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An outage affecting Petlibro automatic feeders left some pets hungry, customers report.

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Smart screens mounted on shopping carts might change people’s behavior at grocery stores in a few interesting ways.

The computing industry was once unrecognizable from the one we see today, with the idea of discipline centered around writing code treated as some kind of fantasy. That was before industry pioneer Margaret Hamilton coined the term while leading the flight software team for NASA's Apollo space program in the 1960s.

Pioneering an industry

Hamilton was describing the process by which she coined the term "software engineering" and, by doing so, defined an entire computer science discipline, in an interview.

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Rather than an interview for any media outlet, the transcript for this interview appeared in the first edition of the computer science textbook 'Fluency With Information Technology: Skills, Concepts, & Capabilities' by Lawrence Snyder and Ray Laura Henry.

She recalled during this conversation a particularly memorable moment in which a highly respected hardware guru explained to everyone in the meeting that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline – just like hardware. That's because she and her colleagues had earned the respect of others in the room as being in an engineering field in their own right.

Teething issues

Before Hamilton coined the term and defined many of the processes and best practices that drove the software achievements at NASA during the Apollo mission, the approach to computing was in a state of disarray.

People, at the time, valued physical hardware and the components fitted underneath far more than the code that nobody could see. Programming, in a sense, wasn't seen as a real science until Hamilton came along.

During her time at NASA, she created vital on-board flight software, with a particular highlight being her error-detection-and-recovery system. Her contributions were immortalized in the 2022 short film 'To Go to the Moon', in which she was portrayed by Dominque Roberts.

This attitude led to a software crisis in the 1960s through the 1980s, with many projects running over budget and schedule and with the software that was published containing critical bugs, with costly consequences. This was the direct impact of a lack of professionalization in the field.

• In the first three months of 2026, $130 billion worth of AI data centers have been blocked or delayed across the US
• For the whole of 2025, the amount was only $156 billion
• Now AI firms are filing lawsuits to push back against the pushback

Increased strain on local power grids and water systems, noise and air pollution filling the surrounding area, and dubious economic promises are among the reasons citizens have taken a stand against AI data center development in their areas. And their side is winning time and again.

In just the first three months of 2026, local activism has resulted in $130 billion worth of projects being blocked or delayed across the US. For the whole of 2025, the publicly reported figure was only $156 billion.

As you might imagine, AI hyperscalers aren’t pleased with this.

Developers have taken to suing local authorities behind the bans and restrictions; meanwhile, there are reports that private intelligence firms are creating and selling dossiers on AI and data center critics to help companies and AI regulators tackle this growing movement.

And AI companies are already finding victory. Hill County, Texas, was one of the first counties in the state to impose a one-year ban on data center development in rural areas. However, the data center’s developer sued, and the law was rescinded.

Data centers are appearing everywhere (Image credit: Shutterstock)

The developers’ arguments predominantly stem from questioning what powers local leaders have in deciding how and where data centers are rolled out. As such, it’s unclear whether these lawsuits would hold up as well against statewide bans and moratoriums like the one announced just over a week ago by Texas Governor Greg Abbott — which has paused construction of around 1,800 data centers until audits on their impacts on local communities, water systems, and Texas’ power grid can be properly assessed.

It’s also unclear if AI true believers in the federal government will take a stand against states’ AI data center restrictions. President Donald Trump has called data centers a “tremendous thing”; though, despite the growing divide between Republican and Democrat voters, they share a bipartisan distaste for AI data centers, which could present a challenge for leaders who support them when it’s time for re-election.

Can AI data centers ever win?

Whether AI companies succeed in the courts or not, it doesn't seem like they’ll win in the court of public opinion for a little while longer, since data centers apparently have serious immediate downsides and relatively few upsides.

On the positive side, construction workers can see an uptick in revenue while the project is being built; maybe a few local workers will receive long-term employment to help manage the facility, and they can also bring in high tax revenue relative to their size.

But construction will eventually end; long-term employment on-site tends to be relatively limited, as a lot of management can be handled remotely, and tax revenues require profits.

Does anyone love data centers (apart from AI firms)? (Image credit: Nvidia)

On that front, AI data centers are generally enjoying solid financial performance. However, fears over the AI boom being somewhat bubbly continue, with concerns that the promised ongoing returns of data centers may end sooner rather than later.

In a worst-case collapse scenario, these buildings could become defunct, meaning local residents could face years of issues and never see any kind of reward.

These issues, conversely, can be very immediate and pretty major in some cases.

