Rowhammer attacks have been around since 2014, and mitigations are in place in most modern systems, but the team at gddr6.fail has found ways to apply the attack to current-generation GPUs.

Rowhammer attacks attach the electrical characteristics of RAM, using manipulation of the contents of RAM to cause changes in the contents of adjacent memory cells. Bit values are just voltage levels, after all, and if a little charge leaks across from one row to the next, you can potentially pull a bit high by writing repeatedly to its physical neighbors.

The attack was used to allow privilege escalation by manipulating the RAM defining the user data, and later, to allow reading and manipulation of any page in ram by modifying the system page table that maps memory and memory permissions. By 2015 researchers refined the attack to run in pure JavaScript against browsers, and in 2016 mobile devices were shown to be vulnerable. Mitigations have been put in place in physical memory design, CPU design, and in software. However, new attack vectors are still discovered regularly, with DDR4 and DDR5 RAM as well as AMD and RISC-V CPUs being vulnerable.

The GDDR6-Fail attack targets the video ram of modern graphics cards, and is able to trigger similar vulnerabilities in the graphics card itself, culminating in accessing and changing the memory of the PC via the PCI bus and bypassing protections.

For users who fear they are at risk — most likely larger AI customers or shared hosting environments where the code running on the GPU may belong to untrusted users — enabling error correcting (ECC) mode in the GPU reduces the amount of available RAM, but adds protection by performing checksums on the memory to detect corruption or bit flipping. For the average home user, your mileage may vary – there’s certainly easier ways to execute arbitrary code on your PC – like whatever application is running graphics in the first place!

NoVoice Android Malware

McAfee identified a malware campaign in the Android Play store targeting older devices – using vulnerabilities publicly disclosed and patched between 2016 and 2021 – that was still found in over 50 apps in the official Google store.

All of the infected apps are built using a modified Facebook SDK to avoid detection, which unpacks the actual malicious payload from inside a PNG polyglot image. By using a common SDK found in millions of apps, the app looks like any other app using common libraries, even when viewing a decompiled list of classes referenced inside the binary.

Polyglot files are files that contain multiple valid file formats simultaneously – for instance a single file for Windows, Linux, or Web Browser or a JPEG containing a ZIP of all the works of Shakespeare. Polyglot files are possible because different formats often look for the start of data at different locations or when one file format denotes the length of valid data and happily ignores extraneous information. For malware, polyglot files are often used to hide malicious content in ways that detection tools or researchers may not spot.

Once the malicious payload is extracted from the PNG image in the app, the malware collects a fingerprint of the device, contacts a control server, and downloads exploits for that specific version. After gaining root, the exploit disables SELinux protections and replaces core system libraries with Trojan copies that impact every app. McAfee reports 22 different exploits in use, including Linux IPv6 kernel and Android GPU driver vulnerabilities, however all of the exploits used were fixed as of the 2021-05-01 Android security patches.

Ultimately, the malware steals authentication tokens and message databases from WhatsApp, reading them out of the local storage of the app, extracting the key from the running WhatsApp instance, and sending the decoded databases to a remote service. The malware also contains mechanisms to survive a factory reset by modifying the system partition of the device, but a full firmware re-install is still enough to get rid of it.

Unfortunately, older Android devices are still prevalent, and devices no longer supported by their manufacturers are still vulnerable to exploits based on publicly known and fixed security issues. There isn’t a good solution for devices abandoned by manufacturers, other than alternative firmware like LineageOS, but users of devices stuck on old firmware may also not be tech savvy enough, interested enough, or in a position to risk the device becoming nonfunctional by installing custom firmware.

