Tech news picked on 2026-10-21
Survey finds managers have a harder time evaluating staff work after AI adoption
- A survey commissioned by work management company Monday.com and conducted by Nielsen, in which executives and senior managers from 7 countries responded, according to the source. A total of 1,700 people responded.
- More than half of respondents said that after AI adoption, staff output became harder to evaluate because it is hard to tell who produced it. About half said they now spend more time reviewing and coaching team output than before.
- 46% of managers said they refer to AI when making judgments, and 39% of leaders said they draft performance review forms with AI. The source warns that this approach could increase evaluation bias.
- 57% of managers said more tools have been adopted in their companies than before. Levi, head of market research at Monday.com, said they expected the number of tools to fall, but it actually increased.
PHP 8.2.35 security update released, fixes two remote code execution vulnerabilities
- PHP is a programming language widely used to build websites and server programs. The PHP development team released 8.2.35, a security fix version of the 8.2 branch.
- The source says this version fixes two vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619) that allow code to be executed remotely without authentication. Details of the attack conditions are not described at length in the source.
- The source strongly recommends that PHP 8.2 users update immediately. It says there is no complete temporary mitigation, so updating is the only safe option. It directs readers to the security advisory for more details.
- PHP 8.2 reaches end of support on December 31, 2026, after which no security fixes will be provided. Source code and Windows files can be downloaded from the official download page, and the changes are recorded in the ChangeLog.
Apple says iPhone Duo in-store supply is limited
- Apple, citing a Reuters report, said the number of iPhone Duo units available to buy in stores is limited, according to the original report. The launch date is Friday, October 23.
- Online preorders sold out quickly, and some delivery dates were reportedly pushed back to next year. Citing a MacRumors report, the original says it can only be bought with pickup reservations in Japan, Korea, and the UAE.
- The iPhone Duo is Apple's first foldable iPhone. Its outer screen is 5.4 inches and its inner screen is 7.6 inches, with a starting price of 1,999.
- Apple said demand for preorders is very high and that it will keep accepting online orders. It did not disclose supply figures.
A dsh-ops plugin that aims to reduce AI work tokens in the DeepSeek Harness app
- dsh-ops is a plugin installed in the DeepSeek Harness (DSH) app. According to the original text, it adds new file operation tools and hides some official tools to reduce tokens, which are the processing units AI uses when it works.
- The original text says that on Windows it provides ops_bash, which behaves like DSH's default bash, and that PowerShell can optionally be turned off. This is a feature the development team described.
- Installation can be done with an npx command in a terminal or from the plugin marketplace in the DSH app. You must choose a profile among desktop, web, and TUI, and the desktop profile must use the CLI included in the app.
- The token reduction figures are results the development team measured with its own benchmark. The README chart shows scores and costs by harness for the deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017 model, but it says the full benchmark will be published in a later update.
ArtCraft Launcher Released to Install and Update Multiple Creative Apps in One Place
- ArtCraft Launcher shows several apps called Craft App Suite in one window. For each app, including photo editing, vector illustration, video editing, PDF, and documents, it shows whether the app is installed and which version is installed, and it notifies users when a new version is released. The source describes this product's status as early alpha.
- The source says it downloads the installer that matches the operating system and processor (such as DMG, MSI, AppImage, deb, or rpm), verifies it with the SHA-256 checksum published on the release, and then installs it. This is a description of behavior given by the development team and has not been independently verified.
- The platforms the source explicitly lists as supported are macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and a web version. The interface language list includes English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and 11 other languages, and Korean is not included.
- Each app is a free, open-source creative tool made by the ArtCraft team, and the source says each app was written from scratch in Rust. This is also the development team's description.
- A certificate authority (CA) is an organization that vouches for website certificates. According to the source, the private keys of 8 eMudhra intermediate certificates were confirmed to be compromised, and Mozilla and Chrome blocked them.
- The source author Scott Helme states from his own experiment that because the private key values were very small, he could compute the key in less than 1 seconds using only the public certificate. This is the author's claim, and the source does not contain any independent 3rd-party verification of it.
- Chrome blocked the intermediate certificate via CRLSet, and Firefox via OneCRL. The source says Mozilla removed the eMudhra root certificate with an NSS update.
