Ukraine and SpaceX say they recently collaborated to stop strikes by Russian drones using Starlink and will soon block all unregistered use of Starlink terminals in an attempt to stop Russia's military from using the satellite broadband network over Ukraine territory.

Ukrainians will soon be required to register their Starlink terminals to get on a whitelist. After that, "only verified and registered terminals will be allowed to operate in the country. All others will be disconnected," the Ukraine Ministry of Defense said in a press release today.

Ukraine Minister of Defense Mykhailo Fedorov "emphasized that the only technical solution to counter this threat is to introduce a 'whitelist' and authorize all terminals," according to the ministry. "This is a necessary step by the Government to save Ukrainian lives and protect critical energy infrastructure," Fedorov said.

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The Trump administration is no fan of renewable energy, but it reserves special ire for wind power. Trump himself has repeatedly made false statements about the cost of wind power, its use around the world, and its environmental impacts. That animosity was paired with an executive order that blocked all permitting for offshore wind and some land-based projects, an order that has since been thrown out by a court that ruled it arbitrary and capricious.

Not content to block all future developments, the administration has also gone after the five offshore wind projects currently under construction. After temporarily blocking two of them for reasons that were never fully elaborated, the Department of the Interior settled on a single justification for blocking turbine installation: a classified national security risk .

The response to that late-December announcement has been uniform: The companies building each of the projects sued the administration. As of Monday, every single one of them has achieved the same result: a temporary injunction that allows them to continue construction. This, despite the fact that the suits were filed in three different courts and heard by four different judges.

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Infrastructure delivering updates for Notepad++—a widely used text editor for Windows—was compromised for six months by suspected China-state hackers who used their control to deliver backdoored versions of the app to select targets, developers said Monday.

“I deeply apologize to all users affected by this hijacking,” the author of a post published to the official notepad-plus-plus.org site wrote Monday. The post said that the attack began last June with an “infrastructure-level compromise that allowed malicious actors to intercept and redirect update traffic destined for notepad-plus-plus.org.” The attackers, whom multiple investigators tied to the Chinese government, then selectively redirected certain targeted users to malicious update servers where they received backdoored updates. Notepad++ didn’t regain control of its infrastructure until December.

Hands-on keyboard hacking

Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compromised until September 2. Even then, the attackers maintained credentials to the internal services until December 2, a capability that allowed them to continue redirecting selected update traffic to malicious servers. The threat actor “specifically targeted Notepad++ domain with the goal of exploiting insufficient update verification controls that existed in older versions of Notepad++.” Event logs indicate that the hackers tried to re-exploit one of the weaknesses after it was fixed but that the attempt failed.

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cracked down on lead-based products—including lead paint and leaded gasoline—in the 1970s because of its toxic effects on human health. Scientists at the University of Utah have analyzed human hair samples spanning nearly 100 years and found a 100-fold decrease in lead concentrations, concluding that this regulatory action was highly effective in achieving its stated objectives. They described their findings in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We've known about the dangers of lead exposure for a very long time—arguably since the second century BCE—so why conduct this research now? Per the authors, it's because there are growing concerns over the Trump administration's move last year to deregulate many key elements of the EPA's mission. Lead specifically has not yet been deregulated, but there are hints that there could be a loosening of enforcement of the 2024 Lead and Cooper rule requiring water systems to replace old lead pipes.

“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,” said co-author Thure Cerling . “Sometimes they seem onerous and mean that industry can't do exactly what they'd like to do when they want to do it or as quickly as they want to do it. But it's had really, really positive effects.”

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The ongoing AI-fueled shortages of memory and storage chips has hit RAM kits and SSDs for PC builders the fastest and hardest, meaning it's likely that, for other products that use these chips, we'll be seeing price hikes for the entire rest of the year, if not for longer.

The latest price hike news comes courtesy of Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton, who announced today that the company would be raising prices on most of its single-board computers for the second time in two months.

Prices are going up for all Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 boards with 2GB of more of LPDDR4 RAM, including the Compute Module 4 and 5 and the Raspberry Pi 500 computer-inside-a-keyboard. The 2GB boards' pricing will go up by $10, 4GB boards will go up by $15, 8GB boards will go up by $30, and 16GB boards will increase by a whopping $60.

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On Friday, a judge ruled that the Trump administration violated the law in forming its Climate Working Group, which released a report that was intended to undercut the rationale behind greenhouse gas regulations. The judge overseeing the case determined that the government tried to treat the Climate Working Group as a formal advisory body, while not having it obey many of the statutory requirements that govern such bodies.

While the Department of Energy (DOE) later disbanded the Climate Working Group in the hopes of avoiding legal scrutiny, documents obtained during the proceedings have now revealed the group's electronic communications. As such, the judge ruled that the trial itself had essentially overcome the government's illegal attempts to hide those communications.

Legal and scientific flaws

The whole saga derives from a Supreme Court Ruling that compelled the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate the risks posed to the US public by greenhouse gases. During the Obama administration, this resulted in an endangerment finding that created the foundation for the EPA to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. The science underlying the endangerment finding was so solid that it was left unchallenged during the first Trump administration.

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The Epstein files released by the Department of Justice on Friday included at least a few dozen unredacted nude photos and names of at least 43 victims, according to news reports.

The DOJ missed a December 19 deadline set by the Epstein Files Transparency Act by more than a month, but still released the files without fully redacting nude photos and names of Jeffrey Epstein's victims. The New York Times reported yesterday that it found "nearly 40 unredacted images that appeared to be part of a personal photo collection, showing both nude bodies and the faces of the people portrayed."

While the people in the photos were young, "it was unclear whether they were minors," the article said. "Some of the images seemed to show Mr. Epstein’s private island, including a beach. Others were taken in bedrooms and other private spaces." The photos "appeared to show at least seven different people," the article said.

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Intel's Core Ultra lineup of desktop and laptop processors has been frustrating to review. None of them has been across-the-board awful or totally without redeeming qualities. But Intel has struggled mightily this decade to produce new processors that are straightforward, easy-to-recommend improvements over their predecessors.

The company's 12th- and 13th-generation Core chips offered big boosts to CPU performance over the 11th-generation CPUs, for example, but they also usually came with a significant hit to battery life, and they only minimally improved the GPU. The first-generation Core Ultra chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, improved the GPU but couldn't beat the CPU performance of older chips. Last year's Core Ultra 200V series, codenamed Lunar Lake, boasted good battery life and solid graphics performance but weaker CPU performance; better-performing Core Ultra 200H chips (codenamed Arrow Lake) improved CPU performance but came with lesser GPUs and some other missing features .

The Core Ultra Series 3 processors, codenamed Panther Lake, finally put an end to the years of uneven zig-zagging advancement we've seen in the last half-decade.

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A debilitating infection from the parasitic Guinea worm is inching closer to global eradication, with an all-time low of only 10 human cases reported worldwide in 2025, the Carter Center announced .

If health workers can fully wipe out the worms, it will be only the second human disease to be eradicated, after smallpox.

Guinea worm ( Dracunculus medinensis ) is a parasitic nematode transmitted in water. More specifically, it's found in waters that contain small crustacean copepods, which harbor the worm's larvae. If a person consumes water contaminated with Guinea worm, the parasites burrow through the intestinal tract and migrate through the body. About a year later, a spaghetti noodle-length worm emerges from a painful blister, usually in the feet or legs. It can take up to eight weeks for the adult worm to fully emerge. To ease the searing pain, infected people may put their blistered limbs in water, allowing the parasite to release more larvae and continue the cycle.

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