EU to blacklist ten manipulative online design 'traps', leaked draft shows
Worldwide news and secure communications, including VOIP, e-mail, chat, websites and hosting.
Wednesday, 11 November 2026
Monday, 9 November 2026
Nvidia H200 chips pile up in Hong Kong as Beijing holds back
Nvidia H200 chips pile up in Hong Kong as Beijing holds back, Reuters says
The Next Web · 2 hours ago
by Alina Maria Stan · Nvidia
About 600,000 of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips are being stored in Hong Kong because Beijing has not approved large-scale imports into mainland China, Reuters reported. The news agency cited two people familiar with the matter. Nvidia did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment, and neither did China’s industry ministry or its main economic planning agency. The […]
This story continues at The Next Web
The Next Web · 2 hours ago
by Alina Maria Stan · Nvidia
About 600,000 of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips are being stored in Hong Kong because Beijing has not approved large-scale imports into mainland China, Reuters reported. The news agency cited two people familiar with the matter. Nvidia did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment, and neither did China’s industry ministry or its main economic planning agency. The […]
This story continues at The Next Web
In a Setback to VMWare, Tesco is Looking to Migrate to Proxmox
In a Setback to VMWare, Tesco is Looking to Migrate to Proxmox
Tired of the rising licensing cost of VMWare, Tesco seems to be looking to switch to Proxmox.
Sourav Rudra
27 Oct 20262 min read1 comment
On this page
What edge means for a supermarket
The ask
Where the exit stands
Tesco, the supermarket group with stores in the UK and certain regions of Europe, is hiring a Head of Software Engineering for its Edge Platform. The new hire would be responsible for carrying out the move away from VMware, the Broadcom-owned virtualization software, to Proxmox for the systems that run inside its stores.
The Register were the ones who spotted the listing first, and so far it's the only public sign of the Proxmox plan. Tesco has not said how many stores the move covers or how fast the rollout will occur.
What edge means for a supermarket
Edge computing puts servers and software near the place where the business operates instead of in a faraway central datacenter, and for a supermarket chain, that place is the brick-and-mortar store.
Tesco's listing describes its Edge Platform as the computing environment and software that lets applications run across its stores. Checkout, payments, stock management, and staff-facing apps all depend on it.
The platform covers Linux, server hardware, virtualization, and storage. Stores also need to keep working through connectivity disruptions or when local resources run short, as a badly handled change can interfere with store operations, staff, and customers.
The ask
The hire would handle two jobs. The first is the migration, and it involves defining repeatable setups for different kinds of stores, testing each version before a gradual rollout, and automating installs, upgrades, rollbacks, and recovery.
Along the way, they would also manage any migration dependencies and risks so that critical store operations are not affected.
The second job is a management platform for every store, built as an API-first system for provisioning, monitoring, patching, and remote diagnostics. It has to cope with stores going offline and with systems drifting from their intended setup.
That platform should also evolve independently of any one infrastructure technology where practical. The hire leads engineering managers and principal engineers, and the listed skills include Java, Python, and Terraform.
Where the exit stands
Tesco bought perpetual VMware licenses in 2021, but Broadcom stopped supporting them in January 2026. They have had to pay third-party providers for support since then.
In its lawsuit, Tesco accuses Broadcom of refusing to honor the 2021 agreement and of abusing its market power. They say the end of 2027 is the earliest it can be off VMware and calls that timeline a significant risk to its business.
Tesco also alleges that one Broadcom offer this year came in around 175 percent above what its 2021 contract entitled it to.
Suggested Read 📖: Proxmox Virtual Environment now runs on ARM64.
Tired of the rising licensing cost of VMWare, Tesco seems to be looking to switch to Proxmox.
Sourav Rudra
27 Oct 20262 min read1 comment
On this page
What edge means for a supermarket
The ask
Where the exit stands
Tesco, the supermarket group with stores in the UK and certain regions of Europe, is hiring a Head of Software Engineering for its Edge Platform. The new hire would be responsible for carrying out the move away from VMware, the Broadcom-owned virtualization software, to Proxmox for the systems that run inside its stores.
The Register were the ones who spotted the listing first, and so far it's the only public sign of the Proxmox plan. Tesco has not said how many stores the move covers or how fast the rollout will occur.
What edge means for a supermarket
Edge computing puts servers and software near the place where the business operates instead of in a faraway central datacenter, and for a supermarket chain, that place is the brick-and-mortar store.
Tesco's listing describes its Edge Platform as the computing environment and software that lets applications run across its stores. Checkout, payments, stock management, and staff-facing apps all depend on it.
The platform covers Linux, server hardware, virtualization, and storage. Stores also need to keep working through connectivity disruptions or when local resources run short, as a badly handled change can interfere with store operations, staff, and customers.
The ask
The hire would handle two jobs. The first is the migration, and it involves defining repeatable setups for different kinds of stores, testing each version before a gradual rollout, and automating installs, upgrades, rollbacks, and recovery.
Along the way, they would also manage any migration dependencies and risks so that critical store operations are not affected.
The second job is a management platform for every store, built as an API-first system for provisioning, monitoring, patching, and remote diagnostics. It has to cope with stores going offline and with systems drifting from their intended setup.
That platform should also evolve independently of any one infrastructure technology where practical. The hire leads engineering managers and principal engineers, and the listed skills include Java, Python, and Terraform.
Where the exit stands
Tesco bought perpetual VMware licenses in 2021, but Broadcom stopped supporting them in January 2026. They have had to pay third-party providers for support since then.
In its lawsuit, Tesco accuses Broadcom of refusing to honor the 2021 agreement and of abusing its market power. They say the end of 2027 is the earliest it can be off VMware and calls that timeline a significant risk to its business.
Tesco also alleges that one Broadcom offer this year came in around 175 percent above what its 2021 contract entitled it to.
Suggested Read 📖: Proxmox Virtual Environment now runs on ARM64.
Sunday, 8 November 2026
You, too, can be Iron Man
You, too, can be Iron Man
Jan Hetfleisch/Getty Images
Sometimes people find joy in punishing themselves (watching The Office after Steve Carell left, for example). But the growing number of people participating in Ironman races shows there’s no limit to how much pain can bring someone pleasure.
What makes up an Ironman race? A 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile run. There’s also a shorter race called Ironman 70.3, which is only half as long as a regular Ironman (70.3 total miles). Depending on your fitness level, the full one can take up to 17 hours to complete.
Despite the option to sit on your couch for hours and watch TV, participation in both events surged globally in 2025:There were 250,000 registrants, with newbies up 10% from the previous year.
Under-30 participants grew 35%, while the number of first-timers under 30 has more than doubled since 2019.
In North America last year, the under-30 demographic increased by 23% for the full Ironman and jumped 29% for the shorter one that would still make most of us cry on the ground. Four new races were added this year in Ruidoso, NM; Omaha, NE; Dallas, TX; and Jacksonville, FL.
