Short visual explainers of the tech you use, plus a curated daily feed of AI and tech news.
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Picked each morning and explained in plain language, with a link to the original reporting.
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Eight areas of technology, each one explained from the basics up.
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Short Reels that show how the tech behind your apps works, one idea at a time.
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One short email with an explainer to watch and the story worth knowing about.
Story of the Day
Open-weight models publish their internal settings, so anyone can download and run them instead of only using the maker's app. Meta says its new Muse Spark Open, an 816 billion parameter model that is natively multimodal, is the most capable open model from the US. Running it on a Mac locally needs at least a terabyte of RAM, best on a new Mac Studio.
TechCrunch
Latest headlines
MIT Technology Review
A polygraph tracks body signals such as heart rate and breathing, on the theory that lying changes them. The Pentagon's proposed Polygraph+ program would score those signals with machine learning and add standoff sensing, which reads those signals without touching the person. Experts are skeptical, since a racing pulse can signal nerves as easily as a lie, and tech-based lie detection has a long record of failure.
MIT Technology Review
In macular degeneration, the light-sensing cells in the eye die but the rest of the retina's circuitry survives. The Prima system uses camera glasses and a pocket processor to convert video into near-infrared light, which a 378-pixel implant turns into electrical signals for the retina; the implant also powers itself like a solar cell. Over 80 percent of recipients could read again.
ipinfo.io
Networks tell each other where to send traffic using the Border Gateway Protocol, a system built on trust, so one wrong announcement can hijack a site, as when Pakistan briefly redirected YouTube in 2008. RPKI fixes that by having address owners publish signed records naming which networks may announce their addresses. The share of protected routes rose from 54 to 70 percent in a year.
The Verge
ChatGPT's Chrome extension can now look at the tabs you already have open. When you tag Chrome in a prompt, it can compare products across tabs, fill out forms, or draft emails, and the sidebar now brings your full chat history to any page. ChatGPT Work can also control tabs to send messages, fill forms or download files.
Ars Technica
Zero-click attacks infect a phone without the owner tapping anything. Citizen Lab found that mercenary hackers bought targeted ads carrying code that reached control servers, which then delivered spyware to selected devices, including 45 phones at the Al Jazeera media network in 2024 and 2025. Google and ad platforms have since removed the vendor involved.
