Microsoft picked June 7 to show off a new limited edition Xbox Series X, called the X25, that celebrates the company’s gaming hardware reaching its 25th birthday. The machine carries a translucent green shell that lets light pass through and gives a glimpse of the structure inside. This marks the first time a Series X has received a see-through treatment.

The design is primarily inspired by the original Xbox system, which debuted in 2001. The enclosure includes a prominent 25th anniversary logo. When it boots up, the distinctive green light of the original Xbox button appears, just as fans remember it. There are references to Xbox heritage throughout the case, as well as a few cheeky surprises to honor long-time players. The shell preserves all of the standard qualities introduced by the Xbox Series X, so power, functionality, and performance remain unchanged. You still get a terabyte of storage. The special version simply covers all of the tried-and-true hardware in a new set of colors and embellishments.

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This restomod of sorts includes a matching controller, which completes the package. It’s also made of translucent green, with the rear cover and battery door totally transparent, letting you to view the iconic Xbox logo beneath. However, the buttons are identical to the original; green, red, blue, and yellow all return. The controller’s bumpers resemble the black and white buttons on the vintage “Duke” controller, but the grip texture and overall appearance are comparable to the current models, making it feel right at home in your hands. Wireless connectivity, button quickness, vibration, and all other great features remain same. You basically get a nice nostalgic touch for collectors and anyone who wants to go back to where Xbox began.

In November, the console and controller will be offered in a limited edition package, with the controller sold separately. Microsoft claims it will soon disclose the exact price and pre-order details with select stores in participating areas, but there is one catch: supplies will be limited, so if you’re interested, keep an eye out for updates.

According to Jason Ronald, Xbox’s vice president of next-generation efforts, the collection is all about reproducing the look and feel of the original console, plus a few clever touches to memorialize the journey with the people who helped launch the brand. The release is merely one part of a bigger effort to celebrate this major milestone with the community that has helped propel Xbox to its current position. For fans, this translucent green edition offers a fresh opportunity to own a piece of Xbox history while maintaining current-generation performance.

Massachusetts lawmakers have voted to pass privacy protections that grant the state’s residents new rights over accessing and deleting their data held by big tech giants. The bill also bans companies from selling their users’ precise location data.

Lawmakers in the Massachusetts House passed the state’s Consumer Data Privacy Act in a unanimous 146-0 vote on Thursday, months after all of the Senate’s 40 lawmakers voted in favor of advancing its own bill in September. Now, the bills will be combined in the Senate, and sent to the state governor’s office, where it is expected to be signed into law. It’s not immediately clear when that will happen.

The move makes Massachusetts the latest U.S. state to push for stronger consumer privacy rights after years of documented abuses by the wider technology, advertising and social media industries. While the United States does not have a nationwide privacy law, unlike many of the world’s major democracies, U.S. states have filled the void of legislation by bringing their own patchwork of privacy rules that apply to their states.

The bill, if passed into law, will apply to companies that handle or process the personal data of more than 100,000 consumers. It will largely affect medium-sized startups as well as Silicon Valley technology titans.

The law would block the sharing or sale of sensitive information without a user’s explicit consent. This data includes biometrics (such as health data, genetic information, and fingerprints), their precise geolocation data, and other markers about their religion, immigration status and sexual orientation.

The collection and sale of people’s location data has been a major flashpoint in privacy debates for years. Data brokers have for years relied on app developers selling their users’ location data to repackage and sell it to anyone who can pay, including stalkers, governments and militaries. In many cases, the government says it does not need a warrant to purchase data that’s commercially available on the open marketplace. 

The Biden administration came close to banning the sale of sensitive Americans’ data at the federal level, but the Trump government has since scrapped the change. 

By applying the location data ban to both residents and visitors, the Massachusetts law will effectively blanket ban the sale of location data across the state. The bill is anticipated to have a broad effect on startups that collect, share and sell location data in Massachusetts, as well as advertising companies that use location data to target people with ads.

According to local media WBUR and Massachusetts newspaper Lynn Journal, state lawmakers worked across party lines under the belief that privacy is a fundamental right to Massachusetts state residents.

The bill was generally praised by privacy groups and advocates.

Evan Greer, director of the Fight for the Future advocacy group, said the Massachusetts bill “took a major step toward cracking down on Big Tech’s surveillance abuses,” while the ACLU praised the landmark bill as positioning the state as a “leader in protecting personal privacy and curbing digital surveillance.”

