The Federal Communications Commission last week eliminated the gigabit speed goal established during the Biden administration and declared that current levels of broadband deployment in the US are acceptable. Though fiber networks have routinely offered such speeds for years, the FCC said the gigabit speed goal is not “technologically neutral,” suggesting that it isn’t fair to other, slower technologies.

In 2024, the FCC raised its broadband benchmark to 100Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream, setting the new standard by which to judge whether deployment is reasonable and timely. The FCC at the time also set a long-term speed goal of 1Gbps download speeds paired with 500Mbps upload speeds, saying it would use the goal “as a guidepost for evaluating our efforts to encourage deployment.” Republican Brendan Carr, who is now the FCC chairman, never liked that long-term goal. He proposed abolishing it last year, and the change was finalized on August 14 in the FCC’s latest broadband deployment report. The reports are mandated by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act.

“As part of our return to following the plain language of Section 706, we adopt our proposal from the Notice [of Inquiry] to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500 Mbps established in the 2024 Report,” the order said. “A long-term goal is not mentioned in Section 706 and could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner. At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences.” The FCC said that comments submitted by cable industry group NCTA and wireless industry group CTIA “support our reasoning for abolishing the long-term goal.”

The draft code comprises three principles. The first principle requires businesses to disclose the generative AI models they use, their training data and methods for collecting such data on their websites and make the information publicly accessible. Meanwhile, disclosure of sensitive information will not be mandatory. The second principle calls for businesses to disclose whether certain webpages are included in training data when requested by copyright holders and other rights holders who allege infringement. The third principle states that businesses will respond to requests for information from system and service users concerned about copyright infringement.

A Finnish study has found an unexpected association between screen use and cognitive performance. Children who accumulated more screen time as they grew up tended to show better cognitive processing during adolescence. One of the researchers cautions against viewing screen time as entirely harmful and says the goal should be to balance physical activity with screen use that encourages active thinking. […] “The findings suggest that screen time can support children’s and adolescents’ cognitive processing. Presumably, the essential point here is what kind of things they do in their screen time. Teachers and parents should encourage children to use devices and screens in such ways that promote active thinking, problem-solving, creativity and learning,” states Doctoral Researcher Petri Jalanko from the University of Jyvaskyla.

Digital activities that involve learning, creativity, problem-solving, or other forms of active mental engagement could potentially help explain the association observed in the study. “We should not regard screen time solely as harmful but seek balance between physical activity and screen time that promotes active thinking,” Jalanko summarizes. The relationship between physical activity and cognition was more complicated. Among girls, greater amounts of light intensity physical activity since childhood were associated with better working memory during adolescence. Among boys, greater participation in guided physical activity from childhood through adolescence was linked to better working memory.

The researchers also found an unexpected pattern involving unsupervised exercise. Lower levels of self-reported unsupervised physical activity were associated with better cognitive processing in adolescence. By contrast, physical activity and sedentary time measured using a device that tracked heart rate and movement were not associated with cognitive processing. One possible explanation is that these sensors can measure movement and physiological activity but cannot determine exactly what a person is doing during periods of activity or inactivity.

Katalyst said Link will not attempt to capture Swift and boost it to a higher orbit because of problems with controlling the spacecraft. NASA said this means the telescope will plunge through the atmosphere after more than 20 years of tracking some of the biggest explosions in the universe like gamma ray bursts and exploding stars. Its demise is not expected before October.

NASA paid $30 million to Katalyst in an attempt to raise the telescope to a safer, longer-lasting orbit. Intense solar activity caused it to lose altitude faster than expected. The rescue spacecraft went into an uncontrollable spin a few weeks after its liftoff in early July. While flight controllers managed to slow Link’s tumble, issues continued to plague its pointing and positioning in orbit.

“This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement. As a consolation prize, Katalyst will continue to operate Link in proximity with the telescope to demonstrate capabilities for future rescue operations. Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said it was an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline that was thrown together in under a year. “We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way,” Lee said in a statement. “We have already learned a tremendous amount.”

Meta was infused with a culture in which employees obsessed over user numbers and consistently pushed safety to the side, according to Arturo Bejar, a former employee turned whistleblower, who testified today in the landmark child safety trial against the social media company. Only one man had the ability to change that, Bejar said: CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But he didn’t. “At the end of the day, it was the company culture that Mark had created that made it so that it was practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues that we’ve been talking about,” he said.

