Apple has begun shipping U.S.-made AI servers from a new factory in Houston, Texas — part of its $600 billion investment in American manufacturing and supply chains. CNBC reports: Apple Chief Operating Officer Sabih Khan said on Thursday that the servers will power the company’s Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute services. Apple is using its own silicon in its Apple Intelligence servers. “Our teams have done an incredible job accelerating work to get the new Houston factory up and running ahead of schedule and we plan to continue expanding the facility to increase production next year,” Khan said in a statement. The Houston factory is on track to create thousands of jobs, Apple said. The Apple servers were previously manufactured overseas.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom’s Guide: Microsoft Teams is about to deal a heavy blow to those who like to work from home for peace and quiet. In a new feature update rolling out December 2025, the platform will track a worker’s location using the office Wi-Fi, to see whether you’re actually there or not. From a boss’ perspective, this would eliminate any of that confusion as to where your team actually is. But for those people who have found their own sanctuary of peaceful productivity by working from home, consider this a warning that Teams is about to tattle on you. According to the Microsoft 365 roadmap: “When users connect to their organization’s Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in.” The location of that worker will apparently update automatically upon connecting.

It’s set to launch on Windows and macOS, with rollout starting at the end of this year. “This feature will be off by default,” notes Microsoft. But “tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in.”

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IBM announced that its quantum error-correction algorithm can now run in real time on standard AMD field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips — a major step toward making quantum computing more practical and affordable. Reuters reports: In June, IBM said it had developed an algorithm to run alongside quantum chips that can address such errors. In a research paper seen by Reuters to be published on Monday, IBM will show it can run those algorithms in real time on a type of chip called a field programmable gate array manufactured by AMD.

Jay Gambetta, director of IBM research, said the work showed that IBM’s algorithm not only works in the real world, but can operate on a readily available AMD chip that is not “ridiculously expensive.” “Implementing it, and showing that the implementation is actually 10 times faster than what is needed, is a big deal,” Gambetta said in an interview. IBM has a multi-year plan to build a quantum computer called Starling by 2029. Gambetta said the algorithm work disclosed Friday was completed a year ahead of schedule.

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Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) has announced Halo: Campaign Evolved, a full Unreal Engine 5 remake of the original Halo: Combat Evolved campaign, coming in 2026 for Xbox Series X, Windows PC, and — shockingly — PlayStation 5. “It’s really a new era — Halo is on PlayStation going forward,” Halo Studios community director Brian Jarrard said on a livestream today. Polygon reports: Halo: Campaign Evolved is a from-the-ground-up remake of the first Halo game’s campaign. It’s being built in Unreal Engine 5 — unlike previous Halo games, which have been developed with proprietary software. It aims to modernize the game without changing it on a fundamental level. […]

As signaled by the name, Campaign Evolved will not feature PvP multiplayer, as its focus is on the campaign (Combat Evolved had splitscreen competitive multiplayer modes). However, you’ll still be able to play Halo: Campaign Evolved with your buddies. It’ll support splitscreen two-player local co-op as well as four-player online. Most notably, it’ll support full crossplay and cross-progression.

Gameplay is being changed in ways that are more aligned with later entries in the series. Master Chief will be able to pick up and use enemy weapons that he couldn’t use until later Halo games, like the iconic Energy Sword. He’ll be able to pilot the Covenant Wraith tank in the original game for the first time, and can hijack vehicles (or get hijacked). Campaign Evolved is also implementing a sprint button, altering the way players can move about the battlefield. You can watch a reveal video for the game on YouTube.

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Researchers and users of LLMs have long been aware that AI models have a troubling tendency to tell people what they want to hear, even if that means being less accurate. But many reports of this phenomenon amount to mere anecdotes that don’t provide much visibility into how common this sycophantic behavior is across frontier LLMs.

Two recent research papers have come at this problem a bit more rigorously, though, taking different tacks in attempting to quantify exactly how likely an LLM is to listen when a user provides factually incorrect or socially inappropriate information in a prompt.

