Tech News Roundup: LG TV Backdoor Probe, New Arm Cores and Zelda Remake

The LG investigation was published Sept. 7 by Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs with independent security researchers. It said LG's retail OLED TVs, represented by the G5, scan the local network, map nearby devices and record microphone audio even when the TV is in standby with its screen off. Wireshark packet captures showed the TV probing local IP addresses of phones and smartwatches, gathering nearby Wi-Fi network names, signal strengths and location data, and using automatic content recognition with audio-video fingerprinting to route information to LG Ad Solutions. The ad unit claims to track 363 million second-level addressable devices in the United States, based on LG's worldwide installed base of roughly 216 million smart TVs. In tests, the set captured clear microphone audio in standby; when Ethernet was disconnected, audio was stored locally and uploaded after the connection returned. The investigators also said they found a remote code execution vulnerability in webOS. LG had not responded at publication time.

On Sept. 8, Arm announced C2-Ultra and C2-Pro CPU cores and the Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU for future Android devices. Arm says single-thread performance is 15 percent higher, application startup is 12 percent faster, web browsing is 15 percent faster and cluster-level multi-threading is 12 percent faster. AI acceleration is built into the CPU instead of a separate NPU or TPU, and Arm says the latest AI models run up to 1.7 times faster. The Mali GPU is 14 percent faster overall, the company said, with neural acceleration in the graphics pipeline, Unreal Engine 5 MegaLights support, and low-resolution game super-resolution and frame generation.

Nintendo's Legend of Zelda 40th-anniversary Direct, held the evening of Sept. 8, showed the first gameplay footage of the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake and confirmed it will be released Nov. 5, 2026. The Legend of Zelda feature film will reach theaters April 30, 2027, with no subtitle; Nintendo said audiences will understand why after seeing it. A 40th-anniversary Nintendo Switch 2 and Pro Controller will go on sale Oct. 29, 2026, and a worldwide 40th-anniversary concert tour is planned for 2027.

On Sept. 8, Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent for consumers in the U.S. Muse is powered by the Muse Spark model and runs inside an isolated Muse Secure VM, with a system-level Sentinel agent protecting credentials. It can continue working in the background after a user leaves the app. When no public API exists, built-in connectors can drive a service through the browser. Link by Stripe is already supported, with Shopify's Shop Pay and 1Password to be added. The agent launches on web, iOS, Android and WhatsApp, and is planned for Meta AI glasses. Activating Muse requires attaching a payment card; a basic free tier sends usage-limit warnings, while paid Power and Maximum tiers cost $20 and $100 per month.

On Sept. 8, Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, a database that predicts the molecular impacts of every single-nucleotide change in the human genome. Using the AlphaGenome model, DeepMind precomputed regulatory effects for 9 billion single-letter variants across roughly 3 billion DNA base pairs, creating a 1-petabyte dataset. A new AVI score combines coding and non-coding predictions. DeepMind says the Broad Institute has used the tool to locate a DNM1 splice-site variant for rare-disease diagnosis; in more than 54,000 UK Biobank participants, focusing on the top 1 percent of high-impact variants increased non-coding genetic association discoveries by 22 percent and identified 19 gene regions linked to BMI. The database is available through a no-code website portal.

On Sept. 5, independent developer Jeff Johnson reported that Chrome again appears to exempt Google's own search site from automated site-data clearing. In tests on two Macs running Chrome 152.0.7977.83, with DuckDuckGo as the default search engine, sign-in off and device-side website data set to delete when all windows close, 1,216 KB of Google Search site data remained after all windows closed and even after a browser restart; the leftovers included cookies, local storage and session storage. Johnson said Google Search was the only site known to receive the exemption.

Separately, Google shortened Chrome's major-version release cycle from four weeks to two. The first build on the schedule, Chrome 153, started rolling out to desktop, Android and iOS on Sept. 8, and Chrome 154 is expected on Sept. 22. An eight-week Extended Stable channel remains for enterprise customers.

Also on Sept. 9, Google modified travel search displays in Europe to comply with the Digital Markets Act, removing immediate hotel and flight price and availability information. The change follows a 460 million euro fine from the European Commission and meets a Sept. 23 deadline, with penalties of up to 5 percent of global annual revenue if Google misses it.