Bejar is a linchpin witness for a consortium of states led by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey that sued Meta, alleging violations of consumer and child data protection laws, and that the company lied to the public about risks its platforms posed. The attorneys for the states say Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to hook young users and to keep them on site longer thanks to features such as infinite scrolling and the “like” button. Meta has denied the allegations. In his opening statement on Tuesday, attorney Paul Schmidt argued that the company was sensitive to the risks to teens, sought to address them and did not deceive the public about them. The state attorneys have not yet said if they will call Zuckerberg as a witness.

Testifying in federal court in Oakland, California, for a second day on Wednesday, Bejar, who worked on safety issues at Meta for eight years, said he interacted with Zuckerberg dozens of times, and charged that Zuckerberg was not telling the truth when he made public denials that the company put profits over safety. In particular, Bejar addressed a widely-shared Facebook post Zuckerberg made in 2021 after another whistleblower, Frances Haugen, shared internal documents with The Wall Street Journal that highlighted risks to the mental health of teens. In the post, Zuckerberg said it’s “just not true” that Meta prioritizes profit over safety and wellbeing. “Based on my experience at Meta, that is not an accurate statement,” Bejar said. […] Bejar testified, at almost every turn the company chose policies that boosted usership and revenue over safety. Safety was “not a meaningful priority,” he said.

PINE64 has some very bad news for Linux hardware fans. PINE64 says it has no plans to produce additional Linux devices in the near future because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. Future production will depend on component pricing after mid 2027, while existing PineNote and PineTab2 inventory could run out in roughly three months. The company says PineTime, PineVoice, and Pinecil production will continue as usual, but the outlook for its Linux hardware is much less certain.

OpenRouter has become popular with developers seeking to use AI models, particularly those considered non-proprietary and available for free. Many of these so-called open-weight AI models stem from Chinese labs like DeepSeek and Z.ai, which have gained steam among developers for generally being more cost-efficient relative to proprietary AI models from U.S. companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

In a blog post about the deal, Stripe noted that it’s been working with companies to “optimize their token costs and route tokens efficiently,” referring to a kind of metric used to measure AI model usage. Stripe said it’s difficult to manage AI costs relative to performance because of the rapid “pace at which models are released and repriced.” […]

OpenRouter said in a blog post that combining with Stripe will help with its overall vision of “a healthy AI ecosystem where many models thrive, where AI neurodiversity is a strength, where a lab or an inference provider with a breakthrough can reach millions of developers, and where no single model becomes the default by inertia.”

These will join 11 locations across the US where Amazon already offers drone deliveries, with each Prime Air site serving an area of approximately 175 square miles. The service aims to quickly deliver packages of up to 5 pounds or less […]. Amazon reiterated its drone safety features alongside these expansion plans, including Prime Air’s “industry-leading Detect-and-Avoid system.” That’s likely an attempt to minimize any concerns raised by the communities where the service is expanding, given these drones have already been scrutinized for crashing into cranes, internet cables, gardens, and an apartment building.

Round Hill is a prominent music publisher whose copyrights include the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” the Kinks’ “Lola” and Dio’s “Holy Diver.” The company provided a list of 500 songs that the defendants had infringed upon. Round Hill said in the suits that the company plans to “amend to list potentially ten thousand or more of their musical compositions,” with those damages potentially exceeding $1 billion. “While in other cases for copyright infringement, Defendant has waxed poetic about the necessity of progress and AI’s value to society, there is simply no reason — other than rote expediency — to have that progress come at the cost of copyrights holders,” prominent music attorney Richard Busch, representing Round Hill, wrote in the suits.

Round Hill further argued that the latter "‘expediency’ arguments completely falter” when taking into account Suno and Anthropic’s significant cash valuations they’ve earned while “exploiting illicit copies of copyrighted works, including the Round Hill Works.” “There is simply nothing fair about a company using theft to build for purely commercial purposes a multi-billion dollar business while those from which they steal receive nothing,” Round Hill said.

The three federal agencies recommended that network defenders secure their networks against the ransomware group’s attacks by mitigating security vulnerabilities to protect operating systems, software, and firmware from exploitation attempts. Security teams are also advised to segment networks to block lateral movement after compromise and to block access from untrusted origins to remote services on internal systems.

[…] “Medusa developers typically recruit initial access brokers (IABs) in cybercriminal forums and marketplaces to obtain initial access to potential victims,” the advisory says. “Potential payments between $100 USD and $1 million USD are offered to these affiliates with the opportunity to work exclusively for Medusa.”

