Thursday, 08 October
14:00 EDT
Amazon's new Alexa Tablets drop the Fire branding but are more Android than ever [Ars Technica - All content]
For the last 15 years, you've been able to buy a Fire tablet from Amazon. Which Fire tablet? It doesn't matter—like Kindles, they have been pretty much the same year to year. The company's new tablet lineup is a big change, though. Amazon has dropped the Fire branding in favor of Alexa, and the new Alexa Tablets are now Google-certified Android devices.
Throughout the history of Fire Tablets, Amazon downplayed its use of Android. They ran Android apps from the company's Appstore platform, but there was no Google integration with "Fire OS." However, Amazon shut down its app store last year. The new Alexa Tablets run full-fledged Google-y versions of Android with the Play Store and all the apps you'd expect. This contrasts sharply with Amazon's Fire Sticks, which have abandoned Android for the custom Linux-based Vega OS.
The Alexa Tablet lineup consists of three devices, all redesigned with unibody aluminum housings. The Alexa Tablet 8 starts at $230, and the Tablet 11 jumps to $330. They run on the budget MediaTek 8189 processor, but that's still an upgrade from the last-gen Fire tablets. Both devices have 16:10 display ratios that are better for watching video, but the flagship tablet is a little different.
Amazon builds 1,000th satellite, will launch space internet service by end of year [Ars Technica - All content]
The world's largest retailer wants to sell you something else—Internet from space.
Amazon has been developing a constellation of satellites to deliver broadband Internet from low-Earth orbit for the better part of a decade, and the company is just about ready to pull back the curtain. It is entering a market that SpaceX, with its Starlink Internet, has dominated for the last half-decade. Amazon's debut into satellite Internet is being closely watched, not just by some consumers, but by businesses ranging from airlines to shipping companies to governments. Broadband Internet from orbit has proven broadly useful for a lot of purposes, from video games to commerce to warfighting.
But until now, most people had to buy it from Elon Musk and SpaceX. OneWeb has only offered limited services, leaving Amazon as the only real competitor to deliver high-speed Internet globally. Moreover, at the head of the company's broadband efforts is Rajeev Badyal, who led Starlink during its early years, but whom Musk fired eight years ago for moving too cautiously on Starlink.
13:00 EDT
New U.S. indictment charges former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro with torture [NPR Topics: News]
U.S. authorities added new torture charges to their case against former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, ramping up pressure on the ousted authoritarian leader already fighting drug trafficking allegations.
(Image credit: Ariana Cubillos)
4 people on NASA's Crew-12 mission return to Earth after 8 months in space [NPR Topics: News]
Four people — two NASA astronauts, one from the European Space Agency and a Russian cosmonaut — spent nearly eight months at the space station, conducting spacewalks, science experiments and research.
(Image credit: NASA via Anil Menon)
White House correspondent April Ryan reflects on reporting while under attack [NPR Topics: News]
Ryan has spent decades pressing presidents for answers. She talks about access, power, race and how asking questions put her in President Trump's crosshairs. Her new book is Notes on a Blacklash.
Multi-day Hikes/Debit Card Back-ups/Worst Airport Connections [Cool Tools]
Best Multi-day Hikes on Multiple Continents
This article has a flawed title since it’s missing some of the longest and best-known treks, but this list of 28 of the best multi-day hikes in the world deserves kudos for one big reason: she’s done them all. From the Inca Trail and Chile’s W Trek to Everest Base Camp and the Routeburn Trek in New Zealand, there are a lot of tempting trips on here to plan around if you love the outdoors.
