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OSHA probing worker death at SpaceXs Starbase site

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TTechCrunch

OSHA probing worker death at SpaceXs Starbase site

After unveiling ridiculously expensive AR glasses, Snaps stock takes a dive

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TTechCrunch

After unveiling ridiculously expensive AR glasses, Snaps stock takes a dive

Coinbase debuts AI agent that can trade and pay for premium research

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AArs Technica

Coinbase debuts AI agent that can trade and pay for premium research

I spy with my little eye: Your TV may be tracking what you watch

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WWired

I spy with my little eye: Your TV may be tracking what you watch

Rocket engine startup Impulse raises $500 million to hire people, not AI

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TTechCrunch

Rocket engine startup Impulse raises $500 million to hire people, not AI

TodayWednesday, June 17, 2026

201 technology stories

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OSHA probing worker death at SpaceXs Starbase site

Image Credits:Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch 1:32 PM PDT · June 17, 2026 Former Sequoia Captial managing partner Roelof Botha is joining SpaceX’s board of directors, less than a week after the company went public in the largest IPO ever. SpaceX announced the appointment in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. It said Botha was appointed “to fill the existing vacancy on the Board” and that he will serve until SpaceX’s next annual shareholder meeting.” He will also join the SpaceX board’s audit committee. Botha didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Botha “brings extensive public company experience along with a deep audit committee background, having served on the boards and audit committees of numerous public companies,” SpaceX wrote in the filing. He stepped down from his role as Sequoia’s leader late last year. Botha briefly overlapped with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk at PayPal in 2000. Botha started at the payments company in March of that year, according to his LinkedIn profile. Musk was pushed out as CEO of PayPal in September 200. The addition of Botha brings SpaceX’s board to nine directors. He joins Musk confidants Ira Ehrenpreis, Antonio Gracias, Steve Jurvetson, and Luke Nosek, SpaceX chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell, as well as Google executive Donald Harrison, and VC Randy Glein. Musk is chairman of the board. Botha has been with Sequoia for more than 20 years, and the firm invested in SpaceX in 2019. It reportedly owned 1.5% of SpaceX heading into the IPO, giving it a position worth more than $20 billion. This story is developing. Check back for updates. Topics When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane. You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal. View Bio

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After unveiling ridiculously expensive AR glasses, Snaps stock takes a dive

In Brief Posted: 1:24 PM PDT · June 17, 2026 Image Credits:Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Snap Snap’s long-awaited AR glasses, Specs, didn’t have the best debut. The company’s stock hasn’t been on the healthiest trajectory lately. It’s dropped 30 percent over the past year. Following Specs’ launch, it sank more than 5 percent — falling from $5.86 a share on Tuesday to a low of $4.83 on Wednesday morning. As of this writing, the stock still hasn’t recovered the position it held prior to the announcement. The big concern surrounding Snap’s new smart glasses — which the company has been working on for over a decade — is the cost: the company maintains they will retail at nearly $2,200 apiece. It’s worthy of note that Snap’s core user demographic — teenagers — are not typically equipped with that kind of pocket change, leading onlookers to question the profitability path for the new product. Snap’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, did an interview with CNBC on Tuesday (during which he sported the new glasses) and, when questioned about the hefty price, responded: “The most important way to think of Specs is as a computer, and so they’re comparably priced to other high-end computers or high-end laptops.” Spiegel further justified the cost by saying that Specs occupies a unique space in the AR market between glasses like Meta’s Ray-Bans — which cost a lot less but provide significantly less compute power — and bulkier headsets like the Apple Vision Pro, which are powerful but very expensive. Spiegel said his product was both “highly wearable but also incredibly capable for immersive computing.” Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Latest in Hardware

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Coinbase debuts AI agent that can trade and pay for premium research

