U.S. federal investigators pursuing the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently stole highly sensitive data from the FBI have identified executives at two different ransomware negotiation firms who maintained unusually close relations with the extortion group, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Sources close to the investigation say one of the executives in the United States even helped ShinyHunters operate a website that pressured victims into paying a ransom.

Hackers aligned with ShinyHunters have claimed credit for dozens of major data breaches since 2019, when the group was primarily operated by cybercriminals living in France. As those original members were arrested or jailed one by one, control over the ShinyHunters brand eventually passed to “Rey,” identified last year as a teenage hacker from Amman, Jordan. According to the FBI, ShinyHunters has extorted more than $70 million from victims so far this year.

In late September, ShinyHunters hacked the FBI recruitment website fbijobs.gov and taunted the agency by threatening to publish the stolen files, which reportedly included medical and psychological records, Social Security numbers and home addresses, and information about each employee’s unit and specialization.

The FBI jobs site hack has prompted the agency to move with uncommon speed to arrest, detain and question people who had any communications with Rey or other ShinyHunters suspects. Reuters reported on October 3 that Rey had been detained by Jordanian authorities and was cooperating with the FBI.

Rey was able to assume control over the hacking group because one of its alleged senior members had just been nabbed. On the evening of September 15, 2026, authorities in the Netherlands arrested convicted hacker and ShinyHunters suspect Pepijn van der Stap. Dutch police reportedly used flash-bang grenades in an effort to stun and apprehend Van der Stap as he was logged in to various online accounts.

According to a source close to the investigation, the authorities arrested Van der Stap while he was using his Signal instant messaging account, which allowed them to read recent communications with frequent contacts — including ransomware negotiators based in Canada and the United States.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the matter told KrebsOnSecurity that Van der Stap’s messages were the key to unraveling a murder-for-hire plot that emerged immediately following his arrest. The Dutch news outlet RTL reported last month the two murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and that there are indications Van der Stap gave the order for the attacks (there is no indication those orders were ever carried out).

On October 9, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the FBI arrested a 54-year-old Canadian cybersecurity executive named Edward Dubrovsky in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation. Dubrovsky, who recently published a book on handling cyber extortion that recommended always engaging with the hackers, was charged with threatening to disclose stolen or hacked data and interfering with interstate commerce through extortion, according to court records. Politico reports prosecutors have asked that Dubrovsky remain in custody pending trial, and that records related to his case remain under seal.

A source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that Van der Stap’s Signal messages showed he had frequent conversations with Mr. Dubrovsky and with at least one executive at a large U.S.-based consulting firm, and that these executives often knew the details about new ShinyHunters victims before the victims themselves had even learned of the breach.

That source shared another potentially explosive finding by federal investigators: the Dutch hacker’s chats showed Mr. Dubrovsky knew ShinyHunters had stolen highly sensitive data from FBI servers, and that he never informed the bureau of the data breach prior to ShinyHunters threatening on Twitter/X to publish the agency’s deeply personal personnel files.

SHINYWIRE

KrebsOnSecurity has learned from two sources close to the ShinyHunters probe that FBI investigators believe at least one executive at a U.S.-based consulting firm played an active role in operating the now-defunct ShinyHunters victim extortion website “shinywire[.]com.” KrebsOnSecurity is not naming the U.S. company or the suspected executive(s) for now because they have not yet been charged with a crime, but it is a prestigious firm with more than 1,000 associates.

A section of the homepage for the now-defunct Shinywire website.

The Shinywire website was active from approximately May 3, 2026 until October 16 and had entries for nearly 100 organizations hacked by ShinyHunters. Each entry urged victims to engage with the cybercrime group and discuss terms for payment. The pages also included samples of stolen files and promised those files would be published online if the victim ignored their demands.

The following screenshot shows a cached portion of the Shinywire extortion page for Intuitive Surgical, an American medical technology company that was breached in March 2026 after an employee fell for a targeted phishing email.

The Shinywire website, as indexed by urlscan.io. This listing is an extortion demand targeting Intuitive Surgical, an American medical technology company breached in March 2026 by a targeted phishing email attack that compromised an employee’s credentials.

Victim organizations that refused to engage or negotiate after seven days would find all of their stolen data published on the ShinyHunters victim shaming blog (a website that is only reachable via the anonymity network Tor).

In a story published October 15, The Globe and Mail wrote that a few months before Edward Dubrovsky was arrested by the FBI, the Canadian cybersecurity executive alleged in court documents he had become collateral damage in a campaign by a former business partner to “destroy” another industry executive.

The story noted that Dubrovsky filed the lawsuit in Ontario this year against Daniel Tobok, the former chief executive of Cypfer, a cybersecurity firm founded in Toronto with offices in the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico. The two first became business partners in 2017 and later developed Cypfer together, where Mr. Dubrovsky was a managing partner and chief operating officer. But by 2024, the two had a falling out, with Dubrovsky accusing Tobok of gradually excluding him from business matters and making “increasingly capricious business decisions.”

Mr. Tobok reportedly denied the allegations and filed a counterclaim, accusing Mr. Dubrovsky of accessing confidential information and unfairly competing with Cypfer through work at another firm called CyberSteward Inc. He also said Mr. Dubrovsky has misrepresented himself as a Cypfer founder, and is not a shareholder.

GHOSTBYTE

According to interviews with several former colleagues of Mr. Tobok, as far back as eight years ago he was known to ransomware purveyors by a particular nickname: Ghostbyte. In 2018, a Canadian company was hacked by Dharma, a prolific Russian-language ransomware affiliate program that first surfaced in 2016. The victim company told the Dharma ransomware representative they were leaning toward paying because some of the files were unrecoverable after being locked, but that they needed a better guarantee that Dharma would keep their word if paid.

A redacted copy of the Dharma rep’s reply is pictured below, and it shows the ransomware group urged the victim to contact a person at a Canadian IT firm that helps companies seeking such guarantees. The Dharma rep recommended the victim contact the email address ghostbyte@tutanota.com.

“If you want guarantees, you can write to the IT company,” the Dharma reply advised. “Take the phone and negotiate with them. This IT company often solves such problems in Canada. You can contact them and sign a contract for services. You’ll still have to pay.”

An email reply from the Dharma ransomware group to a victim, recommending they contact an email address that is connected to Mr. Tobok.

It’s unclear if Mr. Tobok ever used that Ghostbyte address offered by the Dharma representative, and he has not responded to multiple requests for comment. However, the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds an email address Mr. Tobok has frequently used — dtobok@me.com — is associated with two online accounts where the chosen username was “ghostbyte,” including a Snapchat account.

Incidentally, Constella also finds the Dharma rep’s email address luckygoodlucky@tuta.io is associated with a cryptocurrency address that processed 38 transactions totaling 43 bitcoin, ~$3.5 million at today’s value (the most recent transaction for this wallet is dated February 2019).

In a statement shared on October 14, Cypfer said the company’s business does not include making or facilitating ransomware payments, and that Cypfer learned of Dubrovsky’s arrest when the news first broke in the media.

“We had no prior knowledge of Mr. Dubrovsky’s arrest,” a spokesperson told KrebsOnSecurity via email. “CYPFER has not received any outreach from law enforcement and, to our knowledge, is not the target of any law enforcement investigation.”

The statement said CyberSteward and Cypfer are separate companies with no officers, directors or employees in common, and that Cypfer was recently acquired by the Apros Group, a holding company led by Jason Hogg, a former FBI special agent and former CEO of Aon Cyber Solutions Group. In 2020, Aon aquired Cytelligence, a security consulting firm where Mr. Tobok was founder and CEO and Mr. Dubrovsky was a managing partner.

CONFLICTING INTERESTS

It is not illegal in the United States to pay hackers for an encryption key to unlock servers infected with ransomware, or in exchange for a promise to delete any stolen files and refrain from publishing them online. While victim organizations can land in legal hot water if they pay a ransom to a group that is sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, ShinyHunters is not among the ransomware groups currently sanctioned by the United States or by any other government.

Experts say ransomware victims are typically directed by their insurance provider to work with a specific incident response firm. But not all cyber forensics and breach response companies will agree to facilitate payments to ransomware groups on behalf of their clients. As a result, once victim firms make a decision to pay, the firms that eschew rewarding extortionists are invariably replaced by companies that have no such qualms.

In December 2024, ShinyHunters began extorting the education technology company PowerSchool, stealing private information on 62 million students and 9.5 million teachers in the U.S. and Canada. PowerSchool reportedly paid a $2.85 million ransom demand, and a “frequently asked questions” statement (PDF) about the breach says PowerSchool was assisted in that effort by CyberSteward (ShinyHunters affiliate Matthew Lane, 20, of Sterling, Mass., was sentenced in November 2025 to four years in prison for his admitted role in the PowerSchool hack).

But that ransom payment did not stop future extortion attempts using the same stolen data. By May 2025, individual school districts were reportedly receiving separate ransom demands using samples of the same stolen files. While nobody has alleged ShinyHunters was behind the second wave of extortion against PowerSchool users, the incident drives home the reality that there is no technical way to verify the threat actors have deleted the stolen data as promised, or prevent others from abusing the same records.

