An adviser to the EU's highest court says Google's Gemini may violate publishers' copyright when it reproduces recognizable portions of their articles or circumvents paywalls and other technical protections to generate answers. Reuters reports: The case before the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union pitted Hungarian website operator Like Company against US-based Google's artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini. A ruling against Google, which could force the tech giant to pay fees for the use of such content, could throw a lifeline to online media such as Like Company. They have seen traffic dwindle as news summaries written by AI chatbots like Gemini increasingly replace traditional search engines' results, which include hyperlinks to the media websites.

"When an LLM (large language model)-driven chatbot retrieves a publication from a press publisher's website, reuses that publication to generate an answer, and provides that answer to the user, the press publisher's right may be infringed in certain circumstances," Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said. Gemini's answers fall under the publishers' right of reproduction when chatbots access publications by unlawfully "circumventing paywalls or other technical barriers, or when they reuse "the form of expression of that publication in a recognizable manner," he said.

Copyright rules do not protect the "mere facts" reported by press publications, but "only the specific form of expression," he added. On the other hand, he said, the use of material protected by copyright to train LLMs -- AI systems that use vast amounts of text to generate human-like responses and summarize information -- is "freely permitted under the text and data mining exception." Szpunar said there was no evidence that Google had used the Hungarian publisher's articles to train Gemini. The court, which follows the majority of its advisers' non-binding opinions, will rule in the coming months. "Google's powerful gatekeeping role in search makes this particularly important. Publishers depend on Google to reach readers, while Google increasingly delivers AI-generated answers directly to users," said Angela Mills Wade, the council's executive director.

"Publishers should not have to choose between search visibility and protecting their rights. Nor should Google's control over access to audiences become leverage to secure publishers' content for AI services," she said.

During a video celebrating Bethesda's 40th anniversary, the studio officially confirmed that The Elder Scrolls VI will be titled The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. "Thank you for 40 years of shared memories," wrote Bethesda in a separate tweet. "We can't wait to make even more together with The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. Development continues, and while it'll be some time before we're ready to share more, it feels great to finally reveal the name and location with you." Video Games Chronicle reports: "You know, as we're here in the 40th anniversary, we think about all of the games we've made," Bethesda's executive producer Todd Howard said in the video, walking past a display case. "And you know, every day when I walk by this case, obviously I look at the games and think about them, but more so I think about the teams that made them, and the time and the passion that everybody put into the games. And then what they meant to all of you, and hearing from you, and the time that you spent in them, how meaningful that was to you, and to let you know when we hear that, how meaningful that is to us.

And so even though yes, we're looking back, we're also looking forward to all we're doing, particularly with the Fallout franchise and obviously The Elder Scrolls. You know, everybody's always asking about Elder Scrolls 6. And we thought, hey, given the the moment, what a perfect time to tell you what The Elder Scrolls 6 is actually called." The video then showed the logo for the game.

Mozilla is testing a new Firefox Nightly feature called Mini Window that lets users pop an entire webpage into a small, always-on-top window stripped of most browser controls. "The idea behind the Firefox Mini Window feature is simple: allow users to move a currently open tab (or a section of a tab) into a separate mini window," writes ZDNet's Jack Wallen. "Think of it as moving a tab from one window to what appears like a web app." From the report: At first blush, there's no address bar, controls, scroll bar, or anything else that would normally be associated with Firefox. The Mini Window appears to be a web app, without having to actually create it. However, when I hover my cursor inside the Mini Window, I do see the address bar, the back/forward/reload buttons, and the window close button -- and that's it. The browser gets out of your way, so the only thing I see is the content.

On top of that (pun intended), the Mini Window stays on top of other Firefox windows, so I can have that popped-out content always in focus while I work on other things. This feature comes in handy when I'm working with limited display space (say, on a laptop) and need to reference a page while working on another. For multitasking, it comes in very handy. [...] Let's say I'm writing a paper on Linux and need to read a particular article for background information. I could have my document open in the main window, and then open the article in question in a Mini Window. I could then reference the article without having to click back and forth between them -- even when working on a smaller display.

Here's another use case I've found: When using MacOS's Stage Manager feature, I only have one window available at a time. The Mini Window bypasses that limitation, so I can have my main browser window focused as well as the page open in the Mini Window. Another handy way I like to use Mini Window is to open a favorite search engine, move it to a Mini Window, and then I have an always-ready search tool at my fingertips. I could also open my favorite AI service and use it in the same way.

Binance says hackers spent months infiltrating its systems through fake job interviews, a tampered developer tool and compromised internal AI tools before stealing $6.34 billion in crypto in the Oct. 29 attack. Co-CEO Richard Teng said Binance has replenished 98% of the affected assets, and that it is still in the process of purchasing outstanding, more illiquid assets. CNBC reports: Preparations for the attack began in June, when a Binance Wallet DevOps engineer downloaded a tampered Homebrew installation "to install a popular AI coding tool after searching for it on a search engine," according to a security report published by Binance Tuesday. It said it detected the suspicious activity, replaced the engineer's device and rotated credentials as a precaution, but that by then the employee's "role and his related colleagues on our wallet infrastructure team was exposed to the hacker."

