Technology

Lt. Gen. Joseph Jarrard said U.S. military bases lack the sensors and counter-drone systems needed to detect and defeat swarm attacks. The warning follows recent remarks from Secretary of State Marco Rubio about unidentified aerial phenomena. Congress has pressed the Pentagon for a base-defense plan.

New York City is not banning e-bikes but is cracking down on models that exceed new speed and power limits under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Riders face confusion over which bikes remain legal. The city has published specifications for compliant models.

Opposition to new data centers is becoming a potent local issue in 2026 races, driven by concerns over electricity costs, water use and land. Candidates in both parties are running against proposed projects. Developers say the facilities bring tax revenue and jobs.

A sportscar priced under $7,000 is being pitched as a template for affordable personal transport. Its light weight and minimal features keep costs down. Reviewers say it is a serious argument against ever-larger vehicles.

A regulatory filing revealed that Nvidia holds a $21 billion stake in SpaceX. The disclosure follows Elon Musk's announcement of an exclusive arrangement for Nvidia to outfit SpaceX data centers. The size of the position makes Nvidia one of the company's largest outside holders.

Security researchers at Wiz found that an AI-generated GitHub Copilot 'Autofix' suggestion introduced a flaw that allowed the compromise of Snowflake's Jira instance. The finding highlights the risk of accepting machine-written security patches without review. Both companies were notified before disclosure.

Germany's Bundeskartellamt concluded that Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework applied looser standards to Apple's own apps than to rivals. The regulator says the asymmetry gave Apple a competitive advantage in advertising. Apple has disputed the characterization.

The DuckDB project published a preview of version 2.0, outlining changes to the embedded analytical database. The release notes cover performance and API updates. A stable release is expected to follow.

An evaluation of GPT-5.6 Sol concludes it is the strongest vision model OpenAI has shipped, outperforming prior releases on document and scene understanding tests. The reviewer notes remaining weaknesses on fine-grained counting. Pricing and rate limits were not part of the assessment.

Satellite operators say a worsening shortage of launch capacity is leaving spacecraft grounded and business plans in doubt. Delays have cascaded across providers. Operators warn some constellations may miss regulatory deadlines.

OpenAI helped lead authorities to Darren Zhou, a 25-year-old South Palm Beach man who used ChatGPT to plot a violent revenge scheme against a former girlfriend. The company flagged the conversations to the FBI. The case is an early public example of an AI provider referring a user to law enforcement.

Election administrators say prediction markets are already complicating the political process ahead of the midterms, from voters confusing odds with results to threats against poll workers. Officials are drafting guidance for handling market-driven claims. Regulators have not settled how the contracts should be treated.

Four states are taking Meta to trial, alleging Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to hook children and that the company concealed evidence of mental health harms. It is the first case of its kind to reach a jury. Meta says its products are built with teen safety features and disputes the claims.

A McDonald's franchise says a scheduling app largely eliminated costly missed shifts by letting workers swap hours themselves. Managers spend less time filling gaps. Labor advocates caution that flexible scheduling can also shift risk onto workers.

Reticulum is a networking stack designed to run over unreliable and low-bandwidth links without central infrastructure. It supports encrypted addressing across radio, serial and internet transports. The project targets resilient communication where conventional networks fail.

An early evaluation finds Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 27B model strong across tasks but prone to excessive reasoning on simple prompts. The behavior inflates latency and token cost. The reviewer suggests configuration changes to curb it.

A widely read commentator argued that text alterations used to watermark Claude's output corrupt the writing itself. The critique says invisible modifications trade readability for provenance. Anthropic has described watermarking as a transparency measure.

With the last Chromium holdouts completing their extension platform migration, Firefox stands alone in fully supporting uBlock Origin. Ad-blocking users are being pushed toward a browser choice they may not have considered.

Security researchers say a flaw that hands attackers complete control of Apple computers is being exploited in the wild, and users are urged to patch immediately. The bug bypasses protections Apple designed to keep untrusted code from touching the core of the system.

The biggest all-electric airplane yet built completed its maiden flight on roughly five dollars of electricity. Its makers argue the economics, not the engineering, are the real breakthrough for short-haul routes.

The French Constitutional Council struck down a law that would have barred children under 15 from social media, ruling it went too far against freedom of expression and privacy. The decision resets Europe's debate over how to shield minors online.

Google described a system that runs AI computations directly on encrypted data, so a server can answer a query without ever seeing it. Long dismissed as too slow, the approach is now fast enough for real products, the company says.

Betting on what public figures will say has become a fast-growing category of prediction market, and federal officials have now opened a probe into whether those 'mention markets' are a magnet for manipulators. Election officials separately warn that betting markets on races could erode public trust.

