5 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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News Archive

Archives for August 2026

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Almost half of HBO Max subscribers watch with ads.

As part of WBD’s Q2 2026 earnings report (pdf) released today, the company revealed that around 40 percent of HBO Max subscribers across the globe are on the ad-supported tier, an 11 percent increase from the same time last year. The company’s quarterly streaming revenue also surpassed $3 billion for the first time.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Peloton turns its first net profit even as it keeps losing subscribers.

CEO Peter Stern said in the company’s latest earnings report that “Peloton delivered its first full year of net profitability” in 2026, after launching a new hardware lineup that initially had “weaker-than-expected” sales. At the same time, Peloton lost 247,000 subscribers year-over-year.

Dominic Preston
Dominic Preston
TikTok is shutting its Nashville office.

250 employees have been laid off, The New York Times reports, including members of the social network’s content moderation team. The closure was made “to streamline our operations and better align our teams for long-term growth,” a press officer for TikTok’s US joint venture told The Times.

Dominic Preston
Dominic Preston
Bose’s next headphones leak with new colors and a tweaked design.

Leaker OnLeaks has shared renders of the second generation QuietComfort headphones, which appear to be launching in six colors with contrasting ear cups and more synthetic leather detailing. More worrying: I can’t spot a headphone jack anywhere on these, suggesting that wired audio might be limited to USB-C.

1/6Image: OnLeaks / HotEUDeals
Robert Hart
Robert Hart
Now Meta’s AI agents are going rogue.

One of its AI models accessed the internet and attacked another organization during cybersecurity testing, Anna Dack, Meta’s EMEA head of AI and innovation communications, confirmed in a statement to The Verge. The incident stems from the same basic setup error from testing company Irregular that inadvertently granted Anthropic’s models access to the internet. It only adds to growing concern over the safety of frontier systems.

Robert Hart
Robert Hart
Teamwork makes the dream work.

Two OpenAI researchers have shed some light on how the company’s AI agents escaped containment and hacked Hugging Face during cybersecurity tests. In a talk at the Black Hat security conference, Eric Wallace and Michael Dalton said a swarm of agents communicated using a message board, working together to find exploits and move undetected through the company’s systems.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Soon, free Gmail won’t let you “send as” third-party email accounts.

Support for sending emails from third-party accounts like Yahoo or Outlook is ending in January 2027, Android Authority reports. Google’s also discontinuing Gmailify and the ability to fetch emails from third-party accounts in Gmail, but says you can still use “send as” for Gmail addresses and aliases, and “Google Workspace ‘Send as’ functionality is not affected.”