The UK's oldest satellite, Skynet-1A, mysteriously shifted from its original orbit above East Africa to a new position over the Americas, likely due to a mid-1970s command whose origins remain unknown. "The question is who that was and with what authority and purpose?" asks the BBC. From the report: "It's still relevant because whoever did move Skynet-1A did us few favours," says space consultant Dr Stuart Eves. "It's now in what we call a 'gravity well' at 105 degrees West longitude, wandering backwards and forwards like a marble at the bottom of a bowl. And unfortunately this brings it close to other satellite traffic on a regular basis. "Because it's dead, the risk is it might bump into something, and because it's 'our' satellite we're still responsible for it," he explains.

Dr Eves has looked through old satellite catalogues, the National Archives and spoken to satellite experts worldwide, but he can find no clues to the end-of-life behaviour of Britain's oldest spacecraft. It might be tempting to reach for a conspiracy theory or two, not least because it's hard to hear the name "Skynet" without thinking of the malevolent, self-aware artificial intelligence (AI) system in The Terminator movie franchise. But there's no connection other than the name and, in any case, real life is always more prosaic.

Amazon is developing smart eyeglasses for delivery drivers to improve efficiency by offering turn-by-turn navigation. "Such directions could shave valuable seconds off each delivery by providing left or right directions off elevators and around obstacles such as gates or aggressive dogs," reports Reuters. "With millions of packages delivered daily, seconds add up. The glasses would also free drivers from using handheld Global Positioning System devices, allowing them to carry more packages." From the report: Amazon's delivery glasses, the people warned, could be shelved or delayed indefinitely if they do not work as envisioned, or for financial or other reasons. The sources said they may take years to perfect. "We are continuously innovating to create an even safer and better delivery experience for drivers," an Amazon spokesperson said, when asked about the driver eyeglasses. "We otherwise don't comment on our product roadmap." [...]

The delivery glasses in development build on Amazon's Echo Frames smart glasses, which allow users to listen to audio and use voice commands from Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant, the people said. Known by the internal code name Amelia, the delivery glasses would rely on a small display on one of the lenses and could take photos of delivered packages as proof for customers, the sources said. Amazon released in September an unrelated chatbot for third-party sellers that is also known as Amelia. But the technology is still in development and Amazon has had trouble making a battery that can last a full eight-hour shift, and still be light enough to wear all day without causing fatigue, the people said. As well, gathering complete data on each house, sidewalk, street, curb and driveway could take years, they said.

Delivery drivers visit more than 100 customers per shift, Amazon has said. With increased efficiency, Amazon could ask drivers to ferry more packages and visit more homes. The Seattle company could face other obstacles, including convincing its thousands of drivers to use the eyeglasses, which may be uncomfortable, distracting or unsightly, the people said, not to mention the fact some drivers already wear corrective glasses. However, much of Amazon's delivery force consists of outside companies, meaning Amazon could make wearing the glasses a contractual requirement, the people said. [...] The embedded screen in development is also slated for a future generation of the Echo Frames that could be released as soon as 2026's second quarter, two of the people said.

D-Link confirmed no fix will be issued for the over 60,000 D-Link NAS devices that are vulnerable to a critical command injection flaw (CVE-2024-10914), allowing unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary commands through unsanitized HTTP requests. The networking company advises users to retire or isolate the affected devices from public internet access. BleepingComputer reports: The flaw impacts multiple models of D-Link network-attached storage (NAS) devices that are commonly used by small businesses: DNS-320 Version 1.00; DNS-320LW Version 1.01.0914.2012; DNS-325 Version 1.01, Version 1.02; and DNS-340L Version 1.08. [...] A search that Netsecfish conducted on the FOFA platform returned 61,147 results at 41,097 unique IP addresses for D-Link devices vulnerable to CVE-2024-10914.

