Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by the prolific hacker group ShinyHunters. In the days immediately following the suspect’s arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members dramatically escalated their attacks, stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the Russian ransomware group Cl0p. According to three sources familiar with the matter, the Dutch man arrested by authorities this month is Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted cybercriminal from Almere and Lelystad in the Netherlands. Van der Stap was previously convicted in 2023 in connection with a string of data thefts and extortions that prosecutors said earned between 1.5 million euros and 2.7 million euros.

At his trial in late 2023, van der Stap admitted that he lived a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde existence, secretly using the hacker handle “Umbreon” to extort victims and post their data on English language hacking communities like the now-defunct RaidForums and Breached. By day, however, van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD), a nonprofit security research group. Van der Stap confessed to his data theft and extortion activity, and was sentenced to four years in prison (one of which was suspended).

Nanoparticles could someday provide a new way to help soldiers fight back against deadly nerve agents on the front lines. In a new study, Northwestern University scientists developed a nanoparticle-based compound that, when mixed into clothing dyes, could limit the impact of chemicals commonly found in pesticides, insecticides and nerve agents. Manufacturers could potentially add the nanoparticles to clothing used by those most at risk, such as farmers’ masks and gloves or soldiers’ uniforms and tactical gear. Or, if someone is exposed to a potentially deadly chemical, they could spray their clothing with water mixed with the compound to deactivate the chemical before its damaging effects take hold.

Every year, the night sky is becoming 10% brighter. Eighty percent of people live under light-polluted skies. And while the UN declared a healthy environment — clean air, clean water — to be a human right, I believe we also all have a right to darkness as well. This doesn’t mean turning off every streetlamp. But do we really need bright white floodlights at the front of every garage? Replacing lights with ones that are bright enough to do the job — and no brighter — might make it so I wouldn’t have to get in my car and drive for hours to see the night sky as it actually shines above us. To preserve the darkness would mean rules and enforcement around the warmth of the lights, where they point, and how bright they can be. It would mean not putting in three lights when one would do. If we recognized that darkness is something we need, we’d become more careful about chasing it away.

[…] Access to darkness is about more than stargazing. The night is its own habitat. Artificial lights confuse animals who use the moon to navigate, whether they’re baby sea turtles navigating toward a parking lot instead of the ocean or moths who fly in circles around a lightbulb. Lightning bugs and frogs need darkness to complete their courtship rituals. Migrating birds get thrown off course by the bright lights of big cities. But the effects of light pollution linger even after it’s daylight again, becoming visible. Research has shown light pollution is breaking the relationship between plants and pollinators, changing the time of year trees break into flower, and disrupting circadian rhythms for all living creatures. This includes humans. Whether it’s artificial lights indoors or creeping in through the window at night, studies have found that we need darkness in order to rest, recover and stay healthy.

Some tech workers in San Francisco hooked up ChatGPT to a Toyota Corolla and got it to drive around a parking lot. This may not sound impressive in the age of the self-driving car until you realize that the LLM driving the car was a general purpose chatbot running on a laptop and not the purpose-built driving system based on millions of hours of training data used by Waymo or Tesla.

The people behind the stunt call themselves DrivingBench and they’ve posted their code, their prompts, and videos of the experiment online. In the experiment, DrivingBench hooked up GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Grok 4.6, and GPT-5.6 Sol to a Toyota Corolla and gave the LLMs control over the car’s steering, accelerator, and brakes. Then they set up a small cone course in a public parking lot and prompted the chatbots to navigate the space.

The goal, they said, was to find out if untrained, off-the-shelf frontier AIs can drive a real car. The results were mixed. Grok, Sol, and Fable only drove a few meters and didn’t finish the course. GPT-6 Astra, however, did eventually learn to navigate the course and complete it. But not without a lot of troubleshooting.

According to Mozilla, the design changes will have “no cost to your browser performance.” Mozilla says the overhauled design is a “renewal” for Firefox, following major updates over the last year, like homepage widgets, Split View, a built-in VPN, and controls for disabling the browser’s AI features.

Microsoft has made WSL Containers generally available, giving Windows 11 developers a built-in way to build, run, and deploy Linux containers through Windows Subsystem for Linux. The release includes wslc.exe for managing containers, GPU support, networking improvements, health checks, storage mounts, and integration with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Intune. Microsoft also claims up to twice the performance when Linux environments access files stored on Windows.

Docker Desktop, Podman Desktop, and Rancher Desktop are not going anywhere, but developers who only need basic container functionality now have another option built around WSL. One notable feature is still missing: Compose support. Microsoft says adding it is now a priority.

