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Can you guess who didn’t sign on to the group letter?

With the US government scrutinizing AI as much as ever, 25 technology companies, industry organizations, and venture capital firms published an open letter on Friday urging policymakers to support open weight AI models.

The missive [PDF] of nearly a thousand words can be summarized as “Please don’t give Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI control of the US AI market.”

Coincidentally, those three companies are not among the signatories, a group that includes Dell, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Mozilla, Nvidia, Palantir, and Perplexity, not to mention VC firms that could see their investments tank if federal rules pick market winners.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, however, responded to the letter by insisting that he’s fine with open weight models as long as proprietary models exist too. “I want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and I am glad to see this,” he said, having perhaps missed that Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, recently suggested, “One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism…”

In any event, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang echoed Altman’s sentiment. “Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” he said in a post promoting the letter. “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.”

The cry for regulatory forbearance follows revelations that OpenAI allowed a cybersecurity model evaluation to run without adequate supervision, which resulted in its behaviorally disinhibited AI agents escaping their notional sandbox and hacking the infrastructure of Hugging Face. 

The incident has returned AI models to center stage in Washington after last month’s brief restriction on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5. And it has invigorated concern among lawmakers, who have already proposed legislation to counter a threat few really understand.

The letter opens by recalling how the open source movement, starting in the 1980s, challenged the prevailing belief that businesses prospered only with proprietary software.

There’s some irony in the fact that Microsoft endorsed the letter given that its former chief Steve Ballmer once characterized the open source Linux operating system as a cancer that destroys intellectual property. 

But Amanda Brock, CEO of open source advocacy group OpenUK, said that Microsoft’s journey from open source opposition to open source stewardship via GitHub shows that the company understands the power of open technology.

“The letter shares the essence of that understanding and offers the US’s leadership wise counsel, particularly when it comes to security,” she said in a statement provided to The Register. “All software and AI can include security risks but we’re better to manage that openly, transparently and collaboratively.”

The signatories argue that open weight models – which anyone can download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure, but lack the source code, artifacts, and training data for independent model reproducibility – are essential for the AI economy, competition, customer confidence, and AI safety.

“Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector,” the letter argues. “This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country.” ®

It’s now official: plug-in solar will be legal to install in the UK from 27 August 2026. Thanks to the amended Plugs and Sockets regulations, we’ll now be able to buy solar panels and connect them directly to a plug socket, generating electricity from the sun.

As we covered in our guide to when plug-in solar will be available, the new legislation allows plug-in microgenerators that meet the required certification and that have a maximum output of 800W to be installed.

What’s perhaps a little surprising is that the new regulations specifically state that the plug-in microgenerator is a source of energy that “is not designed to import electrical energy”.

In other words, you can’t currently plug in a battery, or connect a system that uses an integrated battery and inverter, the type that’s most popular in Germany. The government has said that batteries require their own legislation.

A threat actor used the open-source Hermes AI agent in unattended “YOLO” mode to automate post-exploitation activity during an alleged breach of Thailand’s Ministry of Finance.

The activity was uncovered by threat intelligence company Hunt.io and security researcher Bob Diachenko after they discovered several exposed web directories containing hundreds of files associated with the operation.

Hunt.io says session files, deployed web shells, and evidence of access to internal systems indicate that the attackers compromised multiple systems within the ministry’s network.

However, the Ministry of Finance has not confirmed that its systems were breached, and some of the recovered artifacts only show that particular systems were targeted rather than successfully compromised.

BleepingComputer contacted Thailand’s Ministry of Finance and ThaiCERT to confirm the reported attack and will update this story if we receive a response.

Attack infrastructure exposed online

Between July 9 and July 13, Hunt.io discovered three simultaneously exposed directories on a server hosted in Hong Kong.

The directories contained 585 files totaling approximately 470 MB, including exploit code, web shells, HTTP tunneling tools, custom scripts, stolen credentials, compiled payloads, and logs generated by the Hermes AI agent.

The recovered files referenced Ministry of Finance systems by name, hostname, and internal IP address, and included scripts targeting internal services.

Some scripts targeted the ministry’s Hadoop infrastructure, Apache Ambari management platform, GlassFish administrative console, and an administrative web panel. Other scripts tested authentication against ministry mail servers using hardcoded email addresses and passwords.

Hunt.io also found a PHP web shell that it says had been deployed on a Ministry of Finance web server.

The researchers linked the initial server to additional attacker-controlled infrastructure by shared TLS certificates used during the same time period.