A number of leading cyber incident response firms, including Coveware and Unit 221B, have consistently warned victims against paying ShinyHunters, noting that “destroyed” victim data is often kept, resold or used to extort the company’s clients directly later on.

The FBI echoed those sentiments in an alert on May 15, 2026 advising victims against paying the ShinyHunters group. Meanwhile, ShinyHunters members have been harassing and threatening employees at Coveware and Unit 221B for offering this advice.

The following screenshots show just how annoyed the ShinyHunters leaders were with Coveware’s relentless advice against paying the group. The first image is from a conversation on May 6, 2026 that took place between the group’s main account on Telegram and a co-conspirator. In that chat, snippets of which were shared with KrebsOnSecurity by a trusted source, ShinyHunters complained that Coveware was harming the group’s payment rates.

The operator of the ShinyHunters account on Telegram speaking privately with a co-conspirator and complaining that Coveware was harming their business.

“Go on my website, majority of those companies would’ve paid if it weren’t for Coveware giving them misinformation,” the ShinyHunters account wrote. “Someone (100% Coveware) is going out of their way to make sure i am not paid.”

In another conversation on April 11, 2026, the ShinyHunters Telegram account privately said they were trying to “eliminate the problem,” which they said was Coveware. Coveware declined to comment for this story.

“I’m sure the company will pay but in this specific case I am aware of Coveware and their involvement, and I’ve probably been not getting a lot of other negotiations mostly likely because Coveware keeps getting involved,” the ShinyHunters account bemoaned.

The operator of the ShinyHunters account on Telegram telling a co-conspirator they were “trying to eliminate the problem,” which they identified as Coveware advising victims not to pay the cybercrime group.

Mark Camillo is chief executive at CyberAcuView, an industry group founded in 2021 by a consortium of major cyber insurance carriers. Camillo said some firms charge a flat retainer fee, while those that specialize in helping companies negotiate a ransom payment tend to charge a percentage of the total ransom amount paid.

That latter dynamic, he said, is an inherent conflict of interest, as the negotiator has every incentive to make things more favorable to the attackers because they are financially incentivized to negotiate and pay out, and to not negotiate down on the price.

“It has come to the industry’s attention that many of the ransomware payers charge a percentage of the final payment which may or may not be disclosed,” Camillo said. “This makes no sense if they are also the negotiator. There needs to be more transparency in the process as no one in the ecosystem should be profiting purely on the size of the ransomware transaction or payment itself.”

Camillo said the firms doing this work would argue the fees are needed because there may be unexpectedly higher costs to secure larger quantities of cryptocurrency or more risk carrying the float, and because cryptocurrency exchanges may charge higher fees for high risk transactions.

“There definitely needs to be more visibility around the transaction and clarity on the increasing value of the crypto and the exchange’s percent in the transaction to get to the bottom of this and remove any misaligned incentives,” he said.

In recent months, the U.S. Department of Justice has prosecuted a number of ransomware negotiators alleged to have conspired with cybercriminals to defraud their clients. On October 7, the DOJ charged MonsterCloud CEO Zohar Pinhasi, 50, with wire fraud and conspiracy for allegedly charging customers to remediate ransomware attacks without paying the hackers. According to charging documents, Pinhasi secretly went behind his customers’ backs and paid hackers anyway, paying ransomware groups $8 million while charging customers $19 million.

In July, Angelo Martino, a 41-year-old ransomware negotiator from Land O’Lakes, Florida, was sentenced to 70 months in prison for conspiring with the Blackcat/ALPHV ransomware group to extort multiple victims. According to the DOJ, Martino was paid by BlackCat attackers to provide confidential information about the negotiating position and strategy of his employer’s clients and enable the ransomware actors to maximize the ransoms paid by the victims.

The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) has begun notifying victims impacted by a recent data breach of driver’s license and motor vehicle data, but not everyone whose information was stolen will receive an alert.

In a notice posted Friday, FLHSMV confirmed that it took “immediate steps” after discovering that “a malicious actor accessed certain department records on September 4, 2026, using compromised credentials.” There’s “no evidence” that data has yet been misused, the department said, but law enforcement “determined the information potentially affected includes driver license and motor vehicle data, to include document images, and other personal information.”

FLHSMV is sending out letters to everyone affected, offering victims one year of credit monitoring from Sontiq, Inc. However, the state acknowledged that it may not have current contact information for many former Florida residents’ whose data was still being stored. Those potential victims can confirm if their data was stolen by emailing FLHSMV at customerinquiry@flhsmv.gov, officials said.

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This week, Character.AI declared bankruptcy. While some saw the fall of a chatbot platform as a harbinger for the industry, court filings indicate that the decision was actually a key part of a deal that has let Disney hire most of Character.AI’s staff—including its now former CEO Karandeep Anand—potentially acquire most of Character.AI’s technology, and avoid the beleaguered startup’s many legal liabilities and obligations.

In the past few years, Character.AI has faced multiple private lawsuits over the safety of its chatbots, as well as investigations from regulators around the world. In a declaration filed as part of the bankruptcy, Character.AI’s newly appointed CEO explained that the goal of the bankruptcy was to reach a “consensual resolution” with personal injury claimants and a group of states investigating the company, while maximizing the value of the company’s assets for shareholders.

The Disney deal seems to be structured so that whatever is left of Character.AI will retain responsibility for those legal battles, some of which are still ongoing.

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About a month ago, a Chinese rocket took off from a remote spaceport in the Gobi Desert, released 10 satellites into orbit, then reignited its engine and put itself on a trajectory to rain down debris over the American Midwest.

The rocket's flight on September 15 lasted between 75 and 80 minutes, and it came down without completing a full orbit of the Earth. Social media posts at the time showed streaks of fiery debris falling from the sky, heading north over Kansas toward Minnesota. The overnight spectacle was also visible on the western horizon from Wisconsin.

The exact time, location, and direction of the debris allowed experts to connect it to the launch of a Zhuque-2E rocket, a medium-lift vehicle built by a Chinese company called LandSpace. The rocket had launched from Dongfeng, a commercial launch zone co-located with the military-run Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, less than two hours before.

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The trailers for HBO's DC Universe series Lanterns teased a show that eschewed the usual superhero hijinks in favor of a gritty realism more in the vein of True Detective or Slow Horses. Personally, I liked the change. My verdict: Ignore the review bombing; it's wonderful. The season wrapped with an emotionally charged, almost elegiac finale that fully delivered on that initial promise. I've found the rebooted DC Universe films released thus far to be enjoyable but rather forgettable, even when the positives outweigh the negatives. But Lanterns is a shining beacon of what is possible when someone is allowed to get really creative within the genre.

(Spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

There are two primary storylines. The first takes place in 2016 with a mass shooting at a local football game in Rushville, Nebraska. Current Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and his new trainee, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), get involved in the investigation, to the annoyance of Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), who initially doesn't think the case has any extraterrestrial connection. She is soon proved wrong when the suspect (an alien) self-detonates. Hal's power ring controls the damage, but the mystery remains.

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Virtual reality is in a bit of a weird place right now. After a lot of unfulfilled promise in the 1990s, it came back strong with the 2016 release of the Oculus Rift. For a while, it looked like VR, AR, XR, the metaverse, or whatever you wanted to call it, was going to be huge. Mark Zuckerberg was certainly convinced, and even Apple got in on the hype with its Vision Pro.

But by then momentum for alternate realities of every acronym was already in steady decline, and it only dwindled from there. The rate of development of new headsets has slowed, with many companies (including Apple) scaling back or shelving their efforts. While new releases like the Steam Frame and Pimax Dream Air are still happening, many of the most interesting developments in the space these days are on the enthusiast front.

That's right, DIY VR is a thing, and with a couple hundred dollars in components, plus many hours of your time, you too can enter the immersive world of virtual reality while also experiencing the highs and lows of soldering, firmware flashing, and 3D printing. I rode that rollercoaster myself and learned why this is still a decidedly niche movement.

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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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In the middle of an especially warm July in 2021, a wildfire ignited in a thick forest of black spruce and peeling paper birch trees on the northern campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. 

The blaze, possibly sparked by lightning, burned across the dry carpet of feather mosses and lichen before climbing into the crowns. By the time fire agencies responded, flames had reached 12 feet in length and sent up a 500-foot column of smoke. 

A few days shy of the five-year anniversary of the Yankovich Road Fire, I followed three members of the Alaska Fire Science Consortium into the boreal forest, walking along cross-country ski trails lined by feathery field horsetail.

In 2024, the organization, which hosts presentations to keep wildfire managers abreast of new developments in fire science, helped turn the area into an educational walking trail, with interpretive signs posted along the route. About a half-mile in, the horizon opened up as we reached a sparse stand of naked, blackened tree trunks, stripped of needles and neighbors. 

Hilary Shook, the coordinator of the consortium, stepped off the trail with her thaw probe, a T-shaped pointed metal rod used to detect the upper boundary of the permafrost, the ancient layer of frozen soil that underlies 15% of the land around the Northern Hemisphere and stores roughly twice as much carbon as the atmosphere.

