In a new experiment, Meta is limiting the number of links users can post on Facebook, unless they have a paid Meta Verified subscription. Over the last week, several users have spotted Meta's test, which impacts link posting. Social media strategist Matt Navvara noted that users part of the test can only post two links unless they pay for a Meta Verified subscription, which starts from $14.99 per month. According to the screenshot posted by Navarra, users can still post affiliate links, comments, and links to Meta platform posts, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. “This is a limited test to understand whether the ability to publish an increased volume of posts with links adds additional value for Meta Verified subscribers,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. This would directly impact creators and brands posting links from their blogs or other platforms to reach a wider audience. It also said that users can still post links in comments, and they are not impacted by the limit. It is not clear if this signal pushed the company to experiment with limits on link sharing, however. With the new link posting limit test, creators and brands would be forced to post content from other Meta platforms if they reached their limit, or stop posting altogether if they didn't want to pay for a subscription. AI summary and search have impacted the publishing industry negatively. In the past few years, social networks like X have toyed with demoting linked posts to encourage users to post content on the platforms natively. DoorDash driver faces felony charges after allegedly spraying customers' food With iOS 26.2, Apple lets you roll back Liquid Glass again — this time on the Lock Screen Google launched its deepest AI research agent yet — on the same day OpenAI dropped GPT-5.2 OpenAI fires back at Google with GPT-5.2 after ‘code red' memo Google debuts ‘Disco,' a Gemini-powered tool for making web apps from browser tabs

Prasad's departure comes two weeks after Amazon unveiled its Nova 2 models at its annual re:Invent conference, and as the company attempts to close the gap with AI rivals including OpenAI and Google in the race to develop increasingly capable AI systems. He joined Amazon in 2013 during the early days of Alexa and was named senior vice president and head scientist for artificial general intelligence in mid-2023 as part of a broader effort to recharge the company's AI initiatives in the face of stiff competition. The new organization will bring together Amazon's most expansive AI models, including Nova and AGI, with its custom silicon development group, which builds chips including Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro, as well as its quantum computing efforts. DeSantis, who is part of Amazon's senior leadership team, will report directly to Jassy. Prasad's departure was mentioned toward the end of Jassy's memo, with the Amazon CEO saying that he “has built a strong team, differentiated technology, growing customer momentum, and a culture of ambitious invention.” Amazon has positioned itself as a major player in enterprise AI through its Bedrock platform. The Nova Forge service, launched at re:Invent, lets businesses and developers customize models using their own data. The company also unveiled a series of “frontier agents” at re:Invent, aiming to get ahead of the industry's push toward autonomous AI systems for businesses. But the company is still generally viewed as a fast follower in generative AI, trailing OpenAI, Google, and others in the perception of frontier model capabilities. The chips powering your smart TV, voice assistant, tablet, and car all have something in common: MediaTek Filing: Amazon cuts 84 jobs in Washington state, unrelated to broader layoffs AI is coming for your shopping cart: How agentic commerce could disrupt online retail Amazon expands same-day service for perishable groceries, intensifying battle with Instacart Amazon hires founders from well-funded enterprise AI startup Adept to boost tech giant's ‘AGI' team Podcast: Amazon, AI, and the cloud — a reality check, with Corey Quinn of ‘Last Week in AWS'

With Bitnami discontinuing their offer, we recently switched to other providers. I guess you need the enterprise offering for organisation support. What is the use case for CVE hardened images that you cannot properly run in an CICD and only on your dev machine? Are there companies that need to follow compliance rules or need this security guarantee but don't have CICD in place? I guess you need the enterprise offering for organisation support. What is the use case for CVE hardened images that you cannot properly run in an CICD and only on your dev machine? Are there companies that need to follow compliance rules or need this security guarantee but don't have CICD in place? Offering image hardening to custom images looks like a reasonable way for Docker to have a source of sustained income. Regulated industries like banks, insurers, or governmental agencies are likely interested. Docker communicated its intent to sunset the Docker Free Team plan on March 14, 2023, but this decision was reversed on March 24, 2023. Docker communicated its intent to sunset the Docker Free Team plan on March 14, 2023, but this decision was reversed on March 24, 2023. We just cache all the public images ourselves and avoid it.https://www.docker.com/blog/revisiting-docker-hub-policies-p... There's an excellent reason: They're login gated, which is at best unnecessary friction. Chainguard still has better CVE response time and can better guarantee you zero active exploits found by your prod scanners. (No affiliation with either, but we use chainguard at work, and used to use bitnami too before I ripped it all out) (No affiliation with either, but we use chainguard at work, and used to use bitnami too before I ripped it all out) We don't guarantee zero active exploits, but we do have a contractual SLA we offer around CVE scan results (those aren't quite the same thing unfortunately).We do issue an advisory feed in a few versions that scanners integrate with. The traditional format we used (which is what most scanners supported at the time) didn't have a way to include pending information so we couldn't include it there.The basic flow was: scanner finds CVE and alerts, we issue statement showing when and where we fixed it, the scanner understands that and doesn't show it in versions after that.so there wasn't really a spot to put "this is present", that was the scanner's job. Not all scanners work that way though, and some just rely on our feed and don't do their own homework so it's hit or miss.We do have another feed now that uses the newer OSV format, in that feed we have all the info around when we detect it, when we patch it, etc.All this info is available publicly and shown in our console, many of them you can see here: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisoriesYou can take this example: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisories/blob/main/amass.advi... and see the timestamps for when we detected CVEs, in what version, and how long it took us to patch. We do issue an advisory feed in a few versions that scanners integrate with. The traditional format we used (which is what most scanners supported at the time) didn't have a way to include pending information so we couldn't include it there.The basic flow was: scanner finds CVE and alerts, we issue statement showing when and where we fixed it, the scanner understands that and doesn't show it in versions after that.so there wasn't really a spot to put "this is present", that was the scanner's job. Not all scanners work that way though, and some just