FTC News Today Tech

More than ten days after Apple was notified of the eMudhra CA compromise, the git, curl, and python3 tools shipped with macOS still trust the compromised certificates. The issue remains unresolved despite the notification.

ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations is conducting one of the largest anti-left surveillance operations in U.S. history, according to the report. The far-reaching spying on left-wing activists is described as rivaling FBI and CIA crackdowns on the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.

CNC stone carving may seem out of place in ancient Gothic architecture, but medieval builders were themselves at the forefront of technology in their time. Using modern CNC machines could help make the construction of new Gothic architecture a practical reality today.

A Git-like version control system for US legislation would let lawyers read statutes as they stood on any date and trace each phrase back to the law that wrote it. An example history of nine US Code titles was built by replaying every amendment.

Amazon has agreed to acquire satellite firm Globalstar for $11.57 billion, bringing its satellite assets and spectrum into Amazon’s competition with SpaceX’s Starlink. The deal would preserve Globalstar’s satellite services for Apple devices, which became a major part of its business after Apple’s iPhone Emergency SOS feature and roughly $1.5 billion in Apple investment. Globalstar’s survival followed a 2002 bankruptcy and a rebuilt constellation that helped restore capacity.

A new introductory textbook, Start Doing Graph Theory, aims to teach readers graph theory by applying it to puzzles, theorem proofs, and other problems. It presents the subject as a hands-on toolkit rather than abstract theory, covering a broad range of uses.

A Massachusetts factory is using a factory-scale robot to build circuit boards on demand, claiming turnaround times twice as fast as a typical Shenzhen quick-turn shop. The setup highlights a U.S.-based alternative for rapid PCB prototyping and production.

At least 10 people died when one high-speed train struck another near Toledo, Spain, causing two carriages to derail. Rescuers are searching the wreckage, and authorities warn the death toll could rise.

Readers are skeptical that Nvidia and Micron’s outsized contribution to U.S. earnings reflects broad economic strength, seeing it more as a bubble or temporary fluctuation masking a weak, K-shaped economy. The discussion highlights concentration in AI-driven profits and Baumol-style cost pressures, where lucrative tech sectors raise costs for other services while many businesses and workers struggle.

A visualization illustrates U.S. wealth inequality by showing median household wealth as a 9-inch stack of $100 bills, compared with a 145-foot stack for the average top-1% household. The scale highlights the enormous gap between typical families and the wealthiest Americans.

A Tesla Semi caught fire on I-880 in Hayward with no crash involved, closing the freeway for 10 hours. While truck fires are common, this incident raises questions that need answers.

Apple is automatically blocking certificates linked to the compromised eMudhra intermediate CAs. Mac administrators can take optional steps to address affected command-line tools.

At least 10 people have died and scores more were injured in a high-speed train collision in Spain’s Toledo province. The accident occurred on the line connecting Madrid to southern Andalusia.

Moderators of r/Seattle say they discovered that archive.today was injecting malware links into archived pages and have banned the service, though the claim has not been externally validated. The move follows long-standing concerns about archive.today’s behavior, including past reports that it used visitors for DDoS attacks.

Ole Bielfeldt of Germany won the top prize in the Nikon Small World contest for a microscopic video showing an inkjet printer depositing ink onto paper. The winning image captures the precise motion of ink droplets as they land on the page.

An Anthropic team member argues that the traditional coding interview no longer provides useful hiring signal, at least for their team. They offer an optimistic take that this shift creates a major opportunity for junior engineers, with hunger mattering more than tenure.

In the latest installment of its Gaussian splatting series, PlayCanvas details how it bypassed GPU Scene instance caps, implemented Streamed SOG LODs, and managed GPU memory budgets for production-ready photogrammetry. These changes bring the renderer to a point where it can finally claim to be “unlimited”—maybe.

Dayjob: Tax is a new benchmark that evaluates AI agents across 50 realistic tax assignments, testing how well they navigate messy records and apply professional judgment. It aims to measure whether agents can deliver reliable tax work in practical environments.

Rob Manuel, creator of Fesshole and co-founder of B3ta, has created “81 Jokes for the ZX81,” an absurd self-set project featuring 81 jokes he wrote and illustrated himself for the vintage computer. The collection leans into the retro constraints of the ZX81 platform.

Researchers explain soap-film colors as a fixed white minus a cosine transform of the CIE color-matching functions evaluated at twice the film’s optical thickness. The computed color sequence matches Newton’s thin-film table, and thick films fade to white because that transform decays.

Assembly Nights appears to make the case for returning to low-level programming as a way to counter skill atrophy from heavy Claude/Codex use and keep engineering fundamentals sharp. Readers are receptive to the idea, with discussion turning to practical choices like NASM versus FASM and whether GDB is the right tool for debugging assembly.

A Hacker News post announcing a personal strike this November sparked debate about whether tech workers can organize collective action and resist AI-driven productivity pressures. Commenters were largely skeptical that an individual strike would matter, while some managers argued engineers who oppose AI tools risk being managed out as output and metrics improve. The thread also reflected broader frustration over locked-down devices, cloud dependence, and the declining affordability of independent computing hardware.

Researchers are using lightweight radio-pulse tags and cellphone signals to track migrating monarch butterflies, revealing their routes, behavior, survival, and habitat needs. The findings are intended to inform conservation efforts and future land management across North America.

The piece compares the architectures of Obsidian Canvas and Heptabase, focusing on how their file-centric versus card-centric data models shape spatial thinking, graph indexing, and data portability. It examines how these foundational design choices affect the tools’ behavior and suitability for different workflows.

The author has become an ARPA member of SDF, a non-profit public-access UNIX system that has run continuously since 1987. The piece traces SDF’s history from Ted Uhlemann’s early 300-baud-era origins.

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5 introduces two new benchmarks and three upgrades. For the first time, most of the index is built on private datasets.

Wedgewood’s admission that it produced fake polls spread rapidly online, with the news quickly amplified and folded into a range of rumors and conspiracy theories. The resulting conversation has become a framing contest that continues to evolve.

Emacs has turned 50, marking half a century since the MIT AI Lab’s text editor helped give rise to the free software movement. Its legacy continues to shape open-source software and developer tools.

A new v1.0 MacOS Extensions Pack has been released for the 1996 Apple Network Server, adding Mac OS extension support to the rare Unix-based server. The project reflects ongoing retrocomputing interest in Apple’s short-lived Network Server line.

Anthropic is expanding its partnership with GSA to bring its Claude AI to all levels of government. The company said the move supports its work building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems for public-sector use.