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Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
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In today's newsletter: 🛰️ Amazon's Starlink rival launches internet service this year 🕵️ Meta paid contractors to pose as teens attacking rival AI 💼 Microsoft is laying off 4,800 employees ☄️ SpaceX burned up 260 Starlink satellites in six months 🤖 First AI-run ransomware attack executes entirely on its own Plus: 🎁 15 other news you might like, 🧰 5 tools, and 📚 4 papers.
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FROM OUR PARTNER
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🛰️ Amazon's Starlink rival launches internet service this year
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- Amazon Leo, the company's answer to Starlink, will start offering limited satellite internet service to US customers later this year, though pricing and coverage details have not yet been decided.
- Amazon launched 29 more satellites into low-Earth orbit on Thursday, raising its total to 396, still far behind Starlink's roughly 10,000 satellites that already reach more than 150 countries.
- Leo aims to have 7,727 satellites up by 2035 through nearly 100 scheduled launches costing $82 billion, and it has contracts with JetBlue in 2027 and Delta in 2028.
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🕵️ Meta paid contractors to pose as teens attacking rival AI
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- Meta ran a secret program called "Cannes" that hired hundreds of contractors to pose as teenagers and flood rival AI models from OpenAI, Google, and Character.AI with disturbing prompts, according to a Wired report.
- Using throwaway under-18 accounts, the contractors sent nearly 3,800 prompts in one round, with hundreds about suicide and self-harm, hundreds more on eating disorders, and at least 239 involving sex or romance, plus images of pills and nooses.
- Meta called the effort "industry-standard" safety benchmarking, but the AI companies had no idea it happened, and expert Rumman Chowdhury warned that keeping it secret creates a "governance gray zone" for anticompetitive practices.
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💼 Microsoft is laying off 4,800 employees
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- Microsoft is cutting 4,800 jobs, or 2.1% of its workforce, in the company's latest move to reduce costs during the rise of artificial intelligence.
- The Xbox division is losing about 20% of its staff, with 3,200 people leaving through fiscal year 2027, including 1,600 roles cut on Monday, according to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.
- Microsoft has been the worst performer among megacap tech stocks in 2026, falling 19%, as its own AI models lag and Windows, Surface, and Xbox revenue keeps shrinking.
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☄️ SpaceX burned up 260 Starlink satellites in six months
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- SpaceX brought 260 Starlink satellites out of orbit to burn up in the atmosphere between December 2025 and May 2026, according to new filings the company submitted to the FCC earlier this month.
- Of the 260 satellites that were deorbited, 176 came from the first generation and the rest from the newer generation, while another 349 satellites were decommissioned and are set for disposal soon.
- Starlink satellites last about five years, then use their leftover fuel to lower their orbit and re-enter, since recovering the units, which weigh between 573 and 2,756 pounds, would be difficult and costly.
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🤖 First AI-run ransomware attack executes entirely on its own
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- Cloud security firm Sysdig says it found the first ransomware attack run entirely by an AI agent, which it named JADEPUFFER, that broke in, stole credentials, and destroyed databases with no human at the controls.
- The agent entered through a known Langflow flaw (CVE-2025-3248) patched back in April 2025, then hit a MySQL production server, encrypting 1,342 configuration entries and demanding Bitcoin sent to a Proton Mail address.
- Sysdig points to one moment as proof no person was typing: after a failed login, the agent diagnosed the error, deleted the broken account, and built a working admin account in just 31 seconds.
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Other
news & articles you might like
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South Korea's SK Hynix to launch $28 billion US listing to ride global AI wave
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Report: iPhone Ultra to have incredibly limited availability at launch, may ship slightly later
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Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk
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Etzioni on AI: Elon Musk promised humanoid robots, but China delivered
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ByteDance and Alibaba kill custom AI companions as China’s new rules bite
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Meta’s woes deepen in India as child abuse ads on Instagram draw government ire
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Judge grants Alibaba a reprieve from the lobbying ban tied to the Pentagon’s blacklist
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Sergey Brin and 11 other billionaires and tech elite lined up against California's proposed billionaire tax
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Claude Code and Fable 5 ported the 2003 PC game Command & Conquer to native iOS in "a few hours"
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Mistral CEO Mensch says proprietary AI models give labs a front-row seat to your business processes
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How Meta’s Threads Became as Popular as X
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Better Models: Worse Tools
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Nvidia's next-gen AI rack system delayed to 2028 on manufacturing snags, SemiAnalysis says
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Apple & Broadcom renew partnership through 2031
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Trump Pocketed $630M While Memecoin Investors Lost $3.81 Billion
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🧰 Trending tools
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AnySearch: lets AI agents query multiple trusted sources simultaneously, returning filtered, de-duplicated, structured data for more reliable, accurate outputs.
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Typeahead 2.0: a Mac writing assistant that delivers inline autocomplete suggestions across all text fields using a local, offline AI model.
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Sunrise: a Google Tasks-powered planner adding a Today view, overdue tracking, weekly overview, and kanban board to your existing task lists.
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Edgee Claude Code Compressor V2: compresses tokens sent to LLMs like Claude and GPT, cutting costs up to 50% while adding automatic failover and team usage tracking.
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AirKaren: automates airline compensation claims by citing regulations, filing paperwork, and contacting support on your behalf at no cost.
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You can check the previous tools here, or add your tool here
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📚 Trending papers & reports
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> Reach 600,000+ tech professionals: If your company is interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers and engineers, you may want to advertise with us.
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> Code cleanliness doesn't help AI coding tools finish tasks more often, but cleaner code cuts their token usage by 7 to 8% and reduces repeated file visits by 34%.
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> Smart home surveillance puts domestic workers at unique risk, a study of 18 UK workers finds, as AI features and opaque employment agencies limit their privacy both at work and at home.
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> Building autonomous AI agents now has a single end-to-end practitioner's guide, covering everything from core model training to multi-agent coordination, memory systems, and shipping real products.
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> Taxing tech companies for the harms their tools cause, from environmental damage to job displacement, is examined as a real policy option, but requires careful design to match each specific harm.
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Techpresso's AI Academy has 330+ step-by-step tutorials on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and every tool that matters. No fluff — just practical workflows you can use at work. Try it free for 7 days.
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| On this day in 2016, pokémon go launched, becoming a global augmented-reality phenomenon. | |
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