"Woman Hailed as Hero for Smashing Man's Meta Smart Glasses on Subway," reads the headline at Futurism: As Daily Dot reports, a New York subway rider has accused a woman of breaking his Meta smart glasses. "She just broke my Meta glasses," said the TikTok user, who goes by eth8n, in a video that has since garnered millions of views.

"You're going to be famous on the internet!" he shouted at her through the window after getting off the train. The accused woman, however, peered back at him completely unfazed, as if to say that he had it coming.

"I was making a funny noise people were honestly crying laughing at," he claimed in the caption of a followup video. "She was the only person annoyed..." But instead of coming to his support, the internet wholeheartedly rallied behind the alleged perpetrator, celebrating the woman as a folk hero — and perfectly highlighting how the public feels about gadgets like Meta's smart glasses.

"Good, people are tired of being filmed by strangers," one user commented.

"The fact that no one else on the train is defending him is telling," another wrote...

Others accused the man of fabricating details of the incident. "'People were crying laughing' — I've never heard a less plausible NYC subway story," one user wrote.
In a comment on TikTok, the man acknowledges he'd filmed her on the subway — it looks like he even zoomed in. The man says then her other options were "asking nicely to not post it or blur my face".

He also warns that she could get arrested for breaking his glasses if he "felt like it". (And if he sees her again.) "I filed a claim with the police and it's a misdemeanor charge." A subsequent video's captions describe him unboxing new Meta smartglasses "and I'm about to do my thing again... no crazy lady can stop me now."

I'm imagining being mugged — and then telling the mugger "You're going to be internet famous!" But maybe that just shows how easy it is to weaponize smartglasses and their potential for vast public exposure.

"Researchers engineered a strained germanium layer on silicon that allows charge to move faster than in any silicon-compatible material to date," reports Science Daily. "This record mobility could lead to chips that run cooler, faster, and with dramatically lower energy consumption.

"The discovery also enhances the prospects for silicon-based quantum devices..." Scientists from the University of Warwick and the National Research Council of Canada have reported the highest "hole mobility" ever measured in a material that works within today's silicon-based semiconductor manufacturing.... The researchers created a nanometer-thin germanium epilayer on silicon that is placed under compressive strain. This engineered structure enables electric charge to move faster than in any previously known silicon-compatible material...

The findings establish a promising new route for ultra-fast, low-power semiconductor components. Potential uses include quantum information systems, spin qubits, cryogenic controllers for quantum processors, AI accelerators, and energy-efficient servers designed to reduce cooling demands in data centers. This achievement also represents a significant accomplishment for Warwick's Semiconductors Research Group and highlights the UK's growing influence in advanced semiconductor materials research.

To build three-wheeled, solar electric vehicles, Aptera has now launched its "validation" vehicle assembly line, reports the San Diego Business Journal.

"The validation line will set a technical foundation for the company's eventual low-volume assembly line, ensuring that manufacturing processes are optimized and refined, particularly for the company's composite body structure." To date, Aptera has produced three validation vehicles, two of which are in use driving around the San Diego region, with plans to build another 10 in the coming weeks as progress continues on the validation manufacturing line. "You learn things when you start to put miles on vehicles, putting 10s of thousands of miles on these validation vehicles and learning a lot from the durometer of the suspension, ride quality, spring rates and braking pressure," Aptera co-founder and co-CEO Chris Anthony said. "We've been able to incorporate a lot of the usability stuff back, but also, just as we've gone through the process of building these, a lot of order-of-operation stuff that's educated us on what's going to make for the best initial assembly lines," he added....

Aptera made its public debut on October 16, with the company's executive team participating in the Nasdaq closing bell ceremony that evening. Shares of SEV have hovered between $6.50 and $8.50 for much of the company's first month on the exchange. The company's equity line of credit also took effect in mid-November... expected to aid in Aptera generating at least a portion of the $65 million the company has said it will need to complete validation manufacturing and begin low-volume production for customers. Aptera previously raised some $135 million from more than 17,000 investors in what the company touts as the most successful crowdfunding effort of all time, but Anthony argued Aptera will soon need to invest larger sums of capital to scale its production needs.

"Publicly listing the company gives us a lot more funding mechanisms to get into production," he said. "So just having access to the public markets, public liquidity and the kind of instruments and tools that banks offer to public companies, it just seemed like now is the right time." Alongside the IPO, Aptera made its formal transition to a Public Benefit Corporation, giving the company a legal obligation to consider its effect on employees, communities and customers in addition to the profit motives of its shareholders.
California's state government also awarded Aptera $21 million "to support its push toward scaled manufacturing," the article points out.

