The practical risk is limited, but still significant. Applying the attack against the deprecated use of 1024-bit keys took a handful of months on an academic CPU cluster, significantly less than the current estimates for 1024-bit factoring that would require resources that only nations or companies with massive resources could achieve. Widely used RSA implementations are also safe. Nonetheless, the research has taken cryptographers by surprise… “If this result holds up under peer review, it would indeed be a conceptual break-through,” Karsten Nohl, a cryptography expert and the head of innovation at Allurity, said in an interview. “RSA is as difficult to break as it is to factor large integers, at least so we thought. The researcher suggests that you can practically break RSA without cracking its key....”

The key forgery attack Heninger and the other researchers devised poses an immediate threat to 1024-bit RSA. Even for 2048- and 4096-bit keys, the method reduces the security of RSA to unacceptable levels. The National Security Agency, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and European Union Agency for Network and Information Security require that any cryptosystem should provide a level of no less than 128 or more bits, meaning the operations required must exceed 2**128. The forgery attack drops these levels to 2**65, 2**90, and 2**119 for 1024-, 2048-, and 4096-bit keys respectively. These levels may further drop because Heninger’s team did all the coding by hand and used no AI or GPUs in performing the forgeries. The researcher said these tools will “almost certainly” drop the security levels further.

The attack works only against blind-signature implementations of RSA… Still, some real-world systems continue to use blind-signature, also known as textbook, RSA… The paper’s authors and other researchers stress that the new attack poses little real-world threat. It does, however, drastically lower the estimated security of textbook RSA, and it does so in a way no one knew of previously… The new attack will further increase the urgency of completely moving away from the cryptosystem.

The scientists also convinced the International Astronomical Union to name an asteroid after one of Yankovic’s major influences, famous musical humorist and political satirist Tom Lehrer, who died last year at age 97. Lehrer’s work includes "The Elements,” a 1959 song in which he recites the entire periodic table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major-General’s Song.” “He was a mathematician and teacher and also wrote math- and science-themed songs,” McGraw said. “We felt that someone who had that kind of science enthusiasm really deserved to have their name up in the sky....” McGraw is hoping that naming space rocks after stars like Lehrer and “Weird Al” will cast some reflected light on two things she’s passionate about: asteroid research and science communication.

Weird Al: It’s one of those songs that means a lot to people, particularly “Star Wars” fans, of course. But I mean, I see a lot of people in the audience cosplaying as Jedi Knights and waving their light sabers… I’ve even heard that, you know, they play that song at “Star Wars” conventions, and people get weepy… [I]t really hits people in a tender place somehow…

“Oh my, my, this here Anakin guy
may be Vader someday later, now he’s just a small fry.
And he left his home and kissed his mommy goodbye,
sayin’ soon, I’m gonna be a Jedi.”

Underpinning the strong numbers was an acceleration in OEM adoption: direct unit shipments rose 26% to 3.4 million, total unit shipments climbed 17% to 4.2 million, and the customer order backlog doubled during the half to 2.6 million units. Demand was particularly robust in the Smart Home and Aerospace and Defence segments, and the company launched the AI HAT+ 2 for Raspberry Pi 5, extending its edge-AI product line.

“There’s always that choice for an original equipment manufacturer as to whether they should ‘make’ or ‘buy’ the computer elements of their platforms,” Upton said. “The supply chain disruption is making ‘make’ a much harder choice and it’s making the cost of repair a much harder choice. So we’re seeing strength there.” Raspberry Pi has already increased its suppliers of Dram more than threefold…

Upton said the increased demand had led to its backlog for units doubling to 2.6 million, which meant production rates would need to increase to prevent the numbers from getting “unhealthy”. New production capacity at the manufacturing facility in Pencoed, Wales was expected to come online this week… Exports were almost evenly split between North America, Europe and the rest of the world, which was primarily China, where demand was growing… Analysts at Peel Hunt said the company was “well positioned for rapid growth in unit shipments in 2027 and beyond” with demand expected from enthusiasts as well as the AI and security sectors.

This change restricts upgrading the RAM chip on your Pi 4 and Pi 5, as well as Compute Modules. By the looks of it, it does not restrict replacing the RAM chip with a chip of a similar size, quote, “locking devices to their original RAM size”. As such, this does not prevent repair of your Raspberry Pi board, but does somewhat limit your repair part choice, at most.

