The government shutdown-spurred airport chaos is about to get a whole lot worse. From a report: The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday it will reduce flight volumes by 10 percent across 40 major airports in response, a move that could threaten 3,000 to 4,500 flights daily. The cuts will affect "high volume" markets, including in Atlanta, Dallas, New York City and Los Angeles, according to CBS. The FAA has not formally announced which airports will have their capacity cut.

"I'm not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we've had a situation where we're taking these kinds of measures," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said at a news conference, according to the AP. The government shutdown, which is now the longest in US history, has already been causing thousands of delays each day, as well as long waits at airport security. Some major airports have even been forced to operate without air traffic control for hours at a time.

The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data centre projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically-made AI chips, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centres that are less than 30% complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage will be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said.

The move could represent one of China's most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a pause in trade hostilities between Washington and Beijing, and achieve its quest for AI chip self-sufficiency. China's access to advanced AI chips, including those made by Nvidia, has been a key point of friction with the U.S., as the two wrestle for dominance in high-end computing power and AI. U.S. President Donald Trump said in an interview aired on Sunday following talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week that Washington will "let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced" chips.

A massive cyberattack on Swedish IT supplier Miljodata exposed personal data from up to 1.5 million citizens, prompting a national privacy investigation and scrutiny into security failures across multiple municipalities. BleepingComputer reports: MiljÃdata is an IT systems supplier for roughly 80% of Sweden's municipalities. The company disclosed the incident on August 25, saying that the attackers stole data and demanded 1.5 Bitcoin to not leak it. The attack caused operational disruptions that affected citizens in multiple regions in the country, including Halland, Gotland, Skelleftea, Kalmar, Karlstad, and Monsteras.

Because of the large impact, the state monitored the situation from the time of disclosure, with CERT-SE and the police starting to investigate immediately. According to IMY, the attacker exposed on the dark web data that corresponds to 1.5 million people in the country, creating the basis for investigating potential General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) violations. [...] Although no ransomware groups had claimed the attack when Miljodata disclosed the incident, BleepingComputer found that the threat group Datacarry posted the stolen data on its dark web portal on September 13. The leaked database has been added to Have I Been Pwned, which contains information such as names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, government IDs, and dates of birth.

Speaking of Australia, its government has introduced content quotas on global streamers. From a report: The rules require Netflix, Prime Video and the other global streamers with more than one million Australian subscribers to spend 10% of their total Australian expenditure -- or 7.5% of their revenues -- on local originals, whether they are dramas, children's shows, docs, or arts and educational programs.

Following the announcement, the legislation will be introduced into the Australian parliament. Australia's Labor government has long planned to being in the quotas as part of its Revive cultural policy, but months and months of delays had left the local industry wondering how committed their political leaders were to the plan. Global streamers have broadly rejected the necessity of quotas, claiming their local investment in content and jobs offsets them.

Amazon's data-center expansion turned Umatilla, Oregon into an unlikely nerve center for American infrastructure investment. The community of roughly 8,000 residents has seen home prices double and local government budgets surge from $7 million in 2011 to a hundred and $44 million in the past fiscal year. Yesenia Leon-Tejeda, a Realtor and daughter of Mexican-born farmhands who once worked 12-hour shifts at a distribution center, is now on pace to close 35 deals this year.

Federal data shows investment in software and information-processing equipment drove most of America's GDP growth in the first half of 2025. Goldman Sachs estimated that roughly 72% of all server-farm capacity sat in just 1% of counties as of July. The region's hydroelectric dams and cheap power attracted Amazon Web Services more than a decade ago. Growth has brought rising costs for housing and child care. Political tensions over spending erupted this year when Mayor Caden Sipe sued the city manager and council members.

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Sales of electric vehicles surged in September as shoppers rushed to take advantage of the $7500 federal EV tax credit before it disappeared at the end of the month. With the government subsidies now gone, EV sales were expected to take a hit in October. While only a few automakers still report sales on a monthly basis, the results we do have do not paint a rosy picture for EVs in a post-tax credit world.

The Korean automakers were hit particularly hard by the loss of the tax credit. The Hyundai Ioniq 5, which was the fifth-best-selling EV through the third quarter of this year, experienced a 63 percent drop, moving 1642 units in October 2025, down from 4498 in 2024. Its platform-mates saw similar declines. The Kia EV6 moved just 508 units, down 71 percent versus the same month the year before, while the luxurious Genesis GV60 only found 93 buyers, a 54 percent slide year over year. Things were even worse at Honda. While the Acura ZDX was recently discontinued after just a single model year, the related Honda Prologue remains on sale but registered just 806 units, down 81 percent from 4130 sales in October 2024. [...]

