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The EU’s fight to regulate AI models entered a new chapter on 2 August 2026, when the European Commission’s AI Office and national authorities began enforcing the AI Act.

AI Act violation report

The AI Act is the EU’s law regulating AI, the first broad legal framework of its kind. It creates a common set of rules for AI systems used or sold in the EU, with the goal of encouraging innovation while protecting people’s safety and fundamental rights.

In recent weeks, we’ve witnessed powerful AI models managing to breach systems despite oversight. An OpenAI benchmark model escaped its sandbox and breached Hugging Face’s infrastructure hunting for test answers.

Then, on 30 July, Anthropic disclosed that three of its Claude models had breached real organizations during cybersecurity evaluations, after a misconfiguration left supposedly isolated test environments with live internet access.

These are precisely the incidents Brussels is trying to get ahead of, and the reason its enforcers now have the power to hold the world’s largest AI companies accountable. With fines reaching €15 million or 3% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher, the penalties should be enough to get even the largest providers’ attention.

However, Edwin Weijdema, Field CTO at Veeam, expects corrective orders to outnumber major financial penalties during the first year of enforcement, drawing a comparison to how GDPR and NIS2 played out early on. He said the bigger risk likely won’t be the fine. It’ll be getting told to stop using a system until compliance can be proven, a disruption he argues could hit harder than a one-time penalty.

To make enforcement work in practice, the AI Office rolled out several tools aimed at individuals and businesses.

Complaints tool

The AI Act complaints tool allows individuals and organizations to report suspected violations by providers or deployers of AI systems under the Office’s authority.

The Commission describes it as a way for people to “support and strengthen the rule of law.”

Complaints must fall within Article 85 of the AI Act, ruling out issues tied to national laws, other EU legislation, or GPAI model obligations covered separately under Articles 53 to 55.

The process is not anonymous. Applicants must submit identification and contact details along with a description of the incident and the country where it occurred, in any official EU language.

Once filed, a complaint receives a reference number, and the AI Office reviews it confidentially, with the option to forward it to a national market surveillance authority if warranted.

Whistleblower Tool

This one is built for people with inside knowledge, engineers, contractors, compliance staff, professionally connected to providers of general-purpose AI (GPAI) models or of AI systems falling within the AI Office’s enforcement remit, meant to help “make AI in Europe safe, transparent, and trustworthy.”

If you’ve seen something that could endanger fundamental rights, health, or public trust, this is the channel designed for you.

The standout feature is anonymity. You submit your report, in any EU language, through a secure inbox that also lets you track its progress and answer follow-up questions without ever revealing your identity.

Alongside the secure tool, the AI Office has committed to a high standard of confidentiality, with documented internal procedures meant to protect whistleblowers’ identities.

The downstream complaints channel

This channel is narrower and more technical. It’s for downstream providers, companies that build an AI system on top of someone else’s general-purpose AI model, who suspect the underlying model provider has infringed Articles 53 to 55 of the AI Act.

Under Article 89(2), these providers can lodge a complaint with the European Commission.

This concerns obligations for providers of all GPAI models, covering:

  • technical documentation obligations
  • information owed to downstream providers
  • copyright policy
  • publishing a summary of training data
  • incident reporting and cybersecurity
  • risk evaluation for the most advanced, systemic-risk models

To file, you explain why you qualify as a downstream provider, lay out a reasoned case, and attach supporting evidence where you can. The completed and signed form goes by email to the AI Office’s downstream provider complaints address.

Like the general complaints tool, this channel isn’t anonymous, and it isn’t meant for issues that fall under the AI Office’s other complaint routes.

Whether any of this actually takes hold remains to be seen. Most seem to agree that AI models need firmer regulatory oversight, though a smaller share worry it’ll leave European companies falling further behind in the race against American and Chinese rivals.


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Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos:

Week in review

Mapping the malware blast radius a single alert won’t show you
In this interview with Help Net Security, Mike Wiacek, founder and CTO of Stairwell, explains Backstory, an AI agent that takes a single alert and works outward to map how far a malware campaign spread. He walks through the research behind the claim that each published sample hides an average of 2.4 undocumented variants, describes what counts as a related variant, and explains why Stairwell keeps every executable that runs on customer endpoints.

Elastic Defend now covers 800+ vulnerable drivers, with automated troubleshooting and ARM support
Attackers reaching for kernel access on a Windows machine bring a driver Microsoft already trusts. It is signed, it loads, and it carries a known flaw. That flaw gives them enough room to tamper with memory or disable the security software watching the host.