Why would anyone do this?
Besides the obvious reason (for the ‘gram), there’s a $6 million annual prize pool for professionals. There’s something in it for the hosts and recreational competitors, too.
Ironman Wales in Tenby has a reported £7.3 million ($9.7 million) economic impact on the city and its surrounding areas. It’s so vital economically that Tenby agreed to a new hosting lease earlier this year despite one council member calling the race a “pain in the ass” during the debate process.—DL
Jan Hetfleisch/Getty Images
Sometimes people find joy in punishing themselves (watching The Office after Steve Carell left, for example). But the growing number of people participating in Ironman races shows there’s no limit to how much pain can bring someone pleasure.
What makes up an Ironman race? A 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile run. There’s also a shorter race called Ironman 70.3, which is only half as long as a regular Ironman (70.3 total miles). Depending on your fitness level, the full one can take up to 17 hours to complete.
Despite the option to sit on your couch for hours and watch TV, participation in both events surged globally in 2025:There were 250,000 registrants, with newbies up 10% from the previous year.
Under-30 participants grew 35%, while the number of first-timers under 30 has more than doubled since 2019.
In North America last year, the under-30 demographic increased by 23% for the full Ironman and jumped 29% for the shorter one that would still make most of us cry on the ground. Four new races were added this year in Ruidoso, NM; Omaha, NE; Dallas, TX; and Jacksonville, FL.
Why would anyone do this?
Besides the obvious reason (for the ‘gram), there’s a $6 million annual prize pool for professionals. There’s something in it for the hosts and recreational competitors, too.
Ironman Wales in Tenby has a reported £7.3 million ($9.7 million) economic impact on the city and its surrounding areas. It’s so vital economically that Tenby agreed to a new hosting lease earlier this year despite one council member calling the race a “pain in the ass” during the debate process.—DL
Saturday, 7 November 2026
Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production after years of poor sales in a few markets
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review
Posted on November 6, 20264 min read
· Last updated: November 6, 2026
FinanceBankingMarkets
Quick Summary
Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that Cybertruck production at the Texas gigafactory will wind down around mid‑2027 to make room for scaling up production of the new Cybercab for its robotaxi network.
Tesla to Halt Cybertruck Production in Texas Amid Weak Sales by 2027
Overview and Implications of Tesla's Cybertruck Production Wind-Down
By Ananya Palyekar, Akanksha Khushi and Nick Carey
Production Timeline and Strategic Shift
Nov 6 (Reuters) - Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production at its Texas gigafactory around mid-2027, CEO Elon Musk said on Friday, after years of persistently weak sales for a futuristic model once touted as a rival to legacy pickup trucks that ultimately only sold in just a handful of markets because of its heavy, angular design.
Musk said in an X post that the production wind-down would enable the automaker to accommodate increased output of its newly launched Cybercab model, which the billionaire has made central to Tesla's robotaxi ambitions.
Friday, 6 November 2026
U.S. skiers latest to be fined for entering closed backcountry
U.S. skiers latest to be fined for entering closed backcountry in Rogers Pass
Published 4:40 pm Wednesday, November 4, 2026
By Evert Lindquist/Revelstoke Review
Views from Loop Brook Trail in Glacier National Park pictured Feb. 17, 2025. (Evert Lindquist/Revelstoke Review)
Two U.S. skiers are the latest to be penalized by a provincial court judge for entering a backcountry area of Rogers Pass that was closed for avalanche risk.
Jacob A. Gordon and Jack William Elder appeared at the Revelstoke Courthouse on Oct. 7, each charged on one count of prohibited or restricted activity under Section 7.4 of Parks Canada’s general regulations.
On April 14, the two men parked their Montana plate-bearing vehicle at the Loop Brook parking lot in Glacier National Park to go ski touring.
They set off into the West Rogers Winter Restricted Area, which, unbeknownst to them, Parks Canada had closed earlier that day due to avalanche conditions and potential need for howitzer-based avalanche control.
The pair of experienced skiers had avalanche training and familiarity with Rogers Pass and the Canadian Rockies, and arrived that day with valid 2025-26 winter permits. They’d checked Avalanche Canada’s bulletin for advisories in the park.
However, the men failed to consult Parks Canada’s online map that’s updated every morning to show which areas in Glacier are closed. Entering Loop Brook, they would’ve passed signage reminding them to check that map.
Published 4:40 pm Wednesday, November 4, 2026
By Evert Lindquist/Revelstoke Review
Views from Loop Brook Trail in Glacier National Park pictured Feb. 17, 2025. (Evert Lindquist/Revelstoke Review)
Two U.S. skiers are the latest to be penalized by a provincial court judge for entering a backcountry area of Rogers Pass that was closed for avalanche risk.
Jacob A. Gordon and Jack William Elder appeared at the Revelstoke Courthouse on Oct. 7, each charged on one count of prohibited or restricted activity under Section 7.4 of Parks Canada’s general regulations.
On April 14, the two men parked their Montana plate-bearing vehicle at the Loop Brook parking lot in Glacier National Park to go ski touring.
They set off into the West Rogers Winter Restricted Area, which, unbeknownst to them, Parks Canada had closed earlier that day due to avalanche conditions and potential need for howitzer-based avalanche control.
The pair of experienced skiers had avalanche training and familiarity with Rogers Pass and the Canadian Rockies, and arrived that day with valid 2025-26 winter permits. They’d checked Avalanche Canada’s bulletin for advisories in the park.
However, the men failed to consult Parks Canada’s online map that’s updated every morning to show which areas in Glacier are closed. Entering Loop Brook, they would’ve passed signage reminding them to check that map.
Canva praised for the way it fired employees
Canva praised for the way it fired employees
Canva
Hate to see them go, love to watch what they leave with: The internet is enchanted by a severance package Canva announced this week as part of a massive restructuring that impacts 22% of its staff.
Nearly 1,300 workers will lose their jobs, switch roles, or relocate. Canva didn’t say how many people fall into each category, but:Those leaving will receive at least six months’ pay, one year of healthcare, one year of LinkedIn Premium, career coaching, and access to an alumni network.
Canva will also let them keep their work MacBooks, and it’ll nix its one-year vesting cliff so recent hires can retain their company shares.
“We need more founders like thissss,” one X user wrote about the severance package in a post that garnered 7+ million views. Still, lots of people are losing their jobs, and other internet commenters took issue with the layoffs, which come amid Canva’s broader AI pivot.
“This has been our hardest year yet,” co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins wrote in her note to employees. Canva—like the rest of the design software sector—has been hobbled by the growing capabilities of AI image generation tools. The company’s AI costs are surging and revenue growth forecasts are shrinking while it tries to adapt, which led investors to cut its valuation in August—the last thing the company wants as it eyes an IPO.—ML
Canva
Hate to see them go, love to watch what they leave with: The internet is enchanted by a severance package Canva announced this week as part of a massive restructuring that impacts 22% of its staff.
