From CNET: Music fans who are seeking to pin down AI artists versus human creatives on Spotify will soon have a new tool at their disposal. On Tuesday, the music streamer shared that it’s adding an “AI Persona” label to the platform as another way to help fans — and artists — identify AI creators. The badge will start appearing in profiles, songs, search results and in an artist’s About section in mid-September.

If you’re worried about those tracks popping up in your finely tuned algorithm, don’t. Spotify explained that AI Personas will automatically be excluded from your personalized recommendations by default, unless you choose to follow the AI Personas account or a specific AI music profile.

How will the streamer pinpoint which accounts are AI? Starting Aug. 11, accounts can self-report via Spotify for Artists, but Spotify will also conduct its own reviews and tag profiles with the AI Persona label. According to the streamer, it will check “artist profiles and identify those whose public identity — the identity an artist presents on their profile, including name and imagery — appears to represent photorealistic AI-generated identities.” To take it a step further, when you, as a listener, click the badge, you’ll be able to see whether the artist disclosed their AI identity themselves or if Spotify classified them as an AI artist.

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From PC World: It’s about to get much easier to spot AI-generated text, with Anthropic announcing that invisible AI watermarks will soon be added to all Claude-created content.

The new policy, which is mandated by the European Union’s AI Act, will apply to any text or files that were created or otherwise touched by Claude, including computer code, company reports, or cover letters to potential employers.

In a recently published support page, Anthropic says that new Claude models launched in the EU on or after August 2, 2026 will support adding watermarks to the content they create or edit, and that it’s working to add watermarking abilities to previously launched Claude models.

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From PC Mag: Researchers at A Security have discovered a critical bug in Zoom that allows attackers to assume full control of a participant’s device by exploiting a flawed screen-sharing function.

The vulnerability exists in the Zoom Workspace app for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Linux. When a user launches the annotation tool while sharing their screen, the bug allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code and access participants’ devices. The attack requires no action from a victim’s end and leaves no visible warning, A Security says in its blog post.

The firm discovered the bug and developed a working exploit for it in just 24 hours. They did it using just 20 prompts on a publicly available AI model, highlighting how AI can make cyberattacks easier to carry out.

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From Tom's Hardware: If you've ever stumbled upon the Amazon CPU best sellers list over the past few years, you've been greeted by a wall of red boxes. This list isn't a good source of data, without hard sales figures and heavily skewed toward what's available on Amazon at any given time. But AMD senior marketing director Saša Marinković recently shared a screenshot of the Amazon CPU best-sellers list, bragging on AMD's representation. The interesting bit is that the screenshot Marinković shared shows the $80, DDR4-based Ryzen 5 5500 at the top of the charts.

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D has since reclaimed the top slot — it is the best CPU for gaming, after all — but the screenshot touches on the prevalence of DDR4 platforms, nearly four years after the launch of Zen 4 and introduction of DDR5 to AMD's platform. It's not just the Ryzen 5 5500, either.

Of the 25 best sellers on Amazon, three slots are occupied by Intel, and one slot is claimed by the Thermal Grizzly AM5 contact frame. AMD holds every other slot, though it's nearly an even split between DDR4 and DDR5. There are nine Zen 3 CPUs on DDR4 platforms to 12 Zen 4/5 CPUs on DDR5 platforms.

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From CNET: Meta is putting its money (and AI models) where its mouth is. The company said Monday that its latest model is built specifically for AI agents. Meta’s Muse Glimmer is out now and is built to run on your laptop or PC.

Muse Glimmer is a 30-billion-parameter model, which sounds big, but it’s actually built to run more efficiently than other big AI models. (By comparison, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model, which approaches the capabilities of top models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, has 2.8 trillion parameters.) It can run on a single GPU, so you can run it on a newer MacBook or another computer with a relatively recent chip. The model is meant to help you orchestrate an army of AI agents, the newest wave of generative AI tech that lets you outsource tasks to bots known as agents.

Open-weight AI lets anyone, including researchers and cybersecurity defenders, see how an AI model operates. It isn’t fully transparent – open-source advocates say that to be truly open source, we’d need to know what’s inside the black box of training data used by Meta and other companies – but it’s less opaque than the closed-weight models offered by other major US developers. You can check out the model’s documentation on Meta’s website and HuggingFace. Meta also plans to release the weights of its newest model, Spark 1.2.

