In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.

More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.

This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7 , which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and "anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump's counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.

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I'm not suggesting that a man like Pope Leo—the Vicar of Christ, the Bishop of Rome, the Servant of the Servants of God—would stoop to anything quite so base as "trolling" the onetime PayPal co-founder and current Antichrist alarmist Peter Thiel. But I'm also not not suggesting it, if you see what I mean.

How else to explain the novel appearance of Gandalf—yes, the pipe-smoking wizard!—in the pages of one of Catholicism's most important documents, a major papal encyclical about AI and technology ? Perhaps Leo, who was born and raised in Chicago before spending decades in Peru, is simply a big J.R.R. Tolkien buff who can't get enough of magic rings, Eldar lore, and tricksy little hobbitses. Or perhaps Leo is sending a message.

In his new encyclical, released yesterday , Leo quotes one literary character in the entire 40,000-word document. It's Gandalf, doling out some of his wisdom in a scene from Return of the King : “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”

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SpaceX and the Pentagon have been bickering about the price of using Starshield satellite service during the Iran war, according to a Reuters report published today. It appears that SpaceX asked the military for more money after it started using satellite terminals on "kamikaze" attack drones in Iran.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claimed the Reuters report is wrong. But Musk also said the military drones initially used the commercial Starlink service instead of the government-specific network, in violation of Starlink's terms of service. Musk blamed the violation on the contractor that built the drones for the government.

The Reuters report, based on Pentagon documents and interviews with sources familiar with the pricing talks, said that SpaceX recently asked the military to pay $25,000 for Starshield access on each kamikaze drone. The Pentagon, which previously paid $5,000 for each connection, objected to the price hike but ultimately agreed to pay it, according to Reuters.

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NASA officials announced contract awards for the initial elements of a lunar base on Tuesday, including two rovers that will provide mobility to astronauts.

With the series of announcements, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sought to maintain momentum around a Moon Base initiative revealed two months ago as part of the space agency's return to the Moon. "For those waiting patiently, the grand return is close at hand, and we will not slow down," he said.

The manager for the lunar base, Carlos Garcia-Galan, said the space agency had selected two companies, Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, to build approximately one-ton rovers that would be ready for delivery to the Moon in 2028. Astrolab will receive $219 million for its "CLV-1" rover, and Lunar Outpost $220 million for its "Pegasus" rover, building upon initial contracts awarded two years ago . Each rover is expected to have a range of 200 km and be capable of driving autonomously, with guidance from operators on Earth, in addition to being driven by astronauts.

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It seems fair to say that Apple's MacBook Neo took the rest of the PC industry by surprise. Companies are used to competing on price and features with $1,000-and-up Apple laptops like the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, but their $600 and $700 models usually come with cut corners and compromises that are more noticeable than the Neo's. The CEO of Asus admitted to being surprised by the laptop's price (while simultaneously trying to downplay the Neo's value); a Microsoft-backed study comparing PCs to the MacBook Neo included several laptops that can't compete with the Neo's price unless they're deeply discounted.

In the last couple of weeks, we've started to see a more intentional and targeted response to the MacBook Neo from PC makers. These mostly seem to revolve around Intel's low-end Core Series 3 processors , codenamed Wildcat Lake; while Intel's last few generations of low-end chips have mostly been rebrands of older and less power-efficient parts, Wildcat Lake is a new purpose-built budget chip that benefits from Intel's latest CPU and GPU architectures and its 18A manufacturing process. This should help these chips compete better with the Apple A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo.

Many early Wildcat Lake systems have already been announced, though not all have included a price tag, and several have only been announced for the Chinese market as of this writing. Lenovo is planning to launch some IdeaPad Slim models with the new processors, with some optional spec upgrades including 16GB of RAM and a 120 Hz high-refresh-rate display. Asus and HP have also announced some early products.

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Millions of AI agents and tools around the world have been imperiled by a critical vulnerability that can allow hackers to breach the servers running them and make off with sensitive data and credentials to third-party accounts, a security researcher is warning.

The vulnerability is present in Starlette, an open source framework that its developer says receives 325 million downloads per week. Thousands of other open source projects are also vulnerable because they require Starlette to work. The framework is an implementation of the ASGI (asynchronous server gateway interface), which allows large numbers of requests to be efficiently processed simultaneously. Starlette is the base of FastAPI and other widely used frameworks for building services in Python apps, as well as many others.

Trivial to exploit, millions of servers exposed

ASGI, and by extension Starlette, have access to servers running the MCP (model context protocol), which allows AI agents from major providers to access external sources, including user data bases, email and calendar accounts, and all manner of other resources. To connect with these external systems, MCP servers store credentials for each one, making them especially valuable storehouses for attackers to breach.

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Planet Earth has some pretty great qualities going for it. (Negative reviews mostly revolve around the staff and clientele.) Pretty high on the list of positives is a richly oxygenated atmosphere. But that’s something that evolved and built up over a couple billion years, only eventually resulting in a world conducive to animal life like us.

Scientists have many ideas about what could have caused oxygen to increase, and it seems that a number of them are probably correct . No one thing in isolation seems to explain it. Life is part of the story, with photosynthetic life pumping out oxygen. The chemistry of the solid Earth also had a role to play, both through supporting photosynthetic life and through reactions that can shuttle oxygen between the atmosphere and rocks deep inside the Earth.

A new study led by Wei Shi of the Chengdu University of Technology suggests that evidence of changes in the subduction of tectonic plates—the process by which they disappear down into Earth’s interior—lines up with the timing of jumps in oxygen levels.

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The earliest arrests under the Take It Down Act (TIDA) suggest that cops don't have to work too hard to identify people illegally posting and selling nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes of women online.

Last week, the FBI arrested two men after visiting porn websites and clicking on hashtags like #AI #Deepfakes or video titles like "AI_tits" or "Ass_AI."

One suspect accused of violating TIDA was 20-year-old Arturo Hernandez. He allegedly posted 113 albums viewed nearly a million times featuring AI-generated sexualized images and videos of approximately 50 women. Victims included political figures, actresses, and musicians, as well as women who are not public figures, such as female individuals who attended his Texas high school and an Instagram friend.

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A $2,500 pair of humanoid robot legs built from 3D-printed parts and off-the-shelf components is not going to win marathons just yet. But such relatively inexpensive hardware could enable researchers to more easily test and train AI-powered robotics software in a physical body during real-world experiments.

The newly available LeRobot Humanoid project comes from the machine learning and AI development platform Hugging Face . The full-stack release gives robot builders and researchers access to a bill of materials, files for 3D-printable parts, wiring documentation, and physical assembly instructions—but it also includes software tools for calibrating and controlling the robot in both the physical body and in simulation.

“If you are looking for the most advanced humanoid robot, this is not it,” according to Virgile Batto , a robotics engineer at Hugging Face, in a blog post coauthored with other colleagues. “If you are looking for a humanoid you can build, understand, repair, instrument, simulate, and use for learning experiments, this is the robot we are trying to make.”

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