Author: Olivia Hartman
Olivia Hartman is GeekBlog's general technology reporter, covering the wider world of tech beyond smartphones: AI and software, laptops and PCs, gaming, streaming, space, science, consumer gadgets, deals and the policy stories shaping the industry. A versatile journalist with a nose for what actually matters, Olivia turns breaking news and product launches into accessible, no-hype reporting for everyday readers.
Zak, Zelda and Cody Williams brought their father’s dormant Instagram account back online to reclaim his likeness from AI generated video. The move works as a cultural statement. Legally, it does almost nothing, and that is the real story.
Jason Kelce and Liquid Death are asking Americans to mail their urine to AI data centers. It is a stunt, but the water figures behind it are real: 4.5 trillion liters in 2025, and 7 in 10 Americans now oppose a data center near them.
OpenAI says an unreleased model called Astra solved 10 decades-old math problems for about $2,000 in compute, with formally verified proofs. Days later, the same system was hit with a Critical cyber-risk classification. Here is what happened and why mathematicians are both impressed and wary.
Honor’s Robot Phone mounts a 200MP camera on a motorized titanium arm, adds ARRI color science, and costs about $1,480. Here is what the gimbal actually does, how it compares to every other moving part phones have tried, and why Honor is not selling it outside China.
404 Media hid an Apple AirTag inside a bulk order of roughly 1,000 secondhand books and followed the shipment across four states. It stopped at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, at a unit whose job is to cut the spines off books, scan the loose pages for AI training, and throw the originals away.
Flock says it operates more than 120,000 license plate cameras across 49 states. Crowdsourced maps have verified tens of thousands of them, down to the pole. The result is a country where you can now look up what is watching your commute, and a growing list of councils cancelling their contracts.
AT2024wpp, nicknamed the Whippet, briefly shone with 400 billion times the Sun’s energy. New observations from Keck, Magellan and the VLT found helium still racing outward at more than 6,000 kilometers per second, and that changes the story of what the black hole actually ate.
Forty feet beneath Launch Complex 39 sits a domed concrete bunker on springs, built to survive a fully fueled Saturn V exploding overhead. You reached it by jumping into a 200-foot slide. It was never used, and SpaceX is legally required to keep it.
Apple sent threat notifications to users in 110 countries on August 13, and for the first time the warning lands on the iPhone Lock Screen. Here is what the alert means, how to spot a fake, and the six things to do in the first hour.
Through August 15, GameStop is giving the same trade credit for defective official controllers that it gives for working ones. Stick drift qualifies. Completely dead controllers do not. Here is how the offer actually works.