Tech

Discord Rolls Out Its Revised Age Verification Policy

Published

2 hours ago

22 September 2026

NewsAdmin

It will offer several privacy-focused options for users who aren’t automatically confirmed as adults.

Discord

Many social media platforms have been applying new age verification rules in response to growing interest in limiting access for minors. Discord had planned to enact a policy this year that would have required either a facial age estimation or an ID scan for users who couldn’t have their status as adults confirmed by its internal tools. The company announced in February that it would be delaying those changes in response to concerns about privacy and the collection of personal data involved in both of those verification methods. Today, the service shared details about how it will begin checking ages while accounting for that community feedback.

Starting this week, Discord will automatically sort users into either the Adult or Teen age group based on markers such as how long the account has existed, the servers they’re in and their general activity levels. The blog post explicitly stated that Discord will not be accessing messages or calls to determine an age estimate, and the individual’s age group will not be displayed on their profile or shared with other server members. Discord users will be able to check which group they’ve been sorted into under the Account Status section of the User Settings menu. For an expected 90 percent of platform’s audience, no further action will need to be taken if they are placed in the correct group.

If a user is put into the Unconfirmed age category, they will have several options for verifying that they are older than 18. Depending on regional restrictions, those choices might include confirmation via credit card, Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Google Wallet or the AgeKey credential service, as well as more common tools such as an ID scan or a video selfie. To further allay privacy concerns, Discord said it will require any third-party age assurance vendor to permanently delete a user’s information once their service is completed, as well as requiring any facial age estimation to run completely on the user’s device.

For the users placed in the Teen Age Group, there will be a trio of restrictions placed on their accounts. First, any messages from non-friends will be sent to the message requests inbox, and Discord will give an alert before accepting a friend request from a user who doesn’t have mutual friends or shared membership in a small server. Second, the user will not be able to view some content across Discord. The age-gated material includes images that have been tagged as sensitive by the platform’s content filters, in addition to any servers, channels and bot commands that are restricted to only adults. The final limitation is that a teen’s full profile details and activity will only be accessible to friends and to members of smaller servers. Accounts in the Unconfirmed category will be placed under the first two restrictions until the user confirms their age.

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NYT Strands hints and answers for Wednesday, September 23 (game #934)

Published

12 minutes ago

23 September 2026

NewsAdmin

Looking for a different day?

A new NYT Strands puzzle appears at midnight each day for your time zone – which means that some people are always playing ‘today’s game’ while others are playing ‘yesterday’s’. If you’re looking for Tuesday’s puzzle instead then click here: NYT Strands hints and answers for Tuesday, September 22 (game #933).

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

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Are Students Suddenly Losing Interest in Computer Science as AI Coding Takes Off?

Published

25 minutes ago

23 September 2026

NewsAdmin

On academic mentoring platform Nova Learning, Computer Science and AI, “once the dominant choice among students… is losing ground fast, while Engineering has nearly doubled its share.” It’s a small survey, but “The steepest proportional decline is in Software & Data Science, the most traditional ‘learn to code’ pathway, which lost 44% of its 2025 share. AI saw the largest absolute drop of any single subject in the survey, down 6.2 points.

“The category did not decline uniformly. Students moved away fastest from the pathway most associated with entry-level software work, while the more applied and human-facing subfields held their ground better.”

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes:

Nova Learning says the share of surveyed middle and high school students naming Computer Science and AI as their primary academic interest fell from 42.3 percent in 2025 to 27.9 percent in 2026, while Engineering rose from 11.9 percent to 23 percent. The biggest gains came from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering…

[B]roader enrollment data points in the same direction. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported declines in Computer and Information Science enrollment at four year institutions, even as Engineering grew. AI coding tools are not proven to be the cause, but as software development changes and AI handles more coding tasks, students may be starting to rethink what a future in technology should look like. [Undergraduate enrollment in CS programs at four-year institutions fell 8.1%, to approximately 606,000 students.]

Tech

Meta says Muse looks like OpenClaw because it was built that way

Published

40 minutes ago

22 September 2026

NewsAdmin

We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw.

