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Daily News Digest

Monday, June 22, 2026

Primary Coverage (Tier 1)

BleepingComputer 19:28

Microsoft fixes AutoGen Studio flaw that enabled code execution

A vulnerability chain dubbed AutoJack in Microsoft's AutoGen Studio interface for prototyping AI agents could let attackers manipulate an agent into executing arbitrary commands on its host system simply by visiting a malicious webpage. [...]

Tech & Secondary News (Tier 2)

9to5Mac 20:33

Here’s what’s new with iOS 27 beta 2

Apple released iOS 27 beta 2 today, giving developers the first follow-up update since iOS 27 debuted at WWDC. The new beta is available now for registered developers ahead of next month’s expected public beta release. iOS 27 is a major iPhone update centered around Siri AI, Apple Intelligence, Liquid Glass refinements, and a long list of quality-of-life changes. Here’s what we’ve found so far in iOS 27 beta 2.

9to5Mac 20:22

iOS 27 beta 2 includes Write with Siri, the new version of Apple Intelligence writing tools

iOS 27 beta 2 includes our first look at the new Write with Siri features, which replace the standalone Writings Tools feature introduced as part of the first wave of the iOS 18 Apple Intelligence rollout. When editing text, the keyboard now prompts the user to write with Siri. This allows you to ask Siri using a natural language request to generate new text, proofread something you already wrote, rewrite a document into another style, and more.

9to5Google 19:34

Monday’s best Android app deals and freebies: Rare 30% price drop on Blasphemous, Hitman Sniper, more

Joining the hundreds of new early Prime Day deals going live today, your Monday afternoon lineup of the best Android game and app deals is now ready to roll, including titles like Blasphemous, Dungeon Clawler, Hitman Sniper, Bridge Constructor Portal, Mythic Trials 2, Lara Croft GO, Dungeon Village, Earn to Die, and more. Alongside Best Buy’s massive Tech Fest Prime Day sale that is now live with up to $650 off all-new 2026 Copilot+ PCs, we also have the official Walmart Deals Prime Day sale with deep deals on Galaxy Tab S10 Lite and the ultra-affordable Galaxy Tab A11+ at the $169 low. As for the apps, everything awaits below.

Toms Hardware 19:26

Anthropic’s powerful Mythos AI reportedly breached ‘almost all’ NSA classified systems within a few hours during red-team test — report sheds more light on the U.S. government's sudden ban on the flagship models

Anthropic’s Mythos AI reportedly breached nearly all NSA classified systems during a controlled red-team test, according to a quote cited by The Economist. The report adds context to the U.S. government’s sudden restriction on Anthropic’s latest models.

9to5Mac 19:08

iOS 27 beta 2 now available as Apple tests major Siri AI upgrade

Apple has released the second iOS 27 beta for developer testing. iOS 27 beta 2 replaces the first iOS 27 beta, which arrived after WWDC 2026 earlier this month, and continues Apple’s summer beta cycle ahead of a public release this fall. We’ll update our devices and share what we discover.

9to5Google 18:59

New Google Search setting saves images and audio you upload; how to turn it off

Google says it’s saving files and media uploaded during searches in user search history to train AI and improve the experience after announcing the change last month. Search history will include pictures, screenshots taken with Circle to Search, and audio files used in voice searches, but you can disable that.

9to5Google 17:40

Deals: Massive Best Buy Tech Fest sale, Galaxy Tab S10 Lite $249, Tab A11+ $169, latest Copilot+ PCs up to $650 off, more

The early Amazon Prime Day deals have been updated with loads of new price drops, and today’s 9to5Toys Lunch Break is headlined by Best Buy’s massive Tech Fest Prime Day sale as well as the up to $650 off it is offering on the all-new 2026 Copilot+ PCs. However we also now have the gigantic Walmart Deals Prime Day sale live with Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S10 Lite hitting one of its best prices ever today at $249 (Reg. $400) alongside the ultra-affordable Galaxy Tab A11+ at the $169 low (Reg. $300), plus much more. Head below for a closer look.

Just The News 02:00

Judge blocks DOJ subpoenas for Tim Walz

Walz was a leading opponent of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surge in Minneapolis, Minn., earlier this year and has been at the epicenter of a public welfare fraud scandal.

Technical Blogs & Lifestyle (Tier 3)

Phoronix 20:45

Intel Optimization Zone 1.1 Lays Out Tuning Recommendations For More Workloads

Back in March Intel announced the Optimization Zone as a new initiative for helping server administrators and developers better maximize the performance of different workloads running on Intel hardware. Out today is the Intel Optimization Zone 1.1 release with more workloads now covered for squeezing out the most performance on Intel CPUs...

