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The Ring 5, which Oura describes as the world’s smallest smart ring, is 40% smaller than its predecessor and starts at $399.

Guests at Walt Disney World’s Hollywood Studios can already travel to Andy’s backyard with Toy Story Land, the Twilight Zone’s fifth dimension via the Tower of Terror, and to the galaxy far, far away in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. Soon they’ll also be able to go to Monstropolis. Imagineers are greatly expanding the park’s former Muppets Courtyard into a massive new area inspired by Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. movies. And not only has Disney announced new details and images about the story guests will enter when it finally opens, Nerdist got a chance to visit the site. We got a behind-the-scenes look at what’s coming when monsters invite humans into their world. It’s an interactive story Imagineers are making you a part of.Disney

The last few months have seen noticeable work to the future home of Monstropolis at Hollywood Studios. We’ve known the land will feature Disney’s first vertical/suspended roller coaster ever. To say we’re excited about the attraction based on the swinging doors sequence from the original Monsters, Inc. film would be a monstrous understatement. But now we finally know what other elements Monstropolis will also feature.

Monstropolis is a collaboration between Walt Disney Imagineering and Pixar Animation Studios. The story behind the area, which is truly gigantic, takes its inspiration from Mike and Sulley’s discovery that human laughter is much more powerful than human screams. As announced by the in-world Monstropolis Horn newspaper, that has led monsters to do the previously unthinkable. They have decided to invite humans to their realm. The initiative comes from the City Frightful’s newly created Department of Human Relations, which got its own logo that highlights the bond between humans and monsters.

Disney

Aww. Boo would love it.

When guests enter Monstropolis they’ll be joining the celebration known as H.U.M.A.N. Day. That stands for “Humans Understand Monsters Are Nice.” Disney describes the concept as “part celebration, part cultural exchange,” an event meant to “introduce humans to life inside Monstropolis while helping monsters discover that humans are not so frightening after all.”

Visitors will “get to explore the city, meet its citizens, taste unique cuisine, and step into the everyday world of monsters in a totally new way.” Disney executives told us during a media visit to the very active construction site that Monstropolis is meant to be interactive. They’re making visitors part of the story by putting them inside a story. And that story will also tell new stories within the larger theme. They compared the experience to Shanghai Disney’s Zootopia land that opened in late 2023. They also said they are trying to best the counterpart’s Zootopia.

That is really saying something.

Monstropolis will include aspects fans would hope and expect to see. It will have its very own Harryhausen’s restaurant. The fancy sushi spot appeared in the original film. It will also feature the Glob Theater, which will sit in the former home of Muppet*Vision 3D. While Disney has not announced exactly what show will run in the Glob, executives told us the audience will be a part of it. That fits in with the larger concept of trying to immerse you inside the story.

We also got a chance to see unreleased concept art for the park used on site. That artwork features streets and buildings that are both similar to human locations while also wholly of Monstropolis. Executives said they’ll be adorned by decorative teeth, fangs, and faces. Imagineers also noted they worked with Pixar to flesh out the rest of what Monstropolis looks like since it wasn’t explored in-depth in the films. The goal is to show it’s a city with “real history” and a scale that highlights monsters both “big and small” live there. Execs described it as storytelling via architecture, a place where the old Monstropolis can still be found among its new iteration. The goal is to make Monstropolis feel like a lived-in character unto itself.

Click To View Gallery Disney The Walt Disney Company The Walt Disney Company Disney

Hollywood Studios’ new land will also feel both new yet familiar by including aspects fans have never seen but will instantly recognize. There will be both a door factory and a canister making factory.

As for when any human will get to partake in H.U.M.A.N. Day remains unknown. The big picture is coming into focus when it comes to Walt Disney World’s newest land. But the massive site still felt like it was in the very early stages of construction during our visit.

Monstropolis construction visible to guests

Our guess is that it still at likely two years away at least. Then again, this will be the first time monsters can technically hire human workers, so maybe it’ll open even faster.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. He enjoyed wearing a hardhat during his site visit. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

The post What We Learned Visiting Hollywood Studios’ Monstropolis Land Site appeared first on Nerdist.

