"I am resigning from the White House with tremendous respect for President Trump and Bobby Kennedy," Means wrote in a social media post this afternoon. "It was an honor to advocate for MAHA moms in the administration and steer policies like Dietary Guidelines reform, psychedelic reform, removing soda from SNAP, removing food dyes, GRAS reform, and overhauling government food procurement."

His post did not provide a reason for his departure. Means served as a senior advisor to Kennedy.

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When we first drove BMW’s first Neue Klasse model, the iX3, it quickly revealed that BMW knows how to make a good electric vehicle. A clean-sheet design, it featured the automaker’s sixth-generation electric powertrain, a completely reimagined dashboard, and powerful computers to run the whole show. Now, much of that technology is being ported over to the larger X5 line.

But BMW knows not all its customers are ready to go electric, especially in the US, so it’s sticking with its powertrain-agnostic CLAR platform, as used in cars as diverse as the large 7 Series and the new gasoline 3 Series. Which means in addition to the all-electric iX5, there are also mild hybrid and plug-in hybrid X5s available, and in time, even a hydrogen-powered option. For now, as I’ll explain, I think the EV is the pick of the bunch.

Pick your power

The most conventional option is the X5 40 xDrive, powered by a 3.0 L turbocharged inline six-cylinder engine that generates 394 hp (294 kW) and 428 lb-ft (580 Nm). The 48 V mild hybrid system can contribute a decent slug of torque (148 lb-ft/200 Nm) if necessary, and the engine operates under the Miller cycle for better efficiency, as well as featuring the usual BMW engine technology, like variable valve timing. Expect around 26 mpg (9 L/100 km) from this powertrain and a full-to-empty range of 569 miles (915 km).

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In a new blog post, Samsung UK crows that the company's 2026 foldable lineup is moving much faster than last year's models. Compared to the Galaxy Z Fold 7, combined European sales for the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra are up 45 percent. Samsung isn't talking about Z Flip 8 sales, but it previously noted that its larger foldables made up about 80 percent of foldable purchases. We can assume any increase there is not impressive enough to mention.

The reason for flat Z Flip sales may simply be that Apple didn't release a flip phone. Unsurprisingly, Samsung doesn't mention Apple or the iPhone Duo in its press release. However, it does say that search volume for the Z8 series across Europe spiked 460 percent the week of September 6 to 12. And guess what was announced on September 9? Yep, the iPhone Duo. Z Fold 8 search volume across the entire month of September (when the phones launched) was up 260 percent.

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On Wednesday, several days after a Russian military spacecraft moved within striking distance of one of those commercial satellites, the same Russian diplomat assured the world there's no reason to worry.

There's a sharp incongruity in those statements from Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy head of Russia's delegation to the United Nations. Vorontsov's comments Wednesday in the UN General Assembly's First Committee came moments after a US official called attention to recent maneuvers by Kosmos 2612, a Russian military craft that approached a US-registered commercial satellite some 340 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth.

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The largest fine to ever hit Meta came after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez declined to join an $18 billion settlement Meta reached earlier this year with attorneys general in nearly all states.

In his opinion Wednesday, US district court judge Francis J. Mathew said there was no “bright line rule” for determining the appropriate penalty for Meta's repeated and willful deception of users since 2010 about their “control of data, third-party data misuse, misinformation, hate speech, and equal enforcement.”

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In an email to Ars Technica, one of the trial's lead researchers, Christine Stabell Benn of Bandim Health Project and the University of Southern Denmark, said that Guinea-Bissau's Council of Ministers "formally reaffirmed its non-acceptance of the study on 16 October."

The revelation that the study was formally rejected last week comes after news on Monday that judicial police in Guinea-Bissau raided Bandim Health's offices and seized vaccines. Stabell Benn highlighted that the police search came after the trial was rejected.

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Rather than simply replacing the Virtual Boy's four shades of red with four different colors, VBoy Color's readme files explain how the emulator's game-specific Color Packs can assign a distinct four-color palette to each 8x8 tile in a Virtual Boy scene. That means the emulator can differentiate between green pipes, grey platforms, and red brick wall in Mario Clash, for instance, even though all those in-game objects share the same overlapping red hues in the original game.

The Game Boy Color-esque results feel like being transported into an alternate history where Nintendo invested in a full-color display rather than cheaper red LEDs for the Virtual Boy hardware. The increased contrast between differently colored elements is particularly welcome in games like Jack Bros. or Vertical Force, where the original red-on-red display often makes it hard to differentiate the player-character from busy red background elements.

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The world’s largest cloud computing provider on Wednesday said it had identified an attempt by hackers to exploit the bug four days before the weakness was disclosed to the public.

Amazon added the flaws were “now being broadly exploited in the wild.”

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Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power returns next month for its third season. Prime Video unveiled a teaser earlier this year at San Diego Comic-Con, but we haven't heard much about the new season otherwise. We now have the official full trailer, and it's jam-packed with a rising Sauron, who is intent on conquering Middle-Earth with his army of Orcs—with the fractured opposition of elves, dwarves, and men scrambling to figure out how best to stop him. We also meet the human men who will become the Ringwraiths; the showrunners have dubbed them the Nazgnagol ("Rings-servant").

(Some spoilers for the first two seasons below.)

Prime Video made a major investment in The Rings of Power when it acquired the rights to the source material from the Tolkien estate, even committing to multiple seasons upfront. S3 is set seven years after the events of S2 and opens when the war between the elves and Sauron is at its height. Per the official synopsis:

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It’s easy to criticize US automakers and their tepid approach to electric vehicles under the current administration and the expiration of the EV tax credit. It’s also easy to look at the rest of the world's embrace of EVs and wonder if the US is entering a “Malaise 2.0” era. Which is why GM wants the world to know that it is still focused on its end goals of electrification, autonomy, and improving vehicle quality while reducing development time.