Flatpak and XDG Fixes

Flatpak 1.16.4 and xdg-desktop-portal 1.20.4 have been released to address multiple security issues:

• CVE-2026-34078 in Flatpak allows a complete sandbox escape from the jailed app environment
• CVE-2026-34079 allows deleting any file on the host environment
• GHSA-2fxp-43j9-pwvc allows read access to files accessible by the Flatpak system helper, a system service for integrating Flatpak apps with the rest of the system environment
• GHSA-rqr9-jwwf-wxgj in xdg-desktop-portal which allowed writing to arbitrary system files, independent of the bug in Flatpak itself

Flatpak is a Linux application packaging format that aims to provide installations that work on any Linux distribution. Normal packaging formats like deb and rpm are tightly linked to the specific version of the specific distribution they are built for. Flatpak packages all dependencies for an application, which increases the package size but reduces the load on the developer to provide builds for every possible variation. xdg-desktop-portal is a companion helper to Flatpak to manage access to system resources like screenshots, opening files outside the sandbox, and opening links in the default browser.

Flatpak attempts to introduce a modern sandboxing security model on top of Linux apps, similar to the restricted access model most mobile apps run under on Android or iOS. Traditionally, any code running has the permissions of the user running it; reducing that access can reduce the attack surface. Flaws in the sandboxing code can allow exploits in an app to impact the rest of the system.

Almost all modern Linux distributions include Flatpak support, and it may not even be obvious to users when a package comes from Flatpak versus a traditional package – many commercial Linux applications like Slack and Steam distribute as Flatpak images, and many open source tools also provide images. For all our Linux users – make sure you’ve applied any pending security updates in your distribution!

Minnesota Ransomware

In an example of real-world impacts, Minnesota has requested assistance from the National Guard after a significant ransomware attack against Winona County. The state has asked the National Guard to assist in recovering from an attack impacting unspecified systems, but which apparently was severe enough that local and state resources weren’t enough. The only definitive statements from county officials are that emergency dispatch and 911 services are not disrupted – a frighteningly low bar you hope to not see. This is the second ransomware attack this county has seen this year, reportedly from unrelated attackers.

While high-profile ransomware attacks against governments and major corporations get lots of press, smaller companies are also impacted. Ransomware continues to be a pervasive problem, especially for organizations with a small – or even no – official IT department or security positions. Many security companies offer discounted or sometimes even free support to small companies and non-profits; if this is you, there’s no better time to look into multi-factor authentication, account privilege auditing and limiting, and testing your (offline) backups!

Router Hacks Redirect DNS

Following on with the real world impacts of some of the advisories, Lumen reports a widespread campaign to exploit home routers and install authentication-hijacking malware.

The attack targets TP-Link and MikroTik routers: TP-Link is a common home router brand, while MikroTik is more common in small business and remote office environments. Lumen comments that the attack seems to focus on older models, implying that it is using older, publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in devices which have been designated end-of-life by the manufacturers. Nearly 20,000 unique IPs were seen communicating with the control servers, so there were a lot of unmaintained routers out the Internet.

Once the router was compromised, the attackers used DNS redirection to send users to fake login pages to capture authentication info for Microsoft Office and other corporate resources. By hijacking DNS in the router and passing a custom DNS server over DHCP to local systems on the network, the attackers controlled the login pages. While DNS level attacks can’t defeat protections like SSL, users may not notice that they are being phished with an unencrypted login lookalike site, or they might just ignore the SSL warnings and click through anyhow.

Lumen credits Russian state actors with the attack, with the victims including national and local governments and regulatory agencies.

Malware on 3D Printer Repos

Striking closer to home, this Reddit post points out a malware campaign targeting sites holding models for 3D printers such as Printables, Thingiverse, and Makerworld.

Abusing the ability to upload arbitrary files to the model sites, the goal appears to be to trick the user into downloading a zip file containing Blender assets with instructions on “how to convert them to a STL”. Unfortunately, Blender has an embedded scripting environment (Python) – opening untrusted Blender ‘blend’ files allows direct execution as the user running Blender! The malicious files and instructions then download traditional malware and infect the user. Vendors of 3D assets have experienced this before, but it may be a first for the printing sites to deal with.

The campaign appears to have been stopped a few days later, with the original poster reporting that the flood of fake accounts appears to have stopped a few days later.

