Submission + - Cloudflare Keeps 1.1.1.1 Out of Piracy Blocking, Escapes Penalties in France (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cloudflare doesn't block pirate sports streaming sites through its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver in France, only through its CDN. The Paris Judicial Court has now accepted that stance, rejecting [French pay-TV provider] Canal+'s request for penalties of 50,000 euros per site, per day. Interestingly, the court's conclusion relies on statistics provided by Canal+ itself. [...] As a result, Cloudflare will not be penalized under these orders, even though its public DNS resolver is not blocking the sites in question. That is in line with the company’s long-standing claim that it doesn’t interfere with its DNS.

In its recent transparency reports, Cloudflare repeatedly stated that it hasn’t blocked any content through 1.1.1.1, despite orders from French and Italian courts. “To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver,” the company’s latest report reads. [...] Blocking through the CDN is another matter. According to the same report, Cloudflare geoblocked 1,238 domains in France in the second half of 2025, all under a single court order. In the first half of the year, it geoblocked 662 domains under seven orders. Cloudflare recently explained its position to the European Commission, in a submission (PDF) to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, stressing that global public DNS resolvers should not be used to block or restrict access.

Instead, it highlights its real-time pirate stream blocking program, which allows vetted rightsholders to flag pirate streams that run through its network. These streams are disrupted "within seconds," Cloudflare says, without any DNS or IP address blocking. "For live content, where speed is crucial, Cloudflare has built real-time mitigation mechanisms that allow vetted rightsholder partners to flag infringing streams. When those streams are running through our network, we act on them in seconds," Cloudflare informed the Commission. For now, Cloudflare can continue to block pirate sites through its CDN only, while its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver remains untouched. Canal+ can still appeal the rulings, so it may not be the last we hear of it.

Submission + - Microsoft îs temporarily barred from using H1-B Visas (apnews.com)

Submitted by Smonster
Smonster writes: "Mr. Vance said on Thursday that companies like Microsoft have used the H-1B visa program to exploit the Labor Department’s permanent labor certification program, which allows H-1B visa recipients to obtain a green card and potentially stay in the United States indefinitely. He said the system was effectively enabling companies to hire “indentured servants” to replace American workers for a fraction of the cost."

Mr. Vance said that in the last year, the company had laid off 6,000 American workers, while it benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards.

Anthony D’Esposito, the inspector general of the Labor Department, also announced that the agency was launching investigations into several universities for potential abuses of the J-1 visa, a cultural exchange program that allows foreign students to work and study in the United States. Among the nine schools are Harvard, Stanford, Arizona State and M.I.T.

Submission + - The Trump administration has barred Microsoft, Adobe from H-1B (politico.com)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

The Trump administration has barred Microsoft, Adobe and six IT companies from sponsoring H-1B workers for green cards, Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday. Vance made the comments during a press conference on visa fraud, during which he argued Microsoft is discriminating against Americans by prioritizing foreign workers

Submission + - Audacious space heist aims to bring home bits of mysterious martian moon (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In 1543, Portuguese merchants caught in stormy winds ran aground on Tanegashima, a verdant island enveloped by crystal-blue waters just south of the Japanese mainland. To those living there, these sailors—the first Europeans known to set foot in Japan—were nothing short of aliens from a distant land, bringing with them strange customs, an unfamiliar language, and new technology.

Nearly 5 centuries later, the island is once again serving as a bridge to an alien world. On 20 October, a rocket will blast off from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) Tanegashima Space Center, flinging a spacecraft the size of a car to Mars. When it arrives, it’ll swoop around the planet before landing on a lumpy island floating above it. And that’s when the real drama begins.

We live in an age of space heists. In recent years, the United States and Japan have retrieved material from several asteroids with smash-and-grab spacecraft. After reaching an asteroid this summer, China is set to return samples from it next year, and it recently conducted the first sample return from the far side of the Moon.

But Japan’s $350 million Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is going to do something even more audacious: Fly to Phobos (ancient Greek for “fear”), one of the two small, battered moons of Mars, and land on the roughly Manhattan-size body not once, but twice. Using two novel extractors, MMX will gather several tablespoons’ worth of material and return the treasure to Earth in 2031. “Phobos will be the second best known moon in the Solar System,” says Matija Cúk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute.

Those precious few grams of material could resolve the mystery of Phobos’s origin—and, potentially, that of its diminutive partner, Deimos (“dread”). Scientists are split on whether the moons are captured asteroids or the consolidated remnants of material thrown up by a long-ago martian impact. But regardless of their genesis, MMX researchers say it’s likely they have since picked up a dusting of material blasted off Mars itself. “This is not going to be just a Phobos sample return mission,” says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built one of MMX’s sample extractors. “It’s going to be Phobos and Mars.”

Submission + - AI slop or the future of development: Adobe Apps "re-implemented" in Rust (github.com)

Submitted by jbarr
jbarr writes: Looks like a team has used Claude Opus 5.5 to vibe-code "re-implementations" of several Adobe applications, including...

