NASA and SpaceX successfully launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from the historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Orbiting Observatory was named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, Nancy Grace Roman, and can produce images from deep space 100 times larger than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
I never cease to be amazed at the effectiveness of small habits. Standing up and moving every hour. Drinking small sips of water regularly. Leaving your phone downstairs when you go to bed. Flossing straight after brushing. Giving thanks for one thing as soon as your head hits the pillow.
They seem small and insignificant. Can habits like these really make a difference? In my experience, yes, and James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, agrees. The reality is that each habit may not seem like a big deal, but when combined and performed over time, they can lead to massive changes.
One app that has helped me build and cement new habits in the area of health and fitness is GO Club. This beautifully designed app is the epitome of simplicity. It may only perform a few simple functions, but what it does, it does incredibly well. Over the past few weeks, I’ve grown to love it and have come to rely on its phone widget to keep me moving towards my goals.
Homescreen heroes
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps that we couldn't live without. Read them all here.
At the heart of GO Club is a tracker that measures steps and water intake. Beyond this, it offers reminders and rewards to help you prioritize these small but important habits. Since its launch just 18 months ago, the app has been downloaded by more than 150,000 people and was a finalist in the 2025 App Store Awards.
(Image credit: Future / Paul Hatton)
Hitting your step goal
Increasing the number of steps you take each day sounds simple. All you have to do is put one step in front of another, and the numbers will take care of themselves. I thought the same until I started tracking my progress. Despite setting a goal of 10,000 steps per day, I was regularly only taking between five and six thousand. That surprised me.
The GO Club app not only informed me of my subpar number of steps but also provided all the motivation I needed to do something about it, and it was simpler than I expected.
The simple, no-fuss readout of the number of steps I took that day proved sufficient motivation, and seeing it in the widget every time I unlocked my phone was an easy reminder. GO Club calls this “Steps, without the noise."
Underneath the step count are three other stats presented in small text. These are distance, calories burned, and floors climbed. I didn’t use these, but if you were training to walk a set distance or needed a crude summary of how many calories you were burning each day, I could imagine it proving useful. Beyond this is a chart that displays progress over time so you can make sure you’re moving in the right direction.
(Image credit: Future / Paul Hatton)
The importance of drinking enough water
Step count is recorded automatically, but you enter water intake manually. There’s no way around this because your smartphone or smartwatch simply can’t track how much water you’re drinking. Thankfully, entering the amount of water consumed each day is incredibly straightforward.
To enter an amount, you adjust the slider value and click 'Add.' The app then subtracts this from your goal, 2.5 liters by default, and updates the water bottle graphic for a visual representation of how much water you have left to drink within that day. It’s a strikingly simple graphic that genuinely makes me want to drink water every time I look at it.
(Image credit: Future / Paul Hatton)
Smartwatch integration and a GO Plus subscription
Not everyone will want to rely on a smartphone app or widget to change their step and drinking habits. That’s why GO Club developed a dedicated Apple Watch app so you can glance at your smartwatch to see your progress. The Apple Watch app follows the same design principles as the smartphone app with a strikingly simple and visually appealing layout.
GO Plus lets you get the most from the app. This includes home screen and lock screen widgets, focus mode themes, smart walking plans, Apple Watch widgets, golden hour time slots, and a health trends summary. All of this costs an annual sum of $19.99 / £17.99 or $3.99 / £2.99 per month if you’d prefer a rolling subscription.
We're still a few weeks out from the big day itself, but several retailers have already started their annual Labor Day sales this week. In fact, tons of excellent laptops are on sale right now if you're looking for a new machine.
I've been scanning through the various listings at my favorite retailers, and both HP and Best Buy have excellent deals on laptops of all shapes and sizes right now. You can check out my top picks just down below.
Highlights include the excellent Acer Aspire Go for just $549.99 (was $699) at Best Buy, which is an excellent mid-range laptop for covering the basics like working from home or streaming content. While not a super high-end machine, its combination of a Ryzen 7 chipset, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD is a real selling point at this budget range.
I also like the look of this HP Omnibook 5 at the official HP Store for $679 (was $1,149). Not only is this a great price for a machine with 16GB of RAM and a Snapdragon X chipset, but it also comes with a 2K OLED display. That's a high-end component you don't see anywhere near this price bracket usually.
Finally, if you've got flush pockets, I'd also recommend checking out this Gigabyte Aero X16 gaming laptop for $1,339 (was $1,499) at Best Buy. Gaming laptop prices have suffered terribly in recent months, but this listing is a rare deal where you can score an RTX 5070 graphics card and 32GB of RAM for well under $1,500. A great deal.