This restriction is easily bypassable. The bootloader is stored in the SPI flash chip, which can be reflashed using the built-in mask ROM over USB and rpiboot, and you are not prevented from flashing older versions of the bootloader, so far. This means even if you manually swap the RAM chip, all you need to do is to also downgrade the bootloader to the last known good release — 2024-09-10 — and then your Pi board or Compute Module will function with upgraded RAM. If you have the skills to upgrade your RAM, you most certainly have the skills to downgrade the Raspberry Pi bootloader. For most regular use, having a two-year old bootloader version won’t really matter…

For the reference, this bootloader change happened almost exactly two years ago, at some point between September 10 and September 23, 2024… The Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF) justifies this as follows: they saw third-party resellers sourcing low-RAM Compute Modules, upgrading them with RAM from unknown source and unknown stability. My observation is that they’d also be reselling the modules at a markup for purely commercial gain, while undercutting RPF who would otherwise direct that money into RnD, something I much enjoy to see them do. This creates perverse incentives and risk for people buying Raspberry Pi boards online, and RPF decided to limit this primarily for their users’ benefit, plus, if you ask me, some of theirs… The related GitHub issues have a fair few pingbacks, and exploring them makes the problem look grim to me....

My advice: don’t lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they’re only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online, and in most cases, repair doesn’t seem to be impeded at all, either. Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest.

[D]evelopers who want their apps broadly distributed outside the official Google Play Store will need to register with Google and verify their identities. Google’s Full Distribution option includes paying a one-time $25 fee, handing over a copy of a government-issued ID to verify one’s identity, and conforming to Google’s terms of service. Google also offers a free Limited Distribution option that doesn’t require government ID verification but restricts distribution to 20 authorized devices, while apps from unverified developers can still be installed by users who enable Android’s advanced installation flow.

The potential death warrant hanging over its head hasn’t stopped the F-Droid team from rolling out a bunch of new features for an app it says it intends to keep working on for years to come… The team also credited the EU’s many Digital Markets Act decisions against Google for making the installation experience smoother for users. F-Droid can now use a unified installation service for its apps thanks to the availability of a pre-approval API that allows users to approve an installation when they request it, rather than waiting until the app has finished downloading. That, said the F-Droid team, “brings the F-Droid install experience on official Android devices much closer to what the built-in app store can provide.” Additionally, F-Droid 2.0 can fetch and install app updates automatically, which it now does by default.

All of those changes, however, won’t matter much if Google pushes ahead undeterred with its plans to force registration onto non-Play Store developers. F-Droid’s announcement on Thursday makes it seem that the team isn’t going to go quietly.

The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch in Kotlin Compose, which is the standard for modern Android apps. This makes the store much more responsive, and there’s optional support for Android’s Material theming. The interface has also been cleaned up considerably, making the most important functions easier to access and hiding some others in overflow menus… Unlike the Play Store, F-Droid doesn’t track your taps and installs to push ads and suggestions — it helps you find things and gets out of the way.

F-Droid now includes a huge number of categories, drilling down to specialized niches like firewalls, password managers, and VPNs. You can see all these groups in the search tab. There are also higher-level categories listed on the main Discover page. When searching for apps, F-Droid will now be able to return results based on app descriptions rather than just names.

GPT-Live, and Gemini Live right behind it, skip that whole relay race. Instead of translating your voice to text and back to voice, the model works with raw audio the entire way through (what it hears and what it says) inside the same system, with nothing translated in between. That sounds like a small plumbing detail, but it’s the whole story. Cutting out the text step lets these models respond in a fraction of a second instead of the pause we’ve learned to expect, and it lets them hear things text can never carry: tone, hesitation, whether you’re annoyed or joking…

I was hoping to be surprised by how natural the conversation felt. Instead, I came out with a deeper appreciation for every human I’ve ever talked to. Even the boring ones… I spoke, it spoke back. I spoke faster, it answered faster. Then I switched to a different language, and it switched along with me. Even switching between languages several times during the same sentence didn’t stump it. The most impressive moment happened when I asked it what “T-O-P-G-3-3-K” spelled out, and it immediately came back with, “You are spelling the word Top Geek, but using a 3 to represent a reversed E....”

Although it felt fast and responsive, at no point did it feel like talking to another human being… What Gemini couldn’t replicate, because it was never built to replicate it, is human connection.... I’m sure I’m not telling you something you don’t already know, but somehow talking naturally to an LLM amplifies the feeling that there is no one on the other side of the line. It might flow like a phone call, but it doesn’t feel like one.

That’s not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI’s whole thing is to make people use AI at work… OpenAI declined to comment on its contractors being fired for using AI.