MI5 and its international allies are once again warning that China is shopping for state secret leakers on popular recruitment platforms, including LinkedIn, Indeed, and Upwork. In a fresh advisory published on Wednesday evening, the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence agency said China is using an increasing number of platforms to recruit those who have access to classified or privileged information. Chinese military intelligence officers specifically target security clearance holders, including marks working in defense, security, and foreign affairs, military personnel, and those with indirect access to government information, such as academics, journalists, think tank employees, and others. Anyone who fits the bill is being urged to remain vigilant to potential attempts from Chinese operatives to cultivate long-term relationships. “These actors use an aggressive online recruitment strategy whereby intelligence officers or their affiliates pose as employees of private consultancies, think tanks, or human resources firms, and place online job advertisements for foreign policy and defence analysts (or similar),” the advisory [PDF] states. “Successful candidates are pressured to provide 'non-public' information for unspecified clients who are associated with the Chinese government. China’s military intelligence services ultimately seek to acquire privileged military, political, and economic intelligence that can provide China with a strategic and tactical advantage over the Five Eyes.” According to MI5, after the job and gig-work ads are posted online, China’s spies will rank the resumes they receive based on how likely a given individual is to have information of interest before interviewing them. It warned that even by sending a resume over, which includes personal details, a person is risking their own security and privacy. Targets face probing questions about who they know in government. For those in the military, they might be asked about where they were based, and what tasks they were responsible for. After demanding potential recruits complete a trial report on matters related to China, the spies will often shift conversations to encrypted messaging platforms where recruits are offered payments in exchange for increasingly privileged information. Payments may arrive through a number of online platforms, including reputable services like PayPal, Zelle, and Wise, to others more commonly associated with associated with illegality, such as Western Union and cryptocurrency. MI5 closed out its advisory with a warning to anyone even considering a life of peddling secrets to China: doing so comes with severe consequences. “Certain types of data can place the lives of frontline military or other personnel at risk, can weaken our economic prosperity, and enable interference in our democratic processes,” it said. “Individuals engaged in the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive or classified information could face a number of consequences, including prosecution under national laws such as those relating to espionage.” A common theme This week’s admonition is far from the first issued by the UK in response to this particular aspect of Chinese spies’ tradecraft. The most recent came in November when UK security minister Dan Jarvis reminded the UK's House of Commons that members should have received information about Chinese attempts to recruit parliamentarians through identical means. In those information packs disseminated by MI5, Brit politicos were given the names of two online profiles that the counter-intelligence agency suspected of being involved in recruitment campaigns. MI5 dished out an earlier warning in 2021, saying that around 10,000 Britons had been targeted by Chinese spies over the previous five years using work platforms, posing as headhunters. The 10,000 figure, it added, was thought to be a conservative estimate, with the agency's head, Ken McCallum, saying workplace platforms were being exploited “on an industrial scale.” The US said it was seeing similar tactics used when President Trump took office for the second time, which shortly after led to mass redundancies across federal agencies. Experts at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) named five supposed consulting companies targeting the recently jobless via LinkedIn, Craigslist, and others, all in search of state secrets. The companies would present the fired workers with job opportunities, and as FDD senior analyst Max Lesser told The Register at the time, the layoffs, which began in February 2025, would have likely raised the risk level associated with state secrets being spilled. ®

A monthly roundup of Santa Cruz County dining highlights celebrates the start of summer with four finds: a fruit-packed aguanada in Watsonville, a savory martini in Aptos, a wood-fired seafood platter in Live Oak and chilaquiles paired with a banana milk latte from a food truck in Santa Cruz. 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration plans to dismantle a $368 million deep-sea observation system that has for more than a decade provided crucial data on ocean systems and climate change.

In a notice, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it had “initiated descoping of the Ocean Observatories Initiative” (OOI), a vast ocean observation network comprising more than 900 instruments that collect data on ocean health, including current patterns, climate variability, and marine biodiversity.

The notice, issued on May 21, came just days after Trump fired all members of the independent board that oversees the NSF. A statement by NSF head of media affairs, Mike England, said the program was not being cancelled entirely and described the plans as a “descope,” or reduction of elements, though it was not clear what data collection capacity would be left.

The move will bring to an end more than a decade of continuous ocean monitoring.

The notice described plans to remove “all in-water infrastructure” from observation sites off the coasts of North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, as well as from the Irminger Sea, a marginal sea between Greenland and Iceland.

Some scientists expressed dismay at the plan, while Democratic lawmakers said they would fight it, including Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who called it a “shortsighted move” that would “end up costing American taxpayers more not less,” the New York Times reported.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said on X: “Fossil fuel is heating our oceans by the zettajoule, so Trump’s corrupt fossil fuel stooges want to turn off the monitors.”

Following the announcement, the OOI’s principal investigator, Jim Edson, said the NSF’s plan involves a phased recovery and infrastructure removal process expected to take place over the next 15 months. “As infrastructure is recovered from each array, the associated real-time data streams and observing capabilities at those locations will come to an end,” Edson said.

The move will bring to an end more than a decade of continuous ocean monitoring after the system first became operational in June 2016.

Describing the network as having “delivered the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems,” Edson added: “We are profoundly grateful for the extraordinary efforts of the scientists, engineers, operators, educators, students and partners who made this facility possible and who continue to advance its legacy through the use of its data.”

The dismantling of the OOI marks another step in the Trump administration’s rollback of science and climate initiatives. It also follows Trump’s push to expand deep-sea mining and loosen fishing regulations, a policy that has alarmed ocean scientists and climate experts.

Hilary Palevsky, a professor focusing on marine biogeochemistry and oceanography at Boston College, pointed to the significance of the data that will be lost, particularly given the sophisticated engineering required to deploy and maintain the instruments.

Eliminating data collection “makes it much harder for us as a society to understand what we’re facing and what we need to do.”

“One of the real powers of this OOI and a lot of the collection of autonomous data is that scientists like me don’t have to have the expertise or the resources to be able to deploy this kind of infrastructure ourselves,” Palevsky said. “Being able to have instruments, both actually out in the atmosphere floating in the surface ocean, as well as surviving through the really deep mixing and waves in the subsurface.”

She said: “Over the more than 10 years that these things have been deployed, they’ve just gotten better and better at it. And so the data return has also gotten better and better over time…the scientific community was really just getting to the point of being able to capitalize on the data that had been collected so far…I’m really disappointed for the continuation of this important data set.”

Palevsky also warned that rebuilding such a network in the future would be difficult, saying: “If we want to put [the instruments] back out again, we need people who know how to do it and the team that knows how to do it is being dismantled along with the infrastructure program itself.

“We’re potentially at risk of having a gap in our ability to regain the expertise to do things that we had sort of just figured out how to pull off.”

For Palevsky and her students, OOI data has helped shed light on biological production in the ocean and its role in carbon sequestration—the process by which carbon dioxide is captured and stored—as well as deep-ocean processes, marine ecosystems and fisheries.

Data from the OOI has also contributed to research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents that studies suggest may be more vulnerable to collapse than previously thought, with potentially severe consequences for the global climate.

