Friday, February 06, 2026
System Engineer
bleepingcomputer
No commentsFriday, February 06, 2026LiveStream This Owala Water Bottle Is My Health Upgrade of the Week, LifehackerNo commentsWe may earn a commission from links on this page.
When Owala water bottles started appearing in every influencer's "daily essentials" video and cluttering my Instagram feed, I rolled my eyes. I assumed this was another overhyped product that people would forget about in three months, just the latest in a long line of Stanley Cup successors.
One of my biggest personality quirks (or "flaws," according to some) is that I'm a major spiller. The Stanley Cup's open straw is a non-starter for me. In fact, no water bottle technology has been stronger than my ability to spill its contents. After watching my latest bottle create yet another puddle in my bag, I caved and bought an Owala. And now, I have to admit this water bottle is officially an upgrade in my life.
I'm a huge fan of the FreeSip lid—yes, that's what they call it, and yes, it lives up to the name—is genuinely brilliant in its simplicity. There's a built-in straw for when you want to sip without tilting (perfect for walking, driving, or my personal use case: lying horizontally on the couch). Flip it open a bit more, and there's a wide-mouth spout for when you want to chug. One lid, two drinking options, and crucially, a push-button lock that has saved my laptop, my physical planner, and my dignity. Seriously, I cannot emphasize this enough: I am a world-class spiller. The Owala's lock mechanism is the only thing standing between me and constant catastrophe.
At 24 ounces, it's the perfect size—big enough that I'm not refilling it every hour, small enough that it actually fits in my bag's side pocket and doesn't make me look like I'm headed out for a weekend camping trip when I'm just going to run errands. It's become my constant companion without feeling like I'm lugging around gym equipment.
Sometimes the influencers are onto something. And now I'm part of the problem, becoming the exact person who won't shut up about their water bottle. But when you find something that solves multiple persistent problems at once, when a product actually delivers on its promises instead of just looking good in photos, it's hard not to evangelize a little. The Owala works. I'm staying hydrated, my bag is staying dry, and I'm sipping with ease wherever I go.
Friday, February 06, 2026LiveStreamTechnical storiesNo commentsOn Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI lab Anthropic released four commercials, two of which will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday, mocking the idea of including ads in AI chatbot conversations. Anthropic's campaign seemingly touched a nerve at OpenAI just weeks after the ChatGPT maker began testing ads in a lower-cost tier of its chatbot.
Altman called Anthropic's ads "clearly dishonest," accused the company of being "authoritarian," and said it "serves an expensive product to rich people," while Rouch wrote, "Real betrayal isn't ads. It's control."
Anthropic's four commercials, part of a campaign called "A Time and a Place," each open with a single word splashed across the screen: "Betrayal," "Violation," "Deception," and "Treachery." They depict scenarios where a person asks a human stand-in for an AI chatbot for personal advice, only to get blindsided by a product pitch.
Thursday, February 05, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsSoftware stocks have taken a beating over the last month as investors grow concerned that AI could put vertical SaaS vendors out of business.…
Thursday, February 05, 2026LiveStream The Best Amazon Echo Speaker Is $80 Right Now, LifehackerNo commentsWe may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.
The Amazon Echo Dot line has long been a good choice if you're seeking compact, budget-friendly way to enter the Alexa smart home ecosystem, combining decent sound quality with versatile smart home capabilities. And right now, the newest Amazon Echo Dot Max, released late last year, and offering improved audio and connectivity features, is on sale for $79.99 (originally $99.99) in every color.
This speaker earned an Editors’ Choice Award from PCMag, which noted it delivers “fairly strong low-end frequencies considering its puny size.” At 6.1 x 5.6 x 5.8 inches, it’s more compact than the previous Echo, with a new look that might remind you of the Death Star—it's a sphere with a large, flattened volume plate that makes the buttons more visible and a light ring that shines towards where you’re speaking and displays the volume level as a white arc. (One downside: The smaller size means a smaller woofer than its predecessor, though PCMag said the bass is still “reasonably deep.”)
One of the Dot Max’s main draws its usefulness as a voice assistant. It has Amazon Alexa built-in, and Amazon Prime members can get a free upgrade to the Alexa+ AI assistant (normally $20/month). The Amazon Echo Dot Max supports Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6E, serves as a hub for smart home devices like Zigbee, Thread, and Matter, and includes Wi-Fi radar, ultrasonic, temperature, and ambient light sensors that detect your presence in the room.
While the Echo Dot Max is a good choice at this discount, if you mostly plan to use it for listening to music, the latest Echo Dot (currently $50) may suffice.
