X says it’s investigating a wave of unsolicited password reset emails tied to the September 2026 launch of X Money, which includes a bank card. On Sept. 1, product engineer Mridul Singhai said there’s no evidence of any breaches and apologized for the multiple emails; Grok is telling users to enable two-factor authentication, and counsel James Burnham vowed to hold attackers accountable.
September 2026 saw Florida and Texas move to drop Flock license-plate readers over privacy and misuse. Florida DOT ordered removal from state highways within 30 days after Ron DeSantis called it “out of control”; Texas halted funding after a Lufkin officer was indicted on 100 felony counts over alleged unauthorized database tracking in the ~130,000-camera network.
Microsoft traced the multi-day Microsoft 365/Outlook disruption to a misconfigured “core authentication configuration” that prevented authentication components from deploying as expected. By 10 p.m. ET Monday mail flow was improving, search remained degraded until about 3 a.m. ET Tuesday, and a later X update said mitigation actions are continuing with telemetry positive and extended monitoring underway.
Microsoft confirmed a multi-hour Outlook/Exchange Online outage on Aug. 31, 2026, traced to a failed “authentication component.” Downdetector saw reports from ~11:30 AM ET, topping 5,000 by 2:00 PM, while users faced auth errors, message send/receive failures, and mailbox search issues.
VideoLAN says VLC has topped 7B downloads on all platforms as of Aug 2026, about 18 months after hitting 6B in Jan 2025. President/lead dev Jean-Baptiste Kempf cites a port to Amazon’s Vega OS for TVs and ongoing work on VLC 4, plus last year’s local-model translation/subtitle tease.
Phil Schiller, one of Apple’s longest-serving executives, is stepping down from his roles overseeing the App Store and Apple events, according to a report from Bloomberg published August 31, 2026….
Google Maps began displaying “Lake America” in place of Lake Ontario for US users in late August 2026, making it the first major online maps provider to reflect President Donald Trump’s executive…
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic on Aug. 29, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging Claude training used “brazen” illegal torrenting, scraping, and downloading of thousands of copyrighted books and sheet music. The complaint builds on Bartz v. Anthropic, where a judge said AI training can be legal but piracy isn’t, ordering $1.5B.
Google began automatically expanding its AI search summaries for some queries in 2026, pushing traditional link results further down the page, according to a report first noted by Search Engine…
Brave adds email aliasing to block real-address tracking: after creating a Brave account, users choose an alias via a pop-up or right-click; mail is forwarded and then deleted from Brave servers. Brave doesn’t read contents beyond spam/virus filtering; notes are local (E2E if synced).
A Georgia police officer used a license plate reader system to surveil two fellow officers — including a former romantic partner — dozens of times over several months, according to internal investigation records obtained by WIRED through a public records request.
Barret Zoph returns to Google as VP of Research, bringing RL and post-training know-how to Gemini after bouncing back to OpenAI in January 2026 for five months. He’d exited in October 2024 to co-found Thinking Machines with Mira Murati.
