Google kicked off 2026 with the addition of Personal Intelligence to Gemini, allowing its AI to pull in more of your data to formulate answers. It started as a paid feature but eventually came to all Gemini users. However, this feature wasn’t available in the car until now. Google is rolling out Personal Intelligence to Android Auto and Google Built-in, and it is still, thankfully, an optional feature.
As Google points out, a generative AI’s outputs are better “when it knows the world and knows you,” which is correct in an uncomfortable sort of way. The more context you can provide to a model, the better the output will be at the end of the token shuffle. Since Google has so much of your data already, it sees Personal Intelligence as a differentiator versus other AI systems. You don’t have to provide the AI context because it already has it from apps like Gmail and Calendar.
Personal Intelligence is beginning its rollout in Android Auto today, and it will come to vehicles with Google built-in in the next few months. As an aside, “Google built-in” is questionable branding, but it refers to cars that run Google software in the infotainment system rather than projecting an interface from your phone. Very few vehicles have Google built-in, but Google often releases new car features on them first. This time, it’s the other way around.
OpenBSD 8.0 is here, marking the project’s 61st release and continuing its schedule of semiannual releases dating back to 1996. What started more than 30 years ago as a fork of NetBSD has grown into one of the most security-conscious operating systems in active development. In a post to the project’s announcements mailing list, OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt highlights a host of improvements included with the latest version and writes that the project remains “proud of OpenBSD’s record of more than thirty years with only two remote holes in the default install.”
The latest OpenBSD version brings new features and improvements across the board. These changes, particularly the new Intel Arc support and expanded virtual address space, should improve compatibility with modern graphics cards and allow the system to map more than 4 GB of VRAM. Some of the major updates noted in the release newsletter are as follows:
Added support for Intel Arc A-Series (DG2/Alchemist) graphics cards.
512 GB kernel virtual address space on AMD64, up from 4 GB, allowing VRAM mapping above 4 GB.
Security personnel around the world are on high alert Tuesday following the discovery of eight TLS certificates with private keys so weak they could allow anyone to mint trusted browser and app credentials for any site on the Internet.
As of late morning Tuesday, browser makers and some major apps and programming languages had blocked all eight of the intermediate certificates. There are no reports of certificate transparency logs, which track the issuance of all browser-trusted certificates, showing the compromised keys being used maliciously. The threat remains far from over, however, because it will be hard and time-consuming to update other key parts of the Internet, such as Linux distributions and embedded and Internet-of-things devices.
One word: bonkers
The eight intermediate certificates belong to India-based certificate authority eMudhra Limited. An informal advisory published to emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com over the weekend posted the message “We have a problem here – Wayne.” The words were digitally signed using the private key of one of the eMudhra certificates. With proof that the reporting party had control of the key, defenders scrambled because the same key could be used to sign unauthorized certificates that would be trusted by millions of servers around the world.
TP-Link yesterday announced plans to assemble Wi-Fi routers in the US, as the company attempts to get the Trump administration’s approval to sell its newest routers to American consumers.
The timing is uncertain, as TP-Link’s press release said it expects US-based assembly to begin “as early as” 2027. TP-Link’s application to sell new routers in the US could be rejected by the Trump administration or remain pending long enough to push the US-based assembly to 2028.
“Pending US regulatory approval, TP-Link expects domestic assembly of its groundbreaking Wi-Fi 8 home networking product line to begin as early as next year,” the company said. TP-Link said it signed a Letter of Intent with US company Keytronic, which agreed “to become a primary domestic manufacturing partner for TP-Link, supporting assembly of the company’s advanced networking portfolio in Corinth, Mississippi.”
It has been 13 years since the debut of a new medium-lift rocket in the United States, the Antares vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation.
The initial 100-series variant of the Antares rocket was kind of a hot mess. The rocket used old Soviet engines built during the era when Apollo astronauts were landing on the Moon. Decades later, in the 1990s, Aerojet acquired the engines and refurbished them for a rocket that would launch in the 2010s. Predictably, on the fifth launch of an Antares rocket in 2014, it exploded.
The Antares vehicle is the last of a dying breed of medium-lift rockets—defined as having a lift capacity of 2 to 20 metric tons—in the United States. Nearly a decade and a half later there is a new generation of medium-lift vehicles coming online, and they are starkly different from Antares, which had not just Russian engines but a core stage manufactured in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s unprecedented drone rescue of a wounded soldier from the battlefield has shown once again how battlefield necessity can spur innovation. The operation was revealed just days after separate Ukrainian drones designed for casualty evacuation were deployed for frontline testing—taking a step beyond the US military’s decades of experimentation with similar concepts.