Nearly 1,300 workers will lose their jobs, switch roles, or relocate. Canva didn’t say how many people fall into each category, but:Those leaving will receive at least six months’ pay, one year of healthcare, one year of LinkedIn Premium, career coaching, and access to an alumni network.
Canva will also let them keep their work MacBooks, and it’ll nix its one-year vesting cliff so recent hires can retain their company shares.
“We need more founders like thissss,” one X user wrote about the severance package in a post that garnered 7+ million views. Still, lots of people are losing their jobs, and other internet commenters took issue with the layoffs, which come amid Canva’s broader AI pivot.
“This has been our hardest year yet,” co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins wrote in her note to employees. Canva—like the rest of the design software sector—has been hobbled by the growing capabilities of AI image generation tools. The company’s AI costs are surging and revenue growth forecasts are shrinking while it tries to adapt, which led investors to cut its valuation in August—the last thing the company wants as it eyes an IPO.—ML
Thursday, 5 November 2026
Apple and Meta team up to make Muse AI model run on Mac computers
Apple and Meta team up to make Muse AI model run on Mac computers
Published Thu, Oct 15 20261:00 PM EDT
Kif Leswing@kifleswing
Jonathan Vanian@in/jonathan-vanian-b704432/WATCH LIVE
Key Points
Apple and Meta are collaborating to let developers run Meta’s massive Muse Spark Open AI model locally on high-end Mac computers.
The news reflects a growing interest in running powerful AI models on local hardware rather than relying on cloud data centers.
The collaboration is an unlikely alliance between two longtime rivals who often clashed when Tim Cook was at the helm of Apple.
In this articleMETA-1.94 (-0.26%)
AAPL+1.48 (+0.43%)
John Ternus, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., greets customers during the first day of in-store sales of Apple’s latest products at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York, US, on Friday, Sept. 18, 2026.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg have clashed for years, but with John Ternus taking the reins at Apple, the rivals are finding common ground in artificial intelligence.
Meta and Apple revealed a new collaboration Thursday that will enable developers to easily run Meta’s new open-weight AI model on Apple’s high-end desktop computers.
Muse Spark Open, which the companies’ collaboration centers on, is the most capable open-weight model released under a license that allows for limited commercial use, according to Meta. It’s an 816-billion-parameter model using a so-called mixture-of-experts architecture. As an open-weight model, developers can download the technology’s parameters, or weights, from the internet and run the model on a wide range of hardware.
Customers will be able to pair between two and four Mac Studio PCs to use Muse Spark to code, analyze video or do other agentic work. The model runs locally, instead of in the cloud, adding a layer of security and saving users money, the companies said.
Thursday’s announcement, following months of collaboration, is a sign that the AI boom has shifted historical alliances in Silicon Valley. For years, Apple and Meta regarded each other warily and avoided public partnerships, and the relationship hit rock bottom after Apple introduced privacy changes in 2021 that limited the targeting capabilities of digital ad companies. Meta estimated in early 2022 that the change would cut its revenue that year by $10 billion.
Representatives from Apple and Meta declined to say if the Muse Spark Open collaboration was the start of a deeper relationship.
The new Apple Mac Studio computer and Studio Display are displayed shortly after going on sale at the Apple Store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, in New York City, New York, March 18, 2022.
Mike Segar | Reuters
Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said in an interview that many powerful open-weight models are too big to be run on the majority of personal computers, but Apple’s Mac Studios make enough memory available to users so that it’s practical to run Muse Spark Open.
The move represents an important show of confidence in Meta’s rebooted AI efforts and could pose a challenge to OpenAI and Anthropic. It could also signal Apple’s growing strength in AI chips, a market that Nvidia has dominated so far due to their prevalence in large data centers.
″We worked with Apple to bring leading Agent capabilities to your desktop for the first time on the Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios, so you know we’re really excited about this,” Wang said. Developers can download a version of the AI model from websites like Hugging Face without extra configuration for Apple’s silicon. Muse Spark Open has also been tuned to run faster on Apple’s hardware, and the iPhone maker revealed new benchmarks for its chips and published technical documentation about its MLX AI framework’s ability to split open-source models across multiple machines.
Mac Studios aren’t cheap though, and this AI model requires the fastest Apple chips and as much memory as possible.
Currently, a Mac Studio with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory costs at least $10,799. A more expensive version with 512GB of RAM will be released later this month.
Plus, users will need to buy multiple machines.
Common ground on open source
The two companies are collaborating on open-source AI, which has become a point of contention in Washington as politicians worry that free Chinese models could undercut American AI. Although Meta once centered its AI strategy on its older open-weight Llama family of models, it has since focused on creating proprietary models under the leadership of Wang, who joined Meta when the company invested more than $14 billion into his former startup Scale AI last year.
While Apple and Meta, then known as Facebook, partnered on iPhone extensions over a decade ago, they haven’t struck any public partnerships since 2017 after Apple removed system-level Facebook integration from the iPhone.
“Most of the animosity predates my tenure at the company, but obviously there’s been a long history between Meta and Apple,” Wang said, pointing to one member of his team, AI researcher and former Apple director Daniel Gross, as a reason for the collaboration. Gross, along with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, was a major Zuckerberg hire last year as the Facebook founder was overhauling his company’s AI strategy.
Meta CEO. Mark Zuckerberg and Apple Inc. CEO, Tim Cook.
Jon Putman | Anadolu | Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Their leaders have also traded harsh words.
Cook, who was Apple CEO until Ternus succeeded him last month, took a shot at Zuckerberg in 2018, during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying, “I wouldn’t be in this situation.” Cook often criticized Meta for compromising user privacy.
Zuckerberg has also insulted Apple in public, telling Joe Rogan last year that the company “hasn’t invented anything great since the iPhone.” Zuckerberg has long sought to find a platform that Meta can own so it’s not beholden to Apple.
Ternus, a hardware engineer, has already started changing things at Apple, including when it releases products.
And Meta’s developers haven’t been able to resist Apple’s products. The company bought hundreds of Mac computers so its Superintelligence team could experiment with local AI and agents earlier this year.
Apple’s multiple partners
Meta is just the latest AI model developer to team up with Apple.
In 2024, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri, although the integration “dramatically underperformed” and didn’t lead to OpenAI user growth, OpenAI said in a filing that’s part of a legal dispute with Elon Musk’s xAI. Apple sued OpenAI in July, alleging trade secret theft, a claim OpenAI denied.
Earlier this year, Apple announced a deal with Google, to use its Gemini models in Apple Intelligence as well as Google Cloud infrastructure.
Still, Apple’s AI strategy has drawn criticism from investors and customers in part because its new version of Siri, released last month, isn’t as advanced as chatbots and agents from leading labs.
