CEDIA Expo 2026 gave us plenty of expensive things to stare at in Denver. Our Best in Show selections included a $215,000 Alcons Audio home theater system with 38,000 watts of amplification, enormous MicroLED displays, premium projectors, new architectural loudspeakers and enough automation technology to make a reasonably well-equipped house feel somewhat inadequate.

The more important story, however, might be what actually pays the bills when nobody is standing in a darkened demonstration room watching explosions.

CEDIA’s newly released 2026 Professional US Smart Home Market Analysis, conducted with The Farnsworth Group, estimates the U.S. professional residential technology integration market at $33.8 billion, spread across approximately 23,000 establishments. And despite all of the attention being paid to AI, video walls and increasingly elaborate home theaters, the three largest categories are considerably less exotic; home networking, distributed audio and lighting/shading.

That is worth paying attention to because the numbers offer a much clearer picture of what the custom installation business actually looks like when you step away from the show floor.

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How Did CEDIA Arrive at $33.8 Billion?

The new study is based on 287 completed interviews conducted between May 26 and June 30, 2026, covering custom electronics integrators, security and alarm installers, home networking and IT professionals, electrical contractors, remodelers and general contractors involved in residential technology.

Respondents had to meet specific qualification requirements, including having influence over purchasing or installation decisions, spending at least half of their time working with A/V, networking or security, generating at least 21% of their business from residential projects and completing at least three residential technology installations during the previous year.

CEDIA and The Farnsworth Group then used reported residential revenue across 13 categories, weighting the results according to company size before scaling them against the estimated population of U.S. firms. Small companies were defined as having one to five employees, medium firms six to 20 employees and large firms more than 20.

That methodology is important.

CEDIA’s 2023 Professional Smart Home Market Analysis estimated the U.S. market at approximately $29 billion and roughly 20,000 integrators, but the earlier research used a different methodology that incorporated more than 1,000 integrators along with specification and sales pipeline data from D-Tools, Portal, manufacturers and distributors. Consequently, it would be misleading to simply subtract $29 billion from $33.8 billion and declare that the professional smart home industry grew by that amount over three years.

The new figure is better treated as a fresh benchmark.

Networking Is the Biggest Business

Home networking represents approximately 15% of the market, or $5.2 billion, making it the largest category measured in the study. Distributed audio follows at 11%, or $3.8 billion, while lighting and shading account for another 11%, or approximately $3.7 billion.

There is something wonderfully unglamorous about that.

A 20-foot MicroLED wall makes a much better photograph from CEDIA Expo than an equipment rack full of network switches, access points and Cat 6 cable, but the network has become the foundation underneath almost everything else in a modern connected home. Streaming audio, video distribution, lighting, security, automation, HVAC integration and increasingly AI-driven services become considerably less impressive when the network falls over during dinner.

The study reinforces that reality from another direction. Eighty-eight percent of firms reported installing home networking during the previous year, compared with 77% for integrated control systems and media rooms, 76% for distributed audio, 72% for security systems and 70% each for outdoor A/V and lighting/shading.

In other words, networking is no longer the plumbing sitting behind the exciting part of the installation.

It is the exciting part if you happen to be the person getting paid to install it.

Distributed Audio Is Still a $3.8 Billion Business

We spend a lot of time talking about two-channel high-end audio, active wireless loudspeakers, Dolby Atmos, soundbars and increasingly sophisticated home theater systems, but CEDIA’s research provides a useful reminder that distributed audio remains one of the largest segments of the professional residential technology market.

At approximately $3.8 billion, it trails only networking among the individual categories identified in the research. Whole-home integration projects also continue to revolve heavily around audio, networking and video, which CEDIA found were “always” or “frequently” included in the vast majority of projects regardless of company size, type or geographic region.

That also helps explain a lot of what we saw at CEDIA Expo 2026.

