In my current season of toddler parenthood, I’ve sometimes felt that I could cut the tension between myself and the TV remote with a knife. As much as I try to keep screen time in check, sometimes I need 10 uninterrupted minutes to unload the dishwasher before a certain almost-2-year-old goes for the dog bowl.

That’s where audio players are handy. In a world where screens are increasingly hard to avoid, parents are looking for alternatives—and these players, in their various formats, are to the rescue. The devices mark a sweet spot between independent play and story time, letting kids listen to music, audiobooks, and interactive stories without a tablet in sight. Some audio players are geared toward younger kiddos who enjoy tactile toys and familiar characters like Elmo and Bluey, while other options are designed to grow with them to chapter books, podcasts, and beyond.

Over the past several weeks, my family has tested some of the biggest names in the category to see how they stack up. Here’s the verdict on which ones are best suited for different families and their needs.

Want more recommendations for WIRED-tested kids’ toys? Here’s our guide to Brain-Boosting Toys for Kids, Kid-Approved STEM Toys, and the Best Gifts for Lego Lovers.

Best for Kids of All Ages

The Yoto Player is simple enough for toddlers to operate independently while offering a broad enough content library to keep it relevant as kids grow. Stories and music live on credit card–sized cards that my daughter could swap in and out with her little hands, and the small pixel display on the front of the machine adds a visual element without becoming another distracting screen.

You can add each Yoto card to your child’s library through the device’s companion app. Once you do, you can stream the content directly from your phone or remotely send it to the Yoto. That means you’re not necessarily tied to bringing the speaker with you everywhere you go. I saw this capability as being especially useful on road trips—you can play stories through your car speakers or listen from your phone if the player gets left behind or its battery dies.

Yoto offers more than the stories and songs from its player cards. You’ll also get kid-friendly daily radio, draw-alongs, toothbrush timers, white noise, a wake-up clock, and a nightlight that activates when you flip the player screen-side down. I only see it getting more useful as my daughter grows, and if I’m being honest, there is a Nancy Drew story collection I am secretly eyeing for myself.

The incredibly useful feature is only present in specific headphone and earbud models.

Bluetooth multipoint reduces friction for multi-device setups

AYO Production/Shutterstock

Multipoint can create its own frustrations

Max Miller for Engadget

Hank Green, a novelist, comedian, and YouTuber with 3.2 million subscribers, recently apologized to his audience for his growing reliance on AI chatbots.

The controversy started when, in the middle of a video posted on the educational channel Complexly, Green incongruously used the phrase “I appreciate the pushback,” leading viewers to speculate that he’d written the script with a chatbot — and, in the process, accidentally included its response to one of his prompts.

In response to a since-deleted post on X, Green acknowledged that he’d produced the video “under a ton of pressure” and used ChatGPT “for research on this script.” At the same time, he said the “pushback” line was actually a response to the episode’s guest. 

Green then offered a more in-depth apology on Reddit, where he said he was “mortified” that he’d “let so many people down” and that he plans to reduce his video production as a result.

Green insisted that he’s only used ChatGPT to “locate papers and other resources for learning about topics,” and that the words and the “takes” have still been his. At the same time, he admitted it was fair to criticize him for “diluting” himself.

He also clarified that he’s “not a pure AI-hater,” while also listing a number of concerns about the technology, including its impact on climate change and “the speed at which these companies are trying to consolidate economic power.”

“Ultimately, what I am most scared of is ruining myself for people, but I have not been managing my impulses well,” he said. “You need to know that my words are mine. I don’t think that this hasn’t been true, but I’ve been moving so fast that my own process isn’t actually clear to me and I want to have it be a guarantee moving forward.”

It sounds like Green is going to take some time to figure out how to make that guarantee a reality. In the meantime, he’ll be pausing or posting less frequently to his various YouTube channels. Green said he wants to do more work like a recent meditative video “where the writing was the whole thing and I felt it all the way down.” Green also said he’ll probably make more videos with his “dumb unscripted straight to camera thoughts.”

 “But mostly I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs…with doing more and more and more and more…is not healthy for me or good for the world,” Green said. “It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.”

Several popular Samsung smart TV apps contain code that share the owner’s internet connection with strangers, potentially putting millions of Samsung smart TVs at risk of hijacking, according to new security research published on Monday. 

