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In two separate reports, Apple and Samsung are said to report underwhelming sales of their new ultra-thin smartphones. According to The Elec, Apple plans to cut production of the iPhone Air while Samsung has canceled its planned Galaxy S26 Edge smartphone after disappointing sales of the Galaxy S25 Edge, Korea's NewsPim claims. MacRumors reports: Samsung apparently halted work on the Galaxy S26 Edge this week, informing employees internally that the product line would be discontinued. Internal discussions in September shifted priorities toward the more conventional "Plus" form factor after confirming that consumer demand for ultra-slim flagships was weaker than expected. [...] Samsung will apparently instead add a Galaxy S26 Plus model to its 2026 lineup, reverting to the company's traditional three-tier structure of base, Plus, and Ultra variants. Despite the cancellation, development of the Galaxy S26 Edge was already complete. Development of the S26 Plus is expected to begin before the end of the third quarter of 2025. The atmosphere inside the company is said to be "chaotic" and "embarrassed" following the sudden lineup revision. Samsung reportedly plans to sell through existing inventory of the Galaxy S25 Edge and cease further production once stock is depleted. As for Apple's iPhone Air, here's what MacRumors is reporting: The Japanese investment banking and securities firm claims that the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are seeing higher sales than their predecessors during the same period last year, while the standard iPhone 17 is a major success, performing significantly better than the iPhone 16. The iPhone Air is apparently the outlier; Apple plans to reduce production by one million units this year. Meanwhile, Apple plans to increase production of all other models by two million units. The overall production forecast of the iPhone 17 series this year has also been increased from 88 million units to 94 million units for the start of 2026.

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A network of classified Starshield satellites built by SpaceX for the U.S. government is transmitting signals on radio frequencies reserved for Earth-to-space commands. According to NPR, it may violate international standards. From the report: Satellites associated with the Starshield satellite network appear to be transmitting to the Earth's surface on frequencies normally used for doing the exact opposite: sending commands from Earth to satellites in space. The use of those frequencies to "downlink" data runs counter to standards set by the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency that seeks to coordinate the use of radio spectrum globally. Starshield's unusual transmissions have the potential to interfere with other scientific and commercial satellites, warns Scott Tilley, an amateur satellite tracker in Canada who first spotted the signals. "Nearby satellites could receive radio-frequency interference and could perhaps not respond properly to commands -- or ignore commands -- from Earth," he told NPR. Outside experts agree there's the potential for radio interference. "I think it is definitely happening," said Kevin Gifford, a computer science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder who specializes in radio interference from spacecraft. But he said the issue of whether the interference is truly disruptive remains unresolved. [...] Tilley says he's detected signals from 170 of the Starshield satellites so far. All appear in the 2025-2110 MHz range, though the precise frequencies of the signals move around.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: When teachers rely on commonly used artificial intelligence chatbots to devise lesson plans, it does not result in more engaging, immersive or effective learning experiences compared with existing techniques, we found in our recent study. The AI-generated civics lesson plans we analyzed also left out opportunities for students to explore the stories and experiences of traditionally marginalized people. The allure of generative AI as a teaching aid has caught the attention of educators. A Gallup survey from September 2025 found that 60% of K-12 teachers are already using AI in their work, with the most common reported use being teaching preparation and lesson planning. [...] For our research, we began collecting and analyzing AI-generated lesson plans to get a sense of what kinds of instructional plans and materials these tools provide to teachers. We decided to focus on AI-generated lesson plans for civics education because it is essential for students to learn productive ways to participate in the U.S. political system and engage with their communities. To collect data for this study, in August 2024 we prompted three GenAI chatbots -- the GPT-4o model of ChatGPT, Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash model and Microsoft's latest Copilot model -- to generate two sets of lesson plans for eighth grade civics classes based on Massachusetts state standards. One was a standard lesson plan and the other a highly interactive lesson plan. We garnered a dataset of 311 AI-generated lesson plans, featuring a total of 2,230 activities for civic education. We analyzed the dataset using two frameworks designed to assess educational material: Bloom's taxonomy and Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content. Bloom's taxonomy is a widely used educational framework that distinguishes between "lower-order" thinking skills, including remembering, understanding and applying, and "higher-order" thinking skills -- analyzing, evaluating and creating. Using this framework to analyze the data, we found 90% of the activities promoted only a basic level of thinking for students. Students were encouraged to learn civics through memorizing, reciting, summarizing and applying information, rather than through analyzing and evaluating information, investigating civic issues or engaging in civic action projects. When examining the lesson plans using Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content model (PDF), which was developed in the 1990s, we found that the AI-generated civics lessons featured a rather narrow view of history -- often leaving out the experiences of women, Black Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asian and Pacific Islanders, disabled individuals and other groups that have long been overlooked. Only 6% of the lessons included multicultural content. These lessons also tended to focus on heroes and holidays rather than deeper explorations of understanding civics through multiple perspectives. Overall, we found the AI-generated lesson plans to be decidedly boring, traditional and uninspiring. If civics teachers used these AI-generated lesson plans as is, students would miss out on active, engaged learning opportunities to build their understanding of democracy and what it means to be a citizen.