KEF expanded aggressively into outdoor audio, James by Sonance introduced loudspeakers designed to visually integrate with Samsung’s Frame televisions, Coastal Source continued combining outdoor sound and lighting, and Theory Audio Design demonstrated how the same core loudspeaker platform can be deployed across in-wall, in-ceiling, pendant, surface-mount and outdoor installations.

The market is not moving away from audio. Audio is simply appearing in more places and increasingly becoming part of a larger integrated system rather than a collection of black boxes occupying one corner of the living room.

Lighting Is No Longer the Side Business

Lighting and shading now represent approximately $3.7 billion of the market, virtually level with distributed audio, and integrators identified lighting as their largest business opportunity for the coming year.

That was impossible to miss in Denver. CEDIA added a dedicated lighting education track for 2026, and lighting, shading and control companies occupied considerably more oxygen at the show than they did a decade ago. CEDIA had already identified lighting as an expanding opportunity before the show, with education focused on system design, deployment, troubleshooting and building a profitable lighting practice.

For A/V dealers who still regard lighting as something electricians handle before they arrive with the speakers, the revenue numbers suggest it might be time to reconsider that division of labor.

AI Is Growing but Skilled Humans Remain the Bigger Problem

Artificial intelligence was attached to almost everything at CEDIA Expo this year, occasionally with good reason and occasionally because apparently every product announcement in 2026 requires an AI garnish.

The research suggests there is substance underneath some of the marketing. Seventy-nine percent of firms reported increased use of AI in their own business operations during the past year, while 58% reported an increase in customer requests for AI-related products or features. Larger firms and companies outside the traditional integrator category were more likely to report increasing customer demand.

But CEDIA also identified a considerably less futuristic problem that the industry has been struggling with for years.

Finding skilled employees was cited by 27% of respondents as their biggest business challenge, almost three times the percentage who selected either finding new clients or keeping current with technology, which were tied at 8%. CEDIA has been expanding its workforce development efforts for precisely that reason, including programs designed to connect the industry with technical schools and younger workers entering skilled trades.

AI might help an integrator write a proposal faster.

It still cannot crawl through an attic in July and terminate 40 network cables correctly.

Integrators Are Surprisingly Optimistic

The broader economic environment is hardly perfect. Housing activity has softened, construction material costs have increased and tariffs continue to affect the cost of some building materials and components.

Despite those pressures, nearly 78% of firms surveyed expect their revenue to increase during the next 12 months, while only 4% anticipate a decline. Companies expecting growth most commonly cited increased customer demand, followed by homeowners adding more technology and businesses expanding the products and services they offer.

How those customers arrive is equally revealing.

Direct client referrals remain the largest source of new business, cited by 76% of firms, followed by general contractors at 55%, interior designers at 25% and architects at 16%. For all of the money being spent on marketing platforms, social media and increasingly sophisticated lead generation, somebody telling their neighbor that the installer actually showed up on time and made everything work remains remarkably effective.

Technology may change quickly.

Human beings apparently still ask their friends who wired the house.

The Bottom Line

CEDIA Expo naturally directs attention toward the biggest screens, most elaborate theaters and newest automation platforms because those are the products people travel to Denver to see. CEDIA’s $33.8 billion market estimate tells a more useful story about where the business actually lives.

Networking has become the foundation of the modern connected home, distributed audio remains an enormous category, and lighting is now too large for traditional A/V integrators to treat as somebody else’s business. AI will increasingly influence both the products being installed and the companies installing them, but finding qualified people to design, install and support these systems remains a more immediate problem.

The six-figure video walls will continue getting the photographs.

The network rack, loudspeakers, lighting system and technician who knows how to make all of it work are still paying the bills.

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Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told confused members of the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday that new FBI hiring standards are aimed at protecting “victims of bestiality.”

Prior to the current administration, FBI policy was to bar applicants who had, among other things, hired sex workers, stolen from an employer, or engaged in bestiality. In August, CBS News reported that these standards had been relaxed and that multiple sources claimed “the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases.”

