California's stand against the Trump administration could result in multiple legal battles involving the state, federal government, and Internet providers seeking government funds. Although California told the federal government it would accept the money, it is reserving the right to challenge the condition imposed by the US. The state could delay or cancel plans to distribute broadband grants depending on how the process unfolds.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) decided last year that states must agree not to enforce any rate regulation or net neutrality rule on ISPs that receive money from the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. California had to decide whether to accept its share of the fund despite that restriction. California is slated to spend $1.42 billion to deploy broadband to 270,571 locations, and may ultimately receive up to $1.86 billion from BEAD for a mix of deployment and non-deployment projects.

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These consequences of Russia's war against Ukraine come as the Russian military has bombarded Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles nearly night and day in recent months, along with specifically targeting Ukrainian data centers since late September. But Ukraine has retaliated with its own drone strikes on military and infrastructure targets across Russia, degrading or knocking out data centers operated by Russian tech giant Yandex, the state-owned bank Sberbank, social media site VKontakte, and the Russian Ministry of Finance.

Now, state-owned telecommunications company Rostelcom has raised the possibility of moving some Russian data centers underground in talks with the nickel and palladium mining company Norilsk, according to Russian newspaper Vedomosti. The industry publication Data Center Dynamics also pointed to a recent proposal by a Russian regional governor to build data centers within open-pit coal mines while planting green public parks above as camouflage.

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"Brave is the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for its own users and many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere," the NYT alleged in a lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Citing third-party revenue estimates, the suit claimed that "Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers’ work without consent or permission," while "publishers have received nothing."

The lawsuit said, "AI companies pay Brave to provide them with real-time online content from the Brave search index," and use content from the Brave index "to train their own AI models" and "to respond to specific user queries." The NYT lawsuit points to Brave's website, which says the Brave Search API is "used by some of the biggest names in AI, including Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com."

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“When the trend of the Piano Black and the switchless interior was happening, it was during a time when designers and companies and engineers and everybody were thinking that, 'Hey, we can just get rid of all these switches on the interior. We can put it all in the software. It'll save money. It'll save us tooling up all these extra parts for unique cars and all this stuff and make the interior more like a software experience.' And it was done with those intentions,” said Hiren Patel, senior design manager at Nissan.

That resulted in cars with minimalist interiors that looked good in the dealership. But people drive their cars on roads; they don’t just sit inside them, parked inside a dealership. “So lots of people were complaining about it and saying, 'Hey, it takes my eyes off the road to change the temperature or to adjust my seat or do whatever.' It's not as easy as doing something on your phone where it's just right at your fingertips and intuitive,” Patel said.

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Google's new overarching approach to AI in K-12 classrooms sounds good on the surface. After consulting educators, researchers, and lawmakers, Google has decided that schools using its education products will be opted out of AI tools by default. It will be up to administrators to manually enable them when these changes roll out in the coming months.

When you look at what Google considers to be an AI tool, the nature of the Faustian bargain becomes clear. The affected products are Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search. There's no picking and choosing—you either allow all the AI or none of it.

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The boom in vaccine-preventable outbreaks, cases,  and tragic deaths is being fueled by slipping vaccination rates nationwide as health misinformation and anti-vaccine sentiments have taken hold. One of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the US currently serves as the US health secretary; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent decades prior to taking office attacking vaccines and spreading misinformation. He and his anti-vaccine organization, Children's Health Defense, have been one of the most prolific sources of anti-vaccine content.

Since taking office, Kennedy has waged a multi-front war on vaccines that has included dismantling and obstructing federal vaccine recommendations; launching dubious studies to look for alleged, unspecified harms of vaccines; promoting alleged vaccine injuries; and continuing to spread misinformation about vaccines and vaccine-preventable illnesses.

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In a detailed blog post, the Threat Intelligence Group explains how the x.cpe botnet evolved quickly from a single-stage dropper into a modular three-stage malware platform that sold access to third parties. Manufacturers must have their devices certified if they want access to Google apps and branding, a process that is supposed to catch threats like this. However, Videostrong's compromised boxes, mostly sold under the MECOOL brand, evaded detection by using a backdoor to remotely install the malware after the devices were set up and online.