Obviously, this isn't the full picture, as several major players -- including General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen -- only release sales reports on a quarterly basis, and others, such as Tesla and Rivian, don't break out individual sales at all. But with four of the top 10 bestselling EVs through Q3 all showing noteworthy declines in October, it spells trouble for the EV market at large. The end-of-year sales figures will provide a much clearer picture of whether October was just a blip or the start of a much more widespread problem for EV sales.

Australia's new "solar sharer" program will give households in NSW, south-east Queensland, and South Australia at least three hours of free solar power each day starting in 2026 -- even for those without rooftop panels. Other areas will potentially follow in 2027. The Guardian reports: The government said Australians could schedule appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers and air conditioners and charge electric vehicles and household batteries during this time. The solar sharer scheme would be implemented through a change to the default market offer that sets the maximum price retailers can charge customers for electricity in parts of the country. The climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, said the program would ensure "every last ray of sunshine was powering our homes" instead of some solar energy being wasted.

Australians have installed more than 4m solar systems and there is regularly cheap excess generation in the middle of the day. Part of the rationale for the program is that it could shift demand for electricity from peak times -- particularly early in the evening -- to when it is sunniest. This could help minimize peak electricity prices and reduce the need for network upgrades and intervention to ensure the power grid was stable.

concertina226 shares a report from The Register: [A massive power outage in April left tens of millions across Spain, Portugal, and parts of France without electricity for hours due to cascading grid failures, exposing how fragile and interconnected Europe's energy infrastructure is. The incident, though not a cyberattack, reignited concerns about the vulnerability of aging, fragmented, and insecure operational technology systems that could be easily exploited in future cyber or ransomware attacks.] This headache is one the European Commission is focused on. It is funding several projects looking at making electric grids more resilient, such as the eFort framework being developed by cybersecurity researchers at the independent non-profit Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

TNO's SOARCA tool is the first ever open source security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platform designed to protect power plants by automating the orchestration of the response to physical attacks, as well as cyberattacks, on substations and the network, and the first country to demo it will be the Ukraine this year. At the moment, SOAR systems only exist for dedicated IT environments. The researchers' design includes a SOAR system in each layer of the power station: the substation, the control room, the enterprise layer, the cloud, or the security operations centre (SOC), so that the SOC and the control room work together to detect anomalies in the network, whether it's an attacker exploiting a vulnerability, a malicious device being plugged into a substation, or a physical attack like a missile hitting a substation. The idea is to be able to isolate potential problems and prevent lateral movement from one device to another or privilege escalation, so an attacker cannot go through the network to the central IT management system of the electricity grid. [...]

The SOARCA tool is underpinned by CACAO Playbooks, an open source specification developed by the OASIS Open standards body and its members (which include lots of tech giants and US government agencies) to create standardized predefined, automated workflows that can detect intrusions and changes made by malicious actors, and then carry out a series of steps to protect the network and mitigate the attack. Experts largely agree the problem facing critical infrastructure is only worsening as years pass, and the more random Windows implementations that are added into the network, the wider the attack surface is. [...] TNO's Wolthuis said the energy industry is likely to be pushed soon to take action by regulators, particularly once the Network Code on Cybersecurity (NCCS), which lays out rules requiring cybersecurity risk assessments in the electricity sector, is formalized.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: You may be disappointed if you go looking for Google's open Gemma AI model in AI Studio today. Google announced late on Friday that it was pulling Gemma from the platform, but it was vague about the reasoning. The abrupt change appears to be tied to a letter from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who claims the Gemma model generated false accusations of sexual misconduct against her.

Blackburn published her letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Friday, just hours before the company announced the change to Gemma availability. She demanded Google explain how the model could fail in this way, tying the situation to ongoing hearings that accuse Google and others of creating bots that defame conservatives. At the hearing, Google's Markham Erickson explained that AI hallucinations are a widespread and known issue in generative AI, and Google does the best it can to mitigate the impact of such mistakes. Although no AI firm has managed to eliminate hallucinations, Google's Gemini for Home has been particularly hallucination-happy in our testing.

