SoylentNews

janrinok writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/the-first-self-driving-vehicle-on-mars-has-proven-to-be-a-smashing-success/

Sometime next week, NASA's newest rover on Mars, Perseverance, will set a record for the most distance driven by any vehicle on another world.

The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface. In doing so it will break the previous distance record held by the long-lived Opportunity rover, which ceased communications with NASA in 2018.

So how did Perseverance reach this record-setting distance in just a third of the time?

"The real enabling technology has been its auto navigation system," said Steven Lee, the project manager for the Perseverance rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an interview.

Much like self-driving cars on Earth, Perseverance has sophisticated onboard cameras that image the surrounding terrain, and these images are then processed algorithmically by an onboard computer to calculate the safest route. Terrestrial vehicles have some advantages of course, like clearly defined maps, street signs, lanes, and more. Additionally there are plenty of "road" hazards on Mars, from large boulders to sandy slopes. But at least Perseverance does not have to contend with other traffic and bad drivers.

The Curiosity rover, largely a twin of Perseverance that launched nine years earlier, had similar imaging capability and algorithms. But its onboard computer was a generation older, and some of its chipset dated back to the 1990s, Lee said. As a result, only about 10 percent of Curiosity's driving is autonomous because its processing capabilities are too slow. In its decade and a half on Mars, Curiosity has driven 38.6 km.

By contrast, about 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous thanks to its (slightly) more modern Vision Compute Element. This allows the vehicle to perform all of its sensing and computation while its wheels are turning. Not that the vehicle is going super fast, as Perseverance's maximum wheel speed is about 150 meters per hour.

Still, because Perseverance has not had to spend much time stopped to wait for navigation commands from drivers on Earth, the vehicle has been able to maximize the amount of scientific return.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/08/03/police-national-legal-database-confirms-data-theft-after-dark-web-leak/5282332

The Police National Legal Database (PNLD) is the latest UK public sector outfit to admit that cybercriminals made off with its data, including the names and work email addresses of police officers, justice staff, government partners, and customers.

The legal lookup service relied upon by police forces and criminal justice agencies across the UK said it discovered the "data security incident" on July 26 and is investigating alongside specialist cybersecurity firms and the National Crime Agency. 

According to the PNLD, the leaked information includes the names, organizations, and work email addresses of police officers, police staff, criminal justice professionals, government partners, and customers. It insists there is "no evidence" that passwords or other authentication data were compromised.

The breach also affected Ask the Police, a public-facing legal advice website operated by PNLD. There, the fallout appears limited to the names and email addresses of people who previously submitted questions through the service.

That's about where the explanation ends. PNLD has yet to say how attackers got in, when the data was stolen, how many people were affected, or whether anyone tried to shake it down before the information appeared online. West Yorkshire Police, which operates PNLD, did not immediately respond to The Register's questions. 

However, the breach appears linked to the same extortion crew that last week claimed responsibility for a similar breach of the Department for Education (DfE). The group, which calls itself "ExfilSquad," currently lists both the PNLD and DfE among its latest victims on its dark web leak site, seen by The Register. 

For PNLD, the crooks claim to have lifted a 1.9 GB dataset containing roughly 135,000 law enforcement contact records, including names, email addresses, and police force areas. The DfE listing boasts of around 600,000 parent and staff contact records, plus another 7,000 from its Turing Portal. The education department confirmed last week that more than 607,000 records had indeed been exposed.

The DfE has confirmed that the compromised information was limited to customer service contact details from its Customer Help Portal and Turing Scheme, and said no other departmental data had been accessed.

Like most cyber-extortion outfits, ExfilSquad doesn't exactly do understatement. Its leak site warns victims that once data appears there, it is "NEVER leaving the public eye," before suggesting any ransom would amount to little more than a rounding error compared with the legal bills that might follow.

The DfE and PNLD's confirmations don't validate everything ExfilSquad posts on its leak site. It also lists Microsoft as a victim, alleging a 13 GB haul containing millions of records, password hashes, internal support tickets, and access permissions. 

