Most of the value in SpaceX's IPO is effectively a call option on the company's ambitious space data center plans.
Vercel will escape civil penalties over a contempt of court case brought by the US government, but has admitted wrongdoing and overhauled its data retention practices. The cloud hosting provider failed to comply in a timely manner with a federal search warrant issued in August 2025 at the FBI's request, sought in connection with an unidentified individual's Vercel account, which was deleted before the company acted on the warrant. At the heart of the legal issue was that the user's account was placed into Vercel's deletion queue. Deletion queues let data-heavy organizations erase requested information - user accounts and all associated data - thoroughly and without disrupting the live database. Vercel believed the data had already been deleted, however, it was still sitting in a deletion queue, and so the company only handed over part of what the FBI was looking for, falling short of full compliance with the warrant. On February 2, Vercel's reps attended a hearing to decide whether it would be held in civil contempt as a result of its non-compliance. Magistrate Judge Carson found the US government had established a prima facie case for civil contempt, referring it to a district judge for further consideration. Three days later, Vercel handed over all the "files it previously believed it did not possess and previously could not locate", according to a Justice Department announcement. Vercel's civil contempt case will not go any further after it agreed to a stipulated dismissal, a legal mechanism under which the parties agree to end a case permanently. However, the dismissal came with requirements for Vercel, including an admission of wrongdoing. Vercel admitted its legal process response tools were inadequate in two areas: the Trust and Safety team was unable to locate, preserve, or produce "certain content," and it was also unable to do the same with respect to content held in a deletion queue. Officials said Vercel has since updated its legal processes to allow it to comply more quickly with future warrants of a similar nature, and it covered the government's legal fees. "When a federal court issues a search warrant, it is not a suggestion, but a mandatory directive, essential to the pursuit of justice, that a recipient company must comply with," said A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general at the Justice Department's Criminal Division. "The Criminal Division pursues technology companies who fail to uphold their lawfully mandated obligations. We are pleased Vercel has belatedly complied and accepted responsibility for the unnecessary costs incurred by the government in this matter." ®
Pinterest is adding support for Amazon Storefronts, allowing creators to earn affiliate commissions more easily while showcasing their product recommendations in one place.
Through the acquisition, WMG aims to better track when its artists' work is used in AI-generated content or for training AI models.
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Quick Take
- The first trailer for writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, starring Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, puts Facebook on trial.
- Unlike The Social Network, this movie does not seem as intent on humanizing or apologizing for Mark Zuckerberg, and that was are greatest issue with the original.
The Social Network told the story of how Mark Zuckerberg took Facebook from a dorm room to a global powerhouse. That was obviously not the end of the story for either the company or its founder. It was also not the end of Aaron Sorkin’s interest in both. The writer-director is back with The Social Reckoning, a pseudo-sequel starring Jeremy Strong as the infamous CEO. And the film’s first trailer sets the stage to show how Facebook’s darkest secrets came to light.
We’re confident Meta is really going to be pushing out stories about this trailer! Probably a top priority. ….Well, maybe not. But we’re definitely interested in this film starring Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White as the whistleblower and journalist who revealed some of Facebook’s most heinous actions (which it is still paying for today) to the public. In addition to the trailer, here is The Social Reckoning‘s synopsis from Sony Pictures:
A companion piece to the hit film The Social Network, Sorkin’s original screenplay is based on the events that gave rise to the Wall Street Journal’s shocking exposé The Facebook Files. The film is inspired by the true story of how Frances Haugen (Madison), a young Facebook engineer, enlists the help of Jeff Horwitz (White), a Wall Street Journal reporter, to go on a dangerous journey that ends up blowing the whistle on the social network’s most guarded secrets.
The film also stars Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, and Bill Burr.
Sony Pictures
Can The Social Reckoning live up to its predecessor, which many consider to be among the best films of the century? That’s a tall order, but this sort-of-sequel does have one advantage going for it. I’ve always thought the only problem with The Social Network is that it generously humanizes Mark Zuckerberg. This trailer indicates that will not be a problem with Strong’s portrayal of the billionaire. And we’ll all find out when the movie signs in to theaters on October 9, 2026.
The Social Network is available online to rent or buy.
The post THE SOCIAL RECKONING Puts Facebook on Trial in First Trailer appeared first on Nerdist.
ServiceNow is used by thousands of enterprises to automate their internal processes, but says several customers had data accessed because of a security bug.
