An anonymous reader shares a report: California-based TP-Link says it may take a sales hit of more than $1 billion because of erroneous reports that the networking company's technology has been "infiltrated" by Beijing. In a lawsuit, TP-Link claims its competitor, Netgear, orchestrated a smear by planting false claims with journalists and internet influencers with the goal of scaring off customers.

Closely held TP-Link, which makes wireless routers, alleges in a complaint filed Monday that Netgear's campaign "threatens injury to well over a billion dollars in sales" and violates a 2024 settlement of a patent fight. That accord, in which TP-Link agreed to pay Netgear $135 million, includes a provision that the public company promises not to disparage its rival, according to the suit in Delaware federal court.

The suit comes as TP-Link faces growing scrutiny in Washington over national-security issues. US lawmakers from both parties have expressed concern that TP-Link's wireless equipment could be exploited by Chinese hackers following a series of attacks on its routers.

A majority of global fund managers think companies are overinvesting, as market anxiety grows about the sustainability of the AI spending boom. From a report: A net 20 per cent of fund managers surveyed this month by Bank of America said companies were spending too much on their investments -- the first time this has been a majority view in data running back to 2005. "This jump is driven by concerns over the magnitude and financing of the AI capex boom," said BofA analysts.

The surge in investment to develop AI infrastructure has been a dominant theme in the record rally in US tech stocks this year -- with chipmaker Nvidia becoming the world's first $5tn company last month -- but growing concerns about the sustainability of this spending has caused a pullback on Wall Street in recent weeks.

Chinese automakers are rapidly expanding across South America, boosted by the new Chinese-built Port of Chancay, aggressive pricing, local partnerships, and growing regional demand. Reuters reports: China has been ramping up sales since the opening last year of the Port of Chancay, north of Lima. The Chinese-built megaport has halved trans-Pacific shipping times just as Chinese manufacturers face rising barriers to entry in the United States and greater trade restrictions in Europe.

BYD, which makes EVs, plug-in hybrids and combustion engine cars, plans to open a fourth dealership in Lima by the end of this year, while Chery and Geely have more than a dozen in total in Peru. Chinese carmakers face a profit-destroying price war at home and a growing surplus of new cars rolling out of Chinese factory lines. Much of this excess is being shipped overseas to the Middle East, Central Asia and Latin America, according to global automotive analyst Felipe Munoz at JATO Dynamics.

The Chinese have "carved out space," across both electric and petrol-powered cars, said Martin Bresciani, president of Chile's automotive business chamber, CAVEM. "The Chinese have already demonstrated that they match global standards in quality." Chinese brands reached 29.6% of all new passenger car sales in Chile in the first quarter of this year. [...] Part of China's success has been partnering with trusted local importers to offer more affordable models tailored to regional tastes, according to seven dealerships Reuters spoke to in Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina.

Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, which operates publishing labels including GTA-maker Rockstar Games and 2K, said on Monday that although gaming consoles are not going away, the industry is moving toward PCs in the next decade. From a report: "I think it's moving towards PC and business is moving towards open rather than closed," Zelnick told CNBC's "Squawk Box."

"But if you define console as the property, not the system, then the notion of a very rich game that you engage in for many hours that you play on a big screen -- that's never going away." Zelnick said the current split between console and mobile is about even in the market, but mobile is growing more rapidly than consoles.

Global internet freedom declined for a 15th consecutive year, according to Freedom House's annual report. Semafor: "Always grim reading," this year's is particularly sobering, Tech Policy Press noted, with the lowest-ever portion of users living in countries categorized as "free." Conditions declined in 27 of the 72 countries assessed, with those in Kenya -- where anti-corruption protests were quelled, in part, by a seven-hour internet shutdown -- deteriorating the most. China and Myanmar tied for least-free, and the US' ranking dropped, while Iceland retained its top spot for the freest digital environment. Bangladesh improved the most. The most consistent trend observed over 15 years, Freedom House noted, is the growing digital influence of state actors: "Online spaces are more manipulated than ever."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: Solar and wind are growing fast enough to meet all new electricity demand worldwide for the first three quarters of 2025, according to new data from energy think tank Ember.

