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Technology

Chrome Deleted the Last of the Old Extensions Yesterday, and the Ad Blockers Are the Point

31 August was the date the remaining Manifest V2 extensions came out of the Chrome Web Store. They stopped running more than a year ago. What changed yesterday is that you can no longer get them back.

Sep 1, 2026/3 min read

The Google sign outside the company's Charleston Road offices in Mountain View, California, photographed in 2022

Technology

OpenAI Is Buying Mac Minis by the Ten Thousand, Because Teaching a Model to Use a Computer Needs Computers

Training an agent to operate an operating system means running an operating system, watching the screen, taking an action and being scored, millions of times over. That work wants breadth across many machines rather than the largest possible GPU.

Sep 1, 2026/3 min read

An Apple Mac mini, the small desktop computer now being bought in bulk to train agents that operate a screen

Technology

The Malware Did Not Need Anyone's Password, and That Is the Whole Point

Anthropic is signing affected users out, removing saved payment methods and refunding unauthorised charges. What was stolen was session cookies from infected computers, the category of theft that walks straight past two factor authentication.

Aug 31, 2026/3 min read

A single door key on a ring, photographed against black. A stolen session token works the same way, as a key already cut that opens the door without anyone being asked who is holding it

Technology

A Federal Judge Has Told the Pentagon That National Security Is Not a Blank Cheque

Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Defense Department's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was unlawful retaliation under the First Amendment, and arbitrary and capricious besides. The label had told every federal agency to stop buying.

Aug 30, 2026/3 min read

The Phillip Burton Federal Building and United States Courthouse in San Francisco, which houses the United States District Court for the Northern District of California

Technology

They Have Photographed the Star Hiding Inside Betelgeuse, and They Still Are Not Certain It Is There

The clearest picture yet of Betelgeuse B was taken with the Very Large Telescope. The caveat almost all the coverage dropped is the astronomer's own: he cannot be sure until he sees it again on the other side of the star, a year from now.

Aug 28, 2026/4 min read

The four Unit Telescopes of ESO's Very Large Telescope on the platform at Cerro Paranal in Chile, ready for the night

Technology

Physicists Made Entangled Photons Out of Ordinary Sunlight, Which Was Supposed to Require a Laser

A team in Ottawa and Erlangen put a window sized lens in the sun, funnelled the light down a glass cone into a fibre the width of a hair, and got entangled photons at ninety four per cent fidelity. The Sun is not supposed to be able to do this.

Aug 25, 2026/4 min read

A laser driven photon pair source on an optical bench at NIST, the conventional arrangement this experiment replaced with sunlight

Technology

Nvidia Is Putting AI Server Prices Up by More Than Fifteen Per Cent, and the Chips Are Not the Reason

Bloomberg reports that customers have been warned of rises above fifteen per cent on Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell systems shipping early next year. The cause is memory, and three companies control the supply of it.

Aug 25, 2026/3 min read

An aisle between rows of server racks in a data centre

Technology

Five US Agencies Say AI Is Writing the Exploit Code Being Aimed at Water Utilities

A joint advisory describes AI-generated attack scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools, pointed at industrial controllers in water, energy and manufacturing. The honest version is narrower than the headlines and more worrying than the reassurance.

Aug 22, 2026/4 min read

A Siemens Simatic S7 programmable logic controller, the device family named in the advisory

Technology

Nevada Approved Up to 8,000 Robotaxis. Tesla's Own Cybercab Engineer Says It Might Manage 2,500.

The Nevada Transportation Authority voted unanimously to let Tesla, Waymo and Uber run paid driverless rides in Clark County. The permitted number and the deliverable number are very different figures, and the company said so itself.

Aug 22, 2026/3 min read

Traffic moving along the Las Vegas Strip at night

Technology

The Telescope Launching This Month Sees a Patch of Sky a Hundred Times Wider Than Hubble's

Nancy Grace Roman is not a bigger Webb. It is a survey instrument, built to photograph enormous areas of sky at Hubble-class sharpness, and its value is in the sheer volume of what it will record.

Aug 21, 2026/3 min read

A wide field of sky scattered with distant galaxies of similar scale

Technology

China Is Sending a Lander, a Rover and a Hopper to the Lunar South Pole on Monday

Chang'e 7 targets the one part of the Moon where ice may have sat undisturbed for billions of years, in craters the sun has never reached. The hopper is the part nobody has tried before.

Aug 21, 2026/3 min read

The cratered lunar surface near the pole with long shadows cast across it