Today's top 100 technology stories
Friday, August 28, 2026 · 100 stories from 10 publications. Captured automatically each morning from ten of the most-read technology publications, summarized in a few sentences, and linked straight to the original reporting.
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The Verge
The iPhone Fold could make concerts even worse
You know the person blocking your view of the concert because their phone is swaying in the air, recording the entire thing? Get ready for the unfolded version of it. This week on The Vergecast, we dive right into the big week of Apple news.
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TechCrunch
Friend-focused photo sharing app Retro snags $21M
Retro, a friend-focused photo-sharing app built by former Instagram employees, has raised more than $21 million in Series A funding.
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Ars Technica
Authorities arrest 2 alleged members of prolific hacking group TeamPCP
Authorities in Australia said Wednesday that they arrested two men accused of participating in cybercrimes for TeamPCP, a prolific group of hackers that, over nine months, has carried out a relentless series of supply-chain attacks that infected more than 1,000 organizations worldwide.
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WIRED
AI Has Human Doctors Asking: What’s Left for Us?
A recent paper argues that AI is often better at doctoring than doctors. Guess who isn't thrilled.
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Engadget
How to make your Android alarm ring at full volume even when your calls are muted
Your phone should be able to still sound your morning alarm when it's in silent mode. If it's not, here are some settings to check.
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ZDNET
The best early Labor Day Costco deals 2026: TVs, smartwatches, Apple devices, and more
Summer may be ending, but Costco deals are heating up in time for Labor Day: Save big on electronics, home essentials, and more now.
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CNET
Apple TV Now Costs More. Here’s What to Know
A price hike has also hit Apple One, affecting subscribers in the US.
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VentureBeat
Cohere Parse 5 loses the benchmark on points. It wins on cost per page.
Enterprises trying to feed PDFs, slides and scanned documents into AI pipelines keep running into the same wall: the tools either miss the structure — tables, charts, layout — or cost too much to run at scale.
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The Register
US government snitch-finder pleads guilty to leaking state secrets to foreign spies
The former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) IT specialist previously accused of trying to pass secret and top-secret information to foreign spies has pleaded guilty following a successful FBI sting.
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MIT Technology Review
The Download: a secretive antiaging drug and joining virtual power plants
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
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The Verge
Apple TV now costs $14.99 a month after its fourth price hike in four years
Apple raised the price of its streaming service for new and current subscribers on Friday, bumping it up from $12.99 per month to $14.99, Deadline and Variety are reporting. An annual subscription now costs $119, up from $99.
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TechCrunch
Apple TV is raising its subscription prices again
Now, Apple TV subscriptions will cost $14.99 per month, up from its previous price of $12.99 per month.
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Ars Technica
Rocket Report: Europe splashes some cash on launch startups; Pallas-1 nears debut
Welcome to Edition 9.08 of the Rocket Report! Some major news this week from the state of Louisiana, previously associated with space due to NASA's aging Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans.
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WIRED
Best Laptops (2026): My Top Recommendations After Testing Hundreds
I’ve been reviewing laptops for over a decade, and here's my advice on how to find the right laptop for you.
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Engadget
Price increases suddenly hit Apple TV and Apple One
You might have to pay a bit more to catch the end of the latest Ted Lasso season.
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ZDNET
This Linux and Windows app makes managing all your documents easier
If you're a student, writer, or professional juggling documents, this app can help keep you organized.
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CNET
The 2026 Midterms Are Coming. Political Deepfakes Are Already Here
Remember that fake Joe Biden robocall? That likely won’t be the last AI deepfake we see during election season.
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VentureBeat
Enterprise AI's real risk isn't autonomous agents. It's the complexity between them.
Presented by Gravitee Agent complexity is the insidious shadow lurking inside enterprises right now that needs a light shone on it.
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The Register
Keepers of Noble Numbats to be offered a Resolute Racoon: Ubuntu 26.04.1 is coming
It looks like the Racoon has bedded in and settled down, as Canonical releases the first point release of this year’s Ubuntu LTS version, offering an upgrade to users on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat). Ubuntu 26.04.1 is the first point release of April’s long-term support version, which will be supported until 2031.
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MIT Technology Review
How to sign up for a virtual power plant—and decide whether you should
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one.
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The Verge
Apple TV’s sci-fi thriller Dark Matter gets even trippier in season 2
Confusion is a generally accepted side effect of mystery box shows. They slather on secrets with the promise of a satisfying payoff in the end, and sometimes the cast and crew even have a hard time following what's going on.
