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Daily News Digest

Friday, June 19, 2026

Primary Coverage (Tier 1)

BleepingComputer 14:12

Webinar: How attackers bypass MFA and how defenders can respond

Modern phishing attacks, including Device Code phishing, can undermine MFA protections and grant attackers access to corporate accounts without stealing passwords. This webinar explores how behavioral AI can help security teams detect compromised accounts faster and automate response workflows. [...]

Tech & Secondary News (Tier 2)

9to5Google 19:25

Friday’s Android app deals and freebies: Hyper Light Drifter, Flame Keeper, Dungeon Defense, more

Your afternoon lineup of the best Android game and app deals is now ready to roll, including titles like Hyper Light Drifter – S.E., Flame Keeper, Dungeon Defense, To the Moon, Backflip Madness 2, Graffiti Simulator, and more. We also have early Prime Day TCL NXTPAPER Android tablet deals up to 36% off, an all-time low on Lenovo’s new 2026 Yoga 7a 2-in-1 touchscreen OLED Copilot+ PC at $400 off, and Amazon Device early Prime Day deals live from $16. The apps, however, await down below.

9to5Mac 18:00

The Oura Ring 5 is the ultra-smart wearable you won’t know you’re wearing

I’m a well-known grump when it comes to subscription apps, so when you find me endorsing a relatively expensive piece of hardware that requires an annual subscription for full functionality, then you know it has to be good. 2024 was a bit of an eventful year for me on the wearables front: after nine years of use, I ditched my Apple Watch in favor of dumb watches, and reinstated smart health and activity tracking by using the third-generation Oura Ring. I’ve recently upgraded to the latest 5th-gen model …

9to5Mac 18:00

9to5Mac Daily: June 19, 2026 – Apple confirms looming price increases

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players. Sponsored by Backblaze: Backup you can rely on. Save 20% with code 9to5daily.

9to5Google 17:45

Deals: TCL NXTPAPER Android tablet Amazon lows, Google Pixel Watch 4, new Lenovo Yoga 7a 2-in-1 $400 off, Amazon Echo, more

Today’s 9to5Toys Lunch Break is headlined by early Prime Day TCL NXTPAPER Android tablet deals up to 36% off with prices from $150. And now joining pre-orders on the new Google Home Speaker, Amazon has dropped this Obsidian Google Pixel Watch 4 to one of its best prices alongside the ongoing all-time low on the latest Nest Cam Indoor at $70. Those offers sit next to Lenovo’s new 2026 Yoga 7a 2-in-1 touchscreen OLED Copilot+ PC at $400 off today (all-time low), the brand’s Black Friday in June sale, the Amazon Device early Prime Day deals live from $16, and these rare WD SSD discounts at up to $400 off. Get a closer look below.

9to5Mac 17:30

Deals: iPhone 17 Pro/Max up to $290 off, AirPods $99, Apple Watch price drops, M5 Pro MacBook Pro $200 off, more

Today’s 9to5Toys Lunch Break is headlined by iPhone 17 Pro Max at up to $250 off and 17 Pro up to $290 off. But we also have Apple’s most affordable current-gen iPad back in stock down at $299 with Father’s Day delivery as well as a chance to land Dad a pair of current-gen AirPods for $99, and the silver base model M5 Pro MacBook Pro 24GB back to all-time low pricing at $200 off today. Those deals join rare offers on Apple Watch Ultra 3 at nearly $100 off, alongside MacBook Neo shipping by tomorrow from $590, and Beats headphones up to $220 off at Best Buy. Head below for a closer look.

9to5Mac 17:01

Apple just said the thing about Siri that we’ve long wanted to hear

Siri AI is a major overhaul for Apple’s assistant, and so far in the iOS 27 beta, it’s very good. One upgrade I’m especially excited about is that it’s the same Siri everywhere, regardless of what device you use—which Apple explains in a new interview was a very intentional goal.

