The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch in Kotlin Compose, which is the standard for modern Android apps. This makes the store much more responsive, and there's optional support for Android's Material theming. The interface has also been cleaned up considerably, making the most important functions easier to access and hiding some others in overflow menus.

While the new F-Droid looks nicer, the update was largely about making it easier to find and install apps. When F-Droid first appeared, there wasn't much to see, but now it has thousands of open source apps. Unlike the Play Store, F-Droid doesn't track your taps and installs to push ads and suggestions—it helps you find things and gets out of the way.

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“By running an unlicensed gambling operation, Polymarket has done more than just knowingly violate state law, they have put New Yorkers at risk, especially those underage who are most vulnerable to problem gaming," Governor Kathy Hochul said in a press release announcing the lawsuit.

Polymarket is "sidestepping its obligation to pay taxes like licensed casinos and mobile sports gambling platforms do," New York said. "This tax revenue from gambling regulation funds public schools, sports programs for underserved youth, and problem gambling education and treatment."

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Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has never been one to shy away from controversy. His latest feature, Musk, has stirred up plenty even before its release, drawing the ire of its subject, Elon Musk, and threats of a defamation lawsuit. After the film debuted two weeks ago at the Venice International Film Festival, rumors swirled that Universal Pictures was getting cold feet about theatrically releasing the film in international markets.

Those rumors appear to be unfounded (at least for now). And Musk is still on track for a US theatrical release, thanks to the folks at domestic distributor Bleecker Street Media, which released the official trailer today.

Gibney has been making documentaries since the 1980s, covering such varied subjects as Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, WikiLeaks, Scientology, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes (the subject of another forthcoming documentary, You Can See Everything, featuring comedian Nathan Fielder), Boris Becker, The Sopranos creator David Chase, alleged Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election, the opioid epidemic, and cyclist Lance Armstrong. He snagged his first Oscar nomination for 2005's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature two years later for Taxi to the Dark Side.

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The Ukrainian Third Army Corps revealed a “world-first” airborne assault involving robots and drones that took place within Russian-held territory on September 21, 2026, according to the Ukrainian government media platform United24. Heavy bomber drones air-dropped explosive ground robots more than six miles behind Russian frontlines, helping the robots bypass tough terrain and enemy defenses to attack supply lines in the rear.

This is not the first time that Ukraine has used heavy drones to deliver robots closer to their intended targets. But the incident is reportedly the most ambitious robotic airborne assault to date.

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DataOne got hit with the fine after an investigation by The Guardian and Floodlight News in August shared thermal drone footage showing that 45 of the 62 gas generators were operating. None of the generators had permits required for generators with 37-kilowatt capacity or higher, despite running at 1,982-kw capacities more than 50 times higher than the state limit.

States track gas generators like DataOne uses because they emit “carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and other combustion-related pollutants,” officials from New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) noted. Those pollutants can worsen asthma, trigger heart attacks, and cause early deaths.

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The satellite, dubbed MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator. Inside, it has four of Google's custom TPU AI accelerators, which are used to train AI models and run inference to generate tokens for AI workloads. On Earth, a data center will run thousands of these chips, which consume massive amounts of power—one of the reasons putting solar-powered AI hardware in space is so attractive.

MVP is starting small, with solar panels that supply only about one kilowatt of power, The New York Times reports. That's enough to power a microwave or a hair dryer. Google did not build the satellite from scratch. While the AI hardware inside is Google's, the spacecraft comes from a satellite imagery firm called Planet Labs. The initial plan was to launch two custom satellites in 2027, but Google wanted to accelerate its efforts. So the company opted to integrate its chips into a satellite that Planet Labs had already built for an early test.

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Speaking in New York on Wednesday, Albanese said three other public health statistics systems also "may have been impacted" across Australian federal and state governments. He added that these portals "contain non-sensitive Medicare information" such as aggregate statistics and that early indications suggest "no personal information is believed to have been accessed."

