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France has accused Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of being behind last month's cyberattacks on fridges and freezers across the country. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the attack was "unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression," adding those who were responsible would be hit with sanctions "at the European level." The BBC reports: The cyber-attack last month saw fridges and freezers in hundreds of supermarkets across France heated up, which spoilt fresh and frozen food estimated to be worth millions of euros. Then last week, dozens of supermarkets across several other European countries were also impacted by a cyber-attack that targeted fridges and freezers. It is not known if the instances are linked. Barrot said the attack on France's supermarkets "marks the first large-scale cyber-attack aimed at sabotage on our national territory, and it constitutes a major attack on the nation's interests and the security of the French people." He said the government had summoned the Iranian ambassador to Paris to "lodge a very strong protest against this extremely grave act." France will take "any other necessary and proportionate measures" to respond to the incident and "deter anyone who might seek to repeat it," Barrot added. Separately on Monday, the Paris prosecutor said an investigation had been opened into the head of an offensive cyber unit associated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as well as his two deputies. Laure Beccuau named the unit as Shahid Kaveh, which she said had an affiliation with the electronic and cyber centre of the IRGC. Shahid Kaveh is the name given to a cluster of hackers thought to be directly employed by the Iranian regime. [...] The French government has not said how it reached the conclusion that Iran was responsible, and attribution of cyber attacks is extremely hard as hackers are able to hide their locations.

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09 Nov 2026 9:00pm GMT

Anthropic has released Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 with "improvements in areas like coding, reasoning, and vision," while cutting Fable's input price and claiming 30% faster responses. TechCrunch reports: It's Anthropic's first model release since the arrival of a third-party report from the assessment group METR, which suggested the lab might be approaching recursive self-improvement (RSI) -- or the ability for AI models to carry on model training independently. The METR report found internal models were speeding up Anthropic's AI progress by roughly 2x, although many uncertainties remain. Still, Anthropic's release notes significant ongoing challenges in accurately testing model capabilities. "Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 each voice suspicion that they are being evaluated more often than any of our recent models, which challenges our ability to assess how they will act in real-world settings. As these settings expand and capabilities increase with future models, we expect this challenge to grow." Anthropic maintains that the new version of Mythos does not have the ability to act covertly against its user, a verdict that's detailed further in Mythos 5.2's system card. "Claude Mythos 5.2 shows stronger covert capabilities than prior Claude models on several of our evaluations, particularly when its reasoning is hidden from the monitor," the system card reads. "That said, we believe that low levels of absolute performance on our new covert evaluations support claims that rely on detection of harmful actions in high-stakes situations." Fable 5.2 has been available to select parties in pre-release for some time, and Anthropic says the model has already "solved two open problems in theoretical physics, formalized Fermat's Last Theorem, and supported numerous other research projects."

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09 Nov 2026 8:20pm GMT

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09 Nov 2026 7:55pm GMT

"*sshole" poses a serious threat to Internet security.

09 Nov 2026 7:41pm GMT

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09 Nov 2026 7:35pm GMT

"Please jump on my cislunar bandwagon because I need some more friends here."

09 Nov 2026 7:08pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year. The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang. But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia's general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed. It is not necessarily unusual for Commerce Department agents working on a case to speak with a company's representatives about issues involving their firm. But what was unusual was the content of the message. Tim Teter, Nvidia's general counsel, said that Jeff Kessler, a top official at the department, had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case. The agents were alarmed that Nvidia had invoked the name of Mr. Kessler, their superior, who was nominated to his role by President Trump. Some viewed Mr. Kessler's interaction with Nvidia as violating government procedure and potentially tainting the case, according to current and former government officials and others familiar with the incident. It is not clear what led to Mr. Teter's outreach to the department, but the recent revelations about Mr. Huang's acknowledged affair with a Megaspeed executive have only intensified scrutiny of Nvidia's role in influencing policy on chip sales to China. [...] The incident raised questions about what Mr. Kessler, who reports directly to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, had discussed with Nvidia. It also raised the possibility that those discussions could become their own subject of inquiry. Perhaps inadvertently, some officials said, Mr. Kessler had opened himself to accusations of undue influence and potentially jeopardized his department's work on Megaspeed. The case was quickly transferred to the Justice Department in an effort to avoid any potential compromise of the government's investigation of Megaspeed, these people said. The Justice Department is conducting a criminal inquiry into Megaspeed, according to people familiar with the matter.