SCIENCE

Global Talent visa program aims to draw in dissatisfied scientists from countries including the US

Britain’s much-heralded scheme to attract top scientific talent has managed to attract a total of 18 takers, the government has admitted.

The Global Talent visa program was launched last summer following announcements from the EU and France that they intended to tempt scientists unhappy with their lot in Trump’s America and elsewhere.

But while the EU was putting up €500 million ($575 million) in funding for foreign eggheads, the UK could only stump up a dedicated pot of £54 million ($72 million) to lure boffins to Britain.

According to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), UK research organizations have managed to attract ten leading international researchers in the latest wave, who are expected to drive breakthroughs in clean energy, life sciences, and other advanced technologies.

This is on top of eight researchers previously announced by the agency.

Nevertheless, DSIT today declared a key milestone for the scheme, with all 12 of the Global Talent Fund research organizations taking part having successfully recruited international candidates. This demonstrates strong delivery against initial program objectives, it claimed.

DSIT highlighted two scientists that have left the US for Great Britain: Professor Bryony DuPont is joining the University of Strathclyde in Scotland from Oregon State University to work on the use of AI to improve energy systems and make them more resilient to the changing environment.

The second is Dr Ivana Bukvin, who is joining the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, from Stanford University. She is researching proteins to advance understanding of aging and neurodegeneration in diseases such as Huntington’s. 

UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), which oversees the scheme, says it is expanding its Global Talent visa fast-track route to cover all of the Association for Innovation, Research and Technology Organisation members (including IBM).

Doing so means it will cover about 100 R&D-intensive businesses across key high-growth sectors, including advanced manufacturing and digital technologies. 

“It’s no coincidence that the world’s top researchers, driving groundbreaking innovations in AI, life sciences, advanced manufacturing, and clean energy, are choosing to come to the UK to advance their work,” stated Lord Vallance, Minister for Science, Innovation, Research and Nuclear.

The government says the Global Talent Fund is also strengthening UK research capability thanks to early investment in infrastructure and lab equipment. Some organizations are already deploying funding into specialist facilities and start‑up resources to support incoming talent, it claims. ®

Dell has shaped its XPS line into new territory with a mini PC that brings together NVIDIA RTX Spark technology and a chassis styled after the Mac Studio. The result sits in a space between traditional towers and ultra-compact devices, offering desktop performance in a package that fits easily alongside a display or on a shelf. A dark gray finish covers the boxy form, with ventilation slots running along the sides to keep temperatures in check during extended work sessions. A removable lid on the underside opens access to the internal storage drive, allowing straightforward upgrades without special tools or disassembly of the whole unit.

Ports are a key selling factor for the XPS Mini PC. The device’s front panel contains two USB-C ports as well as a handy full SD card reader, which is a significant feature because most competitors’ RTX Spark tiny PCs lack it. Moving on to the back, there’s even more going on: a slew of USB-C connectors capable of handling high-speed data, power delivery to keep peripherals or the PC charged, an HDMI output for a monitor or TV, a regular Ethernet port for a dependable wired network connection, and the power button.

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All of this means that many creators will no longer need to use adapters or external docks to complete their projects. A photographer can simply insert a card and start uploading files, whereas a video editor can connect many drives, a main display, and network storage all at once without any hassle or fussing. The unified memory is particularly impressive, with capacities of up to 128GB of LPDDR5X, making it ideal for use in huge projects with numerous sophisticated features and AI components.

Photo credit: Wccftech
Users can also easily expand storage by just lifting the bottom up. Consider the power under the hood. This device is powered by NVIDIA’s RTX Spark, which combines up to 20 ARM-based Grace cores for general tasks with a Blackwell graphics engine capable of scaling up to 6,144 CUDA cores. It all adds up to a seriously high bandwidth of 300 gigabytes per second at the very top end, with AI acceleration yielding a petaflop of FP4 precision. All this means is that you get extremely gorgeous seamless high-resolution video playback, substantially faster rendering and exports, and the ability to mess about with 3D models or run local AI tools for upscaling, noise reduction, or generative features in the right apps.

Photo credit: Wccftech
The desktop cooling system enables the components to run hotter for longer periods of time than a compact laptop, making it perfect for sustaining optimum performance. Dell is now pushing the XPS tiny PC as part of their creator-focused lineup, alongside the XPS 16 Creator Edition laptop, which has the same CPU but is in laptop form. They focused construction quality and beneficial elements that are only suitable for pros.

Photo credit: Wccftech
Compared to the Mac Studio, the XPS Mini PC offers a Windows environment with native software support in a variety of industries, as well as a wealth of built-in connections that will appeal to a diverse spectrum of customers. The unified memory architecture serves the same purpose, but the NVIDIA graphics stack has a speed edge in CUDA-accelerated programs and gaming-specific features.