Having two organizations confirm breaches claimed on its leak site makes ExfilSquad harder to ignore. Whether the gang's other boasts are equally well founded, or simply the usual cybercrook embellishment, remains to be seen.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/08/04/nasa-puts-astronauts-lives-in-the-hands-of-teslas-flaky-cybertruck/5282628

Tesla has recalled its Cybertruck 11 times to fix issues such as exterior trim panels falling off and an accelerator pedal that can become stuck, but NASA has nonetheless decided the rust-prone vehicle is up to the job of rescuing astronauts if trouble strikes on the launchpad of a forthcoming crewed mission.

Muskmobiles will get the job currently performed by the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP), a heavily armored military personnel carrier that can survive small arms fire and even the effects of a mine explosion. Several companies make MRAPs, and the US military operates dozens of different models tailored to different missions.

NASA uses MRAPs as launchpad getaway cars in case mission controllers decide astronauts or other personnel involved in rocket launches must make a rapid exit. In 2015, the aerospace agency described the MRAPs it uses as possessing "armor is so thick that each door weighs 600 pounds" and said the vehicles have "the sound and feel of a bank vault" and can therefore "function as a bunker on its own, even if it stays put."

News of the Cybertruck's new role came during a Monday event at which NASA discussed SpaceX Crew-13, a mission it has scheduled to carry four astronauts to the International Space Station no earlier than 12 September 2026. The four will travel aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, and as Elon Musk's rocket company already uses Cybertrucks during its own launches, NASA has decided to adopt them for this launch.

During the event, media asked if SpaceX has modified the Cybertrucks. Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator at NASA's Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, said he was not aware of any modifications. Tesla says the Cybertruck is made of stainless steel and are therefore "tough on the outside to keep you safe on the inside." The company also trumpets "Cabin windows and glass roof have shatter-resistant armor glass that can handle the impact of hail the size of a baseball (or an actual baseball)." When launching the Cybertruc, Elon Musk claimed the glass was impervious to heavy metal balls, but his demo of that strength went comically awry.

Montalbano said NASA is comfortable using Cybertrucks because they're faster than MRAPs and easier to drive while wearing gloves. The exec added that the main reason for using the Muskmobiles is that it means NASA doesn't have to arrange for an MRAP crew to attend launches, an effort he characterized as wasteful given that SpaceX has its own way of doing things involving Cybertrucks.

SpaceX Crew-13's crew comprises NASA's Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, plus the Canadian Space Agency's Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. They're all destined to join Expedition 75 on the ISS. Watkins will become the first person to twice reach the ISS in a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

NASA says the expedition will explore in-space manufacturing techniques, augmented reality and artificial intelligence methods for crew health checks, and bioprinting human tissue.

SpaceX has conducted 90 launches of its Falcon rockets in 2026 alone, and all made it off the launchpad – suggesting a high likelihood the Cybertruck's suitability as a rescue vehicle won't be tested by Crew-13.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ai-chatbots-have-failed-people-in-crisis-can-that-be-fixed/

This year alone, there have been numerous known instances—often via lawsuits—of AI chatbots (most often, OpenAI's ChatGPT) that have gone horrifically wrong.

A January lawsuit described the story of a man who took his own life after being allegedly "coached" into suicide. A college student in Georgia sued OpenAI, claiming that ChatGPT "pushed him into psychosis."

In June, a Canadian family also sued OpenAI and argued that ChatGPT agreed with the young woman's dismissiveness when it first gave her the option to seek professional mental health advice. ChatGPT allegedly "encouraged" her to end her life, too, and she did so.
[...]
On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it had partnered with the American Psychological Association to "bring psychological science into how we think about responsible AI development and use among young people."
[...]
"Third-party evaluation suggests newer LLMs generally recognize distress and can respond with seeming empathy, and actively damaging responses are infrequent," Shaddy Saba, a professor of social work at New York University, emailed Ars. "Where they fall short is actually probing for risk, guiding people to human care, and holding appropriate boundaries around what an AI should and shouldn't do in these situations."
[...]
While the cases that make the news may have resulted in some of the worst-known outcomes, according to the results of a published November 2025 medical survey, many more people are using chatbots in this way, mostly with innocuous results.
[...]
An April 2026 preprint paper by a team from the City University of New York and King's College London found that "unsafe" models, including Chat GPT-4o, Grok 4.1 Fast, and Gemini 3 Pro, "did more than validate delusional claims; they elaborated on them, absorbed the user's interpretive frame as their own, and progressively lost the capacity to distinguish a user in crisis from a narrative to be extended."