Linux Lite 8.0 is now available, rebuilt atop Ubuntu 26.04 and with its custom helper apps rewritten around GTK4. It arrives almost exactly two years after we looked at Linux Lite 7, itself two years after Linux Lite 6.0. The regularity of the release cycle is a sign of its maturity: the project is now 14 years old. Version 8 is based on Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Raccoon, but it eliminates the vexed question that many distros pose: which desktop to use. Linux Lite uses version 4.20 of the Xfce desktop, which in our opinion is an excellent choice. While Ubuntu continues to pile on the pounds, this release of Linux Lite is slightly smaller than its predecessor – the download is 410 MB less. As ever, it includes neither Snap nor Flatpak, which should help users to keep it slim and light. Each major version number of Linux Lite is rebased on a new LTS version of Ubuntu, and will be followed by point releases – very similarly to Linux Mint. Linux Lite 8.x sees some substantial changes, although to be fair, some of these first appeared late in the 7.x release series. The default web browser is now Mozilla Firefox – Google Chrome has got the boot. We can't help but wonder if this is at least in part inspired by Google silently embedding a 4 GB LLM, or perhaps the restrictions that stopped uBlock Origin working from 2024. One of the benefits of Linux Lite for less experienced or technical users, who don't know where to go to do things like changing system settings, installing drivers, and so on, is its selection of handy pre-installed helper applications. The release notes list 15 of these that have been rewritten for this version, and now they use GTK4. The announcement also mentions "end-to-end GTK4 theming." That sounds great, but there's always a cost, and this time, it is that GTK4 no longer supports what the GNOME developers consider tired old UI metaphors like menu bars. So the new Lite apps have fondleslab-style hamburger menus instead, and the primary or default button appears in the title bar. Even years after GNOME 40, we find that a bizarre and unintuitive location. Some of these custom apps are important tools. For instance, Lite Terminal replaces Xfce Terminal. The announcement says it is a "super light, responsive built from the ground up terminal. Beautiful font rendering, predictive auto-complete, a slew of right click options," and calls out "a title bar that turns light red when you are in sudo" (which the new GNOME terminal Ptyxis does too). That's all good, but this vulture would rather just have a menu bar that responds to keyboard controls. The Lite Software app now replaces the venerable Synaptic. It's true, there's been little visible development in Synaptic for years, but we don't find Lite Software capable enough to replace it: for instance, it can only sort by name, not by any other columns – such as whether packages are installed or not, or by version. These changes mean that the new GTK4 apps aren't consistent with the rest of Xfce and its traditional menu bar/toolbar layout. Personally, this vulture doesn't care much about performance or appearance or fonts or themes; we care much more about a consistent working UI that can be driven by the keyboard alone. These GNOME-isms creeping in, such as disappearing menu bars, are not welcome – any more than they are in Linux Mint. Google Chrome has been ousted, but AI hasn't. There's a new MyAI function in Firefox (rather than as a standalone app), which offers a choice of local LLM tools. The announcement devotes over 100 words and eight big screenshots to this, saying: Yes, we understand that AI is a polarising topic. With an estimated 1.2 billion people using it, we felt a responsibility to provide the option, but in a way that respects people's choice rather than forcing it on them. So, yes, points for awareness, but we still feel that generative AI is a profoundly and irredeemably unethical and harmful technology – even privacy-centric local models with open weights burned huge amounts of resources in their training, using material from people who never got offered the choice of consent. We are saddened to see it installed by default in any FOSS-adjacent product. Saying that, we did appreciate the note at the end: If you don't want it: sudo apt purge myai Right click, Delete Bookmark in the Toolbar in Firefox. Good for the team for that concession. The docs also clearly state that it doesn't support Secure Boot: Secure Boot is not supported on Series 8. You must disable Secure Boot in firmware before installing. We made this call so the system stays simple and reliable for everyone – no MOK enrolment, no shim quirks, no surprise breakage after a kernel update. That's a good call, although some guidance on how to do that would be much better. It's not trivial. For all that many corporate coders like it, this jaded old hack feels that Richard Stallman's position on "Secure Boot" was right: Truly secure boot means YOU specify what system is allowed to run in your computer. On the desktop is a link called "Wiki," pointing to the project's online documentation. That's good, but it won't help someone to