We’ll have to wait a little longer to find out the final price, specific configurations, and shipping dates. What is clear is that this is a well-thought-out little desktop that provides artists with a new Windows-based option for power, as well as appropriate space and connectivity.
[Source]

Contact information, direct messages and connected accounts potentially compromised, Meta said.

Hackers used Meta AI to hack into 20,225 Instagram accounts, Meta reported in a government data breach notice on 6 June.

According to the notice, the breach occurred on 17 April, but wasn’t discovered by the company until more than a month later, on 31 May.

The company explained that hackers exploited a now-resolved bug in its AI-assisted support tool, designed to help Instagram users access their account after being logged out.

“HTS (High Touch Support) is an AI-assisted support tool designed to help users who are locked out of their Instagram accounts regain access,” said Amber Hannah, Meta’s associate general counsel for incident response legal.

“Users can request support from HTS and, as part of that process, can ask that a password reset link be sent to their email address.

“The tool itself worked properly and functioned as intended; however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify that the email address provided by the individual requesting a password reset matched the email address associated with that user’s Instagram account.”

The bug allowed hackers to avoid triggering Instagram’s automated account protections, enabling password reset links to be sent to an email not connected to the account. Bad actors were then able to reset passwords to gain access to a victim’s account. The breach affected accounts without two-factor authentication enabled.

The hack affected prominent figures’ accounts, including the inactive Instagram handle for the Obama-era White House, beauty retailer Sephora and a senior US Space Force official.

Meta said that hackers could have potentially accessed sensitive data, including contact information, direct messages and communications, and connected accounts and linked services, such as email IDs. The company said that it will fix the bug before relaunching the AI tool.

In 2024, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined Meta €251m for a 2018 data breach affecting approximately 29m Facebook accounts. The same year, the watchdog  fined Meta €91m for improperly storing passwords.

In 2023, the company was fined €1.2bn by the DPC for violating GDPR guidelines by transferring users’ personal data outside of the EU.

AI-enabled cybercrime is fast becoming a sore point for companies, as attacks become more frequent and sophisticated. Just last month, hackers stole 8TB of data from the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, while medical equipment manufacturing giant Stryker was struck in a global cyberattack.

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ASUS has introduced a new initiative to make genuine laptop battery replacements easier for customers across India. Through this initiative, customers can now replace their laptop batteries with ease and get proper service and warranty advantages in the process. Rather than opting for risky third-party alternatives, customers can now purchase official ASUS batteries. This initiative covers not only regular laptops but also gaming laptops.

Battery Finder Tool Simplifies the Replacement Process

ASUS has launched a Battery Finder microsite that will make laptop battery replacement easy for its customers. Using this facility, consumers can enter their laptop model and find a compatible battery. The system also finds the locations nearest to them where such batteries are available at exclusive ASUS outlets and channel partners. Consumers can even contact ASUS’s authorized service centers for assistance.

The battery replacement program supports many of ASUS’s most popular laptop series. Customers with Vivobook laptops can access genuine replacement batteries through the initiative. Several ROG gaming laptops are also part of the program. ASUS has further expanded coverage to include ExpertBook, ProArt, and TUF models. The Battery Finder platform helps users confirm compatibility before visiting a store or service center.

ASUS Strengthens Its After-Sales Support Network

As part of enhancing its customer support services, ASUS has extended its post-sale service network in various parts of India. This has included areas such as Delhi-NCR, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Gujarat, Punjab, and others. ASUS has made this service available as part of its Assurance Program. The organization’s main aim is to provide reliable and effective service, warranties, and an enhanced customer experience.

Apart from increasing the number of battery sources, ASUS is also working to help consumers manage their batteries effectively. Consumers are advised on how to charge their laptop batteries to ensure that their performance remains high. ASUS also highlights the need to control laptop temperature and have devices serviced regularly.

The lobby of Hyundai’s Seoul headquarters now waters its own plants. On Monday it was also handling security and deliveries, a row of robots laid on for one important visitor: Jensen Huang.

Nvidia’s chief executive was in the South Korean capital to deepen the chipmaker’s alliance with Hyundai Motor Group, and the pitch on display in that remodelled lobby, which Hyundai has rebuilt as a “physical AI testbed”, was the whole point.

After talks with Hyundai executive chair Chung Euisun, the two companies laid out an expanded plan to turn physical AI and robotics from research projects into industrial products, spanning mobility, manufacturing, and robotics.