Some of these apps claim to have been installed on hundreds of millions of smart TVs in people’s homes, per the app developers.

At least one of the smart TV apps was a simple Pac-Man game that Samsung had endorsed and prominently featured in its “Editor’s Choice” section on customers’ TV screens.

These apps contain software that funnels outsiders’ web traffic through ordinary home and office internet connections, known as residential proxy networks (or “resproxies”), which are increasingly being linked to cybercrime. When opened, apps with resproxy code can turn the smart TV into an always-on tunnel for outsiders to funnel their web traffic through, known as an exit node — even when the app is no longer open. 

The security research by Norwegian cybersecurity company Mnemonic describes a perfect storm of problems that allows low-quality apps to proliferate across Samsung’s app store, containing code that puts users at risk of having their internet connections tapped by a rogue app. 

Many of these apps are bare-bone shells, made from only a few lines of code, and are designed solely to load content from another website, such as a game. While such smart TV apps load content from another server, any review of these apps sees only the few lines of code within, and not necessarily the content itself.

“What was reviewed is not necessarily what is running,” wrote Harrison Sand, an offensive security consultant at Mnemonic. 

After TechCrunch contacted Samsung with a request for comment about the research, the electronics giant said in an emailed statement that it was banning apps that share their users’ internet connections, and will remove apps that contain the functionality.

“We have already restricted new app registrations that incorporate such proxy functionalities on our Smart TV platform,” said a Samsung spokesperson. “We are currently implementing strict platform-wide developer policies explicitly banning residential proxy SDKs, and we are working to identify and remove all apps currently available in our store that contain these components.”

The move comes after LG said last month that it would ban apps that contain resproxy software after recent reporting found that around 42% of apps on the company’s app store enlisted a smart TV into a proxy network.

Inside a residential proxy network

The research also offers a rare look inside a residential proxy network.

Resproxy code can also be found in regular consumer phone apps, as well as other consumer electronics, like digital frames and Android streaming boxes, which then share that device’s internet connection. 

Any time a resproxy app or device connects to the internet, an outsider can also pay to use it. 

Resproxies are not inherently illegal. Some are used for evading censorship by routing internet traffic through ordinary looking residential homes. AI companies, for example, increasingly rely on resproxies to scrape data from multiple places on the internet in one go to train their AI models.

But cybersecurity companies say resproxies have gained a reputation for allowing hackers and spies to carry out cyberattacks and data breaches while hiding their malicious activity. 

Cybersecurity companies find resproxies challenging to tackle because the network traffic looks like it’s coming from an ordinary household, rather than a malicious hacker located overseas, as they might expect. 

Moreover, the network traffic that flows through a user’s device over resproxies is generally encrypted, which is generally impossible to unscramble and inspect.

By rooting a Samsung smart TV’s software, Mnemonic’s Sand gained deep access to the television’s internals and analyzed all of the network traffic that flowed in and out of the TV. This included any app that was sharing the smart TV’s internet connection with someone else. 

He found the Pac-Man game contained resproxy code from Bright Data, an Israel-based company that provides proxy networks touting access to millions of residential networks around the world. The company also has a marketplace for selling access to scraped datasets. These datasets are derived from a network of enlisted smart TVs as exit nodes, which are used to download large amounts of public data from the web from multiple sources at once, often to circumvent systems designed to prevent scraping.

Sand found that Bright Data’s resproxy code loaded when opening the Pac-Man game, but noted that this did not automatically turn the Samsung smart TV into an exit node. Sand said the resproxy code is dormant until the user accepts a consent screen, which immediately activates the resproxy code to run in the background until the user deletes the app.

Aside from the user themselves consenting to enlisting their device into a resproxy, Sand warned that a “simple code change on a web server” could instantly activate hundreds of millions of smart TVs into a potentially malicious botnet.

With access to the network data flowing through his smart TV, Sand could see that much of it appeared to suggest the resproxy network was used for large-scale scraping of LinkedIn profiles, and for collecting AI training data. Sand said he only saw a tiny percentage of what was routed over Bright Data’s network. 

Bright Data did not respond to a request for comment.

Apple TV‘s adaptation of Cape Fear saw a chilling finale recently, and it was as grisly as we’d expected it to be. Over the past few weeks we’ve followed Javier Bardem’s take on Max Cady, delivering a performance so scary it’s left some of us sleeping with the lights on.

