“They’ll do the minimum the law requires to respect user choice,” explains Kush Amlani, Mozilla’s counsel overseeing global competition and regulatory work… Mozilla recently marked 100 days since it released an 87-page report detailing the ways in which Microsoft pushes Edge on Windows PCs.... One example is how Windows often displays a “Let’s finish setting up your PC” pop-up after an OS update. This screen has an enabled-by-default option to “use recommended browser settings,” which makes Edge the default web browser.

However, that screen doesn’t appear in Europe. European laws now force Microsoft to make Windows more respectful of user choices. For instance, in European countries, the Start menu opens links in your default web browser rather than in Edge, as it does everywhere else. Amlani says Mozilla wants Microsoft to release the European version of Windows to the rest of the world. However, he thinks this will require government action. As he puts it, “Microsoft can do better when it’s forced.”

The timing of Anthropic’s public fund announcement is both mandatory to prepare for an initial public offering, and “beneficial from an image perspective,” especially as AI reshapes the jobs market, Lise Buyer, partner at IPO advisory firm Class V Group, told CNBC…

Anthropic said it will share more about the fund structure and governance in the coming months, including valuation milestones that may increase the stake. It said it will also share progress on the fund in an upcoming public benefit report. In response to Anthropic’s announcement, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on X that he “recommend[s] giving the shares directly to the public.”

Wearing spiked gloves, a helmet and protective padding, the 5-foot-6, 205-pound LaPenna held his own against all three bots. He dominated his first opponent, referred to at the fight as "the child robot.” Next came an imposing "Terminator”-inspired humanoid, which was listed on the fight video as 6-feet and 200 pounds with a kick force of 850 pounds. The robot landed several hard kicks, including one that knocked LaPenna across the mat and another with an impact that brought the humanoid to the ground and caused its head to come off — but the human seemed to gain strength as the match went on and eventually stood triumphantly with his foot on the machine’s crumpled body.

LaPenna was dominant early in his final match, in which he faced a robot that resembled a “Predator” from the movies of the same name. After landing several punches and kicks and taking his opponent to the ground multiple times, LaPenna eventually became fatigued and called for the match to be ended. “He doesn’t get tired. He doesn’t stay down,” LaPenna said in a postmatch interview.

“It’s very unfair to put a human in with a heavily motorized system that’s only going to dominate,” said Ken Goldberg, a professor who oversees the automation lab at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s nothing surprising about that....” He said he understood the appeal of the fights that Robot Entertainment Kombat (REK) was staging, noting that it tapped “into some of the fear and frustration with robots that people feel.... I mean, they love to see the human kick the robot’s gearbox,” he said. But the odds of that human fighter getting his gearbox kicked are much greater, Dr. Goldberg said, given that REK’s humanoid robots can weigh several hundred pounds and are made of steel.

On Sept. 23, the California State Athletic Commission sent a cease-and-desist order to REK, its CEO Cix Liv and “all persons holding, promoting, advertising or sponsoring unsanctioned human versus humanoid robot cage fight.” The letter states that “any boxing or mixed martial arts contest, match, or exhibition, involving any human in the State of California” requires the prior approval of the commission and that it is a misdemeanor to hold such an event without obtaining a license or permit from the state. A spokesperson for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the CSAC, said in a statement emailed to The Times that the commission is “committed to protecting the safety of the public and integrity of combat sports.”

“Unsanctioned activity puts the physical and financial well-being of all those involved at risk and such activity will not be tolerated,” the statement said.

The fifth best-selling game of 2024 in the U.S. was NBA 2K25. Every year, fans dump hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars into the grindy NBA basketball sim. But just a little over two years after its release, 2K Games confirmed it’s already pulling the plug on it. The game will be delisted from digital storefronts on October 30. By January 1, 2027, online servers will go offline as well, making it impossible to play the most popular modes. A game millions paid $70 for will become mostly useless. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres wants to change that.