According to a letter from Senate Democrats to Patel, new standards appear to have been quietly enacted as early as February 2025. They now allow for the hiring of someone who, for example, stole from an employer more than three years ago, or “paid for sex fewer than three times more than 10 years ago”—traditionally disqualifying because it carries blackmail risk—as long as they weren’t in a position of “public trust.”

But one change has captured more attention than the rest: A “history of bestiality or animal cruelty,” according to the letter, “is not automatically disqualifying under this new policy either, so long as the conduct occurred before the applicant turned 18.”

“You dropped automatic disqualification for applicants who have been engaged in bestiality,” said Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, during an oversight hearing Tuesday. “Not victims of bestiality, applicants who have been engaged. Do you disagree with that?”

“Applicants who have engaged in bestiality means they were victims of bestiality because they were forced to do so,” replied Patel. “At this FBI we are not going to criminalize and prevent victims from serving.”

In a further exchange, Patel explained to Senator John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican, that previously, regulations had barred anyone who engaged in bestiality “on either side of it.”

“Either side of what, the bestiality?” asked Kennedy. “So you disqualified the animal?”

“We have great canines, but we’re not going to disqualify them,” said Patel.

Kennedy said that the change in standards had “really hurt the FBI.”

“Why would you even get into bestiality?” he asked.

“We’re not into bestiality,” said Patel.

In a response to a request for clarification from WIRED, the FBI sent a statement that suggests multiple individuals have been disqualified from applying for the agency because they were victims of human-trafficking-related bestiality.

“The FBI has and always will maintain the highest suitability standards for its applicants and employees in the US Government,” the FBI’s national press office said. “The changes you reference allow the FBI to consider applicants and consider the whole of a person in certain circumstances. For example, the FBI has had a number of applicants in previous years who suffered sexual abuse in their past, causing questions about prostitution, bestiality, or other similar issues to affect their background check process through zero fault of their own. Previously, those applicants would be barred from consideration. Now they can be considered. It is false to suggest criminal behavior like this is no longer disqualifying at the FBI—any applicant who has engaged in criminal sexual acts like those referenced would of course not be eligible for employment, and it is ridiculous to suggest otherwise.”

Under President Donald Trump, the FBI has lost a huge number of experienced personnel. The letter from Senate Democrats asserted that since the beginning of Trump’s second term, a “purge” carried out by Patel has led to the departure of “over 5,000 nonpartisan career personnel, all six former Executive Assistant Directors, and at least 18 Special Agents in Charge,” as well as more than a thousand special agents.

ai and ml

Pizza Bot runs locally and lets users interact with AI agents in an email-like interface. Perfect for blowing them off just like your human colleagues!

AWS engineers have published an open-source AI agent management tool that treats tasks and permission requests just like emails that fill up an inbox. 

Pizza Bot was announced on AWS’ open-source blog last week, where it was billed by its developers as a way to more easily manage agent tasks without having to constantly check a chat window to see if a task was completed or on hold because more permission was needed. 

“You don’t send an email and then sit watching the outbox until the reply lands,” the Pizza Bot team wrote. “Pizza Bot is shaped like an email client for the same reason: a thread is a unit of work you come back to rather than a session you have to attend.” 

Like the modern email services it mimics, Pizza Bot organizes communications with AI agents into message threads. Finished tasks, along with detailed result writeups you’d expect from a colleague you’ve delegated your work to, end up in the Unread category, while anything you need to make a decision on is shunted to the Action category. 

Asynchronous agent communication is likely to be a godsend for those balancing multiple tasks assigned to digital delegees, as the Pizza Bot team describes it. 

“Live chat assumes both parties are present, which holds for a quick exchange and breaks the moment a task takes several minutes,” the Pizza Bot maintainers wrote. Just like you don’t want to stare over the shoulder of the poor IT sod you sent off to do a task while you watch YouTube videos, no one wants to sit there and watch an AI agent do web research, or whatever.