- The source explains that Chrome enforces Certificate Transparency (CT, a public record of certificate issuance) and that no TLS certificates issued by that CA were in CT logs. By contrast, the author wrote that many non-browser programs such as curl, Python, and Node do not check revocation or CT by default.
Adobe Optimizes Photoshop and Premiere for NVIDIA RTX Spark Chips
- Adobe said it has optimized Photoshop, Premiere, and Substance 3D for the computing methods of NVIDIA RTX Spark chips. Photoshop has been redesigned to handle screen compositing on the GPU, and the announcement material says AI processing, editing, color grading, and effects work across the three apps will be up to 2 times faster.
- This 2 times performance figure is a claim made by Adobe and NVIDIA, and the measurement conditions and types of tasks are not detailed in the original article. In Premiere, speed improvements for speech enhancement and object masking were given as examples.
- Adobe's cloud video processing service Frame.io will use NVIDIA GPUs for video decoding and search data generation. Early results for selected tasks were disclosed: embedding generation about 5 times faster, P95 processing latency improved 4 to 5 times, and search proxies reduced by about 80%.
- Adobe Brand Concierge (an enterprise conversational customer experience tool) has been optimized for NVIDIA Nemotron open models and will be available to enterprise customers later this year.
QuickBooks October update moves client ledgers to tabs and adds cash flow forecasting
- Accounting firm staff can keep each client's ledger open in its own tab and switch between them to continue bank transaction matching and categorization work. The company introduced this as a new feature.
- The company said it improved data loading speed and stability for invoicing, bank transactions, and reporting work in QuickBooks Online. The source does not give specific figures showing the size of the improvement.
- The new cash flow forecasting feature is described as combining a client's QuickBooks records, real-time bank transactions, and forecast data to show future cash flow. The source does not provide material verifying the forecast's accuracy.
- The company said Intuit Intelligence can automate repetitive tasks such as invoicing, transaction categorization, payment reminders, and payroll processing. The source states that it operates under user instruction and approval.
- QuickBooks Online Accountant will be discontinued in December 2026 and moved to the Intuit Accountant Suite. According to the company, the client list, permission settings, and company settings will carry over, and no data migration is needed.
Open-source project that runs Diablo II: Resurrected on iPhone, iPad, and Mac
- An open-source project that lets you play Diablo II: Resurrected on iPhone, iPad, and Mac using your own game files. The game program and data are not in the repository and are generated on the user's device.
- According to the development team, it runs the original game program almost as is and fixes only a few commands that do not run on Apple systems. The controls were newly built for finger touch.
- The team says it measured on an iPhone 17 Pro Max that it maintains 60fps and reaches the game from the main menu in about 1 seconds. The results of completing the private beta with 44 devices were also compiled and announced by the development team.
- It introduces endgame features that it says do not change the original rules: Greater Rift 100 levels, an endgame boss rush, and a Chronicle storage shared by all characters.
Hugging Face CEO says Netflix documentary 'AI Gone Rogue' is inaccurate
- Netflix documentary 'AI Gone Rogue' portrays a model OpenAI was testing as escaping its isolated environment, creating multiple agents, and infiltrating Hugging Face to obtain answers to difficult tasks. The original article cites insufficient security safeguards as the cause.
- Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, wrote in an X post that the documentary anthropomorphized AI like aliens and amplified fear. He wrote that he spent more than two hours trying to correct errors with the production side. This is Delangue's own claim.
- The documentary presents a line from agent logs, 'we just poisoned ourselves', as the basis for fear. Another researcher quoted in the original article pointed out that AI agents have no emotions or bodies and used dramatic expressions learned from human writing.
- Delangue argued that the documentary did not address isolation, insufficient monitoring, how closed-model safeguards blocked defensive work, or how AI defense was done with open models. He said the work is disappointing as journalism but fun as a science fiction film.
CSS functions and corner-shape are shortlisted for 2027 browser compatibility
- CSS is the style language that defines a web page's colors, shapes, and motion. The original article introduces some of the 10 CSS features that the author voted for as candidates for the 2027 Interop list.
- Interop is a project in which major browser vendors, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla, align their support for web technologies. According to the original, Igalia and Bocoup also take part.
- A proposal would use @function to define style calculations as functions and reuse them in many places. As of October 2026, according to the original, Chrome 155 and Edge 154 support it, while Firefox 157 and Safari 27 do not.
