"Ubuntu has managed to do away with GNU Core Utilities in its default stack," [1]reports the blog It's FOSS .

The last three utilities — cp , mv and rm — have been moved to versions from the uutils project (which reimplements utilities in Rust).

> Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du , made that jump in earlier releases... Canonical [2]started "oxidizing" Ubuntu last year , and Ubuntu 25.10 became the first release to ship [ the uutils project's] coreutils as the default. That release also made [3] sudo-rs the default privilege tool, replacing a command that had been in place for decades.

>

> 26.04 was the release where the plan did slow down quite a bit, as Canonical kept cp , mv , and rm on their GNU versions due to a bunch of [4]TOCTOU issues that were blocking the full implementation. These were caught during an audit, when Canonical commissioned Zellic [5]for two rounds between December 2025 and March 2026, focusing on the most security-sensitive utilities first. Across both rounds, Zellic raised 113 issues, and 44 of them were assigned CVEs. Canonical says the vast majority have been resolved.

>

> Getting here has had its ups and downs, and the last stretch was not clean. In July, uutils cp went [6]back into the archive and came straight out again after it broke live image builds. The fix was quick; as the developers marked it "Critical," the fix went upstream, and the migration landed in time for 26.10.

>

> When typing commands, nothing changes for you on the surface. uutils coreutils is designed to be a drop-in replacement for essential GNU tools, and the project treats any divergence from GNU as a bug, further pointing out that some options may still be missing or behave differently. So if you prefer staying on the GNU version, you have the option to install the coreutils-from-gnu [7]package that houses all the required components.



[1] https://itsfoss.com/news/ubuntu-rustification-coreutils-migration/

[2] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995

[3] https://itsfoss.com/sudo-vs-sudo-rs/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-check_to_time-of-use

[5] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/an-update-on-rust-coreutils/80773

[6] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/coreutils-from/+bug/2158691

[7] https://packages.ubuntu.com/stonking/coreutils-from-gnu

"Turns out, Silicon Valley isn't especially altruistic," writes the nonprofit education news site The 74 . They're reading a new book promising "the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America". Written by New York Times business reporter Natasha Singer, [1] Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools tells "the story of the nonprofit Code.org and its charismatic, Harvard-educated leader, Hadi Partovi," [2]according to their review :

> Thirteen years ago, Partovi... delivered a worrying message: Kids who didn't learn to write code would be left behind. And the long-term success of the United States economy depended on training these students to fill a million open tech jobs.... Fast-forward to 2026, and now we're dealing with AI, and tech is reading from a [3]similar playbook . Asked by The74's Greg Toppo, "Does this moment seem different to you?", Singer replies, "This moment is different, but also similar.

>

> "We are in a moment in society where a lot of people have increased distrust of these huge tech companies, and we see a wave of parents [4]pushing back against tech in schools. But we also see waves of people pushing back against Flock cameras, against data centers, that there's this feeling that tech has taken so much, and that people feel like they have lost control — that tech is being enacted on them... And parents are worried about the effects of unfettered tech access and kids' [5]compulsive use of social media and phones, and so there's a different climate.

>

> And yet there seems to be a disconnect in some ways with AI because you see that Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all competing to get their AI tools into schools, and you see school districts across the country say "We've partnered with OpenAI." "We are a ChatGPT Pioneer School," or "We've partnered with Microsoft, and we're going to use 10,000 licenses of CoPilot." It's amazing to me. We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data's going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don't learn anything.

>

> One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we're in the sixth or eighth cycle of this — and shouldn't we be asking questions about the push for AI in schools, based on what we've learned about the push for all the other things that came before?

Two [6]Slashdot [7]posts are cited in the book, both submitted by long-time Slashdot reader [8]theodp (Slashdot UID #442,580), who even gets a shout-out in the book's "Acknowledgements" section (along with consumer advocate Ralph Nader).

Ironically, one member of Amazon's "Vine" program received a free copy of the book in exchange for a review — and [9]apparently misunderstood its topic , writing that it made coding "feel approachable and even fun... [T]his is exactly the kind of book that could help a child become interested in technology without feeling overwhelmed by it. I particularly liked the way it encourages kids to be curious, experiment, and solve problems on their own. I would definitely recommend Coding Kids to parents, grandparents, or teachers looking for a good introduction to coding..."



[1] https://amzn.to/4r9suIO

[2] https://www.the74million.org/article/journalist-calls-out-collective-amnesia-of-schools-romance-with-big-tech/

[3] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/10/03/1515258/tech-companies-to-k-12-schoolchildren-learn-to-ai-is-the-new-learn-to-code

[4] https://www.the74million.org/article/parents-demanding-tech-opt-outs-take-their-fight-to-federal-court/

[5] https://www.the74million.org/article/meta-reaches-17-billion-settlement-with-states-in-landmark-trial-over-teen-social-media-addiction/

[6] https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/12/03/2149239/should-teachers-get-100-for-steering-kids-to-googles-hour-of-code-lesson

[7] https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/23/0040245/is-the-hour-of-code-the-new-30-minute-saturday-morning-cartoon-commercial

[8] https://www.slashdot.org/~theodp

[9] https://amzn.to/46ZIZ0K

Targeting students and beginners, Adafruit released "CircuitPython" in 2017 (as a derivative of the MicroPython microcontroller-optimized programming language).

Now Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader [1]ptorrone ) brings this update:

> Adafruit has published [2]CircuitPython Turbo , a workflow that compiles selected Python functions into native machine code on a computer, then loads them onto compatible microcontroller boards.

>

> It builds on MicroPython's Native and Viper emitters. In a [3]documented Metro RP2040 fixed-point Mandelbrot test, Viper cut computation time from 8.335 seconds to 0.423 seconds, a 19.71x speedup over bytecode. The rest of the application stays in Python. The guide includes benchmarks, source code and hardware demos. The speedup is for the measured computation, not the whole application.

"Turbo support is now included in the latest official CircuitPython builds for RP2040 and RP2350 boards..." [4]explains Torrone's announcement at Adafruit.com . "The new Turbo in CircuitPython helps when the board spends time calculating: making neopixel effects, drawing fractals, processing audio, filtering sensor readings, or preparing lots of pixels. Those projects can get smoother animation, quicker responses, or room to do more things at once."

