A new study proposes using shoebox-sized detector satellites to sniff out nuclear weapons launched by adversary nations. The idea is aimed at addressing fears that a space-based nuclear detonation could destroy satellites across low Earth orbit and make some orbits unusable for years. Space.com shares the findings from a new paper authored by Areg Danagoulian, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: No reliable way currently exists to detect and defuse a nuclear bomb in space. Danagoulian proposes a constellation of small “9U” cubesats, each one about the size of a large shoebox and each carrying a special detector capable of sensing radiation emitted by unexploded nuclear bombs. He explores a scenario in which Russia launches a suspected space nuke into an orbit with an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 km). That number is not random. In 2022, Russia’s Kosmos 2553 satellite, orbiting at that exact altitude, triggered suspicions it might be testing components for a future orbital nuclear weapon.
Russia claims the satellite just observes Earth. At that altitude, the satellite passes through the Van Allen belt, a region of intense cosmic radiation trapped by Earth’s magnetic field. Most of the belt stretches between altitudes of around 600 miles (1,000 km) to tens of thousands of miles, but in some areas the radiation can reach much closer to Earth’s surface. The interaction between the fissile material inside the nuke and the energetic particles from the radiation belt would create distinct signatures, Danagoulian said, which could help confirm whether a suspicious satellite carries a nuke or not.
“The thermonuclear weapon would contain a significant amount of uranium,” Danagoulian said. “The high-energy protons [in the uranium] would break up when another proton is coming in and shred the nuclei. That would knock out a large number of neutrons. This interaction turns that device into a very intense neutron source that otherwise would not be there.” he process is known as proton-induced neutron spallation, which essentially means the ejection of fragments from material triggered by impacts of protons. The detector satellite Danagoulian proposes would have to be able to get quite close to the suspect spacecraft — a few kilometers.
The inspector spacecraft would carry a sensor combining two types of detectors. At the heart of the device is a neutron scintillator, which detects all incoming neutrons and protons. Around it is a “cage of diamond” detector that detects only neutrons — not protons. Such a set-up helps filter out the particles present in the environment naturally, said Danagoulian. In addition, by using two “planes of neutron detectors,” the sensor can determine the direction from which the neutrons arrived. “If the external diamond detector triggers and gives a signal, you can ignore the particle, because it’s most likely a proton and not a neutron,” said Danagoulian. “Once you identify those neutrons, by having those two detections, you can back project and find out where the neutron came from.”
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Danagoulian says such a nuke sniffer would have to be launched into an orbit aligned with that of the suspicious satellite and creep up as close as 2.5 miles (4 km) from it. It would then take about a week to gather enough measurements to confirm whether the object is hiding a nuke or not. A constellation of 10 such satellites could reduce the process to mere hours, Danagoulian said. If a nuke were detected, the military could then try to jam the satellite’s communications link from the ground, making it impossible for the adversary to remotely detonate the bomb. There is currently no technology available to safely defuse a nuclear weapon in space. […] Danagoulian also suggests that high-grade radiation hardening could improve satellites’ chances of surviving a nuclear winter in space. The paper has been published in the journal Nature.
In late November in Jamnagar, India, the scions of two of the most powerful families in the world stood face-to-face. On one side was 30-year-old Anant Ambani, son of one of the richest men in Asia. On the other was Donald Trump Jr. For months, the Trump administration had been on the offensive against the sprawling Ambani energy empire, placing it at the center of an escalating tariff campaign against India. But after Trump Jr. touched down, the two men toured the Ambanis’ private zoo, and at night they performed a Gujarati folk dance, grinning as they moved together to the music.
Four months later, an obscure Texas startup called America First Refining announced that it had received a nine-figure investment from the Ambanis’ company. The deal puzzled numerous energy investors familiar with the project, which aims to build the first major new oil refinery in the U.S. in about 50 years. The company is run by a serial entrepreneur with a history of bankruptcy and lawsuits alleging fraud. After more than a decade of failed attempts to raise money, blown deadlines and rebrands, it had been floundering.
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America First Refining’s unexpected breakthrough came after it forged a previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr., who secretly acquired a stake in the startup, according to records and seven people familiar with the company. The new details reveal the role the president’s son has played in a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.
Over the past year and a half, Trump Jr. has amassed a fortune from stakes in companies ranging from crypto startups to a drone business to a firearms retailer. Some firms tied to the president’s son have received contracts or other support from the federal government, part of what critics describe as a run of Trump family self-dealing. In December, Forbes estimated that Trump Jr.’s net worth had rocketed from roughly $50 million to $300 million since the election. But the Forbes figures were based on the investments that have been publicly disclosed. The America First Refining episode suggests there is much about the family business that remains secret.
