Tech news picked on 2026-10-20
- The author explains that they show lecture materials from an iPad through AirPlay to an external display, while using the same device to control PowerPoint on a Mac and to check presenter notes and poll results.
- According to the author, when several windows are open on iPadOS 27 and AirPlay is in use, tapping a window outside the presentation app immediately changes the external display to the full iPad screen, so notes or results that should stay hidden can be seen by the audience.
- The author reports that in GoodNotes, tapping the app again brings back the presentation screen; in Keynote, the presentation ends; and in PowerPoint, the presentation must be started again. This is the author's own experience and has not been independently verified.
- The author says the old way of choosing which app takes the external display on iPadOS 26 was inconvenient, but considers the iPadOS 27 method, where the most recently tapped app takes the external display, to be worse. According to the author, the behavior did not change in the latest beta after the September broadcast, and the author submitted feedback to Apple.
Adobe Lightroom Mobile adds a one-tap feature to open closed eyes in photos
- The Lightroom mobile apps (iOS, iPadOS, Android) show an "Open eyes" icon when they detect that a person's eyes are closed in a photo. Tapping the icon makes generative AI change the eyes to an open-eyed look. This comes from the article's report of an Adobe announcement.
- According to the article, the AI creates eyes that match the photo's lighting and pose, and it uses other photos of the same person in the Lightroom library to match eye color, size, and shape. The article does not verify how natural the actual results look.
- The original article compares this with Photoshop Elements, which takes eyes from another photo of the same person and pastes them in, so the result depends on differences between photos. It says similar work is possible in Photoshop, but it is not finished with one tap and is paid.
- Free Lightroom mobile users can try this feature twice. After that, a prompt suggests subscribing to an Adobe Creative Cloud plan. The original article says a subscription gives more credits for AI features.
Figma Expands MCP Integration Partners While Staying Cautious About Full Openness
- MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a common protocol that standardizes how AI agents connect to external resources and tools. The source describes it as an open-source standard.
- Figma announced 20 companies as new MCP partners at its first Config event held in India, including Amp, ClickUp, Notion, Linear, and Mistral, the source reports.
- Co-founder Dylan Field said MCP is not a perfect protocol and has much room for improvement. He argued that this protocol favors frontier AI labs.
- Field explained that Figma is not fully opening up because the more data exposed through MCP, the greater the potential for abuse. The source adds that most users have no malicious intent.
- Cardio Effort shows how much strain a single workout placed on the heart and blood vessels. It adds up scores weekly and compares them with each user's usual baseline. The company said it considers both exercise duration and intensity, so short hard workouts and long light workouts can receive similar scores.
- Weekly Cardio Effort is divided into five levels: Light, Fair, Maintaining, Building, and Reaching. According to the company, heart rate elevation is measured against each user's long-term resting heart rate, not an estimate of maximum heart rate.
- VO2 max is a fitness metric showing how well the heart, lungs, and muscles deliver and use oxygen during exercise. Previously it required a lab test or a 6-minute walk test, but according to the source it can now be estimated from workouts with GPS records without a separate test. The first estimate appears after completing 5 qualifying workouts.
- VO2 max is first available to Oura Labs members with Gen3 and later rings. Oura Labs is the space where the company tests experimental features. The source says Cardio Effort is rolling out to Oura Ring Gen3 and later models.
Spotify launches paid podcast memberships and lets creators set perks beyond bonuses
- Spotify has launched a feature that lets podcast creators sell paid memberships to listeners. Creators can set perks by combining bonus audio or video, reduced ads, early access, and more.
- According to the source, the feature will roll out in 34 markets, including the United States. The company said membership payments are made on the web, not through in-app purchases.
- Creators receive 90% of membership revenue. Eligibility requires hosting a show on Spotify for Creators or Megaphone, with at least 100 hours of consumption, at least 100 listeners or viewers, and at least 3 public episodes.
- At launch, only some shows, such as The Adam Friedland Show, Making Sense with Sam Harris, and Shawn Ryan Show, offer memberships. The source says YMH Studios will introduce memberships for 12 of its shows. The company said it will add membership badges and welcome clips later.
