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According to the Wall Street Journal, SpaceX is reportedly poised to secure a $2 billion Pentagon contract to develop hundreds of missile-tracking satellites for President Trump's ambitious Golden Dome defense system. The Independent reports: The planned "air moving target indicator" system in question could ultimately feature as many as 600 satellites once it is fully operational, The Wall Street Journal reports. Musk's company has also been linked to two more satellite ventures, which are concerned with relaying sensitive communications and tracing vehicles, respectively. Golden Dome, inspired by Israel's "Iron Dome," was announced by Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at the White House in May and will amount to a complex system of satellites and weaponry capable of destroying incoming missiles before they hit American targets. The president promised it would be "fully operational" before he leaves office in January 2029, capable of intercepting rockets, "even if they are launched from space," with an overall price tag of $175 billion.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: It's time for Xbox to eat some humble pie and perform some real soul-searching. Microsoft released its latest quarterly earnings report and proved the worst of our fears about its gaming brand. Not only are Xbox hardware sales down significantly, but the brand itself is barely treading water. Gamers are voicing their displeasure with their wallets, but Microsoft's top brass is still only thinking about the margins. Microsoft was more keen to promote the scale of its cloud and AI services revenue -- which was up 28% year over year -- than talk about its beleaguered gaming brand. The company's overall gaming revenue fell by 2% compared to the same time last year. This was precipitated by a "decline in Xbox hardware," which was down by 22% following a steady decline quarter after quarter. Its first-party games and its Game Pass subscription were doing better, though the overall growth was only up by 1%, and even that was driven by the "better-than-expected performance" of third-party games. You can give credit to titles like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for why Xbox isn't in an even deeper hole than it is now. The tech giant has no expectation that its Xbox brand will start making more money anytime soon. In its earnings call with investors, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said the company expects Xbox will continue to decline "in the low to mid-single digits" for the following quarter. That's mostly due to the lack of landmark first-party titles. Just this month, Xbox released Ninja Gaiden 4, The Outer Worlds 2, and Double Fine's The Keeper. Xbox also made a huge marketing push for its first handheld, made in partnership with Asus, the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X. In any other year, this would be a big month for any gaming company. The dour outlook comes after months of bad news. After two subsequent price hikes, Xbox Series S and Series X consoles now cost between $100 to $150 more than they did at launch five years ago. Microsoft also pushed prices of its Game Pass Ultimate subscription tier from $20 to $30 per month. A full-year's subscription would now demand $360. In a separate article, Gizmodo reviews Microsoft's new ROG Xbox Ally X handheld, which "offers a better experience overall" than the "other small-scale Windows PC gaming devices released this year." However, "it's still nowhere close to what you truly want from a console."

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OpenAI has introduced Aardvark, a GPT-5-powered autonomous agent that scans, reasons about, and patches code like a human security researcher. "By embedding itself directly into the development pipeline, Aardvark aims to turn security from a post-development concern into a continuous safeguard that evolves with the software itself," reports InfoWorld. From the report: What makes Aardvark unique, OpenAI noted, is its combination of reasoning, automation, and verification. Rather than simply highlighting potential vulnerabilities, the agent promises multi-stage analysis -- starting by mapping an entire repository and building a contextual threat model around it. From there, it continuously monitors new commits, checking whether each change introduces risk or violates existing security patterns. Additionally, upon identifying a potential issue, Aardvark attempts to validate the exploitability of the finding in a sandboxed environment before flagging it. This validation step could prove transformative. Traditional static analysis tools often overwhelm developers with false alarms -- issues that may look risky but aren't truly exploitable. "The biggest advantage is that it will reduce false positives significantly," noted Jain. "It's helpful in open source codes and as part of the development pipeline." Once a vulnerability is confirmed, Aardvark integrates with Codex to propose a patch, then re-analyzes the fix to ensure it doesn't introduce new problems. OpenAI claims that in benchmark tests, the system identified 92 percent of known and synthetically introduced vulnerabilities across test repositories, a promising indication that AI may soon shoulder part of the burden of modern code auditing.

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The FCC plans to repeal a Biden-era ruling that required ISPs to secure their networks under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, instead relying on voluntary cybersecurity commitments from telecom providers. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the ruling "exceeded the agency's authority and did not present an effective or agile response to the relevant cybersecurity threats." Carr said the vote scheduled for November 20 comes after "extensive FCC engagement with carriers" who have taken "substantial steps... to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses." Ars Technica reports: The FCC's January 2025 declaratory ruling came in response to attacks by China, including the Salt Typhoon infiltration of major telecom providers such as Verizon and AT&T. The Biden-era FCC found that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), a 1994 law, "affirmatively requires telecommunications carriers to secure their networks from unlawful access or interception of communications." "The Commission has previously found that section 105 of CALEA creates an affirmative obligation for a telecommunications carrier to avoid the risk that suppliers of untrusted equipment will "illegally activate interceptions or other forms of surveillance within the carrier's switching premises without its knowledge,'" the January order said. "With this Declaratory Ruling, we clarify that telecommunications carriers' duties under section 105 of CALEA extend not only to the equipment they choose to use in their networks, but also to how they manage their networks." A draft of the order that will be voted on in November can be found here (PDF).

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Bluesky has surpassed 40 million users and is launching a "dislikes" beta to improve its personalization algorithms and reduce toxic content. TechCrunch reports: With the "dislikes" beta rolling out soon, Bluesky will take into account the new signal to improve user personalization. As users "dislike" posts, the system will learn what sort of content they want to see less of. This will help to inform more than just how content is ranked in feeds, but also reply rankings. The company explained the changes are designed to make Bluesky a place for more "fun, genuine, and respectful exchanges" -- an edict that follows a month of unrest on the platform as some users again criticized the platform over its moderation decisions. While Bluesky is designed as a decentralized network where users run their own moderation, some subset of Bluesky users want the platform itself to ban bad actors and controversial figures instead of leaving it up to the users to block them. Bluesky, however, wants to focus more on the tools it provides users to control their own experience.

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