Slashdot 20:00

Valve Prices the Steam Machine At $1,049

Valve's new Steam Machine will launch June 29 starting at $1,049 and go up from there depending on the configuration. Although it costs considerably more than the PS5 ($599.99) and Xbox Series X ($649.99), "the value proposition for the Steam Machine is that it can play your library of Steam games you may have accumulated over years (or even decades), rather than just PlayStation games, and it's also a full Linux PC that you can customize to your heart's content," reports The Verge. "Valve also says that it's selling the Steam Machine for the cost of its components alone instead of subsidizing the price." From the report: You can now register your interest to buy a Steam Machine as part of a reservation system. To offer a fair playing field for people who want to buy one, Valve will randomize everyone in the queue on Thursday at 1PM ET. After that, anyone who registers their interest will be added to the end of the waitlist. The first emails giving people the opportunity to buy will go out on June 29th. Valve will sell four configurations of the Steam Machine: - A 512GB model for $1,049 - A 512GB model with a bundled Steam Controller for $1,128 - A 2TB model for $1,349 - A 2TB model with a bundled Steam Controller for $1,428 Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wirecutter 19:56

The Best Barbecue Sauce

Believe it or not, in the world of barbecue, barbecue sauce can be a controversial topic. If you stroll into a brisket joint in Texas and ask for sauce, you might be asked (nicely) to leave the premises. Many pit masters say that properly cooked barbecue shouldn’t need a sauce. At the risk of losing…

Phoronix 19:33

Steam Machine Launches, Priced $1049 To $1428 USD

Valve today finally revealed pricing on their SteamOS Linux-powered Steam Machine living room PC. Given the ongoing RAM and storage pricing pressure, the Steam Machine pricing comes in at the high-end...

Slashdot 19:00

AI Law Firm Wins UK Court Case For First Time

Garfield AI, the UK's first regulator-approved AI law firm, has won its first court case after helping a freelancer recover 7,000 pounds in unpaid fees. "I was owed money for work I had done, but it felt like the process of recovering it could be too stressful, expensive and time-consuming," said Tamires Camal Taquidir, a freelancer who had provided HR-related services to a hospitality business. "Garfield made it possible for me to pursue the claim and keep going. When the counterclaim was brought, it was intended to intimidate me, but I knew I had accessible, cost-effective and competent support. I'm delighted by the result." Computer Weekly reports: After attempting to resolve a dispute over paid fees without court action, Camal Taquidir [...] used Garfield AI to help her pursue the case in court. She was able to generate pre-action correspondence, and then prepare and issue court proceedings. The AI legal assistant conducted all of the legal work preceding the court trial. The defendant instructed solicitors and brought a counterclaim, which the claimant disputed with the support of Garfield AI. The claimant continued to trial, including dealing with document production, the preparation witness statements and trial bundles. Garfield then instructed a junior, shortly before the trial began. She won the claim over unpaid fees following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court. The claimant paid around 400 pounds in Garfield AI fees to recover the 7,000 pounds owed, while the defendant instructed both a solicitor and a barrister. [...] Following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court on 14 May 2026, in which both sides were represented by barristers, the court found in favor of the claimant, awarding 7,000 pounds and dismissing the counterclaim. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wirecutter 18:20

The Best Under-Desk Mini Stair Stepper

I’m naturally a fidgety person, which is a real problem when my job keeps me in a chair for eight hours a day. By midafternoon, I’m restless, a little stiff, and finding it hard to focus. A small under-desk stepper turned out to be the fix I’d been looking for. It helps me burn off…

Wirecutter 18:16

The Best Dictation Software

It took computers nearly half a century to catch up with science fiction — think “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” But today’s dictation or speech-to-text software is now impressively accurate. iPhones and Android devices today understand at least nine out of 10 words spoken to them. And dedicated dictation software recognizes 97% of words…