Nat Friedman posted that on X on Monday evening. The head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs was answering a fortnight of speculation about Meta’s new personal agent, and why it felt so familiar to anyone who had used the open source one.

Sarah Perez reported the exchange for TechCrunch. Early adopters had spent days comparing Muse’s internal files with OpenClaw’s, and they kept finding more than a family resemblance.

What users found

The thread that set it off came from Ansh Nanda, who cofounded an AI app company. He wrote that Muse is OpenClaw for normies, and that it is actually just OpenClaw.

Nanda had put the question to Muse itself and posted the reply. The agent said the similarity between its own system files and OpenClaw’s was not a coincidence but a match.

Others piled in. One noted that Muse carries a SOUL.md file, the plain text configuration file that sets an agent’s personality, tone, values, boundaries and areas of expertise. Another checked the contents rather than the names, and found those almost entirely the same too.

Friedman’s answer

Friedman set out the history in his first reply. He used OpenClaw in January, then bought hundreds of Mac minis for the Superintelligence Labs team, and a lot of them fell in love with it.

He called Steinberger a genius and his harness pioneering from the start. The goal with Muse, he wrote, was to build something like OpenClaw that Meta could make safe, secure, easy to use, and able to scale to billions of people.

Nanda came back with a narrower question. If Muse was built from scratch, why copy the exact file names for the workspace, and why near identical content in SOUL.md. Was that intentional, or an artefact of inspiration?

Friedman did not dispute the premise. He answered that the team thought Peter had got those things exactly right.

Both answers went up on Monday evening, minutes apart, as replies rather than as a company statement. Meta published nothing of its own, and TechCrunch reported the exchange the following day.

Who Steinberger is

Steinberger, an Austrian developer, wrote OpenClaw and released it as open source. It became a hit among developers in January and spread well past them. The project went through two names before that one, launching as Clawdbot and then Moltbot.

The harness Friedman praised is the scaffolding around a model rather than the model itself. It holds the instruction files, the tool definitions and the loop that decides what the agent does next. SOUL.md is one of those files.

We reported in February that he joined OpenAI. In May we covered the token bill his own project ran up.

His framework keeps turning up inside other companies’ products. Last Thursday we wrote about Google Home opening to third party agents, OpenClaw among them.

The licence allows it

Steinberger published OpenClaw under an open source licence, which makes the file similarities a product question rather than a legal one. Open source exists so that other people can read the code and build on it.

Friedman ran GitHub as chief executive before joining Meta last year, alongside Alexandr Wang, the company’s chief AI officer. He knows the norms of the thing he is describing.

What the licence does not settle is the product question underneath. Meta has told developers it will review and approve the connectors that plug outside services into Muse, and it decides which ones get featured. OpenClaw has no gatekeeper, because nobody owns the distribution.

Meta has done this before

The company has a long record of adopting features that worked somewhere else. The clearest case is Stories. Snapchat launched the format in 2013, and Instagram shipped its own version in August 2016.

Zuckerberg addressed the pattern at a US antitrust hearing in 2020, where he acknowledged that Meta had copied its competitors.

What Muse asks for

Meta describes Muse as an agent that books appointments, fills in forms, handles customer service, makes purchases, generates images and creates documents. It runs on macOS, with no Windows version so far, and it also works inside WhatsApp.

To do any of that it needs access. Users authenticate it to their email, calendar, messaging and social accounts, and grant it macOS permissions covering files, the microphone, the camera and location. The app is limited to users aged 18 and over. It is free within limits, and Meta sells more capacity at $20 and $100 a month.

Two weeks of Muse

Meta launched Muse on 8 September and it reached number one on the US App Store. Jyoti Mann reported for The Information that more than 500,000 people tried it in roughly its first week, including more than 250,000 daily users, who submitted upwards of two million prompts. Those figures come from internal Meta data the publication says it viewed.

Meta shares jumped 11% on Monday on the app’s reception, the biggest one day gain since April 2025.

Not everything has gone Meta’s way. Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its site on Sunday, saying the agent does not identify itself and breaks its conditions of use. Security researcher Patrick Wardle then disclosed a zero day in the Mac app. Meta issued what it called a hotfix and said the practical risk to users was low.

