Apple’s iPhone Air was the company’s most interesting new iPhone this year, at least insofar as it was the one most different from previous iPhones. We came away impressed by its size and weight in our review . But early reports suggest that its novelty might not be translating into sales success.

A note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, whose supply chain sources are often accurate about Apple’s future plans, said yesterday that demand for the iPhone Air “has fallen short of expectations” and that “both shipments and production capacity” were being scaled back to account for the lower-than-expected demand.

Kuo’s note is backed up by reports from other analysts at Mizuho Securities ( via MacRumors ) and Nikkei Asia . Both of these reports say that demand for the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro models remains strong, indicating that this is just a problem for the iPhone Air and not a wider slowdown caused by tariffs or other external factors.

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We’ve got a new international trailer for Predator: Badlands , the latest installment in a popular franchise that’s been around since 1987. It’s directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who is very familiar with the franchise, having also directed 2022’s highly acclaimed standalone Predator movie Prey .

In April, Twentieth Century Studios released the first teaser , which involved multiple predators fighting or threatening one another, Elle Fanning looking very strange and cool as an android, and glimpses of new monsters and the alien world the movie focuses on. And the film was featured prominently at San Diego Comic Con this summer. But it hasn’t quite wormed its way into the cultural zeitgeist for fall releases. Perhaps this latest trailer will boost its profile.

This is a standalone film in the franchise, with a particular focus on the culture of the Predator species; in fact, the same conlanger who created the Na’Vi language for James Cameron’s Avatar franchise also created a written and verbal language for the Predators. (We hear a bit of the dialogue in the new trailer.) And this time around, the primary Predator is actually the film’s protagonist rather than an adversary. Per the official premise: “Set in the future on a deadly remote planet, Predator: Badlands follows a young Predator outcast (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) who finds an unlikely ally in Thia (Elle Fanning) as he embarks on a treacherous journey in search of the ultimate adversary.”

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Porsche’s new boss was a sceptic of battery motors for luxury vehicles long before he was picked to lead the revival of the petrol engine at the German sports car group.

“The technology isn’t ready,” Michael Leiters told the Financial Times late last year while still in his old job as chief executive of British supercar manufacturer McLaren. Electric vehicles lacked the emotional thrill of noisy engines and were quicker to lose their value, he said.

Leiters will take over at Porsche in January at a critical juncture for the Stuttgart-based company, as it tempers its electric ambitions and ploughs new investment into petrol engine models in an attempt to turn its fortunes around.

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Have you heard the news that Texas’ senators want to chop up NASA’s retired space shuttle Discovery in order to move it from the Smithsonian to Houston? The lawmakers in question have and are now crying foul to the Department of Justice.

Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), together with Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas), on Wednesday sent a letter to the DOJ urging the Smithsonian be investigated for allegedly violating the Anti-Lobbying Act. They claim that the institution— Discovery ‘s home for the past 13 years—improperly used appropriated funds to influence Congress regarding the relocation of the winged orbiter.

“Public reporting suggests the Smithsonian Institution has taken affirmative steps to oppose the passage and implementation of the shuttle’s relocation, as part of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” wrote Cornyn and Cruz to Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate. “These steps include lobbying the staff of the Senate Appropriations and Rules Committees to express disapproval, coordinating with members of the press to generate public opposition to the law’s passage and disseminating misinformation about the cost and logistics of the move.”

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Defense contractors are in full sales mode to win a piece of a potentially trillion-dollar pie for development of the Trump administration’s proposed Golden Dome missile shield.

CEOs are touting their companies’ ability to rapidly spool up satellite, sensor, and rocket production. Publicly, they all agree with the assertion of Pentagon officials that US industry already possesses the technologies required to make a homeland missile defense system work.

The challenge, they say, is tying all of it together under the umbrella of a sophisticated command and control network. Sensors must be able to detect and track missile threats, and that information must rapidly get to weapons that can shoot them down. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s top commander, likes to call Golden Dome a “systems of systems.”

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On Tuesday, OpenAI announced Atlas , a new web browser with ChatGPT integration, to let you “chat with a page,” as the company puts it. But Atlas also goes beyond the usual LLM back-and-forth with Agent Mode, a “preview mode” feature the company says can “get work done for you” by clicking, scrolling, and reading through various tabs.

“Agentic” AI is far from new, of course; OpenAI itself rolled out a preview of the web browsing Operator agent in January and introduced the more generalized “ChatGPT agent” in July . Still, prominently featuring this capability in a major product release like this—even in “preview mode”—signals a clear push to get this kind of system in front of end users.

I wanted to put Atlas’ Agent Mode through its paces to see if it could really save me time in doing the kinds of tedious online tasks I plod through every day. In each case, I’ll outline a web-based problem, lay out the Agent Mode prompt I devised to try to solve it, and describe the results. My final evaluation will rank each task on a 10-point scale, with 10 being “did exactly what I wanted with no problems” and one being “complete failure.”

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The makers of BIND, the Internet’s most widely used software for resolving domain names, are warning of two vulnerabilities that allow attackers to poison entire caches of results and send users to malicious destinations that are indistinguishable from the real ones.

The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2025-40778 and CVE-2025-40780 , stem from a logic error and a weakness in generating pseudo-random numbers, respectively. They each carry a severity rating of 8.6. Separately, makers of the Domain Name System resolver software Unbound warned of similar vulnerabilities that were reported by the same researchers. The unbound vulnerability severity score is 5.6

Revisiting Kaminsky’s cache poisoning attack

The vulnerabilities can be exploited to cause DNS resolvers located inside thousands of organizations to replace valid results for domain lookups with corrupted ones. The corrupted results would replace the IP addresses controlled by the domain name operator (for instance, 3.15.119.63 for arstechnica.com) with malicious ones controlled by the attacker. Patches for all three vulnerabilities became available on Wednesday.

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Tesla reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2025 this afternoon. Earlier this month , we learned that the electric vehicle manufacturer had a pretty good Q3 in terms of sales, which grew by 7.3 percent year over year and cleared out tens of thousands of cars from inventory in the process. However, that hasn’t translated into greater profitability.

Even though revenues grew by 12 percent to $28 billion compared to the same period last year , Tesla’s operating expenses grew by 50 percent. As a result, its operating margin halved to just 5.8 percent. And so its profit for the quarter fell by 37 percent to $1.4 billion.

Some growth in revenue came from its battery and solar division; this increased by 44 percent to $3.4 billion compared to Q3 2024. Services—including the Supercharger network, which is now open to an increasing number of other makes of EV—also grew, increasing by 25 percent to $3.4 billion. EV deliveries increased by 7 percent to 497,099, most of which were the Model 3 sedan and Model Y crossover. Automotive revenues grew slightly less, increasing 6 percent year over year to $21.2 billion.

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The cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover is estimated to have cost the UK at least £1.9 billion in what is likely to be “the most economically damaging cyber event” for the country.

The month-long shutdown of internal systems and production at JLR affected over 5,000 British organisations, according to an analysis by Cyber Monitoring Centre, a non-profit organization that ranks the severity of cyber events in the UK.

“This incident looks to have been by some distance, the single most financially damaging cyber event ever to hit the UK,” said Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre and chair of CMC’s technical committee.

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