The group now expects fossil power to stay flat for the full year, marking the first time since the pandemic that fossil generation won't increase. Solar and wind aren't just expanding; they're outpacing global electricity demand itself. Solar generation jumped 498 TWh (+31%) compared to the same period last year, already topping all the solar power produced in 2024. Wind added another 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they supplied 635 TWh of new clean electricity, beating out the 603 TWh rise in global demand (+2.7%). That lifted solar and wind to 17.6% of global electricity in the first three quarters of the year, up from 15.2% year-over-year. That brought the total share of renewables in global electricity -solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy, and geothermal — to 43%. Fossil fuels slid to 57.1%, down from 58.7%.

For the first time in 2025, renewables collectively generated more electricity than coal. And fossil generation as a whole has stalled. Fossil output slipped slightly by 0.1% (-17 TWh) through the end of Q3. Ember expects no fossil-fuel growth for the full year, driven by clean power growth outpacing demand.

A new "cold war" between America and China is "pushing leaders to sideline concerns about the dangers of powerful AI models," reports the Wall Street Journal, "including the spread of disinformation and other harmful content, and the development of superintelligent AI systems misaligned with human values..."

"Both countries are driven as much by fear as by hope of progress. " In Washington and Silicon Valley, warnings abound that China's "authoritarian AI," left unchecked, will erode American tech supremacy. Beijing is gripped by the conviction that a failure to keep pace in AI will make it easier for the U.S. to cut short China's resurgence as a global power. Both countries believe market share for their companies across the world is up for grabs — and with it, the potential to influence large swaths of the global population.

The U.S. still has a clear lead, producing the most powerful AI models. China can't match it in advanced chips and has no answer for the financial firepower of private American investors, who funded AI startups to the tune of $104 billion in the first half of 2025, and are gearing up for more. But it has a massive population of capable engineers, lower costs and a state-led development model that often moves faster than the U.S., all of which Beijing is working to harness to tip the contest in its direction. A new "whole of society" campaign looks to accelerate the construction of computing clusters in areas like Inner Mongolia, where vast solar and wind farms provide plentiful cheap energy, and connect hundreds of data centers to create a shared compute pool — some describe it as a "national cloud" — by 2028. China is also funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into its power grid to support AI training and adoption...

"Our lead is probably in the 'months but not years' realm," said Chris McGuire, who helped design U.S. export controls on AI chips while serving on the National Security Council under the Biden administration. Chinese AI models currently rank at or near the top in every task from coding to video generation, with the exception of search, according to Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced ranking platform. China's manufacturing sector, meanwhile, is rocketing past the U.S. in bringing AI into the physical world through robotaxis, autonomous drones and humanoid robots. Given China's progress, McGuire said, the U.S. is "very lucky" to have its advantage in chips...

If AI surpasses human intelligence and acquires the ability to improve itself, it could confer unshakable scientific, economic and military superiority on the country that controls it. Short of that, AI's ability to automate tedious tasks and process vast amounts of data quickly promises to supercharge everything from cancer diagnoses to missile defense. With so much at stake, hacking and cyber espionage are likely to get worse, as AI gives hackers more powerful tools, while increasing incentives for state-backed groups to try to steal AI-related intellectual property. As distrust grows, Washington and Beijing will also find it hard, if not impossible, to cooperate in areas like preventing extremist groups from using AI in destructive ways, such as building bioweapons. "The costs of the AI Cold War are already high and will go much higher," said Paul Triolo, a former U.S. government analyst and current technology policy lead at business consulting firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group. "A U.S.-China AI arms race becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with neither side able to trust that the other would observe any restrictions on advanced AI capability development...."
The article includes an interesting observation from Helen Toner, director of strategy for Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member. Toner points out "We don't actually know" if boosting computing power with better chips will continue producing more-powerful AI models.

So "If performance plateaus," the Journal writes, "despite all the spending by OpenAI and others — a growing concern in Silicon Valley — China has a chance to compete."

"Media headlines suggesting some slowdown in EV sales are simply incorrect," writes the site Electrek, "and leave out the bigger picture that gas car sales actually are dropping..." Over the course of the last two years or so, sales of battery electric vehicles, while continuing to grow, have posted lower year-over-year percentage growth rates than they had in years prior. EV sales used to grow at 50%+ per year, but for the last couple years, they have grown closer to ~25% per year. This alone is not particularly remarkable — it is inevitable that any growing product or category will show slower percentage growth rates as sales rise, particularly one that has been growing at such a fast rate for so long. In some recent years, we had even seen year-over-year doublings in EV market share (though one of those was 2020->2021, which was anomalous). To expect improvement at that level perpetually would be close to impossible — after 3 years of doubling market share from 2023's 18% number, EVs would account for more than 100% of the global automotive market, which cannot happen...