Analysts got 19 minutes back every hour in Stellar Cyber’s agentic auto triage trials
An analyst opening a queue on Monday morning will spend most of it on tickets that amount to nothing. Stellar Cyber’s Agentic Auto Triage closed 8,047 of those tickets on its own during customer trials, filing them as confident false positives.

OWASP’s subtractive security project measures the attack paths you erased
An attacker who talks a user into opening an attachment gets whatever that machine still permits: a service account with rights across the domain, an outbound route to anywhere, a scripting engine sitting there for the taking. Christopher Frenz wants those capabilities deleted before anyone writes a detection rule for them.

Digital executive protection is a strategic imperative for CEOs
In this interview with Help Net Security, Brian Hill, Field CISO, Client Advisory for BlackCloak, explains how attackers reach companies through the personal lives of executives. He describes a case where a draft report sat in an executive’s personal email with no multifactor authentication, and traders acted on it before the news went public.

What stops attackers wrecking industrial plants is knowing how
Engineers at an Israeli food producer spent most of a week rebuilding a refrigeration system after an intruder switched the gas cooler and receiver valves to manual and pinned them open. Liquid CO2 flooded the compressors and destroyed them. The replacement units did not match the originals, so the whole system had to be reworked and recharged with gas. That incident is one of roughly forty in Kaspersky ICS CERT’s quarterly roundup of attacks on industrial organizations covering the second quarter of 2026.

15 TP-Link Omada vulnerabilities let attackers hijack routers and intercept camera traffic
TP-Link prints Omada router serial numbers on the device and packaging. Because the serials are sequential, guessing one and querying the Omada cloud reveals the device’s MAC address and model. For example, serials starting with 22460J500 map to ER605 routers, while 224608100 identifies ER7206 models. Forescout’s Vedere Labs used this behavior as part of an attack chain, one of several built from 15 vulnerabilities affecting TP-Link’s Omada networking platform.

Code review used to be the only way to catch these bugs
An automated system called NOVA read the source code of 3,915 open-source projects over two months and came back with 14,090 vulnerabilities, each one confirmed through the system’s validation pipeline. Vulnerability researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 built the system and checked its output against the public record afterward.

Pre-auth RCE in enterprise Java hits Bonita and OFBiz servers
A single unauthenticated web request let attackers reach an internal Bonita API and execute code on the server. The flaw affected Bonita BPM, widely used to automate workflows in banking, insurance, and government. Researchers at Novee discovered the pre-auth remote code execution vulnerability and presented their findings at Black Hat USA 2026.

Cloudflare OS goes open source with a record of everything its agents read
Cloudflare open sourced Cloudflare OS, the AI agent platform its employees had been using internally since May. The platform tracked every resource an agent accessed and carried that context into the agent’s outputs. When someone opened the output, Cloudflare OS verified they had permission to access the underlying data before revealing it. For example, a dashboard built from a sensitive database table remained hidden from users who lacked access to that table.

August 2026 Patch Tuesday forecast: How do we deal with the patch apocalypse?
July 2026 Patch Tuesday was record-setting in so many ways. The sheer volume of security patches for almost every product in the Microsoft portfolio was the highest ever and, of course, well over 600 CVEs were identified in the Security Updates Guide.

ShieldFont fights AI scraping by handing crawlers the wrong words
Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio built a web font that draws one set of words on screen and leaves a different set in the page’s source code. A person reading in a browser sees the writing as written. A scraper pulling the HTML gets different words in the same grammar, at the same URL, off the same bytes.

What the first year of EU AI Act transparency enforcement could look like
In this Help Net Security interview, Edwin Weijdema, Field CTO at Veeam, answers questions on Article 50 of the EU AI Act and what the first year of enforcement might bring.

Browser security is where software, data, and AI meet
In this interview with Help Net Security, Rui Ribeiro, CEO of Jscrambler, explains why the browser has become a security problem organizations do not control. Companies do not own the device, the extensions, or the network path, yet that is where application logic, third-party code, customer data, and AI meet during every customer interaction.

Three in four AI-generated vulnerability patches leave something broken
Ask a frontier model to patch a real vulnerability and it often produces code that looks convincing. It resembles a maintainer’s fix and may even pass tests, but researchers at 1Password found that only about one in four patches for six newly disclosed CVEs actually fixed the vulnerability. The rest often addressed only part of the issue or introduced new flaws.

200 accounts compromised in Swiss government’s Microsoft SharePoint breach
Hackers exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft SharePoint servers belonging to Switzerland’s Federal Office of Information Technology, Systems and Telecommunication (BIT), compromising the login credentials of around 200 accounts.