It also notes that Aptera's vehicles "are technically classified as motorcycles rather than standard passenger cars, presenting a potentially cheaper alternative for consumers on the hunt for an electric vehicle."

What happened when a school in Los Angeles gave a sixth grader an iPad for use throughout the school day? "He used the iPad during school to watch YouTube and participate in Fortnite video game battles," reports NBC News.

His mother has now launched a coalition of parents called Schools Beyond Screens "organizing in WhatsApp groups, petition drives and actions at school board meetings and demanding meetings with district administrators, pressuring them to pull back on the school-mandated screen time." Los Angeles Unified is the first district of its size to face an organized — and growing — campaign by parents demanding that schools pull back on mandatory screen time. The discontent in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, reflects a growing unease nationally about the amount of time children spend learning through screens in classrooms. While a majority of states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88% of schools provide students with personal devices, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, often Chromebook laptops or iPads. The parents hope getting a district that has over 409,000 students across nearly 800 schools to change how it approaches screen time would send a signal across public school districts to pull back from a yearslong effort to digitize classrooms....

[In the Los Angeles school district] Students in grade levels as low as kindergarten are provided iPads, and some schools require them to take the tablets home. Some teachers have allowed students to opt out of the iPad-based assignments, but other parents say they've been told that they can't. Parents can also opt their children out of having access to YouTube and several other Google products... The billion-dollar 2014 initiative to give tablet computers to everyone became a scandal after the bidding process appeared to heavily favor Apple, and it faced criticism once it became clear that students could bypass security protocols and that few teachers used the tablets. Currently, the district leaves it up to individual schools to decide whether they want students to take home iPads or Chromebooks every day and how much time they spend on them in class...

Around 300 parents attended listening sessions the district held last month about technology in the classroom. Nearly all who spoke criticized how much screen time schools gave their children in class, pointing to ways their behavior and grades suffered as students watched YouTube and played Minecraft... Several also asked district officials to explain why children as young as kindergartners were asked to sign a form to use devices in which they promised they would honor intellectual property law and refrain from meeting people in person whom they met online. "Is it possible for children to meet people over the internet on school-issued devices?" one father asked. The district officials declined to answer, saying it was meant to be a listening session.
In 2022, Los Angeles Unified started requiring students to complete benchmark assessments on educaitonal software i-Ready, the article points out, which generates unique questions for each students. "But parents and teachers are unable to see what children are asked, in part because the company that makes the program considers them proprietary information..."

One teacher says his school's administartors are requiring him to use i-Ready even though it doesn't have any material for the science class he's actually teaching. He's also noticed some students will use answers from AI chatbots, bypassing the school's monitoring software by creating alternate user profiles. But the monitoring software company suggests the school misconfigured their software's settings, adding "More commonly, when students attempt to bypass filtering or monitoring, they do so by using proxies."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

While Netflix hopes to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $72 billion, CNBC reports a senior official in America's federal government said the administration was viewing the deal with "heavy skepticism. And that's not the only hurdle: On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paramount, in a letter to lawyers for Warner Bros. Discovery [WBD], had warned that a sale to Netflix likely would "never close" because of regulatory challenges in the United States and overseas. "Acquiring Warner's streaming and studio assets 'will entrench and extend Netflix's global dominance in a matter not allowed by domestic or foreign competition laws,' Paramount's lawyers wrote," the Journal reported.
Paramount "is now weighing its options about whether to go straight to shareholders with one more improved bid," CNBC reported Friday, "perhaps even higher than the $30-per-share, all-cash offer it submitted to Warner Bros. Discovery this week."

And CNBC reported Friday that the review by America's Department of Justice "can take anywhere from months to more than a year." Netflix said Friday it expects the transaction to close in 12 to 18 months, after Warner Bros. Discovery spins out its portfolio of cable networks into Discovery Global... As part of the deal, Netflix has agreed to pay a $5.8 billion breakup fee to Warner Bros. Discovery if the deal were to get blocked by the government.
Netflix's planned move is already drawing high-powered criticism, reports CNN:

• "The world's largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent. The outcome would eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers, and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers...." the Writers Guild of America union representing Hollywood writers.