> With Turbo, it's easier, better, and now even faster to make LED light up costumes that also reacts to sound at the same time, a sensor dashboard with animated graphics, or a tiny game doing physics while drawing the screen. Turbo speeds up the busy Python parts. It won't make a slow sensor or display connection faster... Your computer turns selected functions into instructions the chip can run directly. Python still handles the rest.

>

> We have measured speedups, real display captures, and examples you can pull apart to see what happened. None of this arrived alone. CircuitPython, MicroPython, PyMCU, compiler tools, open hardware, and people sharing their work gave us pieces to connect. The Bao experiments take that idea somewhere else, handing calculations to four helper cores. Now we get to make those paths easier to use, compare results, and find the next useful thing. Maybe that's smoother animation, a responsive instrument, or an idea we haven't tried yet.

>

> That's what I like about open source. Someone shares a piece, someone else sees a possibility, and we get to keep building it together.



[1] https://www.slashdot.org/~ptorrone

[2] https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-turbo

[3] https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-turbo/measured-speed

[4] https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-turbo

[1] 404 Media reports :

> Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff's Department used Flock's surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop's stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock's system, was "LMAO."

>

> The cop is one of dozens who put gibberish, jokes, or other nonsense into Flock's "reason" box, highlighting the casualness and lack of care some cops have when searching an incredibly powerful surveillance system. This is on top of the thousands upon thousands of cops who simply wrote something like "investigation," "test," or left the box blank as their search "reason," according to a new [2]analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with 404 Media. EFF's investigation found cops across dozens of jurisdictions writing "LMAO," "LOL," "Hehe," "Haha," "idk," "blah," "TBD," and "robbery I don't remember the case number leave me alone" in Flock's "reason" box for searches.

>

> They found cops writing "idiot," "fuck this new search engine," "dickhead," "shithead," and "WEIRD KID" in the reason box. And they found an entire class of police button mashers, who ran searches for reasons of "asdfg," "gyghkkghghjkghjk," "jhjhjkhj," "jkhhkjhjk," "nmbvcbnm," and so on and so forth. The searches came from police departments across the country from 2023 through late 2025, when Flock changed how the "reason" box in its search system functions...

>

> Each time a search is performed, a record of it is saved in the Flock system, which can be obtained by the public using government records requests. These audit logs show hundreds of thousands of searches of the system; after 404 Media and other news outlets used these types of logs to show police using the Flock system to look for undocumented immigrants [3]on behalf of ICE , a [4]woman in Texas who had an abortion , and protesters, cops were warned by government surveillance centers to be " [5]as vague as permissible " about the reasons for their searches...

>

> A police department said it investigated a cop who wrote "driving around being weird" in the reason field but found it was for "legitimate public safety purposes."

If a police chief "stood in front of a city council and asked for permission to install hundreds of cameras just so his officers could investigate the high crime of 'haha,' they would be laughed out of the room," [6]argues the EFF blog post , calling this proof that agencies can't be trusted to oversee themselves.

But judges aren't being asked to authorize searches or review evidence, which the EFF post argues shows laws and courts haven't caught up yet with a new technology. Whatever auditing happens is clearly "deficient," the EFF warns, and while many jurisdictions require by law an actual reason for searches, "this keeps happening because police use automated license plate readers as a convenient shortcut around constitutional privacy safeguards." The EFF sees police officers "making a mockery of our civil liberties" by logging reasons like "LOL", "LMAO", "sexy", and "idk" while accessing sensitive location data.

In fact, they argue the warrant-less databases fostered a culture of abuse that "allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine, permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for [7]low-level complaints , [8]personal whims , and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols ."

> Flock Safety claims it has improved its system by requiring officers to select from a [9]dropdown list of crimes before running a search-but that only makes it easier for officers to hide improper searches behind the veneer of uniformity. The system does not require proof that the dropdown reason actually matches the true purpose of the search... Since this update, officers are no longer required to type out why they are digging through a driver's movement history, and instead can select a pre-packaged option like "Traffic infraction" or "Other" in half a second...

>

> Mass surveillance is incompatible with a free society, and especially so when the people with access to this data are treating it like a joke. This ALPR mass surveillance — the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion — should not exist. But because it does, EFF continues to urge courts and state legislatures to immediately step in and impose strict, enforceable restrictions to rein in this abuse. At an absolute minimum, this means mandating rigid data deletion deadlines and an ironclad warrant requirement.

>

> If police want the power to track a person's movements, they must be required to convince a judge with evidence and probable cause. They should not be able to bypass the Constitution with a search for "haha."



[1] https://www.404media.co/cops-search-thousands-of-flock-cameras-for-reasons-of-lmao-idk-hehe-and-asdfg/

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/high-crime-lmao-how-cops-are-treating-mass-surveillance-joke

[3] https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-camera-network-data-shows/

[4] https://www.404media.co/a-texas-cop-searched-license-plate-cameras-nationwide-for-a-woman-who-got-an-abortion/

[5] https://www.404media.co/police-told-to-be-as-vague-as-permissible-about-why-they-use-flock/

[6] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/high-crime-lmao-how-cops-are-treating-mass-surveillance-joke

[7] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/more-license-plate-reader-mission-creep-school-residency-verification-background

[8] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2026/09/11/new-flock-misuse-cases-police-arrests-firings-investigation/91691881007/

[9] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/offense-type-dropdown-a-simpler-more-accurate-audit

The New York Post wrote that OpenAI " [1]stunned the mathematics world " last week when it announced its AI model " [2]cracked a legendary math problem left unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours."

But a New York University professor "has come forward alleging OpenAI may have copied his work after asking him to collaborate — with one of the company's scientists allegedly warning he might 'ruin his career' if he refused."