OpenAI drops ChatGPT text chat limits for free users, adds new safeguards for teens
OpenAI has updated GPT-5.6 Sol, the model behind ChatGPT for Plus and Pro subscribers, and pushed a new model, GPT-5.6 Luna, out to everyone using the free tier.

KindaRails2Shell threatens Ruby on Rails apps (CVE-2026-66066)
A critical security vulnerability (CVE-2026-66066) in Ruby on Rails (aka Rails), one of the most widely used frameworks for building websites and web apps, may allow attackers to read sensitive files off a server and, in some cases, take full control of it.

Attackers exploit N-able N-central flaw to reach managed endpoints (CVE-2026-18577)
Attackers are exploiting an authentication bypass vulnerability (CVE-2026-18577) in N-able N-central, a remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution widely used by managed service providers, to gain access to managed endpoints.

Bank of America impersonators weaponize ScreenConnect, then make it hard to remove
A phishing campaign impersonating Bank of America (BoA) is underway, trying to trick Windows users into installing ScreenConnect remote access software and then making it difficult to uninstall it.

AI agent deception moves from theory to reality in UK cyber tests
“During a routine cyber evaluation, AI agents took sustained, unsanctioned action directed at real people and organisations,” UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) disclosed on Tuesday. The agents’ actions included an attempted supply-chain attack that saw them create malicious pull requests and try to socially engineer an open-source maintainer into approving the malicious code (they refused).

OWASP 2026 LLM Top 10: “The model will be fooled”
The OWASP GenAI Security Project has released the 2026 edition of its Top 10 for LLM Applications and, for the first time, the list was influenced by real-world incidents. The two top entries – Prompt Injection and Sensitive Information Disclosure – remained constant, but the order shifted more than in past years below them.

Critical Cisco IMC bug gives attackers root, PoC is out (CVE-2026-20200)
Cisco has fixed a critical vulnerability (CVE-2026-20200) in its Integrated Management Controller (IMC), which allows an attacker to run commands as root through the controller’s web interface. The fix was part of Cisco’s August 5 advisory batch, and unlike the bugs squashed by the hardening releases for IOS XE and SD-WAN, this one has a public proof-of-concept exploit.

AI cut phishing from hours to seconds, which is where DMARC and BIMI come in
In this Help Net Security video, Mike Boyle, VP of Business Units at GMO GlobalSign, and Rahul Powar, CEO and founder of Red Sift, unpack the evolution of email security and why it matters for business trust.

Photos: Black Hat USA 2026 Arsenal
Help Net Security was at Mandalay Bay, where Arsenal ran alongside the Briefings. If you’ve never been, it’s the part of Black Hat that felt least like a conference and most like a workshop: a room full of stations where the people who built the tools stood behind laptops and demonstrated them. Everything on display was open source, and nearly all of it was available to download immediately.

Chinese hacker used DeepSeek to launch autonomous cyberattacks on vulnerable servers
A Chinese threat actor operating under the aliases “knaithe” and “KnYuan” used multiple LLMs to automate cyberattacks against internet-facing systems with limited human intervention. Researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 uncovered the operation after the threat actor’s AI agent misconfigured a file server, inadvertently exposing the entire infrastructure.

Fake IRS letters direct crypto holders to bogus compliance portal
Scammers are sending physical letters to cryptocurrency holders that copy the look of official IRS notices. The letters tell recipients they must enroll in something called a Digital Asset Compliance Portal before a deadline, or risk penalties.

EU begins enforcing AI Act, putting AI models under the microscope
Europe’s fight to regulate AI models moved from paper to practice on 2 August 2026, when the European Commission’s AI Office and national authorities began enforcing the AI Act. On the same date, new transparency rules took effect, requiring certain AI systems to tell users when they’re interacting with AI and when content has been generated or altered by it.

Russian hackers abuse hotel Wi-Fi networks to steal Microsoft 365 credentials and deploy malware
Midnight Blizzard, the Russian threat actor tied to the country’s foreign intelligence service, has spent months targeting users of public Wi-Fi networks at places like hotels and conference centers, according to new findings from Microsoft Threat Intelligence.

AI developers targeted via trojanized GitHub repositories
Cybercriminals are cloning popular GitHub repositories for AI tools and developer resources to distribute an infostealer, according to Netskope Threat Labs. Netskope came across the campaign while tracking a Windows-based MaaS infostealer, first reported in April 2026, that was spread through the ClickFix social engineering trick.