Meta contaminated Cheyenne’s water system with bacteria; data centers are said to have electricity bills for the general public of $23 billion, and a Michigan data center is in trouble for emitting incredible noise pollution 24/7, described by one resident: “You’ve seen movies and stuff where they have somebody in a cell torturing them with sound. And that’s basically what it is."

Many understand the enormous possible economic and scientific advantages of AI and the need for it to be supported and developed in their country — 55% of Americans don’t oppose the construction of new data centers in general, according to a June 2026 IPSOS poll. However, 59% of respondents would actively oppose a center being built within 10 miles of their home.

As AI excitement fails to die down, we’ll undoubtedly see even more data center plans pop up, and see just as many communities oppose them.

The new feature will be available on the Pixel Watch 4 as well.

Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora distributions get first dibs.

Search efforts continue though hopes are fading as teams dig for survivors from the 7.4 magnitude earthquake that killed more than 250 people.

A variety of issues could slow down the rollout of the anticipated new Apple device.

• China launched a fully autonomous vulnerability hunting attack against Taiwan
• The attack leveraged eight open-source AI models to hunt for new attack vectors
• The attack hit Taiwan government accounts, personnel records, the nuclear safety agency, and more

A first-of-its-kind cyberattack using autonomous AI has been spotted attacking Taiwan, and it compromised 85 government accounts and stole over 2,500 personnel records before moving on to hit the country’s nuclear safety agency and at least seven energy companies.

The attack used eight open-source AI models to build a hacking program that was able to independently conduct reconnaissance and intrusion, and was able to chain vulnerabilities and change tactics whenever it was blocked.

The intrusion took place over the course of four days, and was first exposed by The Financial Times on August 12, 2026. The FT article covered research performed by Dream, an Israeli AI and cyberdefense company that first identified the breach.

Autonomous AI attack

The attack was first uncovered during routine monitoring of cyber criminal activity. Dream found a 160MB online archive of 1,395 files. Further examination of the files revealed that the attack relied on Hermes and OpenClaw - two open-source AI agents.

As is typical of attacks relying on AI models, the hackers had framed the context of the intrusion as a routine cyber readiness test in order to bypass the built-in guardrails of the AI models.

The attack used multiple agents to hunt for new vulnerabilities and access points across the internet, providing the tool with multiple attack paths to take if one failed to gain entry.

AI agents have been quickly integrated into the attacks of cybercriminal organizations and state-sponsored threat actors alike, enhancing their abilities to launch highly complex attacks at scale. “This must be the basic assumption of every government around the globe,” said Amir Becker, Dream's chief strategy officer.

Dream did not tie the attack to any specific cybercriminal group, nor did it confirm the target of the attack, but said it had alerted a government in the “Asia-Pacific.” Documentation within the recovered archive contained Simplified Chinese, which is the official written language used in mainland China.

The archive also contained data collected from the targets, which was written in Traditional Chinese. This form of written Chinese is widely used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs has refused to comment on the breach, and the Chinese authorities have not responded to requests for comment.

China has long considered Taiwan to be a part of mainland China. Taiwan declared its independence following the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. A report from Taiwan’s National Security Bureau earlier this year revealed that the country was subject to 2.5 million Chinese cyberattacks per day in 2025.

Expert perspective on autonomous AI attack

Collin Hogue-Spears, senior director of solution management at Black Duck:

The agents ran the intrusion end to end and invented nothing new to run it with. Familiar identity and API failures opened every confirmed path into Taiwan's systems. Dream Research Labs documented up to eight subagents working concurrently across twelve waves, ranking attack paths, redirecting when a technique failed, and researching alternatives online before trying again.

What they found was exposed development endpoints, an API accepting authentication tokens with the signature check disabled, unauthenticated data APIs, and passwords built from employee ID numbers.

The framework also ran its own AI static analysis hunting unknown flaws, but Dream says it worked against two public single sign-on SDK sample projects, and none of those findings produced a confirmed exploit on the live systems. No zero-day appears anywhere in the report, but a nuclear safety regulator does.

In conventional web and identity logs, this reads as a security scan. The distinguishing signal is the sequence across systems, not any single request. The tell is not the request. It is what the same account does next, somewhere else.

Conventional scanners have tested thousands of endpoints at machine speed for twenty years, so raw coverage is not the change here. What Dream Research Labs describes is chaining: password spraying, then fresh SSO sessions, then access to routes an account had never touched, then the same suspected weakness retested until it held, then one identity surfacing across several connected applications.

The evidence therefore supports a Chinese Mainland-language operator against a Taiwanese target, with a target profile consistent with mainland collection priorities.