The size of Trump Jr.’s stake in America First Refining and what he paid for it remain unclear. Top executives at the startup have also said that they speak regularly with Trump Jr., according to a person close to the company. And after the Ambani investment was announced, Trump Jr.’s personal lawyer took credit on social media for playing a part in the deal.
America First Refining has flexed its Trump Jr. connections during pitch meetings with foreign officials. Early last year, Trump Jr. joined the company’s leadership for a meeting in South Florida with potential investors from Saudi Arabia, according to two people familiar with the matter. Another foreign government official pitched on the project told ProPublica that the company’s team emphasized they had backing from the Trump family and suggested that an investment would help with White House access.
The Ambanis’ investment coincided with the family’s securing major U.S. policy wins that their company, Reliance Industries, had been lobbying for. “Reliance Goes From Trump Foe to Friend With Refinery Pledge,” ran the Bloomberg headline after the deal was announced. Reliance’s intent with the deal was to “smooth out” tensions between the U.S. and India, the outlet reported.
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A Trump Jr. spokesperson said that Trump Jr. “has no operational involvement in AFR and is simply a passive minority investor in an American company that aligns with his worldview.”
“The entire premise of this story relating to Don is false,” the spokesperson said, adding, “Don does not interface with the Federal Government on behalf of any company that he invests in or advises.” ProPublica did not find evidence Trump Jr. was aware of refinery executives’ suggesting that an investment would help with White House access.
In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for America First Refining said, “The claims in this story are false,” but declined to specify what they were referring to. The company’s CEO previously denied wrongdoing in the lawsuits against him reviewed by ProPublica, and the suits were either settled or dropped.
The Ambani family had long been cultivating its relationship with the Trumps. Reliance paid $10 million to the Trump Organization in 2024 as a “development fee” for a project in Mumbai, according to the president’s financial disclosure. (Despite the payment, Reliance has not yet announced a Trump project. Reliance told ProPublica that “the real estate project is real” and “remains under development.”) Ivanka Trump attended Anant Ambani’s wedding party in India that year, where guests were treated to a Rihanna concert. Anant’s father, Mukesh — who is worth an estimated $90 billion and lives in a 27-story home — came to Washington, D.C., for Trump’s second inauguration, posing with the president at a private reception.
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But by the summer of 2025, the family was under attack from the White House. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Reliance had reportedly made billions in profits by purchasing vast quantities of Russian oil at a discount. In August, as Trump grew frustrated with his administration’s struggles to bring the war to an end, the president doubled his tariffs on India to 50%. The move was explicitly designed to force companies like Reliance to stop buying Russian oil. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro publicly assailed “India’s politically connected energy titans” for “funding Putin’s war machine,” widely read as a reference to the Ambanis.
Amid this tension, Trump Jr. visited Anant Ambani on his November trip to India. At the end of the trip, Trump Jr.’s personal lawyer commented at a business conference in Miami: “I had a nice closing this morning with Don Trump Jr., who’s flying back from India today.” (The following week, the Texas startup — then called Element Fuels — filed paperwork to create America First Refining LLC. In an email, the attorney, John Willding, told ProPublica that there was “no transaction in India or with an Indian company that I was ever involved with.”)
Anant Ambani, who helps run Reliance’s energy business, personally worked on the Texas refinery deal for months before it was announced, a major Indian newspaper later reported.
As the Ambanis quietly finalized their deal with America First Refining, U.S.-Indian relations appeared to warm. In February, the Trump administration struck a trade deal with India, dramatically lowering tariffs, and also reportedly gave Reliance a license to buy Venezuelan oil. When the Iran war broke out and rocked global energy markets, the U.S. gave India a sanctions waiver to buy Russian crude. (The waiver was later expanded to all countries.)
In response to ProPublica’s questions, the White House said that “there are no conflicts of interest.” Reliance did not answer ProPublica’s questions about Trump Jr.’s and Anant Ambani’s roles in the investment deal, but said in a statement that the company did not receive “any unique or preferential treatment” from the U.S. government.
“There is no connection between Reliance’s investment in AFR and any unique measures associated with general U.S. trade, tariff, sanctions or licensing outcomes,” Reliance said. “The investment was evaluated and approved on its commercial merits, strategic fit and long-term value creation potential.”
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In March, President Trump personally announced Reliance’s deal with the Texas startup on Truth Social, thanking the Ambani company for its “tremendous Investment.”
After the announcement, Willding, the Trump Jr. lawyer, shared the news on LinkedIn: “Just so proud to have been part of this one.”
Willding rowed back his claim in an email to ProPublica. “I have never worked for or advised AFR and had zero involvement in their deal with Reliance Energy,” he said. “I simply saw the press release and was excited for them.” America First Refining’s spokesperson called Willding’s comment “moronic and false.”