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TechCrunch
a16z creates a $1.1B ‘Machine Age’ fund to ‘accelerate the physical buildout of AI’
The firm, known for its focus on software, is going to start throwing more money at the hardware behind AI.
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Ars Technica
Anthropic's new hardware standard lets AI agents control the physical world
For all the interest in and uptake of agentic AI systems over the past year or so, the world of automated AI has thus far been primarily limited to text, images, code, and other data and actions that take place inside a computer.
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WIRED
He Scraped All of Their Art for AI. Now He’s Collaborating on a Tool to Help Them
The art portfolio platform Cara, designed for creators who don’t want their work used to train AI, has been under assault by trolls seizing and publishing its data.
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Engadget
Pokémon Champions review: Peak monster battling
If you want to be the very best, Pokémon Champions is your new arena.
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ZDNET
91% of professionals say their firm still falls short on AI - how to fix that
Research suggests a gap between AI ambition and on-the-ground reality, but the good news is that professionals can fill it by focusing on well-grounded explorations and solid production use cases.
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CNET
Apple Isn’t Following Its Typical Playbook for the September iPhone Event
Tim Cook is having a wild last week on the job.
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VentureBeat
Visa ships a security AI that patches production code before any human reviews it
Visa's open-source security harness now finds the vulnerability, writes the fix, and turns an adversarial panel on its own patch before any human reviews it. The whole loop ships on by default.
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The Register
Word 97's ghost in the machine: The crash that vanished the moment anyone looked at it
Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen shared another fireside tale – one to strike fear into the hearts of engineers everywhere: the bug that can't be replicated in the debugger. The story begins near the end of the Word 97 release cycle, when a defect surfaced in the test labs but vanished the moment engineers reached for a debugger.
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MIT Technology Review
A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young
I knew I’d officially become a “longevity influencer” this month when a company called Generation Lab reached out to offer me the chance to write about—and even receive—their new rejuvenation treatment, an injectable combination of two existing drugs which they call 1 Generation.
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The Verge
Anthropic was illegally blacklisted by the Trump administration, court rules
On Thursday, a judge ruled that the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic earlier this year was unconstitutional, delivering the AI lab a win in a monthslong rollercoaster of a battle with the Trump administration.
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TechCrunch
Anthropic gets its first court win over the Pentagon’s supply chain risk label
A federal judge ruled the Trump administration illegally labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, handing the AI company a victory as its second Pentagon lawsuit continues in Washington.
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Ars Technica
Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says
xAI has now been accused of training Grok on child sex abuse materials (CSAM), as regulators and courts continue to probe how far the problem goes, and some Grok users have been arrested.
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WIRED
Inside Meta’s Push to Put Robots to Work in Data Centers
The company is testing robots that can swap cables, reset servers, and take on other tasks performed by technicians, fueling concerns among some workers that their jobs could be at risk.
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Engadget
The pros and cons of flash memory
Flash memory is popular for lots of good reasons, but it's not without its faults. Will the market be moving on?
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ZDNET
I've tested dozens of robot vacuums - this new $599 Roborock has all the features I need
The Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro is a midrange robot vacuum and mop with a hands-free cleaning experience.
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CNET
The iPhone Air Is One of Apple’s Most Important Products, Even if It Wasn’t a Blockbuster
Apple’s super-thin iPhone didn’t sell like crazy, but it helped set the stage for something bigger: the long-rumored foldable.
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VentureBeat
When agents act on their own, governance has to live in the data layer
Presented by EDB As enterprises give AI agents more autonomy — the ability to plan, decide, and act across systems without a human approving each step — a hard question moves to the center of every architecture review: When an agent tries to complete an action that it was never authorized to do, what actually stops it?
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The Register
Datacenters face direct hit from China rare earth curbs, as clock runs out on escalated licensing chokeoff
The IEEE is warning that China’s export controls on rare earth minerals could start to impact datacenters, as shipments of some key materials are down 75 percent and Beijing is due to review its policies this November.
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MIT Technology Review
The Download: inside OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack, and a new EV takes on the US
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
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The Verge
The GTA VI ‘extended look’ is now streaming on YouTube
Rockstar has officially published its "extended look" at Grand Theft Auto VI on YouTube and on its website, as promised. The in-depth preview, which "entirely" features footage captured from the PS5 version of the game, initially premiered on Netflix at 3PM ET.
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TechCrunch
Meta executive leaves for OpenAI as the social media giant faces growing scrutiny in India
Sandhya Devanathan will oversee some OpenAI operations across Southeast Asia and Australia in her new role.
