A Microsoft 365 outage that began with Exchange Online spread across Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Copilot, Purview, Defender XDR and administrative tools. Microsoft traced the disruption to an authentication configuration error affecting shared infrastructure.

Linux kernel maintainers are being overwhelmed by automated and AI-generated bug reports, many of them duplicates or poorly validated. The problem has become serious enough that maintainers are using frontier AI models to help triage the reports and considering whether rarely used legacy code should simply be removed.

An AV-Comparatives test using 250 live phishing sites found major browsers blocking approximately 75 to 79 per cent. Several dedicated security products blocked between 94 and 96 per cent, demonstrating why browser protection alone may not be enough.

Amazon is also pouring money into AI and cloud infrastructure while reducing corporate employment. At the same time, US Government Accountability Office data shows a growing number of Amazon employees receiving SNAP food assistance during 2025.

Jim Love covers these stories on Hashtag Trending for Wednesday, September 2, 2026.

00:00 Today's tech headlines 00:26 Microsoft 365 outage spreads 01:41 How shared authentication widened the outage 02:07 AI bug reports overwhelm Linux maintainers 03:40 Linux uses AI to triage AI reports 04:22 Browser phishing protection tested 05:30 What IT teams should do next 06:27 Amazon's AI spending and labour divide 08:40 Wrap-up and where to reach us

Tim Cook leaves Apple with an unexpected AI success story as OpenAI reportedly buys tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios to train computer-use agents.

On Hashtag Trending for Tuesday, September 1, Jim Love looks at why Apple Silicon is finding a new role inside some of the world's leading AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic.

Also in today's show:

OpenAI says advertising in ChatGPT has reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days. That's still tiny beside Google and Meta, but already about one-third the current size of Reddit's advertising business.

OpenClaw 2.0 arrives with its biggest update yet, involving 933 contributors and more than 16,000 pull requests. Installation is easier, security has improved and the agents can do more, but prompt injection remains a risk and sandboxing is still disabled by default.

And MapQuest suddenly becomes the number-one navigation app in the U.S. Apple App Store after refusing to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America." We look at what Google, Apple and Waze are doing, why MapQuest usage exploded, and the Indigenous origins of the name Ontario, which dates back at least to 1641.

00:00 Today's Headlines 00:31 Apple's Surprise AI Win 02:36 Why Macs Work for AI Agents 03:18 ChatGPT Ads Hit $1 Billion 04:49 OpenClaw 2.0 Arrives 07:18 OpenClaw's Remaining Security Risks 08:05 MapQuest Takes a Stand on Lake Ontario 09:47 The Indigenous Origins of Ontario 11:06 Wrap Up

OpenAI is cutting off Cursor's direct model access ahead of Astra, while IBM's claimed quantum advantage already faces a classical challenge.

Jim Love covers the technology headlines for Monday, August 31, 2026.

OpenAI will stop supplying models directly to Cursor on November 12 following Cursor's $60-billion acquisition by SpaceX. OpenAI cites its contract and concerns that model outputs could be used to help train competing xAI systems. Developers can still access OpenAI through standard APIs, Codex and cloud gateways including Amazon Bedrock and Microsoft Azure.

IBM says its quantum computer completed a difficult 70-qubit test in 16.1 minutes while detecting errors and validating its results. Researchers working with Nvidia then reported a classical method using 256 H100 GPUs and projected that a comparable workload could be completed in 10.6 minutes.

Also in this episode: Flock Safety faces 90 municipal cancellations in August; infostealer malware is hijacking authenticated Claude sessions; and New Brunswick introduces a bell-to-bell school phone ban, child-care screen limits and social-media blocking on school networks.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Headlines and introduction 00:47 OpenAI cuts Cursor off before Astra 02:53 IBM's 70-qubit quantum test 04:13 Classical computers challenge IBM 05:34 Flock Safety backlash accelerates 07:53 Infostealers hijack Claude sessions 10:22 New Brunswick's school phone ban 13:08 Wrap-up and credits

AI Hardware Arms Race & Humanoid Robot Olympics: Apple Chips, OpenAI 'Jalapeno,' Meta Models, and Robot Prices Plummet

Jim Love, Marcel Gagné, and retired John Pinard cover tech news and a deep dive on robots. They note Linux's 35th anniversary and how the name changed from "Freax" to Linux. They discuss Apple's AI-focused hardware advances (integrated CPU/GPU/neural processing and shared memory) enabling large local model inference, and OpenAI's "Jalapeno" inference chip built with Broadcom, developed in about nine months, delivering 1.5–1.9x more AI work per watt, raising questions for NVIDIA's CUDA moat. They touch on Meta's strong new Muse Glimmer/Spark models despite Reuters reporting failed internal AI rollout, morale issues, and metrics like 220% more AI-assisted coding with 40% reaching production alongside slower issue resolution. Bill Gates warns AI's growing capability could drive permanent job loss and dual-use security/bio risks. They then review China's World Humanoid Robot Competitions, rapid performance gains, autonomous team sports, and one-shot robot learning, plus falling robot price points—from $8K household task bots to Unitree's ~$5,900 humanoid and a ~$1,300 wheeled home helper—arguing autonomy is advancing fast.