• "Producers are rightfully concerned... Our legacy studios are more than content libraries — within their vaults are the character and culture of our nation." — The Producers Guild of America
• The deal raises "many serious questions" about the entertainment industry's future, "especially the human creative talent whose livelihoods and careers depend on it." — SAG-AFTRA, Hollywood's biggest actors union

• "This is not a win for consumers. Netflix has already aggressively raised prices, increased ad load, and stopped people from sharing passwords. Absorbing a competitor with strong content will only lead to its service becoming more expensive and give consumers less choice." — Ross Benes, a senior analyst at eMarketer, told CNN. [Benes also thinks this could mean fewer companies spending heavily on movies and TV shows. "This contracts the industry."

Linus Torvalds recently defended Windows' infamous Blue Screen of Death during a video with Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips, where the two built a PC together. It's FOSS reports: In that video, Sebastian discussed Torvalds' fondness for ECC (Error Correction Code). I am using their last name because Linus will be confused with Linus. This is where Torvalds says this: "I am convinced that all the jokes about how unstable Windows is and blue screening, I guess it's not a blue screen anymore, a big percentage of those were not actually software bugs. A big percentage of those are hardware being not reliable."

Torvalds further mentioned that gamers who overclock get extra unreliability. Essentially, Torvalds believes that having ECC on the machine makes them more reliable, makes you trust your machine. Without ECC, the memory will go bad, sooner or later. He thinks that more than software bugs, often it is hardware behind Microsoft's blue screen of death. You can watch the video on YouTube (the BSOD comments occur at ~9:37).

Meta has officially confirmed it is shifting investment away from the metaverse and VR toward AI-powered smart glasses, following a Bloomberg report of an up to 30% budget cut for Reality Labs. "Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio we are shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables given the momentum there," a statement from Meta reads. "We aren't planning any broader changes than that." From the report: Following Bloomberg's report, other mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider have published their own reports corroborating the general claim, with slightly differing details...

Business Insider's report suggests that the cuts will primarily hit Horizon Worlds, and that employees are facing "uncertainty" about whether this will involve layoffs. One likely cut BI's report mentions is the funding for third-party studios to build Horizon Worlds content. The New York Times report, on the other hand, seems more definitive in stating that these cuts will come via layoffs. The Reality Labs division "has racked up more than $70 billion in losses since 2021," notes Fortune in their reporting, "burning through cash on blocky virtual environments, glitchy avatars, expensive headsets, and a user base of approximately 38 people as of 2022."

sinij shares news of the Trump administration surprising the auto industry by granting approval for "tiny cars" to be built in the United States. Bloomberg reports: President Donald Trump, apparently enamored by the pint-sized Kei cars he saw during his recent trip to Japan, has paved the way for them to be made and sold in the U.S., despite concerns that they're too small and slow to be driven safely on American roads. "They're very small, they're really cute, and I said "How would that do in this country?'" Trump told reporters on Wednesday at the White House, as he outlined plans to relax stringent Biden-era fuel efficiency standards.

"But we're not allowed to make them in this country and I think you're gonna do very well with those cars, so we're gonna approve those cars," he said, adding that he's authorized Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to approve production. [...] In response to Trump's latest order, Duffy said his department has "cleared the deck" for Toyota Motor Corp. and other carmakers to build and sell cars in the U.S. that are "smaller, more fuel-efficient." Trump's seeming embrace of Kei cars is the latest instance of passenger vehicles being used as a geopolitical bargaining chip between the U.S. and Japan. "This makes a lot of sense in urban settings, especially when electrified," comments sinij. "Hopefully these are restricted from the highway system."

The report notes that these Kei cars generally aren't allowed in the U.S. as new vehicles because they don't meet federal crash-safety and performance standards, and many states restrict or ban them due to concerns that they're too small and slow for American roads. However, they can be imported if they're over 25 years old, but then must abide by state rules that often limit them to low speeds or private property use.

U.S. and Canadian cybersecurity agencies say Chinese-linked actors deployed "Brickstorm" malware to infiltrate critical infrastructure and maintain long-term access for potential sabotage. Reuters reports: The Chinese-linked hacking operations are the latest example of Chinese hackers targeting critical infrastructure, infiltrating sensitive networks and "embedding themselves to enable long-term access, disruption, and potential sabotage," Madhu Gottumukkala, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in an advisory signed by CISA, the National Security Agency and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. According to the advisory, which was published alongside a more detailed malware analysis report (PDF), the state-backed hackers are using malware known as "Brickstorm" to target multiple government services and information technology entities. Once inside victim networks, the hackers can steal login credentials and other sensitive information and potentially take full control of targeted computers.

