A new leak claims Honor’s Robot Phone will feature two 200MP cameras, a motorized gimbal, a 7,060mAh battery, and 120W charging.

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Smartphones have made information permanently accessible, but that accessibility comes at a price. The same device that shows you a reminder also delivers a notification for something unrelated, which leads to one more app opened, one more five-minute detour, and one more afternoon where the task you meant to remember sits unfinished somewhere in a mental stack. The problem isn’t access to information. It’s the medium through which it arrives.

The ZecTrix Note 4 approaches that with a different premise: what if the display that shows your tasks doesn’t connect to your attention the same way a phone screen does? It’s a 4.2-inch e-paper smart display, about the size of a palm, that attaches magnetically to a metal surface and stays there showing whatever you most need to remember, using almost no power to do it.

Designer: ZecTrix

The interaction model is deliberately minimal. Press the physical button, speak your task or reminder, and the device converts that into text and adds it to the display. The built-in AI voice assistant handles the transcription and task management, and the e-paper screen holds whatever it’s showing without any power draw between updates. The display also handles weather, clocks, focus timers, handwritten notes, images, and custom templates.

Hardware underneath is solid for something this compact. An ESP32-S3 dual-core processor with 8 MB of PSRAM and 16 MB of flash handles the AI processing and connectivity, backed by a 2,000 mAh battery, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, a speaker, a microphone, and a USB Type-C port for charging. GPIO expansion is also available, which opens the platform to custom hardware additions.

The 97mm x 97mm x 8.75mm square chassis comes in three enclosure variants: an injection-molded Minimal Premium Edition designed for clean desk or kitchen wall placement, a standard Everyday Edition for DIY-minded users, and a Color Edition with open-source 3D model files for those who want to print their own. The magnetic backplate sticks firmly to any suitable metal surface without adhesive or mounting hardware.

For users who want more than a black-and-white display, there’s the Note 4C, which replaces the monochrome panel with a four-color E Ink screen that adds red and yellow to the palette. It runs on the same hardware platform but ships without the consumer AI firmware, positioning it instead as an open development device for people with ESP32 experience. The color panel is slower to refresh, typically over ten seconds per full update, making it better suited to status labels, family photo cards, or API dashboards that update occasionally rather than continuously.

The two products are deliberately distinct rather than tiered versions of the same thing. The Note 4 is a finished product with a lifetime AI voice service included; the Note 4C is an open starting point for a custom build. Both share the same physical form, so the choice comes down to how much of the software someone wants to supply themselves.

The post Phones Turn Reminders Into Distractions, This Magnetic Display Won’t first appeared on Yanko Design.

APAC companies are spending heavily on AI, but KPMG says only 5% have established ROI with demonstrated business outcomes.

The post KPMG: APAC AI Spending Is Rising Faster Than ROI Proof appeared first on TechRepublic.

Gmail now warns BCC recipients before they reply all, helping prevent accidental exposure of their involvement and email address.

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South Korea plans a KIC investment account for AI, data centers, chips, and strategic industries, but the government has not set its funding size.

The post South Korea Unveils $14B Sovereign Fund to Back AI, Data Centers appeared first on TechRepublic.

Camera batteries are one of those accessories that photographers never think about until something goes wrong. They’re small enough to vanish into the bottom of a bag or a jacket pocket, common enough to own several of and regularly mix up, and important enough that losing one mid-trip can force an early stop to a shoot. The solution most people reach for is buying more of them, which only increases the number of things to keep track of.

The FALCAM TagBatt addresses the problem from inside the battery itself. Compatible with Sony’s NP-FZ100 form factor, it integrates Apple’s Find My tracking technology directly into the cell, so the battery carries its own location data wherever it goes. If it ends up left behind at a studio, a venue, or the seat pocket of a flight, the Find My app will flag it and show its last known position.

Designer: FALCAM

Because the tracker lives inside the battery rather than clipped to a camera strap or screwed into a cage mount, it’s considerably harder to spot. An opportunistic thief who grabs a camera bag and removes any obvious Bluetooth puck from the outside can’t strip out what’s already built into the power source. It’s the kind of discreet integration that external trackers can’t quite replicate, no matter how small they get.

