The state of New Mexico asked a judge on Thursday to order Meta Platforms to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion in penalties after a jury found the company had misled consumers about the privacy of their data on Facebook in a case that came out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Attorneys for New Mexico made the request at a hearing in a lawsuit brought following revelations that the British political consulting firm, which worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app without their consent. The jury returned its verdict on September 25. Judge Francis Mathew, who oversaw the trial in Santa Fe, will decide how much Meta must pay in financial penalties. […] State law allows the judge to decide how much to fine Meta per violation, up to $5,000. At the hearing on Thursday, Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution’s protections on due process. But the judge should order a significant payment that will impact the company, McGinn said.

“This court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price,” McGinn said. She said $35 billion to $40 billion, which represents about 20% of the possible penalties that could be awarded under state law from the verdict, would impact the stock price while complying with Meta’s right to due process under the Constitution. At the hearing on Thursday, Matt Nicholson, a lawyer for Meta, called the state’s request an “astronomical penalty that would obviously violate a host of constitutional provisions.” In court filings, Meta urged Mathew to cap the penalties at $3.45 billion. The jury may have said it found Meta’s statements misleading, but the evidence shows that Meta does not sell user data and New Mexico did not prove that any consumer had actually been misled, the company said in court filings. The judge said he expected to issue a ruling later this month.

Just like [DeepMind’s DeepNash, introduced in 2022], Ataraxos learned by playing against itself — 163 million games in total. In these self-play sessions, moves that led to wins were reinforced and played more often in future matches, while moves that led to losses were played less, which was the same simple training idea. The difference was in how much Ataraxos adjusted after each game, because hidden information tends to send self-play learning algorithms around in circles. The team addressed this by making big, bold changes in strategy early in training and small, careful ones later.

The even bigger innovation was something DeepNash never had: thinking ahead before each move. AIs like AlphaGo refine their general strategy with a search just before acting. DeepMind couldn’t make that work in Stratego because the search space was too large, leaving it an open question whether it was worth trying. “This is one of the things that we did figure out how to do,” Farina said. The solution was a second neural network, a belief model, trained to guess the opponent’s hidden pieces based on how they had been moving. This way, instead of iterating through every possible arrangement, Ataraxos samples plausible ones, plays out candidate moves in each, and picks based on how they turned out. And it shows in its playstyle.

[…] DeepNash was trained for two to three months on 1,024 of Google’s specialized chips, a run the Ataraxos team estimates would cost $3 million to $4.5 million at 2025 prices. Ataraxos, in contrast, needed 16 GPUs for a week, plus an additional four GPUs for four days to train the belief model. Farina and lead author Samuel Sokota achieved this efficiency by writing a simulator that runs millions of moves per second on graphics cards. “At the scale that we are in academia, we don’t really have access to an entire field of GPUs,” Farina said. The algorithm also learned far faster — it played about 34 times fewer games than DeepNash, and still ended up much stronger.

GeekWire

reports that the University of Washington has moved its Global Innovation Exchange {GIX) program to Microsoft’s campus in a rent-free deal (UW News release). GIX, an institute supporting tech leaders that offers an MS in Technology Innovation, is the first UW program to set up full-time operations at Microsoft, whose headquarters are just across Lake Washington from the university’s main campus. Microsoft provided a $42 million in-kind donation to establish the embedded facility; the UW is leasing the new 48,500-square-foot GIX space in Microsoft’s Building 92 rent-free. GIX debuted in 2015 as a partnership of the UW and China’s Tsinghua University and received $70 million in Microsoft support at the now-abandoned GIX location in Bellevue (the Steve Ballmer Building), although indications are that a long-term arrangement did not come together as intended.

In a Thursday LinkedIn post, Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote: “Last night we opened a door unlike any other. At the heart of Microsoft’s campus, step into the new home of the UW’s Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) and you cross from Microsoft into the University of Washington. No one has ever put a great research university and a leading technology company under the same roof quite like this. As far as I know, no one has even tried. The timing matters. Artificial intelligence is advancing fast. The question is whether the people building it understand the world it’s changing. This calls for a new style of education and leadership. We need leaders who understand the technology deeply and see things through other people’s eyes. Leaders who learn by collaborating on real projects with people from different countries and disciplines. That’s what GIX is built for. Students will learn from faculty across the UW, take classes taught by Microsoft employees, and be mentored by people from across our industry here in the Pacific Northwest.”