Meanwhile, Meta has bet big on becoming a leading lab but has struggled to keep up with the competition and its business remains almost entirely reliant on ads. Recent developments, such as Meta’s Muse personal agent app and its latest proprietary foundation model, Muse Wonder, released earlier this week, have begun to excite investors who are optimistic about new AI business opportunities.
Open source remains part of Zuckerberg’s AI strategy. In August, Meta debuted a small open-weight AI model dubbed Muse Glimmer, with Zuckerberg pledging to eventually release something bigger and more powerful.
Muse Spark Open isn’t as advanced as Muse Wonder, a proprietary offering, but Wang said it’s good enough to potentially entice more coders to upgrade.
“These aren’t the most capable models that we’ve developed or released,” Wang said. “But we think that there will be a lot of companies and developers who sort of use this model and tinker with it at small scale and then seek to ramp up and scale up their usage.”
Published Thu, Oct 15 20261:00 PM EDT
Kif Leswing@kifleswing
Jonathan Vanian@in/jonathan-vanian-b704432/WATCH LIVE
Key Points
Apple and Meta are collaborating to let developers run Meta’s massive Muse Spark Open AI model locally on high-end Mac computers.
The news reflects a growing interest in running powerful AI models on local hardware rather than relying on cloud data centers.
The collaboration is an unlikely alliance between two longtime rivals who often clashed when Tim Cook was at the helm of Apple.
In this articleMETA-1.94 (-0.26%)
AAPL+1.48 (+0.43%)
John Ternus, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., greets customers during the first day of in-store sales of Apple’s latest products at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York, US, on Friday, Sept. 18, 2026.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg have clashed for years, but with John Ternus taking the reins at Apple, the rivals are finding common ground in artificial intelligence.
Meta and Apple revealed a new collaboration Thursday that will enable developers to easily run Meta’s new open-weight AI model on Apple’s high-end desktop computers.
Muse Spark Open, which the companies’ collaboration centers on, is the most capable open-weight model released under a license that allows for limited commercial use, according to Meta. It’s an 816-billion-parameter model using a so-called mixture-of-experts architecture. As an open-weight model, developers can download the technology’s parameters, or weights, from the internet and run the model on a wide range of hardware.
Customers will be able to pair between two and four Mac Studio PCs to use Muse Spark to code, analyze video or do other agentic work. The model runs locally, instead of in the cloud, adding a layer of security and saving users money, the companies said.
Thursday’s announcement, following months of collaboration, is a sign that the AI boom has shifted historical alliances in Silicon Valley. For years, Apple and Meta regarded each other warily and avoided public partnerships, and the relationship hit rock bottom after Apple introduced privacy changes in 2021 that limited the targeting capabilities of digital ad companies. Meta estimated in early 2022 that the change would cut its revenue that year by $10 billion.
Representatives from Apple and Meta declined to say if the Muse Spark Open collaboration was the start of a deeper relationship.
The new Apple Mac Studio computer and Studio Display are displayed shortly after going on sale at the Apple Store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, in New York City, New York, March 18, 2022.
Mike Segar | Reuters
Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said in an interview that many powerful open-weight models are too big to be run on the majority of personal computers, but Apple’s Mac Studios make enough memory available to users so that it’s practical to run Muse Spark Open.
The move represents an important show of confidence in Meta’s rebooted AI efforts and could pose a challenge to OpenAI and Anthropic. It could also signal Apple’s growing strength in AI chips, a market that Nvidia has dominated so far due to their prevalence in large data centers.
″We worked with Apple to bring leading Agent capabilities to your desktop for the first time on the Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios, so you know we’re really excited about this,” Wang said. Developers can download a version of the AI model from websites like Hugging Face without extra configuration for Apple’s silicon. Muse Spark Open has also been tuned to run faster on Apple’s hardware, and the iPhone maker revealed new benchmarks for its chips and published technical documentation about its MLX AI framework’s ability to split open-source models across multiple machines.
Mac Studios aren’t cheap though, and this AI model requires the fastest Apple chips and as much memory as possible.
Currently, a Mac Studio with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory costs at least $10,799. A more expensive version with 512GB of RAM will be released later this month.
Plus, users will need to buy multiple machines.
Common ground on open source
The two companies are collaborating on open-source AI, which has become a point of contention in Washington as politicians worry that free Chinese models could undercut American AI. Although Meta once centered its AI strategy on its older open-weight Llama family of models, it has since focused on creating proprietary models under the leadership of Wang, who joined Meta when the company invested more than $14 billion into his former startup Scale AI last year.
While Apple and Meta, then known as Facebook, partnered on iPhone extensions over a decade ago, they haven’t struck any public partnerships since 2017 after Apple removed system-level Facebook integration from the iPhone.
“Most of the animosity predates my tenure at the company, but obviously there’s been a long history between Meta and Apple,” Wang said, pointing to one member of his team, AI researcher and former Apple director Daniel Gross, as a reason for the collaboration. Gross, along with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, was a major Zuckerberg hire last year as the Facebook founder was overhauling his company’s AI strategy.
Meta CEO. Mark Zuckerberg and Apple Inc. CEO, Tim Cook.
Jon Putman | Anadolu | Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Their leaders have also traded harsh words.
Cook, who was Apple CEO until Ternus succeeded him last month, took a shot at Zuckerberg in 2018, during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying, “I wouldn’t be in this situation.” Cook often criticized Meta for compromising user privacy.
Zuckerberg has also insulted Apple in public, telling Joe Rogan last year that the company “hasn’t invented anything great since the iPhone.” Zuckerberg has long sought to find a platform that Meta can own so it’s not beholden to Apple.
Ternus, a hardware engineer, has already started changing things at Apple, including when it releases products.
And Meta’s developers haven’t been able to resist Apple’s products. The company bought hundreds of Mac computers so its Superintelligence team could experiment with local AI and agents earlier this year.
Apple’s multiple partners
Meta is just the latest AI model developer to team up with Apple.
In 2024, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri, although the integration “dramatically underperformed” and didn’t lead to OpenAI user growth, OpenAI said in a filing that’s part of a legal dispute with Elon Musk’s xAI. Apple sued OpenAI in July, alleging trade secret theft, a claim OpenAI denied.
Earlier this year, Apple announced a deal with Google, to use its Gemini models in Apple Intelligence as well as Google Cloud infrastructure.
Still, Apple’s AI strategy has drawn criticism from investors and customers in part because its new version of Siri, released last month, isn’t as advanced as chatbots and agents from leading labs.
Meanwhile, Meta has bet big on becoming a leading lab but has struggled to keep up with the competition and its business remains almost entirely reliant on ads. Recent developments, such as Meta’s Muse personal agent app and its latest proprietary foundation model, Muse Wonder, released earlier this week, have begun to excite investors who are optimistic about new AI business opportunities.