[...] As of Tuesday Binance has rebuilt the affected wallet system and internal AI tool, replaced compromised devices, decommissioned credentials and tokens associated with the affected engineers and expanded security scans across employee devices, Teng told "Squawk on the Street."

"We're also getting an independent expert to review everything that we have done, and we'll keep strengthening our defenses as the investigation continues," Teng said. "We're working around the clock with law enforcement agencies and with industry partners to trace and freeze the stolen funds for that front."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In an announcement released Thursday, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly 10 billion yen (about $63 million) to increase its production capacity fivefold for an unlikely beneficiary of the AI era: magnetic tape. Fujifilm attributes the surge in archiving demand to the spread of generative AI, which the company remarked is producing "exponential growth" in data needs worldwide. The 5x increase in production capacity will be measured against fiscal year 2025 production levels.

The investment in Fujifilm's Kanagawa Factory, Odawara site will make it "the largest investment Fujifilm has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities." The project will run from fiscal years 2026 through 2028 to fund manufacturing expansion and additional personnel, primarily to produce the latest-generation "FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10" tape. [...]

According to Fujifilm, "major cloud service and data center operators" have been expanding their use of magnetic tape because it can store large data volumes at relatively low cost. Tape backups can be easily disconnected and stored in a drawer, a vault, or a separate facility. Fujifilm highlights the ability to air-gap tape cartridges as a last defense for user data: "Given the sophistication of cyberattacks, magnetic tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware."

Google will disable AI tools by default for K-12 students early next year unless school administrators explicitly enable them, but schools that choose to block AI entirely will also lose student access to Google Search. The New York Times reports: Executives at the tech giant said they wanted to be responsive to educators and parents who have asked for more control in how children interact with A.I. But there is a catch: Schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search. A.I. features are now a standard part of Google's commercially available search engine.

"Search and A.I. are deeply integrated," said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students "will not have access to search, and they'll see a message from their school that indicates it's not available." [...] The company's new strategy underscores Google's powerful role in American education. If school leaders want continued student access to search within the company's ecosystem, they will be forced to embrace Google's A.I.

SUSE plans to cut roughly 10% of its 1,900-person workforce, with CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen saying "automation and AI" are reducing the need for some roles and allowing the open source software company to operate with less overhead and flatter management structures. "We are announcing a reduction of SUSE's global workforce of approximately 10 percent," said Van Leeuwen in an email. "These decisions are painful for our people, our culture, and our open source community, but they are necessary for us to adapt and build a sustainable, resilient SUSE for the long term." The Register reports: Van Leeuwen says the business, bought by Swedish private equity provider EQT, decided to cut jobs after scrutinizing its "future strategy, required capabilities, and team structures." The rest of the organization will get a look at the fiscal year 2027 strategy on November 16. He said in the message to staff: "What is clear is that automation and AI are fundamentally shifting how software companies operate. AI capabilities are advancing exponentially, forcing us to radically reimagine our work. We have seen this trend already both inside our sector and in the wider economy. This means that the organizational design and cost base that SUSE is built on today will not carry us forward successfully.

"We are adapting. Across SUSE, modern tooling is already changing our daily workflows, enabling teams to move faster with less operational overhead and flatter reporting lines. The requirement for some existing roles has greatly diminished. Other roles will evolve over the next few years. This means we are accelerating investments in high priority areas, and deprioritizing others. These are hard, painful decisions to make, but necessary for our future."

[...] The specific roles at risk of redundancy were not outlined but SUSE claims it has considered where the people in those positions are "able to evolve, what they can stop doing, what they need to do more of - and decisions have been made on that basis." Staff caught up in the redundancies will be informed by November 4, employee representatives nominated the following day, and one to one meetings will begin at the start of next week. Van Leeuwen says in the internal memo that the job cuts are a "reflection of shifting organizational needs, not your talent or commitment. You have tackled hard infrastructure and open source challenges that power critical enterprise systems around the world. "Any organization will be fortunate to have your expertise."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) reported today that they used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra language model to raise a small, open source Qwen model's math score roughly sixfold by directly editing its weights -- the numerical parameters that govern its behavior. Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang and Omar Khattab described their work in a research blog post published November 2. They call the approach "weight-space programming" and tested Astra's ability to interpret and alter networks without using conventional training procedures to generate the edits.

