We have a remarkable blend of stories for you today from the world of science and technology. A $7 gadget that punches well above its price by sniffing out hidden cameras with surprising reliability. In the age of stylized camera-equipped creepy glasses, we need gizmos like this. Next, we get a trip back to the dawn of artificial intelligence courtesy of the Internet Archive's new collection of 1970s chatbots you can actually converse with. And finally, a genuine leap in space communication as China demonstrates a high-speed laser link stretching all the way between Earth and the Moon.

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Researchers at KAIST built a gadget that can find hidden cameras in seconds, and hidden cameras stuffed inside pens, clocks, chargers, and picture frames have become an unsettling reality in hotel rooms and short-term rentals, and the consumer detectors most people rely on are largely failing them. A study from University College London found that people using off-the-shelf detectors still missed 59% of devices during testing, a sobering figure that researchers at KAIST used as motivation to build something far more reliable. Their answer is SweepLED, a smartphone attachment that costs under $7 to construct and catches hidden cameras with 94% accuracy in under five seconds per object. The reason existing detectors fall short comes down to physics.

They shine light at an object and look for a telltale reflection, but glass, metal, and shiny plastic all bounce light back in similar ways, leaving users guessing whether a glint is a lens or just a coincidence. SweepLED sidesteps that problem by keeping the phone camera stationary while sweeping the LED light across the object from multiple angles. A camera lens, with its layered glass, aperture, and sensor, deforms and warps its reflection in a distinctive pattern as the light angle shifts, something an ordinary shiny surface simply does not do. The tool records the full sweep as a short video and runs it through an AI model trained to identify those specific deformations. SweepLED is not a consumer product yet, but the simplicity of its design suggests it could translate into a real, affordable gadget sooner rather than later.

ChatGPT and Claude don't just answer questions anymore. Employees are connecting them directly to Notion, Linear, Jira, and the rest of your stack. The AI can read, write, and take actions on company data. Most IT and security teams have no visibility into any of it.

Harmonic Security Connectors changes that. It sits inline with every AI-to-app connection, so you see each call, control what data moves, and block destructive actions before they happen. Employees notice nothing different.

See what's actually running across your business in a live demo.

See what's connected

The Internet Archive has quietly assembled one of the most fascinating corners of computing history, a browser-playable collection of artificial intelligence software spanning the 1970s through the 1990s. Curated by Jason Scott under the title "Vintage Artificial Intelligence," the collection gathers emulated chatbots and AI-adjacent games that once tried, with wildly varying success, to convince users they were communicating with something that could think. No downloads or setup are required as everything runs through in-browser emulation, making decades of AI prehistory immediately accessible to anyone curious enough to click. The crown jewel of the collection is ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum's DOCTOR script that mimicked a therapist so convincingly that early users reportedly opened up to it as though it were a real person.

The archive holds dozens of versions reflecting how widely the software was rewritten over the years. Alongside it sits Racter, a 1985 commercial chatbot that generated such strange passages of prose that some found their way into published work, an eerie prequel to what large language models do today. The collection also includes Activision's Alter Ego, a psychologist-designed life-simulation game, David Crane's Little Computer People, and Suspended, which splits a player's consciousness across six robots, each handling separate tasks, a structure that feels remarkably familiar in the current age of AI agents. For anyone who wants to understand how today's AI conversations evolved, this collection offers a rare and genuinely playable record of the long road that led here.

Chinese researchers have successfully established a two-way high-speed laser communication link between Earth and the Moon, spanning more than 400,000 kilometers. Announced by the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the milestone follows more than a year of in-orbit testing and represents a significant extension of China's laser communications capabilities beyond near-Earth orbit into deep space. Compared with traditional microwave systems, laser communications deliver faster speeds, greater bandwidth, stronger security, and more compact hardware, advantages that become increasingly critical as lunar ambitions grow more complex.

To recover a signal so faint that ground telescopes catch only a handful of photons at a time, drowned out by moonlight, starlight, and urban light pollution, the researchers developed superconducting single-photon detection hardware and high-sensitivity algorithms. Special coding schemes and high-bandwidth signal processing pushed the link to verified rates of 1.25 Mbps uplink and 100 Mbps downlink. With China planning manned lunar landings and a permanent lunar research station, the volumes of imagery and scientific data that future missions will generate would quickly overwhelm conventional radio links, making this laser highway a foundational piece of infrastructure for the next era of lunar exploration.

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