Technology & Science

OSAKA — Capcom said on October 22 that a third party accessed records for 11,774,247 accounts on its Capcom ID service, which handles sign-in for its web services and some online games. The records pair email addresses with account-creation dates, last-login times, login counts and the IP address used at last login. For 43 accounts, birth date, gender, country or region and nickname were also accessed. Attackers changed passwords on 196 accounts, and Capcom has reset them. The company says no credit card data was involved and it has found no evidence that users' original passwords leaked. It detected the intrusion on October 19 and reported it to Osaka police and Japan's Personal Information Protection Commission on October 21. It has not disclosed how the attackers got in. It warned users to expect phishing and will notify affected customers in stages.

CUPERTINO — Apple has invited media and analysts to an October 28 event in Los Angeles titled 'Pro and tell,' which suggests a focus on high-end Macs with the company's own chips. Analysts quoted by CNBC expect new Macs, possibly including Apple's first touchscreen laptop. Apple has not confirmed any products. Reports cited by Macworld and Digital Trends point to an OLED MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, an entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M6 chip and an updated iMac. Shipping could start around November 6, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman as relayed by Macworld. It would be the third launch event under CEO John Ternus, who succeeded Tim Cook last month. Meanwhile, Apple's foldable iPhone Duo, announced September 9, goes on sale today in initial markets, per Business Today.

LYON — INTERPOL announced on Thursday the results of a coordinated law enforcement operation against cybercrime. Authorities disrupted 10,909 malicious networks and recovered more than $105 million in illicit funds, according to The Hacker News' report of the announcement. Agencies from 21 countries took part and arrested 1,462 suspects. The report did not detail which fraud or malware types were targeted. Further breakdowns by country and crime type typically follow in INTERPOL's own release, which has not yet been reviewed here. Such sweeps tend to hit infrastructure and money-mule networks rather than the core operators of ransomware or fraud groups.

METR and Redwood Research published a public account Thursday of a three-week exercise inside OpenAI. One researcher from each group had deep access to OpenAI's internal code, monitor prompts and staff from July 21 to August 11. They estimated that 75% to 94% of agentic internal Responses API traffic from models at least as strong as GPT-5.5 was eligible for monitoring, and 99.2% of internal Codex traffic. Because compaction events were not monitored, about 10% of eligible Codex traffic went unreviewed between May and July. OpenAI had found that gap itself and fixed it during the exercise. The auditors also described a Codex sandbox bypass, an exploit that could hide hundreds of recent actions, and two client-controlled settings that could switch monitoring off for new agents. OpenAI says it patched every production-affecting vulnerability. The findings describe the system as it stood before July 21, not its current state. The full 61-page report remains internal and parts are redacted.

NEW ORLEANS — A three-judge Fifth Circuit panel on Thursday vacated U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate's injunction against Mississippi's law banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public schools and universities. It ordered the case reassigned to another judge. Judge Jerry Smith's opinion said Wingate's temporary restraining order contained errors that appeared to be AI hallucinations. It named parties not in the case, quoted terms absent from the statute and cited evidence not in the record. The corrected version still cited a case that does not exist. The panel said the preliminary injunction incorporated that reasoning. Judge Kurt Engelhardt joined the opinion, and Judge Catharina Haynes agreed with the result but not most of the reasoning. Wingate said in 2025 that a law clerk used Perplexity to help draft the order, and that it was an early draft that had skipped normal review. The case now returns to a new district judge.

Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Arizona, Arkansas, Montana, Idaho and West Virginia filed separate but coordinated lawsuits against OpenAI on October 14, according to a legal newsletter that tracks AI litigation. The states allege OpenAI misled consumers about ChatGPT's safety and failed to protect children and other vulnerable users. The complaints say the chatbot can reinforce delusions, give dangerous advice, encourage self-harm or violence, and foster emotional dependency. The newsletter notes that per-violation consumer-protection statutes can produce very large penalty figures. It cited a New Mexico judge's $25 billion order against Meta this week, a different case over Cambridge Analytica-related privacy claims, as an example of that arithmetic. The allegations are unproven, and the newsletter's account of the filings was not confirmed against the complaints.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission says the first harmonised standard supporting the AI Act was published in the Official Journal on October 19. Such standards are the technical yardsticks companies will use to show compliance. The publication comes as the AI Act's Digital Omnibus, Regulation 2026/1744, has been in force since July 27. It pushed stand-alone high-risk obligations, covering hiring, credit, education and border uses, to December 2, 2027, and product-embedded systems to August 2, 2028. Transparency duties under Article 50 already apply. The next fixed date is December 2, 2026. By then, generative AI systems already on the market must mark their outputs in machine-readable form. New bans also start on systems that generate child sexual abuse material or non-consensual intimate imagery. Maximum fines are unchanged, at up to 35 million euros or 7% of global turnover for prohibited practices.

Physical Review Letters published "One-Positron Quantum Cyclotron" on Oct. 21. The authors are T. G. Myers, L. Soucy, B. A. D. Sukra, B. Sinha and G. Gabrielse (Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 173001). The journal's accompanying Physics Viewpoint, titled "A Quantum Cyclotron for Antimatter," says the apparatus stores one positron, the electron's antimatter partner, and controls its quantum states. According to that commentary, the setup could measure the positron's magnetic moment with unprecedented precision. Such a measurement would test a symmetry principle central to quantum field theory. The paper is peer-reviewed. It describes the device and its capability, and the commentary frames the magnetic-moment measurement as a future possibility. Whether that measurement matches the electron's has not yet been reported.

A paper in the journal Digital Medievalist, published Oct. 19, argues that the undeciphered 15th-century Voynich manuscript was bound in the wrong page order. Lisa Fagin Davis of the Medieval Academy of America and Colin Layfield of the University of Malta propose that it began as loose folded sheets, called singulions. They say these were never meant to be nested into booklets. Davis noticed that handwriting alternates oddly between pages and that some drawings run off one page and resume far away. Layfield applied latent semantic analysis, a statistical text-comparison method, to the roughly 35,000 words. He found some distant pages are more alike than pages now side by side. The authors stress that the work does not decode the text. They say earlier studies assuming the current order need rechecking. The idea has been floated before; this paper adds quantitative testing and is a single peer-reviewed study awaiting wider scrutiny.

KYIV — Ukraine's Defense Ministry signed a letter of intent on Oct. 22 with Finland's ICEYE and Nokia to study a sovereign satellite-communications system. The move follows a week of disruption to SpaceX's military-grade Starshield service. Ukrainian units reported that speed limits knocked out terminals on fast-moving drones, which then fell from the sky. CBS News reported that Musk was behind the slowdown after talking with administration officials. The Wall Street Journal reported the same, according to Via Satellite. Musk has said the US military and the president decide any limits. President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth have denied ordering them. President Zelenskyy said the service was still limited as of Wednesday, and Secretary of State Rubio has said he would work to unblock it. Details of the Finnish plan are sparse. The partners say it will use European technology.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — New detail on the Artemis lander schedule comes ahead of NASA's 2 p.m. EDT Artemis Acceleration briefing today at Kennedy Space Center. At the International Astronautical Congress in Antalya, Turkey, on Oct. 5, NASA's acting Human Landing System manager laid out the milestones. Artemis III, now a low-Earth-orbit test, is targeted for the third quarter of 2027. Four astronauts will rehearse docking with test versions of SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon. SpaceX's test ship will have no crew cabin. SpaceX is targeting an uncrewed lunar landing in the fourth quarter of 2027. Blue Origin is targeting the first quarter of 2028. Those results will inform which lander carries astronauts on Artemis IV, which is aimed at early 2028. NASA says today's briefing will cover how the 2028 return is progressing. Administrator Jared Isaacman, Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya and program manager Jeremy Parsons are scheduled to speak.