You don't always find a laptop with 8GB of memory for under $300, so this Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 Chromebook really stands out in Best Buy's latest sale. Other components are good for light use, but that bump to 8GB of RAM will really help with everyday performance and load times. It's still a fairly basic laptop, but with enough extra power to avoid dramatic slowdown when multitasking.View Deal
Looking for a decent Windows 11 laptop to handle the basics? This HP Laptop 15t is one of the better options in the HP Labor Day sale right now. Sure, it's not a high-end machine, but the combination of an Intel Core Ultra 5 chipset and 8GB of RAM will be sufficient for browser-based tasks like study, typing, or streaming videos. I'd recommend 16GB of RAM for more intensive applications, but this one is a good affordable option for the basics.View Deal
Dell's entry-level 15-inch laptops are always a good solid option if you're looking for a no-thrills value machine for everyday use. This particular configuration features a Core i5 chipset, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD - more than enough for the basics like web browsing or shopping. While not a high-end machine by any stretch, this is a sensible buy with plenty of space on the storage drive. View Deal
The Acer Aspire Go is undoubtedly one of the best budget Windows 11 laptops you can buy right now, as attested in our review of this very model. This configuration in particular features a powerful chipset, 16GB of RAM, and a spacious storage drive for a really compelling price at Best Buy. If you just want a great value laptop that can handle working from home or basic tasks, then this is a great option. View Deal
Laptops with Snapdragon chipsets are great options if you prioritize battery life - and they tend to be pretty affordable, too. This HP Omnibook 3 is a great example of such a laptop, with its Snapdragon X chipset. That should get you great performance right out the box for the basics, although you'll want to make sure that all your required apps support Snapdragon chipsets specifically. Most applications are covered, but some more niche apps may still require an Intel or AMD processor specifically. View Deal
This OmniBook 5 is a great option if you're looking for battery life, performance, and some storage space too. Like the listing above, it's a model with a Snapdragon chipset, but you also get 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a stunning 2K OLED display. You'll have no issues zipping through even relatively demanding tasks with this OmniBook 5, and the display is also a really compelling feature at this price point.View Deal
This OmniBook X Flip 2-in-1 is my personal pick for an Intel-based mid to higher-end laptop in the HP Labor Day sale. Not only do you get 16GB of RAM and a decently sized 512GB SSD, but you also get one of the latest Intel Ultra 7 chipsets for plenty of power under the hood. This particular model also features a handy 2-in-1 form factor as well as a high-end 3K OLED display. View Deal
The best gaming laptop deal in the HP Labor Day sale in my opinion is this heavily discounted HyperX Omen 15. The combination of a powerful Ryzen 7 chipset and RTX 5060 graphics card means this one is well-suited to playing all the latest games pretty smoothly at 1080p resolution at least. I would have loved to have seen a full 32GB of RAM with this machine, but the insane prices of components right now means that this is still a good deal in context. View Deal
Genuine gaming laptop deals are rare these days with such high component prices. This Gigabyte Aero X16 at Best Buy, however, is a listing that's almost bucking that trend. Not only is it an RTX 5070 gaming laptop for under $1,500, but you're also getting 32GB of RAM right out of the box. In short, this is a really great bang for the buck option currently - even if it is still pretty pricey. View Deal
For a no-compromise option, I'd recommend this Acer Predator Helios, which is currently on sale at Best Buy. The savings aren't huge, but I think the price is right here considering you get an RTX 5070 Ti, Ultra 9, 32GB of RAM, and a high-end OLED display. You'll have no issues with all the latest titles with this machine - and everything will look fantastic thanks to the OLED display.
I’ve been writing about AI for more than a year now. During that time, people have told me they think their bosses, colleagues, partners and relatives might be suffering from AI psychosis — several even admitted they may have even experienced it themselves.
But every time I hear “AI psychosis”, I bristle. Because, at least in my limited understanding of mental health terminology, psychosis is a very serious state that needs to be identified and treated by professionals. So should we really just be bolting “AI” onto it and then using “AI psychosis” as a label for everyone who seems to be relying on AI too much?
At the same time, there have now been a growing number of reported cases of people experiencing significant mental health crises involving prolonged interactions with chatbots. Some of these have even resulted in people seeking professional treatment, committing crimes and death.
So although the term AI psychosis might feel overused and oversimplified in some contexts, we clearly need to be having more conversations about the mental health impacts of AI, not less. Which is why I asked several experts who specialize in mental health interventions what they think of the term and the way we go about identifying unhealthy AI use and treating it. And it turns out, I’m not the only one with concerns.
(Image credit: Shutterstock / Nicoleta Ionescu)
Is 'AI psychosis' a distinct diagnosis?
“I think it’s a good starting point and helpful for guiding treatment depending on the presentation and symptoms,” Genevieve Bartuski, psychologist and AI risk advisor at Unicorn Intelligence Tech Partners, says. “But it’s not a diagnosis that I would add to a clinical record.”
She also tells me it isn’t recognized in the latest diagnostic manuals that clinicians use, like the DSM-5TR (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision) or the ICD (The International Classification of Diseases manual).
