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      Netflix trying to "poison regulators" about WBD merger, Paramount lawyer claims

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 June 2026

    Paramount Skydance is accusing Netflix of maintaining a campaign against its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).

    In a June 5 letter (PDF) addressed to Jared A. Hughes, acting section chief of the Media, Entertainment, and Communications Section of the US Department of Justice's (DOJ's) Antitrust Division, and A. Maya Kahn, a trial attorney for the Antitrust Division, and first reported on by Politico today, Paramount chief legal officer Makan Delrahim accused Netflix of trying to influence stakeholders about the merger. The letter reads:

    Indeed, Netflix’s panic-level response and scorched-earth campaign to try and poison regulators and other stakeholders against the Transaction shows just how seriously Netflix takes Paramount as a scaled competitor.

    The letter from Delrahim, a former assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division, is a response to a letter that The International Brotherhood of Teamsters sent to the DOJ in March. The teamsters' letter argued that Paramount and WBD's merger would threaten film and TV workers. The union, which has 1.3 million members, asked the DOJ to block the merger "unless substantial and enforceable safeguards are put in place to increase domestic production and protect jobs," per an announcement from the group.

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      Anthropic says these topics are too dangerous to let its Fable 5 model talk about

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 June 2026 • 1 minute

    Anthropic Tuesday publicly released Claude Fable 5 , its first "Mythos-class" model that it says surpasses its previous frontier Opus models in overall capabilities. But the model's launch today comes with safeguards designed to prevent it from answering queries on topics like cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry, where the company has publicly worried about its potential impact to "uplift" malicious actors.

    Anthropic says Fable 5 operates on the "same underlying model" as Mythos 5, which is coming out of its monthslong "Mythos Preview" period today, but only for "a small group of cyberdefenders" judged trustworthy through the existing Project Glasswing . Unlike Mythos 5, though, the publicly accessible Fable 5 is designed to funnel queries on certain sensitive topics to the earlier Claude Opus 4.8 model and to warn the user when this is happening.

    Among the many claimed benchmark improvements for Fable 5, the one related to cybersecurity was a particularly large jump. Credit: Anthropic

    Anthropic said it has tuned these safeguards to be "stricter than ideal," meaning the system may occasionally refuse "harmless requests" in a way that it acknowledges may be frustrating for regular users. But Anthropic says such false positives come up in less than five percent of all sessions in testing, and were worth it to avoid situations where Mythos could give malicious actors assistance in "causing serious harm that they couldn’t have received from other sources."

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      Google announces Gemini 3.5 Live Translate for instant voice-to-voice translation

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 June 2026 • 1 minute

    Google has been chasing real-time translation for years, which it says has been one of its "pioneering machine learning experiments." We've seen numerous demos on stage at Google events in the past, but you needed Google phones, earbuds, or some other specific setup. Last year, Google brought real-time translation to more users in the Translate app, and now it's expanding availability more. With the release of Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, you'll have access to instant translation in more places and with lower latency than ever before.

    The new AI model is part of the version 3.5 family that launched at I/O . Before today, Google had only rolled out the Flash version, but we're expecting a Pro model to drop in the coming weeks. Gemini 3.5 Live Translate is a speech-to-speech model tuned to automatically detect and translate in more than 70 languages.

    Google says Gemini 3.5 Live Translate is fast enough to keep up with a normal conversation, following just a few seconds behind the speaker while also matching intonation, pacing, and pitch. In short, the voice sounds more like you than a generic robot. The demos, which are all being recorded under controlled conditions, do sound impressive. You won't have to wait long to verify the model's abilities for yourself, though.

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      NASA assigns crew for Artemis III, sets aggressive timeline for flying it

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 June 2026

    The US space agency unveiled the crew for its Artemis III mission on Tuesday during an enthusiastic event at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

    For this spaceflight into low-Earth orbit, which will see the Orion spacecraft rendezvous and dock with lunar lander prototypes, NASA chose an experienced, all-male crew with military backgrounds. They were revealed inside a darkened Teague Auditorium where hundreds of friends, family members, and NASA employees cheered enthusiastically.

    The four crew members are:

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      Screwworms in US: Human risk is low—but they can burrow through your skull

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 June 2026

    Ravenous, flesh-eating flies have busted through containment barriers and have now reemerged in the US . On Monday and Tuesday, the US Department of Agriculture reported three new cases, bringing the tally to five.

    One of the cases is in a dog, though it's unclear where it became infected; the dog lives in New Mexico , had its infection reported in Texas, and may have recently traveled to Mexico , where the flies are also spreading. But the other four US cases were all in Texas—and all in calves— two in Zavala County and two in La Salle County .

    Almost all the attention over screwworm's resurgence has focused on the threat to livestock, like the calves and, in turn, the financial risk to the cattle industry. The fly's voracious, screw-shaped larvae can fell cattle if given the chance, and preventing infestations requires intense vigilance. The USDA has estimated that if the flies stage a comeback rivaling isolated outbreaks of the past, they could cost Texas producers $732 million per year and the Texas economy $1.8 billion.

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      One day after discovery, Meta pulls facial recognition code from its smart glasses

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 June 2026

    One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.

    The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses , strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.

    Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

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      US military claims first drone boat rescue of downed helicopter crew

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 June 2026

    A drone boat picked up two US Army pilots from waters near the Strait of Hormuz after their helicopter gunship went down, US military officials said in interviews with various broadcast news outlets. The incident apparently represents the first time the US military has used a drone for such a rescue mission at sea.

    The two crew members from the US Army AH-64 Apache were “rescued by American forces” at 7:33 pm US Eastern Time after their helicopter went down off the coast of Oman on June 8, according to a US Central Command press release . That press release mentioned support from US Navy units including the US 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59 , which is charged with integrating uncrewed aerial, surface, and underwater vehicles, alongside AI, into 5th Fleet maritime operations.

    Anonymous US military officials told CBS News that the Apache air crew was rescued by an uncrewed surface drone operated by Task Force 59 from the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. The officials also described the incident as the first time the military had used a drone to rescue people from the water.

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      High-severity vulnerability in Linux caused by a single errant character

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 June 2026

    Researchers have analyzed a high-severity vulnerability in Linux that’s able to escalate untrusted users to root by exploiting a bug you don't often see: a single errant character inside the kernel.

    The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-23111 , is located in nf_tables, a subsystem of the Linux kernel that provides packet filtering capabilities. It’s used to manage firewall rules and replaces older subsystems such as iptables, ip6tables, arptables, and ebtables.

    !!!WTF!!!

    The presence of a single mis-issued exclamation point in code implementing nf_tables introduced a use-after-free, a class of vulnerability that corrupts memory by placing malicious code at memory addresses that haven’t been properly freed of their previous contents. CVE-2026-23111 can be exploited by an unprivileged user or process to elevate system rights to root.

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      Gold isn’t inert, it just has bodyguards protecting it

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 June 2026

    Gold is weird. It's one of the few metals that doesn’t really oxidize. Even silver and copper—from the same column of the periodic table—form weak oxides. Naively, you might expect that gold would tarnish just like silver. Gold also sits right next to platinum, but it has none of that metal’s catalytic properties.

    Then came gold nanoparticles that acted like catalysts, and we were confused by their apparent willingness to take part in chemical reactions.

    Now, a pair of scientists has explained that gold’s inertness isn’t inherent to the atom but rather to the surfaces that gold crystals form. Before we get to the results, let’s first take a look at the traditional explanation for gold’s inertness and why an inert material that has no catalytic activity suddenly acts as a catalyst when in its nanoparticle form.

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