The Nvidia Shield TV Is 7 Years Old. The price of anything with memory is skyrocketing thanks to AI. Aging streaming devices are no exception. The era of generative AI has upended technology supply chains, and there is one ironclad rule in 2026: If it has memory or storage, it's getting more expensive. Even devices with years-old tech inside are still apparently subject to that unwritten rule. Nvidia has just announced that the Shield TV Pro is getting $100 more expensive, effective immediately.

Millions have downloaded Meta's AI agent Muse. But getting it to do your bidding comes with privacy costs. Meta's new personal assistant, Muse, has become a viral hit, with millions downloading the AI agent, connecting it to bank accounts, messages, or health data, and allowing it to complete tasks for them. But as Muse takes off among consumers, data from inside the app is providing insight into how it organizes and presents information to users. In recent days, multiple researchers have extracted Muse's internal files and dumped the agent's operating instructions, providing a glimpse of how the system was built and behaves. Meta has maintained that it intended for these files to be accessible in the interest of transparency, and they do provide insight into how Muse responds to prompts and questions about, for example, highly politicized or sensitive topics.

A Decade-Long Experiment Is Unlocking the Mysteries of the Ocean's'Deep Reefs' Scientists left structures up to 100 meters under the surface. Here's what they found when they retrieved them 10 years later. On a bright, sunny day last May, I stood on a boat surrounded by the turquoise waters of the island nation of Palau . I was there in the western Pacific watching scuba divers as they prepared to bring up evidence of a mysterious aquatic world. Palau is famous for its spectacular and rich coral reefs . But these divers were planning to descend past those sun-lit marine communities and down into a lesser-known twilight zone known as the "mesophotic coral ecosystem." Divers prepare to retrieve research structures from down in the "deep reefs."

DHS agents not only tracked and intimidated people observing ICE activity in Maine, but stored information about them in a Palantir-built database, newly unsealed court filings say. An explosive and newly partially unsealed court filing alleges that the US Department of Homeland Security built up dossiers on ICE observers--including their photos, license plate numbers, and other information--and stored them in a system called the Investigative Case Management database, which was built by Palantir . Palantir did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for DHS calls the case "meritless" and says that "the underlying lawsuit is based on the lie that there is a database of'domestic terrorists' run by DHS." Plaintiffs allege in the filing, which is heavily based on documents produced by the government and depositions of DHS agents, that agents had a practice of intimidating protesters and observers. They did this, the filing says, by doing drive-bys of the observers' homes and, in the case of at least one observer, requiring that she be referred to secondary inspection any time she tries to cross the border until at least January 2027.

The league is releasing romance-style audio stories to promote games. Critics say it’s cheap pandering that doesn’t address toxic masculinity in the sport.

Many frontier labs keep their risky research locked away. Trillium Labs wants to show off its work when it comes to self-improvement and model behavior. Some big AI companies seem to think that the best way to keep models from becoming too chaotic or too mischievous is to keep them locked inside of labs. If only a chosen few can access them, the thinking goes, they can do less damage in the real world while researchers try to understand what they're capable of. Nathan Lambert and Tom Zick, two industry scientists, believe the opposite. The pair founded a nonprofit, Trillium Labs, that will work on various areas of AI research--including potentially problematic areas like recursive self-improvement (RSI) and agents--in a more transparent way.

Trump's Crazy AI Rebrand Was a Loyalty Test for Tech Execs--and It Worked But they meekly went along when Trump cancelled the term. Seventy years ago last summer, a group of scientists met at Dartmouth College to discuss a wild idea--that machines might one day be capable of human-like thought processes. One of those scientists, John McCarthy, had suggested a name for the new field: artificial intelligence . When you search Google Scholar for "artificial intelligence," approximately 7,420,000 results appear. The term is utterly ubiquitous. Even for people who despise AI, the least of their worries is what we call it.

Self-driving cars from Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla are studded with cameras and sensors. Some of them are pointing at riders. One afternoon this past summer, a self-driving Waymo pulled into a parking lot in San Mateo County, California, and stayed there until the police arrived. Local cops had gotten a 911 call from Waymo staffers--humans, it should be said --who were viewing the car's passengers through cameras installed inside the vehicle. It looked like two teens were shooting a black handgun out the window of the vehicle, playing with it and drinking between shots, a police report said.

Election Deniers Think the GOP's Terrible Midterm Polling Is a'Psyop' Dozens and dozens of high profile MAGA influencers and pundits have weighed in. "The laughable fake polls are rolling out," Catturd posted on X. Taking their lead from president Donald Trump, election deniers have dismissed the GOP's terrible polling numbers by claiming the polls themselves are fake, a psyop, or a ploy to stop Republicans from turning out to vote in November. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, told Fox News that midterm election polling is a "psyop to depress conservative turnout." "The midterms are near," Phillip Buchanan, the election denier and MAGA troll known online as Catturd, wrote to his four million followers on X. "The laughable fake polls are rolling out." For over a decade, Trump has claimed without evidence that American elections have been impacted by fraud.

A Flaw in ChatGPT's Mac App Could Have Let Hackers Grab Sensitive Data While the focus has been on AI agents' hacking capabilities, a recently patched vulnerability in a ChatGPT app shows that AI software is itself an inviting--and vulnerable--target. Hardly a day goes by lately without news of AI agents autonomously hacking websites or AI tools being used by cybercriminals and scammers . But a recently patched vulnerability in the macOS version of OpenAI's ChatGPT underscores the potential value to attackers of compromising AI software itself as these apps proliferate more and more. The bug could have been exploited to essentially take over ChatGPT on a victim's computer, giving an attacker access to all the chat logs and other data stored by the app, as well as interconnections like browser sessions. Discovered by researchers at the Objective-See Foundation, the vulnerability illustrates the deep system access and trust that AI platforms are afforded in order to work--and the target that this puts on their backs.