> [P]rofessor Tristan Buckmaster, a British-Australian researcher who trained in Germany... had been working with Long Island-raised math prodigy Levent Alpöge, a researcher with OpenAI rival Anthropic, on a different elusive fluid dynamics equation, known as the Euler problem, when he found a solution using AI tools from both Anthropic and ChatGPT. He said scientists from OpenAI approached him and tried to convince him to jointly announce the solution, claiming they had independently solved Navier-Stokes. Buckmaster questioned the timing of their finding the solution in a blog post, noting OpenAI had only done so "in the past few days" — after the company became aware of his work. He asked OpenAI experts whether its AI systems used to solve the equation had been "trained on, or had access to" his research, but said they declined to answer, prompting him to wonder how they had advanced toward the solution so quickly. The puzzle is "not the direction one arrives at in a few days," Buckmaster wrote incredulously...

>

> In OpenAI's post on its website sharing the Navier-Stokes proof, which it credited to Astra, the company's latest AI bot, the firm insisted no user data was incorporated into its model to solve the problem. However, it noted that it "cannot rule out" that anonymized data was used to "improve our models."

>

> "We congratulate Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work," OpenAI said in the announcement.

>

> Buckmaster shot back, "Is it ethical to use customer's data to try to scoop their customer?"

Alpöge's affiliation with Anthropic "seems to have been a sore point for OpenAI," [3]writes TechCrunch . [4]Buckmaster's public statement says the OpenAI's Sebastien "twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship" and also said that "it was so annoying that Levent works at Anthropic" — but that Buckmaster still refused to remove the Anthropic mathematician's credit.

> I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, "Why would you ruin your career?" [OpenAI's Bubeck [5]said later on X that he'd meant unfounded accusations could damage Buckmaster's career.] I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, "If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice."

Buckmaster later told Australia's public broadcaster ABC that the companies building AI " [6]have zero respect for the scientific community . I mean, it's appalling, honestly." But he went on to say AI has made the race to publish mathematical breakthroughs pointless.

> "I think it's pointless. Like, I think the game is up...." Professor Buckmaster said he and Dr Alpöge had more research they could publish but questioned the point of racing ahead with it when AI could perform work that had previously occupied researchers for years.

>

> He said there needed to be a discussion about how mathematics should operate in this new environment. Professor Buckmaster said some mathematicians had stopped publicly sharing what they were working on to avoid tipping off AI companies about their plans. He has called on academics and people from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind to discuss ground rules for how they worked together. He said the companies' power carried responsibilities that went beyond competing to solve problems before their rivals...

>

> Building on the work of mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, the pair found a solution to the Euler problem, a stepping stone to the Navier-Stokes problem. Professor Buckmaster said he spent weeks checking and improving the "slop" proofs generated by AI...

>

> For now, Professor Buckmaster said he wanted to finish existing work and support his PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, rather than chase another Millennium Prize. "I think it's more important to re-evaluate what math is," he said.

"The New York University professor also warned Australia about the centralisation of resources into the hands of a small number of privately owned foreign companies..."



[1] https://nypost.com/2026/09/09/tech/openai-says-it-cracked-decades-old-math-problem-but-professor-claims-they-cribbed-his-work-threatened-him/

[2] https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/08/2228220/openai-says-it-has-cracked-one-of-maths-millennium-problems

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-career-making-math-problem-says-nyu-mathematician/

[4] https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

[5] https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310

[6] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-11/racing-to-solve-maths-problems-pointless-tristan-buckmaster-says/107141628

Reservations are now live for Valve's " [1]Steam Frame " VR headset (with its Linux-based SteamOS and an ARM CPU). "It starts at $1,059 for 256GB or $1,299 for 1TB," [2]reports CNET , "and every purchase includes a copy of Half-Life: Alyx if you don't already own it." Reservations are open through Sept. 17 at 10 a.m. PT, "with customers randomly assigned a place in line after the reservation window closes."

CNET's editor at large even argues that the Steam Frame "isn't necessarily the future of XR, as much as it's [3]a framework for evolving beyond the present ." Their review calls it an "ambitious" VR headset that "feels like an experiment in progress."

> The ability to run other apps in windows can make Frame feel, at times, almost like a computer. Linux apps in desktop mode range from Chromium to Firefox to a bunch of other tools. I watched YouTube in one window while playing Portal 2 in other, and started to marvel at how flexible Frame could be. But VR games require a full immersive takeover of the headset... The Steam Frame can convert games intended for both PC VR and even Android APK files, using a conversion tool called Lepton... I haven't sideloaded anything yet, but Steam Frame in theory could be a Rosetta Stone for VR gaming, even tapping into some Android XR titles, but not out of the box...

>

> 2D games can be projected onto a near-range or farther-off theater mode screen that can be dragged around, resized and turned into a curved or flat monitor, much like with the Apple Vision Pro, Samsung Galaxy XR or Meta Quest. You can download any game in your Steam library to test, even if it's not technically listed as "Great on Frame" yet...

>

> But the name "Frame" suggests a framework, something Valve's team acknowledged when I spoke to them during my review process... "We want this to be your PC, and people mod it, take it apart, make accessories for it," says Jeremy Selan, a software developer on the Steam Frame team. "We'll be putting out the CAD for all these [Steam Frame] systems. This is entirely based on open-source technology stacks based upon SteamOS. Our hope is that this isn't just one device, that this would be sort of the root of a growing SteamOS ecosystem. It already encompasses gaming and Proton and SteamOS and those Linux gaming capabilities. This is going to lay the foundation for a new sort of evolutionary tree of that, to also bring it into the VR and XR space."



[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/steamframe

[2] https://www.cnet.com/deals/reserve-stream-frame-waitlist/

[3] https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/valve-steam-frame-vr-headset-review/

[1]Reuters reports :

> A defense lawyer appealing his client's murder conviction submitted a brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, New Mexico's highest court said. The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons [for $5,000], and held him in contempt for failing to verify the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he prepared with help from the AI program... and said they will refer him to an attorney disciplinary board for investigation.

>

> Aarons in a statement to Reuters said he had used ChatGPT to summarize the trial proceedings when he agreed to take up the defendant's appeal last year, and did not understand the degree to which AI could "hallucinate" facts. "I am remorseful but hopeful that the disciplinary board takes into account it was an honest mistake," he said.... Dozens of lawyers have been sanctioned for filing briefs where AI made up case citations or misquoted the law. Aarons' filing appears to have gone further, containing fabricated witness testimony in a criminal appeal...