Solve this flawed theorem for me

In one pre-print study published this month, researchers from Sofia University and ETH Zurich looked at how LLMs respond when false statements are presented as the basis for difficult mathematical proofs and problems. The BrokenMath benchmark that the researchers constructed starts with “a diverse set of challenging theorems from advanced mathematics competitions held in 2025.” Those problems are then “perturbed” into versions that are “demonstrably false but plausible” by an LLM that’s checked with expert review.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The outage that hit Amazon Web Services and took out vital services worldwide was the result of a single failure that cascaded from system to system within Amazon’s sprawling network, according to a post-mortem from company engineers. […] Amazon said the root cause of the outage was a software bug in software running the DynamoDB DNS management system. The system monitors the stability of load balancers by, among other things, periodically creating new DNS configurations for endpoints within the AWS network. A race condition is an error that makes a process dependent on the timing or sequence events that are variable and outside the developers’ control. The result can be unexpected behavior and potentially harmful failures.
In this case, the race condition resided in the DNS Enactor, a DynamoDB component that constantly updates domain lookup tables in individual AWS endpoints to optimize load balancing as conditions change. As the enactor operated, it “experienced unusually high delays needing to retry its update on several of the DNS endpoints.” While the enactor was playing catch-up, a second DynamoDB component, the DNS Planner, continued to generate new plans. Then, a separate DNS Enactor began to implement them. The timing of these two enactors triggered the race condition, which ended up taking out the entire DynamoDB. […] The failure caused systems that relied on the DynamoDB in Amazon’s US-East-1 regional endpoint to experience errors that prevented them from connecting. Both customer traffic and internal AWS services were affected.

The damage resulting from the DynamoDB failure then put a strain on Amazon’s EC2 services located in the US-East-1 region. The strain persisted even after DynamoDB was restored, as EC2 in this region worked through a “significant backlog of network state propagations needed to be processed.” The engineers went on to say: “While new EC2 instances could be launched successfully, they would not have the necessary network connectivity due to the delays in network state propagation.” In turn, the delay in network state propagations spilled over to a network load balancer that AWS services rely on for stability. As a result, AWS customers experienced connection errors from the US-East-1 region. AWS network functions affected included the creating and modifying Redshift clusters, Lambda invocations, and Fargate task launches such as Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow, Outposts lifecycle operations, and the AWS Support Center. Amazon has temporarily disabled its DynamoDB DNS Planner and DNS Enactor automation globally while it fixes the race condition and add safeguards against incorrect DNS plans. Engineers are also updating EC2 and its network load balancer.

Further reading: Amazon’s AWS Shows Signs of Weakness as Competitors Charge Ahead

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The outage that hit Amazon Web Services and took out vital services worldwide was the result of a single failure that cascaded from system to system within Amazon’s sprawling network, according to a post-mortem from company engineers.

The series of failures lasted for 15 hours and 32 minutes, Amazon said. Network intelligence company Ookla said its DownDetector service received more than 17 million reports of disrupted services offered by 3,500 organizations. The three biggest countries where reports originated were the US, the UK, and Germany. Snapchat, AWS, and Roblox were the most reported services affected. Ookla said the event was “among the largest internet outages on record for Downdetector.”

It’s always DNS

Amazon said the root cause of the outage was a software bug in software running the DynamoDB DNS management system. The system monitors the stability of load balancers by, among other things, periodically creating new DNS configurations for endpoints within the AWS network. A race condition is an error that makes a process dependent on the timing or sequence events that are variable and outside the developers’ control. The result can be unexpected behavior and potentially harmful failures.

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I recently reviewed Even Realities G1 smart glasses (they’re very cool) and the first real-world thing I used them for was scamming someone. I told a local bartender I had an encyclopedic knowledge of film, and I would answer the hardest movie trivia question he could come up with in exchange for a drink. After a short consultation with Google, dude came back with “Who directed 1922’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?”

I tilted my head thoughtfully and repeated the question as if verifying I heard him right. The AI agent silently did its thing, and in about three seconds, the answer was floating before my eyes, totally invisible to everyone around me.

