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Saturday August 29 -
Friday August 28- 'Security by Antiquity': Why Older Tech is Sometimes Safer From Hackers (14)
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Thursday August 27- China Calls Off Ambitious Ice-Hunting Moonshot a Day Before Flight (1)
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- OpenAI's Overhead Will Rise 20 Percent for Some Workloads as It Hardens Security (8)
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Wednesday August 26
Quick Links
The saying "cleared for takeoff" has a whole different meaning in space:
Historically, humankind has sent only one thing to the moon at a time so that it has the whole metaphorical highway to itself. But NASA's planned moon base is expected to have a lot more concurrent traffic in the future, which means it's time to start writing rules for a busier road. Engineers from Texas A&M, Purdue and NASA's Johnson Space Center joined forces to help write some of those rules.
The system is outlined in a recent study, and it's a lot more complex than one would think. Gateway and other spacecraft orbiting the moon are expected to use the near-rectilinear halo orbit, which takes spacecraft around both poles of the moon.
This is pretty simple for a single space station like the now-defunct Gateway space station, for which this control system was designed, but it gets complicated quickly when you have the Orion crew capsule, uncrewed cargo ships and lunar landers all sharing the same orbit, thereby necessitating the need for an air traffic control system similar to an airport on Earth.
"Collisions and serious damages could happen. To ensure crew safety and mission success, effective traffic management in the NRHO is crucial," Diane Davis, associate professor of space engineering at Texas A&M and an author of the study, said in a statement. "The future of lunar explorations depends as much on the traffic management as it does on the rocket science."
[...] There isn’t anything tangible that you can see with this traffic control system, but if you've ever flown in an airplane before, you have experienced it. Air traffic control on Earth is an intricate dance that helps airplane pilots know where to fly and where to land without colliding into other aircraft. That means managing holding patterns so airplanes don't collide midair, assigning runways and making sure the sky is clear for aircraft taking off.
The control system for the moon isn't much different in terms of basic functionality. Spacecraft coming and going might be headed for the surface or loitering around waiting for their chance to head back to Earth. These spacecraft have to be managed just like aircraft or they'll eventually crash into each other, which is about as devastating as you can imagine. They also have to conserve fuel to keep costs low.
"Larger orbits at the moon that are suitable for staging an Orion and lander mission to the surface take many hours or days to make (a) revolution around the moon," Davis told CNET in an email. "In order to keep propellant costs low, often there are particular locations along the orbit where it is most efficient to leave your loiter station and particular points where you want to meet up."
[...] The NRHO is not the most hospitable orbit. Spacecraft are subjected to gravity from the moon, Earth and other sources from deep space. They have to adjust constantly to avoid crashing into one another, falling into the moon or drifting into space. The new control system takes the NRHO's quirks into account and successfully simulated multiple spacecraft in the same orbit without them crashing into each other.
Why pick such a difficult orbit? NASA says the NRHO grants enough access to the lunar surface to send and receive shipments to the moon, but is far enough away from the lunar surface to not require constant fuel to avoid being dragged down by the moon's gravity.
"Every spacecraft is constantly moving," Davis said. "It's a Goldilocks zone of keeping 'parked' vehicles far enough from each other to be safe, but close enough to their destination so that resources are used effectively."
An interesting tidbit is that NRHO was chosen for the Gateway space station. NASA canceled the space station to skip directly to the moon base, so Davis says the agency is now considering other orbits since it doesn't have to deal with a space station anymore, but the research still applies to whatever NASA chooses to do.
"To enable the ambitious lunar missions planned by NASA, bold new mission designs are being created," Davis said. "These designs take advantage of the opportunities presented by the gravitational tug-of-war in cislunar space: These orbits often allow significant propellant savings and opportunities that just aren't available with more familiar low Earth or low lunar orbits."
The traffic control system is getting its first test with the Capstone 02 mission, which is expected to launch sometime next year, per Davis. It'll get further testing with the next Artemis mission, which is also set for launch in 2027.
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UPDATE After publication, the US Justice Department walked back its earlier claims that multiple US government agencies were hacked by Beijing's cyberspies. In an updated press release, the feds removed "victims," and now says NASA, the Federal Reserve, departments of Energy, Justice, and Health and Human Services, along with the National Institutes of Health, and the US Senate were "targets."
The FBI on Wednesday said it disrupted a botnet and seized two platforms that Chinese-government cyberoperatives used to hack NASA, the US Senate, the Department of Energy, and several other government agencies and critical networks.
The Federal Reserve, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health were also among those victimized by the two now-seized hacking tools: a vulnerability scanning and exploitation malware named QScan, and an obfuscation network named QTRouter.