What happens when you give AI coding agents a lab full of robotic arms, some compute resources, and a “generous token budget” for teaching the robots various tasks? The agents can apparently figure out a training regimen that teaches the robots to successfully cut zip ties and even insert GPUs into thin sockets on motherboards. That glimpse into how AI can act in a fully autonomous way to automate robot training was made possible by a new agent harness framework—software that wraps around AI models to enable their use of various tools while also providing capabilities such as memory, context, constraint, and feedback loops. That agentic harness, called ENPIRE, was developed by robotics researchers at the NVIDIA GEAR (Generalist Embodied Agent Research) lab alongside collaborators from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of California, Berkeley. “A part of our NVIDIA GEAR lab now self-improves tirelessly overnight,” wrote Jim Fan, director of AI at NVIDIA, in a LinkedIn post. “We just read the reports in the morning.” Fan also jokingly described the goal of such AI-directed robot training, saying, “We all take a holiday and Jensen wouldn’t even notice,” in reference to Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. But it’s not only Nvidia robotics researchers who could benefit—Fan said the team would be open-sourcing everything so anyone can host their own “self-running robot lab at home.” The ENPIRE harness has four modules that enable AI coding agents to perform automatic reset and verification on tasks, refine policies that guide robotic behavior, evaluate such policies across multiple physical robots working in parallel, and address failures by analyzing logs, ingesting research papers, and improving training infrastructure and algorithm code. More technical details are available in the research paper uploaded on June 16, 2026. The harness was tested with three different AI coding agents, including OpenAI’s Codex with GPT-5.5, Anthropic’s Claude Code with Opus 4.7, and Moonshot AI’s Kimi Code with Kimi K2.6. Teams of the coding agents independently developed different algorithmic approaches to robot training, tested them in real-world experiments, and then retained whatever changes helped raise the overall success rate over repeated cycles of self-directed testing.

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I spy with my little eye: Your TV may be tracking what you watch

At IO-AI Tech, a startup about 45 minutes north of downtown Shenzhen, China, I glimpsed a wacky new frontier of blue-collar work. Workers wearing the company's VR headsets, handheld controllers, and motion-tracking gear remotely control humanoid robots for workplaces like factory floors and convenience stores. The company wants the robots to do useful work, like stocking shelves and picking items out of bins, but it also wants to gather training data that could one day let the bots operate autonomously.To show off the tech, the company invited me to its offices, where I was allowed to control 10 humanoid robotic hands, each from a different company, using a custom motion-tracking glove. The device instantly transferred my finger movements to all 50 robotic digits.I’m a little embarrassed to say that the first thing I tried with this futuristic gear was getting all 10 hands to flip the bird. After getting this out of my system, I was impressed by how quickly my movements transferred to the robot hands, and how easily the tech went both ways—I was able to feel a ball placed in one of the electronic hands.Courtesy of Will KnightThe company also let me try a system that’s being tested by a Chinese convenience store chain. Using a VR headset and a pair of grippers, I tried picking up boxes of medication from a shelf. It was disorienting at first: I had to adjust to a slight difference between my movements and those of the robot I could see through the headset. After a little practice, however, I was stacking shelves like a robot-boss.Elsewhere, I watched people wearing virtual reality headsets and body-tracking sensors reminiscent of Ready Player One. In one large room, I saw workers using a range of different systems to control diminutive Unitree humanoids. One person marched around with a Unitree robot next to them, and the machine mirrored their movements within a mocked-up apartment. The human operator, wearing a headset and viewing the scene through the robot’s eye-level cameras, went through the motions needed to remove a shirt from a hanger and fold it.IO-AI develops technology that transfers a person’s movements to different robot forms—a useful offering because there are dozens of different humanoids and robot hands on the market in China today. The startup's algorithms also need to combine human control with some level of autonomy because a person and a robot aren’t always going to be the same shape, size, and weight. Without some ability to move independently, the robot may lose its balance.Courtesy of Will KnightCourtesy of Will KnightShenzhen, which is home to thousands of manufacturers, is an ideal base for the company. Si Chin, one of IO-AI Tech’s cofounders, tells me that the location makes it easy to develop and refine new prototypes. She also notes that IO-AI Tech is working with a number of local manufacturers keen to automate tasks. One Chinese company, Jack Sewing Machines, makes clothes manufacturing equipment and is working with the startup to train two-armed robots to perform tasks like ironing shirts. These robots could fit onto an existing production line and automate work currently done by hand, an executive from the company told me.Some roboticists believe that giving AI algorithms vast amounts of tele-operation data will eventually unlock extremely capable and general models. Chin says that might be so, but she also believes it makes sense to take an incremental approach to deploying AI-powered automation.“It is similar to self-driving cars,” she says, referencing the way that these machines have been deployed in more and more settings with increasing autonomy. “You need this training data that’s more focused on the specific thing you’re trying to address.” She says that robot teleoperation is even gaining traction in some Chinese vocational schools.China’s manufacturing prowess already produces cheap, high-quality robots like Unitree’s. If IO-AI Tech is any indication, it might also help AI master the