“I think there should be a simple rule: if you pay for it, you own it,” Torres told Kotaku in a phone interview this week. To make that the law of the land, the U.S. representative for New York’s 15th congressional district since 2021 plans to introduce legislation in Congress called the Power To The Players Act. The bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to create regulations protecting ownership rights for video games. Companies selling digital games would need to grant players more than just a license that can expire at any time, and games with online features would need to provide offline modes that still work even when servers eventually shut down…

The Power To The Players Act noticeably leaves out other types of digital media like movies and music, though Terminator 2 and a bunch of other movie purchases were ripped from people’s digital libraries earlier this year.

Nscale’s problem is not really Nscale’s. It is Britain’s. Grid-connection times have become the single biggest brake on new data centres. Some UK projects face waits stretching close to a decade for enough power. One estimate found more than a quarter of data-centre capacity slipped in 2025 alone.

Microsoft’s decision threatens to undermine Nscale’s attempts to push ahead with a Wall Street flotation worth up to $35bn (£26bn), despite a brutal sell-off in AI computing stocks. Rival data centre developers have seen their share prices plunge over the last week on concerns that they will struggle to repay their debts as interest rates and inflation continue to rise.... Tech analyst Gartner said last week that $3.5 trillion could be written off by 2030 if the AI boom fails to deliver on its promises.

“In 2026, AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, and are forecast to invest an additional $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030,” said Will Sommer, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner.... Failure to achieve sustainable return on investment capital (ROIC) on rapidly depreciating assets would almost certainly necessitate write-downs. Based on Gartner projections, a continued AI infrastructure investment trajectory could leave more than $4 trillion in asset value exposed to write-down risk through 2032. In this scenario, Gartner does not expect the 12% ROIC to be achieved until the end of 2032 at earliest…

Gartner estimates AI-optimized IaaS spending will grow from $66 billion in 2027 to $174 billion in 2030. “The growth in spending on AI-optimized IaaS will be too low for most AI compute providers to recover their AI investments before the current generation of AI semiconductors is replaced,” said Sommer. By 2030, Gartner predicts that cost pressure and a lack of a differentiating business model will force over 80% of neocloud [AI-specialized infrastructure] providers to cease independent operations.

Roughly 84.4% of the world’s coral reefs suffered bleaching-levels of heat stress during the last major marine heat wave from January 2023 to September 2025, with over half already lost compared to coral coverage in the 1950s… But there’s some good news, thanks to a new study published this Wednesday in the journal Science Advances: Marine ecologists at Stanford have discovered that bleached corals can be revived via contact with a healthy coral neighbor, who (like a good neighbor) shares their photosynthetic, symbiotic algae (Symbiodiniaceae) with their peers.

“This incredible new result — that fast and full recovery is possible in bleached coral — can inspire solutions that eventually may be scalable,” [Fiorenza Micheli, a marine ecologist with Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions and study co-author, told the journal Nature]… Unlike their controls, bleached coral in contact with healthy coral recovered in just eight weeks… [T]he surprise discovery of this method alongside the other techniques that marine conservationists are now actively pursuing — including the successful deep-freezing and revival of at-risk coral sampled from Hawaii — could offer threatened reefs the lifeline they need. Coral contact could super-charge other efforts, like the selective breeding of heat-tolerant corals and the cultivation of protected coral nurseries

OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won’t play nice?

In recent weeks, users of services like Meta’s Muse, xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking tickets on behalf of users. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they’re blocking AI agents from accessing accounts due to security concerns. Some users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtrak, suggesting other companies could be quietly blocking them....

Muse, Meta’s deceptively cute AI assistant, most recently faced the wrath of Amazon, which said its “continued access” violates its site policies. There are reports of xAI’s Grok, Instinct’s AI agent, and OpenAI’s Dots being unable to use Amazon as well. xAI owner Elon Musk responded by saying that maybe he “should start a competitor to Amazon.” The more places bots struggle to access, the greater the questions about how useful they are....