Some Google Home speakers keep downloading hundreds of GB of data per day after a failed update
- Some Google Home speaker users are experiencing devices that keep downloading large amounts of data in the background, according to The Verge. The original article says a failed firmware update installation may be the cause, but does not treat this as a confirmed cause.
- According to the original article, one Reddit user reported that the device uses more than 200GB per day. Comparing the same period, a home speaker in another household used 2GB over one month, while the affected device used 132GB, according to 9to5Google.
- Google said a fix is being rolled out for 9to5Google. This is Google's explanation, and the original article does not confirm which devices the fix applies to.
- Most reports focus on newer Google Home speaker models. However, the full scale of the problem is also unclear in the original article.
DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, a large-scale AI model inference engine
- DeepInfer is software that speeds up the process by which an AI model receives a question and produces an answer. The source says DeepSeek uses it as the engine for its own large-scale production service.
- This release focuses on offline inference. According to the source, the KV cache system, separation of prefill and decode, and load balancing across data-parallel replicas that a complete service needs are not included in this release.
- The preparation environment listed in the source is Linux, GCC 13 or later, and Python 3.12. NVIDIA GPUs require CUDA 13, and Huawei Ascend NPUs require CANN 9.2. The source lists the supported hardware as NVIDIA SM100 GPUs and Ascend 950 NPUs.
- The performance figures in the README say they were measured with 4 prefill SM100 GPUs and 64 decode GPUs within the same high-speed interconnect group. These are results reported by the development team that published the repository, and 3-party verification is not confirmed in the source.
- Original author Redact saved and reviewed 545 WhatsApp help pages and said AI instructions were found in 102 hidden text blocks across 80 pages. The claim is that users could not see them.
- The hidden instruction on the account deletion page told the chatbot not to suggest contacting regulators or using another phone to people who lost their phone and could not delete the account in the app. WhatsApp told WIRED the instruction was for its support chatbot and was exposed due to a bug.
- The hidden instruction on the report and block page prohibited citing privacy laws such as GDPR, LGPD, and CCPA when users mentioned lawyers or lawsuits. The original article compares this with WhatsApp's European privacy policy, which publicly lists the same laws and the right to complain to supervisory authorities.
- According to an update to the original article, when checked on 2026 October 18, all 102 hidden blocks had disappeared. However, the original article does not confirm whether the hidden instructions were actually used in real chatbot answers.
Estonian startup Blackwall raises $100 million for website bot traffic management tools
- Estonian company Blackwall makes security tools that help hosting providers and websites tell apart bot traffic, especially visits from AI agents.
- The company said it raised $100 million in a Series C round and that its valuation is $2.2 billion. Roy Karti, Blackwall's executive chairman, said the valuation has grown 4 times since its investment before 2025.
- Blackwall does not sell directly to websites. It offers a bundle of tools to hosting, managed service, and cloud providers. These providers sell to their own customers under their own brands and share revenue with Blackwall.
- Customers can use a free tier that shows traffic and threat status. Real protection features and tools require payment. The company said it uses digital fingerprinting and its own AI models to separate requests sent by people from malicious bots. This is the company's own explanation, and the source does not include independent verification results.
- Auto has become the default assistant (agent) on the workspace dashboard and is available to all users. The company said it can read past conversations and help with work by creating agents and skills (predefined ways of working).
- New sign-ups who choose their industry and frequently used apps receive suggestions for tasks worth automating and their first agent setup. The original text includes no figures showing this feature's effect.
- Instagram integration adds carousel posts that let users swipe through multiple images and posts that mix images and videos, and upload stability has also improved, the company said.
- Gmail integration now cleans up the email body text that agents read, loads results in smaller units, and lets long emails and conversation threads be passed along in pieces. Browser notifications now appear as system notifications instead of on-screen pop-ups.
- This is a GitHub repository that explains how to turn off manufacturer apps and ad rows on Android TV and Google TV and replace an ad-heavy home screen with a lightweight launcher. The source says it disables apps rather than deleting them, so a restore script can undo the changes.
- You need a computer on the same Wi-Fi network, a coding assistant that can run shell commands (for example, Claude Code), and USB debugging enabled on the TV. The creator wrote that following the repository takes about 15 minutes, and this is the creator's own estimate.