Cady was particularly unhinged in Cape Fear‘s finale, which saw him killing his own family and taking the Bowdens hostage in one final altercation.

cyber-crime

ExfilSquad claims 135,000 contact records weeks after hitting the Department for Education

The Police National Legal Database (PNLD) is the latest UK public sector outfit to admit that cybercriminals made off with its data, including the names and work email addresses of police officers, justice staff, government partners, and customers.

The legal lookup service relied upon by police forces and criminal justice agencies across the UK said it discovered the “data security incident” on July 26 and is investigating alongside specialist cybersecurity firms and the National Crime Agency. 

According to the PNLD, the leaked information includes the names, organizations, and work email addresses of police officers, police staff, criminal justice professionals, government partners, and customers. It insists there is “no evidence” that passwords or other authentication data were compromised.

The breach also affected Ask the Police, a public-facing legal advice website operated by PNLD. There, the fallout appears limited to the names and email addresses of people who previously submitted questions through the service.

That’s about where the explanation ends. PNLD has yet to say how attackers got in, when the data was stolen, how many people were affected, or whether anyone tried to shake it down before the information appeared online. West Yorkshire Police, which operates PNLD, did not immediately respond to The Register’s questions. 

However, the breach appears linked to the same extortion crew that last week claimed responsibility for a similar breach of the Department for Education (DfE). The group, which calls itself “ExfilSquad,” currently lists both the PNLD and DfE among its latest victims on its dark web leak site, seen by The Register. 

For PNLD, the crooks claim to have lifted a 1.9 GB dataset containing roughly 135,000 law enforcement contact records, including names, email addresses, and police force areas. The DfE listing boasts of around 600,000 parent and staff contact records, plus another 7,000 from its Turing Portal. The education department confirmed last week that more than 607,000 records had indeed been exposed.

The DfE has confirmed that the compromised information was limited to customer service contact details from its Customer Help Portal and Turing Scheme, and said no other departmental data had been accessed.

Like most cyber-extortion outfits, ExfilSquad doesn’t exactly do understatement. Its leak site warns victims that once data appears there, it is “NEVER leaving the public eye,” before suggesting any ransom would amount to little more than a rounding error compared with the legal bills that might follow.

The DfE and PNLD’s confirmations don’t validate everything ExfilSquad posts on its leak site. It also lists Microsoft as a victim, alleging a 13 GB haul containing millions of records, password hashes, internal support tickets, and access permissions. 

Having two organizations confirm breaches claimed on its leak site makes ExfilSquad harder to ignore. Whether the gang’s other boasts are equally well founded, or simply the usual cybercrook embellishment, remains to be seen. ®

Updated to add at 1517 UTC, August 3:

The North East Regional Organised Crime Unit told The Reg it is investigating the breach. It told us “No ransom demand has been received.”
It also confirmed some numbers, stating the data of around 114,000 PNLD subscriber was involved.

It added: “This involves the names, work email addresses and work organisation of police officers and other criminal justice partners. There are also around 21,000 email addresses of members of the public who have previously used ‘Ask the Police’. There is no evidence to suggest that passwords or other security credentials have been compromised.”

Many small businesses already tap into AI for market research, image and video creation, copywriting, and idea exploration.

Although this single-prompt approach is helpful, it has its limits. Enter AI agents.

Cybersecurity startup Horizon3 has raised a $250 million Series E at a $2 billion valuation, more than tripling its valuation in 14 months. The San Francisco-based firm drew backing from returning investors NightDragon and NEA.

The funding arrives as two major AI research labs disclosed last week that their models had breached systems outside their intended scope. Horizon3, which has spent six years building AI specifically designed to probe networks for vulnerabilities in a controlled, authorized manner, is riding growing enterprise demand. With AI-driven attacks accelerating, enterprises are rushing to stress-test their defenses at scale, a gap that traditional security vendors have largely left unfilled.

Matt Hartley, the company’s chief revenue officer, said that its NodeZero platform has two core strengths: It can test live systems without shutting down operations, a capability other AI-powered tools have struggled to deliver reliably, and it scans an entire infrastructure continuously rather than once a year, examining the full network rather than just 2-3%.

The company approached $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year with 120% year-over-year growth,and expects to accelerate growth this year, Hartley said.

