Tech & AI News Roundup — October 16, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

Quick links to what's actually happening in AI, tech, and IT right now — curated from real reporting, not rewritten, so you can go read the full story wherever it's genuinely worth your time.

The tech backlash is now in theaters

Though movies about disruptive tech founders are nothing new, 2026 has been unusually stacked with features that take a much more critical look at how Silicon Valley is reshaping our reality. Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning frames Mark Zuckerberg as a robotic villain whose ambitions are destabilizing society. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything paints a damning picture — The Verge

Plex now helps sell movie theater tickets

Discovery data from Plex users will help studios, advertisers. — Ars Technica

We Got Hot and Heavy With Meta’s Muse—and Baffled by Apple’s HomeView

This week on “Uncanny Valley,” we dive into an unexpected Muse feature, shadowy spending from the largest pro-AI super PAC, and men’s tendency to lie about how much they know about AI. — Wired

Hegseth’s dubious low-T screening may flag up to 25 percent of the Army

Medical experts explicitly recommend against blanket screenings. — Ars Technica

Trump posts AI-edited photo to brag about White House restoration work

President Donald Trump posted a series of photos on Truth Social showing off renovations to the White House - but one of them appears to be modified with AI. The picture, which compares an old White House column to a "restored" one, has several discrepancies and was flagged by Google's AI detector as "made or edited with OpenAI." As pointed out by users on Reddit, the picture of the "restored" col — The Verge

AI Hacks Leave a Mess That AI Companies Aren’t Paying For

Powerful AI models continue to cause chaos, but their targets aren’t widely seeking justice. Instead, they’re being encouraged to adopt those same tools. — Wired

Amazon devices chief Panos Panay on the importance of failure and bouncing back from it

Panay said that it's possible to recover and learn from all sorts of failures, even catastrophic ones, when building products. — TechCrunch

Critical PwnEscape Linux Kernel Vulnerability Lets Guest VMs Read Host Memory

A newly disclosed critical flaw in the Linux kernel allows code inside a virtual machine to read memory on the host computer it runs on. A researcher demonstrated the leak against Vercel's live cloud sandboxes, and Vercel confirmed it. The flaw, now tracked as CVE-2026-99999 and nicknamed PwnEscape, is in the Linux kernel's networking code, not in any one cloud's setup, so it reaches the shared — The Hacker News