Technology News
The latest Technology news, distilled into a calm, readable pulse.
Open in BriflioTechnology coverage tends to split into two failure modes: breathless hype about a launch, or dense trade-press detail that only makes sense if you already work in the field. Briflio's Technology hub aims for the middle — what actually changed, who it affects, and why it's worth five minutes rather than fifty. That means product launches get read against the market they're entering, regulatory stories get tied to the companies they'll actually constrain, and research breakthroughs get translated out of the abstract and into what changes for the people using the tools. New pulses land here as they're distilled, each with sources attached so a claim about a chip shortage or a platform policy shift isn't just asserted — it's traceable. If you check one hub daily to stay current without falling behind on everything else, this is built to be that one.
China Plans Broad AI Guardrails After Global Security Lapses
China plans to roll out a broad set of standards governing the AI safety from development through deployment, representing some of the most comprehensive guidelines to guard against a loss of control over increasingly powerful artificial intelligence.
Controlling Sharpening in LLM Post-Training
LLM post-training via reinforcement learning has shown consistent improvements in accuracy at the cost of reducing behavioral coverage - a phenomenon known as sharpening that can stall progress on difficult tasks. Repeated sampling objectives such as $\mathrm{pass@k}$ and $\mathrm{max@k}$ are known to mitigate sharpening, but the mechanism behind it remains poorly understood. Moreover, existing approaches for $\mathrm{@k}$ optimization use dedicated algorithms, and no general framework exists fo
From PID to Reinforcement Learning in Building HVAC Control: A Control-Architecture Review of Tuning Strategies, Formulations, and Deployment Trade-offs
This paper reviews control architectures for building heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems, addressing the tension among energy demand, occupant comfort and equipment operability, and situating proportional-integral-derivative (PID) regulation within a layered control stack that also includes rule-based and model-based supervisory control and data-driven reinforcement learning (RL). It examines the thermostat-PID layer from two-position and scheduled setpoint control through
Macronix Adds Hardware Security to NOR Flash Ahead of EU CRA - EE Times
The EU CRA, mandatory in Dec. 2027, requires connected devices to build security into flash memory, protecting identity, data and updates.
FlowBatt: Flow Matching for Probabilistic Battery Degradation Prediction
Battery degradation remains a central challenge in the development and broad application of sustainable energy technologies. Accurate degradation prediction is challenging, as battery aging emerges from complex and heterogeneous interactions among cycling behavior, operating conditions, and cell chemistry. Existing machine-learning approaches typically focus on deterministic end-of-life predictions or modeling degradation curves within fixed chemistry settings, leaving probabilistic state of hea
Pick n Pay turns to AI to speed up online orders
Pick n Pay is rolling out OrderGrid's AI store operations platform to more than 720 stores after a pilot cut online order-picking times by about 30%.
"At Home in Space" opens, caps Air and Space Museum renovation
After seven years of work and nearly $1 billion, the Smithsonian has completed the renovation of the National Air and Space Museum's flagship building in Washington, DC. On October 30, the museum debuted its last-to-open spaceflight exhibition, returning "home" with a gallery devoted to establishing a spacefaring civilization. "Welcome to 'At Home in Space'!" said curator Jennifer Levasseur, who guided us through a virtual tour of the gallery. "This is the story of long-duration spaceflight in the last few decades.
Goldman Sachs restricts some AI coding tools to engineers
Some Goldman traders had used AI coding tools to model market moves and create graphic content.
Creating your own avatar in Google Vids just got a lot easier
Google Vids is simplifying the process of creating your digital avatars with a new one that takes far fewer clips.
Why large dogs age faster than small ones, and other October research highlights
It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. October’s list includes an epigenetic mechanism for why large dogs age faster than smaller ones; physicists who trapped a single particle of antimatter for months; and invisible tattoo inks that only show up under UV light. Why large dogs age faster In many mammalian species, larger creatures tend to have longer lifespans.
Working collaboratively to fight scams in Asia Pacific
Google combines built-in protections with local partnerships and education to tackle scams in APAC.
Quickpost: Banana Equivalent Dose
Quickpost: Banana Equivalent Dose
Googling "Zelda" today offers a glimpse of how search worked in 1998
The year was 1998. Britney Spears topped the charts, Bill Clinton was impeached, and a couple of little websites called Google and Ars Technica came online. It was also the year Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64.
Claude’s new rules against game cloning won’t stop the AI copying boom
Last week, Anthropic introduced a new system prompt designed to stop its Claude models from re-creating specific, existing video games. While that move could help shield Anthropic from some liability, it's unlikely to slow much of the massive wave of AI-assisted game porting and copying that has emerged in recent months. A social media user and AI decompilation enthusiast going by the name "chasm" was among the first to note the prompt change late last week, saying a new rule seemed to be added to the Claude Code prompt on or around October 27.
