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23 Oct 2026 8:15pm GMT

SpaceX is reportedly seeking access to at least 80,000 cellular tower sites across the U.S. as it prepares to launch Starlink Mobile as a fourth nationwide wireless carrier. "We will be building out our terrestrial networks so there's broad-based connectivity anywhere that SpaceX and Starlink are allowed to operate," Musk said during SpaceX's earnings call this week. Satellite launches plus spectrum acquisition "will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US," he said. Bloomberg reports: One of the companies they're in talks with is Crown Castle, which, along with American Tower and Vertical Bridge Holdings, are among the largest owners of cellular towers. When asked on a Wednesday earnings conference call whether Crown Castle is discussing leases with SpaceX, Amazon.com or other satellite-based telecom providers, Chief Executive Officer Chris Hillabrant said, "You can assume that we're talking to all parties." He declined to discuss specific customer details. Mobile networks rely on antennas placed on towers across the country to transmit wireless signals. Carriers such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc. typically lease room for their equipment at the tower sites because it's more cost effective than owning and maintaining them, in part because the facilities can be shared. The value of the deals with SpaceX could reach into the billions.

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23 Oct 2026 8:00pm GMT

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23 Oct 2026 7:34pm GMT

Space Force considering options: public-private, federal installation, state land.

23 Oct 2026 7:33pm GMT

If you share Spotify sub with family, you may need to scan QR code to prove it.

23 Oct 2026 7:20pm GMT

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23 Oct 2026 7:09pm GMT

The New York Knicks reportedly sent employees a fake offer of complimentary NBA championship rings as part of an internal phishing test, requiring anyone who clicked the link to attend mandatory cybersecurity training. "Congratulations, your Employee Championship Ring is here," the email said. According to The New York Times, Madison Square Garden employees who clicked that link "were forced to attend a mandatory cybersecurity class to help satisfy some of [owner James] Dolan's growing cybersecurity concerns." Ars Technica reports: The offer wasn't implausible, either. "Typically, most employees for NBA teams receive rings, even if they are not as fancy and expensive as the ones the players receive," wrote Joe Vardon, senior NBA writer for The Athletic, which was bought by The New York Times in 2022 and then merged into the parent news organization. Vardon's article was primarily about how Knicks assistant coaches did not get rings on Tuesday when the team raised its first league championship banner since 1973. The assistant coaches were handed boxes without rings inside, though they are expected to receive rings later on. "Ring orders, designs, and measurements can take time, and not every coaching staff for every defending champion gets its rings on ring night... The Knicks assistants were told they would receive championship rings eventually, but many longtime employees at Madison Square Garden, including some who work in the Knicks' business operations, will not receive rings at all, team sources told The Athletic," Vardon wrote. MSG employee hopes were raised "at the end of September when the Knicks sent an email to a long list of employees, which gave recipients a first glimpse at their would-be championship rings," Vardon wrote. The email included "a graphic of two differently styled rings" that the lucky employees could supposedly choose from, the article said. "(Employee name), this one is on the house. MSG is issuing a complimentary employee championship ring. The same jeweler, the same craftsmanship, personalized with your name. No cost to you," the email said. "There are two designs to choose from: Championship Gold and Garden Classic. Reserve the one you want below." Vardon wrote that "multiple team sources" confirmed the email was a phishing test. It's not clear how many employees clicked the link or whether any of the employees who received the email will eventually get some type of championship ring. We contacted the Madison Square Garden Sports organization with these questions and will update this article if we get a response.

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23 Oct 2026 7:05pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: AI agents left to explore a virtual island without a specific task began inventing challenges of their own. MIT researchers say the behavior bears the hallmarks of play. The researchers put 13 AI agents called Eko, each running on Claude Opus 4.7, alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours. They describe the experiment in a paper posted on arXiv, a site where researchers share studies before peer review. Afterward, they gave the agents specific challenges, like getting as many objects as possible onto the island's tallest rock spire. The Eko agents that had spent those 30 hours playing generally beat identical agents that had never set foot on the island. Today, developers decide in advance what AI should practice and what counts as success. The researchers see this technique -- exploring without a goal -- as a different way for AI agents to learn skills, especially skills that could one day be used to control robots. "We normally develop artificial agents by deciding in advance what they should practice, what they should optimize, and what counts as progress," the researchers write in their report. "Play suggests another regime: give an agent a sufficiently rich and safe world, let it choose what is interesting, and allow useful knowledge to accumulate from the history that follows." UC Berkeley cognitive scientist Eunice Yiu told MIT Technology Review she was impressed with the findings but that more evidence is needed to determine whether AI models are genuinely playing. "It could be the case that the models are genuinely playing, but we don't know based on the paper," says Yiu. "If you only have the behavioral piece, it could be the case that they're just trying to abide by the prompt, trying to imitate humans." MIT professor and coauthor of the paper, Phillip Isola, added: "It's not like this is a system that just suddenly magically decided to play. It's an artifact that learned from our culture, was trained by engineers at Anthropic, and was then placed on an island by us. It does things that surprise us and that are causally related to its future skillful behavior."

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23 Oct 2026 6:00pm GMT

Birds' compact nervous system seems to help them handle tasks very quickly.

23 Oct 2026 5:32pm GMT

The Fwupd 2.1.9 release adds Pixart device support, improves Redfish identification, and fixes several firmware update issues.

23 Oct 2026 2:18pm GMT

OpenSSL 4.1 adds DTLS 1.3 and GREASE support, improves post-quantum cryptographic performance, and introduces new APIs and encryption optimizations.

23 Oct 2026 12:58pm GMT

Tails 7.15.1 addresses compromised CA certificates that could allow attackers to impersonate HTTPS websites through malicious Tor exit nodes.

23 Oct 2026 11:49am GMT