Apple says it is changing its macOS privacy settings to stop third-party app developers from misusing them to access message histories.
Friday’s announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages. Aten said he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages and had assumed they were off-limits. Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.
He said/she said
Meta CTO David Singleton joined the fray with a rebuttal that appeared solid. For Muse to access Apple Messages, a user must manually give it two privileges. One is full-disk access, a macOS system-level permission. The other is to enable a Messages connector setting in Muse.
We are nearing the point of the Wine 12.0 stable release coming up in early 2027 while for now the Wine 11.xx bi-weekly development releases continue. Out today is Wine 11.19 with a few new features and plenty of fixes…
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, NYU, and Stanford have built an AI called Ataraxos that finally cracked Stratego, beating four-time world champion Pim Niemeijer 15 games to one with four draws. Its key advantage was a second neural network that estimates the identities of hidden enemy pieces, letting the system search plausible game states rather than brute-force a massive hidden-information space. Ars Technica reports: Just like [DeepMind’s DeepNash, introduced in 2022], Ataraxos learned by playing against itself — 163 million games in total. In these self-play sessions, moves that led to wins were reinforced and played more often in future matches, while moves that led to losses were played less, which was the same simple training idea. The difference was in how much Ataraxos adjusted after each game, because hidden information tends to send self-play learning algorithms around in circles. The team addressed this by making big, bold changes in strategy early in training and small, careful ones later.
The even bigger innovation was something DeepNash never had: thinking ahead before each move. AIs like AlphaGo refine their general strategy with a search just before acting. DeepMind couldn’t make that work in Stratego because the search space was too large, leaving it an open question whether it was worth trying. “This is one of the things that we did figure out how to do,” Farina said. The solution was a second neural network, a belief model, trained to guess the opponent’s hidden pieces based on how they had been moving. This way, instead of iterating through every possible arrangement, Ataraxos samples plausible ones, plays out candidate moves in each, and picks based on how they turned out. And it shows in its playstyle.
[…] DeepNash was trained for two to three months on 1,024 of Google’s specialized chips, a run the Ataraxos team estimates would cost $3 million to $4.5 million at 2025 prices. Ataraxos, in contrast, needed 16 GPUs for a week, plus an additional four GPUs for four days to train the belief model. Farina and lead author Samuel Sokota achieved this efficiency by writing a simulator that runs millions of moves per second on graphics cards. “At the scale that we are in academia, we don’t really have access to an entire field of GPUs,” Farina said. The algorithm also learned far faster — it played about 34 times fewer games than DeepNash, and still ended up much stronger. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
It is spooky season and while VR gamers have plenty of options for horror games already, we have spotlighted ten more promising games that lovers of suspense and jump-scares should have on their radar.
This article is one of several features James Tocchio and I will be publishing this month for players much braver than the two of us. We have both said multiple times on the UploadVR Gamescast that horror is not our favorite genre of games, but that does not stop us from playing them. Keep an eye out for more horror-themed lists and reviews throughout October.
Games are listed in no particular order.
Out of Sight VR
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This one is a bit of a cheat because it is already in Early Access on Steam, but Out of Sight VR has been confirmed to expand to PlayStation VR2 later this year and Quest in early 2027. The Little Nightmares-akin stealth-horror game casts you as a stuffed teddy bear. No, that is not a typo. You are the cuddly companion and literal eyes of a little girl who has been blinded by her captors in a huge mansion invoking the oversized furniture scale of the Bandai Namco-published Little Nightmares franchise. Yes, we got an actual Little Nightmares VR game earlier this year that I quite enjoyed. Out of Sight is still a well-made slice of horror with a rare second-person perspective and great atmosphere that Flat2VR Studios will thankfully bring to new audiences in the near future.
Confined: Leaving OKB-134
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I played the demo for Confined: Leaving OKB-134 during a Steam Next Fest and while it had the rough edges expected with most early drafts, there was a lot of claustrophobia-inducing suspense to be had. You play as a tourist so gullible you might as well have come from a 1980s slasher-horror film who gets locked in an abandoned bunker and has to repair the defunct structure to escape. The demo is still available to play on Steam.
