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A mistrial was declared today in the trial of former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza, who was accused of bribing a powerful state lawmaker's ally in order to obtain legislation favorable to AT&T's business.

"The jury report they have reached an impasse and cannot reach a unanimous verdict. For the reasons stated on the record, the court declares a mistrial," US District Judge Robert Gettleman wrote in an order today after the trial in the Northern District of Illinois.

La Schiazza could be tried again. AT&T itself agreed to pay a $23 million fine in 2022 to resolve a federal criminal investigation into alleged misconduct involving efforts to influence former Illinois Speaker of the House Michael Madigan. AT&T "admitted that in 2017 it arranged for an ally of Madigan to indirectly receive $22,500 in payments from the company," the Justice Department said in October 2022.

Enlarge / Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma and Virendra Sachdeva, two members of Narendra Modi's ruling BJP party, celebrate the landing of India's Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft on the Moon on August 23, 2023. (credit: Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

All at once, India's government has approved plans to develop a new reusable rocket, the centerpiece of an Indian space station, and robotic sample return mission to the Moon, and a science probe to explore Venus.

"Great news for the space sector!" Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted on X. Collectively, the projects authorized by India's union cabinet will cost an estimated $2.7 billion. Most of the funding will go toward the country's space station and a reusable launch vehicle.

If the projects reach their goals, the approvals announced by Modi on Wednesday will put India on a trajectory to become the third-largest space power in the 2030s, after the United States and China. V. Narayanan, director of India's Liquid Propulsion Systems Center, stated this was the objective in a recent presentation, writing that India's space initiatives will catapult the country to a place "among the three important space powers in the world."

Enlarge / The Windows App runs on Windows, but also macOS, iOS/iPadOS, web browsers, and Android. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft announced today that it's releasing a new app called Windows App as an app for Windows that allows users to run Windows and also Windows apps (it's also coming to macOS, iOS, web browsers, and is in public preview for Android).

On most of those platforms, Windows App is a replacement for the Microsoft Remote Desktop app, which was used for connecting to a copy of Windows running on a remote computer or server—for some users and IT organizations, a relatively straightforward way to run Windows software on devices that aren't running Windows or can't run Windows natively.

The new name, though potentially confusing, attempts to sum up the app's purpose: It's a unified way to access your own Windows PCs with Remote Desktop access turned on, cloud-hosted Windows 365 and Microsoft Dev Box systems, and individual remotely hosted apps that have been provisioned by your work or school.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

LinkedIn admitted Wednesday that it has been training its own AI on many users' data without seeking consent. Now there's no way for users to opt out of training that has already occurred, as LinkedIn limits opt-out to only future AI training.

In a blog detailing updates coming on November 20, LinkedIn general counsel Blake Lawit confirmed that LinkedIn's user agreement and privacy policy will be changed to better explain how users' personal data powers AI on the platform.

Under the new privacy policy, LinkedIn now informs users that "we may use your personal data... [to] develop and train artificial intelligence (AI) models, develop, provide, and personalize our Services, and gain insights with the help of AI, automated systems, and inferences, so that our Services can be more relevant and useful to you and others."

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A coalition of law-enforcement agencies said it shut down a service that facilitated the unlocking of more than 1.2 million stolen or lost mobile phones so they could be used by someone other than their rightful owner.

The service was part of iServer, a phishing-as-a-service platform that has been operating since 2018. The Argentina-based iServer sold access to a platform that offered a host of phishing-related services through email, texts, and voice calls. One of the specialized services offered was designed to help people in possession of large numbers of stolen or lost mobile devices to obtain the credentials needed to bypass protections such as the lost mode for iPhones, which prevent a lost or stolen device from being used without entering its passcode.

iServer's phishing-as-a-service model. (credit: Group-IB)

Catering to low-skilled thieves

An international operation coordinated by Europol’s European Cybercrime Center said it arrested the Argentinian national that was behind iServer and identified more than 2,000 “unlockers” who had enrolled in the phishing platform over the years. Investigators ultimately found that the criminal network had been used to unlock more than 1.2 million mobile phones. Officials said they also identified 483,000 phone owners who had received messages phishing for credentials for their lost or stolen devices.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

After California passed laws cracking down on AI-generated deepfakes of election-related content, a popular conservative influencer promptly sued, accusing California of censoring protected speech, including satire and parody.