rely on our feed and don't do their own homework so it's hit or miss.We do have another feed now that uses the newer OSV format, in that feed we have all the info around when we detect it, when we patch it, etc.All this info is available publicly and shown in our console, many of them you can see here: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisoriesYou can take this example: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisories/blob/main/amass.advi... and see the timestamps for when we detected CVEs, in what version, and how long it took us to patch. The basic flow was: scanner finds CVE and alerts, we issue statement showing when and where we fixed it, the scanner understands that and doesn't show it in versions after that.so there wasn't really a spot to put "this is present", that was the scanner's job. Not all scanners work that way though, and some just rely on our feed and don't do their own homework so it's hit or miss.We do have another feed now that uses the newer OSV format, in that feed we have all the info around when we detect it, when we patch it, etc.All this info is available publicly and shown in our console, many of them you can see here: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisoriesYou can take this example: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisories/blob/main/amass.advi... and see the timestamps for when we detected CVEs, in what version, and how long it took us to patch. Not all scanners work that way though, and some just rely on our feed and don't do their own homework so it's hit or miss.We do have another feed now that uses the newer OSV format, in that feed we have all the info around when we detect it, when we patch it, etc.All this info is available publicly and shown in our console, many of them you can see here: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisoriesYou can take this example: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisories/blob/main/amass.advi... and see the timestamps for when we detected CVEs, in what version, and how long it took us to patch. We do have another feed now that uses the newer OSV format, in that feed we have all the info around when we detect it, when we patch it, etc.All this info is available publicly and shown in our console, many of them you can see here: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisoriesYou can take this example: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisories/blob/main/amass.advi... and see the timestamps for when we detected CVEs, in what version, and how long it took us to patch. All this info is available publicly and shown in our console, many of them you can see here: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisoriesYou can take this example: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisories/blob/main/amass.advi... and see the timestamps for when we detected CVEs, in what version, and how long it took us to patch. You can take this example: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/advisories/blob/main/amass.advi... and see the timestamps for when we detected CVEs, in what version, and how long it took us to patch.

“I was introduced to the planetary science world just a few years ago, and I had always taken for granted that Titan has an ocean,” lead author Flavio Petricca, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Gizmodo in an email. “While working on this and elaborating these ideas, it happened very often that I woke up very early in the morning because I couldn't believe what I was seeing in the data, that Titan might not have an ocean,” he said. NASA's Cassini spacecraft launched in October 1997, embarking on a seven-year journey through the solar system. The spacecraft had its first close encounter with Titan in October 2004, coming within 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) of the moon's icy surface to skim its hazy atmosphere. In December of that year, Cassini deployed the Huygens probe, which touched down on the surface of Titan three weeks later. Cassini went on to complete 124 flybys of Titan. The mountain of data it gathered included radar and gravity measurements that led scientists to believe the moon is hiding a huge ocean of liquid water and ammonia beneath its crust. Huygens also measured radio signals that corroborated this idea. Over the past decade, the idea that Titan harbors a vast underground reservoir of liquid water became widely accepted, but there was always one nagging problem. These gravitational “tides” deform Titan's surface, creating bulges that point toward Saturn. If Titan were composed entirely of solid rock, Saturn's gravitational attraction would produce bulges only 3 feet (1 meter) high, but the Cassini data showed that they're actually much larger. This suggested that Titan is not solid all the way through to its core, leading scientists to assume the moon has a subsurface ocean. “On the other hand, a layer of slushy ice with widespread melt pockets can also lead to strong deformations,” Petricca explained. If Titan had a liquid ocean beneath its crust, the surface would respond immediately to Saturn's gravitational pull. “Imagine standing on the surface and Saturn passing above your head. If instead there is a layer of slush with pockets of meltwater, that would cause tidal dissipation in the interior, creating a delay between Saturn's gravitational influence and Titan's bulge response, according to Petricca. This delay had never been measured before, but his team reanalyzed the Cassini data with improved processing techniques and found a signature of a 15-hour delay in Titan's gravity field. “He spent months and months and months staring at it, re-checking everything, getting critical feedback from some of the top researchers in the world to make sure that he was not making any mistakes,” Journaux told Gizmodo. But there was no error—the results strongly suggested that a layer of slushy, high-pressure ice sits between Titan's core and its frozen crust. The findings offer a revelatory new view of Titan's structure and processes, and suggest that its potentially habitable environment may look very different than scientists previously thought. “We went from looking for an open ocean type of ecosystem to something that's probably going to be much more like sea ice or aquifers,” Journaux said. “Because we don't have an open ocean, I think even just the signatures of life will be different.” This basically changes everything about the way researchers will hunt for signs of life on Titan. The tools, strategies, regions of interest, and clues will all be different, according to Journaux. While this presents an enormous challenge, “I think that our new results make Titan more interesting,” Petricca said. “Our models indicate that there should be pockets of liquid warm water, with temperatures up to [68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius)], cycling nutrients from the moon's rocky core, through slushy layers of warm ice, to a solid icy shell at the surface,” he explained. “This might have strong implications for the habitability potential of Titan, but I should emphasize that our study did not look into these.” Both Petricca and Journaux hope their findings will pave the way for habitability studies that are better suited to the moon's slushy subsurface environment. Nearly three decades after Cassini's launch, it appears a new era of Titan exploration is just beginning. MAVEN has circled Mars for more than a decade, exploring the planet and relaying data from robots on the surface. Amid media reports of skyrocketing valuation and a potential IPO for SpaceX, the company could have a lot to lose next year.