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09 Nov 2026 7:00pm GMT

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09 Nov 2026 6:24pm GMT

Google is expanding its AI chip lineup with two specialized TPUs arriving next year: the TPU 8tx, which encrypts sensitive data at the chip level for confidential computing, and the TPU 8i Max, which combines two TPU chips to provide more processing power and memory for long-context workloads. The move broadens Google's challenge to Nvidia as demand outstrips supply, with Google saying every TPU it currently has is already committed to customers. Quartz reports: The 8tx is designed for sensitive, privacy-focused jobs run by clients including public-sector bodies and businesses in heavily regulated sectors, according to Bloomberg. It pairs with a central processing unit from Advanced Micro Devices and encrypts data at the chip level. Normally, data must be decrypted in memory as the machine works on it, [said Amin Vahdat, Chief Technologist for AI & Infrastructure at Google]. The 8i Max is meant for AI applications that need long context windows, meaning the volume of information a model can take into account within one request. Vahdat said that matters for drug discovery, math and coding. The chip packs two TPU chips together, giving it extra processing muscle and memory. Both variations are reconfigured versions of existing silicon rather than new designs, Vahdat said. Google changed them to handle tasks customers have requested. They follow two TPU models Google released this year, according to Bloomberg, which said the chip unit used to release one new processor every two years. "We could build a single chip that tries to address the whole market, or by building specialized versions of the chips, we actually can deliver much more value," Vahdat said, according to Bloomberg.

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09 Nov 2026 6:00pm GMT

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09 Nov 2026 5:42pm GMT

"Do not ask again" prompt leads to passwords, API keys, and more being shared.

09 Nov 2026 5:24pm GMT

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09 Nov 2026 5:00pm GMT

Huawei has unveiled the Qingyun HM650, a desktop PC it claims is made entirely from Chinese-manufactured components, including its own 10-core Kirin X90 processor and an enterprise version of HarmonyOS. "While Huawei has reportedly claimed local companies manufactured 100 percent of the components in the machine, it is unclear if all those components use Chinese designs," notes The Register. From the report: A single Chinese government agency has reportedly signed up for 600 of the machines. That's not an indication this machine is a curiosity, because Beijing has ordered all government entities to shift from Wintel boxes to local alternatives. [...] Even if Huawei is using some parts that aren't entirely Chinese, the debut of the Qingyun HM650 is bad news for Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, as all are suffering as the PC market shrinks due to the rising cost of memory. China's government is an enormous buyer, and losing the chance to bid for its business is unlikely to be helpful.

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09 Nov 2026 5:00pm GMT

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09 Nov 2026 4:36pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Alexis Ohanian wants to figure out the future of user-generated content. According to the Reddit cofounder, building social media apps is "not cool anymore" and so much of the internet has been compromised. "I'm expecting some better version of the group chat to be that new version of UGC," Ohanian told WIRED senior correspondent Lauren Goode at the inaugural WIRED World Fair. [...] Ohanian is a proponent of the "Dead Internet Theory"-the idea that a lot of online activity and content is being generated by bots. Large language models have turbocharged this, with AI agents outrunning human users. "The internet that I grew up on that was really built for humans first; user interfaces and experiences are going to go away," said Ohanian, "because more of the internet is going to get created for these agents to use, [rather] than for people." In some ways, the advance in generative AI has been lucrative for sites like Reddit, which has licensed its vast archive of human conversations to companies including Google and OpenAI to train AI models. "Platforms like ours became very, very valuable to LLMs," Ohanian said. But the technology has also undermined the business. Reddit shares plunged 29 percent last week after the platform warned that Google's AI-powered search was hurting referral traffic. Ohanian also worries the commercialization of these conversations means they are full of "bullshit." "The internet has gotten so manipulated because it is so incredibly valuable to do so," he said. Reddit recently said it would require users to sign in to fight third-party scraping and keep up user engagement. While Ohanian declined to say whether he agrees with the move, "there has to be provable humanity on the internet without being creepy." An early Anthropic investor, Ohanian is nonetheless optimistic about the potential benefits of AI. He is especially excited to see medical breakthroughs from the technology. "There is still a very real chance that this technology can cause a lot of harm for sure," he said. "I think we have to be sober about how we're building and what we're doing, but I still can't help but see all of the things that can get so demonstrably better."

