• Drones sink ships near NATO countries in “unacceptable” attacks, EU says
• OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT outputs by default—but only in the EU
• HBO Max, Paramount+, and Discovery+ "will unify into a single service”
• It looks like the Atlantic storm season may finally produce a hurricane
• Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services
• Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth
• Support Ars and get a better reading experience in return
• Amazon kills Alexa’s ability to control Echo speakers' AUX input
• Neutrino physicist wins 2026 Nobel Physics Prize
• Googlebook "Better Together" phone features don't work with Samsung at launch
• Why is NASA bringing 7,500 contractors back to work as civil servants?
• All-electric camping gets a solar upgrade: The 2027 Pebble Flow
• Big Oil asks Supreme Court to kill climate lawsuits before trial
• OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic
• Licensing costs driving 90 percent of VMware users to explore options: Survey
• MCP for agent-to-agent comms may be the riskiest protocol you've never heard of
• Cable lobby to sue Trump FCC over repeal of national TV ownership cap
• Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage
• Command-line tool quickly removes Apple Intelligence from macOS 27
• Controlling the brain with light earns a physiology Nobel
| • Spotify expands audiobooks to 180+ markets, bringing its catalog to 750M+ users, and adds 350K+ titles in 120+ languages in partnership with 300+ publishers (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
• GoTo and Grab face pressure to offer drivers better deals; GoTo's share price has fallen 90% from its 2022 peak, while Grab's has fallen 50% in the past year (Financial Times)
• Turba Labs, which develops tech for optimizing AI infrastructure by creating digital twins of data centers, emerges from stealth with a $52M seed and Series A (Sarah Klearman/Wall Street Journal)
• Sources: Singapore distances itself from regulating Hyperliquid, citing its "decentralized nature", even as the crypto futures DEX confirms it is based there (Owen Walker/Financial Times)
• Filing: China-based Transsion, which commands 53% of Africa's mobile phone market by unit sales, is seeking to raise as much as ~$428M in a Hong Kong share sale (Sangmi Cha/Bloomberg)
• Sources: the European Commission considers taxing big US tech companies through a broad levy on large corporations to avoid singling out individual companies (Financial Times)
• AI startup acquisitions by AI startups hit 195 through September 29, up 14% from all of 2025, but the number of buyers grew just 2%; OpenAI was the most active (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
• Japanese chipmaker Rapidus is partnering with 17 companies, including US-based Synopsys, to help customers design chips; Rapidus has $15B+ in state funding (Reuters)
• A September 24 cyberattack on Arizona's court system stole PII for 1.3M people, including 30K orders of protection and 150K reports from a foster care board (Associated Press)
• A US federal court sentences Michael Smith, who pleaded guilty to using bots to stream AI-generated songs, making $8M+ in royalties, to 18 months in prison (Bill Donahue/Billboard)
• Boston Dynamics appoints former Amazon executive Rohit Prasad, who spent 12 years helping build and expand Alexa, as its CEO, after Robert Playter stepped down (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)
• GLM-5.3's open release has yet to produce major attacks despite Anthropic's warnings about its Mythos-level cyber risk, undercutting calls to ban open models (Nathan Lambert/Interconnects AI)
• New York-based Melius, which provides AI tools for generating ad campaigns, images, and videos, raised $25M, including a $20M Series A and a $5M seed (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
• OpenAI says its internal model produced 372 math breakthroughs, nearly all from a single prompt to one AI agent, though some may have taken multiple attempts (Joseph Howlett/Scientific American)
• Google releases Nano Banana 2.1, based on Gemini 3.6 Flash, saying it improves on previous versions "across the board"; pricing is ~50% lower than Nano Banana 2 (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder)
| • How to help stop spam calls on iPhone and Android
• Why do some PCs have two Ethernet ports?
• Apple reportedly worked with LG on gadgets for its upcoming smart home push
• Kindle Click vs Kobo Remote: How much of a difference is there?
• Remember MapQuest? You can now use it with Android Auto
• Doom on the Vectrex turns the classic shooter into Tron-like vector art
• Skydance will combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single streaming service
• Google Photos vs. Gallery app: What's the difference and which should you use?
• Asos hit by extortion hack that may have compromised some customer data
• Why it's important to regularly replace your surge protectors
• Don't throw away your old digital camera — do this instead
• How to check if your Android phone is still getting security updates
• How to supercharge your Windows 11 PC with this built-in automation tool
• Affordable alternatives to Nintendo's Switch 2 Pro Controller
• Why don't you see external antennas on mesh Wi-Fi systems?
• Apple iPhone Duo vs. Motorola Razr Ultra: How do these foldables compare?
• Controversial $110 billion mega-merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. finally closes
• The Emmy Awards are moving to Prime Video in 2027
• Should you buy or rent your router from your internet service provider?
• JBL's PartyBox Ultimate 2 delivers 1,500 watts of sound and a built-in light show
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