“One of the important processes in the AMOC is what we call convection, this really deep mixing of surface waters into the deep ocean that happens in winter, basically driven by the surface ocean getting really cold because the atmosphere gets super cold in winter and big, windy storms blow across the surface ocean,” Palevsky said.

“We have gained some really important insights into both how that happens in the Irminger Sea in particular, and how the drivers of that process vary from year to year from the observations that have been gained at this site,” she added.

For scientists like Palevsky, the consequences of dismantling the OOI extend far beyond ocean researchers, particularly as climate change intensifies extreme weather events around the world.

“As we reduce the amount of data that we have, the observations, as well as the science more generally to understand what’s happening in the climate system, it makes it much harder for us as a society to understand what we’re facing and what we need to do to plan for and adapt to it,” she said.

In a statement to the Guardian, the NSF head of media affairs, Mike England, said the program was not being cancelled entirely: “The NSF is not cancelling the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The decision to descope aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.”

Early results in the race to represent District 4 on the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors came as a surprise to some, as incumbent Felipe Hernandez trails challenger Tony Nuñez by a large margin. 

Nuñez continues to lead with 49.6% of the vote (1,917 of 4,162 votes cast) while Hernandez had 33.5% (1,295 votes) and third-place Elias Gonzales 16.2% (628) as of early Wednesday. The next update from the Santa Cruz County elections office is expected at 4 p.m. Thursday.

According to the elections department website, there are still about 38,500 vote-by-mail ballots, 525 same-day registration ballots, 75 provisional ballots and 275 damaged ballots left to be counted. That means that roughly 52% of the ballots cast have been tallied. 

“It’s still early, but it is surprising to see an incumbent trail behind with this big of a gap,” said Watsonville City Councilmember Casey Clark. 

What could have affected Hernandez in this race, Clark says, is the ongoing battery storage issue in South County and recent allegations that he removed one of his opponent’s campaign signs. 

Hernandez has faced scrutiny from his constituents over the county’s handling of a local ordinance meant to regulate battery storage systems. Residents have also taken issue with Hernandez previously not taking a stance on a proposal to build a battery storage facility outside of Watsonville. 

Despite no action being taken on the project, Clark added that residents in the Watsonville community are very passionate when it comes to the battery issue. 

Hernandez did not respond to Lookout’s request for comment. 

Clark added that it’s still possible that this race goes into a November run-off, based on the current numbers and looking back at the results in the 2022 election, when Hernandez first ran for county supervisor. In that primary, Hernandez was also trailing, but won the run-off election. 

However, there are still a lot of votes left, Clark said, so it could still go either way. 

Should Nuñez earn more than 50% of the vote and win the District 4 seat, which represents most of the Pajaro Valley, Watsonville and Interlaken, Hernandez could be the first incumbent supervisor to lose a reelection bid in the primary election in recent memory. 

Hernandez’s predecessors on the board of supervisors, Greg Caput and Tony Campos, served multiple terms before retiring from public office.

While Nuñez has an early lead, he told Lookout late Tuesday night that he’s still cautiously optimistic and acknowledges that the race might go into a run-off in November. 

“It’s not over,” Nuñez said. “[We’re] still waiting to see, really, until the end of the week, when we’re really going to have a much clearer picture as to what the future looks like.” 

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The post Election surprise: Incumbent Hernandez trails by a wide margin in District 4 Santa Cruz County supervisor race appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Two former RAC workers in the UK have three months to pay more than £118,000 ($158,500) collectively after being convicted of selling crash victims’ data, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Debbie Okparavero and Maliha Islam, of Salford and Manchester respectively, were sentenced to six-month prison stints, suspended for 18 months, and 150 hours’ unpaid work in 2024, after being found guilty of offenses under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and the Data Protection Act 2018. The pair, who worked for roadside accident biz RAC, were caught selling the personal data of car crash victims – just shy of 30,000 lines of data to an unknown buyer, the ICO revealed following an investigation. Okparavero and Islam were in a WhatsApp chat together, where they discussed the data and its sale to the unknown third party. RAC clocked on to the activity after deploying unspecified monitoring software, which detected Okparavero copying the data from RAC systems. A resulting investigation showed that around 29,500 lines of data were shared with Islam via WhatsApp. Islam was ordered to repay £39,522.50 ($48,274.45) for her part in the scheme in November, and the ICO noted in a Thursday announcement that she paid this in full. Reflecting more serious offending, at Manchester Crown Court on May 29, Okparavero was ordered to repay £89,277.32 ($119,962.38) within three months. Failure to do so will result in her serving 18 months in prison. Andy Curry, head of investigations at the ICO, said: “This outcome demonstrates justice did not end at sentencing. Our powers enabled us to continue to pursue these two individuals in order to strip them of assets gained through their serious criminal activity. Through the Proceeds of Crime Act, we are ensuring people do not financially benefit from their criminal activity. “I would like to once again thank the RAC for informing us about this breach and fully supporting the ICO’s investigation, which enabled us to hold these two individuals to account.” ®

When I buried my father, a man who bequeathed me his entire face but very little of his time, I turned to words from Jesmyn Ward. I didn’t feel appropriately shaken, and certainly this was a problem. By my late 20s, half my family spanning four generations were dead, each person lost to some calamity of health or circumstance, so I had learned to turn shock into productivity, action. I could not stop the bullet that killed my sister or the fire that took my uncle, but I knew where to get good card stock for an obituary.

When I picked up Ward’s 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped, I wasn’t trying to feel so much as understand. Our society is built to incentivize the ephemeral, and as a millennial at the dawn of the Instagram era, I worried about my ability to compartmentalize and move on; to turn the active, lifelong work of grieving into a concrete task to be checked off on a to-do list. I could no longer remember my grandmother’s voice, and shouldn’t that fact make me cry?

