Category: Science & Tech

On Tuesday, Rockstar Games gave us some details about how Grand Theft Auto VI will look and run on current-gen consoles. But there was a fascinating buried lede in that blog post.

Specifically, it will actually be possible to play GTA 6 on a last-generation Xbox One console at launch. There is, obviously, a huge catch to that: You’ll only be able to play it that way by streaming the game over the cloud. The actual news here is that GTA 6 will be playable through Xbox Cloud Gaming, a feature available to Xbox Game Pass subscribers, starting at 1 a.m. ET on Nov. 19, the day the game comes out.

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Using Xbox Cloud Gaming, you’ll be able to stream GTA 6 to an Xbox Series console or an Xbox One. I’m not entirely sure why you’d stream it to one of the newer consoles instead of just running it natively, but the option is there, nonetheless. If you play GTA 6 this way, the stream will use the Xbox Series S version’s graphics settings.

Of course, there is one final very relevant detail here: Starting this month, Xbox has imposed strict hourly limits on cloud gaming. You can only stream games for five to 15 hours per month, depending on which version of Game Pass you pay for. There’s also the matter of game streaming being subject to the whims of internet quality, so things like buffering, latency, and poor visual quality can be part of the experience.

So, it might still be worth it to just try and find a current-gen console instead.

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As Flock Safety looks to expand its already massive network of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) throughout the US, political lobbying has become a key tool for the extremely unpopular company to achieve its aims.

As the Chicago Sun Times reported in the wake of the US midterms, the controversial AI surveillance company Flock Safety has given nearly $500,000 to campaigns for local and state candidates in Illinois alone over the past two-odd years.

The political spending spree in Illinois comes as a result of two contracts with lobbying firms including Cozen O’Connor Public Strategies, which the Chicago Sun reports was first retained by the surveillance company in early 2024. Cozen O’Connor represents other startups-turned-tech-dynasties like Lyft, as well as facilitating loans between lenders and data center developers.

Flock has also contracted the firm Mercury Public Affairs to lobby federal politicians on both sides of the aisle, including the successful Democrat senate nominee from Illinois, Juliana Stratton. The company’s total lobbying spend on this election came out to more than $2 million across the country, as its surveillance network has ballooned to include nearly 150,000 ALPRs.

Despite all of Flock’s spending in races across the US, voters loudly rejected the company’s advances in local contests. In towns from Texas to Maine where ALPRs came up through ballot measures, voters rejected them, voting overwhelmingly to require voter consent for police to install new surveillance tools — or even to end ongoing contracts with Flock entirely.

More on Flock: Signs of Crisis at Flock as It Offers Employees Buyouts to Quit and Get Off Payroll

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today debuted a new line of central processing units for servers.

The Epyc 6 series, which is also known as Venice, comprises 10 CPUs that are organized into two groups. The first set includes chips with a large number of relatively slow cores. The remaining CPUs feature fewer, higher-frequency cores. Both chip collections feature optimizations designed to speed up artificial intelligence agents.

AI agents run their neural networks on graphics cards and use CPUs to power their tools, the applications with which they carry out work. CPUs also perform certain other tasks in machine learning clusters. According to AMD, Epyc 6 chips can support up to 3.3 more agents per watt than Nvidia Corp.’s Vera CPU. Additionally, the company says that its processor series significantly outperforms comparable Intel Corp. silicon.

Deploying an AI agent’s tools on CPUs with a relatively small core count can reduce software expenses in some cases. Certain enterprise applications, notably databases, are billed according to the number of cores on which they run. As a result, deploying a database on one high-frequency core is cheaper than using two slower ones that together provide the same amount of processing power.

The two highest frequency Epyc 6 chips have a base speed of 4.05 GHz. They can boost their clock to 5.3 GHz when running demanding workloads. Both chips have 96 cores and a 384-megabyte cache.

The two densest Epyc 6 chips, meanwhile, include 256 cores with a base speed of 2.55 GHz. Each core can power two threads, or stream of calculations, for a total of 512 threads. That enables the chips to run a large number of AI agents at once. Some large language models spin up hundreds of agents or more when tackling complex tasks.

The Epyc 6 series is based on a new core architecture called Zen 6. Its IPC, a key measure of CPU performance, is 31% higher than AMD’s previous design when running AI workloads. The increase partly stems from the fact that AMD uses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s latest two-nanometer node to make Zen 6 cores.

The cores come in two editions. There’s a version called simply Zen 6 that is optimized for clock speed and a scaled-down edition, Zen 6c, that is designed to power CPUs with high core counts. Zen 6c core features an enhanced out-of-order processing mechanism not included in the standard edition. The mechanism speeds up programs by performing some calculations well before the results are needed.