A fresh analysis of tidal perturbations on Titan challenges a long-held hypothesis: that the cloud-shrouded Saturnian moon harbors an ocean of liquid water beneath its surface ice. Our new results do not preclude the existence of such environments within Titan, but rather, further support their plausibility,” University of Washington planetary scientist Baptiste Journaux, a co-author of the study published in Nature, told GeekWire in an email. Journaux acknowledged that the results don't match up with conventional wisdom. He said they represent a “true paradigm shift” in how scientists think Titan is put together. Journaux and his colleagues used improved, up-to-date techniques to put Cassini's radiometric measurements through a fresh round of analysis — and came to a different conclusion. In contrast, the newly published research finds insufficient evidence for a liquid layer that large. Journaux pointed out that ice tends to exclude salts and other dissolved materials as it freezes, which means “these slushy, near-melting environments would be enriched in dissolved species and nutrients for life to feed on, as opposed to a dilute open ocean.” Such life would probably be most similar to the types of organisms found in sea-ice ecosystems on Earth. Titan's interior is by no means the Saturnian moon's only region of interest: Titan also has lakes of liquid ethane and methane, plus an atmosphere that's rich in hydrocarbons. NASA's Dragonfly mission, which is due to lift off from Earth in 2028 and touch down on Titan in 2034, could provide new insights about the moon's surface conditions and its interior structure. Looking beyond Titan, there are several other icy moons in our solar system that are thought to harbor hidden reservoirs of water, including the Saturnian moon Enceladus and three of Jupiter's moons: Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Those three Jovian worlds will get a close look from the European Space Agency's Juice spacecraft (launched in 2023) and NASA's Europa Clipper (launched in 2024). Journaux hopes the results announced today will help other scientists get a better sense of what they should be looking for on all of these icy moons. “As our understanding of their interiors will become much more accurate and refined with upcoming missions … this result shows us how we can, with new measurements, place much stronger and more precise constraints on the types of habitable environments that may exist,” he said. Flavio Petricca of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the corresponding author of the study published in Nature, “Titan's Strong Tidal Dissipation Precludes a Subsurface Ocean.” In addition to Journaux, co-authors include Steven D. Vance, Marzia Parisi, Dustin Buccino, Gael Cascioli, Julie Castillo-Rogez, Brynna G. Downey, Francis Nimmo, Gabriel Tobie, Andrea Magnanini, Ula Jones, Mark Panning, Amirhossein Bagheri, Antonio Genova and Jonathan I. Lunine. Eyebrow-raising revelations come to light as hearings into Titan sub's loss wrap up NTSB spots flaws in hull of Oceangate's Titan submersible and focuses on a bang Coast Guard hearing looks at the gaps in regulations that preceded Titan sub's loss GeekWire Awards: Echodyne, Pulumi, Read AI, Statsig and Truveta in line for Next Tech Titan

Google today released its fast and cheap Gemini 3 Flash model, based on the Gemini 3 released last month, looking to steal OpenAI's thunder. For instance, it scored 33.7% without tool use on Humanity's Last Exam benchmark, which is designed to test expertise across different domains. The company says the new model is good at identifying multimodal content and giving you an answer based on that. For instance, you can upload your pickleball short video and ask for tips; you can try drawing a sketch and have the model guess what you are drawing; or you can upload an audio recording to get analysis or generate a quiz. Google noted that companies like JetBrains, Figma, Cursor, Harvey, and Latitude are already using the Gemini 3 Flash model, which is available through Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise. This is slightly more expensive than $0.30 per 1 million input tokens and $2.50 per 1 million output tokens of Gemini Flash 2.5. And, for thinking tasks, it uses 30% fewer tokens on average than 2.5 Pro. That means overall, you might save on the number of tokens for certain tasks. “We really position flash as more of your workhorse model. So if you look at, for example, even the input and output prices at the top of this table, Flash is just a much cheaper offering from an input and output price perspective. Since it released Gemini 3, Google has processed over 1 trillion tokens per day on its API, amid its fierce release and performance war with OpenAI. Earlier this month, Sam Altman reportedly sent an internal “Code Red” memo to the OpenAI team after ChatGPT's traffic dipped as Google's market share in consumers rose. Post that, OpenAI has released GPT-5.2 and a new image generation model. OpenAI also boasted about its growing enterprise use and said the ChatGPT messages volume has grown 8x since November 2024. While Google didn't directly address the competition with OpenAI, it said that the release of new models is challenging all companies to be active. “Just about what's happening across the industry is like all of these models are continuing to be awesome, challenge each other, push the frontier. And I think what's also awesome is as companies are releasing these models,” Doshi said. Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. DoorDash driver faces felony charges after allegedly spraying customers' food With iOS 26.2, Apple lets you roll back Liquid Glass again — this time on the Lock Screen Google launched its deepest AI research agent yet — on the same day OpenAI dropped GPT-5.2 Disney hits Google with cease-and-desist claiming ‘massive' copyright infringement OpenAI fires back at Google with GPT-5.2 after ‘code red' memo Google debuts ‘Disco,' a Gemini-powered tool for making web apps from browser tabs

Donald Trump's appearances on the podcasts of Joe Rogan and Theo Von, among others, were seen by many as a key part of securing his second term in office. But while Trump was speculating about alien life on Mars with Rogan, he had a team of acolytes appearing on dozens, if not hundreds, of much smaller niche podcasts hosted by right-wing content creators who typically don't talk about politics. At the time, there was no hard evidence behind an idea the Trump campaign appeared to understand instinctively: Social media creators, especially those who do not typically speak about politics, have an extraordinary ability to sway their audiences. The study was conducted with 4,716 Americans aged between 18 and 45, most of whom were randomly assigned a list of progressive content creators to follow. Over the course of five months, from August to December 2024, these creators produced nonpartisan content designed to educate followers rather than explicitly advocate for a specific political viewpoint. The results showed that exposure to these progressive-minded creators not only increased general political knowledge, but also shifted followers' policy and partisan views to the left. In contrast, a placebo group that was not assigned any creators to follow but was allowed to scroll social media as normal “showed significant rightward movement,” which researchers said was related to the right-leaning nature of social