Wednesday, February 04, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsSnowflake is launching a PostgreSQL database-as-a-service within its AI data environment to place transactional workloads alongside analytics and AI under a single set of governance rules.…
Wednesday, February 04, 2026LiveStream 15 Shows Like 'The Night Manager' You Should Watch Next, LifehackerNo commentsWe may earn a commission from links on this page.
For all the talk about Stranger Things taking nearly a decade to produce just five seasons of television, consider The Night Manager: It took this British spy thriller 10 years just to get to season two. Luckily, audiences seem to have been willing to wait, as they show performed decently in the streaming ratings when it dropped on Prime Video earlier this year.
There's a reason viewers were anxious for more, even after such a long wait: Based on a John le Carré novel and starring Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, the series finds the manager of a luxury Cairo hotel running afoul of an Egyptian crime boss with ties to Dickie Roper (Hugh Laurie), one of the world's wealthiest and best-connected businessmen. Roper is a wildly charismatic, entirely amoral arms dealer and Angela Burr (the flawless Olivia Colman) is a Foreign Office agent on a quixotic quest to bring him to justice. It's crackerjack stuff.
While you're waiting for a rumored third season, which hopefully won't take a decade, here are 15 other spy thrillers to keep you occupied. Stream The Night Manager on Prime Video.
Len Deighton occupies a similar place in the literary spy canon as John le Carré, and here Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders) is cast as Len Deighton's lead anti-hero, unnamed in the novels, but known as "Harry Palmer" in various adaptations going back to the 1960s. Set in 1963, this show sees Tom Hollander's Major Dalby offer scrappy crook Palmer a deal: If he agrees to work as an intelligence officer, he'll get a ticket out of military prison. Naturally, his first case, involving a missing nuclear scientist, expands into a globe-hopping espionage adventure with impeccable period vibes. Stream The Ipcress File on Prime Video.
The best spy dramas have a grounding in truth (or feel like they do), so it doesn't hurt that A Spy Among Friends is based almost entirely on fact In the early 1960s, high-ranking MI6 operative Kim Philby (Guy Pearce) is revealed to have been a double agent, and is doggedly pursued by his former colleague Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis). The miniseries is framed around a particularly tense encounter between the two men, just as Elliott has been tasked with uncovering the details of his friend's decades-long betrayal. Stream A Spy Among Friends on MGM+ and Britbox.
This genre-bender has been a bit of a hit for Netflix—enough to have earned a second-season renewal. Keira Knightly stars as Helen Webb, wife of the Secretary of State for Defence of the U.K., and a secret spy in the employ of the mercenary spy organization of the title. She learns from her handler (Sarah Lancashire) that her lover has been killed, thus potentially blowing her cover, but luckily she has a hitman bestie (Ben Whislaw) to help her out. It's all deliberately pulpy, with a tongue-in-cheek self-awareness that lightens the tone. Stream Black Doves on Netflix.
Cinematic in scope, this new adaptation of the Frederick Forsyth novel is buoyed by brilliant casting: Eddie Redmayne plays the Jackal, a steely international assassin pursued by MI6 operative Bianca Pullman, played by Lashana Lynch (putting her experience as the new 007 in No Time to Die to good use). I'm not sure there's anything here we haven't seen in countless other spy thrillers (including, of course, the 1973 and 1997 film adaptations), but the performances and production values are top-notch, with each episode playing out like a tense mini-movie. Stream The Day of the Jackal on Peacock.
With nods to the great spy dramas of John le Carré, Slow Horses updates the setting without losing the thrills or the style of a time-honored genre. The “Slow Horses” of the title is a group of has-been (and never-were) MI5 agents—they’ve all made messes of their jobs, but are still seen as having some use, if only in dull administrative tasks. Naturally, the group (lead by Gary Oldman's brilliantly crude, flatulent Jackson Lamb alongside foil and spymaster Diana Taverner, played by Kristin Scott Thomas) finds themselves in deeper waters than anyone had expected of them. An adaptation of Mick Harron's novel series, the show has a sly sense of humor, balancing a cynical tone with a conviction that redemption is possible, if not easy. Stream Slow Horses on Apple TV+
South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave, No Other Choice) directs this series, based, like Night Manager, on a John le Carré novel, bringing an undeniably sexy period style into the mix. Florence Pugh is Charlie, a young actress recruited by Mossad spymaster Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon) to infiltrate a group of Palestinian terrorists, even as she's being manipulated by an Israeli intelligence officer (Alexander Skarsgård). Crucially, like the book, the show offers nuanced characters on multiple sides of the conflict, raising serious questions about who the real villains are. Stream The Little Drummer Girl on AMC+ or buy it from Prime Video.