Unfortunately this goes to show that constant vigilance is needed – if something that should be a basic 3d model expects you to download additional tools to convert it to the format used everywhere else on the site, it’s probably worth being suspicious. Formats with embedded scripting environments are a new level of unexpected behaviors users have to be aware of – difficult if you’re not already a Blender user familiar with the capabilities and risks!

PLC takeover

Finally, this week’s “you hope it’s not your problem” is an advisory from CISA, the United States cyber security agency. It appears that Iranian state-sponsored agents have been attacking Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) systems. Usually outside the realm of the home hacker, PLC systems like these are used to control factories, power plants, water treatment facilities, and other industrial scale facilities.

Before the Internet of Things took the reins as the joke category for security — “the ‘S’ in IOT stands for security” — one of the strongest contenders was SCADA, or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition devices. SCADA fills a suspiciously parallel role to IOT in the industrial space, providing network monitoring and control of physical systems, and suffers some of the same fate. A SCADA system may be too difficult to update, too important to risk the downtime of a change gone wrong, or simply too legacy to have support from the manufacturer, and like an IOT device, generally isn’t expected to be exposed to the entire Internet.

Out of the realm of most people – even technically inclined ones – SCADA attacks may still be some of the highest profile attacks someone has heard of. The Stuxnet worm in 2010 targeted SCADA control systems and modified PLC-controlled centrifuges used for uranium refinement. In 2015 and 2016 the Ukrainian power grid suffered two major attacks targeting the SCADA control systems, closing breakers and forcing manual intervention at each substation to restore power to 250,000 people. The attacks evolved into the ‘CRASHOVERRIDE’ malware, which is specifically designed to target power grid SCADA control systems.

The simplest fix is to ensure these systems are never connected to the Internet at large. (If simple can be said to apply to processes controlling multi-million dollar facilities.) But even separated from direct connections, systems that cannot be safely updated to patch security concerns will always be at risk of router and firewall appliance compromises, or compromised PCs or laptops allowed onto the control network.

San Francisco police arrested an individual early on Friday morning for allegedly attacking the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and making threats outside of the company’s headquarters, a spokesperson confirmed to WIRED. OpenAI’s corporate security team sent a note to employees about the incident on Friday.

“At approximately 3:45am PT, an unidentified individual approached Sam’s residence and threw an incendiary device toward the property. The device landed nearby and extinguished. There were no injuries and only minimal damage was reported,” the message to staff reads.

“Shortly afterward, an individual matching the suspect’s description was contacted by security outside MB1,” the message continues, referring to OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood. “This person made threatening statements about the building.”

OpenAI’s corporate security team told staff that it is cooperating with law enforcement to assist with an investigation, and that employees may notice an increased police and security presence around the office on Friday. The security team said that the company’s offices remain open, but employees were advised to “not let anyone tailgate into the building.

“Early this morning, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home and also made threats at our San Francisco headquarters. Thankfully, no one was hurt,” said OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood in an email to WIRED. “We deeply appreciate how quickly SFPD responded and the support from the city in helping keep our employees safe. The individual is in custody, and we’re assisting law enforcement with their investigation.”

The San Francisco Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

LG’s 2026 OLED lineup is headlined by the G6, but the C6 is likely the model most people will end up considering. On paper, both TVs share a lot, including LG’s new Alpha 11 AI processor Gen 3, along with similar gaming features and AI-driven tools.

After seeing both models up close during LG’s recent reviewer workshop at its U.S. headquarters in New Jersey, the overlap becomes even more apparent, but so do the areas where they start to separate.

The differences aren’t always obvious at first glance. If you’ve been trying to figure out what actually separates the G6 from the C6, and which one makes more sense for your setup, here’s what you need to know.

The G6 is where LG is pushing OLED the hardest

The G6 is positioned as LG’s flagship, and the focus this year is clearly on brightness.

