An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The U.S. designated helium as a critical material on Friday because it’s indispensable for making semiconductors that are essential to energy generation, and the global supply is at risk of disruption, according to the Energy Department. The designation by the Energy Department means that more federal financing will be available for helium producers and that the government will monitor it more closely. Helium is primarily produced as a byproduct of natural gas processing. The United States is the world’s largest producer of natural gas and of helium. Qatar and Russia are the other top helium producers.

[…] Helium makes balloons rise, but that’s not why the DOE is interested in it. Helium plays an important role in wind, solar and nuclear energy production, space exploration, medical imaging and research. Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said helium’s unique properties make it irreplaceable, such as the fact that it’s non-combustible and has the lowest boiling point of any gas. The nation needs an ample supply for semiconductors, quantum and super computing, and superconducting magnets, added Robertson, who oversees the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.

[…] Despite environmental concerns with recovering helium from natural gas, there are also opportunities, said Greeshma Gadikota, director of the Lenfast Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University. “If we burn the natural gas, there are a lot of CO2 emissions associated with that,” Gadikota said. “But if you just extract the helium and use it, the uses of it don’t contribute necessarily to greenhouse gas emissions. “So from a climate standpoint, if we are going to continue down the line of extracting natural gas and recovering helium,” she added, “I would prefer to see natural gas being used in a form where we directly produce hydrogen and we produce solid carbon.” Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel, and solid carbon can provide permanent carbon sequestration and can be used widely in industrial applications, including rubber and pigments.

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Lockdown Mode enables extreme protections for those most at risk, but it’s overkill for most people.

On Monday, Microsoft said it will offer voluntary buyouts to eligible employees in select parts of the company. CNBC reports that the buyouts will be offered to roughly 60,000 employees, or about a quarter of its global workforce. The company describes the offer as an opportunity for employees who may have already been considering career moves outside Microsoft. While Microsoft did not give a direct reason for the buyout package, it comes as the company has spent the last several years managing costs amid investment in AI infrastructure and data-center buildout.

Microsoft will extend the voluntary exit offer (VEO) to qualifying employees in the United States, India, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Microsoft employees at level 70 or below will be eligible for the buyout program. The company’s employee rankings are internal, but according to the salary and career database Levels.fyi, levels 65–67 correspond to principal positions, and 68–70 are at the partner/distinguished level. According to Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, eligible organizations were selected “based on each business’s priorities, customer commitments and workforce needs.”

The effort is the second time Microsoft has run a voluntary workforce reduction in 2026. In April, the company offered its first voluntary retirement package to 8,750 US employees. In July, the Xbox division laid off 3,200 employees, or about 20 percent of its entire gaming division. As reported by CNBC, about 30 percent of eligible employees accepted the retirement offer, lessening the impact of the planned layoffs, according to Coleman. While the offer in April went out to long-tenured employees who might be nearing the end of their career, the VEO expands the effort to a much larger potential pool.

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You can do more than charge your controllers with the USB ports on your PS5. Here are some of the possibilities.

The critical PHP2Shell vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) have now been successfully exploited in the wild, just days after patches were released and initial exploitation attempts failed. BleepingComputer reports: The malicious activity was caught by Adel Karimi, detection and response lead at Perplexity, whose honeypots recorded evidence of confirmed remote code execution against an Apache mod_php installation running PHP 8.4.26. “This is now confirmed RCE with usable memory disclosure, not just a crash followed by a suspicious process. The response delivered an 800 KiB decoded cookie dump, and a function address derived from that dump using the public exploit’s offsets appears in the subsequent execution payload,” Karimi shared.

“The evidence demonstrates this chain on the intentionally favorable single-worker mod_php profile; it is not a measurement of exploit reliability on other worker counts, PHP builds, or applications,” he added. Karimi’s findings were also confirmed by Expel threat researcher Marcus Hutchins, who has been tracking a stream of alleged successful PHP2Shell exploitation reports.

“This is by far the highest quality confirmation of in-the-wild php2shell exploitation I’ve seen so far. Deep technical breakdown of a successful exploitation attempt against an Apache mod_php installation running PHP 8.4.26,” Hutchins said.

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Camera app Halide released a new update for the iPhone Duo that adds three different shooting modes based on what position the foldable is in.

Charging behaviors and heat are the things to pay attention to.

This is a video highlighting the vast amphibious collection of Susan Burgos, who was recently recognized by Guinness World Records as having the largest collection of frog memorabilia. Ribbit! The previous record was an already impressive 10,502, but Susan’s totals 13,201. That’s no tadpole! Susan even bought a second home with a large garage to store the collection. Wait, what?! Does, uh, does that collection need a roommate? Per Susan:

“I won’t add to it. I think it’s complete. I just feel totally fulfilled.”

And people say collecting doesn’t provide fulfillment — Susan is living proof! Sure it might take owning 13,000 of something, but still, there’s hope. Just a heads up though: if your collection is just old newspapers and non-nudie magazines you’re a hoarder, not a collector. There will never be any fulfillment, only a sad episode on A&E.

You might be surprised at the rankings of some streaming services when it comes to what Americans watch on their TVs.