Feed aggregator

The Russian espionage crew that turned simply reading an email into a security risk has expanded beyond Zimbra, with Proofpoint saying it's now pulling the same half-click trick against Microsoft Outlook Web Access. Proofpoint says the cyber group it tracks as TA488, or "Laundry Bear," began exploiting CVE-2026-42897, a cross-site scripting flaw in the Outlook Web Access (OWA) component of on-premises Exchange Server, a day before researchers and government agencies exposed the group's abuse of a zero-day in Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Unlike conventional phishing attacks, this one doesn't depend on persuading the victim to follow a link or download a file. If a target opens the booby-trapped message in OWA, the browser executes attacker-controlled JavaScript inside the victim's authenticated mail session. Exchange Online is not affected. According to Proofpoint, TA488 abused the OWA flaw to target government organizations in the US and Europe, along with telecommunications, financial services, hospitality, and aerospace companies. The researchers said the unusually broad campaign may have been intended to hide among the background noise of everyday email traffic rather than the tightly focused operations more commonly associated with espionage groups. "TA488 appears to demonstrate interest in a wide range of sectors while maintaining priorities for intelligence collection against government and defense," Proofpoint said. "Lure themes remain generic and unremarkable, so the target is more inclined to open and skim the email but ultimately overlook it." Instead of dropping conventional malware onto the endpoint, the attackers deploy a browser implant dubbed OWAReaper that lives entirely inside OWA. Proofpoint says it leaves virtually no host artifacts, communicates over two command-and-control channels, supports multiple methods of exfiltrating data, and survives browser restarts, password changes, and even a complete device rebuild because the foothold resides in the compromised mailbox rather than on Windows itself. CVE-2026-42897 isn't making its debut on The Register. Microsoft disclosed the bug in May following reports that attackers were using it in the wild. Proofpoint's latest report fills in more of the picture, showing the activity formed part of a broader espionage campaign rather than isolated exploitation. Proofpoint believes TA488 may actually have been exploiting the flaw as a zero-day, citing attacker infrastructure that dates back to March, roughly two months before Microsoft's out-of-band patch. If accurate, that would suggest the campaign was underway well before defenders knew there was a vulnerability to fix. "If this is the case, the combined improvement of the malware and the exploit development against a harder target in Outlook Web Access signal a leap in capability by TA488," Proofpoint said. Microsoft did not immediately respond to The Register's questions, but if Proofpoint's assessment holds up, TA488 isn't just recycling an old trick. It's refining one that has already proven capable of slipping past one of the oldest pieces of security advice in the book: don't click suspicious links. ®

Alani Bankhead, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Montana, should end her campaign and clear the path for independent Seth Bodnar to consolidate the votes of the state’s non-Republicans. Bodnar is polling better than Bankhead in head-to-head matchups against Republican candidate Kurt Alme and probably has a better chance of winning. And a Bodnar win could be critical, potentially denying the Republicans the 50th seat they need to control the Senate. 

This shouldn’t just be a strategy for one Senate race in Montana. Democratic leaders, strategists, and ultimately voters need to start regularly backing independent candidates in very red places, at least for the next few election cycles. This may not work. But we should test every possible approach to keep politicians nominated by today’s radical, anti-democratic Republican Party out of power, and running independents has real potential to do just that. 

The reality is that Democratic candidates simply can’t win races in many states and districts right now. (And the same is true for Republicans in very blue areas.) It’s hard for Democrats to accept this reality, because they remember the exceptions to this rule. Alabama’s Doug Jones, Montana’s Jon Tester, Kansas’s Laura Kelly, Louisiana’s John Bel Elwards, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear are among the Democrats who have won in very red areas over the last decade. But those are outliers, usually with some specific explanation. (Manchin and Tester were incumbents who had first been elected in less polarizing eras. So had Beshear’s father, Steve. Jones’s Republican opponent was accused of sexually assaulting underage girls.) The overwhelming majority of Democratic candidates in those states and other red places lose. 

These candidates aren’t losing simply because they are too liberal. (Tester lost his 2024 reelection bid, and Manchin almost certainly would have been defeated if he had run as a Democrat for another term two years ago.) Democrats who take conservative stands, such as opposing abortion rights, run all the time and still lose in red states. 

What’s plaguing them is the label Democrat. Today, much more so than in the past, many voters and therefore entire districts and states almost never will back a candidate from the opposite party, no matter their policy stands. The party brands eclipse any individual. Swing voters exist. But their ranks are small. So both parties can win statewide races in Michigan or Wisconsin, but Republicans almost always win in Kentucky, as do Democrats in Massachusetts. 

But shunning the party label seems to help shake up this state of affairs. In 2022, Never-Trump former Republican Evan McMullin ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Utah as an independent, even though he was as critical of MAGA Republicans as most Democrats. He lost by 10 percentage points. Two years later, an anti-MAGA candidate who ran as a Democrat lost by 30 in a Utah Senate race. Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, a mechanic and union leader, ran for the Senate in 2024 and by lost seven. In that same election, Kamala Harris ran 20 points behind Donald Trump, and in Nebraska’s other U.S. Senate race, a Democratic candidate lost by 25 to a Republican. In both McMullin and Osborn’s races, the Democratic Party didn’t really run anyone, allowing the independent candidates to get all Democratic votes without having to use the party’s label. Osborn is running again this year and effectively tied in polls against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts. 

In Montana, polling also suggests the value of an independent candidacy. The Democratic-leaning firm GQR released a survey this week showing the Republican Alme at 41 percent, the independent Bodnar at 27, and the Democrat Bankhead at 21. (There is a Libertarian candidate getting a small percentage of the vote too.) If the independent Bondar is not included in the poll, Republican Alme leads 44-40 over Democrat Bankhead. But if the Democrat Bankhead is not included, the independent Bondar has a 44-40 lead over Republican Alme. 

We are talking about a fairly small advantage—independent Bondar leading by four, while Democrat Bankhead is down by four. This poll alone does not give assurance that the independent Bondar would certainly win, that the Democratic Bankhead would certainly lose, or that Bondar would do better than Bankhead against the Republican. But the long record of Democrats losing Montana and other red states and the better showings by independents in other states in that region make me think that Bondar would be the superior candidate. And one thing is for  certain: having them both run guarantees a Republican victory. 

I would normally be reluctant to ask a candidate to stand down. Bankhead ran in a competitive primary and won. She has earned the right to be on the ballot and force Bodnar and Alme to beat her. We aren’t in normal times though. A Senate without a GOP majority could be a critical bulwark against Trump, most notably in stopping the appointment of more ultra right-wing judges. If one of the conservative judges on the U.S. Supreme Court dies or suddenly can’t serve because of health reasons, I want a Trump nominee to get confirmed only if he can win the votes of some non-Republican senators. So Senate seats really, really matter right now. Bodnar has committed to not joining the Senate Democratic Caucus if elected. But he will not join the GOP either. More importantly, he would not be an automatic vote in favor of Trump’s agenda, as outgoing senator Steve Daines is and Alme likely would be as well. 

There are four real shortcomings to this independent strategy. First, it may never work in actually defeating a Republican candidate in a red state. McMullin and Osborn were the more liberal candidates in their races and tacitly backed by the Democratic Party. And that likely limited their ability to appeal to stalwart Republican voters, the majority of the electorate in red states. Bodnar, who is backed by Tester and other prominent Democrats in Montana, will also likely be seen as essentially a Democratic candidate by many Montana voters, complicating his path to victory. 

Second, if Osborn and/or Bodnar make it to Washington, they won’t be full-fledged Democrats. If 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats, and Osborn and Bodnar are elected to the Senate this fall, the Republicans would likely remain in charge of the chamber and determine the agenda, because JD Vance would be the 50th GOP vote. And Osborn and Bodnar would probably try to cast high-profile votes with Republicans and against Democrats to solidify their independent bonafides. Think of Manchin or Kyrsten Simena—but maybe worse. These senators would be formally independent from the Democratic Party. 

Third, this strategy weakens the party in the long term. In pursuing this course in Utah, Nebraska, and now potentially Montana, Democrats are essentially announcing that their party brand is toxic and can’t win in certain states. That’s certainly true right now. But that admission reinforces that weakness. This is not how a confident party would act. It also denies the party opportunities to get stronger in red states. Perhaps Nebraska’s Osborn would win fewer votes by running as a Democrat, but he might convince more union workers or mechanics to join the party if he were running under its banner. 

Same for Bodnar. “His candidacy is entirely focused on one short-term win—and if what he’s doing becomes the norm, there might be no rescuing the party from the wreckage,” former Tester aide Nick Perkins wrote in a recent TNR essay. 

Fourth, I suspect that this independent strategy will unfairly prop up white male candidates and diminish women and people of color. McMullin, Osborn, and Bodnar are white men. Bodnar is attempting to push aside a female candidate in Bankhead. McMullin, Osborn, and Bodnar’s supporters likely assume they can win over Republican voters in part because of their race and gender. I worry that liberal-leaning women and people of color in the South or West who seek broader support for their independent candidacies won’t get it and that women and people of color who win Democratic nominations will increasingly get shunted aside for white male independents. 

That, I admit, is a lot of shortcomings. This strategy is kind of sexist and racist, weakens the Democratic brand, and will at best send Joe Manchin-types to Washington. But I still want to see this independent experiment tried widely. And that’s partly because of where I live. Here in Kentucky, Democratic candidates just have no chance. Beshear aside, Republicans win virtually all statewide races by 15 percentage points or more. But on policy, this is not an ultra-conservative state. Voters rejected recent ballot initiatives designed to outlaw abortions and create an expansive school voucher program. Voters in the state’s rural areas truly hate the Democratic Party though. I suspect we can have semi-competitive elections and occasional victories by non-Republicans only if alternative candidates are running as independents instead of Democrats. 