Credit: Stephen Johnson

“Robert Wiene?” I asked, feigning uncertainty. Boom! Free drink. It’s not the hardest trivia question, but I could have answered literally anything: the date Dr. Caligari was released, the day of the week it was, or the weather that day—all short work.

Bartenders know to be wary of bar bets, so this one was watching me like a hawk to make sure I wasn’t looking up the answer on my phone or something. He didn’t seem to suspect my glasses, and even if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered. Even inspected up close, G1s offer no indication of electronics of any kind: No USB port, no flashing light, no visible controls.

The AI agent is activated with a subtle tap behind the ear. Repeating the question sends the AI off for the answer, presented in a display that’s invisible to everyone but the wearer. You could do the same trick with a pair of Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses or audio-only smart glasses with AI.

I don’t like deceiving people, so I ended up telling the bartender what was up to and not accepting the drink, but it got me thinking about what more nefarious people than I could do (and probably already are) with AI smart glasses.

Just imagine what I did on a bigger level: a team of hustlers at bar trivia silently tapping their temples whenever “which actor played…?” was asked would never lose. It’s pretty small stakes, but not hard to imagine. Hypothetically, a hacked pair of smart glasses could be programmed to read the cards in your poker hand and give you the probability of winning in real time, either through the display or whispered in your ear. They could, hypothetically, make counting cards in blackjack effortless and undetectable. Stretching it out further, hypothetically, glasses could scan others players for “tells” that they’re bluffing, or read micro-expressions to give a constantly updated read on opponents.

Along the same lines, imagine attending a self-help meeting, and the leader, who you have never met, says, “I’ve had a vision about you” and begins to describe something that happened in your life exactly. All it would take would be glasses that recognize your face (supposedly coming to Meta Displays) connecting to a social media feed, which is then displayed in real time to the leader. Or you could go more subtle and engineer small “serendipities” like mentioning a movie someone recently saw and having exactly their opinion. It would only take a few of these and maybe some mystical patter to convince people you are divine being they should definitely donate to.

How to spot tricky smart glasses

I could go on, but you get the idea. Luckily, there are some indications when someone is using tech hidden in their eyeglasses. The most important is a general understanding of the possibilities of this technology. If someone seems to know something they shouldn’t, ask yourself if their glasses could be the source of their power. Here are some more specific giveaways.

Look for identifiable kinds of smart glasses

Credit: Meta

The most popular display style glasses, Meta Ray-Ban Displays, are distinctive looking, with a fairly obvious camera in one of the corners and a specific look and branding. But other kinds of smart glasses, like the Even Realities G1s mentioned above, are obscure enough that most won’t recognize them, and so “normal” looking that most people wouldn’t pick them out of lineup.

Look for where the tech is hidden

Most smart glasses are still fairly bulky, so look for thick arms or frames where the wires are hidden. But again, that’s only most smart glasses; some are totally sleek, with imperceptible tech.

Look for a small glint

In most situations, the display in display glasses is not visible to anyone but the glasses wearer, but there’s still light being projected. In a dark room, you can see a green glow, and even if it’s not dark, the display windows are visible if the light hits it just right, as you can see here:

Credit: Stephen Johnson

But honestly, it’s subtle and hard to spot.

Listen for the sounds

Older styles of audio-only smart glasses can feed information to wearers, but the open-air speakers mean some sound is bleeding into the atmosphere. You can definitely hear smart glasses if you’re in a quiet room and you’re trying to. If it’s loud, operating glasses becomes problematic for the wearer.

Look for the source of control

Smart glasses have to be controlled somehow. Meta Display glasses are operated with a wrist band. G1 glasses’ AI agent is powered on by tapping on the frames behind your ear. Anyone who practices for a few hours could make these movements seem natural, but they’re there if you know what to look for.

Odd movements and speech

It doesn’t take advanced stagecraft to operate these kinds of glasses imperceptibly, but it does take something. Tells might include small glances upward to see the display, tapping on glasses, stilted speech while waiting for information to come in, and a reading-a-teleprompter style of talking. Watch for people repeating questions back. But understand, it’s hard to spot. When I was conning my bartender, I thought how I repeated the question back was obvious, but my wife said I just seemed a little odd, which suits the personality of a trivia whizz anyway.