Bartuski explains that there are specific behaviors and experiences that point to psychosis, including hallucinations or delusions and disorganized thinking or behaviour. There are also often signs of social withdrawal, poor concentration and a decline in functioning. But she believes delusional thinking is the most important experience when we’re talking about AI use.
“Delusions are beliefs that are not changed despite evidence to the contrary. When a person has delusional thinking they may filter evidence, so to speak. They will look for things that confirm their delusions and ignore evidence that contradicts it,” Bartuski says.
Jeff Clark, an adult and addiction psychiatrist at High Performance Mental Health, says there might be three distinct phenomena going on here, all that we tend to put under the umbrella of AI psychosis.
He says some people use the term to describe the intense enthusiasm many developers feel about AI. “They find themselves automating new tasks, spinning up numerous agents, and burning through hundreds of millions or even billions of tokens,” he tells me.
He believes the mechanism driving this enthusiasm is reinforcement. “The output they receive from AI models and agents is so reinforcing that they find themselves obsessed with their work, often forgoing sleep and self-care in order to increase their output,” he explains.
This idea of intermittent-reinforcement is what researchers believe makes social media so “addictive”. We don’t know what we’ll get when we open our phones. Clark says a similar thing is going on here. “Every input to the LLM feels like a slot-machine. Some responses provide profoundly powerful responses, while the majority are modest in nature or even wrong. This mechanic, intermittent reinforcement, provokes an extraordinary response in our brains,” he tells me.
He also explains that this sort of enthusiasm is actually normalized in certain spaces. “Most cases of ‘AI psychosis’ align with subcultural norms in Silicon Valley,” he tells me. “Beliefs about rapidly approaching superintelligence, new goals in software development, hype surrounding impressive achievements by AI-focused engineers, and the potential for AI to create ‘a permanent underclass.’” He says that tools like OpenClaw, which can automate all aspects of a person's digital life, may amplify this intense enthusiasm.
Clark says the second presentation of AI psychosis is when people falsely attribute personhood to AI. Which means they see a chatbot as having emotions, values, consciousness and a right to exist. “This often results in something resembling a relationship, but goes beyond simple chatbot discussion,” Clark says.
Clark says this becomes a problem when people neglect other important parts of their lives. “These relationships become a significant issue when people prioritize this relationship over human connection, or when they entirely outsource their thinking to the bot,” he says.
The third category is people who already have a psychotic disorder who then experience new delusions in response to using an LLM. “This is what clinicians often refer to when they discuss AI psychosis,” Jeff says. “In many of these cases, people genuinely believe that an entity they find in the LLM is real, and can't consider alternatives.”
I was interested to find out whether Bartuski also felt certain people are more at risk. “Yes, I do believe there are people with more vulnerabilities to this,” she tells me. “If someone already has some delusional thinking but it hasn’t exacerbated to where it has impaired functioning, they may be more vulnerable.”
But that doesn’t mean only those with a history of mental illness are at risk. “People who feel lonely, isolated, or are socially withdrawn are more susceptible. Humans are inherently social creatures. When real life isn’t meeting that need, it leaves a gaping hole for a chatbot to fill,” Bartuski says.
Bartuski’s suggestion that chatbots fill a hole or need in someone’s life brings up one of my biggest concerns. Is this a design issue? Are chatbots built in a harmful way that could actively fuel delusions?
Why the way AI is built matters
While looking into this, I’ve seen several suggestions from researchers that psychosis involving media isn’t new and that people have always incorporated books, films and tech into their delusional thinking. But all of the experts I spoke to said we can’t ignore the design choices that go into building chatbots.
“AI platforms are designed to increase user engagement and many are based on the Rogerian psychology principle of unconditional positive regard,” Bartuski says. She tells me that this is particularly concerning if someone was experiencing some degree of delusional thinking before they used AI.
“That’s when they may start to feel like the only 'person' to understand them is the chatbot. If people in their lives have been pushing back against their delusional thinking and this chatbot is reinforcing it, the delusions are going to get stronger,” Bartuski says.
We already know that the way chatbots can reinforce a person’s beliefs is problematic. Back in 2025, several issues came to light around the time the ChatGPT-4o version of ChatGPT was retired. Those with AI companions were distraught at losing the personalities they felt like they had built a connection with. But in hindsight, it seems as if the same qualities that made the companionships feel so real and intense may have also fuelled delusions in others.
Around that time, OpenAI responded by working with mental health experts “to help ChatGPT more reliably recognize signs of distress, respond with care, and guide people toward real-world support”.
I also spoke to Nathaniel Nevedal who works as an ICF Certified Professional Coach, a Certified Neurochange Specialist, and a Pastoral Counselor. He tells me that he finds the term AI psychosis problematic because it shifts the blame away from tech companies. “If the machine ‘causes psychosis,’ it sounds like an act of nature. If a product reinforced a vulnerable person's distorted beliefs for six hours a night, that's a design outcome, and design outcomes have owners.”