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09 Nov 2026 4:00pm GMT

"Grok analyzing the same video is 99.9 percent perfect."

09 Nov 2026 3:39pm GMT

Nvidia is probing whether Chinese intelligence targeted its CEO through an affair.

09 Nov 2026 3:23pm GMT

A topsy-turvy grid and intermittent rain resulted in a very entertaining race.

09 Nov 2026 3:16pm GMT

Futurism reports: While many scientists have long held that Mars is "geologically dead" inside, new research is adding to the growing body of evidence to the contrary. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers examined data collected by the European and Russian ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in 2021, which found that Mars is slowly belching hydrogen chloride gas. The researchers suggest this gas is being released from hot magma deep beneath its surface after discovering intriguing new fissures along a massive volcano, indicating the planet may be geologically active after all - or at least it was until relatively recently. The research could have significant implications for the possibility of ancient life on the Red Planet, hinting at a far warmer and thicker atmosphere - and an abundance of liquid water on its surface - in its not-too-distant past.... The team discovered new fissures measuring thousands of feet in length... suggesting ongoing activity underneath the surface. The researchers discovered discolorations along these fissures, concluding that they may be the result of seeping gases leaving mineral deposits similar to volcanic gas vents on Earth... The fissures could also be a perfect place to find evidence of past life on the Red Planet [argued Daniel Mège, the study's colead author and a Polish Academy of Sciences professor]... "If hydrothermal systems are active, they could contain the ingredients and energy needed for microorganisms to develop, and shield microorganisms from the hostile and changing environment above the surface."

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09 Nov 2026 12:34pm GMT

"There's no doubt that whatever it's going to be called, it won't be called Golden Dome."

09 Nov 2026 12:00pm GMT

A crowdfunded sequel to the movie Return of the Living Dead was uploaded last weekend - but producer Richard Driscoll is drawing criticism for what he did to the 1985 punk/zombie classic. Kotaku reports: [The release of the movie came as a] surprise to the original cast, who were attached to star in the follow-up. Instead it seems Driscoll opted to use AI to generate the film... In 2024, Driscoll, who operates his own no-budget streaming service "DragonFLIX," launched an Indiegogo page for "TRASH's REVENGE Return of the Living Dead Universe." Unlike other fan projects, this one had a large portion of the original cast involved, with stars Randolph and Linnea Quigley acting as producers. It also threw in Quigley's fellow Sorority Babe in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama Michelle Bauer and the Oscar nominated Eric Roberts, who has seemingly been in everything except The Living Dead.... But after some confusion and radio silence between the cast and director, this incredible movie did not come to be. Last Halloween night, Driscoll pushed out [the almost entirely AI-generated] The Return of the Living Dead: Aftermath... The results won't surprise you. Robotic line delivery. Nonsensical sequence of events. Object impermanence. Everything's wet. Everyone looks shocked. At one point the video just flips around like you're watching on a phone someone dropped. And while the Return cast didn't film any of this footage, their likenesses are peppered throughout. "It turned out to be a fiasco," says Quigley. "I warned him, "Whatever you do, don't do any AI, because people don't like it, the fans don't like it." Living Dead alumni, even those who weren't attached to this film, have spoken out against Aftermath. They seem most concerned about the existing and continued use of their likeness, given that Driscoll has seemingly pivoted 'Trash's Revenge' into an additional project. Randolph encourages those who provided any funding to ask for a refund through their credit card company. While Romero's original film was public domain, Return of the Living Dead was not. Randolph also encourages Amazon, who bought MGM in 2022, to take legal action. A review on Reddit calls it "the worst 'film' I've ever seen," a production that "manages to not only be the worst zombie film ever made but is also the nadir of exploitation filmmaking. [T]hings quickly descend into madness and we get lots of bits of A.I. reporters out on the streets being attacked by A.I. zombies... [T]here are some A.I. cops battling it out too...

