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Coca-Cola has doubled down on AI-generated holiday ads despite widespread criticism of last year's uncanny results. This year the beverage company is replacing human actors with oddly animated animals in a visually inconsistent campaign. The Verge reports: There's no consistent style, switching between attempted realism and a bug-eyed toony look, and the polar bears, panda, and sloth move unnaturally, like flat images that have been sloppily animated rather than rigged 3D models in CG. Compared to the convincing deepfake videos being generated by tools like OpenAI's Sora 2 or Google's Veo 3, the videos produced for this Coke ad feel extremely dated. The only notable improvement to my eyes is that the wheels on the iconic Coke trucks are actually consistently turning this year, rather than gliding statically over snow-covered roads. The Wall Street Journal reports that Coca-Cola teamed up with Silverside and Secret Level on its latest holiday campaign, two of the AI studios that previously worked on the 2024 Coke Christmas ads. Coca-Cola declined to comment on the cost of the new holiday campaign, according to The Wall Street Journal, but said that around 100 people were involved in the project -- a figure comparable to the company's older AI-free productions. That includes five "AI specialists" from Silverside who contributed by prompting and refining more than 70,000 AI video clips.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: You may be disappointed if you go looking for Google's open Gemma AI model in AI Studio today. Google announced late on Friday that it was pulling Gemma from the platform, but it was vague about the reasoning. The abrupt change appears to be tied to a letter from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who claims the Gemma model generated false accusations of sexual misconduct against her. Blackburn published her letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Friday, just hours before the company announced the change to Gemma availability. She demanded Google explain how the model could fail in this way, tying the situation to ongoing hearings that accuse Google and others of creating bots that defame conservatives. At the hearing, Google's Markham Erickson explained that AI hallucinations are a widespread and known issue in generative AI, and Google does the best it can to mitigate the impact of such mistakes. Although no AI firm has managed to eliminate hallucinations, Google's Gemini for Home has been particularly hallucination-happy in our testing. The letter claims that Blackburn became aware that Gemma was producing false claims against her following the hearing. When asked, "Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?" Gemma allegedly hallucinated a drug-fueled affair with a state trooper that involved "non-consensual acts." Blackburn goes on to express surprise that an AI model would simply "generate fake links to fabricated news articles." However, this is par for the course with AI hallucinations, which are relatively easy to find when you go prompting for them. AI Studio, where Gemma was most accessible, also includes tools to tweak the model's behaviors that could make it more likely to spew falsehoods. Someone asked a leading question of Gemma, and it took the bait.

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A long-simmering battle over who controls credit scoring in America has erupted into open warfare. Fair Isaac, whose FICO score is used in about 90% of consumer-lending decisions in the U.S., announced it will double the price of its mortgage credit score to $10 next year. The company also said it will bypass the three credit-reporting firms that have supplied the data feeding into its algorithm for decades. Equifax, Experian and TransUnion created VantageScore in 2006 as an alternative to FICO and collectively own the scoring system. The move came months after Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would allow lenders to use VantageScore for mortgage approvals. The three credit-reporting firms responded by offering VantageScore free for many loans. Fair Isaac had charged a few cents per score for decades before chief executive Will Lansing began raising prices several years ago. Revenue from selling credit scores reached $920 million in fiscal 2024, nearly five times what it was a decade earlier.

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Apple is paying Google to create a custom Gemini-based model that will run on the company's private cloud servers and power the next version of Siri, according to Bloomberg. The decision marks a departure from Apple's tradition of building core technologies in-house. The arrangement follows a competition Apple held this year between Anthropic and Google, the report said. Anthropic offered a superior model, but Google made more financial sense because of the tech giants' existing search relationship. Neither company is expected to discuss the partnership publicly, the report added. The new Siri will introduce AI-powered web search and other features users have come to expect from voice assistants. The custom model will not flood Siri with Google services or Gemini features already available on Android devices. Instead, it will provide the underlying AI capabilities through an Apple user interface. The company is betting heavily on the revamped Siri to undo years of brand damage.

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The Internet Archive celebrated archiving its trillionth webpage last month and received congratulations from San Francisco, which declared October 22 "Internet Archive Day." Senator Alex Padilla designated the nonprofit a federal depository library. The organization currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. But these victories arrived after years of bruising copyright battles that forced the removal of more than 500,000 books from the Archive's Open Library. "We survived, but it wiped out the Library," founder Brewster Kahle told ArsTechnica. In 2024, the Archive lost its final appeal in a lawsuit brought by book publishers over its e-book lending model. Damages could have topped $400 million before publishers announced a confidential settlement. Last month, the organization settled another suit over its Great 78 Project after music publishers sought damages of up to $700 million. That settlement was also confidential. In both cases, the Archive's experts challenged publishers' estimates as massively inflated. Kahle had envisioned the Open Library as a way for Wikipedia to link to book scans and help researchers reference e-books. The Archive wanted to deepen Wikipedia's authority as a research tool by surfacing information often buried in books. "That's what they really succeeded at -- to make sure that Wikipedia readers don't get access to books," Kahle said of the publishers. He thinks "the world became stupider" when the Open Library was gutted. The Archive is now expanding Democracy's Library, a free online compendium of government research and publications that will be linked in Wikipedia articles.

