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In an interview with Michael Cohen, President Trump argued that towns rejecting data centers are making a mistake, claiming the facilities bring jobs and 'tremendous tax revenue.' His remarks come as data centers face bipartisan public backlash over energy use, water consumption, and local disruption.
EuroHPC Joint Undertaking has launched six funding calls totaling €119 million to develop next-generation quantum computing infrastructure across Europe, including trapped-ion and superconducting platforms. The trapped-ion call, worth €20 million, targets a full-stack quantum computer with over 1,000 qubits integrated with HPC systems, while the superconducting call seeks a similarly scaled chiplet-based QPU with cloud access. Both calls opened August 13, 2026, with applications due November 17, 2026.
Formula 1 confirmed on the eve of the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort that Max Verstappen will remain with his current team long-term, ending months of speculation about his future. Williams also announced it is keeping both Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz. Despite the contract news, all three drivers had disappointing race weekends, part of a broader pattern of tense intra-team rivalries seen across the grid.
The open Jabber/XMPP protocol is celebrating a quarter-century of existence, having been designed from the start as a federated, non-proprietary alternative to closed messaging platforms. The piece uses this anniversary to argue that digital services should be treated as infrastructure owned collectively, rather than left to corporate or single-nation control.
Chris Churchman, who runs Goldman Sachs' Marquee platform, said on the firm's Exchanges podcast that heavy reliance on AI models could erode bankers' ability to reason independently. He compared the risk to how GPS and digital tools already weakened people's navigation and memory skills, warning that delegating analysis to algorithms could similarly dull financial judgment.
Shipyard announced that Protocol Labs will not renew its funding, forcing the company to wind down its engineering, maintenance, and infrastructure work on IPFS. The team's final day supporting the project will be September 30, 2026, after roughly three years of building tools like inbrowser.link and reworking gateway infrastructure to handle more traffic at lower cost. Shipyard says planned future work, including HTTP-native IPFS implementations and Tor-based hosting support, will now go unfinished by their team.
Zillow has reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over claims it paid Redfin $100 million to exit the internet listing service market for apartment rentals for up to nine years. The deal reverses that arrangement, requiring Redfin to relaunch its ILS business with significantly more listings and mandating Zillow to share employee information to help Redfin rebuild its team. Several states had joined the FTC's case, which was filed in September 2025 and later consolidated with the federal suit.
Mathematical physicist John Baez has published a new paper arguing that the puzzling existence of exactly three generations of quarks and leptons may emerge naturally from the exceptional Lie group E7, building on earlier work linking the Standard Model's gauge group to the exceptional Jordan algebra. The paper is his third in a series exploring whether unusual mathematical structures built from the octonions can explain quirky features of particle physics rather than treating them as accidental.
The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service recorded average ocean surface temperatures reaching 70 degrees Fahrenheit this month, the highest level since measurements began, and unusually early since such peaks typically occur in spring. One researcher suggested the reading could be the warmest the oceans have been in 125,000 years, spanning back to the last interglacial period. The spike coincides with a strong El Niño pattern layering on top of long-term human-caused warming.
ESPN is increasing subscription costs starting September 17, with ESPN Select rising to $14/month and ESPN Unlimited to $32/month. Several Disney+ and Hulu bundles that include ESPN Select are also going up by $2-3 per month, though ESPN Unlimited bundles remain unaffected.
Reverse engineering of Windows Paint and Photos apps found that both send user prompts to a Microsoft server for moderation even when image generation runs locally via onboard AI models. That server returns a GUID alongside the approved prompt, and this GUID gets invisibly embedded into the pixels of the generated image, separate from the visible watermark toggle users can control. This applies even on Copilot+ PCs where generation happens entirely on-device.
Security researchers say hackers are exploiting two chained vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-61979 and CVE-2026-15981, in the miniOrange SAML 2.0 Single Sign On plugin to forge SAML responses and log into WordPress sites as administrators. The plugin, made by Xecurify, lets sites authenticate through identity providers like Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Google Workspace or OneLogin, and comes in a free version plus six paid editions used by roughly 30,000 customers.