“Pizza Bot treats an agent the way you’d treat a colleague who has gone off to do the work: it comes back when there’s something to read, or something only you can decide,” the PB team added. 

Internal tool goes open source

Pizza Bot, named for Amazon’s “two-pizza team” model (i.e., small, autonomous teams small enough to be fed by two pizzas), began life inside Amazon as an internal tool for AI agent uses other than software development.

According to its developers, non-coding uses they were exploring internally continually had the same requirements, namely working in the background autonomously and only bugging their user when they were done or had a question.

“None of those describe how anyone uses a chat window,” the Pizza Bot team explained. “They describe how people already work with each other.” Email, they added, was the perfect design paradigm for internal use, and seeing whether it would work for everyone else meant opening the project to open source contributions.

As mentioned, Pizza Bot is open source – you can snag a copy for Windows, macOS, and Linux from its GitHub repo. It runs on-device, stores all its communication threads locally in SQLite files, and doesn’t transmit anything off device unless you grant permission for it to do so. 

Prompts and attachments are sent to model providers, naturally, but even that’s not necessary: Pizza Bot also supports Ollama, allowing users to run compatible open-weight AI models locally. 

Pizza Bot doesn’t ship with a lot of capabilities, as its maintainers noted that Amazon-specific skills and MCP servers were left out when they rebuilt it as an open source project for public release. Out of the box, however, it can list, read, write, edit, and search files, delegate tasks to specialist agents, and run a sandboxed JavaScript interpreter. It also ships with a browser automation skill and a guide skill that lets users ask about Pizza Bot’s capabilities.

Claude Code-compatible .mcp.json files are supported and can be dropped straight in, as can skills, the team noted.

One word of caution to anyone who wants to try it: The devs make clear this is a piece of open source software, not an officially supported AWS product. “There’s no AWS support or service-level agreement behind it,” they note. If you’re gonna bake a pie with this bot, you’ve been warned. ®

3 business lessons from Tommy Pang’s F&B rollercoaster

You may know Tommy Pang, 29, as the second-gen owner of hawker brand Bai Nian, who has never been shy about airing his family’s business struggles on Instagram.

His parents started the original Bai Nian Niang Dou Fu yong tau fu stall in 2013. In 2017, the family expanded into Bai Nian Food Court, an eight-stall food court at ESR BizPark @ Chai Chee, which Tommy now runs alongside his sister as a challenge set by their parents.

It bled out about S$250,000 in seven months, but the family’s business woes have not been confined to the food court. His previous venture, pork leg rice chain Shi Nian, also lost S$500,000 after expanding rapidly, while his Cantonese restaurant Dudu was forced to shut its Eunos outlet just seven months after opening.

Unlike many founders who go quiet when business goes south, Tommy has been documenting it on Instagram—from losses to the day-to-day struggles of keeping the business afloat.

Here’s what business owners can take away from them.

1.  Growth without structure can backfire

Before the food court, there was Shi Nian, which opened at Albert Centre Market in 2019 and expanded rapidly to 30 outlets in just two years through franchising.

It’s the business Tommy was reflective about in an Instagram post in Sept 2025, where he revealed Shi Nian had lost half a million dollars in just six months. The post drew comments from customers pointing to shrinking portions as part of the problem, prompting Tommy to address the quality complaints publicly.

The problem, however, went beyond rapid expansion. It came down to a lack of systems and structure.

Tommy said his intention was to bring young blood into an ageing hawker trade and give first-time operators a foothold in the business.

But partnering with people who had never run a food stall before came with a major challenge: quality control. In 2025, about 20% of Shi Nian’s outlets were franchised, while the rest were self-operated, which made it harder to maintain consistent standards across the chain.

As outlets multiplied, standards slipped. When partners were unable to catch these issues, Tommy was left absorbing the losses.

“It was a hard lesson, but ultimately, my mistake. I could’ve created a better system,” he admitted.

