Month: September 2026

Elliot Page after ‘The Odyssey’: ‘I’m not getting calls’

Actor Elliot Page says new offers still aren’t coming in, even after Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey blew past $1.5 billion at the box office.

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People can pretend otherwise now, but for months we had to hear the same line over and over: The Odyssey was doomed to flop because it was “woke” for casting Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page, a Black actress and a trans actor, appearing on screen while being exactly those things.

Regular moviegoers, obviously, did not care. The film has already cleared $1.5 billion, and pretty much everyone tied to it has landed on their feet. Well, nearly everyone.

No Work for Page

You’d think that after working with Christopher Nolan, Elliot Page’s phone would be blowing up. According to Page, that hasn’t happened at all.

Speaking on Kevin McCarthy’s podcast, Page said: “I’m not getting calls. So, if anyone wants to call me…”

McCarthy sounded genuinely taken aback. He asked Page what was next, and whether he had anything due out soon.

Page’s answer was blunt: “The truth is, no. I’d love to do a great job, that’s what I love doing”.

Apparently, Page has even started thinking he may need to call directors himself: “People used to see me one way before, and it’s different now. I think it’s for obvious reasons: I’m Canadian”.

If only. In a world where J.K. Rowling gets showered with praise, imagine if being born in Canada were the issue. Sigh.

For those of us who want to see Elliot Page do well and stick two fingers up at the world, there is at least one small consolation: he thinks he’s acting better now than ever. “I feel like I could do my best work now.”

Right now, the only credit listed on Elliot Page’s IMDb page is a voice role in a movie about dolphins. Is someone going to pick up the phone already?

Google launches Gmail Live: Gemini voice features come to Gmail, Docs, and Keep

Google is rolling out Gmail Live, Docs Live, and Keep Live, three new features that let us talk to our apps to look up information, draft text, and sort through our ideas. All three run on Gemini, and they push Google a little further down a path it’s already been on for months: weaving Google Gemini into everyday products like Gmail and Google Docs, after a long stretch of teaching people to use AI inside those apps.

Gmail Live makes the inbox something we can talk through, and Docs Live and Keep Live follow the same idea

With Gmail Live, we can ask Google Gemini about what’s in our emails. That could mean pulling up details about a trip, finding a specific piece of information, or just asking follow-up questions about the answers while a live transcript appears on screen.

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TechCrunch reports that Google didn’t stop there, because the company is also adding this voice feature to Google Docs and Google Keep**.

In Docs Live, we can say what we want to write and Google Gemini will put together a first draft, using, if we allow it, context from Gmail, Drive, Chat, and the web. Keep Live takes a different angle. It turns Google Keep into a voice-driven notepad where we can organize ideas, lists, or even recipes.

Google says these features are rolling out in English on iOS and Android under different plans. Gmail Live is available with Google AI Plus, Google AI Pro, which students can get for free, and Google AI Ultra. Docs Live and Keep Live, on the other hand, require either a Google AI Pro or Google AI Ultra subscription.

What Google is trying to do here is pretty clear: bring AI into the tools people already use every day. This time, if we’d rather speak than dig through menus and tap our way around the screen, that option’s there.

GPT-6 Astra is here: OpenAI says it’s the start of AGI

OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra exactly one year after it launched GPT-5. Yesterday, the company began rolling GPT-6 Astra out to a small group of organizations.

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OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra is its smartest model yet, and the one that’s most closely aligned with user intent. The company says the biggest jump shows up on the hardest professional work: programming, science, and autonomous computer use.

A model so capable that people are already talking about AGI

By OpenAI’s own numbers, Astra scores 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4, 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, and 100% on ExploitBench. The company is pitching it as a major step up from GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, which were released just two months ago.

OpenAI also says ChatGPT with Astra can use applications, browse the web, and handle multi-step workflows like creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. On most tasks, the company says, it’s nearly twice as fast.

Greg Brockman serves as OpenAI’s president, and he believes we’re starting to move into the era of artificial general intelligence. Part of that claim comes from OpenAI’s own testing: Astra’s cybersecurity capabilities have reached the company’s “Critical” level. OpenAI has also put new security measures in place after the Hugging Face incident.

The rollout started yesterday with selected organizations and, OpenAI says, GPT-6 Astra will reach the rest of ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in the next few days, along with the API and AWS.

Luna Band launches globally at IFA 2026: a screenless tracker with no subscription

At IFA 2026, Luna took Luna Band global and pitched it as a screen-free fitness tracker, putting it head-to-head with Fitbit Air in one of the wearables market’s fastest-growing corners.