Slashdot 18:00

2,000 Retired Google Pixel Phones Get a Second Life As a Private Cloud

UC San Diego researchers are working with Google to build a private cloud from 2,000 retired Pixel Fold motherboards, demonstrating how discarded smartphones could provide useful, low-cost computing capacity. "The full smartphone cluster is expected to launch this fall," reports The Register. "Depending on how well the initial phase goes, we're told the cluster could grow even larger." From the report Once the phone's motherboards have been extracted from their shells, the researchers say that the chips hiding within remain more than potent enough to be useful for a variety of tasks. In many cases, the single-threaded performance of these chips is as good as, if not better than, what you'd find from a many-cored datacenter chip. The Pixel Fold smartphones, which will form the basis of the cluster, are powered by a Google Tensor G2 processor with two 2.85 GHz Cortex-X1, two 2.35 GHz Cortex-A78 and four 1.80 GHz Cortex-A55 Arm cores, a Mali-G710 MP7 GPU, and 12 GB of system memory. Early benchmarking using the SPEC suite suggests that 25-50 phones should deliver performance similar to that of a conventional server. The major challenge, instead, is distributing workloads across multiple devices, each of which has a handful of cores of one or more varieties, and most have 8-12 GB of memory. UCSD researchers are approaching this challenge from a couple of different angles. The first is by targeting applications that can easily fit within a single device. The second is using Kubernetes to orchestrate container deployments across clusters of 25-50 phones. For this to work, the devices first need to be flashed with a Linux operating system suitable for the job. While Android makes for a great handheld experience, it is not intended for server duty. In the blog post, researchers note that Android includes functionality intended to stop rogue applications from chewing up excessive amounts of memory and draining your battery. In server context, these safety mechanisms are no longer necessary. [Ryan Kastner, an associate professor of computer science at UCSD] told us this was by no means an easy task, but the team has made steady progress toward getting Linux running smoothly on these devices, including support for the phone's onboard GPUs. Access to some functionality, like the chip's integrated tensor processing unit, remains elusive. Clustering these devices will require networking the phones together. Normally these devices would connect over cellular or Wi-Fi, but at this scale, this not only isn't practical, but also has implications for security, he explained. Instead, the team will employ PCBs that both supply power and break out wired Ethernet networking. The researchers suggest that many EdTech, grading, and research workloads commonly run by universities in the cloud are small enough to run on the cluster without issue. "The vast majority of these applications are within the capabilities of a single smartphone to host, with the standard grading backend running on small cloud instances," a blog post detailing the planned deployment reads. "Early experiments show that even a moderately-sized cluster of 20 phones is capable of supporting peak submission rates for a 75+ student class." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix 17:30

Benchmarking Bcachefs 1.38.6: The First Release No Longer "Experimental"

Released last week was Bcachefs 1.38.6 with a host of performance improvements to this out-of-tree, copy-on-write file-system. Given all the performance improvements and this being the first release since Kent Overstreet dropped the "experimental" flag on the file-system, I decided to fire up some benchmarks looking at how the Bcachefs file-system performance has changed with this new version.

Wirecutter 17:23

The Best Gift I Ever Received Was This Bug-Like Silk Eye Mask

One of my favorite pastimes is going to bed. My ideal bedtime is between 9:30 p.m. and 10:15 p.m., and I strive to get at least eight hours of uninterrupted sleep every night. The key word there is “uninterrupted.” For over a decade, I lived in New York City — a place that famously never…

Wirecutter 17:19

The Best Retinol Products

Many skin-care products promise miracles, but retinoids are among the few with the science to back them up. At prescription strengths, these vitamin A derivatives, like tretinoin, have been shown to speed up skin’s cellular turnover, boost collagen, and minimize the appearance of pores and the production of oils. Milder over-the-counter versions, such as retinol,…

Slashdot 17:00

Ubisoft Co-Founder Claude Guillemot Dies In Plane Crash

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Claude Guillemot, co-founder of French video game company Ubisoft, died Friday at the age of 69. According to French media (via Bloomberg), Guillemot died in a plane crash in the French resort town of La Baule. He was one of two people aboard the plane, both of whom died. Guillemot founded Ubisoft with his four brothers in 1986. Since then, the company has published the Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Prince of Persia, and Tom Clancy video game franchises, as well as many other titles. The family retains control of Ubisoft, and Guillemot's brother Yves is still CEO. Guillemot was also chairman of Guillemot Corp., which makes gaming and audio accessories. "Ubisoft was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Claude Guillemot, co-founder of the group and chairman of Guillemot Corp., in an accident," Ubisoft said in a statement. "Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones during this difficult time. No further statements will be made at this time." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix 14:53

AMD Updates ROCDXG To Deliver Better ROCm Experience On WSL

Back in March AMD introduced ROCDXG to improve their Windows Subsystem for Linux support. This improved Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" support with the ROCm compute stack is a cleaneer architecture, open-source compared to their legacy WSL code having closed bits, and more robust handling. Today they issued a new ROCDXG library release to further enhance their WSL support...

Wirecutter 14:00

The Best Early Prime Day Deals You Can Snag Right Now, From All Around the Internet

It's official. Prime Day 2026 is on the horizon, with an avalanche of deals promised on June 23 — and we’re already seeing some prices drop early. Originally an Amazon-specific quasi-clearance event, Prime Day has become much more since Wirecutter first covered it in 2015. Retailers including Walmart, Target, and Best Buy usually offer their…