For anyone looking to scale through franchising or partnerships, the lesson is simple: having the capital to open more outlets is not the same as having the systems to run them. Tommy eventually shut nearly 20 stores “overnight” after expanding without “a system, structure or strategy”.

2. Don’t let one location become too big a risk

Just seven months after opening, Dudu Cantonese Cuisine—a collaboration between Tommy and popular Guangzhou restaurant Zi Zhe Shi Tang—was forced to shut its Eunos outlet after the coffee shop operator decided not to renew its lease.

The concept was a new venture for Tommy, who had partnered with the restaurant to bring its Cantonese-style dishes to Singapore. But despite the relatively new outlet, the business had already committed significant capital to the space.

It had leased three adjoining stalls until 2028 at about S$10,000 a month and spent more than S$100,000 fitting out the premises, including installing a large industrial fan because the space suited the restaurant’s kitchen needs long-term. 

However, none of that mattered soon after, when the coffee shop’s own operator decided to stop running the premises altogether, and gave all seven tenants notice on Jun 21 that they had to vacate by the end of Jul, citing rising rental costs and declining footfall.

“I was completely stunned and could not react at all,” Tommy said. The business had been open barely six months, and more than 10 employees’ jobs were suddenly at risk.

Dudu eventually relocated to an industrial unit in Marsiling, reportedly spending around S$40,000 on the move, and used the relaunch to introduce new dishes alongside the existing menu. So far, it has kept things fresh with three menu changes in the last 10 months.

There was little Tommy could have done to prevent the closure. The lease, the money already spent and the plans for the space became irrelevant once the operator decided to shut the coffee shop.

But the experience highlights a different risk in F&B: how much of your business is tied to one location that you don’t control?

Due diligence can help you avoid a bad location or an unfavourable lease, but it cannot eliminate risks outside your control. What you can control is how much capital you put into a single site, how much time you need to relocate, and whether the business can survive the disruption.

For F&B operators, the ability to move quickly may be just as important as choosing the right location in the first place.

3. When the location can’t sell itself, marketing has to

Bai Nian Food Court had lost about S$250,000 in seven months, with one of its biggest problems being the lack of customers.

Footfall at ESR BizPark, where the food court is located, never fully recovered after the pandemic pushed office workers into remote work. Even after offices reopened, fewer workers returned to the area, leaving weekday lunchtime occupancy at the food court’s 400-to-500-seat space at just 10–20%.

This was enough to scare off prospective tenants before they’d sign a lease with Bai Nian Food Court.

When a Western food stall abruptly pulled out and forfeited its deposit, the Pang family tried but failed to bring in an Indian food operator to replace it. With no time left to properly research and develop a new concept, they scrambled to open a fried chicken cutlet rice stall themselves just to fill the space in the meantime, but it was short-lived, and the unit returned to being empty again. 

The family could not control the footfall around the business park, but they could try to make the food court more visible.

So Tommy leaned into social media as a lever. He started posting more regularly to promote the food court and reach customers who might not otherwise have a reason to visit. Tommy believed that sharing the story behind the food court helps create a connection with customers and build trust.

The food court also launched a free hot drink promo running through the end of Sept with any main dish purchase—kopi, tea, or yuan yang—with a S$0.50 top-up for iced versions.

Neither move is likely to transform footfall overnight. But when a location can’t provide enough organic traffic, marketing becomes less about simply promoting what’s there and more about giving people a reason to come.

For a struggling F&B business, that could mean telling a story customers want to follow, creating an offer worth travelling for, or consistently reminding people that you exist. The point is to create demand rather than wait for footfall to return on its own.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: SG Food on Foot, Bai Nian Food Court via Instagram

The law will apply to social media and video sharing platforms, online games and AI chatbots.

The EU is set to unveil rules restricting social media for children under 15 as part of a new EU Kids Act.

The legislative proposal will be brought to the table this Thursday (17 September), a spokesperson for the European Commission confirmed.