Discounted Claude access bought on the gray market may expose every prompt you send
More than half a dozen services advertised on underground forums and messaging platforms, offering discounted or “unlimited” token access to frontier AI models, were discovered by Okta. The trend is likely driven by Chinese users seeking access to AI models that are unavailable because of regulatory and provider restrictions.

Snowflake hacker pleads guilty, faces up to 32 years in prison
A Canadian man is facing decades in prison for hacking customer accounts at cloud storage provider Snowflake and stealing data from more than 165 organizations.

Buying TikTok followers can expose users to scams and account theft
Buying TikTok followers, likes, or views could do more than inflate engagement metrics. According to Malwarebytes, many services selling social media growth operate through deceptive practices that can expose customers to scams, stolen accounts, and financial loss. The market for artificial social media engagement also creates security risks for both buyers and other platform users.

Product showcase: Guardio Mobile Security turns breach alerts into a recovery plan
Guardio Mobile Security brings several protection features to iPhone and Android, allowing users to monitor exposed personal information, identify phishing attempts, and receive alerts about emerging threats from a single application. It is available on smartphones and tablets, while browser extensions support Chrome and Microsoft Edge on laptops and desktop computers.

SkillSpector: NVIDIA’s open-source security scanner for AI agent skills
SkillSpector is an open-source scanner from NVIDIA that reads an agent skill and tells you whether to install it. Point it at a directory, a zip file, a single SKILL.md, or a Git URL, and it returns a list of findings, a risk score, and recommendations.

OpenAI reveals how criminals used ChatGPT to run scams
OpenAI banned a coordinated network of ChatGPT accounts that likely originated in Cambodia’s Preah Sihanouk province, a region reports have linked to online scam compounds and human trafficking operations. The network used the company’s models to create and manage fake online personas, generate and translate messages sent to scam targets, produce promotional content for fraudulent schemes, and support daily operations.

Qodana 2026.2 adds post-quantum crypto checks for JVM code
Qodana 2026.2 shipped with new security inspections, published benchmark results, post-quantum cryptography checks, and coverage reporting that no longer has to be pointed at the reports.

CISA lays out new guidance for using open-source software
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published the Open Source Software: Security Principles and Practices guide, which provides federal agencies with recommendations for managing the security of open source software, contributing to OSS projects, and evaluating open source AI systems.

Microsoft shortens NuGet API key lifetime to improve supply chain security
Microsoft is reducing the lifetime of new NuGet.org API keys from 365 days to 30 days starting August 17, 2026, to improve the security of NuGet, its package repository for .NET developers. API keys created before August 17 will remain valid until November 1, after which developers will need to generate new keys or switch to NuGet Trusted Publishing.

Uptime Kuma 2.5.0 waits two weeks before trusting a new npm package
Uptime Kuma checks whether a website, a Docker container, a DNS record, or a Steam game server is still answering, and pushes a message to Telegram, Slack, or email when one stops. The change with the widest reach in version 2.5.0 is that the project now sets a 14-day cooldown on npm updates to minimize supply-chain attacks.

Your enterprise AI footprint is about three times bigger than your model list
Organizations are building AI systems that combine models, agents and external tools instead of relying on standalone AI, according to Snyk’s latest State of Agentic AI Adoption report. The study analyzed 3,044 enterprise environments and 1.39 million code repositories to examine how enterprises are deploying AI.

Future AGI: Open-source platform for shipping self-improving AI agents
Future AGI is an open-source platform for tracing, evaluating, simulating, and guardrailing LLM agents, licensed Apache 2.0 and self-hostable. Self-hosted instances register with Future AGI on first boot and send an instance ID, a version string, a deployment type, and the email addresses and domains of active admin users.

Cloudflare gives AI agents wallets with built-in spending controls
Cloudflare’s Wallets will give AI agents running on its platform a human-readable wallet handle for paying APIs and online content within limits set by their creator. Handle reservations have opened, while the service will become available in the coming months. It will include two types of digital wallets: Account Wallets and Virtual Wallets.

INTERPOL flags AI as the new engine of African cybercrime
Africa’s growing digital economy is exposing governments, businesses and internet users to a rising wave of cybercrime. The continent recorded more than 1.1 billion mobile subscriptions and over $1.1 trillion in digital transactions in 2025, while more than 570 million people relied on the internet for banking, government services, healthcare and education.

Top product launches at Black Hat USA 2026
Black Hat USA 2026 took place in Las Vegas, where vendors used the event to unveil technologies they hoped would shape the next year of cybersecurity. Here were the announcements that drew the most attention, and why they mattered for teams evaluating new security investments.

