An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Uber employees have built an AI clone of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi — internally dubbed “Dara AI” — and have been using it to rehearse and fine-tune presentations before delivering them to the actual Khosrowshahi, he revealed on a recent podcast.

Khosrowshahi said a team member told him that some teams “make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me,” and that the bot helps them adjust their slides and sharpen their delivery. Asked by the podcast host whether employees might eventually show Dara AI to the board, Khosrowshahi laughed but noted that AI models still can’t process and act on new information the way executives do. “When the models can learn in real-time, that is the point at which I’m going to think that, yeah, we are all replaceable,” he said.

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Anthropic last week promoted Claude Code Security, a research preview capability that uses its Claude Opus 4.6 model to hunt for software vulnerabilities, claiming its red team had surfaced over 500 bugs in production open-source codebases — but security researchers say the real bottleneck was never discovery.

Guy Azari, a former security researcher at Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks, told The Register that only two to three of those 500 vulnerabilities have been fixed and none have received CVE assignments. The National Vulnerability Database already carried a backlog of roughly 30,000 CVE entries awaiting analysis in 2025, and nearly two-thirds of reported open-source vulnerabilities lacked an NVD severity score.

The curl project closed its bug bounty program because maintainers could no longer handle the flood of poorly crafted reports from AI tools and humans alike. Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO of security firm Socket, said discovery is becoming dramatically cheaper but validating findings, coordinating with maintainers, and developing architecture-aligned patches remains slow, human-intensive work.

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Kalshi, the prediction market platform regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has for the first time publicly disclosed the results of an insider trading investigation, naming an editor for YouTube’s biggest creator as the offender.

The company identified Artem Kaptur, an editor for MrBeast, who it says traded around $4,000 on markets tied to the streamer and achieved “near-perfect trading success” on low-odds bets — a pattern investigators flagged as suspicious. Kalshi froze Kaptur’s account before he could withdraw any profits, fined him $20,000, suspended him for two years, and reported the case to the CFTC.

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It’s always a fun day for the space nerds when a NASA team has new images to share from the James Webb Space Telescope. Today’s pair has brains on the brain, with a look at the fittingly named Exposed Cranium Nebula. More officially, this cloud of space dust and debris is known as Nebula PMR 1. The images shared today may capture a moment in the final stages of a star, as well as giving hints as to how the nebula got its brain-like shape.  

“The nebula appears to have distinct regions that capture different phases of its evolution — an outer shell of gas that was blown off first and consists mostly of hydrogen, and an inner cloud with more structure that contains a mix of different gases,” NASA’s blog post reads. The dark line that runs vertically through the nebula, giving it the cranial appearance, could be the result of “an outburst or outflow from the central star, which typically occurs as twin jets burst out in opposite directions.” Both Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) were used to document the nebula.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/new-webb-telescope-photos-show-off-the-exposed-cranium-nebula-235609619.html?src=rss

Determined to beat the previous longest drone flight world record of 3 hours 12 minutes, this is a video of Luke Maximo Bell designing, building, and flying a carbon fiber massively propellered quadrocopter for 3 hours and 31 minutes. But did it deliver any drugs? You may previously recall Luke setting the world record for fastest quadrocopter drone, with this 363MPH electric missile. The man loves drones. Me? I love good food and fine wine. I’m kidding, I love fast food and Mad Dog 20/20s. *shrug* We all have our Achilles’ heel. Mine just happens to be in both heels, plus gout.

Telegram is among the most popular WhatsApp alternatives around. Telegram supports messaging individuals and groups, but it also has social media-like channels where you can post to thousands of subscribers at once. In this piece, I’ll be focusing more on Telegram as a messenger, since that’s how I use it the most. In my decade of using the app, I’ve learned quite a bit about it, and I’m here to share the best Telegram hacks that you should know.

You need to manually enable end-to-end encryption

Unlike Signal or WhatsApp, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default. End-to-end encryption ensures that your messages cannot be read by anyone without accessing either your device or the recipient’s device, and at this point, it’s become an industry standard security protocol for messaging apps. You can enable end-to-end encryption in Telegram, but it requires a few extra steps, and even then, the implementation is not very user-friendly. Secret Chat is Telegram’s name for messages that have end-to-end encryption, and to access it, follow these steps:

1. Open Telegram and start a chat with a contact.

2. In the chat window, tap the name of the contact up top.

3. On the next page, tap more, and select Start Secret Chat.

4. You now need to wait for the recipient to come online and accept your request to start a Secret Chat. When they do, that conversation will become end-to-end encrypted.

Sadly, you’ll have to repeat this process with each of your contacts, which leaves you with two different chats per contact (a Secret Chat and a normal chat). The other limitation is that you can’t access Secret Chats on multiple devices. They’re limited to your phone and the recipient’s phone, and won’t show up on Telegram’s desktop app. It’s great for security, but not as good for convenience.

Don’t forget to delete your old profile photos

When you add a new profile picture to your Telegram account, it does not automatically delete the previous picture. That means your contacts can still go to your profile and see your older profile pictures. To fix this, open the Telegram app and go to the Settings page (which is within the bottom bar on iOS and hidden under the three-lines menu on other platforms). Tap your profile photo, select the Edit button, and delete the pictures you don’t want to keep.