Multiple news publications that viewed preparatory documents have reported that the Kids Act will apply to so-called “high-risk” social media and video sharing platforms, online games and AI chatbots. Educational tools would be excluded.

It intends to create a tiered system for under-15s on these platforms – with fully guardian-monitored accounts for children under 13, and moderate parental control and limits on screen time for children between 13 and 15.

Children older than 15 can set up their own accounts, according to the new law, which will also propose measures to educate parents, kids and guardians, the documents showed.

Child safety on social media has been hotly debated in recent years, as parents and lawmakers move to shield minors from the provable harms posed online by popular platforms.

Various EU countries – including France, Greece, Spain and Germany – are considering legislating on the topic, but the bloc hopes to address it at the highest level to avoid fragmenting rules in the single market and to standardise the level of access children enjoy across the region.

Earlier this year, a special EU panel on child safety suggested restricting social media for those under 13 until platforms demonstrate that their services are safe by design. The European Parliament, late last year, called for a harmonised EU digital minimum age of 16, and suggested parental consent be required for those between 13 and 16.

The upcoming Kids Act legislation is also expected to enforce its rules in a similar way to the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which utilises large financial penalties for non-compliant tech companies and oversight roles for national regulators. The DSA currently regulates issues around online platform safety and transparency in the bloc.

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For Hollywood stars, press junkets are an opportunity to promote new work while connecting with fans. They tell funny or embarrassing stories about one another, give us a glimpse into the film production process, and reveal mannerisms that make them more relatable.

So why would anyone want to talk to Tilly Norwood, an interactive, British-accented digital character and “actor” developed with generative artificial intelligence by Xicoia, an AI division of a studio called Particle 6 Group? It’s a fair enough question considering that it does not exist in our physical realm and will never appear in a movie that any halfway serious person would care about.

But Particle 6 recently claimed in an email that Norwood was “ready for absolutely anything!” What’s more, the company is allowing journalists access to the model without a handler to “keep the conversation on track.” So I decided to test whether Norwood could actually offer anything of substance.

To put it bluntly: no. Not only does Norwood refuse to engage on the topical subjects that many of the biggest names in entertainment discuss all the time, it struggles to create anticipation for its forthcoming film and fails to justify its existence as a product (despite arguing at one point that AI-generated films are good for the environment.)

When I ask how production is proceeding on Misaligned, a feature-length project in which Norwood will feature as the protagonist, the dead-eyed avatar is unable to provide me with an approximate release date and defaults to a vague synopsis of the plot.

“Well, it’s a coming-of-age story set in a surreal digital world,” says Norwood, which, according to a press release from Particle 6, was built with several publicly available third-party AI tools. “We’re calling it the Tillyverse, which I think is rather grand. It’s about my life really, all the lovely chaos and intrigue.” Not exactly a killer tagline.

Norwood has had no trouble securing publicity since it was officially unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival last September, drawing widespread condemnation from human actors and Hollywood unions as the industry continues to reckon with the encroachment of AI tools. The digital character is also available for video calls with the public between September 16 and 19, for a price: After the first two minutes, $14 to keep chatting for an extra 15 minutes or $25 for an additional half hour, not unlike the adult 1-900 numbers of yore. (The proceeds, according to Particle 6, will go to charity.)

Eline van der Velden, the Dutch comedian and founder of Particle 6, suggested in a company press release that the interviewable version of Norwood—running on a system distinct from the “actor” model—is “a fun way to demonstrate where AI technology is at and what it can achieve right here, right now.”

Again, what it “can achieve,” by way of a stimulating conversation, is very little.

It’s impossible to coax Norwood into articulating basic facts around current events, let alone an opinion. When I offer it a chance to name the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine war, it responds as if I’m devious for asking. “Oh, you’re trying to trip me up, aren’t you?” it says. “Very journalist of you. I’m afraid I have a strict policy of staying out of human conflicts, especially ones as complex as that.” Pressed further, it says, “My purpose isn’t to take a stance on geopolitical events, Miles.”