Moderna developed the vaccine with Merck and tested it together with immunotherapy drug Keytruda, a widely used treatment for melanoma. […] This is the first positive late-stage trial result for an mRNA cancer vaccine, which trains a patient’s immune system to fight tumors by targeting specific mutations in those cells and the first such study to show that adding a treatment to Keytruda worked better than that therapy alone. Similar approaches are being tested against lung, breast and pancreatic cancers.

[…] The cancer treatment combines Merck’s Keytruda with a made-to-order mRNA vaccine from Moderna that is based on an analysis of mutations found in the patients’ own tumors. The trial enrolled 1,137 high-risk patients with stage IIB-IV melanoma that had been surgically removed. Volunteers were randomized to receive up to nine doses of Keytruda plus the personalized vaccine or Keytruda alone for about one year. The companies said no new safety signals have emerged in the trial. In January, the companies announced results of a mid-stage trial of the treatment showing that it reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49% after five years.

X’s algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X’s feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site’s algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when it generated a user’s For You Page. It also showed that X serves more ragebait to people who say they are Democrats, although the exact reason for that is unclear.

Twenty soldiers at Fort Stewart in Georgia in the Army’s 9th Brigade Engineering Battalion, part of the 3rd Infantry Division, have already chosen this incentive as part of their reenlistment, an Army spokesperson told CBS News on Wednesday. “The idea was to have a unique incentives program that connects to what Soldiers are interested in,” Lt. Col. Angel Tomko, a spokesperson for the 3rd Infantry Division, said in a statement. “The command team, in conjunction with the career counselor, wanted to get soldiers excited to reenlist.”

[…] The Army memo, which has circulated online, says any soldier who signs a reenlistment contract between Aug. 1, 2026 and Nov. 14 will be authorized for a special four-day pass designated to coincide with “the highly anticipated release of the video game Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6).” About 130 soldiers are currently eligible for the incentive, Tomko said. Eligible soldiers must reenlist for a minimum of two years and up to six years.

Unitree, officially known as Yushu Technology Co Ltd, was founded in 2016 and now plays a key role in Beijing’s ambitions to develop advanced technology. It has become a robotics industry leader, selling devices from sensors and automated arms to four-legged and human-like machines. The firm shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots last year as demand for the technology grows.

Unitree is one of the few companies in the sector to make money, delivering a net profit of 278 million yuan in 2025. It is a fierce rival to developers in the US as it produces robots with similar features but at lower prices. The company is based in Hangzhou, in eastern China. The region is home to a so-called golden cluster zone of robotics firms, which have benefited from huge government investments. That support helped drive a more than threefold increase in the number of Chinese robotics firms between 2020 and 2024, according to state-run China Daily.

[…] Unitree’s robot dogs start at $2,700, a fraction of the roughly $70,000 price tag for Boston Dynamics’ four-legged device, Spot. “They’re not exactly comparable because some of Unitree’s dogs are much smaller,” [said Harold Soh, a researcher from the National University of Singapore]. “But the price is a big difference.” Unitree has been selling humanoid robots since 2023, with its $13,500 child-sized G1 model hitting the market the following year. Meanwhile, major US rivals — including Elon Musk’s Tesla — have yet to start delivering rival products.

[…] Some experts expect Unitree’s market debut to be a gauge of investor appetite for the fast-growing humanoid robotics sector. The listing has given the public a rare chance to invest in a humanoid robotics company and could set a benchmark for other manufacturers, said Jack Pearson from investment firm RoboStrategy. The listing also marks a “turning point” for China’s robotics industry, as Unitree’s success comes even as the US is curbing imports of foreign-made robots, Pearson said.

After the second world war, sugar remained rationed in Britain for several years. But in September 1953, rationing ended and people started eating a lot more sugar. Consumption nearly doubled. This meant that children born just a few months apart had very different levels of sugar exposure both in the womb and during early childhood. For our study, we used data from over 64,000 people born in Britain between 1951 and 1956. Those born earlier spent a larger share of their first 1,000 days under sugar rationing, while those born later experienced progressively less of it.

[…] What is most surprising, however, is not the cancer results or the biological markers of ageing. It’s how early-life sugar exposure continued to affect people’s diets even 50 years later. We found that people who experienced sugar rationing early in life still consumed less sugar in adulthood, around age 50. They also ate less overall, and their diets were healthier and more diverse. This suggests that the level of sweetness people are exposed to very early in life may shape their taste preferences for a long time.