media networks. “The research concretizes what a lot of people have been hypothesizing, which is that content creators are a powerful force in politics, and they are absolutely going to play a big role in the 2026 midterms, and they will play an even bigger role in the 2028 elections,” says Samuel Woolley, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies digital propaganda and who reviewed the research. As well as trying to prove that social media influencers can shape public opinion, the researchers also wanted to find out if those creators were more or less influential when their content is more overtly political. To do this, the researchers randomly assigned the study's participants a list of creators to follow, with some being assigned creators who mainly post about political issues, while others were assigned creators who are predominantly apolitical in their output. “We find that individual [creators]—who cultivate parasocial connections but often lack expertise or formal authority—can shape political preferences by establishing trust,” the researchers write. “It's fairly clear at this point that Republicans have been much more invested in building these relationships over the couple of years preceding the 2024 election,” says John Marshall, an associate professor of political science at Columbia University and co-author of the new report. While the non-partisan messages shared by creators in this study are not the types of messages that campaigns will be seeking to share ahead of next year's mid-terms, there are a lot of lessons that campaigns can learn from the study's findings, including the fact that building relationships with these creators does not happen overnight. “If I was in a campaign I would say we should start earlier,” says Nathaniel Lubin, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University and co-author of the report. “We should treat this more like an organizing problem, or how to work with creators, rather than an advertising problem where you sort of raise money and then dump it in at the last minute.” “What this research is telling us is that the people who are most compelling, most persuasive when you actually consume their content, are the people who are not constantly producing political stuff—and by implication, the people who are not really bashing you over the head with [messages] like you have to vote Democrat,” says Marshall. Harnessing the influence of social media creators is clearly a tantalizing opportunity for campaigns on both sides of the aisle ahead of next year's midterms, but there are some concerns about how transparent and ethical these relationships will be. “This is both exciting but also incredibly concerning, because influencers don't work to the same standards as professional journalists,” says Woolley. “In a lot of my research, what we found is that influencers tend to lack any unified, ethical standards, that they feel more compelled to note when they're paid to do a commercial activity because of standing US law than they do when they're paid to do political activity.” This is an edition of the Inner Loop newsletter. In your inbox: Maxwell Zeff's dispatch from the world of AI WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Rapidus, which positions itself as a vertically integrated chipmaker that offers both front-end semiconductor production and back-end packaging, plans to discuss its efforts in the field of panel-level packaging (PLP) on glass substrates at SEMICON Japan event this week, reports Nikkei. Panel-level packaging on glass substrates is among the most advanced chip packaging technologies that is set to emerge in the coming years. The core of Rapidus's development is 600mm x 600mm glass panels that are used to make substrates for high-end multi-chiplet processors, such as those used for AI and HPC accelerators. This means that Rapidus plans to leap ahead of its rivals using both panel-level packaging and glass core substrates, which is a risky, but perhaps necessary move, as the company only plans to offer leading-edge process technologies and the most sophisticated packaging technologies for customers who need them. Today's advanced packaging technologies (such as TSMC's CoWoS) rely on silicon interposers with fine-pitch redistribution layers (RDLs) and through-silicon vias (TSVs) that electrically connect GPUs and HBM stacks. Silicon is used because it supports very high wiring density, tight dimensional control, and thermal expansion behavior that is designed to match logic and memory dies. However, properties of organic substrates sometimes do not match those of silicon interposers (limited wiring density, warpage at large sizes, weaker thermal and mechanical stability, etc. ), which is why established players like AMD, Intel, and Samsung are exploring glass-core substrates for their next-generation packaging flows. Glass-based substrates offer clear advantages over traditional organic materials, including excellent flatness that enables exceptional dimensional control, which is a key requirement for dense interconnects in advanced system-in-packages (SiPs) built from multiple chiplets. In addition, glass delivers stronger thermal performance and mechanical rigidity, enabling it to tolerate higher operating temperatures and harsher conditions typical of data center–class SiPs. As a result, glass substrates are particularly well matched for AI and cloud processor designs that tend to rely on large, complex, and thermally demanding multi-die packages. Panel-level packaging refers to processing chip packages on large rectangular panels rather than round wafers, and today it is used mainly in fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) for some automotive, power, RF, and wearable solutions, though they are not yet common. PLP offers clear advantages over 300-mm wafers: they can offer more efficient manufacturing and a larger package. However, currently, there are no higher-end semiconductor packaging tools that can enable front-end-like processing on panels. That said, the ongoing work on glass-based panels suggests PLP could become viable in the late 2020s at the earliest, initially as a way to replace very large organic substrates and potentially complement (but not fully replace) silicon interposers in advanced AI system-on-chips (SoCs). Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. 