It combines a new panel with Hyper Radiant technology and LG’s Brightness Booster Ultra system, with claims of up to 3.9 times the brightness of a standard OLED. In real use, that shows up most clearly in HDR highlights and brighter scenes, where the G6 has more punch and better visibility.

At the same time, LG is maintaining core OLED strengths. The G6 is certified for both “perfect black” and “perfect color,” so contrast and accuracy remain intact alongside the brightness gains.

The C6 carries more of that experience than you’d expect

While the G6 leads on paper, the C6 doesn’t feel like a major step down.

It runs on the same Alpha 11 AI processor Gen 3 and includes many of the same core features, including Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and LG’s updated AI-driven picture and sound tools.

Brightness is improved over previous generations, even if it doesn’t reach the same peak levels as the G6. For most viewing scenarios, the gap is present but not always dramatic unless you are specifically comparing HDR-heavy content side by side.

Gaming performance is essentially identical

This is where the distinction between the two models almost disappears.

Both the G6 and C6 support 4K at 165Hz, along with VRR, Nvidia G-Sync, and AMD FreeSync Premium. That level of support puts them closer to high-end gaming monitors than traditional TVs.

LG is also focusing on low input lag and smoother motion handling, which makes both models equally capable for fast-paced gaming. If gaming is your priority, there’s little reason to choose one over the other.

AI features are shared, not exclusive

Both models use the same processing platform, and that shows in how similar their feature sets are.

AI Picture Pro handles real-time image optimization, while AI Sound Pro can simulate virtual 11.1.2 surround sound. There’s also a personalization layer that adapts picture and audio settings based on your preferences over time.

Filmmaker Mode with ambient light compensation adds another layer by adjusting the image based on room lighting without sacrificing accuracy.

Where the gap really starts to show

The biggest differences come down to performance ceiling and positioning.

The G6 is built to push OLED further, especially in brightness and overall visual impact. It is also the model that scales up to larger, premium sizes, going as high as 97 inches.

The C6 is designed to be more flexible. It starts smaller, at 42 inches, and is priced to fit a wider range of setups, from bedrooms to living rooms.

So which one actually makes more sense?

For most people, the C6 is the more balanced option. It delivers the key improvements LG is focusing on this year, including better brightness, updated processing, and strong gaming performance, without pushing into flagship pricing.

The G6 still has the edge in peak performance, especially if brightness is a priority or you’re building a high-end home theater. But the gap between the two isn’t as wide as you might expect in everyday use.

This week, our hosts discuss why OpenAI and Elon Musk’s legal feud is heating up once again—and happening alongside SpaceX’s IPO filing. They also dive into how a Department of Justice lawyer misled a judge about how they’re handling voter data, and why the Artemis II’s launch captured all of our imaginations.

• YouTube Premium has silently raised its tier prices
• Google started emailing users about the change before announcing it
• For a lot of subscribers, this could be the last straw

YouTube Premium is the latest subscription service to hike its prices in the US, but the timing couldn’t be more awkward — especially since it follows the controversy of its 90-second unskippable ads for free users.

As spotted by eagle-eyed users on Reddit, YouTube has already increased its monthly fees across all of its plans, including its budget Premium Lite tier which was launched only last year. With the new changes in place, subscription prices have gone up by as much as $4.

In short: Meow Technologies has launched what it describes as the world’s first agentic banking platform, enabling AI agents to open business bank accounts, issue cards, send payments, and manage day-to-day account activity on behalf of users, with no human required to initiate any action.

The platform supports Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, and other leading AI tools, and is built on a permissioned architecture that prevents agents from moving money unilaterally by default. The announcement marks a significant step in the race among fintech firms to become the default financial infrastructure layer of the emerging agent economy.

The agentic stack reaches financial services

By the spring of 2026, AI agents had gained the ability to write and publish blog posts, manage customer service queues, redesign marketing workflows, and co-ordinate tasks across enterprise software. Banking was the conspicuous exception: every other layer of business operations was being handed to autonomous agents, but financial accounts still required a human to log in, click through dashboards, and authorise transactions.

