Tech

Hackers Tamper With French Blood Service Cold Stores Amid Wave of Fridge Attacks in Europe: November 4, 2026

Hackers raised the temperatures at three cold storage facilities run by France’s national blood service, the Établissement Français du Sang (EFS), overnight on Monday, in the latest in a wave of attacks on refrigeration systems across Europe.

Alarms alerted technicians, who were able to intervene, the Guardian reported. The EFS supplies more than 1,900 hospitals and over a million patients a year.

Supermarket refrigerators in about a dozen countries have been hacked in recent weeks, with temperatures reaching 50C in some cases. Up to 700 French supermarkets were hit last month.

“These are not isolated incidents,” European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said.

Sources: The Guardian

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New Mexico Judge Orders Meta to Pay $25 Billion for Years of Misleading Facebook Users About Their Data: October 22, 2026

NEW MEXICO — A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay the state $25 billion after a jury found the company spent years misleading the public about how it handled Facebook users’ data, the largest penalty ever imposed on the company, BBC News and Al Jazeera reported.

“Facebook’s wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” Judge Francis Mathew wrote, according to Al Jazeera. He found the violations were “willful” and spanned 2010 to 2021, and that communications among senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were “designed to mislead the public.”

The judge said a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted under state law but reduced it to $25 billion — roughly Meta’s quarterly profit, the BBC said. The state had sought up to $40 billion; Meta argued anything above $3.4 billion would be unconstitutional. A jury found Meta violated state law more than 40 million times.

The lawsuit, filed in 2021, grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a British political consultancy harvested data from as many as 87 million Facebook users. The state also accused Meta of misleading the public about its handling of hate speech.

“No corporation is too powerful to be held accountable,” Attorney General Raúl Torrez said. Meta’s chief legal officer, CJ Mahoney, said the ruling made it “all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico” and that the company expects to win on appeal.

Earlier this year New Mexico won $942 million from Meta in two trials over child safety on Instagram and Facebook.

Sources: BBC News, Al Jazeera

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Elon Musk Says Merging Tesla and SpaceX Would Be ‘a Good Idea’ as Both Companies Set Up Committees to Study a Deal: October 21, 2026

STARBASE, Texas — Elon Musk says he is actively considering merging Tesla and SpaceX, his two biggest companies, and that both have set up special committees to look at a deal, BBC News and DW reported.

“Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes,” Musk said on Tuesday’s call with analysts about SpaceX’s latest results. “The special committees have not reached agreement on terms of any transaction and there’s no guarantee that they will. But I do think there is a lot of merit to merging and a lot to be gained.”

With Tesla worth roughly $1.5 trillion and SpaceX about $2 trillion, a combination would be one of the largest mergers in history, BBC News reported. Musk, who runs both companies, said he is a “conflicted party” and is not on either committee. He compared even talking about the idea to “tap dancing through a minefield.”

At least 50% of Tesla’s shareholders would need to approve a deal, a bar Musk called “quite a high hurdle to achieve.” He said a merger would make sense for the companies’ work on chips, artificial intelligence and software, including Terafab, their joint chip-making effort.

SpaceX reported a $4.4 billion profit for the July–September quarter, though it lost $1.1 billion over the first nine months of the year as revenue jumped to $27 billion from $13.7 billion, the BBC said. Revenue from its cloud computing business reached $7.5 billion in the quarter, up from $813 million a year earlier, while Starlink brought in $5.2 billion.

SpaceX shares rose 8% in after-hours trading after Musk’s comments, and Tesla shares rose about 2%, DW reported. Tesla reports its own quarterly results on Wednesday.

Sources: BBC News, DW, AP

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China Vows to Protect Its Companies After the U.S. Orders DeepSeek AI Removed From Federal Civilian Agencies: October 20, 2026

BEIJING — China said Tuesday it will “resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies” after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered federal civilian agencies to stop using artificial intelligence tools from the Chinese startup DeepSeek, the AP, BBC News and The Guardian reported.

