U.S. President Donald Trump "doxxed" a U.S. senator today, writes the Washington Sun, by posting his cell phone number "as part of a plea for his Truth Social followers to badger his Republican ally into making daylight saving time permanent."
When The Washington Sun called the number minutes after Trump's post, a recording said the mailbox was full and could not receive messages...
[Senator Tom] Cotton has long detested the idea of making daylight saving time permanent. In a Senate floor speech last year, Cotton said doing so would "make winter a dark and dismal time for millions of Americans," particularly harming kids. The Senate was only able to unanimously pass the bill in 2022 because Cotton was reportedly unaware the vote was taking place, though the measure stalled out from there. The Arkansas Republican didn't back down in a post on Saturday. "Arkansans don't want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I'll always put Arkansas first," he posted on X.
Trump continued his tear against Cotton soon after. "If Tom Cotton were putting Arkansas first, he would give them an extra hour of daylight and, more importantly, they wouldn't have to run all over their houses, farms, work places, and everywhere else, twice a year, having to change their Clocks, and often forgetting to do so," he posted on Truth.
Phoronix reports:
Steam on Linux use in March hit an all-time high of around 5.33% marketshare. Since then it pulled back to around 4% while for September 2026 the Steam Survey results... indicate a rather steep decline of 0.85%, down to 3.05%. Meanwhile macOS is at 1.92% and Microsoft Windows at 95%... Steam's Survey reports a 7.42% increase in Chinese use, up to 31.39% overall of the Steam population. Usually those large month-over-month swings where Steam China use shoots up dramatically is a boost to Windows and a detriment to Linux. Some attribute the large increases in Simplified Chinese use to being a reporting/sampling issue.
When diving into the Steam Linux data exclusively, CachyOS has spiked by another 2.65% to now account for 18.12% of the sampled Linux gaming population. That even outperforms SteamOS Holo coming in at 17.37%. Among Linux gamers on Steam, AMD CPUs still account for the high 60 percentage space thanks to the Steam Deck and Steam Machine using AMD APUs and their open-source/Linux support being popular with enthusiasts.
"The winner of the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is under investigation," writes the photography news site PetaPixel , "after scientists accused Dr Ning Xu of using AI in his video."
The Nikon competition is about showcasing the beauty, complexity, and artistry of the microscopic world. The entries are abstract, often baffling to laypeople. But when Dr Xu was announced as the winner last month, members of the scientific community began to cry foul. "There are many serious problems with this video," Edward Phelps, associate professor at Florida University, says on LinkedIn. Phelps points out that "purple structures pop in and out of existence" and "green cilia also appear from nowhere and do not match the known size."
Dr Xu's video is supposed to show the movement of cilia, which are hair-like structures that line part of the lungs... However, since Dr Xu won the prize, Nikon Small World updated its LinkedIn post celebrating his triumph with a note that reads: "Regarding questions raised about this year's Small World In Motion winning video, Nikon is carefully re-reviewing the information provided during the initial vetting, along with additional supporting materials from the entrant." Nikon adds that Dr Xu is "respectfully complying and has provided detailed technical documentation outlining the microscopy equipment, imaging methods, and processing techniques used to create the source video."
Worse still, Ian Donovan, an MD/PhD Student at UT Southwestern Medical Center, says he ran the video through Google Gemini, and the result came back with an invisible Google SynthID watermark that indicates at least some of the video is AI-generated. Dr Xu, an optical engineering researcher at the National University of Singapore, reportedly responded to the LinkedIn post. According to Nature, Dr Xu accepted that he had used an AI model to assist with post-processing but denied breaking the rules of the competition, which clearly state that "AI-generated videos are not permitted."
"It was applied afterwards to the reconstructed grayscale data to distinguish and color structures with similar morphology," he wrote. However, Dr Xu's messages on the LinkedIn post can't be found as of today (October 1), and his LinkedIn profile now appears to have been deleted entirely.
Meanwhile, some college students "see a double standard when colleges penalize them for outsourcing academic work to AI but allow similar use by institutional leaders," writes Entrepreneur magazine:
According to a recent report from The New York Times, Dartmouth College students are calling out a top professor for allegedly using AI to help with writing... The school's provost, Santiago Schnell, faced allegations of AI use last week from the college's student-run newspaper, which detected AI in some of his published writing. The college said it was launching an investigation into the written work. Schnell said in a statement to the student-run newspaper, The Dartmouth, that he used AI "for language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization and making writing processes more efficient." The newspaper ran his statement through an AI detector, which said that Schnell had used AI to write it, too.