A test of the ground just outside the burn scar hit the concrete-like layer about a foot below the surface. But as Shook applied pressure here, where the fire had burned away the moss and organic-rich topsoil that insulates the permafrost, the probe plunged at least three times deeper into the ground.

“That was an immediate effect of the fire,” said Alison York, the outgoing coordinator of the organization, who was standing nearby. “When we monitored right after, it had already thawed quite a bit.”

LEIF VAN CISE

This rudimentary tool, offering a measure of depth from a single point in the earth, reveals an escalating problem across the far north. As climate change fuels increasingly frequent and severe fires in the planet’s northern latitudes, they’re accelerating the thawing of more and more permafrost. This allows the organic matter to break down and release powerful greenhouse gases that contribute to a spiraling climate feedback effect, propelling more warming, more fires, and the loss of still more permafrost. 

Most dramatically, intensifying wildfires in Canada released more carbon than the nation’s combined fossil fuel emissions in 2023. As in Alaska, many of these megafires occur in vast remote areas where the policy is to let them burn so long as they don’t threaten human habitats. Yet if intensifying fires and warming are left unchecked, the world’s boreal forests and permafrost could increasingly transition from giant carbon sinks into massive sources of atmospheric carbon. 

Now, international teams of researchers across the US, Canada, and elsewhere are scrambling to understand what’s at stake, financially as well as ecologically. They’re looking at preventive measures, like controlled burns, and studying the potential to rapidly detect and extinguish wildfires before they grow out of control. They’re even exploring what was once unthinkable: sending in human firefighters not to save lives or structures, but to protect one of our planet’s great stores of carbon.

“We need to figure out a better way to live with wildfire,” says Brendan Rogers, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, one of the main organizations driving the loosely collaborative research effort. “I do think that it can make a meaningful difference.”

PHILIP KEITH (PHOTOS), WOODWELL CLIMATE RESEARCH (MAPS)

Woodwell, the University of Victoria’s Polis Institute for Ecological Governance, and the nonprofit Alaska Venture Fund are now partnering on a multimillion-dollar initiative known as North Fire to study and raise public awareness about the potential benefits of these interventions, MIT Technology Review can report. 

The idea is complicated and controversial for a number of reasons. Wildfire is a natural and necessary component of healthy forest ecosystems. Preventing or suppressing fires across huge stretches of largely unmanaged Arctic-boreal forests and tundra would take vast resources. And it’s not yet clear how much of a difference such interventions would make in emissions.

Ultimately, the mere fact that researchers are considering such extreme interventions into natural systems is a grim reflection of the dangers we’ve placed ourselves in by continuing to generate more and more greenhouse-gas emissions each year. Those threats are forcing us to grapple with increasingly difficult questions that involve ever steeper trade-offs: What’s the best way to spend our finite resources and dwindling time to avoid the worst dangers of climate change? And when, if ever, is it okay to put people in possible danger to reduce broader risks to the world?

‘A massive blind spot’

Emissions from forest fires have risen 60% around the world since 2001—but they’ve nearly tripled across the boreal forests in the far north.  

This stretch of the globe is warming as much as four times faster than the rest of the planet, drying out the landscape. In addition, lightning strikes that set off fires have ticked up sharply as warmer air increases the convective energy in the atmosphere, driving the updrafts that trigger thunderstorms.

In that sense, humans have already interceded in these otherwise natural ecosystems by producing the greenhouse-gas emissions that are increasing temperatures, subjecting forests to fire patterns well outside healthy historic norms.

“To me, that outweighs the existential dread of ‘Should we or should we not intervene?” says Kate Hayes, an assistant professor at Western Washington University, who is working with Woodwell to study the emissions benefits of fire interventions. “We’ve already intervened, arguably. And so from here, it’s a little bit of a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”

The permafrost that encircles the northern latitudes, underlying large stretches of Canada, Greenland, Siberia, Scandinavia, and other Arctic nations, stores around 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, much of which froze in place millennia ago. The steady global rise in temperature, however, has already shrunk the footprint of Arctic permafrost by about 12 % since 1850, with that loss rapidly accelerating during the last 50 years.

By 2100, fire-driven thawing of permafrost could release about the equivalent of nearly 80 billion tons of carbon dioxide, under high warming scenarios. That’s more than half the emissions that fires will release from the direct combustion of vegetation, according to a January study. And it would be on top of more than 400 billion additional tons that could be released through thawing from general warming over that period.

Despite its growing contributions to climate change, only a minority of the models that have informed the UN’s major climate reports to date include the gradual loss of permafrost through warming temperatures, and none incorporate the abrupt collapse and accelerated thaw that can often occur after fires and heat waves. In light of those phenomena and other powerful and undercounted climate feedback effects, we’re almost certainly underestimating how rapidly the planet will warm up, as scientists warned in a paper earlier this year.

These warming-driven emissions are a “massive blind spot,” says Brian Buma, a senior climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund and a coauthor of the paper, who is working to develop tools that could help fire agencies decide which fires to prioritize.   

As escalating fire and permafrost emissions become significant additional contributors to climate change, some researchers have begun to explore what it might cost to take on the responsibility of preventing them, in much the way we’ve sought to cut the pollution from power plants, vehicles, and factories.

A 2022 paper in Science Advances, led by researchers at Woodwell and the Union of Concerned Scientists, found that making greater efforts to put out boreal fires could be a cost-effective climate solution—comparable to, or even cheaper than, addressing emissions by building wind turbines, solar farms, or carbon-sucking factories.

The Yukon Flats pilot

Those economic findings were instrumental in getting more researchers to take the idea of tackling fire emissions seriously, says Peter Frumhoff, a coauthor of the 2022 paper and now a senior science policy advisor at Woodwell.

For several years now, Woodwell researchers have been in discussions with forest managers, fire agencies, Indigenous communities, and other groups across Alaska to communicate the potential of this approach. 

It hasn’t been an easy sell, given the constrained resources and tightly defined mission of the federal and state agencies responsible for combating fires in Alaska. The general policy there is to allow fires in remote territories to burn unless they present a direct danger to communities. 

“Those agencies are tasked with protecting life and property now, and to a lesser extent natural resources,” says Randi Jandt, a fire ecologist at the Alaska Fire Science Consortium. “But they’re not tasked to save the world.”

There was one notable early success, however. 

The Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge is an 11-million-acre patchwork of wetlands, forests, and bogs. The foothills sit above a particular type of frozen soil known as yedoma. It’s an especially deep, ice-rich, and carbon-dense form of permafrost, composed of massive wedges of silty, wind-blown sediments frozen during the late Pleistocene, which ended about 11,700 years ago. (It also presented ideal conditions for preserving mummified remains of woolly mammoths.)

“It took kind of the last ice age to accumulate,” Hayes says. “So there’s no rapid way to re-accumulate it. We can’t really put it back.”

LEIF VAN CISE

LEIF VAN CISE

LEIF VAN CISE

Members of the Alaska Fire Science Consortium hike into areas affected by fire to measure the layers of ash left in the soil on the forest floor.

In 2019, the region suffered a series of devastating fires that burned some 750,000 acres. After an Alaska Fire Science Consortium meeting at which Woodwell scientists highlighted the possible climate benefits of more aggressive fire suppression, the refuge’s then manager, Jimmy Fox, began exploring the possibility of putting out blazes when they threatened that permafrost, whether or not they threatened human habitations.

The early reaction was not encouraging. 

“You’re going to have people jumping out of airplanes with parachutes to save frozen woolly mammoths—and maybe dying from that?” he recalls being asked.

But eventually, he persuaded managers at the US Bureau of Land Management’s Alaska Fire Service to carry out a pilot project on a 1.6-million-acre section of the Yukon Flats. They agreed to try to put out fires there if they had the resources available and believed they could contain a blaze within 72 hours.

Woodwell and its partners agreed to study how that change affected permafrost loss and fire emissions, in the hope of making the case for similar programs elsewhere. 

It wasn’t clear the pilot program would survive after Donald Trump was reelected, particularly once the DOGE initiative retroactively cut the public funding for that research collaboration.  

But in February, the federal government formally preserved the program and broadened its rationale to include goals like protecting habitat diversity, water quality, and air quality.

Mapping and modeling

One of Woodwell’s main tasks now is determining when and where fire agencies should step in. Crucially, excessive efforts to stamp out fires in the past have allowed the buildup of dry plant material that fuels more severe fires later.

“We’re not going after all fires all the time,” says Rogers over lunch in a sunny courtyard on the Stanford University campus, where Woodwell and EDF hosted a workshop on potential fire interventions in January. “We can’t do that. We don’t want to do that. We shouldn’t do that. So how do we prioritize our resources?” 

Woodwell and its collaborators are working to answer that question by developing a map of burn risk and carbon vulnerability across interior Alaska. The plan is to eventually expand it across much of Canada as well.

