Slashdot readers Cpt_Kirks, eklektic, sconeu, and Vrallis share the unfortunate news of Patrick Stewart’s passing. Longtime spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak said Stewart died Wednesday at the age of 86 at his home in Los Angeles following “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.”

“He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all,” Bush Novak wrote. “We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace.”

The acclaimed British actor became a science-fiction icon as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films. Beyond those iconic roles, Stewart earned multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for performances in Moby Dick, The Lion in Winter, Extras, Hamlet, and Blunt Talk. He later returned to his most famous role in Star Trek: Picard.

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It’s hard to convince yourself to spend nearly half a grand on premium headphones, like the Sony WH-1000XM6, even if you consider yourself an audiophile. Not everyone can afford those prices, which is why the budget, mid-tier, and premium tiers exist. While the premium 1000XM6 headphones are over three times the price of the mid-tier Sony WH-CH730N, they’re not three times as good. The Sony WH-CH730N are $128 (originally $179) right now, the lowest price they’ve ever been according to price-tracking tools, and they offer an amazing value for your money.

It’s pretty impressive what $128 in headphones gets you in 2026. The CH730N uses the same Sony Connect app as the premium headphones; as a result, you get a 10-band slider on the EQ menu, a battery care feature that extends the longevity of your battery life, 50 hours of juice, ANC, Ambient Sound (transparency mode), Multipoint to connect to two devices at once, and Bluetooth 6.0. The Adaptive Sound Control feature can detect your activity (walking, sitting down, loud environment, etc.) and automatically switch the level of ANC and transparency to make your experience as comfortable and seamless as possible.

The microphones are decent and use a feature to isolate your voice in noisy environments. I love that there’s an AUX connection to give you the option, which seems to be coming back with newer headphones. The design is light and will feel like plastic, but they are comfortable to wear for long sessions. If you’re looking to maximize the quality of headphones you can get for your money, the Sony WH-CH730N offer a pretty compelling option at $128.

Trying to make everyone happy could make no one happy.

The site’s data is reportedly intact, but the cause of the outage is still unknown.

President Donald Trump has declared the imports of foreign-made factory robots to be a national security threat—ordering new US negotiations with trading partners while holding out the possibility of imposing new tariffs on such robot imports in the future.

Issued on October 28, Trump’s presidential proclamation represents heightened government scrutiny of foreign-made industrial robots that could complicate the manufacturing operations of major US corporations that rely on such robots. Those companies include Detroit automakers General Motors and Ford, electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, and aerospace and defense giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Trump’s proclamation describes industrial robots and machinery as being crucial for producing US military weapon systems along with representing a “driving force” behind all critical infrastructure sectors within the US economy. The proclamation cites an investigation under US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick as having found that US imports of such robots “pose[] risks to the United States industrial base and threatens the long-term competitiveness of the United States in a sector that is increasingly vital to national security.”

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence. A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset (source paywalled; alternative source), funneling information to Beijing. But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive.

For years, Washington has worked to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass the United States in the intense global competition for superiority in artificial intelligence. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump’s, set off alarms at the White House. Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Mr. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.

This account is based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the findings are drawn from classified intelligence, as well as other officials and industry executives and analysts. American officials already suspected that Ms. Huang was helping China evade constraints on its ability to gain access to advanced A.I. chips. But the revelation that she was feeding information directly to Beijing raised more troubling possibilities, including that Mr. Huang had insights into Mr. Trump’s thinking on an issue of vital importance to both nations, one likely to come up when the president visits China next month. And it left questions about whether she could be gleaning information about Nvidia, which as much as any company accounts for the lead the United States has maintained in developing cutting-edge A.I. models. The surveillance of Ms. Huang continues, they said, and companies that have been affiliated with her continued this year to purchase Nvidia chips.

Nvidia said in a statement: “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.” Nvidia is “confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know.” Customers like Megaspeed, the company that employed Ms. Huang, “receive ordinary business information — not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security,” the company added.

In a statement to The New York Times, Megaspeed said that its “current leadership” takes the matter “extremely seriously and is committed to getting to the facts behind these allegations.” It added that “outside counsel has been retained to conduct a thorough internal investigation and has notified the U.S. government that we are fully committed to cooperating.”