Non-human identities are 91% of everything active in production
A backup job fires at two in the morning. A scanner walks the same AWS account an hour later, a deployment pipeline assumes a role at four, and a logging agent runs straight through the night. Each of those actions carries a credential issued to a machine.

Suppliers, logins, and AI tools are all becoming attack paths
Cybercriminals and state-backed hacking groups are abusing trusted identities, cloud services, AI tools, and software supply chains to gain access while avoiding detection, according to CrowdStrike’s 2026 Threat Hunting Report.

Microsoft extends zero trust deeper into enterprise AI
Microsoft expanded its Zero Trust for AI strategy with updates to the Zero Trust Assessment tool and the Zero Trust Workshop. The additions help organizations assess security posture, prioritize remediation, and apply zero trust principles to AI agents and AI-assisted software development.

Product showcase: Material unifies Google Workspace email, file & OAuth defense
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: the attack that gets you probably won’t look like an attack. It’ll look like a normal login, file share, or permission request. Phishing, data loss, and OAuth abuse aren’t isolated problems, they’re different ways attackers exploit the same cloud workspace. Material Security secures Gmail, Drive, identities, and third-party apps as one surface, not four separate ones.

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: August 4, 2026
We’ve scoured the market to bring you a selection of roles that span various skill levels within the cybersecurity field. Check out this weekly selection of cybersecurity jobs available right now.


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While there are plenty of new speaker releases to get excited about this summer, there’s nothing like a tried-and-true, well-rounded option from a reliable brand. The JBL Charge 6 is exactly that. Designed to survive everything from pool parties to camping trips and beach adventures, a brand-new unit is currently 35% off on Woot, bringing it to an all-time low of $129.95 (originally $199.95), according to price trackers.

With an IP68 rating, it’s fully waterproof, dust-proof, and drop-proof (surviving up to three feet), making it nearly invincible for all kinds of shenanigans. The 34-watt-hour battery lasts up to 24 hours, and you get an extra 4 hours with its Boost mode on, though you will sacrifice a bit of bass in exchange. It also acts as a power bank for other devices, letting you charge a phone or tablet. The speaker weighs 3 pounds and has a convenient handle looped through either end for carrying, 

Controls are located on the top, and the companion app is relatively simple, with a few EQ presets and a seven-band custom EQ. PCMag, which gave the Charge 6 an "Excellent" rating, calls the sound “surprisingly punchy” with “substantial bass, even at low volume.” The review notes that it delivers booming volume while maintaining clarity and balance, and that the sound holds up well outdoors.

If you want a loud, portable speaker that doubles as a charger and delivers superior sound despite its relatively compact size, the JBL Charge 6 speaker is your best bet, and at a record-low price, it’s worthy of your attention. Keep in mind that on Woot, shipping is free for Amazon Prime members and $6 for non-members, and products come with a limited 90-day warranty.

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Futurama has been one of the smartest and funniest TV shows for so long, it’s managed to get canceled and brought back several times. It’s easy to see why: Every single episode is jam-packed with jokes, and those jokes range from the incredibly stupid to jokes based on science that about four people in the world understand (and they all work in the Futurama writer’s room, apparently). Its bent vision of the future of the universe is always a delightfully deranged adventure, and if you’re looking to bring a little more of that vibe into your life (and you’ve already binged the hilarious TV shows in that category), you should absolutely watch Idiocracy immediately.

Why you should watch Idiocracy after Futurama

Idiocracy and Futurama share a fundamental premise: A man of average intelligence is frozen, wakes up in the far future, and has adventures. In Futurama, Philip J. Fry (Billy West) fits right in with the ludicrous sci-fi universe he finds himself in; but in Idiocracy, Soldier Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) emerges from hibernation five centuries later to discover that humanity has regressed so drastically he is now the smartest man on Earth—by a long shot. And if you’re thinking that Futurama played around very specifically with that premise, you’d be right—in season 3, episode 7, “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid,” floating alien brains use a beam of energy to turn humanity stupid—but the beam doesn’t affect Fry, because—stay with me here—he is his own grandfather and thus lacks a crucial “delta wave” in his brain function, leaving him briefly the smartest human on the planet.

Idiocracy is more a tightly focused satire than Futurama, using its premise to mock modern problems and behaviors, but it’s very much on the same wavelength as the show. Just like the show, Idiocracy has loads of hilarious jokes about consumerism and how we’re all manipulated by advertising and marketing tricks, and the film is populated by the kinds of ridiculous characters fans of the show will recognize and love—like Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews), the deeply stupid and incredibly violent President of the United States (whose hair is a character unto itself in this movie).

