California law prohibits "operating" a mobile phone while driving. And that makes it illegal for a driver to hold a cellphone in order to look at a map, a state appeals court ruled this week. From a report: In a 2016 law intended to strengthen previous restrictions, "the Legislature intended to prohibit all handheld functions of wireless telephones while driving" and "to encourage drivers to keep their eyes on the road," said the 6th District Court of Appeal.

A Superior Court panel had reversed a driver's conviction for a traffic infraction and $158 fine in San Jose, ruling that the law prohibited only "actively using or manipulating" a hand-held phone for actions such as talking or listening, browsing the internet or playing video games while driving. The appeals court reinstated the conviction and the fine, in a ruling that could set a statewide standard unless it is narrowed or overturned on appeal.

Automated web-scraping bots seeking training data for AI models are flooding scientific databases and academic journals with traffic volumes that render many sites unusable. The online image repository DiscoverLife, which contains nearly 3 million species photographs, started receiving millions of daily hits in February this year that slowed the site to the point that it no longer loaded, Nature reported Monday.

The surge has intensified since the release of DeepSeek, a Chinese large language model that demonstrated effective AI could be built with fewer computational resources than previously thought. This revelation triggered what industry observers describe as an "explosion of bots seeking to scrape the data needed to train this type of model." The Confederation of Open Access Repositories reported that more than 90% of 66 surveyed members experienced AI bot scraping, with roughly two-thirds suffering service disruptions. Medical journal publisher BMJ has seen bot traffic surpass legitimate user activity, overloading servers and interrupting customer services.

"Chaos ensued on German roads this week after Google Maps wrongly informed drivers that highways throughout the country were closed during a busy holiday," writes Engadget. The problem reportedly only lasted for a few hours and by Thursday afternoon only genuine road closures were being displayed. It's not clear whether Google Maps had just malfunctioned, or if something more nefarious was to blame. "The information in Google Maps comes from a variety of sources. Information such as locations, street names, boundaries, traffic data, and road networks comes from a combination of third-party providers, public sources, and user input," a spokesperson for Google told German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost, adding that it is internally reviewing the problem.

Technical issues with Google Maps are not uncommon. Back in March, users were reporting that their Timeline — which keeps track of all the places you've visited before for future reference — had been wiped, with Google later confirming that some people had indeed had their data deleted, and in some cases, would not be able to recover it.
The Guardian describes German drives "confronted with maps sprinkled with a mass of red dots indicating stop signs," adding "The phenomenon also affected parts of Belgium and the Netherlands." Those relying on Google Maps were left with the impression that large parts of Germany had ground to a halt... The closure reports led to the clogging of alternative routes on smaller thoroughfares and lengthy delays as people scrambled to find detours. Police and road traffic control authorities had to answer a flood of queries as people contacted them for help.

Drivers using or switching to alternative apps, such as Apple Maps or Waze, or turning to traffic news on their radios, were given a completely contrasting picture, reflecting the reality that traffic was mostly flowing freely on the apparently affected routes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The U.S. government today imposed economic sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams known as "pig butchering." In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Funnull was being used as a content delivery network that catered to cybercriminals seeking to route their traffic through U.S.-based cloud providers. "Americans lose billions of dollars annually to these cyber scams, with revenues generated from these crimes rising to record levels in 2024," reads a statement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which sanctioned Funnull and its 40-year-old Chinese administrator Liu Lizhi. "Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses."

The Treasury Department said Funnull's operations are linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI. The agency said Funnull directly facilitated pig butchering and other schemes that resulted in more than $200 million in financial losses by Americans. Pig butchering is a rampant form of fraud wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency trading platforms. Victims are coached to invest more and more money into what appears to be an extremely profitable trading platform, only to find their money is gone when they wish to cash out. The scammers often insist that investors pay additional "taxes" on their crypto "earnings" before they can see their invested funds again (spoiler: they never do), and a shocking number of people have lost six figures or more through these pig butchering scams.