We have seen a global EV sales growth rate of 23% in the first 10 months of this year, according to a report just released by Rho Motion (recently acquired by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence). That includes a +32% bump in Europe, +22% bump in China, +4% in North America, and a big +48% bump in the "rest of the world." Notably, this 23% global growth rate is higher than last year's YTD growth rate, which was 22% at this time...

In covering these trends, some journalists have attempted to use the less-wrong phrase "slower growth," showing that EV sales are still growing, but at a lower percentage change than previously seen. But for the first ten months of this year, that isn't true — EV sales are up more in 2025 than in 2024 by a percentage basis. They are also up in raw sales numbers — in 2024, EV sales grew by a larger number than in 2023. And the same is true so far in 2025. Going back to 2023, 10.7 million EVs were sold globally in the first 10 months. Then in 2024, 13.3 million were sold, a difference of 2.6 million. And so far in 2025, 16.5 million EVs have sold, a difference of 3.2 million. Not only are the numbers getting bigger, but the growth in unit sales is getting bigger as well.
Even in America, the EV market "has increased so far this year, with 11.7% US EV sales growth YTD." In terms of US hybrid sales, much has been made of customers "shifting from EVs to hybrids," which is also not the case. Conventional gas-hybrid sales are indeed up and plug-in hybrids, which have grown more slowly than gas-hybrids/BEVs, have also shown some growth lately. But gas-hybrid sales have not come at the cost of EV sales, rather at the cost of gas-only car sales.

Because that's just the thing: the number of gas-only vehicles being sold worldwide is a number that actually is falling. That number continues to go down year over year. Sales of new gas-powered cars are down by about a quarter from their peak in 2017, and show no signs of recovering... And yet, somehow, virtually every headline you read is about the "EV sales slump," rather than the "gas-car sales slump." The one you keep hearing about isn't happening, but the one you rarely hear about is happening... No matter what region of the world you're in, EV sales were up in the first 10 months of this year.

"The International Energy Agency's latest outlook signals that oil demand could keep growing through to the middle of the century," reports CNBC, "reflecting a sharp tonal shift from the world's energy watchdog and raising further questions about the future of fossil fuels." In its flagship World Energy Outlook, the Paris-based agency on Wednesday laid out a scenario in which demand for oil climbs to 113 million barrels per day by 2050, up 13% from 2024 levels. The IEA had previously estimated a peak in global fossil fuel demand before the end of this decade and said that, in order to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, there should be no new investments in coal, oil and gas projects... The IEA's end-of-decade peak oil forecast kick-started a long-running war of words with OPEC, an influential group of oil exporting countries, which accused the IEA of fearmongering and risking the destabilization of the global economy.

The IEA's latest forecast of increasing oil demand was outlined in its "Current Policies Scenario" — one of a number of scenarios outlined by the IEA. This one assumes no new policies or regulations beyond those already in place. The CPS was dropped five years ago amid energy market turmoil during the coronavirus pandemic, and its reintroduction follows pressure from the Trump administration... Gregory Brew, an analyst at Eurasia Group's Energy, Climate and Resources team, said the IEA's retreat on peak oil demand signified "a major shift" from the group's position over the last five years. "The justifications offered for the shift include policy changes in the U.S., where slow EV penetration indicates robust oil [consumption], but is also tied to expected increases in petrochemical and aviation fuel in East and Southeast Asia," Brew told CNBC by email. "It's unlikely the agency is adjusting based on political pressure — though there has been some of that, with the Trump administration criticizing the group's supposed bias in favor of renewable energy — and the shift reflects a broader skepticism that oil demand is set to peak any time soon," he added...

Alongside its CPS, the IEA also laid out projections under its so-called "Stated Policies Scenario" (STEPS), which reflects the prevailing direction of travel for the global energy system. In this assumption, the IEA said it expects oil demand to peak at 102 million barrels per day around 2030, before gradually declining. Global electric car sales are much stronger under this scenario compared to the CPS. The IEA said its multiple scenarios explore a range of consequences from various policy choices and should not be considered forecasts.
Thanks to Slashdot reader magzteel for sharing the news.

