Submission + - SpaceX in talks for 80,000 cell sites to build nationwide wireless network (yahoo.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Space Exploration Technologies Corp is in discussions to secure access to at least 80,000 cell sites across the United States, according to Bloomberg, signaling a concrete step toward establishing a fourth nationwide wireless carrier. The satellite giant is negotiating with major tower operators, including Crown Castle International Corp, as it gathers the physical infrastructure required to complement its orbital network.

The potential leasing agreements are expected to reach into the billions of dollars, reflecting the vast scale of the physical network required. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has positioned the initiative as a direct challenge to incumbent carriers, supported by recent regulatory milestones and strategic spectrum acquisitions.

The Federal Communications Commission granted SpaceX approval to launch 15,000 specialized satellites engineered to stream mobile connectivity directly to standard smartphones. Integrating tens of thousands of ground sites will allow the company to manage signal density and deliver reliable broadband across dense suburban and urban corridors.

Submission + - Getty Images files for US bankruptcy, advances restructuring plan (reuters.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Last week, Getty announced plans to file for bankruptcy, marking a major reset after its planned merger with rival Shutterstock collapsed under the weight of heavy debt and growing competition from AI-generated imagery.

Getty said the affiliates of the Getty family and Koch Equity Development, which committed to provide up to $533 million in new equity, will own 100% of the company after the restructuring

It's hard to compete against things like the DALL-E image generator.

Submission + - The Pentagon is quietly building an elite new tech sabotage agency (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Pentagon has spent months quietly building an elite new tech agency to help covertly disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs considered threats to American military superiority.

Neither Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor any other senior Pentagon official has publicly mentioned the agency since it was established this April — a conspicuous omission for a department that has reveled in announcing other major changes aimed at modernizing the military or adopting hard-nosed new policies against foreign adversaries.

Information on the Technology Support Office, or TSO as it is called internally, is nearly impossible to find on Pentagon websites, and the agency is mentioned by name only in several previously unreported Defense Department historical records and memoranda.

Special Operations Command and U.S. Cyber Command both objected to creating the new agency, fearing it would cut into their budgets, according to the two former intelligence officials and one former senior U.S. national security official.

But by creating an agency dedicated to expanding that work, the Defense Department is signaling its intent to ramp up a range of aggressive covert activities abroad — potentially including cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions and disinformation operations.

Many of the people who spoke argued that the aggressive new initiative is needed to help the Pentagon counter foreign adversaries they say are harnessing artificial intelligence and advanced commercial technologies, such as drones, in creative ways that could erode America's military advantage.

Submission + - Microsoft says October updates didn't actually fix VPN issues (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Microsoft says it mistakenly flagged a bug causing Always On VPN connection issues as fixed in the October 2026 Windows 11 cumulative updates.
Always On VPN replaced the legacy DirectAccess technology and supports domain-joined, non-domain-joined, and Microsoft Entra ID–joined devices running Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server.

It runs in the background and establishes secure tunnels back to the user's corporate network whenever their device connects to the internet.

Microsoft first acknowledged the issue in a service alert sent to IT administrators in late September, saying it was triggered on systems running Windows 11 24H2 and later after installing the September 2026 security updates when the initial Always On VPN connection failed (e.g., when using automatic protocol selection with IKEv2 and SSTP).

"When automatic protocol selection or protocol fallback was configured, affected VPN connections could remain stuck in a Connecting state or fail to connect after an initial connection attempt failed," it said. "In some cases, subsequent connection attempts could display the error, 'The specified port is already in use.'"

After releasing the October 2026 Patch Tuesday Windows 11 cumulative updates, Microsoft marked the bug as resolved, but in a Tuesday update it said the issues weren't actually addressed and that a fix would ship later.

"This disclosure was mistakenly updated to Resolved status on October 13, 2026. We have returned its status to Mitigated," it said in a service alert sent to IT admins. "A resolution for this issue is planned to be included in an update to be released in the coming weeks. We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion."

While Microsoft continues working on a permanent solution, it shared a temporary fix that requires affected customers to choose one of two VPN tunneling protocols to work around the issue.

Submission + - Nuclear Power Now Has Bipartisan Support (reason.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Nuclear power has historically been a divisive issue: During the Cold War, an entire generation feared annihilation at the hands of the same basic technology that some want to use to power their homes.

That's unfortunate, because nuclear energy has considerable benefits—a reliable source of power with very few greenhouse gas emissions—with increasingly lower risks.

Thankfully, it seems that message is catching on with people from both major political parties.

"About six-in-ten U.S. adults now say they favor more nuclear power plants to generate electricity," Pew Research reported in October 2025. "That's up from 43% in 2020, driven by increasing support among both Republicans and Democrats." The authors noted that "Republicans are more likely than Democrats" to favor the policy, with "roughly seven-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents" expressing support, but it still included 52 percent of Democrats and independents who lean in that direction.

Submission + - EA Shutting Down Bioware (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by atari_kid
atari_kid writes: According to a recent report by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, EA has reportedly decided to shut down BioWare. While the closure has yet to be officially announced, it appears the studio's future may already have been decided.

Submission + - Physicists Trapped a Particle of Antimatter And Kept It Caged For Months (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Theoretically, the birth of the Universe should have produced equal quantities of particles and antiparticles.

Why the current Universe is so heavily skewed in particles' favor is an enduring mystery – one whose solution remains all the harder to find because of antiparticles' tendency to go and collide with particles.