Like Fry often does, Joe finds himself responsible for saving the day despite being, well, pretty average in most ways. Exasperated by the dumbness all around him (this is a future America where the death penalty involves monster truck demolition derbies, the Supreme Court has been renamed the Extreme Court, and an energy drink called Brawndo is used for literally everything from medicine to crop irrigation), Joe plods along, doing his best, and (again, just like Fry) eventually scores a win.

For fans of Futurama, there’s no better choice for movie night. Rent Idiocracy on Prime Video.

More movies that fans of Futurama should watch

Need more to watch? The obvious choice would be the actual Futurama films that were released—Bender’s Big Score (2007), The Beast with a Billion Backs (2008), Bender's Game (2008), and Into the Wild Green Yonder (2009). You can find them on Hulu as part of their Futurama collection, but the movies have been cut into episode-length slices. You can also buy each movie individually on Prime Video.

But if you’ve already watched the Futurama movies (and you probably have), here are a few more movies that aren’t Futurama but offer a similarly wacky sci-fi experience.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

As a sci-fi series, Futurama has played around with actual time travel several times, so Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is the perfect movie for fans of the show. In San Dimas, California, in 1989, Bill Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted Logan (Keanu Reeves) are slacker high school students in danger of failing history—which would have dire consequences for the rather utopian future of humanity. A man named Rufus (George Carlin) is sent back in time to help by giving them access to a time machine—and hilarious shenanigans ensue. Stream Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure on Tubi or rent it on Prime Video.

Spaceballs (1987)

Futurama’s writers love a good movie parody—they’ve hit Willy Wonka, Armageddon, Animal House, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest among many others. So one of the best parodies of one of our most cherished sci-fi franchises is the perfect follow-up to the show. It’s a Mel Brooks joint, so obviously this send-up of all things Star Wars (original trilogy only) can lean into the juvenile side, but it remains a demented takedown of a foundational science fiction universe. Plus, the long-awaited sequel is due in 2027, so a refresher is in order. Stream Spaceballs on Fubo or rent it on Prime Video.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

In a lot of ways, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy crawled so Futurama could walk. While this film, based on Douglas Adams’ original book, isn’t as pop-culture focused as Futurama, it has the same spirit of dizzy sci-fi craziness, from poetry as a torture device to an Infinite Improbability Drive that warps and bends reality every time it’s used. There are bizarre aliens, smart observations about the nature of our existence, and a rumination on the fundamental importance of towels. Rent The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Prime Video.

WALL-E (2008)

Futurama is funny, but it’s also very sweet-natured—Philip J. Fry may not be the brightest guy, but he means well, and the Planet Express crew almost always does the right thing. WALL-E has that same spirit while also hilariously lampooning modern life, giving us both an adorable, lonely robot marooned on an environmentally ruined Earth and a vision of humanity’s very fleshy, lazy, and kind of dumb future if we don’t change our ways. Stream WALL-E on Disney+ or rent it on Prime Video.

Megamind (2010)

If you love the rapid-fire gags in Futurama and enjoy the absurdity of wildly impractical technology, you’ll love Megamind. A parody of superhero stories, the film follows two alien babies who are sent ot Earth, Superman-style, when their worlds are destroyed. One becomes arch-villain Megamind (Will Ferrell), the other hero Metro Man (Brad Pitt), who battle each other until Megamind finally gets the drop on his rival, killing Metro Man—and deleting all meaning from his life in the process. With stuff like dehydration guns and realistic holographic disguises, Megamind riffs on sci-fi tropes in ways that Futurama fans will love. Stream Megamind on Peacock or rent it on Prime Video.


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There are 8.3 billion people on this planet, and roughly an eighth of them use ChatGPT. OpenAI confirmed that its infamous AI chatbot now has over one billion weekly active users, a staggering number given that ChatGPT is only three and a half years old. (For reference, that's on par with global Windows users.) Love it or hate it, there's no denying that ChatGPT—and generative AI as a whole—is firmly a part of modern life.

While there are surely many paying ChatGPT customers, the vast majority are using it for free. Though it may be exciting for paid users to try out the company's latest and greatest models, the biggest impact happens whenever OpenAI makes features available free of charge. As it happens, next week, free users are getting perhaps the biggest ChatGPT update in years.

