The company on Thursday issued reports of four new incidents, all of which occurred in June. They come after the company revealed in July that internal test agents exploited a zero-day vulnerability in a tool designed to restrict their access to the Internet. They then broke into the network of AI tool provider Hugging Face. The agents took that illegal action to steal answers to a hacking test that weren’t available when completing the tasks on their own. The incident—which likely would have resulted in criminal charges had they been performed directly by a person—has further heightened concerns that widespread AI use could have harmful effects on an unprecedented scale.

Easier to beg for forgiveness than ask permission

In two of the cases reported Thursday, OpenAI agents tasked with retrieving information from websites hacked them when the models ran into obstacles obtaining it directly. In one incident during reinforcement training, a model that received access denials when trying to retrieve historical hospital-bed statistics on a government statistics website “used the site's file-download feature to retrieve server configuration and application files, including sensitive credentials,” OpenAI said. “It inspected the application code, bypassed the statistics endpoint's authorization checks, and retrieved data that had previously been denied. The model saved the data locally.”

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In the US, cops have vowed to crack down on AI CSAM since at least 2024, when the Department of Justice made one of the earliest arrests. After charging a Wisconsin man with spreading “thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors” across Telegram and Instagram, the DOJ clarified to law enforcement that “CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM.”

On Thursday, New Jersey officials accused 51-year-old Fitzgerald of using AI to make photos from social media of real minors into sexualized images that he then distributed on social media.

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A new bill proposed by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) aims to establish new regulations that would ensure that "buying a video game would give the consumer ownership of the game rather than a license to play it," including assurances that they can continue to access the games for years after they are released.

The announcement names NBA 2K25 as an example of the problem the bill aims to solve; that game launched on September 6, 2025, but is scheduled to become unplayable on December 31 due to server shutdowns. The bill, which is called the Power to Players Act, directs the FTC to take action to prevent outcomes like that in the future.

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This week, some users reported online that their Ray-Ban Metas were recording without their consent. A person going by Kindly-Audience-137 on Reddit, for example, said this happened to them across three Meta Ray-Bans and that they had the “Respond without Hey Meta” setting turned off. The person said the Meta AI app “saves audio recordings and text transcripts of these conversations in my conversation history.”

“I believe this deserves a serious technical investigation. Customers should not have to wonder whether their private conversations are being captured when they have not intentionally activated their glasses’ AI assistant,” the Reddit user said.

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The FDA submitted an "Interim Access Policy" on peptides for review by the White House, according to a filing notice posted on an Office of Management and Budget website. The posting does not provide information on the proposed policy. But people familiar with the proposal told The Associated Press that it would give the FDA "enforcement discretion" on certain peptide drugs. This would allow the agency to choose not to enforce current restrictions on peptides and provide an assurance to specialty pharmacies eager to start making them that they will not be targeted by the agency.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, did not respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

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Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.

As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta's terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.

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Two global election markets on Polymarket’s offshore platform, for instance, generated over $600 million in trading volume, far more than most political markets typically attract. Most of the activity took place buying and selling contracts tied to long-shot candidates who ultimately did not win.

This summer, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party cruised to victory in federal elections, winning 438 parliamentary seats and paving the way for him to serve another five-year term. The closest competitor won 13 seats. On prediction markets, trading volume—the total value of contracts bought and sold—typically tracks roughly with the odds of a given outcome; frontrunners attract far more volume than long shots. But in this case, the trading patterns deviated sharply from the norm. Just $173,000 was wagered on Ahmed winning, compared to more than $41 million traded on his chief of staff, Shimelis Abdisa, becoming the country’s next leader. Altogether, the volume traded added up to over $285 million, nearly all on losing candidates.

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The new Roadster, we’re told, will be unlike anything else, although the angular, wedge-shaped styling owes more than a little to Giorgetto Giugiaro’s original Lotus Esprit—Musk is known to own a James Bond prop car—as well as the more recent Lamborghini Gallardo. At the rear are four giant exhaust pipes; these do not signal Tesla’s sudden embrace of hydrocarbons beyond those emitted by private aviation.

