Googlebooks on Android are up for preorder at the Google Store and Best Buy, hitting stores on Oct. 4. Prices range from $899 (Acer) to $1299 (Asus, Lenovo, HP), with 10 years of updates and a year of Google AI Pro with 5TB and Gemini Advanced.
External OEM enterprise storage revenue hit $10.3 billion in Q2 2026, up 33.6% year over year, the second-highest quarter on record. The server market set a record $166.3 billion (+52%), led by Dell Technologies, as NAND and DRAM shortages and AI infrastructure demand drive growth.
Astronomers have found an exoplanet that orbits its star in the opposite direction to the star's own rotation. Planets normally form from the same protoplanetary disk as their star and thus rotate the same way.
After Defender signature update 1.455.50.0 and Windows patch KB5121003, Microsoft's antivirus quarantines VLC's plugin cache (plugins.dat), making the player take several seconds to launch. Microsoft has not released an official fix; resetting the cache via vlc-cache-gen.exe or excluding the plugins folder restores normal startup.
Belgium's Royal Table Tennis Federation and its French-speaking branch AFTT are investigating a cyberattack after hacker Venus1337 claimed to have stolen 1.69 GB of data on 66,800 members and 17,400 users. The same hacker earlier claimed a breach at the French-speaking Gymnastics Federation FfG, where data on more than 200,000 members was allegedly affected.
Melbourne-based Amber Electric has raised €49m in a Series E round led by 1GT, Morgan Stanley Investment Management's climate equity fund, with E.ON participating. The funding will support growth and European expansion; its SmartShift platform optimises home batteries, rooftop solar and EVs against wholesale energy prices.
After World of Warcraft: Forever was revealed at BlizzCon 2026, fans on social media are calling it an effective sequel to WoW. Blizzard says a separate WoW 2 isn't needed because Forever already delivers the same experience. The release is set for November 4.
AMD shares hit an intraday record of $613.92 on Monday, pushing the chipmaker's market value above $1 trillion for the first time. The stock is on a five-day rally.
Xiaomi has started the second phase of its global HyperOS 4 rollout based on Android 17, shipping as a Stable Beta to Mi Pilot testers. The update reaches Xiaomi 15 and 15 Ultra with the Soft Light Glass design, Rust-rewritten OS modules and the Super XiaoAI 2.0 suite.
A study based on real-world data from electric cars, buses and trains found that battery cells age unevenly, shortening the overall lifespan of EV batteries. This affects the reliability and durability of vehicles meant to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Researchers pinned down Earth's center of mass to within less than a millimeter using GPS data and low-orbit satellites. The seasonal drift turned out to be about half of earlier estimates, suggesting less water and air move between hemispheres.
The US introduced tariffs on drones and components: 100% for aircraft over 25 kg or with thermal imaging, and 25% for smaller drones and parts. Allies including the EU, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland and Taiwan face 15%, while the UK gets 10%. The move aims to cut reliance on Chinese hardware, where DJI holds about 80% of the market.
Microsoft released patches for Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024 to fix copy, autofill, and formula-dragging failures caused by the September 2026 security updates, including KB5002914. Paste operations could fail silently with no error message.
Kremlin footage of Putin voting online in the State Duma elections showed a Dell monitor with an 'Activate Windows' watermark, indicating an unlicensed OS. A legal Windows 11 license starts at $139, and Dell exited Russia in 2022, clashing with the country's 'technological sovereignty' push.
The pieeprom-2024-09-23.bin firmware adds a hard RAM capacity check to the Raspberry Pi 5: if the memory doesn't match the factory spec, the board shows Error Code 9 and refuses to boot. The Foundation says the lock prevents resale of boards with memory of "dubious origin" and cuts support burden.
Uber has redesigned shard placement in its distributed time series database M3DB by partitioning nodes into fixed-size subclusters, each owning a distinct portion of the shard space. The change limits the blast radius of node failures, maintenance and scaling, which previously could affect up to 66.67% of a cluster.
