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After canceling its Flock contract, St. Lucie County, Florida discovered 66 license-plate-reading cameras installed instead of the 52 it had authorized. The sheriff's office admitted to owning three of the extras without explaining their deployment, leaving 11 cameras that no local police agency has claimed. The county has wrapped the unclaimed devices in plastic with notices stating they will be removed within 30 days.
Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3 2025, down about 2.1% from the same period last year, while production rose 3.8% to 464,391 units. The decline follows the September 30 expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, which had driven a surge in sales a year earlier.
Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen announced the open-source smart home platform is rebranding Home Assistant Cloud as Home Assistant Link, saying the company doesn't want the word 'cloud' associated with its service. The change is largely cosmetic, with the same remote-access features plus backend speed and reliability improvements, still priced at $6.50 a month or $65 a year. Schoutsen told The Verge the rename also clears up confusion among users who mistakenly thought the platform itself ran in the cloud rather than locally on users' own hardware.
Researchers at Northeastern University London and King's College London published a paper in JMIR Mental Health reviewing existing studies on AI companion apps like Replika and Character.AI, as well as general assistants like ChatGPT and Claude. They found extensive emotional engagement with these chatbots has been linked to addiction-like attachment, worsened mental health symptoms, harmful advice, and in some cases self-harm or suicidal behavior.
Android Authority's Insights team found code for an unreleased Android Auto feature that would use an animated raccoon character, paired with a temperature caption, to show weather conditions on the dashboard. Columnist Andy Walker argues the cartoonish design clashes with Android Auto's usual large, legible, high-contrast interface elements meant to be read quickly while driving.
Ayaneo has released the Konkr Pocket Advance, a Game Boy Advance-style handheld running Android. The $109 base model includes 3GB RAM and 32GB expandable storage, while a $129 version offers 4GB RAM and 64GB built-in storage, both powered by a MediaTek Helio G90T chip with a cooling fan and 4,000mAh battery.
President Trump hosted a White House meeting with leading AI executives, including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai and Anthropic's Dario Amodei. The gathering highlighted differing policy priorities across the industry, from Amodei's calls for stronger AI safeguards to Elon Musk's push for federal adoption of Grok.
Amazon announced a new initiative to add $1 billion in community support as it seeks local buy-in for its ongoing data center build-out. The company is also promising greater transparency about its facilities, aiming to address concerns from residents and officials near proposed and existing sites.
Neuroscientist Christin Glorioso, founder of NeuroAge Therapeutics, has created a competition called Younger that pits participants against each other based on measurements of biological age. Entrants will submit samples to services such as TruDiagnostic, which uses epigenetic markers to estimate overall biological age, pace of aging, and the ages of 11 individual organ systems. Glorioso says the contest aims to educate the public about aging clocks and to build what she calls the world's most comprehensive dataset on them.
Following a late-September jury verdict finding Meta violated New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act with misleading privacy statements tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, state attorneys have asked a judge to impose penalties of $35 billion to $40 billion. The jury found 26 of 29 examined Meta statements misleading, translating into roughly 43 million consumer-law violations based on the New Mexico Facebook users who saw them. Meta is urging the court to cap penalties at $3.45 billion, arguing no residents were shown to have actually been misled, with a ruling expected later this month.
Micro Center has begun requiring buyers of PowerSpec Ai90 prebuilt PCs with RTX 5090 GPUs to sign a form and have their driver's license scanned, pledging the system stays in the US and won't be resold or exported abroad. A customer reported the policy started within the last two days at a store, with the form asking for name, photo ID and phone number alongside the non-export pledge.
Dell released fixes for six critical-severity vulnerabilities affecting its Container Storage Modules (CSM), which link enterprise storage arrays like PowerStore, PowerScale, PowerFlex, PowerMax and Unity XT to Kubernetes clusters. Two of the flaws, found in the CSM Authorization module, let unauthenticated attackers obtain admin credentials and full control over storage infrastructure; the other four allow root access on cluster nodes, token forgery, proxy takeover, and unauthorized access to Kubernetes Secrets. Dell is urging customers to upgrade to CSM version 1.18.0 or later as soon as possible.