20 Oct 2026

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DHS Lied About Why It Wanted To Search Activist's GrapheneOS Phone

New court records reportedly show that DHS targeted Stop Cop City activist Samuel Tunick at an Atlanta airport because he was under investigation for suspected "terrorist activities." However, the CBP officers told him instead that they wanted to search his phone for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Tunick, who is not accused of terrorism or any other crime beyond allegedly wiping his GrapheneOS phone during the encounter, faces up to five years in prison. 404 Media reports: Instead of saying he was being targeted for suspected terrorism -- although this search happened just at the start of the second Trump administration, it has dramatically broadened what organizations or people may be considered such -- they said they needed his phone to look for "kiddie p*rn." "Good afternoon," an email sent from a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) official, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to CBP and other officials reads. "The following subject is scheduled to arrive in ATL [Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport] today via DL 1778 @ 1930 Hours. TUNICK is under investigation by HSI/JTTF for suspected terrorist activities." The email includes a photo of Tunick, and asks the officials to direct him to secondary inspection, retain all of his electronics, and collect their passcodes. As 404 Media first revealed in December, Tunick was charged because he allegedly "did knowingly destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, and otherwise take any action to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular phone, for the purpose of preventing and impairing the Government's lawful authority to take said property into its custody and control." Matthew Dodge, one of Tunick's lawyers, previously told 404 Media he only found one other case using the same obscure law, a drug trafficking case. "This is extraordinarily rare," Dodge said. Tunick was part of the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, which broadly protested the building of a large police training center, and which authorities investigated for arson, vandalism, and doxing. Tunick is not suspected of any crime beyond the alleged wiping of the phone, and has previously put his current prosecution in the context of the wide spanning cases against other Stop Cop City protesters. The newly filed court record, in which Tunick's lawyers argue that evidence should be thrown out, include new photos and descriptions of the airport encounter. The CBP officials asked Tunick if they were going to find "kiddie p*rn" on his phone, which Tunick immediately denied. "As the evidentiary hearing made clear, these unfounded accusations were nothing more than pretext for a fishing expedition into the depths of Mr. Tunick's devices," the lawyers wrote. They added, "Officer Findley acknowledged that officers had no reason whatsoever to believe Mr. Tunick possessed child p*rnography," referring to one of the officials.

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20 Oct 2026 7:00pm GMT

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SimCity, but with Permits

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20 Oct 2026 6:29pm GMT

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Ukraine’s drone rescue of wounded soldier puts much touted idea into practice

Ukraine's latest drone innovation may boost bleak odds of evacuating casualties.

20 Oct 2026 6:22pm GMT

Quantum error correction goes well beyond breakeven

A demo of error-corrected qubits shows big reductions in errors as they grow.

20 Oct 2026 6:08pm GMT

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OpenBSD 8.0 Released

OpenBSD 8.0 has been released with major virtualization and hardware upgrades, including support for up to 64 vCPUs per VM, Intel Arc graphics, ARM64 hibernation, and expanded RISC-V support. Linuxiac points out that it marks the "61st release of the security-focused Unix-like operating system." From the report: Several fixes improve compatibility with 32-bit Linux guests, while changes to virtual machine ownership management and interrupt emulation make the virtualization infrastructure more capable. Graphics support has also been upgraded, with DRM drivers updated to those from Linux kernel 6.18.53. Notably, OpenBSD 8.0 adds support for Intel Arc A-Series (Alchemist) graphics cards through the inteldrm driver. Another important change increases the amd64 kernel's virtual address space from 4 GB to 512 GB, allowing the system to map over 4 GB of video memory. The release also addresses GPU timeout issues affecting some Intel Alder Lake systems. [...] For security, OpenBSD 8.0 adds checks and fixes across the kernel and system utilities, including improvements to pledge and unveil, tighter validation of executable files, and protections against memory corruption and information disclosure. A full list of changes can be found here. Further reading: Wine Ported to OpenBSD

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20 Oct 2026 6:00pm GMT

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BeamFS Filesystem Proposed for Inclusion in the Linux Kernel

BeamFS Filesystem Proposed for Inclusion in the Linux Kernel

BeamFS, an experimental filesystem designed to detect and repair corrupted data, has been submitted for review by Linux kernel developers.

20 Oct 2026 5:59pm GMT

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Meta tries to scapegoat staff who downloaded torrents to spare execs

Meta argues nobody "decided" to pirate books to train AI.

20 Oct 2026 5:40pm GMT

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Meta Muse Exposes Users' Personal, Business Secrets When They Share Conversations

Security researchers say Meta's Muse AI assistant exposed thousands of users' shared conversations because conversation titles were placed in subdomains that could be discovered through public DNS records. Meta has since suspended the sharing feature while it considers making changes. Ars Technica reports: Like many online services, Muse has allowed users to share searches, conversations, images, and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that can't be easily guessed. Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was "built from the ground up for privacy and security," seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available... [...]. "If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort," the researchers wrote. "It took one query." [...] The easiest way to discover the URLs is to perform a passive DNS search through one of many available commercial services. Passive DNS records store the historical resolution of domain names to IP addresses, as well as nameserver, and mail-server records over time. Passive DNS systems typically collect DNS responses from sensors positioned at recursive DNS resolvers or other infrastructure. A passive DNS record is generally created when a monitoring system observes a DNS response. In the case here, once the intended party clicks on the share link, the DNS information is recorded in a searchable database. Claroc researchers were able to discover the Muse share links because all of them use the domain name cf.metaaiusercontent.com. Discovery is further made easy by the decision to add the conversation name to the URL, along with a long string of text. Simplified examples of such links are home-sale-budget-9f21c8a3.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, and loan-application-draft-a4c9e2.cf.metaaiusercontent.com. It's this last design decision, putting the conversation title in the subdomain rather than in the URL path, that makes public discovery possible.

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20 Oct 2026 5:00pm GMT

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Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end for TPUs

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20 Oct 2026 4:40pm GMT

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SparkyOS 2026.10 Debuts as an Arch-Based Portable Linux Distro

SparkyOS 2026.10 Debuts as an Arch-Based Portable Linux Distro

SparkyOS 2026.10 launches as a portable, Arch-based Linux distro featuring Xfce, Linux kernel 7.2.11, and persistent USB storage.

20 Oct 2026 4:21pm GMT

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Voxtral 3

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20 Oct 2026 4:02pm GMT

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qBittorrent 5.3 Released with Web UI Improvements, Security Fixes

qBittorrent 5.3 Released with Web UI Improvements, Security Fixes

qBittorrent 5.3 brings Web UI enhancements, improved torrent management, new networking options, and important security fixes.

20 Oct 2026 1:44pm GMT