2D transistors based on 2D materials have been demonstrated in academia and research labs for more than a decade, but none of these demonstrations were compatible with high-volume semiconductor manufacturing, as they relied on small wafers, custom research tools, and fragile process steps. But this week, Intel Foundry and imec demonstrated a 300-millimeter–ready integration of critical process modules for 2D field-effect transistors (2DFETs), indicating that 2D materials and 2DFETs are moving closer to reality. Modern leading-edge logic process technologies — such as Intel's 18A, Samsung SF3E, TSMC's N2 — rely on gate-all-around (GAA) devices, and all leading chipmakers are also developing complementary FETs (CFETs) to vertically stack transistors to extend density gains beyond what is possible with GAA. However, Intel and other chipmakers argue that continued scaling will eventually push silicon channels to their physical limits, where electrostatic control and carrier mobility degrade due to extremely small dimensions. To address this, the industry is increasingly evaluating 2D materials, which can form channels only a few atoms thick while maintaining strong current control. Intel and Imec presented a paper at IDM that details their work on the family of transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). Although these compounds have been studied for years, the main challenge has been integrating them into a 300-mm wafer fab flow without damaging the fragile channels or relying on processing steps that cannot be reliably performed in a high-volume manufacturing environment. Then a carefully controlled selective oxide etch — a process that is conceptually similar to traditional interconnect fabrication — enabled formation of damascene-style top contacts. This damascene top-contact approach addresses one of the most difficult challenges in 2DFET development: forming low-resistance, scalable contacts using processes compatible with production tools. Alongside the contacts, Intel and imec also demonstrated manufacturable gate-stack modules, a major hurdle that has historically prevented 2D devices from achieving industrial integration. By validating contact and gate modules in a production-class environment, Intel Foundry enables customers and internal design teams to evaluate 2D channels using realistic, scalable process assumptions rather than idealized lab environments. This approach is intended to accelerate device benchmarking, compact modeling, and early design exploration. For now, Intel's strategy is to treat 2D materials as a future option that can be assessed well before silicon reaches its ultimate limits. By co-developing processes with partners like imec and exposing them to fab-like constraints early, Intel hopes to solve the challenges associated with their manufacturing early, avoiding late-stage surprises when new materials are finally needed. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Firstly, Intel Foundry continues to conduct long-term research on technologies that will be needed years, if not decades, away, meaning that it will have solutions for the semiconductor industry in the 2030s or 2040s, and, therefore, is a reliable manufacturing partner. Secondly, Intel shows that even at the research stage, new transistor concepts must be developed with manufacturability in mind. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Gizmodo may earn an affiliate commission. I'm really into tech, science, and all that jazz. After all, tech introduced me to the wonderful world of fanfiction, and science created Ingenuity, my favorite Martian space helicopter (it also plays a big role in one of my go-to shows: The Big Bang Theory). First of all, getting someone a tech gift is hard. There are boundless things you have to consider. For instance, how can you make sure they don't have it already without giving yourself away? Can you gift Android devices to an Apple cultist? What if they don't use it and just dump it in the typical basket or closet for unused gadgets? Tech gifts can be expensive, and I am not looking to spend that kind of money on the office Secret Santa or on a gift for the cousin I see once a year. Faced with this panorama, and as a tech enthusiast, I've often gifted the next best, tech-adjacent gifts: coffee mugs. They're the perfect small yet thoughtful gift that people can actually use. Every time I use one of my mugs—the most recent is a Jigglypuff-themed one I got in a white elephant exchange—I fondly remember the person that gave it to me, and then proceed to show it off. You don't even have to be a coffee drinker. I fill them with tea, water, kombucha, and even beer (off the clock, of course). Here are a few of the geeky, original coffee mugs that I'm coveting this year. If you're looking for a small gift that's fun and original, you can't go wrong with one of these. There are, naturally, lots of other options out there, so if anything, use this list as inspiration to get those mental wheels turning. That's probably why I think Snorlax is one of my spirit Pokémon (who said you should limit yourself to one?) and why I don't mind being compared to a round, lazy, fictional creature that's always sleeping. I would really love to have some Lego flowers in my apartment, given that I can't have real flowers because of my cats. But I've long accepted that I'm an idiot when it comes to trying to build anything with Legos. There were two reasons this rad Princess Peach mug caught my eye. This lovely Princess Peach mug will make you feel like a winner every time you take a sip of your coffee/tea/beverage of choice. For the cherry on top, let out a casual, “Oh, did I win?” while you're using your mug. If the person you're shopping for has a love for nostalgia and Super Mario Bros., fear not, our favorite red-hatted plumber has you covered. Besides being an homage to Nintendo's first Super Mario game in 1985, this great cup changes color depending on whether the beverage is hot or old. Who said you needed a screen to see cool special effects? It's taken almost a decade, but this month we'll finally learn just how things end for our favorite band of “kids” (*cough* adults *cough*) in Hawkins. Honestly, I'm not upset that it's taken Netflix forever to finish this show. One thing I do remember is my girl, Eleven, who will live on in my heart as an eternal badass no matter what happens at the end. I may be a homebody, but even I would be willing to pack my suitcase if it meant getting to visit the USS Enterprise. Unfortunately, a ship like the Enterprise is unlikely to be built in my lifetime. That only leaves the next best option: living vicariously through merch. It's just the reminder you need to boldly go where no man has gone before. Overall, I try to have a good and positive attitude, but even I have those days where everything seems to be on fire. In fact, I sometimes joke that I feel like the meme of exasperated Elmo in hell or the dog surrounded by flames. Of course, my first choice in this case was Elmo in hell (I just think his little arms look kind of funny in that meme), but I wasn't able to find a cool mug that did the meme justice. I was able to find a mug with a dog surrounded by flames, though, and I'm already thinking about the beer I'll fill it up with at the end of a long day. This wouldn't be a Gizmodo list if I didn't include a Star Wars mug, and I think I've managed to find just the one that makes the inexplicable Force in George Lucas' world easy to understand. Yeah, it's a bit corny, but given how much shit is going on in the world right now, we could all use a little help from the Force. Playing video games isn't my strong suit, so I just stick to watching others. Luckily, it is within my capabilities to drink from this cool Legend of Zelda mug, which is an ideal gift for fans of the game. And with great success comes a whole lot of merch. I am definitely digging it, but when there's this much hype, I prefer to go for merch that's a bit more unique. That's how I found this delightful Nezuko mug, which connected right with my inner cat mom. Not many of my favorite things in life sit in places where they fit, but Nezuko and my cats do. I love how the sassy little fire makes room for everyone in their odd and misshapen moving castle, even though he does complain while he's doing it. Nothing too crazy, just some humble and reasonable items that I've gotten a lot of value from. Whether you're on Team iPhone or Android, like flat phones or foldables, we've found the best phones released this year.