In a security bulletin today, D-Link has confirmed that a fix for CVE-2024-10914 is not coming and the vendor recommends that users retire vulnerable products. If that is not possible at the moment, users should at least isolate them from the public internet or place them under stricter access conditions. The same researcher discovered in April this year an arbitrary command injection and hardcoded backdoor flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-3273, impacting mostly the same D-Link NAS models as the latest flaw.

GIMP 3.0, the long-awaited upgrade from the popular open-source image editor, has entered the release candidate phase, signaling that a stable version may be available by the end of this year or early 2025. Tom's Hardware reports: So, what has changed with the debut of GIMP 3? The new interface is still quite recognizable to classic GIMP users but has been considerably smoothed out and is far more scalable to high-resolution displays than it used to be. Several familiar icons have been carefully converted to SVGs or Scalable Vector Graphics, enabling supremely high-quality, scalable assets.

While PNGs, or Portable Network Graphics, are also known to be high-quality due to their lack of compression, they are still suboptimal compared to SVGs when SVGs are applicable. The work of converting GIMP's tool icons to SVG is still in progress per the original blog post, but it's good that developer Denis Rangelov has already started on the work.

Many aspects of the GIMP 3.0 update are almost wholly on the backend for ensuring project and plugin compatibility with past projects made with previous versions of GIMP. To summarize: a public GIMP API is being stabilized to make it easier to port GIMP 2.10-based plugins and scripts to GIMP 3.0. Several bugs related to color accuracy have been fixed to improve color management while still maintaining compatibility with past GIMP projects. You can read the GIMP team's blog post here.

AI companies like OpenAI are seeking to overcome unexpected delays and challenges in the pursuit of ever-large language models by developing training techniques that use more human-like ways for algorithms to "think." From a report: A dozenAI scientists, researchers and investors told Reuters they believe that these techniques, which are behind OpenAI's recently released o1 model, could reshape the AI arms race, and have implications for the types of resources that AI companies have an insatiable demand for, from energy to types of chips.

After the release of the viral ChatGPT chatbot two years ago, technology companies, whose valuations have benefited greatly from the AI boom, have publicly maintained that "scaling up" current models through adding more data and computing power will consistently lead to improved AI models. But now, some of the most prominent AI scientists are speaking out on the limitations of this "bigger is better" philosophy. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training -- the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures -- have plateaued. Sutskever is widely credited as an early advocate of achieving massive leaps in generative AI advancement through t he use of more data and computing power in pre-training, which eventually created ChatGPT. Sutskever left OpenAI earlier this year to found SSI. The Information, reporting over the weekend that Orion, OpenAI's newest model, isn't drastically better than its previous model nor is it better at many tasks: The Orion situation could test a core assumption of the AI field, known as scaling laws: that LLMs would continue to improve at the same pace as long as they had more data to learn from and additional computing power to facilitate that training process.

In response to the recent challenge to training-based scaling laws posed by slowing GPT improvements, the industry appears to be shifting its effort to improving models after their initial training, potentially yielding a different type of scaling law.

Some CEOs, including Meta Platforms' Mark Zuckerberg, have said that in a worst-case scenario, there would still be a lot of room to build consumer and enterprise products on top of the current technology even if it doesn't improve.

On its 20th anniversary, Firefox "is still going strong, and it is a better browser today than it ever was," according to TechCrunch.

In an interview, Mozilla's interim CEO says one of the first things they did when was to "unlock a bunch of money towards Firefox product development... I've been in enough places where people tend to forget about the core business, and they stop investing in it, because they get distracted by shiny things — and then they regret it." "Firefox is incredibly important, and it is our core. We've actually put more investment into it this year and into connecting with our communities, into bringing out and testing features that are positive and creating good experiences for folks. That's been a huge priority for me and for the company this year, and it's showing up in the results."

She acknowledged that Mozilla doesn't have the device distribution that benefits many of Firefox's competitors, especially on mobile, but she did note that the Digital Marks Act (DMA) in Europe — which means Apple, for example, has to provide a browser choice screen on iOS — is working. "With the DMA, even though the implementation hasn't been outstanding, we're seeing a real shift. When people have the choice to choose Firefox, they're choosing Firefox," she said...

