AI Weekly Malaysia

At Made by Google 2026, Google announced the Pixel 11 (starting at $899 with 256GB base storage, up $100 from Pixel 10 due to dropped 128GB tier and RAM supply shortage), Pixel Watch 5, and a Pixel Tag AirTag competitor. New Gemini features include ASL-to-text transcription via Pixel Camera, 'Rambler' voice input that handles run-on sentences and filler words, and Circle to Search integrated directly into the camera experience.

Meta and Nvidia both released open-weight AI models this week, available for free download, as part of a broader US effort to compete with leading Chinese labs in the open-source AI space. More than 20 US tech companies recently urged policymakers to avoid 'premature restrictions' on open-weight models, including those from China.

Google announced a tap-to-share mode for Quick Share alongside its Pixel 11 launch, letting Android users exchange contacts, photos, and videos by bringing devices close together, similar to Apple's NFC-powered NameDrop from iOS 17. The update is rolling out now to Pixel 6 and newer devices, with Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, Fold8, and Flip8 support coming soon, and more devices by year-end.

737 free Chrome VPN and proxy extensions across 40+ developer accounts were found routing users' entire browser sessions through a single SOCKS5 proxy on port 1082, giving the operator adversary-in-the-middle visibility into destinations, source IPs, TLS SNI values, and plaintext HTTP bodies. 274 of these impersonated 66 real VPN brands including NordVPN, Proton VPN, and ExpressVPN; 221 have been removed but 516 remain active on the Chrome Web Store with 75,486 total installs.

Dr. Tim King, who developed the Tripos operating system at Cambridge and brought it to MetaComCo in 1984 where it became AmigaDOS, has died at the end of July 2026. He later founded Perihelion (1986) and the ISP UK Online.

Tom's Hardware reviews the QIDI Plus5 3D printer, calling it the best QIDI model yet, highlighting its large build volume and strong performance with tough technical filaments.

Known Agents' Agentic Web Index reports that 35% of web traffic is bots, with 29% of that bot traffic being AI-related (up 11% over 90 days). Someone is conducting mass vulnerability scans while spoofing their user-agent as AI bots like ClaudeBot, making malicious scanning traffic harder to distinguish from legitimate AI crawler traffic.

Google announced Malaysia pricing for the Pixel 11 lineup (RM3,999–RM7,999), Pixel Watch 5 (RM1,799–RM1,999), and a forthcoming Pixel Tag. All Pixel 11 phones now start at 256GB base storage, up from 128GB last year, at unchanged starting prices. Pre-orders opened 12 August 2026 with availability from 20 August via Urban Republic, Senheng, Thundermatch, Shopee, CelcomDigi, Maxis, and U Mobile.

Chrome uses a JPEG decoding optimization where it avoids fully decompressing large JPEGs when rendering them at small sizes, instead leveraging the DCT frequency-domain data directly. This causes tiny JPEGs to look noticeably different in Chrome versus Firefox—often thicker or less faithful to the original—because high-frequency detail is handled differently during downscaling.

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LiquidAI released LFM2.5-VL-3B, a 3.1B parameter vision-language model designed for on-device/edge use, pairing a SigLIP2 400M vision encoder with their LFM2.5-2.6B text backbone. It was pre-trained on ~34T tokens with 4x more vision data than prior versions, supports 128K vocabulary for non-Latin scripts, and adds screen/UI understanding, object grounding, multi-image input, and function calling. Benchmarks show it leading its size class on real-world image tasks (RealWorldQA 73.1, MMStar 63.3) against comparably-sized models from Qwen, InternVL, and Gemma.

Google announced the Pixel 11 Pro Fold at $1,899, featuring a stronger hinge, 20% brighter displays (3,600 nits peak on the outer screen), a new 48MP sensor with 30x digital zoom via the G6 Tensor chip, 25W wireless charging, but a smaller 4,750 mAh battery (down from 5,015 mAh). The design is largely unchanged from the previous generation.