Vivo has launched the base X500 in China with MediaTek's Dimensity 9600M, a 7,500mAh battery with 90W wired charging, a 6.59-inch 1.5K 144Hz OLED and Zeiss cameras using the Sony LYTIA-828 sensor. Prices start at 5,499 yuan (~$821) for 12GB+256GB and reach 6,999 yuan for 12GB+1TB.
About 25 lawsuits from authors and publishers are pending against AI companies, yet some publishers are striking licensing deals: Wiley reported $49 million in AI licensing revenue for fiscal 2026. Google partnered with Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Bloomsbury and others to add AI features to e-books in Google Play.
According to a report by ECOnorthwest and the University of Virginia, Oregon's 111 data centers consume nearly 23% of the state's electricity. Their share could reach 31–32% (about 25 TWh per year) by 2030, while all facilities employ just 2,630 workers.
AMD published research on a tetrahedral cage ray tracing technique that animates only an outer cage while keeping dense geometry and its BVH static. On a Radeon RX 9070 XT, a scene with roughly 500 million ray-traced triangles ran above 60FPS at 1080p, with acceleration structure updates dropping from over 300ms to 3.3ms and memory falling from up to 80GB to about 1.7GB.
OpenAI is developing features to compete with SpaceX's recently launched Grok Bot, which creates always-on AI "teammates" for routine tasks, and has discussed a personal AI assistant to rival one from Meta. The products would repurpose existing agentic technology from Codex and ChatGPT.
Microbiologist Lahiru Jayakody of Southern Illinois University Carbondale developed µBites, cookies made from recycled plastic and corn waste, for NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge. Plastic is broken down via oxidative hydrothermal dissolution, and genetically engineered microbes convert the resulting molecules into proteins, fats, vanillin and beta carotene.
Sekoia's threat research team detailed Exvicy, a ClickFix malware-as-a-service framework that injects obfuscated JavaScript into compromised WordPress sites and lures victims into running PowerShell via Win+R. The Russian-speaking operator has sold it on Exploit.IN since May 26, raising the price from $1,200 to $2,000 a month, with roughly 80 panel-hosting servers found by late August.
Huawei will keep its Ascend 900-series AI accelerators China-only, saying it lacks capacity to meet domestic demand. The company detailed its Ascend 960/970/980 roadmap and Atlas clusters of up to 15,488 chips delivering up to 120 EFLOPS in FP4.
Research from Columbia University published in Nature Neuroscience found that tau is synthesized in dendrites rather than migrating there from axons. About one-third of newly made tau is destroyed by neuroproteasomes within minutes, reshaping views of early Alzheimer's pathology.
A check of five free WordPress SEO plugins found that Yoast SEO (10M sites) and All in One SEO (2M) store GPTBot and CCBot blocking settings that their free builds never read — the toggle only works in paid tiers. Rank Math and SEOPress contain no AI crawler names at all, and blocking GPTBot takes just two lines in robots.txt without any plugin.
Schneider Electric published a white paper comparing four modeled 100 MW datacenter designs. Moving from air to liquid cooling with coolant supplied at 45°C cuts water consumption by at least 50%, while cooling towers can use 5 to 20 times more water than dry coolers.
Portainer announced that its Community Edition will stay on the 2.45 LTS branch and won't receive the new Kubernetes-centric Portainer 3.0 architecture. CE will get only security and bug fixes, while new 3.x features are limited to the paid Business Edition or the 3 Nodes Free license.
The Acer Googlebook 14 is the only one of the five launch Googlebook models with a convertible 360° hinge. It packs a 2.8K (2880 x 1800) 120Hz OLED display covering 100% DCI-P3, USI 2.0 stylus support, up to a Core Ultra 7 355, 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM, 16 hours of battery life and a 1.18kg chassis. The base 16GB/Core Ultra 5 version starts at $899 and ships early next month.
Korean media reports say Samsung may equip the Galaxy S27 Ultra with the Exynos 2700 in select markets such as South Korea, while North America could keep Snapdragon. The move would boost Exynos share and cut costs amid rising memory and chipset prices. No final decision has been made and the Galaxy S27 lineup isn't expected until next year.
