A Union of Concerned Scientists report says pesticides become more dangerous as temperatures rise, with field workers who don’t handle chemicals directly making up most reported poisonings and inadequate employer warnings, training, and protective gear increasing risk.
Aug 18, 2026 ·Ars Technica
ChatGPT is rolling out “ChatGPT for Teens,” which applies default teen protections to users who identify as ages 13–17 or who the system estimates are under 18, while users under 13 aren’t permitted to use the platform.
Aug 18, 2026 ·
The Verge
Palantir has expanded across the FAA as the agency prepares a $12.5 billion overhaul, with about $5 billion for software upgrades and none of the new money dedicated to personnel—while the article says staffing is the most urgent need.
Aug 18, 2026 ·The Verge
Hard-coded secrets uploaded through vibe-coded applications to GitHub can create a pathway for enterprise data to leak into the public sphere.
Aug 18, 2026 ·
Computerworld
A U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers approved a hybrid multi-state trial in which Colorado, California, Kentucky and New Jersey will try their state consumer protection claims together while federal privacy claims from all 29 attorneys general are included, with an advisory jury to help inform her final ruling.
Aug 18, 2026 ·
Yahoo Finance
Incogni’s annual Standard plan is 58% off via code ZDNET, dropping to $6.79/month ($81.48 billed yearly) through Aug. 31, 2026.
Aug 18, 2026 ·
ZDNet
Attribution decay means that as diffusion models are trained on larger datasets, generated samples become less (and at sufficient scale, sometimes effectively not) traceable to any specific part of the training data, including after removing images like the Mona Lisa or all of Leonardo da Vinci’s work via ablation.
Aug 18, 2026 ·
The Register
U.S. 30-year Treasury yields jumped to 5.3264%, the highest in almost 20 years, as Middle East escalation fears revived inflation concerns and pressured stocks.
Aug 18, 2026 ·Yahoo Finance
Traders cut their odds of a Fed rate hike in September to 35% from 52% a week ago, while the dollar index edged 0.1% higher to 99.62 as Iran conflict risks kept sentiment fragile.
Aug 18, 2026 ·Yahoo Finance
GitHub restored services about 8 hours after an outage began Aug. 17, with error rates peaking at ~20% for web/API traffic and ~50% for archive and raw repository content downloads.
Aug 18, 2026 ·Computerworld
Google bought a deidentified trove from Spirit at auction for $10 million, including over 100 million emails and 30 million recorded phone calls as it seeks to improve AI services.
Aug 18, 2026 ·The Register
Xen Project created a Safety Committee and is pushing to have its open-source hypervisor comply with IEC-61508 functional-safety process standards for software running in settings that could harm humans.
Aug 18, 2026 ·The Register
Greg Brockman told enterprise CISOs to more aggressively use agentic systems for defense, including “Codex” and the “Codex Security plugin,” and to start with highest-priority systems rather than waiting for a rollout.
Aug 18, 2026 ·Computerworld
The 60 largest US data centers under construction by Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are estimated to produce 101.5 million tons of carbon dioxide annually when fully operational, about 7% of 2025 US power-sector emissions (equivalent to running 27 coal power plants or adding 24 million gas-powered cars).
Aug 18, 2026 ·
CNET
Android 17 QPR2 beta 3 adds a built-in app lock that requires passcode or biometrics to open selected apps and also disables notifications plus prevents widgets or shortcuts for those locked apps from appearing on the home screen.
Aug 17, 2026 ·CNET
In the 2025–2026 school year, only 92.4% of US kindergartners were vaccinated with the MMR shot, down from 92.5% last year, while nonmedical exemptions rose to 4% from 3.2%.
Aug 17, 2026 ·Ars Technica
Nearly 90% of the 5,000 most popular domains (87.2%) violate W3C/WHATWG HTML specs in at least one place, with only 12.8% having fully valid HTML and only 2.6% returning zero errors and zero best-practice warnings.
Aug 17, 2026 ·The Register
Amazon’s updated Conditions of Use require disputes to be resolved by binding arbitration and bar new class-action lawsuits for customers who continued using the service after Aug. 14.
Aug 17, 2026 ·CNET
Rum Group Inc.’s shares rose 10.46% to close at $8.24 after Meta was hit with a $1.4T federal trial damages ruling tied to alleged harms to young users.
Aug 17, 2026 ·Yahoo Finance
Investigators say Apple’s latest spyware threat notifications generated a record high number of help requests—about 30% to 40% more than the nonprofit usually receives after prior notification waves—and the alerts went out to customers in 110 countries.
Aug 17, 2026 ·
TechCrunch