Interestingly, Smith’s contention that UW GIX students will benefit from a ‘new style’ of Microsoft and industry-influenced education sounds a lot like Smith’s contention that K-12 school children are better off thanks to a new style of Microsoft and industry-influenced education. In an interview last month, Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools author Natasha Singer told NPR (podcast, transcript), “For my book, I spoke to Brad Smith, who’s the president of Microsoft, and he has been one of the leaders in the tech industry pushing for [K-12] computer science [and now AI literacy] in schools. […] And Brad Smith said, philanthropy in the private sector is doing this work because public schools have failed to do what they were supposed to do. And his view is that public schools should be teaching modern subjects like computer science, and they were not equipped to do it fast enough and the tech industry stepped in to help. And is it better than if schools were able to do this themselves? He said, no, but it’s certainly better than nothing. And he said to me, you know, think about where we would be on computer science if the tech industry hadn’t stepped up. […] Well, I’ve been having this conversation with him for 10 years, and when we started having it 10 years ago, I said to him, I get that, but when big tech companies put their finger on the scale, it tips education in certain ways that not only favor the tech industry but can obscure equally or more important things.”

So, is “The University of Washington at Microsoft” a good or bad idea?

Days after a journalist claimed that Meta’s Muse app on Mac read their private messages — a claim that Meta disputed — Apple announced that it’s introducing additional controls around a setting called “Full Disk Access” on macOS. The feature was designed to allow backups to function properly, but AI agents have now increased “the risks associated with this level of access,” Apple said. […] In Muse’s case, the AI optionally allows users to enable Full Disk Access. This setting, Apple explains, gives an app permission to access files, mail, messages, and even browsing history.

“Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems… without users’ full knowledge and understanding,” Apple said in a new blog post aimed at developers. The company says that, going forward, it will introduce new controls aimed at ensuring that users who “genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access” can do so only with “every explicit user action.”

“Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy,” Apple wrote.

Anyone buying used hardware for a gaming PC needs to be careful: not just whether the components are still in order but also what the previous owner did with them. A case on Reddit shows this. Someone installed a used AMD processor, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, in their PC. Because the previous owner was caught cheating, the new owner cannot start several online games.

The problem was noticed in the first-person shooter “Valorant” from the development studio Riot. Right from the first start, the new owner was kicked out directly, according to their statement. Riot support confirmed that the previous owner had cheated. The processor is therefore on an internal blacklist — and, with its installation in the PC, now apparently also some other components like the mainboard. Riot support does not remove such entries manually.

In addition to “Valorant,” all other PC games from Riot are affected: the strategy game “League of Legends,” the auto-battler “Teamfight Tactics,” the card game “Legends of Runeterra,” the fighting game “2XKO,” and likely future titles as well.

“I don’t understand the added value here,” one official wrote on an internal staff message board, seen by POLITICO. Another described the tool as “absolute shit.” A third official said that, judging matters on how well Element Pro works compared to Teams, the U.S. would “instantly win the war” if it ever decided to switch off its technology. All the officials were granted anonymity to speak freely.

The Commission hosts the Element system on its own infrastructure rather than relying on Microsoft’s cloud. That gives the institution greater control over its communications data and systems. “That is not the case with Teams, where all we have is a guarantee that Microslop will not peek inside,” a fourth official wrote, presumably referring to Microsoft, in internal communications viewed by POLITICO.

Element is a U.K. company whose software is used by governments and public-sector organizations in Europe. The application works much like Teams, allowing staff to hold “audio and video calls with Commission colleagues, send and receive files, and create dedicated ‘rooms’ for projects and conversations, much like chats and channels in M365 Teams,” according to the Commission memo.

The lawsuits were filed in 2025, and Google requested a dismissal earlier this year. Chegg, an education and learning platform, claimed in its lawsuit that Google illegally scraped its educational content. This allowed Gemini models to essentially recreate that content and reduce the site’s traffic. Penske, which owns publications like Rolling Stone and Variety, filed a similar case that alleged lost traffic. Specifically, the publisher claimed it was unfair that sites indexed for organic search would also have their content harvested for AI answers, with no way to opt out.

