We’ll soon get a closer look at a bunch of features and updates Google has planned for Android and its other services. The company has confirmed that Google I/O 2026 will take place on May 19 and 20. As always, Google will stream some of the keynotes and sessions for free, including the opening keynote (during which the company makes the bulk of its major I/O announcements).

Although I/O is primarily a conference for developers, it’s typically where we first learn about major upcoming Android changes, which of course affect tens of millions of people. Expect a lot of news about Google’s AI efforts as well, such as what’s next for Gemini.

As has been the case for several years, Google revealed the conference’s dates for 2026 after enough folks completed a puzzle on the I/O website. This year’s puzzle has multiple “builds” to play through, all of which use Gemini.

They start with a mini-golf game in which a virtual caddy that’s powered by Gemini offers some of the most anodyne advice imaginable. The second build is a nonogram. If you’ve ever played a Picross game, you’ll know what to do here. It’s about using logic to place tiles on a grid in order to create an image. Here, Google is using Gemini to generate “endless game boards.”

The other three minigames are Word Wheel (which “leverages Gemini 3 to automate level design”), Super Sonicbot (which “uses Gemini to introduce microphone mechanics where noise controls the Android Bot’s altitude”) and Stretchy Cat. The latter “uses Gemini 3 as a stage designer balancing game mechanics and difficulty to create endless play.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/google-io-2026-is-set-for-may-19-and-20-200805024.html?src=rss

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks” from AI, and believes most work involving “sitting down at a computer” — accounting, legal, marketing, project management — will be fully automated within the next year or 18 months. He pointed to exponential growth in computational power and predicted that creating a new AI model will soon be as easy as “creating a podcast or writing a blog.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI-related changes to Notepad—yes, that Notepad—allowed attackers to execute arbitrary code on your computer. The vulnerability was related to Markdown support, which was added last year. Markdown is a simple way to add formatting, including links, to plaintext documents—and links were the source of the vulnerability.

“An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad, causing the application to launch unverified protocols that load and execute remote files,” according to the security response notice.

Markdown has long been popular in certain parts of the internet—anyone who occasionally comments on Reddit or chats using Discord is likely at least a little familiar with it. But the markup language has become even more important in the age of AI—most documents are converted to plain text Markdown files to train models.

Microsoft is patching more bugs than ever in Windows 11

Markdown support was added around the same time Copilot was integrated into Notepad, as part of a broader push to add AI to every corner of the operating system. And there’s an argument to be made that all these AI additions are adding up to new vulnerabilities. Microsoft patched 1,129 bugs in 2025 according to Krebs on Security, a prominent cybersecurity blog. That’s an 11.9% increase over the previous year, which was already unusually high. Microsoft itself admits that AI agents will open up new vulnerabilities, even as the company adds them to Windows.

This is all to say that installing security updates is likely more important now than ever. Sure, you could disable all AI features in Windows, but that’s unlikely to protect you from all the new vulnerabilities—installing Linux might, though.

How to patch this Notepad vulnerability

Credit: Justin Pot

Luckily for Windows users, this vulnerability was fixed in Microsoft’s February 2026 security update. To find out if you’ve installed it, open the Settings app, head to “Windows Update,” then check if an update labeled “2026-02 Security Update” is waiting to be installed. If so, click the “Restart Now” button to install the update.

Texas is suing Wi-Fi router maker TP-Link for deceptively marketing the security of its products and allowing Chinese hacking groups to access Americans’ devices, Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced. Paxton originally started looking into TP-Link in October 2025. Texas Governor Greg Abbott later prohibited state employees from using TP-Link products in January of this year.

TP-Link is no longer owned by a Chinese company and its products are assembled in Vietnam, but Paxton’s lawsuit claims that because the company’s “ownership and supply-chain are tied to China” it’s subject to the country’s data laws, which require companies to comply with requests from Chinese intelligence agencies. The lawsuit also says that firmware vulnerabilities in TP-Link’s hardware have already “exposed millions of consumers to severe cybersecurity risks.”

Engadget has asked TP-Link to comment on the Texas lawsuit and Paxton’s claims. We’ll update this article if we hear back.

TP-Link was reportedly being investigated at the federal level in 2024 after its devices were connected to the massive “Salt Typhoon” hack that accessed data from multiple US telecom companies. Despite all signs pointing to the federal government getting ready to ban TP-Link in 2025, Reuters reports that the Trump administration paused plans to ban the company’s routers in early February, ahead of a meeting between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/texas-ag-sues-tp-link-over-purported-connection-to-china-193802258.html?src=rss

Britain has lost more than 14,000 pubs since 2009, a decline from roughly 54,000 registered public houses and bars to under 40,000 by 2022, according to a new analysis of UK business register data by data analyst Lauren Leek. The North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands lost 25 to 30% of their stock; London saw the smallest decline.