Technology

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leftcallswill

Rocket engine startup Impulse raises $500 million to hire people, not AI

Despite the fact that AI increasingly dominates our economy (it’s hot IPO summer and we’re all just along for the ride), most Americans are not particularly optimistic about the technology’s long term impact on the country, a new study from Pew Research reveals. In fact, although a whole lot of Americans increasingly use AI in their daily lives, most of them have neutral to negative views about it, the research reveals. Only 16 percent of Americans think that AI’s impact on society during the next 20 years will be positive, Pew says, while around 40 percent say that it will have a negative impact. A vast majority of people (67 percent) don’t believe that the U.S. government will do anything to meaningfully regulate AI. A similarly skeptical cohort (59 percent) don’t trust companies to develop it safely. Young people — that is, those people under 30 — are the ones with the most negative feelings about AI. Pew says that only 14 percent of this cohort believe the tech will have a positive impact on society. On top of all this, a vast majority of Americans — nearly two thirds — also think that AI’s development is occurring too quickly. Despite all of the skepticism, a whole lot of Americans also report using AI in their daily lives on an increasingly regular basis. About a quarter of Americans say they use AI chatbots on a daily basis. Those who do are typically using the chatbots for research purposes or for work, Pew says. A vast majority of people using AI are using ChatGPT. Pew writes that 44 percent of U.S. adults now say they use OpenAI’s chatbot, a figure that’s more than doubled since 2023. The next most popular chatbot is Gemini (24 percent), followed by Copilot (17 percent) and MetaAI (14 percent), with Grok (8 percent), Claude (6 percent) and Character.ai (3 percent) lagging behind. There is a bit of a gender divide. While chatbot use is growing for both men and women, men still use AI more and are more enthusiastic about it, while women are more skeptical, Pew says. Men are more likely to say they use AI chatbots in their daily lives (27 percent vs 20 percent for men) and while equal shares of men and women report using ChatGPT, men more commonly report usage of other brands, such as Copilot and Grok. The report also highlights how AI is changing the ways Americans consume information. Six in ten survey respondents told Pew that they routinely read AI generated internet summaries (indeed, on Google, they’re pretty much unavoidable). A much smaller number report using AI to get information on fitness and dieting. There are also still a whole lot of people — about half of the country — that say they do not use AI in their daily lives. The people who do not use AI tend to be older, while those under 50 are more likely to say that they use it. Nearly 75 percent of Americans aged 65 or older say that they never use AI chatbots. Those people who don’t use chatbots say they don’t because they’re not interested in them, and add that they have no intention of using them in the future. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo. You can contact Lucas by emailing lucas.ropek@techcrunch.com. View Bio

The 15 Best Fans to Buy Before It Gets Hot Again (2026)

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betsgetsbefore

The 15 Best Fans to Buy Before It Gets Hot Again (2026)