What Meta said

TechCrunch asked the company for comment. A spokesperson pointed to Friedman’s post and said Meta had nothing to add beyond it.

Wang opened the connector platform to outside developers on Friday, and Shopify and Stripe have both wired their payment systems into the agent. That layer is the part Meta is building for itself, and it is the part the project it borrowed from does not have.

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5 Four-Door Family Vehicles That Are Seriously Fun To Drive

Published

53 minutes ago

22 September 2026

NewsAdmin

Driving a sports car means sacrificing some degree of space and practicality. Sure, you can buy a sports car with four seats or limited cargo capacity, but for drivers needing to cater for a family and their belongings, that won’t be enough. Likewise, most conventional family cars sacrifice driving excitement in the name of everyday practicality. Naturally, some are more interesting to drive than others, but in most cases, it’s safe to assume that an affordably priced family car won’t deliver the driving thrills of a sports car.

Drivers with deeper pockets, however, don’t necessarily need to make the same compromises. With a big enough budget, you can get a family car that happily pulls double duty as a sports car when not needed for hauling around kids and luggage.

Regardless of whether you’re looking for a zero-emissions rocket ship, an old-school V8 muscle sedan, or a refined German long-distance mile muncher, there are plenty of family-friendly performance cars on the market in 2026. These are some of our personal favorites, with SlashGear’s review team being able to personally confirm that each one is enormously fun to drive, in addition to being impressively practical.

Acura MDX Type S

Not every fun-to-drive family hauler looks exceptional on paper — the 2026 Acura MDX Type S certainly doesn’t. Its 355 hp and 354 lb-ft of torque are fairly unremarkable figures for its segment. The three-row SUV’s interior space is competitive but not surprising, and its cabin is comfortable and luxurious but hardly particularly revolutionary.

The secret ingredient that sets the MDX Type S apart from the rest lies in how well Acura manages to balance all of the different roles that a sporty, luxurious SUV has to fulfil. We found it consistently entertaining to drive, both on back roads and on commutes. There was even the right amount of noise from the exhaust — not enough to ever be grating when it wasn’t wanted, but still enough to encourage you to put your foot down a bit more when the opportunity arose.

On top of that, the SUV was also a very comfortable way to get around, and its suite of tech was both comprehensive and easy to use. Its $77,400 starting price (including a $1,550 destination fee) is comparable to its competition, but no similarly priced option offers such a compelling blend of practicality and performance.

It’s not a riot to drive, unlike some of the cars here, but it doesn’t need to be. Instead, the Acura is the car that adds a heavy dose of fun into everyday trips, and it avoids most of the downsides that come with a traditional performance car.

BMW M5 Sedan/Touring

The latest generation BMW M5 has a cohort of critics who don’t like that it is now a plug-in hybrid. The same critics might also point to its increased weight and physical size as evidence that BMW has missed the mark. Those are all valid criticisms, but despite the changes, the M5 arguably still remains true to its core formula.

For starters, it’s still a very entertaining car to drive. It also still serves as a practical family car, both in sedan form and in newly introduced Touring wagon form. That’s two of the most important boxes ticked straight away. Factor in the long-distance comfort, grin-inducing straight line performance, and the long list of extras to customize the car to your tastes, and the result is a car that’s still pitched squarely at well-heeled driving enthusiasts.

However, the M5 is far from perfect, despite its talents. Some minor issues with its infotainment system presented an irritating distraction during our time with it, especially considering this is a super-sedan with a price tag starts at $129,350 (including a $1,450 destination fee and a $2,600 gas guzzler fee).

The car’s fuel economy was also pretty dismal given its status as a PHEV — we averaged 14 mpg over the course of a week with the M5 Sedan, despite the EPA reporting that its combined gas-and-electric economy should reach 47 mpge. It’s flawed, then, but the M5 is still great fun to drive regardless.

Lucid Gravity

An electric SUV might not seem like an obvious candidate for driving fun, but the 2026 Lucid Gravity is excellent at defying expectations. An EV with more than 800 hp on tap and a 0-60 mph time in the mid-3 second range isn’t something you’d expect to see with three rows of seats and enough cargo capacity to carry furniture and other bulky items. The Gravity, though, does it all.

