Signal Weekly
Signal Weekly — Oct 5–Oct 12, 2026
Oct 5–Oct 12, 2026 · 13 stories
A roundup of what came through the dashboard this week, across 4 categories.
Tech news
How Apple Puts Indigenous Languages on the iPhone Keyboard
To save endangered languages, tech companies like Apple are working with Indigenous communities to meet the next generation where they type.
Feds Got Warrants to Use Fake Cell Towers to Hunt Down Don Lemon’s Producer
Investigators also sought permission to use an invasive surveillance tool called a cell-site simulators against journalist Georgia Fort and a Minnesota state Senate candidate.
AlterMe Review: Fitness Built Around My DNA
Six months with AlterMe’s smart ring and a fitness app helped me build better habits, but the genetic insights were less revealing than I’d hoped.
A New Anti-Aging Drug Looks to Turn Back the Clock on Skin Age
After four weeks of using the cream, participants lowered the biological age of their skin by about two years on average.
Far-Right Election Groups Are Now Targeting Nursing Homes
Inspired by new guidance from the Trump administration, right-wing election groups are targeting nursing homes, baselessly claiming that left-wing groups are stealing residents’ votes.
AI papers
Can Language Models Play the Wikipedia Game?
Language models increasingly support or automate information retrieval from document collections too large to index. This task is difficult when it requires specialist linguistic or scientific knowledge. We used the Wikipedia Game to test language models on an analogous information retrieval task. In the game, players must reach a target article using only article links. We compared sentence…
Hide and Seek: HIDE Concepts to SEEK explanations for black box models
Interpreting machine learning model predictions is a central challenge, particularly for black-box vision models. Concept-based attribution methods interpret models using human-understandable concepts. Existing concept-based methods can only interpret classification and regression models. They require access to model weights or large concept-annotated datasets, and most methods cannot provide…
Constructive Bounds for the Topological Expressivity of Neural Networks
The expressivity of a neural network Φ describes the class of functions that a network can express. The term topological expressivity refers to a family of measures particularly suited to understand binary classification and is often formulated in terms of the Betti numbers of a decision boundary β(Φ^-1(0)). Despite its popularity, this measure is not as useful for regression and other…
AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities
Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deployment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted neural networks within host model weights, decrypting and executing them only upon receiving a secret…
Reviews
How is Microsoft's Magnetic Connect different from Apple's MagSafe for MacBooks?
Magnetic Connect and MagSafe for MacBooks have a lot in common, but the Magnetic Connect charger brings more versatility.
8BitDo Ultimate 2 review: The best Switch 2 controller out there
Everything is within reach on 8BitDo's Ultimate 2, even for small hands.
WhatsApp users may soon be able to schedule messages
WhatsApp is finally allowing message scheduling, a feature that's been available on Telegram since 2019.
Microsoft's president says AI is less regulated than a carton of milk
Milk can't hack companies and governments like AI definitely can, but it's still subject to more regulation.
That is the week in Signal. See the full dashboard for everything else that came through.