BabelWire — AI, Science & Technology

A Week of Silence: Bundeswehr IT Outage Cuts Off Nearly All Reservists

A serious fault at BWI, the Bundeswehr's state-owned IT provider, has left nearly all reservists without access to military IT systems, email and messengers for more than a week — a mobilisation-readiness problem, not a routine outage, with serious consequences in a defence scenario.

Latest News

Asus Won an Exemption From the US Router Ban — and Won't Say How

Technology

2 hr. ago1

Asus Won an Exemption From the US Router Ban — and Won't Say How

Asus has a September 9 exemption from the US ban on foreign-made consumer routers, with a blanket green light for all its routers through March 2028. It will not confirm whether it submitted the US manufacturing plan the rule demands — and the FCC never asks companies a single security question.

2 hr. ago1

The Ugly Economics of Consumer AI: 2.2% Pay, and About $31 a Month

As Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots revive consumer AI, the underlying numbers have not moved: only about 2.2% of consumers pay for AI, at roughly $31 a month. Even Netflix-scale adoption would produce revenue far below frontier-lab operating costs — which is why labs keep pivoting to enterprise.

Reddit Fences Off 'Old Reddit' and Kills RSS to Starve AI Scrapers

Technology

2 hr. ago1

Reddit Fences Off 'Old Reddit' and Kills RSS to Starve AI Scrapers

Reddit will reserve the classic 'Old Reddit' interface for logged-in accounts that used it in the previous six months, and will shut down RSS feeds on 13 November, escalating its war on large-scale scraping and automated traffic. Moderators keep access; public data API access ends in March 2027.

A Potato for 82 Cents: Inside Wing's Drone-Delivery Subsidy

Technology

5 hr. ago1

A Potato for 82 Cents: Inside Wing's Drone-Delivery Subsidy

In one Texas neighbourhood a Walmart drone delivery costs 82 cents — no minimum order, no fee, and you can send it to someone else's yard. Wing says it has completed over a million residential deliveries; the economics are clearly subsidised.

A Second-Hand CPU Can Carry a Ban: Riot's Anti-Cheat Knows the Previous Owner Cheated

Technology

5 hr. ago2

A Second-Hand CPU Can Carry a Ban: Riot's Anti-Cheat Knows the Previous Owner Cheated

Buy a used CPU and you may inherit its history: if the chip sits on Riot's blacklist because its previous owner cheated, Valorant and the studio's other titles refuse to launch. How Riot identifies the hardware is undisclosed — fingerprints or a TPM-stored hash are the likely mechanisms.

5 hr. ago1

Instagram's Edits App Gets an AI Assistant That Reads Your Metrics

Meta is rolling out a conversational AI assistant in its CapCut rival Edits that combines a creator's Instagram analytics, comments, trends and audience interests into specific advice — and is metered behind a Meta One subscription.

Cisco Warns of Actively Exploited 9.8-Rated Login Bypass in SD-WAN Manager

Technology

5 hr. ago2

Cisco Warns of Actively Exploited 9.8-Rated Login Bypass in SD-WAN Manager

CVE-2026-76504 lets attackers reach Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager remotely with admin privileges through a URL-encoding flaw in the login handler. Cisco PSIRT reports active exploitation and has shipped fixes across seven release trains.

Spiral and Sink Waves Reveal a Hidden Layer of Brain Organization

Science

5 hr. ago1

Spiral and Sink Waves Reveal a Hidden Layer of Brain Organization

New intracranial recordings show the cortex carries spiral, concentric and converging waves — not just simple planar ripples — and that different memory tasks recruit different shapes. Researchers argue the patterns may reorganize brain activity in real time.

8 hr. ago1

Commentary: The AI Boom's Debt Tower Is the Real Financial Risk

A pointed heise/iX commentary argues the danger is not AI itself but how its providers finance it: half a trillion dollars of spending, record bond issuance, debts moved into special purpose vehicles, and warnings from the BIS, IMF and ECB.

Featured Stories

Beijing Considers Restricting Overseas Access to China's Top AI Models

AI▶

Jul 7, 20262

Beijing Considers Restricting Overseas Access to China's Top AI Models

Chinese authorities have held meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance, and Z.ai about potentially restricting overseas access to China's most advanced AI models — including making AI theft a national security offense.

Earth's Core Reversed Direction Under the Pacific — Satellite Data Reveals a Restless Planet Interior

Science▶

Jul 6, 20263

Earth's Core Reversed Direction Under the Pacific — Satellite Data Reveals a Restless Planet Interior

A massive flow of molten iron in Earth's outer core beneath the Pacific Ocean unexpectedly reversed direction in 2010, switching from westward to strongly eastward — a discovery made possible by ESA's Swarm satellite constellation.

China's AI Companions Go Silent: ByteDance and Alibaba Disable Personalized AI Agents Ahead of Crackdown

AI▶

Jul 5, 20263

China's AI Companions Go Silent: ByteDance and Alibaba Disable Personalized AI Agents Ahead of Crackdown

As China's landmark AI Companion Law takes effect July 15, ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen have disabled their personalized AI agent features. The law — the first of its kind globally — regulates emotional bonds between humans and AI.