Disable unwanted notifications

Credit: Pranay Parab

Telegram tends to be a bit spammy with its notifications. By default, you’ll get an alert whenever any of your contacts joins Telegram, which gets tiring very fast. You can disable these unwanted notifications by going to Telegram Settings > Notifications and Sounds and disabling New Contacts. While you’re on this page, you can take a moment to disable any other notification types you might not want to see, including Group Chats, Stories, Channels, Reactions, etc.

Change when Telegram auto-deletes your account

Telegram is a bit aggressive about deleting inactive accounts. It will automatically delete your account if you don’t use the app for six months. This isn’t going to bother regular users, but it’s a good idea to customize this duration based on your needs. Telegram lets you set the auto-delete timer for anywhere from 1 month to 24 months, so you can pick the option that’s best for you. Go to Telegram Settings > Privacy and Security > If Away For to make the change.

You can block Telegram calls

Telegram supports voice and video calls, which is pretty standard for messaging apps. Unlike most of its competitors, though, Telegram allows you to block voice and video calls entirely. Just head over to Telegram Settings > Privacy and Security > Calls and select Nobody.

Enhance your Telegram account’s security

It’s never a bad idea to add a few extra layers of security to your Telegram account. The app supports two-step verification and passkeys, and you can enable both by going to Telegram Settings > Privacy and Security. Both options are located near the top of this page.

Lower your data usage

One of Telegram’s best features is granular controls for its various settings, including how much data the app uses. This is great for people with metered internet connections. You can access these options under Telegram Settings > Data and Storage. Go to Using Cellular and Using Wi-Fi to customize how much data the app uses. If you set data usage to Low, Telegram will compress media to preserve bandwidth. On the same page, you can also disable all auto-downloads for photos, stories, videos, and files. Or, if you tap any of these options, you can individually disable auto-downloads based on the type of chat. For instance, Telegram lets you disable automatic downloads of photos, videos, files, and stories from only group chats or only channels. This way, it’ll still automatically download media sent in private chats, but not in group chats.

You can also go to the Data and Storage settings page, and enable Use Less Data for Calls. This will compress audio a little bit, but can be helpful for staying under data limits.

Automate the built-in power saving mode

Telegram has a built-in power saving mode that conserves battery by reducing animations or disabling autoplaying videos and other intensive processes. Set it up by going to Telegram Settings > Power Saving. The slider at the top lets you set a battery percentage, and power saving will automatically turn on if your phone dips below it. I’ve set it to 30%, but you can choose a different number if you like. On the same page, you can also manually disable resource intensive processes, which I’ve used it to turn off autoplaying videos and gifs entirely.

Telegram groups have useful granular controls

Credit: Pranay Parab

Group messaging is one area where Telegram allows you to do a lot more than its competition. After creating a group, tap the group’s name, select Group Settings, and you’ll see a plethora of options. Under Permissions, you’ll be able to decide if group members can send messages, voice notes, photos, videos, music, links, add members, pin messages, etc. On the same page, you can also enable Slow Mode, which enforces a minimum delay between two messages from the same member. If you set this to 1 minute, then members will have to wait a minute before sending their second message.

I would love to see other apps also implement a version of Slow Mode, as it stops people from spamming the group with multiple short messages in a row. Additional settings include enabling Topics, which lets you create different “channels” within a group to keep discussions from going astray (separate from the social media “channels” mentioned at the start of this guide). You can think of these like separate channels in Slack or IRC, so in larger groups, you can have separate topics to discuss sport or politics. This keeps the main feed free of unnecessary messages and assigns dedicated spots for different topics.

Telegram Premium adds features you probably don’t need

Telegram has a subscription service ($5/mo) that lets you access features such as unlimited cloud storage (with a maximum of 4GB per document), chat transcription, automatic translation of incoming messages, support for checklists in the app, the ability to see when someone was last seen online (bypassing their privacy settings), and more. These features are great for people who have channels with a large following, but for most people, none of these features are essential. Other than the generous cloud storage, you can get all of these features in other apps for free. And even cloud storage has strong alternatives, including small providers like Proton or larger ones like Google and Apple.

Because who doesn’t wish they were more feline (I’d love to just sleep all day and knock things off tables), these are several shots of the cat claw inspired nails crafted by Jane of 2hi4dis.nails, complete with fleshy quicks. She even provides a video tutorial (2nd video below) if you want to make your own. Could you even imagine getting your back scratched with those? Just a total bloodbath.

Tech companies ranging from 300-person startups to giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce have moved beyond encouraging employees to use AI tools and are now actively tracking adoption and, in several cases, tying it to performance reviews. Google is factoring AI use into some software engineer reviews for the first time this year, and Meta’s new performance review system will do the same — it can track how many lines of code an engineer wrote with AI assistance.

Amazon Web Services managers have dashboards showing individual engineer AI-tool usage and consider adoption when evaluating promotions. About 42% of tech-industry workers said their direct manager expects AI use in daily work as of last October, up from 32% eight months earlier, according to AI consulting firm Section. At software maker Autodesk, CEO Andrew Anagnost acknowledged that some employees had been using initially blocked coding tools like Cursor stealthily — and warned that AI holdouts “probably won’t survive long term.”

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