These maps will highlight the locations of rich reserves of yedoma and other forms of permafrost, forecast where fires are most likely to break out in the next 10 to 15 years, and predict how they’re likely to behave and spread. 

“Our ultimate goal is to get a layer that can tell us, if a fire were to occur, what areas are most vulnerable to high carbon emissions, permafrost thaw, permafrost degradation,” Rogers says.

In response to a question about potentially putting firefighters at risk, Rogers stressed in an email that it’s “a very serious issue that needs careful consideration.”

He added that early fire detection technologies, preventative fire stewardship practices, improved fire suppression planning and other measures can all help to reduce dangers to firefighters as well as communities.

‘Mild fire’

Once areas of particular risk are identified, the first option is to take measures to prevent fires there, or at least to reduce the odds that they’ll become major ones. That generally entails using heavy equipment or intentional, controlled fires to clear away vegetation that could fuel new fires, or to create fire breaks that might check their spread.

COURTESY OF EDWARD ALEXANDER

Indigenous tribes carried out what’s known as cultural burning for thousands of years to reduce fire dangers, clear land for crops, and more. The practice was widely outlawed across North America beginning in the 1800s, though those rules have loosened in recent years.

COURTESY OF EDWARD ALEXANDER

Both cultural and prescribed fires, however, remain controversial because they can burn out of control. And even if they remain contained, the fires can still produce smoke that wafts into towns. 

But rushing around to put out blazes after they’ve started will never get Alaska ahead of its surging wildfire problem, says Edward Alexander, cochair of the Gwich’in Council International, which represents the Indigenous Gwich’in peoples of the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and Alaska. 

“There’s not enough money in the world for this to be a chainsaw-and-ax problem,” he says. “This country is too big up here.” 

Alexander, who also serves as senior Arctic lead at Woodwell, argues that Alaska should encourage much greater use of cultural burning to reduce the risk of conflagrations and the emissions that come with them.

“We need mild fire, not wildfire,” he says.

New pilot projects

The North Fire initiative will include several additional pilot research projects, including an effort to study the potential for cultural burning to reduce climate and fire dangers near Fort Yukon, Alaska. 

The plan is for a wildland firefighting crew operated by the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments, a consortium in the Yukon Flats region, to carry out cultural burns there next spring, Rogers says. 

Researchers at Woodwell and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, will then collect and analyze data flammability, carbon levels, and permafrost over several years, in the hopes of learning more about what such interventions do. 

Similarly, the Polis researchers at the University of Victoria plan to study how adding fuel breaks, by logging or switching to less flammable trees, alters fire risks in British Columbia. 

The broad aim of the North Fire initiative is to accelerate research and expand community involvement “in a way that helps us scale this as a meaningful global natural climate solution on a rapid timeline,” says Erin Harrington, a partner at the Alaska Venture Fund, a philanthropy focused on environmental, economic development, and Indigenous issues. 

Detecting fires from space

Other observers, including Jandt, believe the bigger opportunity to reduce fire emissions and preserve permafrost may lie in the “initial attack.” That means marshalling planes, tankers, and firefighters to stamp fires out at the first sign of them, before they’ve had the chance to turn into conflagrations.

Once fires reach a certain size, it takes much more time to contain them—and the job becomes far more dangerous.

Accelerating response times is one of the chief promises of the FireSat satellite constellation, which is expected to begin delivering fire data at least twice daily from around the world to Woodwell, a handful of fire agencies, and other early adopters by the end of this year. The system will eventually include more than 50 satellites circling the globe, equipped with high-resolution cameras and thermal sensors that can detect smaller, lower-temperature fires than existing satellite systems, down to as little as five by five meters (16 by 16 feet).

Currently, it can take days to spot fires. But once the full constellation is in place, likely in the early 2030s, FireSat should be capable of detecting and providing updated images of fires anywhere in the world every 20 minutes or less. 

The first prototype satellite launched in 2025, and three operational ones went into orbit in July. The Earth Fire Alliance, the nonprofit that manages the constellation, expects to launch four more by the end of next year. 

A number of similar systems are also coming online. German-based OroraTech has launched 18 of its fire-detecting satellites in the last year and a half. Similarly, Canadian agencies are planning to launch their own satellite constellation, dubbed WildFireSat, beginning in 2029. 

But as these systems produce more and more detections across the globe, it’ll become increasingly essential to build tools that can filter through that information. 

EDF is supporting and collaborating on several projects that could potentially help with that, and it ultimately intends to develop an AI-powered triage tool that could help fire agencies prioritize responses as FireSat and other fire-spotting tools come online.

“All of this is kind of like building the data ecosystem around FireSat, so that when they start popping out “fire start here, there, fire start here, fire start there,” we won’t be like, ‘Oh shit, there’s fires everywhere,’” Buma says. “We’ll have a framework. It won’t be perfect, obviously. We’ll have to improve it, but we’ll have the machinery to incorporate those data.”

Rapid response

But faster detections and decisions do only so much. Regions would still need to get firefighting personnel and resources to those fires fast enough to prevent them from burning out of control.

“Say we have the full FireSat constellation up and running, and it spots a fire that just broke out in one of these sort of high-priority, highly vulnerable areas,” I said to Rogers and Frumhoff during our conversation in that Stanford courtyard. “How might we deploy firefighting resources to a remote area fast enough for it to matter in that scenario?”

“I think the answer, unfortunately, is that it depends,” Rogers responded. 

Ideally, he said, we would have fire management policies in place that allow for putting out fires with a high risk of producing climate-warming emissions. In addition, regions could install more firefighting personnel and resources across more operational centers, strategically placed in locations that allow them to get to those blazes fast.

Frumhoff stresses that Woodwell isn’t promoting any particular companies but says there are additional technologies “in the mix of conversations” that might help to prevent or rapidly put out fires as well.

Those possible approaches include seeding clouds to suppress lightning strikes and pre-positioning autonomous firefighting helicopters to respond rapidly to high-emissions-risk fires.

Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin company, is developing and testing autonomous versions of the Black Hawk helicopter, equipped with thermal sensors and water tanks. It is collaborating with Rain Industries, a startup based in Alameda, California, that has developed software to track shifting conditions and steer unpiloted aircraft through the process of putting out wildfires. 

TED CARLSON/RAIN AERO

The company says it has talked to fire agencies and the “broader Alaska fire community” about the potential use of its technology but declined to name any specific entities it has interacted with.

“The twin climate tipping points of the yedoma permafrost and the boreal forest, and the fact that it’s completely underresourced at the moment, from my perspective does make it an ideal use case for autonomous aircraft,” says Max Brodie, chief executive officer of Rain.  

Defending carbon

Advancing technologies can only do so much if governments’ fire prevention and suppression policies don’t prioritize preserving carbon. 

And that will remain a hard sell given the costs of managing extensive areas of land that nations have historically left largely alone.

The 2022 Science Advances paper estimated that additional fire suppression efforts would cost about $12.63 per metric ton of prevented carbon dioxide emissions—a number that drops when the carbon in permafrost is taken into account, according to upcoming research.

But that would still add up to about $7 billion in additional spending this decade to keep Alaska’s fire emissions at their historical levels, and another $7 billion to $50 billion over the subsequent 30 years as fire severity continues to rise.

Frumoff stresses that those figures just reflect what the researchers found it would cost to preserve the status quo, which is not necessarily what the policy goal would be. 

But widening the scope of where we put out fires will inevitably create a big added cost for fire agencies that are already notoriously underfunded in the US. While Alaska produces about half the nation’s wildfire emissions, it receives around 4% of federal firefighting funds. 

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE VIA AP

The US Wildland Fire Service provided a prepared statement in response to an MIT Technology Review inquiry asking whether preserving carbon could or should become a priority in certain fire management decisions. The roundabout reply suggests that this isn’t the agency’s prime concern: “Firefighter and public safety are the top priorities for the U.S. Wildland Fire Service.”

Frumhoff says it’s possible that landowners or government agencies could eventually use carbon markets to defray some of the additional costs. Woodwell has also had multiple conversations with Alaska’s federal legislators about the value of preventing catastrophic wildfires and the need to increase the “total pot” of public funding, he says.

Kicking the fire can

A few days after walking through the fire scar in Fairbanks, I drove slowly along a crumpled stretch of Stampede Road, just north of Denali National Park, where the underlying permafrost had melted without the aid of fire.

I arrived at a cramped wooden cabin to meet with Michelle Mack, a regents professor of ecosystem ecology at Northern Arizona University. 

Mack studies how fire is altering ecosystems in the high northern latitudes as the region grows warmer and drier, and she sometimes collaborates with Rogers and other scientists working on the push to protect permafrost in other areas of research. But she’s unsure how much these interventions will accomplish as climate change continues.

“I’m an empiricist, and at this point, it’s not clear to me that the empirical evidence suggests that we can actually have any impact on these fires,” she says. 

MATT ‘MARTIAN’ WILLIAMS

She expects there will be clear cases where we could and should act fast to put out fires and “keep carbon in the ground.” She points to the example of the 2007 Anaktuvuk River Fire, a massive tundra fire on Alaska’s North Slope that might have been extinguished with relative ease in its early days but was instead allowed to burn until the winter snows put it out nearly three months later. Over that time, it ripped across 400 square miles and, Mack’s research showed, released more than 2 million tons of carbon into the air.

