The first Japanese citizen to launch into space, Toyohiro Akiyama was also the first commercially sponsored cosmonaut and the world's first journalist to file reports while on a spaceflight.

Akiyama, 84, died last Wednesday, August 26, of lower gastrointestinal bleeding, news agencies in Japan reported. A funeral was held with his close relatives in attendance.

As a correspondent for the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), Akiyama was chosen out of his 162 fellow employees who applied to fly to space in celebration of the network's 40th anniversary. He trained at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, located outside of Moscow, and was assigned to the Soyuz TM-11 crew.

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CISA has added the exploited flaw, CVE-2026-53362, to its KEV catalog, alongside a JFrog vulnerability exploited by OpenAI agents.

The post OpenAI Agents Exploited Linux Kernel Flaw on Company’s Own Systems appeared first on SecurityWeek.

CISA is urging government agencies to immediately patch the Citrix NetScaler vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-8452.

The post Recent Citrix NetScaler Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild appeared first on SecurityWeek.

CVE-2026-60004 is a remote code execution vulnerability patched by Gitea developers in late July with the release of version 1.27.1.

The post CISA Warns of Exploited Gitea Vulnerability appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Flowra has launched its Open Orderflow Auction framework for Solana validators, introducing a third-party block-building and MEV auction system designed around short, competitive ordering windows.

The system, launched on August 21, uses 200ms mini-auction cycles in which registered searchers compete for transaction inclusion. It also integrates with Honeypot, allowing validators to run custom block policies without changing Solana’s core protocol.

That distinction matters.

This is not a Solana hard fork. It is not a native protocol-level upgrade. It is middleware infrastructure for validators and block builders, aimed at changing how orderflow can be organized around the network.

TL;DR

• Flowra launched an Open Orderflow Auction system for Solana validators.
• Searchers compete in 200ms mini-auction cycles.
• The system is third-party validator middleware, not a Solana protocol hard fork.

Why Orderflow Matters

Orderflow is one of the most important hidden parts of crypto trading.

Before transactions land on-chain, they can be sorted, bundled, prioritized, routed, or competed over. That creates value for validators, searchers, users, and infrastructure providers. It also creates risk if orderflow becomes opaque or unfair.

Solana’s speed makes this even more important.

When blocks move quickly, the market around transaction inclusion becomes extremely competitive. Validators need tools to handle that flow, while traders and applications want execution that is efficient and predictable.

Flowra is entering that layer.

What An Open Orderflow Auction Does

An Open Orderflow Auction gives searchers a structured way to compete for inclusion.

Instead of orderflow being handled informally or through closed relationships, a defined auction framework can make the process more transparent and competitive. Registered searchers bid or compete within tight time windows, and validators can use the system to shape block construction.

In Flowra’s case, the 200ms mini-auction cycle is designed for Solana’s high-speed environment.

That kind of timing shows how specialized Solana infrastructure has become.

Validator Policy Control Is The Other Piece

The Honeypot integration is also important because it gives validators more control over block policies.

Validators may want to avoid certain transaction types, comply with specific policies, or optimize how they handle orderflow. Giving them configurable infrastructure may make Solana’s validator economy more flexible.

But it can also raise questions.

If validators adopt different policies, users and applications may need to understand how orderflow changes across the network. The line between customization and fragmentation will matter.

MEV Infrastructure Keeps Professionalizing

This launch fits a broader trend.

MEV and block-building infrastructure are becoming more professional across major chains. Ethereum has already seen years of debate around builders, relays, searchers, and validator incentives. Solana is now developing its own version of that market.

The goal is not to eliminate MEV entirely.

The goal is to manage it in ways that are more transparent, competitive, and less harmful to users. Whether Flowra succeeds will depend on adoption by validators and searchers.

What Comes Next

The key question is whether Solana validators actually use the framework.

A block-building system only matters if meaningful orderflow moves through it. Flowra will need participation from searchers, validator adoption, reliable infrastructure, and clear incentives.

If that happens, Solana’s transaction-ordering market could become more structured.

If adoption is limited, the launch may remain a niche infrastructure experiment.

For now, Flowra’s Open Orderflow Auction shows that Solana’s validator stack is getting more sophisticated — and that the battle over transaction ordering is becoming a serious part of the network’s infrastructure story.

This article is based on Flowra’s public launch materials and related infrastructure documentation.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

This report is based on information released in disclosures at primary source documentation.

The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-21962 and it has been widely exploited by threat actors against WebLogic servers.

The post CISA Warns of Exploited Oracle WebLogic Vulnerability appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Tesla looks set to bring support for some new streaming services to its in-car entertainment system, dubbed Tesla Theater after a number of major streaming services appear to be working in full-screen Theater mode.