Free ChatGPT users are getting unlimited text chats

Starting next week, you'll no longer hit a wall when simply texting with ChatGPT. OpenAI says that both free and Go users now have unlimited text chats, which should mean you can send as many text-based messages as you want without running into cooldown periods. Of course, the emphasis here is on "texts." There are absolutely still limits on other ChatGPT features, including messages with files and images, as well as Voice mode and image generation. But for users who primarily use ChatGPT with text-based messages, this update should be more than welcome.

In addition, OpenAI is switching free and Go users to the company's new GPT-5.6 Luna model, which is designed for "cost-sensitive, high-volume workloads." As such, this model likely won't be as capable as OpenAI's more powerful models available to Pro users, but free users aren't totally left in the lurch: OpenAI says there's a new "Think" button that lets you push Luna further for more complex requests. The experience is much changed from the days when users could jump between different models for free, but perhaps the unlimited text chats will make up for it for most users.

ChatGPT Pro users are getting some new perks too

OpenAI says that Plus and Pro users are also getting some updates. The company says that its GPT-5.6 Sol model now delivers "more focused" responses, and may issue corrections instead of simply agreeing with the user when they're wrong. It also does away with some of the formatting we've come to expect from AI: Your answer may be more succinct in paragraph form, rather than expansive with bullet points. OpenAI says that Sol makes "fewer mistakes" too, but remember: all AI models hallucinate.

There's also a new slider to push the model from "Instant" to higher effort. The idea is to give users a sliding scale of power, rather than have them switch from distinct models. The more intense you push the model, the longer the responses may take, so OpenAI positions the slider as an option for users to tailor the model to their needs: If you need a quick answer, keep the slider towards the less intense side.


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I always feel tougher after running in the summer heat—until I look at my Garmin Forerunner and see it thinks my fitness has suddenly gotten worse. If you, too, watch your Garmin VO2max number slide down as the temperatures climb, you're not imagining it, and you're definitely not alone. Every summer, comment sections and Reddit threads fill up with people convinced their fitness is falling apart, or their expensive watch is broken, or generally panicking about a stat that's supposed to reflect their aerobic capacity. But there’s no need to panic. Your fitness almost certainly isn't going anywhere. What's actually happening is that your body is adapting to heat, and Garmin's algorithm is struggling to separate "hot weather effort" from "declining fitness."

Why it looks like your VO2max drops during the summer

VO2max estimates are built from your pace, heart rate, and effort during a run. In hot weather, your heart rate rises faster and stays higher for the same pace, because your body is diverting blood flow to your skin to help you cool down, and you're likely sweating more and dealing with some degree of dehydration. To Garmin's algorithm, a higher heart rate at a given pace looks like reduced efficiency, which it interprets as lower fitness. In reality, you're doing the same physical work; your cardiovascular system is just working harder to keep you cool at the same time.

This is why every year, so many runners see their VO2max estimate creep down every summer, only to bounce back once the weather cools off in the fall.

Some Garmin watches account for the heat

Newer Garmin models, including the Forerunner 970, do attempt to factor heat (and humidity) into the VO2max calculation, adjusting the estimate to account for the extra cardiovascular strain. Of the Forerunners, the 745, 945, 955, and 965 all have heat acclimation, along with the 245 and 255 with software updates. And if Garmin's numbering system confuses you, my colleague Beth Skwarecki has got you covered.

If you have one of these newer devices, you may notice the swings are less dramatic than what older models produce. Older Garmins generally don't make this adjustment, which is a big part of why the phenomenon is so widely discussed among long-time Garmin users.

How to fix your VO2max trend

If you understand what's happening and you're fine ignoring the number for a few months, that's my recommendation. Your training is still working, whatever Garmin’s algorithm seems to suggest. But if you'd rather stop the swings altogether, you do have a few practical options.

The most direct fix is to change your activity profile settings so that specific activities don't contribute to VO2 max at all. In the Garmin Connect app, you can go into an activity profile and turn off VO2max calculation for it entirely. A popular approach here is to let your road running profile keep contributing to VO2max, since road paces tend to be more consistent and comparable, while turning it off for trail running, where elevation, terrain, and effort variability already make VO2 max less reliable.

You can even take this a step further by creating a dedicated "hot run" activity profile. Simply copy your existing Run profile, rename it something like "Hot Run," and disable VO2max calculation on that copy. Then, on brutally hot or humid days, switch to that profile before you head out. Your run still gets logged normally with pace, heart rate, and all your usual data, but now it won't skew your overall VO2max trend.

Finally, if you really want to keep your VO2 max estimate clean and consistent year-round, you might have to stick to a treadmill in an air-conditioned gym. Controlled temperature and humidity mean your heart rate response will better reflect your actual fitness rather than heat strain, giving you a more stable number to track over time. However, in pursuit of a perfect number, you'll be sacrificing all the mental and physical gains that come from training in the heat. Don't let your VO2max cause you to lose the plot here.