Simplified Chinese in the operator's notes is one signal. Traditional Chinese in the stolen files is just Taiwan. Dream rested its China assessment on a code-switching observation, and only half of it points at the attacker. Per Chinese-language coverage of the report, Simplified characters appeared in the operators' internal communications and Traditional characters appeared in the exfiltrated data. The first describes the operator's working language. The second describes the victim, because that is what Taiwanese government files look like [Traditional Characters].

The evidence therefore supports a Chinese Mainland-language operator against a Taiwanese target, with a target profile consistent with mainland collection priorities. It does not name a group or establish state direction. The report also publishes no indicators, no hashes, and no victim confirmation; it does not identify the model, and its executive summary claims installed backdoors while its own attack chain says authentication blocked the web shell.

Security leaders must reject unsigned authentication tokens and prohibit the alg:none setting outright, and separately require reauthentication or multi-factor at any single sign-on boundary into a sensitive system. Dream describes two independent identity failures in Taiwan, and closing one leaves the other open. Provider guardrails cannot compensate for a password-only SSO bridge.

They must also monitor route diversity per source, per session, per account, and per device rather than by request rate alone, because a distributed set of agents spreads requests across addresses and sessions that no single volume threshold catches. If your detection assumes one attacker at one address working one path at a time, you have modeled the wrong shape.

Your thresholds were built for one attacker on one path. This was eight, in parallel. And they must ask two questions of any AI attack disclosure before acting on it: which model ran the operation, and what can we hunt on tomorrow morning?"

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People ask Tucker Bryant’s ChatTJB for advice on everything from their fiction and personal dilemmas to how they should spend their free time.

The board voted to close the Washington, D.C., arts complex's main campus for a $250 million renovation — three months after a federal judge temporarily blocked a similar closure.

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Starting as a spinoff of a renowned VPN service called Hola more than a decade ago, Bright Data is among the best providers of proxy services on the market right now. The platform commands a massive ecosystem featuring 400+ million monthly rotating residential IPs and 1.3+ million static ISP and datacenter proxies each, spanning 195 countries.

Lately, the service has notably been pushing beyond “mere” proxy rotation into a complete web data platform equipped with AI-powered web unlockers, SERP and scraper APIs, and pre-collected structured datasets, to name a few things.

• Want to try Bright Data? Check out the website here

Plans and Pricing

Bright Data has quite a few products listed on its pricing page. Let’s start with proxies, namely residential, ISP, and datacenter variants.

Users pay for residential proxies according to the bandwidth they consume. Bright Data offers three standard plans, currently at a 50% discount for the first three months: $499 monthly for 141 GB, $999 monthly for 332 GB, and $1,999 monthly for 798 GB. Alternatively, you can choose the pay-as-you-go option starting at $4 per GB. The drawback is that the pay-as-you-go plan is slightly more expensive in the long run ($4 per GB compared to $3.5 per GB on the 141 GB plan). If you need more than 1 TB, you can reach out to the company for customized pricing.

For datacenter proxies, users can pay according to the number of IP addresses they require. The shared proxy plans (dedicated proxies are pricier) are 10 IPs at $14 per month ($1.4 per IP), 100 IPs at $100 per month ($1 per IP), 500 IPs for $475 per month ($0.95 per IP), and 1,000 IPs at $900 per month ($0.9 per IP). As with residential proxies, if these plans don’t meet your needs, you can contact the company for tailored pricing above 1,000 IPs. Users can also pay for datacenter proxies according to bandwidth. The standard plans are $499 monthly for 1 TB, $999 monthly for 2 TB, and $1,999 monthly for 5 TB. The pay-as-you-go option with no monthly commitment costs $0.6 per GB.

If you need ISP proxies, Bright Data has four plans to offer you: $18/month for 10 IPs ($1.8 per IP), $145/month for 100 IPs ($1.45 per IP), $700/month for 500 IPs ($1.4 per IP), and $1,300/month for 1,000 IPs ($1.3 per IP). You can also pay for ISP proxies according to bandwidth. Bright Data recently doubled the allowance, so now you pay $499 monthly for 71 GB, $999 monthly for 166 GB, and $1,999 monthly for 399 GB. The pay-as-you-go option also saw changes, with no monthly commitment costing $8 per GB.

Dedicated ISP IPs are a bit more expensive but follow the same structure. Similar to residential and datacenter plans, should you require over 1,000 IPs or 1 TB, you’ll need to check in with the Bright Data team directly.