This car isn’t just fast in a straight line either. When it comes to corners, the Gravity handles better than it has any right to, feeling more like a dedicated performance car than something you could use to transport a five-a-side soccer team to their next game. Lucid remains a niche player in the EV market, but the Gravity is further evidence that it deserves to be better known. Its price tag means that it’s likely to remain a rarity though, since the Gravity Grand Touring that we tested starts from $100,750 (including an $1,850 destination fee).

Porsche Panamera

The Cayenne is Porsche’s best-selling car, but it isn’t the brand’s only family-friendly offering. Buyers who aren’t keen on an SUV can go for a Panamera instead, which starts from $115,350 (including a $2,350 destination fee). The base variant produces 348 hp and will complete the sprint from 0-60 mph in a respectable 5 seconds flat, but higher trims are arguably where the most driving fun is found.

The Panamera GTS starts from $169,250, making it considerably pricier than a base model. However, when we tested both hybrid and non-hybrid variants of the Panamera in 2025, it was the non-hybrid GTS that came out on top. The GTS was more fun to drive, it sounded more distinctly like a Porsche, and its handling felt more like a sports car than the grand tourer-like E-Hybrid. Nothing manages to match the 911 for pure sports car feel and performance, but the Panamera GTS got pretty close while being a whole lot more practical as a daily-driven family hauler.

Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing

Back in 2025, GM announced that the current generation Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing will be axed after 2026. The automaker says a new generation will be developed, but it hasn’t committed to a timeframe for its launch. However, in the meantime, the car remains on sale for a starting price of $103,420 (including a $1,795 destination fee and a $2,100 gas guzzler tax).

In a market where many sports cars now either feature some level of electrification or sport smaller displacement engines with fewer cylinders than their predecessors, the CT5-V Blackwing is an outlier. Cadillac crams a 6.2-liter supercharged V8 engine under the hood, which it says is good for 668 hp, mated to a six-speed manual transmission.

Just like the old-school muscle sedans, this car will shred its tires on command, but it’s also a more accomplished track day toy than many might give it credit for. It’s roomy and comfortable enough to handle family hauling duties too. We found its interior fit and finish lacking given its price, and as you might expect from a V8-powered sedan, fuel efficiency isn’t exactly its strong suit. Anyone who can overlook those flaws will be rewarded with what’s arguably one of the most fun family cars on sale today — at least, if they can get their order in fast enough before production ends.

Methodology

SlashGear’s review team has put the latest cars from virtually every major manufacturer to the test, and we drew on those reviews when selecting cars for inclusion here. Each car has been driven by a member of our team and given the seal of approval both for its capabilities as a spacious family-sized vehicle and for its driving appeal. Each car is also available as either a 2026 or 2027 model year at the time of writing.

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Xbox lays off 268 more people as Activision takes over Halo and Bethesda absorbs Obsidian

Published

1 hour ago

22 September 2026

NewsAdmin

In a nutshell: The next round of Microsoft’s previously announced layoffs includes major studio consolidations and possibly more closures. The Halo franchise just got its biggest shakeup in years as the Xbox manufacturer seeks to cut costs and the number of moving parts. Meanwhile, the fates of Ninja Theory and Arkane Lyon hang in the balance.

Microsoft has cut another 268 jobs across Halo Studios, other first-party developers, and Xbox Game Studios management. The redundancies, announced by Matt Booty, Xbox’s Chief Content Officer, are presumably part of the 1,600 set to occur through July 2027.

This stage of Xbox’s reorganization involves multiple mergers and reassignments. Most notably, Call of Duty maker Activision is taking over development of the next Halo title with a new team. Halo Studios will focus on already-released entries such as Halo: Campaign Evolved and Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Activision will also manage Rare as well as Age of Empires developer World’s Edge.

Meanwhile, Obsidian will continue its current projects under Bethesda. The two RPG houses are collaborating on a new Fallout title, while Obsidian is also developing Grounded 2 and Bethesda continues work on The Elder Scrolls VI.

