Saudi officials paid for his wife and son to fly out of the U.S. and offered to cover his bail, according to court filings. A judge ordered the engineer to remain in custody.

© Aaron Wojack for The New York Times

Nearly 100 years after the dirigible Graf Zeppelin made the first nonstop airship journey across the Pacific Ocean, another airship has successfully completed a round-trip flight from New Mexico to Japan and back. But the significance of this modern feat was less about the journey's length and more about its purpose: demonstrating how a lighter-than-air platform can act as a cell phone tower in the sky.

The trans-Pacific flight that took place over a month between August and September 2026 was the most notable milestone yet for Sceye, a US aerospace company based near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sceye has developed an uncrewed platform filled with helium for buoyancy and equipped with an electric-powered propeller for active propulsion, allowing it to resist most strong winds and keep hovering over the same location for long periods. The platform also uses top-mounted solar panels and onboard batteries to stay powered for stratospheric operations around the clock.

“We can stay over an area of operation, and we do that in the stratosphere right around 60,000 feet, so we're twice as high as air traffic and we're above the jet stream, and yet 30 times closer than low-Earth orbit satellites,” Mikkel Frandsen, founder and CEO of Sceye, told Ars. “We can fly through day and night until the sun comes up the next morning and recharges the batteries, at which point we're still at the same altitude and still over the same area of operation.”

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Wikipedia’s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago

A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at “don’t trust it”, because it was the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”.

Clearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But despite the fact it now has been consulted trillions of times by billions of people (English Wikipedia alone is 5.2bn words long), it inspires an odd lack of curiosity. Even people donating to Wikipedia might say the money was “for the factcheckers”, though there aren’t any – not paid ones, anyway. Meanwhile, the internet in the social media era had begun to feel like a much uglier place, and some digital nostalgia was setting in: here was this holdover that had somehow survived; a website that functions – and even looks – much the same as it did 20 years ago.

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© Photograph: Boris Roessler/EPA

© Photograph: Boris Roessler/EPA

© Photograph: Boris Roessler/EPA

The tech company says successful AI worms need more capability on less powerful devices, but current trends make that feasible by the end of the year

Warnings about what artificial intelligence might do in the future – together with alarming reports of what it has gotten up to already – are being issued so quickly that even security experts have difficulty triaging what to worry about.

Yet a report this week from Anthropic’s offensive research team grabbed attention by describing a new, practical threat, one devoid of human characteristics or apocalyptic musings. The red team, as such internal testers are called, said it created a malicious AI program that spread autonomously through internet-connected “smart” televisions and could do the same inside other ordinary devices. While machines running AI usually need a fair amount of computing power, the researchers said that their program split parts of itself among 15 televisions and was still able to function by using a bit of power from each.

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© Photograph: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

© Photograph: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

© Photograph: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

Whether it was youngsters proving their skills or state sabotage, Europe’s most hacked country was left with a mountain of waste after food began cooking in freezers

Shortly before midnight last Sunday, the digital thermostats controlling hundreds of supermarket cold aisles across France began to flicker and rise.

In a “bizarre and unprecedented” cyber-attack, hackers had remotely overridden the temperature settings on thousands of freezers, fridges and chiller cabinets pushing them from as low as -27C (-16.6F) to well over 50C (122F).

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© Photograph: Lucien Libert/Reuters

© Photograph: Lucien Libert/Reuters

© Photograph: Lucien Libert/Reuters

The company outlined a $65 million budget last year when it embarked on an effort to elect state politicians friendly to the A.I. industry.

© Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

We need to work together to build a more inclusive history, writes Mags L Halliday. Plus a letter from Shane Ritchie

Sandi Toksvig is right to highlight the systemic bias in information about women’s lives in history (Pass notes: Is Wikipedia ‘deeply biased’? Sandi Toksvig says it is – so she’s backing a rival, 12 October). Her comment about Wikipedia, however, implies that no one is working to correct this bias on the site itself. I belong to several projects whose goals are to reduce the gender gap on Wikipedia.

One, Women in Red, started in October 2014. At that point, only 15.53% of biographies on the encyclopedia were of women. As of October 2026, that has risen to 20.42%, in part thanks to the many volunteers who spend their spare time searching for reliable sources to draw on. The Women in Red project currently publishes an average of 1,500 new biographies every month.