“I feel like that’s the low-hanging fruit, something that doesn’t cost much—and that’s where the technology for detection I think is really important,” she says.

But she adds that fires in boreal forests can rapidly spread in unpredictable ways, frustrating efforts to quickly extinguish them even when they are spotted right away.

In addition, rapidly putting out a fire one season doesn’t necessarily reduce the fire risk for a given forest, so suppression may simply kick the “fire can” down the road—delaying but not preventing an inevitable loss of carbon, Mack says.

Her thinking more recently shifted “a little” after she came across an earlier modeling paper that showed some encouraging findings on the potential of early suppression to reduce the footprint of boreal fires. But she says that prevention through forest thinning, prescribed burns, and the introduction of less flammable deciduous trees to create “living fire breaks” is probably a more promising path than technology-augmented suppression.

“If we could solve this with a techno fix, that’d be great,” she says. “But what if we solved it with nature?”

‘A real difference’

Rogers, in an emailed response to Mack’s concern, said that the interventions they’re exploring, which do include both prevention and suppression, “can make a real difference.”

“I certainly agree that some fires are much easier to suppress via initial attack than others,” he wrote. “That said, until I see data showing me otherwise, I believe there is strong potential to bend the curve with management.”

EDF’s Buma acknowledges there are a number of unknowns, including how quickly agencies could act on faster detections from satellites—and how big the political obstacles will be to making necessary changes to fire management policies.

“We can’t overpromise what’s possible. We don’t know what’s possible,” he says. “It’s all new. But we’re in a new climate and have to consider trying new things.”

Curfews to apply to parts of cities including Paris, Nice and Lyon after days of violence on French streets

• Macron criticises ‘unbridled violence’ after 2,400 arrests across France

French PM Lecornu says he has asked prefects to implement “a number of partial curfews” in certain “localised” urban areas to stop further disorder, which he attributes to “the extreme-left” and some criminal elements.

We will no doubt hear more on this from local authorities, as in the example of Marseille (10:32).

Significant changes in this release include some significant binfmt_misc extensions, some group-scheduling work aimed at improving performance on large systems, the new failfs filesystem that fails all operations, the fchroot() system call, global per-CPU data for BPF programs, the completion of the sched_ext subscheduler feature, working-set tracking for virtual machines, alternative data-stream support in the ntfs3 filesystem, a long list of SMB server improvements, and much more.

↫ “corbet” at LWN.net

It’ll make it way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

The story starts in 1996, when Matthias Ettrich, a student at the University of Tübingen, posted to a Usenet group asking for programmers to help build a desktop for Linux. What followed became KDE, one of the largest free software communities in the world. KDE made Linux usable as a desktop for people who weren't system administrators, giving it a complete, consistent graphical environment at a time when there was none. The film covers the highs and lows of three decades of KDE: the Qt licensing fight and the rivalry with GNOME; the success of KHTML, the browser engine that became the basis of Apple's WebKit and Google's Chrome; and the contentious release of KDE 4 and the rebuild that followed. Along the way, KDE invented much of how open source communities organise themselves. KDE e.V., the non-profit association that holds the project's legal and financial responsibilities while leaving technical decisions to contributors, became a model for many other open source projects. Today, KDE is the default desktop on major Linux distributions and on the Steam Deck, and the centre of a whole ecosystem of free and open software. Above all, the film is about the people who built KDE, the friendships that formed, and why generations of developers have given their free time to it.

1. NYT Strands hints, answers for October 18, 2026  Mashable
2. Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Spangram, Answers: Saturday, October 17 (Quite The Crush)  Forbes
3. Today's NYT Strands Hints (and Answer) for Friday, October 16, 2026  Lifehacker
4. NYT Strands Hints And Daily Guide For Puzzle #960 — October 19, 2026: Tips, Theme Clues, And Spangram Help  Yahoo Tech
5. NYT Strands Hints and Answers Today: The “Greek” Grid Puzzle Leaving Word Enthusiasts Baffled  cristinaiglesias.com

1. Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2026 red carpet: See all the celebrity looks  Page Six
2. See All the Stars Arriving on the Pink Carpet at the 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show  People.com
3. Timothée Chalamet Had the Most Relatable Reaction to Kylie Jenner’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show Walk  Harper's BAZAAR
4. All the Stars at the 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show: Nicole Kidman, Law Roach & More  Vogue

Anthropic has granted external evaluators “employee-like access” to assess the risks of its models, following through on a commitment to increase safeguards over concerns the technology could run catastrophically out of control.

METR, a nonprofit that has worked with leading labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, now has a team embedded in the Claude maker’s office with access to its hardware and internal systems.

A greater role for third-party evaluators is among the main concrete steps the labs have proposed in response to rising concern about the dangers more capable AI systems could pose to the economy, cyber security, and humanity at large.

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1. St Petersburg oil facilities ablaze as Ukraine launches more than 1,000 drones at Russia  AP News
2. Ukraine defies Trump and launches one of its biggest drone attacks on Russia this year  CNN
3. Oil Futures Likely to React to Ukraine’s Attack on Russian Oil, Lifting of Diesel Sanctions  Barron's
4. Oil facilities hit in deadly overnight attack on St Petersburg  BBC
5. Ukraine launches 1,000 drones at Russia, attacks set St. Petersburg oil facilities ablaze  CBS News

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1. Congo confirms Ebola outbreak has spread to eighth province  Reuters
2. 1 in 4 Ebola deaths are children in Democratic Republic of Congo's worst outbreak  CBC
3. Ebola Outbreak, DRC and Region, Situation Report #14 (October 13, 2026)  ReliefWeb
4. Congo’s fast-moving Ebola outbreak spreads to eighth province  AP News
5. Opinion | I’ve Worked in Congo for Decades. I’ve Never Seen an Ebola Crisis Like This.  The New York Times

1. The Best Dressed Stars From the 2026 Academy Museum Gala  Vogue
2. Taylor Swift Dazzles in Romantic Dior Gown and Jaw-Dropping Diamonds at 2026 Academy Gala  People.com
3. Taylor Swift wows in Dior, debuts 'Fate of Ophelia' live at Academy Museum Gala  Yahoo
4. Academy Museum Gala 2026 Red Carpet: Taylor Swift, Inde Navarrette, Kate Hudson and More  Variety
5. All the Celebrity Looks From the 2026 Academy Museum Gala  Harper's BAZAAR

1. Software’s new consolidator gets big vote of confidence from Berkshire  CNBC
2. Why Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is betting nearly $1 billion on Bending Spoons  Business Insider
3. Berkshire Hathaway: Abel Pushes Into New Territory With Bending Spoons Investment  Morningstar
4. Berkshire Hathaway Has Piled $930 Million Into This Stock Since Its IPO. Should Investors Follow?  Yahoo Finance
5. Berkshire’s Mind-Bender  Barron's

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1. College football picks: Predictions against the spread, odds, betting lines for top 25 games in Week 7  CBS Sports
2. Connelly breaks down Week 7: Notre Dame-BYU, Ohio State-Indiana, more  ESPN
3. College football Week 7: Live updates, schedule, scores, rankings  NCAA.com
4. Wake Up! Week 7 Viewing Guide and Morning Open Thread  Roll 'Bama Roll
5. 'College GameDay' picks today, including Ohio State-Indiana, Notre Dame-BYU  Yahoo Sports

Close to 1 billion meetings take place each day around the world. CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in meetings. Planning for and spearheading meetings eats up the lion’s share of managers’ time. In much of the industrialized world, meetings are both the metronomes and menaces of people’s working lives.

Given the enormous time spent in workplace meetings, do we know what they accomplish or how to make them as worthwhile as possible? For decades, the answer was… not really. Meetings weren’t a particularly accessible subject of study. But that has changed. Once a tiny niche area, “meeting science” is a growing specialization among organizational and social psychologists. The field is accelerating as archived virtual meetings provide vast swaths of data. And it is providing a fascinating window into human behavior.

Meeting to talk helps fulfill basic human needs to connect, communicate, and cooperate. People have long come together—in caves, fields, market squares, and town halls—to get something done, share ideas, get on the same page, or just to remark on the weather. But meeting scientists define their subject as gatherings of people “with some goal or structure to the event,” says organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, who coauthored a review of over three decades of meeting science in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.

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Neverwinter Nights was made by the studio that produced seminal RPGs Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. It sold well and was critically acclaimed at launch. Yet, somehow, it has not been canonized in most gamers' minds over the decades the same way the games that came before and after it were.

Nonetheless, more than two decades later, it still has a tight-knit and surprisingly active community that none of those other games can rival. I think that's partly because it was a completely different beast.

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In this week’s newsletter: Record labels always push music forward into interesting new places. Here’s a celebration of their power by readers and Guardian music writers

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Last week we asked Guide subscribers to tell us about their favourite record labels, and the response was enthusiastic. Clearly, even in this age of streaming services that flatten albums, singles, EPs and mixtapes into one single “feed”, the lure of a label – and its role in identifying, nurturing and developing musical talents – remains.

