BAT Kenya Sh12.3bn, AMD Cerebras, Patreon 20% Cut

Claude Voice Mode, previously limited to the faster but less capable Haiku model, now supports Opus and Sonnet. Users can switch models mid-conversation and adjust thinking depth. The upgrade also brings Claude deeper into productivity tools: Anthropic extended the assistant reach into Gmail, Slack, and Canva, so voice commands can draft emails, summarise threads, or edit documents. The combination of a powerful model and hands-free interaction is actually useful for developers and knowledge workers who want to stay off the keyboard for certain tasks.

Microsoft opened incident ZJV6-SGG for Azure West US region on July 23 after customers reported intermittent connectivity failures, increased latency, and access problems. Systems were recovering as the issue was rolled back. The outage rippled through Xbox Live and any other service relying on that region. It was not a multi-day disaster, but it is a sharp reminder to run multi-region architectures if your uptime SLA matters. Single-region dependencies are an accident waiting to happen.

Dependabot now defaults to a three-day cooldown before opening version update pull requests. The change means that when a new package version hits its registry, Dependabot waits 72 hours to see if the release gets yanked or flagged before proposing the update to your repository. No configuration required; it is now the baseline across all supported ecosystems on GitHub.com. For teams drowning in noisy or broken update PRs, this is a practical safety net that costs zero setup time.

Codeberg members voted 358 to 144 to ban hosting software that is mostly written by generative AI tools. The new policy also commits the platform not to use hosted projects for LLM training, a stance that directly opposes the data-scraping practices of major commercial forges. The decision has split the open-source community: some see it as necessary protection for the commons, others as an unenforceable restriction on how developers choose to work. Either way, it is the strongest stance any major code hosting platform has taken on AI-generated code.

Amazon launched a preview update for Alexa Plus that connects to smart home devices from Bosch, Delta, Ecovacs, iRobot, Yale Home, Whirlpool, Tapo, and Eufy. The key improvement is automatic request routing: tell Alexa Plus to turn off the living room lights or start the robot vacuum, and it figures out which device and which skill to use without the user setting anything up. If Amazon can deliver on this reliably, it solves the single biggest friction point in multi-brand smart homes and finally makes voice control feel like it works the way people expect.

The Connected Vehicle Security Act advancing through the US Senate would ban Chinese connectivity software from model-year 2027 vehicles and Chinese hardware by 2030. The rule targets companies with more than 15pc Chinese ownership and primarily affects communications and location-tracking components. One former Detroit auto executive told Reuters his jaw dropped at the price difference when comparing an equivalent non-Chinese ADAS system. Car buyers will ultimately foot the bill through higher MSRPs as manufacturers absorb more expensive alternative components.

CISA, the NSA, and FBI jointly released an advisory warning of an ongoing Russian state-sponsored phishing campaign targeting Zimbra Collaboration Suite users. The attack uses a zero-click exploit that compromises the victim account simply by the user viewing a malicious email in the Zimbra web client. No link clicking, no file downloading. The campaign, attributed to a group tracked as Laundry Bear, has been active since at least July 2025 and has hit Western government agencies and commercial organisations. Any organisation running Zimbra should treat this as urgent and review the CISA advisory indicators of compromise.