Meow Technologies, a San Francisco-based fintech founded in 2021, announced on April 8, 2026, that it intends to close that gap. The company launched what it is calling the first agentic banking platform, allowing users to instruct an AI agent in natural language to open a business checking account on their behalf, with the agent then capable of issuing virtual and physical corporate cards, checking balances, sending and receiving payments, and managing invoicing, all without returning to a human for each step.

The announcement lands at a moment when Zendesk acquired the self-improving agentic AI platform Forethought on the expectation that 2026 will be the year AI agents handle more enterprise operations than people do, and when Canva acquired the agentic AI platform Simtheory to extend agents across its marketing and design workflows. Meow’s claim is that financial operations belong in the same category as those other business functions and that the infrastructure to make that possible has now arrived.

What the platform does

A user connecting a supported AI tool to Meow’s platform can issue a single natural language prompt, such as “open a business account for my new project”, and have the agent complete the account-opening process, configure settings, and prepare it for use. The platform is integrated with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Gemini, and exposes an MCP endpoint at meow.com/mcp that allows any Model Context Protocol-compatible agent to connect to the banking infrastructure directly. Once an account is open, the agent can issue corporate cards in virtual or physical form, execute transfers to vendors or team members, pull balance and transaction data for audit or reporting purposes, and handle invoicing without requiring the account holder to log into a dashboard. Brandon Arvanaghi, Meow’s chief executive, described the ambition as a fundamental shift in how business banking is consumed.

“Autonomous finance has arrived,” he said. “With Meow, AI agents can handle everything from opening accounts to managing day-to-day activity.” The MCP integration is significant context. The Model Context Protocol had grown to more than 6,400 registered servers by February 2026, establishing itself as the dominant standard for connecting AI agents to external systems and services. By building its own MCP server, Meow positions its banking infrastructure as a native citizen of that ecosystem rather than a bolt-on integration, meaning any agent or development environment that already speaks MCP can reach Meow’s accounts without custom code. The supported tools, Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Gemini, collectively cover most of the agent frameworks in active business use, suggesting that Meow’s addressable market is effectively the full population of businesses already running agentic workflows.

Guardrails and the trust architecture

The central anxiety around agentic finance is obvious: AI agents that can autonomously move money create a novel attack surface, whether through prompt injection, misaligned instructions, or simple error.

Meow has built its permissioning architecture around the principle that agents should operate within the same rule set that governs human employees, and in some respects a stricter one. By default, agents cannot move money unilaterally: every transfer requires the same initiator-and-approver workflow that would govern a human employee in a finance team, and the platform enforces transfer limits, two-factor authentication requirements, and role-based permissions at the infrastructure level rather than relying on the agent to self-police.

Every transaction is logged and fully auditable. WordPress.com’s March 2026 decision to grant AI agents write and publish access across its platform illustrated how rapidly agent permissions are expanding across business-critical systems, but also the governance questions that come with them.

Meow’s response to those governance questions is a configurable controls layer that businesses can adapt to their own risk tolerance: an e-commerce company running a high-volume payments workflow can configure higher transfer thresholds and fewer approval steps, while a professional services firm with more conservative treasury policies can require human sign-off above any meaningful sum. Arvanaghi framed the direction of travel as irreversible rather than optional. “We believe banking will rapidly shift away from apps and dashboards toward a seamless, automated experience through AI agents,” he said.

The race for agentic financial rails

Meow is not the only company that has identified AI agents as the next major customer segment for financial infrastructure. Stripe announced a machine payments preview integrating stablecoin settlement for agent-to-agent transactions in early 2026; Mastercard launched its Agent Pay programme in April 2025; PayPal and Google announced a joint Agent Payments Protocol; and Visa is developing tokenisation infrastructure designed specifically for autonomous purchasing. What distinguishes Meow’s announcement is its scope: the platform does not merely allow agents to complete a payment, it allows an agent to create and fully administer a business bank account from scratch.

