Are you a Verizon customer looking to get more value out of your mobile or home internet service? Well, keep reading, because I’ve got some news you’ll be interested in. Verizon offers a collection of free and discounted streaming services with many of its popular plans. These perks offer substantial discounts on streaming memberships, giving you plenty of ways to save money while still getting the entertainment you love.

Services such as Netflix and Disney Plus already deliver content at a competitive price. These Verizon perks make those savings even better.

Note that the bargains listed below are available to those with eligible mobile phone and home internet plans, unless otherwise specified. Scroll on for a list of the best free and discounted streaming perks for you.

Read more: AT&T vs. Verizon: Which of These 2 Major Carriers Is Best?

Netflix and HBO Max bundle

Whether you are a Verizon myPlan mobile customer or a myHome internet subscriber, you can choose this streaming service perk. If you have Fios Home Internet, 5G Home Internet or an eligible mobile plan, sign up for Netflix and HBO Max (basic with ads), bundled together at $10 per month for a total monthly savings of $9. (Netflix with ads is $8 per month, and ad-based HBO Max costs $11 per month).

Note: Beginning May 6, the cost of the Netflix and HBO Max bundle through Verizon will increase to $13 per month (saving you $7 per month).

If you tack on this bundle, you can also upgrade to an ad-free HBO Max plan and still get a Verizon discount. Pay an additional $7.50 per month for the Standard ad-free plan (saving you $3.50 total), or get HBO Max Premium (which comes with 4K and 100 downloads) for an extra $12 per month. These savings will automatically be applied for existing Verizon customers.

Disney Plus Premium

If you subscribe to a mobile plan with Verizon and want to stream all the Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars content your little heart desires, you will be able to access Disney Plus Premium — ad-free tier — free for six months. Verizon customers can take advantage of this deal by enrolling by midnight on May 31. 

Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN

If you want more than just Disney Plus, Verizon offers the Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Select (With Ads) bundle for myPlan and myHome customers for $10 per month (typically $20 per month). The previously offered Premium ad-free version of this bundle perk is no longer offered by Verizon.

YouTube Premium

You can subscribe to YouTube Premium for $10 per month ($4 discount) if you have a Verizon Unlimited Ultimate, Ultimate Plus or Ultimate phone plan. Internet customers are eligible with 5G Home, LTE Home, Verizon Home Internet Lite and select Fios Home Internet plans.

Note: The YouTube Premium perk increases to $13 per month, beginning on May 13. Based on YouTube Premium’s recent price hike, you’ll still save $4 a month with this perk.

YouTube TV

If you subscribe to any Verizon home internet plan, you qualify for YouTube TV at $63 per month, after a $20 discount. To get this deal, you must enroll for a YouTube TV subscription from the MyVerizon Account View, download the app to your device and link your account to the streamer. You can create up to six user accounts. The discount lasts for six months, before it reverts to the normal $83 monthly cost. You must be a new YouTube TV subscriber to take advantage of the deal.

FOX One

You can get the new FOX One app for $15 per month with an eligible mobile or home internet plan. The FOX One app offers live and on-demand access to networks like FOX News, FOX Business and FOX Weather, along with sports programming from FS1, FS2 and the Big Ten Network. This is a $5 monthly discount from the regular $20 monthly cost. To take advantage of the perk, you must enroll through Verizon in an Unlimited Ultimate, Unlimited Plus or Unlimited Welcome phone plan or one of six internet plans, including 5G Home, 5G Home Ultimate, LTE Home or Home Internet Lite.

ESPN Unlimited

If you need your NFL fix and missed out on the Sunday Ticket on Us promo, Verizon now has another way to watch the sports content you love. Subscribe to a Verizon Fios TV package that includes the ESPN Network, and you will be eligible to access ESPN Unlimited at no additional cost.

Apple One

With an eligible Verizon mobile phone or home internet plan, you can take advantage of this Apple One perk. The deal offers the full Apple streaming package — which includes Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Arcade and iCloud Plus — for $15 a month ($5 discount) for individuals and $20 a month ($6 discount) for families.