The FBI says a People's Republic (PRC) of China-backed group called QTFY created and operated the two platforms, plus botnets of compromised IoT devices. The Bureau says QTFY's hackers work for a private PRC company called Nanjing Xinjiuwei.
[...] QScan scans and automatically infects thousands of IoT devices worldwide, and then adds them to the QTRouter network of QTFY-controlled devices.
The QTRouter botnet – consisting of these compromised IoT devices, plus commercial proxy service devices, and leased virtual private servers – then serves as an obfuscation network, allowing QTFY and other criminals who pay for the service to conceal the origin of their digital intrusion activities, making these communications appear to originate from local computers.
On Monday, a US federal court granted seizure warrants for three domains linked to QTFY: qtproxy.xyz, qt-proxy.org, and qt-team.com. All three domains were hardcoded into both the QScan and QTRouter malware, and the court-authorized seizures made both hacking services inoperable, the Justice Department said.
The hacking services and malware have been in use since at least 2018, and as recently as this year when QTFY infrastructure compromised the US Senate, according to court documents.
[...] This latest disruption follows a series of court-ordered seizures intended to hamstring China's hacking activities over the last few years. In 2025, the FBI removed PlugX surveillance malware from more than 4,000 US computers that had been infected by the PRC-sponsored group Mustang Panda.
A year earlier, in 2024, China's Flax Typhoon burned down their own botnet consisting of hundreds of thousands of infected internet-of-things devices when confronted by the feds. And in late 2023, the FBI disrupted a botnet used by yet another Chinese government attack crew, Volt Typhoon, to attack US and foreign critical infrastructure.
In June, however, Lumen's Black Lotus Labs reported a "significant resurgence" of a botnet linked to Volt Typhoon, with this cluster of injected machines surging to 1,500 compromised routers and IoT devices.
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As NASA prepares to launch its new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope this weekend, Rochester Institute of Technology's Prof Don Figer examines the telescope's purpose and its origins in US spycraft.
NASA plans to soon launch a new space telescope that will survey a billion galaxies to trace how the universe evolved over time, all courtesy of America’s spy programme and decades of research into detector technology.
The telescope, known as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, was first developed by the National Reconnaissance Office, before being transferred to NASA in 2012. The intelligence agency no longer needed the hardware [PDF] for its future missions, so it sent the unused telescope to NASA. The space agency spent over a decade making modifications and aims to launch the telescope into space as early as 30 August 2026.
Once in position, the telescope will take data that astronomers like me hope will help answer some of the field’s most puzzling questions.
You can expect a slew of exciting discoveries from the new telescope because it was built to look across the universe and study the three-dimensional distribution of dark matter. While scientists haven’t directly observed it before, dark matter produces unseen effects on objects in the universe, similar to those produced by visible matter.
Likewise, Roman will see exploding stars called supernovas that allow astronomers to measure how fast the universe has been expanding. Those measurements will help astronomers measure the varying expansion rate of the universe. Dark matter and dark energy, also not yet directly observed, together are the source of the vast majority of energy in the universe, but their physical natures are unknown.
Closer to home, Roman will monitor small variations in light from stars near the centre of the Milky Way galaxy in order to infer the presence of rogue planets drifting between the stars. As a planet passes in front of a star, it briefly perturbs and magnifies the light from the star behind it, confirming its presence.
Finally, Roman has a coronagraph instrument that will test the technology for future missions that plan to detect Earth-like planets around other stars. A coronagraph blocks most of the light from a star so astronomers can detect the much fainter planets orbiting it. For an Earth-like planet around a sun-like star, the host star can be 10bn times brighter than the planet.
The Roman telescope’s coronagraph will help it study distant planets as they pass in front of a star.
When NASA received Roman, it turned one challenge about the telescope’s spy design into an opportunity. The telescope has a wide field of view, at least compared with most space telescopes made for astronomy. This means it can see a large swath of the sky at once. There lies an opportunity – while telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope see narrow fields very deeply, Roman will be able to see much larger fields.
Roman’s camera has such a wide field because its spy telescope origins give it unusually fast optics. This means that it has a relatively short focal length – the distance between the mirror and the point where the light focuses – for the diameter of its mirror. Effectively, it can project a much larger piece of sky onto a fixed area in the telescope, called the focal plane. Its mirror is about the same diameter as Hubble’s, yet it can capture an area about a hundred times larger per image.
One modification that NASA made included building a large focal plane, the component of the telescope that collects light, made up of 18 wide area near-infrared detectors. These detectors are almost identical to those in the James Webb Space Telescope, but they have four times the number of pixels. They will take in infrared light, which has longer wavelengths than the light that human eyes can see. But while each one on Webb has four megapixels, or 4m pixels, Roman’s detectors have about 16 megapixels, bringing the full coverage of the 18 detectors to around 300 megapixels.