That said, Albanese stressed that the "situation is obviously unacceptable" and that he has expressed his "extreme concern" over how the incident was handled to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

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This was supposed to be a big year for F1, with the introduction of a bold new technical rules package that puts far more emphasis on the electric side of the cars’ hybrid power units than before. But those rules were perhaps too ambitious for 2026, with batteries that can only power the electric motor for a tiny fraction of a lap. Such was the shock of getting it wrong that F1 may fast-track a fix for 2030 rather than 2031, when the next set of rules is currently set to start. And according to a report in Autosport, there is now some agreement on what those power units will look like.

Where are we now?

The current rules were finalized several years ago, when optimism about electrification among automakers was high. F1 wanted more of those automakers, and automakers wanted more electrification. The sport would give it to them with a near 50:50 split between a small 1.6 L V6 turbo and an electric motor, both driving the rear wheels. The idea worked. Audi, Cadillac, and Ford have all signed up since, joining Mercedes, Ferrari, and Honda, which recommitted after pulling out in 2021.

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"They are targeting the exact same location on lunar south pole," Isaacman said Wednesday evening at the Off World conference in Houston. "We may have dodged a bullet with the Chang'e 7 mission a couple of weeks ago because that would have gone to the Shackleton crater."

Much of the lunar surface is pretty barren, but the south pole, and the Shackleton Crater in particular, offers some of the most coveted real estate there. That's because the high rims of the crater create permanently shadowed regions known as “cold traps,” where it’s thought that water (in the form of ice, of course) and other useful materials may have accumulated over billions of years.

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The Meta chief used the company’s annual Connect event at its Silicon Valley headquarters to announce Muse Charm, a small pendant-like device that fits on a keychain and is activated by a fingerprint sensor.

The device, which features a screen showing the Muse avatar, will also have real-time voice interactivity and is set to be released in December.

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The practical risk is limited, but still significant. Applying the attack against the deprecated use of 1024-bit keys took a handful of months on an academic CPU cluster, significantly less than the current estimates for 1024-bit factoring that would require resources that only nations or companies with massive resources could achieve. Widely used RSA implementations are also safe.

Nonetheless, the research has taken cryptographers by surprise because it introduces signature forgery, a new way to break RSA keys without factoring. Equally important, this novel method reduces the required computing resources by orders of magnitude.

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When Apple was using Intel processors and AMD GPUs, the idea of an expandable and upgradeable tower made sense. But Apple Silicon chips bring the CPU, GPU, and memory interface all under one roof in a way that makes that sort of upgradeability not just superfluous but impossible. At least not without breaking some of the chips' key benefits.

And as it happens, Apple Silicon's combination of a fast CPU, solid GPU, and unified memory architecture has made it a good fit for a modern "pro" workload that really pushes high-end hardware: running language models and agents locally.

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Usually, the CDC would allow states to order the newly available seasonal COVID-19 vaccines through the federal Vaccine for Children (VFC) program, which provides vaccines at no cost to children who are uninsured, underinsured, Medicaid-eligible, or Indigenous people in the US. Approximately 52 percent of all US children are eligible for vaccines through the program.

Additionally, The Guardian reports that at least 11 states and one US territory are part of a universal vaccine purchase program, in which they buy all vaccines for children—regardless of their ability to pay or insurance status—through contracts otherwise for the VFC. The 11 states and one territory include: Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming, and American Samoa.

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On Tuesday, 404 Media reported that ShinyHunters took down the agency site, FBIJobs.gov, then posted a banner on the homepage that said “THIS SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED BY SHINYHUNTERS.”

About two to three terabytes of data were taken, ShinyHunters told The New York Times. None of the data has been leaked yet, but it included “names of current and former agents as well as applicants and corresponding home addresses, phone numbers, names of spouses, certain medical information, and other data.” According to Bloomberg, the data could be used to potentially retaliate against agents, with one sample appearing to include “potentially sensitive professional information on the FBI employees’ work focus such as counter-intelligence work on China, Russia and Iran, as well as work against street gangs.”

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Disney+ and Hulu’s respective standalone, ad-free plans (which also support 4K and HDR) are each increasing 13 percent from $19 per month to $21.50/month.

Disney+ and Hulu’s respective standalone plans with ads increased from $12 to $12.50.

