Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense proposed a special budget that would spend $6.6 billion over six years on buying drones made in Taiwan, according to the Central News Agency that represents the national news service of Taiwan. Presented on June 18, the budget proposal would allow the government to buy more than 208,000 coastal attack drones, along with more than 1,400 coastal reconnaissance drones and 1,320 uncrewed surface vessels, between 2026 and 2031.

That would be a significant boost to the Taiwanese military arsenal that currently includes just 5,000 US-made attack drones and domestically produced drones, according to Resilience Media. During military exercises in early June, Taiwanese soldiers fired Altius-600 loitering munition drones—made by a subsidiary of the US military technology company Anduril Industries—from towed flatbed launchers to strike offshore targets, according to USNI News. In another exercise earlier this year, Taiwanese Marines used Taiwan-made drones to similarly strike targets at sea.

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As part of this, officials said work would be paused on the Lunar Gateway planned to orbit the Moon. Of the two elements that were furthest along, NASA also revealed that one of them—the  Power and Propulsion Element—would be repurposed to serve as a core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space.

Less was said about the fate of the other major component, the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO). This is the large pressurized module, 6.1 meters long, in which visiting astronauts would spend the majority of their time when visiting the Lunar Gateway. NASA has awarded contracts worth $1.1 billion to Northrop Grumman to design, build, and integrate the habitation module with the Power and Propulsion Element.

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Google has claimed that developer verification is a necessary change to smartphone software distribution, pointing to the increased prevalence of scams that trick Android users into installing malware apps. Google's solution requires verifying the identities of developers outside the Play Store just like it does for devs publishing on its platform. This has proven to be a contentious change for myriad reasons.

In the new blog post, Google's Matthew Forsythe confirms that the developer verification system is slated to come online on September 30 of this year. The initial deployment will be limited to countries with a high level of app scams: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

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The vulnerability, CVE-2025-20701, allowed improper authentication in the firmware running on the Bluetooth-related chips, enabling people within signal range to impersonate devices that had previously been paired with the earbuds. The researchers demonstrated this in a series of end-to-end attacks that allowed them to eavesdrop on conversations or sounds within earshot of the phone microphone.

Apple joins the patch party

“Impact: An attacker within Bluetooth range may be able to listen through the microphone of a device which is not yet paired and actively seeking pair requests,” Apple said in a Tuesday security advisory. The fix is contained in Beats Firmware Update 1B211, which is delivered automatically while headphones are paired with and within Bluetooth range of a user’s iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Users can check their firmware version by going to Settings on their device, navigating to Bluetooth, and tapping the info button next to the headphones.

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But the OOI also provides data that's useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it's reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month.

As of now, there is no formal statement available from the federal government. However, The New York Times reports that the decision will be announced later today, and Ars received a statement from Zoe Lofgren, the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, indicating that the decision has been made.

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The new details come from a private investor list obtained by ProPublica that sheds light on a particularly delicate issue for Elon Musk’s rocket company: which people in countries like China bought into the company, and how. SpaceX built its business off sensitive US government work like making spy satellites for the Pentagon. While there is no ban on Chinese investment in US military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated.

In a sign of its sensitivity to the concerns, SpaceX barred investors from China and Hong Kong from buying shares in its initial public offering last week due to “regulatory and compliance risks,” Bloomberg reported. The US government alleges that China has a strategy of using investments in sensitive industries for espionage and to get access to cutting-edge technology.

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Sanders shared a summary of his legislation with AP News. If passed, the law would create a sovereign wealth fund “financed through a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI companies,” AP News reported. Any AI firm that does $200 million in annual AI sales would be subject to the tax, as would any new firm once it reaches that revenue level.

In total, Sanders estimated the fund could be worth $7 trillion, generating “hundreds of billions of dollars annually in direct payments to Americans and programs such as health care, education and housing,” AP News reported. Each American would likely receive more than $1,000 annually in 5 percent annual dividends, Sanders estimated.