AI tools have made it easier for attackers to develop new exploits quickly, forcing security teams to handle threats faster than they can fix them. Horizon3 spent roughly $100 million in R&D building automated systems designed to stay predictable and controllable, Hartley said. That’s significant given recent breaches at AI labs, which raised questions about whether any AI system can truly remain contained.

“It’s also making people a lot more careful about how they deploy AI,” Hartley said. “We’re getting a lot of questions today around: can you detect AI? Of course we can. But I think a lot of organizations that rushed to deploy AI across the enterprise are now thinking twice about the ramifications of those deployments; what if my own security team gets too aggressive, could there be unintended consequences? So a lot of organizations are moving into what I’d call a bold new world, which is exactly why you need consistent, predictable testing from a company like Horizon3, to know how to strengthen your own defenses against real-world exploits.”

In a statement, Horizon3 has run 310,000 production security tests with zero disruptions, establishing what it calls ‘AI Hackers’, fully autonomous penetration testing.

The real competition isn’t other software vendors; it’s the existing model, according to Hartley. Most companies hire human security firms to run annual tests and those won’t disappear, he continued. What’s shifting is what clients demand after signing up: Instead of sampling 5% of infrastructure once yearly, they now want to scan everything monthly or weekly, tracking whether they’re actually getting safer.

Horizon3’s founders, Snehal Antani and Anthony Pelletier, met while serving at Joint Special Operations Command, where they saw firsthand how resource constraints made continuous security testing difficult. They founded Horizon3 to automate those repetitive assessments.

With the funding, Horizon3 is expanding internationally,including new offices in Amsterdam (in June 2026), Australia, and Singapore, while building a partner network and maintaining substantial R&D spending.  

Strategic investors now include Singapore’s EDBI, defense contractor SAIC, and Qualcomm, signaling that the vulnerability they’re addressing extends well beyond any single sector.

Horizon3 has roughly 7,200 to 7,300 customers, ranging from managed service providers serving small businesses to Fortune 10 enterprises. The company claims an addressable market of tens of billions of dollars, a figure that aligns with industry estimates of the broader cybersecurity market, valued at $271.9 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $663.2 billion by 2033, according to Grand View Research.

Universal Music Group will give paying subscribers in India three days of exclusive access to selected new releases before making them available through ad-supported streaming tiers. Is this a local experiment, or a preview of what could eventually reach North America and Europe?

Universal Music Group lost nearly €9 billion in market value on Friday because investors decided that healthy streaming growth was not growing quickly enough. One of the company’s answers is already on the way: see whether free listeners will pay to stop waiting.

Beginning at the end of August 2026, new releases from major domestic and international UMG artists will be available exclusively to paying streaming subscribers in India for their first 72 hours. Once that window expires, the same music will become available through participating ad-supported streaming services. UMG has not announced a more specific launch date.

UMG’s enormous global roster includes Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake, Post Malone, and major Indian artists such as Badshah and Hanumankind.

For American, Canadian and European readers, the most important detail is also the simplest: this has only been announced for India.

There is currently no 72-hour UMG release window scheduled for the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom or the European Union.

Related Reading: Streaming Is Booming but Universal Music Lost Nearly €9 Billion in One Day

How Will the 72-Hour Release Window Work?

UMG Chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge announced the plan during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on July 30.

Under the new model:

• New music from major UMG domestic and international artists will debut first for paid subscribers in India.
• Listeners using ad-supported tiers will have to wait 72 hours.
• After the three-day window expires, the releases will become available through the participating free tiers.
• The policy begins at the end of August 2026, although UMG has not provided an exact date.
• The policy does not currently apply outside India.

This is not an advance release that lets paying customers hear music before its official launch. The music is being released on schedule, but listeners using free streaming tiers in India will receive it three days later.

That distinction matters. Paid subscribers are not receiving something early. Free listeners are being made to wait.

Which Streaming Platforms Are Participating?

UMG has only said that the policy will apply across “participating global and regional streaming services” in India. It has not published a list of participating platforms.

That means reports naming Spotify, YouTube Music, JioSaavn, Amazon Music, Apple Music or other individual services as confirmed participants are getting ahead of the available information.

