An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you've even idly checked in on the robust world of Doom fan development in recent years, you've probably encountered one of the hundreds of gameplay mods, WAD files, or entire commercial games based on GZDoom. The open source Doom port -- which can trace its lineage back to the original launch of ZDoom back in 1998 -- adds modern graphics rendering, quality-of-life additions, and incredibly deep modding features to the original Doom source code that John Carmack released in 1997. Now, though, the community behind GZDoom is publicly fracturing, with a large contingent of developers uniting behind a new fork called UZDoom. The move is in apparent protest of the leadership of GZDoom creator and maintainer Cristoph Oelckers (aka Graf Zahl), who recently admitted to inserting untested AI-generated code into the GZDoom codebase. "Due to some disagreements -- some recent; some tolerated for close to 2 decades -- with how collaboration should work, we've decided that the best course of action was to fork the project," developer Nash Muhandes wrote on the DoomWorld forums Wednesday. "I don't want to see the GZDoom legacy die, as do most all of us, hence why I think the best thing to do is to continue development through a fork, while introducing a different development model that highly favors transparent collaboration between multiple people." [...] Zahl defended the use of AI-generated snippets for "boilerplate code" that isn't key to underlying game features. "I surely have my reservations about using AI for project specific code," he wrote, "but this here is just superficial checks of system configuration settings that can be found on various websites -- just with 10x the effort required." But others in the community were adamant that there's no place for AI tools in the workflow of an open source project like this. "If using code slop generated from ChatGPT or any other GenAI/AI chatbots is the future of this project, I'm sorry to say but I'm out," GitHub user Cacodemon345 wrote, summarizing the feelings of many other developers. In a GitHub bug report posted Tuesday, user the-phinet laid out the disagreements over AI-generated code alongside other alleged issues with Zahl's top-down approach to pushing out GZDoom updates.

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The U.S. is awash with scam text messages. Officials say it has become a billion-dollar, highly sophisticated business benefiting criminals in China. From a report: Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City Department of Finance for unpaid traffic violations. The texts are ploys to get unsuspecting victims to fork over their credit-card details. The gangs behind the scams take advantage of this information to buy iPhones, gift cards, clothing and cosmetics. Criminal organizations operating out of China, which investigators blame for the toll and postage messages, have used them to make more than $1 billion over the last three years, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Behind the con, investigators say, is a black market connecting foreign criminal networks to server farms that blast scam texts to victims. The scammers use phishing websites to collect credit-card information. They then find gig workers in the U.S. who will max out the stolen cards for a small fee. Making the fraud possible: an ingenious trick allowing criminals to install stolen card numbers in Google and Apple Wallets in Asia, then share the cards with the people in the U.S. making purchases half a world away.

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Speaking of the new MacBook Pro, which Apple launched on Wednesday, Bloomberg News reports that the company is preparing to launch a touch-screen version of its Mac computer, reversing course on a stance that dates back to co-founder Steve Jobs. From the report: The company is readying a revamped MacBook Pro with a touch display for late 2026 or early 2027 [non-paywalled link], according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new machines, code-named K114 and K116, will also have thinner and lighter frames and run the M6 line of chips. In making the move, Apple is following the rest of the computing industry, which embraced touch-screen laptops more than a decade ago. The company has taken years to formulate its approach to the market, aiming to improve on current designs. Bloomberg News first reported in January 2023 that Apple was working on a touch-screen MacBook Pro. The new laptops will feature displays with OLED technology, the same standard used in iPhones and iPad Pros, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the products haven't been announced. It will mark the first time that this higher-end, thinner system is used in a Mac.

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The TED conference is changing hands, and education pioneer Sal Khan will be the new "vision steward" for the institution long headed by Chris Anderson. From a report: The move aims to ensure the future of the organization, while keeping it a not-for-profit entity. Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, will be the public face of TED, with Logan McClure Davda taking over as CEO. Davda, who previously served as the organization's head of impact and was the co-founder of its fellows program, will run day-to-day operations. Khan remains CEO of Khan Academy while joining TED's board. Jay Herratti, who has served as CEO since 2021, will remain on TED's board. TED announced in February it was seeking new leadership and structure and put out an open call for proposals. The company held dozens of discussions, including some that would have transformed the organization into a for-profit venture. The organization's flagship conference is also headed for a big change, with 2026 being its last year in Vancouver, with plans to hold future events somewhere in California.