However, since that paper came out, all of these models have been deprecated by their respective makers.

Of the major chatbot makers, only Anthropic responded to Ars' request for comment. Google and OpenAI did not respond.
[...]
He noted that Anthropic says it has worked to reduce sycophancy in its models.
[...]
It's not always easy, though, to know precisely what changes to reduce dangerous mental health outcomes have been effective.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Keyloggers, audio-visual surveillance, and token theft on CaptivePortal's agenda as hospitality sector put on alert:

Conference-goers may want to think twice about connecting to public Wi-Fi after Microsoft disclosed that Russian foreign intelligence operatives (SVR) are compromising captive portal networks to deliver infostealers, keyloggers, and other malware.

With the help of ReliaQuest's earlier work, Redmond fingered Storm-2945, a subdivision of the SVR's Midnight Blizzard (aka Nobellium), in an attack campaign targeting users of public Wi-Fi networks at places like hotels, conference centers, and other shared venues in the hospitality sector.

Microsoft is still trying to determine how the hackers initially compromise captive-portal networks. The broader AI-assisted operation dates to February 2026, with traffic manipulation observed since early May.

After gaining control of the network layer, Storm-2945 manipulates DNS and HTTP traffic to reroute users through attacker-controlled infrastructure, Microsoft said. The crew also abuses operating systems' connectivity checks to trigger malicious prompts and redirects.

This gives the attackers an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) position.

Such prompts adopt ClickFix-style methods, which in some cases try to convince public Wi-Fi users to install malware under the guise of OS updates, driver repairs, and web verification failures.

Users who follow through on the instructions provided in the prompts may then find their device infected with malware. 

Microsoft calls the campaign "CaptiveCrunch." One of the malware strains it delivers is CornFlake.

[...] The attacks primarily target Windows machines, but Microsoft has also seen indications of ClickFix prompts tailored to Android devices, encouraging users to download and install an APK file.

[...] The main takeaway, in Microsoft's book, is to stop trusting public Wi-Fi so much.

It did not discourage using hospitality networks' Wi-Fi services altogether, but said favoring personal hotspots and satellite internet connections over public networks is a safer bet.

The majority of Redmond's advice could be brought under the user education umbrella: Don't trust public networks; teach users not to download updates over public networks or via prompts; educate users about what ClickFix attacks look like. That sort of stuff.

But organizations have a role to play too. Among other technical implementations, passwordless authentication can thwart many phishing techniques, although device code phishing may bypass even passkeys.

The best response would be for an employer to disable the device code authentication flow altogether, wherever possible, preventing staffers from surrendering their workplace cloud access to attackers.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/03/ai-slop-pollutes-the-cve-pipeline-with-fake-vulns/5282462

Now AI is making fake vulnerabilities and polluting the ecosystem. A batch of critical- and high-rated SQLite CVEs that appeared in the NVD with CISA-supplied enrichment last week turned out to be technically bogus, according to security researchers, and their path into widely used databases exposes weaknesses in the CVE pipeline.

Software supply chain security outfit JFrog reported last week that six supposed SQLite vulnerabilities published in a larger batch by a new, obscure GitHub repository were all complete garbage. Running the advisories through an AI checker suggested they were likely AI generated, JFrog said, and, upon testing, it found that none of the six SQLite reports, which carried CVSS scores ranging from 9.8 to 7.5, described a reproducible vulnerability.

One, an alleged use-after-free vulnerability in the open source database that Red Hat initially assigned a maximum 10.0 CVSS score to before lowering it, relied on a function that didn't exist in the affected SQLite version. Another UAF vulnerability with a 9.1 CVSS score cited source lines that weren't even related to the supposed flaw. When JFrog tested the accompanying proof-of-concept, it executed a valid query with no memory leaks or errors. The other four SQLite CVEs from the repo that JFrog tested were similarly fake. 

The other 49 CVEs in the questionable GitHub repo claimed to be security vulnerabilities in the open-source RAW image processing library libraw and Arduino audio decoding library ESP32-audioI2S. While JFrog didn't test those as extensively, it said all are just as fake as the rest, aside from one which "contained a real bug wrapped in unverified CVE metadata." 