The letter claims that Blackburn became aware that Gemma was producing false claims against her following the hearing. When asked, "Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?" Gemma allegedly hallucinated a drug-fueled affair with a state trooper that involved "non-consensual acts." Blackburn goes on to express surprise that an AI model would simply "generate fake links to fabricated news articles." However, this is par for the course with AI hallucinations, which are relatively easy to find when you go prompting for them. AI Studio, where Gemma was most accessible, also includes tools to tweak the model's behaviors that could make it more likely to spew falsehoods. Someone asked a leading question of Gemma, and it took the bait.

The Internet Archive celebrated archiving its trillionth webpage last month and received congratulations from San Francisco, which declared October 22 "Internet Archive Day." Senator Alex Padilla designated the nonprofit a federal depository library. The organization currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. But these victories arrived after years of bruising copyright battles that forced the removal of more than 500,000 books from the Archive's Open Library. "We survived, but it wiped out the Library," founder Brewster Kahle told ArsTechnica.

In 2024, the Archive lost its final appeal in a lawsuit brought by book publishers over its e-book lending model. Damages could have topped $400 million before publishers announced a confidential settlement. Last month, the organization settled another suit over its Great 78 Project after music publishers sought damages of up to $700 million. That settlement was also confidential. In both cases, the Archive's experts challenged publishers' estimates as massively inflated.

Kahle had envisioned the Open Library as a way for Wikipedia to link to book scans and help researchers reference e-books. The Archive wanted to deepen Wikipedia's authority as a research tool by surfacing information often buried in books. "That's what they really succeeded at -- to make sure that Wikipedia readers don't get access to books," Kahle said of the publishers. He thinks "the world became stupider" when the Open Library was gutted. The Archive is now expanding Democracy's Library, a free online compendium of government research and publications that will be linked in Wikipedia articles.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), an anti-piracy organization representing Japanese IP holders like Studio Ghibli and Bandai Namco, released a letter last week asking OpenAI to stop using its members' content to train Sora 2, as reported by Automaton. The letter states that "CODA considers that the act of replication during the machine learning process may constitute copyright infringement," since the resulting AI model went on to spit out content with copyrighted characters.

Sora 2 generated an avalanche of content containing Japanese IP after it launched on September 30th, prompting Japan's government to formally ask OpenAI to stop replicating Japanese artwork. This isn't the first time one of OpenAI's apps clearly pulled from Japanese media, either -- the highlight of GPT-4o's launch back in March was a proliferation of "Ghibli-style" images.

Altman announced last month that OpenAI will be changing Sora's opt-out policy for IP holders, but CODA claims that the use of an opt-out policy to begin with may have violated Japanese copyright law, stating, "under Japan's copyright system, prior permission is generally required for the use of copyrighted works, and there is no system allowing one to avoid liability for infringement through subsequent objections."

Palantir launched a fellowship that recruited high school graduates directly into full-time work, bypassing college entirely. The company received more than 500 applications and selected 22 for the inaugural class. The four-month program began with seminars on Western civilization, U.S. history, and leaders including Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Fellows then embedded in client teams working on live projects for hospitals, insurance companies, defense contractors, and government agencies.

CEO Alex Karp, who studied at Haverford and Stanford, said in August that hiring university students now means hiring people engaged in "platitudes." The program wraps up in November. Palantir executives said they had a clear sense by the third or fourth week of which fellows were succeeding in the company environment. Fellows who perform well will receive offers for permanent positions without college degrees.

Millions will set their clocks back an hour tonight for Daylight Saving Time — only to set them forward an hour six months later.

But does anyone like doing this, asks Yahoo News: A recent AP-NORC poll found that about half of the American public, 47%, oppose the current daylight saving time system, compared to 40% who neither favor nor oppose the current practice, while 12% favor the current system, which involves most states switching their clocks twice a year.

Of those polled, 56% would prefer to have daylight saving time year-round, meaning less light in the morning for a tradeoff of more light in the evening. While 42% of Americans said they would prefer to have standard time year-round, which means more light in the morning and less light in the evening. And 12% of Americans prefer switching between standard time and daylight saving time.

Sleep doctors would prefer we switch to standard time permanently. "The U.S. should eliminate seasonal time changes in favor of a national, fixed, year-round time," the American Academy of Sleep Medicine said in a statement published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine last year. "Current evidence best supports the adoption of year-round standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology and provides distinct benefits for public health and safety."

