Month: September 2026

Google said today that it’s launching the Android Digital Credential Alliance, an expansion of its 2021 Android Ready SE program meant to make digital IDs, including driver’s licenses and national ID cards, work more securely across Android devices and services.

The group goes past chip makers. Google says it also brings in phone manufacturers, wallet developers, and government agencies, all aiming at a shared standard for issuing, storing, and verifying credentials. On supported phones, Android Strongbox keeps that data in a protected area and only releases it after you authenticate with a fingerprint, face unlock, or PIN.

Google says this is the same security model already used by Google Wallet, and it pointed to that setup as a reference for the European Digital Identity Wallet expected by the end of 2026. Mobile driver’s licenses are already expanding into more U.S. states and some TSA PreCheck checkpoints, Google says, though you’ll still need a physical ID as backup.

If broader digital ID support on Android matters to you, this is one to watch. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are still warning about surveillance, tracking, function creep, malware, and weak implementations.

You won’t download the alliance itself, but you’ll see its work show up across Android devices, Google Wallet, and the digital ID services that follow.

Google Maps on Android Auto looks to have picked up a visual tweak in Android Auto beta 17.6.663424 on Android. The map itself appears darker now, which should feel a lot less harsh on those bright in-car screens.

What people are seeing so far in beta 17.6.663424 points to a deeper background and toned-down accents in both light and dark mode, so the whole interface may stay more subdued no matter which one you’re using. Reports from the beta also say the turn indicator drops the brighter teal in favor of a darker gray. In practice, that could cut glare, reduce reflections, and make nighttime driving easier on the eyes, especially on bigger dashboard displays. It could also help in those moments when Android Auto bugs out and leaves Google Maps stuck in bright day mode even after the sun’s gone down.

If you use Google Maps in the car all the time, this is one to keep an eye on. The late-2023 color redesign got a pretty mixed response, and this looks like Google adjusting again, even if quietly. Still, Google hasn’t said anything publicly, there’s no timeline for a wider rollout, and nobody knows yet how easy the new colors will be to read at a glance, or how they’ll work for people with color vision deficiencies.

Right now, it’s only showing up in Android Auto beta 17.6.663424 on Android.

John Ternus is now officially Apple’s new CEO and, after Tim Cook’s handover, he wanted to speak directly to the company’s employees. After 25 years in Cupertino, John is beginning his new chapter with a brief but comprehensive memo and with a message that both employees and users will no doubt resonate with.

A first message focused on Tim Cook and on the team

Ternus devotes much of his message to thanking Tim Cook for everything he’s shared with him over the years, as well as his knowledge and experience during the transition, and everything he has contributed to the company.

Ternus speaks of Apple as “the best company in the world” and comments on what lies ahead. He especially mentions an “enormous launch” planned for next week and thanks the team for all the work over the past few months to make it possible.

We already saw it in Tim Cook’s farewell memo, and now we see it again with Ternus: the value of the teams at Apple comes first.

A transition focused squarely on the future

After the thanks, Ternus talks about the products Apple is already developing and those yet to be imagined, and about how the team will create them together. His growing public presence, which we’ve seen in his recent appearances at Apple Park and in many keynotes, shouldn’t distract us from the fact that John is, above all, someone with long experience in creating new products.

With Tim Cook as executive chairman and Ternus taking over the day-to-day as a brilliant hardware engineer, Apple is entering a very interesting new chapter, and it’s doing so while maintaining strong continuity. The first message from its new CEO makes it clear where the focus is: people and products, present and future.

The full memo, as reported by 9to5Mac, is as follows:

Team:

Today, on my first day as CEO, I wanted to send you a brief note to thank you all for the warm congratulations. I also want to express my deep gratitude to Tim for passing on so much of his knowledge and experience to me during this transition and, even more importantly, for everything he has contributed to Apple over these years. We’ve been enormously fortunate to have a CEO who has led with his values at the core and with such decency and humanity. We’re all better because of it, and I’m deeply grateful that he’ll be our executive chairman.

It’s an honor to take on this role at what truly is the best company in the world, and I’m tremendously excited about everything we have prepared. Next week we have a major launch that is going to be phenomenal. Thank you for everything you’ve done to make it possible.

I’m just as excited about everything that will come after that, including the incredible products already in development and those still to be imagined, which we’ll dream up and create together. There’s no better team in the world with whom I’d want to build the future.

More to come. In the meantime, thank you for your excellent work!