The post Support For Apple TV, HBO And More Come To Tesla’s In-Car Entertainment Screen first appeared on Redmond Pie.

— Mehul Shah joined Oracle as group vice president for OCI data and storage services, ending a 14-year run at Amazon and Amazon Web Services.

In his last role at AWS, Shah led engineering and product for Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Oracle and Db2, and ran the launch and expansion of Oracle Database@AWS, the partnership that put Oracle’s database inside Amazon’s cloud.

“Through that collaboration, I saw firsthand that OCI shares the same DNA that inspired me to join Amazon back in 2012,” Shah said on LinkedIn, citing “deep curiosity, a passion to innovate, the courage to make bold decisions, and relentless drive to excel.”

Shah, who is based in Seattle, spent more than eight years at AWS, earlier leading real-time data streaming services including Amazon Data Firehose and Kinesis Data Streams, and serving as director and general manager of Amazon EMR. He started at Oracle this month.

— Seattle Children’s named Dr. Natalie Pageler senior vice president and chief information officer, putting her in charge of digital strategy and IT operations for the pediatric hospital system.

Pageler comes from Stanford Children’s Health and the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she was division chief of clinical informatics and earlier spent a decade as chief medical information officer. She is a pediatrician and clinical informaticist with more than 20 years of experience.

Seattle Children’s CEO Dr. Christopher Longhurst followed a similar path. He was chief medical information officer at Stanford Children’s Health, the same role Pageler held, before spending a decade at UC San Diego Health, most recently as chief clinical and innovation officer.

— Zillow Group named Cassandra “Sandi” Knight its first-ever chief legal and policy officer, a role the Seattle company created this month as part of a broader leadership shuffle. Reporting to CEO Jeremy Wacksman, she oversees Zillow’s legal, compliance and government relations functions.

Knight joins from Google, where she spent four years as a vice president leading global civil litigation and discovery. She was previously vice president and chief litigation counsel at PayPal, and spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley in senior litigation and compliance roles.

She began her career as a trial lawyer at the San Diego Public Defender’s Office, the firm Keker & Van Nest and the San Francisco City Attorney’s office. She holds a law degree from Stanford and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She arrives at a busy moment: Zillow and Redfin are set to go to trial Aug. 24 as defendants in an antitrust case brought by the FTC and five state attorneys general over the companies’ $100 million rental listings deal. Zillow has spent $26 million on the case so far this year.

Two longtime Zillow leaders are heading out:

• Sara Bonert, vice president of industry engagement for Zillow Group and ShowingTime+, is leaving after nearly 20 years. One of Zillow’s earliest employees, she joined in the fall of 2006 as director of broker services, helped build Zillow’s first platform for taking in listing data, and signed the partner agreements that took the site from zero to a million listings in four months.
• Jeff Tompkins, head of corporate real estate and operations, wrapped up almost five years with the company. Tompkins, who is based in Denver, ran Zillow’s workplace strategy across North America and beyond. He said he will share his next role soon.

— Amir Pelleg, a veteran of companies including Amazon and Convoy, is the new chief product officer at Uber Freight. He is based in Seattle, working out of the shared Uber and Uber Freight office on Second Avenue.

At Amazon, Pelleg was principal product manager for Kindle Fire, launched the Dash Button and initiated Alexa’s smart home controls, then incubated and launched Amazon Shipping in India, the U.K. and the U.S. as a director and general manager in Amazon Transportation.

He was a vice president on Convoy’s executive team until the Seattle freight startup shut down in 2023, then spent two and a half years at dental tech company Dandy.

“I’ve seen what works and what fails in digital freight,” Pelleg said in a Q&A posted by Uber Freight.

— Seattle’s Frazier Healthcare Partners added Wes Wheeler to its Growth Buyout team as an executive in residence, advising on diligence and on life science logistics and infrastructure.

Wheeler was most recently CEO of LabConnect, a central laboratory services company serving clinical trials, and before that president of UPS Healthcare, where he built a vertical of 10,000 employees across 35 countries. During Operation Warp Speed he was the primary industry interface to the U.S. government, overseeing distribution of more than 1.5 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to over 100 countries.

— Dr. Heather Cheng was announced as the inaugural recipient of the Marty Lazarus Weiden Family Endowed Chair at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, which will fund her work detecting, preventing and treating hereditary cancers.

Cheng is clinical director of cancer genetics programs at Fred Hutch and directs its prostate cancer genetics clinic. In 2016 she was part of a team that found more than 10% of men with advanced prostate cancer carry inherited mutations in DNA-repair genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2.

