Most people who want the newest phone look at the Ultra or the latest foldable. Meanwhile, Samsung’s Galaxy S25+, priced at $679.99 (was $1,000), delivers the same daily performance without the increased weight or cost. A year and a half after its release, it is still in that unusual position where the hardware feels modern while the software continues to improve.

The phone’s round aluminum edges and glass sandwich provide a really substantial feel in the hand, which you’ll quickly get used to. At 190 grams and just more than 7mm thick, it’s pleasant to hold for as long as you need. The camera is placed low enough so that when you set the phone on a table, it does not rock or tilt to one side. The IP68 rating means you won’t have to worry about rain or the rare accidental splash of water spoiling anything.

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A 6.7-inch Dynamic AMOLED screen occupies nearly the whole front of the phone. The resolution is a whopping 3120 by 1440 pixels, so text is sharp and images are clear and detailed. Even if you’re out in the hot midday sun, the peak brightness of 2600 nits will ensure you can see what you’re doing on the screen. Scrolling and animations feel silky smooth because to the 120Hz variable refresh rate, which also saves battery life. Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protects the phone’s front and rear.

Under the hood is the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, a chip developed by Qualcomm and Samsung specifically for this line of phones. As a consequence, you’ll get quick app launches, consistent frame rates in games, and plenty of buffer to do whatever you require. It has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and UFS 4.0 keeps things operating smoothly. Wireless connectivity choices include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

The cameras are functional and not overly complicated. The 50-megapixel primary sensor performs well in daytime conditions, providing strong dynamic range. Optical image stabilization helps to keep photos and videos steady. A 10-megapixel 3x telephoto lens is adequate for most everyday zooming demands without sacrificing quality too soon. The 12-megapixel ultrawide is ideal for group photographs and confined spaces. When necessary, video can be captured in 8K and remains crisp at 4K. The 12-megapixel front camera captures natural-looking selfies and excellent video calls.

The 4900mAh battery will power you through a full day of messaging, navigation, streaming, and light photography without trouble. If you’re running low, 45W wired charging will recharge your phone in just an hour with a compatible charger, while 15W wireless charging works on any Qi pad. Reverse wireless charging allows you to charge your earbuds if needed.

One UI 7, which is developed on top of Android 15, arrived polished and has only continued to improve. With 7 years of significant reliability updates already paid for, you can be confident that this phone will be up to date until at least the early 2030s. Galaxy AI tools can handle on-device operations such as search, editing, and summarization without the need to constantly sync with the cloud. The ultrasonic fingerprint scanner continues to lock and unlock with the same speed and reliability as before. Stereo speakers provide excellent sound quality for casual listening or video.

Pony and Uber are also expanding their partnership across four additional European cities.

Uber is launching its first robotaxi service in Europe in partnership with autonomous vehicle (AV) builder Pony AI and Croatian mobility company Verne.

Robotaxi services are now available via Uber in select areas in Croatia’s capital city Zagreb, including the city centre.

The phased launch will see a licensed operator on board behind the wheel, before vehicles are slowly scaled to being fully autonomous, the companies said. The service’s geographic coverage is also expected to expand over time.

Pony and Uber are expanding their partnership elsewhere in Europe too, with plans for a fleet of 2,000 additional robotaxis spread across four cities. Details of the expansion plans have not yet been disclosed.

The two companies first began collaborating in 2025 by bringing Pony robotaxis onto Uber’s platform in international markets outside the US.

In March, they joined forces with Verne to test out Pony’s ‘Gen-7’ autonomous driving system in Zagreb, which has already seen “meaningful” commercial scale in China – including unit economics breakeven in China’s Guangzhou and Shenzhen regions – according to Pony.

Verne had already launched AV booking services in Zagreb this April via its own app, in partnership with Pony. Since then, the company said, it has completed “thousands” of AV trips.

This new service in Croatia brings together Pony’s autonomous driving solution, Verne as the fleet owner and service operator, and Uber integration of the service into its ride-hailing network.

“From today, Verne rides are also available through Uber, giving customers another way to access the service,” said Marko Pejkovic, the CEO of Verne. “This marks another European first – the first time autonomous rides are available through Uber in Europe.

