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"Tesla FSD crashes in fog, sun-glare-Feds open new safety investigation."

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Tesla FSD crashes in fog, sun glare—Feds open new safety investigation

Tesla's Full Self-Driving probe initiated

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29by Jonathan M. Gitlin / 4h

Today, federal safety investigators opened a new investigation aimed at Tesla's electric vehicles. This is now the 14th investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and one of several currently open . This time, it's the automaker's highly controversial "full self-driving" feature that's in the crosshairs—NHTSA says it now has four reports of Teslas using FSD and then crash

Elon Musk changes X terms to steer lawsuits to his favorite Texas court

Musk directs X lawsuits to Texas

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21by Jon Brodkin / 2h

Elon Musk's X updated its terms of service to steer user lawsuits to US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the same court where a judge who bought Tesla stock is overseeing an X lawsuit against the nonprofit Media Matters for America. The new terms that apply to users of the X social network say that all disputes related to the terms "will be brought exclusively in the US District

US suspects TSMC helped Huawei skirt export controls, report says

US investigates TSMC Huawei chip ties

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by Ashley Belanger / 1h

Yesterday, it was reported that the US Department of Commerce is investigating the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) over suspicions that the chipmaker may have been subverting 5G export controls to make "artificial intelligence or smartphone chips for the Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies," sources with direct knowledge told The Information . The Department of Commerce has yet t

Today

Desalination system adjusts itself to work with renewable power

by Jacek Krywko / 31min

Fresh water we can use for drinking or agriculture is only about 3 percent of the global water supply, and nearly 70 percent of that is trapped in glaciers and ice caps. So far, that was enough to keep us going, but severe draughts have left places like Jordan, Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa, Spain, and California with limited access to potable water. One possible solution is to tap into the remaining

Amazon exec tells employees to work elsewhere if they dislike RTO policy

AWS CEO defends office return policy

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by Scharon Harding / 1h

Amazon workers are being reminded that they can find work elsewhere if they’re unhappy with Amazon’s return-to-office (RTO) mandate. In September, Amazon told staff that they’ll have to RTO five days a week starting in 2025. Amazon employees are currently allowed to work remotely twice a week. A memo from CEO Andy Jassy announcing the policy change said that “it’s easier for our teammates to lear

OpenAI releases ChatGPT app for Windows

ChatGPT app launches for Windows

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by Benj Edwards / 2h

On Thursday, OpenAI released an early Windows version of its first ChatGPT app for Windows, following a Mac version that launched in May . Currently, it's only available to subscribers of Plus, Team, Enterprise, and Edu versions of ChatGPT, and users can download it for free in the Microsoft Store for Windows. OpenAI is positioning the release as a beta test. "This is an early version, and we pla

Adobe shows off 3D rotation tool for flat drawings

Adobe unveils Project Turntable 3D

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by Kyle Orland / 4h

At this point, we're used to AI-powered image tools that instantly pull off previously high-effort edits, like filling in the missing bits of a scene or erasing unwanted parts of a photo without affecting the background. But a new Adobe Illustrator tool demonstrated at this week's Adobe MAX conference takes 2D image editing things in a literal different direction, letting artists instantly transf

Simple voltage pulse can restore capacity to Li-Si batteries

26by John Timmer / 8h

If you're using a large battery for a specialized purpose—say grid-scale storage or an electric vehicle—then it's possible to tweak the battery chemistry, provide a little bit of excess capacity, and carefully manage its charging and discharging so that it enjoys a long life span. But for consumer electronics, the batteries are smaller, the need for light weight dictates the chemistry, and the de

Rocket Report: Bloomberg calls for SLS cancellation; SpaceX hits century mark

Rocket Lab schedules new launch mission

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24by Eric Berger / 8h

Welcome to Edition 7.16 of the Rocket Report! Even several days later, it remains difficult to process the significance of what SpaceX achieved in South Texas last Sunday. The moment of seeing a rocket fall out of the sky and be captured by two arms felt historic to me, as historic as the company's first drone ship landing in April 2016. What a time to be alive. As always, we welcome reader submi

Finally upgrading from isc-dhcp-server to isc-kea for my homelab

by Lee Hutchinson / 8h

A few months back, I put together a big fat guide on how to configure DNS and DHCP on your LAN the old-school way , with bind and dhcpd working together to seamlessly hand out addresses to hosts on your network and also register those hosts in your LAN's forward and reverse DNS lookup zones. The article did really well—thanks for reading it!—but one thing commenters pointed out was that my prefer

Yesterday

Biden administration curtails controls on some space-related exports

by Stephen Clark / 18h

The US Commerce Department announced Thursday it is easing restrictions on exports of space-related technology, answering a yearslong call from space companies to reform regulations governing international trade. This is the most significant update to space-related export regulations in a decade and opens more opportunities for US companies to sell their satellite hardware abroad. “We are very ex

Qualcomm cancels Windows dev kit PC for “comprehensively” failing to meet standards

Qualcomm cancels Snapdragon Dev Kit

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by Andrew Cunningham / 18h

It's been a big year for Windows running on Arm chips, something that Microsoft and Arm chipmakers have been trying to get off the ground for well over a decade. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus are at the heart of dozens of Copilot+ Windows PCs , which promise unique AI features and good battery life without as many of the app and hardware compatibility problems that have plagued Windows

