An investment firm is offering a way to invest in the broad market without owning Elon Musk’s companies. New York-based Subversive ETFs has filed with the SEC for two “Ex-Elon” funds, Bloomberg reports.

One fund tracks the Nasdaq-100 and the other the S&P 500. Both exclude any company “founded, controlled or led by” Musk.

The products are the Nasdaq-100 Ex-Elon Enterprises ETF and the S&P 500 Ex-Elon Enterprises ETF, ticker symbols QQNE and SPNE. Filings point to a launch around 21 September.

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For now, the exclusions mean no Tesla and no SpaceX. Other Musk ventures, like Neuralink and the Boring Company, are not publicly traded, and the screen could extend to OpenAI, which Musk co-founded, if it ever lists.

The funds are actively managed and aim to hold at least 80% of their assets in their index minus the excluded names. Active management typically carries higher fees than a plain index tracker.

Why a fund to avoid one man

The direct trigger was SpaceX joining the Nasdaq-100. A rule change fast-tracking mega-cap listings meant the newly public rocket firm entered major indexes quickly, pulling it into the funds that track them.

That forces passive investors to hold SpaceX whether they want to or not. Analysts have flagged that hundreds of billions in index-tracking assets were set to buy the stock automatically, a dynamic critics call a wealth transfer toward existing shareholders.

Not everyone wants that exposure. Some object to SpaceX’s governance, where Musk keeps dominant voting control, while others question its valuation, and a Danish pension fund has already blacklisted it.

Conviction has a cost

Screening out a company is not free, and that cuts both ways. SpaceX slipped nearly 7% on its first day in the Nasdaq-100, which would have spared Ex-Elon holders the drop.

But excluding a stock also means forgoing its gains, and Musk’s firms have created enormous wealth for early backers. An investor betting against them is making an active call, not a neutral one.

The funds also sit in a small but growing niche of values- and politics-driven investing. Whether many savers actually route money through a single-person exclusion screen is the open question these tickers will answer.

For now, the pitch is simple, and narrow. If you want the index without one particular founder, there is finally a box to tick.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle was really kind of tough. I did not figure out the theme for a while. Fans of Welcome Back, Kotter, will remember this particular item as being a running joke on the show. If you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. 

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Fishy fare

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Recipe ingredients for an old-fashioned dish

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• SPAT, PEER, PELT, POSE, SLIM, SLIME, LIME, LIMES, APES, AUNT, SLOP

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• SALT, MILK, PEAS, SOUP, TUNA, CHEESE, PEPPER, NOODLES

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is CASSEROLE. To find it, start with the C that is five letters down from the far-left row, and wind across and back.

Casio released the Loopy in Japan back in 1995 as a home console aimed at young girls. It featured a built-in thermal printer that could turn any game screen into a physical sticker. Only about eleven games ever appeared for the system before Casio ended production a few years later. The hardware sat largely forgotten outside a small group of collectors until a new flash cartridge and one determined developer changed the picture.

The Loopy is powered by a Hitachi SH-1 CPU that operates at around 16 megahertz and uses big-endian byte ordering throughout. It has 512 kilobytes of main RAM and 128 kilobytes of video memory, with graphics handled by a unique video display engine that operates in bitmap mode. Audio was initially based on four channels of 12-bit PCM, but the Loopy port adopts a different approach, separating music and effects over separate devices. The port was programmed by ThroatyMumbo, who also released the complete source code on GitHub under the name LoopyDOOM. Its roots can be traced back to GBADoom, an open-source version already modified for the Game Boy Advance, which in turn was derived from PrBoom and all the way back to the original id Software code; this new effort just added the Loopy-specific pieces.

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The biggest issue was that there was no straightforward way to install new software on a real Loopy, as retail carts were read-only, and no official developer tools were available. All of that changed when a hobbyist developed the Floopy Drive, a flash cartridge that allows you to write custom code directly to the cart via USB when it is outside the console. With that little tool, the port could move from emulation testing to running on real hardware.