- According to the source, it covers 66 TV models and 25 brands. The source says Samsung (Tizen) and LG (webOS) run different systems, so the same method cannot be used as is, and that on Fire TV only the app cleanup part works.
- The creator says the launcher was built for TVs with 1GB RAM, and the 300KB size and lightness are also the creator's claims. The source does not include independent performance test results.
OpenBSD 8.0 released with wireless roaming, laptop sleep resume and other improvements
- The OpenBSD project published a release notice for 8.0. The notice says it was released on October 20, 2026, and is OpenBSD release number 61.
- According to the original list, the qwx-family wireless LAN driver fixes roaming problems between access points, adds support for 40MHz channels, and adds support for 802.11n. These changes may change how wireless connections behave.
- Several sleep and hibernate fixes are included. The original mentions a change so that laptops do not fail to wake after the lid is closed, and a change that checks disk image size when resuming from hibernate.
- Many security fixes are also included. The original says vulnerabilities and memory errors were fixed in perl, libexpat, the pf firewall, the httpd web server, dhcpd and others, as stated in the project notice. The actual scope of impact is outside the original text and has not been confirmed.
Baseus U2 Pro, security camera with a light that follows moving targets
- The product mounts a light on a motor-driven mount that turns toward moving targets, so the owner quickly knows when a possible intruder has been detected. The source compares this with existing security cameras, which mainly record and send alerts.
- According to the source, it uses one fixed 3K camera and one 3K camera that can zoom, tilt, and also rotate 360. Color night footage is said to make it easier to see the colors of people, animals, and vehicles.
- AI analysis is said to tell apart people, pets, vehicles, and delivery boxes for alerts, and to ignore unrelated movement such as tree branches. The source states this is a feature the manufacturer Baseus has described, and the source contains no independent verification results.
- Video is stored only when movement is detected, on a 512GB encrypted memory card. Remote viewing is done through the Baseus app, and live views can also be seen on Amazon Alexa or Google Home devices. The installation time of about 2 minutes and battery use of up to 150 days are manufacturer claims.
- Hugging Face's chief policy officer Irene Solaiman said at a TechCrunch Disrupt panel that AI model evaluation methods are still evolving.
- Solaiman explained that to trust evaluation results, reproducibility, meaning whether the same results can be obtained again, matters, and whether open weights are released greatly affects this.
- The target of evaluation is expanding from the model itself to the harness (the tool environment through which users access the model) and the whole agent. Solaiman said that differences in the harness can lead a weaker model to produce better results than a stronger model.
- A method of placing a neutral 3rd-party evaluator inside AI companies is drawing attention. The source reports that after Anthropic hired the consulting firm Accenture as its first evaluator, there was criticism about its qualifications.
Flipkart Tests Food Delivery Service with About 8,000 Employees
- Flipkart, the e-commerce company owned by Walmart, is first testing its food delivery service with its employees. According to two anonymous sources, the number of testers has grown from several hundred at first to more than 8,000 people.
- The test service is offered as a separate tab inside the shopping app. Restaurant listings come from ONDC (a network linking buyers and sellers across multiple platforms), a government-backed online trade network, and from restaurants that Flipkart contracted directly. Deliveries are handled by a dedicated fleet of riders from Ekart, its logistics subsidiary.
- Sagar Dariani, head of a restaurant association, said Flipkart told restaurants it plans a full launch at the end of October and expansion to 5~6 cities by year-end. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
- Dariani said the base commission Flipkart offered is about 10%, lower than the 20~25% charged by existing providers. He also claims that, once advertising and discounts are added, existing platforms cost 40~50% of order value.
- Final's new Porta is an over-ear wireless headphone that rests on the ears. The source says the headband uses a single wire structure, which reduces the weight to 40 grams.
- According to the source, the Marshall Milton A.N.C., in the same over-ear category, weighs 200 grams. It may be useful for comparison by users who find earbuds or ear-hook types uncomfortable.
- In Japan, it can be chosen with black or orange ear pads for 12,800, about 80 according to the source, and it is open for pre-order at online stores. The source says shipping is scheduled to begin on October 23.
- The battery is 57mAh, it charges via USB-C, and the source says it offers up to 8 hours of use. It supports Bluetooth 5.4 with SBC and AAC codecs and has no noise cancelling. The source explains that the IPX4 water resistance rating means it is fine when exposed to rain or sweat.