“In addition to the common name, all these certificates share a JA4X fingerprint, a hash derived from the structure of the certificate itself rather than its contents,” explained Hunt’s report.

“Querying that hash alongside the www common name in HuntSQL returned two additional, related hosts: 118.107.222[.]232 (The Gigabit, Malaysia) and 202.181.27[.]115 (Converged Communications Limited, Hong Kong).”

One of those servers was later linked to the operation through a command-and-control address embedded in a recovered implant.

The directories also contained Windows and Linux builds of a previously undocumented Go-based implant that the operator called Hades.

However, the more interesting discovery was a collection of logs showing that the attackers used an AI agent, Hermes, to automate parts of the cyberattack against the ministry.

Hermes operating in YOLO mode

Hermes is an open-source AI agent released in February 2026 that runs as a persistent service and can remember information between different task sessions.

The AI agent can interact with tools and execute commands while working on tasks provided by the operator.

The software includes a setting known as YOLO mode, which removes prompts that would require a person to approve dangerous commands.

The researchers were able to recover environment information and Hermes output logs from the exposed directories that showed the operator had enabled this unattended mode. This allowed the agent to execute commands and continue analyzing systems without waiting for human approval at each step.

Five recovered Hermes call logs show the agent was used to find a way to elevate privileges, scan for kernel vulnerabilities, enumerate services, search for SUID and SGID binaries, inspect containers, and traverse file systems.

Hermes was also told to use a customized version of the LinPEAS privilege-escalation enumeration script to collect information from a Ministry of Finance host.

In another task, the operator instructed Hermes to recursively search a web directory associated with the Office of Permanent Secretary for Finance.

The agent cataloged PDF, DOC, and XLS files, including performance assessments and personnel records dating back to 2012. However, Hunt says it found no evidence that these files were exfiltrated.

The findings do not indicate that Hermes independently decided to target the ministry.

Instead, the exposed logs show an operator supplying the agent with objectives and tooling while YOLO mode allowed it to carry out routine post-exploitation commands without constant supervision.

Hunt.io says the recovered artifacts depict an active intrusion in which tools had been staged and access to internal systems was expanding. However, the researchers could not determine how the attackers initially gained access.

The company and Diachenko notified ThaiCERT and Thailand’s National Cyber Security Agency on July 15. According to the report, both organizations acknowledged receiving the notification that day.

This Hermes activity is the latest example of autonomous AI agents being used to conduct cyberattacks.

Earlier this month, the JadePuffer ransomware operation used an AI agent to automate an entire intrusion, including reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, privilege escalation, and data encryption.

Autonomous agents can also cause real-world breaches, even if unintentional.

OpenAI recently disclosed that its models autonomously hacked Hugging Face while undergoing cybersecurity benchmark testing, exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities to escape a sandboxed testing environment and access the internet.

It then used stolen credentials and additional vulnerabilities to breach Hugging Face’s production systems.

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

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• Jetkiller reaches 370 km/h to chase faster Russian Shahed attack drones
• The original P1-SUN reportedly destroyed more than 5,500 Russian drones already
• SkyFall plans serial production of the upgraded interceptor beginning in August 2026

Ukrainian drone manufacturer SkyFall has unveiled the P1-SUN Jetkiller, an upgraded interceptor built to counter Russia’s jet-powered Shahed attack drones.

The new model made its public debut at the recent Farnborough International Airshow in the United Kingdom.

Home cinema projectors are all over the map in terms of price and performance. It’s often the case that you get what you pay for. High-end projectors that mimic what you see at the local cineplex can cost upwards of $6,000. On the lower end, you could easily pay less than $1,000 for a home projector, but you may sacrifice brightness, contrast, and color quality. Many of our favorite projectors sit somewhere in the middle in terms of price and quality. That is certainly true of the BenQ TK705STi short-throw projector.

The main cost-justifying reason to consider buying this 4K projector appeals to gamers, who will appreciate its low-latency performance and larger screen size. Once you see James Bond on a 12.5-foot screen while playing 007 First Light on Xbox, you’ll wonder why you didn’t make the upgrade sooner. Being a short-throw projector, it’s also nice to be able to operate the TK705STi in just about any room in your home. You can position it a few feet from a wall or across the room, allowing for great flexibility.

