Personal data from 73 million AT&T customers has leaked onto the dark web, reports CNN — both current and former customers.

AT&T has launched an investigation into the source of the data leak... In a news release Saturday morning, the telecommunications giant said the data was "released on the dark web approximately two weeks ago," and contains information such as account holders' Social Security numbers. ["The information varied by customer and account," AT&T said in a statement, " but may have included full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, social security number, date of birth, AT&T account number and passcode."]

"It is not yet known whether the data ... originated from AT&T or one of its vendors," the company added. "Currently, AT&T does not have evidence of unauthorized access to its systems resulting in exfiltration of the data set."

The data seems to have been from 2019 or earlier. The leak does not appear to contain financial information or specifics about call history, according to AT&T. The company said the leak shows approximately 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders were affected.
CNN says the first reports of the leak came two weeks ago from a social media account claiming "the largest collection of malware source code, samples, and papers. Reached for a comment by CNN, AT&T had said at the time that "We have no indications of a compromise of our systems."

AT&T's web site now includes a special page with an FAQ — and the tagline that announces "We take cybersecurity very seriously..."

"It has come to our attention that a number of AT&T passcodes have been compromised..."

The page points out that AT&T has already reset the passcodes of "all 7.6 million impacted customers." It's only further down in the FAQ that they acknowledge that the breach "appears to be from 2019 or earlier, impacting approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders." Our internal teams are working with external cybersecurity experts to analyze the situation... We encourage customers to remain vigilant by monitoring account activity and credit reports. You can set up free fraud alerts from nationwide credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. You can also request and review your free credit report at any time via Freecreditreport.com...

We will reach out by mail or email to individuals with compromised sensitive personal information and offering complimentary identity theft and credit monitoring services... If your information was impacted, you will be receiving an email or letter from us explaining the incident, what information was compromised, and what we are doing for you in response.

Two of the world's largest credit card networks, Visa and Mastercard, as well as the banks that issue cards with them, have agreed to settle a decadeslong antitrust case brought upon by merchants. From a report: The settlement is set to lower swipe fees merchants pay when customers make purchases using their Visa or Mastercard by $30 billion over five years, according to a press release announcing the settlement Tuesday morning. The settlement, which only applies to US merchants, is the result of a lawsuit filed in 2005. However, nothing is considered finalized until it receives approval from the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Even then, the case can also be appealed in what could be a lengthy battle.

Typically, swipe fees cost merchants 2% of the total transaction a customer makes -- but can be as much as 4% for some premium rewards cards, according to the National Retail Federation. The settlement would lower those fees by at least 0.04 percentage point for a minimum of three years. Additionally, the settlement would require Visa and Mastercard to maintain the swipe fee rates that existed as of December 31, 2023 for five years.

Web-based design platform Canva has acquired the Affinity creative software suite for an undisclosed sum, though Bloomberg reports that it's valued at "several hundred million [British] pounds." The Verge reports that the acquisition helps the company "[position] itself as a challenger to Adobe's grip over the digital design industry." From the report: Canva announced the deal on Tuesday, which gives the company ownership over Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher -- three popular creative applications for Windows, Mac, and iPad that provide similar features to Adobe's Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign software, respectively. [T]he acquisition makes sense as the Australian-based company tries to attract more creative professionals. As of January this year, Canva's design platform attracted around 170 million monthly global users. That's a lot of people who probably aren't using equivalent Adobe software like Express, but unlike Adobe, Canva doesn't have its own design applications that target creative professionals like illustrators, photographers, and video editors.

Affinity apps are used by over three million global users according to Canva -- that's a fraction of Adobe's user base, but Affinity shouldn't be underestimated here. The decision to make its Affinity applications a one-time-purchase with no ongoing subscription fees has earned it a loyal fanbase, especially with creatives who are actively looking for alternatives to Adobe's subscription-based design ecosystem. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Canva co-founder Cameron Adams said that Affinity applications will remain separate from Canva's platform, but that some small integrations should be expected over time. "Our product teams have already started chatting and we have some immediate plans for lightweight integration, but we think the products themselves will always be separate," said Adams.