These detectors are modern marvels in their own right and represent the culmination of a long heritage of new technology that enables new discoveries.
I worked with colleagues in the early 2000s to advance the technology used in this type of detector – versions of which have been used on Hubble and Webb. We measured in the lab how the detectors performed in a simulated space environment. We needed to make sure that they could still sense even tiny signals out in space, which would allow the telescope to take in light from very faint planets, stars and galaxies.
We now see the fruits of those efforts in the beautiful images that Webb has produced, including of perplexing young galaxies in the early universe. I’m excited to see the images Roman will produce, using the newest iteration of this technology.
Astronomers are already eagerly awaiting the astronomical discoveries that Roman and its ultra-sensitive infrared detectors will produce. But how can we have such high expectations of a space observatory that has not even left the ground?
It is because technology precedes discovery. Roman’s detectors are the latest iteration in a long history of scientific success. You can directly tie countless Nobel Prizes to the telescope.
The team of physicists that inferred the existence of dark energy received a Nobel Prize in 2011. The observations they used came from new families of sensitive digital imaging detectors called charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, invented in the early 1970s. These devices helped astronomers measure how fast stars moved through space, which supported the notion that space is permeated with some unknown ‘dark’ matter.
Important validation of that Nobel-Prize-winning research came from near-infrared detectors that used the same technology as Roman.
Likewise, the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way galaxy was awarded to researchers who used a variety of infrared instruments on large ground-based telescopes.
All these telescopes had been outfitted with newly available infrared detectors. In fact, this Nobel Prize highlights the impact of three technologies: infrared detectors, big telescopes and adaptive optics.
People often think of scientific discovery as a eureka light bulb above the head of a brilliant scientist, but discovery rarely happens that way. More often, someone uses a new technology to look at something that, until that point, remained unseen.
Galileo used a telescope to observe the previously unseen moons of Jupiter. Then, the next technological iteration replaced the human eye with photographic plates in the 19th century, which led to the first sensitive all-sky surveys. These surveys yielded a plethora of astronomical discoveries, including that the universe is expanding.
The 1970s saw electronic detectors take over for photographic plates, increasing the detector sensitivity by an order of magnitude. These gains were then transferred to infrared, rather than just visible light, opening a new window into the universe and another wave of discovery.
And now, it is Roman’s turn. But Roman won’t be on the cutting edge for long, because NASA is already designing the next space telescope.
The agency is developing the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a future space mission with the goal of directly imaging Earth-like planets around nearby stars and identifying signs of life in the universe.
Let’s hope for a smooth ride to space for Roman. In the meantime, scientists are already planning for the next generation of discoveries, one new detector at a time.
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*** Note that Proton has a commercial interest in VPNs. This may be biased reporting ***
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/proton-vpn-report-location-tracking-privacy/
With a fast VPN, your speed loss will be virtually unnoticeable.
Using a virtual private network is a surefire way to keep your information private when browsing the internet. But a new report from Proton, released on Wednesday, exposes some major holes in that concept.
A VPN is a tool that encrypts your internet behavior and hides your IP address and physical location, with the goal of keeping your identity and identifying information secure. But 64 of the VPN apps downloaded in the US, Proton found, are owned by Chinese companies and contain trackers that collect all sorts of user information, including device IDs, network information, device models and mobile carrier data.
And 25% of the apps in question were found to actively track your location.
In June alone, these apps were downloaded over 13 million times.
Narrowing down the numbers further, Proton found that 31 of those Chinese-owned VPNs use shell companies registered in jurisdictions such as Singapore, Hong Kong and the UK to further hide their identities.
An authoritarian government like China’s could use this information to track a person’s location. So if a public official, someone in law enforcement, a journalist or even someone attending a protest was using one of these VPNs for safety, this flaw would expose them to potential threats.
It should be clear that China isn’t the only country where companies harvest the data these apps collect, but it’s near the top of the list. Israel, Russia and the Five Eyes countries — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US — all have companies collecting tracking data from millions of people.
Transparency is a big issue here, with a load of bad VPN apps being readily available for download through Apple and Google. Proton’s report points out that both companies require developers to submit their own paperwork to verify their apps, with little verification (and no independent audits) being done on Apple’s or Google’s part. Apple and Google didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
This lack of guardrails in the verification process makes it hard to decipher which virtual private network apps protect your privacy and do what their policies promise and which are virtually doing the opposite.
“Proton's report is yet another example of why it's so important to know who's behind your VPN and what data they're collecting,” CNET Senior Writer Attila Tomaschek said. “It's also another reminder that just because a VPN app is popular in Apple's or Google's app marketplaces, it doesn't necessarily mean that the VPN app is safe to use.”