Enhance Your Rental Apartment
What do an extension cord, a corkscrew, a French press, an ice tray, and a large drinking glass have in common? They’re all items I’ve bought and left behind when the furnished apartment I rented while traveling was lacking what I needed. Yeah, I could have made a request with the owner, and have done that when the kitchen was truly barren, but I’ve learned that “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is a good short-term apartment rule of thumb. Most items I bought in some kind of discount store or the local market, always an added adventure. The coffee press came from a Malaysian IKEA ($8), another interesting cross-cultural experience. One friend who used to be nomadic would even buy an air fryer and leave it if he was in a place for two or three months, but I’m not sure I would go that far…
International Money Back-ups
My ATM card never came back out of the machine when I used it in Tashkent, two years after an airport ATM ate a version of the same card in the Republic of Georgia. The second instance had a happy ending thanks to a phone call from my tour guide and a trip to the bank’s HQ. I was never really sweating it though because I had backups. I have three cards that don’t charge an ATM fee and reimburse the local fee as well (to a point with the last one). They’re tied to cash accounts at Fidelity, Schwab, and my biz bank Novo. I generally keep at least one in a separate place/bag from the others. Plus a PayPal card, a Wise one (don’t love it), and whatever my wife is carrying. Overkill? Maybe, but I never pay a fee to get my money this way and I know I’ll always have access.
Airports Where Connections Are a Pain
While you see lots of lists for best airports (we highlighted one for the USA last week) and worst airports, this article Kevin Kelly sent me that originally ran in the Washington Post focuses on one aspect: long and confusing connections. A few frequent travelers I know are quoted in it and I can say that all four airports I try hard to avoid for connections are featured: Miami, JFK, Heathrow, and Paris. Two of them mentioned, Frankfurt and Denver, have been 50/50 for me. I hate a lot of things about Istanbul’s airport, but getting to your gate is fairly straightforward there.
A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.
12:00 EDT
Female AI Agents 'Paid' Less Than Males, Study Finds [Slashdot]
Ancient Slashdot reader williamyf writes: If you thought the gender pay gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again: A recent study from the University of Limerick found that, in a VR office setting, AI agents -- not even humanoid robots -- that presented themselves as "male" were paid more per task and perceived as more "human-like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail, and harness). The pay gap was approximately 10%. The study was conducted with 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for thought.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
11:00 EDT
Internal files add to evidence of an ExxonMobil climate deception campaign [Ars Technica - All content]
If there was a year the world began waking up to climate change, it might have been 1988. That June, the NASA climatologist James Hansen testified to Congress that the climate was warming and would continue to do so as long as humans pumped fossil fuel pollution into the atmosphere. Months later, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
And, just weeks before the UN vote, Frank Sprow of Exxon’s corporate research department warned his colleagues in an internal memo, “If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur.”
Sprow’s memo is part of a batch of previously undisclosed documents released earlier this year without fanfare as part of an ongoing lawsuit Massachusetts filed against ExxonMobil in 2019. While the memo was quoted in a 2023 article by The Wall Street Journal, it has not been published in full. Several other documents included in the filings are being reported on here for the first time, including more recent statements from Exxon scientists challenging the company’s climate-solution claims about its work on biofuels and carbon capture and storage.
10:00 EDT
South Korea to recall its ambassador to Ukraine over North Korean POW dispute [NPR Topics: News]
The South Korean announcement on Thursday came days after its President Lee Jae Myung threatened unspecified punitive steps if Ukraine refuses to apologize over the revelation.
(Image credit: Seth Wenig)
South Korea test-flies its first domestically developed hypersonic weapon [NPR Topics: News]
The test follows North Korea's recent hypersonic missile test. Tensions between the Koreas have increased after land mine explosions injured three South Korean soldiers near the border. North Korea denies responsibility.
(Image credit: Jeon Heon-kyun)
09:00 EDT
The Epstein mine isn’t tapped out yet [Pharyngula]
There is a lot of stuff in the Epstein files that has been redacted out of the public eye, I guess. We’d been suspicious of Leon Botstein, the long-running (but now former) president of Bard College, and Jamie Raskin kept digging and unearthed some incriminating rot.
Documents in the Department of Justice’s Epstein files show that in May 2014, Epstein sent an aspiring young vocalist he’d been trafficking, called Jane Doe, to meet with Botstein, “ostensibly for him to assess her musical talents and provide her with educational guidance,” Raskin wrote. In a May 15, 2014, email to Epstein, Botstein asked, “Is [Jane Doe] for me, or are you keeping her for yourself.” The Department of Justice redacted Botstein’s official presidential email address in the publicly available file, but members of Congress were allowed to view the unredacted file at the DOJ, according to Raskin’s office.