In June 2025, Willding registered a new entity in Wyoming called TX Fuels, LLC, listing the company’s address as Trump Jr.’s mansion in Jupiter, Florida. In his email, Willding said his “only involvement in AFR was handling the legal paperwork” for the Trump Jr. LLC’s investment in the startup.
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Trump Jr. first hired Willding in May 2021, according tointerviews the lawyer has given. A corporate deal lawyer in Dallas, Willding has referred to himself as “outside business counsel to the Trump family” and has said he talks to Trump Jr. or Eric Trump almost daily. A former Bill Clinton and Barack Obama voter who fell hard for MAGA, the attorney has installed a portrait of President Trump over the mantel in his living room.
Willding’s practice has boomed during the second Trump administration, bringing the lawyer to Argentina, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. “Everybody in the world wants to do business with the United States right now,” Willding said at a conference in June 2025. “Every company wants to do business with the Trump family.”
There are other fingerprints of the Trump world on the refinery deal.
Howard Lutnick’s firm Cantor Fitzgerald — which his sons took over when Lutnick became Trump’s commerce secretary — is working as the financial adviser to America First Refining, including on the Ambani investment deal, Cantor Fitzgerald announced. (Cantor Fitzgerald declined to comment.)
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And the Trump administration played a direct role helping America First Refining find potential foreign investors, according to public comments from the company’s CEO, John Calce. “We have received support from the White House,” he told a local news outlet. The National Energy Dominance Council, led by the interior and energy secretaries, has “helped us with, candidly, introducing us and helping us meet some of these people overseas,” Calce said on an industry podcast.
America First Refining has recently explored going public, according to three people close to the company. That could allow its current investors to start cashing out even if the refinery never gets built — a milestone many energy industry insiders still view as a long shot. Reliance made its investment in the startup at a valuation of at least $1 billion, according to America First Refining’s announcement.
Building a refinery at the Port of Brownsville on the Gulf Coast has been Calce’s mission for a decade. A former Yale offensive lineman, he started his career as a high school football coach after an unsuccessful attempt to make the NFL and now describes himself as a “lifelong entrepreneur.”
The project has been serially delayed, out of money, rebranded and trailed by angry former business partners. At one point, Calce’s companies were being sued simultaneously by eight other firms. In 2022, during bankruptcy proceedings for an earlier iteration of the project, the trustee appointed to impartially oversee the case sued Calce too. The trustee alleged that Calce and other insiders had improperly siphoned away cash and other assets. (Calce denied wrongdoing. The case was ultimately settled.)
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During the Biden administration, as the company sought financial support from the Department of Energy, it pitched itself as a climate-friendly green project that would also help “people of underrepresented social demographics” in Brownsville, according to records from that period. The company failed to get enough money from outside investors, and the planned construction was delayed.
By the company’s own estimate, building the refinery will take years and cost $3 billion to $4 billion. Even if it’s built, profitability could be hard to achieve. Many energy investors told ProPublica there’s a reason the U.S. hasn’t seen a major new refinery in decades. “Refineries cost a lot of money and essentially make pennies on the dollar,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist in Houston. “Wall Street is not going to finance a new refinery.”
Even after the start of the second Trump administration, the company was in jeopardy, according to interviews and documents. It laid off workers last year, and, by late 2025, with delays continuing to plague the refinery, officials at the Port of Brownsville believed the project looked to be dead, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.
That has not stopped Calce and his team from making grandiose claims to the public. Earlier this year,a website went live for another Calce company called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals. It claims to have a far-flung network of oil storage terminals in places like the Netherlands and Singapore, more than 850 employees and a C-suite of experienced energy executives. But ProPublica could find no evidence that the executives are real people or that the storage terminals actually exist. The phone numbers on the website are also currently listed online as the contacts for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service and an OB-GYN office. The numbers are dead.
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America First Refining’s political ties, though, may have boosted its standing with Texas state regulators. In February, shortly before the Ambani investment became public, the company sought an extension on its permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Inside the state agency, emails obtained by ProPublica show, officials scrambled to approve the request.
“Need to get this one logged and processed asap,” wrote one official.
“You are going to have to do this one. I will explain why in person in a few,” wrote another. “You can guess if you check out the name.”
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America First Refining got its approval the next day. A spokesperson for the Texas agency did not address questions about the emails. “This request was processed quickly due to the quality of information provided,” the spokesperson said.
Just days after filing the complaint, Dan Berulis, the whistleblower, found the brakes on his car had been cut after getting into a minor accident near his home. The complaint, which went public in an NPR story the day after it was filed, caused an outcry, with members of Congresscalling for an investigation. The following month, in May 2025, FedScoop reported that the NLRB’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) opened an investigation. It remains ongoing.