A SWAT team in St. Louis County mistakenly raided the home of Brittany Shamily and her family, based on the inaccurate tracking of stolen AirPods by the "FindMy" app. The family is suing for damages stemming from embarrassment, unreasonable use of force, loss of liberty, and other factors. The Riverfront Times reports: Around 6:30 p.m. on May 26, Brittany Shamily was at home with her children, including an infant, when police used a battering ram to bust in her front door. "What the hell is going on?" she screamed, terrified for herself and her family. "I got a three-month-old baby!" Body camera footage from the scene shows Shamily come to the front door, her hands up, her face a mix of fright and utter confusion at the heavily armed folly making its way from her front porch into her foyer. "Oh my god," she says. The SWAT team was looking for guns and other material related to a carjacking that had occurred that morning. Their search didn't turn up any of that -- though it has led to a lawsuit, filed Friday, that may lead to a better public understanding of how county police decide whether to deploy a SWAT team or serve a search warrant in a less menacing manner. Because in this case, the police clearly made the wrong call.

The carjacking that led to the raid happened about 12 hours prior, 16 miles away, in south county. Around 6 a.m., two brothers were leaving the Waffle House on Telegraph Road near Jefferson Barracks when a group of six people pulled up outside the restaurant and carjacked them. Two of the carjackers took off in the brothers' Dodge Charger while the other four fled the scene in their own vehicles. St. Louis County Police were summoned to the scene. As part of their investigation, a friend of the carjacked brothers told police that his AirPods were in the stolen car and that he could track them using the "FindMy" application, a feature that lets users locate one Apple device using another. Police did just that and, according to the lawsuit, the app showed the AirPods to be at Shamily's house.

There was just one problem. "FindMy is not that accurate," says the family's lawyer, Bevis Schock. "I actually went to my house with my co-counsel and played around with it for an hour. It's just not that good." Yet based on the "FindMy" result, an officer signed an application for a search warrant saying he had reason to believe that "firearms, ammunition, holsters" and other "firearm-related material" were inside. That evening, police showed up in full combat gear carrying a battering ram. [...] While the family was detained outside, the SWAT team "ransacked" their house, the lawsuit says. One SWAT team member punched a basketball-sized hole in the drywall. Another broke through a drop ceiling. They turned over drawers and left what had been an orderly house in disarray. After this had gone on for more than half an hour, the AirPods were located -- on the street outside the family's home. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time something like this has happened. In January 2022, SWAT teams in Denver raided an elderly woman's home after the "FindMy" app falsely pinged her home as the location of a stolen iPhone. The woman was recently awarded $3.76 million in compensation and damages.

For decades, U.S. inventors sent in models with their patent applications -- gizmos that reveal a secret history of unmet needs and relentless innovation. The New Yorker: The ruins of American invention have been recently resurrected in a former textile mill in Wilmington, Delaware. The Henry Clay Mill, now better known as Hagley Museum and Library Visitor Center, is perched on the banks of Brandywine Creek, at the southern edge of a sprawling estate once owned by the du Pont family; just upstream lies the oldest of the dynasty's several stately homes in the region, as well as the remains of the gunpowder works upon which its fortune was built. One morning, Chris Cascio, a curator, welcomed me into the mill, where the space once occupied by cotton-picking and carding machines now houses a curious exhibit: the scavenged remainders of a much larger, long-lost museum.

From 1790 to 1880, Cascio explained, the U.S. Patent Office first encouraged and then required an inventor to submit a model along with each application. These models -- thousands of miniature devices, often exquisitely detailed -- were then exhibited in Washington, D.C., in the office's model gallery. Sometimes called the "Temple of Invention," the gallery was a bustling landmark: it regularly attracted up to ten thousand visitors a month and was ranked as "the greatest permanent attraction in the city," according to one newspaper. But by the late nineteenth century it had effectively shut its doors. Hagley's latest exhibit, "Nation of Inventors," is the largest permanent public display of patent models since that time.