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: [C]iting delays in Starship's development and competitive pressure from China, NASA asked SpaceX and Blue Origin — which holds a separate lunar lander contract with the space agency — to submit plans to expedite development of their respective spacecraft by October 29. Both companies have responded. But the space agency is also asking the broader commercial space industry to detail how they might get the job done more quickly, hinting that NASA leadership is prepared to sideline its current partners. CNN spoke with half a dozen companies about how they plan to respond to NASA's call to action, which the agency will formally issue once the government shutdown ends, according to a source familiar with the matter.
One possibility is Lockheed Martin... Notably, as a legacy NASA contractor, the company built the $20.4 billion Orion spacecraft that astronauts will ride when they take off from Earth... Now, Lockheed says it can piece together a two-stage lunar lander that uses spare parts harvested from Orion. The company would make use of Space Shuttle-era OMS-E engines — which are also used on Orion — to serve as the propulsion for an "ascent stage" of the lunar lander, providing the thrust for the vehicle to lift off the moon after a mission is completed. But the vehicle also needs a descent stage to get down to the lunar surface in the first place...

Other commercial space companies contacted by CNN — including Firefly Aerospace and Northrop Grumman — said simply that they were "ready to support" NASA in its endeavor to find a faster way to complete the Artemis III mission. They did not confirm whether they would formally respond to the space agency's anticipated request for companies to submit proposals.
The more important goal, argue some experts, is to pave the way for a permanent lunar base where astronauts can live and work... [P]erhaps the true winner will be the country that is able to build lasting infrastructure, experts say. "It makes great press fodder to frame this as competition," said one space policy source, who was among several that spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity to discuss controversial issues. "But this is about the long game and the sustainability."

The FCC plans to repeal a Biden-era ruling that required ISPs to secure their networks under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, instead relying on voluntary cybersecurity commitments from telecom providers. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the ruling "exceeded the agency's authority and did not present an effective or agile response to the relevant cybersecurity threats." Carr said the vote scheduled for November 20 comes after "extensive FCC engagement with carriers" who have taken "substantial steps... to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses." Ars Technica reports: The FCC's January 2025 declaratory ruling came in response to attacks by China, including the Salt Typhoon infiltration of major telecom providers such as Verizon and AT&T. The Biden-era FCC found that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), a 1994 law, "affirmatively requires telecommunications carriers to secure their networks from unlawful access or interception of communications."

"The Commission has previously found that section 105 of CALEA creates an affirmative obligation for a telecommunications carrier to avoid the risk that suppliers of untrusted equipment will "illegally activate interceptions or other forms of surveillance within the carrier's switching premises without its knowledge,'" the January order said. "With this Declaratory Ruling, we clarify that telecommunications carriers' duties under section 105 of CALEA extend not only to the equipment they choose to use in their networks, but also to how they manage their networks." A draft of the order that will be voted on in November can be found here (PDF).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Even before Azure had a global failure this week, Austria's Ministry of Economy had taken a decisive step toward digital sovereignty. The Ministry achieved this status by migrating 1,200 employees to a Nextcloud-based cloud and collaboration platform hosted on Austrian-based infrastructure. This shift away from proprietary, foreign-owned cloud services, such as Microsoft 365, to an open-source, European-based cloud service aligns with a growing trend among European governments and agencies. They want control over sensitive data and to declare their independence from US-based tech providers.

European companies are encouraging this trend. Many of them have joined forces in the newly created non-profit foundation, the EuroStack Initiative. This foundation's goal is " to organize action, not just talk, around the pillars of the initiative: Buy European, Sell European, Fund European." What's the motive behind these moves away from proprietary tech? Well, in Austria's case, Florian Zinnagl, CISO of the Ministry of Economy, Energy, and Tourism (BMWET), explained, "We carry responsibility for a large amount of sensitive data -- from employees, companies, and citizens. As a public institution, we take this responsibility very seriously. That's why we view it critically to rely on cloud solutions from non-European corporations for processing this information."