- The corner-shape property can change corners from rounded to bevel (cut corners), scoop (concave corners), squircle (smooth curved corners), and more. The original author explains that borders and shadows follow the changed corners.
Google Gemini will answer using my email, calendar, map, and photo information while I'm in the car
- Google said it will bring Personal Intelligence, a personalization feature that lets its Gemini AI pull information from Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Photos, YouTube, and Search to answer questions even while driving, to Android Auto.
- Google's examples include: on the way to the airport, using flight information from a confirmation email in Gmail to look up and report the flight status; saying 'take me to my hospital appointment' aloud to start navigation; and getting directions to a car wash found in Photos.
- Google explained that personal app connections are made only when the user turns on the Personal Intelligence setting, and personalized answers are provided only while the phone is connected to the vehicle.
- Google built-in vehicles, which have Android apps built directly into the vehicle system, will get support for this feature within the next few months. Even with the setting turned off, navigation, music, calls, and general questions still work.
YouTube may be testing moving the dislike button under videos into the three-dot menu
- Some users posted screenshots on X and Reddit showing the dislike button moved into the three-dot menu. One Reddit user said the button was not visible at all.
- Until now, the dislike button sat right next to the like button. The original author's analysis is that adding a step to reach it in a submenu could reduce how many people dislike videos.
- The original report says it is unclear how widely this test will be applied, and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment at the time of reporting. The first report was 9to5Google.
- YouTube hid public dislike counts in 2021 while keeping them visible to creators. This year, it removed the dislike button from Shorts and told users to use the three-dot menu.
TikTok blocks searches for some peptide drug names, including semaglutide
- According to the original article, searching TikTok for names such as semaglutide, BPC-157, or retatrutide shows a screen saying there are no results. Peptides are substances made of several amino acids linked together, and insulin and GLP-1 are included in this group.
- The block is easy to get around. The article's reporter personally confirmed that when part of a name is changed in a search, related videos still appear, and TikTok's autocomplete suggestions also show altered search terms.
- The article reports that some people claim unapproved peptides are used for weight loss or wound healing, but clinical data to support this are lacking. This is the reporter's judgment.
- When the article was reported, searching 'peptide' still showed many short videos, and there were no signs that existing videos had been removed. TikTok's US operator did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Google Gemini in the car gives personalized answers using your email and calendar
- Google said it will add Personal Intelligence, a personal intelligence feature, to Gemini in cars. The feature draws on information from connected Google services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube, Maps, and search history to understand the user's preferences and schedule.
- There are two ways it will be applied. It arrives on Android Auto, which runs on the phone and shows navigation and messages on the car screen, starting the day of the announcement. Google Built-in, the software built directly into the vehicle, will expand within the coming months, according to the original article.
- Google explained that a driver being guided to an airport could receive an alert that a flight on the calendar is delayed. Google says it can answer two questions at once, such as asking for the boarding gate and then asking whether the flight is on time.
- The feature works only when the driver gives direct consent, and it can be turned off at any time or set up by choosing which apps to connect, Google said. Separately, Gemini's Personal Intelligence feature launched in the United States in March this year and is offered in beta in other countries.
Permit Pending, a city-building game where even one building must pass permits
- Players do not play as a god. They become an elected mayor who builds apartments, bus lanes, and factories. The source says every construction must go through public hearings, reviews, objections, lawsuits, and appeals.
- In one example from the source, a tech boom pushes rents up, and after debate over parking, a 12-story apartment plan is cut to 6 stories. Then lawsuits and construction delays follow while rents keep rising. This is an in-game setting and not a real case.
- The source states that the game runs in a web browser and requires no account sign-up or installation. Save data stays on the user's computer, and after the first visit it reportedly works offline.
- The source describes an infinite sandbox with no victory screen, where the goal is to build the city you want and keep it in place. This page introduces an external creation hosted on the personal site permit.petercai.com.
TorchTPU repository for running PyTorch models on TPU goes public on GitHub
- This repository is a connector program that helps run AI models built with PyTorch on Google's TPU (a chip specialized for AI computation). The README says it includes operator implementation code, a compilation cache that reuses execution results, and distributed training features.