[...] The U.S. system was also unique in that no other country required a model to accompany a patent application. The reasons why soon became clear. As early as the eighteen-thirties, the collection had outgrown the Patent Office's cramped headquarters at the former Blodgett's Hotel. In 1836, a fire destroyed at least seven thousand models, but, rather than abandon the requirement, the Patent Office doubled down, securing congressional funding to reconstruct the models and laying the foundations for a truly monumental building, with a facade modelled after the Parthenon. The structure, which now houses the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, occupies an entire city block. In the engineer Pierre L'Enfant's master plan for the capital, it was intended to serve as a kind of nondenominational "church of the republic," between the White House on one side and the Capitol on the other.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He's never been responsible for an accident. So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor. LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a "Risk Solutions" division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl's request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page "consumer disclosure report," which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act. What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn't have is where they had driven the car. On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking.

According to the report, the trip details had been provided by General Motors -- the manufacturer of the Chevy Bolt. LexisNexis analyzed that driving data to create a risk score "for insurers to use as one factor of many to create more personalized insurance coverage," according to a LexisNexis spokesman, Dean Carney. Eight insurance companies had requested information about Mr. Dahl from LexisNexis over the previous month. "It felt like a betrayal," Mr. Dahl said. "They're taking information that I didn't realize was going to be shared and screwing with our insurance." In recent years, insurance companies have offered incentives to people who install dongles in their cars or download smartphone apps that monitor their driving, including how much they drive, how fast they take corners, how hard they hit the brakes and whether they speed. But "drivers are historically reluctant to participate in these programs," as Ford Motor put it in apatent application (PDF) that describes what is happening instead: Car companies are collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles for use by the insurance industry.

Sometimes this is happening with a driver's awareness and consent. Car companies have established relationships with insurance companies, so that if drivers want to sign up for what's called usage-based insurance -- where rates are set based on monitoring of their driving habits -- it's easy to collect that data wirelessly from their cars. But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened. Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people's driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis. Automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans say they have drivers' permission to do so. But the existence of these partnerships is nearly invisible to drivers, whose consent is obtained in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read. Especially troubling is that some drivers with vehicles made by G.M. say they were tracked even when they did not turn on the feature -- called OnStar Smart Driver -- and that their insurance rates went up as a result.

Starting today, Ford electric vehicle owners can use one of Tesla's 2,400+ superchargers, but there's a hitch. "They'll need to get an adapter that Ford will provide for free, although the company won't start shipping those until the end of March," notes the Associated Press. Product Reviewer MKBHD also notes that non-Teslas will need to park in a spot that blocks 2 spots where a Tesla would take up one. "If the charge station fills up the remaining spots with Teslas, the app will show 1 charger as available but the parking spot is blocked by the Mach-E," adds MKBHD. From the report: Last May, Ford became the first automaker to reach an agreement with the Austin, Texas-based Tesla to charge on its network, which is the largest and most well-placed in the U.S. Tesla has more than 26,000 plugs and nearly 2,400 Supercharger stations across the U.S. and Canada. Ford said its owners will have access to about 15,000 Tesla fast-charging plugs that are located strategically along travel corridors. Ford owners won't be able to use some older Tesla plugs.

Most other automakers followed Ford in joining Tesla's network and agreeing to switch to Tesla's plug, called the North American Charging Standard, which is smaller and easier to use than the current plugs on most other EVs sold in the two countries. Ford said adding the Tesla plugs will double the size of the network that can be used by Ford EV owners. There are nearly 166,000 Ford EVs in the U.S.