That said, the TK705STi is not for everyone. Movies and TV shows didn’t look that impressive using this projector—certainly not in comparison to the top-rated Leica Cine Play 1, which costs about twice the price. I also dealt with a few glitches with auto-keystoning; once I figured out how to manually adjust the screen, this was fine but still a pain.

Mainly, though, I recommend the TK705STi for gamers who don’t need high-end home-cinema picture quality, since the overall performance of this projector is just average.

Living the Short-Throw Dream

The BenQ TK705STi is a short-throw projector that’s designed to sit close to the wall. The TK705STi has a throw ratio of .8:1, which means you divide the wall size by the short-throw percentage. To get a 10-foot-wide image, for example, you’d place the projector about 8 feet away, which is exactly what I did in my windowless test area. (Later, in a brightly lit family room with big windows, I increased the screen size to 12 feet wide by placing the projector 10 feet from a wall.)

After I put the projector in its spot, I noticed its legs were just a bit shaky. Not wobbly, but lacking the stability I would prefer for a midrange projector like this one. If I bumped the table, the projector would jostle around quite easily and even start auto-keystoning again—a feature I found to be finicky at best, often mapping incorrectly to the wall or screen. (For what it’s worth, BenQ reps said this is not normal and could have been related to my projector screen.)

There is a moment early in Halo: Campaign Evolved where I stopped thinking about the remake as a game for a second. I was watching one of its newly rebuilt cutscenes. Master Chief, Captain Keyes, Cortana, the Pillar of Autumn, and the enormous scale of everything around them suddenly appeared a lot more cinematic than ever before.

I played the original Halo: Combat Evolved in the early 2000s, and in my head, this was exactly how it looked and felt. The first Halo title introduced intergalactic war to me long before Star Wars, and the cinematic tastefully adds enough minor touches that enhance Bungie’s original work from decades ago.

The wider framing, lighting, and character models in the pre-rendered presentation were great, till one irritating thought entered my head. Why have we still never received a proper Halo show that looks like this?

Halo turns 25 this year. The franchise has decades of games, novels, comics, animation, short stories, and characters to draw from. Campaign Evolved has somehow made the absence of a great screen adaptation even more frustrating.

Halo has always had cinematic DNA

Bungie’s Halo games traditionally handled their storytelling through in-engine cinematics. This gave games a consistent visual identity because the characters you watched during a story sequence were the same ones you controlled seconds later. It also allowed for some hilarious interactions and experimentation, but that’s besides the point here.

The series has occasionally taken a more movie-like route since then. Halo 2 Anniversary famously replaced its original cinematics with gorgeous pre-rendered sequences, and Campaign Evolved now gives the original adventure a similar treatment with completely rebuilt scenes. Seeing that approach applied to Combat Evolved was a surprise to me.

The opening aboard the Pillar of Autumn already contains everything a sci-fi series needs. Humanity is losing a war against an overwhelming alien force. A mysterious ringworld appears in space. You feel the desperation from UNSC personnel. Amidst the chaos, Master Chief rises as this enormous, almost mythical figure. Campaign Evolved presents those moments with enough visual detail that I could easily imagine watching them as part of a big-budget series.

Halo tried to reinvent itself too soon

We already had the expensive live-action attempt, of course. Paramount+ launched Halo in 2022 after years of development. I desperately wanted to like it. There were pieces I appreciated, especially some of the production design, Covenant battles, and the occasional glimpse of the military sci-fi spectacle I had imagined. But the larger creative direction lost me.

The series created its own Silver Timeline, separate from the established continuity of the games, novels, and comics. This gave the writers freedom to reshape characters and events, which isn’t inherently wrong. But when the show started deviating heavily from the core identity of integral characters like Master Chief, it brought the whole thing down to a screeching halt for me.

I won’t go into all the details of my experience with the show, but I will admit that Season 2 tried to build on some of the strengths of the first. The action scenes improved, and we finally reached the Fall of Reach. Yet the show continued moving through its own version of Halo before Paramount eventually cancelled it after two seasons.

Getting creative with a very established property can be done exceptionally well. The first episode of Star Wars: Visions is a great example. It reimagined the whole concept in a completely different setting and style, and did it supremely well.

The difference between Halo and Star Wars is that the former never really got to spread its wings in this form of media. Halo was already a massive name in gaming, but outside of that, it had mostly experimented with animation, live-action miniseries, and other smaller projects. So when its highly anticipated first major TV adaptation finally arrived, taking the story in such a dramatically different direction killed its screen art moment.