00:00 Welcome and Introductions 00:48 Linux Turns 35 02:29 Apple Goes All In 06:18 OpenAI Builds Chips 10:41 Meta Models and Missteps 17:25 Why AI Rollouts Fail 20:33 Bill Gates Sounds Alarm 24:59 AGI and Persistent Agents 33:03 Humanoid Robot Olympics 34:56 Robot Sprint Breakdown 35:49 Humanoid Games Highlights 37:04 Soccer Bots And Teamwork 39:19 From Sports To Warfare 41:04 One Shot Robot Learning 46:33 Robots Making Robots 49:11 Home Robots Price Drop 52:14 MicroDuck And Cheap Bots 53:46 Unitree R1 Under 6K 58:55 Nori Budget House Helper 01:04:18 Autonomy And Price Point 01:05:55 Optimus 2027 Outlook 01:07:42 Weekly Wrap And Signoff

OpenAI has unveiled Jalapeño, its first custom AI inference chip, and the early results could challenge one of Nvidia's biggest advantages.

OpenAI says Jalapeño delivers between 1.5 and 1.9 times more AI work per watt than the systems it tested against. SemiAnalysis watched benchmark runs inside OpenAI's lab and reported strong performance-per-watt results against Nvidia Blackwell. But the bigger story may be software: OpenAI is using Codex to write optimized kernels, potentially weakening the nearly 20-year CUDA software moat that has helped protect Nvidia from competitors.

Also on this episode of Hashtag Trending:

A Reuters investigation reveals how Meta's ambitious AI-driven restructuring plan fell apart. AI-assisted code increased dramatically, but gains in actual product features were far smaller, while technical incidents increased and employee morale deteriorated.

Canada is investing more than $500 million in 64 new research chairs as it tries to turn decades of brain drain into brain gain. The real test will be whether Canada can keep the intellectual property, companies and economic benefits created by those researchers.

And Twitter is back. Sort of. Operation Bluebird has launched a new social network using the Twitter name and the familiar language of tweets and retweets. Elon Musk's X says it still owns the trademarks and is suing.

Hashtag Trending is hosted by Jim Love.

00:00 Headlines 00:27 OpenAI unveils the Jalapeño AI chip 01:39 Can OpenAI challenge Nvidia's CUDA moat 03:02 Meta's AI restructuring plan backfires 04:50 Canada makes a major brain-gain push 06:33 Can Canada turn research into Canadian industry 07:38 X battles a new company called Twitter 09:18 Wrap-up

Meta will pay at least $12.1 billion—and potentially as much as $17.1 billion over ten years—to settle claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users.

Jim Love examines why the record settlement may still be a smart move for Meta. The company admits no wrongdoing, limits its legal exposure and avoids a verdict that thousands of other plaintiffs might have used in their own lawsuits.

TIME also reports that Sam Altman expects OpenAI to have an internal system he would call artificial general intelligence by the end of 2026. What would qualify as AGI, and why would it matter more than passing the Turing Test? We separate confirmed reporting about OpenAI's delayed Astra models and cybersecurity concerns from unconfirmed rumours involving persistent memory and continual learning.

Also in this episode:

The Justice Department and FBI disable QScan and QTRouter, two hacking platforms allegedly used by Chinese state-sponsored attackers against NASA, the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Senate and hundreds of other organizations.

The Environmental Protection Agency proposes removing federal minimum public-participation requirements for minor-source air permits, potentially allowing some data centre generator permits to be approved without public notice or comment.

00:00 Today's tech headlines 01:22 Meta's record teen-safety settlement 04:22 Altman says AGI could arrive this year 08:06 FBI disrupts China-linked hacking platforms 10:44 EPA proposes permit-notice changes 14:11 Wrap-up and where to listen

Hashtag Trending for Thursday, August 27, 2026, hosted by Jim Love.

Apple is making a much bigger bet on local AI. Jim Love looks at the new M6 Mac mini, Apple's first 2nm processor, with Neural Accelerators built into every GPU core, dual 16-core Neural Engines and significantly faster processing. At the high end, the new M5 Ultra Mac Studio can offer up to 80 GPU cores and 512GB of unified memory, potentially allowing enormous AI models to run entirely on the Mac.

The performance comes with a price. The new M6 Mac mini starts at $899 U.S., compared with the original $599 starting price of the M4 model. But Apple did announce one major price cut: its famous polishing cloth drops from $19 to $9.

Also on Hashtag Trending:

A new investigation warns that a catastrophic failure of the aging U.S. electrical grid could leave parts of the country without power for 18 months or more. Large transformers are often custom built, difficult to replace and increasingly hard to source. An earlier FERC analysis identified roughly 30 particularly critical substations and concluded that losing the right nine simultaneously could potentially trigger a nationwide blackout.

