Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily look at the stories shaping our digital world.
The cybersecurity industry finds itself in an uncomfortable position this week, as a report from The Economist lays out how artificial intelligence tools are actively being weaponized by hackers — while the very companies building those tools are quietly positioning themselves to sell the defenses. It's a cycle that raises serious questions about who benefits when the threat and the solution come from the same source.
On a lighter but no less interesting note, HoYoverse — the studio behind Genshin Impact — has announced a cozy galactic life sim called Petit Planet, coming to Switch Two in two thousand twenty seven. It's free-to-play, which means the business model will be worth watching closely. HoYoverse knows how to build worlds people love, and also how to monetize them aggressively.
And in a story that bridges art and science beautifully, new research published in Scientific Reports suggests the swirling sky in Van Gogh's The Starry Night was not purely imagination. Astronomers have matched the painting to the pre-dawn sky over Saint-Rémy on around the twenty-second of July, eighteen eighty nine, when Venus, a crescent moon, and the Hyades cluster aligned almost exactly as Van Gogh painted them.
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