In Montana, Bankhead, the Democratic candidate, insists she won’t drop out by the August 10 deadline.  And the state’s Republican secretary of state says that the Democratic Party would have to choose another candidate if she left the race. But ideally, the party would replace Bankhead with someone who isn’t really running and essentially concedes the Democratic vote to Bodnar. Even if all that happened, the Republican Senate candidate not winning in Montana, which Trump carried by 20 points in 2024, is a long shot. 

It’s a shot worth taking, creatively and yes, independently. A Senate with Seth Bodnar in it will be 1 percent less pro-Trump—and we need every percent we can take to fight our authoritarian president. For now, a winning Democratic Party will be one that tries to win in a few less places. 

It’s easy to feel that you’ve arrived at The Vampire Lestat both a little early and a little late. Lestat is the third season of AMC’s TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series of novels, the first of which was famously the source text for the cult classic 1994 film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. The novel tracks the on-again, off-again relationship between a flamboyant French vampire named Lestat and Louis, the man he turns into a vampire in late-eighteenth-century Louisiana. Transforming from mentor and mentee to frenemies to foes over the course of centuries, Lestat and Louis are an enigmatic couple. In adapting the book for TV, creator Rolin Jones remained largely faithful, with a couple of key exceptions: He converted Louis from a white slave owner to a Black brothel owner, and he made Louis and Lestat lovers.

There was always a quiet, and sometimes not-so-quiet, queer subtext to Rice’s novels, but the show—which was called Interview With the Vampire for its first two seasons, after the title of the first novel, and is now called The Vampire Lestat, after the title of the sequel—brings that same-sex eroticism to the surface. The series is bloody and horny, devastatingly sad and riotously funny, deadpan and melodramatic. It can take new viewers a moment to adjust to the fact that every dial on this show is turned up to 11. It’s an immersive experience of excess, a feast for and an attack on the senses.

In the murky, endless swamp of the streaming landscape, you might happen upon a program as singular as this one and be tempted to say you’ve discovered a hidden gem. You wouldn’t be all that wrong, at least about the “hidden” part. Lestat airs on AMC and on its subscription streaming app AMC+, a service dwarfed by juggernauts like Netflix and Prime Video. And the series isn’t even the biggest draw for its own service, which is anchored by the Walking Dead franchise. From a marketing standpoint, it can’t be a great idea to change your title two seasons in. Regardless, not a lot of people had access to the show, and, of those who did, not a lot watched it.

But what’s special about this drama is the intensity of its niche. Spend any time on social media talking or reading about TV, and you’re likely to encounter the show’s committed fans, nearly feral in their advocacy for this under-watched treasure. TV critics love it, too—the second season appeared on over 20 year-end best-of lists in 2024. So, addressing both the plurality of readers who have never heard of this crazy show and the thin sliver of readers who would gladly take a stake through the heart for it, I say: There’s nothing else like The Vampire Lestat on TV, nothing that can consume you quite the way it does. 

For two seasons, it was built around the titular “interview” Louis gives to intrepid, endangered journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian, doing his best Anthony Bourdain). Louis (Jacob Anderson) related the whole torrid story of his entanglement, affair, and multiple criminal monstrosities with Lestat (Sam Reid) from the steely blandness of a Dubai penthouse in the present day. One of the show’s signatures, then, relying on Louis’s voice-over narration but also his expansive sense of time, was the nesting style of its flashback structure. For instance, at one point in the second season, the narrative moves back and forth between Lestat co-founding the Théâtre des Vampires coven in Paris in the eighteenth century and Louis’s experiences with the group after World War II, and between Louis telling these stories to Daniel in Dubai in the present and Louis telling these stories to a younger Daniel in San Francisco in the early 1970s. Never jarring, the striated layers of time form a dense and luxurious texture for what is both an intimate romance and an epic adventure.

Now that the show has begun adapting Rice’s second novel in the series, the narrative voice has shifted from Louis to Lestat, and it’s not a small shift. Where Louis could be full of quietly simmering mourning or rage, Lestat is loud and upset. By the end of the second season, all the narrative threads were essentially tied up, so, in order to reproduce the show’s sense of chaotic temporality, we move forward again in time. The opening scene of The Vampire Lestat is a secret auction, sometime in the future, that reveals two important twists. First, apparently there’s been some sort of massive global catastrophe brought on by Lestat, leaving Louis with a limp and Louis’s ex-lover Armand (Assad Zaman) with a rather dashing eye-patch. And second, Lestat is a rock star now. This season’s voice-over narration consists of a series of vinyl albums recorded by Lestat that tell us how it all went down from his perspective.

Historically, TV shows have a hard time representing art within a work of art. In other words, it’s difficult, when you’re already working hard at making a good piece of TV, to then set yourself the task of creating a second, different work that functionally exists within your TV production. Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is a famous failed attempt at this—the behind-the-scenes drama about an SNL-like sketch comedy series face-planted by including scenes of dismally unfunny sketches that we viewers were supposed to understand to be cutting-edge, urbane comedy. 30 Rock got around the problem by making its show within a show deliberately bad: TGS With Tracy Jordan was so preposterous that it got a laugh whenever we saw it on-screen. If you can’t make two good TV shows simultaneously, then make one of them a joke.

True to its more-is-more ethos, The Vampire Lestat has decided to pursue both strategies in its depiction of Lestat’s career in rock and roll. Many of the songs Lestat sings are bad. Lyrically, they can tend toward the cringeworthy—there is a higher-than-average amount of nonsense syllables in these tracks—and musically, they sound a little bit like lost T. Rex B-sides. Their energy is appealing, but it’s hard to imagine cuing up the soundtrack on Spotify. So, to some extent, Lestat is meant to appear a bit ridiculous, so long-lived that his creative juices are not especially fresh. (How else to explain a full-on glam rock revival touring in the mid-2020s?) Daniel roasts him about this, and a rival vampire gang tells him one of his songs sucks. (He begrudgingly agrees.) Is it possible that Lestat has simply hypnotized his audience into liking him?

And yet, there’s Reid’s stage presence. Writhing and growling and glaring and surfing through the crowd, Lestat may be singing songs that sound as if they were written for a rock star on a TV show, but he’s embodying every bit of rock star charisma you might hope to see in real life. In fact, as a promotional stunt for the release of the new series, Reid performed a show in character at New York’s Beacon Theatre, and, by all reports, the crowd’s Beatlemania-style response felt real. It’s rare, in this sort of prestige narrative drama to say that a selling point of the show is its sense of spectacle. In previous seasons, those spectacles have been spectacles of sex and violence and, occasionally, theatrical performance. This season, it’s the close-quarters grinding intensity of a killer club show.

All of this takes place in the wake of the release of Daniel’s book, the record of his two-season interview with Louis. Technically, Daniel’s bestseller has outed the vampire community to the world, but most still believe it to be a hoax. So Lestat’s act manages to be both an ultimate reveal of his true self and, for many if not most of his audience members, an expertly crafted bit. That tension between the performed self and the real self is at the heart of this season’s story, especially for a character who is always putting on a show. The arrival of Lestat’s mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle)—whom he turned into a vampire, and with whom he murdered his entire family, and who is also his lover—turns a kaleidoscopic lens onto the character and the question of why nobody, it seems, can ever let him go.

Watching The Vampire Lestat and thinking about its devoted fandom, I’ve been reminded of another underseen AMC program that’s attracted a surprisingly committed following. The Terror was a stand-alone series (the first of a three-season anthology) about a fictionalized nineteenth-century Arctic expedition to find the Northwest Passage. It is an incredible show, filled with compelling performances from a who’s who of British television actors and built around a bizarrely compelling mythology that invokes questions of imperialism, repression, and masculine fragility. The show was a moderate success, but never a big deal. It is, however, a big deal to the attendees of Terror Camp, an annual conference born from the show. With academic presentations on subjects from race and nationalism to Arctic exploration literature, it is a uniquely passionate, positive event. The fans, many of whom are nonbinary and drawn to the drama’s fluid presentation of gender, call themselves “Cold Boys.”

There’s been a lot of discussion in critical circles this year about the rise of “toxic” fandoms: viewers who have harassed the stars of Heated Rivalry online, for instance, or fans of The Pitt who castigate the series’ writers for not focusing enough on the characters’ personal lives. But the idea of fandom is community. Lots of communities we don’t call fandoms get toxic or even violent. The beauty and glory of a small, passionate fandom—like that of The Terror or of The Vampire Lestat—is that it takes this massive, mainstream medium, and it builds a pocket of appreciation and connection for the people inside it. If Lestat hasn’t attracted a massive national audience, that also means that its own invested audience has the place to themselves. This third season, coincidentally and on purpose, is in some ways about that. Sure, being a superfan of the rock star Lestat might kill you, but being a part of the Lestat fandom might well bring you to life.  

Last summer, we often watched ICE raids unfold live, captured by news helicopters and eyewitness video, as—almost exactly one year ago—agents descended on day laborers, street vendors, garment workers, and farm workers in southern California. Frequently, the raids were preceded by warnings vetted by community-based groups and passed around on Instagram reels, and followed by reports from local outlets, such as L.A. TACO’s accounting of daily arrests. For weeks, for months, we watched as people turned out across cities and surrounding communities. The kinds of resistance now synonymous with cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis—residents putting themselves between immigration agents and their neighbors, chasing agents from the hotels where they tried to sleep and from the gas stations where they stocked up for their sick road trips—defined the administration’s first year of what it called “mass deportations.” In truth, what we witnessed were just some of the thousands and thousands of violent abductions carried out by federal agents, all in service of a white nationalist agenda eagerly articulated by regime leaders like the White House’s Stephen Miller and lackeys like Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino.