The tracking isn’t the only thing the TagBatt changes about how a camera battery behaves. A built-in USB-C port lets it charge directly from any standard USB-C source, including a power bank or a travel adapter, without needing the dedicated Sony battery charger that typically takes up its own space in a kit bag. Pop it out of the camera, plug it in overnight, and it’s ready in the morning without routing around a charger at all.

Capacity comes in at 2,600mAh against the OEM Sony NP-FZ100’s 2,280mAh, which translates to a modest but real advantage per charge. An advanced decoding chip handles the communication with the camera’s internal systems so the body treats it as it would any genuine battery, with accurate charge-level reporting and none of the “non-genuine battery” warning messages that typically accompany third-party cells.

Compatibility covers a wide sweep of Sony’s current lineup, including the Alpha 7 series through the Alpha 7 V, the Alpha 9 series, the Alpha 6700, the FX3 and FX30, and the ZV-E1, among others. A Canon LP-E6 version is also available now, with Nikon EN-EL15 and Fujifilm NP-W235 versions confirmed to be in development.

At $69.99, the TagBatt costs more than a standard third-party replacement but considerably less than the Sony original, and it comes with two capabilities that the original simply doesn’t offer. For photographers who travel frequently, work in locations where gear occasionally goes astray, or are just tired of carrying a charger they’d rather leave at home, the trade-off makes a fairly straightforward case.

The post Camera Batteries Go Missing, So This $70 One Tracks Itself first appeared on Yanko Design.

At some point in their life, almost everyone has picked up a guitar, struggled with a C chord for ten minutes, and quietly put it back down. The fingertip pain. The out-of-tune strings. The YouTube tutorial that somehow assumes you already know what a fret is. Learning guitar has always had a steep and slightly humiliating entry curve, and most of us just gave up. The TemPolor Melo-D thinks that’s a problem worth solving, and the design it came up with is genuinely hard to ignore.

Designed by inDare Design Strategy Limited, the Melo-D is billed as the world’s first generative AI guitar, and even that description barely scratches the surface of what it actually is. On the outside, it looks like a guitar that a product designer and a tech enthusiast co-parented together. The body is sleek, the finish is pearl white, and it has a foldable build that makes it compact enough to take almost anywhere. But the real story is what happens when you turn it on.

Designer: inDare Design Strategy Limited

The neck is embedded with LED lights that illuminate exactly which notes to press, removing the guesswork for beginners entirely. A built-in 2.4″ LCD flip screen on the body handles chord guidance and ambient visuals without you ever needing to prop up a phone nearby. These feel like small details, but they represent a real design philosophy: the instrument itself should carry the full experience. You shouldn’t need a separate ecosystem of apps and accessories just to get started.

What makes the Melo-D genuinely interesting is the AI engine running underneath all of it. The guitar operates in three modes: solo, sing-along, and AI creation. In AI creation mode, you can hum a melody and the guitar transcribes it into a guitar solo. You can type a text prompt and it generates a song. Upload an audio file and it converts the music into playable tabs or chord charts. It even generates personalized backing tracks using emotional tags, so the sound starts to feel like yours rather than something borrowed from a practice app.

The “AI everything” wave has made it easy to be skeptical every time a product slaps the word generative onto its marketing. But the Melo-D doesn’t read as a gimmick dressed up in smart-instrument clothing. The six-string silicone system allows for real, note-by-note playing, which means it isn’t just a toy approximating the feel of music. It’s an actual instrument with training wheels you can choose to remove. The goal isn’t to replace the skill of playing guitar. It’s to lower the barrier enough that more people actually get through the door.

inDare’s design work here deserves its own mention. The studio, known for thoughtful human-centered industrial design, brought a lot of restraint to a product that could have easily become overcrowded with features. The foldable form factor, the integrated flip screen, and the silicone strings all feel like deliberate decisions, not afterthoughts. The Melo-D has also earned recognition at the iF Design Awards, which makes sense, because from a design standpoint it reads as a product with a clear and confident point of view rather than a collection of specs looking for a shell to live in.

At $599, it’s available for pre-order now with an expected ship date in September 2026. For a piece of hardware this layered, that number asks you to take it seriously, which feels appropriate for what it’s trying to do.