KrebsOnSecurity's January story on Funnull was based on research from the security firm Silent Push, which discovered in October 2024 that a vast number of domains hosted via Funnull were promoting gambling sites that bore the logo of the Suncity Group, a Chinese entity named in a 2024 UN report (PDF) for laundering millions of dollars for the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus. Silent Push found Funnull was a criminal content delivery network (CDN) that carried a great deal of traffic tied to scam websites, funneling the traffic through a dizzying chain of auto-generated domain names and U.S.-based cloud providers before redirecting to malicious or phishous websites. The FBI has released a technical writeup (PDF) of the infrastructure used to manage the malicious Funnull domains between October 2023 and April 2025.

DevNull127 writes: Stack Overflow will test paying experts to answer questions. That's one of many radical experiments they're now trying to stave off an AI-induced death spiral. Questions and answers to the site have plummeted more than 90% since April of 2020. So here's what Stack Overflow will try next.

1. They're bringing back Chat, according to their CEO (to foster "even more connections between our community members" in "an increasingly AI-driven world").

2. They're building a "new Stack Overflow" meant to feel like a personalized portal. "It might collect videos, blogs, Q&A, war stories, jokes, educational materials, jobs... and fold them together into one personalized destination."

3. They're proposing areas more open to discussion, described as "more flexible Stack Exchanges... where users can explore ideas or share opinions."

4. They're also licensing Stack Overflow content to AI companies for training their models.

5. Again, they will test paying experts to answer questions.

International interest in American higher education has plummeted to levels not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new data tracking prospective student behavior online. Studyportals, which operates a global directory of degree programs, reports that clicks on American university courses have reached their lowest point since the early pandemic period.

Weekly page views of US university courses halved between January 5th and the end of April. First-quarter traffic to American undergraduate and master's degree programs fell more than 20% compared to the same period last year, while interest in PhD programs dropped by one-third. India, which supplies nearly a third of America's international students, showed the steepest decline at 40%. The data suggests British universities would be the primary beneficiaries of students looking elsewhere.

The sharp drop in interest follows the Trump administration's escalating restrictions on international students, including stripping Harvard University of its enrollment authority on May 22nd and suspending all new student visa interviews on May 27th. International students contributed $43.8 billion to the American economy during the 2023-24 academic year, with about three-quarters of international PhD students indicating they plan to remain in the country after graduation.

Newark Liberty International Airport has suffered six radar and radio outages in nine months, with the most recent occurring May 9th when controllers told pilots "our scopes just went black again" before handing off flights to other facilities. The outages have forced flight cancellations, diversions, and delays lasting over a week as airlines repositioned aircraft and crews.

The Federal Aviation Administration created the problem by relocating Newark's air traffic control operations from the understaffed N90 facility on Long Island to Philadelphia in 2024. Only 17 of 33 controllers accepted the move despite $100,000 relocation bonuses, leaving operations short-staffed. Rather than build new STARS servers in Philadelphia, the FAA opted to send radar data over 130 miles of commercial copper telephone lines.

The remote feeds have experienced approximately 10 minutes of downtime over 10 months -- exceeding the agency's reliability standards and occurring 200 times more frequently than the FAA's internal analysis predicted. The agency simultaneously laid off over 100 maintenance technicians and telecommunications specialists in February, further straining an air traffic control system that suffers around 700 outages weekly nationwide while managing 16.8 million annual flights with 1990s-era technology.

Wednesday Google security researchers published a preprint demonstrating that 2048-bit RSA encryption "could theoretically be broken by a quantum computer with 1 million noisy qubits running for one week," writes Google's security blog.

"This is a 20-fold decrease in the number of qubits from our previous estimate, published in 2019... " The reduction in physical qubit count comes from two sources: better algorithms and better error correction — whereby qubits used by the algorithm ("logical qubits") are redundantly encoded across many physical qubits, so that errors can be detected and corrected... [Google's researchers found a way to reduce the operations in a 2024 algorithm from 1000x more than previous work to just 2x. And "On the error correction side, the key change is tripling the storage density of idle logical qubits by adding a second layer of error correction."]