So this week, a celebration of the record label: along with some readers’ favourites, we’ve asked music writers to share their personal picks. They’ve put together a great list of familiar and off-the-beaten-track labels that might just help you discover your next favourite album (I can already tell I’ll be spinning the Verlaines record recommended by reader James a fair bit!).

OpenAI said internal models hacked two more websites, bypassed company-imposed browsing restrictions, and used exposed credentials to draw cryptocurrency from a wallet it couldn’t otherwise access, in the latest installment of disclosures of the unethical and likely illegal acts its agents are performing.

The company on Thursday issued reports of four new incidents, all of which occurred in June. They come after the company revealed in July that internal test agents exploited a zero-day vulnerability in a tool designed to restrict their access to the Internet. They then broke into the network of AI tool provider Hugging Face. The agents took that illegal action to steal answers to a hacking test that weren’t available when completing the tasks on their own. The incident—which likely would have resulted in criminal charges had they been performed directly by a person—has further heightened concerns that widespread AI use could have harmful effects on an unprecedented scale.

Easier to beg for forgiveness than ask permission

In two of the cases reported Thursday, OpenAI agents tasked with retrieving information from websites hacked them when the models ran into obstacles obtaining it directly. In one incident during reinforcement training, a model that received access denials when trying to retrieve historical hospital-bed statistics on a government statistics website “used the site's file-download feature to retrieve server configuration and application files, including sensitive credentials,” OpenAI said. “It inspected the application code, bypassed the statistics endpoint's authorization checks, and retrieved data that had previously been denied. The model saved the data locally.”

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New Jersey’s deputy attorney general, Brian Richard Fitzgerald, was arrested on “felony charges related to AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM),” Bucks County Detectives said in a press release Thursday.

In the US, cops have vowed to crack down on AI CSAM since at least 2024, when the Department of Justice made one of the earliest arrests. After charging a Wisconsin man with spreading “thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors” across Telegram and Instagram, the DOJ clarified to law enforcement that “CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM.”

On Thursday, New Jersey officials accused 51-year-old Fitzgerald of using AI to make photos from social media of real minors into sexualized images that he then distributed on social media.

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A new bill proposed by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) aims to establish new regulations that would ensure that "buying a video game would give the consumer ownership of the game rather than a license to play it," including assurances that they can continue to access the games for years after they are released.

The announcement names NBA 2K25 as an example of the problem the bill aims to solve; that game launched on September 6, 2025, but is scheduled to become unplayable on December 31 due to server shutdowns. The bill, which is called the Power to Players Act, directs the FTC to take action to prevent outcomes like that in the future.

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Some Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses were recording people’s conversations without the wearer knowing. The recordings occurred without users saying the prompt phrase (“Hey, Meta”), in a bug that Meta says has been fixed.

This week, some users reported online that their Ray-Ban Metas were recording without their consent. A person going by Kindly-Audience-137 on Reddit, for example, said this happened to them across three Meta Ray-Bans and that they had the “Respond without Hey Meta” setting turned off. The person said the Meta AI app “saves audio recordings and text transcripts of these conversations in my conversation history.”

“I believe this deserves a serious technical investigation. Customers should not have to wonder whether their private conversations are being captured when they have not intentionally activated their glasses’ AI assistant,” the Reddit user said.

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Samsung announced the Galaxy Watch Ultra in the summer of 2024, and then refreshed it in August of 2025 with double the storage and new color options. The Galaxy Watch Ultra emphasizes outdoor and exercise features, putting it in competition with the Apple Watch Ultra as a premium fitness watch at a premium price. Ever since the Galaxy Watch Ultra2 came out this year, the 2025 Galaxy Watch Ultra has been dropping in price, currently reaching a new low price of $471.78 according to price-checking tools, over $175 off the original $649.99 price tag. And if the extra storage isn't a big deal to you, you can get the 2024 version for $399.99 (originally $649.99).

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The Galaxy Watch Ultra excels over other watches in one key aspect: its outdoorsy features. If you're an avid hiker or an athlete who spends long hours outdoors, this is a worthwhile choice. Like any good rugged watch, this one is tough, made out of Grade 4 titanium, and has an IP68 water- and dust-resistant rating. You can also take it up high altitudes (up to 9,000 meters) and it can withstand up to 10ATM of pressure (about 330 feet underwater). You also get a built-in siren in case of emergencies. The screen is a 1.47-inch Super AMOLED display, brighter than previous Samsung AMOLED smartwatches. The only downside is that it comes in just one size—47mm.

The watch runs WearOS from Samsung and comes with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The 590mAh battery is one of the best for its price point, making it perfect for prolonged outdoor use. If you don't use any power-saving modes, it'll last 60 hours, but it can go up to 100 hours if you're conservative.

One of the new features this watch brings is AI-based health metrics and advanced sleep tracking, which you can read more about in PCMag's "excellent" review. If you're looking for a more budget-friendly (and smaller) option for more general use, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 at $220 (originally $329.99) is a great option.

Under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Food and Drug Administration is moving forward with plans to ease access to unproven peptide drugs that are popular among members of Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again movement—despite FDA staff scientists finding that the drugs have not been sufficiently studied to establish safety and efficacy and may cause harms.

The FDA submitted an "Interim Access Policy" on peptides for review by the White House, according to a filing notice posted on an Office of Management and Budget website. The posting does not provide information on the proposed policy. But people familiar with the proposal told The Associated Press that it would give the FDA "enforcement discretion" on certain peptide drugs. This would allow the agency to choose not to enforce current restrictions on peptides and provide an assurance to specialty pharmacies eager to start making them that they will not be targeted by the agency.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, did not respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

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Legal experts are sounding alarms that Meta will soon update its commercial terms to require business accounts to allow Meta to train AI on their linked website content, not just their social media posts.

Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.

As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta's terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.

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Prediction market boosters often tout the platforms as barometers of public opinion, or even “truth machines” offering a clearer picture of where things are headed than polling or other data. In 2024, for example, Kalshi beat many pollsters in forecasting the outcome of the US presidential race. But their trading activity can also tell more perplexing stories.

Two global election markets on Polymarket’s offshore platform, for instance, generated over $600 million in trading volume, far more than most political markets typically attract. Most of the activity took place buying and selling contracts tied to long-shot candidates who ultimately did not win.

This summer, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party cruised to victory in federal elections, winning 438 parliamentary seats and paving the way for him to serve another five-year term. The closest competitor won 13 seats. On prediction markets, trading volume—the total value of contracts bought and sold—typically tracks roughly with the odds of a given outcome; frontrunners attract far more volume than long shots. But in this case, the trading patterns deviated sharply from the norm. Just $173,000 was wagered on Ahmed winning, compared to more than $41 million traded on his chief of staff, Shimelis Abdisa, becoming the country’s next leader. Altogether, the volume traded added up to over $285 million, nearly all on losing candidates.

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Nine years after first trying to resurrect the Roadster, Tesla is apparently trying again. CEO Elon Musk might have relocated its HQ to Texas, but yet again he has returned to California’s showbiz industry to hawk his wares; last time it was a Hollywood back lot for the remote-controlled Cybercab demo, last night it was decades-old stunt technology to make a show car do tricks in the air.

The new Roadster, we’re told, will be unlike anything else, although the angular, wedge-shaped styling owes more than a little to Giorgetto Giugiaro’s original Lotus Esprit—Musk is known to own a James Bond prop car—as well as the more recent Lamborghini Gallardo. At the rear are four giant exhaust pipes; these do not signal Tesla’s sudden embrace of hydrocarbons beyond those emitted by private aviation.

Rather, it’s where 100,000 psi jets of compressed nitrogen shoot out. It’s early in the morning and the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Statutes are dense reading, so I am yet to find the section where it explains how and when it’s legal to use such a thing on the road.

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If you got a DM from an unverified Jon Bon Jovi account after commenting on one of his official Instagram posts, what would it take to make you believe it was really the rock star hoping to connect? And at what point when he starts asking you to send money—like lose-your-house kind of money—would you snap out of the fantasy and stop draining your bank account?

In a documentary premiering Saturday—Super Scam Me—investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller goes deep into this toxic love-bombing terrain. In a clip that Ars is exclusively debuting below, you can see how van Zeller worked with an ethical hacker, Arman the Cyber, to use a fake bitcoin receipt and bait the fake Bon Jovi, giving the victim some much-needed closure.

Scamming a romance scammer

Broadcasting on National Geographic at 9 pm ET and available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu, the documentary takes viewers on an empathetic quest to understand how the line between “lover” and “fraud victim” gets blurred in romance scams that the Federal Trade Commission says cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion in losses each year.