Photoshop > PhotoCraft
Acrobat > PrintCraft
Premier > FilmCraft
After Effects > EffectsCraft
Lightroom > LightCraft
Illustrator > VectorCraft
InDesign > DesignCraft

They released standalone versions for many platforms as well as web-hosted versions. They install and load extremely fast, and are surprisingly small. Since they have been out for only a few days, they are not 100% feature-complete, but the update rate has been fast.

Some say they will be sued quickly, but allegedly, the developers used Claude to recreate these apps without decompiling or reverse engineering, so that could be an interesting legal challenge to follow.

Submission + - Vance suspends Microsoft, others from foreign workers applying for green cards, (foxbusiness.com)

Submitted by Kingduck
Kingduck writes: Vice President JD Vance and Labor Department officials announced Thursday that the Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe and others from a key employment-based, green-card program, accusing major tech firms and outsourcing companies of abusing the visa system at the expense of American workers.

Submission + - Margaret Hamilton Dies - Led Apollo Software Effort (mit.edu)

Submitted by Veeru
Veeru writes: Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA’s Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, has died. She was 90.

Submission + - Why can't I use normally the app I created for myself using the Antigravity?

Submitted by Max_W
Max_W writes: I created for myself an app, which I use for my daily work. I do not want neither publish, nor sell this app. I used the Antigravity agent, and it took me about twenty minutes to build this app.
It works perfectly, doing exactly what I need. I could not find anything even remotely so good for years. Still I have to use it on my smartphone in the Developer Mode. And I do not want to keep my smartphone in Developer Mode constantly as it is not safe.
My question is the following. Now when we can easily build an app for ourselves, for our specific needs, with the help of an AI agent, can we expect to have a possibility to use it on our own smartphone normally without going through Apple Store or Play Store hoops?

Submission + - Microsoft releases LiteBox operating system and it is not Windows (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft has released LiteBox 0.1.0, an open-source library operating system written primarily in Rust. The project provides operating system services through a smaller interface to the host, aiming to reduce the attack surface. Its use cases include sandboxing Linux applications on Linux and running Linux programs on Windows.

A source-based explainer examines how the architecture works and where compatibility falls short. The Windows runner currently supports x86-64 only and requires executable rewriting and bundled dependencies. Source comments also indicate that fork is not yet supported, and Microsoft warns that the project is still working toward a stable release.

Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Two groups, one in Vienna and one in Beijing, have successfully demonstrated the world's first nuclear clocks. Standard atomic clocks, like the caesium clocks that define the second, operate by observing the transition of electrons between different orbits about the nucleus. The resulting radiation is usually in the microwave range, and can produce clocks accurate to one second in 100 billion years.

Nuclear clocks go a step further, and probe energy transitions within the nucleus itself. Nuclei can arrange their protons and neutrons into different configurations, called isomers. The isomer with the lowest energy is the one usually found; higher-energy ones are only metastable and decay quickly. Usually it takes serious energy — x-rays and gamma rays — to excite a nucleus into a higher-energy arrangement. It so happens that thorium-229 can be excited using UV light with a wavelength of 148 nm — just within the capabilities of some exotic lasers.

It's still been quite a challenge. For one thing, Th-229 is not found in nature; it must be extracted from the decay chain of uranium-235. The Beijing team used just a microgram mixed in a crystal of calcium fluoride.

Although these prototype nuclear clocks are not yet more accurate than existing atomic clocks (one second in millions, rather than billions, of years), they show the way towards what may be possible. Because the energy transition is in the nucleus, rather than the electron cloud, it is less susceptible to outside disturbances like magnetic fields. And the fundamental frequency is much higher (five orders of magnitude), which should yield more precise timing. This development could lead to smaller and more reliable time standards across the world (and solar system).

Submission + - After 9 years of waiting - Will Tesla roadster live up to the hype? (wsj.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The new Roadster, a sequel to Tesla’s first car, was first unveiled in November 2017. Tesla has accepted reservations for the sports car off and on since, with hopeful owners paying at least $50,000, and sometimes much more, to get on the wait list.

Tesla originally said production would begin in 2020. That didn’t happen.

Tesla is now moving forward with what is likely to be its most expensive model in company history even as its core auto business has taken a back seat. Musk has said that the new Roadster will be the final human-driven vehicle that Tesla ever produces because the company’s future lies in autonomy, artificial intelligence and robotics. The automaker didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Bringing an ultracostly, niche vehicle to market could improve the company’s cash flow while longer-term bets, like humanoid robotics, might take a while to pay off, said Jon McNeill, a former Tesla president.

“I think Ferrari proves the point that you can make a lot of money in the automotive business at low volumes, at a high price point,” McNeill said.

Musk in 2017 said the car would be able to go from zero to 60 miles an hour in 1.9 seconds, top 250 miles an hour and drive up to 620 miles on a full charge. He upped the ante in 2024 by saying that the Roadster would hit 60 mph from zero in less than one second. “And that is the least interesting part,” he said.

