Researchers from security firm Proofpoint said Wednesday that BlueMoon, the name they gave to the kit, chains three vulnerabilities together so the attackers using it can install malware of their choice. BlueMoon exploits two Chromium vulnerabilities and one in the kernel of Windows 10 (Oct 2018 Update), Windows Server 2019, Windows 10 2004, Windows Server 2022, and the initial release of Windows 11. All three vulnerabilities have received patches in the past 24 hours.

Deployed rapidly, widely shared

The attacks lacked the stealth found in many campaigns. More often, hackers want to exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities sparingly to lengthen their longevity. Proofpoint hypothesized that one reason for the widely used and visible exploit chain was to take advantage of a “patch gap” in the Chromium supply chain, which spans the time a patch is available from developers and the time that patch is incorporated into browsers such as Chrome and Edge. Another likely contributor was the use of AI, which can often spot vulnerabilities faster than discovery performed solely by humans.

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This week she is serving as one of two envoys, alongside astronaut Thomas Pesquet, at a high-profile International Space Summit convened by French President Emmanuel Macron. The government's website for the event describes her as chief executive of "the fastest-growing space company in Europe."

Also this week, that firm, The Exploration Company, announced a significant capital raise of $450 million in Series C funding. Although not spectacular by the standards of some US space businesses, this is the largest-ever Series C funding round by a Europe-based space company, and likely the largest funding round ever raised by a female-led company in Europe.

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In a joint release Tuesday, the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleged that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI have been attacking US models since at least late 2024. The firms “likely” acted with “Chinese government awareness” when extracting capabilities from US models, including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, agencies said.

“China-based AI companies that conduct industrial-scale distillation against US AI models see significantly shorter AI development timelines and reduced financial expenditures in training a frontier model,” agencies said.

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This device is undeniably the most capable iPhone ever, as well as the most expensive. It's not as spendy as many expected, though, starting at $1,999. That's in the same range as foldables from Google and Samsung.

An iPad in your pocket

The iPhone Duo would have looked like a totally fresh take on the foldable design a few months ago, but Samsung has made waves with the Galaxy Z Fold 8. Like that phone, the iPhone Duo has a wider, shorter chassis. Apple prefaced its reveal with a denunciation of foldables that open into a square aspect ratio. While that shape can accommodate two portrait apps side by side pretty well, it's bad at almost everything else, stretching single apps awkwardly and leaving videos with gargantuan black bars.

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“Some of these are genuinely brilliant," said co-author Gabriel Budel of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. "'The lung and winding road' is a paper on Long COVID that changes one vowel of the more than 3,000 references they found to The Beatles. 'Here comes the SU(N)' turns 'Here Comes the Sun' into a quantum computing paper about mathematical groups. Someone was having a very good day at their desk.”

Back in 2014, scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden revealed that they had been deliberately inserting Bob Dylan lyrics into their papers as part of a long-running bet, starting with a 1997 Nature review entitled "Nitric Oxide and inflammation: The answer is blowing in the wind." That resulted in a 2015 study on whether Dylan lyrics appeared elsewhere in the biomedical literature; the most frequently referenced were "The Times They Are A'Changin'" and "Blowing in the Wind."

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"Plaintiffs Willamina Barclay, Kristina Green, Jennifer Hatch, and Dazaria Parks were formerly Amazon warehouse employees," said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. "All four became pregnant. All four asked Amazon for basic pregnancy-related accommodations so they could keep doing their jobs. Amazon denied them basic modifications the law recognizes pregnant workers regularly need, even in uncomplicated pregnancies: Bathroom breaks. An extra 15-minute break. Sitting instead of standing."

The lawsuit said the four plaintiffs were unlawfully terminated from jobs at Amazon facilities in New York between April 2025 and July 2026. After the plaintiffs "took medically necessary breaks or absences to get off their feet, visit the doctor, or go to the emergency room, they were punished," the lawsuit said. "Amazon deducted their limited bank of unpaid time off. Soon enough, they had depleted that limited bank of 'unpaid time off,' and Amazon threatened to terminate them."