Meta is ‘clear that Instagram and Facebook are intended for people aged 13 and older’, said the company.

The EU has preliminarily found that Instagram and Facebook are in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) for failing to “diligently” identify and mitigate risks that children under 13 face when using these platforms.

The findings are in relation to an investigation the EU launched against Meta’s popular social media platforms in mid 2024 over concerns that Instagram and Facebook use algorithms that stimulate “addictive behaviour” in children.

Users need to be at least 13 years old to use Instagram and Facebook. However, the Commission found that the company’s own restrictions against underage usage don’t work.

It said that minors under 13 can enter false birth dates with no effective controls in place to check its validity. The measures Meta has put in also do not promptly identify under-13 users to remove their access, the EU added.

Meanwhile, the tools Meta offers to report underage users is “difficult to use and not effective”, the Commission said in its statement.

Meta also does not follow up on these reports, which allows underage users to continue using the service without any checks, the European authority found.

Moreover, the social media giant’s lack of enforcement “builds on an incomplete and arbitrary risk assessment” the EU said, “which inadequately identifies” the risk underage users face when accessing Instagram and Facebook.

Meta’s assessment contradicts “large bodies of evidence” from all over the EU which finds that roughly 10 to 12pc of children under 13 are accessing Instagram or Facebook, the authority said, while also disregarding “readily available scientific evidence” which indicates younger children are more vulnerable to potential harms caused by these services.

Meanwhile, last October, the EU, in a different preliminary ruling, found that Meta does not provide Instagram and Facebook users with simple mechanisms to notify illegal content or challenge content moderation decisions.

Meta disagrees with today’s findings. In a statement to SiliconRepublic.com, a spokesperson for the company said Meta is “clear that Instagram and Facebook are intended for people aged 13 and older”, adding that they have “measures in place to detect and remove accounts from anyone under that age”.

“Understanding age is an industry-wide challenge, which requires an industry-wide solution, and we will continue to engage constructively with the European Commission on this important issue.

“We continue to invest in technologies to find and remove underage users and will have more to share next week about additional measures rolling out soon,” the spokesperson added.

Today’s (29 April) results are based on an in-depth investigation by the EU that included an analysis of Instagram’s and Facebook’s risk assessment reports, internal data and documents, as well as the platforms’ replies to requests for information, the Commission said in a statement.

These, however, aren’t the Commission’s final views on the matter. If they are confirmed in its ultimate findings, the Commission could fine Meta as much as 6pc of its total worldwide annual turnover. Meta made more than $200bn in revenue in 2025.

“Meta’s own general conditions indicate their services are not intended for minors under 13. Yet, our preliminary findings show that Instagram and Facebook are doing very little to prevent children below this age from accessing their services,” said the EU’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy Henna Virkkunen.

“The DSA requires platforms to enforce their own rules – terms and conditions should not be mere written statements, but rather the basis for concrete action to protect users, including children.”

The Commission wants Instagram and Facebook to change their risk assessment methodology to properly evaluate which risks arise on its platforms in the EU and how they manifest. It also wants Meta’s social media platforms to strengthen their measures to prevent, detect and remove minors under the age of 13 from their service.

According to the DSA guidelines, age estimation, which includes age verification, is seen as the appropriate measure to ensure the safety of minors. In order to be effective, all age-assurance technologies are required to be “accurate, reliable, robust, non-intrusive, and non-discriminatory”, the EU said.

The Commission, meanwhile, is continuing on with its investigations into Meta’s other potential breaches in relation to this investigation, including the assessment and mitigation of risks arising from the design of Facebook’s and Instagram’s online interfaces, which, it said, could be leading to “addictive behaviour”.

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

Apple will be adding a slate of new Apple Intelligence features to the Photos app in the next major operating system update, including extend, enhance, and reframing options.