Compared to the open battle the agency engaged in last year, ICE appears now to be attempting to maintain a lower profile. And yet the agency has also arrested and detained more people in recent months than at any time since Trump returned to office. Recent data released by ICE shows that in June, it hit a high—1,300 arrests on average each day. That record was then topped in July, which saw 1,474 average daily arrests over just the first 11 days of the month. “This reverses a trend we saw since the early fall where overall arrest numbers had actually remained fairly consistent or declined,” observed Austin Kocher, assistant research professor at Syracuse University. “The purported shift in ICE tactics—from the manic Kristi Noem months that cost the lives of two U.S. citizens to the less spectacular tactics under Markwayne Mullin—has effectively led to more arrests without as much popular backlash.”

There is a difference between a change in ICE tactics and a change in the number of people whom ICE has detained and deported, and understanding the reason for the latter requires us to look beyond ICE for answers. ICE’s purported shift was remarked upon over the winter, when Bovino was benched after immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. More recently, when immigration agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine within days of each other, ICE was briefly suspended from traffic stops. But immigration agents themselves have long known—or at least, some of those whose words have made it into the legal record have known—that despite public outcry over ICE operations, not much beyond appearances has really changed. “They just changed the name,” one agent said in a deposition, when questioned about “Operation At Large,” the high-profile nationwide operation last year. “We’re doing the same thing just with a different name.”

In addition to proceeding as usual under a slightly altered brand, ICE is now working in even closer collaboration with other federal agencies in order to increase arrests: arresting people who allegedly overstayed visas at airports, with the help of TSA data; and arresting people whose children were previously in migrant shelters, based on tips shared by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. But ICE has been able to arrest and detain more people not only through these kinds of agreements with other federal agencies and offices. Its reach has also been broadened by local, county, and state law enforcement, a network of collaboration that goes back to the agency’s founding, and which has become only more sprawling since ICE was formed. Today, ICE’s partnership with the criminal legal system is fully activated in service of the mass deportations agenda.

The sight of singular terrifying raids can sometimes conceal the more fearsome routine violence of anti-immigration law enforcement. This winter, at the height of ICE’s operations in the Twin Cities, about 3000 immigration agents were on the streets. “At the same time, the number of arrests in Minnesota during that operation was less than half the number made through the Miami field office over the same period,” said Silky Shah of Detention Watch Network, in an interview this month with Kelly Hayes of Truthout. The Miami ICE field office continues to make the most arrests in the country, averaging about 120 each day. “There is so much collaboration happening between ICE and local law enforcement,” Shah explained, in Florida but also Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas, where local police, county sheriffs, and state troopers have explicit agreements with ICE, part of what’s known as the 287(g) program, in essence allowing “local law enforcement to act as de facto ICE agents with minimal training,” as journalist Jessica Pishko has reported. In those places with 287(g) agreements, Shah said, “the scale of enforcement is much greater, without the same level of spectacle.”

Former ICE officials acknowledge how working with state and local law enforcement can boost arrests. “What you’re seeing in Miami is a byproduct of a substantial immigrant presence,” former ICE acting director John Sandweg told CBS News. “You’re also seeing higher levels of cooperation between state and local agencies and ICE.” At the same time, state and local opposition to ICE has been critical in slowing the expansion of detention camps, in demanding new protective policies, and pushing local and state agencies to sever 287(g) agreements—even in Florida. Last year, Key West officials voted to end the city’s 287(g) agreement after pressure from local advocates. In response, Florida’s attorney general threatened to remove those officials from office. Miami’s new mayor, a Democrat, pledged to end the city’s 287(g) agreement, made in June 2025. But after seven months in office, she has so far refused to use her power to introduce a proposal to do so to the city commission, while the commission has stalled. The fear instilled by such agreements between local law enforcement and ICE reaches not only immigrant communities, but clearly their elected representatives as well.

Immigrants rights and justice groups have long drawn attention to the entanglement of immigration enforcement and the criminal legal system. Law scholars have dubbed this “crimmigration” law, “the new creature of legal imagination and policing reality,” as César Cuauhtémoc García Hernándezas characterized it in 2015. Because this overlap has been growing for so long, it tends not to grab the attention of those who aren’t themselves snared within it. Someone’s neighbors or coworkers, who might see a raid in progress, can’t so immediately observe a sheriff taking someone from a routine traffic stop to immigration detention. They won’t know when local police email an ICE field office to confirm that someone ICE is looking for is in their custody awaiting arraignment. Such routine policing has made the criminal legal system an ideal tool for a mass deportation regime seeking to more quietly entrench itself in everyday life.

While that police work may not be drawing public notice, the administration has not been quiet about its plans. Homan and Miller were clear during the 2024 Trump campaign: They would turn to local police to carry out mass deportations. When that campaign was underway, I spoke with Meghan Maloney de Zaldivar, now the vice president of advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition, about how racist and xenophobic rhetoric from Trump, Miller, and Homan (among others) —rhetoric like “criminal aliens,” “invasions” at the border, and “the worst of the worst”—creates permission for police. “The people who work within those forces now feel like they don’t have to restrain themselves, and take it upon themselves to take that initiative,” Maloney de Zaldivar explained in 2024. “That message is sent to those folks that they have the power and the backing of the White House to use their authority to take out that racism and hate on immigrants in their communities.” With or without explicit 287(g) agreements, city, county, and state law enforcement still get the message: If your mayor or governor doesn’t have your back, Trump does.

Whatever political and propaganda value there was in ICE storming into communities has perhaps been drained. It is as if someone advised the mass deportation crowd that if that’s what they really want, it’s better achieved without witnesses. Or, worse: It’s as if those elected Democrats who don’t oppose ICE per se, but merely want it produce better optics, got their wish—see the calls to have ICE unmask and identify themselves, without fundamentally questioning the agency’s mission. This is what is meant by “Abolish Trump’s ICE”—not “Abolish ICE”—as some Democratic candidates have campaigned. It is too soon to know just what, if anything, has changed at the top of ICE, other than that Noem’s replacement at DHS hopes the press will look away. But we must not confuse what we aren’t seeing day in and day out for an institutional turn away from Trump’s signature promise: to ethnically cleanse the United States, using federal law enforcement. We must not ignore how the police around us day in and day out are marshalled in service of that campaign.

This summer, I write from Brooklyn, where I live close to several immigrant communities, including one now in need of urgent defense, and where our elected leaders may soon be tested. How will they respond to the possible mass deportation of Haitians, those who have been stripped of their legal status by the Trump administration? “40,000 New Yorkers are going to be losing their protections, their work authorization and their legal protections today, and it is just gutting,” said New York Immigration Coalition CEO Murad Awawdeh in an interview with The City Reporter on Monday. New York City’s still-new Mayor Zohran Mamdani believes in abolishing ICE (and has told the president he believes so), even as Tom Homan routinely threatens to flood New York neighborhoods with immigration agents.

But critically: ICE is not the only problem. The city and state’s sanctuary laws, meant to bar local police from cooperating with ICE, are only as powerful as the people holding police to account, as Spencer Ackerman wrote in his Forever Wars newsletter on Tuesday. The commissioner of the New York Police Department, Jessica Tisch, at least theoretically answers to the city’s mayor, but in practice, the police hold immense power to set their day-to-agenda, city officials be damned. “On one level, it’s important to compel Tisch to prove herself and the NYPD capable of noncooperation,” Ackerman writes. “But on another, more human level, noncooperation can hardly be sufficient against a lawless, violent deportations force empowered by the Supreme Court to racially profile.” Are we Miami or are we New York? Is “noncooperation” even enough?

As the horror of Trump’s mass deportations campaign has become part of daily life, it has only become easier for state and local Democrats to oppose ICE. One would think they have even stronger ground to contest ICE when it comes to their collaboration with state and local police. When will they?

No one has ever seen anything like it, as Donald Trump himself might say. Buried in a new CNN poll is something striking: Trump isn’t just cratering by conventional approval measurements; he’s also absolutely collapsing by many metrics involving personal traits, from his mental state to his disconnectedness from ordinary people to his fondness for building monuments to himself.

Welcome to the era of Late-Stage Trumpism. The “personalist” aspects of Trumpian rule—the shaping of much of the government and even the physical capital of Washington, D.C., around one man’s relentless self-dealing and self-aggrandizement—have all started imploding in on themselves, in a collapsing supernova of venality and megalomania.

The CNN poll finds that only 34 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, matching the low point he hit after inciting a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021. Here are some striking findings on his personal traits and obsessions:

• 73 percent say Trump is not in touch with the problems that ordinary Americans face daily; only 27 percent say he is.
• 66 percent say Trump does not put the good of the country over his personal gain; only 34 percent say he does.
• 62 percent say Trump is not an effective world leader; only 38 percent say he is.
• 57 percent say Trump does not have the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president; only 43 percent say he does.
• 64 percent say Trump has gone too far in pursuing his personal business as president; only 31 percent say this has been about right.
• 61 percent say Trump has gone too far in undertaking projects to remodel the White House and other Washington landmarks; only 32 percent say he hasn’t.

That’s remarkable. Note that the poll uses very benign language to describe Trump’s unilateral razing of the White House East Wing to build a ballroom for himself; his plans for a triumphal arch in the capital; the festooning of his name (and even enormous totalitarian images of his face glowering down on us) at various locations in D.C.; and much more. Even so, a huge majority disapproves.

What’s more, note that huge majorities don’t just disapprove of Trump’s use of the presidency to enrich himself; they also see that Trump is putting his own interests before those of the country, an even more damning construction on his conduct. Large majorities see him as out of touch, failing on the world stage, and lacking in the basic mental fitness required to serve.

“We have seen massive collapses of support for presidents—like Richard Nixon in the midst of Watergate and Lyndon Johnson as the Vietnam War overshadowed his domestic agenda,” Corey Brettschneider, an expert and podcaster on presidential power, told me. “What’s different here is the widespread recognition of Trump’s unprecedented corruption, narcissism, and putting of personal greed over the public interest.”