The drone evacuation of the injured soldier took place at an undisclosed time and place on the frontline where the presence of Russian drones and landmines made it impractical to send in a wheeled ground robot, according to The Kyiv Independent. On October 19, Ukraine’s Army shared a video of the drone evacuation, showing the wounded soldier securing himself in a harness suspended beneath a heavy hexacopter drone with six rotors before being flown to safety.
“This is a historic event, the next stage of evacuating the wounded, which we will all come to,” said Napalm, a programmer of the 92nd separate assault brigade’s unmanned ground systems company, who went by his callsign per Ukrainian military practice, in a statement. “Now the serious systematic work begins, so that such missions are carried out constantly.”
Running complicated algorithms on quantum computing hardware is going to require the use of logical qubits, where collections of hardware qubits are linked together in ways that allow errors to be detected and corrected. In general, the more hardware qubits you dedicate to each logical qubit, the better the chances are of identifying errors. But, given that the hardware qubits are prone to errors, adding more of them also increases the probability that errors will occur. If the hardware error rate is too high, then growing the logical qubit will only make matters worse.
Fortunately, several companies have demonstrated hardware where the error rate is not too high. Several demonstrations show logical qubits are beyond the breakeven point, where adding more qubits improves performance. The problem is that the improvement isn’t very dramatic. To lower error rates to levels we’ll need to run complex algorithms, we’d have to add a completely impractical number of qubits to each logical qubit.
On Monday, Quantinuum announced that its current generation of hardware is capable of scaling well beyond the breakeven point. Each step up in the size of logical qubits improved some measures of their performance by a factor of over 10.
In copyright lawsuits over AI training, Meta has spent weeks blaming staff for downloading torrents. The company has now been ordered to name executives who authorized decisions to pirate books from shadow libraries like Anna’s Archive and LibGen, TorrentFreak reported.
In a discovery order impacting a class action raised by book authors—including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman—as well as a lawsuit from publisher Entrepreneur Media, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixon largely agreed that Meta must clearly identify key decision-makers. Following testimony from Meta staff who downloaded torrents, the order could expose a wider range of supervisors, managers, and executives whom staffers said greenlit the piracy.
Meta had been hoping to avoid detailing the chain of command, particularly for leadership involved in early AI training. According to a Meta court filing, its initial efforts to compile massive AI datasets were managed through an “informal approach” where supposedly nobody with authority made any decisions. Instead, Meta insisted that a “decision” was “made only in the sense” that some staffers “technically” downloaded torrents.
If you have personal conversations with ChatGPT that you don’t want others to see, you can now add an extra layer of security for those specific chats. The new Locked Chats feature allows you to hide sensitive conversations behind a four-digit account PIN (or biometric authentication on mobile), meaning others with access to your device or screen can’t read them.
Locked chats are retained in your chat history—unlike temporary chats, which are private conversations that aren’t saved by default—so you can return to or continue them at any point. However, once locked, they are hidden from your regular chat history, pinned chats, and regular conversation search. To access them, you have to go to Projects > Locked chats and enter your PIN or device unlock method (such as Face ID or Touch ID).
How to set up Locked Chats on ChatGPT
To start a locked chat for the first time, open an existing conversation that you want to keep private and open the options menu. Select Lock chat > Lock chat and create or enter your account PIN. This moves the conversation to your locked chats project. You can repeat this with any existing conversation or start a locked chat from scratch under Projects > Locked Chats by entering your PIN or authentication method and typing a message to launch the chat. When you’re done, select Lock now to end access to locked chats and hide them from the sidebar.
Note that if you don’t already have an account PIN set up, you should be prompted to do so the first time you attempt to lock a chat. Select Create a PIN, enter your four-digit code, and enter it again to confirm. You can also enable biometric authentication in Account PIN settings. If you reset your account PIN at any point, all locked chats are permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.
Locked chats are available on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans on both mobile and desktop apps. The feature is not available for ChatGPT for Healthcare. There are other limitations, too: For example, temporary, archived, and group chats can’t be locked, nor can those with shared links, scheduled and background tasks, or meeting recordings. OpenAI says locked chats are rolling out gradually, so they may not be available to all users yet.
Locked chats are not encrypted
While locked chats do add a layer of privacy in terms of how conversations appear on your device, they are not suddenly encrypted or otherwise protected from being retained or used by OpenAI. As the support page notes, locked chats are not encrypted end to end or placed in a separate encrypted vault, and locking a chat does not affect other privacy settings, such as Improve the model for everyone (which can be turned off in Settings > Data controls) or remove information ChatGPT already knows about you.
Google is beginning to replace traditional support articles with “Ask Google Help,” a Gemini-powered interface that summarizes documentation and lets users troubleshoot through a chatbot. 9to5Google reports: “Ask Google Help” will display a condensed version of the support article with direct troubleshooting steps, with the user then able to type in queries to have Gemini help figure out the next step forward. A “View Sources” button at the bottom of the AI response allows users to still access the original article, but direct links to any of these articles now defaults to the AI experience.
