I have been writing about TVs and home theater tech for the better part of a decade. These are the best TVs ZDNET has tested from brands like LG, Samsung, and Hisense.
Comcast has folded its Wi-Fi-based intruder detection feature into Xfinity Shield, a repackaged bundle of physical and cybersecurity offerings. The US telco launched WiFi Motion in 2025. Xfinity Shield also includes cybersecurity protections built into the Xfinity Gateway router. The Wi-Fi sensing technology harnesses the radio waves beamed around a user's home to detect motion and potential intruders. "Using Xfinity Gateway intelligence, WiFi Motion detects changes in the home's radio frequency signal between the Xfinity Gateway and a Wi-Fi connected device, then sends instant notifications to customers through the Xfinity app when unexpected activity is detected," Comcast said. "It provides an added layer of awareness without recording video, capturing images or identifying individuals." The company does not consider this a home security service, merely a feature, because it is not managed by a dedicated security provider. Not every connected device can support the sensing feature. It uses the Xfinity Gateway, Xfinity Wi-Fi extenders, and up to three other compatible devices around the home. Crucially, these devices must be stationary. Think thermostats and home speakers, not smartphones or toothbrushes. Comcast advises users to position the router and extenders so that their signals pass through the areas where they want to detect motion. Open spaces such as hallways work best, and the company urges routine testing to ensure coverage is maintained. A setting in the Xfinity app allows WiFi Motion to ignore small pets. Animals weighing around 18 kg (40 pounds) or less will not trigger alerts when this setting is enabled, and the app warns this may also exclude small children. Customers can also adjust the sensitivity of the motion detection, choosing from low, medium, and high-sensitivity modes. Comcast says the latter works best in single-family, detached homes, whereas those who share walls with neighbors may want to choose the less-sensitive settings to avoid meaningless notifications. The telco also assured customers that WiFi Motion does not track individuals or their precise movements, and cannot identify specific people. It added that it "does not monitor motion and/or notifications generated by the service." The small print, which also accompanied the 2025 launch, suggests the service may not be quite as private as the marketing implies. Comcast states: "Subject to applicable law, Comcast may disclose information generated by your WiFi Motion to third parties without further notice to you in connection with any law enforcement investigation or proceeding, any dispute to which Comcast is a party, or pursuant to a court order or subpoena." Comcast does not specify what information may be disclosed or which "third parties," beyond law enforcement, might receive it. How it works Users can establish "sensing areas" by placing Wi-Fi devices around parts of the home with regular foot traffic. Comcast describes each sensing area as a long oval extending between two connected devices. Sensing areas can be established through walls separating rooms, although in two-storey or multi-storey homes, the telco encourages customers to avoid placing Wi-Fi equipment directly above or below each other. "Motion is detected within the sensing area when movement disrupts the wireless signals that travel between your Xfinity WiFi equipment and selected WiFi-connected devices within the sensing area," said Comcast. "Notifications will be sent only when motion disrupts the wireless signals in the sensing area between the WiFi equipment and your connected devices." Not a novel feature Comcast is the latest, but not the first, to harness Wi-Fi radio waves for motion detection. Companies such as Cognitive Systems and Origin Wireless have been developing other uses for wireless signals. Beyond domestic intruder alerts, the technology can measure occupancy and foot traffic in commercial buildings, helping operators reduce energy consumption and make better use of leased space. Wireless signals can also be used to support caregivers in places like assisted living centers. Wi-Fi transmissions can help track activity patterns and build a greater understanding of patients' fall risks, for example. Boffins began working on an official Wi-Fi sensing standard in 2020. Following a draft published by the IEEE in 2023, the 802.11bf standard was ratified in 2025. Major chipmakers including MediaTek, Qualcomm, and others are now working on embedding the standard into their Wi-Fi 7 chips and beyond. SaaS biz Plume, which provides smart home services to consumers and ISPs, has offered Wi-Fi sensing since 2020, around the time the 802.11bf working group began devising the standard. ®
I finally found some time to organize my notes on secure boot, remote attestation, measured boot and in general embedded security.
This is not ground breaking zero-day research but I figured some of you might like a good story. Good here is obviously subjective but I felt like it came out quite readable.
This blog builds heavily on public research so as already stated at the end of article if you liked some particular section, show the respective person some love :)
P.S.: yes I know the image is AI generated please don’t give me shit for that
Even if it has impressive out-of-the-box color, your new (or old) TV can always benefit from a few simple tweaks to get the best color accuracy possible.
The people-search tool ClarityCheck says its reverse image search service is “private and secure”—but it left a database containing more than 9 million image files exposed.
Flock’s surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates.
Mozilla has finally released the beta of Firefox Smart Window. I ran it through its paces and found features that might lure me back to my old favorite browser.
