OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told colleagues last month that Google's recent progress in AI could "create some temporary economic headwinds for our company," though he added that OpenAI would emerge ahead, The Information reports [non-paywalled source]. From the report: After OpenAI researchers heard that Google had created a new AI that appears to have leapfrogged OpenAI's in the way it was developed, Altman said in the memo that "we know we have some work to do but we are catching up fast." Still, he cautioned employees that "I expect the vibes out there to be rough for a bit."

IBM and Cisco plan to link quantum computers over long distances by the early 2030s, "with the goal of demonstrating the concept is workable by the end of 2030," reports Reuters. "The move could pave the way for a quantum internet, though executives at the two companies cautioned that the networks would require technologies that do not currently exist and will have to be developed with the help of universities and federal laboratories." From the report: The challenge begins with a problem: Quantum computers like IBM's sit in massive cryogenic tanks that get so cold that atoms barely move. To get information out of them, IBM has to figure out how to transform information in stationary "qubits" -- the fundamental unit of information in a quantum computer -- into what Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and an IBM fellow, told Reuters are "flying" qubits that travel as microwaves.

But those flying microwave qubits will have to be turned into optical signals that can travel between Cisco switches on fiber-optic cables. The technology for that transformation -- called a microwave-optical transducer -- will have to be developed with the help of groups like the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center, led by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, among others. Along the way, Cisco and IBM will also publish open-source software to weave all the parts together.

Mozilla is officially ending its partnership with Onerep after more than a year of controversy over the company's founder secretly running people-search and data-broker sites. Monitor Plus will be discontinued by December 2025, existing subscribers will receive prorated refunds, and Mozilla says it will focus on privacy tools it fully controls. KrebsOnSecurity reports: In a statement published Tuesday, Mozilla said it will soon discontinue Monitor Plus, which offered data broker site scans and automated personal data removal from Onerep. "We will continue to offer our free Monitor data breach service, which is integrated into Firefox's credential manager, and we are focused on integrating more of our privacy and security experiences in Firefox, including our VPN, for free," the advisory reads.

Mozilla said current Monitor Plus subscribers will retain full access through the wind-down period, which ends on Dec. 17, 2025. After that, those subscribers will automatically receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of their subscription. "We explored several options to keep Monitor Plus going, but our high standards for vendors, and the realities of the data broker ecosystem made it challenging to consistently deliver the level of value and reliability we expect for our users," Mozilla statement reads.

Roblox is rolling out mandatory facial age-verification for chat features to prevent children from communicating with adult strangers. The platform will restrict chat to verified age groups, expand parental controls, and become the first major gaming platform to require facial age checks for messaging. The BBC reports: Mandatory age checks will be introduced for accounts using chat features, starting in December for Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, then the rest of the globe from January. [...] Rani Govender, policy manager for child safety online at the NSPCC, said action had been needed because young people had been exposed to "unacceptable risks" on Roblox, "leaving many vulnerable to harm and online abuse."

The charity welcomed the platform's latest announcement but called on Roblox to "ensure they deliver change for children in practice and prevent adult perpetrators from targeting and manipulating young users." The platform averaged more than 80 million daily players in 2024, about 40% of them under the age of 13. [...]

Matt Kaufman, chief safety officer for Roblox, told a press briefing the age estimation technology is "pretty accurate." He claimed the system can make close estimates of "within one to two years" bracket for users aged between five and 25. Currently it can be used voluntarily by anyone in the world.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's meme-friendly Nano Banana image-generation model is getting an upgrade. The new Nano Banana Pro is rolling out with improved reasoning and instruction following, giving users the ability to create more accurate images with legible text and make precise edits to existing images. It's available to everyone in the Gemini app, but free users will find themselves up against the usage limits pretty quickly. Nano Banana Pro is part of the newly launched Gemini 3 Pro -- it's actually called Gemini 3 Pro Image in the same way the original is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, but Google is sticking with the meme-y name. You can access it by selecting Gemini 3 Pro and then turning on the "Create images" option.

Google says the new model can follow complex prompts to create more accurate images. The model is apparently so capable that it can generate an entire usable infographic in a single shot with no weird AI squiggles in place of words. Nano Banana Pro is also better at maintaining consistency in images. You can blend up to 14 images with this tool, and it can maintain the appearance of up to five people in outputs. Google also promises better editing. You can refine your AI images or provide Nano Banana Pro with a photo and make localized edits without as many AI glitches. It can even change core elements of the image like camera angles, color grading, and lighting without altering other elements. Google is pushing the professional use angle with its new model, which has much-improved resolution options. Your creations in Nano Banana Pro can be rendered at up to 4K.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Epishine, a company that makes solar cells optimized for indoor lighting, has announced its technology is being used in a new remote control for Google TV devices, as spotted by 9to5Google. The remote will rely on rechargeable batteries instead of disposable ones, and thanks to the use of solar cells on both sides it may only run out of power when it gets buried and forgotten in the dark abyss of your couch cushions.