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1. Ocasio-Cortez Transfers $1 Million to Help El-Sayed in Final Sprint in Michigan  The New York Times
2. Midterm Election Updates: AOC Donates $1 Million to Help El-Sayed in Michigan as Democrats Fight For Senate Control  The New York Times
3. Candidate El-Sayed, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez draws crowd in Iron Mountain  Upper Michigan's Source
4. Ocasio-Cortez campaigns with El-Sayed in Michigan's Upper Peninsula  Detroit Free Press
5. Why AOC was in a deep-red part of Michigan: From the Politics Desk  NBC News

1. Googlebook review: Android on a laptop is still Android  Ars Technica
2. Google’s new kind of laptop blends Android and Chromebook  KTLA
3. Googlebooks are as poorly timed as Valve’s Steam Machine, and may suffer a similar fate  Tom's Hardware
4. Googlebook OS review: A post-smartphone PC, if Google can keep it  9to5Google
5. Dell XPS Googlebook Review: The Prettiest and Most Portable Android Laptop So Far  PCMag

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This week, Suunto launched its newest addition to its Race line of performance watches, the Race 3S. At $599, it’s lightweight with a premium feel, and to me, its most interesting upgrade is the new silicon-carbon battery, which Suunto says offers up to 38 hours of dual-band GPS, up to 45 hours in Endurance mode, 10 days of training use, and up to 12 days in daily mode. While I usually stick to my Garmin Forerunners, I’ve been personally testing the Suunto 3S and loving it on first impression.

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Suunto may be one of the lesser-known fitness watch brands, but its offerings, aimed at hikers and outdoorsy people, have long been well regarded. The company sorts its sports watches into families: Run, Race, and Vertical. Three families of watches, all with several generations of models and a lot of overlapping specs, are enough to leave you staring at a product page, wracked with decision fatigue. This week’s launch of the Suunto Race 3S, the newest member of the Race family, is a good enough reason for me to help you sort it out.

SUUNTO Run Sports Watch

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Suunto Race GPS Sports Watch

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SUUNTO Race 2 GPS Sports Watch

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SUUNTO Vertical 2 GPS Sports Watch, 1.5”AMOLED 115+ Sports Modes, Black

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The Suunto Run series: Lightweight and run-focused

Best for: Road runners, 5K-to-marathon trainers, and anyone who wants a watch they forget they're wearing, including overnight. It's also a good first step into Suunto's ecosystem.

In her review of the Suunto Run my colleague Beth Skwarecki calls this watch on of her favorite running watches, pointing to features that not only rival, but maybe even outshine Garmin and Coros watches at a similar price point. Both watches in the Run series, the Run and the Run 2, are known for being easy to wear and simple to use, but still with all the core features of a reliable running watch.

The Suunto Race series: Performance training and racing

Best for: Trail runners, triathletes, and runners who want serious training tools and navigation.

The Race S is the compact option, while the Race 2 has since replaced the original Race and has a bigger screen and larger case. It might best suit people with bigger wrists who want a big display and don't mind the weight.

As of today, the Race 3S is the lightweight premium pick. It combines the Race S's compact size with a titanium and sapphire build, a bigger battery, a brighter screen, and double the storage. Suunto says its battery capacity is 46 percent larger than the Race S's, and its display is 233 percent brighter.

When in doubt, the Race series is the middle of the lineup, and it's a natural sweet spot to land on. If you can't decide between the Run and Race options, Beth's got you covered with an in-depth comparison.

The Vertical series: Built for the backcountry

Best for: Ultrarunners, mountaineers, backpackers, and anyone doing multi-day trips where charging isn't an option. It's also a good fit if you want a watch that holds up to rough use.

The Vertical 2 is marketed as an expedition-grade watch. It weighs about 87 grams and measures 49 mm, and it's available in stainless steel or titanium. It's water-resistant to 100 meters. It has a built-in LED flashlight that the lighter Race and Run watches lack, a redesigned heart rate sensor, and more storage and processing power than the original. Its main selling point is battery life—allegedly up to 65 hours of GPS in Performance mode and up to 250 hours in Tour mode.

The original Vertical is the older model, with a solar-assisted MIP display. It's still sold and often discounted, but the Vertical 2's AMOLED screen is a major step up in clarity.

The bottom line

The Suunto Run series is for runners who want a light, simple watch. The Race series is for performance athletes who want a premium build and strong all-around training and navigation tools. The Vertical series is for people who go far from civilization and want the longest battery life and the toughest build.

The Suunto lineup also includes Core outdoor watches and dive computers like the Ocean, but those are a different conversation. For runners and trail athletes, the choice comes down to Run, Race, or Vertical, and which of them fits how far, how long, and how rough you like to get:

• If you mostly run on roads and want a lightweight entry-point watch, look at the Run.

• If you race, train across several sports, or run trails and want a premium build, look at the Race 3S, or the Race if you're sticking to a smaller budget. Or you can choose the Race 2 if you prefer a bigger case and screen.

• If your adventures last days rather than hours, choose the Vertical 2.

For more, here are five hacks every Suunto user should know.

Over the past week, the laptop Microsoft sent me has been summarizing books and movies, generating images from my imagination, and running a 70-billion-parameter AI model that would be a stretch to fit on most laptops. It also played AAA games at a speed and fidelity I would have thought impossible on an ARM system just a year ago. Microsoft wants to sell you one computer for all of your needs, and for once that doesn't feel like total marketing fluff. Mostly.

Microsoft is throwing both arms around the new Nvidia RTX Spark platform with the Surface Laptop Ultra—and setting its sights on the would-be MacBook Pro buyer, or as the company called it, "a high performance audience." The bet is that rather than a gaming desktop for fun and a development laptop for work, buyers will pay more for one machine that does both.

The Surface Laptop Ultra arrives at a strange time in personal computing. Recent industry numbers showed a 20 percent drop in total PC shipments year over year in the third quarter of 2026. That's not just consumer purchasing either—that's across the board. Between the RAMpocalypse that has exploded consumer prices and an industry fixated on enterprise money, there hasn't been much new hardware to excite PC enthusiasts.

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Welcome to Edition 9.15 of the Rocket Report! The launch I'm most looking forward to in the next few weeks is that of Japan's Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission. MMX is one of the marquee space science missions launching this year, and it's set to leave Earth as soon as Monday (US time) aboard a Japanese H3 rocket. The spacecraft will visit Phobos and Deimos, the two asteroid-like moons of Mars, deploying a rover and collecting specimens for return to Earth in 2031. Exploration at its finest.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Reflect Orbital looks to India for launch capacity. California-based Reflect Orbital, the startup attempting to offer sunlight on-demand with in-space mirrors, announced the purchase of two launches Wednesday from Indian launcher Skyroot Aerospace, Payload Space reports. One of the launches will use Skyroot's Vikram-1 rocket, which became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit in July. The other will fly on an upgraded rocket called the Vikram-1U.

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Blue Origin announced a major expansion of its already considerable Florida launch facilities on Friday morning with the intent of eventually flying more than 100 rockets a year from there.

The company said it would add two launch pads for the New Glenn rocket, in addition to two already under construction at Cape Canaveral. The company is also investing heavily in a new manufacturing facility that will produce up to 150 upper stages for a larger variant of the New Glenn rocket.

The company also plans to procure two additional landing ships to catch and return the first stage of the New Glenn rocket (it currently has one, named Jacklyn). Finally, Blue Origin said it would add a new customer integration facility, built in conjunction with the US Space Force, that will feature four payload bays to process multiple missions at the same time.

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Android was designed for phones, but that hasn't stopped Google from trying to adapt the OS and its apps to larger machines over the years. Googlebooks are just the latest attempt after tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables induced little change in how people interact with Android software. These new Android-powered laptops are designed to pick up where the web-focused ChromeOS left off, offering premium hardware and native support for Android apps.

Google sees Googlebooks as an alternative to Windows and macOS, but these platforms are entrenched with decades of software and UI conventions that keep users locked in. Googlebooks have to offer something very special to steal users away from either of the dominant operating systems.

For devoted Android phone users, there are some cool things in Googlebook OS, but the Android roots of these machines are impossible to miss. Sometimes it feels like using a Chromebook, and sometimes it feels like using a giant phone. It almost never feels like using a premium laptop, and that's the problem.

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Security-wise, most browsers are an open door, happy to reveal your screen size, operating system, language preferences, or GPU model when a website asks. But telling those websites to stop selling your data to third parties is still more confusing than it should be. 

Although about a dozen U.S. states—including California, Delaware, New Jersey, and Texas—now require businesses to honor consumers’ privacy preferences online, most browsers do not offer a native opt-out option that lets you signal those preferences by default. Now, the California Opt Me Out Act, which goes into effect on Jan 1, 2027, is making it mandatory for browsers to do so. 

Still, for now, native support for a global privacy opt-out remains inconsistent among web browsers. TSome privacy-forward browsers like Brave, DuckDuckGo, and Mozilla Firefox enable this feature by default, while others, like Chrome or Edge, require you to install third-party extensions such as the EFF Privacy Badger. Since coverage and setup vary wildly, I’ll walk you through the exact steps to enable this feature on every major browser. 

What is Global Privacy Control?