Notably, quantum computers with relevant error rates currently have on the order of only 100 to 1000 qubits, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently released standard PQC algorithms that are expected to be resistant to future large-scale quantum computers. However, this new result does underscore the importance of migrating to these standards in line with NIST recommended timelines.
The article notes that Google started using the standardized version of ML-KEM once it became available, both internally and for encrypting traffic in Chrome...

"The initial public draft of the NIST internal report on the transition to post-quantum cryptography standards states that vulnerable systems should be deprecated after 2030 and disallowed after 2035. Our work highlights the importance of adhering to this recommended timeline."

Google's new AI Mode for Search, which is rolling out to everyone in the U.S., has sparked outrage among publishers, who call it "the definition of theft" for using content without fair compensation and without offering a true opt-out option. Internal documents revealed by Bloomberg earlier this week suggest that Google considered giving publishers more control over how their content is used in AI-generated results but ultimately decided against it, prioritizing product functionality over publisher protections.

News/Media Alliance slammed Google for "further depriving publishers of original content both traffic and revenue." Their full statement reads: "Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company." 9to5Google's take: It's not hard to see why Google went the route that it did here. Giving publishers the ability to opt out of AI products while still benefiting from Search would ultimately make Google's flashy new tools useless if enough sites made the switch. It was very much a move in the interest of building a better product.

Does that change anything regarding how Google's AI products in Search cause potential harm to the publishing industry? Nope.

Google's tools continue to serve the company and its users (mostly) well, but as they continue to bleed publishers dry, those publishers are on the verge of vanishing or, arguably worse, turning to cheap and poorly produced content just to get enough views to survive. This is a problem Google needs to address, as it's making the internet as a whole worse for everyone.

Wisk Aero and NASA have signed a new five-year partnership to advance the safe integration of autonomous, all-electric aircraft into U.S. airspace, focusing on urban air mobility and regulated eVTOL flight. Electrek reports: Wisk Aero shared details of its refreshed partnership with NASA this week. The autonomous aviation specialist has signed a new five-year Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement (NRSAA) with the renowned space administration. Per Wisk, this new agreement focuses on critical research led by NASA's Air Traffic Management Exploration (ATM-X) project, which is centered around the advancement of commercialized autonomous aircraft travel under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) in the National Airspace System (NAS).

As a specialist in autonomous, zero-emission aircraft, Wisk intends to continue its research alongside NASA to help regulators determine future eVTOL flight procedures and capabilities in the US. Regulatory developments on the to-do list for the latest NRSAA include optimizing airspace and route designs for highly automated UAM operations, establishing critical aircraft and ground-based safety system requirements for autonomous flight in urban environments, and establishing Air Traffic Control (ATC) communication protocols and procedures for seamless integration of future UAM aircraft. To achieve these goals, Wisk said its research with NASA will more specifically focus on utilizing advanced simulation and Live Virtual Constructive (LVC) flight environments, which combine live flights with a simulated airspace to enable researchers to assess future operations.

The teams from Wisk and NASA already met last month, continuing their research while beginning to determine how instrument flight procedures and advanced technologies can work together to enable safe autonomous passenger flights by 2030. Wisk Aero is a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing based in California. The aerospace manufacturer said last year that it expects its pilotless air-taxi to begin carrying passengers "later in the decade."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: While using website data to build a Google Search topped with artificial intelligence-generated answers, an Alphabet executive acknowledged in an internal document that there was an alternative way to do things: They could ask web publishers for permission, or let them directly opt out of being included. But giving publishers a choice would make training AI models in search too complicated, the company concludes in the document, which was unearthed in the company's search antitrust trial.

It said Google had a "hard red line" and would require all publishers who wanted their content to show up in the search page to also be used to feed AI features. Instead of giving options, Google decided to "silently update," with "no public announcement" about how they were using publishers' data, according to the document, written by Chetna Bindra, a product management executive at Google Search. "Do what we say, say what we do, but carefully." "It's a little bit damning," said Paul Bannister, the chief strategy officer at Raptive, which represents online creators. "It pretty clearly shows that they knew there was a range of options and they pretty much chose the most conservative, most protective of them -- the option that didn't give publishers any controls at all."

