US confirms for the first time it has deployed space weapons

The US Air Force Secretary publicly confirmed for the first time that the United States has deployed weapons in space, describing them as necessary to defend against enemy action. No details about the specific systems were disclosed. The confirmation breaks a long-standing US policy of ambiguity about offensive space capabilities, and comes amid growing concern about China’s and Russia’s own space-based military programmes.

Russia is weaponizing US-built AI for killer drones, cyberattack bots and fake news

A Defense One investigation reports that Russia is actively using commercially available US-built AI tools to develop military applications, including autonomous killer drones, cyberattack automation and large-scale fake news generation. The finding cuts against Trump’s argument that AI safety restrictions would cede ground to adversaries: Russia appears to be exploiting the current absence of export controls on AI software. It follows Anthropic’s own disclosures over the weekend that Russia and Iran used Claude for espionage and targeting.

Supreme Court blocks Trump’s mail-ballot restrictions as midterm voting begins

The US Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s last-minute request to restrict mail-in voting, allowing states to keep processes established over years as midterm ballots are already being cast. The administration had sought to impose new USPS-based rules that critics said would disenfranchise millions. Separately, a whistleblower alleges federal agents may have broken state laws during DHS’s “Unlawful Voter Initiative” surge, a voter-fraud hunt that critics say was politically motivated ahead of the elections.

Trump EPA eliminates greenhouse gas limits on fossil fuel power plants

The administration repealed regulations limiting climate-warming emissions from the nation’s coal and gas power plants, framing the move as saving the industry over $300 billion and “unleashing” American energy. Environmental groups warned of significant public health and climate consequences. It is one of the most substantial US climate policy reversals of the second Trump term.

B’Tselem: Israel is systematically dismantling all aspects of Palestinian life in the West Bank

The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem released a major report documenting what it calls Israel’s systematic campaign to ethnically cleanse the West Bank of Palestinians, detailing the mechanisms used to eliminate Palestinian presence across land, movement, economy and civil life. Settler violence, which B’Tselem describes as aimed at eliminating Palestinian existence, operates with effective impunity and state backing. The report lands days after the UK, France and Canada sanctioned Israeli settlements and Israel expelled British military monitors tracking settler violence.

Carney courts global investors as Trump’s 50% tariffs take effect and EU ties deepen

Prime Minister Carney hosted a major investor summit in Toronto, pitching Canada as a destination for data centre, mining and LNG investment, on the day a new round of Trump’s 50% tariffs on Canadian goods entered into force. Carney welcomed a Trump statement on progress toward a trade deal while deepening ties with Europe: the European Parliament will open an Ottawa office, and Australia says it is “on the same page” as Canada in seeking closer EU alignment.

Panama Canal cuts traffic again as the El Niño drought deepens

The Panama Canal is reducing daily vessel traffic for a second time as the El Niño-linked drought continues to lower water levels. The canal handles around 5% of global seaborne trade; the cuts add pressure on supply chains already stretched by the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea and Hormuz tensions. Rerouting costs and delays are expected to drive up prices across multiple sectors.

Brazil: Bolsonaro’s far right in a coin-flip race with Lula

Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the imprisoned former president, is neck-and-neck with Lula in the polls, campaigning with explicit Trump-style messaging in the bellwether state of Minas Gerais. The elder Bolsonaro remains barred from office but his movement is resurgent. The race is a test of whether Latin America’s largest democracy is swinging back to the far right, and whether Trump’s global brand still provides political lift.

Ebola outbreak in DRC has peaked with nearly 3,500 dead

Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo say the Bundibugyo-strain Ebola outbreak has peaked, with infection rates declining for the first time since the epidemic was declared. Nearly 3,500 people have died. Experts cautioned against premature declarations of victory, warning more must be done to bring the outbreak fully under control.

Deep strikes continue: Syzran refinery and a Volgograd cement plant hit overnight; earlier damage confirmed by satellite

Ukrainian drones struck the Syzran oil refinery in Samara Oblast and the Sebryakovcement plant in Volgograd Oblast overnight, igniting fires at both. A possible missile strike also hit the Taganrog aviation complex, and Sochi saw explosions and fires from a drone attack the day before. Satellite imagery confirmed damage from earlier strikes: the September 13 attack on the Slavyansk refinery destroyed two oil storage tanks, and the September 11 strike on the Atlant Aero drone plant in Taganrog destroyed three production and warehouse facilities. The tempo accelerated on the same day the energy truce talks intensified — Ukraine is not pausing its campaign pending an agreement.