Instead of trying to fight Amazon, [Meta] has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.

A report published in July by Pangram, a research firm that tracks AI content online, found that more than 40% of long-form posts on the platform were AI-generated, compared to around 30% on X and Medium and a smaller percentage on Reddit and Substack.... LinkedIn previously offered AI tools to edit or rewrite posts, although it recently scaled the offerings back. But low-quality AI posts are a business problem for LinkedIn. They all start to sound the same, [according to LinkedIn Editor-in-Chief Dan Roth Roth]. If users see too many generic AI posts, instead of content that really teaches them something or gives them a deeper understanding of a professional connection, LinkedIn risks losing them to other platforms.

In August, LinkedIn rolled out a button letting users flag when a post “seems like AI slop,” which was clicked more than 1 million times within its first two weeks. Now, the company is trying to use its own AI systems to help weed out AI slop on the platform and to remind LinkedIn users how to post like humans. The company built a team largely made up of former journalists and social media experts who have an eye for recognizing generic, sloppy content. These experts help train LinkedIn’s AI model on what authentic, useful posts look like. If the model flags a post as low-quality, AI-generated content, it’ll be less likely to be distributed beyond that user’s direct connections.

Also key to the strategy is a creator management team that acts as “content therapists” for executives, subject matter experts and other LinkedIn users, many of whom have gotten accustomed to the convenience of using AI to write what, on the surface, appear to be polished posts, Roth said. “A lot of times now today, they’ll run it through Claude or Gemini or wherever, they’ll post it on LinkedIn and it will perform poorly. And then they come to the team and they’re like, ‘Why did this do badly?’" Roth said. “And the best thing you can do is give it back to them and be like, ‘Did you enjoy reading this? Do you see yourself in this?”

The efforts are showing early signs of success. Improvements to LinkedIn’s detection systems have resulted in a 40% decline in views of content classified as AI slop, the platform said last month. That’s not to say LinkedIn is entirely opposed to AI, Roth said, adding that “not everyone is a born communicator.” But failing to edit or personalize content means it’s less likely to reach a wide audience on the platform.

The TIOBE Index is a monthly indicator of programming-language popularity based on factors including skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. The October 2026 rankings show a largely stable top 10, with R overtaking SQL and Julia returning to the top 20 for the first time in three years. [SQL has risen to #9 from #10 in October of 2025 — back when R ranked only #13.]

Python remains No. 1, followed by C, C++, Java, C#, and JavaScript, while Rust holds its No. 10 position. [A year ago Rust ranked only #16.] Outside the top 10, Julia climbs from No. 21 to No. 18, and TIOBE introduces Mandarin Chinese search terms into its methodology to broaden the index’s geographic representation.

Python offers an accessible, high-level approach to numerical computing, but performance can become a bottleneck. C++, on the other hand, delivers excellent performance but comes with a steeper learning curve and a lower level of abstraction. Julia aims to bridge this gap by combining the best of both worlds…

Apart from Julia, two other languages are knocking on the door of the TIOBE top 20: Dart and OCaml. Dart jumps from #41 to #27 this month. Thanks to its popular UI toolkit Flutter, Dart has been hovering around the edge of the top 20 for quite some time. OCaml, on the other hand, might come as a surprise. It jumps from #38 to #26 this month, driven in part by its growing use in real-time trading systems and parsing technology.

The collection includes historical SDKs, developer conference presentations, technical documentation, programming examples, limited source code, and development utilities. (ROM images, commercial applications, and simulator binaries have deliberately been excluded....) Making a broader collection of development resources available to the retrocomputing community, the archive is available at GitHub.com/ardiri/dev-palmos and is intended for historical preservation, education, and research, particularly as enthusiasts continue working to maintain, emulate, and revive the platform… Ardiri has also written an auto-biography and has started explored the engineering principles behind these systems in his books.