Technical Blogs & Lifestyle (Tier 3)

Slashdot 20:00

New Unpatchable Exploit Targets Apple Devices With A12 and A13 Chips

Researchers have disclosed a new unpatchable BootROM exploit affecting Apple devices with A12, A13, S4, and S5 chips. The attack requires physical USB access and DFU mode, but can let an attacker run code before iOS loads, bypass signature checks, and boot modified software. 9to5Mac reports the details: In a highly detailed technical post published today, the Paradigm Shift Team details usbliter8, a new exploit that "leverages both a hardware bug in the USB controller and a specific configuration flaw present in the device firmware" and cannot be patched. The PS Team explains that ahead of today's disclosure, it shared its findings and worked with Apple Product Security to coordinate the release. The researchers also thanked Apple's security team for its "prompt response, constructive engagement, and cooperation throughout" the process. In a nutshell, this bug affects the following Apple SoCs: A12, S4, S5, and A13. [...] They add that "technical support for A12X/Z is possible," but "it is not currently implemented." That could add the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro lineups to the list. The way usbliter8 works is: it sends specially crafted data to a device over USB while it is in DFU mode, confusing the USB controller and causing it to write data to the wrong part of memory. That gives an attacker with physical access to the device control over its startup process. From there, they can run their own code before iOS loads, bypass signature checks, and boot modified system software. Importantly, the exploit does not affect or compromise the device's Secure Enclave, which in practice means that data such as passcodes and encrypted user data remain secure. That said, PS Team says that "although usbliter8 doesn't affect SEP itself, it opens up wider attack vectors to compromise the Secure Enclave," adding that "by releasing this exploit publicly, we hope to highlight the real-world impact of these hardware flaws and contribute to a broader understanding of modern SecureROM security." [...] Given that this is also an unpatchable exploit, the researchers note that "affected users should be aware that migrating to newer hardware remains the most effective mitigation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot 19:00

EU To Soon Classify AWS and Azure As Gatekeepers Under DSA

The European Commission is reportedly preparing to provisionally classify Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as "gatekeepers" under the Digital Markets Act, bringing cloud infrastructure under the law's stricter competition rules for the first time. The designation could require greater interoperability and data portability, making it easier for customers to switch providers, with a final decision expected by the end of 2026. Heise reports: This investigation began in November 2025, when the EU targeted the cloud power of US tech giants. The trigger was outages in cloud services with sometimes significant impacts on other internet services. Shortly before, an approximately 15-hour outage of the AWS cloud in the US meant that not only Amazon's own streaming services but also Atlassian, Docker, Epic Games, and the Signal messenger were unavailable or severely restricted. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft Azure also struggled with an outage, preventing air passengers from checking in and interrupting votes in the Scottish Parliament. As a result, European antitrust authorities have also scrutinized cloud services under the Digital Markets Act for the first time. The major cloud providers, primarily from the US, have so far evaded the EU's Digital Markets Act because a large part of their business is handled through corporate contracts. This makes it difficult to determine the number of individual users. However, this is one of the EU's most important criteria for determining the market power of companies. [...] As gatekeepers, AWS and Azure would be obliged to ensure interoperability and data portability. This would, for example, simplify switching cloud providers and allow customers to link other services with AWS or Azure clouds, instead of being limited to AWS and Azure offerings. Significant fines could also be imposed if the cloud services are found to be in violation of existing regulations. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot 18:00

The Korean Telecom Giant At the Center of Anthropic's Mythos Controversy

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The Trump administration's move to impose export controls on Anthropic's most powerful AI technology followed a spat over the company granting South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom access to its Claude Mythos model, according to people familiar with the matter. US officials were concerned about what they alleged were SK Telecom's ties to China, those people said. Those concerns appear to have compounded when Amazon later flagged vulnerabilities to the White House it identified in Fable 5, a highly safeguarded version of Mythos that Anthropic released to the public on June 9. The Amazon researchers claimed that it was possible to circumvent some of Fable 5's guardrails and access Mythos' formidable cybercapabilities, though Anthropic and outside cybersecurity experts have argued these risks are not unique to Claude. The confluence of events is what ultimately led the White House to determine that it could not trust Anthropic to safeguard its most advanced AI technology, according to a person close to the administration. On Friday, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to revoke access to Mythos and Fable 5 for all foreign nationals, including immigrants inside the US. Rather than gate access to its technology based on nationality, a process that would be difficult to implement while also preserving privacy, Anthropic decided it was better to disable access to the models entirely. The White House and Anthropic still remain at odds after days of negotiations about bringing Claude Mythos and Fable 5 back online. SK Telecom was one of roughly 150 organizations granted early access to Anthropic's vulnerability-detection model Claude Mythos through Project Glasswing, notes Wired. The White House later asked Anthropic to revoke the company's access, reportedly amid concerns about alleged China ties, and Anthropic immediately complied. There was, however, no mention of the telecom in the government's formal demand to restrict Mythos and Fable 5 to U.S. nationals. SK Telecom told a Korean newspaper that the "anonymous insider's remarks in foreign media lack verified facts, and our company has no ties to China." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot 17:00