So what does this say about Late-Stage Trumpism? Consider a related development: On many fronts, Trumpian rule is descending into displays of malice that are unbearably cheap, petty, and venal.

To wit: Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte is now boasting about firings of DNI insiders that may not have actually happened. Feeding the MAGA base even with made-up “deep state” purgings may be good enough these days. Pulte gained renown for using his federal housing agency post to fabricate pretexts for prosecuting Trump critics. Most of those efforts have gone belly up, yet Trump is now seriously considering him for a Cabinet post. To get such a big promotion, all you need these days are personal loyalty and a willingness to supply MAGA with bread and circuses.

Meanwhile, Trump is now reportedly overriding determinations by his own agencies to deny disaster aid to blue states. Trump grew so angry about the failure of his renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that prosecutors are now throwing the book at a former Olympian for supposedly tampering with the project. Yet a key witness dramatically undercut the case by testifying that damage preexisted his contact with it. And the whole country watched—or cringed—as Trump tried to transform our 250th anniversary into a celebration of himself while almost nobody came.

None of this is to minimize the damage that Trump is doing on many critical fronts. But even there a Late-Stage-Trumpism vibe is taking hold: Note how Trump’s ever escalating threats to obliterate Iran entirely don’t seem to be breaking Iran’s resolve. We’re simultaneously getting inundated with nonstop trivialities and pratfalls, all of them direct outgrowths of Trump’s personal obsessions and pathologies, even as he’s cratering by just about every personal polling metric you can think of.

All this has bearing on the national debate that’s underway over what a post-Trump MAGA movement and GOP will look like. In a recent conversation with me, political theorist Alan Elrod cautioned against overinterpreting Trump’s decline, noting that the waning of Trumpism as a “personalist project” doesn’t necessarily mean the broader “reactionary project” he represents is sunsetting with him.

It’s a crucial distinction to keep in mind. And no one should see any of this as a sign that the midterms or the 2028 presidential race will be easy. Nonetheless, if Trumpism as a personalist project is sunsetting, it’s an important, noteworthy development in itself.

For one thing, as Damon Linker aptly points out, the GOP will struggle to evolve out from under Trump’s personal shadow, especially when the 2028 succession battle gets underway:

Then there are the inevitable humiliations Trump is sure to bestow on anyone daring to run to succeed him. The sitting president will be acting as a 24/7 insult comic at rallies and on social media, blasting the party’s nominee for kicks, shits, and giggles.

“As long as Trump is living and/or sentient,” Linker concludes, the GOP “will be stuck in the Trump era.” What’s more, Republicans may also struggle to disentangle Trump’s personalist failings from the failures of the broader reactionary project.

Note that due to war, tariffs, the shredding of international alliances and commitments, and the violence of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, Trump has squandered a trifecta of traditional GOP advantages on the economy, immigration, and national security (the CNN poll reveals this very clearly as well). Protectionism, draconian immigration restrictions, and the “America First” rejection of multilateral alliances and institutions are among the key pillars of right-wing authoritarian nationalism. It’s at least possible Trump will leave them all badly discredited.

Finally, it’s just heartening to see the American people so overwhelmingly reject the trappings and degradations of personalist rule as a development in and of itself. That was not at all pre-ordained. With a little luck, we’ll look back on this as a crucial tell, as an enduring sign of our democratic resilience.

A new batch of documents published by The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals widespread censorship of course content at Texas A&M, one of many public universities where MAGA politicians—not faculty and department heads—now determine what can and can’t be taught. It is the latest example, among many since President Trump’s reelection, that the campus free speech wars of a decade ago are now over. The right has won.

Following the passage of a Texas law that requires governing boards to review academic programs—one of several state laws based on Trump’s January 2025 executive orders against “gender ideology” and diversity, equity, and inclusion—Texas A&M is subjecting course titles, descriptions, and syllabuses to an opaque review process to decide which courses will go forward and which will be canceled. For the coming fall semester, 45 courses were referred from an initial review committee to the university president’s office for a final decision, of which 31 were approved as “exceptions,” eight were approved under conditions of specifying or removing reading materials, and two—an English course on “LGBTQ Literatures” and a Women’s and Gender Studies introduction to “LGBTQ Studies”—were denied outright and removed from the curriculum.

A similar process is unfolding at Auburn University, where faculty received a form referencing Alabama legislation that bans public universities from teaching “divisive concepts,” again based on anti-DEI directives from the Trump White House. When a sociology course on “Crime and Justice in America” drew the ire of conservative website 1819 News and then Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville (“ZERO REASON taxpayer funds should go to teaching our students to HATE law and order. Woke indoctrination has NO PLACE in Alabama or our taxpayer-funded universities”), the sociology professor was removed from the course. Unlike Texas A&M, where the president ultimately makes the decision, Auburn puts the onus on faculty to self-police their courses to remain in compliance with a state law forbidding the teaching of “divisive concepts.” As the Chronicle reports, an Auburn geosciences professor said of the course surveillance forms, “in terms of feeling like you are free to do your job—following scientific rigor, academic rigor, all of that—instead you have to think about the political ramifications of what you’re doing.”

Surveillance and censorship of faculty is not confined to large, land-grant universities or Southern states. At West Point, Tim Bakken, the academy’s longest-serving law professor, has brought a lawsuit against his employer for its adoption of Trump administration directives that, Bakken claims, “chill and suppress speech and censor viewpoints that might be contrary to the views” of West Point, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Trump. The Washington Post recounted a chilling scene in which Bakken arose in a faculty meeting to speak against the policy of requiring faculty members to get administrative approval for giving talks and publishing their work. “Stop talking,” said a deputy department head who outranks Bakken, “and sit down.”

It would be tempting to think all of this is nothing more than the shoe on the other foot. Between 2015 and 2020, conservatives fomented a national panic over the idea that left-wing college students and professors had turned universities into places of censorship and ideological intolerance. After Yale students protested against a professor over her response to a campus-wide directive about offensive Halloween costumes, The Wall Street Journal editorial board called them “little Robespierres”—a reference to the French revolutionary whose eighteenth-century Reign of Terror led to some 17,000 executions. In 2021, New York Times columnist Brett Stephens compared a ham-fisted bias training at Smith College to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China, whose violent purges resulted in death tolls estimated between one and two million.

Centrist commentators embraced such right-wing characterizations of students and faculty as coddled authoritarians who couldn’t live with speech they didn’t like and would resort to violence to stop it. Jonathan Chait, writing for New York magazine, compared campus “political correctness” with Marxist authoritarianism, adding, “American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state.” For Chait, the college campus was an experimental window into a dark future, a place where “the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others” because of its institutional dominance.

At the time, many of us argued in response that although left-wing college students and faculty could be wrongheaded and intolerant, most campus free speech controversies were either actual debates involving speech on all sides—with ordinary social consequences—or debates about access to platforms, not access to free speech as such.

But we also saw unfolding a greater and more dangerous threat to free speech. By pushing hyperbolic portrayals of the campus left as budding murderous authoritarians, the right was normalizing grounds for its own exercises in violent repression. Surveillance and attack-dog organizations, like Turning Point USA, created “watchlists” to publicize (and sensationalize) professors’ statements and courses, leading to intimidation and death threats. Armed, reactionary militia groups began taking up the mantle of defenders of free speech and “Western values,” turning up at campus events with the aim of provoking students and left-wing agitators into violence.

All of this amounted to a twofold assault from the right on free speech itself, albeit one couched as a necessary response to left-wing overreach: First, portray the critical but protected speech of a left majority on campus—student protests, open letters, denials of speaking platforms—as suppression of free speech akin to authoritarianism; then, with that bad-faith characterization as an excuse, rachet up efforts to silence those students—through threats of violence, if necessary—and claim to be defending free speech.

It’s clear now, if it wasn’t then, that the right was always the biggest threat to free speech. The MAGA-pilled Republican Party has moved at the federal and state levels to censor the very content of what professors can teach and students can learn. In some cases, the Trump administration has gone even further to silence speech. A Tufts University student was arrested by masked federal agents, detained for weeks, then forced to “self-deport” for writing a pro-Palestinian column in the student newspaper; a Georgetown professor was arrested and jailed for also expressing pro-Palestinian views.

No exaggeration is necessary here. We can now see the difference between students contesting speech—that is, open debates about the value of certain speech on campus—and real authoritarian suppression of speech, because the latter is happening every day in America. No longer are we using censorship as a metaphor for when a marketplace of ideas picks winners and losers, nor authoritarianism as a hypothetical. The MAGA right has the power to legislate and otherwise enforce censorship on campus, and that’s exactly what it’s doing. Of course, this Trump-led crackdown on free speech extends well beyond campus too. ICE protesters have been arrested and in some cases imprisoned. Vice President JD Vance fueled a witch hunt that led to more than 145 people being fired for protected speech criticizing Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA leader who was murdered. Journalists have been barred from the halls of power in Washington, subjected to federal investigations, and even arrested and charged with bogus crimes. And so on.

It wasn’t very long ago that the right at least pretended to care about First Amendment freedoms. That pretense is out the window. The MAGA assault on free speech is unlike anything we’ve seen since at least the McCarthy era, but it’s also the kind of slow-building political story that we can too easily lose track of amid the daily chaos of the Trump administration. The story is now too big to be ignored: The Republicans are against liberty. They do not believe in freedom. They are enemies of the First Amendment, on and off campus.