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Luna’s pitch is pretty direct: pay once and get the full Luna Band feature set, including the company’s LifeOS health engine, rather than signing up for the subscription setup tied to Fitbit Air and Google Health Premium, at least according to Luna.

The company also says Luna Band can take voice input for meals, symptoms, and other wellness notes, then use that information to serve up more proactive prompts over time. That lines up with what showed up across IFA 2026 more broadly: a bigger push toward sleep, stress, recovery, and day-to-day lifestyle coaching. And it matters. The screen-free category jumped 122% year over year in Q2 2026, even while the broader wearable band market dipped 2%.

If you want something lighter on the wrist, less distracting, and free of another monthly charge, Luna Band looks like a product worth considering. Still, the real test hasn’t changed: sensor accuracy, the quality of its recommendations, day-to-day reliability, privacy, e-waste, and whether automated coaching actually holds up across different kinds of users and different regions.

Luna Band is available now through Luna’s invite-only global rollout, according to the company. We’ll probably get a much clearer read on it once more people outside North America and Europe are actually wearing it.

Japanese Spider-Man figures surge now: collectors rediscover *Supaidāman*

Japanese Spider-Man figures based on Marvel’s 1978 Supaidāman TV series are now out from Hot Toys, Hasbro’s Marvel Legends line, and Bandai’s S.H.Figuarts. That’s put the cult show back in front of collectors again.

What stands out here isn’t one single “most valuable” figure. It’s the growing appetite for premium Supaidāman releases. Plenty of collectors are into the bold design, and there’s a real novelty to seeing Japanese Spider-Man displayed next to the more familiar versions. At the same time, some collectors are still hoping for better accessories and screen-accuracy that’s a little tighter.

If you collect Marvel figures, this is a wave worth picking up. Supaidāman is Takuya Yamashiro not Peter Parker. He gets his powers from an alien from Planet Spider, in a tokusatsu, melodramatic, monster-of-the-week reworking that Stan Lee later praised. And Leopardon matters too. It helped shape the giant-robot formula that ran into Super Sentai and later Power Rangers. You can still see why Japanese Spider-Man has stuck around through the Spider-Verse comics, through fan talk about future animated films, and through the Disney+ Marvel’s 616 episode on the 41-episode series. Coverage is still fairly limited outside U.S. and Japanese collector circles, and there still isn’t much public detail on how the newest figures were designed.

You can find the figures through the usual collector retailers, and you can watch Marvel’s 616 on Disney+.

Claude Mythos flags 23,019 software flaws: 21,000 still await human review

By June 2026, Anthropic said its AI system, Claude Mythos, had produced 23,019 vulnerability reports across open-source software. Only about 1,900 had been reviewed by outside parties. That meant more than 21,000 findings were still unverified. Even so, Anthropic says 1,726 of the reviewed reports turned out to be real vulnerabilities, which helps explain why AI-driven bug hunting can feel like a real shift in security work. But people still have to do the hard part, because severity was often rated too high and the choke point is moving away from discovery and toward validation and patching.

That need for human review shows up pretty clearly in the severity calls. Across 27 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, or CVE, cases, Anthropic’s Claude Mythos labeled eight as critical. After review, only one of those still counted as critical, and 13 of the 27 original ratings were judged too high. Temporal Server is a good example. A flaw there was first tagged as critical, then later dropped to low because exploiting it depended on rare setups, unusual deployment conditions, or privileged access. At that point, maintainers still had to sort out exploitability, business impact, and patch priority.

Anyone who follows software security should keep an eye on this, because the bottleneck is shifting from finding bugs to checking them and fixing them, and monthly CVE disclosures rose 145% in the two years leading up to June 2026. These reports hit open-source projects, not some consumer app download page, and researchers are divided. On one side, cheaper and faster auditing. On the other, the risk that machine-generated disclosures will swamp teams, maintainers, and bug bounty programs as the number of discovered bugs keeps climbing.

Christopher Nolan again calls 2001: A Space Odyssey “pure cinema”

In 2026, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey is back in the conversation. Christopher Nolan, the director of Interstellar and Oppenheimer, has once again called it “pure cinema.”

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Nolan has long said that 2001: A Space Odyssey communicates through image, scale, sound, and feeling more than through tidy plot mechanics. He traces that reaction back to seeing the film when he was seven. Even now, he says he doesn’t fully understand everything the film is doing, which helps explain why you can feel 2001 all through Interstellar and across Nolan’s broader fascination with awe, cosmic mystery, humanity’s place in the universe, and the limits of knowledge.

