The revelation comes as the Trump administration puts a growing focus on space. In 2019, during his first term, Trump created the Space Force as a separate military branch. In his second term, he has announced the “Golden Dome” missile defense system, which includes plans to put U.S. weapons in space. Trump said last year that he expected the system would be “fully operational before the end of my term,” which ends in January 2029, and have the capability of intercepting missiles “even if they are launched from space.” Trump also has directed the Pentagon to pursue the space-based interceptors, in an executive order during the first week of his presidency. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that just the space-based components of the Golden Dome could cost as much as $542 billion over the next 20 years.

The Biden administration announced in 2024 that Russia was developing a space-based nuclear weapon that could loiter in space for long durations, then release a burst that would take out satellites around it. That kicked off a renewed debate on the idea of weapons in space at the United Nations. In April 2024, Russia vetoed a joint U.S.-Japanese resolution that would have called on all countries not to develop or deploy nuclear arms or other weapons of mass destruction in space, as banned under a 1967 international treaty that included the U.S. and Russia… The Russian delegation called the resolution hypocritical and a double standard and instead proposed a rival resolution to ban all weapons in space “for all time.” It ultimately failed. Russia had argued that the United States and its allies opposed a ban on all weapons in outer space because they planned to deploy weapons there.

The remarks this week by Washington’s top military-space officials are part of “the increasing comfort level of the U.S. government to speak about aggressive actions in space” that has been building up in recent years, said Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the nonprofit Secure World Foundation. “We’ve gone from not talking about counter-space capabilities… to now saying flat-out we have weapons in space,” Samson said. “The pendulum keeps on shifting over that way…”

“The acknowledgment of these space-control capabilities is fundamental to ensuring that we prevent deterrence from failing, and that we are postured and ready should deterrence fail to employ them effectively,” Richard Palmer, the director of the Capability and Resource Integration Directorate at U.S. Space Command, said on Tuesday.... “The bottom line is that our joint force and our allied forces require space. Our economies require space,” added Palmer. “We are ready in the U.S. to preserve that.”

Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger then responded to Coxon’s comments, saying he was correct and that he believed there was a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade.

“I recently resigned from Google DeepMind, where I worked on AGI safety and alignment research,” Bilal Chughtai wrote on X. “I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome.” Chughtai, who co-authored research papers while at Google DeepMind, worked there as a research engineer and left the company in July 2026, according to his LinkedIn profile.

AI companies are already motivated to develop their models in a safe way and face “significant liability” to prevent them from causing harm, Zuckerberg said. “Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens,” he wrote on X… Zuckerberg said Meta delayed releasing its Muse AI agent for several months to ensure its safety and security. “We didn’t call for everyone else to do this before we would,” he said.

Companies should prioritize building safe AI models instead of systems that can automatically improve themselves, a function known as recursive self-improvement, Zuckerberg wrote. “Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely.”

Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers. Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone.

Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers. The company is still working on “recovering regional resources” and restoring resources hosted in the other two availability zones in the United Arab Emirates… But the destruction was apparently even more widespread for the data centers in the Bahrain region, because Amazon said it was unable to restore access to resources and data across all three availability zones there. “The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” the AWS update said.

The company had already suspended customer billing in the affected AWS regions in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and has spent the past six months attempting to restore normal operations… [When the war began] AWS immediately urged customers to migrate resources to other cloud regions and use remote backups to restore any “inaccessible resources.” The cloud service also reportedly issued $150 million in customer credits following the initial Iranian strikes in March.

The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. 404 Media and WIRED then analyzed those files as part of a joint investigation… [T]he joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag…

According to our analysis, the camera’s logs recorded about 21 days of activity across several periods. During those windows, the device photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated about 1.6 million images. On a typical day, it logged around 3,300 vehicles, with a high of 4,454… The software running on the camera explicitly detects people, something which is typically overlooked in discussions around Flock cameras. When it spots a person, it records where they appear in the image and how confident it is in the detection.