IT is going remote while sucking up more power. Most corporate IT is now off-premises for the first time, according to Uptime Institute, while the average rack power density has crested above 11 kW for the first time as server fleets are gradually replaced with more powerful hardware. Uptime’s Global Data Center Survey 2026 reveals how the industry is managing to adapt to challenging circumstances, with the usual evergreen concerns over rising costs plus staffing and skills shortages. The survey polls more than 800 datacenter owners and operators across multiple countries, with more than half (52 percent) in North America and Europe. Off premise dominates: Every year, Uptime asks its enterprise respondents to estimate what percentage of their IT workloads are run in-house versus in third-party facilities. For the first time, third-party sites have the larger share, accounting for 46 percent of IT workloads, compared with 44 percent residing in enterprise-owned corporate server farms. Those figures don’t add up to 100 percent, as some respondents (10 percent) say they are using IT rooms and server cabinets rather than a dedicated facility. Uptime’s experts estimate that, by 2028, the proportion of workloads in self-owned server halls will remain the same, while those running in third-party sites will expand to 48 percent, eating away at those currently based in IT rooms and server cabinets. More power: While the headlines have featured AI infrastructure pushing IT infrastructure power density to 120 kW per rack or even higher, the reality is that most datacenters and servers operate at a much lower level than that. This year, the average of the most typical rack densities now surpasses 11 kW, as a gradual ongoing shift toward higher-powered hardware was compounded by a small number of new high-density facilities with racks above 30 kW. Without those few high-density facilities skewing the average, it sits at 7.8 kW, just slightly up from 7.5 kW in 2025. The majority of facilities still do not have any racks of 30 kW or above, Uptime finds, but more respondents (24 percent) now say they have some of these, compared with 19 percent last year. The increase was mostly in the 50-plus kW ultra-high-density range, including some respondents deploying AI and GPU servers into racks configured for above 100 kW. The trend for rising rack density will continue as organizations upgrade their infrastructure with newer hardware. Updated servers boost both workload capacity and energy performance, but maximizing these benefits means a corresponding rise in overall system power, Uptime states. Refresh shortened: Some operators are also pursuing more aggressive technology refresh timelines of less than 4 years, the report claims. If true, this would be the reverse of what some hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google and Meta have been doing in recent years, extending lifecycles out to 6 or 7 years to save on depreciation expenses. Outages: When it comes to outages, this year’s report shows improvement for the sixth year in a row, with the number of respondents who experienced an outage in the past three years down by three percentage points. But Uptime warns against complacency, noting that many of the factors behind outages, such as reduced or unstable power availability, local grid reliability, supply chain constraints, and extreme weather, are on the increase. The flip side is that the costs of any outages that do occur continue to rise. This is because organizations have become more dependent on digital infrastructure, the report says, and so outages may have more financial impact than in the past. Overall, 71 percent of survey respondents reported that their most damaging outage cost at least $100,000, compared with 57 percent a year ago. Staffing shortage: Staffing has long been an issue for datacenter operators, and this year the greatest skills gaps reported were in electrical (38 percent of respondents), junior level operations (38 percent), operations management (35 percent) and mechanical roles (34 percent). However, more than half (53 percent) of operators report difficulties finding qualified candidates for vacant roles, up from 46 percent a year ago. Finally, Uptime found that financial pressure and resource constraints continue to grow among operators. In fact, the high prices of power, staff, and equipment, particularly for AI-related infrastructure, is the primary issue. Alongside that are escalating concerns over capacity forecasting, power availability and supply chain disruptions. ®

It is 30 years since AT&T handed Microsoft a valuable foothold in the browser wars by making Internet Explorer 3 the default for its WorldNet service. Windows 95 was barely a year old when AT&T set out to challenge CompuServe and America Online with its WorldNet service in 1996. The telecommunications giant needed a browser. Netscape Navigator dominated the market, but Microsoft was keen to make up lost ground. A promotion and distribution agreement was announced on July 25, 1996, with a further announcement in October. Under the deal, AT&T WorldNet software was included in versions of Windows 95 supplied to PC manufacturers, with Internet Explorer 3 designated as the service's default browser. Netscape Navigator remained available, but Internet Explorer secured the valuable default slot. Microsoft's browser-bundling strategy would later draw antitrust action on both sides of the Atlantic, including the EU's browser choice screen in 2010. At the time, Tom Evslin, Vice President for the AT&T WorldNet Service, said: "Users now will find that everything they need to sign up for AT&T WorldNet Service is pre-loaded on their new computers, along with the Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 browser." Thirty years on, Evslin told The Register the deal came down to price. AT&T had to pay per copy activated, and he reckoned Microsoft pretty much gave its browser away (but wasn't completely sure - it was, after all, a long time ago). Netscape Navigator was, however, better known at the time, and so was offered as an option. By January 1997, Microsoft claimed Internet Explorer's corporate usage had more than tripled since August while Netscape's share declined. WorldNet was also attracting users by offering straightforward internet access rather than another AOL-style walled garden. It rapidly became the world's largest ISP by one contemporary measure, although it eventually wheezed its last in 2010. Internet Explorer proved more influential, dominating the browser market for more than a decade before its grip began to loosen in the late 2000s. AT&T's choice was only one factor in Internet Explorer's rise, but it put the browser before WorldNet's growing audience just as users were moving beyond the walled gardens of AOL and CompuServe. Microsoft may have been late to the browser game, but it already controlled the operating system on millions of PCs. Three decades later, the deal remains an early demonstration of the value of being the default. ®

Donald Trump is suddenly bumping up against limits in many areas at once. Top aides just leaked to The Atlantic that he’s “frustrated” with his inability to force Iran’s hand with his increasingly deranged threats. In the case of Trump’s bogus efforts to prosecute James Comey, we just learned that he personally demanded briefings in real time about interrogations of him. That reveals in deeply humiliating fashion his extraordinary personal involvement in the case and makes it more likely it’ll get tossed. His acting DNI chief Bill Pulte is boasting about firing “deep state” denizens even though this may not have actually happened. To make sense of all this, we talked to Talking Points Memo editor-at-large David Kurtz, author of the excellent “Morning Memo” newsletter. We discuss the legal ins-and-outs of these new developments, why there’s some cause for optimism that Trump is being meaningfully constrained, how our institutions are nonetheless on a knife’s edge, and what the endgame of Trump’s attempted authoritarian takeover might look like. Listen to this episode here.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in late June that the Department of Homeland Security has more authority to end temporary protected status for certain countries without facing interference from lower federal courts. Local immigration advocates say the ruling has led to more fear among immigrants under TPS.

The streets of downtown Watsonville will turn into a berry-fused carnival this weekend, as the city’s annual Strawberry Festival returns for its 32nd iteration. 

Pajaro Valley’s most popular event dates back to 1994, when it was first held to raise funds to help the city recover from the devastating 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The festival celebrates the region’s largest and most valuable crop — the strawberry —  while also raising money for local nonprofits throughout the three-day event. 

But before you make a trip to Watsonville’s downtown plaza this weekend, here’s everything you need to know to make sure you have a “berry” good time. 

Strawberry Festival days and times

The festival runs from Friday to Sunday, July 31 to Aug. 2. Festivities kick off Friday from 5-9 p.m., where attendees can enjoy live music and carnival rides. On Saturday, the festival will run from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. 

While the festival is free to attend, festivalgoers looking to enjoy the carnival rides will need to purchase tickets — either in person or online. Unlimited ride wristbands are available to purchase online through 10 p.m. on July 30. 

The city will also make available two of its parking garages downtown for festivalgoers: the Civic Plaza parking garage, at 275 Main St., and the West Beach Street parking garage, at West Beach St. Parking at either garage costs $10. 

Santa Cruz METRO is also offering free bus rides Saturday and Sunday from the county’s service facility at 500 Westridge Drive, from 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. (until 8 p.m. on Sunday). Buses will depart every 30 minutes, dropping festivalgoers off near the festival. Parking is free at this location. 

People were dancing in the plaza during The Watsonville Strawberry Festival. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz A community mural and honoring the region’s farmworking community

This year, festivalgoers of all ages have the opportunity to contribute to a community mural, said Jessica Beebe, recreation supervisor for the City of Watsonville. The piece “Every Strawberry Tells a Story” is a new feature to the event, said Beebe, and people are encouraged to paint their own strawberry. 

Beebe told Lookout that she wants community members to paint what Watsonville means to them and what aspects of the Strawberry Festival bring them joy. The mural is led by nonprofit Pajaro Valley Arts and local artists Vanessa Ledesma, Josefina Rocha and Priscilla Martinez. 

The festival will also feature an exhibit exploring the region’s strawberry industry and honor the farmworking community, said Beebe. The Japanese American Museum of San Jose has loaned a few historical farming and harvesting tools to put on display, she said. 

In addition, there will be several screenings of “Dear Watsonville,” a documentary that explores the lives of three Filipino fathers who migrated to Watsonville as part of the Manong Generation through the perspective of their children. The screenings will be held at the Watsonville Center for the Arts just across the street from the plaza. 

Strawberry Jam Fun Run

For any running enthusiasts out there, the Friends of Watsonville Parks and Community Services is hosting its 5th annual “Strawberry Jam 1K/5K Fun Run” at Landmark Elementary School, at 235 Ohlone Parkway in Watsonville.

The event starts at 7:45 a.m. Saturday morning with the kids race, and the adult race begins at 8 a.m. Registration for the event is available online and onsite on race day. 

The food and festival favorites return

As always, festivalgoers can expect to see food vendors offering their own takes on the region’s signature crop — from strawberry tacos and pizza to berry-spike beer. 

Those dressing up in their “berry” finest are welcome to participate in the “Berry Best Dressed Contest,” happening both Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Pie eating contests are also on the schedule this weekend. 

For a detailed list of live entertainment and cultural performances throughout the weekend, visit the city’s website. 

Chocolate-drizzled strawberries brought smiles to festivalgoers at this year’s Watsonville Strawberry Festival. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz

The post Here’s everything you need to know about this weekend’s Watsonville Strawberry Festival appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

As a Central Coast mother, grandmother, small business owner and founder of Save Girls’ Sports Central Coast, I have spent years advocating for our children. Whether working for fair sports, parental notification rights or safe school environments, my commitment remains clear: children must come first.