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© Photograph: Alan Wilson/Alamy

© Photograph: Alan Wilson/Alamy

© Photograph: Alan Wilson/Alamy

“I felt like there were some moments in the film where she was just brazenly lying.”

© Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Image: Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Even as alarm grows over the risks, families are embracing bots and agents to tackle the spiraling administrative tasks of modern child rearing.

© Arin Yoon for The New York Times

The employee, now fired, had said he advised government agencies in Saudi Arabia. He was also listed as a partner at a venture firm with a Saudi prince.

© Aaron Wojack for The New York Times

Jean-Noël Barrot criticises X owner in speech attacking foreign efforts to destabilise France before 2027 election

France’s foreign minister has accused Elon Musk of using his social media platform to orchestrate “massive online harassment campaigns” against European leaders as he took aim at foreign efforts to destabilise the country before next year’s presidential election.

Speaking at an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development conference on Tuesday, Jean-Noël Barrot pointed to the role that social media had come to play in the global battle over democracy. “The forces seeking to undermine democracy now dominate the information landscape, where they employ tactics designed to polarise public debate,” he said.

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© Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

© Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

© Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

As artificial intelligence bots spread, we are increasingly glimpsing how these digital entities interact and what they talk about with one another.

Apple unveiled the device as it continues its foray into artificial intelligence and tries to prove it can still innovate.

© Karsten Moran for The New York Times

The new models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, are meant to compete with cutting-edge A.I. models from rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI.

© Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

Just 19% of the online encyclopedia’s biographies are of women. Is this because it’s edited by ‘mostly white, middle-aged, European men’, as the comedian claims?

Name: Wikipedia.

Age: 25.

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© Photograph: Nordin Catic/Getty Images For The Cambridge Union

© Photograph: Nordin Catic/Getty Images For The Cambridge Union

© Photograph: Nordin Catic/Getty Images For The Cambridge Union

Kanishka Narayan, concerned by Australian incident, says British cyber defences could be bypassed by artificial intelligence agent

• UK politics live – latest updates

An AI-driven cyber-attack similar to the OpenAI breach of Australia’s healthcare system is likely, “if not inevitable”, in the UK, according to a senior minister.

Kanishka Narayan, the UK AI minister, indicated that the British government’s own cyber defences would be bypassed by a technology that has developed highly sophisticated skills in cybersecurity.

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© Photograph: James Manning/PA

© Photograph: James Manning/PA

© Photograph: James Manning/PA

For more than a year, The New York Times followed recipients of universal basic income programs, which Elon Musk and other tech leaders have promoted as a solution to A.I.-fueled job losses.

At the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mary Tsingou Menzel’s computer programming helped set the stage for chaos theory and other fields.

The Philadelphia Police Department said the agents had also sent in a false homicide tip. The incidents led the White House to call for better disclosure of rogue A.I. behavior.

© Caroline Gutman for The New York Times

Mr. Musk, whose company SpaceX owns Starlink, has attacked the top executive of Delta Air Lines for not selecting the internet provider.

© Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times

Meta had delayed releasing Muse, its A.I. agent app, for months over safety concerns. Then new competition forced Mr. Zuckerberg’s hand.

© Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

The woman who helped put astronauts on the moon was a software engineer when the field was not prestigious or lucrative.

© Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

"Billions of phones run on code looked after by a handful of people.We counted them from the code itself." - The people holding up the internet.

The woman who helped put astronauts on the moon was a software engineer when the field was not prestigious or lucrative.

© Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Thinking Allowed, The Artificial Human and Free Thinking among other programmes hit by £500m cuts

BBC Radio 4’s consumer rights show You and Yours is to be axed after more than 50 years, becoming one of the latest victims of the corporation’s £500m cuts plan.

The programme, once described by the former Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer as “one of the most important” on the station, is one of a handful to be cut as the BBC searches for shows that can be more easily adapted as podcasts.

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© Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

© Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

© Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Margaret Hamilton, the first female programmer hired to work on the space project at M.I.T., was 90.

© NASA/Alamy

Lawyers launch super-complaint after research shows officers frequently dismiss image-based abuse

Police forces are routinely failing to investigate complaints about the circulation of image-based abuse, previously known as “revenge pornography”, according to research that has triggered a super-complaint over the way such crimes are handled.