That is a materially broader set of permissions than any of the card network or major payments platform programmes have offered to date, and it reflects Meow’s positioning as a business banking provider rather than a payments processor. The company was founded in 2021 by a team of former cryptocurrency engineers and launched initially as a corporate treasury platform offering businesses access to high-yield investments and DeFi-adjacent yield products. It has since evolved into a full business banking service, with checking accounts, invoicing, and bill pay, and describes itself as holding over one billion dollars in assets on its platform.

The company has raised approximately 30 million dollars in venture funding from Tiger Global, QED Investors, Lux Capital, Slow Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Gemini Frontier Fund. Whether Meow’s “world’s first” claim holds under scrutiny or is quickly overtaken by a larger incumbent is less consequential than the direction the announcement confirms: the agent economy needs financial rails, and the fintech firms that build them earliest will occupy a structurally advantaged position. 2025 confirmed AI agents as the next major computing paradigm, and Meow’s April 2026 announcement suggests the financial infrastructure to match that paradigm is now being built in earnest.

Stoves come in three basic types: gas, electric and induction. There are significant differences among them, which we’ve outlined in this guide to stoves. For me, it’s never been a question; gas was the only fuel professional chefs in the kitchens I worked in growing up used, ergo gas was the only stove I ever considered. That all changed when I bought my first house. 

Moving into a new home with an aging stove forced me to ask a question I thought I knew the answer to. My instinct, honed by years of experience with gas, was to stick with what I knew. But my day job complicated things. As a home tech reporter who covers large appliances and the health risks tied to cooking with gas indoors, I couldn’t ignore what I’d been writing about. 

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I’ve had asthma my entire life, one of the conditions thought to be aggravated by gas stove emissions, particularly in children. And my new kitchen, somewhat cut off from the rest of the house, made ventilation less an afterthought and more an urgent concern.

Ultimately, I opted for induction — Samsung’s feature-rich smart induction stove. After more than a year of use, peace of mind about air quality is just one of many reasons I’m happy I did. It’s faster, safer, cleaner and more energy efficient to boot. 

Here are the five big reasons I made the switch with no intentions of going back.

1. Air quality was the biggest factor

What pushed me to move on from gas has nothing to do with cooking. Study after study has shown that natural gas stoves pose a real risk of environmental contamination. While the scuttlebutt over whether gas stoves are safe and what regulatory guardrails should be in place has largely quieted, the science remains. 

Gas stoves are shown to leak more than previously thought, and those leaks have been shown to cause respiratory issues, particularly in children. As a lifelong sufferer of asthma and the owner of a new but not-so-well-ventilated kitchen, it didn’t seem worth the risk, even if most agree that more research is needed. 

2. Induction heats up freakishly fast 

Modern induction heat is fast. Like, really fast. The Samsung Bespoke brings a pot of water to a boil in less than 5 minutes. A gas stove takes closer to 8. That may not seem like a big difference, but after returning home from a frantic day, and pasta is the only way to turn it around, you’ll notice. 

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The quick heat comes in handy for more than just boiling water. Getting a cast-iron skillet really hot for searing steaks, chicken and burgers takes seconds, not minutes. Calibrating the temperature without a visible flame took some time and practice, but since I got the settings down, there hasn’t been an effect on my cooking. Plus, the temperature adjusts instantly with a slide of a finger on the touchscreen. 

The oven is fast, too. It preheats to 350 degrees Fahrenheit in just over 9 minutes. A gentle ding or an alert on your phone lets you know when it’s preheated or when a timed cooking session is complete.

3. I don’t worry about having left the stove on

I buy into smart home features, here and there, but I’m not one who strives for connectivity in all my home electronics and appliances. My ice maker has app compatibility, for instance, but it’s never crossed my mind to use it.