Total Chaos VR
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Good news for anyone who already owns the 2025 flatscreen version of this game on Steam: you will get Total Chaos VR for free. Developer Trigger Happy Interactive and publisher Apogee Entertainment confirmed plans for SteamVR support and a standalone version for Quest.
You play as a Coast Guard officer responding to a distress call from an ominous island. When a storm wrecks your boat upon the shore, you discover the island’s dark past isn’t totally forgotten. Compelled to explore the island by cryptic radio transmissions, you must delve ever deeper into this twisted and uncertain reality.
The original game has a ‘Very Positive’ rating on Steam from 1.5k reviews.
Affected: The Asylum
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We don’t have store listings yet, but we have been hearing about Affected: The Asylum, the successor to the brief-but-excellent Affected: The Manor for years now. After a long period of radio silence, it resurfaced earlier this year.
Developer Dead Boss Games has taken over production from original studio Fallen Planet Studios. The Asylum has shifted from its originally planned multiplayer focus to an unnerving single-player thriller where you investigate a secretive cult in a desolate mental health institution. Despite the removal of multiplayer, you are not alone. Subject 357, an inhuman result of the cult’s experimentation with a parasitic entity stalks you throughout the asylum. Joy.
This one was originally slated for release this summer on Quest and PC VR and we’re past that point now, so we will continue to monitor this one for future updates.
Poppy Playtime VR
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That thumbnail alone is spine-chilling. Poppy Playtime was a hit with gamers when it launched in 2021, currently sitting at a ‘Very Positive’ rating on Steam from over sixty thousand reviews. Flat2VR Studios confirmed a VR port as one of its numerous projects in a 2025 VR Games Showcase. You must survive Huggy Wuggy and other hazards in an abandoned toy factory. The Five Nights At Freddy’s series has proven many times over how terrifying animatronic toys can be in and out of VR.
We have not heard any additional details about planned platforms yet, but Flat2VR has published on PlayStation VR2, Quest, and PC VR in the past, so there is no reason not to expect the same with this title.
C.A.B.A.
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C.A.B.A. (Center of Anomalies of Buenos Aires), is a short first-person survival horror experience similar to Exit 8, launching with full VR support on PS VR2, Quest, and PC VR, plus flat versions for PS5 and Steam.
Set in a Buenos Aires subway station that shouldn’t exist, the game is a terrifying trek through a subterranean liminal space. You can’t fight what walks the tunnels down here; you can only try to escape.
The Obsessive Shadow – Chapter 2
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The next entry in developer Pablo Heckman’s mysterious stalker jumps forward in time from the 1980s to 2006. Old Diamond Drive, the location of the home from the first chapter, is now abandoned with your character, sixteen-year-old Justin, spending a night there after losing a bet. The Obsessive Shadow – Chapter 2 taps into Blair Witch-like found footage territory with Justin’s camcorder capturing his experience as shown in the trailer above.
Chapter 2 is expected on PS VR2, Quest, and PC VR sometime this year.
Spirit Ritual
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Spirit Ritual is a supernatural horror game, played in either VR or MR, in which you play as a psychic medium attempting to break a demonic curse. You’ll use hand-tracking controls to conjure a spirit board to enter the spirit realm and equip your old-timey spirit camera to capture ghosts.
The Fatal Frame-like title is coming to Pico, PC VR, and Quest.
Project Louisiana – The Bounds VR
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Uncover the truth behind a cursed Louisiana mansion while searching for your missing daughter in story-based Project Louisiana – The Bounds VR. This is another one I played during a recent Steam Next Fest. The Bounds blends puzzle-solving with authentic voodoo mythology and the creepy Baron Samedi (the rightmost character in the title banner for this article) serves as your guide. The demo I played oozed atmosphere, but needed some work with onboarding and a general sense of direction.
Developer Build the Light has vowed to take all of the player feedback from that demo period and polish the game before it releases for PC VR and PS VR2.