Zen 6 also includes AI-specific optimizations. The architecture is compatible with the FP16 data format, which makes it possible to lower agents’ hardware footprint by compress the information they process. There’s also improved support for VNNI-INT8, a technology that condenses multiple AI calculations into a single operation to save time. 

“AI is significantly expanding the role of the CPU across every layer of the data center,” said Dan McNamara, the senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Compute and Enterprise AI unit. “With 6th Gen AMD EPYC, customers can standardize on the proven x86 foundation while choosing a workload-optimized solution to run more agents.”

AMD says that a number of major data center suppliers have already started shipping servers equipped with Epyc 6 chips. Additionally, the processors power a pair of Microsoft Azure instances optimized for AI inference workloads and chip design software. 

Image: AMD

Two weeks after announcing Gemini 4 Carbon for cybersecurity professionals, Google is expanding access to its latest frontier AI model to even more people. It’s now available to developers, enterprises, scientists and consumers. 

As with all new AI models, there are improvements across the board, but Gemini 4 Carbon particularly excels in areas such as knowledge work, agentic coding, science, mathematics and cybersecurity. Google says Carbon outperforms its Argon AI model and competitor models from OpenAI and Anthropic in benchmark tests across a series of areas. 

The model is also said to have improved spatial reasoning and physics simulations for 3D game engines and creative coding. Previous Gemini models were already good for vibe-coding apps and games, and Carbon should be even better. 

As these frontier models become more advanced, virtually all AI companies are prioritizing the mitigation of risks of misuse and cyberattacks such as prompt injections. The model scored a 0% prompt-injection attack success rate on the Gray Swan IPI benchmark test. 

The everyday user may not reap as many of the benefits from the new model, but cybersecurity experts, scientists and other professionals are more likely to make use of the improvements Google has made to its latest model. 

Gemini 4 Carbon is available for developers via its AI Studio and Android Studio, and everyday users who are subscribed to the AI Ultra plan can access the model from the Gemini App.

Blake has over a decade of experience writing for the web, with a focus on mobile phones, where he covered the smartphone boom of the 2010s and the broader tech scene. When he’s not in front of a keyboard, you’ll most likely find him playing video games or watching horror movies.

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A man who lost an astonishing $308,000 by making hundreds of separate sports bets on the prediction market Kalshi, is suing the company to recover his losses. In fact, he’s asking for $580,000 — even more than he frittered away.

While a guy suing a gambling service after losing sounds like a punch line, there’s a lot at stake. The lawsuit strikes at the heart of a heated debate over whether prediction platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket amount to gambling — or, as the companies maintain, if they’re so-called “event contracts” that conform with federal regulations.

Washington, where the suit was filed in September on behalf of Bellevue resident Scott Bright, has “prohibited Internet gambling since 2006,” per the filing. As Ars Technica reports, Kalshi brought forth a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on October 30, denying that betting on the outcomes of sports games on the platform amounted to “gambling.”

“The contracts which Plaintiff mischaracterizes as gambling are event contracts offered on the Platform subject to the CEA [Commodity Exchange Act], in conformance with the rules and regulations of the CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission], the federal agency which has statutory authority to oversee the CEA,” the motion reads.

To the attorneys general of states including Washington, Utah, and New York, however, Kalshi is an “online casino” that needs to be shut down. In late July, New York attorney general Letitia James accused the company of “running an illegal gambling operation.” Just last week, her counterpart in Arkansas, the state’s attorney general Tim Griffin, similarly took aim at Kalshi.

“It doesn’t take a genius to understand that wagering money on whether the Razorbacks win or lose is gambling,” he wrote in a statement. “And gambling on an unregulated platform is squarely prohibited by Arkansas law.”

However, federal courts have yet to agree on whether prediction markets should be regulated as gambling.

It’s nonetheless a particularly precarious moment in time for prediction markets, following the Democratic party’s major victory last week. Lawmakers on the left are already “gearing up for an aggressive oversight regime,” as Politico reports, vowing to rein in prediction markets.

How long Kalshi can hold the line and sell regulators on the argument that betting on the outcomes of sports games isn’t gambling remains to be seen.

It’s also unclear whether Bright will be able to recover his losses after his disastrous betting spree. As Ars points out, Washington had already won a court order to restrict Kalshi’s “illegal gambling operation” — but the order took effect after Bright lost over $300,000.

Bright is only a small part of what experts are warning is an epidemic of gambling addiction in the United States, facilitated by the surge in prediction platforms. And considering that even fortune cookies now come with prediction platform ads, it’s no wonder gambling addiction is spiraling “out of control.”.

More on Kalshi: Gambling Addiction Group in Shambles After It Turns Out It’s Funded by Kalshi

The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is a beast of a smartphone. It’s got snappy performance, a large OLED screen with a stylus, and an excellent camera system that takes high-quality pictures. It’s a premium phone in every sense of the word, which is why we’re excited to see that Verizon already has an early Black Friday Galaxy S26 Ultra promotion.

