New York Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres plans to introduce the Power to the Players Act, which would direct the FTC to ensure consumers actually own purchased video games rather than licensing them, and to require offline modes when publishers shut down servers. The bill cites NBA 2K25 as an example, noting the $70 game will be delisted October 30 and lose online server support by December, just two years after release.
Meta launched Muse Spark Open, which it describes as the most capable open-weight AI model in the US, featuring 816 billion parameters and a 1 million token context window. The model is multimodal, built for coding and agentic tasks, and designed to run locally on Apple hardware, though it requires at least 1 terabyte of RAM and performs best on a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra chip. Meta paired it with its Muse Code coding terminal and demonstrated it fixing a Mastodon client and editing footage in DaVinci Resolve.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin announced a deal on Tuesday to ban horse-drawn carriages from operating in the city, including Central Park. The move would end a practice that has drawn controversy for more than a century and that previous mayors failed to eliminate despite repeated attempts.
New York City's school system, serving nearly 600,000 pre-K through middle school students, began a one-year pause on generative AI use starting September 2. Los Angeles Unified followed with a similar restriction, blocking AI tools on all district-issued devices for its students.
Citizen Lab says it has confirmed the first publicly documented case of zero-click mercenary spyware spread through targeted online advertising, a method it calls 'AdFection.' The researchers say dozens of Al Jazeera devices were compromised via ads run by Discover-Tech, whose Controlium platform can profile and deanonymize internet users before silently infecting selected targets with no interaction required.
Apple has formally responded to OpenAI's claim that a former employee who moved to Apple took over a hundred confidential files about an unreleased OpenAI device. Apple's court filing states the employee had previously left Apple for OpenAI before returning, and that Apple investigated after OpenAI raised the issue on October 9, finding no evidence of OpenAI confidential information on its systems by October 12.
Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Amazon devices chief Panos Panay described a shift from app-driven smartphone use toward ambient AI devices that work passively in the background. He tied this vision to Amazon's newly launched Bee wearables, which record and process audio in real time to surface reminders and insights without storing raw conversations, using encryption keys controlled by the user's device.
A new research analysis estimates that worldwide dementia diagnoses could more than double by 2050, reaching nearly 25 million new cases per year. The researchers identified two population groups facing disproportionately high rates of the condition.
A new analysis of NASA lunar imagery has identified more than 10,000 relatively young geological faults scattered across the Moon's surface. Unlike Earth, whose crust is broken into multiple tectonic plates, the Moon's surface is described as a single continuous shell, meaning these faults can still trigger moonquakes.
Nvidia and Cisco have confirmed making multimillion-dollar donations to the renovation of a White House ballroom championed by President Trump, joining a donor list reported by The Washington Post to exceed $330 million. Nvidia and Apple each reportedly gave $25 million, while Cisco confirmed a $5 million contribution; Amazon, Palantir, ServiceNow, Meta and Microsoft were also named as major donors, funneled through a nonprofit trust.
Military retirement checks and VA disability benefits will increase by 3.6% effective December 1, matching the latest cost-of-living adjustment. Stars and Stripes reports veterans will likely not see the higher payments until December 31 or early January 2027 due to processing timing.
Bluesky executives CEO Toni Schneider and COO Rose Wang said at TechCrunch Disrupt that the company will roll out payment tools in coming months, letting users financially support posts and activity they see on the network. The feature is intended to work across Bluesky and other apps built on its underlying protocol, not just within Bluesky's own app.
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