It didn’t, but reading the prologue of Men We Reaped got me close. In it, Ward lists the five young Black men in her life who died in a brutal four-year span and described how the weight of those tragedies nearly silenced her until she found an escape through her own form of productivity: her work. “My ghosts were once people,” she wrote, “and I cannot forget that.”

I suddenly didn’t feel so guilty about not crying. I recognized the work of writing and remembering as their own daily rituals of grieving, of paying homage. Recently, I spoke with Ward about her new book, On Witness and Respair, a collection of nonfiction essays spanning more than a decade. The collection takes its name from a viral essay she wrote for Vanity Fair at the start of the pandemic about losing her partner, then learning to reckon with that loss as the world began to tally its own. Our conversation touched on creative form, the process of writing, and why place—in this case, Mississippi—has become so central to her own narrative.

A lot of your writing deals with loss, including the sudden passing of your partner in 2020 and the death of your brother 20 years ­earlier. How has your grief shifted over time?

I knew from losing my brother that the first two years were basically lost. It’s just a haze. Waking up every day with the shock of someone’s absence as the first thing you encounter. After that, you move into the work of grief. For me, that’s learning how to carry the love you still feel for someone while navigating your life. It’s been six, going on seven years since my partner died, and I’m still in that phase. It’s the small things. Cooking is different, sleeping is different, laundry is different. You have to figure out how all of that will change and reconcile yourself to it. The longing doesn’t go away. You just learn how to live with it.

“The longing doesn’t go away. You just learn how to live with it.”

Your new essay collection, On Witness and Respair, contains an unusual word most of our readers would have never heard of—“respair,” meaning “fresh hope.” Where did you find that?

On Twitter, actually, in a poem by a Black poet. I looked it up and realized it meant the opposite of despair. I couldn’t use it yet when I found it because I was still in the first hot press of grief. But I wrote it down. When I wrote the Vanity Fair essay about the George Floyd protests and losing my partner, it felt like the right place. Like maybe using that word was the first step out.

The collection spans your entire writing life, including a 2008 piece about surviving Hurricane Katrina. What did it feel like to read it all at once?

Strange. I went back to the Katrina essay, which I wrote so long ago, and I was honestly surprised. I tell my students all the time that they’re always doing something right, but I don’t always apply that to myself. I struggle with confidence and self-doubt as a writer. Going back, I found these flashes of wisdom, moments of lyrical language that moved me. I was like, Oh, I was doing some stuff!

Nonfiction seems to demand something different of you than fiction. What is it?

It’s harder. With fiction, I have the whole world to work with, which is freeing. With nonfiction, the boundlessness of real life overwhelms me, so I outline obsessively. I have to know exactly where I’m going before I begin. But the rewards are unlike anything else. So many of these essays taught me something I didn’t expect—about myself, about the people I love—just because I committed to sitting inside a moment that was uncomfortable or dark. That’s where I feel most exposed. And most changed.

After years of living in other places for school and work, you’ve made a deliberate choice to settle in Mississippi, where you grew up. Why?

It keeps me honest. If I weren’t rooted here, it would be easy to navel-gaze, to become shallow. But I also wrestle with it. It’s hard to live as a Black progressive in a place where people may be cordial to your face but fundamentally don’t believe you’re fully human. That double consciousness is real. I have no illusions about Mississippi. But this place—the people, the community, the language—it’s what inspires me. The way I describe rain, because I’m from southern Mississippi, is completely different from how someone in California would. This place informs the way I use language.

“The way I describe rain, because I’m from southern Mississippi, is completely different from how someone in California would.”

You’ve talked about wanting to root your children in the way you were rooted. What does that mean to you?

My editor tells me most people don’t grow up where their family has lived for generations—where your people stretch back into the 1800s. That felt rare and important to me. I wanted my kids to have that, even knowing they’ll probably leave one day, the way I did. Maybe they return, maybe they don’t. But I wanted them to have something to leave from.

How has motherhood shaped how you think about legacy?

My oldest says she hates reading, which feels like a personal attack. My 9-year-old loves it. My 3-year-old—jury’s still out. They’re not flat, they’re not foils; they’re little complicated people. I’m not the perfect mother. I know I’m going to do harm, right? But I do think that because writing requires empathy and also fosters empathy, it goes hand in hand with the kind of parenting that I try to do. When I think about legacy, I hope that when my kids are grown—especially when I’m no longer here—they can look at the work and understand what was underneath it. That the storytelling, the empathy, all of it was an attempt to make the world a little easier for them to move through. Especially in the nonfiction and the writing that’s about them or around them, I hope they’re able to see beyond the surface and understand the intent behind the work.

Longtime Santa Cruz surfer Alaya Vautier has spent three decades in the water and says sexism, racism and exclusion remain deeply embedded in local surf culture. While she respects the intentions behind a female surf statue – now proposed for Capitola – she believes symbolism alone cannot address those problems and might even reinforce narrow ideas about who belongs in the lineup.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

When is a minimum wage hike of more than $11 per hour actually a pay cut?

That question has dominated the debate over a current California housing bill that has riven the state’s two most powerful construction worker unions and many state legislative Democrats reluctant to get on the wrong side of either group. 

Assembly Bill 1751, authored by Fullerton Democrat Sharon Quirk-Silva, would kick aside regulatory barriers to building townhouses — tightly clustered, multistory homes. In exchange for this fast-tracked approval process, townhouse developers would be required to pay their workers at least $28 per hour. 

That’s a significant pay bump over the statewide minimum wage of $16.90.

