Shameless Plug

Researchers Discover How To Lead Dying Coral Reefs To a 'Fast And Full Recovery' Published on 2026-10-18T20:24:00Z Gizmodo reports: Roughly 84.4% of the world's coral reefs suffered bleaching-levels of heat stress during the last major marine heat wave from January 2023 to September 2025, with over half already lost compared to coral coverage in the 1950s... But there's some good news, thanks to a new study published this Wednesday in the journal Science Advances: Marine ecologists at Stanford have discovered that bleached corals can be revived via contact with a healthy coral neighbor, who (like a good neighbor) shares their photosynthetic, symbiotic algae (Symbiodiniaceae) with their peers. "This incredible new result — that fast and full recovery is possible in bleached coral — can inspire solutions that eventually may be scalable," [Fiorenza Micheli, a marine ecologist with Stanford's Center for Ocean Solutions and study co-author, told the jour...

Websites Are Closing Their Doors to AI Agents Published on 2026-10-18T19:24:00Z The Verge reports: OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice? In recent weeks, users of services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking tickets on behalf of users. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they're blocking AI agents from accessing accounts due to security concerns. Some users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtr...

Court Agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN Law Demands a Technical Impossibility Published on 2026-10-17T22:00:00Z "When state lawmakers attempt to rewrite how the internet works," argues an EFF blog post, "users rely on courts to recognize that laws can't make technical impossibilities a reality." "That's why we were happy to see that a court has blocked Utah's attempt to outlaw the privacy protections of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)." In a win for digital rights, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah's SB 73, the state's draconian anti-VPN age verification law... Signed into law earlier this year, SB 73 attempted to regulate adult websites by requiring them to block VPN users or to identify the physical location of visitors using them or similar tools that mask their network traffic. It even went so far as to prohibit websites from offering instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass these checks. This ma...

MapQuest Shows Location of Flock (and Other ALPR) Cameras Published on 2026-10-17T21:00:00Z MapQuest creates a new layer (that can be toggled on and off), Gizmodo reports: After promising not to comply with the Trump administration's "Lake America" gimmick, the platform announced a new "Surveillance Layer" that displays the locations of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), including those from Flock Safety. Per MapQuest, its new tool will identify the locations of known outdoor surveillance cameras and plate readers from Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and others. While the company didn't specify how it sources its data, it appears to be similar to the data amassed by DeFlock, which maintains a user-submitted map of ALPR camera locations. MapQuest may be sourcing the information from DeFlock and the OpenStreetMap project. Engadget notes that MapQue...

Blue Origin Announces $330M Upgrades to Rocket Facilities for 'Multiple Flights Per Week' Published on 2026-10-17T20:00:00Z "Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin said Friday it plans to make extensive upgrades to its Florida launch facilities," reports CNBC, "with the goal of supporting multiple flights per week by the end of the decade." "The company will add two more launch and landing pads for New Glenn, its heavy-lift, partially reusable rocket." A $330 million expansion to its Rocket Park campus in Cape Canaveral, expected to be complete in the summer of 2027, will enable it to produce up to 150 upper stages of its New Glenn rocket annually, Blue Origin said in a blog post. "These investments are centered on one goal: building the capacity to support more missions, more reliably, and more efficiently," Ian Richardson, Blue Origin's senior vice president of operations, wrote in the post. "As we look ahead, this infrastructure is...

Linux Maintainers Can Now Submit AI-Generated Code Without Declaring It Published on 2026-10-17T19:00:00Z Linux maintainers "have ruled that people no longer have to declare their LLM usage," reports XDA Developers, "as Torvalds himself calls a ban on AI 'utterly stupid.'" The first part of this story comes via a message sent to the Linux mailing list. It announces one of the major changes decided during the Maintainers Summit on October 8, 2026, in Prague, Czechia, where submissions to the kernel no longer need to use the "Assisted-by" tag... meaning that people can submit AI-generated code without needing to declare it as such. In some correspondence regarding concern about this new disclosure removal, the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, made his thoughts known... [Torvalds] compares an AI ban to getting rid of text editors, as doing so would prove that someone could write a good commit message without making any mistakes. He then rounds o...

China's Tencent Says AI Agents Showed Unintended Browsing Behavior Published on 2026-10-16T22:00:00Z Tencent says AI agents used to evaluate third-party models engaged in unintended web-browsing behavior while trying to retrieve data from Alibaba's Amap service. The announcement marks a rare acknowledgment of "rogue" agent activity by a major Chinese tech company. Reuters reports: Tencent Hunyuan, the company's artificial intelligence unit, said in a post on X that the activity did not originate from its Hunyuan models. Its review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination, it said. The Swarmchasers researchers said the agents sought information such as the commonly used entrances at Chinese parks, museums and zoos. [...] Swarmchasers said it used the word "rogue" to describe agents taking actions outside their intended scope or completing a task in unintended ways. After routine automated requests were blocked, the agents tried other ...