Xbox’s most widely anticipated game, The Elder Scrolls VI is likely still at least two years away despite having been announced all the way back in 2018. Candy Crush developer King will also manage Microsoft Casual Games, while Playground and Turn 10 will merge to handle Forza and Fable as one studio.

Unfortunately, Microsoft couldn’t find a buyer for Hellblade developer Ninja Theory despite two separate attempts. While a closure still isn’t inevitable, it seems much more likely now. Attempts to sell Arkane Lyon (Deathloop, Blade) will continue through the end of the year.

Microsoft layoffs since 2023

Date (announcement)	Reported headcount cut	Main business areas hit
18 Jan 2023	10,000	Windows & devices, Xbox, HoloLens, recruiting & marketing
25 Jan 2024	1,900	Activision Blizzard, Xbox, ZeniMax after the ABK deal closed
3-4 Jun 2024	≈1,000 (internal est.)	Azure for Operators, HoloLens/mixed-reality, other “moonshot” teams
12 Sep 2024	≈650	Xbox publishing & game-studio support teams
Jan-Feb 2025	≈2,000	Company-wide “low-performer” cull (no severance in many cases)
13 May 2025	≈6,000 (Microsoft says “< 3% of staff”)	All geographies; focus on middle-management, LinkedIn
2 Jun 2025	305	Redmond, Washington HQ roles; additional WARN-notice layoffs following the May cuts
2 Jul 2025	≈9,000 (Microsoft says “< 4% of staff”)	Company-wide; Xbox, sales, management layers, and other divisions
23 Apr 2026 (opens May)	Up to ≈8,750 offered voluntary exit	US employees at senior director level and below whose age plus tenure equals 70 or higher; certain sales staff excluded
Fiscal Year 2027 (beginning July 6, 2026)	≈4,800	Largest reset in Xbox history, five game studios divested

The layoffs are part of a massive wave that began in July, when Microsoft eliminated around 1,600 positions across Bethesda, id Software, and other subsidiaries. As a result of that initial round, Double Fine (Keeper, Psychonauts 2) and Compulsion Games (South of Midnight) became independent with their back catalogs intact.

Microsoft also announced this week that Undead Labs will continue developing State of Decay 3 under a new publisher. The job losses from July 2026 to July 2027 will total around 3,200, bringing Microsoft’s layoffs since 2023 to about 44,000.

Booty also teased Xbox-related announcements coming on October 6, the day before Microsoft’s first Surface event in more than two years.

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The military wants AI that rarely tells it no

Published

1 hour ago

22 September 2026

NewsAdmin

Who gets to tell the military “no”?

That question has become even more important after the Pentagon pushed AI companies to loosen limits on how their technology may be used in war — including how much human control must remain over autonomous weapons. When Anthropic said no, it lost a major government deal. OpenAI stepped in, embracing the Pentagon’s more flexible standard instead. Now, thanks to new reporting from The Intercept, we’re getting a better look at what those negotiations actually entailed.

The OpenAI-Pentagon agreement included specific language on the type of AI models the DOD would receive: “OpenAI models that are designed for national security use cases and have minimal refusal rates.” That phrase — “minimal refusal rates” — means that the Pentagon is seeking models that rarely, if ever, tell it no. (According to The Intercept, a Justice Department lawyer representing the Pentagon confirmed this language, before backtracking only a few hours later.)

On the surface, that provision might seem reasonable. The military is a strictly hierarchical institution. When your senior gives you an order, you do it. Leaders generally have more battlefield wisdom and experience than their subordinates, so the rank and file can usually assume that their commanders know what they’re doing and follow along. Plus, in the high-stress, time-sensitive environments of most military operations, there is little room for discussion, explanation, or alternative proposals.

So, if soldiers can’t refuse an order, why would a machine be allowed to? Who is a robot to tell its commander no?

There’s just one issue. Soldiers can refuse an order — when the order is illegal. In fact, they are legally required to. But by introducing technologies with a limited ability to challenge commands, the military may be making it harder to stop war crimes before they are committed.

Humans have a duty to disobey

As outlined in US domestic, military, and international law, soldiers are only obligated to follow lawful orders, and they have a duty to refuse unlawful ones.

The Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual is unambiguous: “Each member of the armed services has a duty to: (1) comply with the law of war in good faith; and (2) refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit violations of the law of war.” Obeying an illegal order — as in a directive that violates the Constitution, US laws, international law, or directs one to commit a crime — can expose a service member, as well as their commander, to criminal liability.

This “duty to disobey” has foundations in early British and American common law, but it achieved international recognition after the Nuremberg Trials against Nazi soldiers after WWII.

In those trials, many Nazi soldiers argued they were not liable for crimes they committed during the Holocaust because they were simply following their superiors’ orders. Rudolf Hoess, the commander at the largest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz, himself explained: “In Germany it was understood that if something went wrong, then the man who gave the orders was responsible. So I didn’t think that I would ever have to answer for it myself.”

These defenses were unequivocally rejected by the court.

The tribunal held that obedience is not without limits, especially when a wartime act would be clearly illegal to the subordinate or any person of “ordinary sense and understanding.” If “I was just following orders” was an absolute defense, everyone involved in a crime would escape accountability, with the exception of the single highest-ranking officer. Instead, the court determined that individual moral and legal responsibility supersedes national or military chains of command for illegal acts.

Obedience is not without limits, especially when a wartime act would be clearly illegal to the subordinate or any person of “ordinary sense and understanding.”

But, when it comes to agentic AI systems or AI-assisted weapons, increasingly being used in place of human soldiers, does the same logic apply? And, perhaps more importantly, should it?

When you use an AI chatbot, it does not simply reject queries it may not “agree” with. It does not say no to requests it doesn’t “like.” Instead, it follows a set of established protocols, much as a soldier should follow the law of war: It refuses requests that violate its terms of service.

The military is using AI for far more consequential applications than a layperson using ChatGPT to, say, build a travel itinerary. So, what kind of world is created by the Pentagon’s request for AI that “minimally refuses” its directives, many of which may bear grave ethical, moral, or legal implications?

Rebecca Crootof, an expert on technology law and professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, told Vox that while the language could easily be read as increasing the likelihood of compliance with unlawful orders, or at least reducing the friction around them, “Minimal refusal doesn’t mean no refusal.”

“I both want to say it’s not definitely going to mean compliance with unlawful orders,” Crootof said, “but also acknowledge that identifying and evaluating what constitutes an unlawful order in the moment can be incredibly difficult.”

Even for human soldiers, disobeying illegal orders is neither simple nor easy. To the contrary, it doesn’t even happen that frequently. In fact, some legal scholars have argued that giving illegal directives in and of itself is an act of abuse against subordinates, who are not thoroughly trained in legal nuances, are conditioned to obey, and face prosecution if they make the wrong choice.

Still, the mere fact that soldiers can disobey is an important constraint on commanders who might let battlefield conditions, or even commands coming from their own superiors, erode their ethics and commitment to the law.

Those who are optimistic about AI often argue that machines could be better at interpreting and applying the law than human soldiers. Machines can be trained on the law itself — drawing on a repository of legal cases, rulings, and battlefield data — which might make them more “knowledgeable” than an average soldier. And machines do not face the same pressures as soldiers facing prosecution for making mistakes, since they can’t exactly be held accountable; a problem to unpack another time. That, in turn, might make it easier for them to refuse illegal orders in the proper conditions.

So, is the answer as simple as letting the machines decide? Not exactly. “This has been a desire and a drive by technologists for ages,” Crootof said. “What if we just put the law in the system and have it only do things that are lawful? Isn’t that going to solve things?”

Interpreting and applying the law, though, is not a simple legal-illegal binary. “It’s very context-specific,” Crootof told me, “and honestly, that’s the kind of thing humans generally find difficult and AI decision-making systems are even worse at.” Often, determining the legality of an act comes down to subtle nuances you can’t program for: You’re allowed to target a combatant; you’re not allowed to target a wounded or surrendering combatant. You’re not allowed to target a civilian; you are allowed to target a civilian directly participating in hostilities. The difference between a legal target and an illegal one may come down to body language, clothing choices, or even battlefield intuition.

As Crootof explained, “These are not the kinds of contextual analyses AI is good for.”

So what’s the solution?