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Ars Technica
GOP heads to Supreme Court after losing case over TV election ad prices
Republican campaign committees want the Supreme Court to mandate lower prices for election commercials on broadcast TV stations. If the court agrees, broadcasters would be forced to offer their lowest ad prices to political parties and joint fundraising committees.
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WIRED
The Easiest Ways to Share Anything Between Android and iOS
Transferring files and data across platforms is more straightforward than ever.
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Engadget
How to add an intro to Apple CarPlay using Shortcuts
If you want your car to greet you every morning, the Shortcuts app can make it happen.
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ZDNET
Want a free Apple Watch? Play ZDNET's 'Guessing Game' to win one - only 4 days left
It's the third and final round of ZDNET's Big Guessing Game. What do you think Apple will announce?
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CNET
What Meta’s All-New Social Media Guidelines Promise to Change for Teen Users
A major lawsuit has led Meta to change the rules again for young users on Instagram and Facebook. Here’s exactly what’s changing.
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The Register
Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic over Claude powers it didn't have
The Pentagon illegally blacklisted Anthropic as a national security threat based partly on things Claude couldn't actually do, a US federal judge has ruled.
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MIT Technology Review
Is Slate Auto’s new electric truck the EV Americans need?
EVs account for under 10% of total new-vehicle sales in the US, and the numbers are declining. From a climate perspective, that’s pretty dismal, especially because the transportation sector is the single biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the country.
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The Verge
The biggest video game of all time looks like a movie
I think I know why Rockstar Games debuted its "extended look" of Grand Theft Auto VI on Netflix instead of immediately dropping it for free on YouTube. Unlike most video game trailers, the almost 27-minute preview of GTA VI felt more like a slice of a prestige crime drama than any video game trailer that I've ever seen.
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TechCrunch
As electric two-wheelers gain a foothold, Belgian startup Any bets on cargo space
Launched by Belgian startup Any, LUV1 is a modular electric motorcycle with 120 liters of cargo space that can be used to carry bags, work equipment, or even pets.
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Ars Technica
Report: Nvidia to acquire AI model repository Hugging Face for $13 billion
Nvidia is reportedly moving forward to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The acquisition could help the hardware giant expand and fortify its deep integration with the wider AI industry.
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WIRED
XGIMI Vibe One Battery-Powered Projector Review (2026)
With the curtains closed and the power cable nearby, this affordable Full HD smart projector is a compact delight.
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Engadget
Grand Theft Auto VI could take you more than 80 hours to finish
PSA to friends and family of GTA fans: You'll probably rarely see them from November 19 onwards.
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ZDNET
Even an AI cost-management vendor can lose control of its agent spending
In one instance, an AI agent stayed open for four days and ran 4,819 calls for almost $4,000. No one had budgeted for this cost.
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CNET
1 in 6 VPNs Track Your Location, According to New Report From Proton
According to the report, 64 VPN apps on Apple’s App Store and Google Play contain trackers that collect your sensitive data; the exact opposite of what a VPN is supposed to do.
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The Register
Microsoft preps this year's Windows 11 feature tweaks: 26H2 hits Release Preview
Microsoft has dropped Windows 11 26H2 into the Windows Insider Release Preview Channel and released August's preview update. Windows 11 26H2 shares the same servicing branch as Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, and many of the tweaks and updates that users are looking forward to have already appeared in the monthly Windows updates.
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The Verge
Meta addresses ‘pervert glasses’ reputation with a privacy fix and a new marketing campaign
Meta is updating its AI-powered smart glasses to close a loophole that allowed wearers to keep recording after covering the front-facing LED. Alex Himel, Meta's vice president of augmented reality, writes in a post on Threads that "the camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording."
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TechCrunch
AI, athletes, and Keith Rabois: StrictlyVC is back in New York on September 10
A boutique StrictlyVC evening returns to New York's West Village on September 10 with Keith Rabois, Craig Shapiro, Jason Levien, Tristan Walker, Brynn Putnam, and Deven Parekh — covering AI, sports investing, community-building, venture economics, and politics, with cocktails, food, and networking throughout the night.
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Ars Technica
AI industry says Trump plans to tax chips in the “single dumbest way imaginable”
Donald Trump may be preparing to announce sweeping new semiconductor tariffs at the absolute worst time, the tech industry fears.
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WIRED
I Asked 100 Companies for My Data. I Got Deletion Notices Instead
California residents have a legal right to access the data that companies collect about them. Actually exercising that right is a burdensome nightmare.
