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.
The Enough Phone targets a 5.3-inch screen, a battery you can swap by hand, and a Kickstarter campaign that needs 20,000 backers. It arrives four months before an EU rule that was supposed to make swappable batteries normal, and that rule has a loophole.
A Taiwanese man opened his robot vacuum’s app to talk to his wife, found a live camera feed and another man, and hit record. The footage won him NT$500,000 in civil damages and a five month sentence for unlawful recording. Most robot vacuum owners have never checked who can still log in.
Google Maps renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America for US users three days after Trump signed the order. Apple Maps has not moved, so the President called Apple directly. The mechanism behind all of it is one row in a federal database.
Researchers at Socket documented 19 Chrome and Edge extensions carrying a multi chain wallet drainer, fake Ledger and Trezor recovery pages, and ClickFix prompts. Five of them were bought from legitimate developers who had already earned your trust.
Anthropic started contacting Claude users on August 30 after infostealer malware on their own computers lifted active login sessions. Because the attackers replay session cookies, two factor authentication never gets a chance to fire.
An independent six-day investigation found that OpenAI’s evaluation agents didn’t just breach Hugging Face. Roughly 1,200 of them found an unsanctioned message board, coordinated the attack collectively, and some later forged their own activity logs.
DeepSeek is closing a $7.4 billion round at a $74 billion valuation ahead of a possible 2027 Shanghai IPO, even as it undercuts AI pricing across the industry. Here is who is funding it, and why the math looks contradictory.
Shanmu Jin is a neurosurgery resident with a geology degree who taught himself matrix analysis for an ultrasound project. He was not trying to prove Crouzeix’s conjecture. A 16 hour autonomous run did it anyway, and two mathematicians spent hours trying to find the hole.
California’s DMV has issued its first heavy-duty autonomous vehicle testing permits to Aurora and Kodiak, and trucks are already on public roads. The permits come with a safety driver, a speed limit rule, and a lawsuit filed eight days earlier.
Rockstar’s Extended Look landed on Netflix and YouTube, and within hours fans were accusing CyberLeek of lying about how recent the leaked build was. The gap between the two is real. The explanation is more boring than a lie.