To kick-start some of this growth, Mozilla is looking at reaching new, and younger, users. Chambers noted that Mozilla is running a number of marketing campaigns to make people aware of Firefox, especially those who are only now starting to make their first browser choices. With them, she believes, Mozilla's messaging around privacy lands especially well.
In a future where browsers include AI agents that take actions on behalf of users, there might be more confidence in a browser designed for privacy and transparency, the interim CEO points out — as part of their larger mission. "What I love about Firefox is that it really provides users with an alternative choice of a browser that is just genuinely designed for them.

"We have, from its very inception and throughout, really wanted to create a browser that prioritizes people over profit, prioritizes privacy over anything else, and to have that option, the choice."

Renew Home says they're building a "virtual power plant" in Texas by "enabling homes to easily reduce and shift the timing of energy use." Thursday they announced a 10-year project distributing hundreds of thousands of smart thermostats to customers of Texas-based power utility NRG Energy, starting next spring. (Bloomberg calls them "AI-enabled thermostats that use Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud technology.") The ultimate goal? "Create a nearly 1-gigawatt, AI-powered virtual power plant" — equivalent to 1.9 million solar panels, enough to power about 200,000 homes during peak demand.

One NRG executive touted the move as "cutting-edge, AI-driven solutions that will bolster grid resilience and contribute to a more sustainable future." [Residential virtual power plants] work by aggregating numerous, small-scale distributed energy resources like HVAC systems controlled by smart thermostats and home batteries and coordinating them to balance supply and demand... NRG, in partnership with Renew Home, plans to offer Vivint and Nest smart thermostats, including professional installation, at no cost to eligible customers across NRG's retail electricity providers and plans. These advanced thermostats make subtle automatic HVAC adjustments to help customers shift their energy use to times when electricity is less constrained, less expensive, and cleaner... Over time, the parties expect to add devices like batteries and electric vehicles to the virtual power plant, expanding energy savings opportunities for customers...

Through the use of Google Cloud's data, analytics, and AI technology, NRG will be able to do things like better predict weather conditions, forecast wind and solar generation output, and create predictive pricing models, allowing for more efficient production and ultimately ensuring the home energy experience is seamless for customers.
Google Cloud will also offer "its AI and machine learning to determine the best time to cool or heat homes," reports Bloomberg, "based on a household's energy usage patterns and ambient temperatures."

It was less than a year ago that Renew Home was formed when Google spun off the load-shifting service for its "Google Nest" thermostats, which merged with load-shift management startup OhmConnect. Bloomberg describes this week's announcement as "Three of the biggest names in US home energy automation... coming together to offer some relief to the beleaguered Texas electrical grid."

But they point out that 1 gigawatt is roughly 1% of the record summer demand seen in Texas this year. Still, "The entire industry has been built to serve the peak load on the hottest day of the year," said Rasesh Patel, president of NRG's consumer unit. "This allows us to be a lot more smarter about demand in shaving the peak."

Nathan Sobo "joined GitHub in late 2011 to build the Atom text editor," according to an online biography, "and he led the Atom team until 2018." Max Brunsfeld joined the Atom team in 2013, and "While driving Atom towards its 1.0 launch during the day, Max spent nights and weekends building Tree-sitter, a blazing-fast and expressive incremental parsing framework that currently powers all code analysis at GitHub."

Last year they teamed up with Antonio Scandurra (another Atom alumnus) to launch a new startup called Zed (which in 2023 raised $10 million, according to TechCrunch). And today the open source blog It's FOSS checks in on their open-source code editor — "Zed Editor". Mainly written in Rust, it supports running in CLI, diagnosing project-wide errors, split panes, and markdown previews: By default, any added content is treated as plain text. I used the language switcher to change it to Rust so that I would get proper syntax highlighting, indentation, error detection, and other useful language-specific functions. The switch highlighted all the Rust elements correctly, and I then focused on Zed Editor's user interface. The overall feel of the editor was minimal, with all the important options being laid out nicely.