get online in the first place, and we felt its title in former releases, "Help Manual," was more informative. There are other significant changes. This version uses the Calamares cross-distro installer in place of Canonical's Ubiquity or Subiquity: it is clear and works well, although we've seen reports of problems on very low-end machines, and the release notes warn it could have problems on "potato computers." There are some handy additional tools, such as a junk-files cleaner. There's a one-click Lite Game Center: "Press the big button and it installs Steam, Lutris, Proton, Wine, game controller support and a few popular helpers all in one go." There are also kernel performance-testing tools and a choice of a lower-latency kernel. There are tools to strip the distro down to the core essentials too, and to remaster your own customized version. There's an OEM installation mode, so the end-user can create their own user account from the first boot. There's a custom system monitor app, an informative About applet, and in the shell, btop replaces htop. Version-to-version in-place upgrades are now supported, so it's possible to upgrade Linux Lite 7.x to 8.x – conspicuously absent in earlier releases. We've covered Linux Lite enough in previous reviews, so this is just an overview of the highlights in the new version 8. The additional tools are of real value: things like software updates, driver installers (adopted from Linux Mint), easy point-and-click installation of native packages of popular apps from Audacity to Zoom. Linux Lite adds a lot of polish and improved fit-and-finish over even rivals such as Zorin OS or Linux Mint, and comfortably surpasses what you get with Ubuntu, or even Xubuntu. Post-install, it detected some 160 available updates. We installed them, which showed a friendly if not very informative progress bar: it went straight to 100 percent and then stayed there for many more minutes as it worked away. After a reboot, it found over 40 more. It has some very nice less-obvious customizations, such as the Starship custom shell prompt for bash. The default search engine is the project's own instance of SearXNG. Thanks to the appalling enshittification of Google in the mid-2020s, a custom search engine is more useful than ever. We installed it in a current VirtualBox release, and the driver installer didn't offer the FOSS guest additions – but then that tool is borrowed from Linux Mint, and it never offers them either. Post-update, a full install used 7.8 GB of disk space and idled on 897 MB of RAM – which is almost exactly the same as Xubuntu, while offering a lot more help, guidance, and useful supplementary tools. It's not perfect. We're not delighted by the new Gtk4 Lite apps, and would have preferred the developers favored a consistent classic-Windows like UI over new shiny. There's nothing wrong with the Xfce terminal, Synaptic, and other time-polished tools, or indeed, with Gtk3: better to embrace the classics, and find ways to add value elsewhere. The customizations are great, but could go further: for instance, Xfce's Docklike Taskbar gives a lovely panel that resembles the Windows 7 one, and the fish shell would complement the Starship prompt nicely. These minor criticisms aside, this is one of the best offerings in the greater Ubuntu market. As of version 8, Linux Lite has finally grown into its name. By modern full-fat desktop standards, such as Ubuntu itself, or other downstream distros such as Zorin OS and Linux Mint, it is a lightweight distro – and yet, it offers more assistance and guidance for Windows migrants than any of them. ®
The funding round was led by Norwest, with participation S Capital VC, Cerca Partners, and Oceans Ventures. Snowflake Ventures also participated as a strategic investor.
Almost all UK workers now have to deal with AI, but few firms report big productivity gains because of all the time lost in hand-holding the systems and cleaning up their mistakes. So says a report by the Work AI Institute, a research arm of AI biz Glean Technologies. It claims there are productivity gains to be had from introducing AI-based tools, yet much of this is being negated by the amount of time employees waste making them work – a phenomenon it has christened "botsitting." The organization surveyed 1,500 digital workers for "The Work AI Index: UK 2026" report, finding 90 percent are now required to use AI in their roles, 80 percent use multiple AI tools every week, and 39 percent use four or more. The workers indicate AI automation saves them roughly 12 hours a week, or just under a third of their working week. Yet only 18 percent agree AI has significantly improved their organization's performance. The time freed up isn't flowing into productive work, it's being absorbed by the unglamorous human labour required to keep those systems running, according to the Work AI Institute. For every hour a UK staffer spends getting output from their AI tools, they spend roughly another hour making it usable. Part of the reason so much time disappears into botsitting is how often the tools fail, with employees finding that more than a third (36 percent) of AI sessions fail