In one case, the attackers used Brickstorm to penetrate a company in April 2024 and maintained access through at least September 3, 2025, according to the advisory. CISA Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity Nick Andersen declined to share details about the total number of government organizations targeted or specifics around what the hackers did once they penetrated their targets during a call with reporters on Thursday. The advisory and malware analysis reports are based on eight Brickstorm samples obtained from targeted organizations, according to CISA. The hackers are deploying the malware against VMware vSphere, a product sold by Broadcom's VMware to create and manage virtual machines within networks. [...] In addition to traditional espionage, the hackers in those cases likely also used the operations to develop new, previously unknown vulnerabilities and establish pivot points to broader access to more victims, Google said at the time.

Meta is acquiring AI wearable startup Limitless, maker of a pendant that records conversations and generates summaries. "We're excited that Limitless will be joining Meta to help accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. CNBC reports: Limitless CEO Dan Siroker revealed the deal on Friday via a corporate blog post but did not disclose the financial terms. "Meta recently announced a new vision to bring personal superintelligence to everyone and a key part of that vision is building incredible AI-enabled wearables," Siroker said in the post and an accompanying video. "We share this vision and we'll be joining Meta to help bring our shared vision to life."

India is weighing a proposal to mandate always-on satellite tracking in smartphones for precise government surveillance -- an idea strongly opposed by Apple, Google, Samsung, and industry groups. Reuters reports: For years, the [Prime Minister Narendra Modi's] administration has been concerned its agencies do not get precise locations when legal requests are made to telecom firms during investigations. Under the current system, the firms are limited to using cellular tower data that can only provide an estimated area location, which can be off by several meters.

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), which represents Reliance's Jio and Bharti Airtel, has proposed that precise user locations should only be provided if the government orders smartphone makers to activate A-GPS technology -- which uses satellite signals and cellular data -- according to a June internal federal IT ministry email. That would require location services to always be activated in smartphones with no option for users to disable them. Apple, Samsung, and Alphabet's Google have told New Delhi that should not be mandated, said three of the sources who have direct knowledge of the deliberations.

A measure to track device-level location has no precedent anywhere else in the world, lobbying group India Cellular & Electronics Association (ICEA), which represents both Apple and Google, wrote in a confidential July letter to the government, which was viewed by Reuters. "The A-GPS network service ... (is) not deployed or supported for location surveillance," said the letter, which added that the measure "would be a regulatory overreach." Earlier this week, Modi's government was forced to rescind an order requiring smartphone makers to preload a state-run cyber safety app on all devices after public backlash and privacy concerns.

The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement, accusing the AI startup of repackaging its paywalled reporting without permission. TechCrunch reports: The Times joins several media outlets suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week. The Times' suit claims that "Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute" for the outlet, "without permission or remuneration." [...] "While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity's unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products," Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times, said in a statement. "We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work."

Similar to the Tribune's suit, the Times takes issue with Perplexity's method for answering user queries by gathering information from websites and databases to generate responses via its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) products, like its chatbots and Comet browser AI assistant. "Perplexity then repackages the original content in written responses to users," the suit reads. "Those responses, or outputs, often are verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of the original content, including The Times's copyrighted works."

Or, as James put it in his statement, "RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time. That content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers." The Times also claims Perplexity's search engine has hallucinated information and falsely attributed it to the outlet, which damages its brand. "Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI," Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's head of communications, told TechCrunch. "Fortunately it's never worked, or we'd all be talking about this by telegraph."

Cloudflare says it blocked 416 billion AI scraping attempts in five months and warns that AI is reshaping the internet's economic model -- with Google's combined crawler creating a monopoly-style dilemma where opting out of AI means disappearing from search altogether. Tom's Hardware reports: "The business model of the internet has always been to generate content that drive traffic and then sell either things, subscriptions, or ads, [Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince] told Wired. "What I think people don't realize, though, is that AI is a platform shift. The business model of the internet is about to change dramatically. I don't know what it's going to change to, but it's what I'm spending almost every waking hour thinking about."

While Cloudflare blocks almost all AI crawlers, there's one particular bot it cannot block without affecting its customers' online presence -- Google. The search giant combined its search and AI crawler into one, meaning users who opt out of Google's AI crawler won't be indexed in Google search results. "You can't opt out of one without opting out of both, which is a real challenge -- it's crazy," Prince continued. "It shouldn't be that you can use your monopoly position of yesterday in order to leverage and have a monopoly position in the market of tomorrow."