Le Pan-European Games Information (PEGI) a visiblement fait un petit faux départ concernant le jeu GTA 6, puisque sa fiche PEGI 18 a été publiée hier, le 2 octobre 2026, avant d'être rapidement retirée ensuite. Bien évidemment, il était déjà trop tard et iGrandTheftAuto, par exemple, avait déjà pris...
The Guardian reports that California governor Gavin Newsom signed laws on Wednesday "aimed at protecting California workers from the threats of artificial intelligence , including potential job losses and workplace surveillance."
The laws ban employers from using the technology to predict a worker's emotional state by using their biometric data, require employers to send written notices to workers if AI is responsible for mass layoffs and ban employers from relying on AI to decide to fire someone... The governor signed a law this month requiring operators of AI chatbots to perform risk assessments before rolling them out and an executive order requiring the state to consult with experts to further improve oversight over the industry.
The law includes "expanded tracking of AI's economic effects" leading to recommendations on how to best "adapt job-training and public-benefit programs," according to the governor's office. "California has also launched an AI Unemployment Tracker and solicited statewide public input on AI's economic impacts through Engaged California."
But two weeks ago Politico reported that the governor also signed executive orders to "explore proposals like requiring that AI companies develop a 'kill switch' for their most advanced models."
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who called for a slowdown in AI development amid existential risk concerns, said... that while a kill switch "could be a good idea," it was no "panacea...." [California lawmakers] were generally supportive of Newsom's plan and showed signs of coalescing around the kill switch idea, which was stripped out of legislation proposed two years ago. Rep. Ted Lieu, who introduced bipartisan kill switch legislation in the House, boosted Newsom's call for Congress to mirror California's approach.
But not everyone supports this approach, including the Free Software Foundation's campaigns manager, Greg Farough:
FSF: Having control over the technology we use is a fundamental part of software freedom. Without it, you simply don't have the basic freedoms you deserve when doing any type of computing, large or small. Don't let "artificial intelligence" be an exception: all users everywhere deserve complete control over their own computing. While it's understandable to be pleased by this news from California, Newsom's executive order also invites questions about the "kill switch" itself that could matter a great deal for freedom. Assuming such a kill switch was developed, who would really control it?
We hope our readers understand the problems inherent in giving one single or a small number of kill switches to anyone. Newsom wisely wants an independent organization to verify their functionality, but even this still sets too dangerous of a precedent. We cannot allow such centralization of power over our computing to become commonplace, especially by the corporations that provide these models in the first place. We also cannot trust even the most well-intentioned "independent organization" to take care of its verification.
Giving users the freedom that they deserve over large languages models would be an enormous departure from how most are developed and used today. But, if any group is capable of coming up with such a plan, it's the experts mentioned in Newsom's order. Like he states at the beginning of his executive order, the vast majority of them are already right there in California. We urge the Government Operations Agency to consider the precedent they are setting, and ask them to write their recommendation to the governor in ways that puts the freedom and dignity of the individual user first and foremost.
The Guardian adds that Newsom also signed an executive order this week "to require state agencies to continue to refer to the technology as 'artificial intelligence' instead of the term 'super intelligence' as Donald Trump recently ordered US diplomats to use."
Flock's cameras offer "indiscriminate mass surveillance," a U.S. federal judge wrote in a ruling Thursday, as does any system with "continuously updated" location histories for all the vehicles filmed by automated license plate-reading cameras.
The judge's ruling included italics for emphasis when describing "the question of why is it the government's business where everyone goes all the time?"
Judge Hill: We might reasonably expect our friends and family to tell us something like: "Hey, I saw you out driving by the store last week." But we do not expect people we know — let alone strangers, and especially not law enforcement — to randomly approach us to say: "Hey, I have been following your car for the last 30 days, and here is a detailed log of every place your vehicle has been with supporting photographic evidence. I am also going to share this information with law enforcement throughout the country so they know your whereabouts, too...."