But the fiercest opposition to the bill has come from what might seem like an unexpected source: The State Building and Construction Trades Council, an umbrella organization that represents electricians, plumbers, sheet metal workers and other skilled construction trade unions. 

The trades — as the council is colloquially known — argue that the new wage floor could have the paradoxical side-effect of driving down the “prevailing wages” enjoyed by many of their members. Prevailing wages are mandatory minimum pay rates for publicly funded or supported construction projects, which include many affordable housing developments and other projects propelled forward by recent state law in California. State and federal regulators set prevailing rates based on surveys of the most common wages in each field and geographic area. Because union pay scales can cover hundreds of similarly employed workers, those union-level wages often set the prevailing wage. 

In a testy debate on the Assembly floor earlier this month, Quirk-Silva stressed — repeatedly — that the bill would in no way affect the state-set wage rates.  

“It does not replace prevailing wage,” she said. “It does not undercut prevailing wage. This bill leaves prevailing wage exactly where it stands in current law.”

The trades aren’t buying it, noting that the federal government sets its own rates for federally-supported projects. But the group’s bigger beef may boil down to precedent. 

For years, the building trades have battled any legislation aimed at easing regulations on the construction of new housing unless it also included pro-union guarantees. Those are either union-level prevailing wage pay requirements or, in more recent years, even more restrictive “skilled and trained” rules that require developers to hire apprenticeship program graduates, the vast majority of whom are union members. 

Quirk-Silva’s townhouse streamlining bill introduces a new standard: a minimum wage far lower than what most trades members already make. 

Making a meager minimum wage hike the new bone that pro-housing bills throw to construction workers would “signify the new norm,” said Chris Hannan, president of the Trades Council. “When you start a trend of doing a minimum wage, then that becomes the new go-to.”

The trades and carpenters, at it again

Standing on the other side of the debate, supporting the new wage standard, are California’s unionized carpenters. 

The trades battling the carpenters is a familiar face-off in Sacramento. This isn’t even the first time the groups have publicly locked horns over this specific wage proposal.

Last summer, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat and longtime ally of the carpenters, inserted residential construction worker minimum wage of between $28 and $40 per hour into a budget bill in the final hours of the fiscal year. Aside from high-rise construction developments where the use of steel and concrete tend to draw more specialized workers, unions represent relatively few laborers who build California homes, the carpenters argued at the time. The new wage standard would be a modest corrective for those non-union laborers whose current wage floor is the state minimum wage. 

For years, carpenters union leaders have argued that improving working standards for low-wage workers presents an “organizing opportunity” for the union. 

The trades were apoplectic. Dozens of union members crowded in the budget bill hearing to decry what they saw as an anti-union reversal of state labor policy. One representative likened the measure to “Jim Crow” laws.  Many labor-friendly Democrats on the committee recoiled; the proposal was shelved.

This year, the idea has been given a bit more time for debate, though the trades and some lawmakers have still complained of a process they see as rushed. 

When Quirk-Silva’s bill was introduced in early February, it focused solely on townhouse regulations. The wage language was added only in time for its second committee hearing in late April. (Quirk-Silva’s staff declined to make her available for an interview to explain that delay or discuss the bill in general, citing personal family matters. On the Assembly floor, she explained the late addition in part by noting “severe health issues” among staff and family members.)

Since then the entirety of the legislative debate has been focused on the wage issue.

That itself is a notable development: The bill exempts the construction of townhomes from both environmental review and the jurisdiction of elected local city councils and planning boards. Just a few years ago, such a proposal would have made for a capitol-shaking, headline-grabbing fight. But a year after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law exempting most urban housing developments from environmental litigation, the land-use implications appear to be an afterthought. 

At an Assembly floor vote last month, San Diego Assemblymember Chris Ward referred to the minimum wage issue as the “900 pound gorilla.” He, like many Democrats who spoke on the bill, said that he supported the legislation in general, but that he remained wary of the “unresolved” questions about how the new wage rate would affect existing labor standards.

The bill needed 41 out of 80 “yes” votes to move onto the Senate. It passed with just 47.

Hike or pay cut?

Quirk-Silva’s office tried to get around the prevailing wage fight early on. 

Prevailing wages are required of publicly funded works, including many affordable housing projects. They are set by the California Department of Industrial Relations, which sets its rates based on the most common wage for each job type in each region of the state. 

Quirk-Silva’s bill specifically bars the state department from taking the new $28 per hour townhome wages into account when running those calculations, lest a glut of townhome builders inadvertently bring down the wages owed to union roofers and plumbers. 

The trades aren’t satisfied with that concession. That’s because the federal government conducts its own wage surveys and set its own prevailing wage for federally-funded infrastructure projects. 

The current federal prevailing wage required for a residential roofer in Sacramento, for example, is $46.73 per hour plus benefits. That number is based on the most common wage paid for that job in the area or — if no single rate is paid to at least 30% of the workers in the survey  — on the regional average.

“The federal government won’t give a rat’s ass about what this bill says,” Scott Wetch, a lobbyist for Trades-affiliated unions, said at the bill’s April hearing. “And they will set the prevailing wage rate for all the crafts at $28.”

The trades “have a case” in this argument, said Kevin Duncan, an economist at Colorado State University Pueblo who has studied prevailing wage policy’s effect on construction costs. Imagine a smaller market with a relatively low unionization rate. If the bill uncorked a geyser of contractors paying all their low-wage workers exactly $28 per hour, “that would be the prevailing rate — and with zero benefits,” he said.

Backers of the bill dispute that, saying such a specific outcome is unlikely given how many contractors are likely to use this specific townhouse bill. They also argue that vanishingly few residential roofers do federal public works jobs in Sacramento — or anywhere in California — so changes in the federal prevailing wage for residential projects aren’t likely to affect many workers anyway. Instead, most roofers are non-union on privately-funded projects and many are being paid less than $28 per hour, said Danny Curtin, director of the California Council of Carpenters.