If you’re looking for a VPN, Tomaschek points to VPNs like Proton and ExpressVPN, which regularly rank near the top of CNET’s VPN recommendations. Each virtual private network is put through a rigorous testing process that includes a thorough examination of the app’s privacy policy, transparency reports, audits, corporate structure and legal jurisdiction.
When all else fails, avoid any VPN that is murky about any of those key principles. “Instead, opt for a trustworthy VPN that is crystal clear about where it’s based, who’s behind it and how it protects user privacy,” Tomaschek said.
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Earlier this year, Meta created a "plan" to reduce some of its teams by as much as 60 percent to make the company "AI native," Reuters reported today, citing two people familiar with Meta's internal affairs.
Reuters' report highlights the challenges organizations face when analyzing the best uses for AI and determining when the technology is a better fit for certain tasks than employees.
Meta confirmed to Reuters that the plan, reportedly codenamed Project OT (short for organization transformation), explored scenarios in which Meta reduced some team headcounts by 60 percent and that the plan called for two rounds of layoffs. Meta wouldn't confirm which teams Project OT affected.
Meta told the publication:
As part of our company restructuring earlier this year, we asked some teams to conduct a scenario planning exercise looking at the potential impact of redeployments, open role closures and cuts. This ultimately resulted in moving thousands of employees to do priority work on several newly-established teams, as has been publicly reported. Ultimately, we didn't move forward with every scenario from the exercise – and it was never assumed we would.
As part of our company restructuring earlier this year, we asked some teams to conduct a scenario planning exercise looking at the potential impact of redeployments, open role closures and cuts. This ultimately resulted in moving thousands of employees to do priority work on several newly-established teams, as has been publicly reported. Ultimately, we didn't move forward with every scenario from the exercise – and it was never assumed we would.
Reuters reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg "set Project OT in motion and directed executives to proceed with the changes to management structures" earlier this year. It said that the first round of layoffs from Project OT occurred in May and that Meta canceled the second.
Reuters said it reviewed "scores of internal documents, posts, and recordings" and spoke with "more than 20 people with knowledge of Meta's inner workings" about the since-scrapped plans.
Per the publication, Meta executives created Project OT in January. Project OT reportedly explored using AI to perform "much of the daily work performed by thousands of human employees." Small teams of people would oversee the AI, the report said, citing "one internal planning document reviewed by Reuters and three people familiar with the project."
In these scenarios, Meta would give some employees new roles and lay off others. One HR executive reportedly said that Meta would have reduced its headcount by about 25 percent or more under these scenarios. Meta told Reuters that it canceled Project OT before determining how many layoffs the plan called for.
Meta was going to use some of the money that it saved from layoffs to pay for high-performing employees, especially those with AI engineering skills, Reuters reported, citing "two people familiar with the matter."
One of the Project OT documents that Reuters reviewed described "AI native" as a company where "AI-ready tools and agents interact, workflows are automated, [and] new builds are AI-first." Being "AI native" also means, per the document, selling AI agents to third parties, which Meta started doing in June.
This year, Meta reportedly launched a pilot program that restructured engineering teams, research teams, and at least eight other teams into smaller groups.
This followed the reported October publishing of an internal post called "AI-Native Playbook," in which a Meta product management team member outlined how the pilot would remove middle management and use "agent-assisted analysis" to help prioritize daily tasks.
Reuters noted that HR employees and "AI systems" would help Meta's leaders decide about promotions; however, Meta told the publication: "Performance rating and promotion decisions were and are made by people, not AI."
Immediately after issuing the May layoffs, Zuckerberg reportedly canceled the November wave. Reuters said it "was unable to determine what exactly prompted Zuckerberg to shift course."
Reuters said March and April reports of impending layoffs and Meta tracking employees' keyboard and mouse input in order to train AI agents (Meta has since paused the program) hurt employee morale.
Another potential factor in Meta's decision to scale back Project OT was uncertainty about whether increased AI use would boost productivity. Citing internal posts, Reuters noted: "For instance, code changes made to the internal software platforms and infrastructure employees use on the job were up 220 percent year-over-year, according to a post by [Meta CTO Andrew] Bosworth in early June. But changes that led to new or upgraded features reaching Meta users were only up 36 percent."
Internal posts also reportedly pointed to AI agents making "large-scale, disruptive actions that humans are unlikely to execute" and leading to a 40 percent increase in major technical and security incidents compared to the prior year. Employee time spent resolving those problems increased by as much as 70 percent. Meta declined to comment on these internal posts.
In July, however, Zuckerberg reportedly acknowledged during a company meeting that the "trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected."