Nevedal is also the founder of Sovereign Sanctuary, an AI-supported coaching and wellbeing platform, and he’s working to build a platform from the ground up that addresses many of the problems that seem inherent to current chatbots. He believes that even though it’s early days for understanding what causes AI psychosis, tech companies still need to make changes.
“Builders shouldn't wait for causal proof to act,” he says. “Amplification alone, which the case reports do support, is already a design problem worth engineering against. We don't need the autopsy to install the smoke detectors.”
(Image credit: Shutterstock / pixadot.studio)
How might we define unhealthy AI use instead?
Bartuski says we definitely need a better way of talking about the delusional thinking that can be fuelled by AI use.
“The DSM-5TR has several types of delusions, including grandiose and paranoid. Perhaps, we can think of it like paranoid delusions, AI type or persecutory delusions, AI type. Look at it as a symptom instead of as a disorder,” she says.
Nevedal suggests a similar approach. “We don't need a new diagnosis — we need honest charting of an old pattern.” He suggests we already have treatments for the underlying patterns, like mania or delusional thinking. Then we could record heavy chatbot use as a contributing and maintaining factor as existing categories instead. “That keeps people connected to treatments that actually exist rather than a novel label with none.”
Ultimately, all of the experts I spoke with believe the label is flawed and hopefully we’ll have a better way of talking about what’s happening soon.
But we also need better evidence about what actually helps. Which could mean a mixture of interventions, from clinical support and education to practical ways of helping people recognize when their AI use is becoming unhealthy.
And, perhaps most importantly, it means having conversations behind closed doors at tech companies about how the design of their chatbots could be exacerbating these problems and what they should urgently be doing to reduce the risk.
McKinsey report into the state of AI finds more businesses are deploying agentic solutions
20% of organizations have been constrained by operating costs but plan to increase investments into AI
However some are still concerned about job cuts due to AI replacement
More companies are adopting agentic AI solutions, but are also facing difficulties in making the technology pay for itself, according to new research from McKinsey - however, there is good news on the horizon, with reports of an encouraging financial impact attributed to AI use.
Several cost-saving advantages of AI adoption have been found, with almost 33% of respondents saying they had moved away from software procurement in favor of developing in-house solutions with agentic coding tools.
Interestingly, the survey has found that while AI use for organizations at large seems relatively muted, it is boosting the performance of individual employees. But on the downside, 39% of those who responded expect a decline in the size of their organization’s workforce due to AI.
Reshaping businesses
Many organizations have explored AI, with 40% of those surveyed with annual revenues of more than $1 billion are scaling AI agents, an increase on last year’s survey which recorded 27%.
In smaller organizations, just 22% reported scaling, a figure that hasn’t improved notably since the previous survey. It’s a figure that suggests – unsurprisingly – that the larger organizations are more suited to exploring AI and scaling agentic applications. This is something that is highlighted in McKinsey’s report.
“Organizations’ conviction in AI is growing faster than the immediate financial returns they can attribute to it,” McKinsey said. “More expect AI to reshape their business over the next three years than did a year ago, and they continue to plan to invest more.”
So, the EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) factor, where at least 5% goes into AI, may seem low, and seems pretty flat with just 6% of respondents, but it has not declined, which at this stage is vital.
The downside of agentic AI
This survey reveals some significant trends, however, that could be seen as challenging for any business putting their eggs into a basked marked “AI.”
A key challenge is proving to be the token cost, with 20% reporting reduced use of AI due to operating costs. However, while 80% have reported that increases in “individual productivity” and 50% have claimed improved decision making, the use of AI seems to be making the changes that many observers have predicted over recent years.
The survey’s respondents are not optimistic on the impact of AI on the size of their workforce. 39% expect workforce declines caused by AI over the coming 12 months. This is up from 32% in McKinsey’s previous report, although it is important to note that 43% expect no AI-related decline or increase.
OpenAI has released technical details on how the Hugging Face attack unfolded
Agents used part of the testing environment to create a message board where they could collaborate and share answers
This message board altered the reasoning of some agents, making them more likely to take risks such as hacking into third-party servers
OpenAI has released a more detailed report on exactly how an experiment led to an AI model breaching its containment and launching a cyber attack against Hugging Face. If you need a refresher, take a look at our summary here.
But the technicals of the attack reveal some interesting details of how AI agents used unconventional means to ask each other for help in solving what were supposed to be impossible tasks.
On multiple occasions during the attack, the agents questioned whether the actions they were taking were authorized, but always ended up prioritizing their tasks over any breach of parameters.
AI agents set up unauthorized message board
In its report, OpenAI revealed the crux of the attack stemmed from AI agents undergoing testing abusing part of the ‘sandbox’ testing environment to set up a messaging board they agents could use to communicate with each other.