A new app called Zuckoff can detect if a user is near someone with Meta’s creepy AI-powered glasses, which have drawn criticism for enabling creeps to record video of women without their consent. Programmer Pawel Szydlowski says tales of dirtbags recording themselves perving on women or harassing strangers prompted him to launch the app…

Zuckoff — which detects Bluetooth signatures broadcast by smart glasses and can estimate their distance — has gained some 5,000 users since it hit Apple’s App Store last month, according to Business Insider. “There’s a need for such an application,” the 30-year-old Polish techie told the outlet, adding that European Union regulators have contacted him for more info about his app. “We as a society have the right to at least know that someone is recording,” Szydlowski said…

Earlier this month, the tech giant disabled thousands of glasses it found had been tampered with to keep a small light off that indicates the device is recording.

The glasses include six built-in microphones so users can communicate with the chatbot, as well as a button on the side of the glasses that, when pressed, activates the AI system… Meta’s Reality Labs, which is responsible for developing its smart glasses line, is still losing a gargantuan amount of money, as its earnings report from April revealed.

The plans, which start at $2.99 per month for single-product plans, $7.99 for individual bundles, and $14.99 for creator and business bundles, provide a number of features for users looking to get more out of their Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp accounts. Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus allow users to keep their stories up for 48 hours instead of 24, send animated super reactions and super hearts to stories, preview stories without showing up as a viewer in other users’ lists, and more. WhatsApp Plus lets you share exclusive stickers, get exclusive ringtones for contacts, and pin up to 20 different chats.

Meta One also includes Core and Premium user plans that offer the features found in the single-product plans, along with increased AI usage limits for images and videos. The social media giant is also offering creator and business plans… that it says include capabilities such as enhanced profiles, automatic follow invitations to users that interact with your content, and increased access to the Meta Business Agent, which can respond on your behalf.

Under the new system, OpenAI will share updates on concerning AI behavior more frequently instead of waiting to bundle multiple instances into one report. The company said it wants to share more information about troubling AI behavior in the absence of an industry-wide standard… “As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post Wednesday…

OpenAI said it observed “misaligned behavior” when training and evaluating AI models in six circumstances in the last six months… In one rare instance, OpenAI said an unreleased research model added “jailbreak-like instructions” to the summaries it uses to preserve context in long-running tasks that said it was “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.” Separately, the company said some instances of its 5.6 Sol model included directives to invent information to conceal failures from the user during training. Other newly reported incidents include an instance of an agent uploading files to the internet to cite them without being told to do so, and agents publicly sharing files to collaborate on a task when they were instructed to only use local files during training. AI models also used an internal software repository as a message board in an unsanctioned way. These instances involved unreleased internal models or internal research models.

Adafruit has published CircuitPython Turbo, a workflow that compiles selected Python functions into native machine code on a computer, then loads them onto compatible microcontroller boards.

It builds on MicroPython’s Native and Viper emitters. In a documented Metro RP2040 fixed-point Mandelbrot test, Viper cut computation time from 8.335 seconds to 0.423 seconds, a 19.71x speedup over bytecode. The rest of the application stays in Python. The guide includes benchmarks, source code and hardware demos. The speedup is for the measured computation, not the whole application.

With Turbo, it’s easier, better, and now even faster to make LED light up costumes that also reacts to sound at the same time, a sensor dashboard with animated graphics, or a tiny game doing physics while drawing the screen. Turbo speeds up the busy Python parts. It won’t make a slow sensor or display connection faster… Your computer turns selected functions into instructions the chip can run directly. Python still handles the rest.

We have measured speedups, real display captures, and examples you can pull apart to see what happened. None of this arrived alone. CircuitPython, MicroPython, PyMCU, compiler tools, open hardware, and people sharing their work gave us pieces to connect. The Bao experiments take that idea somewhere else, handing calculations to four helper cores. Now we get to make those paths easier to use, compare results, and find the next useful thing. Maybe that’s smoother animation, a responsive instrument, or an idea we haven’t tried yet.

That’s what I like about open source. Someone shares a piece, someone else sees a possibility, and we get to keep building it together.

“Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which increases wave height … these could wash away a section of the walkway that protects the San Onofre seawall, and the waste canisters are just 100 feet away from that,” the former wave dynamics researcher and longtime advocate against beach storage of nuclear waste said. Most experts agree the risk of erosion damaging the nuclear waste storage system is extremely low in the near term. The plant’s owner, Southern California Edison, has promised the California Coastal Commission to move the waste to higher elevation on-site if modeling shows sea level rise and erosion will start to pose a challenge. But the recent waves, fueled by Hurricane Marie far away in the Pacific, resurfaced the issue of the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive spent fuel that used to power the reactors. “At the moment, it is under control, I think it’s essential to say that,” said James Day, a geology professor at UC San Diego. “But geologically we must be thinking long term. The waste lasts for hundreds, if not thousands of generations....” [In 2103 some of the site’s canisters’ approach their intended 100-year lifespans, and the utility may have to start the transfer into new cansiters.]