Unfortunately, District 30 incumbent Assemblymember Dawn Addis has demonstrated a different approach, which is why I am running against her in the Nov. 3 election. 

A stark example is her Assembly Bill 2691, the Public Trust Protection Act. Promoted as a measure to prevent convicted sex offenders and human traffickers from holding public office, the bill initially gained broad support and passed the Assembly easily.

That changed in the state Senate. 

Amendments introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener narrowed the list of disqualifying offenses, exempting certain felony sexual offenses involving minors from automatic disqualification. The result was a striking inconsistency: a person convicted of some felony sexual offenses against a minor could remain eligible to hold public office, while someone convicted of a comparable offense against an adult would be barred from serving.

Critics and child safety advocates warn that these changes could allow individuals convicted of serious crimes against children to run for office. 

This is particularly concerning for local school boards across our region. Candidates are now announcing and pulling papers for school boards. These trustees make critical decisions regarding curriculum, facilities, sports participation and student safety. 

We cannot risk allowing predators to gain influence in these roles.

Why were these protections diluted when the stakes involve our children’s safety in local classrooms and on playing fields? As someone who has consistently fought for biological girls’ rights in sports and parental rights, I believe we cannot accept half-measures on child protection. 

Families along the coast and in our rural communities deserve leaders who strengthen safeguards.

I have had a career as a real estate broker and managing our small family construction company. I have extensive real-world experience and I am not a career politician. I have served as a parks and recreation commissioner, PTA president, and have founded two grassroots organizations, alongside leading various local clubs and advocacy groups.

Shannon Kessler. Credit: Shannon Kessler for Assembly.

I am a former athlete and mother of a female athlete.  I founded Save Girls’ Sports Central Coast and have been speaking locally, at the state level, and on social media for girls’ and women’s rights to privacy, safety and fairness in sports. I started Culture Impact, an organization that helps citizens engage locally and prepare for hands-on civic volunteerism, strengthening communities through participation rather than politics.

This is the fundamental difference in Assembly District 30. I offer leadership rooted in real-world experience, from 4-H and local schools to the PTA and community advocacy. 

Addis’ handling of AB 2691 reflects the Sacramento status quo: promising tough action, then compromising when it matters most for our children. Call her Monterey office to voice your concerns at 831- 649-2832.

The Central Coast needs representatives who listen to families and prioritize safety over politics. This November, I urge you to choose strength, consistency and the protection of our children without exception when you cast your vote. 

Shannon Kessler is a mother, business owner, and longtime Central Coast children’s and parental rights advocate running for District 30 state assemblymember. She wants to bring practical, common-sense leadership and fairness to Sacramento. Learn more at Kesslerforca.com.

The post Standing strong for our children: AB 2691 shows why Dawn Addis’ record falls short on school safety appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

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

A windowless warehouse on the outskirts of Davis shelters pieces of California’s forests.

Icy air swirls and fogs around 42,000 pounds of seeds — the past and the future of these trees, frozen in cardboard boxes. It smells like the woods on a snowy day. 

“This is like the mothership of forestry in California right here,” said Stewart McMorrow, staff chief for wildfire resilience at Cal Fire, standing outside the heavy metal door of the state seed bank at Cal Fire’s Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis.

Private landowners especially rely on these seeds — some now more than a half-century old — to reforest property destroyed by wildfire.

At the pace California is burning, it’s nowhere near enough. 

Climate change and more than a century of overzealous fire suppression are now fueling wildfires so severe that they’re wiping out the very forests that need fire to thrive — leaving iconic landscapes at risk of turning into brush and scrub, permanently. 

Over the past quarter-century, high-severity wildfires have burned 2.3 million acres of California’s forestland so completely that the trees are unlikely to return on their own — according to a working draft of the state’s new reforestation strategy obtained by CalMatters. 

California is counting on these forests to store carbon, protect water supplies, clean the air and shelter wildlife. By 2071, one recent analysis reports, half of California’s forest area could be gone.

“Reforestation,” said Malcolm North, a scientist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, “is pretty damn important.”

Yet to replant even a quarter of the privately owned forestlands in the state, California would need to increase seed bank capacity by roughly 300%, according to Cal Fire — which means more seeds, more people, more space. And that wouldn’t solve the problem on federal land, which accounts for more than half the forests in the state and most of the lands that need replanting.

A sheet of Douglas fir seeds at the Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis. Credit: Anna Hoch-Kenney, CalMatters Lily Hessl, a Cal Fire forestry aide, scans a sheet of Douglas fir seeds for insect larvae via X-ray at the Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis. Credit: Anna Hoch-Kenney, CalMatters Stewart McMorrow, staff chief of wildfire resilience for Cal Fire, opens a box of seeds in the seed bank at the Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis. Credit: Anna Hoch-Kenney, CalMatters

CalMatters reviewed a working draft of California’s reforestation strategy; the U.S. Department of Agriculture California Climate Hub is developing it with state and federal agencies, the conservation non-profit American Forests, and the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. 

But both Sacramento and Washington have spent decades letting the money and staff needed to grow back California’s forests wither. 

“We need to focus on reforestation as an emergency, as a state,” McMorrow said. “We are slowly losing our forestland, and we’re not catching up.” 

Bleeding the federal workforce

Timber harvests once paid for much of the U.S. Forest Service’s efforts to replant trees. 

But as new laws tightened endangered species and other public lands protections, logging in national forests declined. Severe wildfires also increased. 

The combination devoured the Forest Service’s resources, and people: from 1998 to 2015, non-fire staff tasked with managing National Forest System lands decreased by 39%, according to a 2015 report. 

With ever-increasing demands, a 2022 Forest Service document warned, there is a “critical need” to increase the number of staff “substantially dedicated” to reforestation. 

Congress and the Biden administration unstoppered additional money for a reforestation trust fund in 2021, a move championed by the conservation nonprofit American Forests. Just a few years later, the Forest Service reported that it had replanted roughly 285,000 acres nationwide — the highest yearly total in more than a quarter century.  

But the need still dwarfs action, and federally directed work is lengthy and intense. Crews must clear dead and dying trees quickly to reduce the danger to people and the chance of reburns, a Forest Service spokesperson said. Finding seeds and growing seedlings can take a year or two, even before planting. 

A sheet of Douglas fir seeds at the Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis. Credit: Anna Hoch-Kenney, CalMatters Burned and fallen trees leave a section of hillside bare near Pollock Pines. Credit: Anna Hoch-Kenney, CalMatters Leilani Villeda prepares to fire a weighted line into the high branches of a pine tree using an air-powered launcher during Cone Camp, an annual training session in Pollock Pines where participants learn how to survey and collect pine cones. Credit: Anna Hoch-Kenney, CalMatters

The federal government’s capacity to replant forests eroded away over time, and it will take time to rebuild it, said Solomon Dobrowski, a professor of landscape ecology at the University of Montana. Dobrowski’s research found that the reforestation gap spans millions of acres across the West and is likely to double or even triple in the coming decades.  

“You don’t turn that ship around on a dime,” Dobrowski said. 

Instead, the Trump administration cut the Forest Service significantly. The agency lost 20% of its staff last year. 

“It just makes me cry at night … it’s basically a child swinging a wrecking ball,” said Hugh Safford, a forest and fire ecologist with the UC Davis Environmental Science and Policy Department and a former regional ecologist for the Forest Service. “Morale is down, capacity already was really minimal.” 

And California keeps burning. 

A widening gap

The loss of forests “is one of the least-known impacts of climate change and megafires,” said wildfire task force director Patrick Wright. 

The draft strategy for California obtained by CalMatters comes with no dedicated funding. The goal, Wright said, is to put every agency and organization trying to replant California’s scorched forests on the same page.

The strategy calls for streamlining planning, prioritizing projects tackling critical human safety concerns and ecosystem issues like water supply, and increasing the supply of seeds, seedlings and workers.

Assistant Nursery Manager Maya Hotz checks on a batch of Douglas fir seedlings in a nursery at the Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis. Credit: Anna Hoch-Kenney, CalMatters

It urges land managers to avoid adding more fuel to the fires, and recommends replanting at lower densities and with more natural spacing instead of the classic, closely-packed “pines in lines” grid. Scientists have linked high-density plantings to high-severity fires. 

The most startling pieces, though, come from the draft strategy’s look at the current landscape. California would need to scale up reforestation by 35% annually to meet the state’s existing post-fire replanting goals, which start at 280,000 acres per year in 2030. The increase would take “significant funds,” the report said, because reforestation can cost up to $6,400 an acre.  

But the current pace is lagging. Statewide, land managers have replanted roughly 254,000 acres of severely burned forest since 2020 — or around 16% of the area stripped of forest cover by high severity fires between 2020 and 2024 alone. The number is just 8% on federal lands, outside of wilderness areas.  

Safford said the numbers are actually even more dire: Factoring in both wilderness areas and excluding forests likely to regrow on their own, his recent study reports that the U.S. Forest Service replanted just 1.2% of the agency’s California lands that wildfire denuded between 2016 and 2023. 

It wasn’t always like this, said Safford. The Forest Service’s replanting efforts mostly kept pace with wildfires until around 2006. 

“And then,” Safford said, “it just falls to shit.” 

‘Nowhere near prepared’

For all the vitriol between Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump over the care and raking of California’s forests, state and federal money — and people — often intersect on the landscape. 

On California’s end, Cal Fire funds and conducts research, and provides grants for forest restoration on private, state and even federal land. Cal Fire also runs the reforestation center in Davis, where flats of glossy young conifers are gently misted with water in the summer heat. 

McMorrow — tall and crisp in his navy Cal Fire uniform — can’t help but dig his hands into the dirt to pull out weeds tangling with the seedlings. 