schwit1 shares a report from the Business Times: General Motors (GM) has directed several thousand of its suppliers to scrub their supply chains of parts from China, four people familiar with the matter said, reflecting automakers' growing frustration over geopolitical disruptions to their operations. GM executives have been telling suppliers they should find alternatives to China for their raw materials and parts, with the goal of eventually moving their supply chains out of the country entirely, the people said. The automaker has set a 2027 deadline for some suppliers to dissolve their China sourcing ties, some of the sources said. GM approached some suppliers with the directive in late 2024, but the effort took on fresh urgency this past spring, during the early days of an escalating US-China trade battle, the sources said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Executives are turning to a novel structure to fund crypto accumulation vehicles as investor appetite thins. They're called in-kind contributions, and they now account for a growing share of digital-asset treasury, or DAT, deals. Instead of raising cash to buy tokens in the open market, DAT sponsors contribute large slugs of their own crypto, often unlisted and hard to value.

Digital-asset treasuries are a new breed of public company built to hold concentrated crypto positions. The structure surged in 2025 as small-cap firms, especially in biotech and mining, reinvented themselves as digital-asset proxies. Sponsors provide tokens or raise money to buy them, and the stock then trades as a kind of listed bet on crypto. For insiders, it's a shortcut to liquidity. For investors, a wager on upside. But not all DATs carry the same level of risk. Earlier deals raised money to buy tokens through regular markets, which offered at least some independent price check. In-kind contributions skip that step -- letting insiders decide what their tokens are worth, sometimes before the token even trades publicly. That shift means pricing and trading risks land more squarely on shareholders, many of them retail investors.

Investor faith is already wobbling. Many DATs that once traded above the value of their holdings now trade below it. As insiders supply the tokens and set their price, it's becoming harder for investors to tell what these deals are really worth, or when to get out. The in-kind structure was on full display in a recent $545 million private placement by Tharimmune Inc., a biotech firm-turned-crypto proxy, to set up a buyer of Canton Coins. About 80% of the raise came in the form of unlisted Canton tokens, priced at 20 cents each, according to an investor presentation seen by Bloomberg News. The token began trading on exchanges Nov. 10 and is now around 11 cents, CoinGecko data show.

More deals are following the same template. In these placements, insiders contribute tokens -- sometimes illiquid or unlisted -- to form a treasury, lock in valuations and seed the perception of market demand. But when tokens list below deal price, public shareholders absorb the difference. [...] Then there's Flora Growth Corp., a Nasdaq-listed company that announced a $401 million deal to start acquiring Zero Gravity tokens in September. On closer inspection, the firm had raised just $35 million in cash to pair with a $366 million in-kind contribution of then-unlisted 0G tokens. Those tokens were priced at around $3 a piece; they subsequently listed, and are now trading at about $1.20.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Chinese electric car has become a symbol of the country's seemingly unstoppable rise on the world stage. Many observers point to their growing popularity as evidence that China is winning the race to dominate new technologies. But in China, these electric cars represent something entirely different: the profound threats that Beijing's meddling in markets poses to both China and the world.

Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China's EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China's car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it "just hasn't erupted yet."

To bypass government censorship of bad economic news, market analysts have opted for a seemingly anodyne term to describe the Chinese car industry's downward spiral: involution, which connotes falling in on oneself. What happens in China's EV sector promises to influence the entire global automobile market. China's emergence as the world's largest manufacturer of EVs highlights the serious challenge the country poses to even the most advanced industries in the U.S., Europe, and other rich economies. Given the vital role the car industry plays in economies around the world, and the jobs, supply chains, and technologies involved, the stakes are high.

But the wobbles in China's EV sector demonstrate the downside of China's state-led economic model. China's government threw ample resources at the EV industry in the hopes of leapfrogging foreign rivals in the transition to battery-powered vehicles. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the government provided more than $230 billion of financial assistance to the EV sector from 2009 to 2023. The strategy worked: China's EV makers would likely never have grown as quickly as they have without this substantial state support. By comparison, the recent Republican-sponsored tax bill eliminated nearly all federal subsidies for EVs in the U.S.

The problem is that China's program encouraged too much investment in the sector. Michael Dunne, the CEO of Dunne Insights, a California-based consulting firm focused on the EV industry, counts 46 domestic and international automakers producing EVs in China, far too many for even the world's second-largest economy to sustain.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Production is now underway at Toyota's new $13.9 billion battery plant in North Carolina, the company's first outside Japan. After the first batteries rolled off the production line at its new facility in Liberty, North Carolina, on Wednesday, Toyota said today marks a "pivotal moment" in the company's history. The facility is Toyota's 11th plant in the US and its first battery plant outside of Japan.