Named ‘Virii,’ the virus intercepted Palm OS system calls to progressively infect legitimate applications while preserving their original functionality. Infected applications could then spread between handheld devices through infrared beaming, potentially allowing an infection to propagate among hundreds of developers exchanging software at the conference. The virus also included a date-triggered payload designed to interfere with system time reporting between October 23 and 27, 2001, potentially causing erratic clocks, unreliable alarms, and missed appointments.

The restriction is not new: the relevant checks were introduced in the device firmware around 2024. However, these hardware handcuffs have only recently received wider attention. Though a user can desolder the original memory and install electrically compatible RAM, the nonfree firmware may refuse to recognize the additional memory, or simply decide not to boot the computer at all. Even replacement RAM of the same capacity can be rejected.

This is worse than Raspberry Pi’s longstanding dependence on nonfree firmware in an important way. It is not only nonfree software, but it is Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), used in this case to prevent the owner of the computer from making a modification that the hardware is otherwise capable of supporting. That distinction matters. Soldered RAM is difficult for most people to replace since it is a physical characteristic of the hardware. In the case of Raspberry Pi boards, users have demonstrated that the hardware itself can be modified successfully....

Raspberry Pi justifies the use of DRM on the basis of being able to identify altered computers. There may be legitimate reasons for wanting to identify such altered computers. Unscrupulous sellers have reportedly replaced memory on lower-capacity boards and resold them as more expensive models, sometimes using unreliable or defective components. But preventing fraud and maintaining quality does not require taking control away from users. A Raspberry Pi could record its original factory configuration in a cryptographically verifiable form. Raspberry Pi could use free software that warns the user when the installed RAM differs from original factory configuration. Raspberry Pi could provide tools allowing buyers to verify what hardware originally shipped with a board. None of those measures requires a software-enforced limit on what an owner may do with the computer…

If compatible hardware can be installed successfully, the manufacturer should not create restrictions to prevent the owner from using it. Restrictions on hardware upgrades are deeply troubling from an organization like Raspberry Pi that has stated their commitment to longevity as a guiding principle. Free software is ultimately about who controls the computer. The user should control it, not the manufacturer that sold it....

The people who own these computers must also have the freedom to modify, repair, and upgrade them, without restrictions imposed by nonfree software limiting their potential.

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… If you have the skills to upgrade your RAM, you most certainly have the skills to downgrade the Raspberry Pi bootloader…

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… 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.

Mark Stephens, better known under the pen name Robert X. Cringely, died last week at 73. Stephens chronicled the tech industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s — the age of Bill Gates’ rise, Steve Jobs’ repose, the dawn of the world wide web — and produced the famed documetary Triumph of the Nerds, based on his own bestselling Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date.

Though not the first InfoWorld columnist to write under the Cringely name, he was responsible for its persona and fought successfully to keep it after he left the magazine in 1995.

I first met him in the 1990s, while he was still working at InfoWorld, and we became friends immediately. He helped me get a job or two, and he was always filled with crazy (meaning really good) ideas.

I’ll miss him and his creativity greatly.

“How does a 67-year-old hack with three minor children recover from going blind, losing his home and business in a horrible fire (like 2,000 others, we are still fighting with insurance companies), while appeasing an angry crowd of Kickstarter supporters armed with pitchforks and shovels?”

That crowd still wants long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely to deliver on his Kickstarter-funded project to create custom Minecraft servers. So in a new blog post this week, Cringely writes that “I went looking for venture money to recapitalize MineServer and I simultaneously started a satellite launch company to fund my eventual retirement. I am not making this up…”

He’s now found a Beverly Hills patron who wants to be a co-investor in the Minecraft servers, but “I will have to earn the matching money on my own, which is what I have been trying to do with my other startup, Eldorado Space.”