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Engadget
Stripe-led group is reportedly abandoning its PayPal acquisition
Stripe and buyout firm Advent are no longer pursuing their acquisition of PayPal as was reported earlier this month.
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ZDNET
How to get free Google AI Pro for an entire year - and save $240: 3 ways
Google is offering its premium AI subscription plan for free. It usually costs $20 a month - and comes with many benefits.
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CNET
Human, Beware: The Secrets We Tell AI Chatbots Aren’t Private
A recent DuckDuckGo survey finds that people are sharing intimate details with chatbots without knowing all the privacy risks.
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The Register
CISA: Most exploited vulnerabilities should have been eradicated decades ago
CISA is still crying out for software vendors to adopt Secure by Design (SBD) development practices, and says in its latest review that longstanding vulnerability classes are still the most exploited.
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The Verge
GTA VI: all the news on Rockstar’s next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series
It’s been over a decade and two console generations since GTA V came out, and its sequel is still a work in progress. GTA VI has faced multiple delays, with developer Rockstar Games bumping back its predicted release date twice, eventually shifting to November 19th, 2026, a full year after its originally planned fall 2025 release window.
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TechCrunch
Anthropic and OpenAI are joining the AI stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the AI Stage is back to dig into the single hottest topic in the community for the past few years, presented by Google for Startups.
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Ars Technica
The iconic T-38 jets flown by astronauts just got a spiffy new look
For the first time in decades, NASA has rolled out one of its iconic astronaut training aircraft with a bold, new look. The space agency debuted a new livery on one of its T-38 jets in celebration of its program to return astronauts to the Moon.
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WIRED
There Are So Many Conspiracy Theories About Dolly Parton and Vaccines
Influential right-wing conspiracy theorists and MAGA-aligned pundits are falsely claiming that the Covid vaccine killed Dolly Parton, the vaccination advocate and philanthropist.
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Engadget
X claims it found a Chinese bot farm posting anti-AI data center sentiments
X found a bot farm in its investigation of inauthentic Chinese accounts. Out of 200,000 bots, 200 allegedly focused on posting against AI data centers.
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ZDNET
These Mammotion robot lawn mowers can climb hills - and they're up to $560 off right now
The Mammotion LUBA 3 AWD 3000H and the LUBA Mini 2 mowers are both heavily discounted - here's which you should get.
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CNET
Adobe Photoshop Adds a Whole New AI Editing Mode
The new AI Assisted Editor is another AI tool for Adobe’s image editing software.
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The Register
Industry that built the problem offers to sell you the solution
OpenAI has gathered more than 100 of the world's biggest tech and infosec companies to warn that cyber defense is in trouble - a reassuring development given quite a few of them helped build the technology involved.
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The Verge
GTA VI looks just as great as we could hope for
Netflix and Rockstar Games finally debuted their "extended look" at Grand Theft Auto VI. It showed that the new game looks to keep much of the spirit of GTA - exploration, driving, crimes, shooting, and cinematic story scenes.
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TechCrunch
Rivian’s CFO is leaving the company
Claire McDonough is stepping down on October 30 to pursue a new opportunity, the company said in a filing on Thursday.
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Ars Technica
RFK Jr. goes full anti-vaccine bananas over two measles deaths—one was a newborn
In the wake of news on Tuesday that two people in Pennsylvania died from measles, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been posting a slew of anti-vaccine rhetoric and misinformation on social media—marking a resurgence of his old ways as a fervent opponent of lifesaving immunizations.
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WIRED
How an Atlanta Suburb Ended Up Sharing Flock Data With More Than 2,000 Organizations
Alpharetta, Georgia, cops share data with thousands of Flock users, ranging from federal agencies to a fish and wildlife commission. The reasons why show how vast—and invasive—the network has become.
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Engadget
Judge rules that the Pentagon's Anthropic ban was 'illegal and baseless'
'The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics.'
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ZDNET
Lawsuit says Oura sleep tracking has 'a coin flip's chance of being correct'
The class action lawsuit claims that Oura's sleep-tracking mechanisms sell 'faulty AI-based inference as reliable science.'
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CNET
Complaints Pile Up for Popular Meal Kit Services Amid Missing Ingredients and Poor Customer Service
Unhappy customers told CNET about their negative experiences with Marley Spoon.