Slashdot 13:34

Several US States Bet That AI Can Solve Their Prison Recidivism Crisis

America's state prison systems need ways "to keep people from returning to prison," reports the Wall Street Journal, "when an estimated 40% end up back behind bars within three years." Part of the problem comes in the form of filing cabinets, manila folders and legacy digital databases. In other words, records for a single prisoner might be kept in a dozen places... Now a group of 19 prison systems are tackling the problem with digital tools and artificial intelligence in some cases. They are contracting with San Francisco nonprofit Recidiviz, whose computer systems bring together prisoner data from its disparate sources into digital dashboards. From there, corrections staff can see information — such as court records and notes from parole-board hearings — about a prisoner or parolee all in one place. The company says its efforts are working: Recidivism has fallen 16% in the prison population its systems track. It is the result of "just streamlining these workflows and knitting someone's journey together end to end," says Clementine Jacoby, chief executive officer of Recidiviz. Some criminal-justice groups show that recidivism is trending downward in general, though most of that data is nearly a decade old... The statistics from 11 states stop at 2019, and for four states stop at 2016. With 10 other states, no data was reported. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix 12:33

Valve Creates The Ray-Tracing Inspector "RTI" To Help Further Optimize Linux GPU Drivers

Merged today to Mesa 26.1 is the Ray-Tracing Inspector "RTI" as a new GUI created by developers on Valve's open-source Linux graphics team. The Ray-Tracing Inspector is designed to help in analyzing and optimizing the Vulkan ray-tracing performance as part of their continued work on further bettering the Radeon RADV RT performance for Steam Play / Linux gaming...

Slashdot 09:34

'Tutor' Who Took Online Tests for 124 Students Jailed for Three Years

A private tutor who charged money to take dozens of exams for students and submit coursework for them "has been jailed for three years," reports the BBC, "after his scam earned him £300,000." Shahid Adnan completed assignments and online tests for more than 120 students at Liverpool John Moore's University, the Crown Prosecution Service said. The 43-year-old, of Lysander Close, Liverpool, was caught in February 2023 after a student handed in a USB drive containing suspicious coursework to Dr Tom Berry of the university's school of computer science and mathematics. Berry's checks revealed the drive was used by Adnan with documents linked to a company he set up called Study Sharp Ltd. Excel spreadsheets containing details of other students, their study modules, coursework due dates, and their personal login credentials were also found. Further checks confirmed suspicions that Adnan was accessing the university's network to submit fraudulent work and sit examinations on behalf of students... [I]nvestigations led police to believe Adnan may have been doing work for 124 students at universities all over the world. The BBC also interviewed detective sergeant Adam Dagnall from Merseyside Police's cybercrime unit, who said Adnan was living a lavish lifestyle "well beyond" his stated occupations as a private tutor and Amazon delivery driver. His bank accounts held more than £2m ($2,645,100 USD). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wirecutter 06:00

The Best Gaming Monitors

The first OLED gaming monitors debuted three years ago, offering incredible contrast and almost unbelievable response times. But early models cost more than $1,000 and were almost impossible to find in stock. Times have changed. Dell released the Alienware AW2726DM earlier this year, which offers the tremendous contrast and response times of 240 Hz OLED…

Slashdot 05:48

TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds

"About 59% of TikTok videos served to a new account's For You feed are AI slop," writes Search Engine Journal, "according to a report from Kapwing, the video creation tool company. That's roughly three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube." The company manually reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 categories and ran a separate fresh-account test, counting AI-generated content in the first 500 For You videos. Kapwing ran the same fresh-account test on YouTube and found that 104 of the first 500 Shorts, or 21%, were AI slop. On TikTok, 294 of 500 For You videos hit that threshold... Of the 2,000 videos Kapwing reviewed in TikTok's Kids category, 57% were AI slop. That was the highest rate of any category in the analysis. The highest-rate tag was #cartoonkids, where 97 of 100 featured videos were AI-generated. Tags like #cartoons and #babysong both reached 83%, and #forkids came in at 79%. After Kids, the next highest AI slop rates were in Science and Education (35%), Health (33%), and History (33%). All three are categories where visual illustration and voiceover narration make up much of the content. On the other end, categories where on-camera presence or physical demonstration are central had the lowest rates. Fashion came in at 1.3%, Music at 1.5%, and Fitness at 1.6%. The article notes that by last November, TikTok "had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated, according to the report." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot 03:48

Someone Forked systemd Over Its New Birth Date Field

The blog Linuxiac reports: A new systemd fork has appeared with a specific purpose: removing systemd's recently added support for storing a user's birth date in JSON user records. The fork, called Liberated systemd, published its first tagged release as v261 shortly after the official systemd 261 release. In other words, the fork follows upstream systemd while reverting the change that added the new optional birthDate field. Importantly, this is not a new init system, a wider redesign of systemd, or a general-purpose alternative to the upstream project. Its stated purpose is to remain close to upstream systemd while removing what the author describes as "surveillance enablement"... The author recommends testing the fork in a virtual machine before using it on real hardware and warns nightly builds are more likely to be unstable than named releases. Read more of this story at Slashdot.