The Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, California, has some of the best real estate in the country, with a charming hodgepodge of homes ranging in style from Tudor revival to modern farmhouse and contemporary Mediterranean. It also has a gigantic compound that is home to Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, and their daughters Maxima, August, and Aurelia. Their land has expanded to include 11 previously separate properties, five of which are connected by at least one property line.

The Zuckerberg compound’s expansion first became a concern for Crescent Park neighbors as early as 2016 , due to fears that his purchases were driving up the market. Then, about five years later, neighbors noticed that a school appeared to be operating out of the Zuckerberg compound. This would be illegal under the area’s residential zoning code without a permit. They began a crusade to shut it down that did not end until summer 2025.

WIRED obtained 1,665 pages of documents about the neighborhood dispute—including 311 records, legal filings, construction plans, and emails—through a public record request filed to the Palo Alto Department of Planning and Development Services. (Mentions of “Zuckerberg” or “the Zuckerbergs” appear to have been redacted. However, neighbors and separate public records confirm that the property in question belongs to the family. The names of the neighbors who were in touch with the city were also redacted.)

Read full article

Comments

Welcome to Edition 8.18 of the Rocket Report! NASA is getting a heck of a deal from Blue Origin for launching the agency’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars. Blue Origin is charging NASA about $20 million for the launch on the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. A dedicated ride on any other rocket capable of the job would undoubtedly cost more.

But there are tradeoffs. First, there’s the question of risk. The New Glenn rocket is only making its second flight, and it hasn’t been certified by NASA or the US Space Force. Second, the schedule for ESCAPADE’s launch has been at the whim of Blue Origin, which has delayed the mission several times due to issues developing New Glenn. NASA’s interplanetary missions typically have a fixed launch period, and the agency pays providers like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance a premium to ensure the launch happens when it needs to happen.

New Glenn is ready, the satellites are ready, and Blue Origin has set a launch date for Sunday, November 9. The mission will depart the Earth outside of the usual interplanetary launch window, so orbital dynamics wizards came up with a unique trajectory that will get the satellites to Mars in 2027.

Read full article

Comments

Helping companies pay ransoms to digital extortionists is kind of a weird business.

On the one hand, you “negotiate” with cybercriminals and in so doing may drive down the costs of recovering from a particular ransomware incident. On the other hand, you’re helping criminals get paid, funding their operations and making further attacks more likely.

And there’s always a temptation built in to this kind of work. Seeing lucrative sums being whisked away through cryptocurrency exchanges and “mixing services”… Realizing from up close just how vulnerable companies are… Learning that modern ransomware can operate as a service where you essentially “rent” the code from its developers in return for a cut of the profits…

Read full article

Comments

The Event Horizon Telescope only recently gave us the first images of the environment immediately surrounding a black hole. Since then, it has been boosting the resolution and filling in the details of an environment dominated by the most extreme gravity in the Universe.

But which gravity are we talking about? Because of its incompatibility with quantum mechanics and our current inability to explain dark matter, people have proposed all sorts of variants of gravity that go beyond general relativity and clean up some of the physics’ awkwardness. It’s possible that the extreme environment near a black hole amplifies the differences among at least some of these hypotheses. So, a group of physicists decided to see whether any of those differences might be large enough that the next generation of telescopes might be able to rule out some potential replacements for relativity.

Searching for subtlety

Any replacement for general relativity faces an awkward challenge: General relativity does pretty well at explaining everything from the large-scale structure of the Universe to phenomena we can measure right here on Earth. So, any alternative theories would have to differ from relativity in very subtle ways that might be extremely difficult to detect.

Read full article

Comments

One of the world’s most ruthless and advanced hacking groups, the Russian state-controlled Sandworm, launched a series of destructive cyberattacks in the country’s ongoing war against neighboring Ukraine, researchers reported Thursday.

In April, the group targeted a Ukrainian university with two wipers, a form of malware that aims to permanently destroy sensitive data and often the infrastructure storing it. One wiper, tracked under the name Sting, targeted fleets of Windows computers by scheduling a task named DavaniGulyashaSdeshka, a phrase derived from Russian slang that loosely translates to “eat some goulash,” researchers from ESET said . The other wiper is tracked as Zerlot.

A not-so-common target

Then, in June and September, Sandworm unleashed multiple wiper variants against a host of Ukrainian critical infrastructure targets, including organizations active in government, energy, and logistics. The targets have long been in the crosshairs of Russian hackers. There was, however, a fourth, less common target—organizations in Ukraine’s grain industry.

Read full article

Comments

Tesla shareholders today voted to approve a compensation plan that would pay Elon Musk more than $1 trillion over the next decade if he hits all of the plan’s goals. Musk won over 75 percent of the vote, according to the announcement at today’s shareholder meeting .

The pay plan would give Musk 423,743,904 shares, awarded in 12 tranches of 35,311,992 shares each if Tesla achieves various operational goals and market value milestones. Goals include delivering 20 million vehicles, obtaining 10 million Full Self-Driving subscriptions, delivering 1 million “AI robots,” putting 1 million robotaxis in operation, and achieving a $400 billion adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization).

Musk has threatened to leave if he doesn’t get a larger share of Tesla. He told investors last month, “It’s not like I’m going to go spend the money. It’s just, if we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army? Not control, but a strong influence. That’s what it comes down to in a nutshell. I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence.”

Read full article

Comments

Google has announced new features in the popular Google Finance platform, and it leans heavily on Google’s tried-and-true strategy of more AI in more places . This builds on Google’s last Finance update, which added a Gemini-based chatbot. Now, Google is adding Gemini Deep Research to the site, which will allow users to ask much more complex questions. You can also ask questions about the future, backed by new betting market data sources.

The update, which is rolling out over the next several weeks, will add a Deep Research option to the Finance chatbot. The company claims that with the more powerful AI, users will be able to generate “fully cited” research reports on a given topic in just a few minutes. So you can expect an experience similar to Deep Research in the Gemini app—you give it a prompt, and then you come back later to see the result.

You probably won’t want to bother with Deep Research on simple queries—there are faster, easier ways to get that done. Google suggests using Deep Research on more complex things, like the doozy below.

Read full article

Comments

AT&T has been told to stop running ads that falsely promise all customers a free iPhone. The rebuke came from the advertising industry’s official watchdog just a week after AT&T sued the organization over a different advertising dispute.

BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Review Board (NARB) “has recommended that AT&T Services, Inc. modify its advertising to avoid conveying a false message regarding eligibility for an iPhone device offer,” the group, which runs the ad industry’s self-regulatory system, said today .

Verizon initiated the case by challenging AT&T’s “Learn how everyone gets iPhone 16 Pro on us” claim. BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division (NAD) ruled in favor of Verizon in September 2025. AT&T appealed but lost the challenge in the NARB decision announced today.

Read full article

Comments

Internal documents have revealed that Meta has projected it earns billions from ignoring scam ads that its platforms then targeted to users most likely to click on them.

In a lengthy report , Reuters exposed five years of Meta practices and failures that allowed scammers to take advantage of users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Documents showed that internally, Meta was hesitant to abruptly remove accounts, even those considered some of the “scammiest scammers,” out of concern that a drop in revenue could diminish resources needed for artificial intelligence growth.

Read full article

Comments