After years of incremental updates, Google is betting that its Gemini AI can reinvent its smart speaker. On Wednesday, the company introduced its first audio device built specifically for Gemini with the $99.99 Google Home Speaker. The new Google Home device is the first standalone smart speaker from the tech giant since the Nest Audio in September 2020. That older device arrived at a time when smart speakers were thought of largely as handy controllers for your smart home and music-playing systems. They lacked the smarts of today’s AI chatbots, as commands often had to be phrased correctly to get things to work. The Google Home Speaker is changing that, as you’ll be able to speak using natural language requests and even make multi-step requests using the phrasing you’d like. For instance, you could tell the speaker to “turn off all the lights except for my bedside lamp,” or “dim the kitchen lights, play some relaxing music, and set a timer for 20 minutes.” You can also make corrections mid-sentence as you speak instead of having to try requests again, and Gemini will understand. That means you could say something like “turn off the coffee maker…I mean, turn it on!” and the AI will respond appropriately, Google points out. Image Credits:Google Plus, the device will ship with 10 new voices that can have two-way conversations with you about topics that aren’t limited to smart home tasks or other simple commands. You can ask more nuanced questions and dive deeper into topics you want to learn about, as you could when speaking with Gemini on your smartphone. The speaker’s microphone can also remain on briefly when using the “Continued Conversation” feature, so you can more naturally ask follow-up questions without having to say “OK, Google” again. The device itself looks similar to older versions, with its 3D-knit textile wrapping and rounded 3.4 x 4.2-inch design. In the U.S., the speaker comes in Jade and Berry colors in addition to the Hazel and Porcelain options available in the rest of the world. A new ring light at the bottom will indicate if the speaker is listening, thinking, or responding. But not all of the new device’s AI smarts will be free. Instead, Google will sell Google Home Premium subscription plans for $10 per month (or $100 per year) if you want to take advantage of more powerful AI features. This includes being able to have more free-flowing conversations with Gemini Live, which you kick off by saying “Hey Google, let’s chat.” Home Premium can also help you ask about and make sense of activity captured on your home’s Nest cameras, or offer summaries of what happened in the home while you were out. Whether those capabilities are compelling enough to justify another monthly subscription remains to be seen, particularly when many of the device’s Gemini features are available without paying. Google will try to get you used to the advanced features by offering them for free for six months before pushing you to subscribe, however. If successful, Google will have reinvigorated the smart speaker lineup with generative AI and found a way to get some customers to pay for those technological advances. The device is available for pre-order now and will ship later this month. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. You can contact or verify outreach from Sarah by emailing sarahp@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at sarahperez.01 on Signal. View Bio

Can tech companies learn to love cheaper AI models?

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indialoveclaude

Can tech companies learn to love cheaper AI models?

Two weeks ago, OpenAI said it would relaunch the robotics program it shuttered in 2021 — the latest signal that the biggest AI labs are racing to teach machines to operate in the physical world. But building capable robots requires something the AI industry doesn’t yet have, which is the training data to match that used for language models. That gap is creating a new kind of infrastructure business. Unlike LLMs that were trained on a vast sea of publicly available text, robots need data that captures physical interaction, and that kind of data barely exists. YouTube videos and footage captured by gig workers are low-fidelity and hard to reconcile with the physical world. XDOF (pronounced “ecks-doff”), emerging from stealth today, is betting that the next great bottleneck in AI isn’t models or chips, but the data feedback loop needed to teach robots how to interact with the physical world. The startup aims to build the data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems that frontier labs and robotics companies can’t easily build themselves — and has raised $70 million from Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, a16z, Lux, and WndrCo to do it. Co-founder and CEO Philippe Wu says XDOF, which has about 60 employees, is already working with 20 customers including several frontier AI labs, but cannot name them. “All of the top labs are trying to pursue robotics,” Wu said. “We’ve already seen some of the downfalls of falling a little bit behind in the language model race … you don’t want to be in this type of situation where you pursue this technology too late, and everyone is in this boat where physical AI is the next frontier.” Wu ran into this problem himself as a PhD student at UC Berkeley. His focus was on enabling robots to learn skills from large-scale data sets. There was just one problem. “We didn’t have large-scale data to work with,” he told TechCrunch. “There was this chicken-and-egg problem — we first needed to actually collect data before we could even ask how to train a foundation model for robotics.” Wu and his future XDOF co-founder and CTO, Fred Shentu, worked on a project called GELLO, a low-cost teleoperation system that lets a human operator control a robotic arm to generate training data. “It ended up becoming a very influential paper in robotics, because a lot of people had similar needs and bottlenecks, and many started leveraging this type of device for data collection,” Wu said. Spotting the opportunity, Wu, Shentu, and third co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Nemo Jin launched XDOF in October 2024 to provide a data ecosystem for companies pursuing robotics models. Mindful that data provision alone can be a dead-end business, the company is also focused on data cleaning, tooling, and annotation — creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop for robot trainers. As a starting point, the company is partnering with UC Berkeley’s AI Research lab to release what it believes is the largest collection of high-quality robot training data ever assembled, dubbed ABC. It includes 130,000 trajectories of robot manipulation data, 300 hours of simulation, and 100 hours of evaluations. That kind of scaled-up pre-training data has never been available to academia before. “We’ve seen in language, image generation, and other fields, that when models and data are released, the community achieves things that you wouldn’t necessarily have expected,” David McAllister, a Berkeley PhD student who helped organize the release, told TechCrunch. The team has already used the data to train robots on benchmark tasks like folding T-shirts and flattening boxes, or loading AirPods into their cases. Unlimited degrees of freedom The company plans to work across three tiers of a data pyramid. The most valuable tier is teleoperation data collected on the actual robot being deployed; next comes teleoperated robots gathering more general data, as with GELLO; and finally “egocentric” data gathered by humans performing everyday tasks, fo