Open source remains part of Zuckerberg’s AI strategy. In August, Meta debuted a small open-weight AI model dubbed Muse Glimmer, with Zuckerberg pledging to eventually release something bigger and more powerful.
Muse Spark Open isn’t as advanced as Muse Wonder, a proprietary offering, but Wang said it’s good enough to potentially entice more coders to upgrade.
“These aren’t the most capable models that we’ve developed or released,” Wang said. “But we think that there will be a lot of companies and developers who sort of use this model and tinker with it at small scale and then seek to ramp up and scale up their usage.”
Wednesday, 4 November 2026
Meta’s Muse AI Agent Caught Leaking Users’ Intimate Personal Information
Meta’s Muse AI Agent Caught Leaking Users’ Intimate Personal Information
Futurism · 6 days ago
by Joe Wilkins · Future Society
As Meta was scrambling to release its Muse AI agent to the public earlier last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to social media to insist that it was “built from the ground up for privacy and security.”
On X-formerly-Twitter, the billionaire’s simple post soon had a correction tagged on via a community note, and for good reason: the AI agent is a font of untold privacy horrors.
As Ars Technica reported today, security researchers found Muse is capable of exposing sensitive information on its users through web links generated via a “share” feature. Investigators at the cybersecurity firm Claroc recently uncovered a simple exploit whereby they could access pages from over 6,800 links Muse had generated to share pages with other users.
The trick worked like this: once a Muse user decides they want to share something with another person — say, a copy of their chat log with Muse — the AI tool would generate a web link for that “share.” That URL included both the AI-generated title of the chat, plus a random string of characters.
When anybody opened the link, the full web address would be noted in a lookup dataset, like a phone book of web addresses that have been visited. Researchers were then able to search that set for other Muse share addresses, from which they were able to find strings of unrelated public chats.
By digging through those “phone books,” investigators were able to easily open chat logs containing detailed private information, including corporate revenue documents, loan applications, bank transaction details, income details, and one workplace vacation calendar, Ars noted.
“If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort,” the researchers wrote. Instead, “it took one query.”
Though Meta told Ars it had shut off the feature, this privacy gaffe is just the latest revelation about Muse’s many security shortcomings.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that Muse was keeping detailed files on users’ friends and families, apparently following an internal instruction to keep a running “page for every person in the user’s life.”
If Muse’s first month in public hands is any indication, this is likely just the start of a long list of security and privacy blunders for the cutesy AI model.
More on Meta: Meta Is Using Its Massive AI Data Centers to Avoid Paying Billions of Dollars in Taxes
The post Meta’s Muse AI Agent Caught Leaking Users’ Intimate Personal Information appeared first on Futurism.
Tuesday, 3 November 2026
Microsoft offers buyouts to 60,000 employees.
Microsoft offers buyouts to 60,000 employees.
The company that makes the spreadsheets your company uses to figure out how to cut costs is looking to cut its own by offering voluntary buyouts to up to 60,000 staffers in the US, UK, Canada, and India. That’s roughly 27% of Microsoft’s 223,000-person workforce. Those who take the buyout will get similar benefits to its standard severance packages, a Microsoft spokesperson told Bloomberg. Microsoft—which also recently offered retirement buyouts and conducted layoffs—joins other Big Tech companies in reducing headcount amid significant spending on AI and its infrastructure like data centers.
Monday, 2 November 2026
Trump and Elon Agree: The Dog That Ate Ukraine’s Starshield
Trump and Elon Agree: It Must Have Been the Dog That Ate Ukraine’s Starshield
Both billionaires denied being responsible for the decision to partially paralyze Ukraine's military satellite network this week.BY TOM MCKAY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 16, 2026, 6:07 PM ET
READING TIME 2 MINUTES
Donald Trump holds a press conference with Elon Musk in the Oval Office on May 30, 2025. © Kevin DietschREAD LATER COMMENTS (144)
Who kneecapped Ukraine’s SpaceX-built Starshield military satellite network? President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk are both unconvincingly feigning innocence.
Earlier this week, Ukraine’s military lost access to Starshield services for objects moving faster than 100 miles per hour and reportedly sometimes slower, which cut it off from fast-moving drones and other aerial vehicles and hobbled much of its capability to intercept Russian fire. The outage conveniently overlapped with Trump’s insistence that Ukraine stop attacks on Russian oil refineries, which Trump blames for soaring oil prices (rather than, say, his disastrous war with Iran).
Musk denied making the decision and deflected to the White House—in a post to X on Wednesday, Musk argued the systems were “owned and controlled by the U.S. government” and “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the U.S. military and ultimately POTUS.” But wink wink, nudge nudge. The same day, Musk also wrote it was “time for [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy] to go” and quote-tweeted “True” to another post accusing Ukraine of “throwing tantrums over not getting all your demands, including offensive use.”
White House officials reportedly initially professed ignorance to the Ukrainians and claimed the slowdown might be a glitch. While Reuters reported on Thursday that two U.S. officials and one Western official said the order did in fact come from the White House, a senior U.S. official told the news service: “No such request was ever made by the president.” That is not the same as saying the administration didn’t. On Friday, Trump publicly denied that he issued the order and covered Musk’s ass: “It wasn’t me and I don’t think it was Elon.”
The Telegraph reported the idea sprang from both billionaires: four sources told the paper that Musk had approached Trump with the idea of restricting Starshield, and one said the president agreed. Musk later panicked when the blackout led to a “night of carnage” in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, fearing European consumer backlash, and rushed to publicly pass the buck to the White House, according to the Telegraph.
This situation has grave implications beyond Musk’s or Trump’s individual credibility, as it’s further alienating allied leaders in Europe and casting doubt on any military technology that relies on U.S. infrastructure to operate. Either Trump and Musk have no idea who actually controls Starshield (a laughable claim) or they’re backstabbing an ally for leverage, which carries the clear implication that the U.S. will do so to anyone on a whim. The stench of suspicion could linger long past Trump’s tenure in office.
According to The Guardian, Zelenskyy said after a meeting of European Union leaders on Friday that speed limits on Ukraine’s Starshield use had been eased but not removed.
Sunday, 1 November 2026
Most People Aren’t Freaks Who Want an AI Agent Running Their Whole Life
The AI Industry Has a Major Problem: Most People Aren’t Freaks Who Want an AI Agent Running Their Whole Life
AI companies have done next to nothing to earn their trust.
By Victor Tangermann
Published Oct 1, 2026 5:55 PM EDT
Add Futurism(opens in a new tab)More information
Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images
Meta’s fuzzy Muse AI personal assistant overtook ChatGPT as the top free iOS app in the US after launching earlier this month, surpassing 3.4 million downloads last week.
