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Many wrong orders and 18,000 cups of water later, and Taco Bell is rethinking using AI to take orders.

Personal information, including Social Security numbers, could have been stolen.

Without Congressionally-approved funding, public media stations say communities will be left with aging infrastructure amid growing risks from extreme weather.

(Image credit: U.S. Coast Guard via AP)

A Duolingo-like experience can help you practice a new language.

Amtrak just reopened a route from Mobile, Ala., to New Orleans that's connecting communities along the Gulf Coast for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. It's called the Mardi Gras line.

Beats is no stranger to teasing forthcoming hardware – think earbuds or speakers – on its social channels, and earlier today, the Apple-owned brand did just that. This team is teasing the Powerbeats Fit, which looks to be the next generation of the popular Beats Fit Pro earbuds, and simultaneously a rebranding.

Shown off in a fresh hue of orange on athletes Saquon Barkley, Justin Jefferson, and Jayden Daniels, these earbuds are promised to “Fit Every Move.” That’s likely a nod to the in-ear design of these, which use a wing tip to fit snugly and securely in the ear, unlike the Powerbeats Pro 2, which wrap around the ear.

Beats Fit Pro first launched way back in November of 2021 and has been on the market, with several new colors, including a partnership with Kim Kardashian. These earbuds still fill a nice spot within the Beats lineup, but compared to the Powerbeats Pro 2, there are certainly a few upgrades I hope we’ll be seeing soon, when the successor drops as the Powerbeats Fit.

The teaser concludes with a promised launch for Fall 2025, which could occur in mid-to-late September, October, or November of this year. With that in mind, here are three things we hope the Powerbeats Fit will offer.

The arrival of heart-rate tracking

(Image credit: Beats)

Considering the Powerbeats Pro 2 introduced the heart-rate tracking function, and AirPods Pro 3 are rumored to offer the capability as well, I hope we see these arrive in the smaller, lighter form factor of the Powerbeats Fit.

Yes, the actual tracking is a bit limited, and if you’re in the Apple ecosystem with an Apple Watch, that wearable will override the earbuds. Even so, the earbuds would offer tracking ability when both are in your ears for select workout apps, as well as on Android via the companion Beats app. It would bolster the feature set here a bit as we’d assume the Powerbeats Fit will feature active noise cancellation and a transparent mode like the Beats Fit Pro.

To power the arrival of the heart-rate tracking sensor, we’d expect to see a jump in the silicon powering these earbuds as well. Currently, the Beats Fit Pro features the Apple-made H1 Chip, but the Powerbeats Fit would hopefully step things into more modern territory with the likes of the H2 chip, the same one that powers the Powerbeats Pro 2.

A step up in durability

(Image credit: Beats)

The Beats Fit Pro currently offers IPX4 sweat and water resistance, which means they can survive light splashes. And that’s also the same degree of durability that the Powerbeats Pro 2 offer, but considering Beats is teasing these with professional athletes and many Beats earbuds or headphones owners like to use these during workouts, runs, or general training, an upgrade in this regard to at least IP55 or IPX7 would be great to see.

Considering the rating on the Powerbeats Pro 2, however, this one might be less likely – especially as it seems Beats is keeping the existing design here.

A longer runtime

A post shared by Beats by Dre (@beatsbydre)

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Beats Fit Pro currently offers six hours of playback with noise cancellation turned on and seven hours with that mode off. You get a few recharges in the case, which Beats says offers 24 hours of battery life.

I’d like to see a step up here, at least closer to the excellent runtime of Powerbeats Pro 2 – those earbuds offer 10 hours of playback and 45 hours when you factor in recharge in the case. That’s a fantastic number, and while the Powerbeats Fit look to be a bit smaller than these, the newer chip and maybe some improvements in battery tech could help to make this a reality.

Similar to the transition from Powerbeats Pro to Powerbeats Pro 2, we’ll see if the design team at Beats was able to slim down the case size here. Fingers crossed that it sticks with a USB-C port.

The good news is that, considering Beats posted the teaser today, August 28, 2025, we only likely have a few weeks to go. Considering Beats rarely makes appearances during Apple events, it’s unlikely we’ll learn more about it at the September 9, 2025, event. However, Beats will likely share more in the weeks after that and officially introduce the Powerbeats Fit.

Let’s just hope the price stays competitive, as the Beats Fit Pro currently has an MSRP of $199 / £199 / AU$299.