For its part, Google said in a statement to Bloomberg: "Publishers have always controlled how their content is made available to Google as AI models have been built into Search for many years, helping surface relevant sites and driving traffic to them. This document is an early-stage list of options in an evolving space and doesn't reflect feasibility or actual decisions." They added that Google continually updates its product documentation for search online.

"The world has changed," writes Stack Overflow's blog. "Fast. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we build, learn, and solve problems. Software development looks dramatically different than it did even a few years ago — and the pace of change is only accelerating."

And they believe their brand "at times" lost "fidelity and clarity. It's very much been always added to and not been thought of holistically. So, it's time for our brand to evolve too," they write, hoping to articulate a perspective "forged in the fires of community, powered by collaboration, shaped by AI, and driven by people."

The developer news site DevClass notes the change happens "as the number of posts to its site continues a dramatic decline thanks to AI-driven alternatives." According to a quick query on the official data explorer, the sum of questions and answers posted in April 2025 was down by over 64 percent from the same month in 2024, and plunged more than 90 percent from April 2020, when traffic was near its peak...

Although declining traffic is a sign of Stack Overflow's reduced significance in the developer community, the company's business is not equally affected so far. Stack Exchange is a business owned by investment company Prosus, and the Stack Exchange products include private versions of its site (Stack Overflow for Teams) as well as advertising and recruitment. According to the Prosus financial results, in the six months ended September 2024, Stack Overflow increased its revenue and reduced its losses. The company's search for a new direction though confirms that the fast-disappearing developer engagement with Stack Overflow poses an existential challenge to the organization.
DevClass says Stack Overflow's parent company "is casting about for new ways to provide value (and drive business) in this context..." The company has already experimented with various new services, via its Labs research department, including an AI Answer Assistant and Question Assistant, as well as a revamped jobs site in association with recruitment site Indeed, Discussions for technical debate, and extensions for GitHub Copilot, Slack, and Visual Studio Code.
From the official announcement on Stack Overflow's blog: This rebrand isn't just a fresh coat of paint. It's a realignment with our purpose: to support the builders of the future in an AI world — with clarity, speed, and humanity. It's about showing up in a way that reflects who we are today, and where we're headed tomorrow.
"We have appointed an internal steering group and we have engaged with an external expert partner in this area to help bring about the required change," notes a post in Stack Exchange's "meta" area. This isn't just about a visual update or marketing exercise — it's going to bring about a shift in how we present ourselves to the world which you will feel everywhere from the design to the copywriting, so that we can better achieve our goals and shared mission. As the emergence of AI has called into question the role of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network, one of the desired outputs of the rebrand process is to clarify our place in the world.

We've done work toward this already — our recent community AMA is an example of this — but we want to ensure that this comes across in our brand and identity as well. We want the community to be involved and have a strong voice in the process of renewing and refreshing our brand. Remember, Stack Overflow started with a public discussion about what to name it!
And another another post two months ago Stack Exchange is exploring early ideas for expanding beyond the "single lane" Q&A highway. Our goal right now is to better understand the problems, opportunities, and needs before deciding on any specific changes...

The vision is to potentially enable:

- A slower lane, with high-quality durable knowledge that takes time to create and curate, like questions and answers.

- A medium lane, for more flexible engagement, with features like Discussions or more flexible Stack Exchanges, where users can explore ideas or share opinions.

- A fast lane for quick, real-time interaction, with features like Chat that can bring the community together to discuss topics instantly.

With this in mind, we're seeking your feedback on the current state of Chat, what's most important to you, and how you see Chat fitting into the future.
In a post in Stack Exchange's "meta" area, brand design director David Longworth says the "tension mentioned between Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange" is probably the most relevant to the rebranding.

But he posted later that "There's a lot of people behind the scenes on this who care deeply about getting this right! Thank you on behalf of myself and the team."