Apparently, Apple is developing a new suite of tools powered by Apple Intelligence. The tools, which will be made available on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, are slated for release this fall, according to Bloomberg.

Currently, Apple only offers a single AI-powered feature: Clean Up. The feature has debuted to somewhat mixed reviews, with some users complaining that it often creates artifacts or fills areas with inaccurate detail.

The new features will include the usual slate of AI-powered photo editing features, like extending, reframing, enhancing, and contextual editing. For instance, enhance will automatically improve color, lighting, and image quality.

An AI-based extend feature would allow users to generate additional content beyond the frame. To do so, users will just need to extend the edges of an image with their fingers.

Reframe is the one feature that is notably different from the others. Designed to target spatial photos, users will be able to shift perspective after a shot is taken.

According to Bloomberg, the processing will be done on-device. That doesn’t come as much of a surprise, considering Apple has reiterated that it wants to avoid sending users’ data off-device whenever possible.

These features have been available for quite some time in other apps and on other platforms. The ability to extend photos, for instance, has been available in Photoshop for nearly three years.

Apple was always going to bring these features to market; it has to keep pace with competitors. However, Apple has struggled to release certain Apple Intelligence features in a timely fashion, so this timeframe may be tenuous at best.

At a US military base in central California, four-seater all-terrain vehicles roam hillside trails. This is a training exercise, but not for the people in the vehicles: This is an effort to train AI models to enter conflict zones. 

The autonomous military ATVs are operated by Scout AI, a startup founded in 2024 by Coby Adcock and Collin Otis, that calls itself a “frontier lab for defense.” The company said on Wednesday that it has raised a $100 million Series A round, led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates, following its $15 million seed round in January 2025.

Scout invited TechCrunch for an exclusive tour of its training operations at a military base it asked us not to name.

The company is building an AI model it calls “Fury” to operate and command military assets, first for logistical support but soon for autonomous weapons. CTO Collin Otis compares this work, which builds on existing LLMs, to training soldiers. 

“They start when they’re 18 years old, and sometimes they even start after college, so you want to start with that base level of intelligence,” Otis told TechCrunch. “It’s useful to start with someone who’s already made an investment and then say, hey, what do I have to do to teach this thing to be an incredible military AGI, versus just being a broadly intelligent AGI?”

Scout has secured military technology development contracts totaling $11 million from organizations like DARPA, the Army Applications Laboratory, and other Department of Defense customers. It is one of 20 autonomy companies whose technology is being used by US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division during its regular training cycle at Ft. Hood in Texas, with the expectation that the unit will bring along products that prove themselves when it next deploys in 2027. 

For Scout’s internal testing, the rubber meets the dirt at in the base’s hilly terrain. There, the company’s operations team, led by former soldiers, is putting the vehicles through their paces on simulated missions.

While autonomous cars are starting to be seen in more cities around the world, they are operating there in more structured environments with rules. Operating autonomously on unmarked trails or off-road is another challenge entirely. Otis, a former executive at autonomous trucking company Kodiak, said he was motivated to start Scout when he realized the system he helped build there wasn’t intelligent enough to operate in an unpredictable war zone. 

A new approach to autonomy

Scout is turning to a newer autonomy technology: Vision Language Action models, or VLAs, that are based on LLMs and used to control robots. First released by Google DeepMind in 2023, the technology seeded robotics start-ups like Physical Intelligence and Figure.AI, the humanoid robot company led by Adock’s brother, Brett. 

Adcock is on Figure’s board. He says that experience convinced him of the opportunity to bring broader intelligence to the military’s growing fleet of autonomous vehicles. His brother introduced him to Otis, who was advising Figure, and they set about applying the latest in AI to military solutions.

“If I handed you the controller of a drone right now and I strapped a headset on you, you could learn to fly that thing in minutes,” Otis said. “You’re actually just learning how to connect your prior knowledge to these couple little joysticks. It’s not a big leap. That’s the way to think about VLAs and why they’re such an unlock.”