Austria's move and motivation echo similar efforts in Germany, Denmark, and other EU states and agencies. The organizations include the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which abandoned Exchange and Outlook for open-source programs. Other agencies that have taken the same path away from Microsoft include the Austrian military, Danish government organizations, and the French city of Lyon. All of these organizations aim to keep data storage and processing within national or European borders to enhance security, comply with privacy laws such as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and mitigate risks from potential commercial and foreign government surveillance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: Denmark's justice minister on Thursday said he will no longer push for an EU law requiring the mandatory scanning of electronic messages, including on end-to-end encrypted platforms. Earlier in its European Council presidency, Denmark had brought back a draft law which would have required the scanning, sparking an intense backlash. Known as Chat Control, the measure was intended to crack down on the trafficking of child sex abuse materials (CSAM). After days of silence, the German government on October 8 announced it would not support the proposal, tanking the Danish effort.

Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard told reporters on Thursday that his office will support voluntary CSAM detections. "This will mean that the search warrant will not be part of the EU presidency's new compromise proposal, and that it will continue to be voluntary for the tech giants to search for child sexual abuse material," Hummelgaard said, according to local news reports. The current model allowing for voluntary scanning expires in April, Hummelgaard said. "Right now we are in a situation where we risk completely losing a central tool in the fight against sexual abuse of children," he said. "That's why we have to act no matter what. We owe it to all the children who are subjected to monstrous abuse."

PC Mag's Michael Kan writes: A "Keep Android Open" campaign is pushing back on new rules from Google that will reportedly block users from sideloading apps on Android phones. It's unclear who's running the campaign, but a blog post on the free Android app store F-Droid is directing users to visit the campaign's website, which urges the public to lobby government regulators to intervene and stop the upcoming restrictions. "Developers should have the right to create and distribute software without submitting to unnecessary corporate surveillance," reads an open letter posted to the site. [...]

Google has described the upcoming change as akin to requiring app developers to go through "an ID check at the airport." However, F-Droid condemned the new requirement as anti-consumer choice. "If you own a computer, you should have the right to run whatever programs you want on it," it says. Additionally, the rules threaten third-party app distribution on F-Droid, which operates as a "free/open-source app distribution" model.

In its blog post, F-Droid warns about the impact on users and Android app developers. "You, the creator, can no longer develop an app and share it directly with your friends, family, and community without first seeking Google's approval," the app store says. "Over half of all humankind uses an Android smartphone," the blog post adds. "Google does not own your phone. You own your phone. You have the right to decide who to trust, and where you can get your software from."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2 billion cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer -- the Israeli government -- had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of an arrangement that would become known as the "winking mechanism." The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel's concerns that data it moves into the global corporations' cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.

Like other big tech companies, Google and Amazon's cloud businesses routinely comply with requests from police, prosecutors and security services to hand over customer data to assist investigations. This process is often cloaked in secrecy. The companies are frequently gagged from alerting the affected customer their information has been turned over. This is either because the law enforcement agency has the power to demand this or a court has ordered them to stay silent. For Israel, losing control of its data to authorities overseas was a significant concern. So to deal with the threat, officials created a secret warning system: the companies must send signals hidden in payments to the Israeli government, tipping it off when it has disclosed Israeli data to foreign courts or investigators.

To clinch the lucrative contract, Google and Amazon agreed to the so-called winking mechanism, according to leaked documents seen by the Guardian, as part of a joint investigation with Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call. Based on the documents and descriptions of the contract by Israeli officials, the investigation reveals how the companies bowed to a series of stringent and unorthodox "controls" contained within the 2021 deal, known as Project Nimbus. Both Google and Amazon's cloud businesses have denied evading any legal obligations.

More than a half dozen federal departments and agencies have backed a proposal to ban future sales of the most popular home routers in the United States on the grounds that the vendor's ties to mainland China make them a national security risk, Washington Post reported Thursday, citing people briefed on the matter. From the report: The proposal, which arose from a months-long risk assessment, calls for blocking sales of networking devices from TP-Link Systems of Irvine, California, which was spun off from a China-based company, TP-Link Technologies, but owns some of that company's former assets in China.

The ban was proposed by the Commerce Department and supported this summer by an interagency process that includes the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense, the people said. "TP-Link vigorously disputes any allegation that its products present national security risks to the United States," Ricca Silverio, a spokeswoman for TP-Link Systems, said in a statement. "TP-Link is a U.S. company committed to supplying high-quality and secure products to the U.S. market and beyond."

If imposed, the ban would be among the largest in consumer history and a possible sign that the East-West divide over tech independence is still deepening amid reports of accelerated Chinese government-supported hacking. Only the legislated ban of Chinese-owned TikTok, which President Donald Trump has averted with executive orders and a pending sale, would impact more U.S. consumers.