In April 2026, though, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a federal agency within the legislative branch that performs audits and investigations for Congress— published its own report about DOGE’s access to the NLRB’s systems, titled “National Labor Relations Board Detailees Did Not Access IT Systems Between April 16 and July 25, 2025.” The report conspicuously only covers the time period immediately following Berulis’ complaint, and does not address any DOGE activity before that point.
But nested in the footnotes of the report is another revelation: In August 2025, shortly after DOGE members left the NLRB but before the GAO’s investigators “requested to observe the systems,” the agency “deleted the team member accounts for system access after the agreement to detail DOGE team staff had expired.” Basically, this means that the digital records of what data and systems DOGE members accessed and when had been eliminated, leaving the GAO no way to confirm what NLRB staff told their investigators.
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“I think you could imagine another situation where the footnote is the central theme of the report,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “The report raises more questions than it resolves, such as who deleted the data.”
The NLRB enforces laws concerning unions and collective bargaining, and investigates unfair labor practices. This gives it access to the identities of whistleblowers as well as their testimony; information about trade secrets and other proprietary data that might be important in issues related to negotiations between employers and employees; and a wide variety of investigative materials.
According to Berulis’ whistleblower complaint, “DOGE officials required the highest level of access and unrestricted access to internal systems. They were to be given what are referred to as ‘tenant owner’ level accounts, with essentially unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter data”—a level of access beyond that of the agency’s chief information officer.
In the report, GAO officials note that they “interviewed NLRB staff regarding what level of access they provided for each system to the DOGE team,” but were unable to confirm whether what they were told was true because the DOGE accounts and associated information had already been deleted from the NLRB’s systems. It’s also not clear exactly who from DOGE had access: Justin Fox, Nate Cavanaugh, and Jordan Wick were all at one point at the NLRB, but no specific DOGE members are named in the report nor in Berulis’ original whistleblower complaint.
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The NLRB did not respond to a request for comment; neither did Fox, Cavanaugh, or Wick.
Tesla and SpaceX, both companies owned by Elon Musk, who also led DOGE, have been the subject of NLRB investigations. Earlier this year, the NLRB dropped the case against SpaceX, saying that the agency didn’t have jurisdiction over the company.
In an April statement announcing an investigation into the case’s dismissal, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote: “Given Musk’s extraordinary financial support for President Trump in the 2024 election, his substantial influence in the Trump Administration and interest in the NLRB’s work as head of [DOGE] … we seek answers to determine if the decision to drop the case may have been based on political considerations rather than the facts at hand.”
Volkswagen has some woolly new unofficial employees flocking to one of its European facilities. There are now 100 sheep grazing at the solar farm that powers the car company’s manufacturing plant in Poznań, Poland. Electrek reports that in addition to replacing lawn mowers, the critters are part of a bigger research project to study agrivoltaics, where agriculture and energy are farmed in the same space in a symbiotic relationship. Poznań University of Life Sciences is handling the study of the flock, exploring how the grazing activity impacts animal welfare, biodiversity, soil quality, vegetation and the microclimate at the site.
“Today, the photovoltaic farm delivers much more than green electricity. It has also become a place that supports biodiversity, local agriculture, and scientific research. The sheep grazing project demonstrates that modern industry can work in harmony with nature,” Marzena Pillich-Grońska, director of Volkswagen Poznań, said. A video posted by Quanta Energy, which built Volkswagen’s solar farm, shows some of the sheep in situ:
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Agrivoltaics has become a compelling subject for the energy industry, allowing hybrid use of land. We’ve seen experiments with crops grown under solar panels, but the introduction of livestock seems both smart and adorable.
At most professional workstations in enterprises, you will see dual monitor setups on people’s desks.
A few years or even a decade ago, it made sense to extend the widely spread single 24-inch monitor setup, which was indeed too cramped to check your emails/notifications and work on your tasks simultaneously.
So businesses had increasingly adopted dual or multi-screen setups to increase the productivity of their workforce. More screen real estate, achieved easily.
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Or so people thought, until the compromises started to become visible.
Paul Butler
Regional Sales Director, AOC and Philips Monitors in the UK/Ireland.
You see, you will have to work with twice the video cabling, twice the power cables, twice the power consumption.
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If a dual-monitor setup is from different brands or models of displays, it was also not guaranteed that you will have the same resolution, same colour grading, same brightness or contrast, so it was a “stop-gap” solution to simply offer more space back then. And it worked, kind of.
In the meantime, the display market changed quite a lot. Ultrawide monitors, with a 21:9 aspect ratio, initially featured in the gaming scene for their increased immersion in games and movies, found their way into the business sector.