However, being able to monitor certain aspects of your oven and stove remotely is a no-brainer. Case in point: I was recently an hour into a long drive when I became utterly convinced I’d left a pot with food on a still-running burner. So sure was I that I pulled over, intending to reroute back home. 

That’s when I remembered to check the SmartThings app. 

To my surprise, the app and range were still connected, even though I hadn’t logged in for weeks. The view showed all burners set to “off.” A sigh of relief and I was back on my way. Even if one had been errantly left on, I could have toggled it off right there from the interstate rest stop.

There are other, less dire uses for the smart app integration, like preheating the oven or dialing down the heat on a simmering sauce from another room. I admit I don’t use my range’s remote control daily or even weekly, but in that moment of uncertainty, the stovetop’s connectivity paid for itself. 

The range’s touchscreen hub can also connect to your phone via Bluetooth to play music or scan the internet for recipes and YouTube cooking videos, and display them for you as you cook along. I don’t find myself engaging often, but I can see why some cooks would. 

4. Induction stoves are easier to clean

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The most welcome surprise in my switch to induction is the cleanup — or should I say, the lack thereof. Anyone who uses gas burners tucked under grates knows there’s just no keeping that stovetop clean, no matter how careful you are while cooking. 

The scratch-free range, which has remained scratch-free for more than a year of use, takes no more than a wipe with a damp towel or sponge to clean, no matter how much of that night’s recipe rained down upon it. 

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An involved cleanup after a long day, labor-intensive recipe or while hosting a gathering is one of the biggest buzzkills when cooking at home. Eliminating one inevitable and unenviable task is a big boon for induction. 

5. Cookware compatibility was not an issue for me

One of the biggest drawbacks of switching to induction is the lack of compatibility with cookware. Induction doesn’t work (or work well) with copper and aluminum pots and pans. 

Most stainless steel, cast iron and ceramic cookware is compatible. I only use pots and pans made from those materials, so I have had no compatibility issues. 

Quality kitchen brands always indicate whether their pans are induction-compatible. If you’re making the switch to induction, do some research and ensure you don’t have to buy new cookware after the fact.

If I could do it over, I’d skip the in-oven camera

The Samsung Bespoke Smart induction range I chose costs north of $2,000, about twice as much as a similar, less feature-heavy Samsung model. The key differences are that mine has “more advanced” AI-powered cooking modes and an internal oven camera, so you can monitor food remotely via phone and share time-lapse videos. I don’t use or rely on either of these. 

The control panels are also different, with the pricier model featuring an LCD. In my experience, LCDs have more issues and glitches than simpler digital interfaces, although mine has been great so far.

For my money, the $1,100 Samsung Bespoke 30-inch Smart Induction Range, which has all the features I care about, as outlined above in this article, is the better buy.

An interesting story unfolded in the world of classic Nintendo games just yesterday, and it has already sent shockwaves across all of the retro gaming groups. A mysterious buyer paid $60,000 for a cartridge containing an early prototype of Punch-Out for the NES, and here’s where things get interesting. Rather than simply taking this unusual find home and storing it, the buyer collaborated with the Video Game History Foundation to extract the game data and upload the entire ROM online.

Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation created a video walkthrough that takes you through every nook and cranny of the build, demonstrating how different it feels from the final product that fans all remember. TThe cartridge itself bears a mock-up label in Nintendo’s traditional black-box style, along with a plainly mismatched product code stamped on the mask ROM chips inside. This indicates that these chips are not the same as the rewritable Eproms often seen in test cartridges, hinting at a more advanced stage of testing than most prototypes reach.

So in this build, you only receive four boxers on the roster, and they appear in a predetermined order that never changes. Glass Joe enters the ring first, followed by Bald Bull, King Hippo, and Don Flamenco. Finish the match against Don Flamenco, and the screen cuts to a training sequence in which Little Mac appears in his humble training gear – then a password appears, and the entire loop begins again, with Glass Joe waiting in the wings. That’s it; there is no one else on the roster, and forget about Mike Tyson; this build predates his involvement.