Many organizations, including those much bigger and much smaller than Meta, are exploring ways that AI could help with company goals, such as by saving employees time, driving revenue, or reducing costs, including, in some cases, human resources. Meta's story also shows how far some firms are willing to go to implement AI in an advantageous way, even at the cost of jobs.
Meta's case suggests that even some of the most eager organizations may struggle to replace various human workloads with AI while also highlighting the risks of overzealous AI projects.
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https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/sony-is-reminding-us-again-that-we-dont-own-our-playstation-games/
The future of gaming is going to be all digital, whether anyone likes it or not.
Some things are too bizarre to make up, and Sony's inability to read the room is one of them.
Over the last week or so, the media giant has sent emails to PlayStation users with its entire Terms of Service, which includes a reminder that their digital games are "licensed” and not “sold.” The communication comes as gamers continue to protest Sony's removal of physical media from the PlayStation 6.
As an isolated incident, Sony's email isn't really anything untoward. It lets the user know that they have recently accepted the most recent Terms of Service, Code of Conduct, End User License Agreement and Privacy Policy. The company even included full copies of each in the email.
But the timing of Sony’s email appears intentional, not just unfortunate. PlayStation users are furious over the company’s decision to remove the physical disc drive from the PlayStation 6, as well as its announcement that it will stop producing game discs altogether as of January 2028. Sony announced the end of physical discs just a few days after removing several digitally purchased movies from users’ accounts.
The email was spotted by The Verge's Tom Warren, who posted about it on X over the weekend: “Sony emailing everyone about PlayStation terms of use during a backlash over the end of discs and a lack of digital ownership is certainly a choice.”
The backlash has grown large enough to inspire a PlayStation boycott — starting Sunday — with players pledging not to buy, log in to or play games for a week to protest Sony’s abandonment of physical media for the console.
So, right in the middle of a protest centered on concerns about game ownership, Sony is reminding us we’re merely buying a license to use a game under the company’s terms.
A move like this from another multibillion-dollar company underscores the new normal in gaming and tech, where companies appear to be shifting further away from the idea of ownership. Instead, they ask consumers to retain access to products that may be revoked or restricted at the company’s discretion. These changes didn't come in one dramatic wave, but in a steady stream of small consumer-facing microaggressions that have built up over time.
Take the recent HP printer controversy, for example. HP programmed its printers to lock users out if third-party ink is detected. That means you can buy an HP printer and own it — but if you don’t fill it with the official (more expensive) ink cartridges, the printer can sass back like an angsty, spoiled teenager and refuse to work.
There are subtler attempts to chip away at our agency (and purchasing power) as consumers. Apple raised MacBook prices this year, then started a program where the company will literally rent you one, presumably because you can’t afford it otherwise. You wouldn’t own the MacBook, so Apple could lock you out of your device if you missed a lease payment.
When it comes to music and movies, streaming has been the norm for years — we’re dutifully reminded every so often that we’re renting the ability to listen or watch something rather than owning it. I’ll never forget a couple of years ago when the entire library from the rock band Coheed and Cambria's was removed from YouTube Music due to a licensing dispute while I was in the middle of listening.
Sony and other gaming companies are starting to adopt the same lending-access business model in software and digital entertainment: In this brave new world, mega corporations can own everything and make us “purchase” rentals entirely on their terms. That means they can change, restrict, discontinue or shut down access, but we can never keep, lend, sell or pass down a product.
The shift is leaving older generations (millennials like myself included) increasingly nostalgic for a time when buying something meant taking home something tangible — something that belonged to us.
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A mischief-maker in a Darth Vader suit recently endorsed Flock at a city council meeting, and it has not helped the company's fortunes. Around the US, citizens have been protesting and sometimes vandalizing the company's network of surveillance cameras. And the advocacy has caused some governments to change course.
Government officials, commonly hesitant to second-guess law enforcement practices, have become concerned enough to question these mass surveillance practices. US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) on Wednesday wrote to Flock CEO Garrett Langley to announce an investigation of "Flock Safety's collection, retention, and dissemination of data gathered by its artificial intelligence cameras."
Despite "Darth Vader's" comments last week at a San Diego City Council meeting about the need to "continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum," a growing number of local governments in the US have been cancelling or choosing not to renew their contracts with Flock and other makers of automated license plate readers (ALPRs).
The Institute for Justice (IJ), a Virginia-based legal advocacy non-profit, on Wednesday published a new database that tracks the termination of local government ALPR contracts. As of Wednesday, the database documents 93 local governments that canceled ALPR contracts.
The IJ, which is challenging ALPR use on Fourth Amendment grounds in Norfolk, Virginia and San Jose, California, previously published a database that documents police abuse of ALPRs, a topic addressed in Hawley's letter. Incidents include romantic stalking, wrongful traffic stops and detentions, and other forms of misconduct.