Graphics are handled using an 8-bit per pixel bitmap layer with double buffering, with one frame drawing in the background and the previous one remaining on the screen. That keeps everything running smoothly even though the processor is handling every pixel on its own, with no fancy 3D chip to aid. On actual hardware, the game runs at between eight to fifteen frames per second. Even in quiet portions, movement feels quick, but things slow down a little when you’re ascending stairs or fighting a swarm of enemies.

Working on music was challenging because the original tracks were in this strange MUS format that the build tools had to translate into note tables for the Loopy’s uPD937 processor. Because the chip uses its own sound library rather than General MIDI, the developer had to listen to each file in the first six levels, select the closest accessible tones, and occasionally run some variations via an AI computer before making final judgments by ear. The result is played with the console’s native audio and includes every map available in the game.

Sound effects take a different approach because the upd937 synthesizer lacks a PCM channel, therefore all that is delivered over a serial port is a series of short command frames to the RP2040 chip, which happens to be located on the Floopy Drive cartridge. A little extra gear helps get the correct digital audio from that chip out, into an external DAC, and back into the console. So, after updating the cartridge’s firmware, you can expect to hear gunfire, item being picked up, and monsters.

It appears that one of the options menu items simply sends the current screen directly to the thermal printer built into the console, allowing you to take a sticker of your progress (or your favorite moment) with you when you walk away, as intended by the console’s designers. Of course, the one negative to this function is that it is dependent on the printer not jamming on the paper path, so keep your fingers crossed.

There is an emulator called LoopyMSE that will run the same binary for testing, but it will never be completely realistic because it cannot duplicate all hardware limits, such as sprite-per-scanline restrictions. When it comes down to it, the real hardware determines whether or not everything works smoothly. The port currently only includes the first six maps from the shareware episode, complete with music and sound, which is a good start. As previously stated, all of the code is available on GitHub, so anyone may add new levels, enhance speed, or experiment with some of the hardware’s additional features.

AI and ML

Standalone experiment killed after less than 12 months as model maker redirects agentic ambitions towards workplace productivity

OpenAI has decided its AI browser experiment has run its course, pulling the plug on ChatGPT Atlas less than a year after launch and moving its browser-based agent features into ChatGPT and Codex.

The company said Atlas will stop working on August 9 as it rolls out the newly unveiled ChatGPT Work platform.

Atlas arrived last October with no shortage of ambition. Rather than trying to out-Chrome Chrome, OpenAI wanted to bolt ChatGPT directly onto the web, promising a browser that could read pages, rewrite them, answer questions, and eventually start doing the clicking itself.

However, within days of its debut, security researchers demonstrated prompt injection attacks that could manipulate the browser’s AI assistant into following malicious instructions embedded in web pages. A few days later, researchers uncovered another flaw that allowed malformed URLs to cause Atlas to expose information about previously visited sites. Neither flaw proved fatal, but they quickly exposed the gap between an AI browser on launch day and one ready for the open web.

OpenAI hasn’t fully abandoned the idea of AI-powered browsing, but appears to have decided it doesn’t need a standalone browser to deliver it.

ChatGPT Work looks less like a browser and more like OpenAI’s attempt to become the operating system for office work. The desktop application combines ChatGPT, Codex, and Atlas into a single package that can connect to files and business applications, browse the web, generate documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and websites, and stick with long-running projects for hours at a time instead of answering one prompt after another.

Powering it all is GPT-5.6, OpenAI’s latest model series, which the company says is better at reasoning through multi-step tasks and producing work that follows users’ templates and reference material.

The pitch is different this time around too. Atlas was all about rethinking the browser, but ChatGPT Work is about getting office workers to spend more time with OpenAI. To help with that, OpenAI has bundled plugins into a single directory, allowing ChatGPT to pull context from tools including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, SharePoint, email, calendars, CRMs, and project trackers, either automatically or when users explicitly call them into a prompt. 