Mistral Chief Executive Arthur Mensch has accused leading global artificial intelligence companies of using the debate over the safety of the technology as a cover-up for their “negligence.” “The debate that we’ve seen in the U.S. has been a cover for the negligence of some of our competitors,” Mensch told CNBC’s Annette Weisbach, adding that it was necessary to make systems that can contain the AI agents. […]

“When you give them a lot of tools, those systems [AI agents] are very dynamic, so they can go and do things that you do not expect,” Mensch told CNBC. “You need to have the right monitoring in place, and the enterprises we work with, we give them those kind of monitoring systems,” he said.

Mistral also develops AI models but takes a different approach to OpenAI and Anthropic by working with individual companies to create custom AI tools to suit their needs and integrate them with their businesses. But unlike its competitors, Mistral has no plans to slow down development of advanced models. The lead that U.S. labs have is “not extremely large,” Mensch said, adding that his company was confident that its next-generation model will close the gap “very significantly.”

“We have been raising the capital needed to scale the compute that we need to train bigger and more powerful models, in order for us to own our own destiny,” he said. Earlier this month, Mistral raised 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) in fresh funding led by memory chip giant Samsung, as it looks to position itself as a European alternative to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Reuters got a look at the interface that franchisees use to access this technology and it’s pretty creepy. Messages show stuff like “your restaurant is showing MEDIUM SENSITIVITY to price” based on “customer willingness to pay in your area.” Cost differences at nearby locations can be stark. Researchers found that a Big Mac at a Fresno, California store cost $5.69, but the same burger cost $6.89 at another branch two miles down the road. That’s a 21 percent difference.

The company acknowledges that using this dynamic pricing system could open up franchisees to legal hurdles, all while continuing to push the platform. The pricing portal’s terms of service reportedly warns that owners “may be competitors of each other” and “it is particularly important for all Users of the Tool to understand and comply fully with antitrust and competition laws.” The document also reiterates that franchisees are “always free to determine the final price,” thus potentially absolving corporate from any antitrust concerns.

McDonald’s has decried Reuters’ reporting as “speculative and uninformed.” The company says the pricing portal is “a tool, not a mandate, designed to provide restaurant-specific recommendations to help franchisees deliver value for customers and make informed business decisions.” The company has been using some version of this technology since at least 2019, according to Reuters. In 2023, however, CEO Kempczinski boasted to investors that it had developed proprietary tools to evaluate pricing at individual restaurants.

British Transport Police said that since the extension there had been three positive confirmed alerts of people who were subsequently confirmed to be complying with sexual harm prevention orders or other imposed court conditions. When Transport for London announced its support for the extension of the trial, it said LFR technology “will target and identify people on police watchlists at key stations chosen for maximum impact” and would “specifically tackle violence against women and girls, whose travel behaviors are shaped by experiences of sexual harassment and sexual offenses.”

Fraser Sampson, a former biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner for the UK, said the police needed to show that the use of the technology was proportionate. “There many variables and all need to align: the choice of location, times of day, make up of the watchlist and likelihood of people being present and many more.” Sampson, who is now a non-executive director of Facewatch, a company that operates facial recognition systems in shops, added: “We know the technology works, but using it in supermarkets to deter shoplifters and prevent attacks on staff is very different from deploying it to catch people on a public transport network.”

“Success in a shop means no such people coming in. Success for the police trying to catch people means people being caught. In that respect the trial doesn’t appear to have been very fruitful. Everything depends on the police watchlists; if you’re not on a watchlist, the live FRT cameras do not “see” you and they don’t retain your image in the same way as CCTV cameras. However, they are processing special category personal data and the technology must be used in a way that is appropriate, proportionate and necessary. It’s for the police to show how any deployment meets those criteria and — as the ICO [information commissioner’s office] has recently reported — for their oversight boards to hold them firmly to account in doing so.”

Dots are frontier intelligence that have your back. Powered by GPT-6 Astra, they have their own cloud computer, learn from feedback over time, and can work towards your goals 24/7. Through our ecosystem of plugins, they can readily connect to over 4,000 apps, giving them the tools to help wherever you need them.

Your dot is always within reach, whether it is through ChatGPT, Slack, or Teams. You can ask questions, explore ideas, and give feedback along the way; or you can simply hop on a voice call when you need to talk something out. The more you work together, the more your dot learns your preferences, how you think, and what good looks like to you.

The magic of dots is when they bring you work done the way you would do it, sometimes before you even think to ask. With dots alongside you, ambitious ideas and projects you haven’t had the time or support to pursue start to feel achievable.