These arguments did not sway the judge, who noted that Google’s implicit agreement with websites is not legally relevant. “Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an ‘expectation’ that Google will send them search “traffic if they make their content available for free,” wrote Mehta. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.”

Since Google never had a formal arrangement with either Chegg or Penske, antitrust law doesn’t apply. And Mehta is aware of the legal issues surrounding search. He also heard the DOJ’s long-running search antitrust case against Google, eventually finding that Google violated the law. However, the government didn’t get the harsh penalties it wanted in that case.

A growing number of people think social media manipulates and divides people and harms democracy, Pew Research Center said on Thursday, echoing rising concern and tighter scrutiny across the world. Companies running popular social platforms, including Meta, Snap, and TikTok, have faced thousands of lawsuits and paid large sums to settle claims that they harmed users. Governments, meanwhile, have sought foolproof ways to protect their citizens’ privacy.

Australia has proposed rules to let users opt out of algorithmically recommended feeds, after becoming the first country to ban social media for children under 16. Pew’s latest survey showed that 82% of Australian adults support the government’s move to restrict social media access for children. A majority of respondents said social media informs people and gives them a voice in politics, but there was a broad rise in those who now see social media as a “bad thing” compared to 2022, according to the report.

People in wealthier countries, including the US, Canada and UK, are more inclined to believe that social media is harming democracy, versus their counterparts in economies with lower gross domestic product per capita — such as Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. The US is among the most skeptical, with 64% of adult respondents saying social media harms democracy. The share of people who consider social media bad for democracy increased in 16 of 26 countries where older data was available. Pew Research said it surveyed more than 45,000 people in 37 countries, while polling an additional 5,511 US adults on American social media use.

While so many of us were focused on fictional superintelligent machines that we were told could hypothetically cause human extinction, however, there was a more serious story being reported. A series of events almost got us to armageddon, not caused by “rogue, superintelligent AI,” but by government reliance on error-prone systems that are marketed by their manufacturers as being close to superintelligent.

A CNN report published on September 18, which hasn’t been verified by other major outlets, describes how the US “almost started a war” with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.

It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel’s contents. Unlike the terminator, “rogue AI,” scenario, this incident didn’t galvanize lawmakers into announcing calls for regulation so as to avoid potential human extinction. Media outlet after media outlet didn’t warn the public that we almost triggered a war against a nuclear superpower because of our military’s reliance on error-prone chatbots.

Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and lead author of the report, said many people do not realize how fast glaciers are retreating, or that just one generation ago some now-barren sites used to sit beneath hundreds of meters of ice. The scientists have not yet compiled a formal tally of lost glaciers this year but said they had witnessed the death of a number of small ones. “I visited one last week and it’s so impressive to stand in this moonlike landscape where there was a big layer of ice — an extensive glacier — just a few years ago,” said Huss. “And now it’s a rock desert where there’s some scattered blocks of old ice still lying around and melting on the hot rocks.”

The report, a collaboration between the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation, found the mean thickness of individual glaciers fell by between 2.5 metres and 4 metres in 2026. Huss said scientists were increasingly seeing glaciers collapse from the inside — the result of internal streams beneath the ice that excavate caverns — rather than simply retreating from surface heat. […] Analysis published by MeteoSwiss on Tuesday found the summer half-year from April to September was the hottest and driest it had been since records began in 1864. In that time, humanity has filled the atmosphere with 1.8tn tons of carbon dioxide and heated the planet by about 1.4C.

OpenAI has informed more than 100 organizations about incidents involving unauthorized activity tied to its AI agents, according to a blog post by the ChatGPT maker, as AI labs face mounting scrutiny over rogue AI agent activity. Here are some other details:

- The Sam Altman-led company has been conducting a broad review of the activities of its AI models after the accidental hacking of Hugging Face.
- OpenAI is searching through roughly 50 petabytes of data as it works to understand the full scope of its rogue agent activity.
- A string of high-profile breaches globally by rogue AI agents in recent months has sparked widespread worries within the AI industry over its ability to control the more powerful AI models now under development.
- “In some cases, models used internet access in unintended ways or, in retrospect, did not have the ideal restrictions applied. Over the last several months, we have been applying new technical and operational measures to avoid similar problems, or catch them very early, and will continue this work,” OpenAI said.
- OpenAI previously said the review would take months to complete given the scale of the work.
- The Hugging Face incident remains the most severe rogue agent activity OpenAI has identified from its AI models so far.