Cheap AI “video scraping” can now extract data from any screen recording

by Benj Edwards / 21h

Recently, AI researcher Simon Willison wanted to add up his charges from using a cloud service, but the payment values and dates he needed were scattered among a dozen separate emails. Inputting them manually would have been tedious, so he turned to a technique he calls "video scraping," which involves feeding a screen recording video into an AI model, similar to ChatGPT, for data extraction purp

The Sisterhood faces a powerful foe in Dune: Prophecy trailer

Dune Prophecy series premieres November 17

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by Jennifer Ouellette / 21h

Dune: Prophecy will premiere on HBO and Max on November 17, 2024. New York Comic-Con kicked off today, and among the highlights was an HBO panel devoted to the platform's forthcoming new series, Dune: Prophecy —including the release of a two-and-a-half-minute trailer. As previously reported , the series was announced in 2019, with director Denis Villeneuve serving as an executive producer and Ali

Redbox easily reverse-engineered to reveal customers’ names, zip codes, rentals

Redbox kiosks face abandonment challenges

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21by Scharon Harding / 21h

Since Redbox went bankrupt , many have wondered what will happen to those red kiosks and DVDs. Another question worth examining is: What will happen to all the data stored inside the Redboxes? Redbox parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in June and is in the process of liquidating its assets . Meanwhile, stores with Redboxes are eager to remove the obsolete hard

How the Malleus Maleficarum fueled the witch trial craze

27by Jennifer Ouellette / 21h

Between 1400 and 1775, a significant upsurge in witch trials swept across early modern Europe, resulting in the execution of an estimated 40,000–60,000 accused witches. Historians and social scientists have long studied this period in hopes of learning more about how large-scale social changes occur. Some have pointed to the invention of the printing press and the publication of witch-hunting man

US vaccinations fall again as more parents refuse lifesaving shots for kids

100+by Beth Mole / 23h

Measles, whooping cough, polio, tetanus—devastating and sometimes deadly diseases await comebacks in the US as more and more parents are declining routine childhood vaccines that have proved safe and effective. The vaccination rates among kindergartners have fallen once again, dipping into the range of 92 percent in the 2023–2024 school year, down from about 93 percent the previous school year an

Here’s how SIM swap in alleged bitcoin pump-and-dump scheme worked

FBI arrests SEC Twitter hacker

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by Dan Goodin / 23h

US officials charged a man with compromising the official Twitter/X account of the Securities and Exchange Commission for purposes of posting false information that caused the price of bitcoin to spike. The January attack, federal prosecutors said, started with a SIM swap, a form of fraud that takes control of a cell phone number by assuming the identity of the person the number belongs to. The a

It’s increasingly unlikely that humans will fly around the Moon next year

Artemis II launch faces delays

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100+by Eric Berger / 23h

Don't book your tickets for the launch of NASA's Artemis II mission next year just yet. We have had reason to doubt the official September 2025 launch date for the mission, the first crewed flight into deep space in more than five decades, for a while now. This is principally because NASA is continuing to mull the implications of damage to the Orion spacecraft's heat shield from the Artemis I mis

EU considers calculating X fines by including revenue from Musk’s other firms

X not deemed important by EU

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31by Jon Brodkin / 1d

European Union regulators warned Elon Musk's X platform that it may calculate fines by including revenue from Musk's other companies, including SpaceX, according to a Bloomberg article published today. X was previously accused of violating the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6 percent of total worldwide annual turnover. That fine would be levied on the "provider"

Android 15’s security and privacy features are the update’s highlight

Android 15 enhances security and privacy

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by Kevin Purdy / 1d

Android 15 started rolling out to Pixel devices Tuesday and will arrive, through various third-party efforts, on other Android devices at some point. There is always a bunch of little changes to discover in an Android release, whether by reading, poking around, or letting your phone show you 25 new things after it restarts. In Android 15, some of the most notable involve making your device less a

Feds test whether existing laws can combat surge in fake AI child sex images

Prosecutors target AI child exploitation

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by Ashley Belanger / 1d

Cops aren't sure how to protect kids from an ever-escalating rise in fake child sex abuse imagery fueled by advances in generative AI. Last year, child safety experts warned of thousands of "AI-generated child sex images" rapidly spreading on the dark web around the same time the FBI issued a warning that "benign photos" of children posted online could be easily manipulated to exploit and harm ki

ULA is examining debris recovered from Vulcan rocket’s shattered booster nozzle

100+by Stephen Clark / 1d

When the exhaust nozzle on one of the Vulcan rocket's strap-on boosters failed shortly after liftoff earlier this month, it scattered debris across the beachfront landscape just east of the launch pad on Florida's Space Coast. United Launch Alliance, the company that builds and launches the Vulcan rocket, is investigating the cause of the booster anomaly before resuming Vulcan flights. Despite th

Meta fires staffers for using $25 meal credits on household goods

Meta fires staff for meal credit abuse

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100+by Hannah Murphy and Stephen Morris, Financial Times / 1d

Meta has fired about two dozen staff in Los Angeles for using their $25 meal credits to buy household items including acne pads, wine glasses, and laundry detergent. The terminations took place last week, just days before the $1.5 trillion social media company separately began restructuring certain