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Even wider displays, with a 32:9 aspect ratio became more and more popular, since they can replace exactly two 16:9 usual monitors, with no bezel in between, offering a fully usable horizontal landscape.
In certain sectors, such as video editing and music production, where users work with long timelines, or in banking and commerce, where office workers use long and detailed spreadsheets, the entire workflow benefits from more horizontal real estate.
In my mind, I see five main topics why today businesses need to shift towards a single ultrawide or superwide display instead of multi-screen setups.
Bezels that distract
In a usual dual monitor setup, you set up the desk with two 16:9 displays side by side and place the chair in the middle of both displays to have an equal distance away from the screens. But this initial alignment already causes the first and biggest distraction.
In the middle of your central field of view, you will see the right bezel of the left screen, and vice versa. Your primary focus area is filled with bezels, in older displays even as thick as several centimeters.
If you want to use both monitors with a single program at once, such as a long spreadsheet or a video/audio timeline, this “bezel” issue alone breaks your focus and productivity, making following rows or timelines more difficult than a single monitor setup.
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(Non-)Ergonomics that hurt
Dual setups usually mean one of two things. Either, both displays are placed side by side with a straight angle. Which means, your eyes will have more distance towards the side edges than towards the center of your field of view. Or they both are slightly angled towards the center .
In both cases, you will either keep twisting your neck left and right all day long, or you will work off axis for hours. To make matters worse, if none of the dual monitors offer an ergonomic, height-adjustable stand, with tilt and swivel capabilities, you will often try to readjust them to your posture.
A single, curved, ultrawide or superwide display simply keeps equal distance to your eyes from the sides or the center, and its curve matches the natural curvature of your eyes.
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Panels that don’t match
In a dual setup, you will try to install two identical business monitors on a single desk. If that is not possible, there are even bigger issues to deal with. If one has a different resolution or size, you will lose the uniformity between extended screens. Texts may be differently scaled, and it is quite a distraction to move windows and programs between the two displays.
If we assume that “identical” units are set-up side-by-side, the fact that they are “identical” models alone cannot guarantee the same brightness, gamma, contrast and other visual features, since all panels in most manufacturers can show some kind of variation between panels, sometimes very little, sometimes more significant.
Some monitors offer features such as “Sync” or “Link” the displays to make them appear as uniform as possible. But, by definition, a single ultrawide or superwide panel, simply is uniform and eliminates these concerns completely.
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Complexity of scales
With a dual monitor setup, you will need space for two stands on the desk, two power bricks on the floor, two power sockets, more video cables and more clutter, better video cards with more video outputs.
With even larger multi-screen setups, this increases linearly and can become costly, distracting and simply clutters the workspace, when it needs to be clean and minimalistic to allow users to focus on the task at hand. A single ultrawide or superwide display simply cuts the multitude of cables and all the requirements to just one connection to the workstation.
Modern business-focused 21:9 or 32:9 displays also feature KVM switches, USB-C or Thunderbolt 4 connectivity with Power Delivery, built-in USB hubs and even DisplayPort outputs thanks to the additional space on the back for these features. The USB-C or TB4 connectivity allow easy charging of connected laptops or smartphones while also extending the display, using the same cable.
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Some fully-fledged docking models also include a built-in webcam with Windows Hello easy login, and/or a RJ-45 input to route the network connection to the computers plugged in with USB to the monitor.
In short, with a modern large ultrawide/superwide display you can replace even more peripherals than just a single extra monitor.
Cost of ownership
Bringing two panels to each desk directly means double the procurement, double the power consumption, double the devices the IT department needs to check, support, replace – multiplied across every desk in an enterprise. It can get costly and quickly unmanageable.
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Employing “older” displays in a dual-monitor setup as a stop-gap solution becomes unsustainable in a short time with consumption figures easily doubling.
A new ultrawide or superwide display with sustainability features built-in, such as a presence sensor, or a light sensor to adjust its consumption automatically, not only offers a much more comfortable usage for the workforce but also reduces the consumption figures for years to come.
Two monitors solved yesterday’s problem at twice the cost. The businesses that are at the head of the game are the ones that have realized that one great big screen has always been the right answer from the start.
This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.
The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit
American insurance company AssuranceAmerica has disclosed a data breach impacting nearly 7 million drivers after attackers gained access to its systems earlier this year.
AssuranceAmerica operates through a network of over 9,500 independent agents and provides auto, renters, and commercial auto insurance coverage across 14 U.S. states.
While the company has yet to publish a press release regarding the incident, it revealed in a filing with Maine’s Office of the Attorney General that the data breach has exposed the information of 6,998,886 people.
