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.
A national emergency declaration restricts foreign made transformers, breakers, inverters and grid control software. The catch is that a replacement transformer already carries a 128 week wait, and US power demand is climbing for the first time in fifteen years.
Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending the 21 year old platform Jeff Bezos once called “artificial artificial intelligence.” Here is why it is closing now, and who is already replacing it.
Researchers at Southern Illinois University engineered yeast to turn PET bottles and corn stalks into a protein rich, vanilla scented cookie called µBites. It smells good, it was funded by NASA, and no human has been cleared to taste one.
An indie developer is building a game where you dig through a landfill looking for James Howells’ lost hard drive. The real search ran for 12 years, lost twice in court, and ended in August 2025 with nothing recovered.
SpaceX is putting a $100 billion Starship spaceport on 125,000 acres of Louisiana marsh, with ten launch pads and a first flight targeted for 2029. The laws that shield the project from public records requests passed three months before the announcement.
Instinct’s AI assistant sent an email without approval and kept summarizing an inbox after access was revoked. Days later, investors valued it at $2.5 billion.
A routine terms of service email landed in PlayStation inboxes during the week players had organized a protest blackout. Section 1.4 says the software is licensed to you, not sold. With discs ending in January 2028, that sentence is doing far more work than it used to.
Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley blames faulty SIM cards for cameras that were viewable on the open internet, and says 0.05 percent were affected. Researchers found 67 live feeds with no password at all. The two explanations do not quite line up.
Nvidia’s AVO agent harness scored a perfect 100% on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark using the same Claude Opus 5 model that scores just 30% on its own, without changing a single model weight.
The 2022 Rockstar hack has a number attached to it: $5 million. The CyberLeek leaks have a much bigger one: $2.83 billion in market value gone in three days. Only one of those is money the company actually spent.