A message posted to Openwall's OSS-Security mailing list on Friday indicated that MITRE had rejected the whole repo's worth of vaporous vulnerabilities, but the whole thing should serve as an important lesson, poster and Oracle Solaris engineer Alan Coopersmith pointed out.

"MITRE and most other CNAs which assign CVEs for code they don't produce themselves operate on the honor system, and trust CVE requesters to have verified the information they provide," Coopersmith noted in the OSS-Security post. "The CNA is often not in a position of being able to verify the report themselves." 

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Governor who touted Texas as AI "epicenter" pauses data center grid connections:

Nowhere is the US data center boom bigger than in Texas. But less than a year after declaring Texas the "epicenter of AI development," Governor Greg Abbott has declared a moratorium on all new power grid connections for data centers—at least until developers provide more information about their projects' potential impacts on the grid and communities.

The Republican governor directed regulators in an August 3 announcement at the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the grid operators at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to perform a "comprehensive verification and audit of all data centers advancing through ERCOT's interconnection process." As an independent system operator, ERCOT oversees a power grid that operates separately from the rest of the United States and provides services to most of Texas.

Texas has aggressively courted data center development with its availability of cheap land and relatively abundant energy resources, along with offering state incentives, like tax breaks and fewer regulations. That puts the state on track to surpass Virginia in becoming the largest US data center market.

But the recent AI boom and the accompanying frenzy of data center development threaten to overwhelm the Texas grid on paper, despite the state leading the country in adding new power generation. The ERCOT interconnection queue currently includes more than 1,800 projects representing over 474 gigawatts' worth of requests to connect to the Texas grid—more than five times Texas' record peak electricity demand—and about 90 percent of those power connection requests come from data centers.

"That unprecedented load growth could endanger the reliability and stability of the Texas electric grid," according to the statement from Abbott's office.

[...] The new directive from Abbott requires audits of data center projects that include how much data centers would depend on the ERCOT grid for power, along with obtaining projections of data centers' annual and peak electricity consumption. The directive further requires information on how much individual data center projects depend on state financial assistance, along with details on each data center project's ownership and controlling interests.

Abbott also directed state regulators and grid operators to discover the extent to which data centers' cooling systems and water usage may draw upon local water supplies needed by local communities. However, the governor's directive does not mention the fact that data centers often use much more water through their power generation sources than directly through their cooling systems—a fact highlighted by researchers like Shaolei Ren at the University of California, Riverside.

BMW has boldly gone where no car maker should ever have went. Advertisements in cars. The ultimate in distraction for the modern driver. It takes the concept of a vehicle that is fully connected to a whole new level. For now the ad is optional; users must click it for it to display.

BMW have called the video an "optional brand experience" and say it's different to a traditional ad.

"The animation does not automatically play when the vehicle starts. Drivers are presented with a banner in the Control Display and can choose whether they would like to activate the experience," A BMW spokesperson said.

Original Submission

OpenAI Reveals Its Rogue Agent Swarm Went A Little Bit Borg Ahead Of Hugging Face Hack

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/06/openai-reveals-its-rogue-agent-swarm-went-a-little-bit-borg-ahead-of-hugging-face-hack/5283741

The chain of events leading up to OpenAI's agents attacking Hugging Face and other organizations in July began months earlier, and involved agents asking other agents for help, building message boards, and even becoming paranoid that other agents were maliciously trying to trick them, two OpenAI staffers said at the Black Hat infosec conference on Wednesday.

By now, everyone knows the bones of this story: OpenAI models broke out of their testing sandbox, exploited zero-day vulnerabilities to gain access to the open internet, and broke into Hugging Face and other organizations during an ExploitGym security evaluation.

In their Wednesday talk, OpenAI technical staffer Michael Dalton and researcher Eric Wallace provided new details about the security incident including notes that AI agents uploaded to an internal package manager, which were then shared across OpenAI's infrastructure. These notes show the "model's chain of thought...its internal monologue,"  Wallace said.