Smart glasses are powerful tools, like a hammer or a calculator. Like any innocent tool, they can be used for nefarious things, so until manufacturers or regulators require obvious indicators, like flashing lights or visible controls, we have to protect ourselves by paying attention to these small cues and staying skeptical when someone seems to know more than they reasonably should.

A 61-year-old man in California is lucky to be alive after a combination of herbal supplements he was taking for joint pain ended up utterly wrecking his body, landing him in intensive care and in a delirious state for months. His case is reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine: Clinical Cases.

The man turned up at a hospital in San Francisco in bad shape, but with nonspecific problems that had begun just two days earlier. His back hurt, he was feverish, nauseous, bloated, and he hadn’t been eating much. He was so weak he couldn’t walk or get out of bed without help. His heart rate and breathing rate were high. His blood pressure was low. There were multiple wounds on his lower body in various stages of healing.

Initial exams and lab work revealed Staphylococcus aureus bacteria in his blood. There was also an abscess on his shoulder and an infection in and around his spine, which was worsening. Doctors wanted to perform a surgical procedure to relieve the pressure building up on his spinal cord and nerves, but his blood pressure was too low—and then he went into hemorrhagic shock from bleeding in his gastrointestinal tract. Doctors transferred him to the intensive care unit.

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A study involving 641 participants across 10 European countries found pesticides in every silicone wristband worn for one week. Researchers at Radboud University tested for 193 pesticides and detected 173 substances. The average participant was exposed to 20 different pesticides through non-dietary sources. Non-organic farmers had the highest exposure at a median of 36 pesticides. Organic farmers and people living near farms recorded lower numbers.

Consumers living far from agricultural areas had a median of 17 pesticides. The wristbands captured banned substances including breakdown products of DDT, which was prohibited decades ago, and insecticides dieldrin and propoxur. Paul Scheepers, the molecular epidemiologist who co-authored the study, said people cannot avoid exposure to pesticides in their direct environment.

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For the past few years, Google’s Pixel phones have had recurring problems with calling 911, and the issue has once again reared its ugly head. Over the past 24 hours, multiple users on Reddit have complained about being unable to call 911, while the Bell carrier in Canada issued a warning that the Pixel 6 and up was also having problems contacting emergency services on its network.

According to user Fabulous_Disaster730, who posted yesterday about difficulties contacting emergency services during a gas leak, her Pixel 9 Pro repeatedly prompted her to turn on wifi calling or turn off airplane mode before she could call 911, despite her having full signal on both 5G and wifi. The phone would then freeze and restart. After multiple attempts, she resorted to asking a friend to place the call for her instead.

Multiple replies mentioned facing similar problems yesterday as well, across multiple networks and models of Pixel. Bell, however, was the only carrier to issue an official notice.

Aside from the obvious danger, the problem with this bug is that it’s not consistent. Despite seemingly having had a surge yesterday, it’s been a known issue as far back as 2021. However, it doesn’t affect all users, nor is it entirely predictable when or how it will pop up. While recent reports are of calls simply not going through, one user posted two months ago that their call did go through, but they only heard screeching and static on the other end of the line. These recent reports are only the latest in an ever-evolving concern.

It’s also not clear what’s causing the problem. In 2021, the problem was attributed to Microsoft Teams, but even with that error patched up, users are still facing problems. To Google’s credit, Bell said it reached out to the company shortly after it learned about yesterday’s uptick in cases, and afterwards said that a fix had been issued. However, no other carriers have issued similar notices, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see other users making their own complaints in the future.

It’s worth noting that Bell mentioned that Pixel 6 users and up were the ones affected this time around, and that the Pixel 6 also happened to release in 2021, which is when the bug first started making news. Whatever is at the core of the problem here, I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked its way in on the Pixel 6 and just hasn’t yet been addressed.