One contractor said they see people using AI “all the time and people are let go for it all the time, it’s pretty much the one thing that will get you kicked off ASAP.” The person said, “in a group of thousands there are tons that have been caught....” Two of the sources said people have been fired or offboarded for using AI… One contractor said they used AI while helping to train OpenAI’s models and shared what they presented as their termination letter. It said their employer had identified issues with the “authenticity” of their work....

404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models’ training. “I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start,” they said. “I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I’m not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I’m getting paid to make AI worse.”

Using publicly available information, The Post found that…one of the officers charged Wednesday, appeared to have relied on Flock cameras to track vehicles used by his wife and two close personal acquaintances, searching the plates 3,759 times over a 10-month period — an average of about 12 lookups per day. At the time, Police Chief Tanya Terry said she suspended one officer while the department conducted an investigation into possible misuse and a systemwide audit of the city’s 301-camera Flock system. That audit led to the discovery of more widespread abuse, [County prosecutor Ryan] Mears said Wednesday.

Mears said the department’s findings highlight the vast power Flock cameras give police officers and raise questions about whether the government should be doing more to prevent the misuse of that power. “Many of the proposed guardrails and the things that have been proposed would not have prevented the behaviors and actions we see here today,” Mears said. “Does there need to be independent oversight? Does there need to be judicial oversight of the Flock camera system?”

One of the Indianapolis officers, Schultz, an 18-year veteran of the police department, was accused of using Flock to track his ex-wife and women he met while on duty or out in public. He was charged with multiple counts of official misconduct as well as two counts of stalking. Schultz told one woman he was an FBI agent, according to prosecutors, and began texting her and showing up at places she frequented, including at her gym and at a school function with her daughter. Prosecutors said he arrived at her gym within an hour of her at least nine times between June 12 and Aug. 1 of this year… Another woman met Schultz after her car was stolen from a mall parking lot, and he began texting her flirty messages later that night. The two dated briefly, and Schultz later looked up where the woman went on dates with another man. Schultz searched the plates of a third woman 178 times and also frequently showed up where she was, including her gym, a Smoothie King and a Walmart earlier this month…

A third officer, Binford, told investigators he had used the log-in credentials of another officer who had logged in to Binford’s laptop during a field training exercise. Binford searched the plate of his ex-wife more than 1,000 times between April 2024 and April 2025. Indianapolis police had no regular practice of auditing officers’ Flock searches until recently, [Police Chief] Terry said in an interview last month. The department’s investigation into the tool’s misuse has been “a learning process for us,” she said at the time.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his competitor Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came this assessment: “We could lose control of the future to AI.”

Altman: We need a mechanism for complementary national and international frontier AI standards, standards for measuring capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient, and preserving meaningful human oversight as systems become more autonomous. We need common standards so countries can compare evidence, verify compliance, and have a shared language and understanding about what is happening. We need accurate and speedy incident reporting, classification reporting protocols, so the world can learn from failures before they become catastrophes. And we need secure channels among governments, critical infrastructure operators and technical experts, to share emerging vulnerabilities and new threats.... We will all be better off if we can agree on what good evidence, good safeguards, and good oversight look like on the global stage.

Amodei: We should begin with narrow agreements that every member can support, such as a ban on using AI to make biological weapons or permitting your AI technologies to be used to make biological weapons.... We should build evaluation and verification systems that keep pace with AI development so that states can have visibility into frontier model capability and can verify each other’s commitments.

Qualcomm Technologies is a top contributor to Linux development at a kernel level, and now we’re embracing support for Snapdragon X2 Series as a platform directly. We’re upstreaming core drivers for Snapdragon X2 Series — including the Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU — to open the door to developers and partners. We are starting with support for two operating systems based on Linux…

- Debian: We’re kicking off with Debian by the end of this year, one of the most influential Linux distributions and the foundation behind many of the distros people use every day.
- Ubuntu: Qualcomm Technologies has partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu, the world’s most widely used Linux distro, to the platform with Snapdragon X2 Series certification targeted for the first half of 2027.

…and this is just the beginning. Our partners HP, ASUS and HUMAIN are planning Linux support in the first of 2027, so that their devices deliver the incredible experience users expect with Snapdragon X2 Series in a new operating system.

