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"Private security firms will soon be able to hack overseas cybercriminals."
Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents. Accessed on 14 August 2026, 0018 UTC.
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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencemonitor.blogspot.com).
165
Today
The Trump administration is recruiting private security firms to conduct federal government-authorized operations, including cyber attacks, against overseas-based criminal organizations that commit hacks on US persons, organizations, or government entities. In a National Security Presidential Memorandum issued Thursday, US President Donald Trump directed the National Coordination Center (NCC), wh
As Virgin Galactic nears christening the first of its next-generation spaceship designed to launch customers on suborbital flights, it still is missing a key component—a name. The self-described "commercial spaceline," which was founded by British tycoon Richard Branson, has turned to the public to vote on what to call the new vehicle . The spaceplane will be a member of Virgin Galactic's Delta-c
Ukrainian drone teams demolished a brigade of US Army tanks and armored vehicles during a live war game held this year—but the US soldiers were lucky enough to get “respawn” attempts while learning from the experience. The semiannual military exercise, called Combined Resolve, gave the US military a firsthand taste of how modern drone warfare has evolved on the battlefields of Ukraine. The Ukrain
On Thursday, Flock announced plans to require all agencies with access to license plate reader data to use a safety tool that automatically detects abnormal activity and locks out cops who abuse their access to stalk people they know in their personal lives. Flock’s audit assistance tool suspends access when user activity “meets defined criteria for abnormal behavior,” Flock said. The suspension
by Scharon Harding / 4h
Smart pet-feeder company Petlibro suffered an outage on Tuesday, giving users a harsh reminder of the risks of relying on smart devices. Petlibro makes pet feeders that connect to Wi-Fi and, for setup with Petlibro’s mobile companion app, Bluetooth. Users can set the feeders to automatically dispense food at scheduled times, which is handy for pet care when the owner is out of the home. In a stat
Today, Instagram unveiled a refresh of its wordmark, accompanied by the usual bland corporate platitudes these kinds of announcements are always packaged with. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri called it “leaner and more modern, with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that’s always made it Instagram.” Sure, Adam. Simplicity and craft are definitely what everyone thinks of when I
Google is announcing a new Gemini model today, but it's not the long-awaited 3.5 Pro. Gemini 3.7 Flash is now rolling out to replace 3.6 Flash, which itself was released only three weeks ago . This new "workhorse" model is supposedly the product of core optimizations and developer feedback, offering improved coding and agentic performance. And Google is hoping to counter the lower cost of some co
It's time for Rivian's changeover from model year 2026 to 2027, and the electric vehicle startup has decided to take a page from its recently released R2 SUV and apply it to the company's larger, more expensive R1 line. The changes aren't massive—the R1 got a refresh in 2024 that saw the R1S SUV and R1T pickup each get some comprehensive re-engineering with new powertrain options, a new electroni
Anthropic investors expect the AI startup to float at a valuation of $2 trillion or more in October, a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab’s debut the largest-ever initial public offering. Half a dozen of the company’s backers told the FT that Anthropic’s rapidly rising revenue would enable it to more than double its current valuation in a planned autumn float. A listing
Solar storms, like the one in August 1972 that hit during the gap between the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, throw bursts of protons intense enough to raise an astronaut's cancer risk or even cause radiation sickness. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field absorb this radiation, but crews heading to the Moon or Mars won't have that protection, and no spacecraft built so far has enough shielding
Anthropic has revealed that it will soon watermark content that is processed ( not just generated! ) by any of its models. In a support article , Anthropic explained that it was rolling out machine-readable watermarks to comply with the European Union’s AI Act, which requires all AI system providers to watermark AI-generated or manipulated audio, image, text, and video outputs. The law applies to
Yesterday
by Beth Mole / 1d
A healthy toddler in Washington state fell ill abruptly. It began with vomiting, lethargy, and weakness on his right side. Then it progressed to a headache, fever, and trouble swallowing. At one point, he briefly became unresponsive, and he had episodes where he stopped breathing. Doctors admitted him to the hospital, but his condition only deteriorated. The boy was infected with an ultra-rare am
