Author: The Tech Guy

There are three pipelines operating now to take oil around the Hormuz blockage. The East-West Crude Oil Pipeline (Petroline) in Saudi Arabia, and the UAE’s ADCOP pipeline and the Iraq Kirkuk–Ceyhan (Turkey) Pipeline. The Iraq Turkey pipelin is at an initial ~250k bpd but could ramp over the next month or two to 400k-650k bpd. Saudi Yanbu Terminal and Export Optimizations and Minor Petroline Tweaks. This could provide a +0.5–1 mb/d potential export uplift. Terminal and jetty constraints currently limit full pipeline use. This enhances Red Sea access without new builds. There could be continued Gulf field curtailments. There is…

OpenAI has swapped out GPT-5.3 Instant for GPT-5.5 Instant as the default ChatGPT model, rolling the update out to all users starting today. The new model focuses on improving three things: accuracy, conciseness, and personalization. Less hallucination, less fluff OpenAI says the accuracy improvements are most notable in high-stakes subject areas. In internal testing, GPT-5.5 Instant produced 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims than its predecessor on prompts covering medicine, law, and finance, and 37.3% fewer inaccurate claims on conversations users had previously flagged for errors. GPT-5.5 Instant is starting to roll out in ChatGPT.It’s a big upgrade, giving you smarter, clearer,…

FCC votes to ban Chinese and Hong Kong testing labs75% of US-bound devices are tested in ChinaThe ban could seriously shake up the US electronics supply chainThe Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has voted in favor of banning Chinese labs from certifying devices bound for the US.Any device that emits a radio frequency requires FCC approval before being sold in the US, and currently 75% of devices bound for the US are tested in labs in China.Every lab in China and Hong Kong will lose its ability to certify products over fears China could compromise devices before they are shipped to…

Microsoft has warned organizations in the United States about a sophisticated phishing campaign that uses a “code of conduct review” theme to lure victims to a malicious website. The tech giant observed more than 35,000 attempts between April 14 and 16. The malicious emails were received by users across roughly 13,000 organizations in 26 countries, but 92% of the targets were in the US.  Many of the messages were received by users in the healthcare and life sciences, financial services, professional services, and technology and software sectors. Microsoft phishing email The phishing emails purport to be internal regulatory or compliance…

A new paper from NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project announces that volunteers have essentially doubled the number of known brown dwarfs, with over 3,000 new discoveries made over the past 10 years since the project began. Brown dwarfs are balls of gas the size of Jupiter, less massive than stars. There’s one for every three or four stars near the Sun.  Although brown dwarfs are common, they can be hard to spot because they shine so faintly compared to stars. Having twice as many brown dwarfs to study allows astronomers a deeper understanding of these elusive objects. Already, this…

About a year ago, Xiaomi introduced the Xiaomi 15S Pro, its first phone to be powered by an in-house chipset, which was called the Xring O1. This was a variant of the Xiaomi 15 Pro, which originally ran on a Snapdragon 8 Elite. The company may be looking to do something similar this year, reports Yogesh Brar. The scuttlebutt is that there will be a version of the Xiaomi 18 Ultra powered by the Xring O3. That’s the next generation Ultra, which should arrive in December – according to Brar, the company isn’t planning on a global release for the…

Claude has been wonderful, but not just because its Sonnet or Opus models are so good. In fact, a lot of Claude’s success comes from the tools Anthropic has built around those models. Anthropic has made an arsenal of Claude tools, including the new Claude Design, but the main star among them all is still Claude Code. I use it a lot. One thing I do with it is have Claude Code write code, obviously, but I also use it for a lot of regular non-code work. Claude Code is a tool that gives an agentic AI access to a…

Honor has quietly introduced a budget Play series device in China, called the Play 70C. It is powered by a MediaTek Helio G81 Ultra chipset and packs a 5,300mAh battery. The company also unveiled the Play 80 Plus with a 7,500mAh battery and a Snapdragon 4 Gen 4 SoC. The Honor Play 70C comes with a 6.75-inch LCD display that offers HD+ resolution and a refresh rate of 90Hz. It gets a single 13MP rear camera that supports 1080p video recording and offers up to 10x digital zoom. On the front, the phone offers a 5MP camera for selfies and…

Threat actors have separately started exploiting two critical-severity vulnerabilities in MetInfo and Weaver E-cology that allow them to execute arbitrary code remotely, without authentication. MetInfo is an enterprise content management system (CMS) that relies on PHP and MySQL and provides various SEO optimization capabilities. Tracked as CVE-2026-29014 (CVSS score of 9.8) and disclosed in early April, the now-exploited critical flaw in MetInfo is described as an unauthenticated PHP code injection issue. The issue exists because the execution path insufficiently neutralizes user-supplied input, allowing attackers to send crafted requests containing PHP code, achieve remote code execution (RCE), and take over vulnerable…

Emergency doctors make high-stakes decisions in fast-paced, often chaotic situations. They have to figure out which patient most urgently needs care, what’s wrong, and what to do next.AI could lend a hand. In a series of challenging scenarios, OpenAI’s o1-preview model matched or exceeded doctors in clinical reasoning. Debuted in 2024, the AI is a large language model similar to those powering ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other popular chatbots.But when it was first developed, o1-preview differed in its ability to “think” through problems before answering. Such reasoning models explore multiple strategies, check themselves, and revise answers before offering a conclusion.…