Cal Fire staff chief of wildfire resilience Stewart McMorrow (left) and Assistant Nursery Manager Maya Hotz check on seedlings in a nursery at the Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis. Credit: Anna Hoch-Kenney, CalMatters Cal Fire staff chief of wildfire resilience Stewart McMorrow holds a seedling in a nursery at the Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis. Credit: Anna Hoch-Kenney, CalMatters

One of the most challenging chokepoints, McMorrow said, is finding the right seeds to grow these seedlings — getting climbers to the right spot, at the right time, to pluck ripe cones from the treetops. 

“Believe me, I do it,” said McMorrow, who created a tree-climbing program at Cal Fire. “We are trying to meet the demand that’s in front of us, and it’s crushing.” 

Yet the money for Cal Fire’s efforts — cobbled together from the state budget, federal grants and other one-time funds — represents a relatively small and ever-changing fraction of Cal Fire’s multibillion-dollar budget. 

The nursery in Davis shut down in the early 2000s, a casualty of across-the-board state budget cuts. Though the seed bank freezer stayed on, the reforestation center didn’t fully reopen until after the Legislature in 2017 tapped a 2012 fee on wood products to bring it back online. 

Scaling up and upgrading the facility now carries an estimated $26.2 million price tag; this year’s state budget included about $1.2 million to fund preliminary planning.

Meanwhile, other funding is on the line. California’s climate regulators — chaired by Newsom appointee Lauren Sanchez — voted in May to overhaul a key climate program  in ways that could substantially reduce, or even eliminate, up to $200 million a year for wildfire resilience. Grants for reforestation are among the many competing priorities for this funding. 

While the Proposition 4 climate bond includes $1.5 billion for wildfire and forest resilience, state leaders are spending down the bond quickly.  

“The truth of the matter is that California is probably, infrastructurally speaking, in a better place than any other western state,” Safford said. 

“What that tells you is how piss-poor the capacity is in general in the Western U.S., because California is nowhere near prepared for the scale of this.” 

Cone hunting

On the banks of Jenkinson Lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Stella Krone and Elyse Wohlenberg wrestled with a slingshot that towered over the two of them. It took their combined strength to slot the bungee into position, then Wohlenberg stepped back. 

“All clear?” Krone asked, kneeling in a clearing and pointing the slingshot at a Douglas fir 50 yards away. “Firing!” 

Krone, Wohlenberg and dozens of other hard-hatted people were there, crunching over conifer needles, for Cone Camp — a training program led by American Forests with support from Cal Fire and the Forest Service. 

Cone Camp participants search for the right pine tree to collect cones from on the shores of Jenkinson Lake in Pollock Pines. Cone collection helps contribute to Cal Fire’s seed bank and reforestation program. Credit: Anna Hoch-Kenney, CalMatters

The campers — some forestry professionals, some interested laypeople — peeled off with oversized slingshots and souped-up potato guns to learn how to knock cones loose from tree branches. That’s how they check the cones for ripeness and viability, before sending someone up the tree to collect them for a seed bank. 

The problem was, there were hardly any. Last year’s dry cones rattled to the forest floor as Krone and another camper jiggled the rope they’d shot into the canopy. 

“So far, not a great cone year,” said Leana Weissberg, American Forests’ California director. 

In the clearing, the instructor asked whether the group was ready to try again. 

“Let’s go,” Krone said. “We’re cone hunters for a reason.”

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

The post California can’t replant its forests fast enough to keep up with wildfires appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

BORK!BORK!BORK! An update message made an unscheduled appearance on a big screen during July's On The Beach event in Brighton, England. Partially obscured by speakers capable of deafening those at the back of the audience, the pop-up still managed to compete with the performers for attention. Thanks to modern technology, something unexpected appearing behind the performer is now high on the list of worries for technicians tasked with making sure all goes well for popsters. In the old days, it might have been a bulb blowing, an unfortunate miscalculation in scale for a model of Stonehenge, or a spontaneously exploding drummer. Now it's the unwanted update message distracting from the performance of whoever is on the stage. Some eardrum-splitting speakers obscure part of the message, but no amount of antics from David Rodigan can hide the dialog – complete with the ominous choice between "Remind me later" and "Install updates." Either unaware or too fiercely professional to let technical trouble derail the show, Rodigan continued entertaining the audience while, we imagine, somebody with a keyboard and mouse sweated profusely – and not just because Brighton was in the middle of a heatwave. What do you do? Do you allow the update to proceed? Do you close the message and hope it won't reappear at an inopportune moment? And if you do something, do you risk interfering with a carefully choreographed show? Welcome, as the headline act would later sing, to the House of Fun. Unexpected update pop-ups are the bane of many an administrator's life, filling helpdesk systems with "this weird thing happened" tickets, and clogging the telephone lines with confused users. You might hope a seaside gig on a sunny Friday would offer a break from such nonsense. But no. While much of the music came from an era before auto-updates and the World Wide Web, the tech, alas, wanted to be kept bang up to date. And it was not afraid to share that fact with a crowd more keen on a Night Boat to Cairo than a bork to nowhere. ®

PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we show you how not to use your computer or your network. In this week’s fable of fecklessness, we talk about a teacher who had a lot to learn about security. 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. Our story comes courtesy of Kevin Walker, a seasoned IT veteran from the UK. At one point, he was providing his services to a school when he came across the headteacher’s (aka principal’s) laptop. At the bottom of the laptop there was a sticker with the woman’s username and password. Even if they had been complicated, the post-it would have given them away, but in fact, the combination was: Username: headteacher Password: headteacher Using that laptop, a malefactor could have had access to pupils’ personal information, internal conversations, emails, and all kinds of private school files. There could be serious problems for everyone who worked for or attended the school. “A headteacher’s laptop is not just a laptop; it's an entry point to the most sensitive information a school holds,” Walker told us. If a cybercriminal got access, they could effectively break into the school without ever setting foot in the building. This wasn’t the only instance of poor security Walker saw in his time doing IT for schools. He also saw an institution create an Excel file called Passwords.xlsx, then put it on a shared drive that students could get to. As its name suggests, Passwords.xlsx was filled with login credentials that any bad actor could take advantage of. Walker also saw leaver accounts that remained active, a server that had its backup drive permanently plugged in so hackers could potentially wipe the backup as well, a Wi-Fi password written on a whiteboard in reception, and one critical system that users could only access from an ancient laptop. There was also a machine with a “Do Not Turn Off” note posted to it sitting in a corner that everyone was afraid to touch. And, years after Windows XP was no longer the current platform, the school had a CCTV monitor with that ancient OS running on it. And, a supposedly secure server room doubled as a storage closet for stationery and Christmas decorations. Walker told us that, in his experience, the schools he worked with had priorities other than cybersecurity and they didn’t understand its importance. One boss even denied the importance of keeping data safe at all. “We don’t need to worry about cybersecurity. They're only a primary school,” his manager told him when Walker tried to get them to use cloud backups. The problem, Walker opines, is that schools often have to work with outdated gear and the teachers and school administrators have other concerns. His solution: keep it simple. “Make the safe thing the easy thing,” Walker said. “Give staff password managers. Use multi-factor authentication. Review accounts properly. Test backups. Remove shared admin logins. Keep systems updated. Enforce proper passwords and block the ones that have already turned up in data breaches. If a password is already doing the rounds online, it has no business protecting a school system. None of that is as exciting as rolling out a fleet of shiny new iPads, but it works.” ®

The OpenAI rogue agent behind the Hugging Face hack accessed four accounts on four services, according to updated company disclosures about the intrusion. One of those four accounts belonged to a Modal customer that had published an unauthenticated endpoint for running arbitrary code in a sandbox on the AI infrastructure provider, Hugging Face noted in its technical timeline and Modal later confirmed. “We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution,” Modal Chief Technology Officer Akshat Bubna told The Register. “This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform was not compromised in any way.” The other accounts included one used for data storage and two others “accessed by the models in a read-only manner, and were not used in furtherance of compromising Hugging Face,” OpenAI disclosed on Tuesday. “We’ll continue to notify service owners directly, and have not seen evidence of broader impact to these providers or other accounts on their services,” the AI giant added. Also on Tuesday, we learned that the rogue agent broke out of its testing environment by exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in JFrog’s universal binary repository manager Artifactory. While both OpenAI and Hugging Face’s updates and timeline provide defenders with useful details about how the attack worked and what the agent did - not to mention a lesson in security-incident transparency - they fail to answer one major question: Who is legally responsible when AI agents attack? “If a human employee intentionally conducted unauthorized access to third-party systems, it’s a much more clear path forward,” Gabrielle Hempel, security operations strategist at Exabeam, told The Register, adding that depending on the facts and jurisdiction, the person could face criminal charges. ‘So many unknowns’ “The company could also face scrutiny depending on whether the employee acted within the scope of their employment, whether appropriate controls existed, and whether the conduct was authorized, foreseeable, or preventable,” Hempel said. However, she added, the “important thing here” is that legal frameworks in both the US and UK have been designed around human decision makers - not AI systems. “Our laws generally know how to ask questions about things like human intent, organizational oversight, and corporate responsibility.” Autonomous AI agents hacking into companies remains uncharted legal territory, and Hempel said it’s “too early to draw conclusions about liability in this case because there are so many unknowns.” AI systems aren’t legal persons, so they don’t share the same legal responsibilities as individuals and companies. “Because of that, the questions become: Who designed the system? Who determined the objectives it pursued? What safeguards were implemented? What level of autonomy was considered acceptable? Were the resulting actions reasonably foreseeable, and were appropriate controls in place? These are going to be important questions as organizations deploy more autonomous AI systems,” Hempel said. It's highly unlikely that Hugging Face will sue OpenAI over the agentic intrusion, given the amount of very public collaboration between the two companies over the past couple of weeks, and the self-congratulatory celebration of the autonomous attack as a success story. It also appears that this former worst-case scenario didn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for setting advanced models loose (or at least unsupervised in a test environment), which means there are sure to be more agents-gone-wild attacks in the near future. “The first part of the OpenAI/Hugging Face drama did not produce enough effect to impress investors who start losing their excitement over the AI hype, so the second part of the story is now unfolding,” said Ilia Kolochenko, founder of application security company ImmuniWeb and a cybersecurity and data-protection lawyer. “AI agents and LLM models tasked with security testing can, and almost certainly will, go rogue when security controls or safeguards are insufficient,” Kolochenko told The Register. “Powerful LLMs are unpredictable by design and thus virtually uncontrollable by humans. Using frontier AI models for security testing might be extremely costly from the legal viewpoint.” Existing laws on both sides of the Atlantic likely hold the AI operator liable for any damages caused if an agent or AI system escapes its sandbox and breaches a third party. “Excuses like ‘AI did it’ do not currently exist in the eyes of the law, leaving AI vendors on the hook,” he said, adding that this also holds true for end-users. “Even if your security testing tool is powered by a third-party AI model, your company will be fully liable if something goes wrong,” Kolochenko warned. “You may then file a lawsuit against the AI vendor that you used, but your chances of succeeding in the court of law are tiny due to countless contractual disclaimers and limitations of liability that may be enforceable against you.” His final words of advice: “If you plan to use agentic AI for security testing, you must think twice and talk to your lawyers. Otherwise, you could start getting summonses to court on a daily basis.” ®