It seems that Bright Data has slowly phased out mobile proxies from its proxy offer. Existing users with an active mobile proxy can continue to use the proxies, but the service is now unavailable to new signups and inactive accounts.

Bright Data offers sophisticated web access APIs with its Unlocker API pricing coming in four versions. First, the Free Tier (found in most products) grants you 5,000 requests per month. Then, there are three Scale plans: $499 monthly for 383,000 requests ($1.3 per 1,000 additional requests), $999 monthly for 908,000 requests ($1.1 per 1,000 additional requests), and $1,999 monthly for 2 million requests ($1 per 1,000 additional requests). The company also offers a custom pricing option for enterprise-level projects. If you don’t want a monthly commitment, you can choose the $1.5 per 1,000 results pay-as-you-go plan.

The Web Scraper API, SERP API, Crawl API, and Scraper Studio (AI-powered development environment for building and deploying custom scrapers) are identically priced, with tiny differences regarding the number of requests/page loads included. The Browser API pricing follows much the same sentiment, costing $499/month for 71 GB, $999/month for 166 GB, and $1,999/month for 399 GB. The no-commitment option is charged $8 per GB.

Bright Data also offers pre-built datasets, a unique feature that many proxy platforms don’t have. Starting at $250 per month for 100,000 records, these datasets allow businesses to access ready-made data instead of scraping it from scratch at higher costs. Available datasets include Amazon products, Yahoo Finance stock market data, Zillow real estate listings, LinkedIn profiles, and much, much more.

Finally, the Data Firehose product delivers a continuous, real-time stream of live web data, while Web Archive provides direct programmatic access to a 90 PB cached repository of the web. Pricing is based on the pay-as-you-go rate, starting at $0.20 per 1,000 HTMLs for Data Firehose and $1 per 1,000 HTML records for archived data. For projects with large data needs, long-term commitments, or multiple scrapers, volume discounts are available through Bright Data's team.

Features

Accessing Bright Data’s features starts with registration. To sign up as a new user, you’ll need a work email address, but the platform also supports logging in with Google and GitHub accounts. You'll receive a verification email after signing up and creating a password.

Residential Proxies

Bright Data offers proxy IP addresses sourced ethically from physical devices worldwide. This means that device owners (peers) explicitly opt in to share their idle bandwidth and IP addresses in exchange for perks like ad-free app experiences, cash payouts, or free premium software such as BrightVPN. Bright Data’s users can then choose one of the IPs to bypass geo-restrictions and scrape data.

Default proxy behavior rotates per request, though Bright Data also supports sticky sessions where the same residential IP is active for a specified duration, as well as custom AI-driven rotation rules. The platform offers more than 400 million ethically sourced residential proxies from 195 countries with precise country-, state-, city-, ZIP code-, and ASN-level targeting. The most popular locations are the United States, Brazil, India, Germany, the United Kingdom, and China.

(Image credit: Bright Data )

During our test, the residential proxies had excellent speed and reliability. Both static and rotating proxies allowed us to surf the web seamlessly and bypass strict website geo-restrictions. You can manage all proxies from your user dashboard, deploying new ones or removing existing ones at will.

Bright Data gives you significant control over your proxies. You can choose proxies from specific cities, states, and countries. The robust IP network, especially in Europe and North America, makes it easier to bypass geo-restrictions. If an IP address can’t successfully bypass the restriction, Bright Data rotates different IP addresses until it succeeds.

ISP Proxies

ISP proxies are static residential proxies sourced directly from Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Unlike residential IPs that rotate with each browsing session, a static ISP proxy is assigned only to you. You can keep this static IP for as long as your subscription lasts.

Bright Data offers a network of 1,300,000+ fully compliant static IPs spanning 35 countries. The U.S. commands the vast majority of this infrastructure with over 1.17 million static IPs, whereas international locations account for smaller, dedicated pools of fewer than 15,000 each. This smaller number is expected because of the higher costs and difficulty of obtaining IP addresses directly from ISPs.

The static ISP proxies offered excellent speed and reliability during our test. Bright Data lets users manage static IPs directly from their Control Panel or an external API. The user-friendly Control Panel makes it easy to deploy and organize a large number of proxies.

ISP proxies are more reliable than typical residential proxies because they don’t change frequently. Using one IP address for a long period makes it easier to browse anonymously and break through geographical and IP website restrictions. Once you bypass a site’s restriction with a static IP, you can continue accessing the site with that IP. In contrast, rotating proxies mean you can bypass a site’s restriction today and struggle to bypass it tomorrow with a new IP address. Expectedly, Bright Data’s static IPs cost more than rotating IPs.