Rather, it’s where 100,000 psi jets of compressed nitrogen shoot out. It’s early in the morning and the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Statutes are dense reading, so I am yet to find the section where it explains how and when it’s legal to use such a thing on the road.

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In a documentary premiering Saturday—Super Scam Me—investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller goes deep into this toxic love-bombing terrain. In a clip that Ars is exclusively debuting below, you can see how van Zeller worked with an ethical hacker, Arman the Cyber, to use a fake bitcoin receipt and bait the fake Bon Jovi, giving the victim some much-needed closure.

Scamming a romance scammer

Broadcasting on National Geographic at 9 pm ET and available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu, the documentary takes viewers on an empathetic quest to understand how the line between “lover” and “fraud victim” gets blurred in romance scams that the Federal Trade Commission says cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion in losses each year.

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Microsoft is throwing both arms around the new Nvidia RTX Spark platform with the Surface Laptop Ultra—and setting its sights on the would-be MacBook Pro buyer, or as the company called it, "a high performance audience." The bet is that rather than a gaming desktop for fun and a development laptop for work, buyers will pay more for one machine that does both.

The Surface Laptop Ultra arrives at a strange time in personal computing. Recent industry numbers showed a 20 percent drop in total PC shipments year over year in the third quarter of 2026. That's not just consumer purchasing either—that's across the board. Between the RAMpocalypse that has exploded consumer prices and an industry fixated on enterprise money, there hasn't been much new hardware to excite PC enthusiasts.

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As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Reflect Orbital looks to India for launch capacity. California-based Reflect Orbital, the startup attempting to offer sunlight on-demand with in-space mirrors, announced the purchase of two launches Wednesday from Indian launcher Skyroot Aerospace, Payload Space reports. One of the launches will use Skyroot's Vikram-1 rocket, which became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit in July. The other will fly on an upgraded rocket called the Vikram-1U.

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The company said it would add two launch pads for the New Glenn rocket, in addition to two already under construction at Cape Canaveral. The company is also investing heavily in a new manufacturing facility that will produce up to 150 upper stages for a larger variant of the New Glenn rocket.

The company also plans to procure two additional landing ships to catch and return the first stage of the New Glenn rocket (it currently has one, named Jacklyn). Finally, Blue Origin said it would add a new customer integration facility, built in conjunction with the US Space Force, that will feature four payload bays to process multiple missions at the same time.

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Google sees Googlebooks as an alternative to Windows and macOS, but these platforms are entrenched with decades of software and UI conventions that keep users locked in. Googlebooks have to offer something very special to steal users away from either of the dominant operating systems.

For devoted Android phone users, there are some cool things in Googlebook OS, but the Android roots of these machines are impossible to miss. Sometimes it feels like using a Chromebook, and sometimes it feels like using a giant phone. It almost never feels like using a premium laptop, and that's the problem.

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After 42 years in service, the X11 protocol is losing another major desktop environment. Plasma will fully adopt the Wayland system and put support for starting new X11 sessions in Plasma to bed. Users opting to stay on Plasma 6.7 will keep their existing sessions for now. The move was expected, with GNOME officially dropping X11 sessions by default in 2025.

The new Plasma 6.8 brings many improvements, including increased support for adding window decorations (like shadows and rounded corners) to third-party apps, and a more streamlined Union theming system. Other notable additions include Nvidia triple buffering being enabled by default, Kup backup integration (KDE's backup utility—now integrated into Plasma), and kscreenctl, a command-line utility that allows power users to adjust display configurations.

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Plex partnered with Fandango, which has sold movie tickets since 2000, to drive ticket sales from people searching for movies to stream. Per the announcement:

Starting today, Plex users in the US will see a Fandango ticketing option on title pages for movies currently playing in theaters, allowing them to click through to Fandango to find showtimes and purchase tickets. The integration also enables direct attribution through Kochava, giving studios and advertisers greater visibility into how campaigns and audience engagement translate into ticket sales.

