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The New York Times Sues Brave Web Browser For AI Scraping, Bypassing Paywalls Published on 2026-11-02T19:00:00Z The New York Times and several other publishers have sued (PDF) Brave Software, accusing the browser maker of scraping their websites without permission and helping users bypass paywalls. The Verge reports: According to a complaint (PDF) filed by the companies that run New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, Brave Software has monetized its index of scraped websites by, in part, providing AI companies with paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index." The AI companies then use that index to train their models, access content to "respond to specific user queries," or both. Brave has allegedly provided "stolen copyrighted content" to "many" AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. Brave also promotes "hundreds of top publishers" as being accessible th...

Toyota's EV Sales More Than Doubled In a Year, While Its Gas Car Sales Drop 20% In China Published on 2026-11-01T23:36:00Z Toyota's EV sales have jumped 127% through September, reports Electrek: Including Lexus, Toyota sold 309,766 battery electric vehicles (BEVs) globally through the first nine months of 2026, up 127.4% from the same period last year. Except for January (+87.5%), Toyota's EV sales have more than doubled every month this year compared with 2025... While its EVs are catching on, Toyota Motor's global sales fell for the third straight month in September. Toyota sold 860,107 vehicles in September, down 2.2% from the previous year. The company said that although overall demand remained steady, sales in China fell, leading to lower overall sales than last year. Through September, Toyota sold 7.51 million vehicles globally, down 3.4%. In China, Toyota's sales plunged nearly 20%, marking its eighth consecutive month with lower sales. Toyota said the ov...

SystemD's Creator Opens Signups for Private Preview of Amutable's Cryptographically Verified Linux Systems Published on 2026-11-01T22:33:00Z SystemD creator Lennart Poettering left Red Hat for Microsoft in 2022, but 10 months ago left to co-found Amutable a company that aims to build cryptographically verified Linux systems that stay trusted over time. It's FOSS calls it "a read-only, image-based system where every machine produces signed reports of its own state" — and signups are now open for a private preview: Before announcing this Linux-based implementation, Amutable had released two open source tools. tine, a Buck2-based build system that composes OS images; available under MPL-2.0, and Quarry, a TUF-based tool that distributes those images to machines; available under Apache-2.0. What Amutable Foundations brings to the table is a service where Amutable runs the images, update repositories, control plane and vulnerability fixes for organizations and ind...

Religious Exemption from Using AI in Workplace Granted to Humanist Published on 2026-11-01T21:33:00Z "David Durman, a nontheistic humanist, recently secured a religious exemption from using AI in the workplace," reports TechCrunch. Durman, a University of Kentucky administrator, told TechCrunch that humanism centers on "human well-being and flourishing, both individually and collectively ... and implores a person to try to improve both their well-being and their flourishing as well as the others around them." He believes that using the technology runs counter to his beliefs. "The way we become moral actors for ourselves and for others is through the active application of our minds, and the diminishing of that [through AI use] is going to necessarily have a negative impact on our ability to do so," he said, reflecting on how overreliance on AI might affect critical thinking...." [Humanism] tends to appeal to people who are skeptical of a god or ot...

AI Makes Linux 7.4 Merge Window the Largest in Kernel History Published on 2026-11-01T20:14:00Z "On a Git commit basis, the Linux 7.4 merge window has been the busiest on record," writes Phoronix," with 19,671 commits since Linux 7.3: As of this morning in Linux Git ahead of v7.4-rc1, the kernel source tree is up to 41,605,120 lines. That's from 5,193,578 blank lines, 4,993,604 lines of comments, and 31,417,938 lines of detected code. Or nearly half a million lines of code added during the Linux 7.4 merge window, ignoring comments and blank lines [as detected by cloc ]. A historical graph of commits shows a clear spike for Linux 7.4, which Phoronix argues shows the definite recent uptick due to AI/LLM activity." With Linux kernel maintainers being "completely overwhelmed" due to both AI generated bug reports and patches/fixes, the Git commit activity has been surging as a result... The upward trend has continued building the past several kerne...

Computer Simulations Suggest Building Blocks of Life Didn't Arrive on Prehistoric Comets Published on 2026-10-31T21:50:00Z CNN reports: The popular theory that comets were crucial in kick-starting life on Earth billions of years ago may not hold up, according to new computer simulations that counter decades of scientific thinking. The finding suggests the fragile organic molecules supposedly carried by the icy objects would have been destroyed on impact, upending an established origin of life theory that dates back to at least 1961 [with earlier versions postulated in 1908]... Early in its history — over 4 billion years ago — Earth may have experienced a period of heavy bombardment from more than 100,000 comets larger than 100 meters (328 feet), according to the new study, published Wednesday in the journal Scientific Reports. Those impacts, however, were mostly too heavy for life-starting molecules to withstand. The team used the latest models of comet formation and e...

Recycling ANSI Art: Tracing the Origins of BBS Logon Screens Published on 2026-10-31T20:50:00Z BBS-era "door" games are preserved by the site Break Into Chat, along with their history. Now the site's actually traced the origins of several ANSI art screens in the 1980s and "how different people later transformed the original images," starting from one of the most popular bulletin board systems in St. Louis, Missouri. Slashdot reader Kirkman14 writes: "Fire Escape" was curator of the authoritative list of bulletin board systems in St. Louis's area code and sysop of the area's most popular board. Like many sysops of that time, Fire Escape enlivened her bulletin board by finding and repurposing older ANSI art. Eventually her BBS had 18 different logon screens in its rotation, many of which featured flames or mushroom clouds or made liberal use of red and yellow. Break Into Chat follows the trail: Some, maybe even most, of Fire Escape's ...