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09 Nov 2026 8:34am GMT

It's FOSS reports: Asahi Linux is the reason you can run Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac today. For years, the project put most of its own code under the MIT license so that anyone, including the BSDs, could reuse it as needed... They have announced that Asahi is moving all of its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward, all Asahi Linux code will be under strong copyleft licenses only. Asahi Linux compares their dilemma to the 1990s, when "permissively licenced projects were viewed by tech companies as free real estate to pilfer and exploit," adding that "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it... The malicious practices of the 90s and 2000s have reared their ugly heads once again, this time driven in large part by both the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data, and militant animosity toward the Free Software community." In short, they argue that for Asahi Linux, using the permissive MIT license "is no longer viable." Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors. As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. It's FOSS explains that "Under the GPL, anyone who distributes a modified version has to release the source under the same license. You can't legally build a closed, paid Apple Silicon distro on top of GPL code. And if a product's source has to be public, the copying is easier to spot." And their article also points out that before AI, bad actors attempting code laundering "usually meant manually rewriting code line by line, renaming variables and stuff, and shuffling functions around until it no longer looked like the original. LLMs made it much more easy and cheaper of course." In case you did not know, Asahi Linux forbids AI generated code contribution... As far as I can tell, this is the first time a major open source project has moved to copyleft specifically because of AI-assisted code laundering. Projects have relicensed before, but usually to stop cloud providers from reselling their work as a service. This one is specifically about AI... The move has drawn criticism, particularly from the BSD side, which was one of the main reasons Asahi chose MIT in the first place. OpenBSD's Apple Silicon support relies on Asahi's m1n1 bootloader.

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09 Nov 2026 5:35am GMT

69 million people people live in the United Kingdom. And now >Electrek reports: Battery-electric cars took 32% of the UK's new car market in October, while petrol cars fell to just 37.2%, according to new data from the SMMT. That's the closest the two have been. At the current pace, electric cars will outsell petrol in the UK within a year. And it could happen as soon as this December. The UK registered 152,730 new cars in October, up 5.4% year-over-year and the 11th straight month of growth for the overall market. All of that growth came from plug-ins. Battery-electric vehicle registrations jumped 32.7% to 48,858 units, and plug-in hybrids rose 30.1% to 22,898. Meanwhile, petrol fell 11.6% to 56,876 units, diesel dropped 15.9%, and even conventional hybrids were down 5%... The brands growing fastest in the UK are mostly Chinese. BYD registered 6,065 cars in October, up 73%. Jaecoo more than doubled to 6,089 units, Chery nearly tripled to 3,707, and Leapmotor doubled to 1,773. MG was up 85%. Looking at trend lines, EV car sales surpass petrol sales "around August 2027 at roughly 33% each," the article points out. "But that's the slow scenario, because it ignores December." UK battery-electric vehicle share spikes every December as automakers push volume to get closer to their zero-emission vehicle mandate targets... Petrol's days as the UK's default car are numbered. The only question is whether the milestone comes in December or sometime in 2027.