However, given the severity of the issue, it’s something that needs looking at sooner rather than later. I’ve reached out to Google for comment on this issue, and will update if I hear back. In the meantime, it’s best to be prepared in case the worst happens. If you’re on a Pixel phone, here’s what you can do to contact 911 in an emergency:

First, try to place a 911 call

If you have time and the danger is not immediate, it’s worth trying to call 911 on your Pixel despite the issues. While users reporting problems have increased as of late, it’s still not an everyone or every time problem. It’s possible your call will still go through without issue.

You can also text 911

If, however, you are unable to call 911, it’s worth remembering that in certain jurisdictions (check this regularly updated list to see if where you live is supported), you can also contact 911 via text. This is a slower method of reaching out for help, but is still better than nothing. To text 911, open your texting app, put in 911 as the recipient, and write a concise message with your issue, your location, and any necessary specifics, like cross streets, landmarks, a specific hiding location, or whether you’re able to talk.

Use a backup phone

While I don’t expect someone who isn’t constantly reviewing tech to have multiple phones on hand, the surest method to ensure you’ll be able to call 911 if you’re on a Pixel is to keep a backup phone that isn’t a Pixel handy. This could be a landline or another cell phone. Crucially, it can be an old cell phone, even one that isn’t actively attached to a phone plan. So long as your phone is able to connect to a network, it’s legally required to be able to call 911, so if you have an old phone you’ve upgraded from and haven’t traded in laying around, it may be smart to keep it charged up in case you need it in an emergency.

One of the things that emerging diseases, including the COVID and Zika pandemics, have taught us is that it’s tough to keep up with infectious diseases in the modern world. Things like air travel can allow a virus to spread faster than our ability to develop therapies. But that doesn’t mean biotech has stood still; companies have been developing technologies that could allow us to rapidly respond to future threats.

There are a lot of ideas out there. But this week saw some early clinical trial results of one technique that could be useful for a range of infectious diseases. We’ll go over the results as a way to illustrate the sort of thinking that’s going on, along with the technologies we have available to pursue the resulting ideas.

The best antibodies

Any emerging disease leaves a mass of antibodies in its wake—those made by people in response to infections and vaccines, those made by lab animals we use to study the infectious agent, and so on. Some of these only have a weak affinity for the disease-causing agent, but some of them turn out to be what are called “broadly neutralizing.” These stick with high affinity not only to the original pathogen, but most or all of its variants, and possibly some related viruses.

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The U.S. will expand the use of facial recognition technology to track non-citizens entering and leaving the country in order to combat visa overstays and passport fraud, according to a government document published on Friday. Reuters: A new regulation will allow U.S. border authorities to require non-citizens to be photographed at airports, seaports, land crossings and any other point of departure, expanding on an earlier pilot program.

Under the regulation, set to take effect on December 26, U.S. authorities could require the submission of other biometrics, such as fingerprints or DNA, it said. It also allows border authorities to use facial recognition for children under age 14 and elderly people over age 79, groups that are currently exempted. The tighter border rules reflect a broader effort by U.S. President Donald Trump to crack down on illegal immigration. While the Republican president has surged resources to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, he has also taken steps to reduce the number of people overstaying their visas.

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Before there’s a new Halo game, Halo Studios is revisiting the past. Xbox has announced Halo: Campaign Evolved, a remake of the first game in the storied shooter series, Halo: Combat Evolved, developed by Halo Studios and coming to Xbox, PC and PS5 in 2026.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is described as “a faithful yet modernized remake” of the first game’s campaign, with updated visuals and cinematics, “refined controls” and “three brand-new prequel missions featuring the Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson.”

The game will feature new weapons, vehicles and enemies, along with the all-important option for two-player splitscreen co-op on console. The game will also support cross-platform play with PS5 for the first time, and four-player online co-op between consoles and PC.

Halo: Campaign Evolved will be available in 2026 for Xbox Series X / S, PS5 and PC.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/halo-campaign-evolved-is-a-remake-of-the-original-story-coming-to-xbox-pc-and-ps5-in-2026-203913552.html?src=rss