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A potential tragedy was narrowly averted at a Wikipedia conference in Manhattan when two volunteer editors tackled an armed man who stormed the stage and threatened to kill himself during a keynote speech (source paywalled; alternative source). The gunman, who claimed he was protesting Wikipedia's policy banning self-identified pedophiles, was disarmed and taken into custody after community members swiftly intervened. The New York Times reports: The armed man came striding up the aisle at a conference for Wikipedia editors Friday morning in Manhattan, several witnesses said. The man, draped in a multicolored flag, walked onto the stage and stood next to Maryana Iskander, the chief of the nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia, interrupting her speech. He announced that he was going to kill himself. He held a gun near his head and pointed it toward the ceiling. The audience of well over a hundred people panicked. "People started yelling, 'Get down, get down!' and people started ducking behind their chairs," said Bill Adair, a journalism professor who was there and is writing a book on Wikipedia. A man in an orange sweatshirt rushed the stage. He was not in law enforcement, but a Wikipedia contributor on the conference's "trust and safety team": Richard Knipel, the City University of New York's "Wikimedian-in-residence." He grabbed the gunman from behind. Another Wikipedian on the trust and safety team, Andrew Lih, had been standing watch in the aisle and charged forward, too. "I saw the gun he's holding go from pointing up at the ceiling to sweeping down toward the room, and as it swept across me I said 'Oh, my god,' and I ducked down, but I still kept moving" said Mr. Lih, a digital strategist who works with museums and libraries. "I grabbed his arm," he continued. "He was still clutching his gun pretty hard. I pried his fingers away from it, removed it from his hands and put it down." The gun was loaded, according to a senior law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a pending investigation. In seconds, a potential scene of bloodshed had been averted, a life may have been saved, and two volunteer editors of an online encyclopedia had become unlikely heroes.

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Amazon is investing hundreds of millions into the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility, a next-generation small modular reactor project in Richland, Washington, developed with X-energy and Energy Northwest. "The question now is will it be enough to kick off a new wave of U.S. nuclear energy innovation -- a field that America largely soured on by the 1980s?" writes GeekWire. From the report: The facility will be located near Richland, Wash., near Energy Northwest's Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant. The initial goal is to install a cluster of four small modular reactors (SMRs) that can produce up to 320 megawatts of power, but the overall vision is to construct 12 reactors total, with a capacity of nearly one gigawatt. If all the funding, permitting and public support come together, construction should start within the next five years, with the plant coming online in the 2030s. [...] For Amazon, its support of the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility is part of a much bigger initiative. The company has set a goal of deploying 5 gigawatts of nuclear power in the U.S. by 2039. "One thing that Amazon does well is scale technology," said Brandon Oyer, Amazon Web Services' head of power and water for North and South America. "We've done this over and over again ... We'll go and make an investment and then learn how to scale that up, drive out cost, make it more readily available." Targeting SMRs for amplification was a "natural fit," Oyer added. The company believes nuclear aligns with its climate ambitions. Amazon matches all of its electricity use with clean power and is the largest corporate purchaser of wind, solar and other renewable sources. That said, it is struggling to cut its carbon footprint to reach a goal of net-zero emissions by 2040 as the AI-boom stokes energy use. Amazon reported that its carbon footprint grew by 6% last year. Amazon has dibs on half of the 320 megawatts of electricity that will be generated by the first four reactors at the Washington site, but will take all of it if the power prices are too high for local utilities to afford. Cullen said that if everything goes well with the initial phase, it would be straightforward to build the other eight reactors as the permits will encompass the complete build out. The added reactors would produce enough electricity for about one million homes and should come at a lower cost. "Amazon recognizes the role they can -- and are willing -- to play," Cullen said. The company can take some of the early risk and bring that catalytic capital, he said, which is "every, very difficult for utilities to do."