Hackers hack victims hacked by other hackers

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Hackers hack victims hacked by other hackers

Pinterest on Wednesday announced a new experimental app called “Ask Pinterest” that will allow the company to explore a more conversational approach to shopping and product discovery that could eventually find its way to the main Pinterest app. It also introduced other AI initiatives, including Pinterest Model Context Protocol (MCP), designed for advertisers running campaigns on Pinterest’s platform, and other AI ad tools. The news comes just ahead of the adtech industry’s annual gathering at Cannes Lions, which is this year mainly focused on how AI can serve the needs of advertisers and marketers. The “Ask Pinterest” online application gives the company another way to utilize its “Taste Graph” — its internal data mapping people to their interests and aesthetics. It will initially be available in limited access, the company said. The AI-powered experience is designed to expand the visual discovery experience Pinterest is known for beyond the main app to a conversational, chatbot-like interface where consumers can ask questions using natural language to get more personalized recommendations and inspiration. It also arrives as AI chatbots are increasingly competing with traditional search engines for consumers’ attention. Google has already put AI to work to help online shoppers find what they need, track prices, and check out. ChatGPT also experimented with agentic shopping, as have Meta, Shopify, and others. Rather than turning itself into a source of product recommendations that other AI services could leverage through licensing deals, Pinterest has largely focused on using its own data to train AI models and power its AI products. Image Credits:Pinterest Plus, by making Ask Pinterest a standalone app, the company has a way to experiment with the technology without disrupting the main Pinterest experience. The company explains that Ask Pinterest could work for more complex or multi-step queries that wouldn’t fit a traditional Pinterest search. For instance, you could use the app to ask for help planning a dinner party or furnishing a room over time. The idea, says Pinterest, is to test and explore how AI could better support people’s shopping experiences while retaining the user’s context across sessions. Ask Pinterest can also leverage users’ own saved Pins and Boards to personalize its answers. In time, these results will help Pinterest when building more AI-powered experiences for the company’s flagship app, the company believes. Image Credits:Pinterest Pinterest’s new app was announced alongside the updates aimed at marketers, including the introduction of an AI assistant, still in beta, in its Ads Manager in the U.S. A new AI model, Performance+ creative, was also introduced globally to help advertisers pick between different ad creatives to find the one that’s likely to perform best each time the ad is shown. And the MCP infrastructure layer that Pinterest announced will allow advertisers to manage and monitor their campaigns using other third-party agentic tools in a standardized way. In an announcement sharing the news, Pinterest’s Chief Business Officer, Lee Brown, gestured towards the changing nature of web search, remarking that, “the future of discovery won’t be driven by keywords alone. It will be shaped by context, taste, and trusted recommendations” — an area where Pinterest feels it has a “unique advantage,” Brown said. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. You can contact or verify outreach from Sarah by emailing sarahp@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at sarahperez.01 on Signal. View Bio

