In a National Security Presidential Memorandum issued Thursday, US President Donald Trump directed the National Coordination Center (NCC), which operates under the Homeland Security Task Force, to develop a program for conducting specific cyber operations that combat foreign transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security will provide oversight. The lynchpin of that program is bringing in private sector companies to participate.

Devil will be in the still-undefined details

A fact sheet that accompanied Thursday’s memo listed ransomware, sextortion schemes, phishing campaigns, financial fraud, and impersonation scams as activities eligible for private-sector security firms to target. The memo said such firms could “conduct Cyber Surveillance Operations and Cyber Effects Operations” against “cyber-enabled” TCOs. Such groups are defined as “any foreign group that conducts cyber-enabled crime against the United States Government, a United States person, or United States interests, and that is not an institutional part of a foreign government or wholly operated under a foreign government’s direction.”

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The self-described "commercial spaceline," which was founded by British tycoon Richard Branson, has turned to the public to vote on what to call the new vehicle. The spaceplane will be a member of Virgin Galactic's Delta-class fleet, succeeding SpaceShipTwo, which carried Branson and 31 others on 12 short hops above the US-defined boundary between Earth and space.

"You can vote for one of four finalist names for a spaceship that will join Virgin Galactic's growing fleet and the next chapter in our journey to expand access to space," the company announced on its website on August 11. "Name a Virgin Galactic spaceship, shape a piece of spaceflight history."

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The semiannual military exercise, called Combined Resolve, gave the US military a firsthand taste of how modern drone warfare has evolved on the battlefields of Ukraine. The Ukrainian drone operators participating in the exercise were easily able to spot and destroy US armored vehicles by mimicking the actions of dropping bombs from above or moving close enough to simulate a kamikaze strike, according to US officials and a participant who spoke with The Wall Street Journal.

US armored vehicles were being destroyed so quickly that they were “respawned” and sent back into the simulated fray, a US official told The Wall Street Journal. The US troops who participated in the exercise—held in Germany from April 9 to May 10—were on rotational deployment from Fort Hood, Texas.

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Flock’s audit assistance tool suspends access when user activity “meets defined criteria for abnormal behavior,” Flock said. The suspension can only be lifted by administrator review, with the goal being “to intervene before misuse becomes recurring or widespread.”

The tech has been available as an optional free feature since April, but only a third of agencies had opted in, Flock said. However, after a single Georgia sheriff’s office used the tool and subsequently arrested three cops who were separately using Flock cameras to stalk acquaintances, Flock CEO Garrett Langley told The Verge that dozens of incidents like these helped his company realize they made a mistake and had to act to correct it.

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Petlibro makes pet feeders that connect to Wi-Fi and, for setup with Petlibro’s mobile companion app, Bluetooth. Users can set the feeders to automatically dispense food at scheduled times, which is handy for pet care when the owner is out of the home.

In a statement to The Verge, Petlibro CEO York Wu said this week’s outage was “related to how the Petlibro app communicates with devices through its online servers.”

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Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri called it “leaner and more modern, with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that’s always made it Instagram.”

Sure, Adam. Simplicity and craft are definitely what everyone thinks of when Instagram comes to mind.

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According to Senior Director Tulsee Doshi, Gemini 3.7 Flash is noticeably better at coding than the previous Flash release. She cites a jump in the FrontierCode 1.1 Main test from 34.4 to 43.6 percent and DeepSWE v1.1 going from 49 to 65.3 percent. As for the vibes, Gemini 3.7 Flash's WebDev Arena score has risen to 1,588 from 1,538.

People turning to Gemini and hoping it will "know" things may also see modest improvements in Gemini 3.7 Flash. The GDP.pdf benchmark, which measures how well a model can process complex documents, has gone up to 34 percent versus 22 percent with 3.6 Flash. AutomationBench tests how well models can execute common business workflows, and Gemini 3.7 Flash rose to 30.4 percent from 3.6's 17 percent score.

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But among them is the No. 1 most requested feature by Rivian R1S customers, the automaker told Ars: captain's chairs for the second row. The six-seat interior is an alternative to a middle bench, and the Rivian captain's chair looks thoughtfully designed, with a hidden cupholder that I'm not sure I've seen on any other SUV before. The chairs are also spaced so it's easy to get to the third row, or use that volume between them for skis, snowboards, or surfboards.

Rivian has also changed the trims, bringing them into line with the offer structure on the recently released R2. Instead of choosing from Dual, Tri, or R1s, Rivian is now calling them Premium and Performance; Quad stays Quad. But the base price for each stays the same: The R1T still starts at $79,990 and the R1S at $83,990.

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Half a dozen of the company’s backers told the FT that Anthropic’s rapidly rising revenue would enable it to more than double its current valuation in a planned autumn float.

A listing at that level could unlock billions of dollars in gains for the five-year-old company’s early investors but would also test public markets that are growing more nervous about the AI boom.

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A team led by Jordan Houri and Oren Milstein of StemRad, an Israeli-American startup developing personal protective equipment against radiation, proposed that we could solve this by shielding the astronauts instead of shielding the spacecraft.

To test this idea, StemRad’s team flew a wearable radiation-shielding vest called AstroRad to the Moon and back aboard NASA's uncrewed Artemis I mission, then used the flight data to calculate how it would perform during an actual solar storm. It turns out the vest would perform roughly as well as the Orion’s heavily shielded onboard shelter the crew was supposed to hide in to wait out a storm.