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Hackers breached financial services firm Prosper, stealing the personal data of roughly 17.6 million people, including Social Security numbers, income details, and government IDs. "We have evidence that confidential, proprietary, and personal information, including Social Security Numbers, was obtained, including through unauthorized queries made on Company databases that store customer information and applicant data. We will be offering free credit monitoring as appropriate after we determine what data was affected," the company says. "The investigation is still in its very early stages, but resolving this incident is our top priority and we are committed to sharing additional information with our customers as appropriate." BleepingComputer reports: Prosper operates as a peer-to-peer lending marketplace that has helped over 2 million customers secure more than $30 billion in loans since its founding in 2005. As the company disclosed one month ago on a dedicated page, the breach was detected on September 2, but Prosper has yet to find evidence that the attackers gained access to customer accounts and funds. However, the attackers stole data belonging to Prosper customers and loan applicants. The company hasn't shared what information was exposed beyond Social Security numbers because it's still investigating what data was affected. Prosper added that the security breach didn't impact its customer-facing operations and that it has reported the incident to relevant authorities and is collaborating with law enforcement to investigate the attack. [...] The stolen information also includes customers' names, government-issued IDs, employment status, credit status, income levels, dates of birth, physical addresses, IP addresses, and browser user agent details. Have I Been Pwned revealed the extent of the incident on Thursday.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Hyperscale datacenters stateside will consume 22 percent more grid power by the end of 2025 than a year ago, and are forecast to need nearly three times as much electricity by the end of the decade. Warnings about datacenters' rising energy draw are coming thick and fast of late, and this latest one from 451 Research (now a part of S&P Global) comes with figures and cautions about how fast this change may occur and what grid resources will be required to meet it. The bit barn building boom is largely fueled by estimated demand for new machine learning models, which require highly configured servers packed with power-hungry GPUs to develop and train. The power and cooling infrastructure required also mean it is easier to build a new facility rather than attempt to retrofit an existing one. As a consequence, utility power to datacenters in America is estimated to jump 11.3 GW to 61.8 GW by the end of this year. 451 calculates this will rise again to 75.8 GW in 2026, then 108 GW in 2028, before hitting 134.4 GW by 2030. These figures also exclude enterprise-owned facilities, only considering those of the hyperscale tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, alongside leased and crypto-mining sites. The research identifies Virginia and Texas as the two states with by far the highest requirement for bit barn energy supplies in the US this year. 451 forecasts that Virginia's datacenter load, made up of leased and hyperscale facilities, will reach 12.1 GW in 2025, up from 9.3 GW last year. In Texas, demand is driven by cryptomining and leased capacity, and is slated to hit 9.7 GW this year, from less than 8 GW previously. However, the search for an optimum location is seeing datacenter operators explore emerging markets such as Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma and smaller cities in West Texas, looking for "stranded power" and alternative energy generation opportunities, the report says.

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Apple has struck a five-year, $750 million deal to become the exclusive U.S. home for Formula 1 starting in 2026. "Apple is paying a significant premium over the $90 million per year currently paid by ESPN, whose F1 broadcast deal expires at the end of 2025 after holding the rights in the U.S. since 2018," notes Variety. From the report: According to Apple, it will deliver the Formula 1 programming with a "more dynamic and elevated viewing experience," and both parties expressed optimism that the deal will attract new motorsports fans in America in the years ahead. The company is rebranding the video-streaming service, which launched in 2019 as Apple TV+, to remove the plus sign. It's another big move by Apple into sports, which also has streaming deals with MLB and Major League Soccer. The F1 agreement and follows Apple's partnership with Formula 1 for original film "F1 The Movie," starring Brad Pitt, which raked in $629 million worldwide at the box office this year -- the highest-grossing sports movie of all time and Pitt's highest-grossing feature to date. "F1 The Movie" will debut on Apple TV on Dec. 12, 2025.