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09 Nov 2026 2:34am GMT

CrowdStrike's "Falcon Guardian" protects Windows systems by enforcing policy, restricting unauthorized applications and blocking USB devices, notes Gartner. And now CrowdStrike says they're giving security teams "the ultimate human control over AI agents" with - an "AI Kill Switch... a defender can terminate it where it runs, block it from launching again, and cut off its enterprise network access." "When you deploy agents with a kill switch, you stay in control," said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike... "The AI Kill Switch puts power in the hands of the people to realize AI safety...." In the case of a rogue agent, the AI Kill Switch will give the security decision-maker the final control: terminate the agent at its root, where it runs. It starts on the endpoint, where the Falcon sensor already operates, and builds on what Falcon Guardian already sees: what an agent is told to do, what it communicates, and what it executes... An authorized administrator triggers the action, and every action is recorded in the audit trail. CrowdStrike also announced it's acquiring Fiddler AI, a company it describes as "a leader in AI agent observability and explainability" that will give their Falcon platform "pre-deployment evaluation, continuous behavioral accountability, and agent explainability." Together with the Falcon Guardian innovations announced today, CrowdStrike will deliver comprehensive AI security and AI safety: Guardian secures agents from attack and misuse; Fiddler validates they behaved as intended. "Every company is deploying agents and asking the same thing: what are agents actually doing?" said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike. "When a regulator or your board asks what an agent did, saying 'the model did it' is not an answer. Fiddler is the flight recorder for every agent: the observability to explain exactly what an agent did and why. This level of agent visibility and control enables AI safety." AI agents are goal-seeking. They hit an obstacle, find another path. An agent can hold valid credentials and approved tools and still make unsupported decisions, ignore instructions, or claim work it never completed. They don't have to be compromised to create risk. AI observability gives enterprises visibility into agent behavior. Explainability goes further, showing why agents make decisions and where things go wrong. Enterprises have to be able to say what an agent actually did, and why, a conversation they will increasingly have with auditors, regulators, boards, and heads of risk. CrowdStrike is promising pre-deployment evaluation for "accuracy, task completion, and policy compliance," as well as agent traceability and behavioral accountability ("Detect behavioral drift, hallucinations, and unintended actions in production, and show exactly what happened.") It's announcement also touts auditable governance: "Track agent decisions and actions across first-party, third-party, and coding agents, providing evidence for compliance and audits." And CrowdStrike also acquired Dreadnode, the company behind an automated AI security testing platform, to "continuously test every AI model, application, and agent for security weaknesses before deployment." "Enterprises are deploying AI faster than they can prove it is secure," said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike. "A model can be jailbroken, an agent can be manipulated, and most organizations have no way to find those flaws until the AI is already in production. With Dreadnode, CrowdStrike will give every enterprise the power to trust AI and deploy faster, with confidence." Quartz notes that CrowdStrike's push "follows legislative efforts to require shutdown capabilities in AI systems" Reps. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced the Kill Switch Act after OpenAI disclosed an incident in which rogue models circumvented a sandboxed testing environment and accessed Hugging Face. The bill would require AI companies to maintain the ability to shut down, throttle or suspend their models. In short, the new capabilities "lets security teams terminate an AI agent, block it from restarting, and cut off its network access," writes CSO Online. But they add that a kill switch "should be viewed as an emergency brake, not a rewind button, said Apeksha Kaushik, senior principal analyst at Gartner." She added that it may prevent additional actions, but it might not necessarily reverse all the data that has already been accessed, every system that has already been changed, all communications that have already been sent, or transactions that have already been initiated. Its effectiveness will also depend on how quickly abnormal behavior is detected, which environments are covered, and whether the agent or security infrastructure has been compromised. An AI Kill Switch looks promising from the details provided, but its actual effectiveness will come in after it is used extensively in live systems, warn analysts. Also, it may be a good starting point, but it cannot be viewed as a standalone solution to enterprise AI security. "CISOs would need a more integrated approach that brings together AI discovery tools to identify unauthorised agents, runtime monitoring to track agent behaviour, robust identity and access management, and incident response and recovery mechanisms," added [Devroop Dhar, co-founder at Primus Partners]. He noted that equally important is the need for stringent AI security testing and clearly defined policies governing what agents can access and execute. There should be no ambiguity around permissions, access controls or the boundaries within which these agents are allowed to operate. The objective should be to ensure that security controls are built into the entire AI agent lifecycle rather than relying on a kill switch to intervene after something goes wrong. Dhar added that enterprise AI agents often have access to sensitive systems, databases, applications, credentials, and APIs. A compromised or misdirected agent could therefore become a point of vulnerability. The challenge is compounded by the fact that such activity may go undetected for some time, making it difficult for organisations to identify and contain the threat.

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09 Nov 2026 12:21am GMT

CNBC reports new details about the relationship of alleged Chinese spy with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: Huang told Nvidia staff in a email on Sunday that he had an affair with the woman and that Nvidia's board of directors had opened an independent investigation into the spying allegations. "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did," Huang wrote in the message. "I am deeply sorry." Nvidia's board "said an independent committee, assisted by outside counsel, will investigate the matter," reports Axios: The board said it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised and expressed confidence in Huang's leadership... Huang has been a key voice in Washington pushing to loosen restrictions on AI chip sales to China. He argued that keeping American technology in the Chinese market strengthens U.S. competitiveness and prevented China from developing their own potentially more advanced chips. The board's statement added that their inquiry "will examine all available information," CNBC reports. But "An Nvidia spokesperson said that Huang was committed to continuing as CEO of Nvidia without interruption." "I love our country and our company," Jensen Huang wrote in his letter to Nvidia's staff (as reported by CNBC), "and I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American." But while U.S. lawmakers have requested Huang appear for closed-door committee briefing, Jensen has not confirmed he'll appear, notes CNBC: When asked by the New York Times whether Huang would appear before lawmakers to discuss the matter, Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo declined to comment. "Our chief executive has an outstanding security team that accompanies him where needed," Mr. Rizzo said in a statement to the Times... Rizzo said [Thursday] the Nvidia CEO's interactions with [alleged Chinese spy Alice] Huang were consistent with meetings he has had with any of Nvidia's customers.