Two Virginia brothers Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, previously convicted of hacking the U.S. State Department, were rehired as federal contractors and are now charged with conspiring to steal sensitive data and destroy government databases after being fired. "Following the termination of their employment, the brothers allegedly sought to harm the company and its U.S. government customers by accessing computers without authorization, issuing commands to prevent others from modifying the databases before deletion, deleting databases, stealing information, and destroying evidence of their unlawful activities," the Justice Department said in a Wednesday press release. BleepingComputer reports: According to court documents, Muneeb Akhter deleted roughly 96 databases containing U.S. government information in February 2025, including Freedom of Information Act records and sensitive investigative documents from multiple federal agencies. One minute after deleting a Department of Homeland Security database, Muneeb Akhter also allegedly asked an artificial intelligence tool for instructions on clearing system logs after deleting a database.

The two defendants also allegedly ran commands to prevent others from modifying the targeted databases before deletion, and destroyed evidence of their activities. The prosecutors added that both men wiped company laptops before returning them to the contractor and discussed cleaning out their house in anticipation of a law enforcement search. The complaint also claims that Muneeb Akhter stole IRS information from a virtual machine, including federal tax data and identifying information for at least 450 individuals, and stole Equal Employment Opportunity Commission information after being fired by the government contractor.

Muneeb Akhter has been charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and destroy records, two counts of computer fraud, theft of U.S. government records, and two counts of aggravated identity theft. If found guilty, he faces a minimum of two years in prison for each aggravated identity theft count, with a maximum of 45 years on other charges. His brother, Sohaib, is charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and password trafficking, facing a maximum penalty of six years if convicted.

Netflix says its open AV1 video codec now powers about 30% of all streaming on the platform and is rapidly becoming its primary delivery format thanks to major gains in compression, bandwidth efficiency, HDR support, and film-grain rendering. TVTechnology reports: The blog by Liwei Guo, Zhi Li, Sheldon Radford and Jeff Watts comes at a time when AV2 is on the horizon. [...] The blog revisits Netflix's AV1 journey to date, highlights emerging use cases, and shares adoption trends across the device ecosystem. It noted that since entering the streaming business in 2007, Netflix has primarily relied on H.264/AVC as its streaming format. "Looking ahead, we are excited about the forthcoming release of AV2, announced by the Alliance for Open Media for the end of 2025," said the authors. "AV2 is poised to set a new benchmark for compression efficiency and streaming capabilities, building on the solid foundation laid by AV1. At Netflix, we remain committed to adopting the best open technologies to delight our members around the globe. While AV2 represents the future of streaming, AV1 is very much the present -- serving as the backbone of our platform and powering exceptional entertainment experiences across a vast and ever-expanding ecosystem of devices."

NASA and CNES's SWOT satellite captured the first high-resolution, wide-swath image of a major tsunami in the open ocean after the July 2025 Kuril-Kamchatka quake. "Instead of a single neat crest racing across the basin, the image revealed a complicated, braided pattern of energy dispersing and scattering over hundreds of miles," reports Earth.com. "These are details that traditional instruments almost never resolve. They suggest the physics we use to forecast tsunami hazards -- especially the assumption that the largest ocean-crossing waves travel as largely "non-dispersive" packets -- need a revision." From the report: Three takeaways emerge. First, high-resolution satellite altimetry can see the internal structure of a tsunami in mid-ocean, not just its presence. Second, researchers now argue that dispersion -- often downplayed for great events -- may shape how energy spreads into leading and trailing waves, which could alter run-up timing and the force on harbor structures. Third, combining satellite swaths, DART time series, seismic records, and geodetic deformation gives a more faithful picture of the source and its evolution along strike.