Chegg said on Monday it would lay off about 22% of its workforce, or 248 employees, to cut costs and streamline its operations as students increasingly turn to AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT over traditional edtech platforms. From a report: The company, an online education firm that offers textbook rentals, homework help and tutoring, has been grappling with a decline in web traffic for months and warned that the trend would likely worsen before improving.

Google's expansion of AI Overviews is keeping web traffic confined within its search ecosystem while gradually shifting searches to its Gemini AI platform, Chegg said, adding that other AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic were courting academics with free access to subscriptions. As part of the restructuring announced on Monday, Chegg will also shut its U.S. and Canada offices by the end of the year and aim to reduce its marketing, product development efforts and general and administrative expenses.

Just days after a radar and communications outage at Newark Liberty International Airport, the FAA confirmed a second incident on May 9 that disrupted radar and radio contact for 90 seconds due to a telecom failure at Philadelphia TRACON. "As of 12:30PM ET, FlightAware stats showed 292 total delays for flights into or out of Newark, which is also experiencing delays due to runway construction," reports The Verge. From the report: After the first outage on April 28th, an air traffic controller who had been on duty that day told CNN it "...was the most dangerous situation you could have." CNN reports that after a change made last July, the airport's radar and radio communication flows over a single data feed from a facility in New York, where controllers used to manage Newark's flights, to Philadelphia.

The FAA has announced a plan to replace the current copper connection with fiber, as well as adding "three new, high-bandwidth telecommunications connections between the New York-based STARS and the Philadelphia TRACON," and more air traffic controllers. Until those and other changes are made, the agency also said a new backup system is being deployed in Philadelphia, but it's unclear when that will be available.

NBC News reports the Friday outage affected a limited number of sectors, but it's another incident in the string of issues that have highlighted the problems with the airport's aging control system and lack of staffing. [...] A statement from the FAA said, "Frequent equipment and telecommunications outages can be stressful for controllers. Some controllers at the Philadelphia TRACON who work Newark arrivals and departures have taken time off to recover from the stress of multiple recent outages."

Researchers are sounding alarms about the proliferation of AI-generated content -- dubbed "slop" -- that may be overwhelming the internet's human-created material. Fil Menczer, distinguished professor of informatics at Indiana University, who has studied social bots since the early 2010s, is now expressing serious concern about generative AI's impact. "Am I worried? Yes, I'm very worried," he told Bloomberg.

Another research from Georgetown University found over 100 Facebook pages with millions of followers using AI-generated images for scams. According to Tollbit, a company that helps publishers get compensated when their sites are scraped, web scraping volume doubled from Q3 to Q4 2024, causing significant strain on sites like Wikipedia during high-traffic events.

The situation creates a dangerous feedback loop where AI content is generated to please AI recommendation systems, potentially marginalizing human creators. Jeff Allen of the Integrity Institute told Bloomberg this resembles "the algae bloom that can blow up and suffocate the life you would want to have in a healthy ecosystem."

In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned that AI is breaking the economic model of the web by decoupling content creation from value, with platforms like Google and OpenAI increasingly providing answers without driving traffic to original sources. He argued that unless AI companies start compensating creators, the web's content ecosystem will collapse -- calling most current AI investment a "money fire" with only a small fraction holding long-term value. Search Engine Land reports: Google's value exchange with content creators has collapsed, Prince said: "Ten years ago... for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. ... That was the trade. ... Now, it takes six pages scraped to get one visitor." That drop reflects the rise of zero-click searches, which happen when searchers get answers directly on Google's search page. "Today, 75 percent of the queries... get answered without you leaving Google." This trend, long criticized by publishers and SEOs, is part of a broader concern: AI companies are using original content to generate answers that rarely/never drive traffic back to creators.

AI makes the problem worse. Large language models (LLMs) are accelerating the crisis, Prince said. AI companies scrape far more content per user interaction than Google ever has -- with even less return to creators. "What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250 to one. What do you think it is for Anthropic? Six thousand to one." "More and more the answers... won't lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source." This situation threatens the sustainability of the web as we know it, Prince said: "If content creators can't derive value... then they're not going to create original content."