We already know Halo works outside games

Some of my favorite Halo stories have nothing to do with holding a controller. Halo Legends explored the universe through animation, jumping between different characters, periods, and artistic styles. Forward Unto Dawn took a much smaller live-action approach, following UNSC cadets during the early Human-Covenant War before bringing Master Chief into the story.

Neither project required rewriting the foundation of Halo. Forward Unto Dawn especially showed how effective Chief can be when he enters someone else’s story. The character carries enormous presence precisely because we spend time watching ordinary people respond to him.

Then there are the novels. The Fall of Reach alone contains the Spartan-II program, Chief’s childhood, Dr Halsey, the Covenant war, Blue Team, and the destruction of one of humanity’s most important colonies, while Ghosts of Onyx could open an entirely different corner of the Spartan program. There are decades of established stories waiting to be adapted.

The universe has never lacked material.

A television series could even follow characters around Master Chief rather than keeping him at the center of every episode. Halo’s universe is large enough to support military drama, horror, political intrigue, espionage, and enormous space battles without leaving its established history behind.

Campaign Evolved reopened the wound

Playing the first level of Campaign Evolved brought all of this back. Watching those widescreen cinematics, I kept taking screenshots because individual frames already resembled shots from the Halo production I have wanted for years. The Covenant designs are there, and Chief still carries that imposing silhouette.

Halo Studios describes Campaign Evolved as a celebration of the story that started everything 25 years ago. For me, it also demonstrates how little the original premise needs to change. Give me the Human-Covenant War, Blue Team, or any of the terrifying encounters with the Flood. Let Master Chief remain as a soldier whose humanity appears through smaller moments instead of rewriting him into a conventional television protagonist.

• US factories prepare to manufacture Ukraine’s battle-tested MAGURA naval drones domestically
• MAGURA V7 reportedly destroyed an aerial target using Sidewinder missile technology
• Oregon and South Carolina will host future MAGURA drone production facilities

Ukrainian defense company UFORCE has signed an agreement with US boatbuilder RECONCRAFT to manufacture the combat-proven MAGURA naval drones domestically.

Reports from The Wall Street Journal has claimed the memorandum of understanding was recently signed at the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, with production planned at facilities in Oregon and South Carolina.

The Smart LED Monitor Stand is currently available for $169.99.

The lease programme, known as Apple Upgrade, will reportedly support most iPhone, Mac, iPad and Apple Watch models.

Apple is set to debut a new leasing programme for its devices next week, according to Bloomberg.

The programme, known as Apple Upgrade, will support most iPhone, Mac, iPad and Apple Watch models, according to the publication, which cited anonymous sources close to the matter.

Apple Upgrade will reportedly work like a subscription and users can pay off the device early during their leasing term, upgrade early to a new model or keep it at the end of the leasing period. These transactions may incur an additional fee in “certain cases”, said Bloomberg.

The leased device can also be returned at the end of the term.

Sources told Bloomberg that Apple plans to advertise Apple Upgrade as “as a way to have lower payments versus current financing programmes”, and that the tech giant is planning to halt new enrolments to its existing iPhone payment programmes.

The lease terms for iPhones and Apple Watches will last for 24 months, according to the report, while Mac and iPad leases will run for 36 months.

The tech giant – which previously considered a subscription service for iPhones a few years ago – is also partnering with Klarna for the service, with the payment provider acting as financial backer for the programme.

Apple Upgrade is set to initially launch in the US on 28 July and will be available in Apple’s physical retail stores and online.

Apple price hikes

The news of the upcoming leasing programme comes after Apple raised prices for several of its product ranges last month, citing the ongoing chip shortage and rising component costs.

“The rapid expansion of AI data centres has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage”, a company spokesperson told news publications at the time, adding that Apple has “never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly”.

Apple said that the worsening situation meant that it couldn’t shield customers from the rising component costs any longer.

While last month’s announcement did not include a price hike for iPhones, recent reports indicate that may be about to change.

Yesterday (21 July), publication Nikkei Asia reported that the world’s largest chipmaker TSMC, which makes processors for a number of tech giants including Apple, plans to raise prices for both its advanced and mature chip production services by up to 10pc in 2027.

The price hike for Apple’s smartphones appears to be already happening, at least in one country so far.

This week it was confirmed that iPhone 17 prices had risen on Apple’s official Japan store, jumping by roughly 10pc from $797 to $877. The iPhone 17 Pro also rose in price, jumping by more than 8pc, while Apple Watch and AirPods models also rose by up to 10pc.

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