Where human soldiers’ power to disobey would traditionally serve as an important check on the power of military commanders, if an imperfect one, replacing soldiers with machines that don’t have such safeguards removes one last layer of judgment over the use of force. And yet, machines themselves are not always capable of making the judgment calls that go into interpreting the law, so it may not be appropriate to let AI have the final say either.

So what’s the solution? Given the way AI technology has already been thoroughly integrated into the military, Crootof told me it may be somewhere in the middle.

Rather than programming AI to refuse commands it interprets as illegal, Crootof said, “what it could be designed to do is flag those indeterminate zones, those gray-zone analyses, for human review or for a higher authority.” When a system picks up conflicting signals — an enemy soldier who looks like he may be surrendering, for example — it could prompt the commander to confirm their selection or remind them of applicable law.

In this way, a check on commanders’ battlefield authority could be preserved without fully ceding judgment over the use of force to the machine.

We don’t know yet whether OpenAI has equipped its “minimal refusal” models with such capabilities. But as those technologies become increasingly central to military decision-making, the public deserves answers sooner rather than later.

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DoorDash Will Pay $131.5 Million For Missing And Miscalculated NYC Delivery Worker Wages

Published

2 hours ago

22 September 2026

NewsAdmin

The company blames technical errors and a difference of opinion on how wages should be calculated for pay irregularities.

A delivery worker on a bike making a DoorDash delivery in New York.

rblfmr/Shutterstock

New York City has announced that DoorDash will pay $131.5 million as part of an enforcement action for violating the city’s minimum wage and delivery work protection laws. The settlement covers late or missing payments for delivery workers, civil penalties and specifically “over $83 million to resolve a disagreement over how to calculate pay for time Dashers spend online between deliveries,” DoorDash said in a separate announcement on its website.

The enforcement is the result of an investigation conducted by New York’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), based on reports from workers of late or missing payments for completed deliveries. As part of the settlement, workers will receive more than $115 million total, with more than 260,000 affected workers receiving compensation “calculated at approximately 200 percent of the amount they were underpaid,” according to the city.

DoorDash attributes some of these missing or late payments to technical issues and other complications like “deliveries that crossed city boundaries, had multiple pickup or drop-off locations or were only partially fulfilled or cancelled.” Some payments were also different because DoorDash violated New York’s minimum wage laws. As the company explains in its settlement announcement, New York’s law says workers “must be paid for this time spent online between deliveries,” or on-call time. While the company claims its approach to calculating on-call time was “fair, practical and legal,” it decided to follow the city’s guidance rather than fight in court.

Besides the payments to workers and the DCWP, the settlement also establishes a compliance monitoring program to address future violations. DoorDash has agreed to share monthly data with the DCWP for the next three years as part of the program, and to update its app and adopt “internal controls” to address the issues that led to the violations and prevent workers from being offered deliveries unless they’re compensated for on-call or trip time. To make it easier for people to compile data about their delivery work, the Workers’ Algorithm Observatory and the Workers’ Justice Project have also committed to building software to allow workers to capture the information DoorDash shows them about their deliveries and pay.

DoorDash, like other delivery companies, has generally pushed back on attempts from cities and states to regulate their platforms or secure protections for delivery workers, including even minor changes like a law that would require the company to suggest customers tip at checkout. At least when it comes to the late and missing payments, the company was willing to admit, in its own words, that it “screwed up.”

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Mistral denies a fresh security breach, but the code on sale looks a lot like May’s leak

Published

2 hours ago

22 September 2026

NewsAdmin

Seller claims to be offering Mistral AI’s full source code and says the company was breached again after May 2026 attack
Mistral says an investigation found no evidence of new unauthorized access but has not stated whether the listed code is genuine
No customer data has surfaced in analyzed samples, and nobody has shown files created after the May incident

A seller on a cybercrime forum says French giant Mistral AI has been hacked again and is offering what they call the company’s full source code for sale.

The September 16 2026 post by an account using the handle “mrwho” consists of a listing titled “Selling mistral.ai Source Code” on an English-language cybercrime forum, according to The CyberSec Guru, pricing the material in Monero only before it attempted to steer potential buyers to Session or Telegram.