As TechCrunch first reported, AssuranceAmerica detected the breach on March 17 and found that the attackers had stolen a wide range of customer information from its systems.
“On March 17, 2026, the Company detected suspicious activity involving certain Company systems that appears to have resulted from malicious activity on March 16, 2026 that targeted one of the Company’s employees. During the investigation, the Company determined that an unauthorized third party accessed certain portions of the Company’s informational technology (IT) environment and copied certain data files,” it notes in data breach notification letters that will be sent to affected people on Friday.
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“The Company subsequently conducted a review of the affected files to identify individuals whose personal information may have been contained within those files. Because of the nature of the files involved and the scope of the required review, this file evaluation process was only recently completed (on June 15, 2026), and we are now providing this notice.”
As the company found, the stolen documents contained a combination of affected individuals’ names, contact information, automobile insurance policy or insurance account information, driver or vehicle information, claims-related information, and driver’s license numbers.
Since it detected the security breach, AssuranceAmerica disabled the credentials compromised in the attack, kicked the threat actors out of its network by disabling unauthorized sessions, isolated the affected systems, and notified law enforcement agencies of the incident.
“The Company also implemented additional measures designed to enhance the security of its IT systems and data, including resetting passwords, deploying enhanced monitoring and threat detection tools, and providing additional instruction to personnel regarding cybersecurity threats,” it added.
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AssuranceAmerica also advised affected customers to immediately alert their financial institution if they detect any suspicious activity after reviewing credit reports, bank accounts, and other financial statements.
Last month, American insurance giant Aflac also disclosed a data breach after attackers compromised its Japanese subsidiary’s systems, stealing the personal and bank account information of 4.38 million customers.
Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
The agency is giving autonomous vehicle makers until the end of July to figure out a solution.
Thomas Hunter Ii/Getty Images
The US Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is demanding action from autonomous car makers after identifying “a clear pattern of driverless AVs interfering with law enforcement and other first responders” over the past months. Jonathan Morrison, the agency’s administrator, wrote a letter addressing the developers and issuing a call to action. Emergency situations are not rare or “edge cases,” he wrote, so he wants AV developers and operators focus their resources on fixing the issue immediately.
While the NHTSA didn’t give specific examples, there have been news about self-driving vehicles getting in the way of ambulances and fire trucks, like in the image above, for years. After a deadly shooting at a bar in Austin, Texas in March, a Waymo vehicle blocked an ambulance that was responding to the incident. While an officer was able to manually drive the Waymo robotaxi out of the way, it cost them a few minutes to resolve the problem.
According to Wired, emergency first responder leaders told regulators during a meeting in March that they were becoming frustrated at the behavior of autonomous vehicles on the streets. They said they’ve had to spend time during emergencies resolving problems with frozen or stuck cars. Officials from San Francisco and Austin, where Waymo’s robotaxi service has been in operation for a while now, said the company’s vehicles have been getting worse. They’ve apparently been seeing “backsliding” in the AVs’ performance, with the vehicles now committing more traffic violations.
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San Francisco Fire Department chief Patrick Rabbitt, reportedly said that Waymo vehicles have recently been freezing and blocking the department’s fire stations and trucks. Austin officials echoed what Rabbitt said. Waymo vehicles have also been “freezing up” in the city and have been failing to recognize first responders’ hand signals. Dealing with the company’s robotaxis are costing them precious time and preventing them from responding to emergencies in a timely manner.
“Every second matters when law enforcement officers, firefighters, or paramedics are answering a call because lives are on the line. That is why human drivers who impede these operations are subject to fines and even jail time,” Morrison wrote in his letter. “So, when an AV disrupts first responders or impedes an emergency vehicle, it ceases to be a minor software anomaly. The technology driving alongside them must support their efforts and get out of the way, not disrupt their life saving mission or compound the dangers they face.”
Morrison said the NHTSA will schedule meetings with autonomous vehicle makers by the end of July to hear their solutions, giving them less than a month to conjure up a response to the agency’s call to action.
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.”
Last month, the program concluded, and the ACCC released its final performance report (PDF). Subsequently, the routers used for the program were bricked after June 30.
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Ars Technica reviewed a copy of an email that an MBA volunteer received in mid-June informing them that the program would end on June 30, 2026 and further stating:
Service Termination: Your whitebox will be disabled, and your SamKnows One account will be closed.
The email, signed by “The SamKnows Team (part of Cisco),” noted that after June 30, the devices would stop collecting data and that users’ “measurement and registration data will be deleted in accordance with our retention obligations under our end-user license agreement.”
However, as one MBA volunteer pointed out to Ars via email, the routers are still working, making the decision to disable the devices an avoidable e-waste risk.