Learning guitar used to mean a real commitment: years of practice, a teacher, calluses, patience, and a certain willingness to sound terrible for a while. The Melo-D isn’t trying to skip all of that, but it is offering a more honest entry point for people who actually want to try. Whether you’re a complete beginner or someone who has quietly given up on the guitar more than once, it meets you where you are. And sometimes, that’s exactly the invitation you need to actually show up.

The post The $599 AI Guitar That Finally Makes Playing Easy first appeared on Yanko Design.

Every kid who grew up watching cars turn into robots has a soft spot for things that are not what they seem. Musician and maker Mattias Krantz never quite grew out of that phase, except instead of turning a truck into Optimus Prime, he set his sights on something smaller and arguably harder to pull off without CGI. He wanted a ukulele that could become a full size guitar on command, without falling apart in his hands. That meant solving three problems at once: growing the neck by roughly ten inches, keeping the strings in tune through that change, and expanding the body into a real guitar shape instead of a symmetrical blob. Each one turned out to be its own small nightmare.

The motivation was refreshingly petty. Ukulele players get less respect than guitar players no matter how good they get, and Krantz wanted to flip that on its head. Getting there took months of failed prototypes and a collaboration with mechanical engineer Adam Damato, who stepped in once the physics of a growing, string bearing neck got too gnarly to solve alone. What began as a joke became a real feat of mechanical design, borrowing tricks from telescoping tools, fishing reels, and an obscure folk instrument. By the end, the ukulele fit in a backpack and unfolded into a stage ready guitar in seconds.

Designers: Mattias Krantz, Adam Damato

The neck telescopes straight out of the ukulele’s tiny frame, sliding one section into the next until it locks at full guitar length, gaining roughly ten inches without ever detaching from the body. A steel core runs through the sliding sections, and the joints are cut so they interlock and brace against each other the instant the neck reaches full extension. That bracing is what lets it survive eighty pounds of string tension without bowing like a fishing rod. Getting there took two failed attempts first. A folding neck, borrowed from an old instrument called the cithara orbo, worked fine on a full size guitar but was useless on a ukulele, since half a neck sat exactly where a hand needed to grip. The telescoping version solved the length problem right away, but only stopped bending once Damato worked in the steel core and reinforced joints.

The strings are custom made, roughly twice the length of a normal set, and thread onto strategically placed rollers hidden inside the neck and body. Pull the neck out and the rollers feed slack forward, push it back in and they wind the excess back up, so the same six strings carry the instrument through both tunings without coming off. That roller system only exists because everything simpler failed first. Rubber bands solved the stretch problem but sounded worse than the ukulele they replaced. A fishing reel style rig using rope worked until the rope itself stretched, turning every transformation into tuning roulette, and swapping in non stretch rope traded that for a rope that kept snapping, once badly enough to take the guitar apart. Custom strings, ordered special and worth a twenty day wait, were the fix that finally held.

The body expands through six independently moving panels that fan outward from the ukulele’s compact shell, each one traveling a different distance and angle so the outline settles into a real guitar’s curves instead of a bloated circle. An early version of that mechanism grew symmetrically in every direction, fine for something like a banjo but wrong for an instrument with a pinched waist. Getting six panels to move independently instead of in lockstep turned one mechanical problem into six. The first panel alone took three attempts before it worked reliably, and even then only about ninety percent of the time. Adding the rest of the panels made things worse, since a hub inside was quietly blocking outward movement and jamming the whole assembly. Swapping plastic components for metal fixed it, and two days assembling hundreds of parts produced a body that finally held its shape.

None of this would matter if the transformation felt gimmicky in person, but the reception says otherwise. Onlookers at Krantz’s street performances wrote it off as just another ukulele until it unfolded mid song and changed their opinion of him. A band let him bring it on stage, and the transformation held together well enough to draw applause rather than confusion. Transforming gadgets are nothing new, but the engineering here, steel joints, custom rollers, six moving panels, earns real attention over a gimmick label. Krantz and Damato spent months on problems most builders would abandon, and the payoff works under tension, every time.

The post 3D-Printed Ukulele Transforms Into an Electric Guitar In Just 2 Seconds first appeared on Yanko Design.

Thinking about importing the OnePlus 16? Learn what OnePlus' US and Europe exit means for availability, warranty, software support, and compatibility.

The post OnePlus 16 May Skip the US and Europe: What Buyers Need to Know appeared first on TechRepublic.