In the strongest language-model example, Astra's intervention raised Qwen3.5-0.8B's MATH-500 score from 7.9% to 48.1% while touching approximately 0.016% of its weights. The improvement came primarily from correcting repetitive reasoning—a distinction that shaped both the technical findings and the debate over their implications. Their experiments explored a broader possibility: AI systems that inspect, repair and construct other neural networks by working directly on their internal machinery. "This is cool as heck!" wrote Yuchen Jin, a technical staffer at Databricks and former co-founder and CTO of Hyperbolic Labs who was unaffiliated with the research, on X. "Imagine using a large LLM to directly edit a smaller model's weights and dramatically improve its capabilities. It's like gene editing for neural networks. Even cooler than distillation!"

Voyage AI staff researcher Chandan Singh, formerly of Microsoft AI, also reacted to the findings: "For anyone questioning whether this post is overhyped, I think they are actually *underselling* the approach."

A coalition of security firms working with Japan's National Police Agency has disrupted a botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices across 200+ countries. "We assess with high confidence that the backdoor and botnet were intentionally developed, deployed, and operated for financial gain by Videostrong Technology," the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a blog post. The Register reports: Videostrong Technology is a hardware manufacturer based in Shenzhen, China. It builds Android devices, including home TV boxes and projectors. According to Google, Videostrong deliberately embedded the XCPE backdoor in device firmware and sold access to criminal affiliates, allowing them to install additional malware modules on devices shipped to unsuspecting customers. When buyers connected these devices to their home networks, the preinstalled backdoor allowed operators to create proxy networks and hide malicious traffic using the customers' internet connections without their knowledge.

The firmware's pre-installed management agent purported to be a standard remote-management client, according to TrendAI. It pulled updates from a GitHub page, and connected to a Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) server that gave the operator full remote control of each box, allowing them to install and remove apps, change settings, and push updates to the infected devices. Between June 3 and October 1, TrendAI documented more than 3.8 million distinct home and mobile IP addresses connected to the operation.

The coalition also disrupted the command-and-control domains used to manage the affiliate modules. "Because these affiliates each have diversified distribution channels for their modules beyond XCPE, we assess that taking down their C2 domains will sever access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices," according to GTIG. Google said it had since cut ties with Videostrong, and banned the OEM from making devices with preloaded Google apps.

At the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference in Beijing, Chinese space officials publicly outlined the most detailed roadmap yet for landing astronauts on the Moon "before 2030." Ars Technica reports: China's lunar landings will involve a lunar-orbit rendezvous similar to what NASA did in the 1960s and early 1970s with the Apollo program. However, lacking a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V vehicle, the crew and lunar lander will launch separately to the Moon. According to slides shared on social media, the current plan involves:

- An uncrewed test of the Long March 10A rocket (a single-stick variant, with no boosters) and the Mengzhou spacecraft to low-Earth orbit. Target: early 2027
- An uncrewed test of the larger Long March 10 rocket (a core stage with two boosters) and the Lanyue lunar lander, including descent/ascent from Moon's surface. Target: 2028
- A concurrent launch of two Long March 10 rockets, one carrying uncrewed Mengzhou and the other the Lanyue vehicle; they will dock in lunar orbit. Target: 2029
- Dual launch of Long March 10 rockets, this time with crew on the Mengzhou spacecraft, leading to crewed landing mission. Target: "Before 2030"

The public release of this new information provides a timeline for gauging China's technical progress in its efforts to land humans on the Moon before 2030 and beat NASA and the United States back to the lunar surface. Notably, the plan (for now, at least) omits a mission similar to Apollo 8 or Artemis II, which involved a crew flying out to the Moon and either entering orbit or passing close by before returning to Earth. The Mengzhou vehicle should still get a workout closer to Earth with humans on board as part of missions carrying astronauts to Tiangong, China's space station in low-Earth orbit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The world's leading EV maker is showing no signs of slowing down. BYD sold 490,168 new energy vehicles (NEVs) in October, up 11% from the prior year and the company's highest monthly total in 2026. BYD's battery electric vehicles drove the growth, with a record 305,743 units sold, up 37% year over year and marking the first time its EV sales have crossed the 300,000 mark. To put that into perspective, just over 262,500 EVs were sold in the US in the entire third quarter combined, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates. By the end of the year, BYD expects overseas shipments to reach about 2 million vehicles. "In 2027, that number is expected to rise to more than 2.5 million vehicles," adds Electrek.

Snap has settled a lawsuit brought by two teenagers who alleged Snapchat was deliberately designed to be addictive and contributed to their mental health problems, avoiding a trial that was scheduled to begin this week. Snap was the last defendant to settle after Meta, Alphabet and TikTok resolved claims in the same case. CBS News reports: The teenage plaintiffs, identified in court documents as S.J. and K.D.B., had alleged in the suit that Snapchat was designed to be addictive and that using the platform from a young age contributed to their mental health issues. "We are glad to reach resolution for our clients," Mark Lanier, founder of The Lanier Law Firm and lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement to CBS News. "We believe this jury would have found the companies' conduct reprehensible."