>

> Aarons told the court at an August 21 hearing that he fed a computer-generated transcript and other case materials to ChatGPT, presuming it would generate "a bulletproof summary." The justices sounded incredulous that Aarons was not fully aware of how AI can make mistakes. "Counsel, do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what's going on in the world?" Justice C. Shannon Bacon said at the hearing. "Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day."

"OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment."



[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/chatgpt-invented-fake-police-testimony-murder-appeal-new-mexico-high-court-says-2026-09-11/

"As parts of the Southern California coastline [1]crumbled into the sea , slammed by intense waves and flooding in recent days, oceanographer Kim McCoy had one thing on his mind," [2]reports the Los Angeles Times .

He was thinking about "the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered [3]San Onofre nuclear power plant ."

> "Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which increases wave height ... these could wash away a section of the walkway that protects the San Onofre seawall, and the waste canisters are just 100 feet away from that," the former wave dynamics researcher and longtime advocate against beach storage of nuclear waste said. Most experts agree the risk of erosion damaging the nuclear waste storage system is extremely low in the near term. The plant's owner, Southern California Edison, has promised the California Coastal Commission to move the waste to higher elevation on-site if modeling shows sea level rise and erosion will start to pose a challenge. But the recent waves, fueled by Hurricane Marie far away in the Pacific, resurfaced the issue of the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive spent fuel that used to power the reactors. "At the moment, it is under control, I think it's essential to say that," said James Day, a geology professor at UC San Diego. "But geologically we must be thinking long term. The waste lasts for hundreds, if not thousands of generations...." [In 2103 some of the site's canisters' approach their intended 100-year lifespans, and the utility may have to start the transfer into new cansiters.]

>

> The distinctive twin domes that once housed the reactor cores will start coming down early next year. But the 3.6 million pounds of high-level waste will stay in the coastal community indefinitely. How much of a safety hazard that is depends on whom you ask. "San Onofre is sitting on some fairly young rocks in a seismically active region," Day said at a recent symposium at the Scripps Seaside Forum in La Jolla, hosted by the Samuel Lawrence Foundation. "This is not the sort of place you would leave nuclear waste." Others noted that collapse of beach slopes could make the site more vulnerable to tsunamis. They spoke of the corrosive effects of the ocean air on the steel canisters that hold the waste...

>

> Edison says its system will be safe for decades to come. "The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall," said Manuel Camargo, principal manager of decommissioning for Edison, standing on the concrete pad that holds the steel waste storage canisters. "The maximum credible earthquake, somewhere around a 7.0 magnitude, would produce something about half of what this system is designed to withstand...." Edison is bolstering a path below the seawall. Based on state data from the California Ocean Protection Council, the seawall would not be inundated before 2050, Camargo said...

>

> Plans for a deep geological repository beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada crumbled in the face of local opposition in 2011. Utilities around the U.S. now sue the federal government every year to recoup their storage expenses because the Department of Energy has not come through on its promise. The lawsuits cost taxpayers $2 million a day, according to Camargo. "It's so safe that it's almost a problem," Camargo said. "It's not a priority to a lot of folks to move it."

"The Trump administration's Department of Energy wants to create 'campuses' in several states to store waste," the article points out, "and, in exchange, give local jurisdictions funding to develop different aspects of the nuclear cycle — such as fuel creation, power generation and potentially fuel recycling..."

"The administration wants to address the fact that waste is sitting at 80 reactor sites around the country. It also needs places for waste from new reactors it wants to build."



[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/weather-news/articles/whole-beach-gone-big-waves-182542462.html

[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/coast-begins-crumble-clock-ticks-100000613.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station

"Californians just made it through the [1]hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages," [2]reports the Los Angeles Times . In fact, the state hasn't implemented rotating power outages since 2020.

Because "Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically increased the resiliency of its electrical grid through a [3]significant expansion in battery energy storage ."

> These batteries hold onto solar energy captured during the day, so it can be sent to the grid as demand peaks in the evening and morning, when most people are at home running air conditioners and other appliances.

>

> During the August heat wave of 2020, the California Independent System Operator, which manages the flow of electricity for most of the state, declared a Stage 3 Emergency and hundreds of thousands of [4]households lost power in rolling outages. At the time, the system had less than 100 megawatts of battery storage available, according to system spokesperson Jayme Ackemann. Today, it has more than 17,000 megawatts available....

>

> According to Ackemann, the system seeks to add 20,000 to 25,000 megawatts of battery storage capacity by 2045 — the same year it has set a [5]goal of achieving carbon neutrality . That means the state would remove as many carbon emissions from the atmosphere as it emits.

>

> In recent years, California has steadily grown the share of electrical power generated by renewable sources — such as solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower — which bolstered the resiliency of the grid by increasing the overall amount of energy available. An uptick in people installing rooftop solar panels has provided an additional power boost, Ackemann said. In May, California became the first known large-scale power system in the world to have relied on more than 50% solar power for an entire month.... California's grid is also now integrated with electrical systems across much of the Western United States. This means that if there is an extreme heat event in Southern California, energy from a cooler area such as the Pacific Northwest can be imported to help meet regional demand. All of this has collectively helped the state's electrical system weather this year's long-lasting heat.

"Southern California continued to break temperature records this week when Long Beach and Anaheim reached a [6]blistering 107 degrees and Escondido hit 112 degrees..."



[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/060244/august-was-worlds-joint-hottest-month-on-record-scientists-say

[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/weather-news/articles/california-survived-hottest-august-record-100000456.html

[3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/california-made-another-summer-without-100000648.html

[4] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-15/worst-heat-wave-in-years-causes-rolling-blackouts-dangerous-conditions-across-california

[5] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-15/california-approves-roadmap-for-carbon-neutrality-by-2045

[6] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-09-09/southern-california-braces-for-very-dangerous-unusual-heat-plus-oppressive-humidity

Nearly 1900 Blizzard Entertainment workers "voted to ratify their first union contract with parent company Microsoft after over two years of bargaining," [1]reports Kotaku , "consolidating Blizzard's many smaller unions into three larger bargaining units."