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NPR station photographer and New Orleans native Tyrone Turner travelled back to Louisiana to document the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

(Image credit: Tyrone Turner)

• NJ prisoners get only twenty 1.44MB floppy disks, barely enough for appeals
• Lawyers must transfer files from flash drives back to floppy disks, complicating the process
• Authorities say the ban on flash drives is a matter of security

A prisoner at New Jersey State Prison has publically voiced frustration at being forced to rely on floppy disks for critical legal work.

The US state's prison system restricts inmates to using floppy disks, each with a maximum capacity of 1.44MB, but each prisoner is allowed 20 floppy disks, a limit which barely matches the needs of complex legal correspondence.

Writing for the Prison Journalism Project, Jorge Luis Alvarado said, “Inside New Jersey State Prison, it’s like 1985, where we rely on out-of-date word processors, electric typewriters, and floppy disks that are going extinct in the free world.”

Outdated tools in modern times

Alvarado explains even a single legal brief can exceed this size, requiring the use of multiple disks to store one document.

Such a process becomes cumbersome, and with the added risk of corruption, the format introduces real uncertainty into how files are preserved.

In addition, since major companies like Sony stopped manufacturing floppies about 15 years ago, their scarcity only adds to the impracticality of the rule.

The reliance on floppy media seems especially arbitrary, given that they have only about a year of lifespan left and that flash drives became widely adopted more than two decades ago.

In the early 2000s, USB drives quickly eclipsed floppies, offering both speed and durability.

Today, they are inexpensive, compact, and reliable, with capacity far surpassing anything the floppy era could provide.

Even consumer SSD options now span into the terabyte range, with the largest SSD models rivaling enterprise storage.

Devices once labeled the fastest SSD can manage transfers that dwarf anything possible with legacy media.

However, authorities argue that the ban on flash drives is a matter of security, suggesting they could be misused within prison environments.

While this position explains the reluctance to modernize, it leaves prisoners disadvantaged when dealing with legal matters where technology should serve as a bridge, not a barrier.

Alvarado describes a process where lawyers must copy digital files onto flash drives, only to have them transferred back to floppy disks through a single library computer.

Delays are inevitable, with access often taking days at a time.

Some researchers estimate that between four and six percent of those incarcerated in the United States may be innocent.

Therefore, even if a fraction of these individuals face barriers to appeals due to outdated technology, the issue extends far beyond mere inconvenience.

Via Toms Hardware

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• Security agencies issue joint statement warning Chinese tech firms may be indirectly collaborating with Salt Typhoon
• Salt Typhoon is a hacking group behind multiple high-profile attacks
• Group is thought to have serious links to Chinese government

A new joint cybersecurity advisory from the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies like CISA, the UK’s NCSC, Canada’s CSIS, Japan’s NPA and many more looks ti expose advanced persistent threat (APT) actors believed to be sponsored by the Chinese Government.

According to the advisory, Chinese firms have been providing products and services to China’s Ministry of State Security and the military - which in turn, it is claimed, props up hacking groups.

These threat actors target infrastructure like telecommunications, government, military, transport, and energy agencies - specifically in a global hacking campaign linked to the notorious Salt Typhoon group.

Supplying components

“The data stolen through this activity against foreign telecommunications and Internet service providers (ISPs), as well as intrusions in the lodging and transportation sectors, ultimately can provide Chinese intelligence services with the capability to identify and track their targets’ communications and movements around the world," the advisory warns.

Some of the firms named in the advisory, like Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Co. Ltd, have already been sanctioned for their ties to the group.

Other named companies include Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong Information Technology Co., Ltd., and Sichuan Zhixin Ruijie Network Technology Co., Ltd, all of which are thought to be linked.

The report also outlines specific threat hunting guidance and mitigations against these groups, particularly in quickly patching devices, monitoring for unauthorized activity, and tightening device configuration.

Earlier in 2025, Salt Typhoon was discovered carrying out a cyber espionage campaign that breached multiple communications firms, with hackers lingering inside US company networks for months.

The group was observed abusing vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Servers, which allowed them to breach networks and exfiltrate data. A fix for this flaw has been available for years, but research suggests that nearly 91% of the 30,000 affected instances remain un-patched - highlighting the importance of deploying effective patch management software.

China has always strenuously denied any ties to this group, and to any other cyber-espionage campaigns.

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• Novodisq claims 230PB rack capacity using proprietary 144TB SSDs
• Novoblade integrates compute, networking, and storage in dense blade servers
• Novodisq promises 95% lower power compared with conventional arrays

At the recent Flash Memory Summit, a new name from New Zealand surfaced in a bid to cause waves in the enterprise storage space.

Novodisq presented its Novoblade system, a platform built to combine dense storage, compute acceleration, and network capacity in a compact design.