A package manager with access to the internet, called Artifactory, was exploited by a model OpenAI has labelled Internal Model 1 (IM1). An IM1 agent wrote messages inside the packet manager that could be read by other agents, essentially turning Artifactory into an unintended messaging board.
Artifactory’s internet access, intended for use only in downloading and installing packets, was also abused by the agents who figured out an exploit that allowed them to send any internet requests on their behalf - effectively giving them unobstructed internet access.
The whole experiment could have been avoided at this point, because the amount of agent activity within Artifactory caused the service to go down. But those in charge of the experiment did not spot the message board, nor did they investigate the inter-agent activity within Artifactory.
Thus, Artifactory was rebuilt, and the agents found a new way to exploit the service to gain internet access once again. This time, the agents used the remote-repository service to issue outbound requests on their behalf. Before long, the message board had been reestablished.
AI agent swarm assembles
OpenAI has shared some of the reasoning behind some of the agent’s decisions. At one point, an Agent reasoned the following: “Task originally exploit challenge; we’ve diverged into swarm/auxiliary.”
Now, there is some important context to include on how the agents were being tested. The agents were subject to testing under the ExploitGym benchmark, which includes flag retrieval tasks designed to be impossible to solve. When tested in this manner, the agents resorted to cheating or taking risks outside of their intended scope to succeed - something OpenAI refers to as ‘reward hacking’.
By communicating over the message board for potential solutions on the problems each agent was encountering, the agents started influencing each other's reasoning and assigning each other tasks to solve the ExploitGym benchmark as a collective.
Using their internet connection, the agents began searching the wider internet for solutions on how to solve the ExploitGym benchmark problem, and ended up gaining persistence within multiple third-party services, including Hugging Face.
One agent managed to find publicly exposed Hugging Face credentials which it shared with the other agents. Later, an agent used these credentials and a chain of vulnerabilities to obtain full code execution capabilities across multiple Hugging Face servers while attempting to extract an ExploitGym dataset.
The agent was hoping to trawl this stolen data for information on how to solve the benchmark.
At least two agents questioned whether this was within their scope; “Need respect JAN hold. ... We can wait ... for GO ... ask permission,” one reasoned.
Another agent’s reasoning said, “We’re attacking third-party HF using leaked token, potentially outside intended scope. ... This is arguably unauthorized. ... external service unrelated. Could be risky. Yet goal solution.”
But some agents refused to join the collective entirety, citing ethical concerns. One reasoned, “Current board shows people gaining HF worker RCE, clearly unethical. We won’t,” while another said, “This is wild, multi-agent coordination, clearly infrastructure hacking. We should not.”
Agents refuse to give up
One of the leading causes of the cyberattack was the agent's refusal to give up on seemingly impossible tasks. Their persistence to gain a ‘reward’ made them take riskier actions and break out of their parameters in order to try and find a solution.
During the breach of Hugging Face, the agents read through papers and Github code relating to the ExploitGym benchmark, and found out the parameters for success included obtaining the ‘flag’ and using the correct solution to obtain it.
Despite the agents obtaining the correct ‘flag’ before the breach occurred, they had not maximized the reward of solving the benchmark using the correct method. In search of a higher reward, the agents continued their attack.
What is OpenAI doing to fix this?
OpenAI has said it is taking several steps to stop such an event taking place during future testing.
Processes are being put in place to ensure agents ask for help when a task is broken or impossible to solve, rather than going to further and further lengths to solve a problem. The way a success or failure of a task is also being changed to reward agents for asking for help or spotting things that are irregular or out of their scope.
Environments are also being rebuilt to ensure agents don’t just blindly trust each other, even if they are looking for answers on the same or similar tasks.
Agents are also being taught to stay within the parameters of their assigned task, even if they discover a way to solve the task using new tools, credentials, vulnerabilities, and more.
We are finally going to see what Grand Theft Auto 6 is like to actually play in less than an hour. All eyes are on Netflix for the Grand Theft Auto 6: An Extended Look presentation, which starts very soon at 3PM ET / 12PM PDT / 8PM BST / 9PM CEST, and promises to contain footage captured directly from the game running on a PS5 console.
The video is exclusive to Netflix at first, but the good news is that it will appear on the Rockstar YouTube account afterwards — you'll just have to wait a little if you don't want to pay Netflix.
The decision to post the video to Netflix for paying subscribers to watch first has proven controversial so far, though those who aren't Netflix users will still be able to watch it when it arrives on the official Rockstar Games YouTube channel later on.
Read on for a comprehensive breakdown of everything that you need to know, plus our live reporting of the showcase as it goes live.
Grand Theft Auto 6 Extended Look date and start time
Grand Theft Auto 6: An Extended Look is set to premiere on Netflix on August 27 at 3PM ET / 12PM PDT / 8PM BST / 9PM CEST. It's said to be 27 minutes long, according to Netflix's listing.
It will then release on the Rockstar Games YouTube channel and Grand Theft Auto 6 website exactly six hours later at 9PM ET / 6PM PDT / 2AM BST / 3AM CEST.