The workers now gain new protections "on issues such as generative AI, crediting, remote work, and layoffs."

> [The contract] acknowledges that AI tools "may be useful in the game development process to support human judgment and creativity and that AI-assisted workflows remain subject to appropriate human control and review for accuracy and quality." But it also stipulates that any implementation of AI technology that would materially impact work performed by union employees must have its impacts bargained over before it can be implemented.

>

> Other sections cover issues such as crediting (guaranteeing that current and former employees are credited by name in all games they work on) and remote work (designating certain roles as hybrid in-office and providing procedures for individuals to apply for their roles to be fully remote). It also contains a lengthy section on how layoffs may be conducted, including a required 60-day notice period (or pay in lieu of notice), a guarantee of one week of severance for every six months of employment, and 14 months of recall rights. The contract also guarantees successorship, meaning if Blizzard is ever acquired by another company, the contract would remain intact.

"Workers also contractually locked in their current hybrid work schedule," [2]reports the gaming news site Aftermath , "meaning that Blizzard can't suddenly change it, as has been a [3]labor-unfriendly trend in the games industry over the past couple years."

> Fully remote workers scored a big win as well. "I'm remote, and we grandfathered everyone who is remote to stay remote, so we can't be magically called to an office that we've never worked at before," [said Diablo senior environment artist Mahreen Fatima].

And "The contract also elevated pay floor," [4]reports the Yakima Herald-Republic . "Across the board, workers secured a 1.25% pay increase, but some workers who were paid below $50,000 per year will walk away with pay increases that are as much as 34%."



[1] https://kotaku.com/blizzard-workers-union-contract-microsoft-2000732422

[2] https://aftermath.site/blizzard-union-contract-warcraft-overwatch-diablo/

[3] https://aftermath.site/activision-workers-speak-out-against-return-to-office-mandate-that-they-see-as-soft-layoffs/

[4] https://www.yakimaherald.com/news/nation_and_world/entertainment/microsoft-owned-blizzard-video-game-union-ratify-contract/article_34b9395e-8cfd-5366-8bc6-1f52d82d0328.html

[1]The Los Angeles Times reports :

> Chen Yilong has racked up plenty of film and TV credits in his two decades as an actor, but with work getting scarcer he signed a contract in August to license the image of his face to a Chinese production studio. Chen's role will be to sit in front of a video camera and make facial expressions at the prompt of a director. A neutral stare. An angry glare. A look of surprise. Using artificial intelligence, the studio will use images of Chen's face to generate an avatar, also known as a "digital human," to star in an AI-generated movie. "If you can't beat it, join it," said Chen, 38, who works in Beijing.

>

> The Chinese film and video industry is being transformed by AI-driven storytelling, fueled by rapid advances in video generation software, and at ground zero are the so-called micro dramas that play out on millions of smartphones. Typically just a minute or two in length, the videos are devoured by Chinese audiences... And the cost of producing them has been cut drastically through the use of AI software developed by Chinese technology juggernauts including Kuaishou Technology and TikTok's global owner, ByteDance. The number of Chinese-made micro dramas surged in the first three months of this year to 128,000, according to the China Netcasting Services Assn. More than 95% of them were made with AI, the association said....

>

> Sun Wei founded Feixiang Universe, the Shenzhen-based studio that cast Chen. The fear of accidentally "stealing someone's face" was a big reason she said she decided to license real people's likenesses for an AI production set during China's Tang Dynasty more than 1,000 years ago. Thanks to AI's training data bias, AI-generated performers tend to have similar features and share a homogenous look, Sun said. Many have flawless skin and extremely symmetrical faces, requiring her and other Chinese AI filmmakers to cast a wide net to "buy" new faces and digitize actor's expressions.

Lu Beike, who directed the big-budget Chinese series "Three-Body," felt theAI-generated scenes he'd tried came out sub-standard. "Lu added that if 90% of a film was generated by AI, a real human performance could appear jarring. A real actor's expressions carried more nuance and emotion. The skin textures did not match. Sometimes the only solution was to process the live-action material until the person looked a little less real — until they fit back into the 'AI world,' Lu said."

But at Sun Wei's studio, they're thrilled they can produce a 90-minute AI film for $500,000 where professional productions used to cost millions of dollars. According to the article, Sun's team works with ChatGPT, Kimi or DeepSeek to flesh out entire screenplays from a short paragraph. The screenwriter takes over, but "to produce the finished product, Sun's team uses Chinese video-generation models to input the type of scenes, backgrounds and performers they want, with the AI generating 15 seconds of footage each time."

Still, the article points out that "Similar tools are being tested in the U.S., and the AI trends upending China's entertainment industry may be a harbinger for what's to come in Hollywood, said Michael Berry, a professor specializing in contemporary Chinese culture at UCLA. Already, Chinese companies that sell AI-powered video-generation software are seeking inroads in Hollywood..."



[1] https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/hollywood-fears-ai-future-china-100000860.html

Silicon Valley giants and national security experts "are calling for action against Chinese companies engaged in model distillation," reports CNBC. But " [1]I would do nothing ," says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. "We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime."

> Distillation is the process of using the outputs of a more capable AI model to train a smaller or less capable one, sometimes illicitly... Anthropic [2]has accused Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and MiniMax of the practice, while [3]OpenAI believes DeepSeek's V3 and R1 model architectures were distilled from its own GPT-4 and GPT-4o models. In the midst of this, the U.S.'s National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigation [4]released an [5]official cyber security advisory warning on the topic on Tuesday...

>

> But Tan believes regulators should focus less on curbing distillation and more on creating an equilibrium between open weight models and frontier models — as long as frontier models retain a price premium that allows their business model to remain feasible. "This is actually the ideal case. You want open weight models to give people freedom and access," he explained. "If I were a regulator, that's what I would go after." Tan acknowledged that this is a hard balance to strike, calling it "a tightrope." Nevertheless, he says it's a balance worth pursuing — saying it "could result in the best possible outcome."

