Tech News Today Big Tech

The arm64 port of Haiku OS has reached a mostly stable state in the QEMU emulator, marking significant progress toward running the operating system on M1 Macs. This ongoing development represents a crucial step toward achieving native Apple Silicon hardware support in the future.

A recent analysis reveals that running local LLMs on Apple Silicon is surprisingly more expensive than routing queries through API aggregators like OpenRouter. The findings emphasize that while Apple's hardware carries a high premium, exploring alternative local setups can yield significantly cheaper AI inference costs.

Security researcher Nightmare-Eclipse alleges that Microsoft intentionally built a backdoor into Bitlocker encryption and released an exploit called YellowKey to prove the claim. The researcher explained that this unusual vulnerability can be reproduced by copying a specific FsTx folder.

As Apple and Google impose increasingly strict limitations on their mobile ecosystems, users are turning to alternative smartphones to escape traditional walled gardens. This guide highlights the best non-Apple and non-Google phones currently available for consumers looking to make the switch.

Security researchers have uncovered a new zero-click exploit chain for the Google Pixel 10 that grants attackers full root access. Building on similar findings from the Pixel 9, this demonstrates that modern Android devices can still be completely compromised without any user interaction.

The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding that Apple and Google reveal the personal data of over 100,000 users who downloaded the EZ Lynk Auto Agent car-tinkering app. Federal authorities are seeking to unmask these drivers in order to investigate the use of the vehicle modification software.

A new book about Steve Jobs' time at NeXT Computer reveals how his so-called exile actually forged the foundation of Apple's modern software architecture. The publication also provides essential context for understanding the company's upcoming CEO transition.

Amazon and other big tech companies are pressuring employees to increase their AI tool usage as a performance metric, prompting workers to fabricate tasks just to burn through AI tokens. Critics argue this creates a perverse incentive that inflates token consumption without actually improving real productivity or development velocity.

A recent hardware experiment successfully connected an Nvidia RTX 5090 desktop GPU to an M4 MacBook Air using an external enclosure. The extreme setup tests whether Apple's ultraportable laptop can handle high-end gaming when paired with top-tier desktop graphics hardware.

Despite Apple spending five years fortifying its systems against memory corruption, security researchers have developed the first public macOS kernel exploit for the new M5 chip. Working alongside Mythos Preview, an engineering team successfully built a functional exploit in just five days.

An open-source project is porting Microsoft's nostalgic 1990s animation software, 3D Movie Maker, to the Linux operating system. This effort allows users to experience the classic movie-making features and the iconic dog mascot McZee on open-source platforms.

A newly discovered zero-day exploit named YellowKey is currently targeting Microsoft BitLocker encryption. Additionally, security teams are tracking a second zero-day vulnerability called GreenPlasma that enables local privilege escalation.

Meta is testing a new Threads feature that allows users to tag a Meta AI account to ask questions and receive answers. However, users do not have the option to block the AI account if they prefer not to interact with it.

US residents can register free subdomains under their local city and state domains by coordinating with their delegated domain manager. The setup process requires using Amazon Lightsail for nameservers, submitting an interim template, and pointing DNS records to a webhost.

Laurent Le Brun's blog post details the evolution of Google's internal development environments, tracing the company's shift from relying on third-party tools to building bespoke, cloud-based IDEs tailored for its massive monorepo. This overview highlights how the immense scale and complexity of Google's codebase forced the tech giant to engineer highly customized, scalable software ecosystems rather than relying on commercially available tools.

Apple's new $699 MacBook Neo utilizes the iPhone 16 Pro's A18 Pro chip to deliver CPU performance between the M3 and M4 with a single-core Geekbench 6 score of 3,569. A recent deep dive into the device examines its full benchmarks, thermal dynamics, and wafer economics, while scrutinizing the laptop's base 8GB RAM configuration.

Apple is facing a growing memory shortage that could drive memory costs to as much as 40% of a device's total bill of materials. The tech community has been closely monitoring the situation since January as the company strategizes how to manage these skyrocketing component prices.

The newly introduced Googlebook is a high-performance laptop built to harness Gemini Intelligence. The device delivers heavyweight computing power and features seamless integration with Android smartphones.

Cactus Compute has released Needle, a lightweight foundation model that distills Google Gemini's tool-calling capabilities into just 26 million parameters. Weighing only 14MB, the model can process up to 6,000 tokens per second on resource-constrained hardware. This enables advanced, local AI functionalities on tiny devices like mobile phones, wearables, smart home systems, and robots.

Google DeepMind is transforming the traditional mouse cursor into a context-aware AI partner to streamline digital interactions. This innovation, starting with the Chrome browser, aims to replace the friction of standard text prompting with seamless, intuitive AI collaboration.

Google has introduced a new verification step for Gmail registration that requires users to send a text message. To create an account, users must now scan a QR code with their smartphone, which automatically triggers an SMS to Google to verify their phone number.

A new technical guide demonstrates how to optimize large language model training in Swift by drastically accelerating matrix multiplication. By exploring ten handwritten implementations ranging from plain C and Swift to Apple's Metal API, the tutorial shows how developers can push performance from gigaflops per second up to teraflops per second.

Google's threat intelligence group reported that criminal hackers likely used an AI model to discover and weaponize a major software vulnerability, citing the exploit script's textbook formatting and hallucinated details as evidence. However, readers note that while these markers strongly indicate the code was generated by an AI, they do not definitively prove the model was used to find the underlying bug.

Nvidia has introduced cuda-oxide, an official compiler that enables developers to write and compile GPU device code directly in Rust. Rather than replacing host-side libraries like cudarc, the new tool complements them by generating embedded PTX code from Rust source files for execution via existing CUDA APIs. Additionally, cuda-oxide leverages Rust's strict memory and type safety models to provide robust guardrails against common undefined behaviors in GPU kernel programming.

Apple and Google are increasingly pushing third-party services to adopt hardware-based attestation to verify device integrity across mobile apps and the web through similar frameworks like their respective Integrity APIs. This coordinated expansion of hardware verification standards could ultimately serve as a powerful tool to further entrench the tech giants' market dominance.

A 2010 post on the MathOverflow forum features an undergraduate student seeking unconventional academic guidance from the online community. The user apologized for deviating from standard mathematics topics, highlighting the platform's history of helping students navigate similar career inquiries.

Google has updated the Gemini API File Search tool to support multimodal data processing. This enhancement makes it significantly easier for developers to build efficient file retrieval systems. These new capabilities allow applications to seamlessly handle and search through diverse file types.

The first chapter of a new six-part history of Visual Basic has been published on the EvilGeniusLabs website, highlighting lesser-known aspects of the programming language's origins. This installment explores Microsoft's early BASIC dynasty, the acquisition of a California developer to front the project, and Bill Gates' strategic marketing pitch prior to the software's release.

A new Hacker News project introduces a maintained meta-index dedicated to cataloging indie web and small blog directories. The collection currently highlights 38 different index sites organized across six distinct categories to help users navigate independent online communities.

While the Apple I and Altair 8800 are commonly cited as the first microcomputers, the actual pioneer was the transfluxor-powered Arma Micro Computer built in 1962. This obscure device predates the widely recognized founders of the personal computing industry by more than a decade.