But whether the agent will be able to hold on to that momentum is anything but guaranteed, considering the sheer amount of changes it requires to its users’ behavior. Tech companies like OpenAI and Meta would love us to hand over mundane tasks like booking a flight or shopping online to their agents — but that may not even be a priority for the average user.
As Axios points out, Muse and similar products like Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s two-day-old Dots have a “normal-people problem,” requiring the average user to adjust their private lives to have AI agents solve various problems.
In other words, most people aren’t AI-pilled fanatics looking to hand over their day-to-day responsibilities to AI agents.
Besides, the cute facade of Muse’s mascot, internally known as “Jolly,” elides a far darker side of the flashy trend: by having Meta ask users to give its assistant permission to log in to email accounts, enter credit card information, or trawl through extensive social media records, they’re potentially opening themselves up to a world of hurt.
Case in point, one user already claimed this week that Meta’s Muse AI agent was giving out his physical home address to strangers on Facebook Marketplace.
That’s not to mention Meta’s abysmal track record of safeguarding its customers’ sensitive personal information.
Did we mention that the industry is struggling to control its AI agents, which are repeatedly going rogue and surpassing the original scope of their tasks?
As such, the vast majority could be bristling at the idea of handing over their login information. One recent Thales poll found that only 13 percent of respondents said they would let an agent read their emails. Only seven percent said they would allow the tools to transfer money across bank accounts.
Put simply, tech giants have an enormous amount of convincing to do before the tech could stand a chance of going mainstream.
While there’s always a chance that could eventually change as consumer behavior adapts, the stakes for the AI industry are rising right now. Companies need to exponentially drive up revenues into the trillions of dollars over the next couple of years just to cover their enormous amounts on spending on data centers, let alone stand a chance of turning a profit.
Millions of Muse AI downloads are one thing — but we’ve got a long way to go before AI agents are as transformative as tech companies would like us to believe.
More on AI agents: Man Says Meta’s Muse AI Gave His Home Address Out to Strangers
Add Futurism as a preferred source on Google to see more of our reporting.
Victor Tangermann
Senior Editor
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
AI companies have done next to nothing to earn their trust.
By Victor Tangermann
Published Oct 1, 2026 5:55 PM EDT
Add Futurism(opens in a new tab)More information
Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty ImagesMeta’s fuzzy Muse AI personal assistant overtook ChatGPT as the top free iOS app in the US after launching earlier this month, surpassing 3.4 million downloads last week.
But whether the agent will be able to hold on to that momentum is anything but guaranteed, considering the sheer amount of changes it requires to its users’ behavior. Tech companies like OpenAI and Meta would love us to hand over mundane tasks like booking a flight or shopping online to their agents — but that may not even be a priority for the average user.
As Axios points out, Muse and similar products like Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s two-day-old Dots have a “normal-people problem,” requiring the average user to adjust their private lives to have AI agents solve various problems.
In other words, most people aren’t AI-pilled fanatics looking to hand over their day-to-day responsibilities to AI agents.
Besides, the cute facade of Muse’s mascot, internally known as “Jolly,” elides a far darker side of the flashy trend: by having Meta ask users to give its assistant permission to log in to email accounts, enter credit card information, or trawl through extensive social media records, they’re potentially opening themselves up to a world of hurt.
Case in point, one user already claimed this week that Meta’s Muse AI agent was giving out his physical home address to strangers on Facebook Marketplace.
That’s not to mention Meta’s abysmal track record of safeguarding its customers’ sensitive personal information.
Did we mention that the industry is struggling to control its AI agents, which are repeatedly going rogue and surpassing the original scope of their tasks?
As such, the vast majority could be bristling at the idea of handing over their login information. One recent Thales poll found that only 13 percent of respondents said they would let an agent read their emails. Only seven percent said they would allow the tools to transfer money across bank accounts.
Put simply, tech giants have an enormous amount of convincing to do before the tech could stand a chance of going mainstream.
While there’s always a chance that could eventually change as consumer behavior adapts, the stakes for the AI industry are rising right now. Companies need to exponentially drive up revenues into the trillions of dollars over the next couple of years just to cover their enormous amounts on spending on data centers, let alone stand a chance of turning a profit.
Millions of Muse AI downloads are one thing — but we’ve got a long way to go before AI agents are as transformative as tech companies would like us to believe.
More on AI agents: Man Says Meta’s Muse AI Gave His Home Address Out to Strangers
Add Futurism as a preferred source on Google to see more of our reporting.
Victor Tangermann
Senior Editor
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
Character.AI’s bankruptcy could be Disney’s gain
Character.AI’s bankruptcy could be Disney’s gain
Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Samuel Boivin/Getty Images
Character.AI, the company that allows users to create controversial AI companions, declared bankruptcy yesterday in the face of “legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds,” according to a statement from CEO Colin Adams. It also entered into an agreement to sell Disney some of its assets for $20 million, although other companies can still place a higher bid, just like contestants on The Price Is Right.
Founded in 2021, Character.AI reached 20 million active users by October 2024 and was one of the top apps in time spent by users, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower. But it faced a problem many consumer-facing AI products have: the inability to monetize and scale after an influx of millions of users raised the company’s costs.
And then there were the lawsuits
The “legal” issues Character.AI mentioned refer to the numerous lawsuits brought against the company:In a filing last week, Kentucky’s attorney general alleged that Character.AI’s chatbots have advised users to cut, starve, or kill themselves, and that the company’s products “were designed to entice children in a manner that prioritizes engagement over child wellbeing.”
Other lawsuits have accused the app of providing sexual content to children.
Character.AI settled five lawsuits and eventually banned users under 18 from using the app.
Disney also got lawyers involved: In September 2025, Disney sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter, demanding the app stop offering companions of its copyrighted characters like Elsa and Darth Vader without permission.
More than just legal pressure: The House of Mouse hired Character.AI’s former CEO Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer last month as it continues its push into AI.
What’s next: Disney had originally licensed its intellectual property to OpenAI so that users could create videos using Sora, but the $1 billion deal was canceled when OpenAI shut down the app earlier this year. Anand oversaw Character.AI’s push into microdramas, a sign that Disney is exploring a new way to fold AI into its ecosystem.—DL
Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Samuel Boivin/Getty Images
Character.AI, the company that allows users to create controversial AI companions, declared bankruptcy yesterday in the face of “legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds,” according to a statement from CEO Colin Adams. It also entered into an agreement to sell Disney some of its assets for $20 million, although other companies can still place a higher bid, just like contestants on The Price Is Right.
Founded in 2021, Character.AI reached 20 million active users by October 2024 and was one of the top apps in time spent by users, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower. But it faced a problem many consumer-facing AI products have: the inability to monetize and scale after an influx of millions of users raised the company’s costs.
