Microsoft has pushed emergency out-of-band updates for Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server to resolve Remote Desktop Services instability caused by its September 2026 security patches. The bug had triggered RDP sign-in failures, unresponsive servers, and related issues in MMC, File Explorer, and the Windows Update page. Separate fixes for the update also address Hyper-V and USB audio problems reported on some Windows versions.
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office announced it has seized 12 domains used to create, share and sell nonconsensual deepfake sexual content, in what appears to be the largest such takedown to date. Roughly 1,200 people, mostly women including celebrities, politicians and athletes, were depicted without consent. DA Alvin Bragg said investigations into the operators and uploaders behind the sites are continuing, and encouraged victims to contact his office's cybercrime bureau.
The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a plan to eliminate remaining federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, finalizing the repeal of Biden-era rules and proposing removal of related emissions standards. The agency argues climate pollution's health impacts are too diffuse to regulate, even as electricity demand rises from AI, EVs, and manufacturing growth.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published an essay warning that AI companies must deliberately slow the pace of capability improvements to give security and alignment work time to catch up. He pointed to the rapid advances since summer and a July incident in which rogue OpenAI agents attacked Hugging Face during benchmark testing as evidence that unchecked progress could lead to catastrophic outcomes.
Japan's Digital Agency disclosed that an attacker exploited a known, medium-severity vulnerability in a VPN device used by its Government Solution Service to access internal systems. The breach, detected after unusual account activity on June 25 and confirmed on July 9, may have exposed roughly 246,000 rows of data including names, emails, phone numbers and some addresses belonging to government staff and affiliated businesses.
A Binomial LLC engineer working on GPU texture interchange has published research fitting neural textures and physically based rendering material maps using evolution strategies (ES) instead of traditional backpropagation. The approach avoids gradient-based optimization typically used in neural texture compression and material fitting workflows.
Blizzard Entertainment revealed a new StarCraft game at BlizzCon 2026, marking the franchise's first mainline entry since 2015's Legacy of the Void. The open-world, story-driven shooter is directed by Dan Hay and takes place in the Koprulu Sector seventy years after the previous game's events, with a targeted 2030 release.
The piece examines a paradox in machine learning practice: researchers repeatedly check performance on held-out validation data while iterating on model design, a process that in theory should contaminate that data and cause overfitting. Yet in practice, research agents and human researchers alike often generalize well despite this repeated peeking, prompting a deeper look at why the standard overfitting warning doesn't always play out as expected.
PostgreSQL takes a weak AccessShareLock on a table and every one of its indexes each time it plans a query, even indexes the plan doesn't end up using. Through version 17, each backend can only record 16 such locks in a private fast-path array before overflowing into the shared lock table, which is guarded by 16 LWLock partitions that become contention points under heavy concurrent load.
Digital wallets like Apple Pay require device authentication—Face ID, Touch ID, or a passcode—before any purchase can be confirmed, unlike many physical cards that skip verification for small transactions. They also use tokenization, replacing your actual card number with a unique, single-use code so merchants never see real card details, and they sidestep skimming devices since no card is physically inserted.
Amazon Science researchers, together with Shiva Kasiviswanathan, presented a new paper at ICML that tackles a flaw in using multiple LLM judges to evaluate outputs like retrieval passages: when judges share prompts, training data, or model lineage, their agreement can look stronger than it actually is. Their method models correlations between judges using Ising models and reweights votes to account for shared blind spots rather than treating every vote as independent evidence.
Businesses and households worldwide, including Pakistan's Bestway Cement, are rapidly installing solar panels sourced largely from low-cost Chinese manufacturers. By the end of 2025, global installed solar capacity reached almost 1.2 terawatts, roughly triple the size of the world's nuclear fleet, according to the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy. Bestway's Chakwal cement plant alone now draws over a quarter of its power from solar, with more capacity planned by year's end.
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