Indeed, I got a chance to drive one of Scout’s ATV around the rutty trails, and the terrain was challenging: steep hills, loose sand on turns, disappearing tracks, confusing intersections. I’m not an experienced ATV driver but made a fair go on my first attempt (if I do say so myself). That’s the kind of general intelligence the company wants in its models, which it has been training via these ATVs for just six weeks after using civilian ATVs to start the process. 

I also rode in the ATV under autonomous control, and could feel the difference — it accelerates faster than a human who might be thinking about a passenger’s comfort. The operations team points out how the vehicles hug the right on wider trails but stay in the middle of narrow ones, like their training drivers. They also, when confused, suddenly slow down to think over their next move, something that happens a few times as it carries us on a 6.5 km loop before returning to base. 

Though the VLAs are new enough that they have yet to be deployed by any company in an operational setting, “the technology is good enough to be doing that experimentation in the field with soldiers to figure out how to most be effective to US forces,” Stuart Young, a former DARPA program manager who worked on ground vehicle autonomy said. And like other autonomy companies, Scout’s full autonomy stack also includes deterministic systems and other flavors of AI to round out its agents’ capabilities.

Young left DARPA this month to join Field after managing a program called RACER. It asked companies to create high-speed, autonomous off-road vehicles, helping seed this space the same way that the organization’s Grand Challenge boosted self-driving cars. Two competitors in this space, Field AI and Overland AI, were spun out of that program, and Scout also participated in as a later addition.

The first applications of ground autonomy, according to Scout executives and military technologists, will be automated resupply: Carrying water or ammunition to distant observation posts, or in a convoy where a crewed truck might be followed by six to ten autonomous vehicles, saving precious human labor for more important tasks. Brian Mathwich, an active duty infantry officer doing a stint as a military fellow at Scout, recalled a recent exercise in Alaska where he led a resupply convoy in total darkness and wished for autonomous vehicles to help him out.

Adding intelligence to the Army’s motorpool

Scout sees itself primarily as a software company, building an intelligence layer for military machines. It doesn’t intend to make the autonomous vehicles themselves but to build atop them.

Adcock expects the startup’s first product to be widely adopted will be one called “Ox,” the company’s command and control software, bundled on hardened computer hardware (GPUs, communications, cameras). It’s intended to allow individual soldiers to orchestrate multiple drones and autonomous ground vehicles with prompt-like commands: “Go to this waypoint and watch for enemy forces.”

However, making that software work requires training on real vehicles. Hence Foundry, which is what the company calls its training range at the military base. There, drivers spend eight hour shifts putting the ATVs through their paces, then work through a reinforcement learning system to log where they had to take over, which is then used to improve the model. The base commander has asked the company’s ATV to take a turn with security patrols.

One hypothesis Scout is testing is that VLAs will enable this relatively limited data set, alongside training data in simulations, to deliver a fully capable driving agent. While the the vehicle seems comfortable on trails, for example, it isn’t ready to operate fully off-road.

Scout is also practicing with drones for reconnaissance and as weapons, giving them intelligence with vision language models, a multi-modal LLM variant.

Scout is working on a system that would see groups of munition drones fly with a larger “quarterback” platform that provides more compute resources to command them. In one mission, the drones would search a geographic area for hidden enemy tanks and attack them, possibly without human intervention. Otis contends that the alternative approach in this scenario might be indirect artillery fire, which is imprecise compared to drone strikes.

While autonomous weapons are a flash point in the politics of defense tech, experts note the concept is old: Heat-seeking missiles and mines have been in use for many decades. The question for technologists is how the weapons are controlled, Jay Adams, a retired U.S. Army Captain who leads Scout’s operations team, told TechCrunch.

He notes the company’s munitions drones can be programmed to only attack threats in a specific geographic area, or only with human confirmation. He also says autonomous weapons platforms are unlikely to fire because they are scared, the way an eighteen year-old soldier might. 

