Xpeng Unveils Next-Generation Humanoid Robot IRON

On November 5, Xpeng Inc. released its brand-new humanoid robot, IRON. Built around a “skeleton–muscle–skin” biomimetic architecture, it comes equipped with a high-performance AI chip and an in-house developed physical-world large model.

IRON features a human-like spine, bionic muscles and fully-covered flexible skin, with a 3D curved display for the head. Both shoulders and arms adopt agile biomimetic designs, allowing a total of 22 degrees of freedom for fine precision control. Its gait is more natural, and it can perform stable walking, posture adjustments, and fine operations with its hands.

On the hardware side, it uses three Turing AI chips with a combined computing power of 2250 TOPS, enabling multi-modal conversation, visual recognition and interactive behaviour decision-making. For energy it employs an all-solid-state battery system, achieving lightweight construction and high safety. Its robotic system is based on XPENG’s self-developed physical-world large model architecture, integrating three core capabilities: VLT (Visual-Language-Motion model), VLA (Visual-Language-Action model), and VLM (Visual-Language-Perception model). This allows real-time sensing, inference and response in complex environments.

XPENG says IRON will first be deployed in commercial service scenarios such as museums, 4S car dealerships, and shopping malls. Meanwhile they are partnering with Baosteel to explore industrial inspection and safety monitoring applications for the robot. Looking ahead, XPENG plans to open an IRON SDK to invite global developers to take part in the humanoid-robot application ecosystem, driving the industrialisation of bionic intelligence.Source

Sora Lands on Android Platform

Also on November 5, Sora — the AI video-generation app from OpenAI — officially launched on Android, in the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries. Mirroring the iOS version released a month earlier, the Android version remains invite-only.

Sora was originally launched on iOS in September; according to official data it reached over 1 million downloads within five days. The app offers a TikTok-style video browsing experience and lets users become the star of AI-generated videos via its “Cameo” feature.Source

Google Removes Large Bulk of “Anna’s Archive” URLs

According to a transparency report published November 5 by Google LLC, copyright holders requested removal of 784 million URLs from the notorious pirated-book site Anna’s Archive, of which Google complied with 749 million. The non-removed portion was due to Google not indexing those links.

The URLs from Anna’s Archive accounted for 5% of all removal requests Google received. Since publishing its first transparency report in 2012, the company has received 15.1 billion URLs flagged for copyright infringement. Among the most active publishers targeting Anna’s Archive are Penguin Random House and John Wiley & Sons; on average copyright holders report about 10 million new Anna’s Archive URLs every week.Source

Microsoft to Retire Defender Application Guard in Office

On November 5, Microsoft Corporation announced that beginning February 2026 it will eliminate the “Microsoft Defender Application Guard (MDAG)” feature built into the Office suite. After the removal, protected files will open by default in “Protected View”, which is essentially a read-only mode disabling most editing functions.

According to Microsoft’s published timeline, the removal will begin with the Office 2602 version released in the February update channel and will roll out phase-by-phase across update channels. The full removal is expected by the December 2027 release of Office 2612.Source

CowTransfer to Cease Service

On November 5, the file-transfer service CowTransfer’s team announced that the platform will officially shut down on December 8. After that date, login, upload, and download functions will cease. Users are advised to download and back up their important files before December 8. If a user’s membership remains valid past that date, they can log in to the account, read the internal announcement and follow the service’s handling instructions.

The team stated that they will now focus on upgrading and innovating their sister product Gaoding Design. For users who still need file-sharing, multi-user collaboration, online design or AI-creation support after CowTransfer’s shutdown, Gaoding Design will serve those needs.Source

SanDisk Launches Extreme Fit USB-C Flash Drive

On November 5, SanDisk announced the new Extreme Fit USB-C Flash Drive. According to the company, the 1TB configuration is “the world’s smallest 1TB USB-C flash drive,” measuring just 18.50 × 15.70 × 13.60 mm and priced at $119.99.

Designed with a plug-and-stay concept, the drive is extremely compact—once inserted into a MacBook’s USB-C port, it barely protrudes from the chassis. Beyond Mac devices, it’s also compatible with all iPad and iPhone models equipped with USB-C.The product line ranges from 64GB to 1TB, all supporting the USB 3.2 Gen 1 standard with read speeds up to 400 MB/s.

However, due to its inability to meet the high sustained write speeds required for formats like 4K 120fps ProRes, it cannot record high-bitrate video directly when connected to an iPhone.Source

Toshiba Launches S300 AI Surveillance HDD

On November 5, Toshiba Corporation unveiled its new S300 AI series of mechanical hard drives specifically designed for modern AI video-surveillance workloads. The lineup offers eight capacities: 8 TB, 10 TB, 14 TB, 16 TB, 18 TB, 20 TB, 22 TB and 24 TB. It supports up to 550 TB of annual workload and offers a MTTF (Mean Time To Failure) of up to 2.5 million hours, engineered for mission-critical, 24/7 environments with a five-year warranty.

Toshiba says the S300 AI series has been optimised to handle the random read/write demands typical of AI workloads in surveillance applications, ensuring fast access to imaging datasets for accurate, real-time AI analysis and insights. It supports up to 64 high-definition camera streams, plus an extra 32 AI streams. Deliveries of the 8 TB and 10 TB models will begin this month, with larger-capacity versions expected in Q1 2026.Source