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"When state lawmakers attempt to rewrite how the internet works," argues an EFF blog post, "users rely on courts to recognize that laws can't make technical impossibilities a reality." "That's why we were happy to see that a court has blocked Utah's attempt to outlaw the privacy protections of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)." In a win for digital rights, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah's SB 73, the state's draconian anti-VPN age verification law... Signed into…

MapQuest creates a new layer (that can be toggled on and off), Gizmodo reports: After promising not to comply with the Trump administration's "Lake America" gimmick, the platform announced a new "Surveillance Layer" that displays the locations of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), including those from Flock Safety. Per MapQuest, its new tool will identify the locations of known outdoor surveillance cameras and plate readers from Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications,…

"Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin said Friday it plans to make extensive upgrades to its Florida launch facilities," reports CNBC, "with the goal of supporting multiple flights per week by the end of the decade." "The company will add two more launch and landing pads for New Glenn, its heavy-lift, partially reusable rocket." A $330 million expansion to its Rocket Park campus in Cape Canaveral, expected to be complete in the summer of 2027, will enable it to produce up to 150 upper stages of its New Glen…

Linux maintainers "have ruled that people no longer have to declare their LLM usage," reports XDA Developers, "as Torvalds himself calls a ban on AI 'utterly stupid.'" The first part of this story comes via a message sent to the Linux mailing list. It announces one of the major changes decided during the Maintainers Summit on October 8, 2026, in Prague, Czechia, where submissions to the kernel no longer need to use the "Assisted-by" tag... meaning that people can submit AI-generated code withou…

"Cloudflare has acquired Deno, the company behind the [server-side] JavaScript and TypeScript runtime created by Ryan Dahl, the inventor of Node.js," Forbes reported last week. But Deno "has no future at Cloudflare, which will maintain the runtime for another year before ending its development," writes The Register. "That's OK with Dahl. 'I am now of the opinion that if you're choosing Node.js for building servers, you're doing it wrong,' Dahl told The Register." It all started with his team's …

Millions of current and former students at California's public school have had their data stolen — including names, date of birth, and addresses — stolen in a breach, reports the Los Angeles Times. The breach affects students "who took the state's mandated standardized tests that annually assess their academic proficiency, education officials announced Friday." The compromised information affects many more than the state's current 5.7 million public-school students as the breach dates back to 2…

TechCrunch writes: "Isn't it weird that I, like, did a TV show about kind of a business scam, and you got in trouble for like ... a business scam?" comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder gently asks Elizabeth Holmes. One month before the notorious Theranos CEO surrendered to begin her 11-year criminal fraud sentence in 2023, Holmes and her husband contacted A24 as a last-ditch effort to exonerate her in the public eye, suggesting they send a film crew to document her final days of freedom. Along…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Microplastics are a source of extreme concern for health: the presence of these tiny pieces of plastic has been linked to heart attacks, stroke, dementia and brain tumors. But what drives these associations is unclear. Now a study published in Nature offers a tantalizing clue: microplastics interact with water, generating highly reactive molecules. When microplastics come into contact with water, the water near their surface can beco…

Google is expanding its Android Earthquake Alerts System from 98 to more than 200 regions worldwide, using smartphone sensors to detect early earthquake activity and warn users before potentially dangerous shaking begins. The update also enhances the system's "Be Ready" alerts with estimated earthquake magnitudes, epicenter information, maps showing affected areas, and additional safety guidance. From a Google blog post: Be Aware: A straightforward alert for estimated light shaking, letting you…

Astronomers have identified what may be the first genuinely green star, a white dwarf called WD J1330+6435 located about 326 light-years from Earth. Space.com reports: The researchers found that some dead star white dwarfs can go a little green around the gills after snacking on orbiting planets. An example of this is WD J1330+6435, a cool white dwarf located around 326 light-years away, which has been accreting rocky material from a planetary companion. This has enriched its atmosphere with ca…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Prediction market boosters often tout the platforms as barometers of public opinion, or even "truth machines" offering a clearer picture of where things are headed than polling or other data. In 2024, for example, Kalshi beat many pollsters in forecasting the outcome of the US presidential race. But their trading activity can also tell more perplexing stories. Two global election markets on Polymarket's offshore platform, for instance, generated o…

The collaborative reverse-engineering site decomp.dev is shutting down, with its administrator saying AI has made game decompilation so fast and accessible that the community's human-driven model has effectively broken down. "The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which ones are done by AI," reports 404 Media. From the report: "Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time consumi…

Tencent says AI agents used to evaluate third-party models engaged in unintended web-browsing behavior while trying to retrieve data from Alibaba's Amap service. The announcement marks a rare acknowledgment of "rogue" agent activity by a major Chinese tech company. Reuters reports: Tencent Hunyuan, the company's artificial intelligence unit, said in a post on X that the activity did not originate from its Hunyuan models. Its review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination, it s…

Valve has released a new Steam Client beta that finally moves the Linux client to 64-bit architecture, while also placing it inside a containerized Steam Runtime environment. However, Linux users still need 32-bit libraries and graphics drivers for compatibility, meaning fully 64-bit-only systems remain unsupported. VideoCardz.com reports: Valve's updated requirements explicitly state that 64-bit-only installations are not supported. Systems must still provide both 32-bit and 64-bit libraries a…

Meta is facing criticism over updated commercial terms taking effect October 30 that could give the company broad permission to scrape content from websites linked to business accounts and use it to train AI. Legal experts warn the changes could undermine lucrative AI licensing deals for news publishers, with no direct opt-out for businesses that accept the terms. Ars Technica reports: As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news …