VLAs, too, offer promise for better targeting. Scout says its models are pretrained on a specific set of military data to prepare them for, say, running into an enemy tank while on a resupply mission. Lt. Col Nick Rinaldi, who supervises Scout’s work for the Army Applications Laboratory, says that while automated targeting is hard and unlikely to be used outside of constrained environments in the near term, the potential of VLAs to reason about threats make them a promising technology to investigate.

Adams says the promise of drones that can identify their own targets is key to future warfare: While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has generated intense interest in drone warfare, he believes having humans operating individual UAVs doesn’t scale enough for the US to face a large number of low-cost unmanned systems should they threaten US forces. 

A mission to counter anti-military vibes

Like many defense startups, Scout wears its mission on its sleeve, and executives will freely criticize companies that are reluctant to hand their technology over to the government. Google, for example, reportedly pulled out of a Pentagon contest to develop control systems for autonomous drone swarms, a capability Scout is also working on.

“The AI people don’t want to work with the military,” Otis told TechCrunch, referencing Anthropic’s spat with the Pentagon over its terms of service. “None of them are open to running agents on one-way attack drones, or running agents on missile systems.”

Nevertheless, Scout is actually using existing LLMs as the base to build its agents, though declined to say which ones. Otis says it has agreements with “very well known hyperscalers” to provide the pretrained intelligence for Scout’s foundation model. Otis also declined to comment on if it uses open-weight models, such as those offered by Chinese companies. Many companies reliant on AI inference build on these models to operate with lower cost compared to models from frontier labs like Anthropic or OpenAI.

Scout expects to address this by building its own model from the ground up in the years ahead, and the founders say much of its capital will go into those training and compute costs. Indeed, Otis wonders if Scout will beat the existing leaders to AGI because its model will be constantly interacting with the real world. 

“There’s an argument in the AGI community along the lines that you can only get so intelligent by reading the internet, and most intelligence comes with interacting in the world,” Otis said.

Does that mean Adcock is competing with his brother’s army of humanoid robots at Figure? No, Otis says, but “we can get to scale much faster because our customer has assets,” he said, referring to the Pentagon.

Founded by a former Atomico talent adviser, Dex charges employers agency fees only on successful hires, and has gone from zero to $1.8 million ARR in under six months of charging.

Paddy Lambros spent two and a half years advising roughly 100 European startups on hiring at Atomico, one of Europe’s largest venture capital firms. The recurring lesson, was simple: nearly every serious problem at an early-stage company was downstream of a hiring decision. The wrong person in the role, or the right role left unfilled too long, and otherwise promising companies would stall.

That observation became Dex, an AI talent agent for technical hiring that Lambros founded in early 2025. The London-headquartered startup has raised a $5.3 million seed round led by Notion Capital, with participation from a16z Speedrun, Concept Ventures, and angel investors from OpenAI and other firms, the company announced on Monday.

The new funding brings total capital raised to $8.4 million, following a $3.1 million pre-seed last year.

What Dex does?

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Dex has deliberately narrowed its focus to a single slice of the technical talent market: AI researchers, software developers, and machine learning and quantitative engineers.

More than 15,000 engineers have signed up to the platform, and over 50 technology companies, including Lovable, ElevenLabs, Synthesia, Granola, and Fyxer, are paying for the service.

Since beginning to charge in late 2025, Dex has grown from zero to approximately $1.8 million in annualised recurring revenue. Lambros described profitability by year-end as “conceivable.”

The product works in two stages. A candidate begins with a conversation, either voice or text, with Dex’s AI agent, which asks open-ended questions about their experience, motivations, and ambitions.

The agent, built on a combination of models from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, then surfaces relevant roles from a curated set of openings, helps the candidate research companies, benchmarks compensation, and prepares them for interviews.

On the matching side, Dex uses what Lambros describes as ‘old-school machine learning’, a proprietary engine built from the richer, more detailed profiles the conversational AI assembles, to surface candidates to employers. When both sides indicate mutual interest, Dex introduces the candidate directly to the hiring manager.