Snap was the last social media company named in the lawsuit to settle the case, which was set for opening arguments this week. Meta resolved claims last week, while Alphabet and TikTok, the other defendants, each also resolved the allegations. Terms of the Snap settlement were undisclosed [...]. Earlier this year, a jury found Meta and Google-owned YouTube liable in a landmark social media addiction lawsuit, awarding $6 million in damages to a young woman who alleged the platforms' addictive features harmed her mental health. In August, Meta also agreed to pay up to $18 billion in settlements and introduce new child-safety measures to resolve claims from dozens of U.S. states that it deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children while misleading the public about their risks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly "off." Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG's response? To deny everything. [...] That latter point is central to a new study out of Northeastern that conducted 5,943 experiments across twelve commercial "smart" TV devices. The researchers found that most smart TVs utilize automatic content recognition (ACR), a technology that captures audio or video snapshots of viewed content and then monetizes that data to help build personalized profiles of viewers.

TV makers insist that users are supposed to be able to opt out, but the choice simply doesn't work across a large segment of TVs. Companies like Vizio simply ignored the consumer requests entirely more often than not: "We find that the advertised ACR opt-out fully suppresses ACR-attributable traffic on only four operating systems; on Samsung Tizen traffic consistent with ACR activity persists in more than 60% of evaluated scenarios, and on Vizio SmartCast a content correlated endpoint hosted on Amazon Kinesis continues to receive traffic in 100% of opted-out scenarios."

[...] The researchers say since they can't see the precise scope of what's being collected due to encryption, they're unsure whether Vizio is technically violating its FTC agreement (not that we have a current FTC that would care if they were): "The opt-out setting has no observable effect on traffic sent to this endpoint; however, we cannot inspect the payload due to encryption so we cannot confirm whether this violates the FTC settlement." Results of whether opting out of ACR tracking actually stopped ACR tracking were all over the map. Roku, for example, ignores opt-out requests when users are watching Roku's own channels. None of the smart TV vendors track Netflix viewing for fear of violating agreements with the streaming giant. Samsung's opt out function was more likely to actually work when a user was watching antenna broadcasts.

On two Smart TV platforms, personal viewing data collected by ACR remains unencrypted, despite years of bad press and scandal on the subject. Many appear to be violating the law, but because U.S. regulatory oversight has been gutted, they see no meaningful accountability. That includes smart TV OS' like VIDAA, which is most prominently found on Hisense and Toshiba smart TVs: "VIDAA OS sends ACR data to servers run by Unruly over MQTT without encryption, so anyone on the network path between the TV and those servers can read it. Each message carries a Client ID, a permanent identifier for the TV that can't be reset, along with the time zone, the app name, the input (antenna, HDMI), the antenna channel and an audio fingerprint."

According to The Information, Apple is developing a $1,000 HomeView Ultra smart home hub with a 9-inch touchscreen mounted on a motorized arm that can follow users around a room and autonomously respond to its surroundings. It's also said to be experimenting with more ambitious home robots, including a wheeled robot that follows people, a smart home drone and a machine capable of folding laundry. Notebookcheck reports: According to the report, HomeView Ultra will feature a larger 9-inch touchscreen mounted on a robotic arm. This arm can automatically turn the screen toward the user. With a camera and several sensors, this smart home hub is said to be "fully aware" of its surroundings and capable of acting autonomously. This autonomy ranges from turning on the lights when someone enters the room to shooing a cat away when it jumps onto a table. These sensors are also intended to prevent the arm from hitting nearby objects with the display.

Apple is reportedly currently planning to announce this smart home hub in 2027 for around $1,000, but according to The Information, its launch could be delayed until 2028. The reason is allegedly the software, which has not yet been finalized, while the hardware is said to be ready for market already.

SpaceX has reportedly held talks with EchoStar about acquiring Boost Mobile or gaining access to its network, potentially giving Starlink a shortcut toward becoming a full-fledged U.S. mobile carrier. Engadget reports: According to Washington Post's sources, the deal could look like SpaceX acquiring Boost Mobile outright or gaining access to its cell network, which is leased from AT&T and T-Mobile. There could be a major hitch with the deal though, since SpaceX's potential mobile service would need the green light from those major mobile carriers, according to the report. The Washington Post also reported that major cell companies, which include AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, have already turned down Musk down for access to its cell networks in order to launch a separate SpaceX service. Last month, SpaceX reportedly held talks with Crown Castle to access at least 80,000 cellular tower sites across the U.S. as it prepares to launch Starlink Mobile. "We will be building out our terrestrial networks so there's broad-based connectivity anywhere that SpaceX and Starlink are allowed to operate," Musk said during SpaceX's earnings call this week. Satellite launches plus spectrum acquisition "will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US," he said.