Google announced the $29 Pixel Tag at its Made by Google '26 event, an AirTag competitor using the Android Find Hub network for lost-item tracking. It supports Bluetooth and Ultra Wideband precision finding, has a built-in speaker, runs on a user-replaceable CR2032 battery for roughly a year, and ships November 11, 2026 with a four-pack costing $99.

Google announced the Pixel Watch 5 at its Made by Google event, starting at $399, with on-device Gemini for offline voice tasks (timers, alarms, workouts) and proactive contextual suggestions based on message content. New health features include blood pressure pattern tracking using a waveform model trained on over 1 billion minutes of data from 500,000+ people, insulin resistance detection combining sleep/heart rate/activity signals via a large sensor model, and an oxygen-saturation drop detector that can contact emergency services (launching in select European countries first).

Google's Pixel 11 lineup is light on hardware changes but pushes deeper into agentic AI via Gemini, allowing U.S. users to order groceries, book rides, and have Gemini call businesses for reservations with user oversight. Google is connecting Gemini to third-party apps including Granola, Otter.ai, Wix, OpenTable, Ticketmaster, Thumbtack, and Zocdoc over the coming weeks, and is bringing its Rambler dictation product to Pixel phones alongside live translation for videos and podcasts.

The UK's criminal records office (ACRO) was reprimanded by the ICO after attackers maintained persistent access to its Kentico CMS v12.0.0 for over seven months (Aug 2022–Mar 2023), potentially exposing data on ~11,000 people. The root cause was running an unpatched CMS from September 2019 to March 2023, compounded by a miscommunication where the managed service provider didn't learn patching was its responsibility until February 2020 and still didn't actively monitor for vulnerabilities.

A new leak suggests Intel's upcoming Nova Lake CPUs with cut-down E-core clusters may retain their full cache pool, revising predictions for the 8P+12E config from 33MB to 36MB and the 4P+4E config from 15MB to 18MB. The article itself is mostly site navigation boilerplate with minimal additional detail beyond the headline.

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Tencent beat Q2 2026 revenue estimates at 204.78 billion yuan ($30.36B), up 11% YoY, driven by domestic gaming revenue jumping 17% (titles like Delta Force and Valorant) and AI-driven advertising. Net profit missed at 56 billion yuan vs 61.82 billion expected, and capex is rising as the company competes in China's AI race; the stock was down 26% YTD.

A blog post argues that AI coding tools have removed the 'speed limit' on software development, letting teams with weak engineering culture accumulate massive technical debt far faster than before. The author describes a scenario where a senior engineer faces 7 PRs on a Monday morning with diffs like +24,506/-3,938 lines, AI-generated descriptions, and codebases so convoluted that the original authors no longer understand their own features and must ask Claude to explain them.

ShadeMap is a free online tool that simulates 3D sun shadows cast by buildings, trees, and terrain for any location and time on Earth, including shadow accumulation maps and sun path visualization. It positions itself as a browser-based alternative to Google Earth Pro for shadow studies, solar analysis, and photography planning.

Nathan Lambert reflects on writing an AI textbook and argues that LLMs remain stagnant at long-form non-fiction writing, increasing entropy rather than compressing knowledge into insight. He contends that if models can't organize and present established science, they're not ready to autonomously solve open-ended scientific problems, and that progress will look more like low-hanging fruit and cross-field connections than revolutionary breakthroughs.

An Akira ransomware affiliate breached a victim via a SonicWall SSL VPN account that lacked MFA, then rebooted the machine into Safe Mode to kill security tools—but Safe Mode also broke the encryptor due to memory constraints. Huntress analyst James Northey warns this was a lucky break, not a reliable defense, since attackers could retool the encryptor to work in Safe Mode. Data and credentials were already exfiltrated before the encryption failed.

The FCC is drafting a measure under the Secure Networks Act to block imports of new Chinese optical transceiver models, with a target to publish the rule before end of 2026. The move has sent shares of Chinese photonics makers (Zhongji Innolight, Eoptolink, TFC Optical) tumbling while boosting Western rivals Coherent and Lumentum, as companies like Nvidia and Marvell pour billions into silicon photonics acquisitions to solve AI's copper interconnect bottleneck.