Have you heard the news that Texas’ senators want to chop up NASA’s retired space shuttle Discovery in order to move it from the Smithsonian to Houston? The lawmakers in question have and are now crying foul to the Department of Justice.

Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), together with Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas), on Wednesday sent a letter to the DOJ urging the Smithsonian be investigated for allegedly violating the Anti-Lobbying Act. They claim that the institution— Discovery ‘s home for the past 13 years—improperly used appropriated funds to influence Congress regarding the relocation of the winged orbiter.

“Public reporting suggests the Smithsonian Institution has taken affirmative steps to oppose the passage and implementation of the shuttle’s relocation, as part of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” wrote Cornyn and Cruz to Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate. “These steps include lobbying the staff of the Senate Appropriations and Rules Committees to express disapproval, coordinating with members of the press to generate public opposition to the law’s passage and disseminating misinformation about the cost and logistics of the move.”

Read full article

Comments

Defense contractors are in full sales mode to win a piece of a potentially trillion-dollar pie for development of the Trump administration’s proposed Golden Dome missile shield.

CEOs are touting their companies’ ability to rapidly spool up satellite, sensor, and rocket production. Publicly, they all agree with the assertion of Pentagon officials that US industry already possesses the technologies required to make a homeland missile defense system work.

The challenge, they say, is tying all of it together under the umbrella of a sophisticated command and control network. Sensors must be able to detect and track missile threats, and that information must rapidly get to weapons that can shoot them down. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s top commander, likes to call Golden Dome a “systems of systems.”

Read full article

Comments

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced Atlas , a new web browser with ChatGPT integration, to let you “chat with a page,” as the company puts it. But Atlas also goes beyond the usual LLM back-and-forth with Agent Mode, a “preview mode” feature the company says can “get work done for you” by clicking, scrolling, and reading through various tabs.

“Agentic” AI is far from new, of course; OpenAI itself rolled out a preview of the web browsing Operator agent in January and introduced the more generalized “ChatGPT agent” in July . Still, prominently featuring this capability in a major product release like this—even in “preview mode”—signals a clear push to get this kind of system in front of end users.

I wanted to put Atlas’ Agent Mode through its paces to see if it could really save me time in doing the kinds of tedious online tasks I plod through every day. In each case, I’ll outline a web-based problem, lay out the Agent Mode prompt I devised to try to solve it, and describe the results. My final evaluation will rank each task on a 10-point scale, with 10 being “did exactly what I wanted with no problems” and one being “complete failure.”

Read full article

Comments

The makers of BIND, the Internet’s most widely used software for resolving domain names, are warning of two vulnerabilities that allow attackers to poison entire caches of results and send users to malicious destinations that are indistinguishable from the real ones.

The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2025-40778 and CVE-2025-40780 , stem from a logic error and a weakness in generating pseudo-random numbers, respectively. They each carry a severity rating of 8.6. Separately, makers of the Domain Name System resolver software Unbound warned of similar vulnerabilities that were reported by the same researchers. The unbound vulnerability severity score is 5.6

Revisiting Kaminsky’s cache poisoning attack

The vulnerabilities can be exploited to cause DNS resolvers located inside thousands of organizations to replace valid results for domain lookups with corrupted ones. The corrupted results would replace the IP addresses controlled by the domain name operator (for instance, 3.15.119.63 for arstechnica.com) with malicious ones controlled by the attacker. Patches for all three vulnerabilities became available on Wednesday.

Read full article

Comments

Tesla reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2025 this afternoon. Earlier this month , we learned that the electric vehicle manufacturer had a pretty good Q3 in terms of sales, which grew by 7.3 percent year over year and cleared out tens of thousands of cars from inventory in the process. However, that hasn’t translated into greater profitability.

Even though revenues grew by 12 percent to $28 billion compared to the same period last year , Tesla’s operating expenses grew by 50 percent. As a result, its operating margin halved to just 5.8 percent. And so its profit for the quarter fell by 37 percent to $1.4 billion.

Some growth in revenue came from its battery and solar division; this increased by 44 percent to $3.4 billion compared to Q3 2024. Services—including the Supercharger network, which is now open to an increasing number of other makes of EV—also grew, increasing by 25 percent to $3.4 billion. EV deliveries increased by 7 percent to 497,099, most of which were the Model 3 sedan and Model Y crossover. Automotive revenues grew slightly less, increasing 6 percent year over year to $21.2 billion.

Read full article

Comments

The cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover is estimated to have cost the UK at least £1.9 billion in what is likely to be “the most economically damaging cyber event” for the country.

The month-long shutdown of internal systems and production at JLR affected over 5,000 British organisations, according to an analysis by Cyber Monitoring Centre, a non-profit organization that ranks the severity of cyber events in the UK.

“This incident looks to have been by some distance, the single most financially damaging cyber event ever to hit the UK,” said Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre and chair of CMC’s technical committee.

Read full article

Comments

Amid the chaos of the Trump administration’s haphazard job cuts and a mass exodus of leadership, the Food and Drug Administration is experiencing a slowdown of drug reviews and approvals, according to an analysis reported by Stat News .

An assessment of metrics by RBC Capital Markets analysts found that FDA drug approvals dropped 14 percentage points in the third quarter compared to the average of the six previous quarters—falling from an average of 87 percent to 73 percent this past quarter. In line with that finding, analysts noted that the delay rate in meeting deadlines for drug application reviews rose from an average of 4 percent to 11 percent.

The FDA also rejected more applications than normal, going from a historical average of 10 percent to 15 percent in the third quarter. A growing number of rejections relate to problems at manufacturing plants, which in turn could suggest problems with the FDA’s inspection and auditing processes.

Read full article

Comments

Netflix’s international offerings include some entertaining Norwegian fare, such as the series Ragnarok (2020–2023), a surprisingly engaging reworking of Norse mythology brought into the 21st century that ran for three seasons . Another enjoyable offering was a 2022 monster movie called Troll , essentially a Norwegian take on the classic Godzilla formula. Netflix just dropped a trailer for the sequel, Troll 2, which looks to be very much in the same vein as its predecessor.

(Spoilers for the first Troll movie below.)

Don’t confuse the Netflix franchise with 2010’s Trollhunter , shot in the style of a found footage mockumentary. A group of college students sets off into the wilds of the fjordland to make a documentary about a suspected bear poacher named Hans. They discover that Hans is actually hunting down trolls and decide to document those endeavors instead, but soon realize they are very much out of their depth.

Read full article

Comments

The clock just ticked past noon here in Houston, Texas, so it’s acceptable to have a drink, right?

Because after another turbulent morning of closely following the rough-and-tumble contest to become the next NASA administrator, I sure could use one.

What has happened now? Why, it was only SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is NASA’s most important contractor, referring to the interim head of the space agency, Sean Duffy, as “Sean Dummy,” and suggesting he was trying to kill NASA. Musk later added, “The person responsible for America’s space program can’t have a 2 digit IQ.”

Read full article

Comments