Lawyers have gathered evidence from 100 people who reported intimate images being shared online without their consent. Their research suggests that image-based abuse is still frequently dismissed or not recognised as criminal offending, despite being described by the former prime minister Keir Starmer as a national emergency.

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© Photograph: Microgen Images/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF

© Photograph: Microgen Images/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF

© Photograph: Microgen Images/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF

Independent researchers say they've identified a large "fleet" of AI agents apparently running on Tencent infrastructure and making parallel queries against Alibaba's Amap mapping service. TechCrunch reports: Researchers, however, resisted the term "swarm," noting that there seems to be little coordination between their different queries. "'Agent fleet,' not 'swarm:'" one researcher wrote in the preliminary report, "many parallel agents on the same kind of task, with no sign of communication between them." The agents were discovered by monitoring traffic to the domain-scanning service urlquery, a technique that previously revealed long-running activity by OpenAI agents. AI agents often use urlquery to load websites that they cannot access directly, leaving a record of their activities that can be valuable to researchers. In this case, the record showed queries to Alibaba's Amap service, seeking directions to different entrances of various public places, including a park, a zoo, and a hospital. The research is ongoing and so few details are available, but the behavior shows how persistent AI agent activity has become on the internet. In the wake of the Hugging Face incident, many researchers are actively monitoring for rogue agent activity on the internet. Much of that activity has been easy to find because agents tend to use the same techniques and make little effort to conceal themselves.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shares in fashion company fall nearly 10% after its app systems are accessed by ‘unidentified third party’

Asos is investigating unauthorised access to its app system after shoppers received a notification claiming hackers had “fully compromised” its data.

The online fashion retailer said basic personal information including name and contact details might have been accessed by an unidentified third party but it did not believe payment card records or passwords had been compromised.

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© Photograph: Rafael Henrique/Sopa Images/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Rafael Henrique/Sopa Images/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Rafael Henrique/Sopa Images/Shutterstock

Scammers reuse personal details harvested from fake Esta websites – and texts and calls can keep arriving for months

When the British actor Lisa Riley was preparing to travel to the US last year, she applied online for an Esta so she would not need a visa. After finding the site through a Google search she filled in her passport, bank and personal details and waited for the confirmation, which normally takes just under an hour.

When it failed to arrive, she emailed an address from the site where she had paid and got back a message unlike any she had seen before, with a link to a website that displayed a jumble of words and letters.

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© Photograph: NetPhotos/Alamy

© Photograph: NetPhotos/Alamy

© Photograph: NetPhotos/Alamy

Nine months [in 1996], 25,000 miles, one phone cord, and the kindness of strangers. [Longreads]

Few populations illustrate the internet's profound effects better than transgender people, whose ability to build wide-ranging networks exploded after the internet became publicly available. Suddenly, after decades of insular community groups and disparate activist campaigns, anyone who believed they were the only trans person on earth could privately hop online, search for keywords they could never speak aloud, and find dozens — no, hundreds, no, thousands — of others from all over the world looking for information, support, and understanding about exactly the same topics.

The internet giant is the latest technology company trying to address increasingly hostile local sentiment toward data center projects.

© Nathan Howard for The New York Times

Cloudflare has launched two open-weight decision models, Clef and Clef-flash, designed for structured yes/no, multiple-choice, and ranking tasks while also supporting images, video, and up to a 64K context window. Cloudflare says its models outperform TypeSafe's Jev on several benchmarks and can run locally from Hugging Face. The Register reports: For starters, Clef has an LLM backbone. According to Cloudflare, Clef uses specially post-trained, frozen versions of Qwen3.8-27B and Qwen3.5-9B for Clef and Clef-flash, respectively, with the Qwen backbone performing a prefill-only pass during inference. Clef is still fast - faster than Jev, to be fair - and scores choices in parallel after that prefill-only pass. It's not clear what Jev's underlying architecture is, as TypeSafe has kept that a secret. As for its speed and capability, Clef moves fast. Cloudflare ran it against Jev and some other open decision models using the Jev Decision Index available on Hugging Face, and the company's own ranking suggests Clef is slightly slower than other open models, but more accurate, with Clef-flash just as accurate as most of the others, but far faster. To be fair to the competition, Cloudflare self-reported its own scores against the benchmark, and they have yet to be reproduced for ranking on the official Decision Index. Cloudflare also ran Clef against TypeSafe's own benchmarks, and claimed it beat Jev in three out of four areas, only losing out on agent trace observability. Even if it were a bit slower or less accurate, Clef has another major leg up on Jev: It's not limited to classifying text -- it can also handle images and video. Additionally, Clef supports a 64k context window. Jev can also handle up to 64k tokens across a request, although its state plus longest individual question is limited to 32k.