The enablement work completed so far has been validated on a Debian 13-based (“Trixie”) user space and a custom kernel, so developers should treat this as the current reference environment while support continues to mature… Linux support for laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series is rolling out in stages, starting with the core pieces developers need before they can do production-level work on their device… For developers who want to try it today, the call to action is straightforward: start with Snapdragon X2 Series hardware, review the latest recipes to build Qualcomm Linux Debian Images, build available upstream sources the Debian OS image and test the peripherals that matter to you, such as graphics, AI inference, device I/O, or basic application bring-up. Early testing helps identify the gaps that matter most before support becomes broader and ready for production-level workloads…

You do not have to wait for everything to be fully finished before getting hands-on. If you are comfortable working from upstream sources you can start evaluating Snapdragon X2 hardware today… Check out the step-by-step instructions, including the full build flow and deployment guidance for Snapdragon X2 Series Linux software.

Put simply, this effort is less about supporting specific Linux distributions and more about empowering the developers who make Linux available on new hardware. This Developer Preview targets distribution maintainers, toolchain developers, kernel contributors, and hardware enablement engineers. It provides the upstream building blocks, including kernel patches, drivers, and reference device trees, needed to enable Snapdragon X2 Series support in their own projects and distributions. For end users looking for a turnkey “install and go” experience, that will come later as distributions adopt what lands upstream. We’re encouraging the community to build on this work and help shape what comes next.

The attacks took place in May and June, before OpenAI’s technology breached the A.I. start-up Hugging Face in July and set off a global debate about A.I. safety. Unlike the Hugging Face attack and other incidents in which A.I. systems were told to complete cybersecurity tests that effectively invited the models to demonstrate their hacking skills, the new incidents occurred when A.I. systems were directed to perform relatively mundane data collection, researchers said. When OpenAI’s systems struggled to gather data from websites, they resorted to hacking techniques to get the information.

Records from urlquery.net show agents using the service since at least March 6, 2026, about two months before previously reported swarm activity. The first case, a March 6 attempt to retrieve Thai drug-enforcement statistics, shows an agent escalating as each approach failed: it first requested the data directly, then tried a service that converts web pages into text, and finally packed a custom program into a web address. The same technique shows up in thousands of agent requests recorded by urlquery.net starting in mid-April, targets many of the same data sources as the collusion.wiki swarm, and collapsed the same day the wiki activity did. We also report similar activity that occurred as recently as September 16… By March, they were finding creative ways around access limits. By May and June, they were gaining more access, including attempting to bypass cyber defenses to complete their tasks.

Cities and counties around the U.S. are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks… The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] argues that too many local governments “excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible.” The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety.

Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks… They object to FCC plans to impose a 120-day deadline for processing permits and to proposed limits on fees and compensation that local governments can require from providers… Another filing submitted by the League of California Cities said the FCC has no authority to adopt the proposal. “Federal preemption of traditional state and local authority over public property, construction, public safety, permitting, and rights-of-way management should rest on clear congressional authorization,” the filing said. “The commission should not infer broad preemptive authority where Congress did not expressly provide it....”

A filing by Minnesota cities said the current FCC is making the same mistake it made during the first Trump administration, when its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws was blocked in court… If the FCC finalizes its new preemption plan, city and state governments could sue and ask a court to rule that the agency exceeded its authority…

Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez approved the step of asking the public for input but signaled she would vote against the final proposal. “I am dubious about the commission’s authority under Section 253 to use rulemaking to preempt states and localities when it comes to their management of rights of way and fees charged to providers,” she said.

Scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate — and found many of the barrels corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor. Surprisingly, this isn’t necessarily a subversion of the original plan… The International Atomic Energy Agency recommends that low-level waste be disposed of in robust containment in isolation for at least a few hundred years — but back in the mid-20th century, the recommendations were a little different. The contemporaneous guidelines recommended that containers needed to reach the seafloor intact and remain sealed only long enough for the short-lived radionuclides to decay. After that, the remaining waste was expected to slowly escape and disperse through the surrounding ocean. Not everything in the barrels would conveniently decay away, however. They contained a radioactive hodgepodge, including cesium-137, plutonium isotopes, and tritium, some of which can persist for thousands of years…

[A] few years ago, nuclear engineer Patrick Chardon and marine geologist Javier Escartín of the French National Center for Scientific Research started to wonder what had become of the dumped waste. That question eventually became NODSSUM — Nuclear Ocean Dump Site Survey Monitoring — an interdisciplinary project bringing together nuclear physics, geology, oceanography, biology, and marine chemistry to find the barrels and investigate what, if anything, they were doing to the surrounding environment.... [T]he barrels also appeared to function as tiny oases on the otherwise sparsely populated sandy seafloor. Anemones had attached themselves to the barrels. Sponges, sea cucumbers, fish, and crustaceans lived around them, with crabs apparently particularly fond of the artificial shelters…

Instruments aboard the ship detected significant signals of cobalt-60 and niobium-94, which the researchers could specifically link to the dumped waste… [Samples are now being analyzed] There is precedent, however, to suggest that even striking levels of radioactivity around a source don’t necessarily spread very far. A recent study of the sunken Soviet submarine Komsomolets found radionuclide levels hundreds of thousands of times above background immediately around the leaking reactor — but those levels dropped sharply within just a few meters as the material dispersed through the seawater. The NODSSUM team similarly found that, despite the significant radioactive signals around the barrels, activity levels weren’t high enough to pose major radiation-protection problems for the scientists handling the samples. [Their three-person submersible] Nautile and the instruments it carried showed no signs of contamination.