You’ll be playing through this entire thing in complete silence because none of the code that’s supposed to manage music sound effects and speech clips made it into this release, so all of the matches are just a constant beat with no notes or grunts to be heard. The pre-match graphics lack some of the text that fans expect, and the major title bout announcement never appears after a streak of victories. For example, Bald Bull lacks the dramatic bull charge animation that he became famous for later on, while some other fighters rely on placeholder animations that are simply a couple of lines created initially for Glass Joe and replayed over and again.

One of the fun aspects of this build is that there are some hidden debug settings that allow players to take control of opponents who have never received a full programming treatment and cycle through their movesets at will. Yes, the controls cause some strange visual abnormalities, but they also open up a portal to characters who vanished before the game’s release. For example, if you select a fighter named Von Kaiser, all you get is a simple animation test while the credits roll, listing some of the names that have changed over time. Vodka Drunkenski appears where Soda Popinski would eventually be, Piston Hurricane replaces Piston Honda, and there are two additional submissions, Pizza Pasta Rockyhead and Mongol Khan, neither of which made it into the final game.

from the 24/7-agitprop dept

Last month FCC boss Brendan Carr illegally ignored remaining U.S. media consolidation laws to rubber stamp Nexstar’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna. It’s part of the generational Republican quest to steadily consolidate media, then replace whatever journalism remains with a soggy mish mash of lazy infotainment and right wing propaganda (see: Sinclair Broadcasting).

But there’s trouble in paradise: a judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the merger from proceeding. For now.

“Defendants must immediately cease all ongoing actions relating to integration and consolidation of Nexstar and Tegna,” wrote Troy Nunley, the chief judge in US District Court for the Eastern District of California.

The savior in this case is curiously DirecTV, not-long-ago spun off from its own disastrous union with AT&T. DirecTV filed suit saying that the consolidation in local broadcast TV will erode what’s left of competition in the local broadcast TV sector, harming product quality, opinion diversity, and labor, while resulting in higher overall prices (for everyone) in exchange for even worse product.

From the restraining order:

“Nexstar admits the merger will greatly increase its already huge “scale” and its “leverage,” i.e., the ability to force its TV distribution customers, including Plaintiff, to pay even
higher fees for local news, live sports, and other content they distribute to their subscribers.
Plaintiff alleges Nexstar will also shut down local newsrooms in dozens of markets, reducing the amount, variety, and quality of local broadcast news that Americans rely on for trusted
information about their communities. Plaintiff asserts those harms from reduced
competition are precisely what antitrust laws are designed to prevent.”

Nexstar was so certain the merger was a done deal, it had begun changing the physical signs and logos on many of the acquired stations it had begun integrating, something it’s since been forced to reverse. The company has also tried to insist it can’t comply with some of the Judge’s demands because some aspects of the early integration “can’t be undone.”

The deal would combine Nexstar’s stable of more than local 200 stations with Tegna’s 65 outlets in major markets nationwide, blowing past restrictions that no company can control more than 39 percent of households (the new combined company reaches 54.5 percent). In addition to the NexStar lawsuit, the companies are also being sued by a coalition of eight attorneys general and consumer groups.

Since Rupert Murdoch convinced Ronald Reagan to eliminate laws preventing one mogul from owning a paper and TV station in one market, Republican policies (and corporations) have pushed relentlessly to pursue the goal of a monolithic, highly consolidated media in exclusive service to the extraction class and corporate power. The result has been anything but subtle.

Media scholars have been warning about the perils of this for decades, but only recently, under the ham-fisted efforts of Trumpism, have people truly begun seeing the full outline of the threat. The media sector (like most U.S. sectors) desperately needs an antitrust renaissance; and if the federal government is no longer willing to engage in adult supervision, other parties will have to fill the void.

Filed Under: agitprop, antitrust, competition, consolidation, fcc, mergers, propaganda, republican, troy nunley, tv

Companies: nexstar, tegna