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Amazon's Ring has announced a partnership with Flock Safety, the AI-powered camera network already used by ICE, the Secret Service, and other federal agencies. "Now agencies that use Flock can request that Ring doorbell users share footage to help with 'evidence collection and investigative work,'" reports TechCrunch. From the report: Flock cameras work by scanning the license plates and other identifying information about cars they see. Flock's government and police customers can also make natural language searches of their video footage to find people who match specific descriptions. However, AI-powered technology used by law enforcement has been proven to exacerbate racial biases. On the same day that Ring announced this partnership, 404 Media reported that ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy had access to Flock's network of cameras. By partnering with Ring, Flock could potentially access footage from millions more cameras.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Texas is being sued by a Big Tech lobby group over the state's new law that will require app stores to verify users' ages and impose restrictions on users under 18. "The Texas App Store Accountability Act imposes a broad censorship regime on the entire universe of mobile apps," the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) said yesterday in a lawsuit (PDF). "In a misguided attempt to protect minors, Texas has decided to require proof of age before anyone with a smartphone or tablet can download an app. Anyone under 18 must obtain parental consent for every app and in-app purchase they try to download -- from ebooks to email to entertainment." The CCIA said in a press release that the law violates the First Amendment by imposing "a sweeping age-verification, parental consent, and compelled speech regime on both app stores and app developers." When app stores determine that a user is under 18, "the law prohibits them from downloading virtually all apps and software programs and from making any in-app purchases unless their parent consents and is given control over the minor's account," the CCIA said. "Minors who are unable to link their accounts with a parent's or guardian's, or who do not receive permission, would be prohibited from accessing app store content." The law requires app developers "to 'age-rate' their content into several subcategories and explain their decision in detail," and "notify app stores in writing every time they improve or modify the functions, features, or user experience of their apps," the group said. The lawsuit says the age-rating system relies on a "vague and unworkable set of age categories." "Our Constitution forbids this," the lawsuit said. "None of our laws require businesses to 'card' people before they can enter bookstores and shopping malls. The First Amendment prohibits such oppressive laws as much in cyberspace as it does in the physical world." The lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Western District of Texas. CCIA members include Apple and Google, which have both said the law would reduce privacy for app users. The companies recently described their plans to comply, saying they would take steps to minimize the privacy risks.

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Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) pump out nearly five times more planet-heating pollution than official figures show, a report has found. The Guardian: The cars, which can run on electric batteries as well as combustion engines, have been promoted by European carmakers as a way to cover long distances in a single drive -- unlike fully electric cars -- while still reducing emissions. Data shows PHEVs emit just 19% less CO2 than petrol and diesel cars, an analysis by the non-profit advocacy group Transport and Environment found on Thursday. Under laboratory tests, they were assumed to be 75% less polluting. The researchers analyzed data from the onboard fuel consumption meters of 800,000 cars registered in Europe between 2021 and 2023. They found real-world carbon dioxide emissions from PHEVs in 2023 were 4.9 times greater than those from standardized laboratory tests, having risen from being 3.5 times greater in 2021.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Cloud-computing firm Salesforce was hit with a proposed class action lawsuit by two authors who alleged the company used thousands of books without permission to train its AI software. Novelists Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore said in the complaint that Salesforce infringed copyrights by using their work to train its xGen AI models to process language.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Atari has announced yet another retro console revival, but this time it's launching hardware from an old competitor. Atari and Plaion, a company that develops, publishes, and distributes games, have collaborated on the new Intellivision Sprint that blends '80s console aesthetics with modern gaming conveniences. It's a new take on Mattel's Intellivision, which initially went head-to-head with the Atari 2600 when it was released in 1979. The $150 Sprint looks a lot like the original Intellivision with a gold and black case and a wood-grain panel on the front, but there are a lot fewer cables. It connects to a TV using a single HDMI cable, and while it still includes two controllers featuring dials and number pads instead of joysticks, they're both wireless and charge when docked to the console.

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Foreign institutional investors have pulled nearly $30 billion from Indian equity markets over the past twelve months. A substantial portion of that capital moved to Korea and Taiwan. Foreign portfolio investor ownership in stocks listed on India's National Stock Exchange fell from 22.2% in September 2024 to 17.3% in May 2025. Taiwan absorbed $15 billion of net foreign inflows in the third quarter of 2025 alone. HSBC analysts say global investors increasingly view India through the lens of AI economics and are positioning the world's most populous nation as a global anti-AI play. India employs roughly 20 million people directly and indirectly in IT services. Services account for 55% of Indian gross domestic product. HSBC estimates digital AI agents cost approximately one-third as much as human agents for customer support and certain mid-office functions. Global tech giants will spend two trillion dollars on AI infrastructure between 2025 and 2030. India's AI Mission committed $1.25 billion over five years beginning March 2024.