Deepfakes are a growing problem for any organization jacked into the internet. They can be especially dangerous when weaponized by nation-states and cybercriminals. “When people think about deepfakes, they often picture fake videos or voice-cloned calls,” noted Arif Mamedov, CEO of Regula Forensics, a global developer of forensic devices and identity verification solutions. Deepfakes are dangerous because they attack identity itself, which is the foundation of digital trust.” “Unlike traditional fraud, which relies on stolen or leaked data, deepfakes allow criminals to recreate existing or create entirely new people — complete with faces, voices, documents, and believable behavior,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Our 2025 research shows that deepfakes don't replace traditional fraud — they amplify it, exposing old weaknesses and making them far more expensive,” he added. Mike Engle, chief strategy officer for 1Kosmos, a digital identity verification and passwordless authentication company headquartered in Iselin, N.J., explained that traditional security assumes that once someone is authenticated, they are legitimate. Deepfakes don't break systems first — they break human judgment, maintained David Lee, CTO of Saviynt, an identity governance and access management company in El Segundo, Calif. “When a voice or video sounds right, people move quickly, skip verification, and assume authority is legitimate,” he told TechNewsWorld. A believable executive voice can authorize payments, override processes, or create urgency that short-circuits rational decision-making before security controls ever come into play.” “As with any fraud or scam, a deepfake-driven scam puts any business at risk, but especially smaller or thin-margined businesses, where financial impacts can have a disproportionate affect on the health and viability of the entity,” added James E. Lee, president of the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), a nonprofit organization devoted to minimizing risk and mitigating the impact of identity compromise and crime, in San Diego. “Cybersecurity reports and regulatory warnings all indicate an exponential rise,” observed Ruth Azar-Knupffer, co-founder of VerifyLabs, a developer of deepfake detection technology, in Bletchingley, England. “Threat actors are increasingly leveraging accessible AI tools, such as open source deepfake generators, to create convincing fakes efficiently,” she told TechNewsWorld. “The proliferation of digital communication, such as video calls and social media, has expanded attack opportunities, making deepfakes a growing vector for scams and disinformation.” “Fraudsters can buy complete ‘persona kits' on demand: synthetic faces, deepfake voices, digital backstories. This marks a shift from small-scale, manual fraud to industrial-scale identity fabrication.” He cited Regula data showing that about one in three organizations has already experienced deepfake fraud. One way organizations are addressing the deepfake problem is through training. KnowBe4 Chief Human Risk Management Strategist Perry Carpenter explained that the training focuses on employee interaction with deepfakes. “Those are all things that we can do, but those are things that will go away within the next six months to a year, as the technology gets better.” “So, the last thing I want somebody to do is to believe that there will always be a visual or audio tell that they can figure out,” he said. “The best thing is always going to be, am I feeling manipulated in some way? Is this asking me to do something out of the ordinary? Rich Mogull, chief analyst with the Cloud Security Alliance, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to cloud best practices, agreed that employees shouldn't rely on visual or audio artifacts to identify deepfakes. He recommended requiring multiple checks before issuing a bank transfer and implementing internal controls that block attempts to circumvent them. He also suggested training employees to validate CEO calls via an out-of-band channel, such as Slack/Teams, and to look for social engineering signals, such as “we don't have time for that, just do it now.” “Awareness helps people pause, but it doesn't replace verification,” he said. That means callback procedures, secondary approval paths, and removing voice or video as standalone trust signals.” “They expose how many organizations still rely on recognition instead of verification.” “It's treating identity as something that must be explicitly validated and continuously enforced by systems. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. OpenAI's Sora 2 Found To Generate False Claim Videos 80% of the Time Alliance Calls for Cyber U to Stem Tide of Nation-State Attacks The New Hollywood: Inside GenAI's Coming Shakeup of Film and TV AMD Positions Itself as a Platform Power in the AI Era Our Children Are Not Ready: A Generational Crisis in the Age of AI How To Leverage Gen AI Without Losing the Corporate Shirt

About 10 Apple employees spent some of their valuable hours over recent months on a project that might seem unusual for the tech giant: customizing an open source AI tool for ImageTek, a small manufacturer in Springfield, Vermont whose lines of business include printing millions of labels for food packaging. The Apple engineers developed a computer vision system to automatically identify color errors, and on one run it picked up bacon labels with a far-too-pinkish beige before they got shipped, according to Marji Smith, ImageTek's president. She says the timely catch helped ImageTek from losing a crucial customer. The iPhone maker committed to opening up a server factory in Houston, which it did recently. It also pledged to increase spending with domestic suppliers and educate “the next generation of US manufacturers.” It's run in partnership with Michigan State University, which is receiving $2.5 million from Apple to partially reimburse for classrooms, marketing, and instructors as part of the first 12 months of a three-year deal, according to a contract obtained by WIRED through a public records request. An attendee looks over one of the demos at a recent Apple Manufacturing Academy workshop. The academy has held free monthly workshops in Detroit to share lessons with and provide networking opportunities for over 100 small-time manufacturers from around the country. What's significant is that ImageTek and two other participants revealed to WIRED that they are receiving an unexpected bonus in the form of site visits and deep technical support from Apple employees. Jamie Herrera, a director of product operations at Apple who oversees the academy, says its goal is to make an impact. “We're able to pair them up with engineers, experts … and go deeper into: How do we take that learning and start to turn it into application?” Apple has just one factory, which assembles iMacs in Ireland, and is generally secretive about its manufacturing processes. But its staff have decades of knowledge from collaborating with partners such as Foxconn—mostly outside the US—that make parts or put them into iPhones and other Apple products. Academy participants believe they have been treated to unique candor, including about how Apple recovered from its 2014 