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03 Nov 2026 4:57am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The world's leading EV maker is showing no signs of slowing down. BYD sold 490,168 new energy vehicles (NEVs) in October, up 11% from the prior year and the company's highest monthly total in 2026. BYD's battery electric vehicles drove the growth, with a record 305,743 units sold, up 37% year over year and marking the first time its EV sales have crossed the 300,000 mark. To put that into perspective, just over 262,500 EVs were sold in the US in the entire third quarter combined, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates. By the end of the year, BYD expects overseas shipments to reach about 2 million vehicles. "In 2027, that number is expected to rise to more than 2.5 million vehicles," adds Electrek.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Nov 2026 3:30am GMT

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03 Nov 2026 3:10am GMT

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03 Nov 2026 2:58am GMT

Snap has settled a lawsuit brought by two teenagers who alleged Snapchat was deliberately designed to be addictive and contributed to their mental health problems, avoiding a trial that was scheduled to begin this week. Snap was the last defendant to settle after Meta, Alphabet and TikTok resolved claims in the same case. CBS News reports: The teenage plaintiffs, identified in court documents as S.J. and K.D.B., had alleged in the suit that Snapchat was designed to be addictive and that using the platform from a young age contributed to their mental health issues. "We are glad to reach resolution for our clients," Mark Lanier, founder of The Lanier Law Firm and lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement to CBS News. "We believe this jury would have found the companies' conduct reprehensible." Snap was the last social media company named in the lawsuit to settle the case, which was set for opening arguments this week. Meta resolved claims last week, while Alphabet and TikTok, the other defendants, each also resolved the allegations. Terms of the Snap settlement were undisclosed [...]. Earlier this year, a jury found Meta and Google-owned YouTube liable in a landmark social media addiction lawsuit, awarding $6 million in damages to a young woman who alleged the platforms' addictive features harmed her mental health. In August, Meta also agreed to pay up to $18 billion in settlements and introduce new child-safety measures to resolve claims from dozens of U.S. states that it deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children while misleading the public about their risks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Nov 2026 12:00am GMT

The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has all of its "space" back open.

02 Nov 2026 11:30pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly "off." Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG's response? To deny everything. [...] That latter point is central to a new study out of Northeastern that conducted 5,943 experiments across twelve commercial "smart" TV devices. The researchers found that most smart TVs utilize automatic content recognition (ACR), a technology that captures audio or video snapshots of viewed content and then monetizes that data to help build personalized profiles of viewers. TV makers insist that users are supposed to be able to opt out, but the choice simply doesn't work across a large segment of TVs. Companies like Vizio simply ignored the consumer requests entirely more often than not: "We find that the advertised ACR opt-out fully suppresses ACR-attributable traffic on only four operating systems; on Samsung Tizen traffic consistent with ACR activity persists in more than 60% of evaluated scenarios, and on Vizio SmartCast a content correlated endpoint hosted on Amazon Kinesis continues to receive traffic in 100% of opted-out scenarios." [...] The researchers say since they can't see the precise scope of what's being collected due to encryption, they're unsure whether Vizio is technically violating its FTC agreement (not that we have a current FTC that would care if they were): "The opt-out setting has no observable effect on traffic sent to this endpoint; however, we cannot inspect the payload due to encryption so we cannot confirm whether this violates the FTC settlement." Results of whether opting out of ACR tracking actually stopped ACR tracking were all over the map. Roku, for example, ignores opt-out requests when users are watching Roku's own channels. None of the smart TV vendors track Netflix viewing for fear of violating agreements with the streaming giant. Samsung's opt out function was more likely to actually work when a user was watching antenna broadcasts. On two Smart TV platforms, personal viewing data collected by ACR remains unencrypted, despite years of bad press and scandal on the subject. Many appear to be violating the law, but because U.S. regulatory oversight has been gutted, they see no meaningful accountability. That includes smart TV OS' like VIDAA, which is most prominently found on Hisense and Toshiba smart TVs: "VIDAA OS sends ACR data to servers run by Unruly over MQTT without encryption, so anyone on the network path between the TV and those servers can read it. Each message carries a Client ID, a permanent identifier for the TV that can't be reset, along with the time zone, the app name, the input (antenna, HDMI), the antenna channel and an audio fingerprint."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Nov 2026 11:00pm GMT

Plus invisible tattoos, medieval skeleton gets an ID, trapping a single antimatter particle, and more.

02 Nov 2026 10:54pm GMT

GIMP 3.2.8 delivers a faster Preferences dialog, improved RTL text editing, restored Offset filtering, and multiple bug fixes.

02 Nov 2026 10:23pm GMT

The threat is still considered to be low, but the virus continues to spread.

02 Nov 2026 9:21pm GMT

Raspberry Pi raises the price of its 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 by $80 to $385, citing rising memory costs and supply constraints.

02 Nov 2026 8:25pm GMT

aerynOS 2026.11 ISO adds Budgie Desktop, an experimental installer with Btrfs support, and a redesigned Moss package manager CLI.

02 Nov 2026 6:33pm GMT