Meta Lobbies Congress For Protection From Child-Harm Lawsuits

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Meta has lobbied the U.S. Congress for legal immunity from child-harm claims tied to social media products such as Instagram, as it faces thousands of lawsuits from young users and their families, according to a source familiar with the matter and proposed legislative language reviewed by Reuters. If adopted by lawmakers and passed into law as part of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) under consideration in the U.S. Senate, such a provision could undermine thousands of lawsuits against Meta and other online platforms over harms to children. Meta and Google's YouTube face a combined $6 million in damages after they lost the first case at trial early this year. While legislators have given no indication of adopting the language, the lobbying effort shows the kind of legal protections Meta is seeking amid the biggest attempt to regulate online platforms in the U.S. since the 1990s. Meta has reportedly proposed the language in exchange for dropping its opposition to KOSA. Under the law, platforms would be required to mitigate harms to minors tied to features such as infinite scrolling, notifications, and appearance-altering filters. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wirecutter 13:00

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 13:00

NASA Picks Eric Schmidt's Rocket Company For Mars Mission

NASA has selected Relativity Space to build and launch Aeolus, a 2028 Mars orbiter that would provide daily global measurements of dust, winds, and atmospheric temperatures to support future robotic and human missions. TechCrunch reports: The structure of the contract is akin to the deals that NASA made with SpaceX to fly cargo to the International Space Station, or Firefly Aerospace to put a lander on the Moon. The government agency handles the science, while the private company provides low-cost infrastructure. Aeolus, as the mission is dubbed, will contain four instruments to measure and image Mars from orbit, providing what NASA expects to be the first daily, global view of dust, winds, and temperature in its atmosphere. The agency said that data will make it safer for landers and, someday, astronauts, to visit the surface of the Red Planet. By pairing NASA's world-class instruments with commercial innovation and investment, we can deliver more science, more often, and reduce the time it takes to get essential data into the hands of researchers preparing for future human missions to Mars," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said in statement. The mission is set to launch in 2028 -- a rapid pace that will require Relativity to design and build the spacecraft to carry the Aeolus instruments, and finish building the rocket that will carry it to space, all on a tight timeline. NASA did not disclose how much it is paying Relativity for the mission, and Relativity did not respond to questions from TechCrunch. Relativity was founded in 2015 by two former SpaceX and Blue Origin engineers, with the idea of using 3D printing to its maximum potential as a path to building a cheaper rocket. The company's first design, Terran-1, launched in March 2023 and failed mid-flight. Relativity doubled down by moving on to a larger design, dubbed the Terran R. Before Relativity could get it to the launch pad, the company ran into fundraising challenges, and Schmidt took a majority stake in the company in it last year, installing himself as CEO. He's been tight-lipped about the investment but has expressed interest in orbital data centers, and is thought to be using Relativity to launch a space telescope, Lazuili, financed by his family philanthropy, Schmidt Sciences. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix 12:31

AMD Introduces An AI-Powered Bash Coding Agent

Just days after AMD engineers released a new Lemonade AI server with MCP server integration to make it much more useful, they have now released a new release of their GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" open-source software. With AMD GAIA 0.21.2, they have introduced a bash coding agent is their latest big ticket item in the AI space...

Phoronix 12:18

Intel TDX Now Much More Practical With Ability To Apply Important Updates Without Reboot

For those interested in Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) with modern Intel Xeon processors for confidential computing but also view system uptime as critical, beginning in Linux 7.2 the TDX support is now much more practical with allowing live updates without the need to reboot the running system in the event of security updates and similar...

Wirecutter 11:00

Are Robot Mops Actually Good?

