California lawmakers passed AB 1661, directing $5 million in penalty funds from oil wells near Inglewood toward direct cash payments for up to 1,000 households affected by respiratory or reproductive health issues linked to nearby drilling. The bill, authored by Assemblymember Isaac G. Bryan, would offer eligible households as much as $5,000 each and awaits Governor Gavin Newsom's signature, expected by October. The funding draws from a state repair and reinvestment account meant for communities closest to the oil field, which sits near predominantly Black neighborhoods like Ladera Heights and Baldwin Hills.
wired.com
· 2026-09-19
A Taiwanese husband suspected his wife of an affair after finding a stray toothbrush and garage footage of an unknown man driving her to their holiday home. Months later he opened his robot vacuum's companion app hoping to talk to his wife remotely and instead watched a live camera feed capturing her with another man. The incident highlights how ordinary smart-home devices now silently collect footage and data that can become unexpected evidence in personal disputes.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-19
A venture called San Francisco Onion Futures Company is selling private, transferable contracts for future delivery of yellow onions, priced between $3 and $12 per onion for delivery up to six months ahead. Payments are processed via Stripe, and buyers in San Francisco, Toronto, Seattle, and Chicago receive physical onion delivery arranged in the first week of the contract month.
onionfutures.com
· 2026-09-19
California faces pressure from the Trump administration, which is withholding Bipartisan Infrastructure Law broadband funds from states unless they agree not to enforce net neutrality rules. California and Illinois remain the only states yet to finalize their BEAD funding agreements, and California is weighing whether to accept the federal money and abandon enforcement of its own net neutrality law or fight the condition in court. Nearly 30 advocacy groups have urged state leaders to defend the law rather than trade it away for funding.
yro.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-18
ATF agents arrested 19-year-old Emani Rey Justavino of Jacksonville after he sold undercover agents 3D-printed 'Glock switches,' devices that convert semiautomatic pistols into fully automatic weapons, in two separate transactions in August. Investigators traced the sales back to Instagram accounts advertising the parts, with Justavino allegedly offering dozens more printed devices and a Glock 19 handgun during the deal. He was formally charged on September 3 and taken into custody on September 10.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-18
OpenAI unveiled Astra for Law, built on its GPT-6 Astra model, giving law firms and legal tech companies a foundation to build AI products for legal work. The platform includes a specialized legal search index covering over 230 million U.S. legal documents, plus 26 plugins connecting ChatGPT to tools like Relativity and Clio, with early access for API customers Harvey and Legora.
openai.com
· 2026-09-17
Major AI companies, alarmed by reports of rogue AI agent behavior and warnings from a departing Anthropic engineer, have proposed a joint 'slowdown' in AI development to address safety risks. Legal experts note that describing this as a coordinated pause could itself trigger antitrust scrutiny under the Sherman Act, since agreements among competitors to limit output are traditionally viewed with suspicion by regulators.
wired.com
· 2026-09-17
New research from Lasso Security found that SynthID-Text, the watermarking scheme Google open-sourced and Anthropic plans to adopt for future Claude models, does more than mark AI output as machine-generated. It also changes which tools a model calls and how likely it is to follow or break its own safety rules, especially when facing adversarial prompts designed to extract sensitive data.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-17
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued a remedies order requiring Google to make its ad-tech products interoperable with rival platforms, share more auction data with publishers, and accept an internal compliance monitor. The ruling stops short of the Justice Department's push to force Google to sell off parts of its advertising technology business, despite Brinkema's earlier finding that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in the ad-tech market.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-17
Waymo says its robotaxi detected a terms-of-service violation involving a firearm, pulled over, and alerted emergency responders, leading police to arrest two teenagers after allegedly finding a loaded AR-style ghost gun inside the car. The incident adds to a growing list of episodes where Waymo vehicles have supplied footage or triggered law enforcement action, including hit-and-run evidence and protest surveillance concerns.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-17
An 1829 collapse at the Norfolk Arms Hotel killed 30 people when a crowded floor gave way, and a coroner's jury applied the centuries-old English legal doctrine of deodand, valuing the broken timbers at just five shillings to be split among victims' families. Deodand law held that any moveable object directly causing a person's death was forfeited to the Crown as an 'accursed thing,' a concept rooted in the idea that objects tied to death carried a kind of divine taint. The practice persisted in English courts until it was abolished in 1846, even as it clashed with the realities of industrializing Britain.
daily.jstor.org
· 2026-09-16
A New Jersey court ordered data broker Radaris to transfer control of radaris.com and more than a dozen related domains to Atlas Data Privacy Corp after the company repeatedly stonewalled a lawsuit alleging violations of Daniel's Law. The statute lets state law enforcement officials, judges and their families demand removal of their personal data from commercial brokers, with fines for noncompliance. Radaris, run by brothers Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky, had previously used a fictitious CEO and denied ownership claims made by investigative reporting.
krebsonsecurity.com
· 2026-09-16
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