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University of Oxford ancient DNA researcher Ruairidh Macleod and his colleagues recently sequenced the telltale bacterial DNA in teeth from plague victims at four ancient cemeteries in the area around Russia’s Lake Baikal. The tragedy that befell these communities is now the earliest known plague outbreak, courtesy of the oldest strain of Y. pestis ever sequenced.

Unearthing a new backstory for the plague

Until recently, scientists who study the evolution of diseases have held two fairly solid ideas about the origins of plague, the disease caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria. It's a scourge so awful that it has gone down in history as not just a plague but the plague. The first idea is that the earliest strains didn't have the right genetic traits to be really lethal. And the second is that the plague first began menacing humans when the first farmers settled in densely packed towns alongside rats and domestic animals.

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With Samokutyaev's death on Wednesday, he becomes the first former ISS long-duration resident to die in the 26 years that the space station has been a home to 155 other cosmonauts and astronauts as expedition crew members. The cause of his death is unknown.

"The leadership and staff of the Roscosmos State Corporation extend their sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Aleksandr Mikhailovich," officials with Russia's space agency said in a statement.

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We're about six weeks out from the debut of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home. It's been five years since Spidey graced the big screen, so naturally, Sony Pictures has released a new trailer to build audience anticipation.

(Spoilers for No Way Home below.)

No Way Home ended on a pretty bleak note, with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase him from everyone’s memory to protect the multiverse, including MJ (Zendaya).

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With the clearance, Cuprina appears to be the only company to have FDA clearance to sell two species of fly larvae—and it's abuzz with the potential to dominate the global maggot market.

The new species is Lucilia cuprina, or Australian sheep blowfly. It's a close relative of Lucilia sericata, or the common green bottle fly, which is the fly species most often used for wound therapy, often called biosurgery or maggot debridement therapy (MDT). L. sericata is the only other fly with FDA clearance, which the agency first granted in 2004 to Ronald Sherman, who is now Cuprina’s Medical and Scientific Director.

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These include a promise of useful, error-corrected quantum computing as soon as 2028, details on an updated trapped ion processor, and a case in which claims of quantum supremacy have been cut back a bit thanks to advances in more traditional algorithms.

2028 is remarkably soon

Many people in the field expect that useful quantum computers are still about five to 10 years away. While there may be a few useful algorithms that can be run on existing error-prone hardware, almost all of the interesting problems that quantum computing can be applied to will require some form of error correction enabled by linking a small collection of hardware qubits together into what's called a logical qubit. Logical qubits include the redundant storage of information along with neighboring qubits that can be measured to determine when errors occur and how to fix them.

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"AT&T asserts that California seeks to prohibit or hinder wireline carriers from discontinuing copper facilities and investing in fiber," said a June 15 filing by the state of California and the California Public Utilities Commission. "Indeed, AT&T has been making this argument for years. It is not and has never been true."

As we reported last month, AT&T sued California over the state’s refusal to let it stop providing phone service to all potential customers in its wireline network territory. AT&T also petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to declare that California cannot enforce its rules and to let AT&T stop providing service to about 199,000 phone customers.

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Nearly 74,000 Fortinet devices from more than 21,000 IP addresses in 194 countries have been compromised and their plaintext credentials exposed online, Bob Diachenko, a security researcher and head of SecurityDiscovery.com, said online and in an interview. He said he found the data after gaining access to the attackers’ command-and-control server and other infrastructure. The exposed data also included the industry, revenue, and employee count for each compromised organization.

Exceptional scale, poor opsec

Independent researcher Kevin Beaumont reported that “almost all” of the compromised devices remained online as of Wednesday morning. He went on to say that he has confirmed with multiple organizations found in the attackers’ logs that the credentials are real and current. In many cases, once the threat actors compromised the devices, they went on to access affected organizations’ centralized authentication systems, such as Radius servers and Microsoft Active Directory. The number of compromised devices comprises roughly half of all Internet-facing Fortinet firewalls, based on polling from Shodan.