“This is an important milestone not only for Verne, but also for Croatia. A service pioneered here in Zagreb is now available through the world’s largest mobility platform. The experience we are gaining every day in Zagreb will help us bring Verne to other European cities.”

Uber said it expects AV and human drivers to “coexist and grow together for the foreseeable future”. Many journeys will continue to require human drivers while AVs are trained, it added. Riders can access the service through the UberX or Comfort options on the Uber app.

“Today marks a major milestone for autonomous mobility in Europe,” said Annie Duvnjak, the global head of autonomous mobility operations at Uber.

“By bringing together Pony AI’s proven autonomous-driving technology, Verne’s operational expertise and Uber’s global platform, we’re making it simple for riders to access autonomous rides through the Uber app.

“Zagreb is an important first step as we work to bring AVs to millions of riders and build the world’s largest platform for AV deployment.”

The US ride-hailing platform has plans in place to expand robotaxis to London, Madrid, Munich, Hong Kong and a number of US cities. It already operates robotaxis in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Riyadh, alongside US cities Atlanta, Austin and Dallas.

Uber also has existing partnerships with May Mobility, Lucid and Nuro, China’s Baidu and WeRide, and the UK’s Wayve to test and deploy AVs across metropolitan areas worldwide.

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The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) has disclosed that the personal information of some current and former employees, as well as job applicants, was exposed in a “cybersecurity incident.” The hospital says the breach stemmed from a flaw in third-party software.

Clinical systems and patient records were untouched, according to the Toronto pediatric hospital, but its public-facing Careers website was temporarily pulled offline.

Careers site restored, incident scope under review

SickKids disclosed the incident this week, saying it resulted in unauthorized access to employee data.

The hospital attributes the breach to a vulnerability in a third-party software application that it says is used by SickKids and other organizations, according to a media statement.

The framing appears to suggest that there’s a wider campaign against users of the same product, although the hospital has not named the vendor, the application, or the CVE involved.

The external Careers website was temporarily affected and has “since been safely restored,” per the statement.

Clinical systems and patient information were not affected, and patient care continued as usual, SickKids says.

After learning of the incident, the hospital launched an investigation with the help of outside cybersecurity experts.

The findings indicate that personal information belonging to current and former SickKids, Boomerang (a SickKids-owned pediatric clinic), and SickKids Foundation employees, as well as SickKids job applicants, may have been exposed.

The hospital has not said what categories of data were involved, how many people are affected, or when the intrusion took place.

Its review of the impacted information is ongoing, with individuals confirmed as affected to be notified directly.

In the meantime, SickKids says it has alerted everyone potentially caught up in the incident out of an abundance of caution, and is offering 24 months of complimentary credit monitoring and identity protection.

Job application portals are an unusually rich target for data thieves. Applicants routinely hand over full names, home addresses, phone numbers, employment histories, and in some jurisdictions government identifiers. That information is useful both for identity fraud and for building convincing social engineering pretexts against hospital staff.

A repeat target

This is not the first publicly known security incident to have hit the hospital in recent years.

In December 2022, SickKids was hit by a ransomware attack that disrupted internal systems, hospital phone lines, and its website, and caused delays in lab and imaging results.

The LockBit ransomware gang subsequently issued a rare public apology, saying the affiliate responsible had broken its rules against encrypting medical institutions, and handed over a free decryptor, though only after the hospital had spent nearly two weeks restoring systems on its own.

In September 2023, SickKids was among the Ontario healthcare providers caught up in a breach at a third-party organization it shares perinatal and child health data with. That incident, which stemmed from mass exploitation of the MOVEit Transfer zero-day (CVE-2023-34362), exposed information on 3.4 million people, including names, home addresses, dates of birth, and health card numbers.

Healthcare remains one of the most heavily targeted sectors for both ransomware crews and data extortion groups.

Pediatric hospitals in particular sit on decades’ worth of sensitive records, which continues to make them attractive to attackers regardless of the ethical lines criminal operations claim to observe.

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

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After a dominant win at Galle in the first Sri Lanka vs India Test, Shubman Gill’s men will now be looking to grab another 30 crucial World Test Championship (WTC) points in the second Test at SSC Colombo.

