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J Studios/DigitalVision/Getty ImagesFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysOpenAI’s ChatGPT Desktop App for Linux is an Electron-based program.The application is proprietary, not open source.Frankly, it’s not that impressive. I’ll keep using ChatGPT in the browser.OpenAI has released a preview of its ChatGPT desktop application for Linux. With this, OpenAI now has a native client on all major desktop operating systems and is placing its coding agent, Codex, alongside ChatGPT and its Work environment.That’s the good news. The bad news is that, for me at least, ChatGPT continues to be annoyingly inaccurate. While I can cosplay…

Authorities in Ukraine shut down 94 fraudulent call centers across the country that lured people into investment scams or tried to obtain access to bank accounts. The operation occurred this week, and police officers conducted a total of 411 searches following an investigation that involved the National Police, Ukraine’s Security Service, the Prosecutor General’s Office, and the German police. According to the Ukrainian police, the fraudsters ran various schemes to obtain money from victims or gain access to their bank accounts. In some cases, they posed as bank officers and called victims under the pretense of suspicious transactions, threatening to…

Bitcoin has fallen from a record high of roughly $126,080 in October to trade recently in the low-$60,000s — a decline of nearly 50% that has rattled sentiment. But it may just be business as usual.  According to a Thursday report from asset manager VanEck, Bitcoin’s current slump tracks the asset’s historical four-year halving cycle, in which mining rewards are periodically cut in half, tightening new supply and often preceding a bear phase. The firm framed this downturn as a recurring feature of Bitcoin’s market structure rather than a break from it. VanEck’s GEO framework — which tracks Global Liquidity,…

New research from the University of East Anglia suggests that a lost papal letter could change how historians understand the events of 1066 and the Norman Conquest. Surviving excerpts of the letter, preserved in the Vatican archives, point to a major political struggle in Rome that may have influenced the fate of England. The evidence suggests King Harold may have weakened his position well before the Battle of Hastings by supporting the wrong faction during a bitter conflict between two competing popes. If that interpretation is correct, the outcome of 1066 may have depended not only on what happened on…

Singapore’s offshore marine solutions company PACC Offshore Services Holdings (POSH) has won a contract with Subsea7 in the Arabian Gulf.Source: POSH via LinkedIn The lump-sum contract for subsea diving and installation services was awarded by Subsea 7 Arabia Co., Ltd. and is scheduled for offshore execution in the third quarter of 2026. The company’s DP3 multi-purpose offshore construction vessel (OCV) POSH Deep C will be deployed for the work, equipped with an integrated saturation and air diving system. “This latest win underscores our partners’ continued confidence in POSH’s technical capabilities, proven operational performance, and unwavering commitment to safety as regional offshore…

Claim: In August 2026, Walmart banned influencer and comedian Damon Darling from its stores for buying other people’s groceries. Rating: What’s True Walmart did ban Darling from its stores, as confirmed by a company spokesperson. What’s False Darling was not banned for buying other people’s groceries, according to the company — he recorded pranks and stunts in Walmart stores, which the company deemed disruptive enough for a ban. Furthermore, a video uploaded to Darling’s YouTube page in April 2025 suggests he was banned from Walmart more than a year before this claim spread. On Aug. 11, 2026, the social media…

Military and government sources say the paramilitary RSF and allies advance into town of Kurmuk in Blue Nile state.Published On 13 Aug 202613 Aug 2026Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces and allies of the paramilitary group have advanced into a strategically important town on the Sudanese border with Ethiopia, military and government sources told Al Jazeera.They said the RSF and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement – North (SPLM-N) entered Kurmuk in Blue Nile State on Thursday, as the army began to withdraw.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listAn RSF statement said an RSF-led coalition had inflicted heavy losses on army troops…

Twenty-eight-year-old Jacob Fortinsky has been busy. “I was a groomsman at two weddings this weekend,” he tells me over Zoom. Also, the sports trading company he runs, Novig, launched its prediction market last week, facilitating $18 million in trading volume on its first day. Today, Novig launches a “responsible trading framework” in its exchange rulebook, codifying its guardrails as part of its effort to be seen as a kinder, gentler prediction market player.Unlike industry leaders like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow people 18 and older to participate, you have to be at least 21 to use Novig. Fortinsky says that…

Dyna Robotics has released Dyna-2, a world-action model for robot manipulation. It was pre-trained on more than one million hours of egocentric human video. That is roughly 170 years of continuous waking experience. Robot learning has been bottlenecked by action-labelled data, which teleoperation must deliberately produce. Dyna-2 tests whether ordinary human video can substitute. The research team trained a data ladder from 1,000 to 1,000,000 hours and measured what scales. Three results follow: a scaling law on human data, the first transfer of that law to unseen robot data, and evidence that video prediction drives the transfer. Is it deployable?…

Swati KhandelwalAug 11, 2026Cryptography / Software Supply Chain Mozilla has scrapped the cryptographic key behind Firefox and Thunderbird downloads for Linux after an unencrypted copy of it was committed by mistake to one of the company’s own private code repositories. That key is how a user, or a Linux distribution packaging the browser, confirms a downloaded Firefox tarball came from Mozilla and was not tampered with. That decision carries a cost for anyone who checks what they download: files signed with the old key stop verifying once a user imports the revocation. That covers older Firefox and Thunderbird downloads, not…