Cell phones also move in public places where people can see you in plain view. But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient... [I]t is also consequential that we are
not just dealing with stationary cameras. The cameras on [police officer] Alaniz's vehicle itself feed information into these systems... It is also no longer difficult to imagine law enforcement using a fleet of drones hovering over an entire city so they don't miss the movement
of a single vehicle.
Officer Alaniz had used Flock's travel history for a car when deciding to pull over its driver, which eventually led to a vehicle search and charges of possessing drugs with intent to distribute. But the judge wrote that because this violated reasonable expectation of privacy, "all evidence obtained after Alaniz initiated the ALPR search must be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree." The judge granted a motion to "suppress all evidence obtained as a result of these unconstitutional searches
and seizures."
The Washington Post got this comment from a Flock spokesperson about the judge's ruling: "we expect it will be appealed and ultimately overturned." (Flock's spokesperson added that the ruling "does not set controlling precedent and does not affect law enforcement agencies' continued use of these important public safety technologies.")
But meanwhile, on Friday U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Ban Flock Act. The proposed bill bans federal agencies in America from using automated license plate reader systems "without explicit statutory authorization". The bill also lets certain federal agencies (including the Homeland Security Department) withhold grant money from State and local governments that use automatic license plate readers.
TechCrunch reports:
Despite its title, the bill doesn't call out Flock in the text and covers any and all ALPR systems. The bill allows exceptions only for toll collection and for uses that Congress approves in future legislation, which would have to limit data retention to no longer than 48 hours.... Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) are co-sponsors.
Mise à jour à 16 h 20 : Le responsable "anti-triche" chez Riot Games, Phillip Koskinas, s'est exprimé au sujet du cas d'After-Cartoonist-196. Il a tenu à rappeler certaines règles concernant Vanguard et ses bannissements. Tout d'abord, les bannissements liés à des composants hardware ne peuvent pas...
Petit Le Mans 2026 : dernier rendez-vous et des titres en jeu. Comme toujours, la classique automnale de l’IMSA, disputée ce week-end sur 10 heures en Géorgie, distribuera les couronnes aux pilotes, équipages et constructeurs.
Dans la catégorie reine GTP, les jeux sont quasiment faits. Sauf grosse surprise – par exemple un forfait – le Britannique Jack Aitken (Cadillac n°31) devrait remporter la distinction la plus importante de sa carrière.
Son seul adversaire mathématique, l’inattendu Laurin Heinrich (Porsche) compte 151 points de retard après les qualifications. Cadillac est parallèlement tout près de s’attribuer son premier titre constructeur depuis 2023.
Toutefois, Aitken l’a promis : « on arrive ! ». L’Anglo-Coréen ne mènera donc pas une course d’attente avec ses équipiers Frederik Vesti et Earl Bamber à bord de la Cadillac Action Express n°31. Ses débuts parfois brouillons en endurance ne sont qu’un souvenir : il est devenu l’une des vedettes de la discipline.
Les intrigues de ce Petit Le Mans 2026 sont également nombreuses au sein du plateau de 11 voitures. Acura stoppera son programme avec l’ARX-06 après le damier. Tom Blomqvist (Acura n°60) a réalisé la pole position vendredi. Un dernier triomphe, avec une livrée de circonstance, aurait la saveur d’une consolation.
Photo : Acura
L’usine Porsche-Penske n’a rien gagné depuis les 12 Heures de Sebring. Et l’équipage de la n°6 composé de Kévin Estre, Laurens Vanthoor et Matt Campbell ambitionne sans doute effacer l’inquiétant spectre d’une année sans victoire.
Fort de sa victoire récente à Indianapolis, l’alliance germano-belge BMW-WRT veut triompher pour la première fois dans une manche de la Michelin Endurance Cup, regroupant les courses de longue durée.
Luttes passionnantes en LMP2 et GTD
Dans la catégorie LMP2, la lutte pour le titre demeure très ouverte. Le Français Tom Dillmann (Oreca Inter Europol n°43) pourrait gagner sa deuxième couronne après 2024. Associé à Jeremy Clarke, il compte dix points d’avance sur le tandem George Kurtz/Alex Quinn.
La lutte promet aussi d’être passionnante en GTD Pro. La Corvette n°4 de Tommy Milner et Nicky Catsburg est en tête des tableaux avec 42 points d’avance sur la BMW M4 pilotée par Connor De Phillippi et Neil Verhagen après les qualifications. Une victoire rapporte 350 points.