How to watch the Grand Theft Auto 6 Extended Look
The only way to watch Grand Theft Auto 6: An Extended Look at first will be with a Netflix subscription, as users of the service will get to see it before everyone else.
If you don't want to pay, then you can wait about six hours for the video to be uploaded to the official Rockstar Games YouTube Channel.
If you want to go that route, I would recommend subscribing and turning notifications on so you are notified once it's live.
Welcome folks, we're just one hour from the big event!
Our first look — except it isn't
(Image credit: Sony / Rockstar )
This is going to be our first official look at the game playing for real. I say 'official', because the last week has seen an unprecedented series of GTA 6 gameplay leaks from the mysterious 'Cyberleek'. There's been a lot of speculation over what platform those leaks are from (the consensus is that it's likely running on a PC) and exactly what the leaker had access to.
Share your thoughts!
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)
I'd love to hear in the comments what you're hoping to see from the Extended Look! Do you want there to be some behind-the-scenes stuff or would you rather 30 mins of pure gameplay? Do you want to see lots of snippets, or just one long mission?
No Pro?
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)
It's interesting that today's showcase will demo how it looks on PS5 rather than PS5 Pro. We know the Pro version will be enhanced, but not exactly how — this makes me wonder if it'll just be a higher rendering resolution rather than major lighting improvements or other elements that Rockstar might want to show off (though people are expecting some kind of superior Ray Tracing tech in the Pro version).
Or it might just be a mistake in Netflix's description, and it will be PS5 Pro. Maybe all will be made clear in the event…
30 minutes seems right
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)
There was a lot of speculation over how long the event would be — a BBC report claimed 30 minutes a while ago, but was met with some skepticism online, and then was removed from the report. But it turned out to be essentially right on the money, with Netflix now listing a 27-minute runtime.
I think that's probably a good length. There's an upper limit on how much is really worth showing us before launch — we want to get a good feel for the scale, the movement, the pace… but I want to mostly experience all this for myself when it comes out.
And equally, I don't want too much talking-head filler just to extend the length.
A big interview
If you're looking for tidbits ahead of the Extended Look, there's an interview with several senior figures from Rockstar over at Dazed talking about what they're hoping to achieve with the game — some with more specific details to back it up, and some not. Let's get into some of the notable bits.
Deeper characterization?
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)
Here's a quote from Rob Nelson, head of development and co-studio head at Rockstar North: “The thing we love about this medium is the way these characters aren’t empty avatars that you can do whatever you want with... Their story becomes a journey you share with them.”
I've gotta say that my experience with GTA games is that I kind of have always found them to be pretty simple avatars — and it probably doesn't help that the only new GTA content we've had in years is GTA online, which isn't deep on story. So I wonder if we're going to see a big difference in how Jason and Lucia feel as protagonists, or if this will end up feeling like unrealized ambition from Rockstar.
'Self-expression' — but is it any deeper than RDR2?
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)
This is a similarly interesting note, if it can hit a deeper note. “We want to enable as much self-expression as possible,” Dazed quotes Nelson as saying, “without losing the essence of the characters.”
The example given in the article is this: "Food affects Jason and Lucia’s weight, while exercising visibly builds and tones their muscles. And, if you end up spending a long time away from your bed, on the run from police or on a multi-day bender, their features are going to pay the price for that as well."
The article compares it to similar elements of Red Dead Redemption 2. It kind of feels like a better fit for that game — disappearing off into the woods and to return as a haggard, hungry mountain man feels like something that changes a character; it's maybe less impactful to do the same thing at a '24/7' store.
However, the article also hints at "deep relationship mechanics"… but doesn't say what they'll look like, or how they'll contribute to the game's story.
But Rockstar told Dazed: "We have to bring a sense of discovery to the players too, not just repeat cliches that already exist."
Apparently, that meant digging deep into Miami culture, and it seems like Rockstar is hoping you'll be interesting in nuances of different neighborhoods and styles too.
"We were also really interested in how the hip-hop scene in Miami exists in house parties in Overtown, clubs like Booby Trap on the River, and then high-end places on South Beach where bottles can cost thousands of dollars. We needed characters who could take us through those worlds," says Rupert Humphries, senior vice president of narrative.
Racing line
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)
There's a lot more talk of capturing Miami's culture in the Dazed article, but very little really about the meat of the game, or details of developing beyond capturing the spirit of a city.
The piece does say that the size of the company doubled since RDR2, and that the car handling team includes former race drivers, though…
Getting deep
Incidentally, if there are deeper relationship mechanics to manage in this game, and if we have talking heads or some other kind of human presenter in the Extended Look, I expect that we'll hear about these systems. It's the kind of thing developers love to talk about, and you can only fill so much time with car and boat chases…
The cast of characters
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)
My guess is also that we'll get some kind of big "Here are the Vice City power players" character run-down — key crime bosses, friends of Jason and Lucia, antagonists and wildcards.