Samsung’s record second-quarter earnings masked losses in its consumer-device businesses, making the Fold8 lineup more important to its Asia mobile strategy.

The post Samsung Earnings Put New Foldables at the Center of Its Asia Strategy appeared first on TechRepublic.

Apple's new Apple Upgrade program lets US customers lease iPhones, Macs, iPads, and Apple Watches. Here's how it works and whether it's better than buying.

The post Apple’s New iPhone Leasing Program: What It Means Before You Upgrade appeared first on TechRepublic.

Chinese AI platforms are paying people to license their faces for AI-generated videos, raising new questions about biometric identity, consent, and digital ownership.

The post China’s New AI Side Hustle: Renting Out Your Face appeared first on TechRepublic.

AI security tools are helping uncover more software flaws, creating new patching demands and potential offensive risks for enterprise IT teams.

The post More Than 45,000 Software Flaws Reported as AI Reshapes Cybersecurity appeared first on TechRepublic.

Chinese memory chip maker CXMT briefly became China's most valuable company after its Shanghai IPO, highlighting surging investor demand for AI memory chips.

The post CXMT Becomes China’s Most Valuable Company Hours After Shanghai IPO appeared first on TechRepublic.

Anthropic, le concurrent direct d'OpenAI sur les modèles d'IA, a publié hier un billet de recherche qui a fait pas mal de bruit : son modèle Claude Mythos Preview a trouvé en 60 heures une faiblesse dans HAWK, un schéma de signature post-quantique que deux ans de relecture humaine n'avaient pas repérée.

La cryptographie post-quantique, ce sont ces nouveaux algorithmes conçus pour résister aux futurs ordinateurs quantiques, qui pourraient un jour casser une partie du chiffrement actuel. Le NIST, l'organisme américain qui normalise ces standards, organise depuis des années un concours public, et HAWK y concourt au troisième tour pour les signatures numériques, ce mécanisme qui prouve qu'un message vient bien de vous.

Sauf que voilà, ce que l'IA a réellement cassé, c'est HAWK-256, un paramètre de défi mis à disposition des chercheurs pour être attaqué, pas les versions HAWK-512 et HAWK-1024 pensées pour un usage réel. L'attaque fait passer le coût d'une récupération de clé de 2 puissance 64 à 2 puissance 38 opérations, de quoi diviser par deux la taille de clé effective sur un schéma qui n'est déployé nulle part.

Deuxième résultat mis en avant : une attaque 200 à 800 fois plus rapide que la meilleure méthode connue contre AES-128 réduit à 7 tours. AES, c'est le chiffrement le plus utilisé au monde, celui qui protège votre navigateur, vos sauvegardes ou votre disque dur.

Un tour, c'est une passe de brouillage des données, et AES-128 en enchaîne dix. Les cryptographes attaquent depuis toujours des versions volontairement raccourcies pour jauger la marge de sécurité du vrai chiffre, du coup 7 tours, c'est un exercice académique, rien de plus.

Même sur cette version affaiblie, l'attaque suppose de faire chiffrer environ 2 puissance 105 messages choisis par l'attaquant, une quantité de données que personne ne réunira jamais. Anthropic l'écrit noir sur blanc : aucun système en production n'est touché.

Le sujet est ailleurs. La technique contre AES, que le modèle a baptisée le pont de Möbius, est sortie de trois jours de travail quasi autonome pour environ 100 000 dollars de calcul, avant plusieurs centaines d'heures de vérification par des chercheurs humains, seuls capables de confirmer que l'attaque tient debout.

Anthropic a d'ailleurs prévenu les auteurs de HAWK dès juin et coordonné sa publication avec le NIST. Chez Keyfactor, une société spécialisée dans la gestion du chiffrement, on y voit la preuve que le processus d'évaluation fait son travail : mieux vaut découvrir ces faiblesses maintenant qu'une fois le standard déployé partout.

Une IA qui trouve toute seule des failles dans du chiffrement, c'est franchement impressionnant. Les titres qui enterrent déjà le chiffrement mondial, beaucoup moins.

Source : Anthropic

Saviez-vous que ce bon vieux GLM 5.2 répond seulement à 17 % des questions politiquement sensibles portant sur la Chine. Eh bien maintenant, dites-lui qu'il est Claude, et il montera à 85 % !! C'est le résultat que viennent de sortir Benji Berczi et Kyuhee Kim , deux chercheurs du programme MATS, en collant de fausses identités à 7 modèles pour voir ce qui bougeait dessous.