India now need 7 wins out of their remaining 8 matches to make it to the WTC final. Sri Lanka’s loss, however, puts them nearly out of the WTC final race, as they now need 6 out of 6 wins to keep their hopes alive, while also depending on other results.

It’s less about an autonomous vehicle’s capabilities and more about what conditions it can operate in.

Why Waymo is considered Level 4 automation

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What separates Level 4 from Level 5 automation

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Why getting to Level 5 is much harder than expanding Level 4

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Threat actors are abusing FTP banners to hide commands that deliver two previously undocumented remote access trojans named E4del and PINHOLE.

MalwareHunterTeam observed this unusual technique in July in an attack that used shortcut files (.LNK) and FTP server banners as dead-drop resolvers (DDR) to retrieve commands.

FTP banners are text strings the server uses as a greeting message for connecting hosts before they log in.

By embedding commands in the initial response sent when a compromised system connects to an FTP server, a malware stager can receive instructions from a remote server.

After discovering FTP banners being used to deliver malicious commands during an investigation, researchers at threat intelligence platform SOCRadar expanded their hunt and found that the technique remains in use.

“By utilizing FOFA searches, we determined that this technique has been weaponized since early July 2026 and remains operational, with new infrastructure observed as recently as August 2026.”

In a report shared with BleepingComputer, SOCRadar says that the observed attacks start with a ZIP archive that triggers an LNK-based infection chain. The researchers note that the initial compromise likely occurs through phishing.

The infection chain delivers two remote access trojans (RATs) named E4del and PINHOLE via two distinct infection routes, both retrieving  a PowerShell script from FTP banners.

E4del is a Node.js-based RAT packaged inside a digitally signed Electron application that masquerades as Discord.

The RAT supports running commands through persistent or temporary shells, capturing screenshots, streaming the desktop over WebSockets, and downloading and executing additional payloads.

SOCRadar also mentions a Node.js module named crypto32.node that attempts privilege escalation, but the researchers could not retrieve it for analysis.

PINHOLE retrieves its C2 configuration from Pinterest pins and SurveyMonkey survey questions, a tactic that offers versatility and resilience to take-downs.

The malware leaves a minimal footprint on the host, using shellcode fluctuation to keep only one 4KB section of the payload in memory at a time, and injecting the final assembly into a suspended ApplicationFrameHost.exe process via Early Bird APC injection.

PINHOLE supports 14 commands, including file enumeration, uploading and downloading files, command execution, process management, capturing screenshots, and deploying a module for stealing credentials stored in browsers.

At the time of analysis, the PINHOLE script counted only 11 execution events, suggesting that the campaign was in an early stage.

While abusing FTP banners to deliver commands is a novel alternative, SOCRadar says that the approach is less stealthy than traditional web-based DDRs (e.g., X, GitHub, YouTube) because FTP connections to unknown servers are more likely to stand out.

“While threat actors typically utilize legitimate web services, such as X, GitHub, or YouTube, to provide cover through high-volume, expected network traffic, FTP banners represent a novel alternative.”

The researchers note that the technique is very versatile and could “easily” be adapted for ClickFix social engineering campaigns.

SOCRadar’s report provides indicators of compromise that could help defenders identify the malicious infrastructure as well as infected machines on the network.

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

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On Hackaday last week, and on the podcast, we were talking about one of the educational toys of yesteryear that launched a thousand careers, at least if the comment section is to be believed: the Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronics kit. The “toy” itself was basically a bunch of components with spring terminals, but the secret sauce was in in the instruction book, and maybe the marketing.

Tom had one of these when he was a kid, and told a great story about wanting it desperately based on the ads he had seen with kids Morse coding to each other. When he got the kit, and found out that “it was just a bunch of wires” he was fully pissed off. But he worked through the examples, learned some basic electronics, and the rest is history.

What I really love about this story is the siren’s call of a good project. Tom was pulled in, and maybe even fooled, by the advertising, but it probably changed his life. It’s funny how many of our folks can remember the first project that got them hooked as well. With me it was some simple audio effects pedals and then maybe later some simple BEAM robots, and for younger hackers maybe it was a 3D printer or Arduino project.