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The company is starting with tests outside of the US.

Hey, that’s not what Magic Eraser is supposed to do!

Microsoft is beginning the rollout of a Windows 11 preview update that finally addresses a persistent power user complaint with the operating system: the right-click menu that obliterated years of muscle memory on command locations, and hid others behind an additional click. The timing for the release is notable, as the announcement comes alongside Microsoft’s quarterly financial report that saw a continued decline in the business of selling Windows licenses for new PCs.

The preview update, KB5127936, is cumulative for Windows 11 versions 26H2 and 25H2. The update will be a gradual rollout before eventually moving on to a normal rollout for all Windows 11 devices once it reaches general availability. The highlight of the new update should calm annoyed users who have spent years with custom scripts and services in an attempt to shape Windows the way they’d prefer it. Users will get a “customize menu” button that controls what commands appear when they right-click their mouse. Users can toggle built-in commands such as Send To or Create Shortcut on or off, rearrange what appears on the main menu, and control which third-party extensions show up in either the main or submenus. The gripe with the right-click menu had been that Microsoft hid familiar command locations behind a top row of icons while moving other familiar commands under the “Show more options” submenu. Now, Windows users will have the ability to customize the whole thing around their habits.

The original Windows 11 right-click menu is a mess.
Credit:
Microsoft

The new preview also highlights a new Windows feature called Cloud Rebuild, a recovery option that can reinstall Windows 11 directly from the cloud, even when an existing Windows 11 fails to boot. Cloud Rebuild will pull the Windows 11 image and needed system drivers directly from Windows Update. Users will not need a custom recovery image or external media to reinstall Windows. There is an important distinction to note however. Microsoft classified Cloud Rebuild as a recovery option, but it behaves more like a fresh Windows install than a repair, as existing applications and files will not be included. Those worried about data security have the option to sanitize entire system drives prior to reinstalling. For a full list of improvements coming to Windows 11, including changes to Xbox mode and settings, you can view the official Microsoft release announcement.

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Adding sponsored content in more markets could make the feature profitable.

The Pentagon inspector general’s office declined a request from US senators to investigate restrictions recently imposed on the Ukraine military’s use of SpaceX’s satellite network.

Ukraine, which uses SpaceX’s Starlink service and the military version known as Starshield, said earlier this month that military drones lost satellite connectivity when traveling above 161 kilometers per hour (100 miles per hour). The limit was removed after about 10 days.

Five Democratic and four Republican senators sent an October 15 letter to Department of Defense Inspector General Platte Moring, asking for a probe into the reported disruptions of Starlink and Starshield. The letter asked, among other things, “whether any restrictions on Starlink or Starshield services were directed, authorized, or implemented by SpaceX, the Department of Defense, or other US government entities; whether such restrictions were consistent with applicable US government contracts, and what actions, if any, the Department of Defense took in response.”

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Yesterday, Google reported its Q3 results that showed searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search, even as overall search revenue grew 12% year over year to $63.25 billion. The news sent Alphabet shares plunging, with Bespoke Investment Group reporting that the stock is on track for its steepest post-earnings decline since the company went public in 2004. Yahoo Finance reports: At its low, Alphabet had lost $524 billion in stock market value, the second-biggest one-day loss ever for a US-listed company. Only Nvidia has lost more, about $593 billion on Jan. 27, 2025, the day China’s DeepSeek rattled AI investors. Alphabet would need to close at about $274.75, down roughly 15%, to take Nvidia’s record, by Yahoo Finance calculations. It has already blown past the $400 billion SpaceX lost on June 22, the previous No. 2.

In dollars, it’s Alphabet’s worst day by far. Its previous worst was about $275 billion on July 23. It’s also on track for the stock’s steepest drop after an earnings report since the company went public, according to Bespoke Investment Group. The previous low was a slide of nearly 10% in July 2008.

[…] US-listed stocks have shed $200 billion or more in a single session 18 times this year through Wednesday. That’s up from 13 in all of 2025 and none before 2022, according to Yahoo Finance calculations from Bloomberg data. Alphabet alone has lost about $1.4 trillion since its record in May.

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