Fandango says it sells tickets for 31,000 movie theater screens in the US. The Plex deal allows it to leverage data from Plex’s streaming service (Plex claims users of the service “make more than 100 million streaming decisions each month”), including "ratings and cross-platform viewing" to gain “insight into audience intent," the announcement said.

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The finding adds to concerns that the mandatory screening announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in July will lead to a cascade of unnecessary medical evaluations for military members. Those evaluations could result in inappropriate testing, inaccurate results and diagnoses, and overtreatment that could cause harm, including infertility. Medical experts, including the Endocrine Society and the American Urological Association (AUA), have recommended against blanket screenings for these reasons. Still, the Pentagon has moved forward with the plans, releasing clinical guidance in September.

The JAMA study highlights the reasons why testosterone levels are not measured in men without symptoms—and also offers a glimpse of how many Army members could become ensnared in the clinically dubious screenings.

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The finding, published Thursday by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, said the incident is likely to be the first confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads. The attacks, which worked on iOS and Android devices, are particularly pernicious because they work without requiring any interaction from the target and are invisible unless users run special forensic hardware or software. Citizen Lab said it confirmed that AdFection, as it named the campaign, infected 45 devices at international media organization Al Jazeera in 2024 and 2025.

A clear warning signal

“This investigation should… serve as a clear warning signal to news organizations around the world that they may be being actively targeted via this new threat,” Citizen Lab researchers wrote. “This targeting may happen both in newsrooms and to individual journalists, editors, and other staff members.” Their report went on to say: “The distribution of spyware via targeted ads represents a security risk not only for potential victims but also for states and civil society at large.”

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Things have been tough for the German automaker of late. Just three years ago its profit margin was the envy of the industry at 18 percent; last year it collapsed to just 1 percent. It has recovered a little since then, and Porsche’s board has a plan to get back to double-digit margins by 2035, called “Sportwagenschmiede '35,” which involves prioritizing “value over volume,” with greater individualization for customers—and the associated higher selling prices that come with it.

“We are pursuing a clear plan with our strategy Sportwagenschmiede '35. The ultimate goal is to further strengthen our unique sports car brand–across all model lines and with new, highly desirable models in particularly high-margin segments,” said Porsche Chairman Michael Leiters.

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The Liberty Bell, with its famous crack, hasn't been rung in 180 years, but that hasn't stopped scientists from pondering what the bell might have sounded like when tolling. In honor of the nation's 250th anniversary, researchers at Penn State University have modeled its acoustic properties, drawing on data collected from one of the bell's replicas. The work was first presented at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia earlier this year, followed by an article in Physics Today.

Historians aren't sure exactly when the Liberty Bell acquired its distinctive crack, just that it occurred sometime between 1817 and 1846. An 1846 account in the Public Ledger described the ringing of the bell on February 23 that year and mentioned that the bell had developed a crack, which someone had attempted to fix by filing the sides down. But it didn't work: The February 23 ringing extended the crack even more, so much so that "the old Independence Bell ... now hangs in the great steeple irreparably cracked and forever dumb." Nobody has heard it ring since.

This wasn't the first time the bell had cracked; the rim cracked shortly after it arrived in Philadelphia in 1752, the first time the clapper struck while testing the sound. It was recast by two local foundry workers, John Pass and John Stow, not once but twice, because the first recast produced a sound that one bystander likened to coal scuttles banging together.

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Such attacks have spurred requests for NATO to redeploy counter-drone systems to provide more protection. In a social media post on October 15, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stated that NATO had increased "counter-drone capabilities" along the alliance's eastern flank after meeting with the leaders of Bulgaria and Romania.

The latest attacks this week occurred within 24 hours between October 14 and October 15, when the two chemical tankers were set afire after Russian drones were detected in Romanian airspace, according to Deutsche Welle. Both ships were sitting at anchor near the mouth of the Sulina canal that connects the Black Sea to the Danube River, which has become a crucial shipping export route for Ukraine, Reuters reported.

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