The business model is deliberately agency-shaped rather than SaaS-shaped. Dex does not sell software to recruiters or integrate with applicant tracking systems. It charges employers a success fee of 20–30% of a hired candidate’s first-year salary, the same fee structure as a traditional executive search firm. “We only earn money if we do a good job,” Lambros said.

The fee model is both a strategic choice and a pitch to employers who have grown wary of software subscriptions that promise to improve hiring without accountability for outcomes.

Lambros’ argument is that AI capable of sustained, contextually-rich back-and-forth conversation has, for the first time, made the core agency function genuinely automatable, and potentially better than the human version at scale.

A human recruiter knows a few hundred candidates; an AI agent can hold detailed conversations with hundreds of thousands. A human recruiter works with a handful of clients at once; an AI agent can serve thousands simultaneously.

The depth of data that candidates share privately with a conversational agent is also, Lambros argues, meaningfully richer than what they would put on a public LinkedIn profile or CV.

That data asymmetry is Dex’s core product thesis: the quality of the match is only as good as the quality of the candidate model, and most existing tools, LinkedIn’s recruiter products, cold-outreach scrapers, job boards, are working with shallow, public information.

The seed funding will go towards opening offices in New York and San Francisco later in 2026, taking the company into the most competitive market for AI engineering talent.

Lambros’ background, talent at Improbable when it grew from 50 to 650 people, people and talent at construction-tech startup Sensat, and then advisory work across Atomico’s portfolio, gives him credibility on both sides of the hire.

If a London-founded, vertically-focused AI talent agent can hold its positioning against better-capitalised generalists as both scale into the US market is the question the next twelve months will answer.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has ordered federal agencies to secure their Windows systems against a vulnerability exploited in zero-day attacks.

Tracked as CVE-2026-32202, this security flaw was reported by cybersecurity firm Akamai, which described it as a zero-click vulnerability left behind after Microsoft incompletely patched a remote code execution flaw (CVE-2026-21510) in February.

As CERT-UA revealed, the Russian APT28 (aka UAC-0001 and Fancy Bear) cyberespionage group exploited CVE-2026-21510 in attacks against Ukraine and EU countries in December 2025 as part of an exploit chain that also targeted a LNK file flaw (CVE-2026-21513).

“Microsoft fixed the initial RCE (CVE-2026-21510), an authentication coercion flaw (CVE-2026-32202) remained. This gap between path resolution and trust verification left a zero-click credential theft vector via auto-parsed LNK files,” Akamai said in a Thursday report.

As Microsoft explains, remote attackers who successfully exploit the vulnerability in low-complexity attacks by sending “the victim a malicious file that the victim would have to execute,” could “view some sensitive information” on unpatched systems.

Microsoft flagged the CVE-2026-3220 flaw as exploited in attacks on Sunday after BleepingComputer reached out last week to ask why the advisory released during the April 2026 Patch Tuesday had an exploitability assessment of ‘Exploitation Detected’ while the vulnerability was flagged as not exploited.

A Microsoft spokesperson has yet to reply to a second email requesting more information about the CVE-2026-32202 attacks, including whether APT28 hackers also exploited this zero-click vulnerability.

Feds ordered to patch by May 12

On Tuesday, CISA added CVE-2026-32202 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog, ordering Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to patch their Windows endpoints and servers within two weeks, by May 12, as mandated by Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01.

“This type of vulnerability is a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and poses significant risks to the federal enterprise,” the cybersecurity agency warned.

“Apply mitigations per vendor instructions, follow applicable BOD 22-01 guidance for cloud services, or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable.”

Although BOD 22-01 applies only to U.S. federal agencies, CISA has urged all security teams to prioritize deploying patches for CVE-2026-32202 and securing their organizations’ networks as soon as possible.