When asked by Ars, the ACCC didn’t specify the number of SamKnows routers disabled last month. However, in a report about the MBA program released in December 2020 (PDF), the ACCC said it initially expected to release about 4,000 whiteboxes throughout the program’s duration and had distributed “over 2,600″ by December 2020. The report noted that the ACCC retained an “adequate pool of whiteboxes to allow for the expansion of our reporting to cover, for example, emerging [retail service providers] and new speed tier plans.”
Android 17 is finally here, rolling out to Pixel devices now, with Samsung phones and other devices receiving it in the near future. Over the past few years, it would be fair to say that most upgrades to the Android operating system have been largely cosmetic, under the hood, or a little of both. But this year, Android is gaining some new features and abilities that haven’t been around before — or at least not system-wide.
Indeed, there are a number of features that are new to the operating system. They might not be useful to everyone, to be sure. Some of these updates have been cooking for a while; others are coming out of nowhere. Plus, there are still some under-the-hood and cosmetic updates as well. We’ve already outlined some of the big changes that are coming to Android 17, but we wanted to take a moment to point out some of the more noticeable ones that may affect you on a day-to-day basis that we think are pretty cool.
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Bubbles!
Adam Doud/SlashGear
Bubbles are here, and they’re a new multitasking feature that takes a page from Facebook, of all places. You may recall a concept called “chat heads” that Facebook introduced back in 2013. Chat heads surfaced Facebook messages as a round profile picture that appeared on your screen. Tapping on it opened the message. And you could drag the chat head around and ultimately dismiss it by dragging it to the X at the bottom of the screen.
Bubbles are basically that idea, but with every other app on your phone as well. You can open any app into a bubble. The app itself will open in a screen, slightly smaller than your phone screen along with a “bubble bar” interface at the top of the screen. You can have up to four apps open at once and just tap on each icon to switch between apps. It’s really fast and seamless.
It won’t be for everyone. Many people are accustomed to just using the app that’s on the screen and that’s it, but for those people who want to quickly switch between apps, bubbles might be a great way to do it.
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Foldable fun
Adam Doud/SlashGear
Another feature that isn’t out yet but is coming in the near future pertains to foldables like the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold or the Motorola Razr Fold. In this case, Android puts on its best Nintendo 3DS suit and morphs itself into a gaming screen and a controller. When you half-fold a book-style foldable, the bottom portion of the screen switches to become a virtual gaming controller while the top of the screen displays the game. Mishaal Rahman, staffer at Google, took to Reddit to show a preview of the feature.
This allows you to play games without having your fingers on the display, obscuring game elements for controls. It can be beneficial especially to heavy gamers. The posture is available for any game that supports external controllers. The controller itself can be switched and customized to your tastes as well. This is not available today, or at least it isn’t on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold that we tested the feature on, but it will be rolled out in the coming weeks.
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Selfie screen records
Adam Doud/SlashGear
This next update feels like the most niche of the updates, but the screen recorder can now record you and your voice with tools built in. When you initiate a screen recording, you get four options — record device audio, record microphone, show selfie camera, and show touches. This is probably going to be the most useful for tutorials and things like that.
You’ll be able to do that full-on, “Hey everyone. Today we’re going to be learning how to turn on your selfie camera while screen recording,” thing. It’s pretty similar to the green screen feature that social media apps like TikTok and Instagram. This could also be useful if you want to show people how to do something on their phone complete with your disapproving glare. It’s certainly not a feature everyone will use, so we’ll file it under better to have it and not need it.
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Some other cosmetic touches
Adam Doud/SlashGear
Finally, some of the more design-centric touches include smaller details that can help grow and mature the platform. You’ll now be able to turn off app labels on the home screen if you want to, which is something that has been missing for quite a while. The widget picker will not have a bit of translucency to it, just the app launcher and the notification panel.
When you go into settings, you’ll notice the labels for settings are a bit closer together — the photo above shows settings on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold on the left (with Android 17) and the Pixel 10 (Android 16) on the right, both of which have the same size screen. The change is very subtle, but you can definitely see it when placed side-by-side. Speaking of settings, Google combined Wi-Fi and mobile data into a single quick setting called “Internet” a few years back, and it has now re-separated them into their own toggles.
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Finally, you can customize the perma-search bar at the bottom of the screen. You can adjust the level of transparency on it and even add a third icon. Previously you could do this, but only for a new Google search widget and not the one that is at the bottom of the home screen, so that’s a welcome addition as well.
If people think you are doing a legitimate job, you can get away with anything
PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, where each week we share the saga of an organization that couldn’t get out of its own way when it comes to security.
This week’s tale comes courtesy of Dahvid Schloss, a professional red teamer who was also involved (as a supervisor) in last week’s story about hackers shoveling snow in order to gain access to restricted areas. This time, it was Schloss himself who broke in, and he used the promise of better connectivity to do it.
