A New Mexico judge ruled that Meta must pay $25 billion in civil penalties after a jury found more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices law tied to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The judge calculated the maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation, totaling over $219 billion, before reducing it to $25 billion. Meta's chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the company plans to appeal, calling the ruling an attempt to tax speech.
Security researchers at Claroc found they could access personal conversations shared through Meta's Muse AI by querying passive DNS records, since the service embeds each conversation's title directly into a shareable subdomain. Meta confirmed it has paused the share-link functionality while reviewing the report and considering changes to how the links are discovered, after Claroc reported the issue through Meta's bug bounty program on October 8.
Supernatural has returned as an Early Access app in the Meta Horizon Store after spinning off from Meta, which had said it would stop creating new content for the game. The relaunched app includes thousands of remastered workouts, weekly new content starting next week, and a subscription price increase from $9.99 to $20 per month (or $200 annually).
Meta has suspended the conversation-sharing feature in its Muse AI assistant after security firm Claroc found that over 6,800 shared chat links were discoverable through public DNS records. Some of the exposed pages contained sensitive business documents and personal financial information accessible without any login. Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said sharing has been paused while the company reviews the report and considers changes to how links are generated.
A federal judge has ordered Meta to disclose the names of employees who authorized the company's use of torrenting to download materials from shadow libraries Anna's Archive and Library Genesis, reportedly used to train its AI models. The ruling emerges from ongoing litigation over Meta's data-sourcing practices for AI training.
Researchers studying the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans report that lowering ambient temperature activates a metabolic network built around tetrahydrobiopterin (BH2/BH4) precursors that promotes longer lifespan and better protein quality control (proteostasis). The work used an extensive panel of mutant worm strains—including those lacking enzymes in dopamine, serotonin and pterin biosynthesis pathways—to trace how cold exposure engages this network. Experiments were conducted across three standard rearing temperatures, 15°C, 20°C and 25°C, in adult hermaphrodite worms.
Liu et al., writing in Nature, describe an additive-manufacturing technique that produces single crystals of metals in a wide range of shapes and sizes, including complex geometries not achievable with existing crystal-growth methods. The process builds crystals layer by layer, similar to 3D printing, and can be carried out using equipment that is already commonly available.
Scientists report using generative protein design to build entirely new protein scaffolds that bind metal polypyridine photocatalysts, which previously lacked natural protein partners capable of enantioselective control. Directed evolution refined these designed proteins into artificial metalloenzymes that perform efficient, highly enantioselective light-driven reactions, including with cheap racemic metal complexes, and support high catalyst turnover and recycling. Spectroscopy showed the protein environment extends the photocatalyst's excited-state lifetime and positions substrates to control stereochemistry.
Tomás Villalón Jr., an MIT-trained materials science engineer, cofounded Phoenix Tailings in 2019 after working at MIT spinoff Boston Metal on decarbonizing steelmaking. The company has developed a process to extract rare earth metals from mining waste rather than through conventional mining.
Sensor Tower reports Meta's AI app Muse became the 12th app since 2015 to reach 10 million US downloads within 40 days of launch, and the first since Threads in 2023. The firm says Muse's retention outpaces rivals like ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude, which saw far fewer US downloads in their first 40 days. The news comes as Meta has suspended Muse's conversation-sharing feature after researchers found it could expose sensitive personal and business data.
Meta edited the wording of its new commercial terms of service, set to take effect October 30, removing the word 'train' after legal experts warned the policy could let Meta scrape data from websites linked on business pages for AI training. A Meta spokesperson said the crawling terms only apply to ads and business products, don't change how Meta's web crawlers operate, and that robots.txt preferences still apply. The company did not notify users of the wording change.
Security firm Claroc found that Meta's Muse AI agent generated shareable chat URLs using the conversation's title as a subdomain, which were recorded in public DNS and discoverable via passive DNS searches. Claroc said it enumerated roughly 6,800 shared Muse links, exposing personal and business data including meeting schedules, a loan application, a bank fraud alert and internal company documents. Meta confirmed to Ars Technica that it has paused the sharing feature while reviewing the report.
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