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Anthropic confirmed that moving forward, all new models offered globally—not just in the EU—will mark AI-generated content “from day one.” Text outputs will “carry embedded watermarks,” invisible to the user, and other “generated files will include digitally signed provenance metadata where supported,” Anthropic said.

Notably, Anthropic is deploying a "nuke it from orbit" approach, applying the watermarks to all processed content where supported, even though the EU does not require it for cases where an AI system performs "an assistive function for standard editing" (the guidance's own example is grammar correction), or where it doesn't "substantially alter" the user's text or its meaning.

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The boy was infected with an ultra-rare amoeba known for ravaging the brain. The opportunistic pathogen was first identified in 1986 from the brain of a San Diego Zoo monkey, which died from the infection. Since then, only about 200 human cases have been recorded worldwide. About 90 percent of them have been fatal.

The initial symptoms can be vague and, given its rarity, the infection is notorious for being undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. Still, the scant medical literature does provide some telltale signs, clues of what it can look like on tests and scans. But for the toddler, the infection looked different, sending doctors down the wrong path.

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ShieldFont, as designers Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio write in a recent white paper, was made to offer web publishers "a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and [to] disrupt what is collected when that choice is ignored."

When is a horse a potato?

The font is based around ligatures, a long-standing feature of many fonts that is usually used to replace certain letter pairs with a more readable version when they're smushed up next to each other. With ShieldFont, though, those ligatures are instead used to replace entire words with others in an attempt to destroy the text's value to scrapers. This substitution only happens when the font engine draws the page onscreen, meaning scrapers that simply download plaintext source code get an altered version that end users never see.

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The revelation was posted on Tuesday and Wednesday by security firms CloudSEK and Hudson Rock. CloudSEK said it found cloud keys, repository tokens, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, package publishing credentials, environment variables, and AI provider keys that could allow attackers to gain access to more than 2,500 organizations.

40 minutes is all it takes

The credentials were extracted during a 40-minute window in March while the victims used compromised versions of LiteLLM downloaded from the package’s official location in the Python Package Index repository. Hudson Rock said it made the discovery after analyzing a 195TB file that it obtained. Neither firm identified the source of the information.

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All the stuff we see around us is made up of quarks held together by gluons (carriers of the nuclear strong force) to form protons and neutrons, which comprise the core of every single atom. The Higgs boson, discovered in 2012 after decades of searching, was widely touted as the final missing piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. But there are still plenty of unanswered questions, including whether or not glueballs really exist. They should, if the Standard Model is correct; they're a direct prediction of quantum chromodynamics, i.e., the theory of the strong nuclear force. There should even be several kinds of glueballs.

As Matthew Francis wrote for Ars in 2015:

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In an updated support page, Twitch confirms that users must opt out if they don’t want their “streams, VODs, clips, stream chats, and pictures and text on your channel [to] be used in future training of a model developed by Amazon whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images, or video.”

To opt out, users must go to the proper settings at www.twitch.tv/settings/security.

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Trump's social media company this month started charging customers up to $100,000 per month for the earliest access to posts that can have immediate impacts on financial markets. The first customers are mostly high-frequency trading firms that could benefit financially from getting official government news milliseconds before others.

"This scheme is profoundly corrupt. The President stands to gain financially by giving 'market-moving' government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company," the lawsuit said.

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The flesh-eating New World Screwworm is the parasitic larva that emerges from eggs laid by flies in the open wounds or body openings of warm-blooded animals and humans, with untreated cases potentially leading to severe injury or death. Since the first screwworm cases were detected in South Texas in June, the US Department of Agriculture and US Customs and Border Protection have been conducting “one of the most extensive animal-health surveillance operations in the country,” the USDA said on August 10 in social media posts on platforms like X and Facebook.

The effort involves at least 200 drones owned by the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. But the actual number in use "varies depending on availability and need," a USDA spokesperson told Ars.

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JCB is a UK-based manufacturer of heavy industrial and agricultural equipment—think diggers, loaders, backhoes, tractors, and so on. And as JCB is based in the UK, it doesn't have the luxury of being able to ignore carbon emissions targets; it has to have alternatives to diesel engines. For some products, that means switching to batteries, but the company has also been working with hydrogen. At first, that meant fuel cells, but after developing prototypes, JCB concluded the tech was too expensive and too fragile for life on the farm or the construction site. Instead, in 2020, the company started developing its own hydrogen combustion engine.

The idea of burning hydrogen in an internal combustion engine has been tried before with little success. For example, in 2006, BMW modified a naturally aspirated V12 engine in a 7 Series to run on hydrogen, which it did, but with 60 percent of the power and five times the fuel consumption compared to gasoline. More recently, Toyota's president Akio Toyoda has been among the drivers of an experimental hydrogen-burning Toyota Corolla in some Japanese endurance races. In this case, Toyota started with the GR Corolla's turbocharged three-cylinder engine; the forced induction from the turbocharger made up somewhat for the reduced energy density of hydrogen.

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The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that it exercised its emergency authority in response to a "market emergency." The CFTC said it acted "to ensure market stability" and "ordered the exchange to continue to operate in accordance with the Commodity Exchange Act’s Core Principles." The Trump administration took the action after a request from Kalshi.

The market emergency alleged by the CFTC is that New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Kalshi on July 31. James' lawsuit seeks a court order to permanently enjoin Kalshi "from operating an unlawful gambling business" in the state. The lawsuit also demands that Kalshi "make full restitution to customers who have engaged in betting" and pay financial penalties.

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