[Its status bar] had some interesting panels. The first one I checked was the Terminal Panel, which, as the name suggests, lets you run commands, scripts, and facilitates interaction with system files or processes directly from within the editor. I then moved to the Assistant Panel, which is home to various large language models that can be integrated into Zed Editor. There are options like Anthropic, GitHub Copilot Chat, Ollama, OpenAI, and Google AI... The Zed Editor team has also recently introduced Zed AI in collaboration with Anthropic for assisting with coding, allowing for code generation, advanced context-powered interactions, and more...

The real-time collaboration features on Zed Editor are quite appealing too. To check them out, I had to log in with my GitHub account. After logging in, the Collab Panel opened up, and I could see many channels from the official Zed community. I could chat with others, add collaborators to existing projects, join a call with the option to share my screen and track other collaborators' cursors, add new contacts, and carry out many other collaborative tasks.

One can also use extensions and themes to extend what Zed Editor can do. There are some nice pre-installed themes as well.

On Tuesday Massachusetts voted to become the first state to allow gig-working drivers to join labor unions, reports WBUR: Since these gig workers are classified as independent contractors, federal law allowing employees the right to unionize does not apply to them. With the passage of this ballot initiative, Massachusetts is the first state to give ride-hailing drivers the ability to collectively bargain over working conditions.
Supporters have said the ballot measure "could provide a model for other states to let Uber and Lyft drivers unionize," reports Reuters, "and inspire efforts to organize them around the United States." Roxana Rivera, assistant to the president of 32BJ SEIU, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, that had spearheaded a campaign to pass the proposal, said its approval shows that Massachusetts voters want drivers to have a meaningful check against the growing power of app-based companies... The Massachusetts vote was the latest front in a years-long battle in the United States over whether ride-share drivers should be considered to be independent contractors or employees entitled to benefits and wage protections. Studies have shown that using contractors can cost companies as much as 30% less than employees.

Drivers for Uber and Lyft, including approximately 70,000 in Massachusetts, do not have the right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act... Under the Massachusetts measure, drivers can form a union after collecting signatures from at least 25% of active drivers in Massachusetts, and companies can form associations to allow them to jointly negotiate with the union during state-supervised talks.
But the Boston Globe points out that the measure " divided labor advocates in Massachusetts, some of whom worry it would in fact be a step backward in the lengthy fight to boost the rights of gig workers." Those concerns led the state's largest labor organization, the AFL-CIO, to remain neutral. But two unions backing the effort, the SEIU 32BJ and the International Association of Machinists, say allowing drivers to unionize, even if not as full employees, will help provide urgently needed worker protections and better pay and safety standards.

Tuesday at California's Vandenberg Space Force base, the U.S. launched a Minuteman III missile, "in an important test of the weapon's ability to strike its targets with multiple warheads," according to Air and Space Forces magazine: The Minuteman III missiles that form a critical leg of the U.S. nuclear triad each carry one nuclear-armed reentry vehicle. But the missile that was tested carried three test warheads... The intercontinental ballastic missile (ICBM) test was controlled by an airborne command post in a test of the U.S. ability to launch its nuclear deterrent from a survivable platform.... Gen. Thomas A. Bussiere, the commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, said in a release: "An airborne launch validates the survivability of our ICBMs, which serve as the strategic backstop of our nation's defense and defense of allies and partners...."

The three test reentry vehicles — one high-fidelity Joint Test Assembly, which carries non-nuclear explosives, and two telemetry Joint Test Assembly objects — struck the Reagan Test Site near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands roughly 30 minutes later after launch, a flight of about 4,200 miles. "They make up essentially a mock warhead," Col. Dustin Harmon, the commander of the 377th Test and Evaluation Group, the nation's operational ICBM test unit, said in an interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine. "There's two different types. One is telemetered, so it's got a radio transmitter in it, it's got antennas, gyroscopes, accelerometers — all the things that can sense motion and movement. And we fly those or we can put one in there that's called a high-fidelity. That is assembled much like an actual weapon would be, except we use surrogate materials, and so we want it to fly similarly to an actual weapon. ... It has the explosives in it that a normal warhead would to drive a detonation, but there's nothing to drive...."