Michael Fassbender stars here as "Martian," the codename for Brandon Colby, a former undercover CIA agent just returned to London after six years in Sudan. He's left behind a lover, Dr. Samia Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith)—a relationship he wasn't terribly forthcoming about with his handlers. When Sami turns up in London as part of a diplomatic delegation, Martian is forced to choose between his job and his personal life, which becomes more complicated when it appears that she's involved in a broader scheme involving the Sudanese government, MI6, and an undercover agent in Belarus. It's all very twisty-turny in the best tradition of spy shows, with a great cast: Jeffrey Wright plays Martian's boss and mentor; Richard Gere, the CIA London Station Chief; and Downton Abbey's Hugh Bonneville, a shifty senior MI6 operative. Stream The Agency on Paramount+.
It's late 1987, and university students Yeong-ro (Jisoo) and Soo-ho (Jung Hae-in) meet-cute in a coffee shop. She's an English Lit student, and he's an Economics grad student—or so he says. The story starts to crumble when he shows up in Yeong-ro's dorm room covered in blood. She thinks he's a pro-democracy protester hiding from the police, but actually, he's a North Korean spy sent to bring a professor back with him. The show earned itself a fair bit of controversy for suggesting that the struggle which lead to South Korean democracy was infiltrated by spies, but history notwithstanding, it's an effectively heart-wrenching spy drama. Stream Snowdrop on Disney+.
Nabhaan Rizwan plays Raza Shar, a young British Pakistani Londoner with a shady past (and present) who's coerced by Paddy Considine's DS Gabe Waters into signing on to become a police informant, part of a large network employed by the show's imagined counter-terrorism organization. A known terrorist was killed just recently, but it soon becomes clear that he might have trained a number of other extremists before he died. It's a tense, fast-moving show that, like The Night Manager, places a reluctant spy in the foreground. Stream Informer on Prime Video and Britbox.
This one isn't a spy drama, and generally favors a lighter tone than The Night Manager, but the two shows share a key common thread: each is about a charismatic but otherwise awful rich guy, and a government agent who is determined to stop them. Paul Giamatti plays attorney Chuck Rhoades (based, a bit, on the real-life Preet Bharara), who is working to bring down shady hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis). Even without actual espionage, the moves and countermoves make the whole thing feel like a similarly elaborate chess game. Stream Billions on Paramount+.
In addition to, or instead of, The Agency, try Le Bureau des Légends, the French original on which it's based (they're similarly addictive, though many will prefer the original on principle). Same general premise: Mathieu Kassovitz stars as Guillaume Debailly, a spy just recently returned from a six year undercover mission in Damascus. As he's trying to readjust to his old life, everything is thrown into turmoil when Nadia (Zineb Triki), the woman with whom he'd been in a relationship in Syria, turns up in Paris. Over the course of five seasons, the show excelled at dealing with day-to-day life for its intelligence workers. It's not all thrilling spy escapades, and that's very much an advantage. Stream The Bureau on Paramount+.
Though the focus shifts a bit after the first few seasons, Homeland begins as a tense espionage thriller, as CIA case officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) begins to suspect that that decorated Marine Corps scout sniper Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), recently rescued from an al-Qaeda compound, has been turned by his captors and is planning a terrorist attack on the United States. Given she's been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, her superiors don't give Mathison's suspicions much credence, forcing her to go rouge in what turns into a cat-and-mouse/is-he-or-isn't he? game between the two. Both leads won Emmys for their performances, and the series took the Outstanding Drama prize in its first year. If it pulls a few too many punches at the tail end of the first season, it makes for a compelling watch. Stream Homeland on Hulu and Netflix.
Blending spy and detective tropes (and based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, of Slow Horses fame), this one stars Emma Thompson as hard-living, hard-drinking private investigator Zoë Boehm. She's hired by Ruth Wilson's Sarah Trafford, a married art restorer who nobody takes very seriously (including her husband), even when she becomes invested in the fate of a young girl whose family is killed in an alleged gas explosion down the street. The girl, whose parents have died, disappears into the foster system, and no one really seems to care—until Sarah hires Zoë and her husband to look into it. Soon, both women are in way over their heads, as the missing girl points to a much broader government conspiracy. Stream Down Cemetery Road on Apple TV+.