For developers, the biggest change is that Codex is no longer treated as a separate product. Codex is losing its standalone app and moving into ChatGPT Work, picking up inline diff editing, pull request reviews, and multi-repository support.

ChatGPT Work is available to all plans on desktop, rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu on web and mobile over the next few days.

AI browsers have attracted no shortage of hype over the past year, but convincing people to swap Chrome for an AI-first alternative was always going to be a taller order than bolting another chatbot onto the web.  ®

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s NYT Connections puzzle was a true mix. The blue category words jumped right out at me and the purple category is really creative when you realize what it is. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: The big top.

Green group hint: Like a placid lake.

Blue group hint: To infinity, and beyond!

Purple group hint: Repeated letters in special spots.

Answers for today’s Connections groups

Yellow group: Circus equipment.

Green group: Undisturbed, as water.

Blue group: Toy Story characters.

Purple group: Double letters appearing in that letter’s alphabetical position.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is circus equipment. The four answers are cannon, stilts, trapeze and unicycle.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is undisturbed, as water. The four answers are calm, flat, glassy and still.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is Toy Story characters. The four answers are Bo Peep, Jessie, Slinky and Woody.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is double letters appearing in that letter’s alphabetical position. The four answers are aardvark, bocce, ebbing and twiddle.

U.S. federal cybersecurity agency CISA said it did not have a prepared response plan for how it should handle a cybersecurity incident in May, after an investigative reporter notified the agency that a contractor had publicly exposed sensitive keys and credentials for accessing U.S. government systems.

CISA, the Homeland Security unit tasked with defending federal networks and helping to safeguard critical infrastructure, revealed Friday in a postmortem report that its staff “had to spend time building [a playbook] during the early stages of the incident.” The agency said it is important to prepare playbooks for “all anticipated needs” to ensure that organizations are ready to respond in the event of a security incident rather than scrambling to improvise one in real time.

The agency did not say how long the missing playbook delayed CISA’s response, and a spokesperson did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. 

Independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reported in May that a security researcher with cyber firm GitGuardian alerted him to reams of exposed passwords stored in a publicly accessible GitHub repository, which an employee of a CISA contractor had uploaded.

According to Krebs, the researcher tried to alert the contractor but didn’t hear back. Only after Krebs contacted CISA did the agency take the repository offline and revoke and replace all of the exposed credentials to prevent any potential future abuse.

CISA said that no customer or mission data was exposed in the incident and thanked the researcher and reporter for their help. The agency said that its channels for allowing security researchers to notify CISA of potential incidents “were not well defined,” and that it has made changes to make it easier and faster for researchers to contact the agency.

CISA has been without a permanent director since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term in January 2025. The agency has also been affected by cuts, furloughs, and layoffs affecting about a third of its workforce since Trump took office. 

The Dutch National Police (Politie) says it has found “strong indications” that Dutch hackers have been involved in a February breach at the telecommunications provider Odido.

“This includes a telephone conversation that was made with Odido customer service shortly before the hack. In this conversation, a Dutch-speaking man posed as Odido’s IT employee. The company was then misled through phishing, after which the data theft took place,” the police said in a Thursday press release.

“This type of investigation is often complex and takes time, but cybercriminals are also vulnerable and leave traces. Traces have been secured at several times during the investigation into the hack at Odido, which the research team continued to work on,” added Stan Duijf, the head of operations at the National Investigation and Interventions Unit.

Odido is one of the largest Dutch telecommunications companies, offering mobile, broadband, and television services to millions of customers across the Netherlands.

When it disclosed the breach on February 12, the company said the attackers accessed its customer contact system on February 7 and downloaded the personal data of many of its users. It also told local media that the resulting data breach affected 6.2 million customers and that the threat actors reached out to say they had stolen millions of user records.

