The National Reconnaissance Office, the agency overseeing the US government's fleet of spy satellites, has declassified a decades-old program used to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union's military communication signals.

The program was codenamed Jumpseat, and its existence was already public knowledge through leaks and contemporary media reports. What's new is the NRO's description of the program's purpose, development, and pictures of the satellites themselves.

In a statement, the NRO called Jumpseat "the United States’ first-generation, highly elliptical orbit (HEO) signals-collection satellite."

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Complaining about Windows 11 is a popular sport among tech enthusiasts on the Internet, whether you're publicly switching to Linux , publishing guides about the dozens of things you need to do to make the OS less annoying, or getting upset because you were asked to sign in to an app after clicking a sign-in button.

Despite the negativity surrounding the current version of Windows, it remains the most widely used operating system on the world's desktop and laptop computers, and people usually prefer to stick to what they're used to. As a result, Windows 11 has just cleared a big milestone—Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's most recent earnings call ( via The Verge ) that Windows 11 now has over 1 billion users worldwide.

Windows 11 also reached that milestone just a few months quicker than Windows 10 did—1,576 days after its initial public launch on October 5, 2021. Windows 10 took 1,692 days to reach the same milestone, based on its July 29, 2015, general availability date and Microsoft's announcement on March 16, 2020.

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At this point, we've all heard plenty of stories about AI chatbots leading users to harmful actions , harmful beliefs , or simply incorrect information . Despite the prevalence of these stories, though, it's hard to know just how often users are being manipulated. Are these tales of AI harms anecdotal outliers or signs of a frighteningly common problem?

Anthropic took a stab at answer ingthat question this week, releasing a paper studying the potential for what it calls "disempowering patterns" across 1.5 million anonymized real-world conversations with its Claude AI model. While the results show that these kinds of manipulative patterns are relatively rare as a percentage of all AI conversations, they still represent a potentially large problem on an absolute basis.

A rare but growing problem

In the newly published paper "Who’s in Charge? Disempowerment Patterns in Real-World LLM Usage," researchers from Anthropic and the University of Toronto try to quantify the potential for a specific set of "user disempowering" harms by identifying three primary ways that a chatbot can negatively impact a user's thoughts or actions:

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Last year, Google showed off Genie 3 , an updated version of its AI world model with impressive long-term memory that allowed it to create interactive worlds from a simple text prompt. At the time, Google only provided Genie to a small group of trusted testers. Now, it's available more widely as Project Genie, but only for those paying for Google's most expensive AI subscription.

World models are exactly what they sound like—an AI that generates a dynamic environment on the fly. They're not technically 3D worlds, though. World models like Genie 3 create a video that responds to your control inputs, allowing you to explore the simulation as if it were a real virtual world. Genie 3 was a breakthrough in world models because it could remember details of the world it was creating for a much longer time. But in this context, a "long time" is a couple of minutes.

Project Genie is essentially a cleaned-up version of Genie 3, which plugs into updated AI models like Nano Banana Pro and Gemini 3. Google has a number of pre-built worlds available in Project Genie, but it's the ability to create new things that makes it interesting. You can provide an image for reference or simply tell Genie what you want from the environment and the character.

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In April 2025, Comcast President Mike Cavanagh bemoaned that the company's cable broadband division was "not winning in the marketplace” amid increased competition from fiber and fixed wireless Internet service providers.

Cavanagh identified some problems that had been obvious to Comcast customers for many years: Its prices aren’t transparent enough and rise too frequently, and dealing with the company is too difficult. Comcast sought to fix the problems with a five-year price guarantee, one year of free Xfinity Mobile service for home Internet customers, and plans with unlimited data instead of punitive data caps. But the company is still losing broadband customers at a higher-than-expected rate.

In Q4 2025 earnings announced today , Comcast reported a net loss of 181,000 residential and business broadband customers in the US. The loss consists of 178,000 residential Internet customers and 3,000 business customers.

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A Texas fight with a nurse practitioner may eventually push the Supreme Court to settle an intensifying battle between states with strict abortion-ban laws and those with shield laws to protect abortion providers supporting out-of-state patients.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused Debra Lynch, a Delaware-based nurse practitioner, of breaking Texas laws by shipping abortion pills that Lynch once estimated last January facilitated "up to 162 abortions per week" in the state.

"No one, regardless of where they live, will be freely allowed to aid in the murder of unborn children in Texas," Paxton's press release said.

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Ice fishing is a longstanding tradition in Nordic countries, with competitions proving especially popular. Those competitions can also tell scientists something about how social cues influence how we make foraging decisions, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.

Humans are natural foragers in even the most extreme habitats, digging up tubers in the tropics, gathering mushrooms, picking berries, hunting seals in the Arctic, and fishing to meet our dietary needs. Human foraging is sufficiently complex that scientists believe that meeting so many diverse challenges helped our species develop memory, navigational abilities, social learning skills, and similar advanced cognitive functions.

Researchers are interested in this question not just because it could help refine existing theories of social decision-making, but also could improve predictions about how different groups of humans might respond and adapt to changes in their environment. Per the authors, prior research in this area has tended to focus on solitary foragers operating in a social vacuum. And even when studying social foraging decisions, it's typically done using computational modeling and/or in the laboratory.

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Two security professionals who were arrested in 2019 after performing an authorized security assessment of a county courthouse in Iowa will receive $600,000 to settle a lawsuit they brought alleging wrongful arrest and defamation.

The case was brought by Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, two penetration testers who at the time were employed by Colorado-based security firm Coalfire Labs. The men had written authorization from the Iowa Judicial Branch to conduct “red-team” exercises, meaning attempted security breaches that mimic techniques used by criminal hackers or burglars.

The objective of such exercises is to test the resilience of existing defenses using the types of real-world attacks the defenses are designed to repel. The rules of engagement for this exercise explicitly permitted “physical attacks,” including “lockpicking,” against judicial branch buildings so long as they didn’t cause significant damage.

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On Tuesday, OpenAI released a free AI-powered workspace for scientists. It's called Prism, and it has drawn immediate skepticism from researchers who fear the tool will accelerate the already overwhelming flood of low-quality papers into scientific journals. The launch coincides with growing alarm among publishers about what many are calling "AI slop" in academic publishing.

To be clear, Prism is a writing and formatting tool, not a system for conducting research itself, though OpenAI's broader pitch blurs that line.

Prism integrates OpenAI's GPT-5.2 model into a LaTeX-based text editor (a standard used for typesetting documents), allowing researchers to draft papers, generate citations, create diagrams from whiteboard sketches, and collaborate with co-authors in real time. The tool is free for anyone with a ChatGPT account.

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