October 2026

You can buy practically anything these days on the internet — especially when it’s being shipped straight from China, the beating heart of global manufacturing. It doesn’t matter how macabre the object in question is. If it has a price, there’s a company willing to sell and even advertise it to you on social media. […]

Millions have downloaded Meta’s AI agent Muse. But getting it to do your bidding comes with privacy costs.

As programmers make more and more use of generative AI in the workplace, their responsibilities are quickly transitioning from creating new products from scratch to babysitting a large language model that cobbles together code. It’s gotten to the point where some engineers are no longer able to make sense of the code being spat out

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that searched for the ur-animals, wandered the poles, rained on Mars, and destroyed the solar system. First, scientists present new evidence that the first animals appeared more than 800 million years ago, a truly ancient origin that suggests our metazoan ancestors survived a period

The AI industry’s data centers aren’t belching pollution, driving their neighbors bonkers with screeching noise, and using up vast amounts of power and water. They’re also allowing companies to exploit tax breaks to save billions of dollars on their federal tax bill. As the New York Times reports, Meta is writing off its enormous, multibillion-dollar

Nothing is guaranteed but there are ways to boost your chances of experiencing such in-demand events Rupert Jones Whether your passion is the battle of the bands or the Battle of Hastings, Britain’s hottest cultural tickets are about to go on sale. And to be in with a shout of getting one, there are insider

Company says it is reviewing 50 petabytes of data after its agents accessed websites including Medicare without authorisation Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast OpenAI says its review in response to the Medicare and Hugging Face agent attacks is costing the company more than US$500,000 per day, as it deploys

Apple says it is changing its macOS privacy settings to stop third-party app developers from misusing them to access message histories. Friday’s announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages.

Melbourne Theatre CompanyWhile the cast is excellent, a play that sends us back to artificial intelligence’s genesis moment should feel more human than this It can be fiendishly difficult to write plays about contemporary obsessions, not least because they can shift and mutate in the time it takes to mount a production. A clever solution

FieldAI Inc., a startup that develops artificial intelligence models for robots, is reportedly seeking $700 million in funding. A source told Business Insider today that the round could value the company at $10 billion. That’s five times what FieldAI was worth last August. It’s believed the company has already signed a term sheet, a nonbinding