California's Assembly Bill 1856 has passed both chambers of the state legislature and now heads to Engrossing and Enrolling before reaching Governor Gavin Newsom's desk. The bill retains an amendment carving out open-source operating systems from its age-verification mandates, an exemption first added back in May. Covered operating systems will need to collect birth date or age information during account setup and share a coarse age-range signal with app stores and developers via API.
During a routine ground taxi test to diagnose an electrical fault in English Electric Lightning XM135, pilot Taffy Holden unintentionally pushed the throttle past the afterburner gate. Unfamiliar with disengaging the afterburner, Holden found the aircraft accelerating rapidly, narrowly avoiding a fuel tanker crossing the runway before becoming airborne despite having no flight training clearance, helmet, or radio for the exercise.
Walmart has installed 838 EV charging ports across 100 stores since launching its first company-branded charger last year, with construction underway at 100 additional locations. The retailer's network grew faster than any other charging provider except Tesla last month, and Walmart aims to expand to thousands of sites by 2030.
Match Group turned to one of its own directors, Spencer Rascoff, to take over as chief executive and steer a company turnaround. The move highlights a growing trend of boards selecting insiders already familiar with the business rather than launching external searches.
A developer has released BlindLock, a local password vault that stores encrypted credentials embedded within an image file rather than in a central database. The vault relies on hardware binding and 256-bit authenticated encryption, and incorporates NIST-standardized post-quantum algorithms ML-KEM-1024 and ML-DSA-87 for key exchange and signatures.
Anthropic released a framework restructuring the software development lifecycle around AI coding agents, arguing that since agents made writing code fast, the bottleneck has shifted to planning, review, and verification. The playbook defines six stages—planning, design, build, deploy, and self-checking—each producing a document like intent.md, spec.md, or plan.md that feeds the next stage, with hooks preventing agents from gaming tests and CI evals treating agent configuration itself as software.
Incident responders at Sygnia say the China-linked group Fire Ant has expanded from compromising VMware hypervisors to hijacking Cisco routers, TACACS authentication servers, and Linux management hosts. Investigators found a hidden GRE tunnel on a Cisco IOS XR router that didn't match its configuration history, leading to discovery of custom malware that hides its activity from administrators and runs only during set hours. The attackers used their router access to capture network traffic and exfiltrate it to external FTP servers, then pivoted through a hidden tunnel into a Linux server to probe further into connected high-value networks, including ones tied to critical infrastructure.
Glassdoor research found that insurance claims adjusters criticize AI in their reviews 98 percent of the time, making them the most AI-averse profession tracked on the platform. Adjusters describe being handed misclassified claims and AI-generated errors, or hallucinations, that they must fix, often after passing bad information to policyholders or attorneys. One former adjuster, Ahmad Jackson, said the technology added extra work and led him to leave his company for another insurer.
CERN halted its injector complex and Antimatter Factory this morning, stopping the final proton and ion beams that had continued running since the LHC itself went dark in June. This completes the transition into Long Shutdown 3, a multi-year pause across the entire accelerator chain. Engineers used the last weeks of operation to gather performance data and finish physics measurements before maintenance begins.
In a wide-ranging interview, New York Governor Kathy Hochul discussed her positions on AI, teen social media restrictions tied to Meta's multistate settlement, ghost gun bans challenged by activist Cody Wilson, Flock surveillance cameras, and a one-year moratorium on data center construction signed in July. She argued AI development needs stronger guardrails and pushed back on critics who say her policies face legal or technical loopholes.
Security researcher Matt Burch disclosed nine vulnerabilities in CryptWare's CryptoPro Secure Disk, an encryption and pre-boot authentication tool used in ATMs including Diebold Nixdorf's Vynamic Security Suite. The bugs could have let attackers bypass integrity checks and gain full access to encrypted devices, and CryptWare has since patched them across two software updates released in November and December.
IBM's next-generation mainframe processor, discussed by Christian Jacobi and Christian Zoellin at Hot Chips 2026, integrates decoders capable of handling both the z/Architecture instruction set and Arm instructions within the same core. The chip uses a shared decode pipeline with separate instruction decoders for the two architectures, a design approach IBM says differs from earlier dual-ISA attempts like Itanium.
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