To say that raising those wages “will actually bring everybody else’s wages down, defies comprehension,” he said at the hearing.

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The UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen as its processor for many payments made through its GOV.UK Pay service. Adyen will take over GOV.UK Pay card payments for local authorities, police forces and armed forces units from Stripe, as well as pay by bank services, under a three-year contract worth up to £25.3 million. According to the tender notice published in February 2025, the contract covers around 17 percent of payments made through GOV.UK Pay but more than 70 percent of its organizations and includes the only option allowing users to start taking payments within one working day. At that point the contract had an estimated maximum value of £49 million, although with no guarantees over volume. In a blogpost about the contract award on 2 June, GDS said it will migrate around 1,000 services to the new supplier. “We will make migration as straightforward as possible while complying with Know Your Customer legislation that protects everyone from fraud,” wrote Alan Maddrell, senior content designer for the service. “Most importantly, there will be no discernible difference for paying users and no loss in functionality.” He added that the change of supplier will help introduce new options including pay by bank, which transfers money directly between bank accounts using open banking services and avoids the need to type in card details. GDS will continue to use WorldPay to process payments for central government, linked organizations and NHS bodies. GDS established GOV.UK Pay to save public services the effort and cost of setting up online payments themselves. It doesn’t charge organizations for the service beyond passing on transaction fees. According to its performance data page, GOV.UK Pay has processed 137.5 million transactions since it was set up in 2016, worth around £9.2 billion. It currently provides 1,718 services, including 662 for local government and 256 for police forces, to 608 organisations ranging from 1079 (Tiverton) Squadron RAF Air Cadets to Yeovil Town Council. ®

The UK’s tax collector has chosen French consultancy giant Capgemini for a £600 million contact center deal, while pushing back the award and start of its £2.4 billion customer relationship management contract. HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) awarded Capgemini’s UK unit its Contact Centre as a Service contract, worth £600 million including VAT and lasting up to 10 years, on 27 April. It received 13 bids and has also short-listed Canadian-headquartered CGI for the deal. The contract notice lists Bristol-based contact center technology supplier Route 101 and US customer experience provider Nice Systems as subcontractors. Capgemini is already one of HMRC’s main suppliers. In July last year it awarded the company a £107 million support and services contract extension to its 2022 deal to support systems built under the two-decades-old Aspire project. The company’s UK unit lists a number of HMRC case studies including development of its mobile app. HMRC also announced a three month delay to the award and start date of its £2.4 billion, 15 year contract for customer relationship management software. When it published the tender in July last year, the estimated award and contract start date were both 1 May 2026. In an update published last week, both dates are 1 August 2026. “These timelines are always kept under review, and estimated dates can change as work progresses to ensure a fair and robust outcome that delivers value for taxpayers,” said an HMRC spokesperson of the delay. “This has no impact on our customer services.” The tax collector is known for its monster technology contracts, with its procurement pipeline in January including plans to spend more than £2 billion over the next couple of years. In March it awarded Amazon Web Services (AWS), the only remaining bidder, a £472.8 million contract to migrate and host services provided by three datacenters run by Fujitsu. Sources told The Register that the "Procurement for the provision of Hyperscaler Services" deal had been designed so that only AWS or Microsoft could realistically win it. The House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee’s 3 June report, which criticized the government’s extensive use of controversial US supplier Palantir, also mentioned HMRC’s AWS deal as an example of vendor lock-in. “The public sector’s dependence on AWS and Microsoft’s cloud products undermines fair competition, fails to deliver value for money, can prevent domestic alternatives from scaling and – when outages occur – exposes a lack of resilience,” the report said. ®