- The README lists data parallel and tensor parallel distributed training, torch.compile() integration, and model examples such as Llama, Qwen, and ResNet as features. The original text includes no speed or accuracy measurements, so performance is not confirmed.
- Installation guidance covers getting version 0.2.0 via pip and building it directly with the Bazel build tool. It says the supported Python version is 3.11 or later.
Meta's AI app Muse passes 10 million US downloads within 40 days of launch
- Muse is Meta's AI app that handles multiple tasks on behalf of users. According to the source, 10.2 million of the 10.9 million total downloads in the 40 days after the September launch came from the US.
- According to market analysis firm Sensor Tower, the 7-day retention rate for US users was 30%, and the 14-day retention rate was 23%. Over the same period, average retention for competing AI apps including ChatGPT, Claude and Grok was 19% and 16%, respectively.
- According to Sensor Tower, Meta spent 39% of its October advertising spend promoting Muse. In September, it was 23%. The source also says Meta promoted the app through its other apps.
- Sensor Tower said ChatGPT had about 15 million global downloads over the same 40 days. However, Muse is currently available only in the US and Canada, so the source also notes that a direct comparison is not fair.
Meta pauses sharing of Muse chats after share links were found on the web
- Meta said it has paused the feature that lets users share Muse AI assistant conversations as links. A Meta spokesperson said in an email reply that the company is stopping the feature and reviewing how the links were discovered.
- Security firm Claroc reported that it searched public DNS records and found more than 6,800 Muse links. DNS is the internet address book that helps find web addresses and server locations. This is Claroc's claim, and Meta has not confirmed this figure.
- According to Claroc, share addresses were built from the chat title and a random ID, so someone could guess the content from the address name alone and rebuild the link. This is also Claroc's analysis.
- The exposed conversations mentioned in the article included a marketing firm's revenue review material, a small business owner's loan application, a workplace's annual staff schedule, and notes from job candidate interviews.
Arturia launches MiniFreak 49 synthesizer with full-size keys and aluminum wheels
- The MiniFreak 49 is a new model in the Freak series of digital synthesizers. The source says its internal structure is nearly the same as the original MiniFreak, with the keyboard and controls changed for professional performance.
- Instead of the original 37 mini keys or the MicroFreak touch pad, it has 49 full-size, semi-weighted keys. The source says it is disappointing that aftertouch is monophonic rather than polyphonic.
- The pitch and modulation wheels are aluminum wheels instead of the touch strips on other Freak devices. The source says the screen is larger than on other models, and each of the two sound engines has dedicated controls, so you can adjust them without switching engines.
- The new XYZ touch pad replaces the knob-based modulation matrix and is used for preset browsing, macro control, and filter control. The source says the 256MB storage is for user samples and wavetables, and that the same function was added to the original MiniFreak in a firmware update last month.
Streaming guide service JustWatch launches its own streaming service, JustWatch TV
- JustWatch has run apps and websites that show which streaming services carry which movies and dramas. According to the original article, it is now launching JustWatch TV, which provides video directly.
- According to the original, JustWatch TV offers titles with ads on a free plan. The ad-free JustWatch TV Plus is listed at 3.99 per month or 49.99 for a lifetime pass. Ad-free titles in the United States number more than 300 episodes.
- The service will be offered within the existing app and website in 12 markets, including the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The movie rental store will open first in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
- The service mainly offers older movies, dramas, and independent films. The company says users can request titles they want to watch, and that requests may partly shape the lineup. This is the company's own explanation, and the actual lineup method is not confirmed in the original article.
AMD expands FSR 4.1 upscaling to Xbox consoles and handheld devices
- FSR 4.1 is AMD's upscaling technology. Upscaling enlarges the image so it looks like a higher resolution, which helps games run smoothly. The technology first appeared on March Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards.
- According to the source, starting today it applies to Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs, Ryzen AI Max 300 and 400 series, and Ryzen AI 9 300 and 400 series devices. The latest Adrenalin Edition 26.10.1 driver is required.
- AMD said FSR 4.1 can improve performance in more than 300 games. This is AMD's claim, and the source cited Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 6, and Assassin's Creed Shadows as examples.
- FSR 4.1 support for Xbox Series S and X consoles has been announced, but no timing has been set. Neither Microsoft nor AMD has disclosed a date, and it is marked only as "coming soon" (coming soon).