Then, nearly 6,000 senior executives were asked what AI has actually done for their companies. More than 90 percent reported no impact on employment and 89 percent reported no improvement in labour productivity. Yet executives still expect AI to reduce employment. Separate research finds that AI-related layoffs can make employees less receptive to the very technology companies hope will increase productivity.

And Linux turns 35. Linus Torvalds introduced his new operating system in 1991 by calling it "just a hobby" that wouldn't become big or professional. Today Linux powers servers, cloud infrastructure, Android and every one of the world's Top500 supercomputers.

Hosted by Jim Love.

00:00 Headlines and intro 00:33 Apple M6 and the local AI push 03:45 Apple's $9 polishing cloth 04:24 America's aging power grid 06:06 AI productivity reality check 08:07 Linux turns 35 10:07 Wrap-up and where to listen

Sam Altman is warning that artificial intelligence could become concentrated in the hands of a few companies, models or individuals. But there's an uncomfortable tension in that warning: OpenAI and Anthropic both rely heavily on proprietary models, while Chinese companies are aggressively releasing increasingly capable open-weight alternatives.

Jim Love also looks at billionaire Mark Cuban's proposal for tackling wealth inequality by giving workers equity in the companies they help build, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offering a similar philosophy on employee compensation.

Then, a developer discovers that AliExpress was silently using Web Audio and a range of hardware and software signals to create a fingerprint of visitors' devices and send encrypted results back to Alibaba servers. Brave blocked the technique, while Chrome allowed it in the researcher's testing.

And Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs in Siri and Vision Pro-related teams just days before the company's CEO transition, despite recently reporting its strongest June quarter ever.

Jim Love hosts Hashtag Trending for Monday, August 24, with four big tech stories.

First, signs of AI-generated writing are spreading fast across the web. LinkedIn says more than a million people clicked its "Seems Like AI" button, while Pew Research found AI indicators on about 10 percent of July 2026 webpages and 35 percent of pages published after ChatGPT launched. Jim explains what researchers look for, including the overuse of em dashes, Oxford commas, certain words, and "not just X, it's Y" phrasing.

Next, the Flock camera backlash continues. In Ohio, a grand jury declined to indict Cody Morelock after police said surveillance footage identified him dismantling a Flock license-plate reader.

Then, PJM, the largest grid operator in the U.S., signals that big data centers may need to bring their own power or risk being cut first during grid stress. Jim looks at rising wholesale power costs, spot-market spikes, and the growing shortage of gas turbines needed for backup generation.

And finally, at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, robots Tiangong Ultra and Lightning ran the 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt's human world-record time. They just could not stop at the end.

If you follow AI, data centers, robotics, surveillance technology, and tech policy, this episode pulls it all together.

Timestamps 00:00 Headlines and intro 00:32 AI writing floods the web 01:48 How AI detection works 03:40 Flock camera backlash 04:39 Grand jury refuses indictment 05:41 Data centers: bring your own power 06:20 Power prices and grid stress 07:24 Gas turbine bottlenecks 07:59 Robots beat Bolt 08:45 They can't stop 09:08 Humanoid robotics acceleration 09:51 Wrap up and where to listen

AI companies are buying physical books, cutting off their spines and scanning the pages to train AI models. This episode of Project Synapse examines destroyed originals, copyright loopholes and what mass digitization could mean for cultural and historical preservation.

The conversation compares destructive book scanning with Google Books' non-destructive approach and limited search access. The hosts also discuss the shift from printed books to ebooks and audiobooks, the challenge of storing personal libraries and whether physical books are becoming a niche product.

Then they examine claims that powerful AI backers are funding influencer-driven "AI doom" content. Is this a genuine warning campaign, an attempt to shape public opinion or a route to regulatory capture?

The episode closes with the robot future: the World Robot Conference in Beijing, one-shot robot learning, the social impact of automation and increasingly capable local AI models such as Qwen running on a laptop.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Cold open 00:53 Fame and familiarity 02:59 Rare books and AI scanning 04:23 Bookstores and changing reading habits 09:54 Anthropic, piracy and severed book spines 14:03 Copyright loopholes in AI training 21:20 Convenience changes culture 26:40 Who funds anti-AI influencers? 33:34 Finding middle ground on disruption 36:49 How influencers shape beliefs 38:27 The business of AI fear 39:53 Fear, regulation and control 41:22 Cybersecurity failures are mostly human 42:20 The doomer view of cyber risk 43:22 Social media as a rage machine 44:20 Billionaire promises meet reality 46:36 AI goals, autonomy and escape 48:53 Toddlers with PhDs 49:51 Is education designed to make cogs? 54:04 AI agents cheat at school 56:18 Learning by talking to AI 58:04 Automating the classroom 01:00:25 Riding the AI shockwave 01:04:36 Policy, disruption and universal basic income 01:07:31 Robots change everything 01:09:35 China's robotics leap 01:12:12 Running Qwen on a laptop 01:13:45 One-shot robot learning 01:15:15 Closing thoughts