That’s a dense paragraph. We learn that:
- Members of congress have access to the unredacted Epstein files. Wouldn’t this be better managed by journalists?
- Botstein was actively involved in sex trafficking.
- Botstein regarded students as potentially “for him”. The attitude is horrifying.
- In 2014, Epstein was a convicted sex offender, and Botstein should not have had the power to recruit students, so what was the nature of the “guidance” he was offering?
I’m wondering what aspirations a young vocalist might have had that were met by being sent by a rich sex trafficker to meet with a bald old man in a bow tie. We’ve also learned what advice she was getting.
But instead of helping her pursue her career, the lawmakers said in their letter, Epstein pressured her to take sex education and massage courses, and “employed” her while he was sexually abusing her.
This was an effective revelation.
The latest development appears to have triggered the immediate resignation of Botstein from all Bard-affiliated positions, including his professorship and roles in Bard’s music programs. Botstein had led the college for 50 years and only recently stepped down as president.
Fifty years too late. Botstein had made at least one trip to Epstein’s island and multiple trips to his New York townhouse, and we all know there’s only one reason to visit those places.
This semester Nixie rides the bus with me on Mondays. She is, of course, a good dog: quietly looking out the window from atop my lap, giving those who pass by a little sniff, and happily accepting attention from those who give it.
08:00 EDT
Nvidia's big bet on physical AI aims for safer robotaxis, humanoid robots [Ars Technica - All content]
Investors bullish on AI data centers may be fueling Nvidia’s multitrillion-dollar market capitalization, but the AI chipmaker has also bet billions of dollars on physical AI technologies such as robotics and self-driving cars. Part of that gambit has involved developing a full-stack safety system that companies can build upon to reduce the risk of their machines harming nearby people.
Nvidia's Halos system launched in 2025 with hardware and software tools to help developers implement guardrails in self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles. Then the company expanded its safety architecture to more physical AI technologies by announcing Nvidia Halos for Robotics in June 2026—with the goal of enabling safe deployments of autonomous mobile robots in warehouses, humanoid robots walking around inside a factory, or even surgical robots.
“Now the AI models are getting capable, the robot hardware is getting capable, and a thing we thought is going to be the next bottleneck is safety,” Amit Goel, head of robotics ecosystem and edge computing at Nvidia, told Ars. “So that's why we launched our Halos for Robotics to unlock the capability of these systems.”
A senator tried to ban gambling on prediction markets—now she's a Kalshi lobbyist [Ars Technica - All content]
In July 2010, US Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) predicted the rise of prediction markets and the problems they could cause. If not properly regulated, Lincoln warned during Senate proceedings on the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, prediction markets could evade gambling laws by offering "event contracts" that let people place wagers on sports games.
"It would be quite easy to construct an event contract around sporting events such as the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, and Masters golf tournament," Lincoln, who played a key role in making the law that now regulates prediction markets, told fellow senators. "These types of contracts would not serve any real commercial purpose. Rather, they would be used solely for gambling."
Today, Lincoln is a lobbyist for prediction market Kalshi and has urged the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to allow sports gambling on the markets. The firm she founded has received $480,000 from Kalshi since 2024 in exchange for lobbying Congress and the CFTC for looser regulation of event contracts.
Isaias intensifies to hurricane. And, judge orders Pike execution evidence preserved [NPR Topics: News]
People in the Gulf are preparing for bad weather this weekend after Isaias intensified into a hurricane. And, a judge has ordered Christa Pike's failed execution evidence be preserved.
(Image credit: Brandon Bell)
Strike on Ukrainian public bus leaves 30 dead as blackouts worsen in Kyiv [NPR Topics: News]
Russian strikes in eastern Ukraine have killed 30 people and injured at least 18, according to authorities. The attacks included a strike on a public bus and have worsened power outages in Kyiv.