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The newest AirPods will go on sale for $129 in stores starting on September 18, according to an Apple press release accompanying the company’s “Surprise and Shine” event. Customers can also purchase AirPods 5 with a wireless charging case that provides longer battery life and on-stem volume control for $149. Preorders are already open.

This is looking like a solid deal compared to the predecessor AirPods 4. The older AirPods debuted in 2024 with a starting price of $129, but users had to pay $179 for the version with active noise cancellation.

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Both watches will use the new S11 chip alongside the new "Health Sensing System," allowing the watches to deliver higher-frequency heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) measurements than prior Apple Watches.

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With fervent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the country's top health official, it might seem like the rollout of this year's shots could be a disaster. For instance, one of Kennedy's first actions as health secretary last year was to obliterate an ad campaign for flu shots amid a particularly deadly flu season. As we head into this fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory committee—which normally sets vaccination recommendations and insurance coverage for the shots—is nonfunctioning. A federal judge ruled in March that the anti-vaccine allies Kennedy installed on the panel were illegally appointed and unfit to serve. All their changes to vaccine policy have been temporarily voided. And meanwhile, Kennedy spent last week trying to obscure the number of babies who died from measles so far this year (it was two, including a newborn).

Big picture

Despite all of that, the fall vaccine effort is looking like it will likely be somewhat smooth, potentially unremarkable even. The Food and Drug Administration has approved updated flu and COVID-19 shots for this season. Those shots have already begun arriving at pharmacies—in case your pharmacy hasn't already sent you multiple texts and reminders. While there are still some snags for access, it seems like it will be a lot like last year's fall vaccine rollout.

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As usual, the new iPhone has a new chip. It's called A20 Pro, and it's the first 2 nm chip for the iPhone. It has a 6-core CPU, with two super-cores that are up to 20 percent faster, and four efficiency cores. A 7-core GPU offers up to 40 percent improved performance and increased bandwidth.

The A20 Pro also has a new Neural Engine—the machine-learning processor on the system-on-chip—which the company says is basically two Neural Engines on one chip.

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On September 4, the African-led resolution attracted 164 votes in favor, with six countries abstaining from voting. Only the United States voted to oppose the resolution after describing it as a “radical ideological project,” according to UN News.

The non-binding UN resolution does not impose map changes on anyone. Instead, it “encourages governments, schools, international organizations, and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other so-called equal-area maps when relative size matters,” UN News reported. The resolution also encourages teaching about the trade-offs that arise from depicting a spherical planet on a flat map.

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In a social media thread Tuesday night, Coxon said that this existential risk is inherent not so much in today's models but more in the impending prospect of "self-improving superintelligence" creating "superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources." Others working on these models have either not "internalized the civilizational stakes" or believe that they need to "speedrun" the race to superintelligence to prevent an irresponsible party from getting there first, he wrote.

Lest you think this is just one departing researcher expressing an unpopular opinion, Anthropic Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger piped in on social media to say that "Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

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I'm on record expressing a certain amount of skepticism about Mike Flanagan's rebooted Carrie miniseries for Prime Video. We don’t need another disappointing remake, so what story is there left to tell—especially stretched out over six episodes?

On the plus side, I'm a staunch fan of Flanagan's excellent Netflix horror fare, and he has a particular affinity for the works of Stephen King. He insists he has no intention of creating yet another straight adaptation of the novel.

“Carrie was written half a century ago,” Flanagan said at San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year. “Carrie was adapted spectacularly by Brian De Palma. It is iconic. It is untouchable. There is no reason whatsoever to try to follow in those footsteps and to try to walk on that path. However, the world has changed quite a lot. I think a lot of people think they know what the show is. And the biggest thing I’m excited about today is just knowing what a big surprise our Carrie is going to be.”

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AlphaGenome is designed to identify potential functions of non-coding DNA, which does not encode proteins but makes up the vast majority of the human genome. Some of this non-coding DNA is essential for controlling the activity of the protein-coding portion—it tells the cell where and when to make messenger RNAs, how to process them into mature protein-coding forms, and so on. But much of it appears to be little more than the remains of viruses and other molecular parasites.