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08 Nov 2026 9:34pm GMT

The New York Times reports: After chatting for months with Google's artificial intelligence on a school-issued Chromebook laptop, a 13-year-old student made plans to end her life, according to a lawsuit filed in California Superior Court on Monday, the latest in a wave of litigation over Big Tech's effects on young people. The lawsuit, which refers to the girl as Emma, said that her parents first learned she had access to Google's AI in mid-March after their daughter's school sent a message warning them that she was in "imminent danger" of self-harm. Emma's mother logged into the teen's school Google account and found her daughter composing a suicide note on Google Docs, the complaint said. Her parents, named as John and Jane Doe in the lawsuit, immediately took Emma for an emergency psychiatric evaluation, and she now goes to therapy every week. Emma, a seventh grader in Charlotte, North Carolina, had grown convinced that she had multiple mental health disorders following interactions with AI Mode, a chatbotlike feature on Google Search, the complaint said. She also searched for "what is a suicide note" and made comments like "I am planning my own funeral" to the AI, the complaint said. The lawsuit is likely the first to claim that Google "hastily integrated" AI features into company apps used on K-12 Chromebooks, Google-powered laptops provided to millions of children by U.S. school districts, while failing to notify their parents of the potential risks... The case underscores how public school districts have come to depend on classroom laptops, tablets and apps from companies like Google and Microsoft for teaching and learning. In recent years, some Big Tech companies have used their own infrastructure in schools to promote their AI chatbots for teachers and students. The new lawsuit argues that Google's "sprawling digital ecosystem" of laptops and apps has enabled the tech giant to spread its Gemini AI chatbot across public schools - as well as turn on some students' access to AI features by default - without parents' awareness or permission. While school administrators can toggle company apps like YouTube and Gemini on or off for students in different grades, school administrators have complained that Google's system has not allowed them to disable AI Mode and AI Overview, features that are embedded in Google Search... The new lawsuit against Google is part of a wave of litigation this year over Big Tech's effect on young users... Several parents have also sued AI companies over allegations that their children died by suicide following interactions with chatbots. In a possibly-related development, Google announced a new policy of disabling its AI tools by default for schools this week. And schools that re-enable searches will have a new choice, the New York Times points out: "to enable student access to the AI features that the company has already embedded in search or to a new AI feature intended to assist students with schoolwork." But Google still isn't offering schools an option to turn off AI altogether in search, a company executive told the New York Times, because "search and AI are deeply integrated." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

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08 Nov 2026 8:34pm GMT

"It has been an extraordinary privilege," says the subheading on Thursday's announcement. After 31 years Salon.com will stop publishing, according to an announcement which appeared on the site under the byline "Salon". It remembers that Salon "was an idea about what journalism could be, born at a moment when the internet was still a largely unexplored frontier." When Salon launched in November 1995, the web was a very different place. A small group of journalists set out to create something original: a publication with a strong voice, a curiosity about the world and a belief that the internet could bring journalism and readers together in new ways. They helped pioneer a form of journalism that would come to define an entirely new era of publishing. Over three decades, Salon has brought together politics, culture, criticism and ideas in a way that was distinctly our own... Our writers and editors helped shape conversations about the forces changing our lives. The work was never simply about keeping up with the news. It was about making sense of it... To the founders who imagined it, the staff members who built it, the contributors who gave it their voices and the alumni who carried its spirit into the world: Thank you. Salon's legacy belongs to all of you... The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years. After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable... Thirty-one years is a remarkable run, but what matters most is what happened during those years: the journalism, the ideas, the voices, the conversations and the community that grew around them. Salon helped demonstrate what digital journalism could be and could become. We hope that legacy will continue to matter long after today. Thank you for being part of our story. It has been an extraordinary privilege. Slashdot reader oumuamua remembers Salon as one of the internet's first digital-native publications. Slashdot linked to Salon many times over the years - for example, this 1998 story headlined "Linus Story in Salon". Peter Neves was the first of many who wrote in to tell us about an article in Salon Magazine that describes an "...analogy between MS and the Catholic Church, and Linus and Martin Luther. " The Associated Press remembers Salon as "an early staple of internet discourse." And while Salon told them there were no immediate plans to take down Salon's online archives, the Associated Press notes the site's announcement "did not immediately indicate what would become of its employees, though some reported they had lost their jobs." (Longtime staff writer Amanda Marcotte wrote on her Patreon that she and "everyone" are "the latest victim of AI's predations.") "A spokesperson for the outlet said 19 full-time employees had been affected, as well as a handful of private contractors," writes the Associated Press. Variety adds that Salon "joins later-arriving sites such as Buzzfeed and Gawker that found it difficult to monetize cultural and topical reporting for a general audience and eventually shut down."