Microsoft's push to transform Windows into an "agentic OS" that allows AI agents to control PCs is drawing user backlash similar to the Windows 8 controversy, as the company marks the operating system's 40th anniversary this week, writes Tom Warren, a reporter at The Verge who has been covering Microsoft for nearly two decades. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri announced the agentic OS plans in a post on X last week and faced immediate criticism in hundreds of replies before they were locked days later.

"It's evolving into a product that's driving people to Mac and Linux," one person wrote, while another asked for a return to Windows 7's "clean UI, clean icon, a unified control panel, no bloat apps, no ads, just a pure performant OS." Davuluri later responded to software engineer Gergely Orosz, saying "we care deeply about developers" and acknowledging Microsoft has "work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the Dwarkesh Podcast that the company's business "which today is an end user tools business, will become, essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work." The Recall feature already spooked users when it was initially turned on by default before Microsoft reworked it to be opt-in. Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows experiences, told The Verge that "every user can use [AI agents] when they're ready. It's their choice, they decide."

Autonomous electric tractor startup Monarch Tractor -- which we covered in 2022 -- warned staff Thursday it may need to lay off more than 100 employees, or possibly even "shut down," according to a company-wide memo obtained by TechCrunch. The report adds: The memo comes after Monarch Tractor was already cutting some positions over the last few weeks at its California corporate facilities and remote teams in India and Singapore, according to multiple former employees who spoke with TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity.

Monarch Tractor was founded in 2018 by a team that included a former top executive at Tesla's first gigafactory and Carlo Mondavi, a scion of the famous winemaking family. The company raised at least $220 million, including $133 million in 2024, as it pursued a goal of making "driver optional" autonomous tractors that could perform tasks at places like wineries and other fruit farms.

Researchers in Germany achieved a major milestone for the future quantum internet by successfully teleporting quantum information between photons generated by two different, physically separated quantum dots -- something never accomplished before due to the difficulty of producing indistinguishable photons from remote sources. Phys.org reports: At the University of Stuttgart, the team succeeded in teleporting the polarization state of a photon originating from one quantum dot to another photon from a second quantum dot. One quantum dot generates a single photon, the other an entangled photon pair. Entangled means that the two particles constitute a single quantum entity, even when they are physically separated. One of the two particles travels to the second quantum dot and interferes with its light particle. The two overlap. Because of this superposition, the information of the single photon is transferred to the distant partner of the pair.

Instrumental for the success of the experiment were quantum frequency converters, which compensate for residual frequency differences between the photons. These converters were developed by a team led by Prof. Christoph Becher, an expert in quantum optics at Saarland University. [...] In the Stuttgart experiment, the quantum dots were separated only by an optical fiber of about 10 m length. "But we are working on achieving considerably greater distances," says Strobel. In earlier work, the team had shown that the entanglement of the quantum dot photons remains intact even after a 36-kilometer transmission through the city center of Stuttgart. Another aim is to increase the current success rate of teleportation, which currently stands at just over 70%. Fluctuations in the quantum dot still lead to slight differences in the photons. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Longtime Slashdot reader ukoda shares a report from the Associated Press: China is replacing its diesel trucks with electric models faster than expected, potentially reshaping global fuel demand and the future of heavy transport. In 2020, nearly all new trucks in China ran on diesel. By the first half of 2025, battery-powered trucks accounted for 22% of new heavy truck sales, up from 9.2% in the same period in 2024, according to Commercial Vehicle World, a Beijing-based trucking data provider. The British research firm BMI forecasts electric trucks will reach nearly 46% of new sales this year and 60% next year.

China's trucking fleet, the world's second-largest after the U.S., still mainly runs on diesel, but the landscape is shifting. Transport fuel demand is plateauing, according to the International Energy Agency and diesel use in China could decline faster than many expect, said Christopher Doleman, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Electric trucks now outsell LNG models in China, so its demand for fossil fuels could fall, and "in other countries, it might never take off," he said. [...]

The share of electrics in new truck sales, from 8% in 2024 to 28% by August 2025, has more than tripled as prices have fallen. Electric trucks outsold LNG-powered vehicles in China for five consecutive months this year, according to Commercial Vehicle World. While electric trucks are two to three times more expensive than diesel ones and cost roughly 18% more than LNG trucks, their higher energy efficiency and lower costs can save owners an estimated 10% to 26% over the vehicle's lifetime, according to research by Chinese scientists. "When it comes to heavy trucks, the fleet owners in China are very bottom-line driven," Doleman said.