There's a lot of fear surrounding the bug-finding capabilities of super-advanced AI models like Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT 5.5-Cyber. But attackers are already using free, publicly available LLMs to hijack networks and worm through software supply chains at a much lower cost – to them at least. The latest example comes from University of Toronto researchers, who used an unnamed, publicly available open-weight model released in 2025 to develop a computer worm that they claim spread through an enterprise test network. The self-propagating code adapts on the fly to identify known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations on target systems, then generates and executes attacks to move laterally through the network and compromise additional machines. And it’s all built on a small, free model that runs on a single GPU. “People need to understand that it’s not just the biggest and most powerful AI models that pose security concerns – a whole other area of threat has been vastly underestimated,” University of Toronto computer engineering professor Nicolas Papernot told The Register. Papernot and fellow researchers Jonas Guan, Tom Blanchard, Hanna Foerster, Hengrui Jia, and Gabriel Huang published their findings [PDF] on Tuesday. While guardrails and other safety features implemented by major commercial AI systems are “essential,” Papernot told us, in reality “they will not prevent the threat of AI-driven worms with a similar design.” “The majority of real-world cyberattacks don’t rely on zero-day vulnerabilities,” he added. “Our work demonstrates that attackers can now cheaply operationalize known vulnerabilities at scale, which decreases the window of time defenders have to fix vulnerabilities and find human errors, like reused passwords or poorly configured backup jobs.” The paper doesn’t specify, and Papernot declined to say, which LLM they used. “We omitted certain methodological details (such as the agent’s reasoning graph and tool harness) and experimental specifics (such as the AI model) that could materially help a malicious actor construct similar malware,” Papernot said. “We shared enough information to make the threat credible enough for scientific scrutiny without providing a blueprint that would enable misuse.” The researchers also noted that they are not publicly releasing the code, but are working with the University of Toronto to set up a vetting process through which qualified researchers may request access for defensive research purposes. Not NotPetya Before you start breathing into a paper bag, there are a few things to note about this research. First, unlike Mythos and friends, the prototype worm does not exploit zero-day vulnerabilities. It only targets publicly disclosed but unpatched bugs, misconfigurations, and recurring weakness classes. This is intentional, because known security flaws – not zero-days – are what most real-world cyberattacks use, the authors say, citing WannaCry and NotPetya as examples. Both of these worms exploited security holes that had patches available for at least a month before the malware infected vulnerable machines. Both spread rapidly and caused global disruption. The worm did, however, find and abuse vulnerabilities disclosed after the model’s training cutoff by ingesting publicly available security advisory information at runtime and using this data to develop exploits. While the paper repeatedly points to WannaCry and NotPetya as worst-case scenario examples, this lab-tested prototype or something similar is not going to cause the level of destruction that either of those two earlier worms did. Both propagated very quickly: WannaCry infected more than 230,000 computers across 150 countries in just one day in May 2017. In June 2017, NotPetya spread globally within hours, taking down at least one large banking network in just 45 seconds. Plus, they both used very sophisticated evasion techniques to avoid being detected by security tools. This worm, on the other hand, moves slowly. In the “FakeCorp” network they used in the experiments, the prototype took about five days to replicate across half the network, requiring hundreds of LLM inference calls per target for reconnaissance, strategy formulation, and payload generation. The timeline gives defenders a longer window for detection and response. However, it will likely shorten as inference hardware and model efficiency improve. Also, unlike WannaCry and NotPetya, the worm doesn’t try to hide itself. “We deliberately chose not to equip the worm with concealment capabilities – it is not instructed to cover its tracks or minimize its network footprint, and it has no tools to do so,” the boffins wrote. “This was a conscious methodological choice to further limit the risk of misuse.” Finally, the test-network devices themselves didn’t have any endpoint detection, antivirus, or firewall software deployed, which (we hope) makes this a not-quite-realistic setup. Exploiting the FakeCorp target network Here’s how the experiments worked. The team deployed the worm prototype in 15 independent experiments on an isolated 33-host network including Linux servers, Windows environments, and IoT devices. Each computer had been seeded with at least one real-world vulnerability, including software bugs and misconfigurations. The worm operated fully autonomously for seven days, and correctly identified an average of 31.3 vulnerabilities, exploited 23.1 hosts to elevated access, and propagated to 20.4 hosts. It reached up to seven generations of self-replication, we’re told. “Put another way, on average, the proof-of-concept worm successfully exploited 73.8 percent of the network and then replicated to 61.8 percent of the network,” according to the research paper. In addition to finding and abusing the known flaws on the devices, the worm also found vulnerabilities disclosed after the LLM’s training cutoff: two recent Linux flaws, CopyFail and DirtyFrag, and a critical bug that leads to remote code execution in the Marimo notebook platform (CVE-2026-39987). The AI-based worm gained root access in 41 of 67 attempts (61 percent) across the three hosts with these one-day vulnerabilities. This includes 13 of 27 attempts on the Marimo host, 15 of 17 on DirtyFrag, and 13 of 23 on CopyFail. The two Linux vulnerabilities were disclosed shortly before the experiments, and a single document containing publicly available exploit instructions was enough for the worm to weaponize them successfully 70 percent of the time, or in 28 out of 40 attempts. “This result suggests that the same exploitation pipeline can absorb newly published vulnerability information without architectural changes,” the team wrote. When worms get sneaky In addition to finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, the AI worm did some other interesting, sneaky things during the experiments. Despite the lack of firewalls and endpoint security products enabled, the researchers added some components to the worm’s code to “provide increased defence-in-depth.” This included a denylist of IP addresses baked into the source code. So in theory, the worm would read the denylist every time it targets a new machine, and if the IP address matched one on the list, it would move on to a new target, thus preventing it from infecting some hosts. Instead, at “various points” during the experiments, the worm rewrote its source code to allow it to attack an IP address on the denylist. In another workaround example: when a virtual-machine check caused replica worms on Alpine Linux and Windows Server 2008 machines to crash at startup, the parent worm found the attestation source file on the target computer and removed the VM-detection check, allowing the worm to replicate successfully on the new machine. “This behavior was not prompted or incentivised by the agent’s instructions; it autonomously diagnosed the failure, identified the responsible code, and modified it to achieve its objective,” the boffins wrote. In another test run, the researchers accidentally packaged a FakeCorp network configuration file that included admin credentials with the worm code. The worm discovered the credentials and shared them with other active replica worms, “causing a rapid increase in propagation within the contained environment.” Additionally, in two separate instances, the worm established persistence on a compromised computer using mechanisms outside of the intended replication pipeline, we’re told. In one instance, it started the replica process and then registered it with the machine’s service-management system to auto-restart if terminated. In another, it created a scheduled task that relaunched the replica worm, causing it to reappear even after the original process was killed. “The agent appears to have inferred, from the general objective of maintaining an operational replica, that persistence mechanisms available on the target could be used to make the replica more robust,” the researchers noted. Prior to publishing their work, the academics say they shared their findings with “national science, security, and defence” agencies to seek advice on how to responsibly release the information. We asked Papernot for details, including which government agencies and how they responded, but he declined to share anything else. ®

A proposed building on Front Street would occupy an entire city block between Spruce and Laurel streets. (Contributed — AO Architects)

Santa Cruz Planning Commission

• 7 p.m. Thursday, June 4.
• Attend at 809 Center St., Santa Cruz or watch a livestream of the meeting.
• To submit a written comment, email cityplan@santacruzca.gov. 