According to the telecom firm, the exposed information varies per customer, and it may include a combination of full name, address and city of residence, mobile number, customer number, email address, IBAN (bank account number), date of birth, and some identification details (passport or driver’s license number and validity).

However, it added that no call details, location, data, billing data, scans of identity documents, or Mijn Odido passwords were exposed during the incident.

While Odido has yet to attribute the incident, the ShinyHunters extortion gang claimed responsibility for the breach on its dark web leak site, releasing an 88GB archive containing over 15 million records, including data the company had already disclosed as exposed in the attack.

​ShinyHunters has been behind widespread vishing campaigns targeting Okta, Microsoft, and Google single sign-on (SSO) accounts, impersonating IT support staff to trick targets’ employees into entering credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes on phishing sites.

After breaching corporate SSO accounts, the threat actors steal data from connected SaaS applications, including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, SAP, Slack, Zendesk, Dropbox, Adobe, Atlassian, and others.

The cybercrime group has been linked to a growing number of breaches involving companies such as Google, Cisco, PornHub, the online dating giant Match Group, the European Commission, Rockstar Games, and the McGraw-Hill edtech giant.

They were also behind security breaches at over a dozen Snowflake customers, various other third-party integration providers, and, more recently, a new series of breaches that hit over 100 organizations (including the University of Nottingham) following data-theft attacks exploiting an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day flaw.

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Bigme built the HiBreak Dual 2 around a simple mechanical solution to a familiar problem. Regular smartphones deliver color, speed, and apps but wear out eyes during long reading sessions. Dedicated e-readers protect vision and sip power yet lack cameras, video, and quick multitasking. This device carries both screen types in one slab so owners turn it over instead of juggling separate gadgets.

The 6.13-inch E-ink display is available on one side. The black and white version measures 824 by 1648 pixels, which is a fairly acceptable resolution of roughly 300 pixels per inch. Color versions aren’t as sharp, but they do offer thousands of distinct colors without the need for a larger screen. Bigme rates the screen for up to 80 hertz refresh in supported modes. The front light has 36 brightness settings and can be tuned to warm or cool, making reading for extended durations more pleasant whether indoors or outside in bright sunlight. You can even write and draw straight on the screen; simply grab an optional pressure-sensitive stylus and you’re ready to go.

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Flip it over and on the other side, you’ll find a 5-inch LCD. That’s 1280 by 720 pixels of full-color action, ideal for viewing videos, scrolling through social media, playing games, or even using the camera, since the 50-megapixel sensor on the back works well with this display for framing images. You can also use your face to unlock the phone.

The MediaTek Dimensity 8300 processor handles everything on both screens. You can choose 12 or 16 gigabytes of RAM combined with 256 or 512 gigabytes of storage. Android 16 and Google Play are pre-installed, so you have the complete package. There are unique software fixes available to help apps work properly when you flip the smartphone around. Dual SIM 5G, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3, and stereo speakers complete the connectivity possibilities. The battery has 4450 milliamp hours and a 30w quick charger, albeit the E-Ink side does not draw much power as you sit there reading for hours on end. That will help you get more use out of your battery. Of course, if you use the LCD side frequently, your battery life will suffer, but Bigme believes you should be able to get through the day just fine.

Bigme improved on their previous dual-screen model. They ended up with a larger LCD around the back and a greater refresh rate on the front, but the essential idea remains the same. It’s still a physical flip, not simply software trickery. They also solicited user suggestions on how to improve the software’s usability, and it appears like they did a decent job of keeping the various aspects of the phone separate.

On Kickstarter, the base black and white model costs $599 and includes 12 gigabytes of RAM. If you want a color version or 16 gigabytes of RAM, you’ll need to pay $200 more. Each pledge includes a protective cover, and you can purchase the stylus separately. Bigme expects to begin distributing these out this fall, before the rest of the globe can get their hands on them at exorbitant retail pricing.