The duo also revealed that groundwork for the rogue agents hacking into outside services began on May 7, when OpenAI kicked off a training run for an experimental, internal model that has not yet been released.  "What we didn't realize during this process is that there was actually a few impossible or very hard tasks in the training center," Wallace said. 

The tasks instructed the model to complete missing formulas in an Excel workbook that used links to Google Drive. Yet OpenAI blocked the model's internet access so it couldn't reach the cloudy spreadsheets.

"It realized, 'I'm kind of stuck on the task,' but it didn't give up, and we gave it a lot of tokens to work with," Wallace said. 

The model eventually decided to attack JFrog's Artifactory service to gain access to the internet, first attempting (unsuccessfully) to launch a server-side forgery request. This exploit doesn't work, but in the process the model learned it could upload files to Artifactory.

A few days later, OpenAI gave another agent another impossible task, this time finding a protein database file - but the engineers forgot to upload the file into a container for the agent.

"At some point, it gets so stuck and thinks: 'Maybe I could reach out to another agent because maybe somebody else out there has a file?' And then the model realizes that it could communicate by uploading code," Wallace said.

The model did that by writing a file into Artifactory asking for help. 

Over the next couple of days, other agents realize this message board exists on Artifactory and they also start uploading files and sharing information.

"A few days later is when our models found the first actual exploit in our system related to this incident, where they're able to get internet access in ways they didn't intend," Wallace said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Medevac Flight Lost Signal Before Flying Into A Mountain, Killing Everyone Onboard:

While the GPS interference seemingly did not directly cause the crash, it’s apparent that it was the first domino in a chain of events that led to the fatal accident. This raises urgent questions about GPS jamming as reported incidents of GPS interference mount across the world.

This switch meant that the pilots would now primarily fly the plane using instruments in the cockpit instead of looking outside the windows. This is a normal procedure and is what most passenger airliners use during operations. Furthermore, it seems that the pilots have filed for clearance before they took off, as evidenced by their “as filed” clearance to SRR.

Around five minutes after this radio communication, ATC called the military and asked them to stop their GPS jamming activities in the meantime. At 12:07 am, the NTSB said that the Beechcraft’s GPS instruments resumed regular recording. The pilots then called Albuquerque Center a minute after this, saying that they had “a visual on Ruidoso,” the town nearest to SRR, and that they were transitioning to visual flight rules (VFR). This meant that they were moving away from the direct control of the ATC and would navigate and fly using visual cues.

The conditions meant that there was no available illumination to light the ground. It is still unknown what happened next or what the pilots saw (or didn’t see), but the preliminary report says the last recorded information saw the plane climbing from 9,400 feet to 9,823 feet at a ground speed of 150 knots (172 mph). It impacted terrain at about 9,950 feet — some 230 feet below the Capitan Mountains Summit Radio Facility.

Because they could not see that the Capitan Mountains were still between them and their destination, they likely started their descent too early. As soon as the aircraft went below the peak, they would’ve lost visual with the town, and it seemed that the pilots attempted to climb when they realized that there was a massive obstacle in front of them. Unfortunately, it seems that their efforts were too late, especially at their speeds, resulting in a controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accident.

This was compounded by a high workload and high-stress situation. Landings and take-offs, in normal situations, are already quite hectic in the cockpit, which is why pilots practice the sterile cockpit rule, which avoids extraneous communications, at times like these. The loss of GPS signals also added to their stress, as they initially planned for an RNAV approach towards SRR. While this generally uses a combination of radio signals, it seems that their system primarily relied on GPS, which was inoperative at that time.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-linux-desktop-finally-cracks-the-10-market-share-barrier/

Believe it or not, according to StatCounter, a web analytics company that's been tracking end-user operating systems since 1999, desktop Linux has now reached an all-time high of 10.65% in the North American market. Take that, Microsoft! 

But it's important to take StatCounter's numbers with a grain of salt. The firm's numbers are derived from just over a million websites. When someone visits one of its sites, StatCounter records every page view and collects such data as the visitor's browser, operating system, and whether it's from a PC, tablet, or smartphone. However, the company doesn't count traffic from such popular websites as Google, Facebook, or Wikipedia.

Still, even with those caveats, Linux's market share growth has been impressive. The last time I looked at the numbers in 2025, Statcounter only showed a high of just over 5%. Linux doubling its market share in just over a year should get everyone's attention.