"I think what's happened is that the American public has woken up to the mass surveillance that quietly arose around them," said Robert Frommer, senior attorney at IJ, in an interview with The Register. "And they don't like it.
"It does seem to me that the rate of cancellations, the rate of public protest has increased over the past few months. I think that's both due to more news attention being paid to the real life abuses of this technology, as well as the Supreme Court's recent decision in the geofence case," Frommer said. In that case, SCOTUS ruled that cops need a warrant to grab location data.
Frommer said that he believes the IJ's efforts to document ALPRs and associated abuses have helped focus the public's concern and have illustrated the problems with warrantless mass surveillance.
ALPRs, from vendors like Flock, Motorola Solutions, and PlateSmart, among others, capture license plates whenever cars drive by, along with geodata and potentially images of people. This data can be combined with other information, effectively putting all passersby under constant surveillance without any warrant.
"I think what we're seeing now is the reaction to that," said Frommer, who explained that the problem with Flock cameras is that they're accessible to anyone with login credentials, without any authorization from a supervising authority.
"You don't need to go to a judge and get a warrant," Frommer explained. "You don't need anything. And when you basically give that search power to the bored officer in his cop car in the middle of a shift, it inevitably happens that they start using it and start misusing it, whether to look people up personally or whether to investigate people at political protests."
These sorts of issues, Frommer said, have made people question whether we should live in a panopticon.
The IJ's litigation and its Plate Privacy Project, said Frommer, follow from the belief that there are solutions, whether they come from the courts or lawmakers. Pointing to Hawley's letter, he said that this is not just a state or local issue, but has become a federal concern.
"I think what the din that you've heard over the past couple of months shows that there absolutely needs to be a change, a reckoning," he said. "And that's what we're pushing for in our litigation. We're pushing for a warrant requirement. You want to go look up somebody's past travels and see where they have been? Go to a judge, explain it, and get a warrant."
Flock did not respond to a request for comment.
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India plans the first launch of its crewed space program this year and has expanded its orbital ambitions to include operating a space station by 2035.
India's crewed space program is called Gaganyaan and has already missed deadlines to fly in 2022 and 2025. The nation's space research organization (ISRO) agency and government did not say anything about the future Gaganyaan schedule after last year's deadline passed without a launch.
That silence ended earlier this week, when ISRO Chairman Dr V. Narayanan used the occasion of India's third annual National Space Day to reveal that testing of the rocket and crew module to be used by Gaganyaan missions is almost complete, and the first of three test missions will launch this year.
The test flights will use India's LVM3 launcher, which ISRO has flown nine times without failure. The version ISRO will use for Gaganyaan missions is rated for human use thanks to the inclusion of a crew escape system equipped with solid-fuel motors designed to speed Vyomanauts – the Sanskrit-derived word India has unofficially adopted for its astronauts –to safety.
The Gaganyaan crew module is built to carry three Vyomanauts and spend three days in a 400km orbit before splashing down into Indian waters.
ISRO has previously said it will launch a robot on at least one Gaganyaan test mission. It's unclear if that's still the plan. The aerospace agency has also not said when it plans to launch its second and third test flights, or a first crewed mission.
If India can put Vyomanauts in orbit it will become just the fourth country to do so on its own vehicle – after Russia, the USA, and China.
Dr Narayanan and other officials and government figures used this year's Space Day to tease other future initiatives, one of which is putting an Indian space station into orbit around 2035. More involvement from private space companies was also on the agenda, perhaps as manufacturers of the launchers ISRO uses. If India chooses that path, it will mimic the USA's current approach, which sees NASA make just one vehicle – the ultra-expensive Space Launch System – and contract its other launches to commercial launch companies. Japan's space agency uses a slightly different approach, defining specs for its vehicles and contracting industrial giants like Mitsubishi to make them, but then runs its own missions under its own name.
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https://www.engadget.com/2246131/judge-rules-that-pentagon-anthropic-ban-illegal-and-baseless/
A US federal court has ruled that the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was illegal, CNBC reported. US District judge Rita Lin found that the US Department of Defense's restrictions placed on the AI company and its Claude model were "illegal and baseless." As part of the ruling, the judge barred certain federal agencies from enforcing President Trump's order to stop using Anthropic's tools.
"The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Judge Lin said in a 59-page decision. "Neither the Constitution nor the federal statute invoked by Defendants allows them to impose sweeping penalties based principally on Anthropic's critique of the Administration's views."
"We welcome the court's ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful," an Anthropic spokesperson told CNBC. "We remain focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology."
The dispute arose in late February, after the Department of Defense and its Secretary Pete Hegseth pressured Anthropic to remove certain safeguards from its AI systems. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, however, made it clear the company would refuse to allow its model to be used for mass surveillance or the development of autonomous weapons.