The modern web is breaking. AI companies are aware of the problem, and the business model of the web can't survive unless there's some change, Prince said: "Sam Altman at OpenAI and others get that. But... he can't be the only one paying for content when everyone else gets it for free." Cloudflare's right in the middle of this problem -- it powers 80% of AI companies and a 20-30% of the web. Cloudfaire is now trying to figure out how to help fix what's broken, Prince said. AI = money fire. Prince is not against AI. However, he said he is skeptical of the investment frenzy. "I would guess that 99% of the money that people are spending on these projects today is just getting lit on fire. But 1% is going to be incredibly valuable." "And so maybe we've all got a light, you know, $100 on fire to find that $1 that matters." You can watch a recording of the interview and read the full transcript here.

Google has pushed back against Apple executive Eddy Cue's testimony that Safari searches declined last month, asserting it continues "to see overall query growth in Search" with "an increase in total queries coming from Apple's devices and platforms."

The statement comes as Apple's Senior VP revealed under oath that the company is "actively looking at" revamping Safari to focus on AI-powered search engines, potentially threatening the estimated $20 billion-a-year deal making Google the default search provider on Apple devices.

Cue testified that AI search providers including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic will "eventually replace standard search engines." Google, in its response, pointed to ongoing enhancements to its search product, noting users are "accessing it for new things and in new ways, whether from browsers or the Google app, using their voice or Google Lens."

Amazon's Zoox said it has issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis after a crash in Las Vegas last month. CNBC reports: The recall surrounds a defect with the vehicle's automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing "the risk of a crash," according to a report submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on May 1. Zoox submitted the recall after an April 8 incident in Las Vegas in which an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, the NHTSA report states. There were no injuries in the crash and only minor damage occurred to both vehicles.

"After analysis and rigorous testing, Zoox identified the root cause," the company said in a blog post. "We issued a software update that was implemented across all Zoox vehicles. All Zoox vehicles on the road today, including our purpose-built robotaxi and test fleet, have the updated software." Zoox paused all driverless vehicle operations while it reviewed the incident. It has since resumed operations after rolling out the software update.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Teslarati: Waymo Driver is already reducing severe crashes and enhancing the safety of vulnerable road users. As per a new research paper set for publication in the Traffic Injury Prevention Journal, Waymo Driver had outperformed human drivers in safety, particularly for vulnerable road users (VRUs). Over 56.7 million miles, compared to human drivers, Waymo Driver achieved a 92% reduction in pedestrian injury crashes. It also saw 82% fewer crashes with injuries with cyclists and 82% fewer crashes with injuries with motorcyclists. Waymo Driver also slashed injury-involving intersection crashes by 96%, which are a leading cause of severe road harm for human drivers. Waymo Driver saw 85% fewer crashes with suspected serious or worse injuries as well. "It's encouraging to see real-world data showing Waymo outperforming human drivers when it comes to safety. Fewer crashes and fewer injuries -- especially for people walking and biking -- is exactly the kind of progress we want to see from autonomous vehicles," said Jonathan Adkins, Chief Executive Officer at Governors Highway Safety Association.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider: A Lufthansa flight carrying 461 passengers had to divert after someone's tablet became "jammed" in a business-class seat.

The Airbus A380 took off from Los Angeles on Wednesday, bound for Munich, and had been flying for around three hours when the pilots diverted to Boston Logan International Airport. In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the tablet had become "jammed in a Business Class seat" and had "already shown visible signs of deformation due to the seat's movements" when the flight diverted. [The aviation site] Simply Flying, which first reported the news, said the device was an iPad.

The decision to divert was taken "to eliminate any potential risk, particularly with regard to possible overheating," the spokesperson added, saying that it was the joint decision of the crew and air traffic control. Lithium batteries pose a safety risk if damaged, punctured, or crushed... In a confined space like an aircraft cabin, a lithium battery fire poses a serious hazard to the passengers onboard. Last year, a Breeze Airways flight from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh had to make an emergency landing in Albuquerque after a passenger's laptop caught fire.