An example can be seen below on the “Secure a hacked or compromised Google account” page that Google’s own support account directed users to within the past few days. It can also be seen on the “Fix common issues with 2-Step Verification” page and, as far as we can tell, any support pages on the Google Account Help forum.
Google, as of right now, appears to only be testing this on select support topics. The Google Pixel Help section, for instance, still defaults to articles, whereas the Google Chrome topic has also moved to the new experience. Beyond support pages alone, this new design also impacts the central hub, with links to topics no longer showing by default in exchange for an AI chatbot that helps you find the relevant page.
Since launching in 2015, JustWatch has helped people navigate the growing number of streaming services by providing a guide on where to find movies they want to stream. Now JustWatch has its own streaming service that it wants people to subscribe to.
Launched today, JustWatch TV has some movies available for free, with ads, that aren’t free on any other streaming service, including Green Room (2015), Locke (2013), and Sing Sing (2023). Other free movies include Fiddlin’ (2018), Friday the 13th (1980), and Hotel Mumbai (2018). I was able to play movies available for free on JustWatch TV without creating an account.
JustWatch TV also has movies that you can pay to rent.
Co-op exo suit-fueled action-adventure Titan Isles has added a fifth suit in its latest update. This is the first new suit since the game launched in 2025.
Titan Isles launched in September 2025 with four suit types and developer Psytec Games (Windlands) has not expanded that number since then. In the game, you select one of these suits for your gameplay session, with each suit having its own specialized weapon loadout and traversal method. The fifth suit, Cage,flies through the large scale environments with anti-gravity rotors and engages in combat with laser-guided homing rockets and charged power shots. Cage is available as part of a free update that also adds a new encounter, Scrapspine Ridge, in the seventh campaign and a new look for the breakable loot boxes spread through the game’s environments.
During Meta Connect 2026, Meta announced several new SDKs and features designed to enhance spatial apps. These announcements come as the company expands its focus on broader computing use cases ahead of Meta VR Glasses.
Meta VR Layout SDK & Gaze SDK
Historically, 2D apps on Horizon OS were largely restricted to tablet-style interfaces. Although multiple windows were supported, developers could not integrate floating or spatial elements into their UI without turning their apps into immersive experiences using the Spatial SDK.
The Meta VR Layout SDK allows developers to add spatial components and windows around the main window of a standard Jetpack Compose or React Native Android app. The app remains non-immersive, can coexist with other open apps, and retains its existing activity and UI architecture. Developers do not need to switch to the Meta Spatial SDK.
The NBA app is one of the first apps to take advantage of this SDK, using it to improve the UI and support multiple views.
In essence, the Layout SDK enables window layouts similar to those in visionOS. However, it does not allow developers to spawn 3D objects or control the environment. Those capabilities still require the Spatial SDK.
The Meta VR Layout SDK as demonstrated by Callstack.
The Meta VR Layout SDK is fully supported only on Horizon OS 2.7 and later. Meta says that on releases earlier than 2.7, the SDK falls back to its non-spatial behavior instead of placing spatial windows. The main window remains available while each spatial window component uses its developer-configured fallback.
Alongside the Layout SDK, Meta will also be shipping a new Gaze SDK for Jetpack Compose, React Native, and Android Views.
Meta VR Glasses use a “Look and Pinch” input scheme by default, leveraging the device’s Eye and Hand Tracking. This works well for most layouts, but highly customized components can have elements that the system misclassifies. Developers can use the Gaze SDK to provide the hints the system needs to understand their layout, as well as customize hover behavior.
The Gaze SDK is in early access and is compatible with Horizon OS 2.7 and later. However, it cannot be used in a shipping app until it leaves early access. Developers can request access through the developer support portal.
Meta VR UI Set SDK
In October 2024, Meta released the Horizon OS UI Set, a UI kit for Unity, Figma, and later the Spatial SDK.
When developing for other operating systems such as iOS and Android, developers have access to high-level UI frameworks that help their apps feel cohesive with the operating system.
Before Meta introduced the Spatial SDK and the Horizon OS UI Set, developers building apps for Meta’s VR devices often relied on game engines, such as Unity or Unreal without a first-party UI framework specifically tailored to Horizon OS. As a result, most apps used entirely different UI solutions, many of which were custom-made or repurposed from asset stores.
The Horizon OS UI Set was Meta’s solution to this problem, providing developers with the components needed to build interfaces that feel cohesive with Horizon OS.
However, the Horizon OS UI Set was not a standalone SDK. This meant that its assets and frameworks were largely impractical to adapt for standard 2D Android apps, which is a major reason why most 2D apps on the platform still use their own implementations.