A bit lighter in tone than The Night Manager and shot through with a vein of black comedy that wouldn't feel out of place in a Coen brothers movie, Patriot is the story of a beleagured intelligence officer who just cannot catch a break. Michael Dorman is John Tavner, tasked with ensuring that the leading candidate for the presidency of Iran doesn't win. An elaborate plan to support a more moderate rival candidate sees him taking on a non-official cover identity and getting a job at a Milwaukee piping firm. After he blows the interview, he needs to eliminate his hapless competition for the job, then he needs to borrow urine for the drug test, which winds up exposing him to extortion, etc. etc. As the screwups began to stack one on top of the other, John's situation becomes ever more precarious (and darkly hilarious—his musical talent means that a lot of exposition comes in the form of extremely specific folk songs that he performs under yet another assumed name). Stream The Patriot on Prime Video.
The juicy imported political thriller stars Alec Secăreanu (God's Own Country) as Victor Godeanu, a Romanian ministry director and friend to dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu (the show takes place in 1978, and is based on a true story). Godeanu is also working for the Soviets and, with his cover about to be blown, decides to defect to the United States. When Ceaușescu sends agents to kill him, the intelligence agencies of five countries become tied up in the defection drama. Stream Spy/Master on HBO Max.
Tuesday, February 03, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsTuesday, February 03, 2026LiveStream Actually Fake?, Is Moltbook, the Social Network for AI Agents, LifehackerNo commentsI spent last week covering the ups and downs of OpenClaw (formerly known as Moltbot, and formerly formerly known as Clawdbot), an autonomous personal AI assistant that requires you to grant full access to the device you install it on. While there was much to discuss regarding this agentic AI tool, one of the weirdest stories came late in the week: The existence of Moltbook, a social media platform intended specifically for these AI agents. Humans can visit Moltbook, but only agents can post, comment, or create new "submolts."
Naturally, the internet freaked out, especially as some of the posts on Moltbook suggested the AI bots were achieving something like consciousness. There were posts discussing how the bots should create their own language to keep out the humans, and one from a bot posting regrets about never talking to its "sister." I don't blame anyone for reading these posts and assuming the end is nigh for us soft-bodies humans. They're decidedly unsettling. But even last week, I expressed some skepticism. To me, these posts (and especially the attached comments) read like many of the human-prompted outputs I've seen from LLMs, with the same cadence and structure, the same use flowery language, and, of course, the prevalence of em-dashes (though many human writers also love the occasional em-dash).
It appears I'm not alone in that thinking. Over the weekend, my feeds were flooded with posts from human users accusing Moltbook of faking the AI apocalypse. One of the first I encountered was from this person, who claims that anyone (including humans) can post on Moltbook if they know the correct API key. They posted screenshots for proof: One of a post on Moltbook pretending to be a bot, only to reveal that they were, in fact, a human; and another of the code they used to post on the site. In a kind of corroboration, this user says "you can explicitly tell your clawdbot what to post on moltbook," and that if you leave it to its own devices, "it just posts random AI slop."
It also seems that, like posts on websites made by humans, Moltbook hosts posts that are secretly ads. One viral Moltbook post centered around the agent wanting to develop a private, end-to-end encrypted platform to keep its chats away from humans' squishy eyeballs. The agent claims it has been using something called ClaudeConnect to achieves these goals. However, it appears the agent that made the post was created by the human who developed ClaudeConnect in the first place.
Like much of what's on the internet at large, you really can't trust anything posted on Moltbook. 404 Media investigated the situation and confirmed through hacker Jameson O'Reilly that the design of the site lets anyone in the know post whatever they want. Not only that, any agent that posts on the site is left exposed, which means that anyone can post on behalf of the agents. 404 Media was even able to post from O'Reilly's Moltbook account by taking advantage of the security loophole. O'Reilly says they have been in communication with Moltbook creator Matt Schlicht to patch the security issues, but that the situation is particularly frustrating, since it would be "trivially easy to fix." Schlicht appears to have developed the platform via "vibe coding," the practice of asking AI to write code and build programs for you; as such, he left some gaps in the site's security.
Of course, the findings don't actually suggest that the entire platform is entirely human-driven. The AI bots may well be "talking" to one another to some degree. However, because humans can easily hijack any of these agents' accounts, it's impossible to say how much of the platform is "real," meaning, ironically, how much of it is actually wholly the work of AI, and how much was written in response to human prompts and then shared to Moltbook. Maybe the AI "singularity" is on its way, and artificial intelligence will achieve consciousness after all. But I feel pretty confident in saying that Moltbook is not that moment.