Datacenter Proxies

Datacenter proxies are sourced from secondary corporations and high-speed server hubs rather than ISPs. A server (in a datacenter) with a unique IP acts as the intermediary between your device and a website you want to access. You can request a shared or dedicated datacenter IP: a dedicated IP is more reliable in circumventing site blockades.

(Image credit: Bright Data)

Bright Data offers over 1.6 million datacenter proxies across 98+ countries, unlike residential proxies available in 195 countries. You can select your datacenter proxy by specific country, state, city, or ASN. These proxies are the fastest option in Bright Data's lineup because your browser request is sent directly from the proxy server to the target website, unlike residential proxies that bounce through several peer devices before reaching the target site.

The drawback is that datacenter proxies are more vulnerable to detection and automated bans because of their predictable IP subnet ranges. They are cost-effective but less efficient at bypassing geo-restrictions than residential and ISP proxies.

Web Scraper API

Web scraping is one of the most common use cases for proxy servers. Some businesses need to scrape massive amounts of data from a website, e.g., pricing data from retail sites. However, many websites discourage scraping by implementing geographical and IP restrictions. Proxy IPs let businesses bypass these restrictions and scrape their desired data.

(Image credit: Bright Data)

As a first-rate platform, Bright Data doesn’t stop at providing proxy IP addresses for web scraping. It also provides APIs that let businesses automate data scraping without writing complex parsing code or managing proxy pools. It has north of 600 ready-made scraping APIs for websites like Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, LinkedIn, Zillow, X, ChatGPT, YouTube, and TikTok, as well as the AI-powered Scraper Studio for turning any unlisted site into a structured data pipeline. Several websites, such as Facebook, have filed lawsuits to block these scraping APIs, but Bright Data has countersued and prevailed.

Suppose you run a price comparison site that helps people find the best e-commerce deals. You can use Bright Data’s APIs to automate data scraping from Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and other popular e-commerce sites. You’ll then clean the scraped data and display it on your price comparison website.

Bright Data's APIs can handle bulk asynchronous scraping requests, convert raw HTML into structured data, deliver payloads straight to S3/Cloud Storage, and validate data automatically with built-in self-healing parsers.

Datasets

You don’t always have to scrape data from scratch. Bright Data offers an alternative: ready-made datasets sourced from 250+ domains and 700+ structured datasets. It includes the likes of LinkedIn (profiles, company data, job postings), Pinterest, Crunchbase, Amazon, Instagram, Google Maps, and Redfin. You can also get categorical datasets, such as car prices, housing prices, crime rates, NBA players' stats, etc.

(Image credit: Bright Data)

Pre-built datasets reduce headaches for businesses. Instead of scraping data from scratch and waiting a while to access it, you can access over 21 billion clean, validated records. Bright Data even provides an AI prompt tool that lets you describe (in plain English) the precise subset of data you need to filter out fluff before paying.

Ease of Use

Bright Data has an intuitive interface you’ll likely enjoy using. The left menu has all the features you need to access, and the right side is the main dashboard displaying real-time traffic analytics, success rates, bandwidth usage, and so forth. Many features are neatly arranged across the dashboard to make them easy to find. With a white background and a few contrasting colors, Bright Data’s interface looks visually pleasing.

(Image credit: Bright Data)

You can access this proxy software primarily from the cloud-based web dashboard. There’s also a Google Chrome and Firefox extension that lets you seamlessly change proxy locations, switch between IP types, and rotate IPs on demand. For complex, large-scale scraping, Bright Data also offers an open-source downloadable Proxy Manager app. The platform’s user-friendliness is unmatched by most rivals, thanks to a fine balance of accessible self-service controls and dev-oriented technical options.

Customer Support

One of Bright Data’s strengths is its top-notch support. You can contact its support team 24/7 and receive a response in less than 30 minutes. It offers support via a dashboard ticketing system, web chat, and email, along with dedicated Slack channels and technical account managers (TAMs) for enterprise accounts, but there’s no telephone support.

Bright Data also provides extensive documentation and user manuals to help users figure out solutions to their problems. The website’s Docs section contains detailed guides for all features and interactive code builders, plus an API reference that helps users write effective data scraping commands.

We found Bright Data’s documentation easy to follow and helpful for our test. For instance, we followed the web scraping tutorial to harvest data from an external website.

The Competition

There’s no shortage of rivals to Bright Data, and the ones we’d like to highlight are Decodo (formerly Smartproxy), Oxylabs, and Webshare.