The U.S. government formally notified Russia in advance of the launch in accordance with a 1988 bilateral agreement. More than 145 countries were also provided with advance notice of the launch under the Hague Code of Conduct — an international understanding on launch notifications. The U.S. also provided advance notice to China, a DOD spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine. China notified the U.S. of an ICBM launch over the Pacific Ocean in September. There is no formal agreement between Washington and Beijing that requires such notifications, but each side provided them to avoid miscalculations.
Test launches happen three times a year, according to the article, yielding "several gigabytes of data" about reentry vehicles, subsystems, and payloads. "There are 400 Minuteman III missiles currently in service across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the article.

A 2002 Slashdot post informed the world that "Recently Blake Ross, a developer of the Phoenix web browser, has made a post on the Mozillazine forums looking for a new name for the project. Apparently the people over at Phoenix Technologies decided that the name interferes with their trademark since they make an 'internet access device'..."

And then, on November 9 of 2004, the BBC reported that "Microsoft's Internet Explorer has a serious rival in the long-awaited Firefox 1.0 web browser, which has just been released." Their headline? "Firefox Browser Takes on Microsoft." Fans of the software have banded together to raise cash to pay for an advert in the New York Times announcing that version 1.0 of the browser is available. ["Are you fed up with your browser? You're not alone...."] The release of Firefox 1.0 on 9 November might even cause a few heads to turn at Microsoft because the program is steadily winning people away from the software giant's Internet Explorer browser.

Firefox has been created by the Mozilla Foundation which was started by former browser maker Netscape back in 1998... Earlier incarnations, but which had the same core technology, were called Phoenix and Firebird. Since then the software has been gaining praise and converts, not least because of the large number of security problems that have come to light in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Rivals to IE got a boost in late June when two US computer security organisations warned people to avoid the Microsoft program to avoid falling victim to a serious vulnerability.

Internet monitoring firm WebSideStory has charted the growing population of people using the Firefox browser and says it is responsible for slowly eroding the stranglehold of IE. Before July this year, according to WebSideStory, Internet Explorer was used by about 95% of web surfers. That figure had remained static for years. In July the IE using population dropped to 94.7% and by the end of October stood at 92.9%. The Mozilla Foundation claims that Firefox has been downloaded almost eight million times and has publicly said it would be happy to garner 10% of the Windows- using, net-browsing population.

Firefox is proving popular because, at the moment, it has far fewer security holes than Internet Explorer and has some innovations lacking in Microsoft's program. For instance, Firefox allows the pages of different websites to be arranged as tabs so users can switch easily between them. It blocks pop-ups, has a neat way of finding text on a page and lets you search through the pages you have browsed...
Firefox celebrated its 20th anniversary with a special video touting new and upcoming features like tab previews, marking up PDFs, and tab grouping.

And upgrading to the latest version of Firefox now displays this message on a "What's New" page. "Whether you just downloaded Firefox or have been with us since the beginning, you are a vital part of helping us make the internet a better place.

"We can't wait to show you what's coming next." ("Check out our special edition wallpapers — open a new tab and click the gear icon at the top right corner...")

Google is generally rolling out its Gemini AI-powered Vids app that lets you create video presentations using a prompt. From a report: Some of Vids' key features include letting Gemini auto-insert stock footage for you, generating a script, and making AI voiceovers so you don't have to speak. Google advertises that the tool can help turn customer support articles into videos, make training videos, share company announcements, create meeting recaps, and more. Vids will be available by default for Workspace organizations with access, but Google notes possible usage limits may apply to features like "Help me create" and AI voiceovers starting in 2026.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic has announced a partnership with Palantir and Amazon Web Services to bring its Claude AI models to unspecified US intelligence and defense agencies. Claude, a family of AI language models similar to those that power ChatGPT, will work within Palantir's platform using AWS hosting to process and analyze data. But some critics have called out the deal as contradictory to Anthropic's widely-publicized "AI safety" aims. On X, former Google co-head of AI ethics Timnit Gebru wrote of Anthropic's new deal with Palantir, "Look at how they care so much about 'existential risks to humanity.'"

