Misc. Tech
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
153 Million License Scans Are for Sale, and the Sellers Say They Still Have Access
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Internet, Misc. Tech,
The last time you handed your driver's license to a rental car counter, or a hotel front desk, or the guy working the door at a dispensary, somebody ran it through a scanner. You probably never learned the name of the company behind that scanner. You never signed up with them, either.
A dark web store called Nexus is selling those scans. Its catalog claims 153 million driver's licenses covering people in the United States and Canada. Brian Krebs broke the story Wednesday at Krebs on Security, and he verified it against himself. He found a record holding six image files of his own license, timestamped to a trip he took in June 2025. Other people he reached out to found their own records too.
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Dyson Put a Camera Inside a $500 Toothbrush
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Smart Home, Misc. Tech,
Dyson spent six years building a toothbrush that can see inside your mouth. The CameraJet is up for pre-order now at $499.99 in Ceramic Ultra Blue and Ceramic Pink, and it ships September 8. It brushes, flosses and rinses in one pass. The seeing part is the whole pitch. A camera under the brush head finds the gaps between your teeth and fires water at them, so you never have to aim.
That is either the most Dyson product ever made or five hundred dollars for a toothbrush. Both are true.
Click to continue reading Dyson Put a Camera Inside a $500 Toothbrush
VW’s first electric California camper skips the kitchen and the pop-top
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Misc. Tech, Transportation,
The camper van fantasy usually falls apart at the sink. You picture waking up at a trailhead with the doors thrown open, and then you remember the plumbing, the gas bottle, and the cabinetry you haul around all year and use four weekends of it.
Volkswagen's answer is to leave most of that out. The ID. California Cruise, shown today at the Caravan Salon in Düsseldorf, is the first fully electric van to wear the California badge, and it's built on the ID. Buzz Pro. You get a bed for two, blackout blinds on every window, two camping chairs, a table, and a 2,000-watt socket. You don't get a kitchen, and going by what VW has announced, you don't get a pop-top roof either.
Click to continue reading VW’s first electric California camper skips the kitchen and the pop-top
Cerebras Built a Chip the Size of a Dinner Plate Because Memory Is the Wall
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Misc. Tech, Artificial Intelligence,
Most AI chips spend a lot of their time waiting. The math units sit idle while the memory system hauls in the next slab of model weights, and that waiting is a big part of why a chatbot pauses before it answers you. Cerebras's answer has been to skip the step where a wafer gets cut into individual chips and ship the entire wafer as one processor.
That wafer is close to the size of a dinner plate: 46,225 square millimeters, a bit under 8.5 inches on a side, carrying four trillion transistors and 900,000 cores. Cerebras announced the CS-4 in mid-August, a rack holding three of them, with first shipments beginning this quarter. At Hot Chips this week the company walked through how the rack is built and where the wafer goes next.
Samsung Put a Processor Inside Your Phone’s RAM
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Misc. Tech, Artificial Intelligence,
Every time your phone runs an AI feature on-device, most of the energy goes into hauling data out of memory, over to the processor, doing a bit of math, and hauling it back. Again and again. The math is cheap. The commute kills your battery.
Samsung's answer, shown at the Hot Chips conference this week, is to stop commuting. LPDDR5X-PIM puts small compute units inside the memory chip, so the calculations happen where the data already lives. It's the first time this has been done with LPDDR, the low-power memory that goes into phones and laptops instead of data center racks.
Click to continue reading Samsung Put a Processor Inside Your Phone’s RAM
Xpeng Raised $900 Million to Build Humanoid Robots on a Car Assembly Line
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Misc. Tech, Transportation, Artificial Intelligence,
Xpeng's robotics business just raised more than $900 million at a valuation above $6.3 billion, in what the company says is the largest single private round China's embodied AI sector has seen. IDG Capital led it, Gaorong Ventures joined, and Tencent and Alibaba came in as strategic investors.
The money goes toward one machine: a humanoid robot called IRON, which Xpeng expects to enter mass production by the end of 2026.
Click to continue reading Xpeng Raised $900 Million to Build Humanoid Robots on a Car Assembly Line
The Echo Dot Is $79.99 Now, and AI Data Centers Are the Reason
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Home Entertainment, Smart Home, Misc. Tech,
The Amazon Echo Dot cost $49.99 last week. It costs $79.99 now, a 60 percent jump that Amazon made overnight with no announcement. Fortune caught the change across Amazon's hardware lineup and got the company to confirm it.
Amazon's explanation is the one every hardware maker is giving this year. A spokeswoman said the consumer electronics industry is facing steep increases in memory and storage component costs, and that Amazon absorbed them for as long as it could before adjusting prices across its product lines.
Click to continue reading The Echo Dot Is $79.99 Now, and AI Data Centers Are the Reason
Nvidia’s Groq Chip Is in Full Production, and It Exists to Fix One Annoying Thing
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Misc. Tech, Artificial Intelligence,
When you hand an AI coding agent a task and it sits there for eleven seconds before doing anything, you're feeling a very specific bottleneck. Not training. Not raw compute. Token generation speed, which is how fast a model produces its answer one piece at a time. Nvidia just put a chip into full production that does almost nothing else.
Announced at Hot Chips 2026, the Groq 3 LPX is an inference accelerator that extends Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform. It's also the first real product to emerge from Nvidia's $20 billion Groq acquisition, and Nebius is the first AI cloud signed up to run it.
AliExpress Was Playing Silent Audio in Your Browser to Track You
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Internet, Misc. Tech,
A developer noticed his Bluetooth headphones wouldn't hand off from his laptop to his phone. He closed a browser tab and the problem vanished. The tab was AliExpress. What he found digging through the site's code is one of the more inventive tracking techniques to surface in a while: silent audio, played at zero volume, running purely to identify his machine.
It's called audio fingerprinting, and it doesn't need a single cookie to work.
Click to continue reading AliExpress Was Playing Silent Audio in Your Browser to Track You
You Don’t Own What You Bought. Here’s the Proof. (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Editorial, Home Entertainment, Smart Home, Misc. Tech, Videos,
You bought the thing. It's sitting in your house. The box listed the features, you paid the money, the return window closed. So you own it, right? Here's the uncomfortable answer I landed on after digging through more than a decade of firmware updates, lawsuits, and shutdown notices: a company can sell you a product, wait out your return window, and then reach back into it to slow it down, strip its features, or kill it entirely, without anyone ever touching the hardware sitting in your living room.
Click to continue reading You Don’t Own What You Bought. Here’s the Proof. (Video)