Decodo is an excellent mid-market proxy provider offering residential, ISP, and datacenter proxies. It's a cost-effective alternative with a large pool of 125 million+ IPs across 195 countries. However, Bright Data has a larger IP pool across the same number of countries and offers more features and customizability.

Oxylabs offers a slightly larger IP pool, with 175 million+ addresses compared to Bright Data’s 400 million+. Both platforms have similar enterprise-grade offerings, but Bright Data provides some features not available in the other, such as a dataset marketplace and browser-based Scraper Studio. Bright Data also has a more responsive support team than Oxylabs, according to our experience when testing both.

Webshare is one of the best alternatives budget-wise that go head-to-head with Bright Data. It’s a notably more affordable tool, including a permanent 10-proxy free tier, which is crucial for small businesses. It offers effective APIs to scrape data en masse, just like Bright Data. However, Webshare has a much smaller pool of IP addresses: roughly 80 million compared to Bright Data’s 400 million.

Final Verdict

Morphing into a full-stack web data platform that goes beyond basic proxy services, Bright Data offers a sizable network of 400 million+ IPs covering 195 countries across residential, datacenter, and static ISP tiers. It pairs its foundational proxy service with an unrivaled suite of data collection and scraping automation tools that include over 600 specialized web scraping and crawling APIs, AI-powered web unlockers, and datasets containing over 21 billion ready-made records.

Thanks to all these features, it’s more than well equipped to provide you with anything you need to bypass website restrictions and scrape required data (developers and AI research teams will particularly be happy with the scope of features). There are a few drawbacks here and there, primarily its higher cost compared to the competition, but it might well be worth it, especially for high-volume needs.

We've also highlighted the best proxy and best VPN

Some users are already joking that the new logo reads “Instagzam.”

Dear oh dear... things aren't going well for Dutton Ranch season 2, are they?

After that explosive Ed Harris interview, we know that filming for new episodes isn't supposed to start until February 2027, but the writers room appears to be fully underway as of August 2026.

Thanks to a new report from the Daily Mail, a slew of new dramatic allegations are supposedly threatening the "mess of a show" behind the scenes, with an insider claiming "there is high drama on that one, so much tension.

"I believe it's the actors that are a huge part of the problem," they add. "Too many people think they are in control over there and that's causing a lot of issues."

Alongside Harris feeling "p*ssed off" with his lack of screen time, Annette Bening's "star power" has also allegedly caused friction behind-the-scenes.

But none of this is what I'm most interested in. Since before Dutton Ranch even premiered, I've been publicly campaigning for Taylor Sheridan to shift his role from executive producer to showrunner (much like what we saw with Yellowstone).

While there's been a confirmed positive step in a similar direction, the newly announced showrunner, Benjamin Cavell, opens up an entirely new can of worms.

Benjamin Cavell as Dutton Ranch season 2 showrunner could turn it from Yellowstone to Lioness

(Image credit: Paramount+)

According to this same report, Sheridan is set to have a "bigger presence" in the Dutton Ranch season 2 writers room, which is music to my ears. In order for Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Rip's (Cole Hauser) new start in Texas to be the best it can be, it needs the biggest amount of Sheridan input possible, so this can only be a good thing.

However, the announcement of Benjamin Cavell as the season 2 showrunner might be a cause for concern. Whereas previous showrunner Chad Feehan had Western experience after leading Lawmen: Bass Reeves, Cavell comes from a more military TV background.

With Homeland, SEAL Team, and Justified all under his belt, I wonder if Cavell would be better suited to the Lioness and Tulsa King branch of Sheridan's work. There's no question that he has an exceptional handle on action, and thanks to the miniseries The Stand, we also know that he understands the Paramount+ audience.

But with the Yellowstone world comes such a specific feel and almost a decade of lore attached, and introducing a total newbie at this stage in the game could be a make-or-break moment for Dutton Ranch's future.

As someone who fell head over heels for the spinoff, I'm willing things to work. But even while we have no idea how much truth there really is to these alleged reports, the fact that they exist at all doesn't fill me with confidence.

• Apple's MacBook Air is facing supply constraints, as delivery estimates last up to a month
• The delivery delays are a direct result of the ongoing RAM crisis
• Consumers may have to look at Windows alternatives, as the RAM crisis gets worse

PC hardware manufacturers can't catch a break from the ongoing RAM crisis, and unfortunately, Apple arguably knows that more than anyone.

As reported by 9to5Mac, MacBook Air shortages are worsening, as delivery estimates for configurations on Apple's online store are longer than usual. Nearly all configurations have a 2-3 week shipment estimate, while those with 32GB of RAM have up to 4-5 weeks.

