Ruf has come quite a long way from its roots as a tuner of Porsches. The German company (no doubt familiar to those of us in the Playstation Generation as Gran Turismo 2 's workaround because someone else owned the video game rights to the real 911) has evolved past that stage and now builds cars of its own design. And today at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England, it fired up a brand-new engine for the first time in public.

In fact, the German authorities have considered Ruf a distinct manufacturer (as opposed to a tuner) for some time—the BTR in 1983 was the first to carry a Ruf vehicle identification number rather than the one that Porsche originally stamped on the chassis. Then in 2007, it revealed the CTR3. The Porsche DNA was clear, but the CTR3 was mid-engined, unlike the rear-engined 911, and featured a frame chassis developed by Ruf together with Multimatic.

More recently, it has been building its own all-carbon monocoque chassis for cars like the SCR and Rodeo, which otherwise look like 964-era Porsche 911s. Those still use horizontally opposed six-cylinder engines, but for its next generation of cars it seems Ruf wanted something a little different.

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Robotaxi companies have thrived in California, where the good weather, enthusiasm for technology, and sophisticated labor force have supported their growth for nearly two decades. But a delayed decision from a state regulatory agency is now slowing Alphabet’s subsidiary Waymo, the US leader in driverless robotaxi service.

The holdup means that Waymo isn’t yet allowed to expand into parts of Northern and Southern California. And, in an upside for riders, Waymo still isn’t able to charge California passengers for rides in its new vehicle, a pale blue Chinese-made car it’s calling the Ojai, which started picking up riders last month.

If Waymo continues to operate these vehicles in its driverless ride-hail service, they could be gratis until the end of September and perhaps beyond. (The company continues to charge for rides in its Jaguar I-Pace robotaxis, which make up the majority of its fleet.)
Unlike other states that allow robotaxis to launch testing operations and later public service without much, if any, oversight, California doesn’t allow the vehicles to hit the roads without permission. To put their autonomous vehicles on the road, companies require approval from the state Department of Motor Vehicles. They also need permission from the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates taxi and other transportation services, to carry paying passengers. Credit: Waymo

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This week the US Space Force brought two more companies into the pool of bidders eligible to compete for its launch contracts—Impulse Space and Relativity Space. For a rocket company, cracking into the lucrative US military launch market is both a sign of maturity, as well as an important source of revenue.

The inclusion of Relativity Space, which is making credible progress toward the launch of its heavy-lift Terran R rocket, is perhaps not a huge surprise. Under the leadership of former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, the company has continued to work toward bringing the partly reusable rocket to the launch pad.

The addition of Impulse Space, however, was something of a surprise. The company specializes in building spacecraft for in-space operations, rather than launching from Earth.

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It wasn't easy to find anyone outside of SpaceX clamoring for a rocket like Starship just 10 years ago. Today, the space industry can't wait for Starship to finally deliver .

With a payload capacity of more than 100 metric tons (220,000 pounds) to low-Earth orbit, SpaceX's new rocket is changing the thinking of just about everyone in the space industry. With the unrealized but potentially game-changing benefits of refueling, Starship could carry the same amount of payload to higher orbits, the Moon, or Mars.

It's important to note that Starship is still very much in its experimental phase, far from proving Elon Musk's loftiest claims about what it can do. Still, NASA and the US military are considering novel ways to use Starship to fly to the Moon or transport cargo to far-flung war zones. Scientists are eager to use its enormous volume to launch giant space telescopes. Competitors are taking notice . China, the strongest strategic adversary America has ever faced, is looking for its own Starship . Now, some US satellite manufacturers are adapting for the substantial capacity of the world's most powerful rocket.

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Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. They don't need to use generative AI to cheat on exams; they could just learn the material. But they also tend to be competitive, ambitious, and overscheduled, so AI can look like an easy shortcut that makes more time in their lives for things that can't be done by a chatbot. When the pressure is on, which approach do they choose?

A new scandal at Brown University reveals that huge numbers of these students are likely to cheat.

Record scores

A recent survey of Princeton students found that 29.9 percent admitted to cheating with AI on at least one exam or assignment. But the recent situation at Brown gives us a better sense of what this kind of cheating looks like in one particular class—and just how much it may be substituting for actual learning. And we know all this because the blind economics professor at the center of it all, Roberto Serrano, is not letting it go.

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One of the most horrific cases of allegedly Grok-generated child sex images was shared in a proposed class action lawsuit that was expanded Tuesday. Now, young girls not only accuse X and xAI of building toxic AI "nudify" tools but also of shielding child predators by obstructing police investigations into Grok-generated child sex abuse materials (CSAM).

In March, a girl’s stepfather took his own life after cops discovered that he had used Grok to create 7,000 sexually explicit images using one photo taken when his stepdaughter was 11 years old, the amended complaint alleged.

Grok allowed the man to generate extreme images depicting incest and rape without flagging any harmful behavior, the complaint said. Seemingly, xAI’s child safety system only intervened after the man input a prompt for “gang rape.” That request sent a CyberTip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which alerted law enforcement to the AI CSAM.

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Kalshi lost an attempt to override New York's state gambling laws yesterday, with a federal judge rejecting the prediction market operator's request to prevent enforcement of the rules.

Kalshi is appealing the decision to a higher court. This is one of numerous cases in which judges must decide whether state laws are preempted by federal regulation of prediction markets.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James issued a joint statement on the ruling today. “New York’s gambling laws are designed to protect consumers," they said. "Kalshi tried to ignore them. Yesterday, they lost in court. We will continue to hold all gambling platforms accountable to the law—and that includes prediction markets.”

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A Linux vulnerability that allows untrusted virtual machines to gain root access to host machines is one of two high-severity flaws to surface this week in the open source operating system.

The vulnerability resides in KVM, which is, in essence, a virtual machine app included in the kernel of many Linux distributions. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-53359, allows guest virtual machines—such as those used in cloud platforms to isolate one user’s instance from the host OS and other user instances—to break out of that container.

Januscape: A threat to cloud platforms

The vulnerability affects KVM running on both AMD and Intel processors. It exploits bugs residing in the KVM guest-side , the portion of the VM that consists of only resources like the OS or drivers present in the guest VM, rather than resources present on the host machine. The threat went unnoticed in the Linux kernel for 16 years.

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Last week, thousands of SamKnows routers were bricked after a government program ran its course.

In 2020, as part of a program conducted by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian government's chief competition regulator, thousands of volunteers received routers to help test and report on the typical speed and performance of broadband plans in Australia. (More specifically, the Measuring Broadband Australia (MBA) program targeted fixed-line broadband services provided over the NBN, Australia's government-owned wholesale open-access broadband network, as well as services delivered over other access networks.)

According to the final report that the ACCC distributed, the routers are whiteboxes that were “supplied by SamKnows” and that “perform tests to measure internet performance using test servers maintained by SamKnows and hosted in Australia.”

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