You would think that a multimedia conglomerate as large as Disney would have a few chief technology officers by now, but the company has just appointed someone to the position for the very first time. Today, Disney announced that Karandeep Anand is joining the company as its new CTO. Anand will report directly to recently appointed CEO Josh D'Amaro, and he will head up the company's infrastructure, product, engineering, and data / AI platforms teams. Anand comes to Disney from chatbot startup Character.AI, where he served as CEO for just over a year and oversaw the company's push into microdramas. Anand jumping ship to Disney comes as a …Read the full story at The Verge.

A team of three independent security researchers at Hacktron says it took less than 72 hours for them to hack into OpenAI employee accounts using Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and 5, The Wall Street Journal reports. They were able to access OpenAI's GitHub repository, called "Monorepo," which reportedly contains "OpenAI's algorithmic secrets," according to The Wall Street Journal's sources. They stopped short of accessing internal code in Monorepo themselves, but sent a pull request from an employee's Codex account to prove they gained access. They were able to get in through Discourse, the third-party service that hosts OpenAI's community f …Read the full story at The Verge.

I love using Android Auto and have done so for many years now. It completely replaced vehicle infotainment systems that are often sluggish, underpowered, and sometimes downright useless.

As the tech sector sounds alarms about AI's potential to destroy humanity, entertainment labor groups are urging the public to stay focused on what's already happening. The Verge reached out to Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Lionsgate, and other studios who have started using AI, as well film startups focused on bringing generative AI into the mainstream to ask for their reaction to the recent warnings surrounding the technology. None have responded to our request for comment. The Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) did, however.The AI tools used in entert …Read the full story at The Verge.

I never expected VS Code to replace some of the productivity apps I use every day, but that is exactly what happened. What started as a simple experiment to keep a few article drafts next to my coding projects quickly turned into a much bigger workflow change.

Modern computing has come a long, long way. We went from AGP slots moving about 2GB/s and IDE ribbon cables wide enough to block half the airflow in case to a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot carrying roughly thirty times that bandwidth, storage wired straight into the CPU, and a single rear port that pushes 40Gbps of data and a display signal at once.

Ever since the prices of Raspberry Pi single-board computers hit deranged levels, I’ve found myself gravitating towards the ESP32 lineup for my DIY smart home gadgets. But as much as I hate to admit it, I was somewhat intimidated by these microcontrollers when I first bought an ESP32 module years ago.

The FCC has announced it's waiving its rules limiting foreign equity ownership to 25 percent in the Paramount-Warner Bros. case and will allow three sovereign wealth funds run by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi to own 49.5 percent of the company. During Brendan Carr's tenure, the FCC has repeatedly threatened ABC, tried to block stations from airing interviews with Democrats, censored late-night TV hosts, and tried to bully journalists. However, it seems to have no qualms with repressive foreign governments owning a significant stake in a giant American media conglomerate. In its ruling, the FCC defended the decisio …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's one of the most fascinating years in a while when it comes to iPhone camera upgrades. The big story of the iPhone 18 Pro is the variable aperture main lens, which lets you open the aperture up wider for better low light shots and make the aperture smaller for better depth of field in group photos. But all I can get anyone to talk about is the software upgrades: it turns out, they're a lot more useful day to day than the aperture on a camera this small.This week on The Vergecast, David Imel and Allison Johnson are here for a deep dive into the iPhone 18 Pro's camera. There's a lot to explore here, from the aperture, to the camera app's …Read the full story at The Verge.

When setting up my home server, I wanted a reliable, always-on core to manage my smart home and media library. When looking at prebuilt 4-bay NAS enclosures or dedicated automation servers, the price tags were around $800 before you even consider hard drives. So, instead of buying a locked-down appliance or building a bulky, power-hungry desktop tower, I looked at mini PCs instead and found the GEEKOM A5 2027.

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger ordered the state government to take steps that could empower local communities to have a larger say in data center development and slow down approvals in a state that is already home to the data center capital of the world.Executive Order 22 bans executive branch officials from signing nondisclosure agreements for data center projects, requires expedited noise regulations, and requires a review of backup-generation operations used by data centers, among other requirements. The order also establishes an AI task force responsible for evaluating how the state government can address risks to Virginians like wo …Read the full story at The Verge.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is positioning the state to take the lead on AI oversight, including the potential to mandate a "kill switch" for frontier models, with a new executive order issued Friday. Newsom's order directs the state to convene a group of experts that will deliver recommendations within two months on how to strengthen AI safety measures in state law. Newsom wants the group to consider how the state could require AI companies to embed independent verification groups onsite for regular audits, make their transparency reports and risk assessments subject to standards of independent auditors, create a "kill switch" that's …Read the full story at The Verge.