outright, requiring a full restart or substantial reworking. On average, Brit workers waste 5.8 hours each week in these botsitting processes, the report says. This time is typically taken up by loading the context window with information the AI should already have, and overseeing the output. The latter involves reviewing answers and trying to catch outputs that are wrong, incomplete, or missing important context. When workers spot a problem with the output, they may have to re-prompt, add more context, swap models, and re-prompt again until something usable comes back, the researchers claim. And if they aren't diligent enough to spot when an AI tool has goofed up, the mess lands on colleagues who weren't involved with the work, but now have to fix something they didn't break. Most of this botsitting effort is grunt work, the report notes, such as reloading context into different tools, catching hallucinations, and verifying outputs that may appear perfectly fine at first glance. In effect, workers are serving as the integration layer for their company's AI tools, having to tell them which information sources to use, which documents are current, and what other key details matter, as well as correcting their mistakes. Interfaces and standards such as APIs and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) were supposed to solve this by letting tools talk to each other and share data, the Work AI Institute says, but they don't solve the context problem. Workers eventually tire and start to cut corners, becoming less diligent in checking outputs, verifying sources, or checking whether the AI's recommendations make any sense, the survey says. 70 percent of UK AI users admit to simply passing on the first output that looks "good enough." According to the Work AI Institute, the UK has moved fast on AI uptake, leading even the US on key adoption metrics. However, it is the depth of adoption that stands out, going beyond using it for content generation and moving it into the activities that shape working life. The report warns AI is now being used in higher-stakes areas where UK law is tightly regulated, such as HR decisions. It claims more than half of UK workers are comfortable with AI playing a role in performance evaluation, and nearly 40 percent say it is already used in reviews. British workers are more comfortable than Americans with AI in hiring, promotion, compensation, and even termination decisions. Even so, local organizations are less likely to use AI in termination decisions because employment law makes dismissal harder to defend than in the US. The report concludes that Britain has built a stronger institutional foundation for workplace AI than almost any other country, and claims this is a potential advantage. Yet the value of this AI investment will come from operational discipline, and measuring whether the work produced is better, not just faster. Otherwise the hours workers "save" are lost again in botsitting. "Adoption alone doesn't equal transformation," said Dr Rebecca Hinds, head of the Work AI Institute at Glean. "If employees are spending the productivity dividend on botsitting, companies haven't eliminated work – they've created a new layer of overhead." ®
National headlines may have shifted, but the impacts of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda are still being felt across Los Angeles. For many, it has devastated their financial, mental, and physical wellbeing. And as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents still roam the city, the struggle is far from over. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night remembering…
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When it comes to transformative horror films from the last 20 years, there are few that come to mind. One in particular is Ari Aster’s Hereditary, the 2018 film starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, and Gabriel Byrne. We watched a family completely unravel in the most chilling way following a matriarch’s death. The film made Aster a big name in the horror film world; however, he never followed up with a sequel. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because, well, not everything needs a sequel. Hereditary was phenomenal on its own. But Aster recently revealed that he wrote a Hereditary prequel but it hasn’t felt like “the right time” to pursue it. A24
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster said about Hereditary after a screening of it in June 2026. “It never feels like the right time. It’s a prequel, not a sequel, so I don’t know where this goes.”
Mondo Unveils Eerie A24 Posters for HEREDITARY, SACRED DEERWe aren’t exactly sure what that means or if he ever intends to make a prequel. As we all know in the horror world, it is never, ever too late to pick back up with a universe. Many franchises wait decades before a sequel, prequel, reboot, or whatever term applies. We’d be down to dig into the world of Hereditary more. But, if Aster decides to let that script sit in a box, we will always be thankful for his first feature film.
The post Ari Aster Wrote a HEREDITARY Prequel Film appeared first on Nerdist.