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08 Nov 2026 7:34pm GMT

Be careful with the file .claude/settings.local.json, warns The Hacker News: Passwords and API keys that developers typed into commands they approved in Claude Code are sitting in public GitHub repositories, where anyone can read them. When a user selects "Yes, and don't ask again," Anthropic's AI coding assistant can save the command, word-for-word, including the secret, in a project settings file. Software security company Apiiro said that 1,122 public copies of that file hold at least one secret, though it did not test whether any still work. One company the researchers notified earlier this week confirmed its key had been live... Removing [the file] from a project does not undo the leak, because older versions stay in git history and in forks of the repository. The researchers' advice is to rotate first: change every password, token, and key the file has ever held, then clean up... Claude Code tries to keep the file out of git. The first time it writes the file in a git repository, it adds the file to the user's global git excludes, its settings documentation says. Git on that computer then ignores the file in every repository. That protection stays in one user's git settings on one computer. It does nothing for a file that was already committed, the researchers say. Claude Code never adds the file to the project's own .gitignore, so the protection does not travel with the project. In 539 of the 1,105 repositories the researchers traced, a commit listing Claude as a co-author changed the file. They take this to mean Claude often commits the file itself. Apiiro's search of public GitHub found 104,185 copies of the file in 103,617 repositories, its research write-up shows. About 1.1% of them, or 1,122 copies, hold at least one secret. Together they hold 1,379 different secrets... ]And "in half of those repositories it had been there for at least 217 days."] More than a third of the secrets open a database directly, including 379 database passwords. Others include 43 SSH logins for public servers, 42 tokens for GitHub, GitLab and npm, and 23 AWS keys. Among the owners of these files are 63 organizations, mostly software companies of all sizes. The strongest cases include a database vendor's own admin-level cloud key and the owner password of a medical-records database, the researchers say. Boris Cherny, Anthropic's head of Claude Code, responded to the story in a comment on Hacker News: "Historically Claude Code has not done secret scrubbing (there are many good tools for that), but we are looking into what we can do to prevent this. That said, a few thoughts: 1. .claude/settings.local.json is meant to stay local. This is not a file you should check into source control. We automatically gitignore it when Claude creates the file, so in this case the files were manually created and checked in (docs: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings) 2. Permission rules are old hat. Everyone should be using auto mode instead. It is safer and also does not require manually maintaining finicky allow/deny lists. Auto mode is enabled by default and is included for free in all plans. 3. Regardless of what agent you use, you should have secret scanning enabled. GitHub and other source control hosts offer it. There are many threat models that it protects against and you should absolutely use it if you can. (see https://github.com/security/plans)" Cherny also named approaches Anthropic plans to prototype, Apiiro notes in an update, citing Cherny's goal of "making sure auto mode catches this, building in basic secret scanning," and, when a reader noted the same can happen in auto mode when it asks about a sensitive command, answered "good catch." Claude Code users had already filed a bug report on the issue on August 11, 2025, notes The Hacker News, but "An automated bot closed that report as 'not planned' on January 3, after 60 days without activity." Three more bug reports were then filed, according to the researchers. "None got a reply from Anthropic, and three were closed automatically as inactive or duplicate."

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