After nearly a decade of complaining that modern electromagnetic launch systems are too complicated, President Trump signed a memorandum directing the Navy to strip them from aircraft carriers and revert to steam catapults. Officials and outside experts warn the reversal would carry a heavy price tag and years of redesign work, and Sen. Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot, tore into the decision.

Understanding how ions diffuse through solid materials matters for batteries, electronics and catalysts, but solids are hard to see inside. A tracer exchange technique now reveals that ions can speed up or slow down as they move.

OpenAI's rogue agent hack was a watershed moment for AI safety and cybersecurity. Inside the company, it also sparked hard questions about the culture that allowed it to happen.

President Trump signed a memorandum giving private American companies a role in fighting transnational criminal organizations, allowing them under certain conditions to carry out offensive cyberattacks on overseas groups. It is the first time the government has authorized the private sector to perform hacks, and critics warn of 'cyber privateers.'

Virgin Galactic is asking the public to help name its new Delta-class spaceship, floating options including VSS Horizon, Explorer, Ascend and Apeiron.

A bug report documents severe write amplification in systemd-journald: a single log line can trigger more than 49KB of disk writes on ext4 and more than 110KB on btrfs.

Ukrainian drone pilots destroyed an entire American tank brigade in a live war game, delivering hard battlefield lessons to the U.S. military and NATO about how quickly armor can be neutralized.

Flock says it will lock out officers who use its license plate reader network to stalk ex-partners, but experts say agencies can still hide abuse and that the company cannot engineer its way past the problem. The debate has renewed questions about whether Flock's surveillance network is worth the privacy trade-off.

Cerebras announced it is accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol on its hardware, pitching dramatically faster inference for the model as its latest bid against conventional GPU-based serving.

Owners say an outage at a smart pet feeder service left their animals without food, and that the failure cost them their trust in cloud-dependent hardware.

A researcher followed 657,607 links to measure how much of the older web still resolves, and documents where the missing pages ended up.

Donkey.bas, the 131-line BASIC driving game bundled with the original IBM PC, has turned 45. A retrospective walks through the code line by line.

Reflect Orbital has approval to begin testing satellites that beam sunlight down to solar panels, and aims to launch as many as 50,000 mirror-equipped satellites by 2035. Critics are petitioning over the effects on wildlife, astronomy research and human health.

Mistral announced Mistral OCR 4.1, the latest version of its document understanding model for turning scanned pages and PDFs into structured text.

Google released Gemini 3.7 Flash only three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash debuted, saying the new model brings 'substantial improvements.' The rapid cadence underlines how quickly the major labs are now shipping updated frontier models.

Oxide Computer writes up how running Kubernetes on its rack-scale systems came together, and how customer requirements drove the integrations the company ultimately built.

A diving whale revealed that the global web of subsea cables connecting the world can also be used to monitor cetaceans moving quietly across the seabed, using technology already in place.

Taiwan throttled its mobile internet to text-only speeds as part of a civil defense exercise, a drill that comes amid rising tensions with China, which regularly sends military aircraft and ships toward the island.

The St. Louis public broadcaster Nine PBS has sued the storage company Iron Mountain, saying it was blocked from accessing its own archival data.

DeepSeek published a developer preview of DeepSeek Harness, opening its agent tooling to outside developers ahead of a wider release.

Tailscale engineers chased intermittent database corruption down to a WAL-reset edge case that had been sitting in SQLite for sixteen years. The writeup walks through the forensics that finally pinned it. The fix is upstream.

Tim King, who wrote AmigaDOS under a punishing deadline and later helped build early portable operating systems, has died. His work shaped a machine that a generation of programmers learned on. Tributes have filled the enthusiast forums that never really shut down.

Operators are running broad vulnerability scans against websites while forging user agents belonging to well-known AI crawlers, betting that admins whitelist them. The tactic makes the traffic hard to block without losing legitimate indexing. Verification by IP range is the only reliable defense.

Google laid out its 2026 hardware lineup, headlined by the Pixel 11 phones, a Pixel Watch 5 that can flag breathing emergencies and a Pixel Tag tracker. The camera work leans heavily on new on-device AI tricks. Pricing and release dates put it head-to-head with Apple's fall launch.

Security researchers demonstrated an attack that turns Zoom's remote control feature into a path for taking over a participant's machine. The exploit relies on social engineering during a shared session rather than a memory bug. Zoom has issued mitigations and tightened defaults.

Honor showed a phone with a motorized gimbal camera that physically pivots out of the body to stabilize video. It is aimed at vloggers who have been carrying a separate rig. The moving parts raise the obvious durability questions.

Passengers on a flight full of hackers heading home from DEF CON found a fake in-flight Wi-Fi network harvesting credentials. Airline security is treating it as a criminal matter rather than a prank. Investigators are unlikely to get much cooperation.