Toyota first announced plans to build EV batteries in the US almost four years ago. The nearly $14 billion facility will create up to 5,100 jobs in the area. In addition, the Japanese auto giant announced plans to invest an additional $10 billion in its US operations over the next five years. Since it first arrived in the US nearly 70 years ago, Toyota has invested close to $60 billion.

The mega site spans 1,850 acres, or about the size of 121 football fields, and can produce up to 30 GWh annually. Toyota will use the hub to develop and build lithium-ion batteries for its growing lineup of "electrified" vehicles, including battery electric (EV), plug-in hybrid (PHEV), and hybrid (HEV) models. Batteries from the plant will power the new Camry HEV, Corolla Cross HEV, RAV4 HEV, and Toyota's yet-to-be-announced three-row electric SUV.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: In China, you can buy a heavily discounted "used" electric car that has never, in fact, been used. Chinese automakers, desperate to meet their sales targets in a bitterly competitive market, sell cars to dealerships, which register them as "sold," even though no actual customer has bought them. Dealers, stuck with officially sold cars, then offload them as "used," often at low prices. The practice has become so prevalent that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to stop it. Its main newspaper, The People's Daily, complained earlier this year that this sales-inflating tactic "disrupts normal market order," and criticized companies for their "data worship."

This sign of serious problems in China's electric-vehicle industry may come as a surprise to many Americans. The Chinese electric car has become a symbol of the country's seemingly unstoppable rise on the world stage. Many observers point to their growing popularity as evidence that China is winning the race to dominate new technologies. But in China, these electric cars represent something entirely different: the profound threats that Beijing's meddling in markets poses to both China and the world.

Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China's EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China's car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it "just hasn't erupted yet." To bypass government censorship of bad economic news, market analysts have opted for a seemingly anodyne term to describe the Chinese car industry's downward spiral: involution, which connotes falling in on oneself.

Tim Berners-Lee thinks AI will help the web, not destroy it. The inventor of the World Wide Web has spent years warning about platform concentration and social media's corrosive effects, but he views AI differently. AI has accomplished what his Semantic Web project could not. The technology extracts structured data from websites regardless of how the information was formatted. Berners-Lee spent decades trying to convince database owners to make their systems machine-readable voluntarily. AI companies simply took the data anyway. They achieved the machine-readable internet through extraction rather than cooperation, but the result is the same.

Berners-Lee also weighed in on the growing browser competition in the market. OpenAI released Atlas a few weeks ago. Perplexity has launched Comet. Google has expanded AI features in Chrome. All these browsers run on Chromium, which Berners-Lee acknowledges is not ideal, but conceded that browser engines are expensive to build. He thinks Apple's decision to restrict iPhones to WebKit prevents web apps from competing with native apps.

Investment in subsea cable projects is expected to reach around $13 billion between 2025 and 2027, almost twice the amount invested between 2022 and 2024, according to telecommunications data provider TeleGeography. Tech giants Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft now represent about 50% of the overall market, up from a negligible share a decade ago.

The companies are expanding their subsea infrastructure to connect growing networks of data centers needed for AI development. Meta announced Project Waterworth in February, a 50,000-kilometer cable connecting five continents that will be the world's longest subsea cable project. Amazon announced its first wholly-owned subsea cable called Fastnet, connecting Maryland to Ireland. Google has invested in over 30 subsea cables. Over 95% of international data and voice call traffic travels through nearly a million miles of underwater cables.

"For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby," reports the Wall Street Journal: Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup — called Preventive — has been quietly preparing what would amount to a biological first. They are working toward creating a child born from an embryo edited to prevent a hereditary disease.... Editing genes in embryos with the intention of creating babies from them is banned in the U.S. and many countries. Preventive has been searching for places to experiment where embryo editing is allowed, including the United Arab Emirates, according to correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal...

Preventive is in the vanguard of a growing number of startups, funded by some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, that are pushing the boundaries of fertility and working to commercialize reproductive genetic technologies. Some are working on embryo editing, while others are already selling genetic screening tools that seek to account for the influence of dozens or hundreds of genes on a trait. They say their ultimate goal is to produce babies who are free of genetic disease and resilient against illnesses. Some say they can also give parents the ability to choose embryos that will have higher IQs and preferred traits such as height and eye color. Armstrong, the cryptocurrency billionaire, is leading the charge to make embryo editing a reality. He has told people that gene-editing technology could produce children who are less prone to heart disease, with lower cholesterol and stronger bones to prevent osteoporosis. According to documents and people briefed on his plans, he is already an investor or in talks with embryo editing ventures...

