Tech news from around the world, rewritten in plain English.
Swiss open DNS resolver Quad9 will withdraw from France by November 24 and block French users from reaching public internet addresses through its infrastructure where possible. The move follows a Paris court ruling, requested by Qatari company beIN, that orders Quad9 to manipulate DNS data, with fines of 1,000 euros per day for non-compliance.
A study titled Video Trends 2026 by Germany's state media authorities finds that most Germans regularly encounter AI-generated or heavily altered clips online. About 68 percent of those who have seen such videos have at least once believed one was real, and 81 percent now question video authenticity more often.
Advent, a global private equity investor, announced it has opened a new office at ADGM, the international financial centre in Abu Dhabi, extending its global network into the Middle East. The office will be led by Managing Director Mehdi Iraqi and is intended to strengthen investor ties, support portfolio companies, and explore investment opportunities.
The Browser Company will shut down its Arc browser on December 22, 2026, directing users to its AI-first browser Dia, and cited the rising cost of keeping a browser secure in the age of AI. The shutdown is staged: new Arc accounts were stopped immediately, Arc Search loses its AI features on November 23, and Arc stops working on Mac and Windows on December 22. Dia will carry over equivalents of Arc's core features, such as Profiles, vertical tabs, and Pinned Tab Groups.
At the 8th International Public Safety Industry Expo in Incheon (held 21–24 at Songdo Convensia), companies showcased AI and robot-based policing technologies, including patrol robots that detect fires and falls and AI that finds missing persons in crowds. The eight firms presented approaches ranging from video analytics to digital forensics, and visitors praised their ideas for addressing public safety problems.
A New Mexico jury found Meta committed nearly 44 million violations of state consumer protection laws, and a federal judge ordered the company to pay $25 billion, the largest fine ever levied on Meta. The penalty came after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez declined to join an $18 billion settlement Meta reached earlier this year with nearly all other states' attorneys general.
Two critical PHP vulnerabilities, dubbed PHP2Shell, have forced 32 UK government services offline and left four more partially unavailable. Minister Baroness Lloyd said the outages were largely precautionary while patches are applied, and that no confirmed compromise of central government systems has been identified.
KeePassXC, an open-source password manager for Windows, macOS and Linux, has released version 2.8.0. The update fixes several security vulnerabilities and adds Auto-Type support for Wayland as well as synchronization of databases with external tools.
Elon Musk said on Tesla's earnings call that the company is aiming for 5 million vehicle deliveries a year by around 2030, a figure that is well above Tesla's recent sales. The article argues the goal would require a major reinvention of Tesla's business, given two straight years of delivery declines.
eMudhra, an Indian certification authority, is withdrawing from the global SSL/TLS certificate business after reports that its private keys were weak, one of them simply the number 4. The company said the business is about 1 percent of its global revenue and that scrutiny over the incident was out of proportion to its role.
Security firms raced to patch two PHP2Shell vulnerabilities before attackers could exploit them widely, even though the flaws were found months earlier. Calif Research, a US security startup with many Vietnamese-American members, was first to find one of them, using OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol model. The article says the flaws could let hackers run unauthorized software on any unpatched web server.
Guinea-Bissau's government formally rejected a US-funded trial run by Danish researchers that would have withheld the newborn hepatitis B vaccine dose from half of participants. The decision was reaffirmed on 16 October, shortly after judicial police raided the trial organizer's offices and seized vaccines. The WHO and outside experts had widely criticized the study as unethical and scientifically unjustified.
Microsoft researchers say China state-aligned hackers breached ConnectWise's cloud backup service and stole application credentials used to link ConnectWise with corporate customers. With those credentials, the hackers accessed customers' Microsoft-hosted environments, including emails and files, and Microsoft says AI agents helped them hit about 2,250 organizations at nearly 3,000 sign-in attempts per minute. ConnectWise has paused access to the cloud backup system while it investigates and works to restore the service.
Amazon has rebranded its Kindle Unlimited subscription as Kindle Plus, priced at $11.99 per month. The service adds access to “virtual voice” audiobooks narrated by AI, alongside thousands of existing companion audiobooks at no extra cost.
Railway, a cloud development platform, confirmed a cyberattack allowed hackers to access some customer secrets, and urged all users to rotate their API and cloud keys. The company paused customer deployments while it investigates, and has not said how many users were affected or what caused the incident.
Fusion startup Helion has received $175 million in federal CHIPS Act funding to research, develop, and manufacture advanced semiconductors and power electronics for its fusion plants. The company says halving the roughly 5% to 10% electricity losses in these devices could double its fusion system's power output. A new production line in Washington State would be the first in the U.S. to make this class of semiconductor.
TP-Link's Tapo C675D KIT promises gapless outdoor surveillance with dual 4K sensors, 360° pan, and solar power, requiring no mains connection. A hands-on test checks whether these claims hold up.
Researchers in Singapore have developed an electronic fabric with light-emitting chips woven into fibers, creating a graphical user interface that can be built into garments. The study, published in Nature, reports that the fabric survives 50 gentle machine washes and 1,000 bending cycles. The prototype is still simple and relies on external microcontrollers and battery packs.
Apple is rolling out a “Made for iPhone Duo” badge in the App Store to indicate which apps are optimized for its new foldable. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Microsoft Word and Outlook, and Zoom are among the apps highlighted for taking advantage of the device's inner and outer screens.
Security firms raced to patch two PHP2Shell vulnerabilities before attackers could exploit them widely, even though the flaws were found months earlier. Calif Research, a US security startup with many Vietnamese team members, was first to find one of them, using OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol model, while Google's Wiz reported similar findings using Gemini 4 Argon.
DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash-1017, an update to its V4.1 Flash model, reporting higher coding and agentic benchmark scores and lower cost per task. It also open-sourced DeepInfer, the inference framework behind its large-scale production services, along with deepseek-recipe.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has reportedly raised about $15 billion (roughly 100 billion yuan), one of the largest funding rounds in China, just two days after the U.S. ordered federal agencies to remove its technology over security concerns. Potential investors reportedly include battery maker CATL and Tencent. The round follows a June raise of over $7 billion at a $50 billion valuation.
Fotor Agent, launched in August by photo-editing and design company Fotor, extends AI capabilities across the full video production process rather than just generating clips. Users describe a video in text prompts, and the tool organizes assets, subtitles, audio and animations into an editable project on a multitrack timeline.
AVM's FritzOS 8.50 update is now available for the Fritzbox 7530 AX DSL router and, since mid-October, the 5690 fiber router. The release includes DNS filter lists for blocking ads and trackers network-wide, automatic prioritization of time-critical traffic, and a setup assistant for moving from DSL to fiber with the same provider.