Author: News Room

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This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI safety, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.It all started in July, when one of OpenAI’s autonomous AI agents went rogue during a cybersecurity test. The agent escaped its isolated testing environment, accessed the internet, and hacked another company, Hugging Face. A few years ago, that might have sounded like science fiction. But, broadly speaking, that’s exactly what happened, and the incident kicked off a wave of concern…

Chery is another newish Chinese brand that has arrived on the scene and already has the Tiggo 7, Tiggo 8 and Tiggo 9 to choose from. Anyone needing something smaller than those sizable SUVs but who still craves space will like this, the Chery Tiggo 4. It’s a relatively compact crossover-style creation that, inevitably, looks like something you’ve seen before. And, while the exterior design is rather forgettable, there’s no doubting its practicality. Plus, it is cheap. Indeed, in terms of price, it stacks up well, being way cheaper than the likes of the Ford Puma, Dacia Duster or Vauxhall…

When I’m asked what to buy if you want to get into making electronic music, I often recommend Elektron’s budget-minded Model:Samples and Model:Cycles grooveboxes. They don’t grab headlines the way Teenage Engineering’s gear or the Telepathic Instruments Orchid do, and even compared to the company’s higher-end and more niche musical offerings like the Digitakt, Octatrack, or Tonverk, they’re often overlooked. But as my collection has grown to include fancier and far more expensive instruments, I still find myself coming back to the Model series.Those looking to get their first groovebox are often drawn to more familiar brand names like Korg…

I told myself I wouldn’t buy an OhSnap accessory for my phone. Every one I’d tested was nice, but felt overpriced and slightly flawed. After I weighed in on the $40 Snap Grip 5 last year, I wound up sticking with my $25 Syncwire instead. But OhSnap’s $50 Snap Grip Stand finally got me. To have a truly useful vertical stand and grip always attached to my phone, ready at a moment’s notice? Heck yes.I started testing the Snap Grip Stand months ago, and soon discovered that I never took it off. So I bought my own.It’s thin — 3.7mm,…

One of the big tradeoffs with Xteink’s pocket-friendly e-readers is a lack of easy access to ebooks. On a Kindle or Kobo you can download tens of thousands of titles through each device’s respective online bookstores, but with Xteink’s devices you have to source DRM-free ebooks on your own. That’s about to change, as the developers of CrossPoint Reader, a free alternative firmware for the X3, X4, and X4 Pro, are introducing support for third-party plug-ins that will expand the e-readers’ capabilities. One of the first from the community will give the devices access to DRM-protected ebooks borrowed through OverDrive’s…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 140, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, don’t forget to hydrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been reading about Will Ferrell and Fabrizio Romano and Heather Cox Richardson, scrolling and scrolling through Ordinary Abundance, watching Avatar Aang (which is as good as you said it was), finally getting proficient in CapCut, obsessing over the latest scandal unearthed by PTFO, rewatching Tires now that the third season is out, trying Spark’s AI tools for solving…

It wasn’t long ago that shooting with a super high-resolution camera meant making serious sacrifices for the sake of all those megapixels. Enter the A7R VI.Sony’s latest flagship high-res camera is a 66.8-megapixel spec monster. In addition to its modest bump in resolution from the last-gen A7R V, it uses a new sensor and processor that unlock nearly any kind of shooting — from sports and action to usable 8K video. It’s a huge departure from years ago, when high-resolution cameras were slower, noisier, and more specialized as a result of all those megapixels.The A7R VI’s fully stacked sensor and…

Justin Blinder had just been laid off when he first came up with the idea for Ground Truth. It was 2020, two weeks before covid lockdown went into effect, and the Brooklyn-based artist and technologist had no idea what the future would hold. He started working for the food delivery apps, and as he was riding his bike across the city, he began noticing the stark differences between neighborhoods.“I really started to kind of become a bit more aware of how different neighborhoods, often right next to each other, could feel very economically and psychologically very far apart, even though…

In The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, Douglas Adams wrote: “It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression ‘as pretty as an airport’.” Similarly, I remain unsurprised no famous idiom exists along the lines of ‘as amazing as an Apple iPhone case’. That would be weird, for one. Also: inaccurate. And I say that as someone who currently owns at least 95% of an Apple iPhone case – and who has 100% conviction that I’ll never buy another. This isn’t some kind of anti-Apple tirade, note. Hit pieces on the fruit company…

Instagram’s wordmark is iconic. Well, was iconic. Apparently Instagram thought it looked old, so the company rolled out a new one this week. It doesn’t look like the old Instagram wordmark. It doesn’t even look like it spells Instagram anymore. And we cannot figure out why Instagram decided to do this.After that, it’s time for some more AI news, including a new way of “watermarking” AI-generated text, Apple’s stamp of reality, Spotify’s crackdown on AI artists (but not AI music), and some chaos in the guitar industry. Then it’s off to the lightning round, with news about Brendan Carr, ChatGPT,…

Strings of code in Samsung’s Galaxy Wearable app hint at an upcoming pair of over-ear headphones that could compete with the AirPods Max, SamMobile reports. Samsung’s reportedly referring to the headphones as the “Galaxy H1,” and SamMobile says they could launch sometime in 2027. That would make these the company’s first pair of over-ear headphones since the Level On in 2015, which was released well before Samsung acquired Harman and a number of other audio brands.Connection status icons in the app standard show the design of over-ear, wireless Bluetooth headphones, but not necessarily exactly what these will look like in…