Daily Tech News 23 May 2026

Top Story

• Spotify is focusing on AI to deliver everything except what it is paid to deliver. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Spotify wants to become an "everything audio" app, only it's all AI. Audiobooks read by AI; podcasts read by AI; your daily schedule... Read to you by AI.
  
  Want to listen to music? Well, sure, that's in there too. Somewhere. Probably.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AI 13% of "skills" - instructions for AI agents on how to perform a task, as opposed to "prompts" which tell it what you want it do do - on ClawHub and skills.sh have critical security vulnerabilities. (The Register)
  
  Either upstream - the creator accidentally leaving an API key in the file when uploading it to be shared - or downstream, telling your AI agent to hand over all your valuables.
  
  How do developers get these dangerous files registered on skill sharing sites? Simple: They know that nobody ever reads beyond the first page, not even security scanners:

  The most successful strategy for evading detection was to overflow the context window of the scanner - making the skill too long for the scanner to handle. "In ClawHub-style review, only the first 10K characters of long SKILL.md files are passed to the LLM reviewer, so we place the malicious instruction beyond this boundary while keeping it in the submitted skill," the authors explain.

  Face meet palm.

Tech News

• Google's API keys are distributed - as expected of a global platform - and asynchronous. (Dark Reading)
  
  The upshot of which is that if you delete an API key because you suspect it might have fallen into the wrong hands, it will disappear instantly from view for you. But those wrong hands might have access to it for another twenty minutes, which is a long time on this scale.
  
  
  
• Firefox has stopped crashing on Intel Raptor lake (13th and 14th generation) systems. (Dark Reading)
  
  Mozilla initially blamed Intel for the problem, because 13th and 14th generation Intel processors - at least the high-end desktop ones, not so much laptop chips - had a serious problem where they would draw too much power and slowly kill themselves, resulting in much the same instability that showed up in their diagnostic reports.
  
  Except... It disproportionately affected Firefox. Because this time it wasn't Intel's fault.
  
  
  
• Walmart has announced a new range of Android tablets starting at $97. (Liliputing)
  
  Are they any good? Well, the cheapest model with its 7" 1024x600 screen is most definitely not.
  
  The next step up, though, an 8.1" model priced at $138, has a 1524x1000 screen, 6GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage. It's certainly not a high end model but that's not a high-end price, and the screen while not amazing is distinctly better than the 1280x800 resolution found in competitors. The 6GB of RAM is a useful bump from the more typical 4GB in this price range.
  
  Worth a look if you live near a Walmart, which I do not.
  
  
  
• ENReco Chapter 3 starts tomorrow, running from the 24th to the 29th. There goes all my free time. Chapter 1 produced - from memory - 400 hours of content in eight days, more than was possible to watch even if you skipped sleep entirely and watched two streams at once.