And then there were the lawsuits
The “legal” issues Character.AI mentioned refer to the numerous lawsuits brought against the company:In a filing last week, Kentucky’s attorney general alleged that Character.AI’s chatbots have advised users to cut, starve, or kill themselves, and that the company’s products “were designed to entice children in a manner that prioritizes engagement over child wellbeing.”
Other lawsuits have accused the app of providing sexual content to children.
Character.AI settled five lawsuits and eventually banned users under 18 from using the app.
Disney also got lawyers involved: In September 2025, Disney sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter, demanding the app stop offering companions of its copyrighted characters like Elsa and Darth Vader without permission.
More than just legal pressure: The House of Mouse hired Character.AI’s former CEO Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer last month as it continues its push into AI.
What’s next: Disney had originally licensed its intellectual property to OpenAI so that users could create videos using Sora, but the $1 billion deal was canceled when OpenAI shut down the app earlier this year. Anand oversaw Character.AI’s push into microdramas, a sign that Disney is exploring a new way to fold AI into its ecosystem.—DL
Saturday, 31 October 2026
Nothing scarier than a Big Tech sell-off
Nothing scarier than a Big Tech sell-off
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The state of the Nasdaq yesterday was as scary as encountering a group of teens in matching clown masks stocking up on eggs for an “omelet party.” The tech-heavy index suffered a huge hit over the last few days as investors faced their fears about tech companies’ massive AI spending after several reported less-than-stellar earnings this week.
Correction territory. With tech stocks selling off, the Nasdaq Composite finished the day down 2.86%, its worst single-day performance since June. The Nasdaq 100 shed as much as 4.5% yesterday, falling into its third correction this year.
What’s got investors running scared?
Several Big Tech earnings reports this week led investors and analysts to come to a similar conclusion: A lot of money is going into AI and not enough is coming out. Plus, more traditional moneymakers weren’t delivering as much as hoped amid the spending spree: Google parent Alphabet’s stock had its worst day ever on Thursday, with about $475 billion in market value vanishing after it reported on Wednesday that search revenue growth was slower than expected, and free cash flow (i.e., the money left after paying for AI infrastructure like data centers) had swung to a ~$9 billion loss.
Amazon’s stock fell 1.41% yesterday, after reporting on Thursday that it spent even more money than it expected on AI last quarter, and growth from its online shopping sector slowed down.
Neocloud companies and chipmakers all fell this week. But no one is having a worse time than Intel. Its stock cratered 28.58% yesterday—its worst day in 50 years—after its Thursday earnings report revealed weak PC demand amid high AI spending. The US government’s 10% stake in the company lost about $12 billion yesterday, according to CNBC.
Big picture: AI spending is having a big impact on the economy, and tech companies see it as their way to dominate in the future, but investors are getting nervous about whether it’s going to pay off.—MM
Holiday travel could be the priciest in a decade
Holiday travel could be the priciest in a decade
Nick Iluzada
Everyone is getting coupon books for Secret Santa this year. Holiday air travel is shaking out to be its most expensive in 10 years, according to Hopper’s 2026 Holiday Travel Index. The average domestic round-trip flight for Thanksgiving is hovering around $402, a 31% jump from last year, while Christmas flights cost $452, up 23%.
What’s causing the surge? The biggest culprit is the ballooning cost of jet fuel. The Iran war has rapidly driven up energy prices: The average monthly spot price for jet fuel is at $4.50 per gallon, a 91% increase from February, before the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran. United Airlines cut its profit outlook yesterday for this year because of fuel prices.
Airlines are betting that you’ll still pay
Delta CEO Ed Bastian told analysts this month that there has been “limited amount of resistance” to price increases, likely because the top 40% of US households (most of Delta’s customers) have more money than they did a few years ago.
There are a few things you can do to try and protect your wallet during the holidays besides the old hack of buying flights in incognito mode. (And AI assistants may cause more grief than they’re worth.)Book flights three to five weeks in advance, so for Thanksgiving, that’s…now. Travel site Kayak found that airfare jumped 16% the week before Thanksgiving and 21% during the week of Turkey Day.
Avoid high-traffic days if you can, or even fly on the holiday itself. Sunday, Nov. 29 is expected to be one of the busiest and most expensive travel days of the year: A round-trip flight returning Sunday averages about $604 but drops to $473 with a Monday flight home.
Flying direct and booking a flight departing before 9am can also decrease the chance of expensive delays and last-minute changes.
It could continue into 2027. Ryanair’s CEO warned yesterday that fuel costs could push European fares up by another 20% over the next year. —MM
Nick Iluzada
Everyone is getting coupon books for Secret Santa this year. Holiday air travel is shaking out to be its most expensive in 10 years, according to Hopper’s 2026 Holiday Travel Index. The average domestic round-trip flight for Thanksgiving is hovering around $402, a 31% jump from last year, while Christmas flights cost $452, up 23%.
What’s causing the surge? The biggest culprit is the ballooning cost of jet fuel. The Iran war has rapidly driven up energy prices: The average monthly spot price for jet fuel is at $4.50 per gallon, a 91% increase from February, before the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran. United Airlines cut its profit outlook yesterday for this year because of fuel prices.
Airlines are betting that you’ll still pay
Delta CEO Ed Bastian told analysts this month that there has been “limited amount of resistance” to price increases, likely because the top 40% of US households (most of Delta’s customers) have more money than they did a few years ago.
There are a few things you can do to try and protect your wallet during the holidays besides the old hack of buying flights in incognito mode. (And AI assistants may cause more grief than they’re worth.)Book flights three to five weeks in advance, so for Thanksgiving, that’s…now. Travel site Kayak found that airfare jumped 16% the week before Thanksgiving and 21% during the week of Turkey Day.
Avoid high-traffic days if you can, or even fly on the holiday itself. Sunday, Nov. 29 is expected to be one of the busiest and most expensive travel days of the year: A round-trip flight returning Sunday averages about $604 but drops to $473 with a Monday flight home.
Flying direct and booking a flight departing before 9am can also decrease the chance of expensive delays and last-minute changes.
It could continue into 2027. Ryanair’s CEO warned yesterday that fuel costs could push European fares up by another 20% over the next year. —MM
Friday, 30 October 2026
Your coworker might be faking it
Your coworker might be faking it
PointImages/Getty Images
On Tuesdays, the Brew’s Matty Merritt brings you the news you need to make life a little easier during your 9–5, 5–9, or OOO.
There’s a good chance that at least some of your coworkers bragging about their AI capabilities would crack under the pressure of a follow-up question. In a survey of 1,000 full-time workers in the US, 48% said they exaggerate their AI usage or expertise at work at least some of the time, according to AI workplace software company Visier.
Fake it until you make it. Companies are making massive investments in AI platforms in an effort to increase productivity and instituting AI requirements, but workers might not be using the technology particularly well. Instead, many are opting for “performative AI” to protect their jobs, Visier found.