(Image credit: Evgeniy Maloletka)
Chrome 155 Ships Decoding Support For JPEG XL [Slashdot]
Google has released Chrome 155 with support for decoding JPEG XL images, a format that offers 30-50% better compression than JPEG along with lossless compression, JPEG transcoding, HDR, animation, and progressive decoding. From a blog post: We expect that JPEG XL is most helpful for high-fidelity or lossless compression, especially of photographic images or in cases in which fine-grained progressive decoding is preferred. In this post, we share why we brought JPEG XL to Chrome, how we used Rust to ensure memory safety first, the extensive performance work that makes it fast, and what the journey tells us about developer feedback and the web standards ecosystem. [...] With JPEG XL officially landing in Chrome, the web becomes faster, richer, and safer. We encourage developers, content creators, and platform owners to start using .jxl images and animations in their pipelines. Try it out, file bugs, and help us continue building a faster and safer web for everyone.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
07:00 EDT
ICE has quietly used this warehouse as a detention facility all summer, neighbors say [NPR Topics: News]
Throughout the summer, rumors have been bubbling in North New Jersey that ICE has quietly been using a warehouse as a detention center. NPR investigated.
(Image credit: José A. Alvarado Jr. for NPR)
06:00 EDT
Syrian general accused of atrocities is protected by U.S. and Lebanon, NPR and BBC find [NPR Topics: News]
A former Syrian general wanted for crimes against humanity is living quietly in Lebanon, bankrolled and protected by American and Lebanese authorities, a BBC/NPR investigation has found.
(Image credit: BBC)
Toss-ups, triage and targets: How to read the wide-open 2026 House map [NPR Topics: News]
Both parties are spending heavily in roughly 60 House districts — where Trump won by an average of nine points in 2024 — that could be key to deciding control of the chamber, an NPR analysis finds.
(Image credit: Jeff Dean)
Medical debt is crushing hospital patients in LA. Health officials may have a fix [NPR Topics: News]
In Los Angeles County, the nation's most populous, a new system could screen hospital patients for financial aid, preventing hundreds of thousands from getting bills they can't pay.
(Image credit: Lauren Justice)
How 'Musk' director Alex Gibney became a critic [NPR Topics: News]
A trove of documents and interviews with people close to tech billionaire Elon Musk reveal a damning picture of his rise as one of the world's richest and most powerful men.
(Image credit: Ken Cedeno)
Flock is catching flak. Experts say other police surveillance tools are more worrisome [NPR Topics: News]
Real-time crime-center software is a sometimes overlooked but powerful tool allowing police to aggregate immense amounts of data, significantly expanding their surveillance reach.
(Image credit: Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group)
As crypto and prediction markets expand, their regulator shrinks [NPR Topics: News]
Even as the agency is tasked with drawing up new rules for crypto and prediction markets, its staffing and enforcement actions have dropped precipitously during the second Trump administration.
(Image credit: Jacquelyn Martin)
First Draft Notes: Verifiable Credential Threat Models [W3C - News]
The Verifiable Credentials Working Group has published a series of W3C Working Group Note Drafts for threat models. All identify and analyze security and privacy threats specific to their respective recommendation-track documents:
- Recognized Entities Threat Model v1.0
- Data Integrity Threat Model v1.1
- Verifiable Credential Barcodes Threat Model v1.0
- Verifiable Credentials Render Method Threat Model v1.0
- VCALM Threat Model v1.0
The working group welcomes comments via GitHub repository issues; the respective repository URL-s can be found in the header of each document.
04:00 EDT
One-Minute Daily AI News 10/7/2026 [AI Daily News by Bush Bush]
- Broadcom seeks more than $50 billion in private credit financing to fund OpenAI’s custom “Nexus” AI chip architecture alongside lenders Apollo and Blackstone.[1]
- CZ Biohub, Meta, Google DeepMind, and the U.S. government commit $1.8 billion to build open AI-ready biological datasets and virtual cell foundation models.[2]
- Elon Musk announces SpaceX’s Grok Bot will function as a multi-model router, directing advanced reasoning and coding workflows to Anthropic’s Claude Opus.[3]
- OpenAI introduces College Planner inside ChatGPT alongside dedicated guidance features and parental advisory controls for teens.[4]
Maricarmen, the 87-year-old woman whose eviction shook Spain, has died [NPR Topics: News]
María del Carmen Abascal, the 87-year-old woman whose eviction from her Madrid home sparked nationwide protests across Spain and unleashed a political crisis, died on Wednesday while hospitalized.
(Image credit: Bernat Armangue)