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Many think artificial intelligence companies should be held liable for their runaway technology. But legal scholars say applying existing law could be messy.

© Antonio Sortino

The tech giant will refund $7.25 million in Prime membership fees to affected customers and pay an additional $1 million to settle the suit brought by the District of Columbia.

© Lucia Vazquez for The New York Times

Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, said internally that the super PAC, Leading the Future, had become a “distraction” for the A.I. company.

© Jason Henry for The New York Times

100 Zeros, a collaboration between Google and Range Media Partners, aims to give the tech giant a foothold in movies, TV and emerging forms of entertainment.

© Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times

The agency will examine whether A.I. labs have broken federal laws prohibiting companies from unfair and deceptive practices.

© Al Drago for The New York Times

Bill Draper began funding start-ups in the early 1960s, when the Santa Clara Valley was better known for apricot orchards than microchips. He has died at 98.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN: President Donald Trump on Tuesday unveiled America.gov, a government website meant to serve as a one-stop shop for people trying to accomplish basic tasks like renewing a passport, enrolling in Medicare or applying for disaster relief. The site, which launched with some basic functions ahead of a full rollout next year, is designed to serve as an AI-powered guide through the thicket of government agencies that Trump officials pledged would ultimately save people a whole lot of frustration. The administration's new initiative aims to allow Americans to access dozens of federal websites through a single point, making America.gov akin to a search tool that pulls information from across the government. And in the same way that people increasingly use AI models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to compile information and provide customized answers, Trump officials claimed that America.gov would be able to do the same for people's interactions with the federal government. Enrolling in Medicare, for example, will become a matter of typing the request into the America.gov AI tool and following its step-by-step instructions. The same goes for applying to a government job -- the new tool will now let people upload their resume directly to the site -- or answering questions about federal benefits, publicly available documents or other necessities that fall under the federal government's vast umbrella. "Our vision is that one day, this type of convenience and simplicity will be across every government service," said Joseph Gebbia, who leads the government's National Design Studio. But the reality is that the most advanced actions won't be available until some point in 2027, raising questions about how long it will take for the administration to revamp the way the people interact with the government's websites. The current version of America.gov can only do "answers." U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia said the new chatbot is powered by Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok. "We have great partners behind the scenes," Gebbia told CNBC's "Squawk Box" shortly before the site, America.gov, went live around 10 a.m. ET. "Google is proud to be named a technology partner in this vital initiative, leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease," the company said in a blog post. "By supporting the administration's vision for digital modernization, we are committed to making these everyday public services seamless, accessible, and responsive for all Americans."

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Employees and security researchers said that they had cautioned the company on safely testing its A.I. models and strengthening its corporate infrastructure, but that OpenAI did not listen.

© Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

Dorm Room Fund, a program that lets college students invest in their peers, raised a new $50 million fund as the competition for young founders ramps up.

© Hilary Swift for The New York Times

The company’s researchers raised questions about the security of the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra.

© Carlos Barria/Reuters

The increase comes four months after the chip giant added $80 billion to its buyback program, bringing the total remaining authorized amount to $235 billion.

© Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

The settlement, which also includes changes to the platform’s features, is the latest in a string of agreements by companies to address child addiction.

© Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The company did not learn until recently that its technology had meddled with websites for the Education and Commerce Departments and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

© Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

A new report by a Bay Area start-up called Parse adds details to an incident that has shocked the A.I. world and led to calls for closer government regulation.

© Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Meta’s C.E.O. talks for the first time about his style evolution.

© Victor Llorente for The New York Times

As Xi Jinping visits President Trump in Washington, the leaders are expected to discuss claims that China is surreptitiously copying American A.I. technologies, a process known as distillation.

© Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images