes and continues to be a nice addition in the new episodes.

That shouldn’t be surprising, considering the caliber of actor delivering these lines.

Colin Farrell is magnetic as John Sugar, who is soft-spoken, calculated and stoic. His performance as the alien private eye is the exact opposite of the work he did as Oz Cobb in The Penguin, where he disappeared in the role of the brash, boisterous Gotham City crime boss through heavy prosthetics. 

His voice-over segments, accompanied by classic film clips featuring a lot of Humphrey Bogart, guide the emotional journey Sugar is on. He’s far from being a human, but he can’t get enough of humanity. The camera work, filled with Dutch angles and other stylistic elements, helps inform the series and pay tribute to the noir genre while also solidifying the notion that John Sugar is a strange man, stuck living a solitary life in a rather strange land.

Heck, I would go so far as to say that John Sugar is kind of how I’d imagine Clark Kent could’ve turned out, if he remained an outcast, fell in love with movies and never decided to put on the Superman costume to share his powers with the world.

Farrell’s Sugar is always watching, observing, fascinated with the people around him. He’s a rudderless being still searching for purpose. So, he works to find humans — which, I suppose, means there’s a conversation that can be had here about how cinema benefits and connects humanity, but I digress.

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Yes, Farrell is the No. 1 reason you should give the show a watch. But the supporting cast is worth your time, too. Shea Whigham’s turn as Sugar’s Big Lebowski-style mentor, Tom, adds a similar energy to Elliott Gould’s in The Lincoln Lawyer. Laura Donnelly’s femme fatale, Charlotte, keeps Sugar on his toes. Sasha Calle brings street smarts as his new assistant, Val, and the always superb Tony Dalton, who is this season’s big bad, Ray Vega, does unnerving work without chewing the scenery.

Trust me, scenery could easily be chewed here, and it’s all so delectible to take in, I assure you. Sugar is a science fiction series that would still fire on all dramatic cylinders if it were solely a brooding detective story. It’s all so good from the writing and cinematography to the steadily increasing emotional stakes and nuanced performances of its cast. 

But it has that supernatural DNA, to be sure. And that makes it another unique, intriguing, must-watch entry in Apple TV’s lineup.