Ford is offering the adapters for free to the owners, who can sign up on the Ford.com website to reserve them between Thursday and June 30. The company will provide one free adapter per vehicle. Tesla's network was turned on Wednesday morning, and software enabling the Ford vehicles to charge at Tesla stations was to be sent out around the same time. Ford will switch to Tesla's charging connector with its second-generation EVs starting next year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Wildfires sweeping across Texas briefly forced the evacuation of America's main nuclear weapons facility as strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm temperatures fed the blaze. Pantex Plant, the main facility that assembles and disassembles America's nuclear arsenal, shut down its operations on Tuesday night as the Windy Deuce fire roared towards the Potter County location. Pantex re-opened and resumed operations as normal on Wednesday morning. Pantex is about 17 miles (27.36 kilometers) northeast of Amarillo and some 320 miles (515 kilometers) northwest of Dallas. Since 1975 it has been the US's main assembly and disassembly site for its atomic bombs. It assembled the last new bomb in 1991. "We have evacuated our personnel, non-essential personnel from the site, just in an abundance of caution," said Laef Pendergraft, a spokesperson for National Nuclear Security Administration's Production Office at Pantex. "But we do have a well-equipped fire department that has trained for these scenarios, that is on-site and watching and ready should any kind of real emergency arise on the plant site."

Undersea data cables in the Red Sea have reportedly been damaged, months after Yemeni Houthi rebels threatened to do so. From a report: At least 15 submarine cables pass through the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, a body of water just 26km wide at some points. Yemen is the Strait's northern shore. The first reports of damage to submarine cables off the coast of Yemen began emerged on Monday morning, with Israeli news outlet Globes claiming that four cables (EIG, AAE-1, Seacom and TGN-EA) had experienced damage. Seacom has reportedly confirmed damage to a cable it operates on a stretch between Kenya and Egypt.

"The location of the cable break is significant due to its geopolitical sensitivity and ongoing tensions, making it a challenging environment for maintenance and repair operations," Seacom said. "The team is currently working towards restoration timelines and will communicate these plans with our clients." Globes attributed the outages to the Iran-backed Houthis, and claimed the damage was "significant, but not critical," because several other undersea cables serve the region. Seacom has already reassured customers it has re-routed traffic onto other cables. While the world has a decent supply of cable repair ships, they are booked up well in advance so finding one ready to work is not always possible. Nor are cable repairs easy: it takes time to find and retrieve a damaged segment and reconnect it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Vision Pro owners are posting near-identical reports of a crack appearing on the front glass of their headsets. None of them seem to know how it happened, either. The issue was first spotted by MacRumors, and so far, there have been five separate Redditors who have posted about it in the r/VisionPro subreddit. Engadget also reported that the same happened with its review unit.

What makes it curious is that all of the uploaded pictures appear to show vertical hairline cracks in the same exact area above the nose bridge. All the affected Redditors say they didn't do anything obvious to cause the cracks, like dropping the device or storing it improperly. Reddit user @dornbirn claims that they polished the front glass, placed the soft cover on, packed it away in the case, and woke up to see the crack the next morning. Most of the other affected Redditors also noted they either stored their Vision Pros in cases or placed the soft cover on.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN Business: AT&T's network went down for many of its customers across the United States Thursday morning, leaving customers unable to place calls, text or access the internet. By a little after 3 pm ET, roughly 11 hours after reports of the outage first emerged, the company said that it had restored service to all impacted customers. "We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. We sincerely apologize to them," AT&T said in a statement. The company added that it is "taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future."

The Federal Communications Commission confirmed Thursday afternoon that it is investigating the outage. The White House says federal agencies are in touch with AT&T about network outages but that it doesn't have all the answers yet on what exactly led to the interruptions. Although Verizon and T-Mobile customers reported some network outages, too, they appeared far less widespread. T-Mobile and Verizon said their networks were unaffected by AT&T's service outage and customers reporting outages may have been unable to reach customers who use AT&T.

Thursday morning, more than 74,000 AT&T customers reported outages on digital-service tracking site DownDetector, with service disruptions beginning around 4 am ET. That's not a comprehensive number: It tracks only self-reported outages. Reports had been rising steadily throughout the morning but leveled off in the 9 am ET hour. By 12:30 pm ET, the DownDetector data showed some 25,000 AT&T customers still reporting outages. By 2 pm ET, fewer than 5,000 customers were still reporting issues. Earlier Thursday, AT&T acknowledged that it had a widespread outage but did not provide a reason for the system failure. By late morning, AT&T said most of its network was back online, and it confirmed Thursday afternoon that service was fully restored. According to an anonymous industry source, the issue for the outage appears to be related to how cellular services hand off calls from one network to the next, a process known as peering. They said there's no indication that it was the result of a cyberattack or other malicious activity.