Fyr: The Lost Island
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FYR: The Lost Island is a psychological horror game set on the shores of a remote Norwegian island. As you explore the island seeking clues and relics to unlock its secrets, you are hunted by a ‘relentless’ monster. A demo has been available on Steam since last year, showing strong visuals and leaning into the suspense thriller atmosphere its foggy setting naturally lends itself to. Your flashlight reveals ethereal projections of the island’s past inhabitants to aid in piecing together the island’s history. I played this demo and thought it was a strong start, enough to merit a wishlist for future follow-up.
“Rendering Doom in a database is obviously a bad idea,” Lukas Vogel writes in a lengthy blog post explaining how exactly he managed to render Doom using an SQL database.
OK, that’s not entirely accurate. The SQLDoom project uses a small Python client to handle input and output, drive the game’s timing, and display each frame to the screen. Behind that, a series of CedarDB tables tracks the game geometry and state, while about 1,300 lines of SQL queries spread across 89 common table expressions implement the game logic and generate 35 bitmap framebuffers per second.
In this, SQLDoom is a major improvement over Vogel’s previous DoomQL project, which last year set out to build “a multiplayer Doom-like shooter entirely in SQL.” Unfortunately, that effort ended up with raycasting-based, grayscale ASCII graphics that were more akin to the simplistic 90-degree-angled maps of Wolfenstein 3D. The newer SQLDoom, on the other hand, generates full-color 640×480 frames that look like they could have come from the original Doom executable.
It appears agentic AI is all the rage: OpenAI’s new agents, “Dots,” rolled out this week, while Meta’s Muse just passed five million downloads. Rather than just chatting with or using them to generate images, AI companies want users to start asking their bots to do things on their behalf, from managing their inboxes to ordering dinner.
But agents aren’t just the next logical step for AI as a technology. When implemented poorly, they can be wildly dangerous. AI agents are designed to run on their own, and, in order to do that, they often need near-total access to your devices and their data. Some people are now giving agents full use of their computers, including all of their messages, files, passwords, and accounts. That’s a lot of trust, especially when it’s not that difficult to “hack” one of these agents for malicious purposes with a poisoned prompt hidden on a website, which could lead your AI agent to hand hackers the keys to your bank accounts. That’s no good.
Apple is making it much more difficult for you to put yourself in this situation
How does Apple feel about this? The company is famously behind on the software side of AI—it only rolled out its AI-powered version of Siri in September—but its AI hardware business is booming. When the AI agent craze first took off with projects like Moltbot, customers bought Mac minis in droves in order to run those programs. Now, Apple advertises its various Macs with AI at the forefront: It doesn’t offer its own models like OpenAI or Anthropic, but it’s making plenty of money selling you the hardware to run those models.
Perhaps that’s why Apple seems quite concerned about the AI agent trend, particularly when it comes to the data users are exposing to run these programs. Apple is all about privacy and security, and as such, I can only imagine the company watching in horror as so many users willingly hand their Macs (and all of their data) over to automated AI bots.
Against that backdrop, the company posted an update on its developer forum entitled “Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS.” In it, the company highlights the dangers of developers asking users to grant “Full Disk Access” permissions to an app. Apple says this function has been traditionally reserved for backup apps that need to access the entire disk to function. (After all, if your backup app can’t access your entire Mac, how can it back up your entire Mac?) But now, Apple says developers are asking users to expose everything on their Macs, including messages, mail, browsing history, and more, without those users fully understanding the consequences. Apple even argues the privacy implications extend beyond the user, as communication apps that demand Full Disk Access compromise the people the user is chatting with, too.
And Apple appears to be doing something about it: While details are slim, the company says it will introduce “additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action.” I’m guessing this means that in the future, once you download an agent to your Mac, you’ll have to click through a series of warnings and settings to “prove” to macOS that you really want to expose your entire Mac to the app and its AI. The company says it’s doing this now, as the threat will only grow as AI agents improve and become more autonomous.
The risks of AI are increasing across the board
I’m all for additional safeguards when it comes to AI. In the past, you needed some level of technical expertise to install an AI agent on your Mac. As such, you likely understood the risks involved, or willfully ignored all the warnings in order to do so. Now that running agents is as easy as installing Muse on your Mac, the barrier to entry is minimal. Anyone can do it, even if they don’t fully understand what they are actually doing. As the AI industry reckons with the risks its technology poses to humanity, companies like Apple should indeed be figuring out how to protect their users from AI’s current dangers—even if users can still choose to ignore those warnings.