In his complaint, Christopher Kohls—who is known as "Mr Reagan" on YouTube and X (formerly Twitter)—said that he was suing "to defend all Americans’ right to satirize politicians." He claimed that California laws, AB 2655 and AB 2839, were urgently passed after X owner Elon Musk shared a partly AI-generated parody video on the social media platform that Kohls created to "lampoon" presidential hopeful Kamala Harris.

AB 2655, known as the "Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act," prohibits creating "with actual malice" any "materially deceptive audio or visual media of a candidate for elective office with the intent to injure the candidate’s reputation or to deceive a voter into voting for or against the candidate, within 60 days of the election." It requires social media platforms to block or remove any reported deceptive material and label "certain additional content" deemed "inauthentic, fake, or false" to prevent election interference.

Enlarge / Fitbit's Charge 6. (credit: Google)

Users of Fitbit’s iOS and Android apps have been reporting problems with the apps' ability to sync and collect and display accurate data. Some have been complaining of such problems since at least April, and Fitbit has been working on addressing syncing issues since at least September 3. However, Google's Fitbit hasn't said when it expects the bugs to be totally resolved.

On September 3, Fitbit's Status Dashboard updated to show a service disruption, pointing to an incident affecting the web API.

"Some users may notice data discrepancies or syncing issues between [third-party] apps and Fitbit. Our team is currently investigating the root cause of the issue," the dashboard reads.

Enlarge / Sometimes this is all you need. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Image)

Remy Ra St. Felix spent April 11, 2023, on a quiet street in a rented BMW X5, staking out the 76-year-old couple that he planned to rob the next day.

He had recently made the 11-hour drive up I-95 from southern Florida, where he lived, to Durham, North Carolina. It was a long way, but as with so many jobs, occasional travel was the cost of doing business. That was true especially when your business was robbing people of their cryptocurrency by breaking into their homes and threatening to cut off their balls and rape their wives.

St. Felix, a young man of just 25, had tried this line of work closer to home at first, but it hadn't gone well. A September 2022 home invasion in Homestead, Florida, was supposed to bring St. Felix and his crew piles of crypto. All they had to do was stick a gun to some poor schlub's head and force him to log in to his online exchange and then transfer the money to accounts controlled by the thieves. A simple plan—which worked fine until it turned out that the victim's crypto accounts had far less money in them than planned.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Florian Gaertner)

The maker of a homeopathic nasal spray with a history of contamination is refusing to recall its product after the Food and Drug Administration once again found evidence of dangerous microbial contamination.

In a warning Thursday, the FDA advised consumers to immediately stop using SnoreStop nasal spray—made by Green Pharmaceuticals—because it may contain microbes that, when sprayed directly into nasal cavities, can cause life-threatening infections. The FDA highlighted the risk to people with compromised immune systems and also children, since SnoreStop is marketed to kids as young as age 5.

According to the regulator, an FDA inspection in April uncovered laboratory test results showing that a batch of SnoreStop contained "significant microbial contamination." But, instead of discarding the batch, FDA inspectors found evidence that Green Pharmaceuticals had repackaged some of the contaminated lot and distributed it as single spray bottles or as part of a starter kit.

Enlarge / Cutting metal with lasers is hard, but even harder when you don't know the worst-case timings of your code. (credit: Getty Images)

As is so often the case, a notable change in an upcoming Linux kernel is both historic and no big deal.

If you wanted to use "Real-Time Linux" for your audio gear, your industrial welding laser, or your Mars rover, you have had that option for a long time (presuming you didn't want to use QNX or other alternatives). Universities started making their own real-time kernels in the late 1990s. A patch set, PREEMPT_RT, has existed since at least 2005. And some aspects of the real-time work, like NO_HZ, were long ago moved into the mainline kernel, enabling its use in data centers, cloud computing, or anything with a lot of CPUs.