The Dreamie alarm clock got me to stop using my phone in bed

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whatstopbest

The Dreamie alarm clock got me to stop using my phone in bed

Jun 16, 2026 7:48 PMThe Best Handheld and Wearable Fans for People Who Hate Being SweatyWhether you’re at a festival, tennis match, or wedding, these hand fans and wearable cooling devices will make the heat way more bearable.Featured in this articleBest Handheld Fan OverallPlayHot Handheld Turbo FanRead moreBest Waist FanAecooly Portable Waist FanRead moreBest Neck FanJisulife Portable Neck FanRead moreBest Cooling JacketOroro ZenFlow Power Cooling JacketRead moreBefore I started using a handheld fan, I was a total skeptic. I’d seen the ones that attach to your phone or fit in a bag, and I couldn’t imagine they’d provide any real relief from the heat—and they seemed completely unnecessary. But now that I’ve used the fans on this list, I don’t know how I was functioning without them.There are certain scenarios where having a portable fan makes your life so much better: Outdoor concerts, weddings, festivals, amusement parks, sporting events, backyard parties. I don’t live in New York City anymore, but I could imagine having one of these on the subway would be a game changer. Despite their size, they do actually create a significant breeze—in some cases, it’s enough to stop you from getting sticky, shiny, and sweaty. If you want to make it through a ridiculously hot day without your makeup melting or pitting out, you need one of these handheld fans.Photograph: Kat MerckFor more ways to stay cool, check out our guides to the Best Fans and the Best Window ACs.Updated June 2026: We've added new fans from Dyson, Shark, and Aecooly, removed discontinued fans, and ensured up-to-date links and prices.Best Handheld Fan OverallPhotograph: Kat MerckPhotograph: Kat MerckVideo: Kat MerckPlayHotHandheld Turbo FanThis fan was a godsend during a sweltering outdoor concert. It bends at the neck, so I was able to set it up on the picnic table and blast it toward my face without even holding it, then straighten it back into the standard position to carry it with me as I walked around. It also comes with a lanyard that allows you to hang it from your neck. It felt stronger than the other handheld fans I tested, and I liked that the blades were contained, which made the airflow feel more concentrated and meant I couldn’t catch them on anything. It kept my face from melting off on the 100-degree day I used it, and while it isn’t slim enough to slide into a clutch or pocket (like some other fans on the list), it fit into my small crossbody bag.There are five speed levels, and the 5,000-mAh battery lasts from three to 12 hours depending on which level you’re using. A digital display lets you know what level you’re using and how much battery life you have left (you can get a full charge in three hours). The only cons to this fan are that it doesn’t have any other uses (no charging bank or flashlight capabilities, like some options on this list), and it’s a bit loud, with a drone-y sound. It didn’t bother me at a loud concert, and I was even able to talk to a friend without any problem, but if you’re in a quieter setting, it might be an issue. At only $20, it’s a solid investment for any outdoor festivals or weddings where you need a heavy-duty airflow to really stave off sweat. —Kristin CanningWIRED/TIREDWIREDHands-free carry and operation5 speed levelsLong battery lifeTIREDCan't fit into a pocketBest Waist FanPhotograph: Kat MerckVideo: Kat MerckAecoolyPortable Waist FanI liked the 3-in-1 design of this chunky waist fan, which lets you wear it on your belt or waistband inside or outside your shirt, on a strap around your neck, or propped up on a table or desk. It's not super lightweight at nearly three-quarters of a pound (which means you can't wear lighter-weight pants or shorts if you plan to clip it on your waistband), and it's not exactly quiet at 53 decibels, but with five speeds and a top wind speed of 866 feet per minute, it's one of the more powerful waist fans I've tried. There's also a “flashlight” on the side with a strobe option, but it's