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Jason Allen has responded to critics who say he is not an artist by filing a new brief and announcing plans to sell oil-print reproductions of his AI-generated image. Allen won the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition in 2022 after submitting Theatre D'opera Spatial, which Midjourney created. He said in a press release that being called an artist does not concern him but his work and expression do. Allen says he asked himself what could make the piece undeniably art and decided to create physical reproductions using technology. The reproductions employ a three-dimensional printing technique from a company called Arius that uses oil paints to simulate brushstrokes. Allen said the physical artifact is singular and real. His legal filing argues that he produced the artwork by providing hundreds of iterative text prompts to Midjourney and experimenting with over six hundred prompts before cropping and upscaling the final image. The U.S. Copyright Office has rejected his copyright applications for three years. The office maintains that Midjourney does not treat text prompts as direct instructions.

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Backblaze has been tracking hard disk drive failures in its datacenter since 2013. The backup and cloud storage company's latest analysis of approximately 317,230 drives shows that peak failure rates have dropped dramatically and shifted much later in a drive's lifespan. Where the company once saw failure rates of 13.73% at around three years in 2013 and 14.24% at seven years and nine months in 2021, the current data shows a peak of just 4.25% at 10 years and three months. This represents the first time the company has observed the highest failure rate occurring at the far end of the drive curve rather than earlier in its operational life, it said. The drives maintained relatively consistent failure rates through most of their use before spiking sharply near the end. The improvement amounts to roughly one-third of the previous peak failure rates.

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Instant coffee beat drip coffee in blind taste tests conducted by researchers at the Drexel Food Lab. Jonathan Deutsch and Rachel Sherman tested 84 participants across two rounds of tastings for The Guardian's Filter US newsletter. They first narrowed 24 instant coffee varieties to the best options. Those finalists then competed against drip coffees in a second test. 77% of participants preferred instant coffee over drip. The top-performing instant coffee was not from premium third-wave brands but a common grocery store variety. Deutsch compared the result to iconic products like Heinz ketchup and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Upscale interpretations of certain classic items often fail to surpass the originals, he said.

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has signed into law legislation banning the use of price-fixing software by landlords to set rental rates. From a report: New York is the first state to outlaw algorithmic pricing by landlords, following a number of city-wide bans in Jersey City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle. Software companies such as RealPage offer landlords algorithms that can set rental prices. The software can also help determine the ideal number of people to live in a unit or the terms of a lease renewal. RealPage says it can help its clients "optimize rents to achieve the overall highest yield, or combination of rent and occupancy, at each property." But the "private data algorithms" advertised by these software companies, Hochul says, cause the "housing market distortion" that harms renters "during a historic housing supply and affordability crisis." Not only does the law outlaw setting rental terms with the software, it also says that any property owners who use the software will be considered colluding. In other words, two or more rental property owners or managers who set rents with an algorithm are, in practice, choosing to not compete with each other, whether they do so "knowingly or with reckless disregard," the law says. This is a distinct violation from simply using the software itself.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung Electronics will unveil its highly-anticipated trifold smartphone when world leaders and global dignitaries gather at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea later this month. It will be the company's first device with two hinges -- allowing it to work as either a conventional smartphone or a significantly larger tablet when fully unfurled -- and will be displayed at an exhibition of cutting-edge Korean technology on the sidelines of the multilateral summit, according to a person familiar with the matter. For Samsung, the Gyeongju-hosted APEC event will provide a global spotlight for a product it hopes will burnish its reputation as an engineering pioneer. Alongside Huawei, Samsung has led the move to develop foldable phones, and Huawei introduced the world's first trifold device in China last year. The Korean company now has the opportunity to take the form factor global.

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Maj. Gen. William Taylor told reporters at the Association of the US Army Conference in Washington this week that he and the Eighth Army he commands out of South Korea are regularly using AI for decision-making. Taylor said he has been asking AI chatbots to help build models for personal decisions that affect his organization and overall readiness. The general referred to his chatbot companion as "Chat" and said the technology has been useful for predictive analysis in logistical planning and operational purposes.

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