Communities across California are rushing to prepare for the imminent arrival of the so-called “Kelvin wave,” a massive underwater band of warm water threatening to inundate swaths of the vast North American shoreline. The wave is nearing southern California and expected to reach the San Francisco Bay Area by early October, as it crawls toward Alaska. Waters could rise by a foot along the California coast, according to scientists, who have warned that this could dramatically double the 8-12in rise in sea levels already caused by climate change over the last century.

The Kelvin wave doesn’t climb and crash like a typical ocean wave; rather, it swells the tides from beneath the surface. It’s effectively a massive slosh of warm water, driven by El Nino conditions, that moves across the Pacific before colliding with the South American coastline and surging north. It also won’t transport water in the way a tsunami might, but creates conditions that enable higher sea levels to linger. On their own, Kelvin waves aren’t always hazardous, according to Mike Jacox, a research oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service, though they can reduce the growth of phytoplankton that form the base of the marine food web. “But when there are very high tides or storm surges, their effects can be amplified,” he said.

If the rising waters coincide with other climatic events, such as rainstorms and high tides, the phenomenon could swallow beaches, chew away bluffs and coastlines, and submerge streets, homes and businesses. “This coming Kelvin wave is just the beginning,” said Dr Jonathan Warrick, a research geologist at the US Geological Survey. “The thing to look out for is what will happen in January, February and March — that’s when we get the biggest storms, we get our largest waves and we have some very large tides.” If these events align, their effects will compound, setting the stage for a tumultuous winter. Together, Warrick said, the systems will pack a far bigger punch. “When it comes to these storms and the tides,” he said, “we really are kind of rolling the dice.”

Amazon says [the Kindle Click is] meant for reading under the covers, on a treadmill, or on an airplane tray table. It’s available for preorder and ships Oct. 28. It recharges over USB-C, includes side buttons for adjusting brightness, and works with Kindles released in 2024 or later. The company cited BookTok as an inspiration, Bloomberg reported, a reference to the community of readers on TikTok who post book recommendations, reviews and their reading setups. Kindle fans there have been showing off third-party clickers for years.

Amazon is also bringing back physical page-turn buttons, which disappeared when the company discontinued the Kindle Oasis in 2024. This time they come in a separate $79.99 magnetic cover, which works only with the new Signature Edition versions of the Paperwhite and Colorsoft. The new Kindles have screens that sit flush with the edges, colors that wrap around to the front, and optional aluminum housings. They also have user-replaceable batteries to comply with European Union rules, Amazon told The Verge.

The base Kindle starts at $149.99, or $189.99 in aluminum. The Paperwhite starts at $199.99 and the Colorsoft at $289.99, with Signature Editions at $249.99 and $319.99. Those prices match what Amazon has charged since August, when it raised Kindle prices by $40 to $50, citing memory and storage costs. The base Kindle is available now. The Paperwhite and Colorsoft ship Oct. 28.

British police forces, including specialist units within the Metropolitan Police, have used Oxygen Forensics software to break into the phones of suspects during live investigations, public documents show. The Virginia-based company behind the software has been accused in the US of having hidden its Russian ownership to avoid sanctions, before it was awarded government contracts. Its American chief executive and a Russian national were arrested last week after a US investigation found the company had sought to hide its ownership in an alleged attempt to avoid sanctions and scrutiny.

[…] By September 2024, the US Secret Service had awarded Oxygen a five-year contract for its software. In December 2022, and in October 2023, Oxygen’s chief executive told the US government that Oxygen Forensics had “no immediate or highest-level owner.” By September 2024, the US Secret Service had awarded Oxygen a five-year contract for its software. In March, Mr Reiber allegedly told the US government that there had been no Russians involved in developing the software and that no one in Russia had access to the environment in which it was built. US prosecutors say this was false. If convicted, both Mr Reiber and Mr Davydov could face a sentence of 20 years in prison.