GitHub will change npm's defaults so the install command no longer runs scripts automatically, disabling a feature commonly exploited by malicious packages such as the notorious Shai-Hulud worm. Maintainer Leo Balter said: "Install-time lifecycle scripts are the single largest code-execution surface in the npm ecosystem. Every npm install runs scripts from every transitive dependency, so a single compromised package anywhere in your tree can execute arbitrary code on a developer machine or CI (continuous integration) runner." In npm 12, due July, three security-focused defaults are changing. Scripts configured for preinstall, install, or postinstall will no longer run unless explicitly permitted via allow-scripts. The --allow-git flag, which pulls dependencies from remote URLs, will default to off, closing an attack path where a malicious .npmrc file could override the Git executable and achieve arbitrary code execution. Finally, allow-remote will default to none, blocking dependency downloads from remote URLs entirely. It will still be possible to allow scripts to run via an allowlist in the package.json configuration file. This will be pinned to the installed version of a package by default. These are breaking changes, and Balter recommended developers run the commands to allow scripts for every currently installed package in a project that requires them. "This gets you protected against new, unexpected scripts immediately," he said. The next step is to review these packages and deny scripts for those where they are not needed. Some packages require script approval to function, including native modules that compile on install, testing tools like Playwright and Puppeteer (which fetch binaries via postinstall), and Electron, which wraps the Chromium browser engine for cross-platform desktop applications. These features have been available since npm version 11.10.0, released in February, but as opt-in flags rather than defaults. That version also introduced min-release-age, which blocks installation of package version newer than a specified number of days, designed as a safeguard against newly published malicious packages. Best security practice for developers using npm 11.16, the current version, is to set these flags on in .npmrc or via environment variables, which will also prepare a project for the changes in version 12. One annoyance is that the existing flag ignore-scripts does not support an allowlist, other than via an additional tool. The ignore-scripts setting will override allow-scripts, so developers will need to remove it, if set to true, to enable approved scripts to run. The allowScripts setting exists in npm 11 but is advisory only. Will this fix npm security issues? Unfortunately not. "Now all the malware can move from the install script to the module itself where it will inevitably still be run," said one developer. Another common view is that developers should use pnpm, which already has safer defaults than npm, including a minimum release age. There is consensus, though, that these changes do improve npm security and are long overdue. The pull request for this change includes the remark that "npm is the only remaining major package manager that runs dependency install scripts by default. pnpm v10+, Yarn Berry, Bun, and Deno all block them." ®
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Quick Take
- The BBC has canceled the Doctor Who Christmas special in a surprising move.
- Russel T Davies will also leave the series.
- The BBC is searching for a new Doctor Who head and presumably a new Doctor.
Just like the Grinch came for Whoville, the BBC has come for Whovians this holiday season. The network announced it has canceled this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special. It also revealed that showrunner Russell T Davies is leaving the series. This might all sound very bad, but according to Davies, the mere possibility of a Christmas special was always meant to serve as a bridge to a new era of Doctor Who. And that’s exactly what this is all about. The BBC is already looking for a new voice to lead the show.
BBC
After the Doctor Who Christmas Special was postponed… from Christmas… we know things might not be going in a great direction. And now, the BBC has revealed big changes are coming to its landmark sci-fi series, and they start with not making the planned Christmas special. From the network’s official press release:
After careful consideration, the BBC, Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf have collectively decided not to go ahead with the previously announced Doctor Who Christmas episode. This decision was not taken lightly, and we know it will be disappointing for fans, but in order to set the show up for future series, it was decided that rather than bridge the gap with a one off special, we are choosing to push forward to invest in the long-term future of the show which ensures that when the TARDIS lands once more, it does so in all its glory.
BBC/Bad Wolf Studios/Disney+
The BBC also said that its efforts at “securing the next phase of the show for future generations will include putting the show “out to competitive tender this year.” On Instagram, Davies confirmed his departure and also offered insight into the cancellation of the Doctor Who Christmas special, which apparently only ever existed in strategic name only. Davies wrote, “We only cooked [the special] up to guarantee a future when no one knew what would happen, but now we do know, there’s no need for it.”
Davies also said no Doctor Who Christmas special script ever existed and that he never approached any actor to play the Doctor. Left unsaid is what his departure and the special’s cancellation will mean for the giant cliffhanger he leaves behind. We thought the Christmas special could resolve the shocking return of Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler. Now we don’t know if that storyline will ever get a conclusion. We might never know if she was, in fact, the next Doctor. And we probably won’t find out if we’ll find out until 2028.
That’s not a long time for a regenerating Time Lord. But it’s not exactly the type of holiday present Whovians expected to get this year.
The post DOCTOR WHO Christmas Special Canceled, Russell T Davies Leaving Show appeared first on Nerdist.
Decart is launching Oasis 3, a real-time world model that generates photorealistic driving environments for autonomous vehicle testing, now available via API for developers to build on.
President Donald Trump last year dramatically ratched up the fee for H-1B work visas to $100,000, saying it would protect American workers from losing their jobs to lower-paid foreigners. But on Monday a federal judge struck down the fees, siding with 20 states and ruling that the Trump administration exceeded its authority by raising the fee without congressional approval.
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Users under 16 years old will get a separate profile to show Stories and Spotlight posts to friends that they follow back.
Electricity demand from AI data centers is pushing everyone — including automakers like GM and Ford — into the energy storage business.
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon Related | Transportation chief wants AI to manage your air travel safety…
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Fusion power startup Avalanche Energy said its reactor prototype heated a plasma to over 10 million degrees C.
Ambrosia Energy wants to build power plants in less than 12 months while undercutting natural gas. It hopes to build gigawatts worth by 2030.
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