标签：#TL

Smart Lighting Protocol Showdown: Zigbee vs Matter vs BLE Mesh (2026) After deploying thousands of Zigbee smart lights through our manufacturing line at nexLAMP, and watching countless customers struggle with protocol selection, I decided to write this practical comparison. The Real Problem "My smart lights keep disconnecting! I think I chose the wrong protocol..." This is the #1 complaint I see on Reddit, Xiaohongshu, and Zhihu. The fix isn't a better router — it's choosing the right protocol from day one. Protocol Deep Dive Zigbee — The Workhorse Frequency : 2.4 GHz (separate from WiFi) Topology : Star + Mesh hybrid Max devices : 200+ per coordinator Latency : 50-200ms Cost/unit : ~$3.5-5.0 (Tuya Zigbee drivers) Why it wins for lighting: Each node is a repeater → self-healing mesh Ultra-low power → years on coin cell for sensors Mature ecosystem → Tuya, Hue, Aqara, Xiaomi all ship Zigbee The catch: You need a Zigbee gateway (~$15-20). This is the only upfront cost. BLE Mesh — The Budget Option Frequency : 2.4 GHz (shared with WiFi/BLE) Topology : Managed flood mesh Max devices : ~50 (practical limit ~30) Latency : 100-500ms (increases with node count) Cost/unit : ~$2.0-3.5 The flooding problem: Every command is broadcast to every node. With N nodes, you get O(N²) message propagation. Past 30 devices, you'll notice visible lag. Good for: Small apartments (≤ 6 lights), budget projects. Matter — The Future Transport : Thread (preferred) or WiFi Topology : Thread mesh (similar to Zigbee) Max devices : 250+ (theoretical) Latency : 30-150ms (Thread), variable (WiFi) Cost/unit : ~$7.0-11.0 (currently higher) Matter's promise is genuine cross-platform control. But in 2026: Pros: Native HomeKit, Alexa, Google Home support Thread mesh is excellent (when it works) IP-based → easier cloud integration Cons: Thread Border Routers aren't ubiquitous yet Advanced lighting features still evolving Premium pricing for early adoption Cost Analysis (20-Fixture Deployment) Protocol Driv

The global AI race is often framed as a battle between the United States and China. But at VivaTech, Europe is expected to make the case for an entirely different model.

The global AI race is often framed as a battle between the United States and China. But at VivaTech, Europe is expected to make the case for an entirely different model.

Every founder who applies to Startup Battlefield wants the same thing: the Disrupt Main Stage. Here’s how to get there and why the opportunity starts well before the main stage.

We wanted to show you what happens after the confetti falls. We checked in with some of our recent alumni, many of whom have sat down with us on Build Mode: The Founder Survival Guide, TechCrunch's podcast for founders at every stage.

The Instagram accounts for the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force were briefly defaced with pro-Iranian images and messages over the weekend, after instructions began circulating on Telegram showing how to trick Meta's "AI support assistant" bot into resetting account passwords.

About this series. I'm going to take a fresh paper - Self-Distilled Agentic Reinforcement Learning (SDAR, arXiv:2605.15155 ) - and architect it end to end on AWS: the system design, the actual gate code, the evaluation plan, and a brutally honest cost model. What I'm not going to do is wave a benchmark number around. Reproducing a paper like this costs thousands in GPU time, and I'd rather show you the machinery than a screenshot you can't audit. The design is the deliverable. This is Part 1. A small, infuriating problem Picture an LLM agent working a web-shopping task. It reads the goal, searches, clicks a category, filters, opens a product, compares, adds to cart - twelve steps in all. At the end, it bought the wrong thing. So you do what reinforcement learning tells you to do: you score the trajectory. Reward = 0. Bad agent. Now answer this: which of the twelve steps was actually wrong? Maybe step 3, the search query, was fine and step 9, a filter choice, doomed everything. Maybe steps 1–11 were brilliant and step 12 fat-fingered the wrong button. Your single scalar reward has no idea. It punishes all twelve equally, including the eight that were correct. That's the supervision problem in agentic RL, and it's the thing this whole series is about. Why "just use RL" isn't enough for agents RL has become the default way to post-train LLM agents. The catch is that the reward usually lands at the trajectory level - one number for the entire multi-step episode. For a single-turn task ("answer this question"), that's tolerable; the action and the outcome are close together. For a long-horizon agent - ten, twenty, fifty turns of searching, calling tools, and reacting to an environment - it's a disaster of credit assignment . The signal is too coarse to tell the model which decisions earned the reward and which torpedoed it. You can throw more episodes at it and let statistics sort the credit out eventually. But "eventually" on a 30-turn task burns a lot of expensive comp

Startup Battlefield applications are due tomorrow, so now's the time to put the finishing touches on your submission!

Europe’s startup ecosystem has matured significantly; its founders are increasingly willing to scale companies domestically instead of immediately looking to relocate to the U.S.

After overwhelming demand from founders around the world, TechCrunch has extended the Startup Battlefield 200 application deadline to June 8. Nominate a standout startup or apply yours today.

Forecasters say expected El Niño should temper hurricanes in Atlantic, urge preparedness.

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked credentials.

Canadian authorities on Wednesday arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man on suspicion of building and operating Kimwolf, a fast spreading Internet-of-Things botnet that enslaved millions of devices for use in a series of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the past six months. KrebsOnSecurity publicly named the suspect in February 2026 after the accused launched a volley of DDoS, doxing and swatting campaigns against this author and a security researcher. He now faces criminal hacking charges in both Canada and the United States.

Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems. Security experts said the public archive included files detailing how CISA builds, tests and deploys software internally, and that it represents one of the most egregious government data leaks in recent history.

It’s nasty , but it requires physical access to the computer: The exploit, named YellowKey, was published earlier this week by a researcher who goes by the alias Nightmare-Eclipse. It reliably bypasses default Windows 11 deployments of BitLocker, the full-volume encryption protection Microsoft provides to make disk contents off-limits to anyone without the decryption key, which is stored in a secured piece of hardware known as a trusted platform module (TPM). BitLocker is a mandatory protection for many organizations, including those that contract with governments...

An ongoing data extortion attack targeting the widely-used education technology platform Canvas disrupted classes and coursework at school districts and universities across the United States today, after a cybercrime group defaced the service's login page with a ransom demand that threatened to leak data from 275 million students and faculty across nearly 9,000 educational institutions.

A Brazilian tech firm that specializes in protecting networks from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has been enabling a botnet responsible for an extended campaign of massive DDoS attacks against other network operators in Brazil, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The firm's chief executive says the malicious activity resulted from a security breach and was likely the work of a competitor trying to tarnish his company's public image.

A 24-year-old British national and senior member of the cybercrime group "Scattered Spider" has pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft. Tyler Robert Buchanan admitted his role in a series of text-message phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that allowed the group to hack into at least a dozen major technology companies and steal tens of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency from investors.

Hackers linked to Russia's military intelligence units are using known flaws in older Internet routers to mass harvest authentication tokens from Microsoft Office users, security experts warned today. The spying campaign allowed state-backed Russian hackers to quietly siphon authentication tokens from users on more than 18,000 networks without deploying any malicious software or code.