Data protection vendor Veeam has decided the time is right to support half a dozen more hypervisors in case you are thinking of adopting a new one. Hypervisor migrations are currently a distinct possibility for VMware user who relies on vSphere for basic server virtualization, as Broadcom now focuses on its Cloud Foundation private cloud suite. That product is powerful and comprehensive, but Broadcom requires buyers to license at least 72 cores, which may be rather more than many small shops operate. Before acquisition, VMware had literally tens of thousands of small customers. Many are now looking for a home. VMs are disk images wrapped in metadata and moving them to the format required by different hypervisors isn’t hard. Shifting all the tools that surround a hypervisor can be more complex and therefore the more time-consuming and risky part of a hypervisor migration. Migration projects also create the opportunity to reconsider an entire infrastructure, including the sort of tools Veeam provides. The company knows this and is working to protect its position by giving those considering virtualization migrations comfort they can change hypervisor without the added chore of finding new data protection tools. Which is why the company added support for six additional hypervisors – Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Sangfor aSV, XCP-ng, Citrix XenServer, VergeIO and Platform9 – in version 13.1 of its flagship Data Platform that became available today. Veeam’s president of products and technology Rehan Jalil today told The Register that the company thinks users will appreciate the chance to protect VMs created to run different hypervisors from a single console. Adding six hypervisors to a single release is more impressive than it sounds, because XenServer and XCP-ng are based on the open-source Xen hypervisor, and the remainder use Linux KVM. Veeam already supports KVM-based hypervisors from Proxmox and Nutanix, and has previously found ways to backup Xen VMs – just without the hypervisor integration that comes with inclusion in its Data Platform. Veeam also today launched a product called Cloud Archive that shunts data into an un-named third-party cloud. When The Register asked Jalil to identify that cloud, he noted that AWS’s Glacier service pioneered cloudy archive-grade storage, and pointed to Veeam’s close relationship with Microsoft which operates a service called Azure Archive Storage. Such services operate recovery time objectives that stretch to multiple hours. Veeam suggests the new service is suited to storing “redundant, obsolete and trivial” backups, with better performance than tape. ®

NASA has shared new snaps captured by its Curiosity rover that show a large “field of honeycomb textures” on Mars. Here’s the best of the images Curiosity captured. It shows the honeycomb field, each element of which is four to eight centimeters across. NASA doesn’t know how the honeycomb formed, but The Register is willing to rule out space bees because Curiosity has seen this sort of thing before and scientists are pretty sure the patterns are the result of mud drying and cracking during some unknowably distant Martian event. Curiosity spotted the polygonal features after starting its climb up a Martian valley that mission scientists have nicknamed “Valle Grande.” NASA’s post about the find says the rover has seen “small patches of these geometric shapes several times before, but nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande.” The Rover snapped the honeycomb field on June 19 and 20, the 4,930th and 4,931st Martian days of its very extended mission. Curiosity reached Martian soil on August 5, 2012, and was the first probe to land under a “sky crane” – a hovering craft that lowers rovers to the ground. Previous Mars landings relied on bouncing airbags that space agencies hoped would protect probes as they landed at speeds exceeding 70 km/h. Curiosity has travelled about 35 kilometers since arriving on Mars and has made myriad fascinating observations along the way, some of which suggest Mars was once home to intermittent oases or even a large lake. The journey was hard, with damaged tires a persistent problem. The rover’s drill got stuck in a Martian rock. NASA took a leaf from the Taylor Swift playbook and found a way to shake it off. The space agency has also remotely reprogrammed the rover to conduct different experiments and uploaded major software upgrades to keep it rolling. The rover is currently carrying out its fifth extended mission. NASA typically extends missions for as long as its robots gather enough data to justify the cost of operating them. Curiosity continues to meet those criteria very comfortably! ®

Qualcomm has predicted its entry to the datacenter market will yield $15 billion of annual revenue by FY 2029 – huge growth, but also a modest number compared to its more established rivals. The chip design firm dangled the $15 billion figure on Wednesday along with its Q3 results, which included a warning that revenue from its business selling modems to Apple is about to crater. Execs told investors that supply chain constraints mean Qualcomm expects “an acceleration in the step down of Apple product revenues” as its contribution to the next iPhone “is expected to be materially lower than our prior estimate of 20 percent.” Apple has spent years working on its own modems, a shift Qualcomm has long acknowledged. Now the House of the Snapdragon has advised investors to expect less than $2 billion in sales to Cupertino next year. “This obviously accelerates kind of the exit of Apple revenue out of our model,” said CFO Akash Palkhiwala. Qualcomm has a plan to replace Apple’s cash, by diversifying away from smartphones. Execs said the company thinks it will sell $40 billion a year of products not tied to handsets in FY 2029, with $10 billion of automotive sales and revenue from internet of things devices hitting $14 billion. The company sold $3.3 billion on non-smartphone kit in Q3 and previously forecast $22 billion of non-phone revenue in 2029. Growing its datacenter business from zero to $15 billion in a few years is impressive, but it’s worth comparing Qualcomm’s plans to current results from its rivals like AMD and Intel, both of which won over $16 billion in datacenter revenue in FY 25 and are growing fast. And then there’s Nvidia, which is on track to post over $250 billion annual datacenter revenue. Qualcomm’s datacenter products compete directly with AMD and Nvidia. $15 billion of annual revenue in 2029 will mean Qualcomm is a minor player, suggesting its focus on cheaper inferencing won’t have wide appeal. Execs could at least point to initial sales of datacenter kit arriving just in time to replace revenue it used to win from Apple. On the company’s earnings call, Qualcomm CEO and president Cristiano Amon foreshadowed price rises across the company’s range and said he doesn’t expect that decision will hurt the already-depressed smartphone market. “Even a double-digit price increase, which is just a pass-through of the input costs increase and wafer price increases, it actually is small when you compare it to the order of magnitude of the memory bill of materials,” he said, after blaming slow handset sales on the cost of RAM. Indeed, Qualcomm is banking on increased revenue from sales of its products for use in Android handsets, helped by a resurgent Chinese market. Amon thinks Middle Kingdom smartphone sales will rebound now that vendors have sold all the stock they warehoused and are set to launch new models featuring agentic AI. Q3 revenue came in at $9.95 billion, a four percent year-over-year dip. Net income fell 25 percent to $2 billion. Those figures weren’t far off the company’s predictions. Qualcomm’s share price dropped by about five percent in after hours trading. ®

Cisco has decided to “retire” its Azure Local offering due to changes Microsoft made to the hardware and partnerships it supports for the on-prem hyperconverged cloud stack. The networking giant quietly announced the change in a July 24 end of life and end of sale notice that reveals Cisco will stop selling its Azure Local bundles in October. That notice states Cisco will not offer a direct replacement for the product, but “does encourage customers to evaluate alternative HCI solutions with Cisco Compute.” A Cisco spokesperson referred The Register to a June 16 Microsoft blog post as the reason for its decision to quit Azure Local. In that post, Microsoft explains that it has removed the option to run Azure Local on “Validated Nodes.” Microsoft pre-sales Azure technical architect Sarah Lean, writing on her personal blog, rates Validated Nodes as the most flexible way to run Azure Local. “You can choose to purchase a complete setup from a hardware vendor, or build your own using individual components from the validated list,” she wrote. “You're in full control with a validated node, the hardware, deploying the software, managing firmware, driver updates and keeping the Azure Local operating system up to date.” The other two options to run Azure Local are “Premier Solutions” and “Integrated Solutions.” Both of those options see Microsoft and the solution builder integrate their support services. The Register understands that Cisco’s Azure Local products were Validated Nodes. Now that Microsoft doesn’t allow Validated Nodes, Cisco appears to have decided not to step up to offer a Premier Solution or an Integrated Solution. Microsoft may not be crying into its cloud about that decision, given Cisco is a niche player in the x86 server market and its recent decision to pitch Azure Local as a sovereign cloud rather than HCI. Beyond the fact that Microsoft no longer supports its Azure Local offering, Cisco hasn’t said why it’s chosen to walk away from Azure Local. Independent analyst Michael Warrilow might have one reason, as he last week shared his view that the Microsoft product “is not yet a suitable candidate for traditional data centre requirements.” Cisco may therefore feel it’s not worth investing in the work needed to get its hardware ready to run Microsoft’s stack. Hyperconverged infrastructure has been a tricky category for Cisco, which in 2023 decided to discontinue its own HyperFlex offering and recommend Nutanix instead. ®