Right now, shoppers who purchase a Galaxy S26 Ultra with a Verizon Simplicity Plan and Watch Plan can get a Galaxy Watch 9 and a pair of Galaxy Buds 4 for free. The Galaxy Watch 9 typically costs $430, while the earbuds are $180. If you do the math, that’s a savings of $610. The cost of the smartwatch gets credited to your monthly bill, while the earbuds get shipped to you after you activate your watch and redeem the promo in Verizon’s app.

The S26 Ultra is an expensive phone on its own, with a typical starting price of $1,400, so this Verizon deal sweetens the pot considerably by letting you pay monthly while enjoying some excellent freebies. To grab the deal, simply follow the instructions outlined below.

Looking for more Verizon deals? Check out our full roundup of all the best early Black Friday Verizon bundle deals.

How to get a free Galaxy Watch 9 and Galaxy Buds 4 from Verizon

1. Head over to the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra listing on Verizon, then select the color and storage capacity you want.
2. Next, choose whether you want to upgrade to Simplicity Pro, then select a monthly payment plan, and click Next steps.

1. A side menu will appear showing the phone added to your cart. Click Next steps.
2. On the next page, you can browse through several optional Service Bundles. When you’re ready, click Next at the bottom.
3. The next screen highlights several free device options. Click Add and customize under the Galaxy Watch 9 promotion to lock it in.
4. Choose your Watch 9 color on the pop-up side menu, select a monthly watch plan (required for the promotion), and then click Add to cart.
5. Click Continue at the bottom of the page when you’re ready.
6. Select Protect my devices to sign up for a protection plan, or click Continue without device protection to opt out.
7. Choose whether you’re keeping an existing phone number or you want Verizon to give you a new one.
8. On the checkout page, you should see the phone and watch in your cart, along with an offer for the Galaxy Buds 4. Once you verify the bill and credits are correct, click Begin secure checkout.
9. After you receive and activate your Galaxy Watch 9, you’ll receive a confirmation email, and a link will appear in the My Verizon app to redeem your free Galaxy Buds 4.

Why we love the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra

• It’s a smartphone powerhouse across the board. In our testing, the S26 Ultra handled everyday apps, multitasking, and demanding games with ease, and its speedy Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor should help it stay capable for years.
• Its 6.9-inch OLED screen is excellent for scrolling, streaming, and everything in between. The display is sharp and colorful, with enough brightness for outdoor use. Samsung also includes its handy S Pen, which is great for jotting notes, marking up documents, or getting more precise control.
• The camera system is a real standout. The 200MP main camera captures detailed, vibrant shots, even in dim settings, while the 5x telephoto lens delivers crisp close-ups and framing flexibility. It’s our favorite Samsung phone for photography.
• Battery life is enough to last through a full day, even when our reviewer mixed in gaming and streaming. Light mobile users may get two or three days on a single charge. And when you do need more juice, the phone supports fast 60W wired charging.
• It has thoughtful premium extras. DeX support lets the phone pull double duty as a compact desktop setup when connected to a monitor, and Samsung promises software support through 2033. Just know that the rear glass can scratch easily, so we’d strongly recommend pairing it with a case.

You can learn more in our full Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review.

Shopping for more discounts? Check out our roundup of all the best early Black Friday deals.

The new year is in sight, and an easy way to pick up some fresh skills is with a subscription to an online learning service. The new Coursera Plus early Black Friday deal can help you do just that with its 40% off annual plans offer.

The Coursera Plus deal brings the price of annual plans, normally $399 a year, down to $239 for the first year. That’s $160 in savings, matching last year’s Black Friday offer. After the first year of service, subscriptions will renew at the then-standard annual price, but customers can cancel at any time before then.

Coursera Plus offers a wealth of courses, Projects, Specializations, and Professional Certificate programs across a variety of subjects, including information technology, business, personal development, and humanities, among others. Some of the most popular courses include lessons from major companies, like “AI Essentials” by Google and “Python for Data Science, AI, and Development” by IBM.

Keep reading to learn more about the Coursera Plus deal, including the anticipated end date and eligibility rules. If you’re interested in other subscription discounts, check out our guide to the best Black Friday streaming deals.

FAQ

When does the deal end?

The Coursera Plus deal runs through Cyber Monday. The offer will conclude on November 30, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. UTC (or 6:59 p.m. ET).

Who is eligible for the deal?

The deal is only available to new Coursera Plus subscribers, so current customers won’t be eligible for the discount. The offer isn’t available in India, Great Britain, and Australia.

Is this a good deal?

While this isn’t the absolute deepest discount we’ve seen at Coursera so far this year, it’s a solid deal. As we mentioned above, this matches the Black Friday offer we saw in 2025.