The FCC confirmed that it is investigating the incident. "We are aware of the reported wireless outages, and our Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is actively investigating," the FCC said in a statement posted on X. "We are in touch with AT&T and public safety authorities, including FirstNet, as well as other providers."

U.S. healthcare technology giant Change Healthcare has confirmed a cyberattack on its systems. In a brief statement, the company said it was "experiencing a network interruption related to a cyber security issue." From a report: "Once we became aware of the outside threat, in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we took immediate action to disconnect our systems to prevent further impact," Change Healthcare wrote on its status page. "The disruption is expected to last at least through the day."

The incident began early on Tuesday morning on the U.S. East Coast, according to the incident tracker. The specific nature of the cybersecurity incident was not disclosed. Most of the login pages for Change Healthcare were inaccessible or offline when TechCrunch checked at the time of writing. Michigan local newspaper the Huron Daily Tribune is reporting that local pharmacies are experiencing outages due to the Change Healthcare cyberattack.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that it's working on a finger tracking neural wristband that will be ready to ship "in the next few years." UploadVR reports: Appearing on the Morning Brew Daily talk show on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg said "we're actually kind of close to having something here that we're going to have in a product in the next few years." [...] An entirely different approach to finger tracking is to sense the neural electrical signals passing through your wrist to your fingers from your brain, using a technique called electromyography (EMG). Theoretically this could have zero or even negative latency, perfect accuracy, work regardless of lighting conditions, and not be subject to occlusion. When discussing the technology in 2021 Reardon claimed that a recent breakthrough enabled decoding the activity of individual neurons for "almost infinite control over machines." Occlusion-free finger tracking of this quality and reliability could enable precise control of complex interfaces with incredibly subtle movements of your hand resting on your lap, making it an ideal input method for headsets and AR glasses. [...]

So how will this arrive in a Meta product? In early 2023 an internal Meta AR/VR hardware roadmap leaked to The Verge, revealing details about Quest 3, the existence of the headset now rumored to be called Quest 3 Lite, and the cancelation of the 2024 candidate for Quest Pro 2 in favor of a more ambitious but "way out" model. But this roadmap also mentioned that Meta was planning to release the neural wristband alongside the third generation Ray-Ban smartglasses in 2025 as the input method.

According to that roadmap, two models of the wristband will be offered at different price points - one with the neural input tech only and another that also has a display and camera to act as a smartwatch too. A second generation of the wristband will also apparently act as the input device for the true AR glasses Meta plans to launch in 2027. We should however note that this plan or the timeline may have changed in the year since.

"Apple will reportedly have to pay around €500 million (about $539 million USD) in the EU," reports the Verge, "for stifling competition against Apple Music on the iPhone. Financial Times reported this morning that the fine comes after regulators in Brussels, Belgium investigated a Spotify complaint that Apple prevented apps from telling users about cheaper alternatives to Apple's music service.... The EU whittled its objections down to oppose Apple's refusal to let developers even link out to their own subscription sign-ups within their apps — a policy that Apple changed in 2022 following regulatory pressure in Japan.

$500 million may sound like a lot, but a much bigger fine of close to $40 billion (or 10 percent of Apple's annual global turnover) was on the table when the EU updated its objections last year. Apple was charged over a billion dollars in 2020, but French authorities dropped that to about $366 million after the company appealed.
The Verge cites an Apple spokesperson who said a year ago that the EU case "has no merit."

Reuters that the EU's fine "is expected to be announced early next month, the Financial Times said."

