Category: 4. Technology

TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is back at Moscone West in San Francisco this October 27–29, bringing together 10,000+ startup and VC leaders to dig into what’s next in tech. And when it comes to artificial intelligence, the conversations aren’t just technical — they’re creative, cinematic, and boundary-pushing. That’s why Nikola Todorovic is headed to the AI Stage.

A visual effects veteran turned AI entrepreneur, Todorovic is the co-founder of Wonder Dynamics, now an Autodesk company. Alongside actor and producer Tye Sheridan, he helped launch Autodesk Flow Studio (formerly Wonder Studio), a groundbreaking AI platform that allows creators to seamlessly integrate 3D characters into live-action scenes. The platform uses cloud-based tools to automate complex processes like lighting, animation, and composition, giving filmmakers a radically faster and more accessible path to high-end visual effects.

Todorovic’s journey to this moment wasn’t traditional, but that’s exactly the point. As an award-winning filmmaker and VFX supervisor, he spent years working at the intersection of storytelling and technology. That experience led to Wonder Dynamics, where the mission has always been to empower artists, not replace them. The company’s acquisition by Autodesk in 2024 marked a major validation of that vision, and now Todorovic is helping shape the future of creative AI inside one of the industry’s biggest ecosystems.

At Disrupt, he’ll join other AI industry leaders for a wide-ranging panel on what’s coming next — from generative tools to ethical design to the future of creator workflows. Stay tuned to the fast-growing Disrupt agenda page for the latest updates. Expect a conversation in Todorovic’s session that spans beyond buzzwords and dives into the real-world impact of AI in media and beyond.

Join 10,000 other tech and VC leaders on the AI Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 to hear from Nikola Todorovic and other top voices driving the future of artificial intelligence. It’s all happening October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Lock in your spot today and save up to $675 before prices go up.

When you’re not using your iPhone, the Lock Screen is what you see most often. Liquid Glass is everywhere in iOS 26, and it starts right when you pick up your device. The Lock Screen got a Liquid Glass overhaul, plus a few other new features.

Here’s what you’ll see first when you upgrade to ‌iOS 26‌.

Liquid Glass

The two customizable control buttons on the Lock Screen are larger and have a floating, glass-like appearance like the other Liquid Glass interface options in ‌iOS 26‌. The clock has a frosted glass appearance with the new “Glass” option, using lighting effects to make it look like glass in the real world.

Glass can be selected for any of the clock fonts, and you can choose a color to tint the glass. Apple has multiple preset options, or you can select your own.

When you tilt your ‌iPhone‌, light reflects and glints with the movement, for a realistic glass effect.

Notifications that are on your Lock Screen have a Liquid Glass aesthetic with a frosted glass look that leaves your wallpaper visible behind them.

Clock

In addition to having a Liquid Glass aesthetic, the clock can be resized to better match your ‌iPhone‌’s wallpaper using a new adaptive feature. When you’re customizing your Lock Screen, you can grab the corner of the time and drag it down to expand it.

Adjusting the size of the time only works with the first font option, and only with the standard Arabic, Western numbering.

With photo wallpapers, the time can automatically expand to fill in missing space, and it can change based on the image if you have Photo Shuffle set. The subject in photo wallpapers is meant to always be visible, and can overlap the time in unique ways in ‌iOS 26‌.

There is a Photos watch face for the Apple Watch that also supports time that changes size and position based on the wallpaper.

Wallpaper

There is a new default wallpaper that was designed for ‌iOS 26‌. It’s multiple shades of blue, with the same floating glass aesthetic that the rest of ‌iOS 26‌ features. The wallpaper can subtly shift with ‌iPhone‌ movement.

It’s a small detail, but the icons for selecting different wallpaper categories have been updated to better match the Liquid Glass design.

Spatial Scenes

Aside from the Liquid Glass time, Spatial Scenes are the biggest change to the Lock Screen. 2D photos that you set as wallpaper can be turned into 3D spatial images that separate the subject of the photo from the background using depth information.

When you move your ‌iPhone‌, Spatial Scenes shift and move along with it, making the images feel alive. Spatial Scenes is a feature in the ‌Photos‌ app too, and it can be added to any image that you’ve taken with your ‌iPhone‌, including older ones.

Tap on the small icon with a mountain and a sun to activate the Spatial Scenes setting when choosing a photo wallpaper.