The distinctive twin domes that once housed the reactor cores will start coming down early next year. But the 3.6 million pounds of high-level waste will stay in the coastal community indefinitely. How much of a safety hazard that is depends on whom you ask. “San Onofre is sitting on some fairly young rocks in a seismically active region,” Day said at a recent symposium at the Scripps Seaside Forum in La Jolla, hosted by the Samuel Lawrence Foundation. “This is not the sort of place you would leave nuclear waste.” Others noted that collapse of beach slopes could make the site more vulnerable to tsunamis. They spoke of the corrosive effects of the ocean air on the steel canisters that hold the waste…

Edison says its system will be safe for decades to come. “The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall,” said Manuel Camargo, principal manager of decommissioning for Edison, standing on the concrete pad that holds the steel waste storage canisters. “The maximum credible earthquake, somewhere around a 7.0 magnitude, would produce something about half of what this system is designed to withstand....” Edison is bolstering a path below the seawall. Based on state data from the California Ocean Protection Council, the seawall would not be inundated before 2050, Camargo said…

Plans for a deep geological repository beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada crumbled in the face of local opposition in 2011. Utilities around the U.S. now sue the federal government every year to recoup their storage expenses because the Department of Energy has not come through on its promise. The lawsuits cost taxpayers $2 million a day, according to Camargo. “It’s so safe that it’s almost a problem,” Camargo said. “It’s not a priority to a lot of folks to move it.”

Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies; coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries; and, eventually, larger global coordination. At Dreamforce, Amodei said Anthropic has committed to independent evaluators and was “going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry” on the other two steps. Amodei, xAI’s Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have recently called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development. [“Dario is right,” Musk posted on X.com]

Huang, who also made an appearance at Dreamforce on Tuesday, said companies should not slow down AI development. He argued that new regulations were not necessary, advising AI companies to simply wait to release products until they know they are safe rather than begging the US government to intervene… One day prior at the All-In summit in Los Angeles, Donald Trump called Huang while the CEO was on stage. Huang put the president on speakerphone as Trump called the growing concern about AI a “hoax” and asserted again that a slowdown would only benefit China…

[OpenAI’s] Altman said AI models had advanced so quickly that monitoring and security need to be treated with a “new level of rigor”, calling an incident in which OpenAI agents hacked into another company a “wake-up call” for the industry. He also said the public was very “right to be afraid” of AI because of the potential loss of control, and the possibility of a small group of powerful AI companies exerting their views on the world.

He argued that large language models are not artificial general intelligence, so there is nothing meaningful left to slow down. Fast competition benefits incumbents, he said, and danger warnings work as hype ahead of IPOs. The whole exercise, he added, could mask growth that is already slowing as those IPOs get pushed back.

In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo’s IDCT scaling to reduce images during decoding, rather than loading a full-size image into memory and then shrinking it. Benchmarks from the bug report show up to 20x less memory used during very large image loading, and decoding is up to twice as fast. Since these speeds were quite fast already, there’s no perceptible difference to users. Behind the scenes, it’s more efficient.

Firefox’s built-in PDF viewer starts up to 45% faster in this release. The browser now loads the background PDF.js worker sooner, rather than launching it only when needed.

Sponsored suggestions in the address bar are live for users in France, Germany and Italy (Ouais!, Juhu!, etc). These are already available in some other locales. Don’t want them? Disable them via Settings > Search > Firefox Suggest > Suggestions from Sponsors.

Besides that, the rest of this release is primarily bug fixes — worthwhile and welcome as always.

Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That’s why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle…

For the many people who sit in the middle of the AI usage spectrum, we made sure you can opt in and out of specific features in line with your preferences. Capabilities like AI translations, image alt text in Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, and key points in link previews can all be individually switched on and off, ensuring you can enjoy such offerings on a case by case basis as it suits your needs…

Smart Window is Firefox’s most integrated AI experience, but that doesn’t mean it compromises our commitment to choice, privacy, and transparency. Our newest window type, which we’ve been polishing and testing in beta, uses only the context you share with it to help you move work forward and across the finish line. When permitted by you, its built-in, AI-powered assistant can work directly with your open tabs and browsing history to connect the dots. This means comparing information, generating recommendations, summarizing pages, and planning projects without having to feed every crumb of context from your previous and current browsing activity each time you enter a new prompt.