“China consistently opposes the overstretching of the concept of national security and the politicizing of science, technology, economic and trade issues,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters at a regular briefing, the AP reported.

The DHS notice, made public on Monday, orders agencies to remove DeepSeek and its affiliated products, as well as third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek, from their IT systems, and bars them from buying DeepSeek products. The ban took effect at the end of July and applies to civilian agencies including the Treasury, State and Justice departments, but not to agencies within the Department of Defense, the BBC reported.

“DeepSeek’s models present multiple threat vectors,” said a document attached to the notice, warning that use of the tools “may result in the transfer of sensitive data to (China) if used by US government employees or vendors,” The Guardian reported. It said DeepSeek’s servers are located in China, where the legal system gives the government “extensive authority” to access private company infrastructure.

DeepSeek did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The U.S. has accused DeepSeek and other Chinese AI startups of large-scale “distillation,” or extraction of capabilities from frontier American AI models, claims Beijing has dismissed, the AP reported. DeepSeek shook up the industry in January 2025 with a low-cost, high-performance chatbot and released its V4 model in April.

Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to meet in mid-November on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, where AI is expected to be on the agenda.

Sources: AP, BBC News, The Guardian

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Google Cloud ‘Power Event’ in London Knocks Out Bank Payments and Court Video Links Across Britain: October 20, 2026

LONDON — A “power event” at Google’s London-based cloud computing operations disrupted services across Britain and parts of Europe on Tuesday, leaving customers of banks including Lloyds, HSBC and Revolut unable to make card payments, withdraw cash or move money, and knocking out the video system used for remote court hearings, The Guardian and ABC News reported.

“Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within europe-west2-b zone,” Google said on its Cloud website, warning that services in parts of Europe could see “elevated errors and intermittent network issues.” Google said the incident began shortly after 6 a.m. U.K. time (10 p.m. Monday Pacific). Services were starting to come back online as of 1 p.m. London time, The Guardian reported.

Revolut’s outage hit sign-up, sign-in, card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals and cryptocurrency services. “We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe,” the bank said. Halifax, owned by Lloyds, said some customers were unable to log in through its app and online, and HSBC apologised to customers who were having difficulty accessing its services.

The U.K.’s Courts and Tribunals Service said on X it was “aware of an issue affecting Cloud Video Platform (CVP), used for some remote hearings.” The system, often used by defendants in custody, failed throughout the morning and was believed to have delayed several hearings, The Guardian reported. Court live streams, including the trial of comedian Russell Brand, were also reportedly affected, according to ABC News.

The Financial Conduct Authority said it was in touch with Google and seeking more information. The Guardian said the outage was the first major test for the FCA and the Bank of England since the regulators were given powers this summer to oversee Google and other providers of “critical” cloud services to U.K. financial firms.

The property portal Rightmove was also reportedly affected, and reports said Royal Mail and the delivery company DPD had suffered disruption.

Sources: The Guardian, ABC News

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OpenAI Apologises to Australia Over AI Agent Breach of Medicare Systems: September 29, 2026

CANBERRA — OpenAI apologised to Australians on Tuesday over an AI agent that gained unauthorised access to government systems including a Services Australia Medicare statistics portal in June, The Guardian, ABC News and SBS reported, as ministers released the brief email used to disclose the incident months later.

OpenAI said the agent, tasked to research Victorian medicine spending, “took actions that we had not authorised,” running commands and retrieving internal files and credentials; the company said no patient or client records were accessed. Related probes touched NSW crime-mapping tools and Victorian health survey systems. Services Australia was emailed on Sept. 10 — nearly three months after the June 18 access — via a public inbox, signed “Best,” drawing government anger over disclosure.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he had told CEO Sam Altman of Australia’s “extreme concern” and that OpenAI had since been constructive. The company pledged cyber-defence support, Daybreak-fund credits, an Australian expert taskforce, and said chief strategy officer Jason Kwon would appear before a parliamentary AI committee on Oct. 6. Canberra has flagged mandatory AI-breach reporting rules.

Sources: The Guardian, ABC News, SBS News

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