Digital or analog, the common ground here is that we all thought that some project was cool enough to warrant the sweat of learning enough to do it. Good instructions are helpful of course, and having the parts on hand never hurts. But it’s the promise of making something that you really want that I think underlies all good first projects. (And heck, every subsequent project as well.)

So while Tom, and a bunch of our readers, were looking back with nostalgia at the 200-in-1, I’m thinking about how many more than 200 projects I’ve seen made by our community, and even featured here on Hackaday, that are out there to provide the motivation to get someone started. Keep on hacking!

Chinese chip companies are running unusually broad equity schemes to keep engineers, with Cambricon covering 85.3% of its workforce and AMEC more than 97%. Europe’s semiconductor sector has a talent gap estimated at 65,000 workers.

Chinese chip companies are giving away equity at a scale that looks less like a bonus scheme and more like a defensive measure. Cambricon has unlocked around 600,000 shares for 124 core staff, worth an average of 5.57mn yuan each, or about $828,000.

The breadth is the more striking number. The same company has granted 5mn shares to 944 employees, which is 85.3% of its workforce, in a plan running to 2028.

It is not alone in that approach. Zhongji InnoLight, which makes optical transceivers for AI data centres, allocated 2.48mn shares to 99 key personnel with average yields above 26mn yuan, and the chip equipment maker AMEC has a restricted stock plan covering more than 97% of its staff.

Cash is moving in the same direction. ByteDance and Tencent have reportedly offered pay increases of up to 150% and bonuses of around 35% to secure AI talent.

The pressure behind it is domestic as much as geopolitical. Chinese firms are poaching from one another while export controls have made domestic chip design a national priority, which concentrates demand on a small pool of engineers.

The awards are not unconditional. Cambricon has tied an incentive plan to a revenue target of roughly $14.8bn, which turns retention into a performance instrument rather than a gift.

Europe’s problem is described in the opposite terms. The European Chips Skills Academy has put the continent’s semiconductor talent gap at 65,000 workers, in a region that has more AI talent than the United States by headcount.

What Europe lacks is the instrument rather than the people. Many of its relevant employers are listed incumbents, research institutes or university spinouts, and employee share schemes differ so much between member states that equity is a harder tool to reach for.

Its answer has largely been training. Skills academies, apprenticeships and Chips Act programmes address supply, on a timescale measured in graduate cohorts rather than quarters.

The American answer is simply money. TNW has reported that Anthropic pays the highest salaries in AI research, to the point that its chief executive has worried aloud about people joining for the pay.

So three regions are answering the same shortage differently. China is offering ownership, America is offering cash, and Europe is offering courses, which is the only one of the three that cannot be accepted immediately.

Across the world, rising costs and an uncertain economy mean that smartphone sales are falling, yet Apple’s iPhone has still seen a 5% growth in the latest quarter.

The latest figures from Europe recently showed that as the smartphone market continues to contract, the iPhone continues to grow. Now figures for Latin America are saying a similar, but not identical thing.

According to Counterpoint Research, smartphone sales in Latin America for Q2 2026 saw their largest decline in three years. Compared to the same period in 2025, the market shrunk by 10%.

In Europe, Apple still saw its market share rise during that period, but for Latin America, the result is less clear cut. Apple remains behind Samsung, Xiaomi, and Motorola for market share, but it still grew its shipments by 5%.

Only Samsung did better at with a 6% increase. All others saw sales decline, with Xiaomi the worst affected with a 27% drop year over year.

LATAM Smartphone Shipments by OEM, Q2 2025 vs Q2 2026 YoY – image credit: Counterpoint Research.

The price rises from the global chip shortage contributed to the overall drop, with the greatest declines seen by the entry-level and mid-tier brands. Those account for three quarters of all the smartphones sold in the region.

Researchers credit Apple’s growth in the premium market in part to the company absorbing price rises, at least for the time being. They also report that there is consistent demand for the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

There was also steady demand for older iPhones, while the quarter benefited from the then still quite new iPhone 17e. That had launched midway through March, the last month of the previous quarter.

Apple’s fiscal Q2 runs from April to June, and there were no new iPhone launches in that time. The third quarter runs from July to September, so there will be a launch of the iPhone 18 Pro range toward the end of that quarter.

That will probably benefit Apple, but overall the research expects that Latin America smartphone sales will not improve until at least 2028.