The two are getting “very very close” to industrialising robotics, Huang told reporters, adding that they plan to bring AI to “all forms of mobility.” He was effusive about his host’s main advantage, scale.

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“Hyundai is incredible at manufacturing, incredible at mobility, incredible at heavy industries, manufacturing at extremely large scales,” he said. “No one is in a better position to take advantage of that and to create that than Hyundai.”

The clearest shift in the roadmap is location: moving robotics off the lab bench and onto the factory floor. The companies want to use Hyundai’s manufacturing base to build globally scalable robotics platforms, training the machines in simulation first. The marquee example is Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid, the Hyundai-owned robot whose production-ready version drew investor attention at January’s CES.

Much of the conversation centred on Hyundai’s 9 trillion won (about $5.9bn) plan to build an AI data centre, a robot manufacturing cluster, and a hydrogen plant in the western port city of Saemangeum, a site Huang cheerfully rebranded South Korea’s “AI Valley.”

Chung suggested more investment would follow and floated a “perfect AI ecosystem,” including a joint data hub, if Nvidia formally joins the project. Notably, it has not yet. For now Nvidia’s commitment is enthusiasm, plus the prospect of selling a great deal of compute, with the data centre expected to run on tens of thousands of its Blackwell GPUs.

The courtship fits Nvidia’s wider strategy. It has been wiring itself into the hardware end of AI, holding talks with LG Electronics on robotics and data centres, running factory-floor humanoid trials with Siemens, and pouring billions into AI equity stakes. Carmakers, with their plants, supply chains, and capital, are among the most valuable partners for a company betting that the same models behind chatbots will soon run machines in the real world.

Investors liked what they heard, with Hyundai Motor shares jumping almost 7% and Nvidia rising more than 6% on the day. Hyundai has said it wants to mass-produce Atlas from 2028, at up to 30,000 units a year. Whether the robots arrive on schedule is another question, but the ambition is plain.

For Hyundai, the future of carmaking looks less like an assembly line than a fleet of machines that taught themselves the job. For Nvidia, it is one more industry that runs on its chips, from the design software to the factory floor to the robots rolling off it.

Lilian Schmidt could not, for the life of her, figure out how to get her daughter to go to sleep.

None of the advice given to her by sleep experts or her pediatrician worked—not using a white noise machine, not buying blackout curtains, not even giving her a massage. “Every single day, it took like two to three hours to put her to bed,” the brand consultant from Zurich recalls. “She’d scream and fight and we would all be so exhausted and frustrated by the end of the day.”

When her daughter was 3 and a half years old, a bleary-eyed and desperate Schmidt turned to a controversial parenting tool: ChatGPT. The advice it offered “was completely opposite from everything I’d heard before,” she says. “It said she needed more stimulation,” suggesting that her daughter chew gum or jump on a trampoline before bed.

To Schmidt’s utter shock, it worked. Within five minutes, her daughter snuggled up next to her and fell asleep. “I was freaking out,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, nobody was able to help me except ChatGPT.’”

From there, Schmidt, who also has a 14-year-old stepson, became something of an AI evangelist. In June 2025, she posted a TikTok video with the caption, “I Turned ChatGPT into my coparent,” and it went viral. Her follower count swelled to 27,000 in just three weeks. She made her own custom GPT, Coparent, and started selling access to it for $37 on her website.

Schmidt is one of a growing cohort of women branding themselves as a new type of momfluencer—not one who uses aspirational imagery to make the mundane labor associated with motherhood more aesthetically appealing, but one who asks whether the labor is even necessary at all. They post videos like “The AI Assistant That’s Basically My Mom Brain Now” and “How to Use AI as a Mom,” and promote customized prompts or handbooks to moms who “want a coparent who never forgets the sunscreen or asks you to write things down,” as Schmidt writes in one TikTok caption.

One person who is relatively absent from Schmidt’s content is her longtime partner. In her videos, she’s doing pretty much all of the parenting labor, including meal prep, grocery-shopping, and kiddie arts and crafts. This is reflective of reality; moms assume the vast majority of the physical and mental labor in US households, with a 2022 Department of Labor survey finding that employed mothers spend an extra 13.5 hours per week doing chores and an average of 12.5 hours per week on childcare—a 40 percent increase from 1975.

That’s not to say that dads aren’t helping around the house. Pew data shows that fathers now spend more than twice as much time on household chores and childcare than they did 50 years ago. But by and large, women are still expected to shoulder most of the household burden.