Late in February, Trump ordered all US government agencies to stop using Claude and other Anthropic services, escalating the feud. On social media, the president said there would be a six-month phase out period for federal agencies to migrate off of Anthropic's products. Subsequent talks collapsed and Anthropic became the first US company to be designated as a supply chain risk.
After saying it would challenge the decision, Anthropic sued the White House in two federal courts (for two separate designations) to reverse the ban. Today's ruling by Judge Lin gave the company a victory on one of those counts, but Anthropic is still considered a supply chain risk pending the second decision. Even if it wins both cases, though, the Pentagon would not be required to restart its work with the company.
The supply chain designation hasn't slowed Anthropic's march toward a likely near-record IPO later this year. Earlier this month, the company's revenue surged to a record $11.5 billion, 14 times more than it earned in the same quarter last year. Engadget has reached out to Anthropic for additional comment.
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from the Where-can-I-get-a-bot-to-work-my-farm? dept.
The Global Government Affairs team over at X dropped a bombshell Thursday night, revealing that the X Safety team had uncovered proof positive of a foreign influence campaign targeting the build out of AI and data centers in the United States:
It turns out that, after launching an investigation, the team uncovered a massive bot farm consisting of roughly 200,000 "suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts," including hundreds that appear to have been trying to manipulate debate in the U.S. over artificial intelligence, data centers, and the associated energy costs.
This development comes after President Trump warned last month that "other nations are trying to get us to slow down" and are spending money on "propaganda" to convince Americans that data centers aren't a positive thing.
According to X, about 200 accounts within the bot farm network were posting claims that data centers drive up household electricity prices and put excessive strain on the power grid. Some of the accounts, ironically, posted AI-generated cartoons depicting data center operators getting rich while ordinary American citizens were stuck paying the bill.
[...] The insidious thing about this kind of foreign influence operation is that it preys on the concerns that many Americans already have about the data centers popping up in their communities – debates about things like electric bills and the robustness of the power grid are already happening here. All a foreign adversary like China has to do is amplify those fears and sow distrust to make it harder for the U.S. to keep building out its AI infrastructure.
Related:
- Protesters Haul A Guillotine To City Council Meeting About A Potential AI Data Center
- Texas Halts Data Center Connections to Power Grid Amid Overwhelming Demand
- The Fight Against AI Data Centers is Important – but It's Just a Starting Point
- 'Cost Me the Election': Data Centers Trigger Voter Backlash
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Refund4Freedom doesn't just help PC buyers in the quest to get Windows refunds; they have three key demands. Prevention is better than cure, right? The first demand is that “Device manufacturers and vendors should not impose an operating system or software on consumers, and should not force them to pay for software that they don't want.” This is central to the site’s message and purpose. However, it also wants to promote the idea that consumers should have the right to buy hardware without pre-installed software and see the price of the product with and without Windows, etc. Refund4Freedom also urges manufacturers and vendors to clearly outline the steps for requesting and obtaining a refund for pre-installed OSes and software. Of course, the process for consumers should be as friction-free as possible.
Whichever brand of PC you buy, and the above list is far from exhaustive, you should follow a deliberate rejection procedure. If you intend to shun Windows, Refund4Freedom tells users to start up the PC and take pictures showing the contract clauses addressing reimbursement. Do not format or erase the computer at this stage. The next step is to contact the manufacturer's customer service. Do this in a recordable way, and so email/messaging is encouraged for records.
Finally, and whatever the outcome, Refund4Freedom asks its readers to report their experience, good or bad, to the aforementioned AGCM. To inspire you, the site includes several user reports of success, and I note one user getting back as much as €150 from Acer (~$175). That was a combination of Windows license reimbursement and a larger legal fee refund. A more typical reimbursement level is roughly $60.
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PayPal shares plunged as much as 16% in premarket trading Friday, the most in months if the losses hold through the cash session, after a consortium led by private-equity firm Advent International and payments giant Stripe abandoned its takeover bid for the struggling payment processor (paywalled, use Reader mode in Firefox):
A consortium of buyout firm Advent and payment processor Stripe has decided to abandon its pursuit of fintech pioneer PayPal Holdings Inc., a potential deal that would have ranked as one of the biggest-ever leveraged buyouts, according to people familiar with the matter.
From ZeroHedge:
PayPal reportedly rejected the $50 billion offer, betting that Advent and Stripe would return to the negotiating table with a higher price. Instead, the consortium walked away.
[...] Takeover interest in PayPal first came to light in a February Bloomberg article, which reported that Stripe was considering acquiring all or part of PayPal. Reuters then reported on July 15 that an offer had been made, helping to catapult the stock up roughly 30% (as of Thursday's close).