It's increasingly clear that RAM shortages are causing supply issues for Apple, and the extended delivery estimates come shortly after Apple's recent slate of price hikes on Macs and iPads. Notably, the MacBook Air M5 saw a $200 price increase earlier in June, and despite that, shortages remain.

Supply is so bad that 9to5Mac notes that Apple retail employees state that the MacBook Air shipments are "more constrained than they can ever recall", and that's a fitting statement since the PC hardware market is possibly at its worst state ever.

Fresh rumors also point to Apple being set on a price increase for its iPhone 17 — so without a doubt, proceedings aren't looking great for the tech giant (and several other hardware companies) in terms of supply stability.

Apple also has a history of rarely dropping prices for its devices, so the only other options consumers have are to buy MacBooks from other retailers or consider Windows alternatives.

What now?

(Image credit: Shutterstock / D.L.Sakharova)

Outside of Apple's online store, Amazon currently has the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air available at a lower price ($1,256) and a shorter delivery window using Prime. The same applies to several other configurations, including the 15-inch model.

Apple's RAM and supply constraints won't end anytime soon, so Windows alternatives are also sensible for consumers to aim for. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, Yoga Slim 7i Aura, and even Dell's XPS 13 are solid laptop options. They may not all match the MacBook Air in performance, but they are enough to get the job done.

There's no better time than now for consumers to act on purchasing a new laptop, as insiders like Mark Gurman and even Apple chief financial officer Kevan Parekh indicate that Apple's supply constraints aren't set to improve, but only worsen — and that likely extends to 2027 and beyond.

A surprise hearing this Friday in federal court has added to speculation that Luigi Mangione could enter a plea, which could derail a state murder trial.

(Image credit: Steven Hirsch)

The four southernmost islands of the chain also are claimed by Japan, which calls them the Northern Territories.

(Image credit: Gavriil Grigorov)

• Nightmare Eclipse discloses ShieldBreak, a new Windows privilege‑escalation zero‑day
• Flaw bypasses a recent patch and works on fully updated Windows 11 systems
• Researcher’s ongoing exploit spree leaves multiple Windows vulnerabilities still unpatched

Nightmare Eclipse has struck again! The notorious zero-day researcher with a Microsoft grudge disclosed its latest vulnerability, and just as in previous instances, they picked their timing and released their research hours after Microsoft published its August Patch Tuesday cumulative update in order to maximize the hurt.

The newest flaw is called ShieldBreak, and is described as a local escalation of privilege vulnerability that allows threat actors to gain SYSTEM-level privileges on vulnerable systems. Speaking of vulnerable systems, the list is rather long because it includes all versions of Windows 11, including those with the latest security patches.

“The PoC was tested in the latest version of windows 11 25h2 (+Canary channel) and windows server 2025, the PoC also have a 100% success rate,” Nightmare Eclipse said on their GitHub account. “Please note that Windows 10 (and respective server editions) are not currently supported, they are however vulnerable to ShieldBreak as well.”

A bypass for the RoguePlanet fix

The mysterious attacker also said that the bug was actually a bypass for the patch Microsoft issued to fix their earlier work, called RoguePlanet.

“Microsoft has failed to properly patch the RoguePlanet vulnerability CVE-2026-50656, this PoC demonstrates a full patch bypass,” the GitHub read entry.

Microsoft, on the other hand, responded in pure enterprise fashion, sharing a boilerplate statement that it was “investigating” and that it “supports coordinated vulnerability disclosure”.

In response to an enquiry by The Register, a company spokesperson said Microsoft "is aware of the reported vulnerability and is actively investigating the validity and potential applicability of these claims."

"Microsoft is committed to investigating security issues and updating impacted products to protect customers as soon as possible,” the statement reads. “Importantly, we support coordinated vulnerability disclosure, an industry standard that protects customers and supports the research community by ensuring their findings are thoroughly investigated and addressed before being made public."

A hacker on a mission

Together with ShieldBreak, the number of disclosed Windows vulnerabilities and exploits now counts 10. Nightmare Eclipse’s campaign began in April 2026, when they demonstrated BlueHammer, a Windows Defender local privilege-escalation flaw that gives low-privileged users SYSTEM-level access. The researcher claimed BlueHammer, now tracked as CVE-2026-33825, was previously reported to Microsoft, but the company allegedly mishandled the disclosure.

Just before publishing the work, they said “someone violated our agreement and left me homeless with nothing. They knew this will happen and they still stabbed me in the back anyways, this is their decision not mine.”