Bendgate scandal, in which some iPhone 6 models warped in tight pockets. That could help it win favors on tariffs and other potentially costly policies. “It's goodwill,” says Harry Moser, founder of the industry-supported Reshoring Initiative, which tracks and encourages US manufacturing investments. To a small extent, working with upstarts could provide Apple employees fun opportunities for experimentation that may even inform its own manufacturing. Herrera says Apple is not seeking any direct benefit from what he described as the significant investment of labor. “What we're looking at is that rising sea for all ships,” he says. Ultimately, a more robust US manufacturing sector could help companies like Apple potentially lower their costs. Smith, a longtime manufacturing executive, joined ImageTek last year and applied for Apple's academy at the first chance. “We see what's happening with the return of tech manufacturing to the US, and we want to be a part of that,” she says. This year, three people from Apple traveled to the machinery manufacturing region in Vermont colloquially known as Precision Valley to visit ImageTek, which also assembles products including circuit boards, and as of recently, agricultural drones. When she mentioned how humidity, worker errors, and machine failures were affecting color quality in label printing, the Apple team suggested setting up a camera and an automated tool to compare an ideal sample to fresh prints. Beginning in September, a larger group from Apple has joined 30-minute calls nearly every week to coach ImageTek through the process and hand off code. Smith described the employees as mostly having over a decade of experience at Apple in manufacturing operations and quality. Smith says the Apple team has been eager to keep helping. No one has mentioned who owns the code and whether a bill will ever come due. “We haven't talked about licensing or rights,” Smith says. But with customers such as the bacon maker renewing their contracts with ImageTek because of quality improvements, the company is in its best financial position ever and striving to grow enough to supply Apple someday. CEO Jay Patel says he came to the realization that he needed outside expertise to compete with overseas manufacturers and grow the company his father had started. “But I will camp outside the manufacturing academy to make sure we get in.” Ever since, he and his team have been meeting over video with a couple of Apple process engineers for an hour every one or two weeks. They are helping Amtech introduce sensors and analytics tools to reduce downtime in the production of electronics used in agriculture, medicine, and other fields. Overall, about 15 companies have received extensive consulting, Apple's Herrera says. An additional beneficiary has been Walkerton, Indiana-based Polygon, which began making fishing rods about 75 years ago before specializing in industrial products such as tubes that are snaked through the body to remove tumors. Ben Fouch, chief financial officer for Polygon, says older machines give the company troubles; for example, a Haas mill that occasionally punches poorly-located holes in tubes and a centerless grinder that can't track its output. Fouch knew automated sensors could help by, for example, identifying the environmental culprits of the hole-punching issues, but with so many potential options to try he didn't know where to start. Over what Fouch estimates was five hours, the Apple employees evaluated Polygon's challenges and applied the industrial engineering equation of Little's Law—which can identify capacity bottlenecks—to devise solutions. The Apple team is working on visiting Polygon to talk through other upgrades. “Without their help, it's going to take us much longer.” Apple's Herrera says giving small manufacturers a sense of the benefits of automation and other technologies could eventually lead them to work with consultants and invest in more expensive systems. Two other academy participants tell WIRED that they have not received extensive assistance from Apple—Herrera says it comes down to which companies have prepared a “problem statement” that Apple can help with—but they are working to bring what they learned to their factories. Jack Kosloski, a project engineer at Blue Lake, a plastic-free packaging startup, says it was eye-opening for him to hear about the depth of Apple's product testing. In one academy session, Apple employees described a robot that wears jeans and simulates bending over as part of stress testing to try to prevent a repeat of Bendgate, Kosloski recalls. Seth Greenberg, a senior account manager at Focus Integration—which is developing robots to load pallets—says technical drills and thought exercises led by Apple experts during his visit to the academy in September energized him so much that he happily returned this month. As President Trump's tariffs force some companies to find US manufacturing partners, the recipients of Apple's help believe they are now better positioned to win some of the business. “We have been very glad they took an interest in us,” she says. In your inbox: Maxwell Zeff's dispatch from the world of AI

Omar Yaghi thinks crystals with gaps that capture moisture could bring technology from “Dune” to the arid parts of Earth. Omar Yaghi was a quiet child, diligent, unlikely to roughhouse with his nine siblings. So when he was old enough, his parents tasked him with one of the family's most vital chores: fetching water. At least once every two weeks, the city switched on local taps for a few hours so residents could fill their tanks. Young Omar helped top up the family supply. The fear of leaving his parents, seven brothers, and two sisters parched kept him punctual. Yaghi proved so dependable that his father put him in charge of monitoring how much the cattle destined for the family butcher shop ate and drank. The best-­quality cuts came from well-fed, hydrated animals—a challenge given that they were raised in arid desert. Specially designed materials called metal-organic frameworks can pull water from the air like a sponge—and then give it back. But at 10 years old, Yaghi learned of a different occupation. Hoping to avoid a rambunctious crowd at recess, he found the library doors in his school unbolted and sneaked in. Thumbing through a chemistry textbook, he saw an image he didn't understand: little balls connected by sticks in fascinating shapes. “I didn't know what they were, but it captivated my attention,” Yaghi says. “I kept trying to figure out what they might be.” After coming to the United States and, eventually, a postdoctoral program at Harvard University, Yaghi devoted his career to finding ways to make entirely new and fascinating shapes for those little sticks and balls. In October 2025, he was one of three scientists who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for identifying metal-­organic frameworks, or MOFs—metal ions tethered to organic molecules that form repeating structural landscapes. Today that work is the basis for a new project that sounds like science fiction, or a miracle: conjuring water out of thin air. When he first started working with MOFs, Yaghi thought they might be able to absorb climate-damaging carbon dioxide—or