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Captchas have largely vanished from the web in 2025, replaced by invisible tracking systems that analyze user behavior rather than asking people to decipher distorted text or identify traffic lights in image grids. Google launched reCaptcha v3 in 2018 to generate risk scores based on behavioral signals during site interactions, making bot-blocking technology "completely invisible" for most users, according to Tim Knudsen, a director of product management at Google Cloud. Cloudflare followed in 2022 by releasing Turnstile, another invisible alternative that sometimes appears as a simple checkbox but actually gathers data from devices and software to determine if users are human. Both companies distribute their security tools for free to collect training data, and Cloudflare now sees 20% of all HTTP requests across the internet. The rare challenges that do surface have become increasingly bizarre, ranging from requests to identify dogs and ducks wearing various hats to sliding a jockstrap across a screen to find matching underwear on hookup sites.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), an anti-piracy organization representing Japanese IP holders like Studio Ghibli and Bandai Namco, released a letter last week asking OpenAI to stop using its members' content to train Sora 2, as reported by Automaton. The letter states that "CODA considers that the act of replication during the machine learning process may constitute copyright infringement," since the resulting AI model went on to spit out content with copyrighted characters. Sora 2 generated an avalanche of content containing Japanese IP after it launched on September 30th, prompting Japan's government to formally ask OpenAI to stop replicating Japanese artwork. This isn't the first time one of OpenAI's apps clearly pulled from Japanese media, either -- the highlight of GPT-4o's launch back in March was a proliferation of "Ghibli-style" images. Altman announced last month that OpenAI will be changing Sora's opt-out policy for IP holders, but CODA claims that the use of an opt-out policy to begin with may have violated Japanese copyright law, stating, "under Japan's copyright system, prior permission is generally required for the use of copyrighted works, and there is no system allowing one to avoid liability for infringement through subsequent objections."

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A developer operating under the handle @XenoPanther has stripped Windows 7 down to 69MB. The OS boots but runs almost nothing because critical files like common dialog boxes and common controls are missing. @XenoPanther described the project on X as "more of a fun proof of concept rather than something usable." The desktop appears and the genuine check remains intact.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science articles and papers that haven't been vetted by an academic journal or a conference. Why? A tide of AI slop has flooded the computer science category with low-effort papers that are "little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues," according to a press release about the change. arXiv has become a critical place for preprint and open access scientific research to be published. Many major scientific discoveries are published on arXiv before they finish the peer review process and are published in other, peer-reviewed journals. For that reason, it's become an important place for new breaking discoveries and has become particularly important for research in fast-moving fields such as AI and machine learning (though there are also sometimes preprint, non-peer-reviewed papers there that get hyped but ultimately don't pass peer review muster). The site is a repository of knowledge where academics upload PDFs of their latest research for public consumption. It publishes papers on physics, mathematics, biology, economics, statistics, and computer science and the research is vetted by moderators who are subject matter experts.

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Version:next-20251103 (linux-next) Released:2025-11-03

Version:6.18-rc4 (mainline) Released:2025-11-02 Source:linux-6.18-rc4.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)

Version:6.17.7 (stable) Released:2025-11-02 Source:linux-6.17.7.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.17.7.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.17.7

Version:6.12.57 (longterm) Released:2025-11-02 Source:linux-6.12.57.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.57.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.57

Version:6.6.116 (longterm) Released:2025-11-02 Source:linux-6.6.116.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.116.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.116

The OverlayFS bug in Ubuntu last year slipped through normal testing. Nothing exotic, a permissions issue in the filesystem layer that let local users climb the privilege ladder. Classic Linux security problem. The patch landed quickly, but some production boxes stayed behind for weeks. Always the same story.