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microsofttestsencrypted

Microsoft tests Encrypted Spaces for private cloud apps | ETIH EdTech News

Microsoft tests Encrypted Spaces for private cloud apps | ETIH EdTech News EdTech Innovation Hub Signal Veterans Aim to Encrypt Slack and Google Docs in 2026 TechnoSports Media Group Signal Alums Reveal ‘Encrypted Spaces,’ a System for Making Private Collaboration Apps WIRED Signal Veterans Want to Encrypt Slack, Google Docs, and Basically Every Other App Gizmodo

Apple was surprised by AI-driven demand for Macs

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Apple was surprised by AI-driven demand for Macs

3:09 PM PDT · June 16, 2026 Apple’s plan to change a privacy feature that lets paying customers hide their real email addresses when creating online accounts could make it easier for apps and websites to block anonymous sign-ups. Apple’s Hide My Email is an iCloud+ feature that generates anonymous email addresses under the @icloud.com domain, which then forward messages to a person’s real email address. The reason these privately generated email addresses work is because they cannot be distinguished from regular Apple users, whose email addresses also use the @icloud.com domain. Apple said in a note to developers on Monday that in the coming weeks the company will move its anonymously generated email addresses to @private.icloud.com, effectively making it easier for apps and websites to know that an email address is private and block users from signing up. Existing addresses will continue to function and forward mail without interruption, Apple said in the note to developers. The company added that app and email providers would have to update their filtering to ensure that emails to customers who rely on the feature continue to go through. Several Apple users on Reddit criticized the change to the email domain, saying it would make it more difficult to use the service. Apple did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch about the change, or explain why it made the change. Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Apple turned over the real account information of a user who generated an anonymized email address using Hide My Email to send an allegedly threatening email to the girlfriend of the FBI director Kash Patel. The Trump administration has made efforts over the past year to unmask anonymous accounts, including those of Trump’s critics, by using subpoenas to demand that tech companies turn over information about their users. Topics When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Zack Whittaker is the security editor at TechCrunch. He also authors the weekly cybersecurity newsletter, this week in security. He can be reached via encrypted message at zackwhittaker.1337 on Signal. You can also contact him by email, or to verify outreach, at zack.whittaker@techcrunch.com. View Bio

Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society

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Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society

A trove of internal records from a secret society for powerful figures in US politics, finance, and tech was left exposed online, WIRED has confirmed, naming participants in its events and revealing sensitive personal details they were assured would stay private.The group, called Dialog, is a private, invitation-only organization cofounded in 2006 by the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. It convenes US officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats. Dialog has spent two decades declining to disclose its members.A directory in the website's code was first revealed by the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew. Known for exposing the US government’s No Fly List and breaching the surveillance-camera company Verkada, crimew tells WIRED the directory surfaced via an anonymous tip. WIRED independently verified its contents.A source separately provided WIRED with the registration list for Dialog's 2026 retreat, which names 222 people and records what the list describes as each registrant's membership status and attendee type, including “active member” and “guest.” The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at the Powerscourt Hotel outside Dublin, Ireland.The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “ “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.Together, alongside the mundane fare of a typical thought leadership conference, the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's supreme allied commander Europe and the head of US European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country's largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.Those executives appear side by side with senior US officials overseeing their industries. Auren Hoffman, Dialog’s chairman, founded the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp, two of the most important suppliers in the consumer data economy. He appears in the directory alongside Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whose department writes the rules on financial data, and Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which oversees the Federal Trade Commission and its data-privacy authority.Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, whose software runs case management for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and data fusion for the Pentagon and intelligence community, is listed in the same society as Army secretary Dan Driscoll and Representative Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees agencies Palantir contracts with.None of the individuals named in this story responded to requests for comment. Raffi Grinberg, who lists himself as Dialog’s executive director on his LinkedIn profile and is the author of the self-help book How to Be a Grown-Up, did not respond to a request for comment.The registration records appear to show not only who belongs to Dialog but who attends. Of the 222 people signed up for the 2026 retreat, according to the leaked records, 87 are marked as first-time attendees. Others list histories stretching back more than a decade, and a handful to the society's founding 20 years ago. None of the registrants, Grynkewich included, used a government email address. All registered with personal or corporate accounts, placing their a