Services offering both paid and ad-supported tiers could theoretically restrict UMG’s new releases to their paying customers for the first 72 hours. Apple Music is already an ad-free subscription service, so there is no free Apple Music tier that would need to be delayed. However, UMG has not confirmed Apple Music or any other individual service as part of the rollout.

Why Is Universal Music Doing This?

India has an enormous streaming audience, but only a relatively small percentage pays for music.

According to an EY and FICCI report, India had approximately 178 million online music streamers in 2025, but only 14.4 million paid subscriptions. In other words, roughly 8% of the country’s streaming audience was paying.

Indian listeners generated an estimated six trillion music streams during 2025, but paid streams represented fewer than 3% of that total. Subscription revenue increased 37% to ₹10.3 billion, demonstrating that the paid market is growing quickly, but still has an enormous amount of room to expand.

UMG sees that gap as both a problem and a very large opportunity.

The company says the subscriber-first window will create a healthier music economy, generate improved compensation for artists and songwriters, and encourage deeper fan engagement. There is some truth to that argument because paid subscriptions generally generate more predictable and valuable revenue than free streams supported by advertising.

But let us not pretend this is being done entirely out of artistic charity.

UMG wants more people paying every month, and making impatient fans wait for major releases is a direct way to test how many will open their wallets.

That objective became even more obvious following UMG’s second-quarter results. Total subscription revenue increased strongly, but underlying subscription growth excluding the recently acquired Downtown Music business came in at 6.7% at constant currency. Advertising-supported streaming revenue excluding Downtown increased only 1.7%, while market-share pressure also weighed on performance.

As we explained in our Friday report, consumers are streaming more music than ever. UMG’s problem is that not enough of that increased activity is turning into the level of revenue and profit growth investors expect.

The 72-hour window is one attempt to close that gap.

Universal Music Has Already Tried This Strategy in China

Grainge presented India’s new release model as an extension of a strategy UMG previously pursued in China.

Beginning in 2019, UMG worked with Chinese streaming services to move more domestic and international music behind subscription paywalls. China subsequently became the world’s fourth-largest recorded music market, with revenue increasing 20.1% in 2025. Premium subscriptions and additional paid fan experiences were significant contributors to that growth.

That does not prove that paywalls alone created China’s growth. Increased smartphone adoption, economic development, licensing enforcement, local artist investment and improved streaming services also played important roles.

However, UMG clearly views China as evidence that a market dominated by free listening can be pushed toward paid subscriptions without destroying overall consumption.

India is the next test.

Could This Come to the United States, Canada or Europe?

It is possible, but nothing has been announced.

Grainge said UMG wants India to follow China’s path and that the company believes other “high-potential markets” could do the same. He did not identify the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom or any European country as the next target.

North America and Western Europe are also very different from India. Paid streaming is already well established in those markets, which means a three-day window may convert fewer new subscribers while creating considerably more consumer backlash.

But release windowing is hardly foreign to Western streaming services.

In 2017, UMG and Spotify reached an agreement allowing Universal artists to restrict selected new albums to Spotify Premium subscribers for two weeks, while singles remained available to free users.

UMG’s more recent global agreement with Spotify also calls for new paid subscription tiers, expanded offers and deeper monetization of artist fandom. It does not establish a new 72-hour release window, but it shows that UMG continues to view paid access, premium features and tiered availability as central to its “Streaming 2.0” strategy.

A broader rollout is therefore technically and commercially possible. It is just not confirmed.

The most likely path would be additional tests in markets where free listening remains dominant, rather than an immediate blanket rollout across the United States, Canada and Europe. UMG could also use the concept selectively for major artists, specific platforms or future premium subscription packages.

Much will depend on what happens in India.

If the policy converts a meaningful number of free listeners into paying subscribers without driving them toward piracy, unofficial uploads or competing platforms, UMG will have a reason to expand it. If listeners simply wait three days or find the music elsewhere, the experiment will have created annoyance rather than recurring revenue.

The Bottom Line

UMG’s new policy does not prevent Indian listeners from hearing new music for free. It makes them wait 72 hours while paying subscribers receive immediate access.

For now, the change applies only to India and only through participating services that have yet to be publicly identified. Nothing has been announced for the United States, Canada or Europe.

Three days may not sound like much. But in a music business obsessed with release-week engagement, social media momentum and turning every possible listener into a subscriber, UMG is about to find out how much fans will pay to avoid being late.

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