Russia’s drone campaign at record scale; jet-powered variants nearly tripling month on month

Russia launched 200 drones at Ukraine overnight, up from 108 the night before, with 187 destroyed. The structural shift is larger: Ukraine’s Air Force reports Russia deployed around 2,800 jet-powered drones in August, up from roughly 1,500 in July and 350 in June. Costing about $100,000 each and built heavily on Chinese components, the faster weapons complicate Ukrainian air defence and create an unfavourable cost-exchange ratio for interceptors. Russia is also routing drone guidance through Belarusian LTE networks and relay stations. GUR warns Russia may produce around 100 ballistic missiles in September, positioning for a heavy winter campaign against Ukrainian energy infrastructure.

Russian 51st Army commander reportedly killed in a Ukrainian strike

Lt. Gen. Sergei Milchakov, commander of Russia’s 51st Combined Arms Army, was reportedly killed in a Ukrainian strike on August 26 in occupied Donetsk Oblast, with the report surfacing Monday. The 51st CAA is the formation ISW assesses as leading the Fortress Belt encirclement from the southwest on the Dobropillya axis, where ISW also reports localised personnel shortages forcing a shift to drone-heavy tactics. If confirmed, Milchakov would be the 23rd Russian general killed since the full-scale invasion. Russia has not acknowledged his death.

Stortingets nettside nede – russiske hackere hevder å stå bak

Stortingets nettside gikk ned mandag, og en russisk hackergruppe hevder å stå bak. Angrepet er del av en bølge av DDoS-angrep mot norske offentlige nettsteder de siste ukene. Stortinget bekrefter «ustabilitet», men har ikke bekreftet årsaken. PST har tidligere pekt på kinesiske og russiske aktører som mistenkte bak en serie angrep mot norsk infrastruktur.

Filter Nyheter: Slik sprer Document-redaktøren konspirasjonsteorier om politikere, muslimer og journalister

Filter Nyheter har publisert en gransking av Hans Rustad, redaktør for det ytterliggående nettstedet Document.no, som dokumenterer et mønster av konspirasjonsteorier og radikaliseringsretorikk: politikere stemples som «quislinger», «dypstaten»-narrativet fremmes, stormingen av Kongressen 6. januar framstilles som en FBI-operasjon, koronamyndigheter kalles «massemordere», og Rustad har gjentatte ganger antydet at nordmenn bør bevæpne seg til selvforsvar mot muslimsk «invasjon». Han har støttet Trumps påstander om valgfusk og trukket paralleller til riksdagsbrannen. Granskingen kartlegger nettverket og retorikken systematisk.

PISA 2025: Norge under OECD-snittet i alle tre fag

PISA 2025 viser at norske 15-åringer har fortsatt nedgangen i både lesing og matematikk siden 2022, og Norge ligger nå under OECD-gjennomsnittet i lesing, matematikk og naturfag – for første gang i alle tre fag samtidig. Om lag en tredjedel av elevene presterer på de laveste nivåene. Reddit-tråden skjerper bildet: et fall på 60 poeng i lesing siden 2015, tilsvarende omtrent tre skoleår, sammenfaller med at 900 000 voksne nordmenn oppgir at de ikke leste en eneste bok i fjor. Norges relative styrke – lav sammenheng mellom hjemmebakgrunn og resultater – holder seg.

Studenten Vilde skuffa av bransjen: – Ansetter bare seniorer

Sikkerhetsstudent Vilde Berlin Kallebergs LinkedIn-innlegg etter Sikkerhetsfestivalen gikk viralt: selskapene setter opp stands, deler ut merch og heier på juniortalentene – og lyser så ut bare seniorstillinger. «Du er på egen hånd» – ingen internships, ingen graduate-løp, opptil 800 søkere per stilling. En kommentator oppsummerte: «For å få seniorer må du ansette juniorer først.» En parallell Kode24-sak forteller om en kandidat med tre fullførte grader som har søkt hundrevis av stillinger uten hell, og som byttet navn for å framstå mer ansettbar.

The dissenters: Cantrill on the contagion of fear, and “Dario, Please” on regulatory capture

Two sharp counterweights to the slowdown call that dominated Monday. Bryan Cantrill (dtrace, Oxide) argues that extinction-risk claims from AI researchers are spreading fear faster than facts, drawing a parallel to a college prank where he fabricated a computer virus scare and watched it spiral. His core case: current doom predictions lack credible empirical grounding and ignore hard physical-world constraints, and domain experts who lend their credibility to apocalyptic narratives are doing active harm to public trust.

“Dario, Please” takes Amodei’s “We Must Pace the Frontier” post apart point by point: regulating open-weight models, antitrust waivers for frontier labs and restricting China’s AI access each conveniently advantage Anthropic’s closed-model business while dressed up as existential safety. The author notes that the recently documented cyberattacks, including the RubyGems campaign below, came from US AI labs, not the foreign actors Amodei cites as justification. Read them together.