Submission + - Google, Unity Launch Platform to Create Video Games From Prompts (straitstimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Alphabet’s Google and gaming tools developer Unity Software announced a new platform that will allow people to create video games from simple text prompts, marking the latest incursion of generative artificial intelligence into artistic and creative industries. The initiative, called Playground, will “put game creation in the hands of millions of new creators, and bring new experiences to billions of players worldwide," the companies said in a statement on Oct 7.

With its debut, Playground will let people 18 and older generate and customize games using natural language prompts, “no coding required." Later in 2026, a new expanded creation experience called Unity Spark, will be integrated with Playground, providing “robust, professional-level” mechanics and high-fidelity 3D capabilities. Creators will be able to build “immersive, superlative experiences” with a simple text prompt, according to the release. Playground builds on Google’s push into world models, a type of AI that generates virtual environments in real time from text prompts, rather than just video.

Submission + - Auctioning IP packet sent via RFC1149 in 2001 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There is an actual RFC-1149 IP packet being auctioned off via Christie's auction house now until October 13, 2026. This is an IP packet you can actually touch, versus just being an abstraction in the ether.

It is one of the four that was sent and eventually received by the team in Norway that implemented the RFC in 2001 (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblug.linux.no%2Frfc1149%2F)

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fonlineonly.christies.c...

Submission + - AI agents helped an attacker take over a server in under 24 hours (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: ReliaQuest researchers investigated a server takeover in which AI agents likely carried out substantial portions of the attack. An exposed job submission feature allowed the attacker to execute code, steal database credentials, and escalate privileges using public tools. No zero-day or new malware was required.

Researchers found a Cairn AI orchestration dashboard on the attacking host and command sequences that corrected earlier failures. They could not determine which model was used or how often a human approved actions. The incident raises questions about how agent automation could let attackers pursue more targets while reducing hands-on troubleshooting.

Submission + - AI Male Agents paid more than their Female counterparts. (the-independent.com)

Submitted by williamyf
williamyf writes: If you tought the Gender Pay Gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again:

A recent study from the University of Limerick found out that, in a VR office setting, AI agents (not even humanoid robots) that presented themselves as "Male" were paid more per task AND perceives as more "human like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail and Harness). The pay-gap was aprox 10%

The study was done on 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for tought.

Submission + - UK vegetables 20-50% less nutritious than in the 1960s (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'The nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50pc since the Sixties because of declining soil quality, according to a new study.

'The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients.

'Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, said: “For 60 years we’ve measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare.

'“On those measures we’ve done remarkably well. But we’ve been quietly hollowing out what’s inside our food.”

'The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits.'

Submission + - OpenAI Named Lead Partner of 'Hour of AI' for K-12 Schoolkids Across the Globe

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If you thought the announced AI moratoriums by the nation's two largest K-12 school districts (New York City & Los Angeles) might prompt the tech-backed nonprofit CodeAI to ease up on the K-12 AI accelerator, think again. On Monday, CodeAI unveiled a revamped website for December's Hour of AI, with OpenAI named as the Lead Partner for the event and Microsoft named as one of two 'Supporters' (the other being the aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman). In August, as it launched ChatGPT for Teens, OpenAI announced a signature partnership with Code.org to 'prepare the first AI generation', adding that 'through the Hour of AI, OpenAI and CodeAI will introduce millions of students to the basics of using AI thoughtfully and responsibly.'

At a Microsoft AI event in August 2025, Microsoft President Brad Smith called on Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi to "switch hats" from coding to AI, setting the stage for Partovi's announcement that the nonprofit would rename the Hour of Code — formerly the premier event for K-12 schoolchildren during CS Education Week since 2013 — to the Hour of AI in 2025 (a month earlier, Microsoft and OpenAI teamed up with the American Federation of Teachers to hatch a plan to 'bring AI into the classroom'). Later in 2025, Microsoft secured a 27% stake in OpenAI's new for-profit entity, which Reuters reported is now eyeing a $1.4 trillion valuation. In mid-2026, Code.org rebranded itself as CodeAI just ahead of the growing pushback against AI in K-12 schools.

The inside story of how Big Tech is applying the same playbook it used to scale coding lessons nationwide to now mainstream their AI tools in schools is at the heart of the new book Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools.

Submission + - Wisconsin U–Madison Prof Francis Halzen named 2026 Nobel laureate in physi (wisc.edu)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Halzen is the principal investigator of the NSF IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the world’s largest — and perhaps strangest — telescope. The U.S. National Science Foundation-funded observatory is operated by an international collaboration of scientists led by the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center based at UW–Madison.

Embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, IceCube uses thousands of light sensors to survey the universe for neutrinos, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with other matter. Neutrinos provide information about the workings of black holes, galaxies and other objects in the cosmos.

“IceCube is like no other telescope in the world,” says UW–Madison interim Chancellor Eric M. Wilcots. “And there is no other scientist quite like Francis Halzen, whose idea to create a neutrino detector under almost a mile of ice has led to a remarkable multinational and multi-institutional scientific collaboration and a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe.”

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