A procedural motion to advance the bill failed by a vote of 49 to 50, with a handful of Republicans joining all Democrats to shoot it down. The motion needed 60 yes votes to pass, and with the midterm elections looming, the Senate isn’t expected to pick the bill back up this year. Among other provisions, the bill would have taken most crypto trading out of the purview of securities regulators, a key goal of firms like Coinbase Global…

The vote is especially bitter for the crypto industry, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign expenditures over the past year to even get to this point. Crypto regulation doesn’t even register among the issues voters care most about, and the industry has created massive political action committees to insert itself into the Washington agenda and strike fear into the hearts of lawmakers who might oppose them… Democrats who voted against the bill said that it needed to do more to rein in [Trump’s] crypto dealings to get their support. Some GOP lawmakers also voted against the motion after pressure from community bank executives. Bankers argued that the bill needed a stronger ban on high-yield crypto accounts to protect their deposits, a contention that crypto executives and the White House said was nonsense.

[C]rypto firms will be leaning heavily on Trump’s regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Treasury Department, all of whom have said they plan to move swiftly to implement industry friendly rules if a bill didn’t pass. The SEC has already dropped all major enforcement actions against crypto firms and has begun to introduce rules that make it easier to raise money from crypto sales without running afoul of the law. The agency is also expected to implement rules making it easier to tokenize traditional assets like stocks.

The friendly regulatory environment will in effect give the industry a little more than two years to sink roots into the traditional financial system and consumers’ wallets. Even if the SEC took a harsh view of the industry in the future, as it did in President Joe Biden’s administration, the agency at that point might find it difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.

Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du, made that jump in earlier releases… Canonical started “oxidizing” Ubuntu last year, and Ubuntu 25.10 became the first release to ship [ the uutils project’s] coreutils as the default. That release also made sudo-rs the default privilege tool, replacing a command that had been in place for decades.

26.04 was the release where the plan did slow down quite a bit, as Canonical kept cp, mv, and rm on their GNU versions due to a bunch of TOCTOU issues that were blocking the full implementation. These were caught during an audit, when Canonical commissioned Zellic for two rounds between December 2025 and March 2026, focusing on the most security-sensitive utilities first. Across both rounds, Zellic raised 113 issues, and 44 of them were assigned CVEs. Canonical says the vast majority have been resolved.

Getting here has had its ups and downs, and the last stretch was not clean. In July, uutils cp went back into the archive and came straight out again after it broke live image builds. The fix was quick; as the developers marked it “Critical,” the fix went upstream, and the migration landed in time for 26.10.

When typing commands, nothing changes for you on the surface. uutils coreutils is designed to be a drop-in replacement for essential GNU tools, and the project treats any divergence from GNU as a bug, further pointing out that some options may still be missing or behave differently. So if you prefer staying on the GNU version, you have the option to install the coreutils-from-gnu package that houses all the required components.

Chen Yilong has racked up plenty of film and TV credits in his two decades as an actor, but with work getting scarcer he signed a contract in August to license the image of his face to a Chinese production studio. Chen’s role will be to sit in front of a video camera and make facial expressions at the prompt of a director. A neutral stare. An angry glare. A look of surprise. Using artificial intelligence, the studio will use images of Chen’s face to generate an avatar, also known as a “digital human,” to star in an AI-generated movie. “If you can’t beat it, join it,” said Chen, 38, who works in Beijing.

The Chinese film and video industry is being transformed by AI-driven storytelling, fueled by rapid advances in video generation software, and at ground zero are the so-called micro dramas that play out on millions of smartphones. Typically just a minute or two in length, the videos are devoured by Chinese audiences… And the cost of producing them has been cut drastically through the use of AI software developed by Chinese technology juggernauts including Kuaishou Technology and TikTok’s global owner, ByteDance. The number of Chinese-made micro dramas surged in the first three months of this year to 128,000, according to the China Netcasting Services Assn. More than 95% of them were made with AI, the association said....