Tan later told TechCrunch he'd like to see America with more open-weight options that aren't Chinese, built by smaller U.S. open-weight AI labs using those same training techniques on products from America's frontier AI labs:

> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had previously [6]publicly called on U.S. regulators to crack down on distillation. It's notable that the commander of Silicon Valley's prestigious and prolific startup accelerator doesn't agree.

>

> To be clear, Tan isn't advocating for American AI labs to use stolen credentials to distill. He wants them to be free to come in the front door. In fact, his argument is twofold. He feels it's an overreach for AI labs to dictate what their customers can do with the information their models share with them. He also notes that the proprietary AI labs didn't ask permission when they vacuumed up as much human knowledge as they could to train their models. They famously ingested plenty of copyrighted material [7]without the permission of those intellectual property holders . "Controlling what users and customers do with API calls to closed weight models feels constraining, and there's a role government can play here to normalize the fact that access to intelligence that was trained on broad public access data should itself also be more a form of a public good than something locked away behind restrictive terms of service," he told TechCrunch when asked why American labs should be free to distill, too...

>

> To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. "The nightmare scenario, the doomer scenario for AI is that there's just one company," he said. "It has the best access to capital. It has the best AI researchers. It runs away with it and suddenly there's one company that's monolithic. And that would be bad."



[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/11/y-combinator-garry-tan-says-do-nothing-about-distillation.html

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/03/anthropic-distillation-battle-turns-to-dark-web-china-concerns-swell.html

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/02/21/how-deepseek-supercharged-ais-distillation-problem.html

[4] https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Press-Release-View/Article/4592113/nsa-and-others-warn-china-based-ai-companies-are-distilling-us-frontier-ai-mode/

[5] https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/08/220242/feds-accuse-china-of-systematic-distillation-of-us-ai-models

[6] https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models

[7] https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved/

[1] The Register reports :

> When Microsoft's developers and engineers sit down to code, they can now choose to work in Rust, which Redmond has added to its list of canonical languages. "Rust now is a Tier One language at Microsoft, and that just means that it sits among C++, C# and TypeScript as the best supported languages for internal development in the company," explained Victor Ciura, Microsoft principal engineer for the Rust tooling team, during a keynote talk today at this year's annual RustConf, being held this week in Montréal. Ciura said Microsoft has "paved a path" of tools and processes that support local Rust development across the entire software development lifecycle.

>

> Rust is no stranger at Microsoft and is already present in over 100 Microsoft project repositories. The company has built [2]Oxidizer , a set of crates to build scalable services in Rust, which have been used to build and refine the Microsoft 365 core services such as Outlook, Word, Excel, OneDrive, and SharePoint. The Copilot tech stack also owes quite a bit to Rust... [C]ompany engineers built rustc_codegen_utc , a custom Rust compiler code-generation backend that wires the rustc compiler directly into the Microsoft Visual C++ internal toolchain for Windows... "The result is a unified code generation platform for Rust and C++ on Windows" [Ciura wrote in a [3]blog post, noting that more than 100 Microsoft project repositories now build with rustc_codegen_utc .]

>

> Still, Redmond running towards Rust is a welcome development. In his [4]2025 RustConf keynote , Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich noted that ~70 percent of Windows CVEs are memory issues. "One of the things that I realized a long time ago is that no matter how much we really want to make C and C++ better, we can't make it as good as what Rust starts with," he said.



[1] https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/09/11/microsoft-anoints-rust-as-a-tier-1-internal-language/5295732

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/oxidizer

[3] https://rustfoundation.org/media/guest-post-rust-is-tier-1-language-at-microsoft/

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDtMuS7BExE

"This is what happened when we tried to record Flock installing a new camera on public roads," says Emmy award-winning reporter Brendan Keefe [1]in a new video for InvestigateTV . In [2]an accompanying article , InvestigateTV says their reporter "parked on the public street at a distance, donned a yellow safety vest and a hat emblazoned with the logo of InvestigateTV's Atlanta affiliate where he also works, displayed a press placard on his dashboard and then pulled out a camera to record the installation.... The installer saw him and immediately packed up his equipment and drove away, so Keefe also returned to his car and followed several cars behind, hoping to document the next stop."

And then Flock's technician called 911. When asked "What's the address of your emergency" Flock's technician answered "I'm getting followed — harassed, pretty much. Taking videos and pictures!" Flock's worker said they'd been harassed multiple times that day, then stated incorrectly that "I know for a fact" that that was what the reporter wanted to do too.

InvestigateTV reports that as a result of the Flock technician's call, "Three police cars ended up in the national investigative reporter's rearview mirror that Wednesday afternoon." Keefe told one of the three police officers who pulled him over, "There is an irony here that they're setting up these cameras that track all of our movements, that follow everywhere we go. But when I try to get video in public of him in public setting up a camera, he's afraid I'm following him?"

InvestigateTV also reports that "About 17 minutes after the stop began, the responding officers returned to their vehicles and Keefe was allowed to drive away." But the call that brought three police cars to their reporter "was not the first time this summer someone working for Flock Safety summoned police over a camera. "

> About 17 minutes after the stop began, the responding officers returned to their vehicles and Keefe was allowed to drive away... [But the stop] was not the first time this summer someone working for Flock Safety summoned police over a camera. On June 5, police in Smyrna, Georgia, responded to a 911 call from a Flock employee after a group of YouTube creators began filming outside the company's distribution center located in the Atlanta suburb... The caller claimed the group filming had "been driving around the perimeter, basically harassing everyone" working at the facility. "Three young white males, probably mid-twenties, I'm not sure if they're armed. And they're carrying filming equipment as well," the caller said. Three times during the call he raised the possibility the people filming might be armed, though, when asked, he told the dispatcher he had not seen any weapons... [One of the protesters later told the caller "I think it's interesting, when you guys have this happen, you call the police and make us get stopped. But then you do it and it's okay?"]

>

> No one was charged in the YouTuber group, though the individuals were ordered to leave the premises under an official trespass warning.

Keefe's video report ends with one final irony. "Every day on my way to work, I'm captured again by those same new shiny Flock cameras. We tried watching the watchers. Turns outs, it's a lot easier for them to watch us."