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On one assignment, Schloss was asked to test the physical and network security of a company that was near the top of the Fortune 500 and had a reputation for sponsoring and providing the trophy for an international sporting competition. According to him, there were three copies made of the trophy: one for the winner, one for the host nation itself, and one for the sponsor.
When Schloss was conducting his audit, the location he visited was undergoing construction, creating problems with the office Wi-Fi that all the employees noticed and hated. So when Schloss and his team invaded the place and started probing the wireless network, no one questioned them.
“So, you got three of us that are kind of walking through this campus with antennas sticking out of our laptops. We were not being secretive at all, but we figured this is California and there’s plenty of tech bros and nerds everywhere so antennas sticking out of a computer is not going to scare people,” Schloss said. “But everyone kept coming up to us – not to ask us if we were supposed to be there, but to ask us if we were going to fix the Wi-Fi.”
After wandering the building, Schloss and his team came to the marketing department where one of the trophies, which he estimates was worth at least $250,000 (or, perhaps, priceless as there are only three), was sitting in a case. Knowing that his job was to test overall security and not just network security, he opened up the case and proceeded to remove the trophy.
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Someone from the marketing department saw Schloss pulling the trophy out of the case and talked to him while he was doing it. Their question: “Are you here to fix the Wi-Fi?” When he answered “yes,” the marketing people ignored him as he slipped the trophy into his backpack.
He took the trophy out of the building and held onto it for two and a half weeks, with no one saying anything about it. However, when it came time for him to give a presentation to the company executives, he brought the prize with him.
“We walked to the boardroom and the first thing I do in this boardroom is I pull out the trophy and I put it on the table,” Schloss told us. “And all these executives are sitting around there as we’re about to give this security report on where the maturity is at and that was like enough said, right? You could see the eyes just popping open.”
What we can learn from this story is that employees tend to trust people in the workplace, even outside contractors. If they think that someone belongs in the building, they won’t question that person’s motives, even if they see them doing wrong.
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I’m reminded of a situation that took place at a job I was working at many years ago. It was around 6 pm and most people had left the office, but the cleaning lady was there sweeping up when I heard a commotion coming from my coworker’s cubicle. My colleague, who had been at the gym and left her wallet at her desk, returned to find the cleaner taking cash out of her wallet.
At first I didn’t believe it and thought there must be a misunderstanding because the cleaning lady, unlike Schloss’ set of fake Wi-Fi repairmen, was legitimately supposed to be working that night. However, my coworker caught her red-handed and she later admitted stealing the money.
So train your staff to question everyone, especially strangers who look like they belong in the building. ®
Japanese telecommunications giant KDDI revealed that millions of people had their email addresses and passwords exposed after attackers breached an email platform used by five internet service providers (ISPs) in the country.
KDDI is the second-largest mobile telecommunications provider in Japan, with 45,000 employees and annual revenue of $32.4 billion.
The company disclosed last month that it blocked the attackers’ access and implemented defensive measures after discovering the incident on June 17, and revealed that the breach impacted the STNet, JCOM, Chubu Telecommunications C, NIFTY Corporation, and BIGLOBE ISP operators.
KDDI added that the incident may have exposed the email addresses and passwords of up to 14,22 million current and former customers, as well as those belonging to inactive accounts. It also noted that some passwords were stored in hashed and/or encrypted form (making them harder to use for account hijacking), but did not specify how many accounts had passwords stored in plaintext or what type of encryption was used.
In a July 6 update, KDDI revealed that the attackers breached the platform on May 16 after exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in a third-party software.
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“As a result of our investigation, as of June 17, 2026, the date of our confirmation, this vulnerability was not recognized by the software vendor,” KDDI said. “The software vendor has reported this vulnerability to public authorities and is working toward disclosing the information.”
Over 12 million email addresses exposed
The telecom giant is now working to secure affected email accounts after attackers gained access to the email addresses of 12,233,087 people and the passwords of 7,616,173 others.
“We are currently working to change the passwords of affected customers’ email accounts. To date, many customers, primarily those who regularly use email services, have already changed their passwords,” it said.
“In addition, to ensure the security of customers who do not frequently use email services, we are working to have ISP providers complete mandatory password changes within one or two days.”
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Since the attack, KDDI has also deployed Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) software to help detect future breach attempts and said that, on June 23, a forensic audit confirmed that the exploited vulnerability had been addressed and that the systems aren’t affected by other security issues.
KDDI also notified Japan’s Personal Information Protection Commission and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications after discovering the breach, and is currently working with affected ISPs to implement security measures to mitigate the risks arising from this exposure.
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