John

Anthropic has unveiled Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1. Three months after the launch of Fable 5, the company describes both as its most advanced models for programming and knowledge work. The combination of better performance, greater intelligence, and a lower price is, without a doubt, especially interesting.

Better coding and debugging

Fable 5.1 surpasses, of course, Fable 5 and Opus 5, but also GPT-5.6 Sol, in several key benchmarks. According to Anthropic, it’s designed for long-running tasks, where agents become much more important, and it arrives after the return of Claude Fable 5 and while the company continues to make Mythos available, the same model but with fewer safety restrictions, only for certain trusted companies.

Anthropic explains that Fable 5.1 is designed to find the root causes of errors, so we can expect better results in projects that require highly precise code over long stretches of work.

Much cheaper for the most demanding tasks

The base price stays the same, but Anthropic has decided to lower the price of cache reads. The company estimates that the total cost can drop by 25% in the most common workloads and fall by around 45% in the most demanding agentic jobs.

The update arrives with the existing safeguards, although more visible and with the invisible watermark for Claude’s text outputs.

Brotherwise Games has November 4, 2026 penciled in for November 4, 2026. The book is a 405-page core rulebook for the Cosmere Roleplaying Game, with character creation for both players and Game Masters, full campaign tools, and Scadrial material covering Mistborn Eras 1 and 2. A few retailer listings still have it down for November 16 , so that date hasn’t fully settled everywhere yet.

Brotherwise says the system should be easy to get into if you’re new to tabletop RPGs, but not stripped down for longtime players. The pitch is narrative decision-making, heroic paths built around the setting, and, from the early numbers, a Mistborn Handbook that may even come in larger than the current Stormlight handbook.

There’s more coming with it. The broader release also includes a World Guide, the 265-page Mistborn: Legacy Adventure, a starter set, custom dice, and item decks.

And if you keep up with Sanderson’s worlds outside the novels, this Mistborn wave looks especially tempting. Lead writer Meric Moir says the new lore is canon per Dragonsteel. Mistborn: Legacy Adventure is being described as a secret story set inside the timeline. Brandon Sanderson has also said he’s finished a first draft of a Mistborn Apple TV movie screenplay, The Fires of December is due in December 2026, and Mistborn: Ghostbloods is still aiming for 2028.

You should be able to pick up the hardcover through Brotherwise Games and tabletop retailers in November 2026.

Nostalgia for the late ’90s and the start of the 2000s is hitting Hollywood hard. So hard that even movies that were a notorious flop in their day are now set to return as hits. That’s the case with Practical Magic 2, whose advance ticket sales are going so well that they’re already forecasting an opening weekend that will top $40 million in the United States alone. Considering that the first film barely topped 68 million and hemorrhaged money, it gives you something to think about.

Abracadabra at the box office!

Poorly received at the time, Practical Magic has been gaining cult status over the years to the point where today, where, obviously, a whole generation seems to adore it without a second thought. However, Sandra Bullock hasn’t forgotten: “We thought, ‘It’s going to be an incredible movie, people are going to adore it.’ And then, silence. They’d say to us ‘How many women do you need in a movie? How many tones do you need? What kind of movie is this?‘”.

The one who won’t get to enjoy this success is its director, and it still pains the actress: “There’s one thing I want to keep pointing out: Griffin Dunne created this world with us. He let us shine. This movie exists because of him, and he never got to enjoy that success when we made it, so today we’re honoring him”. In fact, he was offered the chance to direct it, but he turned it down because he was sure it needed a feminine touch: Susanne Bier’s, specifically.

Almost 30 years have passed since that first film, and clearly this is the right time to return. We’ll have to see, of course, what its budget is, to know whether it does well at the box office or, on the contrary, whether it has been an even bigger flop than the first film. Not even a good wave of a wand could solve that well enough to make a potential third movie.

Nvidia has put a date on DLSS 5: September 3. The update brings its new 3D-Guided Neural Rendering to RTX 50-series desktop and laptop GPUs, along with GeForce Now. Right now, Nvidia has confirmed just one launch game, NBA 2K27, which arrives on PC that same day at 9 PM PT. According to Nvidia, the system can rework lighting, shadows, textures, and other image data to give games a more photoreal look.

And that’s also why the update has stirred up so much pushback. The March demos, especially the Resident Evil Requiem shots of Grace Ashcroft, caught heat for altering faces and changing the overall styling of scenes. Then a leaked NBA 2K27 DLL was used in Control, Cyberpunk 2077, and Skyrim, which pushed that argument further.