The Philips Hue app now lets AI build smart light automations for you, but early adopters are running into errors and unhelpful limitations
The promised Custom AI Behaviors are now available in the Hue app for Hue Bridge Pro owners.
Most of our measures of a key cognitive process don't agree
It's widely acknowledged that it's nearly impossible to publish negative results in scientific journals. "We didn't see anything" is a much harder sell than finding that a hypothesis is clearly right. Findings of no effect tend to either be shuffled off to low-profile journals or left behind as unpublished lab lore. The high-profile journal Nature, however, made a notable exception this week, publishing a study that tells us that a bunch of methods we have been using to try to measure a key emotional ability don't seem to be measuring the same thing.
Redefining gamers and rethinking gaming with Ria Lu
An interview with Ria Lu and an analysis on the perception of video games and young gamers in the Philippines. MANILA, Philippines – There’s been so much attention on video games and heat on
This $48 e-paper display can be whatever you want it to be
One of the most useful gadgets in my kitchen is now a screen that never asks me for anything. I recently bought a $48 DIY display kit from Seeed Studio (yes, that's three E's), developed in collaboration with TRMNL, that lets me display whatever I want, using whichever software ecosystem I prefer. I previously built something similar by modding a Lenovo ThinkSmart View, which was selling for around $30 on eBay during a liquidation. The Lenovo device was only ever intended for business-to-business video, but it does a decent job of running a fork of LineageOS.
New method helps organic solar cells generate more power with less loss
The team discovered a thermodynamic limit for photocurrent generation, with rigid donor molecules reducing voltage losses.
Third person dies of bird flu since virus started jumping to livestock
A person in Washington state has died from bird flu after exposure at an infected dairy farm, state health officials reported Sunday. It marks the third human bird flu death in the US since a strain of highly pathogenic (H5) avian influenza (HPAI) made the unprecedented jump from wild, migratory birds to dairy cows, which was first reported in the US in March 2024. The person who died was a Yakima County resident and was said to have had underlying health conditions, which could have made the person more vulnerable to the infection.
The world has a new plan to save nature, but it still needs the money
The world is set to miss its 2030 conservation goals as finance and action have fallen short, leaders recognized at a UN biodiversity summit in Armenia’s capital, where they agreed to step up efforts after a final overnight session. Representatives from almost 200 countries gathered in Yerevan over the past two weeks to review progress on a landmark agreement set four years ago to protect about a third of the world’s land and seas by 2030. The COP17 talks on biodiversity concluded on Saturday with a recognition that conservation efforts were so far too slow to realistically achieve the goals o
Boeing 787 GE engines develop early blade cracks, Chinese study claims
A newly published study has claimed that certain General Electric (GE Aerospace) engines on Boeing 787 Dreamliners are developing premature cracks in their high-pressure turbine blades.
Stem cells in deep sleep may point to a secret reserve for lifelong blood renewal
Researchers at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the HI-STEM Stem Cell Institute have discovered a group of particularly long-lived blood stem cells in mice. These cells remain in a dormant state for an exceptionally long time while retaining their ability to generate new blood cells. Thi
'Rings of Power' Showrunner on Why Season 3 Is Changing Up the Release Strategy
Here's why Prime Video’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ series will drop in episode blocks rather than arriving on a week-by-week basis.
Chinese software that produces ready-to-publish research papers in under two hours threatens peer-review system
Scientific papers are a researcher's most valuable currency, and a paper published in a respected journal can represent several years of work. After noting a surge in citations of her work, statistician Andrea Riebler discovered a vendor in China selling a tool that enables rapid paper mining of pub
GazeRIB: Systematic Evaluation of Multi-Reader Gaze-Guided Chest X-ray Learning
Radiologists' visual attention can supervise medical image learning, but how reader panel composition affects its value remains untested. We evaluated GazeRIB (Gaze-guided Radiologist-Informed Blackout), which masks unviewed regions during training and uses unmasked images at inference. Eight experts repeatedly read the same 80 chest X-rays (CXRs). We compared individual readers with three-, five- and eight-reader panels across seven architectures and 10 seeds, evaluating 910 models on a separat
Flide: Accelerating Decision Inference with Exact State Forking
Decision models such as Jev have emerged as a highly promising paradigm for LLM agent systems, providing lightweight and reliable categorical reasoning for rapid System One execution. However, existing generation-oriented inference engines fail to support these workloads effectively, suffering from severe prefix recomputation overheads or distorted output probabilities. To address this challenge, we propose Flide, an efficient and exact inference engine that decouples the logical tree structure
F1 in Mexico City: Yet another Ferrari fiasco, but that’s not all
Formula 1 has a new World Drivers' Champion. Just a few months after turning 20, Kimi Antonelli sealed his first title this weekend at Mexico City, becoming the sport’s youngest-ever champion. Elsewhere, there was drama aplenty, perhaps a consequence of the thin air affecting decision-making in some cases. The race was Ferrari’s to win, but yet again, the team handed victory to a rival this season, in this case Red Bull.