Companies may be faking it too. The survey also found that 59% of workers don’t believe or are unsure whether their employers had a plan for AI’s impact on the company.—MM
Thursday, 29 October 2026
There Are Free, Open-Source Versions of Microsoft Office Apps Thanks to AI
There Are Free, Open-Source Versions of Microsoft Office Apps Thanks to AI
PetaPixel · an hour ago
by Jeremy Gray · News
Brandon Thomas, the experienced software engineer behind the AI-assisted reverse engineering effort to rebuild open-source versions of Adobe's Creative Suite applications, including Photoshop, Premiere, and Lightroom, is setting his sights on another oft-maligned set of software: Microsoft Office.
[Read More]
Wednesday, 28 October 2026
France’s school protests come amid wider trouble
France’s school protests come amid wider trouble
Lou Benoist / Getty Images
Nationwide protests have erupted across France over under-resourced schools, and more students keep arriving at the barricades, joined by educators, parents, and union activists. The government says around 250,000 people participated in yesterday’s demonstrations across more than 40 cities, while union leaders claim the crowd size was at least twice that.
What do they want? The protestors are demanding more teachers and classroom upgrades.
Hundreds of people were injured amid street chaos in recent days, including a 15-year-old who lost his hand after picking up a police grenade. More than 5,000 protesters have been arrested since the protests began last month. The government suspended classes tomorrow and Friday so students can meet with school leaders.
Unrest in cash-strapped times
The growing protests come as France’s government struggles to keep its budget deficit below its goal of 5% of its GDP. The French government proposed a 1.7% education budget increase for next year, which is below inflation.
Zoom out: It’s not the only area of struggle for the French economy. Markets are roiling thanks to ballooning national debt, plus they aren’t thrilled that populists on the left and right are the leading contenders in the upcoming election. France’s 10-year government bond yields—which move in the opposite direction to prices—topped 5% last week, the highest level since 2002. The French stock index dropped 5% in the past month.—SK
Lou Benoist / Getty Images
Nationwide protests have erupted across France over under-resourced schools, and more students keep arriving at the barricades, joined by educators, parents, and union activists. The government says around 250,000 people participated in yesterday’s demonstrations across more than 40 cities, while union leaders claim the crowd size was at least twice that.
What do they want? The protestors are demanding more teachers and classroom upgrades.
Hundreds of people were injured amid street chaos in recent days, including a 15-year-old who lost his hand after picking up a police grenade. More than 5,000 protesters have been arrested since the protests began last month. The government suspended classes tomorrow and Friday so students can meet with school leaders.
Unrest in cash-strapped times
The growing protests come as France’s government struggles to keep its budget deficit below its goal of 5% of its GDP. The French government proposed a 1.7% education budget increase for next year, which is below inflation.
Zoom out: It’s not the only area of struggle for the French economy. Markets are roiling thanks to ballooning national debt, plus they aren’t thrilled that populists on the left and right are the leading contenders in the upcoming election. France’s 10-year government bond yields—which move in the opposite direction to prices—topped 5% last week, the highest level since 2002. The French stock index dropped 5% in the past month.—SK
Tuesday, 27 October 2026
Cartoon Network assets exposed in massive gigaleak
Cartoon Network assets exposed in massive “gigaleak.”
The leak affected over 30 of the channel’s classic shows, according to Gizmodo, including Regular Show and Powerpuff Girls Z. An estimated 200 gigabytes of material were released illegally onto the web. While finished episodes would be bad enough, storyboards, character rigs, internal production guides, and more are now out there. As of last night, there was no word on who was behind the leak or the motive. The crisis comes less than a week after Cartoon Network’s former parent company, Warner Bros., was acquired by Paramount. A similar situation went down in 2024, when Disney Animation had critical internal material leaked onto the internet. That one remains a mystery, too.—HVL
Monday, 26 October 2026
Cohere unveils North 2 AI agent platform with rebuilt orchestration and token spending caps
AI
Cohere unveils North 2 AI agent platform with rebuilt orchestration and token spending caps
by Duncan Riley
Artificial intelligence company Cohere Inc. today unveiled North 2, an overhaul of its platform for running AI agents inside large organizations.
Alongside a redesigned system for orchestrating multistep agent work, the update gives administrators new controls for capping token spending.
With North 2, Cohere is going after a tradeoff it says enterprises have accepted while deploying agents, giving up one of security, capability or cost control to get the other two. North has been generally available since August 2025, and Cohere said a year of large production deployments in industries from finance to the public sector shaped what went into the upgrade.
The orchestration system works through multistep tasks on its own and pulls in a human for steps that need sign-off. Agents built from a simple prompt can now be shared across a company, which saves other teams from building the same workflow twice. Each agent keeps memory between sessions. Cohere also added a skills feature for packaging logic that agents call on repeatedly. Documents and other assets that every agent should be able to reach go into shared libraries.
From a natural-language request, North 2 can produce a slide deck, dashboard or lightweight app that users prototype inside the chat window. For recurring processes there are prebuilt templates and a drag-and-drop workflow builder that reports performance in real time. The connector library now covers Slack, GitHub and Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint and OneDrive. Cohere is also planning connectors to financial data providers, among them PitchBook Data Inc., S&P Global Inc. and FactSet Research Systems Inc.
The new spending controls sit in North Admin, the platform’s management console. It now tracks token use down to the individual user and agent. Administrators can define consumption tiers for users and groups based on request and token rates and cap usage across the company. Alerts can be set to warn teams before a limit is reached. Because North 2 is model-agnostic, the models an administrator assigns to each team can include ones a customer brings from outside Cohere.
Cohere is counting on its work with Nvidia Corp. to bring down what North costs to run, saying its models produce more tokens per second per node on Nvidia’s Blackwell and Hopper graphics processing units. Kari Briski, vice president of generative AI at Nvidia, said that helps North 2 “deliver more tokens for less.”
Security controls also sit in North Admin, where guardrails can be applied to individual agents. The screening covers personally identifiable information in prompts and responses as well as attempted prompt injection. Autonomy policies keep each agent to the actions it is authorized to take. North still runs on-premises or in a customer’s own virtual private cloud, including fully air-gapped installations for organizations that allow no outside connection.
Bell Canada’s Bell Cyber unit is using North inside its own security operations. Jawed Ahmad, Bell Cyber’s chief technology and AI officer, said North lets the unit run agentic AI with the control and sovereignty requirements Bell Cyber’s customers demand “built in from the start.”
Other users include South Korean information technology services company LG CNS Co. Ltd., which runs North internally and brings it to customers across the country. Radical Ventures, an early Cohere investor, built an automation on North that prepares the briefing its team reads before a founder call. Before it existed, partner Parasvil Patel said, the team spent hours gathering basic context.
North 2 arrives less than three weeks after Cohere signed a merger agreement with German AI developer Aleph Alpha GmbH in a deal that will keep the Cohere name on the combined company.
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