Apple says it will tighten macOS Full Disk Access controls as increasingly capable AI agents raise the risks of apps gaining broad access to users’ files, messages, mail, and browsing history. TechCrunch reports: Days after a journalist claimed that Meta’s Muse app on Mac read their private messages — a claim that Meta disputed — Apple announced that it’s introducing additional controls around a setting called “Full Disk Access” on macOS. The feature was designed to allow backups to function properly, but AI agents have now increased “the risks associated with this level of access,” Apple said. […] In Muse’s case, the AI optionally allows users to enable Full Disk Access. This setting, Apple explains, gives an app permission to access files, mail, messages, and even browsing history.
“Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems… without users’ full knowledge and understanding,” Apple said in a new blog post aimed at developers. The company says that, going forward, it will introduce new controls aimed at ensuring that users who “genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access” can do so only with “every explicit user action.”
“Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy,” Apple wrote.
The Debian Project released a new Linux kernel security update on September 29th, 2026, for its Debian 13 “Trixie” stable operating system series to address more than 1300 security vulnerabilities.
The silliest bird photography game in VR is coming to Steam next week.
Birdseed VR, a comical birdwatching and photography game, is coming to SteamVR on October 8. The SteamVR release will include cross play with Quest users, too.
For those who may not know about Birdseed VR, what you’re getting is a cozy birdwatching and photography game in which you hang out in a charming little forest and photograph silly birds. The game has been out on Quest for some time. We reviewed it when it landed on that platform, describing it as a game that “invites you to relax, slow down, and simply enjoy a peaceful slice of nature filled with charming, delightfully curious birds.”
Birdseed is coming to SteamVR on October 8th! Get ready to play with friends (from Steam or Meta!) and enjoy cozy birdwatching together �️ #cozygames #indiegames
Birdseed VR left Early Access on Quest in April, adding new updates such as a Scout’s Store in-game shop to buy camera skins, lenses, and charms, improvements to the game’s multiplayer, and several new birds. We’ll find out soon if the SteamVR release includes everything in the Quest build.
California’s attorney general and three city attorneys announced a $272.5 million settlement with Lyft after allegations that the company “committed wage theft by misclassifying drivers as independent contractors rather than employees” between 2016 and 2020, according to a Thursday statement.
The case dates back to May 2020, when then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is now the Democratic candidate for governor, sued both Uber and Lyft. That lawsuit said the ridehailing companies evaded state law when they declared that their drivers were not employees.
Thursday’s settlement affects only Lyft, while the case against Uber continues.
One argument that often comes up about climate change is that fossil fuels are good because they powered economic growth that has left most people better off overall. And, to an extent, that has been true, but it’s also an extremely limited perspective.
It’s pretty obvious now that the growth they powered has come with very high costs that we’ve only recently started to pay, in the form of damages and disruptions from extreme weather events. With things like sea level rise expected to continue for centuries even if we hit net zero, it’s difficult to estimate how expensive that growth will eventually be.
But that perspective is also limited: We now have better ways to power our growth—ways that are less environmentally damaging now and won’t leave our descendants with a carbon debt that will be difficult to manage.
The US has arrested another suspect accused of smuggling high-end computer servers containing export-controlled Nvidia chips into China.
In a press release on Thursday, the Department of Justice accused 38-year-old Greg Lui of using false paperwork to mask shipments of servers worth more than $300 million that he allegedly knew were ultimately destined for China.
As the CEO of Earthmade Computer, Lui allegedly conspired with freight-forwarding firms in South Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore to illegally divert chip shipments into China, including Nvidia’s A100 GPUs and H100 GPUs, the FBI’s indictment alleged. These are not Nvidia’s most advanced chips. However, the chips can process large amounts of data and train large language models, which the US fears could pose national security risks if China suddenly gets access to enough chips to drastically advance its AI or strengthen its military.