Volcanic eruptions in the tropics are a major factor in Earth's thermostat
Volcanic eruptions are known for their spectacular visual displays of vivid lava, as well as the devastating impacts they can have on the environment and the communities who live nearby. But they can also have far-reaching impacts across the globe.
CVE-2026-58978 Google Android permission
A vulnerability was found in Google Android 14/15/16/16-qpr2/17. This vulnerability was named CVE-2026-58978. To fix this issue, it is recommended to deploy a patch.
CVE-2026-58979 | Google Android 17 PresentationController PresentationController.java canPresent privileges management
A vulnerability, which was classified as very critical, was found in Google Android 17. This issue affects the function canPresent of the file PresentationController.java of the component PresentationController. Such manipulation leads to improper privilege management. This vulnerability is uniquel
China publicly discloses plan for a lunar landing within three years
Chinese space officials confirmed this weekend that the Asian nation plans to land its astronauts on the Moon within three years. At the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference in Beijing, officials, including Wang Xiang, chief designer for the lunar exploration program, laid out the country's most publicly detailed plans yet for a series of missions leading up to a crewed lunar landing "before 2030." China's lunar landings will involve a lunar-orbit rendezvous similar to what NASA did in the 1960s and early 1970s with the Apollo program.
CVE-2026-103310
The PayHere Payment Gateway WordPress plugin from 2.4.0 through 2.4.5 does not verify the authenticity of payment notifications when the merchant secret is unset, which is the default state, allowing unauthenticated attackers to forge a payment confirmation and mark any order as paid without payment
Latent Reasoning in Continuous Space for Unified Multimodal Models
Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) achieve remarkable success on diverse multimodal understanding and generation tasks, yet they still struggle to effectively leverage language-based chain-of-thought reasoning for image generation. As a result, existing reasoning-augmented UMMs often fail to inherit the test-time scaling and fine-grained controllability observed in large language models. We attribute this failure to a fundamental modality mismatch: reasoning is performed in a discrete token space,
AMD Plans RDNA 5+ GPU Architecture For 2029, An Optimized Follow-Up To RDNA 5 That Could Debut Inside Zen 7 "Grimlock" APUs
AMD is reportedly going to offer an enhanced RDNA 5+ GPU architecture in 2029, with the launch aligning with next-gen Zen 7 chips.
Coming in 2027: Apple’s $1,000 home robot for FaceTime and switching on lights
Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, is apparently pushing the tech company’s development of household robots—and the first to debut may be a home robot designed to autonomously roam around while supporting FaceTime calls and switching lights on whenever a person enters the room. People who worked on Apple’s robotic projects told The Information that the AI-driven home robot, code-named J595, could be named HomeView Ultra in line with Apple’s new HomeView stationary smart display.
Want to Sign With a Hollywood Agent? Start Making Fun of AI
Even as studios incorporate generative tech into film and TV production, comedy content creators have broken through by roasting chatbots.
One of Google’s Android partners turned 1.3 million set-top boxes into a botnet
A manufacturer intentionally hijacked its Android TV devices.
Telltale furrows: What the Baltic Sea seafloor reveals about bottom trawling
To what extent does bottom trawling impact the seafloor of the Baltic Sea—and how quickly does it recover? Two new studies from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW) show that the marks on the seafloor provide a much clearer picture of the actual impact than vessel position
Bad Flock Info Leads Police To Tow Wrong Car, Then Towing Company Totals It - Slashdot
"Police continue to blindly trust Flock cameras above and beyond the evidence in front of their own eyes," reports Jalopnik.com. "After incorrectly connecting Rosalyn Crump's car to a shooting that had occurred the previous day, police had her car towed and impounded as evidence, reports Moneywise..
How to watch The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins season 2 from anywhere in the world – stream online for free
Tracy Morgan and Daniel Radcliffe star in this sports mockumentary sitcom
CubeSat achieves challenging laser link to ground
Despite the complexity of the operation, ERMIS-3, an 8U CubeSat developed by the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, has established a link with an optical ground station, marking an important step in validating optical communications on small satellites. The demonstration, supported by
Court hears Lori Vallow Daybell's appeal in Idaho killings of 2 of her children, romantic rival
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The Idaho Supreme Court is scheduled Monday to hear Lori Vallow Daybell’s appeal of her convictions in that state for killing her two youngest children and conspiring to murder a romantic rival. She is asking the court to reverse her convictions in the deaths of Joshua “JJ” Vallo
Senegal is hosting Africa's first Olympic event as citizens battle a cost of living crisis
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Paulina Netinan Nodjibougada knows Senegal is making history hosting the Youth Olympic Games, but with her family struggling to cover daily living expenses, the event feels distant from her concerns. The 26-year-old accounting student said she is struggling to find work and cop