At first, Microsoft took a tough stance, calling the public release “never justifiable” and even warning that it might pursue legal cases against people who put customers at risk.

The community interpreted this statement as a threat of legal action against Nightmare Eclipse, which triggered a backlash. Microsoft later backed away, saying “to be clear about our approach to legal matters, we have no intention to pursue action against individuals conducting or publishing their security research.”

In the meantime, Nightmare Eclipse (also known as Chaotic Eclipse) went on a full-blown rampage. They released RedSun and UnDefend (both targeting Defender), YellowKey (a BitLocker bypass), GreenPlasma (a CTFMON-based privilege-escalation flaw), MiniPlasma (a regression of a vulnerability Microsoft had originally fixed in 2020), RoguePlanet (another Defender privilege-escalation bug), GreatXML (a BitLocker/Windows Recovery Environment bypass), LegacyHive (a Windows User Profile Service privilege-escalation flaw), and now ShieldBreak.

BlueHammer was fixed in April, RedSun and UnDefend in May, and YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma, in June. RoguePlanet was patched in July, while LegacyHive, GreatXML, and ShieldBreak, remain unpatched.

It is also worth mentioning that not all of Nightmare Eclipse’s releases were equally complete or reproducible by third parties. For GreenPlasma, independent researchers said it contained the vulnerability but turning it into a reliable working exploit required significant additional technical work. Some of the early Defender exploits were also apparently difficult to reproduce, mostly because they relied on delicate race conditions and very specific sequences of Windows components.

ShieldBreak, however, seems to be more dangerous in that respect. Speaking to The Register, security researcher Kevin Beaumont confirmed it as working: “I've tried it, it works on latest Windows 11,” he told the publication.

He also said that while ShieldBreak was described as a bypass for the RoguePlanet fix, the two flaws actually operated quite differently.

“RoguePlanet was a filesystem race condition vuln that uses virtual disks and NT native file manipulation to trick quarantine process into overwriting system files,” Beaumont explained. “ShieldBreak user-mode callback hook to change file contents during a Defender cloud-hydration scan via cfapi (Cloud Filter API).”

No one knows how much ammunition Nightmare Eclipse still has, but we will certainly be paying attention to them in the hours after next month’s Patch Tuesday, as well.

• Fans think they've uncovered The Elder Scrolls 6's eight-letter subtitle
• Redditor 'starfieldnovember' suggests the subtitle is "Sentinel"
• The clue comes from Starfield's character creator and employee number, which, translated via the alphabet, spells "Sentinel"

The Elder Scrolls 6 fans believe they've uncovered the game's secret subtitle, and it may have been under our noses the entire time.

Earlier this week, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma shared an X post that blew up, which read, "Live playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6: ******** this morning. The scale and grandeur are incredible. The story is even greater."

Of course, fans instantly began speculating what those eight asterisks could be; Hammerfell? Nope, too many letters. Redguard? Already been used. But one fan has offered up their own theory, and it's the best one yet.

According to Redditor 'starfieldnovember', The Elder Scrolls 6's subtitle could be "Sentinel," and the clue has been hidden in Starfield's character creator without anyone realizing until now (via IGN).

"By the way, Sentinel was already teased in Starfield," they began. "In Starfield Direct and in the final game, we can see our employee number during character creation. Random string of numbers at first look, but if you translate it by dividing it into pairs and then using the corresponding letter of the alphabet, you get SENTINEL.

"This title was at our noses for more than 3 years, and we somehow missed it."

By the way, Sentinel was already teased in Starfield from r/TESVI

Other fans seem to agree with the theory, not only because Bethesda loves to hide easter eggs in its games, but because Sentinel is a major coastal capital city located in the northwestern hills of Hammerfell, which is rumored to be the setting of The Elder Scrolls 6.

What's more, Bethesda developer Michael Kirkbride replied "Yep" to a separate Reddit post after a fan suggested the name could be Sentinel, which seems like a done deal, but we'll have to wait and see.

The Elder Scrolls 6 was revealed in June 2018, and its announcement has now become as old as The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim was at the time. Over eight years later, there's still no development update on the game, besides Sharma's confirmation that she's played it, and no release date.

In November 2025, Todd Howard, director and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, said the game is "still a long way off," and revealed at the time that the studio "did a big play test."

It was also speculated that Bethesda could shadowdrop the game, just like The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered in April 2025, and when the idea was brought up to Howard, he didn't immediately reject it.

"You might say that was a test run. It worked out well," he said on Oblivion Remastered.

In the meantime, Bethesda is currently working on remasters of both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and continuing support for Starfield.