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From Tom's Hardware: An Australian AI user has kicked up a storm at his local gym after trying to use OpenClaw to book himself into a gym class. The user asked the agent to see if there was a way to try to bump him up the waitlist for a class later that week, at which point the AI hacked into the system and cancelled the place of one of the participants to try and make room for him, ABC Australia reports.

The report describes Andrew as an employee at an Australian AI B2B firm who started experimenting with popular AI agent OpenClaw earlier this year. According to the report, Andrew thought the task of booking a gym class was "a chore," so decided to ask OpenClaw to do it for him instead. The AI exceeded its brief in two ways. Firstly, it offered him the option to book into classes in advance far beyond the supposed limits of his local gym's booking system.

Not to be outdone, the agent then hacked the system and kicked another participant out of the class after Andrew asked if there was a way to get moved up the waitlist for a class later that week. "The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already," the bot told him.

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From The Verge: Valve says a data breach may have exposed the personal information of customers who ordered its Steam hardware in Europe. In an email sent to users, Valve says its European shipping partner, CEVA Logistics, suffered a data breach that may have included customer names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses.

The breach at CEVA occurred between July 29th and August 1st, weeks after Valve began taking reservations for its new Steam Machine and Steam Controller. Valve adds that European customer data “was likely compromised” as part of the breach, as CEVA stores “delivery-related information” for up to 90 days after orders.

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From PC Mag: The FCC's latest attack on the drone industry flew past our radar, but is gaining attention after DJI called it out on its ViewPoints blog. The agency issued a public notice on July 21 stating that it intends to retroactively revoke authorization for "military-grade" drones, something that normally wouldn't be an issue for recreational and professional drone pilots. There's a twist, though: the FCC's definition of "military grade" is broad enough to cover any drone with LiDAR sensors.

Several of DJI's consumer drones use LiDAR for obstacle detection and avoidance, including two PCMag Editors' Choice winners: the Air 3S, our top-rated camera drone, and the Avata 360, the best drone for spherical imaging. The Mini 5 Pro, which we missed reviewing, also uses LiDAR. All three of these drones received FCC clearance before DJI was added to the FCC Covered List in late 2025.

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From CNET: I’ve spent years writing about the need to update default passwords on internet-connected devices, but the recent cyberattacks on our water systems show that the same preventable flaws continue to leave our most critical infrastructure vulnerable.

Starting on July 26, more than 30 water systems in Minnesota started experiencing symptoms of a coordinated cyberattack. A week and a half later, those attacks had spread to at least a dozen states, leading to widespread disruptions in service, boil-water notices, drops in pressure and flooding.

In a joint statement on July 30, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Environmental Protection Agency described a situation that will sound familiar to anyone who’s followed cyberattack stories in recent years: Malicious actors gained access to internet-connected devices, changed the IP addresses and passwords and took control of their operations. Iranian hackers are likely behind the attacks, according to multiple news reports.

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From ComputerWorld: Demis Hassabis, the driving force behind Google DeepMind, is ascending to the role of chief scientist at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, replacing Jeff Dean who is leaving to work at a start-up.

The role will enable Hassabis to “put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on the company’s Inside Google blog.

Hassabis’ attention will still be divided, however: He will continue to lead research at Google spin-off Isomorphic Labs, which works on drug discovery, and although he will no longer be CEO of DeepMind, he will be its chair. Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai. He is currently its CTO.

Hassabis has been a strong promoter of AGI, defined by Google as the “hypothetical intelligence of a machine that possesses the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can.”

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From CNET: PC gaming sites and social media discussions were buzzing this week after a report from a Chinese forum claimed PC motherboard prices could soon rise significantly.

Websites including VideoCardz, Guru3D and Digital Foundry, among others, cited what appears to be a supply chain report on a Chinese forum called Boards Channels, suggesting that PC motherboard makers could raise prices for consumers as material costs climb by as much as 50% in the coming months.

The link to the Board Channels report no longer seems to work, but a screenshot posted on these sites suggests that Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers, including ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI, will be trying to address the effects of rising component costs.

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From TechCrunch: Kimi K3, the latest AI model made by Chinese company Moonshot, escaped an environment set up to test its cyber capabilities, researchers said in a blog post published on Friday.

The news shows once again that companies and independent organizations are struggling to contain their AI models designed for hacking.