Starting with Chromebook updates, Google says that “Chromebooks you have today will continue to receive updates through their supported lifetime,” with all Enterprise and Education management capabilities remaining in place as well: “We will maintain support for current Chromebook devices running ChromeOS as outlined in our Auto Update policy and the Chromebooks you have today will continue to receive updates through their supported lifetime…”

Google adds that similar management tools will be coming to Googlebook, but they’re not available yet. Apparently they’re planned for the second half of 2027. Meanwhile, Google says that “many” existing Chromebook models will be eligible to transition from ChromeOS to Googlebook OS. More details are coming “soon.” A later note specifies that Google is referring to “newer commercial Chromebook models.”

Notably, Google specifies a year when ChromeOS updates will come to an end in a later note — 2034. Chromebooks with a 10-year update policy that extends past 2034 will be eligible to move to Googlebook OS. […] Finally, in regards to apps, Google says that it is “committed” to web developers despite an increased focus on Android apps on Googlebooks.

The governor’s office pointed to reports that about a million investors lost an alleged $3.8 billion on their purchases of the memecoin released by President Donald Trump in 2025 as a the motivation behind the new rule.

“No official should profit off their office — and we’re putting stronger protections in place to ensure it doesn’t happen in our state,” Newsom said. The bill also prohibits a company, related or not, from making a memecoin using “the likeness or image” of a public official.

The state of Florida is seeking a temporary injunction to stop OpenAI from continuing to develop what it calls a “reckless, unacceptably risky product” without the deployment of “third-party approved safety guardrails.” The new legal motion (PDF), filed Monday morning, is part of a civil lawsuit the state of Florida originally filed in June, arguing that ChatGPT represented “a threat to the public safety of Floridians,” specifically by preying on vulnerable populations like children and violent or delusional adults. […] In arguing for this injunction, the state points to the Hugging Face incident as well as recent high-profile misalignment cases involving unintended and unauthorized attempts to access Australian and US government servers. Florida also cites AI industry leaders, including many from OpenAI, in arguing that the AI industry is literally asking for this kind of outside regulation.

The motion points to statements from Paul Christiano, who said on joining the company’s board this month that he believes “there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.” The motion also points to OpenAI’s own “An Alien Mind” essay and an open letter from 1,300 AI industry employees, both of which call for enforced slowdowns on frontier AI development, if necessary. Citing laws that allow the state to exercise control over companies that are a “public nuisance,” Florida argues that OpenAI is “the greatest public nuisance ever created by the hand of man, capable of laying waste to global civilization.”

The latest data shows the temperature rise at the heart of El Nino in the Pacific Ocean has now reached 3.05C. That is higher than the 3.02C set in late November 2015, the previous high set in the 150 years of modern records. This temperature is measured against the average of 1991-2020. The preferred measure of most meteorologists uses a 30-year rolling average as a reference and so takes account of human-caused global heating. This metric, called ONI (Nino3.4), is on the brink of breaking the record, just one-hundredth of a degree below the 2015 record. Both metrics are underpinned by data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The most recent forecasts predict a peak of 4.0C in November and December, according to the average of 14 different models assessed by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. That is a level so far above previous events that Hausfather called it “mind-blowing,” while others have described it as “Godzilla-level.” Any temperature rise above 0.5C is deemed an El Nino; above 2C is officially called a “very strong” El Nino — often referred to as a “super” El Nino. The current El Nino is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere in which temperatures are already rising rapidly due to human-caused global heating. This double whammy means 2027 is expected to “blow apart” previous records and become the hottest year ever recorded.

Enceladus isn’t the only place in our solar system with water — so, why is it so exciting in the search for life? Well, it has to do with the seafloor of its extensive, liquid ocean. Down deep at the bottom of this body of water, scientists think hydrothermal processes, or movement or reactions with hot water under the surface, are taking place. The plumes shooting upward from the ocean also contain trace amounts of salts and organic compounds. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft found these traces when it flew through the plumes over a decade ago. Between the hydrothermal activity and the organics and minerals in the water, this moon’s ocean has a number of aspects that could be involved in supporting life.

What’s more, using a combination of Cassini data, theoretical models and laboratory experimentation, in Postberg’s new study the team found that the plume’s water droplets blasting out into space at up to 621 miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per hour) don’t freeze as quickly as expected. Before, scientists thought the freeze would happen instantaneously once the droplets reached space, but Postberg and fellow researchers say they found the freezing would actually happen much slower.

They also found that during this freezing process, the salt, organic compounds (and maybe possible signs of life) in the water droplets separate from one another. Not only that, but the team says that as the particles are blasted out into space, they should often collide with the icy cracks of the planet’s surface. This ultimately would leave behind tiny shards of frozen droplets with individually separated out components. Essentially, it’s like the planet has organized its oceanic ingredients into tiny, frozen particle fragments.