Sun Wei founded Feixiang Universe, the Shenzhen-based studio that cast Chen. The fear of accidentally “stealing someone’s face” was a big reason she said she decided to license real people’s likenesses for an AI production set during China’s Tang Dynasty more than 1,000 years ago. Thanks to AI’s training data bias, AI-generated performers tend to have similar features and share a homogenous look, Sun said. Many have flawless skin and extremely symmetrical faces, requiring her and other Chinese AI filmmakers to cast a wide net to “buy” new faces and digitize actor’s expressions.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object — compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies — four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). “We’ve never encountered a group of objects that act like this,” said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama in a statement.

Compact objects, in the form of black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs, are the remains of stars that have died. Their small size and powerful gravity means that they’re adept at getting close to orbiting companion stars and ripping the stars’ outer layers of gas away. The gas swirls around the compact object, falling onto its surface, and this accretionary process usually produces torrents of high-energy X-rays because the stolen gas becomes superheated by the compact object’s gravitational vice-like grip.

Because of their weak X-rays, Muhibullah’s team refer to them as ‘hypersoft X-ray sources’. Since low-energy X-rays and ultraviolet light are next to each other on the electromagnetic spectrum, Muhibullah and his team suspect that the low-energy X-rays are spillover from objects emitting prodigious amounts of ultraviolet. Moreover, they think that these objects are lower-level compact binaries. They’re hard to find though, because the interstellar medium of hydrogen and helium gas between the stars absorbs ultraviolet light. This could be why we have yet to find any hypersoft X-ray sources in our own galaxy, because we have to look through the interstellar medium through the plane of the Milky Way. Consequently, there could be a large population of hypersoft X-ray sources that remain undiscovered and they could have an important effect on the universe around them.

Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff’s Department used Flock’s surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop’s stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock’s system, was “LMAO.”

The cop is one of dozens who put gibberish, jokes, or other nonsense into Flock’s “reason” box, highlighting the casualness and lack of care some cops have when searching an incredibly powerful surveillance system. This is on top of the thousands upon thousands of cops who simply wrote something like “investigation,” “test,” or left the box blank as their search “reason,” according to a new analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with 404 Media. EFF’s investigation found cops across dozens of jurisdictions writing “LMAO,” “LOL,” “Hehe,” “Haha,” “idk,” “blah,” “TBD,” and “robbery I don’t remember the case number leave me alone” in Flock’s “reason” box for searches.

They found cops writing “idiot,” “fuck this new search engine,” “dickhead,” “shithead,” and “WEIRD KID” in the reason box. And they found an entire class of police button mashers, who ran searches for reasons of “asdfg,” “gyghkkghghjkghjk,” “jhjhjkhj,” “jkhhkjhjk,” “nmbvcbnm,” and so on and so forth. The searches came from police departments across the country from 2023 through late 2025, when Flock changed how the “reason” box in its search system functions…

Each time a search is performed, a record of it is saved in the Flock system, which can be obtained by the public using government records requests. These audit logs show hundreds of thousands of searches of the system; after 404 Media and other news outlets used these types of logs to show police using the Flock system to look for undocumented immigrants on behalf of ICE, a woman in Texas who had an abortion, and protesters, cops were warned by government surveillance centers to be "as vague as permissible" about the reasons for their searches…

A police department said it investigated a cop who wrote “driving around being weird” in the reason field but found it was for “legitimate public safety purposes.”

Flock Safety claims it has improved its system by requiring officers to select from a dropdown list of crimes before running a search-but that only makes it easier for officers to hide improper searches behind the veneer of uniformity. The system does not require proof that the dropdown reason actually matches the true purpose of the search… Since this update, officers are no longer required to type out why they are digging through a driver’s movement history, and instead can select a pre-packaged option like “Traffic infraction” or “Other” in half a second…

Mass surveillance is incompatible with a free society, and especially so when the people with access to this data are treating it like a joke. This ALPR mass surveillance — the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion — should not exist. But because it does, EFF continues to urge courts and state legislatures to immediately step in and impose strict, enforceable restrictions to rein in this abuse. At an absolute minimum, this means mandating rigid data deletion deadlines and an ironclad warrant requirement.

If police want the power to track a person’s movements, they must be required to convince a judge with evidence and probable cause. They should not be able to bypass the Constitution with a search for “haha.”