The Edge of the Cyber World See the latest
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 142, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, how is it almost September already, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been remembering Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, and Peter Cullen, absorbing…
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on falling robots and the US-China AI race, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started I’ve admitted my fondness for…
I recently dug out my CDs and started reripping them all. I’ve found a few forgotten gems in there, but few hit harder for me than the beautifully concise Professor Murder Rides the Subway EP. There was a period of time in the mid-aughts in NYC where it seemed like every indie band wanted you…
Shadow PC is not another game-streaming catalog. While services like GeForce NOW or Xbox Cloud Gaming stream a curated library of titles from remote servers, Shadow hands you a full Windows 11 desktop running on rented hardware, one you install your own games on, configure however you like, and access from a laptop, phone, or…
PaperCut Software spent the final week of August 2026 doing something few vendors want to do twice in 48 hours: shipping an emergency patch, watching researchers break it, then shipping a second one. On August 27, the print-management company confirmed active, in-the-wild exploitation of a chained vulnerability affecting PaperCut NG and PaperCut MF, its widely…
Palo Alto Networks Chief Information Officer Meerah Rajavel has delivered a warning to the cybersecurity industry that runs against the grain of most enterprise threat briefings: the danger isn’t the newest, most powerful AI model. It’s the cheap one that trails a few months behind. In a report published by Business Standard on August 30,…
Pick the wrong managed cloud Kafka platform in 2026 and the bill gap alone can run into six figures a year. Confluent Cloud’s entry-level Freight tier for high-throughput batch workloads starts at roughly $2,300 a month, while its Basic tier costs $0 until data actually flows — a 46x spread across one vendor’s own tier…
Feature flags stopped being a nice-to-have around the time continuous deployment became the default. By August 2026, the question engineering teams ask isn’t whether to adopt a feature management platform, but which one to pay for, or whether to pay at all. LaunchDarkly, Unleash, and GrowthBook represent three distinct answers to that question, and the…
The Liux Big microcar is made in Spain. The startup thinks it can compete in a crowded market with its tiny electric car built around sustainability.
Elon Musk says a secretive new SpaceX foundry will let him cast his own turbine blades and get gas power online 18 months faster than anyone else — but it’s a bet on a fuel source that’s already triggering lawsuits and health studies everywhere his (and others’) turbines have gone in.