“It’s not that my partner isn’t helping, because he is,” Schmidt says. “But for women and moms, there is so much invisible labor that you carry and everything is in your hands, and it actually takes time with your kids away from you.” Moms flocked to her page once they saw she was using AI “to actually be more present with my kids and to be more emotionally regulated, so I can be a cool mom and a happy mom and not a stressed-out one.”

Women are less likely (more than 20 percent less likely, according to one 2025 study) to use generative AI in their everyday lives than men are, a discrepancy known as the “AI gender gap.” Generative AI tools suffer from what Stephanie Leblanc-Godfrey, a founder of the company Mother AI who refers to herself as a “maternal technologist,” likes to call a “PMS” problem, meaning they tend to be “pale, male, and stale.”

• Meta confirms 20,225 Instagram accounts hit by HTS password‑reset flaw
• Bug let attackers request resets to unassociated emails
• HTS disabled, passwords reset, full recovery‑flow review underway

Last week’s attack against Meta’s customer support affected just over 20,000 accounts, the company has now confirmed. Hackers managed to break into these profiles and most likely exfiltrate the data found inside.

Last week, news broke that cybercriminals exploited a vulnerability in Meta’s AI-powered customer support service, tricking it into sending password reset codes for other people’s accounts.

Uber customers in the U.K. can now join an interest list to increase their chances of being matched with a Wayve autonomous vehicle — another sign that the two companies are preparing to launch a robotaxi service in London. When that launch does happen, Uber will be competing directly with Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving company that is considered the robotaxi leader in the United States. 

Uber announced the interest list on Monday in London along with a branded, black Ford Mustang Mach-E equipped with Wayve’s self-driving system. While Wayve is handling the autonomous vehicle tech, Uber has designed what happens inside, including how riders will interact with the vehicle through interactive touchscreens that support 64 languages.

Uber has teased the impending robotaxi service, but has yet to provide an official date, only saying it will launch in the coming months, pending regulatory approval. After launch, Uber customers who request a ride on the app may be matched with a Wayve vehicle, at no additional cost compared with a traditional human-driven one.

Riders can increase their chances of getting a robotaxi by going into their account settings, clicking on rider preferences, and selecting autonomous vehicles. If matched with an AV, riders will be able to decline it and opt for a human driver. The Wayve robotaxis will initially have a human safety operator behind the wheel before fully driverless operations begin in the future, Uber said. 

Meanwhile, Waymo is also on London’s streets. In April, Waymo began testing its autonomous vehicles with human safety operators. The company is testing about 100 of its autonomous Jaguar I-Pace vehicles in a 100-square-mile area of the city.

The imminent showdown is complicated by Uber and Waymo’s existing partnership in the United States — one that is already showing signs of wear. The two companies, once rivals in a trade secrets lawsuit, agreed to work together in 2023 when Waymo put its self-driving vehicles on Uber’s app in Phoenix. That partnership has been relatively limited, though, since Waymo lets Phoenix customers directly hail a robotaxi through its own app as well. 

The pair expanded the partnership in March 2025, when Waymo agreed to put its vehicles on the Uber app in Austin, and later, in Atlanta. In both of those cities, prospective customers cannot hail a robotaxi directly through Waymo’s app, and have to use the Uber app and hope for a match. 

The two companies’ relationship has continued even as they appear to be drifting apart in other areas. Uber has spent the past two years investing in, and partnering with, dozens of autonomous vehicle companies, including Wayve.

Uber executives have also taken direct shots at Waymo, an unorthodox way to treat a business partner. For instance, Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli posted a video and commentary on X calling out the unsafe behavior of a Waymo robotaxi, calling it “scary.”

The ride-hailing giant has launched two new business divisions — a data play called AV Labs, and an operations-focused unit called Uber Autonomous Solutions — that illustrate the company’s broader ambitions to gain market share in the nascent autonomous vehicle industry.

Uber has placed many bets on autonomous vehicle companies that could compete with Waymo, most notably Wayve. In February, the U.K. startup raised $1.2 billion from a number of strategic backers, including Uber as a return investor. The total raise could reach $1.5 billion thanks to another $300 million from Uber contingent on deploying robotaxis, beginning in London.

There is one regulatory hitch that will delay the robotaxi face-off, at least for a while. The U.K. government is in the process of creating autonomous vehicle regulations, and it doesn’t appear to be wrapping up anytime soon. The government’s transportation department opened applications in May for companies interested in its AV pilot program. The department said it will take what it learns from the pilot program and apply it towards the development of its regulations.