La Lamborghini Temerario d’Andrea Caldarelli et Sandy Mitchell reste dans la course au titre avec un écart de 60 unités à combler. Les deux pilotes du Taureau seront accompagnés ce week-end par le Français Franck Perera.
Petit Le Mans 2026 : les pneus
Road Atlanta clôture la saison d’IMSA. Or, c’est au coup d’envoi de la campagne, en janvier, à Daytona, que Michelin avait lancé sa nouvelle gamme pneumatique Pilot Sport Endurance. Ces gommes incorporent notamment 50 % de matériaux renouvelables ou naturels.
Le manufacturier avait notamment pour ambition de faciliter la mise en température. Cet exercice difficile – les couvertures chauffantes étant proscrites – rendait le pilotage pointu dans les premiers tours. La nouvelle gamme améliore la situation.
« La montée en température est fantastique, se satisfait Matthieu Bonardel, directeur de Michelin Motorsport. Nous n’avons plus de remarques de la part des pilotes, ce n’est même plus un sujet. Ils peuvent attaquer dès le début de leur relais. Nous voulions progresser, mais je pense que nous sommes allés au-delà de ce que nous envisagions ».
Ce week-end, la dotation pneumatique s’élève à neuf trains de Pilot Sport Endurance de mélange medium. « C’est un circuit très thermique, explique l’ingénieur. Il n’est pas très usant, mais le revêtement est très lisse en termes de macrotexture et très rugueux, un peu comme du papier de verre. Cela génère beaucoup de grip, mais aussi beaucoup de température parce que, quand on n’use pas, la chaleur perdure. »
La plupart des concurrents tenteront ainsi de doubler leurs relais pendant la journée afin de conserver un maximum de pneus frais pour la fin de l’épreuve, disputée de nuit.
Petit Le Mans : le terrain
Road Atlanta est un circuit court (4,088 km). Et 54 équipages s’élanceront ce samedi soir. Ce qui revient à une moyenne d’une voiture tous les 76 mètres de piste.
Une densité unique en endurance : le rapport est par exemple d’une voiture tous les 220 mètres au Mans. On comprend alors que le nombre d’altercations ou de rixes entre les concurrents soit plus élevé sur le tracé géorgien qu’ailleurs.
Ajoutons le fait que la piste est sinueuse, avec surtout une série de « esses » rendant plus périlleux les dépassements entre les voitures des quatre catégories. Si l’on rajoute encore la nervosité liée aux enjeux sportifs, on obtient un cocktail détonnant.
La direction de course ordonna 6 neutralisations l’an passé. 5 en 2024. Et 13 en 2023. L’irruption de la voiture de sécurité (ou full course yellow) regroupe le peloton et peut donc redistribuer les cartes.
Petit Le Mans est donc habituellement une course hachée, où les concurrents tentent de rester dans le même tour que les leaders. Puis donnent tout dans les dernières heures…
La cadence de ces neutralisations peut d’ailleurs avoir un impact sur le sprint final. Ce fut le cas en 2025. Si les quatre dernières heures se déroulèrent sous régime de drapeau vert, toutes les voitures eurent besoin d’un ultime ravitaillement dans les dernières minutes.
Ceci ouvrit le jeu stratégique, permettant à des outsiders de se glisser dans la lutte pour le podium. La Lamborghini n°63 de Romain Grosjean ou l’Aston Martin n°23 de Roman De Angelis animèrent ainsi les derniers tours de nuit.
Connexion
Le Pan-European Games Information (PEGI) a visiblement fait un petit faux départ concernant le jeu GTA 6, puisque sa fiche PEGI 18 a été publiée hier, le 2 octobre 2026, avant d'être rapidement retirée ensuite. Bien évidemment, il était déjà trop tard et iGrandTheftAuto, par exemple, avait déjà pris...
Mise à jour à 16 h 20 : Le responsable "anti-triche" chez Riot Games, Phillip Koskinas, s'est exprimé au sujet du cas d'After-Cartoonist-196. Il a tenu à rappeler certaines règles concernant Vanguard et ses bannissements. Tout d'abord, les bannissements liés à des composants hardware ne peuvent pas...