After devices appeared online, a stub application called x.cpe or com.oemservice would phone home. This package did not have any malicious capabilities of its own, but it had the system-level permissions necessary to install malware modules at the operator's behest. It also disabled Play Protect, which would have otherwise flagged the silently installed packages as malicious.

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The brothers launched rockets, refurbished rockets, and sold rockets. But when it came time for them to leave SpaceX and start their own space company—a lifetime dream for the Carlisle brothers—they chose not to build rockets. Rather, they focused on spacecraft.

In late 2022, the three Carlisles founded Argo Space to build infrastructure in space. Their vision was not just in-space transportation but also removing the need to use propellants from Earth to move around the heavens. They chose water, which is potentially harvestable on the Moon and found all over the Solar System, as a means of propulsion.

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Microsoft had already patched the vulnerability that BlackLotus exploited in 2022. In 2023 and 2024, Microsoft issued additional updates. The first added a new certificate that no longer trusted the vulnerable boot managers. The second provided the means to revoke trust in the digital certificate used to sign older vulnerable Windows boot managers. The organizations infected by the new bootkit, which is tracked under the name BlackX, had installed all of these patches. So how did they fall victim?

UEFI bootkit refresher

Before discussing the incident further, a brief review of BlackLotus and UEFI malware is in order. Short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, UEFI is firmware that runs immediately after a computer is turned on. One of its main jobs is to load system configuration settings, identify and initialize hardware components, and prepare the computer to start its OS.

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A demand for action came after Meta apologized for temporarily suspending the No Kings Instagram account and disabling access for four hours at the peak of an early voting push from the group. In a post on X, Meta’s Andy Stone said the account had been using a Claude AI tool in a way that made it appear to be a bot. But even though automated review detected the error within an hour, Stone acknowledged that additional hurdles kept admins locked out. State and federal lawmakers—as well as a coalition of 14 attorneys general—have asked Meta to further explain its actions.

In a letter to No Kings, Meta offered to arrange a meeting with a technical expert who could better explain the mistake. But No Kings rejected the response, saying it failed to address any of the group's ongoing concerns and requesting a meeting with Meta senior leadership instead. The group stressed that the issue goes beyond its Instagram account, saying that Americans who rely on Meta's platforms need assurance that voting content won’t be suppressed ahead of or on election day. Among eight questions, the coalition asked Meta to publicly disclose any communications with the Trump administration about the No Kings account or the historic early voting day event.

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The announcement came just days before the midterm elections and was characterized by the agency as a long-awaited reprieve for farmers, a historically important constituency for Trump and the Republican Party.

When tens of thousands of animals are packed into one place, pollution from their waste is blown from ventilation fans or emanates from giant lagoons of liquid effluent. Livestock facilities emit fine particulate matter, ammonia, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds, all contributing to a toxic mix. Research has shown that emissions from these operations are a major cause of air pollution, causing nearly 12,700 deaths in the United States a year.

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Do screens in cars represent luxury? Judging by the latest car interiors, the answer would seem to be an emphatic “yes.” Screens aren't just getting larger; they are multiplying across the dashboard and morphing into different forms and concepts. Indeed, an interior’s screens are a pretty good indicator of what brand made the car—or at least how much the owner paid for it.

But is this actually what customers want? Are more screens really better? And even if they are, luxury car features inevitably trickle down to cheaper, more mainstream offerings, and screens can only get so big. That leaves luxury automakers with another question to answer: “What’s next?”

Mercedes-Benz is working on a new display alternative that could provide an answer. For now, it's known as the holographic display. Forget the images from Star Trek and Star Wars that just popped into your head, though. It's effectively a more advanced form of heads-up display, or HUD.

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On October 30, the museum debuted its last-to-open spaceflight exhibition, returning "home" with a gallery devoted to establishing a spacefaring civilization.

"Welcome to 'At Home in Space'!" said curator Jennifer Levasseur, who guided us through a virtual tour of the gallery. "This is the story of long-duration spaceflight in the last few decades. We generally call it 'reaching orbit.'"