That admiration turned practical in 2018, when Nolan helped present an unrestored 70 mm print struck from the original camera negative, so audiences could get something closer to the tactile, photochemical experience of 1968 rather than a digitally cleaned-up version.

If you follow Christopher Nolan or Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey still makes sense to pick up in 2026. Steven Spielberg has called the film the “big bang” for his generation, and 2001 remains central to criticism, filmmaker interviews, repertory screenings, and online debate. The 2020 monolith sightings pushed it back into mainstream headlines too.

You can revisit 2001: A Space Odyssey at repertory screenings, including 70 mm showings, or through streaming platforms and home video.

Sony’s GTA 6 DualSense controllers launch November 19: two Vice City designs

Sony has unveiled a pair of limited-edition Grand Theft Auto VI DualSense wireless controllers, set for November 19, 2026. They’ll arrive the same day Grand Theft Auto VI lands on PlayStation 5.

There are two versions: one black, one white. Both carry Vice City-inspired graphics, an iridescent sunset-and-neon finish, molded palm tree details on the grips, and a Grand Theft Auto VI logo stamped across the touchpad.

Sony describes the black controller as the nightlife option, while the white model takes its cues from daybreak. The announcement also puts more weight behind the broader Sony and Rockstar Games tie-in around Grand Theft Auto VI. PlayStation 5 is being framed as the lead console, and the game is expected to tap into DualSense features like haptic feedback and adaptive triggers.

For anyone planning to hit Vice City on day one, these have an obvious draw. They work as a launch-day extra, sure, but they also have the kind of collector appeal that usually survives the standard special-edition price bump.

Pre-orders open September 10, 2026, at 10 a.m. local time. Sony has set the price at $84.99 in the US, €84.99 across Europe, and £74.99 in the UK for PlayStation 5.

Google WeatherNext 3 is here: faster forecasts and better rain prediction

Google rolled out WeatherNext 3 today, the latest version of its forecasting system. The update brings faster global forecasts, hourly refreshes, and higher-resolution maps, and Google says it does a better job with rain and snow too.

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The system now uses newer observational inputs, including real-time satellite data. Google says WeatherNext 3 can produce variables like temperature and moisture at resolutions of up to 5 km. That’s a big jump from WeatherNext 2, which worked on 6-hour forecasts across a 25 km grid, so local changes should show up sooner.

Google also says its precipitation forecasts can improve by as much as 50% at least a day ahead. That could matter if you commute, plan events, or manage utilities, especially outside the US and Europe, where rain gauges are more sparse and satellite coverage has to do more of the work.

If weather feeds into energy or grid planning where you work, this deserves a look too. Google says related systems such as GraphCast have generated 10-day forecasts in under a minute on a single machine. WeatherNext 3 also adds 100-meter wind data for turbine operations. And in some studies, GraphCast has beaten ECMWF’s HRES on more than 90% of the variables tested, although human experts are still needed for rare extremes and storm structures that can be tricky to pin down.

You won’t be downloading WeatherNext 3 as a consumer weather app. Google is positioning it for forecasting teams and weather operations.

Apple now faces £2 billion UK lawsuit over ATT: iOS developers claim “double consent” burden

Apple is facing a proposed £2 billion class-action suit in the UK over App Tracking Transparency, or ATT. ATT Collective Action Limited argues, on behalf of UK iOS developers, that Apple’s privacy framework puts third-party apps at an unfair disadvantage.

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The case has been filed by ATT Collective Action Limited for UK iOS developers and is being led by Ann Pope, the former antitrust director at the Competition and Markets Authority. The claim says ATT, which arrived with iOS 14.5 in April 2021, forces apps to ask users for permission before tracking them across apps and websites, while subjecting third-party developers to tighter rules than Apple applies to its own apps and services, including what the suit describes as a “double consent” burden.

According to the claimants, Apple rolled out the system without proper consultation. They say it dragged down opt-in rates, made targeted advertising less effective, pushed up user-acquisition costs, and hit sectors such as mobile gaming especially hard. Apple’s position is that ATT protects user privacy. Critics, though, argue Apple shouldn’t be operating under one set of consent rules for its own services and another for everyone else, and the claimants also point to regulators in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Romania, which are already looking at similar concerns.

If you build, advertise, or publish apps on iOS, this is a case to watch. ATT is still available on iPhone and iPad devices running iOS 14.5 or later.