More from Politico The fine would be the EU's first ever against Apple and is expected to be announced early next month, according to the FT report. It is the result of a European Commission antitrust probe into whether Apple's "anti-steering" requirements breach the bloc's abuse of dominance rules, harming music consumers "who may end up paying more" for apps... The Commission will rule that Apple's actions are illegal and against EU competition rules, according to the report.
"The EU executive will ban Apple's practice of barring music services from letting users know of cheaper alternatives outside the App Store, according to the newspaper."

Texas-based Intuitive Machines' inaugural moon mission began early Thursday morning, heading toward what could be the first U.S. lunar landing in more than 50 years. From a report: Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander launched from Florida on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, beginning the IM-1 mission. "It is a profoundly humbling moment for all of us at Intuitive Machines. The opportunity to return the United States to the moon for the first time since 1972 is a feat of engineering that demands a hunger to explore," Intuitive Machines vice president of space systems Trent Martin said during a press conference.

The IM-1 lander, named "Odysseus" after the mythological Greek hero, is carrying 12 government and commercial payloads -- six of which are for NASA under an $118 million contract. NASA leadership emphasized before the launch that "IM-1 is an Intuitive Machines' mission, it's not a NASA mission." But it marks the second mission under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to deliver science projects and cargo to the moon with increasing regularity in support of the agency's Artemis crew program. The agency views CLPS missions as "a learning experience," NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration in the science mission directorate, Joel Kearns, told press before the launch.
UPDATE: See their first images transmitted from space....

NASA's nearly $1 billion PACE mission launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket early this morning, successfully making it to polar orbit -- a first for NASA since 1960. "When it's up and running, PACE will make key observations of Earth's atmosphere and climate and allow scientists to assess the health of our oceans like never before," notes Space.com. From the report: PACE, by the way, is the first U.S. government mission to launch to a polar orbit from Florida since Nov. 30, 1960. On that day, a Thor Able Star rocket took off on such a trajectory but failed, raining debris down on Cuba, some of which apparently killed a cow. Rather than risk further incidents, the U.S. decided to conduct all of its subsequent polar launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base (now Vandenberg Space Force Base) in California -- until now. That said, PACE wasn't the first mission of any type to launch to polar orbit from Florida's Space Coast in six decades: SpaceX had completed 11 such commercial missions before sending PACE on its way.

PACE's handlers will now work to get the 10.5-foot-long (3.2 meters) spacecraft and its various subsystems up to speed. After this checkout period, the satellite can begin its science work. That work will be done by three instruments. One of them, a spectrometer called the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), will map out the ocean's many hues in great detail and an unprecedented range, from near-infrared wavelengths all way to the ultraviolet. These colors are determined by the interaction of sunlight with particles in seawater, such as the chlorophyll produced by photosynthetic plankton, the base of the marine food web. So OCI will reveal quite a bit about the health and status of ocean ecosystems, according to PACE team members.

"PACE's unprecedented spectral coverage will provide the first-ever global measurements designed to identify phytoplankton community composition," NASA officials wrote in a PACE mission description. "This will significantly improve our ability to understand Earth's changing marine ecosystems, manage natural resources such as fisheries and identify harmful algal blooms." The satellite's other two instruments are polarimeters. They'll measure how the oscillation of light in a plane, known as its polarization, is affected by passage through the ocean, clouds and aerosols (particles suspended in the atmosphere). "Measuring polarization states of UV-to-shortwave light at various angles provides detailed information on the atmosphere and ocean, such as particle size and composition," NASA officials wrote in the mission description.

A radio station in Alabama has been forced to temporarily shut down after thieves stole a 200ft radio tower. The Guardian reports: WJLX, a station in Jasper, Alabama, was ordered to go off air by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after thieves took the station's AM tower last week, the Guardian first learned. "In all my years of being in the business, around the business, everything like that, I have never seen anything like this," WJLX's general manager, Brett Elmore, told the Guardian. "You don't hear of a 200ft tower being stolen," he added.

Elmore said the theft was first discovered last week by a landscaping crew that regularly manages the area nearby the tower, WBRC reported. "They called me and said the tower was gone. And I said, 'What do you mean, the tower is gone?'" Elmore said. The radio tower was previously located in a wooded area, behind a local poultry plant. Elmore said that thieves had cut the tower's wires and somehow removed it. Thieves also stole the station's AM transmitter from a nearby building.