For tsunami modelers and hazard planners, the message is equal parts caution and opportunity. The physics now has to catch up with the complexity that SWOT has revealed, and planners need forecasting systems that can merge every available data stream. The waves won't get any simpler -- but our predictions can get a lot sharper. The findings have been published in the journal The Seismic Record.

alternative_right quotes a report from the Guardian: The statue looms and glints at more than 11 feet tall and weighing 3,500 pounds, looking out at the city with, how to put it ... a characteristically stern expression? Despite its daunting appearance and history as a crimefighter of last resort, the giant new bronze figure of the movie character RoboCop is being seen as a symbol of hope, drawing fans and eliciting selfie mania since it began standing guard over Detroit on Wednesday afternoon. It has been 15 years in the making. Even in a snowstorm in the dark, people were driving by to see it, said Jim Toscano, co-owner of the Free Age film production company, where the statue now stands firmly bolted down near the sidewalk. RoboCop hit theaters in 1987, portraying a near-future Detroit as crime-ridden and poorly protected by a beleaguered and outgunned police force, until actor Peter Weller appeared as a nearly invincible cyborg, apparently created by a nefarious corporation bent on privatizing policing. A grassroots campaign to build a RoboCop statue in Detroit began in 2010, eventually raising over $67,000 on Kickstarter and resulting in a completed sculpture in 2017. However, hosting setbacks caused it to get stuck, "stored away from public view," reports the Guardian. The project finally found a home after business owner Mike Toscano agreed to display it in their new open-air product market, calling it "too unique and too cool not to do."

U.S. regulators are pressing Waymo for answers after Texas officials reported 19 instances of its self-driving cars illegally passing stopped school buses, including cases that occurred after Waymo claimed to have deployed a software fix. Longtime Slashdot reader BrendaEM shares the report from Reuters: In a November 20 letter posted by NHTSA, the Austin Independent School District said five incidents occurred in November after Waymo said it had made software updates to resolve the issue and asked the company to halt operations around schools during pick-up and drop-off times until it could ensure the vehicles would not violate the law. "We cannot allow Waymo to continue endangering our students while it attempts to implement a fix," a lawyer for the school district wrote, citing one incident involving a Waymo that was "recorded driving past a stopped school bus only moments after a student crossed in front of the vehicle, and while the student was still in the road."

The letter prompted NHTSA to ask Waymo on November 24 if it would comply with the request to cease self-driving operations during student pick-up and drop-off times, adding: "Was an appropriate software fix implemented or developed to mitigate this concern? And if so, does Waymo plan to file a recall for the fix?" The school district told Reuters on Thursday that Waymo refuses to halt operations around schools and said another incident involving a self-driving car and an actively loading school bus occurred on December 1, which "indicates that those programming changes did not resolve the issue or our concerns."

In a statement, Waymo did not answer why it had refused to halt operations around Austin schools or answer if it would issue a recall. "We're deeply invested in safe interaction with school buses. We swiftly implemented software updates to address this and will continue to rapidly improve," Waymo said. NHTSA said in a letter to Waymo on Wednesday that it was demanding answers to a series of questions by January 20 about incidents involving school buses and details of software updates to address safety concerns.

A light aircraft crashed in Gloucestershire after a 3D-printed plastic air-induction elbow softened from engine heat and collapsed, cutting power during final approach and causing the plane to undershoot the runway. Investigators say the part was made from "inappropriate material" and safety actions will be taken in the future regarding 3D printed parts. The BBC reports: Following an "uneventful local flight", the AAIB report said the pilot advanced the throttle on the final approach to the runway, and realized the engine had suffered a complete loss of power. "He managed to fly over a road and a line of bushes on the airfield boundary, but landed short and struck the instrument landing system before coming to rest at the side of the structure," the report read.

It was revealed the part had been installed during a modification to the fuel system and collapsed due to its 3D-printed plastic material softening when exposed to heat from the engine. The Light Aircraft Association (LAA) said it now intends to take safety actions in response to the accident, including a "LAA Alert" regarding the use of 3D-printed parts that will be sent to inspectors.

Russia has blocked Apple's FaceTime and the gaming platform Roblox as part of a broader crackdown on foreign tech platforms. CBC News reports: Both restrictions are part of an accelerating clampdown on foreign tech platforms: In the case of FaceTime, Russian authorities allege it is being used for criminal activity, while Roblox was accused of distributing extremist materials and "LGBT propaganda." The move follows restrictions against Google's YouTube, Meta's WhatsApp and the Telegram messaging service.

Critics say the curbs amount to censorship and a tightening of state control over private communications. Russia says they are legitimate law enforcement measures. Russian authorities have this year launched a state-backed rival app called Max, which critics say could be used for surveillance -- allegations that state media have dismissed as false.

Justifying its decision, the communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, said in an emailed statement: "According to law enforcement agencies, FaceTime is being used to organize and carry out terrorist attacks in the country, recruit perpetrators, and commit fraud and other crimes against Russian citizens." The watchdog did not cite evidence in support of the allegations.