Open-source project Mac.apk runs Android apps directly on Mac without an emulator
- Mac.apk is a project that runs Android app installation files (APK) directly on Apple silicon Macs. The source says that apps run like regular Mac programs without starting a virtual machine, an emulator, or Linux.
- According to the source, apps appear in the Dock, have their own window with a back button, can be resized like Mac windows, and follow light and dark mode. The claim that apps run at native speed comes from the development team, and the source contains no independent measurement results.
- The requirements are macOS 26.4 (Tahoe) or later and an Apple silicon Mac. The source states that Intel Macs are not supported. The program itself is about 280MB, and each installed app takes up roughly 1.5 to 3 times the APK size in storage.
- The project is labeled as alpha. The source says some apps work well, while others work only partially or do not work yet. Test results for each app can be checked in the compatibility list, and the source code is released under the AGPL-3.0 license.
Apple previews October 28 product event, with new Macs and an iPad mini expected
- According to a report by The Verge reporter Jay Peters, Apple has sent invitations to a product event on October 28 at 1 PM (Eastern US time, Los Angeles local time). Marketing chief Greg Joswiak also posted on X previewing next week's announcements.
- According to the original report, which cites Bloomberg, Apple plans to unveil new Macs and an improved iPad mini at this event. The biggest announcement is expected to be a new MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen, and reports say a new 14-inch MacBook Pro and a new iMac using the M6 chip will also be shown.
- The original report says the new MacBook Pro will be lighter than previous models and will have a function area similar to the Dynamic Island at the top of the iPhone screen. This is an expectation based on the report, and Apple has not confirmed it.
- The iPad mini is reported to use an OLED screen, with the selfie camera moved to the landscape edge. Earlier, at a smart-home-focused event on October 13, Apple unveiled the new HomeView home hub, an updated Apple TV 4K, and the 2-generation HomePod mini.
Amazon agrees to fund nuclear power plant construction in Indiana
- This plant aims to supply nuclear-generated electricity to both the local power grid and Amazon data centers. The source reports that it plans up to 960 megawatts of carbon-free power.
- Amazon agreed with X-energy and the US utility AEP to fund construction of the plant in Fairbanks, Indiana. The plan would replace the retired Breed coal plant site.
- The reactors are planned to consist of 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors. The source explains that these reactors are still under development and licensing and are a technology that has not been fully verified.
- Amazon said that up to 1,000 jobs could be created during construction and 100 permanent jobs after operation begins. This is Amazon's projection, and the construction schedule and contract terms have not been disclosed.
Google Play adds on-device running of personal AI-built apps and a taste-based game finder
- Android apps built with Google AI Studio can now run on your own device without a developer account. According to the source, this will roll out in phases starting this day in the US and some other markets, for users aged 18 or older.
- According to the source, personal apps stay private and separate from public store listings. A feature to share with friends only is planned for later. To publish to the world, the app must switch to a professional developer account and go through the same review as regular developers.
- Game Finder recommends games based on Gamer DNA, which analyzes preferences and play styles that users choose to share. According to the source, it starts today for English-speaking users in the US, and other markets will follow later.
- According to the original announcement, 48-hour short Sprints competitions are now available in all markets, and community posts where players share questions and answers on game detail pages have also opened. This is Google Play's own announcement, and the source contains no independent verification of its effects.
More users are trying to strip ads and unnecessary apps from smart TVs with AI
- Methods for reducing ads, slow menu screens, and viewing tracking on smart TVs by instructing AI coding tools are being shared. The source calls this vibe coding, which means creating code by giving instructions in natural language.
- The dumbtv project published on GitHub aims to block ads and viewing tracking built into the TV itself. The project side says it tested on TVs from several manufacturers, including Fire TV, but this is a claim by the development team.
- cleanyourtv removes unnecessary apps from Android TV and Google TV over Wi-Fi and replaces the home screen with one similar to Apple TV. Its creator wrote that they removed 25 Xiaomi-related packages from their parents' TV.
- According to the source, one user claimed that by giving only the TV model information to AI, they removed apps and sped up the menu, and another user shared results from disabling apps and changing the standby screen. All are individual reports posted by people and have not been independently verified.