Global Privacy Control (GPC) is an open-source consumer privacy protocol developed jointly by several universities, media organizations, and privacy-focused tech companies. Instead of having to hunt for a manual “Do Not Sell” or “Refuse Third-Party Cookies” link on every website and app, you enable this feature once in your browser to send a legal notification to every online destination you visit that you’d like to opt out of all data sharing and targeted advertising features. 

On a technical level, GPC combines an HTTP header (Sec-GPC) with a JavaScript property (navigator.globalPrivacyControl) that your browser sends with every website fetch request to let website owners know that they are not supposed to share or sell your data. 

Unlike previous iterations like Firefox’s Do Not Track, GPC issues a specific request that’s backed by leading data protection legislation, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), making websites and businesses more likely to honor them. With over 150 million users and more than 66,000 participating websites, the GPC project has garnered support and participation from the Mozilla Foundation, The Washington Post, Automattic, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), The New York Times, and others. It has even been made into an official work item at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 

Unfortunately, even when enabled, GPC isn’t foolproof. USENIX found that about 45% of the 11,708 websites they surveyed did not honor privacy signals even when regional laws required them to do so. Still, it’s better than having no legal privacy opt-out at all, since cookie and tracker blockers work client-side and may end up breaking functionality on certain sites.

How to enable Global Privacy Control on your browser

When it comes to GPC support, web browsers fall broadly into two camps. There are privacy-focused platforms like Brave Browser, DuckDuckGo, and Firefox that offer native support using a built-in toggle, or just enable it by default. Then there are mainstream browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Safari that offer limited support through third-party extensions, or sometimes none at all. Here are the exact steps to follow to enable Global Privacy Control on Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave Browser, and others:

Brave

Being a privacy-first Chromium-based web browser, Brave has GPC enabled by default on Windows, macOS, and Android. However, due to certain platform limitations on iOS, Brave can only enable the feature through the JavaScript API and not the HTTP header on iPhones. 

You don’t need to do anything to enable GPC on Brave Browser, but there’s an easy way to confirm whether it’s active and running: 

1. Launch Brave. In the address bar, type in “brave://flags/#brave-global-privacy-control-enabled” and hit Enter. 

2. Confirm that the Settings page reads Default or Enabled, not Disabled. 

3. To disable GPC on your browser, navigate to Settings > Brave Shields and Privacy to find the corresponding toggle. 

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo, like Brave Browser, enables GPC by default on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and iPadOS. There’s no built-in toggle to disable it, which tells you just how seriously this browser takes its privacy implementation. (There's even a DuckDuckGo Search & Tracker Protection extension you can add to Chrome, Edge, and Firefox to enable GPC on those browsers, too!)

If you’d like to confirm that GPC is on when you’re using DuckDuckGo, there’s an easy way to do that: 

1. Open a new tab on DuckDuckGo Private Browser and visit the Global Privacy Control website. 

2. Check the notification banner at the very top to see if it reads “GPC signal detected.” 

To avoid breaking certain websites on Android, iOS, and Mac devices, DuckDuckGo only sends the GPC signal to websites that are known to respect it. However, you still get full coverage on Windows or if you use the Chrome extension. 

Firefox

Firefox has offered GPC support since version 120. However, it’s not enabled by default, and you need to hunt for a specific toggle to switch it on. 

1. Click on the menu button on your Firefox app, then navigate to Settings. 

2. Access the Privacy & Security tab from the panel on the left.

3. Keep scrolling until you see Additional protections. On Android version 122+, look for a section that says Enhanced Tracking Protection.

4. You should see a checkbox next to an option that reads “Tell websites not to sell or share my data.” This is what you’re looking for. 

5. Make sure you check the option to enable GPC, then relaunch Firefox. 

Chrome

As of this writing, Google Chrome does not offer a built-in toggle or native support for GPC. However, you can install a third-party browser extension like the Privacy Badger by EFF or DuckDuckGo Search & Tracker Protection to enable Global Privacy Control very easily. 

1. Search for Privacy Badger on the Chrome Web Store. 

2. Once you find it, click Add to Chrome. Make sure to enable any required permissions for the extension to work too.

3. That’s it, GPC is enabled on all sites now. You don’t need to fiddle around with the settings since everything comes pre-configured. 

Edge 

As with Chrome, Microsoft Edge users must also rely on third-party extensions to enable Global Privacy Control. And like before, you can choose between Privacy Badger or the DuckDuckGo extension to activate this feature. 

1. Open the Edge Add-ons store and look for Privacy Badger. EFF’s website lists both Edge and Edge for Android as supported browsers for the extension. 

2. Click Get, followed by Add extension. 

3. GPC is now on by default. You don’t need to configure anything else. 

The difference between GPC and an ad blocker

At this point, you might be wondering if there’s any difference between this and just using an ad or cookie blocker extension on your web browser. Well, there are a few important distinctions. 

First, GPC is a signal. It merely informs websites of your privacy preferences, but does nothing to actively block or prevent tracking or sharing of your data. Second, GPC is narrower in scope because it only covers selling or sharing your data with third parties, not collecting or storing data for a website’s own use. 

Finally, ad blockers are very likely to break functionality on websites that rely on certain cookies or trackers to work as intended. Since GPC is a request rather than a blocking mechanism, it preserves existing functionality while sending a legal notification to websites that they may not share your data with anyone. 

When you’re enabling Global Privacy Control instead of using an anti-tracking app or ad blocker, you’re trading coverage and effectiveness for convenience. You’ll have to just trust that websites will honor your privacy preferences, which many don’t, even when they are required to. For example, Disney just settled a $2.75 million lawsuit with the California AG’s office because it didn’t honor opt-out requests for logged-in users on every device like it was supposed to. 

Marking the 30th anniversary of KDE on October 14, the project released Plasma 6.8, debuted a movie, and retired Plasma's native X11 session support. The announcement from KDE dubs the new Plasma 6.8 as the "30th Anniversary Edition" and describes the update as preparing Plasma for the future. Legacy X11 applications will still function via the XWayland compatibility layer, and KDE applications will also continue supporting X11 under other desktop environments.

After 42 years in service, the X11 protocol is losing another major desktop environment. Plasma will fully adopt the Wayland system and put support for starting new X11 sessions in Plasma to bed. Users opting to stay on Plasma 6.7 will keep their existing sessions for now. The move was expected, with GNOME officially dropping X11 sessions by default in 2025.

The new Plasma 6.8 brings many improvements, including increased support for adding window decorations (like shadows and rounded corners) to third-party apps, and a more streamlined Union theming system. Other notable additions include Nvidia triple buffering being enabled by default, Kup backup integration (KDE's backup utility—now integrated into Plasma), and kscreenctl, a command-line utility that allows power users to adjust display configurations.

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TCL has been pushing the boundaries of QLED TVs, making some of the best in the market at very competitive prices. This year, the company released its QM8L model, introducing a new design and impressive features and specs to a series that isn't even their flagship. Right now, the 65-inch QM8L is $1,297.99 (originally $2,499.99), its lowest price since it launched in April, according to price-tracking tools. Larger sizes are also seeing good discounts.

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One of the first things you'll notice about the QM8L is the “Zero Border” bezel design, which gives it a modern, minimalistic look. When you turn it on, you'll likely note how bright this TV gets, which is a huge advantage QLEDs have over OLEDs. TCL claims it reaches 6,000 nits, and seeing as the brightest OLED TV on the market only reaches 700 nits, no OLED can come close to this unit's brightness. Another important spec to note here is the local dimming zones: TCL claims this TV has up to 4,000, which means it gets top-tier backlight control, limited light blooming (thanks in part to TCL's "Halo Control"), and incredible contrast levels that some might not be able to distinguish from an OLED.

While many of us won't manually calibrate our TVs, the picture modes you can switch to in the settings will be most people's go-to. This TV's "Filmmaker mode" provides accurate color and picture, and if you're a gamer, you can use the native 144Hz high-refresh rate. If you don't already have a surround sound system at home and want to keep a minimalist setup, the QM8L comes with Dolby Atmos-ready Bang & Olufsen speakers, which offer above-average audio output compared to most TVs. You can read more about these features in CNET's 8.8/10 review. If 65 inches isn't quite right for your home theater setup, take a look at the QM8L's other sizes, which are also discounted right now.

Plex, which made a name for itself by letting users share movies they own, is now helping sell movie theater tickets. The company is looking to monetize its content-discovery capabilities and expand its business beyond its media server software.

Plex partnered with Fandango, which has sold movie tickets since 2000, to drive ticket sales from people searching for movies to stream. Per the announcement:

Starting today, Plex users in the US will see a Fandango ticketing option on title pages for movies currently playing in theaters, allowing them to click through to Fandango to find showtimes and purchase tickets. The integration also enables direct attribution through Kochava, giving studios and advertisers greater visibility into how campaigns and audience engagement translate into ticket sales.

Fandango says it sells tickets for 31,000 movie theater screens in the US. The Plex deal allows it to leverage data from Plex’s streaming service (Plex claims users of the service “make more than 100 million streaming decisions each month”), including "ratings and cross-platform viewing" to gain “insight into audience intent," the announcement said.

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