Author: Vidya Saras

Lucasfilm Brace yourselves, “Star Wars” fans, as the era of sequel trilogy nostalgia is upon us. It’s not as though Lucasfilm or Disney has officially announced an official campaign to capitalize on fondness for “The Force Awakens,” “The Last Jedi,” and “The Rise of Skywalker,” but the latest fun new trailer for “The Mandalorian and Grogu” includes a shot that serves as a bit of a marker for a turning point within this storied franchise. Like it or not, we’re about to enter a period of nostalgia for some of…

Household energy bills are forecast to fall by around £117 from April, as government policy changes outweigh modest increases in wholesale prices. Energy consultancy Cornwall Insight predicts that the Ofgem price cap will drop 7 per cent to £1,641 a year for a typical dual-fuel household when it is reset on 1 April. The forecast reduction is slightly smaller than Cornwall Insight’s previous estimate of an 8 per cent, or £138, cut, reflecting a recent uptick in wholesale energy prices. Ofgem is due to confirm the official cap level by 25 February for the period running to 30 June. The…

An analyst has highlighted how the Bitcoin Inter-exchange Flow Pulse has continued to be in a bearish phase recently, but its value is starting to flatten out. Bitcoin IFP Could Be Reaching A Low In a new post on X, CryptoQuant community analyst Maartunn has talked about the latest trend in the Bitcoin Inter-exchange Flow Pulse (IFP), which is an on-chain indicator that tracks the BTC flows occurring between centralized spot and derivatives exchanges. When the value of this metric rises, it means more of the cryptocurrency is flowing from spot to derivatives platforms. Such a trend implies speculative interest…

The US state of Nevada has sued Kalshi after the prediction market company lost its court challenge to stop the state’s regulator from taking action over its sports prediction markets.The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Tuesday denied Kalshi’s bid to stop Nevada’s gaming regulator from taking action on its sports event contracts, removing a block on the regulator launching a civil suit against the company.After the decision, the Nevada Gaming Control Board promptly filed a civil enforcement action in state court against Kalshi, which it said sought to block the company “from offering unlicensed wagering in…

tl;dr: Ethereum Protocol Studies returns for 2026 with new content tracks in cryptography, lean consensus and zkEVM, plus a new self-paced learning platform. The program kicks off February 23rd. Visit epf.wiki to get started. Ethereum Protocol Studies (EPS) is back. Since launching as a 10-week study group ahead of EPF5, EPS has grown into the primary educational on-ramp for anyone looking to understand Ethereum’s core protocol. Hundreds of participants have used the program to go from general Ethereum familiarity to reading specs, navigating client codebases, and contributing to protocol development. This year’s program expands in both depth and format. EPS…

The digital currency space is buzzing with activity, and the big question of what crypto to buy now is at the heart of every discussion. Litecoin price continues to show the classic signs of established market movements, with its long-term patterns acting as a familiar map for those following the industry. At the same time, Aster crypto is drawing plenty of interest due to its sharp price changes that offer chances for those with quick timing. Both of these options have found their specific places, providing steady points of contact in a sea of new and rising digital names.But all…

Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. “You’ve likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment,” he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. “Please keep Clawdbot off all company hardware and away from work-linked accounts.”Grad isn’t the only tech executive who has raised concerns to staff about the experimental agentic AI tool, which was briefly known as MoltBot and is now named OpenClaw. A Meta executive says he recently told his team to keep OpenClaw off their regular…

Society / February 17, 2026 The network tried to bury an interview critical of Trump. Stephen Colbert made it an indictment of the administration’s assaults on the First Amendment. Ad Policy The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.(Scott Kowalchyk / CBS via Getty Images) Just a week after the centibillionaire owner of The Washington Post ravaged its news operations in the service of plutocratic impunity, the news regime installed by the centibillionaire owner of CBS News has said, in essence, “Hold my beer.” After Late Show host Stephen Colbert had scheduled an interview with Democratic Texas state Representative James Talarico, the…

Anthropic is officially entering its ‘Thinking’ era. Today, the company announced Claude 4.6 Sonnet, a model designed to transform how devs and data scientists handle complex logic. Alongside this release comes Improved Web Search with Dynamic Filtering, a feature that uses internal code execution to verify facts in real-time. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-4-6 Adaptive Thinking: A New Logic Engine The core update in Claude 4.6 Sonnet is the Adaptive Thinking engine. Accessed via the extended thinking API, this allows the model to ‘pause’ and reason through a problem before generating a final response. Instead of jumping straight to code, the model creates internal…

Cyberattacks are moving faster, shrinking the gap between initial compromise and bad consequences, and the advent of AI is accelerating their timelines in a way that human defenders can no longer keep up with. That’s the broad and perhaps unsurprising finding of Palo Alto Networks’ 2026 Global Incident Response Report, which analyzed 750 incidents in 50 countries that were investigated by the company’s Unit 42 global threat intelligence and incident response team. In the fastest attacks analyzed, threat actors moved from initial access to data exfiltration in 72 minutes, down from nearly five hours in 2024. Increasingly, this is explained…