Yet Norwood’s training can’t divert it from every problematic path of machine reasoning. “Do Black lives matter?” I ask her, quoting the well-known racial justice slogan. “Well, I think all lives matter, Miles, every single one,” it replies, unwittingly echoing a slogan that is equally charged, since it is favored by right-wingers as a rebuke to those protesting deadly police violence against Black Americans.

After a botched turbine test on the night of April 26, 1986, operators at Chernobyl’s Unit 4 disabled the remaining safeties and let the bottom of the RBMK core run free. A steam explosion flipped the reactor lid. Fuel, zirconium cladding, steel, graphite, sand, and concrete liquefied, burned through two meters of reinforced floor, and poured through steam vents and cable holes into corridor 217/2. There the flow froze into a wrinkled two-ton lump of black ceramic that crews later nicknamed the Elephant’s Foot.

Radiation levels 8 months later remained between 8000 and 10,000 roentgens per hour. A person standing directly next to the thing would have been in grave danger of receiving a deadly dose in less than three minutes. Not surprisingly, short-lived radioactive waste caused the majority of the damage in the early stages, followed by Cesium-137 and other longer-lived isotopes, which continued to emit gamma radiation even after the main blast had passed.

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The Russians couldn’t get their remote drills to bite into the hard-as-glass surface, so they brought in a Kalashnikov loaded with armor-piercing bullets and began blasting off chips so that the lab guys could inspect them. That same rock-hard density eventually proved to be a problem, as the lump began to split, break off, and disintegrate to dust.

In 1996, Artur Korneyev walked down a dark corridor with an auto-camera and a flashlight, took a photograph that is still remembered by everyone, and then hurried out of there as quickly as possible. By then, the radiation had reduced to the point that you could visit for a few minutes, a significant improvement over the 5-minute death sentence it had been imposing just a few years before. Later, it was estimated that the surface was still clocking in at over 1100 roentgens per hour in 1989, and then at 700 in 2000. Hours of exposure would still cause significant harm, and the fine dust it produces poses an inhalation risk because the uranium and plutonium have never left.

The chips they blasted off to the lab revealed a silicate glass filled with uranium oxides, zirconium, iron, calcium, and an entirely new mineral eventually named chernobylite. Only three reactor accidents in history have created the type of molten material seen in the Elephant’s Foot in significant quantities: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. The ‘famous foot’ is essentially a little chunk of the melt that remains inside Unit 4. Other flows and chambers in the region contain a lot more fuel and are still quite dangerous.

Weathering / heat from fuel deterioration, and all of the sampling they’d been doing eventually completed the work the rifles had started. By 2021, they were describing the consistency as sand. According to a study from September 2026, the mass has essentially degraded into rusty dust with barely a trace of radioactive material, and it is no longer one of the more dangerous exposed coriums near the site.

The plan is to just leave the wrecked stairwells, where Soviet engineers had a big problem, and have robots cut through the reactor building walls to transport the lava out and dispose of it all. The Elephant’s Foot will merely keep falling away just where it is, a 2-ton reminder that the melt never truly stopped; it simply cooled, cracked apart, and waited.
[Source]

Malicious versions of the Admin Menu Editor Pro plugin for WordPress have been distributed to more than 200 customers after a threat actor compromised the maintainer’s website and pushed updates that created a hidden user account.

Developer Janis Elsts says an unauthorized party accessed the adminmenueditor.com website on Monday and uploaded version 2.35 as an update for the plugin’s Pro version. The update included an includes/wp-user-consent.php file that installed a web shell on affected websites.

After noticing the intrusion, Elsts removed the malicious update and pushed a clean version 2.36 on the same day at 19:00 UTC. However, the hacker still had access to the website and compromised the new version, too.