Nvidia’s latest position is that developers still have fine-grained control, with granular sliders and the option to leave faces untouched. In more recent NBA 2K27 demos, the effect looked more restrained. Even so, titles shown back in March, including Resident Evil Requiem, EA Sports FC, Starfield, and Hogwarts Legacy, still won’t be getting DLSS 5 on day one.

If you use RTX 50 hardware or GeForce Now, this launch is worth keeping an eye on. Frame rates are still expected to drop by 50 to 60 percent, even with the big gains shown in early dual-RTX 5090 demos and the boost from Multi Frame Generation. DLSS 5 makes its debut first with NBA 2K27 on PC, RTX 50-series systems, and GeForce Now on September 3.

Firefox for iPhone and iPad got a new feature today: native ad blocking. Mozilla’s iOS browser now lets users turn it on worldwide, though you have to enable it yourself in Settings > Browsing > Ad Blocker. You can also see whether it’s active from the site menu. Mozilla ships it turned off by default, which sets it apart from some browsers that lean harder into privacy out of the box.

Mozilla says the blocker only works inside Firefox itself. It won’t block ads across the rest of your iPhone or inside other apps. The feature relies on EasyList, and it’s meant to stop third-party ad networks and exchanges, a lot of third-party ads at the network level, ad-related trackers, plus pop-ups and overlays.

Still, don’t expect every ad to vanish. Search ads on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo will still show up. Sponsored content on Firefox Home and the New Tab page also remains, and some ads are likely to get through anyway. EasyList is popular and widely used, but both user reports and academic research have questioned how well it performs on some international or non-English sites, and whether every filtering rule actually makes browsing better in day-to-day use.

If Firefox is your regular browser on iOS, this is probably an update you’ll want. Mozilla is playing catch-up here with Brave and DuckDuckGo, both of which already pushed harder on privacy for iPhone users. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency has already changed the shape of that race.

The update is live in the App Store. If you want broader blocking, though, you’ll still need iOS content filters or an app like Wipr 2.

If you hear someone humming “Thunder, thunder, thunder…” and all you can think is “Thundercats!”, I have two pieces of news for you. The first, that it’s time to start booking an appointment with the doctor for a general checkup. The second, that Adam Wingard, the man behind You’re Next and Godzilla vs. Kong, has spent years preparing the ultimate adaptation of the 80s cartoon series for the big screen. No one has bought it from him so far, but he thinks it’s only a matter of time.

Bringing Out the Claws

If you’re under 40 (how dare you?), Thundercats was a 1985 series starring a group of feline alien heroes wandering through space. It ran for 5 seasons and 130 episodes that for many defined ‘epic’ in the ’80s’. After that they tried to recreate that success in 2011 and 2020, but without too much success. However, Wingard is convinced that this is the moment to bet hundreds of millions on the franchise.

“My career’s bouncing all over the place, so other things have taken priority. But Thundercats is still there. I think it’s a matter of finding time to re-focus and re-connect with it”. What’s more, he says they put together a new pitch at the start of the year, which, for a filmmaker like him, well regarded in Hollywood, should mean securing financing soon.

What’s more, he’s convinced that one day we’ll see it: “I don’t have any exciting update, but it’s not dead. It lives. It’s just not what I’m working on right now”. Put another way: if 80s nostalgia comes back, don’t worry, because we’ll be there, all in for Lion-O and company.

As of March 2026, Warner Bros.’ Meg series looks a little closer to getting a third movie. Between The Meg (2018) and Meg 2: The Trench (2023), the franchise has earned about $927.9 million worldwide, based on reported box-office totals.

The 2018 original did more of the heavy lifting, bringing in $530.2 million. That total included $145.4 million in the U.S. and Canada and $384.8 million overseas, according to reported box-office figures. Meg 2: The Trench, released in 2023, added another $397.7 million worldwide, and its $142 million opening weekend suggested audiences still had plenty of appetite for this kind of movie.

China has been a big part of that story. The Meg made about $153 million there, according to reported box-office totals, and both films were set up as American-Chinese co-productions, with stars such as Li Bingbing and Wu Jing helping boost local appeal.

Studios pay attention to runs like that. Reviews weren’t strong, with The Meg sitting at 47% on Rotten Tomatoes and Meg 2: The Trench down at 28%, but broad, easy-to-export shark spectacle still got people to show up.

For now, though, there are still only two movies. The Meg 3 hasn’t been officially confirmed, and director Ben Wheatley said in March 2026 that he wasn’t sure where things stood.