Lock Screen widgets can be placed on the top of the display under the time, or at the bottom of the display. In earlier versions of iOS, you could only put widgets at the top of the screen. With the adaptive clock and new wallpaper options, widgets can also shift down automatically to ensure the subject of an image is always visible.

Apple Music

Apple added a new Lock Screen widget for Apple Music search, but there are no other new Lock Screen widget options. What is new, though, is a new full screen Now Playing interface that shows album art. Artwork expands and animates right on the Lock Screen.

Read More

We have a dedicated iOS 26 roundup that goes into detail on all of the new features that are available in the update.

If you’re running the Engineering-Special (ES) builds of Cisco Unified Communications Manager or its Session Management Edition, you need to apply Cisco’s urgent patch after someone at Switchzilla made a big mistake.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CM) consolidates IP telephony, high-definition video, unified messaging, instant messaging, and Presence status indicators. Its Session Management Edition centralizes dial-plan and trunk aggregation across multi-site deployments.

However, the ES builds of both packages have hardcoded credentials baked in, and they cannot be changed or deleted, meaning an unauthenticated, remote attacker can quickly get themselves full root control of a system if they know where to look. There’s no workaround, and the only solution is to upgrade to the newest code for Unified CM, Cisco said.

There is an ostensible purpose behind the mistake, dubbed CVE-2025-20309, with a critical rating of 10.0. The credentials have been left in there to make development work easier, Cisco said in its advisory. However, if the attacker identifies the development account, then they can use these credentials and gain root – and then it’s game over for users.

The affected packages are Cisco Unified CM and Unified CM SME Engineering Special releases 15.0.1.13010-1 through 15.0.1.13017-1, and admins can find the patch needed to fix the issue here. If you want the ES patch, however, you need to go to your Cisco Technical Assistance Center account to get the fix.

To check if some malicious actor has already had a go at this, admins need to look for a log entry in

/var/log/active/syslog/secure

by using the

cucm1# file get activelog syslog/secure

command in the command line. Admins can then check if someone has been inside the system with sshd daemon and a successful SSH login as root – if so, that’s a parade of red flags.

Security staff at Cisco have got to be feeling nervous for their jobs at the moment – this is the second CVSS 10 flaw in a week and the third critical. On June 26, Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Cisco ISE Passive Identity Connector were fixed, one an (im)perfect 10 and the other just a CVSS 9.8. Admins, and Cisco itself, better get busy locking down their systems. ®

It took a minute, but Apple has at last activated its official Threads account. And thanks to its massive Instagram presence, it instantly picked up nearly 5 million followers.

Today’s move comes well after several Apple-related accounts joined Instagram’s alternative to X right out of the gate. Apple Music, Apple News, Apple Books, Shazam, and Beats by Dre were among the first to show up shortly after Threads launched in mid-2023, but the main @apple account remained absent until now.

Instant 4.8 million following

Despite having yet to post anything, Apple’s Threads debut already carries quite a bit of weight. The @apple account had over 4.8 million followers the moment it went live, thanks to Threads’ auto-follow feature for Instagram accounts. Given @apple’s massive Instagram presence, currently at over 34 million followers, the immediate boost isn’t surprising.

What makes the move notable is obviously the broader context. Apple has long maintained a strong presence on X, to the point of facing criticism in recent years.

Over there, it has nearly 10 million followers and continues to use the platform to promote events, ads, and product launches. The company has been quiet on alternative platforms like Mastodon, where only Phil Schiller, Apple Fellow and longtime marketing chief, maintains a personal presence.

9to5Mac’s take

Apple’s arrival on Threads may not signal a full-on platform shift just yet, but it does show the company is at least willing to play in the broader social network field. Whether that translates into actual posts, or even full-on marketing campaigns, remains to be seen.

Many companies have rushed to join new platforms, only to let them sit dormant after the initial wave of hype. Just today, The Telegraph published a story called “The Left is abandoning its online safe space“, to which social media consultant Matt Navarra noted:

Still, with Meta continuing to push Threads as a more stable alternative to X and, at the same time, signals it’s finally ready to move beyond being Instagram’s sidekick, Apple’s quiet entrance is worth noting.