According to the Wall Street Journal, SpaceX is reportedly poised to secure a $2 billion Pentagon contract to develop hundreds of missile-tracking satellites for President Trump's ambitious Golden Dome defense system. The Independent reports: The planned "air moving target indicator" system in question could ultimately feature as many as 600 satellites once it is fully operational, The Wall Street Journal reports. Musk's company has also been linked to two more satellite ventures, which are concerned with relaying sensitive communications and tracing vehicles, respectively. Golden Dome, inspired by Israel's "Iron Dome," was announced by Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at the White House in May and will amount to a complex system of satellites and weaponry capable of destroying incoming missiles before they hit American targets. The president promised it would be "fully operational" before he leaves office in January 2029, capable of intercepting rockets, "even if they are launched from space," with an overall price tag of $175 billion.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: It's time for Xbox to eat some humble pie and perform some real soul-searching. Microsoft released its latest quarterly earnings report and proved the worst of our fears about its gaming brand. Not only are Xbox hardware sales down significantly, but the brand itself is barely treading water. Gamers are voicing their displeasure with their wallets, but Microsoft's top brass is still only thinking about the margins. Microsoft was more keen to promote the scale of its cloud and AI services revenue -- which was up 28% year over year -- than talk about its beleaguered gaming brand. The company's overall gaming revenue fell by 2% compared to the same time last year. This was precipitated by a "decline in Xbox hardware," which was down by 22% following a steady decline quarter after quarter. Its first-party games and its Game Pass subscription were doing better, though the overall growth was only up by 1%, and even that was driven by the "better-than-expected performance" of third-party games. You can give credit to titles like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for why Xbox isn't in an even deeper hole than it is now. The tech giant has no expectation that its Xbox brand will start making more money anytime soon. In its earnings call with investors, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said the company expects Xbox will continue to decline "in the low to mid-single digits" for the following quarter. That's mostly due to the lack of landmark first-party titles. Just this month, Xbox released Ninja Gaiden 4, The Outer Worlds 2, and Double Fine's The Keeper. Xbox also made a huge marketing push for its first handheld, made in partnership with Asus, the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X. In any other year, this would be a big month for any gaming company. The dour outlook comes after months of bad news. After two subsequent price hikes, Xbox Series S and Series X consoles now cost between $100 to $150 more than they did at launch five years ago. Microsoft also pushed prices of its Game Pass Ultimate subscription tier from $20 to $30 per month. A full-year's subscription would now demand $360. In a separate article, Gizmodo reviews Microsoft's new ROG Xbox Ally X handheld, which "offers a better experience overall" than the "other small-scale Windows PC gaming devices released this year." However, "it's still nowhere close to what you truly want from a console."

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OpenAI has introduced Aardvark, a GPT-5-powered autonomous agent that scans, reasons about, and patches code like a human security researcher. "By embedding itself directly into the development pipeline, Aardvark aims to turn security from a post-development concern into a continuous safeguard that evolves with the software itself," reports InfoWorld. From the report: What makes Aardvark unique, OpenAI noted, is its combination of reasoning, automation, and verification. Rather than simply highlighting potential vulnerabilities, the agent promises multi-stage analysis -- starting by mapping an entire repository and building a contextual threat model around it. From there, it continuously monitors new commits, checking whether each change introduces risk or violates existing security patterns. Additionally, upon identifying a potential issue, Aardvark attempts to validate the exploitability of the finding in a sandboxed environment before flagging it. This validation step could prove transformative. Traditional static analysis tools often overwhelm developers with false alarms -- issues that may look risky but aren't truly exploitable. "The biggest advantage is that it will reduce false positives significantly," noted Jain. "It's helpful in open source codes and as part of the development pipeline." Once a vulnerability is confirmed, Aardvark integrates with Codex to propose a patch, then re-analyzes the fix to ensure it doesn't introduce new problems. OpenAI claims that in benchmark tests, the system identified 92 percent of known and synthetically introduced vulnerabilities across test repositories, a promising indication that AI may soon shoulder part of the burden of modern code auditing.

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The FCC plans to repeal a Biden-era ruling that required ISPs to secure their networks under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, instead relying on voluntary cybersecurity commitments from telecom providers. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the ruling "exceeded the agency's authority and did not present an effective or agile response to the relevant cybersecurity threats." Carr said the vote scheduled for November 20 comes after "extensive FCC engagement with carriers" who have taken "substantial steps... to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses." Ars Technica reports: The FCC's January 2025 declaratory ruling came in response to attacks by China, including the Salt Typhoon infiltration of major telecom providers such as Verizon and AT&T. The Biden-era FCC found that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), a 1994 law, "affirmatively requires telecommunications carriers to secure their networks from unlawful access or interception of communications." "The Commission has previously found that section 105 of CALEA creates an affirmative obligation for a telecommunications carrier to avoid the risk that suppliers of untrusted equipment will "illegally activate interceptions or other forms of surveillance within the carrier's switching premises without its knowledge,'" the January order said. "With this Declaratory Ruling, we clarify that telecommunications carriers' duties under section 105 of CALEA extend not only to the equipment they choose to use in their networks, but also to how they manage their networks." A draft of the order that will be voted on in November can be found here (PDF).

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Bluesky has surpassed 40 million users and is launching a "dislikes" beta to improve its personalization algorithms and reduce toxic content. TechCrunch reports: With the "dislikes" beta rolling out soon, Bluesky will take into account the new signal to improve user personalization. As users "dislike" posts, the system will learn what sort of content they want to see less of. This will help to inform more than just how content is ranked in feeds, but also reply rankings. The company explained the changes are designed to make Bluesky a place for more "fun, genuine, and respectful exchanges" -- an edict that follows a month of unrest on the platform as some users again criticized the platform over its moderation decisions. While Bluesky is designed as a decentralized network where users run their own moderation, some subset of Bluesky users want the platform itself to ban bad actors and controversial figures instead of leaving it up to the users to block them. Bluesky, however, wants to focus more on the tools it provides users to control their own experience.

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