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Uber has allegedly violated the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) again, but this time to the tune of a 824.9 million euro, or $966 million, fine. The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP), or the Dutch Data Protection Authority, hit Uber with the massive fine, accusing the company of automatically deactivating driver accounts between 2018 and 2022 without human intervention.
According to the Dutch regulatory agency, Uber has deprived its drivers of income through fully automated decisions, violating the GDPR in the process. The investigation was launched after 171 French drivers reported these decisions to a local human rights organization, which eventually led to the AP taking over the case since Uber's European headquarters are located in The Netherlands.
"From one moment to the next, they no longer had any income through Uber," Monique Verdier, deputy chair of the AP, said of the drivers who initiated the complaint. "A computer should not make decisions on its own that have major consequences for you."
The AP has previously fined Uber three times, including once in 2018 for 600,000 euros, or $701,000, and again in 2023 for 10 million euros, or $11.6 million. Uber's previous record-high fine came in 2024 when the AP issued a 290 million euro, or around $339 million, penalty for improperly transferring personal data of European drivers to the US. This time around, the AP said that the 824.9 million euro fine was calculated as the maximum penalty that's derived from four percent of a company's worldwide annual turnover. According to the AP, Uber has already filed an appeal against the fine. We reached out to Uber for their comment on the fine and will update the story when we hear back.
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Brave 1.94 adds Email Aliases, giving users five free forwarding addresses to hide their real email from websites:
Brave, a privacy and security-focused browser, has announced a new feature that will allow users to generate unique email addresses to sign up for online services, and receive emails from those services without revealing their real email address.
The feature, called Email Aliases, has been added to the latest desktop version of the browser, 1.94, and will be coming to mobile soon.
According to Brave, instead of handing over their real email address, users generate a unique alias for each service. For the time being, Brave is "offering everyone the option of five free email aliases," tied to their Brave Account.
[...] The service works by forwarding emails sent to an alias on to the user's real address, without letting the sender see that real address. In the process, Brave acts as a mail server that stores the account email, the aliases, and some information about message delivery.
The company promises that it "doesn't read the contents of emails sent to an alias. We only process emails to perform standard spam and virus filtering."
Since I run my own mail server, I use a special domain and create a unique email address for each vendor I purchase from. It makes it much easier to 1) stop delivery of unwanted marketing email from the vendor, and 2) figure out which vendors are selling my info to 3rd party data brokers. In the latter case I usually stop buying from any vendor who sells my info. What do you do to thwart marketing email and spam?
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More Than 500 Towns Restrict Builds As Councils Shutter Public Comment
Marshall Mayor Scott Wolfersberger told local news station WWMT that the city's police department contacted him on August 12 about the threat and that the investigation is ongoing. Councilor James Hackworth wrote in a social media post that members had received "a legitimate death threat" and that disagreement, protest, and voting the council out are all part of democracy. It's unclear whether the sender supports or opposes data centers, and no suspect has been identified to date.
Woodbury County is separately challenging the annexation in court. The council met a week late on August 20 and voted 3-2 against the moratorium, with Nelson calling officers into the room as members of the public and councilman Gene Monk objected. "We ask for a cool-down period for a year to research, then we can make an educated decision. We can let the people vote for it after that — do something different," Monk said. "It's too big of a decision for us five people [council members]."
Over in Box Elder County, Utah, Commissioner Lee Perry has said that he and fellow Commissioners Boyd Bingham and Tyler Vincent had received threats after voting through two resolutions for the Stratos project area, with an audience of roughly 500 chanting "shame" at the meeting.
Previous incidents show these are more than idle threats. In April, Indianapolis councilman Ron Gibson had 13 rounds fired into his home after backing a rezoning, and Saline Township, Michigan, treasurer Jennifer Zink resigned in May citing threats over the 1.4GW Oracle and OpenAI campus that triggered moratoriums in at least 19 Michigan municipalities. Emporia, Kansas, moved its August 5 and August 19 commission meetings online and dropped public comment after its leaders were threatened.
Recent data published in the Soufan Center's July IntelBrief, which is based on a year of scraping X and Reddit, found hundreds of posts with threat language between July 2025 and July 2026, and a volume surge beginning in April that hasn't receded. Most violent threats in its dataset are targeted towards infrastructure rather than people, with posts naming council members and planning commissions a small minority. Many use memes, emojis, and misspellings to dodge moderation.
The center also found that each new incident now draws far more secondary amplification than it did earlier in the year. Emporia's mayor said the threats to his commission didn't appear to come from locals, and Salix, Emporia, and Marshall have all now canceled, moved, or restricted public meetings because of them, at a point when more than 500 local restrictions on data centers are in place nationwide.
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