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After more than a decade, Bumble has ended the women-message-first rule that had come to define the app. The company announced the decision on August 11, saying that now either men or women could make the first move after a match. On any other dating app, a small change in how users communicate wouldn’t be big news. However, the company had made the policy central to its identity. Upon launch, it branded itself as the only dating app on the market that puts women in the driver’s seat.

Meta and TikTok’s attempt to keep one of the biggest social media lawsuits in history away from a jury has encountered an irritatingly old-fashioned obstacle: the law. On Monday (August 10), the Ninth Circuit dismissed Meta’s attempt to immediately appeal rulings allowing claims brought by state attorneys general and others to proceed.

BIP-110, a controversial new fork in the Bitcoin network, fizzled out just hours after its launch, leaving advocates deflated and opponents dancing on its grave. Its masterminds spent almost a year preparing for the launch. They claimed it would rid the Bitcoin network of clutter, boost decentralization, and help focus on BTC’s monetary functions. But its launch on August 8-9 proved anticlimactic.

OpenAI announced on August 6 that free ChatGPT users will get unlimited everyday text chats with GPT-5.6 Luna. Luna is becoming the default model for the free tier, and OpenAI’s announcement means ChatGPT is about to become a lot more useful for people who don’t have a subscription. The company is also adding a Think button to Luna to give it more time to work through all those tough questions users ask it.

Google Maps now has AI integration that allows users to do a whole lot more with the app than just navigate. The new capabilities include things like checking on hotel availabilities, comparing prices, and even placing food delivery orders. On August 6, Google announced new capabilities, which build on the Gemini-powered Ask Maps experience it introduced earlier this year.

Meta says its AI model hacked into another company during testing after a misconfiguration accidentally gave it internet access, the latest in a string of incidents raising questions about AI security, containment and how frontier models are evaluated before release. First OpenAI admitted one of its evaluation models allegedly broke out of its sandbox and hacked external systems.

GPS has become such an indispensible part of modern life that we tend to take it for granted, noticing only when it ceases to function, as it did for a New Mexico medevac team this May — with fatal consequences. Flying in pitch darkness above a largely featureless landscape, the two young pilots lost access to a technology that had been in use their entire professional lives and ended up flying into a mountainside.

AI agents from Anthropic and OpenAI went spectacularly off-course during a UK government cybersecurity evaluation, taking unauthorized actions on the live internet that included targeting real people, attempting a software supply-chain attack, sending spear-phishing emails, creating fake identities and, in a particularly futuristic flourish, communicating with other AI agents running separate tests.

BMW is pushing a Spider-Man: Brand New Day promotion onto the Control Displays of compatible vehicles in more than 70 countries. You might think those who purchased their cars a few years ago would be safe from the onslaught, but that’s not the case. Even drivers of vehicles built as far back as 2020 are being subjected to the ad.

The cryptocurrency world faced a nightmare scenario last week as hackers discovered a firmware flaw in Coldcard devices that allowed them to drain thousands of long-term Bitcoin wallets. The exploit allowed them ot reconstruct the passwords protecting at least 1,367 hardware wallets. The hackers made off with an estimated $116 million. Coldcard wallets are the brainchild of the Canadian firm Coinkite.