• July, 1999: Cringely’s take on “Pirates of Silicon Valley”
• April, 2009: Three Mile Island Memories
• June, 2011: IBM Did Not Invent the Personal Computer
• March, 2019: Cringely’s Final Predictions: Apple Becomes a Financial Service and Hedge Fund
• June, 2019: Cringely Predicts The End Of Broadcast TV Within A Decade
• April, 2020: Not Just ‘The Death of IT’. Cringely Also Predicts Layoffs For Many IT Contractors
• January, 2021: Robert Cringley Predicted ‘The Death of IT’ in 2020. Was He Right?
• June, 2023: Cringely Predicts Moore’s Law Will Continue — Because of AI

But my favorite Cringely memory is Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, the full 70-minute interview from 1995 that a 40-year-old Jobs gave to Cringely during filming for Triumph of the Nerds. (“And they actually sent someone to wake up the Pope....”) There’s various pirated copies on YouTube and an online transcript, but only 10 minutes made the broadcast — at the time Jobs was still at NeXT after his departure from Apple. But when Cringely rediscovered the videotape, the entirety of the interview was released to theaters in 2012 six months after Steve Jobs’ death.

Share your own memories of Robert Cringely in the comments…

The Department of Justice’s press release about the incident says that the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control section, whose responsibility includes prosecuting spies, is assisting with the case… A Washington-based Middle East expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid incurring wrath from Saudi Arabia, said he believed the Saudi government was almost certainly involved in some way. “No one does this, not even for patriotism, without getting paid,” said the person. And money would not be distributed without agreement by the Saudi royal court, he said. The Saudis lag behind their regional rival, the United Arab Emirates, in artificial intelligence development, he added.

In an Arabic podcast interview last month, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, said he and other Saudi tech professionals in Silicon Valley had formed a group that advised Saudi organizations, including the kingdom’s social insurance agency…

“Silicon Valley is ground zero for espionage from a variety of countries around the world,” said Amy Zegart, a professor at Stanford University who specializes in national security and intelligence. She added that she was “troubled” by the OpenAI incident and expected more cases “because these companies are so important.”

Foreign nationals have long formed the backbone of the American tech industry, helping U.S. companies surpass their would-be international rivals… As recently as April, Katrina Mulligan, a senior member of OpenAI’s national security team, called for an “accelerated pathway to citizenship” for such workers, referring to foreign hires as a “national strategic asset” at an event on Capitol Hill. She estimated that a significant number of OpenAI’s employees were not U.S. citizens, including Chinese nationals. Just half of the 300 top AI researchers in the world, she said, were American.

Other industry leaders — as well as some lawmakers — have long accused top-tier tech companies with many foreign workers of disadvantaging Americans and being breeding grounds for Chinese espionage. Palmer Luckey, CEO of weapons maker Anduril, and venture capitalist Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital took to X on Wednesday to revisit arguments that the industry should focus on hiring U.S. citizens. “Silicon Valley has operated with maximum openness and maximum naivete toward foreign tradecraft,” Maguire wrote… At OpenAI on Wednesday, employees continued tense conversations about the political implications of the arrest for immigrant workers, two OpenAI employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions… The arrest triggered a discussion on OpenAI’s internal Slack messaging platform among employees about whether the incident might increase pressure from the Trump administration on OpenAI to not hire foreign nationals, said one of the people.

In March, Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, wrote in court papers that AI developer Anthropic’s reliance on staff with ties to China was among the concerns that fueled the Defense Department’s conflict with the AI company.

According to police, Marvin repeatedly blocked the robot’s path and ignored multiple commands from officers to move… Marvin said she was protesting the use of delivery robots because she believes they are replacing human workers.... “I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward,” Marvin said…

Marvin said she has confronted delivery robots on multiple occasions… Ashley Baldwin of West Philadelphia said she witnessed one of those encounters. “I actually thought the robot hit her, so my original question was, ‘Are you OK? Did the robot hit you?’ And she said, ‘No, I have to stop this. They’re taking over the world,’" Baldwin said.

Asked whether she plans to continue protesting the robots, Marvin said she does.