Leek trained a random forest model on 49,840 pubs and found spatial isolation — how far a pub stood from its nearest neighbour — was the single strongest predictor of closure. Median nearest-neighbour distance for surviving pubs is roughly 280 metres; for closed pubs, 640 metres. Each closure pushes remaining pubs further into isolation, a dynamic Leek calls a “spatial death spiral.”

Much of that isolation traces to ownership. Stonegate, Britain’s largest pub company and a holding of PE firm TDR Capital, carries over $4 billion in debt from its 2019 leveraged acquisition of Ei Group. PE-backed and overseas-owned companies now control roughly a quarter to a third of all British pubs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Talk show host Stephen Colbert said CBS forbade him from interviewing Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico because of a Federal Communications Commission threat to enforce the equal-time rule on late-night and daytime talk shows.

Talarico “was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert said on last night’s episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “Then I was told in some uncertain terms that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on, and because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”

Colbert went on to describe some of the background Ars readers are already familiar with. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr recently issued a warning to late-night and daytime talk shows that they may no longer qualify for the bona fide news exemption to the equal-time rule, and subsequently opened an investigation into ABC’s The View after an interview with Talarico.

Read full article

Comments

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

The Beats Powerbeats Pro have been on the market for years, and they remain a go-to option for people who work out and want earbuds that stay in place. At launch, they cost $249.95. Right now, they are $134.95 on Woot, and you can use code CNN2025 at checkout to take an extra $5 off. For comparison, refurbished units are selling for $149.97 on Amazon, which makes this new pair the better value. This deal runs for the next eight days or until stock runs out. Prime members get free standard shipping.

Beats Powerbeats Pro

$134.95
at Woot

$249.95
Save $115.00

$134.95
at Woot

$249.95
Save $115.00

What has kept the Powerbeats Pro relevant since their 2019 release is how well they handle the basics. Each earbud has an adjustable ear hook that wraps around your ear, along with four sizes of silicone tips to help you find a secure seal. During runs, strength training, or cycling sessions, that over-ear design makes a difference. They are also rated IPX4 for sweat and water resistance, so sweat-heavy workouts and light splashes shouldn’t be a problem, but they are not designed to be submerged. Using them is straightforward: Controls are physical and mirrored on both sides, which means you can adjust volume, skip tracks, or take calls from either ear without fumbling through touch gestures mid-workout. Built-in sensors automatically pause music when you remove an earbud and resume when you put it back in. 

As for battery life, you get up to nine hours of listening time on a single charge, with more than 24 additional hours from the charging case, notes this PCMag review. These earbuds do not offer active noise cancellation; instead, they rely on the passive noise isolation that comes from a snug in-ear seal. There’s also no customizable equalizer in the companion software. In other words, the sound profile is fixed out of the box, with the tuning leaning into the brand’s familiar presentation of strong bass and crisp highs.

Mark Fischbach, the YouTube creator known as Markiplier who has spent nearly 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers by playing indie-horror video games on camera, has pulled off something that most independent filmmakers never manage — a self-financed, self-distributed debut feature that has grossed more than $30 million domestically against a $3 million budget.

Iron Lung, a 127-minute sci-fi adaptation of a video game Fischbach wrote, directed, starred in, and edited himself, opened to $18.3 million in its first weekend and has since doubled that figure worldwide in just two weeks, nearly matching the $19.1 million debut of Send Help, a $40 million thriller from Disney-owned 20th Century Studios. Fischbach declined deals from traditional distributors and instead spent months booking theaters privately, encouraging fans to reserve tickets online; when prospective viewers found the film wasn’t screening in their city, they called local cinemas to request it, eventually landing Iron Lung on more than 3,000 screens across North America — all without a single paid media campaign.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than two years after Broadcom took over VMware, the virtualization company’s customers are still grappling with higher prices, uncertainty, and the challenges of reducing vendor lock-in.

Today, CloudBolt Software released a report, “The Mass Exodus That Never Was: The Squeeze Is Just Beginning,” that provides insight into those struggles. CloudBolt is a hybrid cloud management platform provider that aims to identify VMware customers’ pain points so it can sell them relevant solutions. In the report, CloudBolt said it surveyed 302 IT decision-makers (director-level or higher) at North American companies with at least 1,000 employees in January. The survey is far from comprehensive, but it offers a look at the obstacles these users face.

Broadcom closed its VMware acquisition in November 2023, and last month, 88 percent of survey respondents still described the change as “disruptive.” Per the survey, the most cited drivers of disruption were price increases (named by 89 percent of respondents), followed by uncertainty about Broadcom’s plans (85 percent), support quality concerns (78 percent), Broadcom shifting VMware from perpetual licenses to subscriptions (72 percent), changes to VMware’s partner program (68 percent), and the forced bundling of products (65 percent).

Read full article

Comments