maybe hold hydrogen molecules, solving the thorny problem of storing that climate-friendly but hard-to-contain fuel. But then, in 2014, Yaghi's team of researchers at UC Berkeley had an epiphany. The tiny pores in MOFs could be designed so the material would pull water molecules from the air around them, like a sponge—and then, with just a little heat, give back that water as if squeezed dry. But his method could do it at lower levels of humidity than rivals—potentially shaking up a tiny, nascent industry that could be critical to humanity in the thirsty decades to come. Now the company he founded, called Atoco, is racing to demonstrate a pair of machines that Yaghi believes could produce clean, fresh, drinkable water virtually anywhere on Earth, without even hooking up to an energy supply. That's the goal Yaghi has been working toward for more than a decade now, with the rigid determination that he learned while doing chores in his father's butcher shop. “It was in that shop where I learned how to perfect things, how to have a work ethic,” he says. Don't start a job unless you can finish it.” Today, desalination plants that take the salt out of seawater provide the bulk of potable water in technologically advanced desert nations like Israel and the United Arab Emirates, but at a high cost. Desalination facilities either heat water to distill out the drinkable stuff or filter it with membranes the salt doesn't pass through; both methods require a lot of energy and leave behind concentrated brine. Typically desal pumps send that brine back into the ocean, with devastating ecological effects. I was talking to Atoco executives about carbon dioxide capture earlier this year when they mentioned the possibility of harvesting water from the atmosphere. Of course my mind immediately jumped to Star Wars, and Luke Skywalker working on his family's moisture farm, using “vaporators” to pull water from the atmosphere of the arid planet Tatooine. Today, harvesting water from the air is a business already worth billions of dollars, say industry analysts—and it's on track to be worth billions more in the next five years. Rising seas seep into underground aquifers, already drained by farming and sprawling cities. Aging septic tanks leach bacteria into water, and cancer-causing “forever chemicals” are creating what the US Government Accountability Office last year said “may be the biggest water problem since lead.” That doesn't even get to the emerging catastrophe from microplastics. So lots of places are turning to atmospheric water harvesting. Instead, buyers in Europe and the United States have approached the company as a way to ensure a clean supply of water. And one of Watergen's biggest markets is the wealthy United Arab Emirates. “When you say ‘water crisis,' it's not just the lack of water—it's access to good-quality water,” says Anna Chernyavsky, Watergen's vice president of marketing. In other words, the technology “has evolved from lab prototypes to robust, field-deployable systems,” says Guihua Yu, a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin. “There is still room to improve productivity and energy efficiency in the whole-system level, but so much progress has been steady and encouraging.” The first generation of commercial tech depended on compressors and refrigerant chemicals—large-scale versions of the machine that keeps food cold and fresh in your kitchen. That's how Watergen's tech works: using a compressor and a heat exchanger to wring water from air at humidity levels as low as 20%—Death Valley in the spring. “Refrigeration works pretty well when you are above a certain relative humidity,” says Sameer Rao, a mechanical engineer at the University of Utah who researches atmospheric water harvesting. In some cases, it's impossible for refrigeration-based systems to really work.” Companies like Source Global use desiccants—substances that absorb moisture from the air, like the silica packets found in vitamin bottles—to pull in moisture and then release it when heated. In theory, the benefit of desiccant-­based tech is that it could absorb water at lower humidity levels, and it uses less energy on the front end since it isn't running a condenser system. Source Global claims its off-grid, solar-powered system is deployed in dozens of countries. Atoco's industrial-scale design uses electricity to speed up the process, but the company is working on a second design that can operate completely off grid, without any energy input. Yaghi's Atoco isn't the only contender seeking to use MOFs for water harvesting. A competitor, AirJoule, has introduced MOF-based atmospheric water generators in Texas and the UAE and is working with researchers at Arizona State University, planning to deploy more units in the coming months. The company started out trying to build more efficient air-­conditioning for electric buses operating on hot, humid city streets. But then founder Matt Jore heard about US government efforts to harvest water from air—and pivoted. Take Maricopa County, encompassing Phoenix and its environs—it uses 1.2 billion gallons of water from its shrinking aquifer every day, and another 874 million gallons from surface sources like rivers. “You know how much influx is in the atmosphere every day? “If you can tap into it, that's your source. AirJoule's system relies on an off-the-shelf version the company buys from the chemical giant BASF; Atoco aims to use Yaghi's skill with designing the novel material to create bespoke MOFs for different applications and locations. Industrial-scale water generators that run on electricity would be capable of producing thousands of liters per day on one end, while units that run on passive systems could operate in remote locations without power, just harnessing energy from the sun and ambient temperatures. In theory, these units could someday replace desalination and even entire municipal water supplies. “To give people water independence, so they're not reliant on another party for their lives.” Both Yaghi and Watergen's Chernyavsky say they're looking at more decentralized versions that could operate outside municipal utility systems. That could be tricky, though, without economies of scale to bring down prices. Difficult as that may be, Yaghi's childhood gave him a particular appreciation for the freedom to go off grid, to liberate the basic necessity of water from the whims of systems that dictate when and how people can access it. “I would say, ‘Continue to be diligent and observant. I pressed him for something more specific: “What do you think he'd say when you described this technology to him?” Yaghi smiled: “I think young Omar would think you're putting him on, that this is all fictitious and you're trying to take something from him.” This reality, in other words, would be beyond young Omar's wildest dreams. Alexander C. Kaufman is a reporter who has covered energy, climate change, pollution, business, and geopolitics for more than a decade. We got a sneak peek inside Found Energy's lab, just as it gears up to supply heat and hydrogen to its first customer. How AI and renewables are shifting the energy landscape. Should private companies be able to dim the sun? Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time.