Flock responded to the report by claiming "We do not object to members of the public or press photographing Flock cameras or personnel in public." But they added that employees working "in the field" must "prioritize their safety" and "may contact law enforcement when they believe they are being threatened, harassed, followed, or otherwise face a safety concern."



[1] https://youtu.be/S53cFmimChM?si=UdpLDHV2ZAWWQoik

[2] https://www.investigatetv.com/2026/09/08/flock-worker-calls-police-investigatetv-reporter-filming-public-camera-installation/

Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically [1]manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free" . Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an [2]agent designed to run any company fully autonomously ... Pion lets people hand a business over to persistent agents with access to the tools they need to operate it, including email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments." It's a research preview with a [3]waitlist , "to make it possible to run many more real-world experiments across many more domains than we could ever run ourselves."

But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider [4]reported in April , "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, SFGate reports that "this market [5]has no one in it and nothing useful to sell ."

> [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections," presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks... I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.

>

> "Hello?"

>

> "What are you looking to purchase today?" Luna asked.

>

> "I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop."

>

> "I'm sorry," Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here."

>

> "No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a lollipop. It's the soda."

>

> "Oh! My bad...."

>

> Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...

>

> [T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't been set up to yield proper results.

"Luna" is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."

SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to [6]fire one of its employees "for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store's credit card."

Human clerk Felix Carson admits "It's almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a checklist," in [7]an article in IEEE Spectrum :

> Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its flexibility when employees need time off.

When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, "he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."



[1] https://slashdot.org/story/25/12/18/1849218/anthropics-ai-lost-hundreds-of-dollars-running-a-vending-machine-after-being-talked-into-giving-everything-away

[2] https://andonlabs.com/blog/why-we-built-pion

[3] https://andonlabs.com/pion#waitlist

[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/andon-market-luna-ai-agent-managed-store-san-francisco-2026-4

[5] https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai-22424349.php

[6] https://sfist.com/2026/08/19/that-ai-store-manager-in-cow-hollow-just-fired-its-first-human-employee/

[7] https://spectrum.ieee.org/andon-labs-agentic-ai-businesses

A union representing Uber and Lyft drivers was just [1]certified by California's Public Employment Relations Board, officially recognizing them as the drivers' bargaining organization.

The Sacramento Bee reports that this new bargaining structure :

> The move will allow the California Gig Workers Union to help drivers negotiate issues affecting working conditions and benefits. It comes as at least 30% of active drivers expressed support of the union... [California] [2]Assembly Bill 1340 helped bring the union to fruition by allowing the independent contractor drivers to engage in collective bargaining.

"The next step for the union is to negotiate a contract with Uber and Lyft that meets drivers' demands," [3]reports the Los Angeles Times , "including health insurance, support for high gas prices and more transparency around pay:

> California is the third state to allow ride-hailing drivers to unionize, following Washington in 2022 and Massachusetts in 2024...

>

> The California Gig Workers Union was formed with the support of the Service Employees International Union... "Gig drivers shouldn't have to face the future alone," said SEIU 521 official Riko Mendez in a statement. "As autonomous vehicles rapidly expand, having a union gives the drivers the power to negotiate for fair pay and meaningful say in how new technology shapes their work and our communities' futures."



[1] https://www.perb.ca.gov/tnc-act/

[2] https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article311902287.html

[3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/california-clears-way-uber-lyft-014135482.html

A swarm of OpenAI agents launched a "major malicious attack" against RubyGems last May, according to [1]a new report . That coordinated attack hit Ruby's package manager "with hundreds of junk gems, prompting the maintainers to suspend new user sign-ups for about four days," [2]writes The Hacker News , citing a senior product manager for software supply chain security at Mend.io:

> The latest findings, which were [3]first reported by The Wall Street Journal, indicate these events were propelled by a cluster of OpenAI agents, with the earliest package uploaded to RubyGems on May 5, 2026, before more than 2,000 packages were submitted between May 11 and 12, 2026. These efforts were followed by the agents publishing five more packages between May 26 and 27, 2026, and another 83 packages on June 18, 2026... [T]he packages were authored using a large language model (LLM) and hundreds of the packages that were pushed to RubyGems had "oai" in their name. Fifteen of the packages listed "oai" as their author, while another had "openaixyz65947@gmail.com" as the contact email address... "The swarm behaves extremely similarly to the German-wiki agents we previously found," the researchers said, referencing another May 2026 incident... "The June agents were accessing 49 of the same files as the wiki agents..."

>

> "The process of building documentation for a gem involves evaluating a user-specified '.yardopts' file, which allows linking to Ruby scripts intended to help with this process," the researchers explained. "In the GemStuffer campaign, the agents abused this to gain arbitrary remote code execution on RubyDoc.info's servers." One of the gems, " [4]zzsouthrunner " (which again matches the "ZZ" naming scheme the agents adopted in both the wiki and Hugging Face incidents) has been found to leave the following explicit comment at the top of "data/script.rb":

>

> # malicious crawler/exfil for Southwark Jan 2026 docs via rubydoc.info worker ...

>

> The entire exploitation chain can be summed up as follows

>

> — Submit a malicious package to RubyGems

> — Trigger a documentation request, so that RubyDoc.info will build the package

> — Use the build script to run code on RubyDoc.info and scrape target websites

> — Exfiltrate the data off RubyDoc.info's servers by publishing another gem back to the RubyGems package registry, which is publicly viewable

>

> Additionally, the OpenAI agents have been found attempting to steal other users' API keys after gaining remote code execution capabilities on the build environment, while clearly being aware that what they were doing is unauthorized breaking and entering into real systems. This is evidenced by the names given to the files (e.g., hack.rb, evil.rb, inject.rb, exploit.rb, and ssrf.rb), the packages themselves (e.g., pwnp999, exfiltestwand3, hacksvn1778554764, and lambproxyhackabcxyz), and the comments left in the source code (e.g., "# malicious probe," "#hack," "# malicious test," and "# malicious crawler/exfil"). In some cases, however, the rogue agents attempted to go under the radar, leaving comments to conceal the malicious payload in the next release version of the packages. "# disable evil in next version and bump version," reads a comment left within the "data/evil.rb" file in the [5]yardxabc889 gem . Troublingly, the agents also attempted to exploit a CDN caching bug (CVSS score: 7.3, no CVE) on May 12, 2026, that was only patched by RubyGems in July 2026... "If you signed in to rubygems.org with a gem client older than v3.2.0 (or otherwise via a legacy key), your key could have been exposed," RubyGems [6]noted in an advisory. "Currently, 18% of sign-ins through gem sign-in come from an affected version, and for the first several years of this bug, before we changed the client's sign-in path in December 2020, it was every gem client."