But an extraordinary effort may have finally tamed one of the biggest tricksters of the antiparticle milieu – the positron, the antimatter counterpart to the ubiquitous electron.

In a cryogenic, superconducting vacuum trap, physicists at Northwestern University in the US successfully kept a single positron for months – a breakthrough that, they say, paves the way to the most rigorous probes yet of particle physics.

Submission + - More than 1.5 million Canadian Crime Stoppers tips leaked (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by doconnor
doconnor writes: Crime Stoppers data was stolen last March by hacktivist collective Internet Yiff Machine. In a manifesto, the group said it wanted to disprove the claim by P3 Global Intel — the company hired by Crime Stoppers to manage its tips — that the platform was "anonymous" and "secure."

A copy of the hacked data was made available to researchers and journalists, including CBC, by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a U.S. non-profit that archives and publishes hacked and leaked documents it deems to be in the public interest.

Submission + - Government web sites go dark after severe PHP vulnerabilities disclosed (reuters.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: PHP disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in their programming language and urged web site operators to immediately apply the fix. As a result, government web sites in Europe and elsewhere temporarily went dark on Wednesday as operators worked to protect their systems.

Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer of Web and cloud security firm Cloudflare (NET.N), opens new tab, said that attacks were emerging and Cloudflare was updating its firewall rules as a stopgap measure.

"We are seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up. This is a STOPGAP only. Patch as soon as PHP releases the update," he said on X.

Officials have said that all PHP versions from PHP 5 onward could be affected, although PHP has not yet disclosed which versions are vulnerable.

Submission + - PHP Warns It Plans to Release 2 Emergency Patches Imminently (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are believed to be uncommonly severe vulnerabilities are scheduled to drop in a little more than 12 hours for PHP, a programming language that powers websites and Web applications everywhere. PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10.

“All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can upgrade as soon as the release is available,” the advisory stated. “We reserve the right to release earlier should details of either vulnerability become public, or should evidence of active exploitation appear in the wild.” The maintainers published the advisory following the leaking of purported details, which have yet to be confirmed. The report showed a video of an exploit tool dubbed PHP2Shell executing code on webservers running WordPress 7.1.3, MediaWiki 1.46.2, phpBB 3.3.17, Magento 2.4.9, Joomla 6.2.0, Laravel 13.36.0, Laravel 8.83.29, Symphony 8.1.9, Drupal 11.4.10, and WHMCS 9.0.9, all of which use PHP. A video depicting the tool has been reposted here.

Attempts to locate the unconfirmed report were unsuccessful, but security firm watchTowr said it claimed to affect every PHP version from PHP 5, released in 2004, onward. The security firm went on to say it has confirmed that the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, are real. Researchers from separate security firm Sansec said they “expect mass attacks to start within 15 minutes of the release.” A third security firm, Webfence, also urged admins to prepare now. Huntress has also issued an advisory.

Submission + - Russian Satellite's Close Shadowing of Radar Imaging Satellite Is A Big Deal (twz.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Russia's Kosmos 2612 came very close to ICEYE X36, which reportedly has Ukraine connections, after weeks of highly unusual maneuvering.

Kosmos 2612, may have passed within approximately 85 feet (26 meters) of a U.S.-registered satellite belonging to commercial imagery provider ICEYE. This would be an extraordinarily close and potentially dangerous pass-by for two objects in space traveling at thousands of miles per hour. For weeks beforehand, ICEYE-X36, which would be of special interest to Russia, had already found itself in increasingly close orbital alignment with its pursuer. The two satellites now look to be drifting further and further apart, but the episode has been a clear sign of what is to come as the potential for conflict in space only continues to grow.

Publicly available space tracking data from the satellitemap.space and orbitalradar.com websites show that Kosmos 2612 (also written sometimes Cosmos 2612 and abbreviated K2612) and ICEYE X36 had their especially close encounter at approximately 16:07 UTC today. Private space services company LeoLabs also told TWZ today that it could not "confirm or contradict what other data sources have stated publicly," but that it has "high-confidence that the objects came within approximately [emphasis in the original] 500 meters [1,640 feet] of each other." Kosmos 2612 had been making progressively closer passes by ICEYE X36 in recent days.

Submission + - Enterprise IT dependency erodes choice

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CIOs admit they are being forced to upgrade enterprise IT

“The deep integration within the organisation makes it increasingly difficult for IT departments to select alternative enterprise IT systems, says survey”

“Switching off a service became easier technically; switching away from the provider could become harder commercially and operationally”

“Over several decades, dependence accumulated with few external guardrails to constrain it.”

“Economists have studied this problem for decades: once a customer makes relationship-specific investments, the vendor gains leverage that no contract can fully anticipate.”

Submission + - Old Blood Cells Have Been Transformed Into Brain Stem Cells That Get Younger (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Now, scientists have transformed old blood cells into young brain stem cells, which continued to grow younger as they grew older.

The researchers, from the University Hospital of Bonn and the University of Bonn, in Germany, described their methods in the journal Aging Cell.

Cellular transformations can be done in two main ways. The first, more circuitous route turns a specific cell back into a pluripotent stem cell, or an embryonic "blank slate," and then into a different cell type.

Submission + - Trump DHS asked CISA to Secretly Aquire and Hack a Voting Machine (propublica.org)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: ProPublica (and others) is reporting that a few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wanted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

In addition, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.” [Or, perhaps do something worse?]

The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.

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