Spur, founded by two former Defense Department engineers in 2017 ' five years before ChatGPT's public launch ' was prescient. The startup's tech helps enterprises distinguish legitimate human users from increasingly well-hidden bot traffic to help identify fake users and threats. 'As sophisticated criminal VPNs, residential proxy networks, and anonymization infrastructure proliferate, organizations are increasingly operating with a critical blind spot: they can see the activity, but not the infrastructure behind it,' Insight's Thomas Krane said in a written statement. Detecting malicious traffic has, of course, been a hill corporate security teams have been climbing for eons. But nothing compares to the onslaught facing them today. As of mid-2026, bots are now more active on the internet than humans, Cloudflare reported last month. 'Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history,' Cloudflare founder and CEO Matthew Prince posted on X last month, pointing to his company's latest traffic report....

Runlayer, a startup that offers a secure Model Context Protocol gateway ' a standard for letting AI models and agents securely pull in outside data and tools ' has filed a lawsuit against HR software startup Rippling, according to the complaint seen by TechCrunch. The lawsuit is a cautionary tale for anyone selling AI infrastructure to enterprise customers, especially to other tech companies, that increasingly have the engineering muscle to just build the thing themselves. In the suit, Runlayer describes an extensive product trial conducted by Rippling as a prospective customer, during which the MCP startup shared everything from its product roadmap to its actual source code. The parties signed a mutual non-disclosure agreement and Rippling signed a product trial agreement with a clause that forbade it from copying Runlayer's intellectual property or making derivative works, which is standard boilerplate in enterprise software trials. Runlayer says in the complaint that Rippling's evaluation involved 'nearly a year of intensive engineering collaboration.' But in the end, the two could not agree on a price, so Runlayer ended the product trial....

While some people debate whether people will shift away from apps as AI agents make accessing online services more efficient, we've found the App Store to be alive and well, with a recent explosion of fun, creative, and innovative tools, experiences, and other indie efforts. Some of the more recent launches may be attributed to the rise of AI coding, which has enabled people to ship software more quickly, and allowed novices to participate in the app ecosystem. According to one report, new app launches have soared in 2026, with worldwide new app releases up 60% year-over-year as of the first quarter across both the Apple App Store and Google Play. On Apple's iOS store alone, that figure was an even higher 80%. While there's valid concern that vibe-coded apps in particular could be cluttering the App Store with lower-quality content, there are plenty of interesting apps worth exploring, and those that resonate with consumers will rise to the top. Many also use AI under the hood to perform their magic ' they're just not promoted as being 'AI-powered.'...

This is the first time the space agency has hired a private company to lift one of its space telescopes to a higher orbit, allowing the observatory to continue operations beyond its expected lifespan. The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was launched in 2004, with the ability to swiftly point at ephemeral space events like gamma ray bursts. The spacecraft has been pulled back toward Earth and needs to be pushed back up to a higher orbit to continue doing its job. The LINK spacecraft was launched into space on July 3 on board a Northrop Grumman Pegasus rocket. Over the past several weeks, flight controllers have worked to commission the spacecraft, activating its various systems before it heads off to rendezvous with Swift. However, the spacecraft suffered issues controlling itself and began spinning over the weekend. According to NASA, the spinning has resulted in 'sporadic communications' with the satellite, likely because its antenna flips away from the planet. Two of the three reaction wheels that control the spacecraft's alignment have failed, and there are problems with one of the spacecraft's thruster systems....