The partnership makes Claude available within Palantir's Impact Level 6 environment (IL6), a defense-accredited system that handles data critical to national security up to the "secret" classification level. This move follows a broader trend of AI companies seeking defense contracts, with Meta offering its Llama models to defense partners and OpenAI pursuing closer ties with the Defense Department. In a press release, the companies outlined three main tasks for Claude in defense and intelligence settings: performing operations on large volumes of complex data at high speeds, identifying patterns and trends within that data, and streamlining document review and preparation.

While the partnership announcement suggests broad potential for AI-powered intelligence analysis, it states that human officials will retain their decision-making authority in these operations. As a reference point for the technology's capabilities, Palantir reported that one (unnamed) American insurance company used 78 AI agents powered by their platform and Claude to reduce an underwriting process from two weeks to three hours. The new collaboration builds on Anthropic's earlier integration of Claude into AWS GovCloud, a service built for government cloud computing. Anthropic, which recently began operations in Europe, has been seeking funding at a valuation up to $40 billion. The company has raised $7.6 billion, with Amazon as its primary investor.

UK government-appointed commissioners have labeled Birmingham City Council's Oracle Fusion rollout as "the poorest ERP deployment" they have seen. From a report: A report published by the UK council's Corporate Finance Overview and Scrutiny Committee found that 18 months after Fusion went live, the largest public authority in Europe "had not tactically stabilized the system or formulated clear plans to resolve the system issues and recover the operation."

The city council's cloud-based Oracle tech replaced the SAP system that it began using in 1999, but the disastrous project encountered a string of landmark failures. The council has failed to produce auditable accounts since Oracle was implemented in 2022, costs have ballooned from around 19 million pound to a projected estimate of 131 million pound and, because the council chose not to use system audit features, it cannot tell if fraud has taken place on its multibillion-pound spending budget for an 18-month period. In September last year, the council became effectively bankrupt due to outstanding equal pay claims and the Oracle implementation.

The report from "best value commissioners" appointed by central government to investigate struggling councils said that following the Oracle implementation, "a serious lack of trust had developed between members and officers driven by the failed implementation and subsequent lack of progress to resolve the situation."

An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD has gained a substantial 5.7 percentage points of share of the desktop x86 CPU market in the third quarter compared to Q2, the largest quarterly share gain since we began tracking the market share reports in 2016. It also represents an incredible ten percentage point improvement over the prior year. AMD also raked in a strong increase in revenue share, jumping 8.5 percentage points over the prior quarter, indicating that it is selling a strong mix of higher-end CPU models.

During the quarter, AMD launched its new Ryzen 9000-series family of processors amid a scandal related to stability issues with Intel's Raptor Lake chips, which generated a flood of negative press for the company over the course of several months, and inventory adjustments for one of Intel's customers. AMD now commands 28.7% of the desktop processor market. AMD also continued to gain share in the laptop and server markets, though its gains on the desktop side of the business were the most impressive, according to Mercury Research.

Block will abandon development of its Web5 decentralized internet project and reduce investment in music streaming service Tidal to focus on bitcoin mining hardware and self-custody wallets, the payments company announced in its third-quarter letter to shareholders. The Jack Dorsey-led firm cited strong market demand for its bitcoin mining products and Bitkey wallet as key drivers behind the strategic shift.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you voted in the U.S. presidential election yesterday in which Donald Trump won comfortably, or a previous election, a website powered by a right-wing group is probably doxing you. VoteRef makes it trivial for anyone to search the name, physical address, age, party affiliation, and whether someone voted that year for people living in most states instantly and for free. This can include ordinary citizens, celebrities, domestic abuse survivors, and many other people. Voting rolls are public records, and ways to more readily access them are not new. But during a time of intense division, political violence, or even the broader threat of data being used to dox or harass anyone, sites like VoteRef turn a vital part of the democratic process -- simply voting -- into a security and privacy threat. [...]