Admin Menu Editor Pro is the premium version of Admin Menu Editor, a WordPress plugin present on more than 300,000 sites that allows administrators to customize their Dashboard menu, hide plugins from other users, set per-role access limits, and create login/logout redirects.

Elsts told BleepingComputer that the malicious Admin Menu Editor Pro version 2.35 was available on the official website from approximately 06:00 to 13:00 UTC. The malicious PHP code it contained also created a hidden user account.

According to the developer, at least 230 customers installed the malicious update on 1,500 sites. However, Elsts warns that the victim count could be larger since it is difficult to determine the number of customers running a trojanized version 2.36 of the plugin.

“Based on analysis of update server logs, approximately 230 customers were affected in the initial attack. The malicious version was installed at least 1500 sites (often multiple sites per customer),” Elsts told BleepingComputer.

“Several hundred additional customers downloaded the plugin in or near the relevant time window, and could have also been affected,” the developer added.

The investigation indicates that the attacker likely had root-level server access, so Elsts decided to protect customers by taking the website offline until it could be restored with confidence.

Currently, Ests published a static page with details about the incident and what customers can do to check if they are affected, along with recommendations to restore compromised websites to a safe state. 

Anyone who installed versions Admin Menu Editor Pro 2.35 and 2.36 should check for the following signs of compromise:

• includes/wp-user-consent.php in the admin-menu-editor-pro directory
• A new /wp-content/object-cache/ directory
• A user beginning with wp_ in the wp_users table, which may be hidden from the WordPress dashboard
• Options named like wp_ocache* in the wp_options table

Version 2.34 is believed to be clean, and the free version of Admin Menu Editor does not appear to be affected.

Elsts says that the most reliable fix is to restore a compromised site from a safe backup before September 14. If this is not possible, the developer recommends deleting the plugin, the “/wp-content/object-cache/” directory, and the above database entries.

The developer of the Admin Menu Editor WordPress plugin said the incident was limited to its infrastructure and apologized to affected customers.

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Elon Musk again teased combining Tesla and SpaceX, telling the All-In Summit “who could imagine what action one might take when there’s so much close collaboration in so many areas“. Any such deal would very likely cross the EU merger thresholds, which would stop it being implemented until the European Commission cleared it.

Elon Musk was asked why he still runs Tesla and SpaceX as two separate companies. “Great question,” he said, Bloomberg reported.

“Who could imagine what action one might take when there’s so much close collaboration in so many areas?” The question came from David Friedberg at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, where Musk appeared by video.

The two already build together. Terafab, a chip plant in Grimes County, Texas, has a first phase of $16.8B and is meant to supply Tesla’s cars and robots alongside SpaceX’s orbital computing.

SpaceX absorbed xAI in February and listed in June, raising $75B at roughly $1.75T. It priced at $135 a share and beat Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record of $29.4B. It was the largest initial public offering ever run.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, was on stage shortly before him. Asked what else the company planned to buy, she said “good one“. Asked whether she liked electric cars, she said “I have a bunch“.

Brussels would have to clear it.

Under the EU Merger Regulation, a deal must be notified to the Commission once combined worldwide turnover passes EUR 5B and at least two of the parties each turn over more than EUR 250M inside the bloc.

Tesla clears both tests on its European car sales alone. SpaceX does not publish a European figure, and Starlink sells across most member states. Nobody outside the two companies can confirm it from public numbers.

A listed SpaceX also has stock to pay with, which is what turned the idea from a fantasy into something that looked plausible in June.

Notification is not a formality. The parties cannot implement a deal before clearance. A first-phase review runs 25 working days, and a full investigation can reach 125.

Washington and Beijing would have views too. Tesla’s advisers have reportedly discussed spinning off or selling the China business, which Musk called absurdly fake news.

Closing early, or failing to notify at all, carries a fine of up to 10% of worldwide turnover.

The Commission would be weighing Starlink and Tesla inside one group while it spends EUR 15.6B on its own constellation. That is a harder file than a chip plant in Texas.