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A few weeks ago, Bentley gave Ars a ride in a new camouflaged electric vehicle. Named after a Spanish rock formation, the Torcal is the brand’s first battery EV, and today the production car had its formal unveiling. That camo was effective: The real car is less bulbous and more blocky than its disguise would suggest. And it’s fair to say it brings some of the ideas of the EXP 15 concept to the road—even if that didn’t include that show car’s elegant, stretched proportions. It’s smaller than the Bentayga, and it should slot beneath that model in pricing (or the PHEV version of it, at least), though Bentley has yet to reveal exactly how much US buyers can expect to pay.

Underneath the bodywork are some relatively familiar underpinnings; Bentley shares technology with Porsche as both are part of the greater Volkswagen Group empire. The power output might not be as prodigious as the electric Porsche Cayenne but should be sufficient nonetheless. The standard car will offer peak outputs of 810 hp (604 kW) and 880 lb-ft (1,194 Nm), enough for a 3.3-second 0–60 mph time (0–100 km/h takes 3.4 seconds).

The more powerful Torcal S boasts 875 hp (653 kW) and 995 lb-ft (1,350 Nm) at its most potent; this is capable of 60 mph from a standing start in a mere 2.8 seconds (2.9 to 100 km/h) and an increased top speed of 162 mph (260 km/h), up from 155 mph (250 km/h) for the standard version, either of which are academic outside certain stretches of German highway.

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It's clear Trump wants it to seem like discussions are going well. Before Trump and Xi meet on Thursday and Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that both sides had already discussed setting up a new AI safety notification mechanism. If China agrees to participate, that would create an open line for either side to send alerts when their country’s AI systems pose threats or behave unpredictably. The same channel, Bessent said, could allow the countries to share their “vision of common goals.”

However, the proposal comes at a time when China may not be ready to trust the US to have AI safety conversations that aren’t about limiting China’s capabilities. Not only has Trump steadily increased export controls that explicitly seek to block China from accessing technology to advance AI, but Congress is mulling bills that would cut the country off from more chips and hardware. Adding to tensions, just two weeks ago, Trump’s Justice Department accused six of China's leading AI makers of stealing from US frontier labs, which China has strongly disputed.

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The competition’s First Prize track for space-based wildfire detection challenged teams to accurately detect all fires across a large swath of Australia within 10 minutes. A second Autonomous Response Prize track challenged teams to autonomously detect and put out a high-risk fire located somewhere within rural Alaska while ignoring decoy fires—all within 10 minutes of the fire igniting.

“We want to be able to prepare and provide tools for firefighters to really allow them to do the best job,” Andrea Santy, program director of XPRIZE Wildfire, told Ars. “They're great at what they do, but it's unfair to continue to put them in harm's way when there's technology coming online that can help keep them safe, keep communities safe, and protect ecosystems.”

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Discord had announced a somewhat different plan for age checks in February, but scrapped it amid backlash from users concerned about privacy. The privacy concerns were heightened by a 2025 incident in which hackers stole government IDs of 70,000 Discord users from a third-party service that Discord used to verify ages in the UK and Australia.

The original plan was to require ID uploads or face scans from users seeking to access age-restricted servers and channels. The revised system, detailed yesterday by Discord CTO and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy, will provide several additional options.

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The design of YouTube's homepage feed comes under fire often, but the platform is preparing to give you more options. With Custom Feeds, you'll be able to add new tabs to the YouTube interface with content of your choice. To create a feed, just type a description and let YouTube populate the page. You can refine your description and rate video suggestions to tune the Custom Feed. Google says you'll be able to save "multiple" feeds without specifying the exact number. This feature will roll out soon in the US for web, mobile, and TV users.

Interacting on YouTube will also change later this year. The platform will finally add the option to post GIFs in comments, which has apparently been a common request for some time. The comment box will let you search for popular animated thumbnails and post them on both regular videos and YouTube Shorts. The YouTube direct messaging feature is also adding support for group chat, but it's only going to be available in the US, UK, Singapore, Brazil, and some European countries to start.

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