Is this Elon Musk’s world?

Is this Elon Musk’s world?

  Ahead of the midterm elections, Elon Musk has become the single largest campaign donor in any election cycle, giving about $450 million to Republicans. It is just a fraction of a percent of his near-trillion-dollar net worth. Musk’s control over SpaceX, Starlink, X, Tesla and Neuralink, on top of his riches, has given him power over wealth, attention and critical infrastructure that few human beings have ever amassed before. What does he want to do with all this power?…

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Researchers uncover signs of massive Israeli surveillance operation on Starlink users

Researchers uncover signs of massive Israeli surveillance operation on Starlink users

Gizmodo reports: Discover-Tech, an Israeli advertising firm previously linked to the delivery of zero-click spyware, is the top bidder for Starlink ad impressions in 105 countries, according to a new report from Reuters. Researchers say it all points to a large-scale tracking effort aimed at users of SpaceX’s satellite internet service. John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, posted on X that data from TrendAI suggest the existence of a “worldwide surveillance op targeting @Starlink…

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‘Black October’: The entire internet is breaking

‘Black October’: The entire internet is breaking

  AI-hacking swarms are poking holes across the internet at such a rate that some cybersecurity professionals have dubbed this month “Black October.” The AI-cybersecurity professional Alex Stamos argues that it’s time to be proactive rather than reactive, and that might mean rewriting the code for the internet in newer programming languages that could make all of our online systems and personal information safer. He joins “Galaxy Brain” host Charlie Warzel to explain why that’s not as big of a…

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The $6.3 billion Binance hack was pulled off in just twenty minutes

The $6.3 billion Binance hack was pulled off in just twenty minutes

Wired reports: Cryptocurrency firms and investigators are racing to freeze and track down billions of dollars of stolen digital cash following what appears to be the largest crypto heist of all time. On Thursday, starting at around 4pm ET, hackers started quickly siphoning around $6.3 billion in cryptocurrencies, spread across multiple blockchains, from wallets belonging to crypto exchange Binance. Following the theft, Binance almost immediately suspended all deposits and withdrawals from its services as part of its investigation into the…

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Gulf states must rethink trillion-dollar defence in light of U.S.-Iran war, IISS reports says

Gulf states must rethink trillion-dollar defence in light of U.S.-Iran war, IISS reports says

The Guardian reports: Gulf states are going to have to reconfigure their trillion-dollar defences given the damage inflicted on their economies and the questionable continued value of US bases in the face of Iranian attack, according to a study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The report says that in the weeks before the 8 April ceasefire, 12 regional states, overwhelmingly in the Gulf, faced 4,670 Iranian one-way attack drones and more than 1,400 ballistic missiles. Nearly half were…

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How a secret vote by UN scientists legitimized carbon capture and skewed decades of climate policy

How a secret vote by UN scientists legitimized carbon capture and skewed decades of climate policy

By Katie Worth This story was originally published by ProPublica In the spring of 2005, the United Nations convened more than 100 of the world’s top scientists in the medieval town of Oviedo, Spain. They were there to finish writing a paradigm-shifting report about a technology that they hoped could help stop climate change.  To celebrate the report’s impending completion, the meeting’s hosts handed out bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, with tongue-in-cheek labels stating that they were to be…

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Twice as many plants and animals sold in wildlife trade as previously thought, report says

Twice as many plants and animals sold in wildlife trade as previously thought, report says

The Guardian reports: The number of plant and animal species in use or sold in the wildlife trade is more than twice as high as previously thought, researchers have discovered. A study, published in Science Advances, warns that there are huge gaps in global assessments of how wildlife is traded, and that past estimates have failed to keep up with changes such as the boom in the online exotic pet trade, where sellers offering to post spider eggs across the…

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How a Kansas megachurch pastor might win Democrats a Senate majority

How a Kansas megachurch pastor might win Democrats a Senate majority

Emma Green writes: One recent Sunday, Adam Hamilton, the Kansas pastor who has been running an unexpectedly competitive Democratic bid for U.S. senator, was scheduled to visit four churches around Kansas City. As he settled into a pew at Oak Ridge Baptist Church, he was fretting. “I want to stay for the entire worship service,” he said. People milled around the sanctuary, greeting one another warmly. Nearly everyone there was Black; all the churches in the day’s lineup were Missionary…

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Irreparable harm? A defense contractor gave their personal AI agent access to a secure Pentagon system

Irreparable harm? A defense contractor gave their personal AI agent access to a secure Pentagon system

Wired reports: Earlier this year, sources tell WIRED, a contractor caused a security incident at the Department of Defense by connecting a secure centralized system used by multiple intelligence agencies to their personal account for Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent. It appears that the agent used by the contractor, who is employed by the global consulting firm Accenture, then sent information about the DOD system, including login credentials, to a high-risk, third-party website. The centralized system contains controlled unclassified…

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Massive leak exposes 41,000 DHS workers — including undercover ICE agents

Massive leak exposes 41,000 DHS workers — including undercover ICE agents

Wired reports: An unprecedented leak of Department of Homeland Security records has exposed details of more than 41,000 employees or contractors who work for the department and its constituent agencies. The records include email addresses, phone numbers, and office addresses, but also references to internal systems and sensitive information on undercover and surveillance programs. In all, the leak provides a map of how DHS is organized and how it operates. The records, which span DHS itself as well as seven…

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Can American democracy survive the next financial crash?

Can American democracy survive the next financial crash?

Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Federal Reserve governor and former deputy secretary of the Treasury, writes: The bailout clock is ticking. In September, Oracle invoked “force majeure” to delay paying debt on a data center, which led to a drop in the corporation’s stock price. This month, OpenAI significantly cut its revenue projections; CoreWeave, a heavily leveraged data-center company, saw its share price plunge; and investors began racing to buy credit-default swaps to protect their portfolios. These are all signs…

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White House arranged a private jet for Bolsonaro to flee Brazil for the U.S.

White House arranged a private jet for Bolsonaro to flee Brazil for the U.S.

The New York Times reports: Flávio Bolsonaro, the Brazilian presidential candidate who faces multiple criminal investigations, is staying in Florida on a temporary status that was given following orders by President Trump, and will likely be granted permanent residency later, U.S. officials said. Mr. Bolsonaro fled Brazil after losing an election this week. U.S. border agents allowed him and his family to enter the United States on what is called parole, usually given for humanitarian reasons, after they landed in…

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Israel has voted, but what comes next? Dissecting a messy ballot and coalition‑building process

Israel has voted, but what comes next? Dissecting a messy ballot and coalition‑building process

Gadi Eisenkot or Benjamin Netanyahu – under whose direction will Israel head? Erik Marmor/picture alliance via Getty Images By Dov Waxman, University of California, Los Angeles The Israeli election of Oct. 27, 2026, was among the most highly anticipated votes in the country’s history. It was consequential, if not yet conclusive. With nearly all the votes counted, it is still unclear who will lead the country following the first national ballot since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack, and the…

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100,000 simulations of comets striking Earth suggest the ingredients of life were not extraterrestrial

100,000 simulations of comets striking Earth suggest the ingredients of life were not extraterrestrial

Science Alert reports: Where did we come from? The answer, many scientists have proposed, is space. One longstanding theory, hypothesized for over a century, is that life on Earth emerged from fragments of prebiotic chemistry that arrived from the cosmic unknowns, possibly delivered by far-flung comets. The idea is supported by a growing body of evidence, with scientists detecting signs of organic molecules in comets soaring through space, which hypothetically could seed the ingredients of life on worlds they come…

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