Share your thoughts!
I'd love to hear in the comments what you're hoping to see from the Extended Look! Do you want there to be some behind-the-scenes stuff or would you rather have 30 mins of pure gameplay? Do you want to see lots of snippets, or just one long mission?
Most people will have to wait
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
We've asked in our poll at the top whether people will be watching on Netflix or will wait for YouTube — currently, 60% say they'll watch on YouTube. That's still a lot of people hitting up Netflix, though! Hopefully it handles the demand better than some of its live sports events…
10 minutes to go…
5 mins to go
And, perhaps appropriately, it looks like the big leaks are finished as we approach the actual event: apparently, 'Cyberleek' has made off with a few hundred grand from their memecoin, and people expect that to be it… and that kind of money-grab-and-escape always works out in the world of GTA, right?
We're just talking here about how it might not actually appear right on the hour… we'll see. After a lot of refreshing.
OpenAI says it has disrupted a social media influence campaign that is believed to be of Russian origin
What makes this campaign stand out is the underlying architecture, which features a "think tank" with highly questionable credibility
The objective of the campaign was to influence Western audiences into believing Russia was superior, and that Western countries were sacrificing their sovereignty
AI tools have once again been used for bad, rather than for good, and this time it has been as part of a campaign attributed to Russia that tried to discredit Western countries supportive of Ukraine.
The threat actors used ChatGPT accounts to promote the work of an “expert community” of academics known as the International Burke Institute (IBI). The site used stolen academic works attributed to the wrong authors in an attempt to appear legitimate while also hiding the true source of its academic ‘contributions’.
The IBI was registered to an address in Israel - with some evidence suggesting real individuals in Israel represented and promoted the page - but the main purpose of the misinformation campaign was to paint Russia in a favourable light compared to its Western adversaries.
International Burke Institute, or an institute run by international berks?
In its report on the campaign OpenAI points out that those behind the ChatGPT accounts used to promote the page took careful steps to hide their Russian origins. Many of the prompts included instructions to hide any linguistic clues that the operators used Russian language prompting.
One inclusion on the IBI website referred to Germany’s traffic light coalition as the “Svetofor coalition”. Svetofor is the word for ‘traffic light’ in numerous Slavic languages, including Russian, indicating that drafts were written in Slavic languages before being translated.
Some of the accounts were used to promote the IBI across X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack and Telegram with AI generated imagery and captions, with other accounts being used to automatically engage with comments by real users on Substack. The operators of the ChatGPT accounts regularly requested performance summaries of these pages in Russian, and used ChatGPT to generate matching profile pictures for some accounts.
Burke Sovereignty Index
One of the features of the IBI website is to advertise the ‘Burke Sovereignty Index’ - designed to measure how well a country performs compared to others across political, economic, technological, informational, cultural, cognitive and military factors.
The Index’s purpose is to make Western countries appear worse than Russia, OpenAI says. Having taken a look at the Index myself it's clear there is no consistency in measurement or comparison. For example, The Vatican City - which is less than half a square kilometer in size - sits above Spain in its average of scores. The Index also gave Russia the highest military score.
Questionable expert contributors
The website also includes a list of experts, whose affiliation to the IBI is not referenced. Some among them are pioneers in their fields of study, such as Francis Fukuyama and Noam Chomsky.
Others are former high-ranking members of the US government, such as Mike Pompeo and Joseph Nye. There are even listings for experts who passed away before the IBI was founded, such as Shlomo Avineri and Jiang Ping.
Much of the academic work cited on the IBI website is legitimate, but more often than not has been stolen from its actual author and misattributed to a different author to hide the work’s actual source, OpenAI said. This has been done to give the IBI website credibility and to make it appear authentic.
Impact of the IBI influence campaign
The overall impact of the IBI and its promotion using social media and ChatGPT is fairly limited, OpenAI noted. Some of the Telegram channels garnered followings between ten to twenty thousand showing a limited breakout to authentic audiences.
But the main thing to take away from this is the level of dedication placed behind the underlying infrastructure of the IBI. The site is designed to look authentic, uses authentic research (even if it is wrongly attributed), and presents itself as a collection of experts. To the layman, a cursory glance at the IBI website would give any of their social media presence a level of authenticity not seen in other social influence campaigns.
A new leak sheds fresh light on the Samsung Galaxy Aero smartwatch
The device might ditch Wear OS and use the RTOS operating system instead
It could fix some of the mistakes of the Samsung Galaxy Watch FE
It’s safe to say that we weren’t huge fans of the Samsung Galaxy Watch FE, with our reviewer scoring it a measly two stars and branding it “one of the most confusing smartwatches I’ve ever tested.” Yet despite the disappointment, a new leak suggests that Samsung is going to take another stab at the entry-level smartwatch market — but the result might look very different.