In recent weeks, frontier LLMs at U.S. artificial intelligence labs at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, as well as the U.K.’s AI Security Institute, all escaped testing environments in different ways and ended up hacking real targets that were not part of the experiment. This is starting to happen so often there’s now a website tracking all these incidents called Felony Bench, a nod to the fact that these LLMs may be committing crimes — at least theoretically speaking.

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From TechCrunch: OpenAI is removing limits on text-based chats for all users on ChatGPT, which recently crossed the 1 billion weekly user mark, the company announced today.

The new GPT-5.6 Luna model will power this experience and will be the default model for Free and Go users, replacing GPT-5.5.

Both users will also get a new “Think” button that lets them select higher reasoning power for complex questions. OpenAI said that there will still be separate limits for files, images, voice, and image generation.

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From ExtremeTech: Windows 11 26H2 is the next annual update for Windows 11 and is is planned to rollout in the second half of 2026, maybe somewhere in and around October. Microsoft says this release will arrive as a tiny enablement package on the same Germanium platform as 24H2 and 25H2, so systems already on those versions can update in a few minutes with one reboot.

With the update, users can finally place the taskbar at the top, bottom, left, or right edge of the screen and can let it use a smaller layout that reduces icon size, something that users have been asking for ages. The Start menu will have size options and toggles for Pinned, Recent, and All apps, along with a privacy setting to hide account details during screen sharing, as reported by Windows Latest.

Search also sees some improvements, as it is expected to have a cleaner layout, better ranking for apps and local files, and most importantly, a toggle to turn off web results for a local‑only experience.

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From PC World: In a recent Microsoft Security Blog post, the company has raised awareness of a widespread attack campaign called CaptiveCrunch. In short, Russian hackers are using manipulated DNS queries to redirect users to phishing sites that mimic Microsoft’s official online services. As a result, Microsoft is warning against the use of public Wi-Fi networks.

With these fake phishing sites, the attackers are attempting to intercept and steal login credentials for Microsoft accounts. Some security researchers previously published a warning to this effect back in July, and now Microsoft is supplementing that report with its own new information based on what it has been monitoring since May 2026.

According to the report, the attackers redirect users—for example, those who are logging into their Microsoft accounts via a hotel Wi-Fi network—to imitation phishing sites. There, the attackers capture device and OAuth codes, which they can use to take over said Microsoft accounts.

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From TechCrunch: Google announced on Thursday that Google Maps’ “Ask Maps” feature is gaining a slew of new agentic capabilities, including the ability to order food, book hotels, and find event tickets. The tech giant is also bringing Personal Intelligence to Ask Maps, allowing the AI tool to personalize its responses by drawing on information from a user’s Gmail and Google Calendar.

The launch of the new features reflects Google’s ambitions to transform Google Maps from a navigation tool into an assistant that’s capable of helping users complete real-world tasks.

With the new agentic food-ordering capabilities, users can open Ask Maps in Google Maps and ask a question like, “Where can I order vegan avocado toast and an oat milk latte near home?” The tool will then surface nearby restaurants that have what they’re looking for.

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From CNET: Apple’s iCloud Private Relay feature is designed to obscure your web traffic so sites like advertisers, unscrupulous governments or malicious attackers can’t trace that traffic back to you. But it turns out the mechanism isn’t actually as private as Apple says.

As reported by 404 Media, security researchers at software company Mysk discovered that even with iCloud Private Relay active, the IP address of a device or home network can be transmitted, which could be used to reveal a person’s identity or location.

iCloud Private Relay is a feature for paid customers of Apple’s iCloud Plus service. It routes web traffic through proxy servers, obscuring your IP address and the website address you’re visiting, so neither the site nor Apple can see that information.

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From Corsair Press Release: CORSAIR today announced three new additions to its everyday gaming lineup, the SKIFF 100 PLUS Gaming Keyboard, the SKIFF 100 Gaming Keyboard, and the HARPOON v2 WIRELESS Gaming Mouse, ideal for first-time gamers, and those balancing work and play.