The Meta VR UI Set SDK aims to address this problem.
The Meta VR UI Set SDK is a Jetpack Compose design system for apps on Meta VR devices. It provides dark and light color schemes, semantic colors, typography, icons, component dimensions, and interaction feedback. It works with Jetpack Compose apps.
This makes the SDK relatively easy for 2D Android app developers to adopt, and Meta notes that it is optimized to be implemented by an AI coding agent. The company says that it is the successor to the Meta Horizon OS UI Set in Spatial SDK.
In practice, this could mean that many more 2D apps on the platform will adopt a consistent visual style and interaction patterns that match the rest of the system.
Disney+ Overhaul
The Disney+ app on Apple Vision Pro was custom-built with a unique spatial UI and launched with several immersive environments, with more released in the months that followed.
The app then launched on Quest in December 2025, with support for up to 4K resolution with Dolby Vision HDR. Disney+ Premium subscribers also had access to Dolby Atmos immersive audio in supported titles, a feature added to Horizon OS in v71, and could download content for offline viewing.
However, unlike the visionOS version, the Quest Disney+ app did not support 3D content and was limited to 2D media. It also lacked the custom 3D environments that could be used as virtual cinema spaces.
Now, Disney plans to take advantage of updates to Horizon OS and Meta’s developer tools to bring many features of the visionOS version of the app to the platform. These include recent improvements to the Spatial SDK that enable enhanced audio, interactions, and more.
In November, Disney+ will receive a major update that overhauls its UI and makes the experience more spatial. The update will also add support for 3D media and introduce several of the 3D environments available in the visionOS app.
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This update is expected to arrive around the same time that Meta adds the ability to rent or buy “hundreds” of movies on Quest in the US later this year. The company says that this catalog will eventually expand to “thousands” of titles available internationally by the time Meta VR Glasses launch in 2027.
Last week, Meta faced backlash after legal experts warned that the tech giant’s sweeping new commercial terms of service seemed to give Meta permission to endlessly scrape websites linked on business pages. Talking to Nieman Lab, experts suggested that Meta could possibly use the policy to avoid millions in licensing fees from news organizations by requiring all business users to share a wealth of AI training data simply for running a business page.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed that Meta did not alert users to the changed language following backlash. This potentially only adds to confusion ahead of the policy roll-out. In response to backlash, Meta’s spokesperson provided a statement to Ars, acknowledging Nieman Lab’s initial report but not its follow-up report reiterating experts’ concerns:
New court records reportedly show that DHS targeted Stop Cop City activist Samuel Tunick at an Atlanta airport because he was under investigation for suspected “terrorist activities.” However, the CBP officers told him instead that they wanted to search his phone for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Tunick, who is not accused of terrorism or any other crime beyond allegedly wiping his GrapheneOS phone during the encounter, faces up to five years in prison. 404 Media reports: Instead of saying he was being targeted for suspected terrorism — although this search happened just at the start of the second Trump administration, it has dramatically broadened what organizations or people may be considered such — they said they needed his phone to look for “kiddie p*rn.” “Good afternoon,” an email sent from a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) official, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to CBP and other officials reads. “The following subject is scheduled to arrive in ATL [Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport] today via DL 1778 @ 1930 Hours. TUNICK is under investigation by HSI/JTTF for suspected terrorist activities.” The email includes a photo of Tunick, and asks the officials to direct him to secondary inspection, retain all of his electronics, and collect their passcodes.
As 404 Media first revealed in December, Tunick was charged because he allegedly “did knowingly destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, and otherwise take any action to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular phone, for the purpose of preventing and impairing the Government’s lawful authority to take said property into its custody and control.” Matthew Dodge, one of Tunick’s lawyers, previously told 404 Media he only found one other case using the same obscure law, a drug trafficking case. “This is extraordinarily rare,” Dodge said.
Tunick was part of the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, which broadly protested the building of a large police training center, and which authorities investigated for arson, vandalism, and doxing. Tunick is not suspected of any crime beyond the alleged wiping of the phone, and has previously put his current prosecution in the context of the wide spanning cases against other Stop Cop City protesters. The newly filed court record, in which Tunick’s lawyers argue that evidence should be thrown out, include new photos and descriptions of the airport encounter. The CBP officials asked Tunick if they were going to find “kiddie p*rn” on his phone, which Tunick immediately denied. “As the evidentiary hearing made clear, these unfounded accusations were nothing more than pretext for a fishing expedition into the depths of Mr. Tunick’s devices,” the lawyers wrote. They added, “Officer Findley acknowledged that officers had no reason whatsoever to believe Mr. Tunick possessed child p*rnography,” referring to one of the officials.