But officialness still matters, and in the 6.12 kernel, PREEMPT_RT will likely be merged into the mainline. As noted by Steven Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet, the final sign-off by Linus Torvalds occurred while he was attending Open Source Summit Europe. Torvalds wrote the original code for printk, a debugging tool that can pinpoint exact moments where a process crashes, but also introduces latency that runs counter to real-time computing. The Phoronix blog has tracked the progress of PREEMPT_RT into the kernel, along with the printk changes that allowed for threaded/atomic console support crucial to real-time mainlining.

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  The PS5 Pro version of the 30th anniversary bundle comes with both varieties of DualSense controller, a plate for an (optional) optical drive, and other accessories. [credit: Sony ]

Sony launched the original PlayStation console in Japan on December 3, 1994, and Sony isn't letting the 30th anniversary pass by quietly. Today the company has announced limited-edition versions of both the PS5 and PS5 Pro with gray plastic shells and multicolored PlayStation logos, inspired by the gray plastic shells of the original. The retro-inspired modern consoles will be released on November 21 and will be available for preorder starting September 26 from Sony's direct.playstation.com site.

Sony is also releasing DualSense and DualSense Edge controllers with gray shells and colorful PS logo buttons and a gray version of the Switch-esque PlayStation Portal streaming console. Sony says that the limited-edition PS5 Pro will be limited to 12,300 units—a reference to the December 3 launch date—but didn't mention any specific manufacturing numbers for the regular PS5, either DualSense controller design, or the PlayStation Portal.

Both console bundles also come with a handful of other accessories: a PS logo sticker, a PS logo paperclip, cable ties, and (my personal favorite) a regular USB-C cable with a giant, chunky PS1-style controller connector on one end.

Enlarge (credit: Ben Orlin)

Math teacher Ben Orlin writes and draws the (aptly named) blog Math With Drawings and is the author of a new book, Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. To mark its publication, he devised this entertaining accompanying quiz. You can read the Ars interview with Orlin here.

Math, we like to say, is math. It often seems that mathematics is something beyond our control—something unyielding, universal, inhuman.

But is it really?

Enlarge / Math for English Majors talks about numbers as nouns, verbs as calculations, and algebra as grammar. (credit: Ben Orlin)

Galileo once famously described the universe as a great book "written in mathematical language and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures." Unfortunately, it's a language that many people outside of math and science simply do not speak, largely because they are flummoxed and/or intimidated by the sheer density of all that strange symbolic notation.

Math teacher extraordinaire Ben Orlin is here to help with his latest book: Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. And just like Orlin's previous outings, it's filled with the author's trademark bad drawings. Bonus: Orlin created a fun personality quiz, which you can take here to find out your mathematical style.

Orlin's first book, Math with Bad Drawings, after his blog of the same name, was published in 2018. It included such highlights as placing a discussion of the correlation coefficient and "Anscombe's Quartet" into the world of Harry Potter and arguing that building the Death Star in the shape of a sphere may not have been the Galactic Empire's wisest move. We declared it "a great, entertaining read for neophytes and math fans alike, because Orlin excels at finding novel ways to connect the math to real-world problems—or in the case of the Death Star, to problems in fictional worlds."

Enlarge / Artist's conception of what used to be possible, before BattlEye ruined things.

Last week, Rockstar added BattlEye support to Grand Theft Auto V, offering some much-needed anti-cheat protection for the game's highly successful GTA Online multiplayer mode. That anti-cheat support wasn't welcome news for Steam Deck players, though, who now get confronted with an error when trying to log in to GTA Online.

According to Valve, though, Rockstar could solve this minor technical issue with a single email.

In both a Steam Community update and a Rockstar Support FAQ, the developer notes that "Steam Deck does not support BattlEye for GTA Online. You will be able to play GTAV Story Mode but unable to play GTA Online." As such, GTA V's Steam page now lists the game as "Unsupported" for Steam Deck users, because "the game's anti-cheat is not configured to support Steam Deck."