Threat actors are also actively exploiting three recently disclosed Windows security vulnerabilities (dubbed BlueHammer, RedSun, and UnDefend) in attacks aimed at gaining SYSTEM or elevated administrator privileges, with the latter two still awaiting patches.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

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Food handling is an area of work that still relies heavily on humans. Fruit, vegetables, meat, and other foods need to be handled quickly but gently. It is also hard to automate because no two pieces of fruit, vegetables, or chicken nuggets look exactly the same.

Eka’s demos suggest that the company may be onto something big. I found myself mentally comparing their robots to GPT-1, OpenAI’s first large language model, developed four years before ChatGPT. GPT-1 was often incoherent but showed glimmers of general linguistic intelligence.

The robots I saw seem to have a similar kind of nascent physical intelligence. When I watched a video of one reaching for a set of keys in slow motion, I noticed it did something that seemed remarkably human: It touched the tips of its grippers to the table and slid them along the surface before making contact with the keys and securing them between its digits. Eka’s algorithms seem to know instinctively how to recover from a fumble. This kind of thing is difficult for other robots to learn, unless the humans training them deliberately make a wide range of mistakes.

Unlike with any other robot I can think of, it’s almost possible to imagine what the world is like for the robot. Its sensors seem to feel the weight of its arm, the inertia as it sweeps toward the keys and slows down. Once it has the keys in its grasp, it seems to sense the weight of them dangling from its claw.

I don’t know if Eka’s approach really is the route to a ChatGPT-like breakthrough in robotics. Some very smart experts believe that mixing human demonstration with simulation will yield better results than simulation alone. Maybe some combination of the two approaches will ultimately be necessary? But it does seem clear that robots will eventually need to have the kind of tactile, physical intelligence that Eka is working on if they are to obtain humanlike dexterity.

Agrawal tells me that the same general approach should work for finer manipulation. The fiddly dexterity required to build an iPhone, for instance, could be achieved by building different actuators and sensors and practicing the task in simulation.

After spending a few hours at Eka, I decide to stop by the restaurant downstairs. I watch from the counter as the staff prepare food and make coffee. A descendant of the machine upstairs may be able to do these things just as well, if not better. But given how much I enjoy chatting with the people who work there, I think I would pay extra to keep humans around. Unless, that is, my hands get automated away too.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].

Microsoft is working to resolve a known issue that prevents some Microsoft Teams Free users from chatting and calling others.

Teams Free (also known as Teams for personal use) is a subscription-free version designed for individuals, families, and small community groups, which provides video conferencing, instant messaging, and collaborative file-sharing tools on mobile and desktop platforms for users with a Microsoft account.

The company blames these problems on a “recently deployed backend change” that skips the onboarding and privacy consent screens for some users, rendering their profiles inaccessible to others.

While it has yet to share which regions are affected and how many users are impacted by this incident, Microsoft says the first reports surfaced three weeks ago, on April 8.

Microsoft has also flagged this incident as a “service degradation,” a label usually applied to issues with noticeable user impact that don’t take the service offline.

“Some new users who signed up during the impact window were incorrectly treated as already onboarded, causing onboarding and privacy consent screens to be skipped, their profiles to appear as ‘Unknown users’ to others, and preventing them from being searchable or reliably reachable in chat,” it said in a service health status update earlier today.

“We’ve identified a recently deployed backend change is causing new Teams Free users to bypass required onboarding steps, leaving user profiles in an incomplete state. As a result, affected users can not be discovered, connect with others, or successfully complete chat request flows.”

Microsoft is still looking for a solution to this ongoing issue and has scheduled another update to share any additional details later today.

Last week, Microsoft acknowledged another issue that is preventing Windows users from joining Teams meetings due to a bug introduced by a recent Microsoft Edge browser update.

Earlier this month, it also reverted a recent service update that was blocking some customers from launching the Teams desktop client and leaving them stuck on the loading screen with the “We’re having trouble loading your message. Try refreshing.” error message.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

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