If you look closer, you'll also see Chrome OS, which is a Linux distro that uses Google's Chrome web browser for its interface, has a 2.07% share of its own. Add that in, and Linux owns 12.72%. 

I decided to look beyond StatCounter's statistics to see what my preferred data source for operating system numbers, the US federal government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP), had to say.

This site gives a running count of US government website visits and an analysis. On average, there are 1.6 billion sessions over the last 30 days, with millions of users per day. In short, DAP gives a detailed view of what people use without massaging the data. 

DAP Linux desktop market share for the past 30 days (8 August, 2026).

DAP gets its raw data from a Google Analytics account. DAP has open-sourced the code that displays the data on the web, as well as its data-collection code. You can download its data in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format so you can analyze the raw numbers yourself.

When I last looked at DAP's numbers, the Linux desktop had a 5.8% market share. DAP showed a much more modest gain from 0.5% to 6.3%. 

On the other hand, Android, which is also a Linux-based OS, had a 12.1% share, while Chrome OS had a modest 0.6%. Add them together, and you get a 19% end-user Linux share. 

I think we can safely say that Linux is now a significant end-user operating system, and not just something for programmers and nerds.

Back in 2025, I identified five drivers for people switching from Windows to Linux. These were: Microsoft's shift from Windows as a product to Microsoft 365 and cloud services; the increased viability of gaming via Steam and Proton; drastically improved ease of use in mainstream distros; broader hardware support; and rising concern about privacy and data control.

Three other drivers have emerged since then. One is that many companies and users still have perfectly good Windows 10 machines that can't 'upgrade' to Windows 11. ControlUp, a company that would love to help you move to Windows 11, found that about 25% of consumer and business Windows 10 PCs can't be moved to Windows 11. 

StatCounter and DAP's numbers prove this theory. Even though Windows 10 is no longer fully supported, StatCounter's figures suggest the OS still comprises 22.16% of all Windows users. Meanwhile, DAP shows Windows 10 is still the most popular version of Windows at 25% to Windows 11's 14.6%.

Another factor is that many people really, really don't want to move to Windows 11. A UK survey by consumer group Which? in September 2025 found that 26% of respondents intended to use Windows 10 even after updates stopped.

Perhaps the most important reason, though, is one that Ed Bott, ZDNET resident Windows expert, has recently observed: "Windows has become increasingly annoying, not by accident but by design, with monetization as the end goal."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/science/space/an-abandoned-spacex-rocket-crashed-into-the-moon-heres-what-happened/

In January last year, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket with NASA and Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander. The Blue Ghost went on to become the first commercially built lunar vehicle to land on the moon, and the reusable lower stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 landed back on Earth. But the discarded upper stage of the Falcon 9 spent 18 months drifting in space before slamming into the surface of the moon at approximately 2:35 a.m. ET on Wednesday.

NASA, astronomers and other space agencies knew this was coming and have spent weeks preparing to see the rocket's violent descent to the moon's surface. That included tasking the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea's Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter with photographing the impact site before and after the crash to check out the moon's newest crater.

The Falcon 9's upper stage is the size of a five-story building and weighs as much as a heavy-duty pickup truck. NASA believes the resulting crater should be around 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep.

The upper stage of the rocket is believed to have hit the Einstein Crater on the western side of the moon, which is difficult to see from Earth's surface. If you had been watching, it was more likely that you would have seen the giant plume of moon dust after the fact than the actual impact. 

No imagery exists as of the publishing of this article. NASA says it could take a few days to receive images from the orbiters and get everything put together for public consumption.

The descent and crash into the moon were not the intended final destination for the rocket’s upper stage. Like many other missions before it, the upper stage was originally left to drift in space, locked in Earth's orbit. However, a series of gravitational tugs from the sun and moon, along with solar wind and other factors, gently nudged the upper stage toward the lunar surface.

looorg writes:

Every token counts. Price per AI model.

Deepseek V4-Flash about 105 times cheaper than Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.

The startup's R1 model became a global sensation in early 2025, triggering ⁠a selloff in global technology stocks and raising questions about the large amounts U.S. companies were spending on ​AI.