You can get the deal directly through Coursera’s website. For more information, check out our comprehensive Coursera guide. If you’re still shopping, you can explore our roundup of the best early Black Friday deals we’ve spotted so far.

With a broad mandate to mop up the corrosive graft seeping out of Washington DC under Donald Trump’s second administration, Democrats are reportedly preparing to bring the legislative hammer down on prediction markets — tech moneymakers era with deep ties to the White House.

That’s according to Politico, which reports that Democrats are preparing to curb what California representative Maxine Waters called “predatory lending and predatory platforms, including prediction markets, so that our constituents keep more of their hard-earned dollars in their pockets.”

As Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley told Politico, “we need to rein in this gambling, and with Democrats taking back control of Congress, now is the time for long-overdue legislative action.”

Beyond protecting consumers from predatory gambling companies, the agenda has the added effect of targeting a key source of income for the Trump family dynasty. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, has emerged as a strong supporter of prediction markets, earning him advisory roles on the boards of Polymarket and Kalshi at the same time that inside traders cashed in on advanced knowledge of Trump administration moves.

And while prediction markets are still going strong currently, the looming crackdown has the attention of financial experts, one of whom said the regulatory regime could get “pretty intense.”

“These guys don’t have an ally in Congress,” a former Wall Street regulator, who was granted anonymity, told Politico. “To a certain extent, they might even be the new crypto as far as congressional attention from Democrats,” they said, referring to the broadly antagonistic stance Democrats held toward the crypto industry under the Biden administration.

But when it comes to fighting hard for any regulatory regime, the proof will be in the pudding. Democrats have reportedly begun preparation for a similar crackdown on the AI industry — an effort which is broadly popular with voters, but which poses a major challenge for the party’s pro-business leadership.

More on politics: Americans Just Resoundingly Rejected AI Data Centers

Here’s your NYT Strands hint for today, plus the spangram and all of today’s Strands answers for puzzle No. 983 on Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026.

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is “Work it out.”

And here’s a hint: Pumping iron.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints, but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• SCUM, LOSE, LOSER, CLOSE, CART, CARTS, SALT, SLAT, SLOB

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight, but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• LATS, PECS, BICEPS, OBLIQUES, QUADS, HAMSTRINGS

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is MUSCLEGROUP. To find it, look for the M that’s two letters down on far left, and wind across.

CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the ’70s and ’80s,” as well as “The Totally Sweet ’90s.” She’s been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She’s Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she’ll be first in line.

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More than 1,000 vulnerabilities were disclosed by Microsoft in the latest Patch Tuesday release as federal cybersecurity officials ordered civilian agencies to patch exploited bugs from Google, Barracuda and Cisco. 

Among the 1,093 bugs disclosed on Tuesday, Microsoft said one is being exploited in the wild: CVE-2026-124194. The company said it has a severity score of 6.5 and impacts Microsoft Outlook. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and gave federal agencies until the end of the month to patch it. 

Microsoft said the bug was discovered by Benoît Sevens using Anthropic’s Claude, writing that an attacker “could send a specially crafted message file and convince a user to open it in an affected version of Microsoft Outlook.” 

“Opening the file could cause Outlook to connect to an attacker-controlled network location without displaying the usual external-content warning, potentially disclosing authentication information that could be used to impersonate the user,” the company said. 

Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said an attack using the vulnerability may allow someone to sign in as the exploited user. 

Several experts said CVE-2026-124194 was the only exploited bug outlined in Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday release but there were 63 vulnerabilities rated critical. Narang noted that Tuesday’s release brings Microsoft to more than 5,160 vulnerabilities disclosed this year, which would far surpass any previous year. 

Last month, more than 1,400 vulnerabilities were disclosed by Microsoft after about 900 in September. 

In addition to Microsoft’s disclosures, Google, Cisco, Adobe, Barracuda, Ivanti and several other companies released patches for dozens of bugs, several of which were spotlighted by CISA as being exploited. 

CISA gave federal agencies until Friday to patch CVE-2026-116606 and CVE-2026-111560 — two bugs affecting Barracuda’s email security product. They also ordered all federal agencies to investigate potential compromises related to both vulnerabilities.

Response to N-able vulnerabilities 

A researcher also uncovered more than 30 serious vulnerabilities in N-Central, a popular remote management tool that IT teams use to monitor and run networks remotely. 

The company behind it, N-able, took all hosted N-central environments offline and ordered customers to turn off their servers. 

“As expected, we are observing scanning activity associated with the published proof-of-concept code. At this time, we have no evidence that any customer environment has been successfully exploited,” the company said on Tuesday. 

“During this time, customers will be unable to access their Hosted N-central classic environment, and associated services may be unavailable.”