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
AI agents can be given a goal and left to work through the steps alone, logging progress as they go. Security firm Norforge found more than 20 exposed instances of Cairn, an open-source problem-solving engine, including one attacker who used it to break into over 100 sites, about 23 hours per breach. Victims reportedly include John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins.
The Verge
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
AI accelerators pair a GPU with stacks of high-bandwidth memory, and demand for that memory has surged with generative AI. Samsung is expanding its Pyeongtaek complex in South Korea, where three fabs already run around the clock, a fourth is coming online and work on a fifth resumed after a 2024 slump. It is trying to catch SK Hynix in high-bandwidth memory.
Ars Technica
Japan's MMX spacecraft is on its way to Mars after launching on an H3 rocket, beginning a roughly 10-month cruise. The plan is to study the moons Phobos and Deimos, touch down on Phobos up to twice in 2029, and bring samples back to Earth. Scientists think Phobos may be an asteroid captured by Mars, so the material could help explain how the Solar System formed.
TechCrunch
Most AI software is built with PyTorch, an open-source toolkit that has been tuned to work best on Nvidia chips. Amazon's new TorchNeuron lets developers move an AI app onto its Trainium chips by changing one line of configuration, and Amazon is also contributing code to make PyTorch less tied to any one vendor. It is a direct challenge to Nvidia's software advantage.
Ars Technica
A researcher chained four recently fixed Plex Media Server bugs into an exploit that can run commands on an unpatched machine. The chain uses an unauthenticated request, a loopback pivot, stolen security tokens and a delivered payload, and a honeypot saw attacks within a day installing a cryptominer and proxy software. Plex users should update to version 1.43.3.