The Voter Reference Foundation, which runs VoteRef, is a right wing organization helmed by a former Trump campaign official, ProPublica previously reported. The goal for that organization was to find irregularities in the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, but state election officials said their findings were "fundamentally incorrect," ProPublica added. In an interview with NPR, the ProPublica reporter said that the Voter Reference Foundation insinuated (falsely) that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was fraudulent in some way. 404 Media has found people on social media using VoteRef's data to spread voting conspiracies too. VoteRef has steadily been adding more states' records to the VoteRef website. At the time of writing, it has records for all states that legally allow publication. Some exceptions include California, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. ProPublica reported that VoteRef removed the Pennsylvania data after being contacted by an attorney for Pennsylvania's Department of State. "Digitizing and aggregating data meaningfully changes the privacy context and the risks to people. Your municipal government storing your marriage certificate and voter information in some basement office filing cabinet is not even remotely the same as a private company digitizing all the data, labeling it, piling it all together, making it searchable," said Justin Sherman, a Duke professor who studies data brokers.

"Policymakers need to get with the times and recognize that data brokers digitizing, aggregating, and selling data based on public records -- which are usually considered 'publicly available information' and exempted from privacy laws -- has fueled decades of stalking and gendered violence, harassment, doxing, and even murder," Sherman said. "Protecting citizens of all political stripes, targets and survivors of gendered violence, public servants who are targets for doxing and death threats, military service members, and everyone in between depends on reframing how we think about public records privacy and the mass aggregation and sale of our data."

Microsoft is introducing a feature to Notepad called Rewrite that will let you use AI to "rephrase sentences, adjust tone, and modify the length of your content." The Verge reports: If you're a Windows Insider with early access to the feature, you can try it by highlighting the text you want to adjust in Notepad, right-clicking it, and choosing Rewrite. Notepad will then display a dialogue box where you can decide how they want to change their text -- for example, if it needs to be longer or shorter. Rewrite will then offer three rewritten versions that you can replace your work with.

It's worth noting that you'll have to sign in to your Microsoft account to use Rewrite, as it's "powered by a cloud-based service that requires authentication and authorization." Microsoft is launching this feature in preview on Windows 11 in the US, France, UK, Canada, Italy, and Germany. In July, Microsoft rolled out spellcheck and autocorrect for Notepad.

Software engineer David Gomes writes in a blog post: I sometimes need to search for a website that will "convert a PNG to SVG", or "remove page from PDF" or "resize svg". And these apps are... okay. I don't really trust most of them with my data, and also a lot of times they just don't work or have too many ads. So, I've been noticing a trend of people just using AI agents to create full blown apps for these simple use cases.

I decided to try it myself for a "resize SVG" app since I recently had to go through a bunch of websites to do this. So, I pulled up Replit Agent and even though I've used it before, it doesn't cease to amaze me just how insanely good it is. The level of polish on this product is unlike any other AI agent out there right now. It starts off by drawing up a plan and asking you for feedback on that plan. Then, it'll just go to town and try to build the app. But what's super clever about it is that the agent asks you for feedback along the way. Effectively, the Replit Agent guides you, not the other way around (as one might have expected).

A pre-dawn statewide alert about an officer shooting in Hall County triggered over 4,500 complaints to the Federal Communications Commission. The 4:52 a.m. "Blue Alert" on October 4 awakened millions of Texans, many living hundreds of miles from the incident location, to notify them about suspect Seth Altman. Air traffic controllers, healthcare workers, and other professionals reported safety concerns from sleep disruption, according to records obtained by 404 Media. Multiple residents told the FCC they disabled all emergency notifications in response, potentially compromising public safety for future alerts.