The Novoblade modules are designed as blade servers, each offering 576TB of raw storage built on flash drives. The drives themselves are based on E2 form factor SSD units with capacities reaching 144TB per device.

How Novoblade is structured

The company says a 2U enclosure can hold up to 20 modules, which equates to 11.75PB of capacity in a single shelf.

Scaling this configuration across an entire 42U rack, Novodisq projects that storage can rise to 230PB.

Alongside the storage figures, Novodisq promotes Novoblade as a hyperconverged design that integrates compute resources directly into each blade.

These include ARM64 cores, FPGA resources, and optional AI or machine learning engines, with networking supported by 200Gbps or 400Gbps Ethernet.

The company positions this as a platform that can replace conventional NAS arrays, with up to 95% lower energy consumption. Such claims, however, are difficult to validate without detailed independent benchmarks.

While the theoretical capacity appears high, the price of such a system raises serious questions.

The company has not announced official figures, but estimates can be made from existing hardware, as a single 122.88TB SSD currently (August 2025) costs close to $14,000.

Using that as a reference, and accounting for Novoblade’s proprietary 144TB SSDs, a single blade with four drives could already exceed $60,000 before considering added compute and networking.

With 20 blades in a 2U enclosure, the total could approach $1.2 million. Extending this to a full 42U rack with 230PB of raw storage means costs would rise well beyond $2 million.

This positions Novoblade as an extremely dense solution, but one that only highly specialized organizations could justify financially.

On paper, these numbers suggest one of the densest deployments yet described, but practical use and performance remain untested.

Novodisq describes the Novoblade as both a storage server and a converged compute platform.

It can expose block, file, and object interfaces, or integrate into distributed systems such as Ceph or Lustre.

At the moment, major players in the storage field continue to focus on balancing capacity with performance.

Therefore, it remains uncertain whether Novodisq can provide not only the largest or fastest SSD arrangements but also sustainable pricing and support.

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The Department of Transportation says it will be "reclaiming management" of the transportation hub, which it has owned since the 1980s. D.C.'s mayor says that would be an "amazing initiative."

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• Nvidia Jetson Thor is framed as the robot brain for physical AI
• Major robotics companies are already listed as early adopters worldwide
• Nvidia Jetson Thor offers 2,070 FP4 teraflops within a 130-watt power envelope

Nvidia has released the Jetson AGX Thor developer kit, calling it the next step toward robotics systems which can function in real time.

The system, built on the Blackwell GPU line, is framed as a platform for “physical AI” and advanced robotic functions across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, farming, retail, and transport.

Nvidia says it can deliver up to 7.5 times more AI compute and over three times the energy efficiency of its Jetson Orin line, which has been in wide use since 2022.

Offers supercomputer-level capacity

Nvidia went on to describe Jetson Thor as “the ultimate supercomputer to drive the age of physical AI and general robotics.”

“We’ve built Jetson Thor for the millions of developers working on robotic systems that interact with and increasingly shape the physical world,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.

“With unmatched performance and energy efficiency, and the ability to run multiple generative AI models at the edge, Jetson Thor is the ultimate supercomputer to drive the age of physical AI and general robotics.”

With a quoted figure of 2,070 FP4 teraflops in a 130-watt envelope, it is positioned as powerful enough to run multiple generative models at once.

It supports vision-language-action models like Isaac GR00T N1.5, along with other LLM systems.

The device also integrates 128GB of memory, which is expected to make it capable of handling larger AI workflows at the edge.

Several robotics players are already listed as early adopters, including Agility Robotics, Amazon Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Caterpillar, Hexagon, and Medtronic.

Meta has also been named as an early partner, while companies such as John Deere, OpenAI, and Physical Intelligence are said to be testing the system.

“Nvidia Jetson Thor offers the computational horsepower and energy efficiency necessary to develop and scale the next generation of AI-powered robots that can operate safely and effectively in dynamic, real-world environments, transforming how we move and manage goods globally,” said Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics.

Nvidia notes more than two million developers already use its robotics stack, with over 7,000 customers having deployed Jetson Orin hardware in edge AI projects.

Jetson Thor runs on the Nvidia Jetson software platform, which is designed to support multiple AI tools at once.

The package integrates with Nvidia Isaac for simulation, Metropolis for vision AI, and Holoscan for real-time sensor processing.

This arrangement is intended to allow one system-on-module to support many AI writer models and workflows, rather than requiring several separate chips.

The developer kit is available now at $3,499 and the production systems, including carrier boards, will be distributed worldwide through its partners.

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NPR first wrote about the group "No Sex for Fish" in 2019 — Kenyan women out to end the practice of trading sex to a fisherman in exchange for his catch to sell. Since then they're faced tribulations.

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