For the small radio station, the theft has had a significant impact. Elmore said the station's property was not insured. Replacing the tower could cost the station anywhere between $100,000 to $150,000, which is "more money than we have," Elmore said. The FCC also notified WJLX on Thursday morning that the station would have to go off the air because of the theft. While WJLX still has its FM transmitter and tower, it is not allowed to operate its FM transmitter while the AM station is off the air. "I had a guy from Virginia call yesterday and say, 'You know, I think a helicopter grabbed [the tower],'" Elmore said. He's hoping that surveillance video from the nearby poultry plant or witnesses nearby can help figure out who stole the station's tower.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Boston Globe: William Straus, like many others, saw the videos in recent days of people behind the wheel of a Tesla in Autopilot mode, sporting their new Apple Vision Pro headsets and typing on an invisible keyboard. "They're all over the Internet, these idiots driving Teslas with their hands up in the air," the state representative said. Some claimed their video was staged. No matter: Straus wants to make it illegal. The Legislature's transportation committee on Wednesday approved language that would ban the use of the new virtual reality headset, or other similar technologies, while behind the wheel in Massachusetts.

Straus, the committee's House chair, said he crafted language with his staff over Monday night and Tuesday morning, and added it to an existing proposal that would, among other things, bar drivers from recording or broadcasting themselves while behind the wheel. That it advanced out of committee less than 48 hours later qualifies as light speed by Beacon Hill standards. (The bill must still pass the full House and Senate.) [...]

"This is absolutely the correct time to wall this off," said Straus, a Mattapoisett Democrat. "People who operate motor vehicles already have too many distractions." Straus' proposal would explicitly not allow drivers to wear, hold, or "otherwise utilize or interact with a spatial computer," or an augmented reality or mixed reality device. It also would ban drivers from viewing any video, images or text unrelated to operating or navigating the car, be it displayed on a screen or "otherwise worn as a headset or elsewhere on the operator's body." Motorists would face the same fines they do now for using their phone to text while driving: $100 for a first violation, $250 for a second violation and $500 for every violation after that. The driver in the viral video posted on YouTube and linked above said that it was a "skit" that he had made with friends and that he wasn't arrested. "[I] was in the right place at the right time," he told Gizmodo. "That's why we filmed the police."

Google has been trying to break into TV for close to two decades. It's here now: Its YouTube TV offering has become one of the biggest pay-TV services in the US. Business Insider: YouTube TV -- which, like conventional pay TV, sells a bundle of dozens of channels -- now has "more than 8 million" subscribers, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan announced Tuesday morning. That makes YouTube the fourth-largest pay TV service in the country, behind Charter and Comcast (14.1 million each) and DirecTV, at around 11 million.

YouTube last disclosed subscriber numbers in 2022, when YouTube TV had 5 million customers. It likely got a meaningful boost last fall when it started selling the NFL's Sunday Ticket service as an add-on to its basic package of TV channels. YouTube's ascent into the mainstream of pay TV represents a couple of things. For starters, it shows you that YouTube and its owner Google have been persistent and patient about trying to crack TV, and its enormous twin revenue streams: subscriptions and ads.

Apple's Vision Pro virtual reality headset officially launched in the U.S. on Friday. Customers who preordered the headset will begin to receive it or pick it up at Apple Store locations. CNBC adds: Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared at the company's flagship Fifth Avenue store in New York City on Friday morning to celebrate the headset's release. Speaking to CNBC's Jim Cramer at the event about the Vision Pro's high sticker price, Cook called it "tomorrow's technology today." The Vision Pro starts at $3,500.

"People can spread their payments out over time, and so that's one affordability kind of thing," Cook said, referring to a monthly financing plan that buyers can choose. "It's chock-full of invention. It's got 5,000 patents on it. We think we priced it at the right level considering the value of it," Cook added.