Listen and follow The Wirecutter Show Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadio The iconic robot vacuum—the autonomous bot that can roam your home sucking up pet hair and Cheerios—is evolving. Manufacturers are shifting almost entirely to combo robot vac-mops. The question, for our vacuum tester, is whether they’re any good…

Wirecutter 11:00

The Very Best Wedding Gifts, According to Our Newsroom

In this edition of The Gift, our newsroom shares a few of the best wedding gifts they’ve received. Plus, more buy-it-for-life presents. My husband and I are not fancy people. When we got married nearly 26 years ago, we were really not fancy people. At the time, we shared a 15-year-old Subaru and enlisted the…

Slashdot 09:00

Rolls-Royce Secures Deal To Build Small Nuclear Reactors For Sweden

Rolls-Royce SMR has secured a multibillion-pound agreement to build three small modular reactors on Sweden's west coast, "marking a major step in the British engineering group's ambition to become a leading supplier of the technology in Europe," reports Euronews. From the report: Following a rigorous selection process that started in 2022, UK engineering giant Rolls-Royce's nuclear division, Rolls-Royce SMR, won the contract to build nuclear reactors for Sweden. As part of the deal, the group, selected by Videberg Kraft as its partner, will deliver three Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) to Sweden's west coast, at the Varo Peninsula. "The Videberg Project will build Sweden's first new nuclear power plant in more than forty years, supporting industries and households in southern Sweden," a press statement from Rolls-Royce said. The partnership with utility Vattenfall and developer Karnfull Next is seen as one of the most advanced opportunities for deployment outside of the UK. [...] The European Commission considers small modular reactors (SMRs) to be a promising low-carbon technology that could help support the bloc's clean energy and energy security goals. In order to remove regulatory barriers, the EU's SMR strategy was adopted in March 2026 to accelerate the development and deployment of the technology across Europe. SMRs are smaller than conventional nuclear power plants, typically generating between 20 and 300 megawatts of electricity. At the upper end of that range, a reactor could produce around 7.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per day -- enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that more than 1,000 small modular reactors could be deployed worldwide by 2050 under a supportive policy scenario, requiring cumulative investment of around $670 billion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot 05:30

Trump Admin Backs Off Plans To Kill Ocean Monitoring

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would take apart a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent over $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but suspicion immediately focused on the network's role in tracking climate change. But the OOI also provides data that's useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it's reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month. [...] The OOI is a federally supported resource that provides ocean data for use by academic researchers, government planners, and private companies. It consists of arrays of monitoring systems in several locations in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that can track things like currents, salinity, chemical levels, temperatures, and tectonic activity. (There are over 100 individual entries on the page that display the data gathered by the system.) Obviously, there are many potential uses of that data. The fact that it has been gathered continuously for a decade means it can help track changes in how carbon dioxide and heat enter the oceans. This is probably what made it a target for the climate change denialists who helped set the Trump administration's policy. Those policymakers are perfectly happy to annoy people with environmental concerns, but they apparently neglected to consider how upset everyone else would be about losing access to the other data. The ensuing public backlash led the Senate on Wednesday to unanimously agree with a measure that would block the government from taking down the OOI. Today's decision may indicate that the administration recognized it had gotten itself into a fight it knew it was losing. The National Science Foundation formally announced the decision, stating: "effective immediately, [it] will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays and will continue operations including planned maintenance." The agency added that it "appreciates the concerns raised by the range of stakeholders that have informed us they rely on data" from the OOI. The NSF also said it would "issue a Dear Colleague Letter to collect input from stakeholders and convene an expert panel to assess observational needs, evaluate available data sources, consider responses ... and help the agency identify a sustainable path for NSF's ocean observing systems." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot 01:00

Adobe Adds Its AI Assistant To Premiere, Illustrator and InDesign

Adobe is expanding its Firefly AI assistant into Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io, where it can automate all sorts of tasks such as organizing clips, renaming assets, adding interview markers, rearranging layers, and finding missing fonts. It's available starting today as part of a public beta. TechCrunch reports: Adobe is slowly transforming Firefly to increasingly resemble Canva, at least when it comes to AI features, loading up the app with AI tools that can generate images, videos and storyboards. The company is now adding a new feature called Elements that can save AI-generated characters, objects and locations for later use. Firefly is also getting a Projects feature that can store existing assets in one place, and share context. This could be useful for teams creating a video series or brand campaigns. Both of these features are currently available in a private beta. The company said users can now describe a brand and its style, or upload existing collateral, in Firefly to have it generate a brand kit, complete with logos, brand identity and color palettes, or even generate product videos from photos. Users can also create storyboards to create videos. Read more of this story at Slashdot.