The US Commerce Department announced Thursday it is easing restrictions on exports of space-related technology, answering a yearslong call from space companies to reform regulations governing international trade.

This is the most significant update to space-related export regulations in a decade and opens more opportunities for US companies to sell their satellite hardware abroad.

“We are very excited about this rollout," a senior Commerce official said during a background call with reporters. "It’s been a long time coming, and I think it’s going to be very meaningful for our national security and foreign policy interests and certainly facilitate secure trade with our partners."

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It's been a big year for Windows running on Arm chips, something that Microsoft and Arm chipmakers have been trying to get off the ground for well over a decade. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus are at the heart of dozens of Copilot+ Windows PCs , which promise unique AI features and good battery life without as many of the app and hardware compatibility problems that have plagued Windows-on-Arm in the past.

Part of the initial wave of Copilot+ PCs was a single desktop, an $899 developer kit from Qualcomm itself that would give developers and testers a slightly cheaper way to buy into the Copilot+ ecosystem. Microsoft put out a similar Arm-powered dev kit two years ago.

But Qualcomm has unceremoniously canceled the dev kit and is sending out refunds to those who ordered them. That's according to a note received by developer and YouTuber Jeff Geerling, who had already received the Snapdragon Dev Kit and given it a middling review a couple of weeks ago .

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Recently, AI researcher Simon Willison wanted to add up his charges from using a cloud service, but the payment values and dates he needed were scattered among a dozen separate emails. Inputting them manually would have been tedious, so he turned to a technique he calls "video scraping," which involves feeding a screen recording video into an AI model, similar to ChatGPT, for data extraction purposes.

What he discovered seems simple on its surface, but the quality of the result has deeper implications for the future of AI assistants, which may soon be able to see and interact with what we're doing on our computer screens.

"The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails," Willison wrote in a detailed post on his blog. He recorded a 35-second video scrolling through the relevant emails, then fed that video into Google's AI Studio tool, which allows people to experiment with several versions of Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash AI models.

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New York Comic-Con kicked off today and among the highlights was an HBO panel devoted to the platform's forthcoming new series, Dune: Prophecy —including the release of a two-and-a-half-minute trailer.

As previously reported , the series was announced in 2019, with director Denis Villeneuve serving as an executive producer and Alison Schapker ( Alias, Fringe, Altered Carbon ) serving as showrunner. It's a prequel series inspired by the novel Sisterhood of Dune , written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, exploring the origins of the Bene Gesserit. The first season will have six episodes, and it's unclear how closely the series will adhere to the source material. Per the official premise:

Set 10,000 years before the ascension of Paul Atreides, Dune: Prophecy follows two Harkonnen sisters as they combat forces that threaten the future of humankind, and establish the fabled sect that will become known as the Bene Gesserit.

Emily Watson co-stars as Valya Harkonnen, leader of the Sisterhood, with Olivia Williams playing her sister, Tula Harkonnen. Mark Strong plays Emperor Javicco Corrino, while Jodhi May plays Empress Natalya, and Sarah-Sofie Boussnina plays Princess Ynez.

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Since Redbox went bankrupt , many have wondered what will happen to those red kiosks and DVDs. Another question worth examining is: What will happen to all the data stored inside the Redboxes?

Redbox parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in June and is in the process of liquidating its assets . Meanwhile, stores with Redboxes are eager to remove the obsolete hardware. And tinkerers have reported getting their hands on Redbox kiosks and doing all sorts of things with them , including running Doom .

But Redboxes falling into technologists' hands can also result in the uncovering of customer data from kiosks' hard drives. As spotted by Lowpass today, programmer and expert reverse engineer Foone Turing reported via Mastodon that she was able to retrieve records for 2,471 transactions from the disk image of a Redbox hard drive. Turing told Ars Technica that she got the image from a Discord channel:

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Between 1400 and 1775, a significant upsurge of witch trials swept across early-modern Europe, resulting in the execution of an estimated 40,000–60,000 accused witches. Historians and social scientists have long studied this period in hopes of learning more about how large-scale social changes occur. Some have pointed to the invention of the printing press and the publication of witch-hunting manuals—most notably the highly influential Malleus maleficarum —as a major factor, making it easier for the witch-hunting hysteria to spread across the continent.

The abrupt emergence of the craze and its rapid spread, resulting in a pronounced shift in social behaviors—namely, the often brutal persecution of suspected witches—is consistent with a theory of social change dubbed "ideational diffusion," according to a new paper published in the journal Theory and Society. There is the introduction of new ideas, reinforced by social networks, that eventually take root and lead to widespread behavioral changes in a society.

The authors had already been thinking about cultural change and the driving forces by which it occurs, including social contagion—especially large cultural shifts like the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, for example. One co-author, Steve Pfaff, a sociologist at Chapman University, was working on a project about witch trials in Scotland and was particularly interested in the role the Malleus maleficarum might have played.

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Measles, whopping cough, polio, tetanus—devastating and sometimes deadly diseases await comebacks in the US as more and more parents are declining routine childhood vaccines that have proved safe and effective.

The vaccination rates among kindergartners have fallen once again, dipping into the range of 92 percent in the 2023–2024 school year, down from about 93 percent the previous school year and 95 percent in 2019–2020. That's according to an analysis of the latest vaccination data published today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .

The analysis also found that vaccination exemptions rose to an all-time high of 3.3 percent, up from 3 percent in the previous school year. The rise in exemptions is nearly entirely driven by non-medical exemptions—in other words, religious or philosophical exemptions. Only 0.2 percent of all vaccination exemptions are medically justified.

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US officials charged a man with compromising the official Twitter/X account of the Securities and Exchange Commission for purposes of posting false information that caused the price of bitcoin to spike.

The January attack, federal prosecutors said, started with a SIM-swap, a form of fraud that takes control of a cell phone number by assuming the identity of the person the number belongs to. The attacker then uses the false identity to induce an employee of the cellular carrier to move the phone number off the current Subscriber Identity Module card, a small chip that connects a device to a specific carrier account. Then, the attacker has the number transferred to a new SIM card, usually under the pretense that the fraudulent account holder has just obtained a new device.

Not the SEC announcement you think it is

The number at issue in the SIM swap, an indictment unsealed on Thursday said, was used to provide two-factor authentication for the SEC X account, which authorized commission personnel to post official communications. One of the people connected to the conspiracy then used the 2FA code to compromise the X account to tweet false information that caused the price of a single bitcoin to increase by $1,000.

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Don't book your tickets for the launch of NASA's Artemis II mission next year just yet.

We have had reason to doubt the official September 2025 launch date for the mission, the first crewed flight into deep space in more than five decades, for a while now. This is principally because NASA is continuing to mull the implications of damage to the Orion spacecraft's heat shield from the Artemis I mission nearly two years ago.

However, it turns out that there are now other problems with holding to this date as well.

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