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Tesco filed a lawsuit in the UK’s High Court against Broadcom alleging breach of contract last year. According to a September report from The Register, the lawsuit claimed that in January 2021, Tesco bought perpetual licenses for VMware’s vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, a subscription to VMware Tanzu, plus support services until 2026, with the option to extend support for four additional years.

But when Broadcom took over VMware in November 2023, it would not honor the deal and instead tried to get Tesco to pay “excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid” and would not allow it to buy support services for its perpetually licensed software without buying “duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products," the initial complaint read, The Register reported at the time.

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That glimpse into how AI can act in a fully autonomous way to automate robot training was made possible by a new agent harness framework—software that wraps around AI models to enable their use of various tools while also providing capabilities such as memory, context, constraint, and feedback loops. That agentic harness, called ENPIRE, was developed by robotics researchers at the Nvidia GEAR (Generalist Embodied Agent Research) lab alongside collaborators from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of California, Berkeley.

“A part of our NVIDIA GEAR lab now self-improves tirelessly overnight,” wrote Jim Fan, director of AI at NVIDIA, in a LinkedIn post. “We just read the reports in the morning.”

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Plenty of people are attracted to the idea of a truck with a compact footprint, no infotainment system or embedded modem, and the option to upconvert it later into an SUV or fastback. In the abstract, at least, people aren't going to jump at the prospect of a truck with 150 miles (241 km) of range if it costs too much.

When Slate broke cover in 2025, it was targeting a price of around $20,000, assuming the $7,500 IRS clean vehicle tax credit would remain in effect, but it was abolished later that year.

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Since Mythos debuted in April, Anthropic has claimed—and warned—that the model has advanced capabilities for not only finding software vulnerabilities to help defenders patch them, but also figuring out ways to exploit them that could be used by bad actors. Anthropic itself noted this double-edged sword in its launch of Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. “A great deal of advanced usage of AI models is dual use: the same queries that are beneficial in the hands of cybersecurity professionals and biology researchers could be dangerous if available to malicious actors,” the company wrote in a blog post last week.

With this in mind, the company initially released a version called Mythos Preview to a select consortium as part of a working group known as Project Glasswing. Mythos 5 was also privately released to this group last week, while Claude Fable 5, which is a Mythos-grade model, was released to the general public with specific blocks on its ability to give responses to questions about biology and cybersecurity.

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The generically named Google Home Speaker is Google's first home audio device in almost six years. The last one was the Nest Audio, which debuted back in September 2020. The new device is small and round—an oblate spheroid, technically. It's covered in a partially recycled fabric available in four colors: hazel, porcelain, jade, and berry (jade and berry are limited to the US). Google says the device produces "360-degree sound" for a uniform listening experience anywhere in a room.

Previous Google speakers included Assistant-style illuminated lights, but the Google Home Speaker features a light ring around the bottom that glows when the device is listening, "thinking," or responding. This is becoming a trend with Google. The company will require a similar glowing lightbar embellishment on the upcoming Googlebook laptops. There are three far-field microphones distributed around the speaker that will pick up your speech, and there's a mute switch when you don't want it listening for the "OK Google" trigger.

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A series of demolition charges on Tuesday (June 16) brought down the access tower, mobile service tower, and what remained of the assembly building at SLC-6—pronounced "slick-six"—in Southern California. Once the location for the US Air Force's first effort to put humans into space and later, the West Coast launch site for the space shuttle, SLC-6 will next be used by SpaceX in support of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions.

"Space Launch Complex-6 represents six decades of American innovation and our unwavering commitment to securing space superiority," Col. James T. Horne III, commander of Space Launch Delta 30 at Vandenberg, said in a statement. "By modernizing this historic footprint in partnership with our defense industrial base, we are building directly upon the foundation of our pioneers."

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