At this year’s GM Forward event, company executives announced that its hands-off, eyes-off Super Cruise technology will expand across the lineup and be available on nearly every vehicle. This will include the pickup trucks and the crossovers, and not just the Escalade IQ that it was announced for last year.

Sterling Anderson, GM’s head of product, said the company is testing this technology to the tune of 1 million miles (1.6 million km) a month in both the virtual and real world. The goal is that not only would the vehicle be able to take you places, but it could go and do things for you.

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The hijacking began in late August, when, according to Tor volunteers, the attacker used a valid password that had been reused to gain access to a Tor management server. The attacker then installed Ebury, a backdoor written for Linux that was discovered 12 years ago.

Mysteries remain

Then the attacker connected from the management server to a second Tor server, called Switzerland2, through SSH, using an RSA key that, for unknown reasons, investigators couldn’t find among Switzerland2’s authorized keys. With administrative control of Switzerland2, the attackers installed Ebury there as well. Finally, the attacker reconfigured settings on two exit nodes that Switzerland2 hosted.

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On Wednesday, for the first time, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) acknowledged that reality and conceded that the goal of keeping warming below 1.5° was no longer a viable one. Instead, its new goalposts focus on keeping both how long we exceed that limit and how much we exceed it by, at a minimum. Doing that will require both dramatic emissions cuts now and the removal of hundreds of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere before the century is out.

Bowing to the inevitable

Depending on which baseline you use to establish pre-industrial temperatures, as well as which reconstruction of global temperatures you rely on, the world has either gotten very close to, or already exceeded, the 1.5° milestone. The current El Niño event, which appears exceptionally strong, will almost certainly mean that we've gone over it no matter which records you choose.

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Carr's post on X said, "Many journalists and broadcasters have been amplifying or airing these Polls without regard to basic journalistic ethics and without informing the public that those Polls lack a scientific, accurate, or even real basis... Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations."

Carr urged broadcasters to "provide their viewers with additional context and information about Polls they have covered." In fact, one small polling outfit was exposed as a hoax this week, and a similar incident occurred in August. News outlets have reported on these hoaxes, providing the very "context" that Carr said is needed.

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The "introductory launch pricing" for Xbox's Cloud Playtime purchases is as follows:

• 10 hours for $4 (~$0.40/hour)
• 25 hours for $8 (~$0.32/hour)
• 50 hours for $12 (~$0.24/hour)

Purchased playtime "remains available until it’s used," Microsoft writes, so you don't have to worry about your 50-hour purchase expiring before you can use it fully.

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Those results are according to a survey of 2,018 chief information officers and senior IT decision-makers at companies with at least 10,000 employees that Origina commissioned for its report, “The Software Tax.” About half of the respondents (1,011) are from the US, and the rest are from the United Kingdom. All respondents worked at companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue.

Keep in mind that Origina provides maintenance for various enterprise software. Its report points to independent software maintenance as a way for IT leaders to regain control over software budgets, illustrating its potential bias. A third-party research consultancy, Censuswide, conducted the survey.

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Automotive revenues were $20.6 billion, a 3 percent decrease year over year. Perhaps more troubling is the decline in revenue from solar panels and storage batteries—this line of business had been growing, but for Q3 revenue fell 16 percent year over year to $2.9 billion. Services and other revenues, though, which include parts and Supercharger use, grew by a third to $4.6 billion.

But the company—like the rest of us—has seen its expenses go up. Operating expenses rose by 39 percent to $4.8 billion, dropping the company’s operating margin to just 2.6 percent; in Q3 2025, Tesla’s margin was 5.8 percent. Net profit fell to $787 million, down 43 percent year over year. What’s more, capital expenditures were up by 110 percent to $4.7 billion, and free cash flow was down 62 percent to $1.5 billion.

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It’s just a trend, it will pass, and at some point I’ll probably cave and upgrade when it starts actually affecting my ability to get work done, or more importantly get security updates. Once I adjust, I’ll stop noticing it, and life will go on.

As such, I wouldn’t normally find an obvious rebrand like this notable, much less feel like I had much to say about it. But then I happened to catch Apple’s behind-the-scenes video in my YouTube recommendations, and I realized I did have thoughts.

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The official announcement was posted mere minutes after a Bloomberg report detailed 400 job cuts across BioWare parent company Electronic Arts, including 50 at BioWare, based on reports from "a person familiar with the company's plans."

"Across our portfolio, we’re making deliberate choices to align talent and investments where we see the greatest opportunities for players and long-term growth," EA executives wrote in a message to staff, according to Bloomberg.

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For enterprise customers and AI enthusiasts, OpenAI's latest model will appear in Google's "Model Garden" in the coming weeks, adding to its 200-plus options. The garden already offers access to Google's Gemini models, as well as an assortment of open models like Mistral, Llama, and Gemma. Anthropic's Claude AI has also been available for some time. Google says it's now the only large cloud provider offering access to all three leading closed LLMs.

While OpenAI notes that Microsoft continues to be its primary cloud partner, the full suite of current GPT 6 and 6.1 models—Astra, Sol, and Luna—will launch on Google Cloud. Astra will naturally cost the most to run, but Google's system supports dynamically moving workloads between LLMs based on performance, latency, and efficiency.

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Trump denied ordering the restrictions. While Musk may have spoken to Trump and administration officials before the decision, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Musk made the final call. The decision came after both Musk and Trump criticized Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries.

"Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration," the WSJ wrote, citing unnamed US officials and people familiar with the matter. The report said that "Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network... rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless."

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