Accessory deals on Amazon

• Anker 25,000mAh power bank, 100W, USB-C: $119.99
• Anker Foldable 3-in-1 wireless charger, 15W, Qi2: 20% off, at $71.99
• AirPods Pro 2: 20% off, at $199.00
• AirTag, 4 Pack: 24% off, at $74.99
• HomeKit Smart Plug, 15A, 4 Pack: 20% off, at $34.99

It’s nearly the end of the road for Warcraft Rumble. Blizzard has announced that it will no longer be developing new content for the free-to-play mobile strategy game, and instead focus on “regular, systemic in-game events and bug fixes.” The change comes as the rest of Microsoft’s business is in upheaval: The company is laying off as many as 9,000 employees across its global workforce.

Blizzard’s statement doesn’t get into the details of what motivated the decision, but is clear that Warcraft Rumble hasn’t been living up to expectations. The game “struggled to find its footing” relative to Blizzard’s ambitions, prompting the studio to explore different options to improve it over the last few years. “Some of that work showed signs of progress, but ultimately wasn’t enough to put the game on a path to sustainability,” Blizzard writes.

Warcraft Rumble was announced in 2019 as Warcraft Arclight Rumble. Much like Hearthstone, the game was a high-profile attempt to translate a popular Blizzard franchise into something that works on smartphones and tablets. Warcraft Rumble plays like a more flexible version of Clash Royale, where miniaturized armies face off in PVP or singe-player challenges, and the biggest strategic choices are when and where characters are placed.

Aftermath reports that winding down Warcraft Rumble is a direct result of the wider Microsoft layoffs effecting Blizzard. While some of the team who created new content for Rumble will be given new roles at the studio, others will be let go, according to a staff email sent by Blizzard president Johanna Fairies that Aftermath viewed. Blizzard’s public statement doesn’t acknowledge these layoffs beyond a mention that the studio is “focused on supporting [its] teammates,” which is telling in context.

While Warcraft Rumble will live on for now in a diminished state, some future Xbox games have been outright cancelled as a result of Microsoft’s restructuring, including Everwild and Perfect Dark. The bigger damage is the loss of talent. Greg Mayles, the lead designer on Donkey Kong Country and creative director of Sea of Thieves, is leaving Rare, according to Video Game Chronicle. ZeniMax Online Studios shared on X that director Matt Firor is also making an exit following the cancellation of the studio’s next MMO.

Microsoft’s layoff of roughly 9,000 employees is continuing to have downstream effects at the company’s subsidiaries. Aftermath reports that as many as 100 developers at Blizzard have been impacted, and as a result the studio is winding down development on its mobile tower defense game Warcraft Rumble.

In an announcement, Blizzard wrote that while the game will not be abandoned entirely, the company will cease development on any new content. “Moving forward, we’ll continue supporting Rumble with updates focused on regular, systemic in-game events and bug fixes, but no new content. ”

Blizzard continued, saying Rumble, “struggled to find its footing relative to our ambition for its long-term success.” And while its developers worked to respond to player feedback that, “ultimately wasn’t enough to put the game on a path to sustainability.”

Warcraft Rumble was the first mobile focused game in the Warcraft Universe. It launched in 2023 after nine years in development and was originally one of two mobile games Blizzard was working on, the other being Blizzard’s take on Pokémon Go. That game was never officially announced by Blizzard and cancelled sometime in 2022. Warcraft Rumble joins a handful of other Blizzard games in development stasis along with Starcraft II and Heroes of the Storm.

Smart glasses are among the latest and most interesting tech developments. They suit an audience of tech enthusiasts and photographers and can even help bridge the gap for those with visual impairment. Amazon took its stab at them, introducing the Echo Frames in 2019 and updating them periodically since. 

Also: The best Prime Day tech deals live now 

Luckily, Amazon is offering an early Prime exclusive bundle deal — even days ahead of Prime Day, which starts on July 8. For only $130, you can get the third generation of Echo Frames in any color, plus an Echo Spot. That’s an excellent offer, considering Amazon is selling the Echo Frames alone for $270. Amazon is also offering another Prime exclusive bundle at a discount. The Echo Frames and Echo Show 8 are on sale together for $240. 

A good way to describe the Echo Frames is as headphones with a little more utility. Besides wearing them for the aesthetic, the glasses offer many different features that substitute devices like your headphones or Bluetooth speaker and your Alexa devices.

Also: These smart glasses beat the Meta Ray-Bans in a few key ways

The glasses are still extremely capable. An Alexa assistant is available, and you can use it to listen to books, music, and podcasts, as the open-ear speakers direct sound to your ear while minimizing it for others around you. 

These frames are a good entry point into smart glasses, as the price is fair. However, the features are minimal compared to their competitors. For instance, the Echo Frames do not have a built-in camera. 

