18 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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News Archive

Archives for October 2026

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Rhode Island is suing Meta for turning a blind eye to scam ads.

The state’s Attorney General Peter Neronha filed the suit in Providence Superior Court, accusing Meta of making billions in profits from scam ads, while simultaneously telling users it was working hard to protect them. The suit cites reporting on leaked Meta documents from Reuters that said:

… it was earning ​far more from high-risk scam ads than it expected to pay in fines for allowing them.

According to those documents, Meta displays around 15 billion “higher risk” scam ads to users every day, and earned roughly ​10% of its 2024 revenue from fraudulent e-commerce, dubious health products and other banned marketing.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Larry and David Ellison got $1 billion from Elon Musk for their Warner Bros. takeover.

Semafor reports that, along with other investors like board member Laurene Powell Jobs, “Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, according to people familiar with the matter, providing a much needed financial injection as the company looks to cut costs and bolster its stock price.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Bluesky now lets you spotlight links on your profile.

With the new profile links feature, you can make buttons for links that sit above your posts. Links to payment platforms will be green.

Here’s what a couple of the buttons look like on my profile.

A screenshot showing Bluesky’s profile links.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Google’s AI overview led some people to think they were donating to James Talarico when they weren’t.

Instead, their money went to a political action committee that funneled the money to the reelection campaign of Colorado’s Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper. According to The Atlantic:

The mix-up wasn’t all AI’s fault. The link led to a misleading donation page that carried Talarico’s name and picture, and specified only at the bottom that the money would go to Hickenlooper. But Google’s AI tool evidently didn’t read the fine print. And perhaps no one would have clicked on it had Google not highlighted the page in an authoritative-sounding AI response.

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
AI agents are causing massive headaches for banks.

According to Axios, banks have detected AI agents accessing customer accounts and taking actions, sometimes without clear authorization or instruction. JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley have started to restrict or block some third-party access because of it. But more concerning, it seems the banks just don’t know what AI agents are doing or why:

One bank executive told Axios they struggle to differentiate between agents, as well as whether an agent has been authorized by a user or has gone rogue and gained access to a customer account.

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
The Internet Archive was briefly forced offline because of PHP.

The list of sites that had to go down, at least temporarily, because of the recently disclosed PHP vulnerability keeps growing. Thankfully, the Internet Archive’s ops team quickly got things patched, secured, and back online. Digital librarian Brewster Kahle posted his thanks on Mastodon last night: “Given the severity, there are heroes in many many orgs from last night. Could have been no lights, no traffic signals, real problems.“

Andrew Liszewski
Andrew Liszewski
Build it, stack it, sort it, make it.

Lego and Daft Punk have revealed a new collaboration that will include an upcoming set based on the pyramid stage design from the duo’s 2007 Alive concert tour. The Daft Punk Concert set was originally submitted to the Lego Ideas platform in 2020 by a father-son duo from Belgium, according to Variety, but has finally been approved for production by Lego after amassing 10,000 supporters.

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Scientists are racing to save the banana.

We already basically lost the Gros Michel to Panama disease in the 1950s. The Cavendish replaced it in our fruit bowls, but because it’s sterile and relies on propagation, it’s threatened by climate change and disease. According to the Guardian, scientists may have found a solution:

This month, Yelloway – a research collaboration between Chiquita, the world’s largest banana company, and the crop-improvement company KeyGene – announced it had developed a fully fertile Cavendish banana, meaning it may be possible, through cross-breeding, to create new banana varieties that are commercially viable and resistant to disease.