A Tokyo court ruled that Cloudflare is liable for aiding manga piracy after failing to act on infringement notices and continuing to cache and serve content for major piracy sites, awarding about $3.2 million in damages. TorrentFreak says the decision sets a significant precedent in Japan, suggesting CDN providers can face direct liability when they don't verify customers or respond adequately to large-scale copyright abuse. From the report: After a wait of more than three and a half years, the Tokyo District Court rendered its decision this morning. In a statement provided to TorrentFreak by the publishers, they declare "Victory Against Cloudflare" after the Court determined that Cloudflare is indeed liable for the pirate sites' activities. In a statement provided to TorrentFreak, the publishers explain that they alerted Cloudflare to the massive scale of the infringement, involving over 4,000 works and 300 million monthly visits, but their requests to stop distribution were ignored.

"We requested that the company take measures such as stopping the distribution of pirated content from servers under its management. However, Cloudflare continued to provide services to the manga piracy sites even after receiving notices from the plaintiffs," the group says. The publishers add that Cloudflare continued to provide services even after receiving information disclosure orders from U.S. courts, leaving them with "no choice but to file this lawsuit."

"The judgment recognized that Cloudflare's failure to take timely and appropriate action despite receiving infringement notices from the plaintiffs, and its negligent continuation of pirated content distribution, constituted aiding and abetting copyright infringement, and that Cloudflare bears liability for damages to the plaintiffs," they write. "The judgment, in that regard, attached importance to the fact that Cloudflare, without conducting any identity verification procedures, had enabled a massive manga piracy site to operate "under circumstances where strong anonymity was secured,' as a basis for recognizing the company's liability."

The publishers believe that the judgment clarifies the conditions under which a company such as Cloudflare incurs liability for copyright infringement. Failure to carry out identity verification appears at the top of the publishers' list, followed by a lack of timely and appropriate action in response to infringement notices sent by rightsholders. "We believe this is an important decision given the current situation where piracy site operators often hide their identities and repeatedly conduct large-scale distribution using CDN services from overseas. We hope that this judgment will be a step toward ensuring proper use of CDN services. We will continue our efforts to protect the rights of works, creators, and related parties, while aiming for further expansion of legitimate content," the publishers conclude. Cloudflare plans to appeal the verdict.

An anonymous reader shares a report: This summer, Oslo's public-transport authority drove a Chinese electric bus deep into a decommissioned mine inside a nearby mountain to answer a question: Could it be hacked? Isolated by rock from digital interference, cybersecurity experts came back with a qualified yes: The bus could in theory be remotely disabled using the control system for the battery.

The revelation, presented at a recent public-transport conference, has spurred officials in Denmark and the U.K. to start their own investigations into Chinese vehicles. It has also fed into broader security concerns across Europe about the growing prevalence of Chinese-made equipment in the region's energy and telecommunications infrastructure.

The worry is the same for autos, solar panels and other connected devices: that mechanisms used for wirelessly delivering system updates could also be exploited by a hostile government or third-party hacker to compromise critical networks. [...] The Oslo transport authority, Ruter, said the bus's mobile-network connection via a Romanian SIM card gave manufacturer Yutong access to the control system for battery and power supply. Ruter said it is addressing the vulnerability by developing firewalls and delaying the signals sent to the vehicles, among other solutions.

The EU's cookie consent policies have been an annoying and unavoidable part of browsing the web in Europe since their introduction in 2018. But the cookie nightmare is about to crumble thanks to some big proposed changes announced by the European Commission today. From a report: Instead of having to click accept or reject on a cookie pop-up for every website you visit in Europe, the EU is preparing to enforce rules that will allow users to set their preferences for cookies at the browser level. "People can set their privacy preferences centrally -- for example via the browser -- and websites must respect them," says the EU. "This will drastically simplify users' online experience."

This key change is part of a new Digital Package of proposals to simplify the EU's digital rules, and will initially see cookie prompts change to be a simplified yes or no single-click prompt ahead of the "technological solutions" eventually coming to browsers. Websites will be required to respect cookie choices for at least six months, and the EU also wants website owners to not use cookie banners for "harmless uses" like counting website visits, to lessen the amount of pop-ups.

Cloudflare suffered its worst network outage in six years on Tuesday, beginning at 11:20 UTC. The disruption prevented the content delivery network from routing traffic for roughly three hours. The failure, writes Cloudflare in a blog post, originated from a database permissions change deployed at 11:05 UTC. The modification altered how a database query returned information about bot detection features. The query began returning duplicate entries. A configuration file used to identify automated traffic doubled in size and spread across the network's machines. Cloudflare's traffic routing software reads this file to distinguish bots from legitimate users. The software had a built-in limit of 200 bot detection features. The enlarged file contained more than 200 entries. The software crashed when it encountered the unexpected file size.

Users attempting to access websites behind Cloudflare's network received error messages. The outage affected multiple services. Turnstile security checks failed to load. The Workers KV storage service returned elevated error rates. Users could not log into Cloudflare's dashboard. Access authentication failed for most customers.

