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.
Epic took Fortnite offline in the early hours of August 20 for update v42.00. Chapter 7 Season 4 Override brought back Sonic, Mega Man, Tetris and Crash, plus a console anyone can grab to change the rules for the whole server.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens on August 18 and auto-enrolls anyone it thinks is under 18. The guardrails are real, the age check is a guess, and reporters had it writing a full homework essay within hours.
Eight months after abandoning open source over the Llama 4 benchmark scandal, Meta released Muse Glimmer, a 30 billion parameter Apache 2.0 model that runs on a single consumer GPU. Here is what it does well, where Qwen still beats it, and why Meta opened the small model instead of the big one.
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.