TechCrunch Mobility's new robotaxi scorecard puts Chinese operators well ahead of US and European rivals on daily rides, city footprint and fleet size. We unpack what the data says, why the gap has widened in 2026, and which cities lead the pack.
Sandi Metz's 2016 essay The Wrong Abstraction returned to the top of Hacker News this week. We unpack her thesis — that duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction — and why it still shapes how software teams make codebase decisions in 2026.
The UK Home Office plans to roll out a facial-age-estimation system for asylum seekers by year-end, even though its own pilot testing showed the technology can wrongly classify children as adults — with life-altering consequences for those affected.
When the first Roomba landed in 2002, most experts thought consumer robotics would be a market dead end. The Verge's new Version History podcast traces the 25-year arc with iRobot co-founder Colin Angle — from a military robot company to the world's most beloved household machine.
Apple's iOS 27, unveiled at WWDC 2026, packed the headlines with Siri's AI overhaul — but the practical wins sit elsewhere. We break down the new Apple Intelligence features arriving in Notes, Messages, Translate, Health, Memories and Reminders, with the trade-offs each carries.
A new field guide on Martin Fowler's site, drawing on the field experience of Bayer's engineering team, sets out practical architectures and test patterns for building reliable agentic AI systems in production. The piece has quickly become a reference for the developer community.
A new TechCrunch analysis traces the history of crypto and cyber export controls from the Phil Zimmermann PGP case in the 1990s through to today's debate over the commercial spyware Mythos. The pattern is clear: controls have come late, been too narrow or too broad.
The Atlantic has made an interactive database that lets users search by artist, album and label through the audio files identified as being used to train AI music-generation models. The release opens a new phase in the debate over training-data transparency.
The Trump administration has stepped back from a plan to shutter the US ocean-monitoring buoy and satellite programme. The reversal followed a bipartisan Senate Environment Committee vote and strong objections from the fishing industry.
The president of the encrypted messaging app Signal, Meredith Whittaker, said the language of "assistants", "friends" and "companions" used to market chatbots is eroding consumer privacy expectations. Her comments reopen a debate about how chatbots are funded by advertising and what data flows they rely on.
This year's Kavli Prize in Neuroscience went to the work showing that brain cells tag past experiences with 'synaptic markers' that move them into long-term memory. The IBM Think summary asks what the finding could change in AI design.
Coral reefs are among the ecosystems most rapidly damaged by global warming. Ars Technica reports on the scientists searching for heat-tolerant coral colonies that could act as 'seed reefs' in the warmer oceans of the future.
NASA has picked Relativity Space — the rocket company former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired in 2025 — to deliver its next low-cost Mars mission. The Verge says the $1.2bn contract targets a launch window in the summer of 2028.
India's ban on Telegram has driven tens of millions of users to VPNs and alternative messaging apps. TechCrunch reports the move has reignited a wider debate on content moderation and data compliance.
TechCrunch lists the 14 nuclear fusion startups that have crossed the $100m fundraising mark. Total private capital in the sector now passes $9bn, with approaches ranging from magnetic confinement to inertial and hybrid designs.
The open-source analytical database DuckDB has become a standard component in data-science tool stacks over the past three years. A new technical post highlighted on Hacker News walks through the three core design choices behind the engine's speed — columnar storage, vectorised execution and zero-copy integration.
Google has set out the timeline and scope for mandatory Android developer verification in a new planning document covered by Ars Technica. Certification will extend beyond the Play Store to the other major third-party stores and will introduce a new compliance framework for sideloaded APKs.
Microsoft's Threat Intelligence team has documented a lightweight, self-propagating backdoor designed to steal wallet keys. According to Ars Technica, the malware spreads as a compressed payload, mimics system processes to bypass existing security tools and systematically scans the typical file paths where crypto wallets are stored.
According to TechCrunch, Amazon is preparing to sell the Trainium and Inferentia chips it designs and manufactures inside AWS directly to enterprise customers as well. The move is being read as the first concrete enterprise-grade alternative to Nvidia's Hopper/Blackwell line in market share.
The steady stream of notifications that smartphone economics built into daily life has spawned a debate stretching from academic research to product design. TechCrunch reports that a new movement known as "slow tech" is trying to make conscious, low-dose use — rather than constant attention disruption — the default design frame.
New research has shown that AI coding agents can directly supervise robots and train them to install GPUs, tie cable bindings and perform other data-centre maintenance tasks. The study points to a vision of physical automation with less human intervention.
Cybercriminals claim to have breached tens of thousands of Fortinet firewalls used by major companies around the world, TechCrunch reports. If verified, the incident would be one of the largest corporate security breaches in recent years.
A new Pew Research Center survey finds that while 64% of Americans see possible benefits of artificial intelligence, 66% believe the technology is advancing faster than it can be governed. The survey covered 5,000 adults.
Amazon Web Services and the neutral-atom quantum computing company QuEra have released a joint roadmap saying useful quantum error correction could be reached by 2028. The roadmap shortens earlier industry estimates.
Best known as a consumer AI image generator, Midjourney has unveiled Midjourney Medical, a full-body ultrasound scanning system that has secured FDA clearance. The company used more than 18 million anonymised clinical scans to train the model.
The Verge has aggregated fresh Apple supply-chain rumors pointing to two flagship products for 2027: a new AirPods generation with camera modules for AI and a second-generation folding iPhone.
Google has begun rolling out Android 17 to Pixel devices. The release brings improved split-screen tools, expanded Gemini agents and long-awaited battery-life optimisations.
Leaked internal documents reviewed by Ars Technica indicate OpenAI is losing roughly $38.5 billion a year, with high-performance GPU compute the dominant cost line.
A widely shared Hacker News post argues that running open-weight language models on your own laptop is finally practical. Hardware, model sizes and the surrounding tooling ecosystem have all made big steps in the past year.
A widely shared write-up on Hacker News explains the recurring problems with JWT-based session management and why returning to old-fashioned session cookies is often a safer architectural choice.