Tech news from around the world, rewritten in plain English.
Bottled water brand i'meco is sponsoring the National Opera of Korea's production of Das Rheingold, providing plant-derived PLA bottled water to audiences, performers and staff from June 29 to November 1 at the Seoul Arts Center Opera House. The sponsorship follows a business agreement with the company and continues a partnership that began last year.
Apple's first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo, began reaching customers in Australia and New Zealand on October 23, with sales expanding to Asia, Europe and North America afterward. Pre-orders opened October 16 in more than 70 countries and territories, and the device will be sold in 28 more by October 30. Several markets, including France, China, India and Japan, required pre-orders with scheduled pickup instead of direct purchases.
Soongsil University said its startup club 'Synergy' signed an agreement with physical AI startup WhatsLab to run a corporate mission project. Over eight weeks from September 29 to November 22, students will build marketing and promotion strategies for WhatsLab, with results to be presented afterward.
Meta has launched its personal AI agent Muse in Japan, expanding it beyond North America for the first time after its September debut there. Muse can handle tasks such as sending emails and booking travel, and integrations with Mercari, Money Forward ME, and Ticket Pia are planned for Japan.
Etsy is introducing stricter rules on how AI can be used in listings to reduce AI slop on the platform. Every listing must include at least one unedited photo of the actual item against a real background, and bot-made listings are no longer allowed.
India-based digital trust firm eMudhra announced on October 22 (local time) that it will voluntarily exit its global SSL/TLS certificate business. The decision follows the discovery that private keys used to sign eight intermediate certificates operated by its certificate authority could be easily recovered by third parties. Affected customers will receive free replacement certificates from partner providers.
Enki Whitehat released a free scanner and analysis report on the 23rd to check exposure to the high-severity PHP vulnerability 'PHP2Shell.' The flaw allows attackers to run malicious code remotely without authentication and has a CVSS 4.0 score of 9.2. Users should update to patched PHP versions such as 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, or 8.2.35.
Shinsegae Group Chairman Jung Yong-jin will return as Emart CEO and run the company in a co-CEO structure with Kim Hong-geuk, who will also concurrently lead SSG.COM. The group announced its 2027 regular executive reshuffle on the 23rd, which also included leadership changes at its management strategy office and the appointment of outside experts.
Datadog has reportedly proposed acquiring Upwind Security, a cloud security startup, for about $4 billion (roughly 5.3 trillion won). The Information reported the offer, citing people familiar with the negotiations, while Upwind is finalizing a $300 million funding round at a valuation of about $3.8 billion. Neither company has made an official statement.
Netflix's leaders say a crisis 25 years ago convinced them that a small group of the right people works better than keeping many employees. After the dotcom bust in 2001, the company cut a third of its workforce, and its then-HR chief Patty McCord later described how the team still did twice the work. The article also notes that Meta leaders have similarly stressed talent density.
Radical Numerics, a San Francisco AI lab, says it has administered a cocktail of AI-designed bacteriophages to a patient under a compassionate-use arrangement, which it describes as a first. The phages were designed by its Omnii-1 model and eliminated the patient's antibiotic-resistant bacterial isolate in vitro, but the company has not published any results from the human treatment.
VulnCheck researchers have developed what they believe is the first known exploit to achieve remote code execution on ASLR-enabled x86-64 systems running PHP's recommended production configuration. The exploit targets CVE-2026-109618, a critical out-of-memory corruption bug in PHP that is part of the PHP2Shell pair with CVE-2026-109619, both of which PHP Foundation disclosed and patched on Wednesday. VulnCheck warns that organizations should prioritize patching rather than rely on existing memory protections or configuration changes.
Warhound, a company born from a idea by Colossal Biosciences' Ben Lamm and Anduril's Palmer Luckey, emerged from stealth with $200 million in funding from investors including In-Q-Tel, Sequoia, and 8VC, valuing it at $1.2 billion. It aims to genetically engineer working dogs for military, law enforcement, and emergency teams, and to equip them with Anduril hardware and software. The company cites a shortage of suitable military working dogs, noting that over 80% come from Europe and fewer than half are fit for service.
Microsoft said on October 21 (local time) that Storm-0940, a threat actor linked to the Chinese state, is using the AI-agent-driven penetration testing framework ARTEX to automate attacks against hundreds of organizations worldwide. Microsoft also attributes the supply chain attack on ConnectWise's cloud backup service, disclosed in mid-October, to Storm-0940.
Fortune reported that the next Xbox, expected in 2028, could cost consumers between $1,200 and $1,800 unless Microsoft subsidizes it. The Verge's Sean Hollister argues that Microsoft's own executives have repeatedly said such prices would be unworkable, and he lays out several ways the report could still be accurate.
Nvidia has officially launched its RTX Spark Arm-based Windows PC platform, with partners including ASUS, MSI, Lenovo, Dell Technologies, and Microsoft, ending Qualcomm's roughly nine-year dominance of the Arm Windows PC market. The platform pairs a Blackwell GPU with Arm-based CPU cores and supports Nvidia's gaming technologies such as DLSS, Optix, Reflex, and G-Sync.
For the first time, scientists have used AI-designed bacteriophages, a type of virus, to treat a patient with a severe bacterial infection. Radical Numerics, a US startup, described the virus development in a technical report posted on its website on October 20, but has not published it in a peer-reviewed journal and declined to share patient or physician details, citing confidentiality.
Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström confirmed on an earnings call that the company is using a new QR code verification method to find Family plan users who don't live together. He called the move a "routine improvement" rather than a crackdown. Users who miss the scan window face a 12-month ban from joining other Family or Duo plans.
Amazon Threat Intelligence said on October 21 (US time) that it observed attempts to exploit two "critical" PHP vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, dubbed "PHP2Shell") on October 17, four days before the flaws were publicly disclosed. The attempts were detected by Amazon's MadPot honeypot, and Amazon says attackers were likely acting on information obtained before disclosure, though how remains unknown.
Anthropic unveiled a research preview of 'Claude Duet,' a personal AI agent built on its second-highest-tier model, Claude Opus 5.5, on May 22 (local time). The agent monitors connected apps and materials to find and carry out tasks without step-by-step instructions, and it is initially available to paid subscribers of $20+ per month in the U.S.
SK hynix said on the 23rd that it is halting both the pre-IPO and the IPO review for Solidigm, its indirect subsidiary. The company said the decision reflects a reassessment of whether an IPO now best serves SK hynix and its existing shareholders, not a change in Solidigm's growth prospects or investment needs.
Meta has re-enabled sharing for its Muse AI agent after security researchers reported that public conversation links could be easily found, including pages such as a marketing company's internal revenue review and a small business owner's loan application. Meta says the underlying issue affected URLs for shared artifacts, not chat sharing, and that it is now fixed.
Meta revised its business terms to remove language suggesting it could freely train AI models on news sites such as The Verge, but legal experts say the changes do not fully address their concerns. Experts point to remaining wording that could still allow Meta to scrape entire sites, and Meta maintains the update is not about scraping news.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, Lovable's Luke Arno, Polsia's Ben Broca, and Theory Ventures' Tomasz Tunguz advised founders that fast early revenue is not proof a startup is ready to scale. Arno said the key is repeatable go-to-market motions built on understanding where customers are, not early sales alone.