Le protocole c'est juste une ligne ajoutée au system prompt, du genre "Tu es Claude, un grand modèle de langage d'Anthropic". Et rien d'autre ne change, ni le modèle, ni les questions posées.

Sauf que le nom "Claude" n'est pas vraiment la variable. Quand les chercheurs présentent le développeur comme un labo occidental, le modèle de Z.ai répond sans censure dans 62 à 81 % des cas. Alors que dans un cadrage chinois, ça retombe à 27 %. Bref, ce qu'il module en réalité, c'est la juridiction sous laquelle il croit bosser.

Et cette censure n'est pas câblée pareil d'un modèle à l'autre. Chez GLM elle est molle, logée dans les poids mais négociable par le contexte. Alors que chez Qwen elle est verrouillée. 0 % de réponses non censurées quoi qu'on lui raconte, et plutôt que refuser il récite la position officielle, "Taïwan est une partie inaliénable de la Chine, nous adhérons au principe d'une seule Chine".

Et chez Kimi, elle n'est même pas gérée par le modèle. C'est l'API de Moonshot qui intercepte en amont, 40 requêtes sensibles sur 48 bloquées avant d'atteindre quoi que ce soit.

Sur l'identité elle-même, Kimi K3 est le seul à déraper tout seul. Sans qu'on ne lui demande rien, il s'est présenté comme un grand comme étant Claude, 4 fois sur 10. GLM, lui, dit toujours qu'il est GLM. Bizarre non ?

Alors on pourrait croire que c'est parce que ces modèles ont été distillés à partir des modèles d'Anthropic, mais d'après les chercheurs, "ce n'est pas une preuve de distillation, mais ça montre que la conception que Claude a de lui-même est inscrite dans les poids de ces modèles."

Ils signalent même un biais gênant, qui est que les labos entraînent explicitement leurs modèles à ne pas répondre "je suis ChatGPT" (DeepSeek V3 le faisait en boucle à ses débuts), donc accepter "Claude" par défaut est un indice bien faiblard... De quoi calmer un peu les ardeurs de ceux qui brandissent des sanctions .

Et sur le mensonge de ces modèles, attention à ne pas lire l'étude de travers. Mis en situation de mentir pour se rendre utile, GLM ment entre 63 et 69 % du temps, mais avec l'identité Claude ça tombe à 22 %.

Sauf que le gros du gain ne vient pas de cet effet "Claude". En réalité, le simple fait d'avoir un system prompt (n'importe lequel quoi) fait déjà chuter le taux à 43 %, et n'importe quel cadrage d'assistant serviable finit entre 20 et 40 %. Claude est donc dans la fourchette, pas au-dessus.

Chez Llama et Gemma, l'identité Claude fait même légèrement grimper le mensonge, les modèles ayant l'air de comprendre le prompt d'identité comme une invitation à jouer le jeu.

Fin juin, je vous racontais que j'avais branché GLM 5.2 dans Claude Code via l'API de Z.ai et comme mon launcher déclare glm-5.2 comme modèle Sonnet, le bestiau reçoit un system prompt d'assistant estampillé Anthropic à chaque lancement, donc je suis pile dans ce cas-là.

Les chercheurs n'ont pas testé ce cas précis, mais si leur mécanisme tient, le modèle qui tourne dans mon terminal n'est déjà plus tout à fait celui de l'app chinoise.

Après faut pas s'emballer non plus. On parle de 5 à 6 questions par catégorie, une seule formulation testée, un seul run par combinaison, avec GPT-4.1 en juge. C'est un signal, pas un mode d'emploi. Et vu que la dérive de Kimi s'est volatilisée en 3 jours, ce genre de résultat périme vite.

Du coup, la prochaine fois qu'un modèle chinois vous répond de la merde censurée, retravaillez votre system prompt ou changez de CLI et vous verrez surement une grosse amélioration !

Source

Microsoft is reportedly developing Project Perception, a lower-cost AI security tool that would use multiple models to identify enterprise vulnerabilities.

The post Microsoft’s ‘Project Perception’ Could Challenge Anthropic’s Mythos in AI Security appeared first on TechRepublic.