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Oil, gas and coal will continue to dominate the world's energy mix well beyond 2050, as soaring electricity demand outpaces the shift to renewables, according to a new McKinsey report. From a report: McKinsey expects fossil fuels to account for about 41-55% of global energy consumption in 2050, down from today's 64% but higher than previous projections. U.S. data-center-related power demand is expected to grow nearly 25% a year until 2030, while demand from data centers globally would average 17% growth per year between 2022 and 2030, especially in OECD countries. Alternative fuels are not likely to achieve broad adoption before 2040 unless mandated, but renewables do have the potential to provide 61-67% of the 2050 global power mix, McKinsey said.

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Hanneke Faber, CEO of global tech manufacturing company Logitech, says she'd be open to the idea of having an AI-powered board member. From a report: "We already use [AI agents] in almost every meeting," Faber said at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington, D.C., on Monday. While she said AI agents today (like Microsoft Copilot and internal bots) mostly take care of summarization and idea generation, that's likely to change owing to the pace at which the technology is developing. "As they evolve -- and some of the best agents or assistants that we've built actually do things themselves -- that comes with a whole bunch of governance things," Faber said. "You have to keep in mind and make sure you really want that bot to take action. But if you don't have an AI agent in every meeting, you're missing out on some of the productivity." "That bot, in real time, has access to everything," she continued.

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The IMF has issued a stark warning over soaring global government debt, saying it is on track to exceed 100% of GDP by 2029. Semafor: Such a ratio would be the highest since 1948, when large economies were rebuilding post-war. Today, "there is little political appetite for belt-tightening," The Economist wrote: Rich nations are reluctant to raise taxes on their beleaguered electorates -- but they're facing pressure to spend more on defense, and on social services for aging populations. Higher long-term bond yields, meanwhile, suggest investor wariness over governments' balance sheets. In the short term, the debt concerns manifest in political disruption: France's budget fight recently toppled another government, while the US federal shutdown highlights the tension between new spending demands and deficit reduction.

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Seven people have died since April this year - the highest number since figures started being recorded in 2006, officials say.

China now generates well over twice as much electricity as the United States. The country's economy has become substantially larger than America's in real terms, measured at purchasing power parity, economist Paul Krugman wrote this week. The Trump administration has moved aggressively against renewable energy development. It rolled back Biden's tax incentives for renewables through the One Big Beautiful Bill. The administration is attempting to stop a nearly completed offshore wind farm that could power hundreds of thousands of homes. It canceled $7 billion in grants for residential solar panels. A solar energy project that would have powered almost 2 million homes was killed. The administration canceled $8 billion in clean energy grants, mostly in Democratic states, and is reportedly planning to cancel tens of billions more. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said solar power is unreliable because "you have to have power when the sun goes behind a cloud and when the sun sets, which it does almost every night." California has already integrated substantial solar power into its grid through battery storage technology. Republican support for higher education has collapsed over the past decade, according to polling data. The administration has also targeted vaccines and research in multiple areas. Krugman argues that by 2028 America will have fallen so far behind China that it is unlikely to catch up.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: U.S. cybersecurity company F5 disclosed that nation-state hackers breached its systems and stole undisclosed BIG-IP security vulnerabilities and source code. The company states that it first became aware of the breach on August 9, 2025, with its investigations revealing that the attackers had gained long-term access to its system, including the company's BIG-IP product development environment and engineering knowledge management platform. F5 is a Fortune 500 tech giant specializing in cybersecurity, cloud management, and application delivery networking (ADN) applications. The company has 23,000 customers in 170 countries, and 48 of the Fortune 50 entities use its products. BIG-IP is the firm's flagship product used for application delivery and traffic management by many large enterprises worldwide. [...] F5 is still reviewing which customers had their configuration or implementation details stolen and will contact them with guidance. To help customers secure their F5 environments against risks stemming from the breach, the company released updates for BIG-IP, F5OS, BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes, BIG-IQ, and APM clients. Despite any evidence "of undisclosed critical or remote code execution vulnerabilities," the company urges customers to prioritize installing the new BIG-IP software updates.

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Anthropic is projecting its annualized revenue run rate to soar from roughly $7 billion today to as much as $26 billion in 2026, driven by rapid enterprise adoption of its Claude AI models. Reuters reports: Anthropic debuted a new version of its cheapest AI model, Haiku, on Wednesday, as part of a broader effort to appeal to companies that are looking for capable AI systems that are dramatically cheaper than its more advanced models. The Haiku 4.5 model sells for about one-third the price of Sonnet 4, one of its medium-sized models. The revenue projections underscore continued strong demand for generative AI tools among businesses and help explain investor enthusiasm, even as AI spending, especially in infrastructure buildout, comes under scrutiny. Some people worry the level of investment might be unsustainable. Fueling the expansion is the uptake of enterprise products, which are built for organizations. Anthropic has more than 300,000 business and enterprise customers, which account for about 80% of its revenue.