After the Journal approached people close to the company last month to ask about its work, Preventive announced on its website that it had raised $30 million in investment to explore embryo editing. The statement pledged not to advance to human trials "if safety cannot be established through extensive research..." Other embryo editing startups are Manhattan Genomics, co-founded by Thiel Fellow Cathy Tie, and Bootstrap Bio, which plans to conduct tests in Honduras. Both companies are in early stages.
The article notes the only known instance of children born from edited embryos was in 2018, when Chinese scientist He Jiankui "shocked the world with news that he had produced three children genetically altered as embryos to be immune to HIV. He was sentenced to prison in China for three years for the illegal practice of medicine.

"He hasn't publicly shared the children's identities but says they are healthy.

"According to court filings and interviews with lawyers and scholars, the legal profession in recent months has increasingly become a hotbed for AI blunders," reports the New York Times: Earlier this year, a lawyer filed a motion in a Texas bankruptcy court that cited a 1985 case called Brasher v. Stewart. Only the case doesn't exist. Artificial intelligence had concocted that citation, along with 31 others. A judge blasted the lawyer in an opinion, referring him to the state bar's disciplinary committee and mandating six hours of A.I. training.

That filing was spotted by Robert Freund, a Los Angeles-based lawyer, who fed it to an online database that tracks legal A.I. misuse globally. Mr. Freund is part of a growing network of lawyers who track down A.I. abuses committed by their peers, collecting the most egregious examples and posting them online. The group hopes that by tracking down the A.I. slop, it can help draw attention to the problem and put an end to it... [C]ourts are starting to map out punishments of small fines and other discipline. The problem, though, keeps getting worse. That's why Damien Charlotin, a lawyer and researcher in France, started an online database in April to track it.

Initially he found three or four examples a month. Now he often receives that many in a day. Many lawyers... have helped him document 509 cases so far. They use legal tools like LexisNexis for notifications on keywords like "artificial intelligence," "fabricated cases" and "nonexistent cases." Some of the filings include fake quotes from real cases, or cite real cases that are irrelevant to their arguments. The legal vigilantes uncover them by finding judges' opinions scolding lawyers...

Court-ordered penalties "are not having a deterrent effect," said Freund, who has publicly flagged more than four dozen examples this year. "The proof is that it continues to happen."

A maintainer of Debian's Advanced Package Tool (APT) "has announced plans to introduce hard Rust dependencies into APT starting May 2026," reports the blog It's FOSS. The integration targets critical areas like parsing .deb, .ar, and tar files plus HTTP signature verification using Sequoia. [APT maintainer Julian Andres Klode] said these components "would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing."

He also gave a firm message to maintainers of Debian ports: "If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port."

The reasoning is straightforward. Debian wants to move forward with modern tools rather than being held back by legacy architecture... Debian ports running on CPU architectures without Rust compiler support have six months to add proper toolchains. If they can't meet this deadline, those ports will need to be discontinued. As a result, some obscure or legacy platforms may lose official support. For most users on mainstream architectures like x86_64 and ARM, nothing changes. Your APT will simply become more secure and reliable under the hood.
It's FOSS argues that "If done right, this could significantly strengthen APT's security and code quality."

And the blog Linuxiac also supports the move. "By embedding Rust into APT, the distro joins a growing number of major open-source projects, such as the Linux kernel, Firefox, and systemd, that are gradually adopting Rust. And if I had to guess, I'd say this is just one of the first steps toward even deeper Rust integration in this legendary distribution, which is a good thing."

Ferrari is tapping into crypto markets and tech-rich youngsters with a planned new digital token that its wealthiest fans will be able to use in an auction for a Ferrari 499P, the endurance car that won three straight Le Mans titles. From a report: The plan for now is limited in scope and is an effort by the Italian sports car maker to tap into a trend among luxury brands seeking access to the growing wealth of younger tech entrepreneurs, as AI and data centres drive investment and markets around the world.

It comes after Ferrari, which is also developing its first electric car, began accepting Bitcoin, ethereum and USDC for car purchases in the United States in 2023 and extended the service to Europe last year. Ferrari is working with Italian fintech Conio to launch the 'Token Ferrari 499P' for members of its Hyperclub -- which groups 100 of its most exclusive clients, with a passion for endurance races -- to trade amongst themselves and bid on the racing model.