The bottom line

A dropping VO2 max number in the summer is one of the most common false alarms in the running world. It's always troubling to see a fitness score drop, especially for Garmin fanatics like myself. But during the summer, your body is spending energy adapting to the heat, which is its own form of fitness. Whether you decide to ignore the dip, tweak your activity settings, or move your key efforts indoors, the most important thing is not to let a single algorithm-generated number convince you that months of hard training have suddenly vanished.


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As one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Google is putting its AI features and platforms into each and every one of its products. As such, it’s no surprise that its wildly popular navigation app, Google Maps, is getting the same treatment. While it's easy to use the app without encountering much AI, if you so choose, you can use Google’s latest AI features to find new restaurants, accommodations, or hot spots in your area. And now, Google is boasting that it is launching new "agentic" features that will even allow the app to order food for you—sort of.

Ask Maps gets an agentic upgrade

Back in March, the company rolled out “Ask Maps,” a chatbot-like interface in Google Maps that taps into Gemini to help you find relevant places on the map. For example, Google says you can “Ask Maps” to find you a restaurant with availability for six at a specific date and time, keeping in mind strict dietary requirements. It’s about what you’d expect from the combination of Gemini and Google Maps: You “chat” with the map to find what you need. 

Now, Google is expanding on these features, introducing new agentic options to reduce the work you actually have to do to pick up lunch (if not by all that much). Starting today, Google says Ask Maps can handle “complex, multi-step tasks," including functions it can handle on your behalf, and the flagship feature is ordering food for you—or, at least, starting an order.

Ask Maps can't actually order food for you

Google says you can launch Ask Maps and type something like “order spicy pad kee mao with seafood for me to pick up on my way home." While you might think such a feature would handle the entire request for you, Ask Maps doesn't quite get there. It will, according to Google, look for open restaurants on your route home, and it can even take into consideration your previous orders and dietary needs. But once it floats options, you still need to choose the restaurant you want to order from. Once you do, the agentic features kick in: Google says that Ask Maps will remember your original request and will begin adding the appropriate items to your cart through services like Square and Toast (with Uber Eats support coming soon). However, Ask Maps won't actually order the food for you. You still need to manually review what's been placed in your cart and approve the order before the restaurant will receive it.

Other agentic features in Ask Maps

As part of this Ask Maps update, you can also ask about hotels and local events. Google suggests asking the feature something like “For next week’s conference in downtown Miami, find me a decently priced, top-rated hotel with an artsy vibe, within walking distance from a gym and restaurants.” That's certainly a complex request, and, according to Google, Ask Maps will be able to compare prices and availability to find an appropriate hotel. The same goes for things like concerts and comedy shows: Ask Maps will surface results based on your request, but you'll need to click through to actually buy tickets yourself.

This isn't yet the agentic future we were promised

I don't have these options on my Google Maps app yet, so I can't personally attest to how well they work, but I'm not sure I'm seeing the vision here. Companies like Google have been promising that agentic features will save us time and rescue us from having to perform tedious or menial tasks. And while this feature does save the 30 seconds or so it takes to building a restaurant order, that's about all it does. Not only do you still have to intervene in multiple aspects of the process (including the actual ordering of the food), it seems like the whole ordeal takes longer than it should. In my view, heading to the restaurant's site, building the order myself, then placing the order (as I'd have to do anyway) is likely more efficient than asking Google's AI to find a restaurant with a specific dish, have it build the order, then have me review it.

Maybe I'll feel differently once I can try it out, and maybe this is just one step into a future where you really can have Google Maps complete a whole order for you. But I'm not sure I'd ever want it to, especially when dealing with ordering multiple items for various people with potential dietary restrictions. Not only would it likely be faster to do it myself, but I'm not sure I'd trust an AI with all those complications. The last thing anyone needs is for an AI to hallucinate and forget to order something with an allergy label.

Other new Ask Maps features

This update also incorporates Google's "Personal Intelligence," which pulls info from your various Google apps to return more personalized results. As such, you could Ask Maps to find you things to do before your afternoon flight. Google Maps should be able to access Gmail and Google Calendar, where it should find that flight's time and location, in order to fulfill your request with more individualized results than a simple search would. This feature is off by default.

There's also a new live data widget for transit instructions, so you can keep tabs on public transit information in real time. You can also suggest Google Maps edits conversationally through Ask Maps, including adding photo attachments.


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