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Mozilla is testing a free, built-in VPN for Firefox that routes traffic through Mozilla-managed servers directly in the browser. The Register reports: According to a staff post on Mozilla Connect, the company's idea-sharing platform, Firefox VPN is still an experimental feature in the early stages of development, but users will be selected at random to test it "over the next few months." Moz describes the feature as one that will sit beside the search bar on Firefox, routing web traffic through a Mozilla-managed VPN server, concealing the user's real IP address while adding a layer of encryption to their communications. Firefox VPN is a different project entirely from Mozilla VPN, a separate, paid-for product. The Firefox version will be free to use and confined to the browser itself, while Mozilla VPN can be used by up to five devices at a time. The Moz staffer on the product team who announced the feature said of the upcoming beta test: "We'll start simple, then gradually add new capabilities while learning how it impacts browsing, usage, and overall satisfaction. "Our long-term vision is ambitious: to build the best VPN-integrated browser on the market." In response to feedback, the staffer noted that while it will be a desktop browser feature first, "mobile is definitely a natural next step."

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Boris Johnson's former adviser claims that China infiltrated a key UK government data-transfer network for years, compromising highly classified materials and prompting a Whitehall cover-up that prioritized Chinese investment over national security. The Times reports: Dominic Cummings, who served as a senior adviser to Boris Johnson, said that he and the then prime minister were informed about the breach in 2020 but that there had subsequently been a cover-up. He said he was warned at the time that disclosing some specific details of the breach would be a criminal offence. He claimed that the breach included some "Strap" material, which is the government term for the highest level of classified information. The breach, which was confirmed by two other senior Whitehall sources, was said to have been connected to a Chinese-owned company involved in Britain's critical national infrastructure. Tom Tugendhat, a former Tory security minister, supported Cummings's account. Cummings said that he and Johnson were informed of the breach in the "bunker" of No 10 -- a reference to the secure room in Downing Street. He told The Times: "The cabinet secretary said, 'We have to explain something; there's been a serious problem', and he talked through what this was. "And it was so bizarre that, not just Boris, a few people in the room were looking around like this -- 'Am I somehow misunderstanding what he's saying? Because it sounds f***ing crazy.'" He added: "What I'm saying is that some Strap stuff was compromised and vast amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control was compromised. "Material from intelligence services. Material from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. Things the government has to keep secret. If they're not secret, then there are very, very serious implications for it."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People in London could be hiring driverless taxis from Waymo next year, after the US autonomous vehicle company announced plans to launch its services there. The UK capital will become the first European city to have an autonomous taxi service of the kind now familiar in San Francisco and four other US cities using Waymo's technology. The launch pits an innovation sometimes dubbed the "robotaxi" against London's famous black cabs, which can trace their history back to the first horse-drawn hackney coaches of the Tudor era. But a representative of the capital's cab drivers said they were not concerned by the arrival of a "fairground ride" and questioned the reliability of driverless vehicles. Waymo said its cars were now on their way to London and would start driving on the capital's streets in the coming weeks with "trained human specialists," or safety drivers, behind the wheel. The company, originally formed as a spin-off from Google's self-driving car program, said it would scale up operations and work closely with Transport for London and the Department for Transportto obtain the permits needed to offer fully autonomous rides in 2026. Uber and the UK tech company Wayve have also announced their own plans to trial their driverless taxis in the capital next year, after the British government said it would accelerate rules allowing public trials to take place before legislation enabling self-driving vehicles passes in full.

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Norway has effectively achieved its 2025 goal of 100% electric new car sales, prompting the government to declare "mission accomplished" and propose scaling back EV tax exemptions to reflect a mature market. "We have had a goal that all new passenger cars should be electric by 2025, and ... we can say that the goal has been achieved," announced Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg. Electrek reports: With the finish line in sight, the Norwegian government is now fine-tuning its approach. The current incentive program maintains the crucial VAT exemption for EVs, but only up to a purchase price of 500,000 Norwegian kroner (approximately $49,000 USD). This move is designed to target more expensive, luxury EVs, ensuring that the incentive benefits a broader range of consumers. However, the latest budget proposal aims to reduce the EV tax exemption to vehicles costing 300,000 Norwegian kroner (~30,000 USD). This would apply for 2026, and then the tax exemption would completely end in 2027. Additionally, the government plans to increase taxes on new gasoline and diesel cars, further widening the cost gap between polluting and zero-emission vehicles. However, the proposal still needs to be adopted by Norway's government, and there is some opposition. EV associations are advocating for a more extended phase-out period to ensure that the adoption rate doesn't decline.

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