Engineers initially suspected a coordinated attack. The configuration file was automatically regenerated every five minutes. Database servers produced either correct or corrupted files during a gradual system update. Services repeatedly recovered and failed as different versions of the file circulated. Teams stopped generating new files at 14:24 UTC and manually restored a working version. Most traffic resumed by 14:30 UTC. All systems returned to normal at 17:06 UTC.

MI5 has warned U.K. lawmakers that Chinese intelligence operatives are using LinkedIn and recruitment fronts to target them for information gathering and long-term cultivation. PBS reports: Writing to lawmakers, House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle said a new MI5 "espionage alert" warned that Chinese nationals were "using LinkedIn profiles to conduct outreach at scale" on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. "Their aim is to collect information and lay the groundwork for long-term relationships, using professional networking sites, recruitment agents and consultants acting on their behalf," he said. MI5 issued the alert because the activity was "targeted and widespread," he added.

The MI5 alert cited LinkedIn profiles of two women, Amanda Qiu and Shirly Shen, and said other similar recruiters' profiles were acting as fronts for espionage. Home Office Minister Dan Jarvis said that apart from parliamentary staff, others including economists, think tank consultants and government officials have been similarly targeted. Jarvis said the government is rolling out a series of measures to tackle the risk, including investing 170 million pounds ($224 million) to renew encrypted technology used by civil servants to safeguard sensitive work. Opposition parties say authorities are not doing enough and are too wary of jeopardizing trade ties with China.

Mexico has finally lifted its long-running Tor ban for the main government portal, allowing privacy-focused users, journalists, and activists to access gob.mx again after more than a decade of blocking. That said, the open data portal and the former Tor-compatible whistleblower system remain inaccessible. CyberInsider reports: The development follows a long period of digital censorship that spanned two full six-year presidential terms, those of Enrique Pena Nieto and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and continued into the early months of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo's current administration. Research conducted by Jacobo Najera and Miguel Trujillo, published in October 2023, documented that 21 federal government agencies were blocking traffic from the Tor network, effectively excluding privacy-conscious users from vital public resources and services.

Blender 5.0 has been released with major upgrades including HDR and wide-gamut color support on Linux via Wayland/Vulkan, significant theme and UI improvements, new color-space tools, revamped curve and geometry features, and expanded hardware requirements. 9to5Linux reports: Blender 5.0 also introduces a working color space for Blend files, a new AgX HDR view, a new Convert to Display compositor node, new Rec.2100-PQ and Rec.2100-HLG displays that can be used for color grading for HDR video export, and new ACES 1.3 and 2.0 views as an alternative to AgX and Filmic.

A new "Jump Time by Delta" operator for jumping forward/backward in time by a user-specified delta has been introduced as well, along with a revamped Curve drawing, which better supports the new Curves object type and all of their features, and a new Geometry Attribute constraint.

Also new is a "Cylinder" option for curve display type that allows rendering thicker curves without the flat ribbon appearance, support for the Zstd (Zstandard) fast lossless compression algorithm for point caches, as well as a new "Curve Data" panel in edit mode that allows tweaking built-in curve attribute values. A full list of changes can be found here. You can download from the official website.

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Meta did not illegally stifle competition when it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. The decision marks Big Tech's first major victory against antitrust enforcement that began during President Donald Trump's first term. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission had sought to force Meta to sell or restructure the platforms to restore competition among social media networks. Meta argued it faced competitive pressure from TikTok, YouTube, and Apple's messaging app.

A majority of global fund managers think companies are overinvesting, as market anxiety grows about the sustainability of the AI spending boom. From a report: A net 20 per cent of fund managers surveyed this month by Bank of America said companies were spending too much on their investments -- the first time this has been a majority view in data running back to 2005. "This jump is driven by concerns over the magnitude and financing of the AI capex boom," said BofA analysts.

The surge in investment to develop AI infrastructure has been a dominant theme in the record rally in US tech stocks this year -- with chipmaker Nvidia becoming the world's first $5tn company last month -- but growing concerns about the sustainability of this spending has caused a pullback on Wall Street in recent weeks.

Google released Gemini 3 on Tuesday, launching its latest AI model with a breakthrough score of 1501 Elo on the LMArena Leaderboard alongside state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks including 91.9% on GPQA Diamond for PhD-level reasoning and 37.5% on Humanity's Last Exam without tool usage. The model is available starting today in the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search for Google AI Pro, Google AI Studio, Vertex AI and the newly launched Google Antigravity agentic development platform. Third-party platforms including Cursor, GitHub, JetBrains, Manus, and Replit are also gaining access.

Separately, Google said AI Overviews now have 2 billion users every month. Gemini app has topped 650 million users per month.