The chair is named for Marty Lazarus Weiden, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993 and died in 2001. The family learned only later that some of its members carry a BRCA mutation.

— Microsoft corporate vice president Darryl Willis was named to the board of ONE Nuclear Energy, a natural gas and advanced nuclear developer going public this quarter through a merger with Hennessy Capital Investment Corp.

Willis has led Microsoft’s energy and resources group since 2019. He was previously a Google Cloud vice president and a BP executive who ran the company’s Deepwater Horizon claims process and testified before Congress. He will officially join the board when the merger closes, and he is expected to chair its compensation committee.

— Jake Milstein was named head of healthcare solutions marketing at Zscaler, a return to healthcare cybersecurity. He joins from application security company Contrast Security and was earlier chief marketing and revenue officer at Critical Insight, the Bremerton, Wash.-based security firm acquired by Lumifi Cyber.

Before moving into technology, Milstein spent a decade at Seattle’s KIRO TV, including four years as news director.

— Michele Mehl left Amazon Web Services after nearly two and a half years to become senior public relations manager at ALSO, arriving the same week the electric vehicle company announced a $150 million Series D round led by Prysm Capital.

ALSO builds the TM-B consumer electric bike and the TM-Q commercial delivery quad, and counts Amazon and DoorDash among its commercial partners.

— Richard Van Bibber was named senior vice president of research and development at Verasonics, the Kirkland, Wash.-based maker of ultrasound research platforms used in fields including biomedical ultrasound, materials science and earth sciences.

Van Bibber has spent much of a 25-year medtech career in the Puget Sound region, including seven years as director of research at Kirkland’s Cardiac Dimensions and five years leading clinical affairs at Bellevue-based Aortica.

— Dave Cotter joined the board of Nickson, the apartment-furnishing startup led by Cameron Johnson, alongside MarcyPen Capital Partners and Larry Braithwaite. Cotter is CEO of Greenwood and has previously worked at Amazon, Nordstrom, zulily, RealNetworks and Leafly.

— PCC Community Markets president and CEO Krish Srinivasan will retire effective Jan. 29, 2027. Srinivasan was chief financial officer at Remitly and vice president of finance at Lyft before joining the Seattle grocery co-op as CFO, and earlier held leadership roles at Amazon and Microsoft.

— Seattle Foundation named Elizabeth Wong as chief philanthropy officer, reporting to President and CEO Alesha Washington. Wong spent more than a decade at Foundation Source and earlier worked directly with the Gates family at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And in case you missed it:

— Jay Bartot, a co-founder of the airfare-prediction startup Farecast and former chief technology officer of Madrona Venture Labs, was named CTO of Lev, the Pioneer Square Labs spinout building an “AI co-founder” for entrepreneurs. Read more here.

— Expedia Group is parting ways with at least eight vice presidents and senior vice presidents, and promoted five other leaders, as it reorganizes its product and technology groups around AI. Read more in this GeekWire story.

The Head Mare hacktivist group has been exploiting the bugs to deploy the PhantomCore malware.

The post CISA Urges Immediate Patching of Exploited TrueConf Vulnerabilities appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The flaws can be exploited for remote code execution, authentication bypass, and device takeover.

The post CISA Urges Immediate Patching of Exploited Microsoft, VMware, Apple Vulnerabilities appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Jay Bartot has spent most of his career building startups and advising other founders. Now he’s joining another veteran entrepreneur in a bet that technology can do a lot of that work.

Lev, the Pioneer Square Labs spinout building an “AI co-founder” for startup entrepreneurs, announced Thursday that Bartot is joining the company as its chief technology officer, working with founder and CEO T.A. McCann to turn the venture studio playbook into software.

Lev uses AI to walk founders through ideation, validation and company formation, generating assets such as competitive analyses, customer outreach templates and product specs along the way.

This week, the company is launching Lev Learn, a free public guide to the startup terminology founders are expected to already know — what a term means, who it’s for, when to use it, and the most common mistakes. McCann said the explanations will also surface inside Lev itself, so a founder told to talk to ICPs (ideal customer profiles), for example, can get an answer in context.

Bartot is a longtime Seattle entrepreneur, best known as a co-founder of Farecast, the airfare-prediction startup acquired by Microsoft in 2008. He later co-founded Medify, a medical information company sold in 2012, and Vhoto, a computer vision startup acquired by Hulu in 2015.

He spent five years as chief technology officer of Madrona Venture Labs — Madrona’s former venture studio — where he helped create and launch new companies, similar to what PSL does.

