Following antitrust cases against RealPage, Yardi and major landlords over algorithmic rent-setting software, cities including San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Philadelphia and Providence have passed laws restricting such pricing tools. Tenants and local governments are now filing follow-on lawsuits, including a July 2026 case against Greystar Management Services in San Francisco, using these new statutes rather than traditional antitrust claims.
Debian held a project-wide vote on whether to restrict AI-assisted contributions and settled on a policy of neutrality: the project neither endorses nor bans generative AI tools for code, packaging, or documentation. Contributors remain fully responsible for the quality, legality, and maintainability of anything they submit, whether or not AI tools were used to help produce it.
The FreeCORE Project has shipped version 15.0-U1, a stable update for its independently maintained fork of TrueNAS CORE 13.3. Existing TrueNAS CORE 13.3 installations can upgrade in place directly to 15.0 and then continue receiving updates through FreeCORE's own release track. The project rebases the old CORE codebase onto FreeBSD 15 and OpenZFS after iXsystems ended upstream development of TrueNAS CORE.
A Smithsonian magazine special report examines how Benjamin Franklin repeatedly invented fictional authorial personas—such as the widow Silence Dogood and the unwed mother Polly Baker—to publish opinions he couldn't voice under his own name. As a teenager, Franklin used the Dogood persona to sneak past his brother's ban on printing his writing, while Polly Baker's fictional courtroom defense skewered unequal treatment of unmarried mothers versus the men who fathered their children.
A new open-source project called Open OSCAR Server, written in Go, lets classic AIM and ICQ clients connect and communicate again by reimplementing the old OSCAR and TOC protocols. It supports a wide range of legacy Windows clients from the late 1990s through 2000s, along with features like buddy lists, chat rooms, file sharing, and user profiles.
A software engineer describes a decade-long pattern of noticing hundreds to thousands of software bugs weekly that most colleagues and users simply don't perceive. He explains that companies sometimes hire him specifically to test products because he reliably surfaces defects others miss, ranging from minor glitches to cases where products are effectively broken despite internal claims that everything works fine.
Conservation Through Public Health, working with the EU-Africa NESTLER project, gathered disease samples from cattle and poultry near Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and combined them with gorilla health monitoring records. The pooled data is being fed into AI models designed to predict zoonotic disease outbreaks before they spread among wildlife, livestock and people, shifting the group's approach from reactive response to proactive prevention.
NASA's $4.3-billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched successfully atop a SpaceX rocket from Kennedy Space Center, carrying the largest infrared digital camera ever built along with a large mirror originally built for a spy satellite. The observatory, named after NASA's first chief astronomer, is now headed to its operational orbit to study dark energy, map millions of Milky Way stars, and search for exoplanets.
Growing numbers of satellites and debris in low-Earth orbit are prompting SpaceX and other operators to repeatedly reposition spacecraft to avoid collisions. The increasing density of objects, ranging from active satellites to defunct hardware and fragments, is straining existing traffic-management practices.
Artist and musician Laurie Anderson has been chosen to contribute the next manuscript to Katie Paterson's Future Library project, joining previous participants such as Margaret Atwood, Han Kang and Ocean Vuong. Her submission will be stored unread in a dedicated room at Oslo's Deichman Bjørvika library until 2114, when it will finally be printed on paper made from a forest of spruce trees planted specifically for the project in 2014.
Google has published troubleshooting guidance for Android Auto users experiencing connection issues, covering both wired and wireless setups. The advice includes checking cables and ports for damage, using data-capable cables under six feet, and toggling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to force a manual reconnection.
The Open Battery Information project has retired its old Python/Tkinter desktop app in favor of a new web-based interface, OBI-1, that connects directly to an Arduino or ESP32-C3 via Web Serial. The tool lets users read and reset battery management system (BMS) faults without installing any software, including flashing firmware straight from the browser.
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