Also: The best Prime Day Echo device deals 

You can make calls, though, which would be a selling point for business professionals or those on the go. The glasses can also be used for controlling Alexa devices, like the Echo Spot, Amazon’s Alexa-enabled alarm clock, which comes with this bundle. 

Also: I took my Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses fly fishing, and they beat GoPro in several surprising ways

ZDNET expert Kerry Wan tested the Echo Frames and thought they were very convenient for daily use, especially for tasks like calling or listening to music while walking.

“Besides the smart features, I’ve also enjoyed listening to podcasts and making calls during my evening walks. Perhaps it’s the ability to listen to my on-device audio while staying aware of my surroundings, or the fact that the speakers on the Echo Frames favor the mid and high frequencies more than the bassy, engulfing lows,” he said. 

The Echo Frames are a great entry point into the world of smart glasses, and right now they’re much cheaper than a pair of Meta Ray-Bans. 

Looking for the next best product? Get expert reviews and editor favorites with ZDNET Recommends.

How I rated this deal 

With this deal you’re getting the Echo Frames at a significant discount, plus a free Echo Spot. We have factored in the 63% bundle discount, and have given this deal a 5/5 Editor’s deal rating. Not only is this a newer product with a price slash, but it also includes a compatible Alexa device. This deal would be great for those who want to try out new variations of tech without breaking the bank. 

There’s good news and bad news: The bad news is that Meta’s continued development of generative AI has led it to add a privacy nightmare setting to its Facebook app. The good news is that, in a big departure from Meta’s status quo, you have control over whether you participate.

It’s all about whether the company and its AI get access to your camera roll and all the pictures there, even the ones you haven’t posted anywhere.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has been trying to keep up with AI heavyweights for the past few years in an ultracompetitive race to make the most advanced AI models. Meta distinguished itself by adding its AI to its social media apps, including Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger. Nowadays, most of us who use those apps have to interact with Meta AI, even if we don’t want to. 

The company also uses the social media posts that its adult users publicly share to train its AI. There is no way to opt out of training, though European users can object to their data being used thanks to more stringent privacy laws protecting them. For those of us who are concerned about AI systems eating up the content we share online, it’s been a nonstop headache.

So it’s not totally surprising to see this feature on Facebook. It’s called camera roll cloud processing, and Facebook says it’s a way to get more creative help when you share photos and videos. It pulls from your newer pictures, from the last 30 days or so, and recommends the best options, makes AI edits or entirely reimagines your photos with AI. It can also pull from your older photos for themed compilations like travel highlights, monthly recaps and birthday and special event content. You also get more ways to sort your photos and videos by topic and suggestions from Meta about the best photos to share.

Before you opt in, you need to understand the privacy implications.

Meta’s AI terms and how to access camera roll cloud processing

When you allow camera roll cloud processing, Meta can “automatically upload your photos and videos to our cloud so that we can create personalized creative ideas for you.” This is not the same as allowing Meta access to your camera roll so you can post photos and videos you took. If you enable this additional setting, Meta can upload your content to its cloud “on a regular basis to create ideas for you with machine learning and AI models.” Meaning Meta will have continual access to your photos, even if you don’t post them on Facebook or post the newly created suggestions.

A Meta spokesperson said, “We’re exploring ways to make content sharing easier for people on Facebook by testing suggestions of ready-to-share and curated content from a person’s camera roll. These suggestions are opt-in only and only shown to you — unless you decide to share them — and can be turned off at any time. Camera roll media may be used to improve these suggestions, but are not used to improve AI models in this test.”

The mobile app help page says that enabling this feature means you agree to Meta’s AI terms, and it says your photos won’t be used for advertising targeting. The feature is in early stages of testing for US- and- Canada based users, but it won’t be available for folks who live in Illinois or Texas. Your suggested photo won’t be shared automatically unless you choose to.

Here’s how to access the setting:

1. Open the Facebook app and tap Menu at the bottom right corner.
2. Tap the gear icon in the upper right corner. You can also scroll down to Settings & privacy and then navigate to Settings.
3. Tap Camera roll sharing suggestions.
4. Scroll to Get creative ideas made for you by allowing camera roll cloud processing.

This feature is currently only available on the iPhone or Android mobile apps. If you have this setting enabled but then change your mind, Meta’s help page says it will remove your content from its cloud after 30 days. There’s no way to confirm its removal, though.

For more, check out how to stay relatively safe while using AI models.