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Why large dogs age faster

In many mammalian species, larger creatures tend to have longer lifespans. Mice, for instance, live an average of just two years, while some whales can last for as long as 200 years. Dogs, however, buck this pattern; larger dogs tend to age faster and die younger than smaller ones, which makes canines an ideal model for biologists to study to learn more about aging in general. Arizona State University scientists report that these lifespan differences seem to be due to so-called "jumping genes," according to a paper published in the journal Science.

The authors used data from 864 dogs collected in the Dog Aging Project to map patterns of DNA methylation (which influences how much certain genes are turned on or off) across the entire genome. It's part of the epigenome, whose markers can change over time in response to stress and other environmental factors. Genetic sequences, by contrast, are largely fixed. So DNA methylation is a good chemical indicator of aging and DNA regulation.

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The person who died was a Yakima County resident and was said to have had underlying health conditions, which could have made the person more vulnerable to the infection. On Friday, county officials reported that the person was severely ill and hospitalized. In the subsequent announcement of the person's death, officials said they would not be releasing further information about the person, including their name, gender, or age, out of respect for the family's privacy.

"Our hearts go out to the individual's family and loved ones during this difficult time," Dave Atteberry, health officer for the Yakima Health District, said in a statement. "Avian influenza can cause severe illness, particularly among people who have underlying health conditions. While this is a serious and heartbreaking outcome, the risk to the general public remains low."

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To access the Google time machine, you just have to search for either "Zelda" or "Ocarina of Time." Google will load the standard 2026 results page, but you'll see an animated Master Sword in the lower right corner. It appears on both mobile and desktop—just click the sword and enjoy the show.

After a little time-skipping animation and a Link shout (you know the one), you'll swear it's 1998 again. The search page is transformed into a simple list of blue links with retro Google branding. This is particularly apt given the time-shifting mechanics in Ocarina of Time.

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The high-profile journal Nature, however, made a notable exception this week, publishing a study that tells us that a bunch of methods we have been using to try to measure a key emotional ability don't seem to be measuring the same thing. The results mean that we don't have a good way to measure the impact of a concept that is the basis of a key method in therapy.

Inconsistencies

One of the most successful forms of therapy is cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. In part, CBT is based on getting people to step back and engage in "cognitive reappraisal." This requires people to think over a situation that has caused a negative emotional response and find ways to reinterpret it so that it has less impact on them. The ability to engage in this process has been linked to emotional resilience.

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People who worked on Apple’s robotic projects told The Information that the AI-driven home robot, code-named J595, could be named HomeView Ultra in line with Apple’s new HomeView stationary smart display. The company is reportedly aiming to launch the robotic product with a possible price tag of $1,000 or more by 2027, although development delays may push that back to 2028.

The earliest prototypes of the home robot first came out in 2018 and received approval from former Apple CEO Tim Cook to continue the project. The Information describes Apple’s engineers as trying to give the robot more capabilities beyond being a “fancy way to make FaceTime calls” in order to justify a high price tag, even as the team has spent years refining the software and incorporating more AI technologies.

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A social media user and AI decompilation enthusiast going by the name "chasm" was among the first to note the prompt change late last week, saying a new rule seemed to be added to the Claude Code prompt on or around October 27. That rule—included in a json file under the name "tengu_heron_brook"—reads as follows:

Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets. Don’t build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.

XDA later independently verified that the new rule appears in version 2.1.314 of the Claude Code binary, which was released on October 30. XDA also reported that the "tengu_heron_brook" rule had been used for other purposes in earlier versions and that the Claude Opus 5.5 model specifically seemed to have its own distinct and independent instructions restricting game recreations as part of its system prompt bundle.

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At the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference in Beijing, officials, including Wang Xiang, chief designer for the lunar exploration program, laid out the country's most publicly detailed plans yet for a series of missions leading up to a crewed lunar landing "before 2030."

China's lunar landings will involve a lunar-orbit rendezvous similar to what NASA did in the 1960s and early 1970s with the Apollo program. However, lacking a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V vehicle, the crew and lunar lander will launch separately to the Moon.

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