More recently, he has mentored at Creative Destruction Lab, the University of Washington, TheFounderVC, and Foundations, in addition to co-founding Seattle startup AirSignal in late 2024.

“Lev pulls all these different pieces together, where I can be building, but also building something that helps me interact with founders at scale,” Bartot said in an interview this week.

The startup grew out of tools McCann and his colleagues built inside PSL to bring more structure to the studio’s company-building process. PSL and its AI Studio Fund have invested more than $1 million in the startup, which spun out as a standalone business this spring, led by McCann, with PSL co-founder and Managing Director Greg Gottesman on its board.

“You think about the 1,000 people who might be Techstars mentors, or all the people sitting at YC giving founders advice, or at CDL or UW or 1,000 different universities,” McCann said. “All of these can be scaled with a product like Lev.”

Monthly signups have grown 17-fold in four months, he said, with active users in more than 50 countries and more than 1,500 projects started. Nearly one in 10 of Lev’s institutional users comes from a university or research organization.

Lev remains a small operation: McCann, Bartot, Per Nilsson, who had been serving as the company’s contract CTO, and design and development engineer Sahana Narendran. The company is pre-revenue, and McCann said he expects to turn on monetization in the coming weeks.

BYD’s new Seal 06 starts at $14,700 as a plug-in hybrid and $16,100 as a full EV, bringing flash charging, long range, and high-end tech to bargain-car pricing.

Volkswagen’s new ID. Era 5S starts at just $17,175 in China, putting a huge price gap between it and America’s cheapest electric cars.

Waymo has added one mo’ type of vehicle to its fleet in the Seattle area, where the company has been testing for the launch of its autonomous taxi service sometime down the road.

GeekWire spotted a boxy baby blue Ojai in the parking lot of a Fred Meyer store in the Ballard neighborhood on Friday morning. A driver inside confirmed the cute little van with an array of cameras on the front, back and top was indeed one of the company’s newest vehicles.

Waymo first announced in May that the Ojai (pronounced oh-hi) was rolling out in initial cities like Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

The purpose-built electric Ojai is developed in partnership with Chinese automaker Zeekr and assembled in Mesa, Ariz. It joins the electric Jaguar I-Pace SUV that is a frequent sight on roads around Seattle and the Eastside where testing with a driver first started last September.

Zeekr is the premium electric vehicle brand owned by Geely Holding Group — the Chinese automotive titan behind Volvo, Polestar, and Lotus. Originally designed at Geely’s research center in Gothenburg, Sweden, the base vehicle platform is customized specifically for autonomous ride-hailing before Waymo equips it with its self-driving tech stack.

The Ojai features Waymo’s 6th-generation autonomous hardware stack, which reduces sensor costs while improving performance in complex road and weather conditions, according to the company. The San Francisco Examiner reported that the updated sensor array has 13 cameras and four lidar sensors, compared with 29 cameras and five lidar sensors in the previous version. 

The inside of the Ojai looks especially roomy, which Waymo calls “a living room on wheels,” featuring elevator-like doors and a low step and flat floor that apparently make it easier to get in and out. Three LED screens are customizable for temperature, music and more.

Alphabet-owned Waymo began in 2009 as the Google Self-Driving Car Project. In 2022, Google tested cars in Bellevue and Kirkland for six months to better understand operations in rainy weather.

Before Waymo can officially pull human safety drivers out of the front seat for paid rides in the region, Washington state lawmakers will need to establish a dedicated regulatory framework.

Earlier this year, state Sen. Matt Boehnke introduced SB 6243, which aimed to establish statewide operational and safety guidelines for commercial autonomous vehicle networks. The measure failed to pass out of committee during the 2026 legislative session.

Waymo says it has facilitated more than 20 million fully autonomous trips across 11 cities. Beyond the initial markets announced in May, Waymo said it planned to roll Ojai out to Denver, Las Vegas and San Diego, before going wider to everyone later this year.

Tesla has just built it's 10 millionth EV! Here is everything you need to know about this.

The post Tesla’s 10 Millionth EV Has Been Built first appeared on Redmond Pie.

Tesla's 2026 summer software release is just around the corner, and the company has shared details about what the update will bring to Tesla vehicles, including Grok improvements and more.

The post Tesla Releases Summer 2026 Software Update, Here’s What Is New first appeared on Redmond Pie.

CISA added CVE-2026-48939 and CVE-2026-56291 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after automated attackers exploited file upload flaws in iCagenda and Balbooa Forms weeks before either bug had a CVE number.

Two Joomla Extensions Hit by Zero-Day File Upload Attacks Before Patches Landed on Latest Hacking News | Cyber Security News, Hacking Tools and Penetration Testing Courses.