Enlarge (credit: J Studios via Getty Images)

If you haven't noticed by now, Big Tech companies have been making plans to invest in the infrastructure necessary to deliver generative AI products like ChatGPT (and beyond) to hundreds of millions of people around the world. That push involves building more AI-accelerating chips, more data centers, and even new nuclear plants to power those data centers, in some cases.

Along those lines, Microsoft, BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), and MGX announced a massive new AI investment partnership on Tuesday called the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership (GAIIP). The partnership initially aims to raise $30 billion in private equity capital, which could later turn into $100 billion in total investment when including debt financing.

The group will invest in data centers and supporting power infrastructure for AI development. "The capital spending needed for AI infrastructure and the new energy to power it goes beyond what any single company or government can finance," Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a statement.

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Elon Musk's X temporarily became accessible again in Brazil despite government orders requiring Internet service providers to block the social network. X's revival was enabled by the company switching to a different network provider, namely Cloudflare, but Cloudflare reportedly made changes that allow ISPs to resume their blocking of X.

"When X was shut down in Brazil, our infrastructure to provide service to Latin America was no longer accessible to our team," X's Global Government Affairs account said last night. "To continue providing optimal service to our users, we changed network providers. This change resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users. While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again shortly, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil."

X's statement that restoration of service in Brazil was "inadvertent" surprised Abrint, a trade group for Brazilian ISPs. The BBC quoted Abrint official Basílio Rodriguez Pérez as saying, "everything that happened during the day led us to believe that it was on purpose."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Most living organisms easily surpass machines when it comes to navigating real-world environments and adaptability to changing conditions. One way to bridge that gap is building biohybrid robots that merge synthetic machinery with biological components like animal muscles, bacteria, or plants.

But living muscles are very hard to keep alive in a machine, bacteria have a very short lifespan, and plants tend to react to things a bit slowly, like Ents in The Lord of the Rings. So, a team of scientists at Cornell University went down a different path and built biohybrid robots controlled by fungi, specifically, oyster mushrooms.

Understanding mushrooms’ signals

Robots controlled by fungi, despite giving strong Last of Us vibes, are a good idea on paper. Fungi are very easy to sustain and can live pretty much everywhere, including extreme environments like the Arctic, or even amid nuclear contamination. They're also cheap to culture in large quantities and excel at reacting to environmental cues like exposure to light.

Enlarge / Instead of giving the ID.4 complicated door handles that recess into the side of the car, VW has designed these to be flush yet always accessible. (credit: Volkswagen)

Volkswagen has a bit of a headache on its hands with the ID.4 crossover. There's a problem with the electric vehicle's flush-set door handles, which VW says don't meet its waterproofing specs. Consequently, moisture can get into the door controller's circuit board, possibly allowing the door to open while the EV is in motion.

As a result, VW has issued a recall for almost 100,000 ID.4s, as well as suspending production of the popular crossover at its factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and issuing a stop-sale to VW dealers. The stop-sale applies to preowned ID.4s as well as vehicles on lots yet to find their first owner.

The recall applies to all US ID.4s—99,064 in total, from the initial model-year 2021 cars built in Germany to the latest 2024 models made in the USA. VW first started hearing complaints in February 2024. By June, together with its suppliers, it had determined the problem was due to inadequate protection against water entering and then corroding the door handle electronics.

(credit: USGS)

Droughts in the coming decades could be longer than projected by current climate models, a new study published Wednesday in Nature warns.

The international team of scientists examined potential biases that could skew climate models used to make drought projections under Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change midrange and high emissions scenarios. The researchers corrected for the bias by calibrating those models with observations of the longest annual dry spells between 1998 and 2018.

By the end of this century, they found that the average longest periods of drought could be 10 days longer than previously projected. Trouble spots included North America, Southern Africa, and Madagascar, where the newly calibrated models showed that the increase in the longest annual dry spell could be about twice what the older models predicted.