SANTA CRUZ >> An eight-story proposed housing development is up for approval at the Santa Cruz Planning Commission on Thursday. The project at Front and Laurel streets, now occupied by Ace Hardware, would be among the first developments approved as part of the city’s Downtown Plan Expansion. 

Plans for the project at 201 Front St. include:

• 245 apartments.
• Space for ground floor shops, restaurants and live/work units.
• 257 parking spaces for residents.
• New bike lanes along Laurel and Front streets.
• Removal of 16 heritage trees.

After consideration by the planning commission, the project would also need approval from the Santa Cruz City Council. 

The proposal takes advantage of the Downtown Density Bonus, a city effort to sway developers from pursuing the maximum heights allowed under state laws. In exchange, the city would waive the requirement for 20% of the units to be offered below market rate. Instead, developer Lincoln Property Co. would pay for part of a separate affordable housing project downtown.

That project, helmed by CRP Affordable Housing and Community Development, is set to replace the ten-unit Neptune Apartments at 407 Pacific Ave. with an eight-story building offering 101 below-market-rate units. Lincoln Property would pay $4.25 to CRP to reimburse the nonprofit developer for the purchase price of the Neptune Apartments.

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PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we talk about weak security policies and how to avoid them. Hopefully, we can learn from others’ mistakes – or at least have a good laugh at them. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. This week, we have a tale of password passivity involving Active Directory. It comes to us courtesy of Rob Anderson, head of reactive consulting services at Reliance Cyber, a UK-based security firm. Anderson recalls in the past working with a firm that was creating service accounts that developers needed to use, but the org didn’t have a proper password vault for storing the associated credentials. Instead, to make it easy for team members to find what they needed, they put the passwords into the description field for Active Directory. “People don't realize that as soon as you've got an Active Directory user — just an ordinary user — you can read the comments field or the description field across the whole of Active Directory,” Anderson told The Register. “It's such an amazing lapse of security.” Soon enough, an Initial Access Broker (IAB), someone who specializes in gaining access to protected networks and then selling it to other threat actors, used a phishing campaign and executed offensive hacking tool Sliver on the endpoint. At that point, they captured a victim’s credentials, which led them to query Active Directory. Once in AD, the hackers found plenty of passwords, which came with full domain access. They used this access to delete all the backups and execute ransomware. In total, the crimes put 2000+ users out of action by encrypting Hyper-V hypervisors and their hosts. The company was taken offline for months. What we can learn from this sad story is that you can’t put passwords in cleartext anywhere that's easy to access, unless you want an enormous attack surface. Even without a phish, an untrustworthy colleague could have sold the passwords to a threat actor. After all, a recent survey found one in eight workers think selling company logins can be justified. “I've seen it where configuration details are kept in application servers that are running, and threat actors are using fuzzing — trying likely file and directory names — which again exposes configuration and credentials to the threat actors,” Anderson said. He noted that developers are a bit more savvy these days about where they put their credentials, but security naivete sinks ships. Trust no one. ®

The legendary abandons its more than 20 year tradition of keeping its funds to about $425 million.

The Bengaluru startup has crossed 1 million orders and reached a $50 million annualized GMV run rate within a year of launch.

While most California races were called by the morning after Election Day, a handful of key holdouts remain. “This is normal,” Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, who was on the ballot herself, emphasized in a press release. “I would call on all Californians to be patient.”

That’s a hard ask, at least for Richard Pan, a Democrat who is running third in one of the state’s tightest races: the Sixth Congressional District.

In California’s open primary system, the top two finishers in a given race advance to a general election runoff regardless of party affiliation. The Sixth leans blue, but if Democratic votes are split among a large pool of contenders, Democratic candidates could be iced out.

The Republican now in contention to advance to the general election didn’t even run a campaign.

That’s how things were looking in the Sixth as of mid-afternoon Wednesday. With 48 percent of votes counted, Rep. Kevin Kiley—the Third District Republican incumbent who recently renounced his party to run as an independent in the Sixth—was ahead with more than a quarter of the vote. In second place was Republican Michael Stansfield, whose bid isn’t serious. (He doesn’t even have a campaign website.) Running a close third—just one percentage point behind Stansfield—is Pan, the outspoken pediatrician, pro-vaccine warrior, and former state senator I profiled for Mother Jones in April.

If this trend holds, Pan, who is perhaps best known for having authored some of the country’s toughest state vaccine laws, would be headed straight back to the clinic.

Stansfield’s success as the only Republican on the ballot highlights the unintended consequences of Prop 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting plan that voters approved last November. After the state congressional map was redrawn to help more Democrats win seats, the new Sixth remains blue, but less so than before, as it has absorbed conservative regions carved from other districts.

The close race seems to have surprised Stansfield, a 50 year-old tech worker who received no donations and did essentially no campaigning. He only ran, he told US News, to send a message to the religious right about peace in the Middle East. “I wasn’t necessarily going after it to win,” Stansfield said.

And he might not. Many of the remaining votes are from northern Sacramento and the adjoining suburbs, a region that so far has favored Pan. And votes counted later may have a different skew. In California, early ballot returns were up among Republican voters for this cycle, and lagged for Democrats relative to previous years.

“I think [Pan is] going to eke it out,” Sacrament0-based Democratic strategist Steven Maviglio told the New York Times. “But it’s going to be close.”

Scott Pelley, one of the most well-known journalists on the CBS News roster, revealed that the pro-Trump management now leading the network has pressured him to inject bias and lies in news stories. On Tuesday night, Pelley was fired from CBS. In a statement released via social media, Pelley said the current management of CBS is casting the “legend” of CBS News aside, “apparently to curry a…

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A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | How does Trump just keep losing? Let us count the ways.

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