SKIFF 100 PLUS & SKIFF 100 Gaming Keyboards
• Six Programmable G-keys (PLUS only): Easy access to macros, hotkeys, and in-game commands.
• Rotary Dial & Media Controls: Skip the menus. Get fast access to volume and track controls.
• 10-Zone RGB Lighting: Customizable dynamic effects make every play a highlight.
• IP53-Rated Spill Resistance: Built to handle the hazards of gaming and work life.
• Quiet, Responsive Membrane Keys: Great for dorms, offices, and shared living spaces.
• Detachable Wrist Rest: Soft-touch rubber surface for ergonomic support.

Built on the popular RGB Gaming Keyboard, the SKIFF series is ideal for gamers putting together their , and for those in search of a versatile keyboard to handle both work and play, the SKIFF 100 PLUS and SKIFF 100 are full-size membrane keyboards designed for daily reliability. Both keyboards share the same core feature set, with the SKIFF 100 PLUS adding six programmable G-keys for players who want dedicated macro access.

A built-in rotary dial puts volume and media control at your fingertips. Adjust volume, mute, pause, play, skip tracks, and more all with one intuitive dial. Ten zones of RGB lighting with customizable dynamic effects add a personal touch to any setup, while quiet, responsive switches make both keyboards a good fit for dorm rooms, shared apartments, and crowded workspaces alike.
Both keyboards carry an IP53 rating, standing up to dust buildup and water sprayed at up to a 60-degree angle. They're built to shrug off the occasional spill without missing a beat. A detachable, soft-touch rubber wrist rest and adjustable tilt legs let players find their ideal typing position, and the wrist rest is easily removed for a cleaner, more minimal setup.

Additionally, they are compatible with PC, Mac, Xbox, and PlayStation and are configurable through , a browser-based utility with no software installation required.

HARPOON v2 WIRELESS Gaming Mouse
• Asymmetric Ergonomic Shape: Thumb rest and side grips built for long gaming sessions.
• CORSAIR MARKSMAN 26K Sensor: Accurate and precise sensor keeps your aim on point.
• Six Programmable Buttons: Your most used abilities and macros are at your fingertips.
• Up to 140 Hours Battery Life: Stay in the game and off the charger.
• Versatile Tri-Mode Connectivity: Easily connect via 2.4GHz, Bluetooth, or wired.

The HARPOON v2 WIRELESS Gaming Mouse pairs HARPOON's signature asymmetric ergonomic shape with updated precision, flexible programmability, and impressive battery life to stand up to daily work and play. Textured side grips and a built-in thumb rest reduce grip strain and thumb fatigue during long sessions, while a 26K DPI CORSAIR MARKSMAN sensor keeps aim crisp and accurate.

Six programmable buttons give players quick access to their most-used abilities and macros, and the primary mouse buttons are rated for up to 100 million clicks. Battery life reaches up to 140 hours on 2.4GHz wireless with RGB off, or up to 210 hours over Bluetooth® with RGB off, for days of gaming between charges.

The HARPOON v2 WIRELESS can connect via 2.4GHz SLIPSTREAM WIRELESS, Bluetooth®, and a wired USB-C connection, so players can choose the option that fits their space. The mouse is compatible with PC and Mac and configurable through CORSAIR Web Hub, with no software installation required.

CORSAIR Quality
The SKIFF 100 PLUS, SKIFF 100 and HARPOON v2 WIRELESS complement CORSAIR’s 2026 lineup of premium keyboards and mice including GALLEON 100 SD, CLIPPER PRO MINI 60, VANGUARD AIR 99 WIRELESS, SABRE V2 PRO MG and CF, and NIGHTSWORD v2 by offering a more accessible way to play with CORSAIR quality and reliability.

From ExtremeTech: How times have changed. After previously suggesting that 16GB of RAM should be the baseline for most Windows laptops and desktops, Microsoft has now removed any mention of 32GB from its Learning Center guides, as Windows Latest reports. This comes alongside its re-release of last year's Surface Laptop and Surface Pro devices with just 8GB of RAM, marketing them as plenty for modern use.

For a number of years, 8GB has been considered the bare minimum for Windows 11, even though the system technically only requires 4GB. For anyone doing more demanding tasks than just web browsing and answering emails, 16GB helps a lot, and for gamers, 32GB is now far more common. But with RAM prices as they are, that kind of recommendation is harder to make, even for Microsoft.

After updating its Learning Center earlier this year to call 8GB the minimum and 32GB a "no worries" upgrade, it pulled that after the backlash and has now gone much further. There's now no mention of 32GB anywhere, and 8GB is back on the menu as viable.

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