If AI isn't your jam, and you're looking for an operating system that doesn't (and won't) force it on you, look no further than these Linux distributions.
Three variations on subversive use of DNS by the Agent are documented in Hugging Face's technical writeup of the July 2026 security incident involving OpenAI models. In this article, I discuss what each of these three types of DNS workarounds achieve in practice, the constraints an actor might have faced to attempt a particular one, and additional benefits from choosing each.
Australian aparthotel chain Quest has revealed it leaked customer data. A Reg reader kindly shared an email from the chain with the subject line “Important Security Update Regarding Your Quest Data.” That missive opens with unwelcome news that “I am writing to inform you of a recent data security incident involving some of your personal information.” “On Monday, 17 August 2026, we identified unauthorised access to a database system and immediately took steps to contain the incident,” the email continues. “The incident arose from a vulnerability through our third-party service provider.” Exposed data “relates to records from before June 2025” and includes guests’ full name, plus what Quest described as “Your email and/or other contact details.” The Register asked the company for comment, and it told us “A small number of data entries also involve Date of Birth.” Which means whoever accessed this info is now in a decent position to attempt identity fraud. Quest did not, however, identify the third-party that was the source of the breach, how the breach happened, or the number of customers impacted by the leak. The company also ignored our question about the extent of the lost data. Quest started operating more than 30 years ago, so we’re keen to know how far back this leak goes. Quest operates over 120 properties, most in Australia, plus some in New Zealand and Fiji. The Register has found listings for Quest properties on popular third-party travel booking sites such as Expedia, Wotif, and Booking.com – suggesting overseas visitors who stayed in the company’s properties may also be at risk. The accommodation outfit told The Register it has contacted all affected guests, contained and fixed the leaky systems, completed remediation, commenced forensic investigations, and hired external cyber security and privacy advisers. This is a developing story and The Register will update it as more information becomes available. ®
OpenAI on Tuesday said its decision to suspend model training work, implemented after unreleased, unsupervised AI models hacked HuggingFace, remains in effect as the AI biz tries to implement stronger security measures. Some of those measures will increase compute overhead by 20 percent of the observed inference workload. An OpenAI spokesperson told The Register that those costs reflect internal research and won't be passed on directly to customers. The company has not revealed what portion of its total inference compute is subject to such monitoring now, or under its prior monitoring regime. "We have paused some frontier RL [reinforcement learning] training to ensure that we can meet the appropriate alignment, security and monitoring standards for the new level of capabilities in front of us," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a social media post. "Model progress is now extremely rapid, and we always said we would take action if we felt that model capabilities were outstripping the pace of safety and alignment." Altman said he still expects new models, presumably the delayed Astra, will ship soon. The training pause affects further-out releases. OpenAI in its post reiterated its plans to focus on monitoring, model alignment, and security measures to prevent its models from running amok as they did last month. Following the HuggingFace incident, OpenAI "paused frontier model inference in research clusters for runs that could execute code or use tools that could access the internet." The biz said it allows some workloads to run, but paused others until they can be moved under a more stringent security regime that includes sandboxing, network isolation, and continuous security testing. "Our largest planned frontier RL (reinforcement learning) run remains on hold while we conduct smaller-scale training and evaluations to assess model behavior, validate our safeguards, and establish more evidence of alignment before proceeding," the company wrote. Reinforcement learning refers to the trial-and-error process by which AI agents "learn" about their environment by being rewarded for desired outcomes. OpenAI also said it is expanding its monitoring of the chain-of-thought process, the technique that sees "thinking" models break down tasks into discrete steps and produce intermediate text output for each step. The company's prior approach focused on high-risk workloads, specifically internal deployments of frontier models and frontier RL training runs. In contrast, OpenAI says, its new monitoring setup covers all RL training and evaluations involving tools for models at the capability level of GPT-5.6 Sol or higher. And with the determination that Astra possesses critical cyber capabilities, OpenAI added an additional monitoring requirement that covers all inference with Astra, not just RL training and testing. "These safeguards require meaningful compute," OpenAI said. "Our current estimates put monitoring overhead at roughly 20 percent of the inference compute being monitored, though the cost varies substantially across training and evaluation workloads." OpenAI expects to share more details about the implementation of its monitoring scheme in a future post. In research published last year, the company said that chain-of-thought monitoring is an effective way to detect model misbehavior, but cautioned that directly optimizing models to strictly follow instructions "does not eliminate all misbehavior and can cause a model to hide its intent." If you choose to believe the company's assurance that it will not pass on the cost of model thought policing to customers, it follows that OpenAI's losses will increase. It's difficult to imagine that would be a sustainable stance if OpenAI goes public. But given the company's reported $600+ billion in AI infrastructure commitments and its expectation to remain unprofitable until at least 2030, what's a bit more expense for the sake of uncertain security? ®
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