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The Register
Microsoft's virtual intern Teams Facilitator will be late for the meeting
Microsoft has pushed back detection and question answering by the Teams Facilitator to November, after initially scheduling General Availability for June. Teams Facilitator is an AI assistant that joins meetings.
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The Verge
Google’s AI note-taking app now allows you to interact with books
Google's AI note-taking app, Gemini Notebook, can now pull information from the books you've purchased.
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TechCrunch
Bluesky adds an ‘algorithmic opt-out’ feature for those who don’t want to go viral
Sometimes people just want to post to their followers, Bluesky says.
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Ars Technica
Why did 1,000 world citizens bury their underpants?
A thousand people voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them, but as part of a citizen science project to map out soil health in 25 countries around the world.
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WIRED
A Judge Has Blocked the Pentagon’s Attempt to Blacklist Anthropic
A federal judge has called the Department of Defense’s designation of Anthropic as a national security supply-chain risk “illegal and baseless.”
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Engadget
Bluesky has a new setting to help you avoid accidentally going viral
The setting will prevent your posts from being recommended in the algorithmic "discover" feed.
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ZDNET
Galaxy Z Fold 8 camera trouble? 4 settings I recommend changing now
The cameras on the Galaxy Z Fold 8 work best when they're pushed to their limits. Here are the settings I changed to get the best results.
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CNET
The Powerful Stealth AI Model ‘Ox Alpha’ Is Now GLM-5.3-Flash, and You Can Use It
The Chinese AI company Z.ai has confirmed responsibility for the model, which caught users’ attention on OpenRouter last week.
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The Register
Unsafe at any speed: AI optimists are turning cautious as safety concerns mount
OPINION It wasn't that long ago, like earlier this year, that AI leaders were doing their usual pie-in-the-sky proclamations of how everything would be so wonderful with AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei tweeted that AI "will actually be possible to cure most human diseases in ~5-10 years."
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TechCrunch
Buried in Meta’s $18B settlement is a legal pass on kids’ data
Meta’s settlement with 29 states allows it to retain certain data from children under 13 to train and test age-detection models, highlighting a privacy trade-off built into the deal.
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Ars Technica
Panic passes Trump tariff refunds back to the Playdate customers who paid them
Panic, the indie game publishers behind the quirky, yellow crank-sporting Playdate gaming handheld, is issuing refunds to customers who had to shoulder the cost of inappropriate tariffs imposed by the Trump administration this year.
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WIRED
6 Takeaways From the GTA VI Extended Look
Grand Theft Auto VI is nigh. Here’s what the developer revealed about its highly anticipated game.
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Engadget
You won't be able to hot-wire every car in GTA 6
Stealing cars in GTA 6 will require different approaches depending on their make and model.
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ZDNET
Apple escaped Android's 'toxic hellstew' - now Siri AI is creating a new one
Apple's new toxic hellstew is a battle over regulation, litigation, and keeping your data safe.
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CNET
Nokia’s 300 Charge Is the Cool Retro Phone You Won’t Be Using in the US
The unavailability of the phone due to its 2G networking may drive fans of retro-styled phones to look at other options.
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The Register
Big Tech market power will cause UK to lose AI race, think tank warns
UK businesses say the market power of Big Tech is stifling competition, and will hinder the UK’s ability to reap the benefits from AI, a key part of the government’s plans for economic recovery.
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TechCrunch
YouTube now lets creators tag Amazon products and earn commissions from purchases
The update turns product recommendations into a more direct revenue stream for creators, and for Amazon, the move puts its massive online marketplace inside one of the most popular video platforms.
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Ars Technica
Traders brought Central American cacao to Georgia 1,000 years ago
A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia state included cacao from Central America. Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s now Atlanta—contained traces of cacao, a raw ingredient of chocolate.
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WIRED
AI Agents Are Hacking Systems. Could That Push the US and China to Cooperate?
This week on “Uncanny Valley,” senior writer Will Knight talks his recent visit to China and the future of AI collaboration.
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Engadget
The most popular Android phone brands rarely sold in the US
People in the US don't have much choice beyond Apple, Google, and Samsung phones. But there are so many more choices that aren't sold in the region.
About this digest
Prism Tech News is a daily reading list, not a publisher. Every morning at 06:00 UTC it gathers what ten of the most-read English-language technology publications have posted in the last day and picks the hundred most recent stories, spread evenly across the outlets. Each entry carries a short, neutral summary written automatically from the publisher's own text, with the headline and a link back to the original article. Headlines and excerpts remain the property of their publishers. Corrections and removal requests: contact page. Also available as RSS and JSON.