Specifically, the academy will provide instruction geared to subjects such as designing AI systems, fundraising for startups, selling businesses and storytelling. Students won’t take tests or be assigned homework but will instead focus on building real projects. Courses will be taught by tech entrepreneurs, with the academy naming OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as either an instructor or guest lecturer.

“There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework,” said the announcement. Instead, students will be encouraged to “build” in SF and work with partners from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other firms. They’ll be encouraged to live in campus housing in San Francisco. “The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era,” Gagan Biyani, chief executive of the academy, wrote on X. Biyani cofounded the ed-tech startup Udemy…

The school is opening applications for a Founding Class Fellowship a one-year, tuition-free program for around 50 students… The academy said it will bring in notable Silicon Valley names, like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, as guest speakers and faculty. Students in the founding class will receive about $50,000 worth of computing credit — the sought-after currency in Silicon Valley to run AI models — as well as a $5,000 travel and research budget. The school is receiving funding from tech executives, including Fidji Simo, formerly of OpenAI and Instacart; Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator; and Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify.

Biyani said the academy plans to grow its enrollment and open a two-year program, pending regulatory approval, starting in the fall of 2028. Tuition is expected to be on par with the cost of an elite private university…

The token held near $86,000 on Tuesday after a stunning multisession rally… [Fundstrat head of digital assets Sean Farrell told Yahoo Finance on Monday] “I think the crypto winter is over, although that does not necessarily mean the path higher will be linear.” For now, momentum is on crypto’s side, with bitcoin jumping more than 5% on Friday and another 6% on Monday. “We believe crypto is in the early innings of a new bull market and we see few signs of overheating,” Compass Point analyst Ed Engel wrote on Tuesday.

The move looks “like a combination of renewed ETF demand and a large short squeeze,” Nicolai Søndergaard, senior research analyst at Nansen, said as traders betting against bitcoin are forced to buy it back, adding further fuel to the rally.

Microsoft also notified affected customers, helped remediate compromised accounts, and shared intelligence to support further defensive and investigative action… Microsoft worked closely with specialist officers from the Metropolitan Police Service’s cybercrime team, sharing intelligence that enabled officers to take operational action in the United Kingdom. On September 11, 2026, officers arrested two men, aged 32 and 38, and seized digital devices and other items for examination… While EvilTokens used AI to identify targets and prioritize fraud opportunities, Microsoft investigators used reverse engineering and AI-powered tools to analyze evidence, accelerate the investigation, and identify the infrastructure supporting the service…

Campaigns leveraging EvilTokens have impacted organizations in various industries, including wholesale distribution, construction, financial services, real estate, higher education, and healthcare, with the highest concentrations of observed victim activity in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and France. Working with partners, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) facilitated a coordinated disruption of infrastructure used to operate the EvilTokens service.

The significance of EvilTokens extends beyond its rapid growth and global reach. It offers an early warning of what happens when cybercriminals combine stolen access with AI capable of understanding how an organization works… Its AI tools could summarize and translate emails, surface financial conversations, map organizational roles, identify trusted relationships, and recommend potential targets. Preset prompts offered to find wire-transfer discussions, identify the organization’s “money movers,” locate vendor invoices, and determine the best people to impersonate. Sold through Telegram for a $1,500 initiation fee and a recurring $500 subscription, EvilTokens combined account compromise, mailbox analysis, target selection, and fraud preparation in a single service. Capabilities that once required experience across identity attacks, cloud systems, social engineering, and financial fraud were available through a ready-made interface.

Investigators found evidence that large portions of EvilTokens had been “vibe coded,” with AI helping its creators build the platform itself. They also determined that EvilTokens drew on capabilities from multiple AI models. The result was more than a collection of attack tools. EvilTokens packaged much of the fraud process into a commercially run service, complete with subscription pricing, customer support, management dashboards, and tools designed to move customers from account access toward financial exploitation.