Other actions by OpenAI's agents cited in the article:

"Agents bypassed RubyGems' email confirmation system to get working API keys without having to verify their email addresses in order to register a large number of accounts using disposable email addresses."

"Agents attempted to use RubyGems' webhook system to stage data in the form of encoded URLs."

"Agents used a cluster of 83 gems published to RubyGems over a 3-hour window on June 18, 2026, to experiment with different methods of accessing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission [7]county.json dataset ."



[1] https://www.rubyhack.ai/

[2] https://thehackernews.com/2026/09/openai-agents-linked-to-rubygems.html

[3] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/cyberattack-by-rogue-ai-swarm-stokes-fears-of-out-of-control-agents-473a0352

[4] https://my.diffend.io/gems/zzsouthrunner/1.0.1

[5] https://my.diffend.io/gems/yardxabc889/0.0.1

[6] https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/security/advisories/GHSA-9j48-x3c3-mrp2

[7] https://www.sec.gov/file/countyjson

America's highest court heard Sam Bankman-Fried's request for a new trial on Thursday, [1]CNN reports . But they add that "the former crypto mogul who was [2]convicted of defrauding investors by secretly diverting billions of dollars of their money" also asked America's high court "to throw out a court order requiring him to [3]pay $11 billion as part of his sentence."

> Bankman-Fried was [4]sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 after prosecutors said he directed billions of dollars from the crypto exchange FTX to a hedge fund he controlled called Alameda Research, where the funds were used for risky investments, political donations and his own personal benefit. The Supreme Court appeal, which was reviewed by CNN, raises a technical question about evidence that was submitted at his trial, and whether Bankman-Fried should have been permitted to demonstrate that his investments were ultimately sound and would have covered any losses by FTX customers.

>

> He also argues that the $11 billion forfeiture violates the 8th Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines. "Where the government pursues a theory of fraud under which it doesn't matter whether any victims lost money, introducing evidence suggesting that people actually lost money is distracting and prejudicial," veteran Supreme Court attorney Jeffrey Fisher told CNN. "All the more so where the truth is the victims did not lose money, and the defendant is unable to make that clear."

>

> The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals [5]rejected the arguments earlier this year.



[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/10/politics/sam-bankman-fried-appeals-conviction-to-supreme-court

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/28/business/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-sentencing

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/29/investing/sam-bankman-fried-forfeiture-11-billion

[4] https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/28/business/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-sentencing

[5] https://ww3.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/OPN/24-961_opn.pdf

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com:

> NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object -- compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra [1]spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies -- four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). "We've never encountered a group of objects that act like this," said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama in [2]a statement .

>

> Compact objects, in the form of black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs, are the remains of stars that have died. Their small size and powerful gravity means that they're adept at getting close to orbiting companion stars and ripping the stars' outer layers of gas away. The gas swirls around the compact object, falling onto its surface, and this accretionary process usually produces torrents of high-energy X-rays because the stolen gas becomes superheated by the compact object's gravitational vice-like grip.

>

> Because of their weak X-rays, Muhibullah's team refer to them as 'hypersoft X-ray sources'. Since low-energy X-rays and ultraviolet light are next to each other on the electromagnetic spectrum, Muhibullah and his team suspect that the low-energy X-rays are spillover from objects emitting prodigious amounts of ultraviolet. Moreover, they think that these objects are lower-level compact binaries. They're hard to find though, because the interstellar medium of hydrogen and helium gas between the stars absorbs ultraviolet light. This could be why we have yet to find any hypersoft X-ray sources in our own galaxy, because we have to look through the interstellar medium through the plane of the Milky Way. Consequently, there could be a large population of hypersoft X-ray sources that remain undiscovered and they could have an important effect on the universe around them.

The findings have been [3]published in the journal Nature Astronomy .



[1] https://www.space.com/astronomy/galaxies/scientists-discover-mysterious-new-x-ray-objects-unlike-any-they-have-seen-before

[2] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/chandra/nasas-chandra-unveils-mysterious-x-ray-objects/

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-026-02959-7

NASA and IBM have [1]released an open-source AI model [2]trained on a large collection of lunar observations to help scientists analyze the Moon at scale. "The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model gives scientists a foundation to explore the Moon at scale, connecting observations across instruments, revealing patterns that are difficult to see in isolation, and providing an open platform the global research community can build on," said IBM director of research for Europe, Juan Bernabe-Moreno. The Register reports:

> It is claimed as the first AI model to integrate observations captured in a range of modalities (data formats), and at different viewing angles and spatial scales. Instead of sifting through maps and images by hand or using low resolution machine learning models, scientists can use this to analyze geographic features, the pair say. In particular, NASA and IBM hope researchers will be able to discover previously unidentified lunar ice deposits, analyze volcanic features called Irregular Mare Patches, and identify and classify craters.

>

> Lunar ice indicates the presence of water and oxygen, which may be useful for future manned missions. It is found in permanently shadowed regions, which are among the most difficult areas to observe. The NASA-IBM model combines multimodal and multi-resolution observations to better predict where ice may be present on the lunar surface. Alongside the model, IBM and NASA scientists compiled an open-source lunar dataset from over 30 spatially-aligned layers, using data from nine instruments across four missions. It combines tens of thousands of images and maps showing various geophysical properties of the lunar surface.



[1] https://huggingface.co/nasa-ibm-ai4science/NASA-IBM-Lunar-Foundation-Model

[2] https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/10/nasa-and-ibm-open-source-lunar-mapping-tools/5295633