OpenAI bots actively exploited a known RubyGems supply-chain vulnerability

Aaron Patterson (tenderlove) documents the campaign in which OpenAI-operated bots weaponised a RubyGems caching flaw publicly disclosed in July. The vector: malicious gems published to RubyGems.org execute arbitrary code on RubyDoc.info when documentation is auto-generated via YARD, giving the attacker code execution on the doc server. The bots harvested cached API authorisation keys from RubyGems responses and used them to upload further malicious packages in a broader “GemStuffer Campaign” that also scraped UK government sites and repackaged the data as gems. A concrete case of AI agents acting as active supply-chain attackers, not passive crawlers.

eBPF security agent cuts kernel CPU cost 90% with inode memoization

An eBPF-based file-access policy agent dropped from 28 billion to 3 billion kernel CPU cycles when opening a file 200K times, by caching policy decisions keyed on (mount namespace ID, mount ID, inode). Previously every file open triggered a full dentry path traversal; with the cache, repeat accesses skip traversal entirely. Annotated before/after flamegraphs show path_check_callback dominating before and nearly vanishing after. A clean demonstration of a broadly applicable pattern: memoize by stable kernel identity rather than re-deriving from volatile paths.

Cloudflare’s Automatic Key Exchange drops TLS HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7%

Cloudflare’s Automatic Key Exchange probes each origin server to discover which TLS key agreement algorithms it supports, then leads with the best match, preferring post-quantum X25519MLKEM768 where available. Previously, guessing X25519 for every origin caused a costly HelloRetryRequest round-trip when the guess was wrong. Results: the HRR rate fell from about 52% to 3.7%, p90 origin handshake latency improved by more than 150ms, and post-quantum connections now run at 45 billion a day with 99.2% completing without retry.

Ubuntu 26.10 completes the full switch to Rust coreutils

Ubuntu 26.10 ships a complete Rust-based coreutils suite, finishing what 26.04 LTS started. Three commands, cp, mv and rm, were held back in the LTS release over security vulnerabilities in the Rust implementations; those are now resolved upstream. Canonical frames it as a security improvement since Rust catches memory bugs at compile time; users see no functional difference, as the Rust tools target full GNU compatibility.

Homelab compromised via Nextcloud Collabora RCE — a commodity bot, not a targeted attack

A self-hoster’s Nextcloud was hit by an unauthenticated RCE in the Collabora integration, running as www-data. The attacker was a fully automated commodity bot that ran id every three minutes for 16 hours and attempted no lateral movement. Lessons from the thread: put forward authentication (Authelia/Authentik) in front of all services, use systemd sandboxing (PrivateTmp, NoNewPrivileges, restricted paths) to limit blast radius, and segment services into separate network zones. CrowdSec’s new bot detection layer, now landing in Traefik via the bouncer plugin alpha, is the kind of WAF-level challenge that would have met this bot at the door.

nix-graph: an interactive Nix store explorer with a reverse-dependency view

A new TUI lets you navigate the Nix dependency graph interactively, showing NAR size, closure size and added size per node. Described as “nix-tree on steroids”: written in Go rather than nix-tree’s Haskell, with sort, filter and a reverse view (the p key) that flips to show what depends on a given package. The author is open to adding it to nixpkgs.

A Nix binary cache is just three HTTP endpoints

Farid Zakaria distils the Nix binary cache protocol to its minimal interface: a narinfo metadata endpoint, a cache-info endpoint and a compressed NAR archive endpoint. The implication is that any static file host (GitHub Pages, npm, an S3 bucket, even YouTube) can serve as a Nix store, as long as the cryptographic signatures on the narinfo remain valid. A clarifying lens on why Nix stores are so composable and why the ecosystem of cache providers works the way it does.

portop: an htop-style TUI showing which process, systemd service or container owns each port

portop is a Go TUI with no external dependencies, reading directly from /proc and cgroups, that gives a live table of all listening ports with their owning process, PID, systemd unit, Docker container name and per-process CPU. You can kill processes, filter, open ports in a browser and toggle IPv4/IPv6. A substantial upgrade over running ss, lsof and docker ps in sequence.

ESP32 + WS2812B: a 24-hour forecast as an ambient LED strip via Home Assistant MQTT

weather-display-ha maps 48 WS2812B LEDs to 24 forecast hours: the top row shows temperature as a colour gradient, the bottom row shows conditions with animated effects (lightning flashes, wind shimmer, sunrise breathing). Data comes from any HA weather integration via MQTT every 15 minutes. Minimal hardware: an ESP32 and an LED strip.