AI companies' penchant for scraping through large swaths of the public web in search of valuable training data has already led to lawsuits and technical fixes aimed at stopping the practice. Now, a pair of designers is hoping to stymie these scrapers with a new font designed to offer people a perfectly readable webpage while serving scrapers a subtly edited, nonsensical version in the underlying
Terabytes worth of credentials, many belonging to the world’s biggest and most sensitive organizations, have been exposed in a supply-chain attack on LiteLLM, an open source tool that streamlines AI-driven software development. Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Samsung, and Salesforce are only a handful of the entities whose access secrets were exposed. The revelation was posted on Tuesday and Wednesday
Physicists with the Beijing Spectrometer III (BES III) experiment have uncovered convincing new evidence of the existence of so-called glueballs , an elusive composite particle made entirely of gluons predicted by quantum theory. The results appeared in a preprint posted to arXiv last month and were also presented last week at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). All the s
Twitch now lets users opt out of Amazon's use of content from their channels to train Amazon's "generative AI content models." The change, announced today, comes more than two years after a company executive confirmed that Amazon was using Twitch content for AI training. In an updated support page , Twitch confirms that users must opt out if they don’t want their “streams, VODs, clips, stream cha
President Trump was sued by nonprofit news groups today over Truth Social's "Truth API" that sells real-time access to posts from Trump and other top users of the social network. Trump is profiting from selling preferential access to government information, the lawsuit said. Trump's social media company this month started charging customers up to $100,000 per month for the earliest access to post
by Jeremy Hsu / 1d
Hundreds of US government drones have switched from border surveillance to a different surveillance mission this summer—looking for signs of screwworm infestations in wild animals and livestock herds. The flesh-eating New World Screwworm is the parasitic larva that emerges from eggs laid by flies in the open wounds or body openings of warm-blooded animals and humans, with untreated cases potentia
It's been far too long since I've been able to report a new land speed record. For a while, it looked like Bloodhound might have been able to make good on its 1,000 mph (1,609 km/h) attempt, but then the money ran out . As a result, Thrust SSC's two-way average of 763.6 mph (1,229 km/h), set in 1997, remains the fastest anyone has ever driven a wheeled vehicle over a timed mile . But yesterday, o
The Trump administration is trying to stop New York from enforcing its gambling laws against Kalshi, and yesterday said it ordered the prediction market to continue operating in the state. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that it exercised its emergency authority in response to a "market emergency." The CFTC said it acted "to ensure market stability" and "ordered the exch
If you can truly appreciate an old book—and maybe even marvel at how its fragile, yellowing pages contain some of the earliest ways that people tried to make sense of the world around them—then headlines about tech companies that are destroying books to train AI likely torture a tender part of your soul. It’s indeed depressing to imagine piles of book spines waiting to be fed into wood chippers w
Google has revealed its Pixel phone hardware for 2026, and you won't be surprised. The Pixel 11 series looks a lot like last year's lineup , featuring an evolution of the design Google adopted with the Pixel 9. There are some minor tweaks, a few new hardware goodies, and yes, even more Gemini-powered AI. The new phones are joined by an updated Pixel Watch 5 with much the same story, as well as Go
As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them , and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees , researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets’ devices. Anyone on a call that involved screen sharing, whether parti
Formula E is set to make a big change in terms of visibility when season 12 gets underway this December. It has signed a new multiyear deal to broadcast the sport on Disney+ and ESPN+ in 144 countries, with live coverage of each entire ePrix, from practice through qualifying to the race. The new media deal means that here in the US, Formula E will be shown on the streaming networks from next seas
The Cambrian explosion may have been fueled by poop. The first animals on Earth emerged about 600 million years ago, and 60 million years later, those simple early animals evolved in wildly different directions, branching out into a diverse menagerie of complicated new forms and conquering new ecological niches. Known as the Cambrian Explosion, this flurry of rapid evolution produced most of the
Aug 11, 2026
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