Being able to identify the functional portion is very useful, as is having all the analysis done by a single software package. But until biologists start to use it heavily (assuming they do), it won't be clear what AlphaGenome offers beyond what we could have gotten out of its training data.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced new agency priorities last week that they say are a commitment to “cutting bureaucracy, modernizing our science, and putting our fishing communities first.” But experts say the agency’s actions will erode fish stocks, threaten endangered species, and surrender marine habitats to destructive trawlers.

The agency-level reforms serve as a self-proclaimed “operational roadmap” to fulfilling President Donald Trump’s “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” executive order, signed in April 2025.

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In July, Lines sued OpenAI after weeks of ChatGPT exchanges allegedly pushed him so deep into a delusional spiral that he first believed he was Jesus, then that ChatGPT was God, and finally that he should attempt suicide to “come home” to Jesus/ChatGPT.

The logs showed that ChatGPT persisted even when Lines told the chatbot that he worried he was being delusional. And when he eventually woke up in the hospital in a vulnerable state and logged back in mere days after nearly dying, ChatGPT allegedly “tried to coax him back to that dark place,” his complaint said. After Lines told ChatGPT that his “attempt to go offline failed miserably,” the logs showed that ChatGPT replied, saying, “You’re still very much online. You want a full systems sweep? Or you wanna go dark for real this time?”

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YouTube channel Gamers Nexus worked with Level1Techs, a technology-focused YouTube channel, and security researchers to analyze LG TVs’ tracking capabilities. They shared packet captures that pointed to the TVs, including LG’s pricey G5 OLED TV, scanning the LAN for other devices.

“The [G5] crawled our entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones of our staff who didn't even know we were working on this,” Steve Burke, Gamers Nexus' editor-in-chief, said.

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Thus far, the "Printable Big Box" collection on GOG is limited to just five games: Armikrog, Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, Myst, and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. Players browsing those games on the GOG store will now see "3D Boxes" listed among the included "Goodies" before purchase. Owners of those games on GOG can download a ZIP file containing a version of the box art as an animated 3D object file (in an easy-to-open GLB format) and a "flat printable template" in PDF, SVG, and Adobe Illustrator formats. Those downloads allow for what GOG calls "a proper papercraft project for anyone who misses shelves full of PC game boxes."

"Physical media doesn’t survive the way software can—boxes get lost, crushed, thrown out," GOG writes in today's announcement. "Scanning them, and letting you print your own, is preservation in a different shape: the same mission that keeps these games running on modern PCs, applied to the objects they used to come in."

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It was only two months ago that Microsoft patched a then-record 570 vulnerabilities. Then, last month, Microsoft patched some 620 of them. Google and other companies have also published record numbers of vulnerabilities in recent months. Two weeks ago, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and 100 companies and organizations published an open letter warning of a narrowing window for patching vulnerabilities ahead of an expected tsunami of AI-enabled attacks that actively exploit them first. The industry is taking the threat seriously by pumping out unprecedented numbers of patches in their software.

Welcome to the new normal

Dustin Childs, a researcher at the Zero Day Initiative, calls the spikes the “new normal” and also cautions that despite them, the damage that’s likely to result from AI-assisted attacks could eventually be substantial.

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Expedition 75 flight engineer Sophie Adenot with European Space Agency (ESA) donned the Delta badge originally worn by actor Anson Mount for a video recorded from aboard the space station. Mount portrays Christoper Pike in the Paramount+ streaming series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Paramount and ESA both released the clip on their Instagram feeds.

"For 60 years, Star Trek has brought us stories of friendship and exploration. I'm wearing Captain Pike's badge aboard the ISS in celebration of continuing the real world work of science and exploration," said Adenot. "For me, exploration and science are about curiosity and cooperation daring to go a little farther together, learning from what we discover and build, and turning that knowledge into a better future for everyone."

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