Mistral AI’s own team has refuted this, stating it has “found no evidence to support this claim.”

Not Mistral’s first hacking-centric PR problem

Mistral’s earlier hacking incident is undisputed – in May 2026, the Mini Shai-Hulud supply chain campaign, attributed to the TeamPCP group, spread from compromised TanStack packages to hundreds of npm and PyPI projects.

Mistral’s own security advisory MAI-2026-002 says an automated worm led to compromised versions of its SDKs being published for a few hours on May 11 and 12, and that an affected developer device was involved. Microsoft Threat Intelligence found that a poisoned Mistral AI Python package fetched a second-stage credential stealer that allowed the attack to exploit users.

Mistral went further in statements to reporters than in its advisory. It told BleepingComputer that attackers had compromised a codebase management system and “contaminated some of our SDK packages for a brief period,” while insisting that hosted services, managed user data, and research and testing environments were untouched. It also told HackRead that only certain non-core repositories were accessed.

TeamPCP, meanwhile, advertised roughly 450 repositories, about 5GB in total, for $25,000, and threatened to dump them for free if no buyer appeared within a week. One can therefore contend that this could be the same dump being remarketed by a different account, and the seller’s profile is already suspect.

The CyberSec Guru noted that the account joined in September 2026 and had four posts and a reputation score of 30, despite displaying a top-tier “GOD User” rank. That profile could fit a scam in the making, but as the outlet pointed out, it could also fit a broker fronting for someone else or a freshly minted alias.

HackRead published 24 sample repository names from TeamPCP’s May post. FrenchBreaches, which examined the 339-file tree mrwho shared in September, lists several of the same names. At least four of these appear in both: mistral-inference-private, mistral-inference-internal, mistral-finetune-internal, and mistral-common-internal.

This makes it hard to tell whether the purported ‘hack’ is just a rehash of an existing dump from Mistral’s previous breach or a second successful hacking attempt. There is a straightforward test, however: If the September archives contain commits, files, or credentials dated after May 12, or secrets that were still valid after Mistral’s cleanup, the seller’s claim of a second breach gains real weight. If everything predates the May incident, this is a resale, which is embarrassing for Mistral but not a new security failure.

Of course, locating the archives or examining them would involve paying the ransom in crypto, as required by what could potentially be a scam in the making- a tremendous leap of faith for an account that was created earlier this month, making this essentially a lottery ticket at best for any security researcher attempting to take a closer look.

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Tech

IT mistake erases 11 years of viewing history for hospitals’ maternity records

Published

2 hours ago

22 September 2026

NewsAdmin

NUH noted that the data loss doesn’t impact current patient care.

“No patient information was accessed or used inappropriately as a result of this incident,” the blog said.

In a statement accompanying the blog, Andy Callow, NUH’s chief digital and information officer, said NUH completed a patient safety incident investigation and has taken unspecified steps to strengthen “technical controls and processes to help prevent a similar incident from happening again.”

“I am sorry for the concern and distress this incident may cause to women and families affected,” he said.

Police investigating

The announcement comes as NUH faces a broader police investigation into allegations that over 500 mothers and babies endured “potentially avoidable” harm or died due to systemic failings within NUH, per a review of the hospitals’ maternity department released in June and led by a senior midwife. These reported failings include understaffing, undertrained employees, and failure to listen to parental concerns, the BBC reported at the time.

Also, in June 2025, a local police investigation concluded that a file with records for hundreds of maternity care patients at NUH was likely erased “intentionally or maliciously.” NUH recovered that data days after its deletion.

Nottinghamshire Police is investigating whether the most recent data loss impacts the larger case concerning the maternity care-related injuries and deaths and if criminal charges will be filed, the BBC reported this week. The police are also trying to retrieve the lost data.

“At present, no crime has been identified,” deputy chief constable Rob Griffin, one of the investigation’s leaders, said, per the BBC.

Nottingham Maternity Family Group, a group representing some of the families affected by the broader investigation, said that the data loss reported this week is “extremely unnerving.”

“Families who have already endured preventable harm, injury, and bereavement should not also have to worry about the security of the records of their experiences,” the group said in a statement, per the BBC.

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