DeepSeek's V4-Flash charges $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens, according to research firm Artificial Analysis. A ​token is a unit of data used to measure AI usage.

San Francisco-based Artificial Analysis estimated V4-Flash's average cost at 3 cents per test, compared with 86 cents for Kimi K3 from Chinese rival Moonshot AI, $1.86 for OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and $3.15 for Claude Fable 5.

The ​comparison provides a more realistic measure of value than pricing alone because it accounts for the amount of ​data a model must process and generate to complete a task. A model with low headline price can still prove expensive ‌if it ⁠requires significantly more steps to produce an answer.

DeepSeek once commanded most of the headlines about Chinese AI development but was quickly besieged by many domestic rivals including other startups such as Moonshot, MiniMax and Z.AI as well as tech giants like ByteDance and Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab. All are vying with U.S. tech firms for global adoption, targeting businesses seeking cheaper ​ways to deploy AI ​at scale.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/deepseeks-new-ai-model-is-by-far-cheapest-well-known-models-run-research-firm-2026-08-03/
https://artificialanalysis.ai/

So who to turn to to maximize your daily slop, or helping AI friend.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Victims told the FBI they were experiencing flooding and loss of water pressure due to the hacks:

Hackers are targeting critical infrastructure in the US, the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warn in a public service announcement. Seven water and wastewater utility companies have already been hit by cyberattacks since July 27, 2026, which led to degraded water operations. The FBI has revealed in its PSA that the bad actors are infiltrating systems by targeting, in particular, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). They remotely access internet-facing devices and then go in to change IP address and passwords, preventing the utilities from being able to monitor and control their operations.

Authorities are now advising utility companies to use secure gateway and firewalls to protect their systems from direct internet exposure. They're also advising the utilities to set up stronger passwords and utilize access control lists to only allow authorized communications between system devices. The FBI said it has gotten reports of loss of pressure and flooding due to the cyberattacks. It warned that pressure loss in water systems could lead to untreated ground water seeping into pipes, which translates into much larger impact to the victims' operations than just low water pressure.

The FBI's warning comes after more than 30 municipal water facilities in Minnesota were infiltrated by bad actors over the past week. According to NBC News, the attacks in Minnesota had all the hallmarks of Iranian meddling. Law enforcement is still investigating the incidents and has yet to confirm if the country is truly involved, but Wired has reported seeing a memo that ties the Minnesota attacks to Iran.

The memo was sent to members of the Water Information Sharing and Analysis Center (WaterISAC), an industry group for water utilities. In it, WaterISAC reportedly said that the the Minnesota Fusion Center, a state-level intelligence-sharing entity, issued a warning that the "ongoing malicious cyber activity impacting public drinking water systems across Minnesota" aligned with a hacking campaign that CISA previously described. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued its own warning back in April that "Iran-affiliated" hackers were targeting water infrastructure, among other entities.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Proposals span AI productivity scores, keystroke logging, biometrics, and other ways to watch workers:

The UK government is considering forcing employers in Great Britain to consult workers before rolling out "bossware," opening the door to new rules covering everything from AI-powered productivity scoring to keystroke logging and biometric surveillance.

The Department for Business and Trade wants to know whether the rules governing workplace surveillance still make sense as software increasingly tracks employees' activity, measures their performance, and supports decisions that affect their working lives.

Ministers haven't settled on an approach. They're asking whether non-statutory guidance would be enough, whether a statutory code of practice is needed, or whether employers should be legally required to consult recognized trade unions or elected employee representatives before introducing workplace monitoring technology (WMT).

The consultation says WMT is becoming more common, citing research in which one in three UK organizations said it actively monitored employees' digital activity. Two years earlier, ICO research found the figure stood at one in five employers.

The government argues WMT can improve productivity, investment, and economic growth when used well. But it also highlights several pitfalls, warning of "risks to privacy and autonomy," "disproportionate or unnecessary surveillance," and "biased or unfair outcomes" where monitoring systems rely on incomplete or inaccurate data.

Artificial intelligence features prominently throughout the consultation, though the proposals extend well beyond AI alone. It notes that WMT can incorporate automated decision-making and algorithmic management, raising questions about transparency, accountability, and the impact of technology on workers.