Block Blast joining Apple Arcade on 3 September 2026 is being pitched as a win for puzzle fans sick of mid-session adverts, and it probably is. But the timing tells a slightly different story about where one of mobile gaming’s most downloaded titles actually stands right now. Apple announced the addition of Block Blast!+ to its subscription gaming service alongside Art of Fauna: Cozy Puzzles+, confirming both titles via its Apple Newsroom. Like every title on Arcade, they will carry no ads and no in-app purchases. Where Block Blast on Apple Arcade fits in the numbers The headline figures are…
Author: Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale has been filing general news for the better part of fifteen years. He started at a regional evening paper, moved to a mid-sized digital outlet covering UK news, and spent three years as a general assignment reporter before going freelance. He has covered inquests, council elections, infrastructure announcements, and the kind of stories that sit on page five but matter on page one. He writes about public services, housing, local government, and the institutional stories that take six months to develop and thirty seconds to read. He prefers facts to angles and considers that unfashionable. Marcus lives in Bristol. He still reads the local paper and thinks that makes him an endangered species.
The OpenAI employee tender offer is done: the company has bought back $7 billion worth of shares from its own workforce, valuing the privately held AI lab at $852 billion, matching the figure set by its most recent fundraising round. The catch, if you’re watching for an IPO, is that OpenAI funded the deal itself rather than bringing in outside buyers. That distinction matters. CNBC confirmed that OpenAI itself was the buyer in the transaction, not external investors purchasing secondary shares. It’s a meaningful difference: when a company spends its own balance sheet to give employees liquidity, the message is…
Aptoide on Google Play is now a reality in the United States: the Portugal-based app distributor became the first rival store to list itself through Google Play in the country, ending more than a decade of absence. It is a direct consequence of court-ordered remedies that Google fought hard, and ultimately failed, to avoid. How a Six-Year Legal Battle Opened the Door Epic Games first sued Google in 2020, alleging anticompetitive abuses in the Android app ecosystem. A jury found in Epic’s favour in 2023. Google appealed, and the 9th Circuit upheld the ruling, confirming the remedy requiring Google to…
Sila’s $1.4bn Pentagon battery loan, announced Friday by the US Department of Defense, puts the Washington state startup at the centre of a broader American push to build a battery supply chain that doesn’t run through Beijing. It’s a large bet on a relatively young factory, and the defence establishment is clearly willing to write the cheque. Why the Pentagon Is Paying for a Battery Factory The context matters here. Most lithium-ion battery anodes rely on graphite, and the supply chain for that material is dominated by Chinese companies. Silicon-based anodes offer a route around that dependency, and Sila’s plant…
Days after nearly dissolving, Situational Awareness has invested a further $400 million into Source Foundry, the chip startup founded by Stanford researchers, bringing its total commitment to $500 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. The round values Source Foundry at $5 billion, per the Journal. To put that in context: the fund writing this cheque just sold off the bulk of its public portfolio at a reported discount after a catastrophic July. A Startup Taking Aim at ASML Source Foundry was co-founded by Abdulmalik Obaid and Joe Burg, both Stanford researchers with an ambitious target: build the next generation…
The Zoox NHTSA commercial exemption, granted on 31 July 2026, does more than let one Amazon-owned robotaxi company start charging fares. It sets the template for every autonomous vehicle maker that wants to put a people-mover on public roads without a steering wheel or pedals. Zoox CEO Aicha Evans called it ‘the first-ever commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi from NHTSA,’ and the phrasing matters. Previous exemptions let the company demonstrate its technology; this one lets Zoox charge for rides, starting 10 August, across up to 2,500 vehicles introduced into commerce annually, for a period of two years. What the…
Silicon Valley misreads democracy the same way it misreads its favourite science fiction: as a manual rather than a warning. That is the central argument in Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, due from Liveright/Norton in the US on 25 August 2026 and from Allen Lane (Penguin) in the UK, priced at £25.Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the US Constitution, spoke to TechCrunch’s Equity podcast about what she calls ‘the artificial state’: a form of governance in which private…
The Amazon GW Ranch emissions target of 33 million tons of CO2 per year would make a planned West Texas power plant the single largest source of climate pollution in the United States, according to The Verge. The company’s 2040 net-zero pledge is starting to look like a note written to a different version of itself. What GW Ranch Actually Is The project, known as GW Ranch, would occupy 8,400 acres along Highway 18, about 17 miles north of Fort Stockton in Pecos County, Texas, according to San Antonio Current. Amazon is the data centre tenant; the on-site gas plant…
X’s Original Content Rewards programme is replacing the platform’s existing Revenue Sharing scheme, ending nearly three years of iterative fixes to a system X itself admits had grown structurally broken. The old programme closes to new participants immediately; existing members earn until 7 September, then applications for the replacement open on 8 September. Allegra Jacchia, posting on X, said the existing programme ‘had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned.’ ‘Creators should be focused on bringing net new content to the platform instead of maximising payouts,’ she wrote. ‘We could have kept adding more rules and exceptions, but ultimately…
Google’s hacker naming system has been redesigned from scratch, replacing a decade of unwieldy alphanumeric codes with two-word cryptonyms whose second word signals a group’s country of origin. Castle for China, Ion for Iran, Neptune for North Korea, Relic for Russia. The overhaul comes from Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), which merged the former Threat Analysis Group with Mandiant after Google’s acquisition of the security firm. The old system inherited from Mandiant, APT1 through to APT-whatever-comes-next, was the first naming scheme the industry ever adopted, originating with Mandiant’s landmark February 2013 report exposing APT1 as a Chinese military cyber-espionage unit.…