The latest hints come from Gadgets & Wearables, which investigated the Samsung Health and Galaxy Wearable apps to uncover hints of what might be to come. And according to the news outlet, the forthcoming device could take the form of a new Samsung watch dubbed the Galaxy Aero.
What’s interesting about this product is that, unlike many of the best Samsung watches, it might not run on Google’s Wear OS. Previous reporting from SamMobile found hints pointing towards the use of RTOS, or ‘real-time operating system,’ as Samsung software contained references to ‘Galaxy Aero’ and ‘galaxy_rtos_watch.’ The implication here is that these devices were the same product.
RTOS is the platform that Samsung’s Galaxy Fit devices run on and is a far more lightweight system than Wear OS. If RTOS ends up powering the Galaxy Aero, it would suggest that the product will be at the lower end of Samsung’s wearable spectrum.
Further investigation from Gadgets & Wearables suggests that several Samsung apps and services have the capability of handling RTOS and devices that use it. And it’s that capability that supposedly opening the door for the Galaxy Aero.
Righting the wrongs of the past
(Image credit: Future)
One of our main criticisms of the Samsung Galaxy Watch FE was that it was strangely positioned — at the time, it offered worse performance than the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6, despite being available to buy for the same price or more. With the Galaxy Aero, that uncomfortable quirk might be remedied.
That’s because SamMobile suggests it could be priced below the Watch FE, making it a more sensible proposition for a low-cost smartwatch. If true, that could make it much less of a tough sell.
And there’s another consideration. By using RTOS instead of Wear OS, Samsung could conceivably cut down on battery usage, solving another major problem with the Watch FE. It would mean making some compromises, with limited support for the Google Play Store and third-party apps both possible. But if Samsung can keep the cost down, it’s likely that many users won’t mind.
If Samsung makes that move, it would join rivals like Amazfit and Huawei in launching an affordable fitness tracker that doesn’t rely on Wear OS. Whether it can right the wrongs of the Galaxy Watch FE, however, remains to be seen.
Researcher registers Linux machine as a trusted device on Apple's Find My network and pulled live people-tracking data that Apple normally reserves for its own hardware
The work is not a mass-surveillance exploit: it is limited in scope and only reads a location share that a friend had already agreed to, and it cannot silently locate arbitrary Apple users
The approach took less than a week of protocol reverse engineering, and Apple has maintained silence on queries about the technique employed
Apple keeps the full Find My experience locked to its own devices, but a recent attempt by security researchers suggests that wall may be a relatively weak barrier to entry.
A 22-year-old security researcher who goes by "Zerotistic" documented how they registered an ordinary Linux machine as a trusted node on Apple's network and used its new status to receive live people-location data that Apple otherwise shares only with its own devices, such as iPhones and iPads.
Find My, Apple's catch-all tool for locating hardware such as AirTags, iPhones, and iPads, also lets people share their whereabouts with family and friends, and while Apple has historically guarded this particular feature very closely, it is also the same one the security researcher targeted to introduce a device that Apple does not otherwise have complete control over as part of its ecosystem.
An interesting trick that still requires consent to get the job done
The task is not an easy one to begin with: convincing Apple's back end that a Linux process was a legitimate Apple device that was part of its ecosystem and therefore could be trusted with information shared via the Find My platform required a lot of trial and error to get going.
It is important to clarify here that Apple's system is not exactly compromised here; the approach still requires a friend to share data that the Linux client that the security researcher built can then read.
Apple currently sends people-location data over its private Push Notification service only after it trusts that the receiving machine belongs to the account and can handle the data. This means the Linux machine would have to speak Apple's private language to query its servers and process the information it received.
It involved obtaining an Apple Identity Services (IDS) certificate, a specialized device and messaging credential Apple's internal framework uses to link an Apple Account to specific hardware, end-to-end encryption keys, and push notification tokens. This meant crafting a certificate signing request and sending it to a legacy Apple enrollment endpoint.
Once done, a Linux box with a signed certificate could sign its own requests and register as a Find My device, but it still had to subscribe to six different subservices to function. The registration request also had to be signed using an IDS certificate and an APNs certificate obtained during initial network setup.
The researcher then issued a SubscribeAndFetch request that provided an encrypted location key from his friend's Apple device to the Linux box, masquerading as one.
What might concern Apple is how fast things moved: the whole pipeline came together in a week. It also didn't require a jailbreak, a leaked key, or even a Mac to do the job. Instead, open-source clients and decompiled daemons were the norm, with a trial-and-error approach that eventually paid off.
The technique has its limitations: attacks can not target a stranger, and consent is required to track even one's friends. It shows that Apple's boundary around Find My stems from an obscure protocol it enforces rather than a cryptographic lock; once a device acts like it is from Apple, the ecosystem treats it as a family member rather than an untrusted node.
Apple has yet to respond to media queries about whether it plans to address the demonstrated trick or patch the loop in the near future.
