For decades, satellites, drones, and human spotters have all been part of war’s surveillance and reconnaissance tool kit. In an age of cheap, insecure, Internet-connected consumer devices, however, militaries have gained another powerful set of eyes on the ground: every hackable security camera installed outside a home or on a city street, pointed at potential bombing targets.

On Wednesday, Tel Aviv–based security firm Check Point released new research describing hundreds of hacking attempts that targeted consumer-grade security cameras around the Middle East—with many apparently timed to Iran’s recent missile and drone strikes on targets that included Israel, Qatar, and Cyprus. Those camera-hijacking efforts, some of which Check Point has attributed to a hacker group that’s been previously linked to Iranian intelligence, suggest that Iran’s military has tried to use civilian surveillance cameras as a means to spot targets, plan strikes, or assess damage from its attacks as it retaliates for the US and Israeli bombings that have sparked a widening war in the region.

Iran wouldn’t be the first to adopt that camera-hacking surveillance tactic. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that the Israeli military had accessed “nearly all” the traffic cameras in Iran’s capital of Tehran and, in partnership with the CIA, used them to target the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. In Ukraine, the country’s officials have warned for years that Russia has hacked consumer surveillance cameras to target strikes and spy on troop movements—while Ukrainian hackers have hijacked Russian cameras to surveil Russian troops and perhaps even to monitor its own attacks.

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The Global Times reports: China’s first domestically developed quantum computer operating system, Origin Pilot, has been made available for online download, the Global Times learned from the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center on Wednesday. A Chinese scientist said while several quantum computing operating system efforts are underway worldwide, this is the first developed in China where it is seen as part of China’s broad effort to achieve technology independence and to achieve technology advance in quantum computing.

The center said the release marks the world’s first open-source quantum computer operating system available for public download, which is expected to lower development barriers and support the growth of China’s quantum computing ecosystem. Developed by Hefei-based Origin Quantum Computing Technology Co, the company behind China’s third-generation superconducting quantum computer, Origin Wukong, Origin Pilot was first launched in 2021 and has gone through multiple rounds of iteration and upgrade.

The developer describes it as an integrated quantum-classical-intelligent computing operating system compatible with major hardware approaches, including superconducting qubits, trapped ions and neutral atoms. It is now deployed on the company’s Origin Wukong series and is available to external users, the company said. Guo Guoping, chief scientist of Origin Quantum and director at the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center, told the Global Times that a quantum operating system is the “soft heart” of the quantum computing ecosystem. He said the decision to make Origin Pilot available globally marks a shift in China’s quantum computing industry from closed-door tech innovation to broader open-source ecosystem development. Dou Menghan, head of the research team, said: “Users can quickly integrate with quantum chips of multiple physical types and, using autonomous programming frameworks such as QPanda, execute quantum computing jobs across different physical quantum chips to support both research and commercialization needs.”

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Ancient Slashdot reader alanw shares a report from the European Space Agency (ESA): Last year, an approximately 60 meter near-Earth object captured global attention. For a brief period, asteroid 2024 YR4 became the most dangerous asteroid discovered in the last 20 years. While an Earth impact was soon ruled out, the asteroid faded from view with a lingering 4% chance of striking the Moon on 22 December 2032. Now, that risk has been eliminated. Astronomers have confirmed that 2024 YR4 will not impact the Moon using new observations made by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Instead, it will safely pass the Moon at a distance of more than 20 000 km.

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An anonymous reader The Guardian: Humanity is heating the planet faster than ever before, a study has found. Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures. It found global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is higher than scientists have seen since they started systematically taking the Earth’s temperature in 1880.

“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5C (2.7F) limit of the Paris agreement before 2030,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study. […] The researchers applied a noise-reduction method to filter out the estimated effect of nonhuman factors in five major datasets that scientists have compiled to gauge the Earth’s temperature. In each of them, they found an acceleration in global heating emerged in 2013 or 2014. The findings have been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said in a filing on Friday that it currently cannot process billions in tariff refunds because its import-processing system is “not well suited to a task of this scale.” The Verge reports: The CBP’s admission comes after the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs imposed by Trump under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) last month. This week, the International Trade Court ruled that importers impacted by the tariffs are entitled to refunds with interest. The CBP estimates that it collected around $166 billion in IEEPA duties as of March 4th, 2026. […]

The CBP says it currently processes imports through its Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system. In the filing, Lord says that using the department’s existing technology, it would take more than 4.4 million hours to process refunds for the over 53.2 million entries with IEEPA duties. Despite these current limitations, the CBP says it’s “confident” it can develop and launch new capabilities to “streamline and consolidate refunds and interest payments on an importer basis” — but this could take 45 days. “The process will be simpler and more efficient than the existing functionalities, and CBP will provide guidance on how to file refund declarations in the new system,” Lord says.

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In his 1961 novel The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck wrote of loss, “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”

The death of NASA’s Exploration Upper Stage today represents the inverse of that sentiment. The world of spaceflight is so much brighter now that its light has gone out.

The rocket’s death came via a seemingly pedestrian notice posted on a government procurement website: “NASA/MSFC intends to issue a sole source contract to acquire next-generation upper stages for use in Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis IV and Artemis V from United Launch Alliance (ULA).”

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Planet Labs, one of the world’s leading commercial satellite imaging companies, said Friday it is placing a hold on releasing imagery of some parts of the Middle East as a regional war enters its second week.

The company, which brands itself as Planet, operates a fleet of several hundred Earth-imaging satellites designed to record views of every landmass on Earth at least once per day. Its customers include think tanks, NGOs, academic institutions, news media, and commercial users in the agriculture, forestry, and energy industries, among others.

Planet also holds lucrative contracts selling overhead imagery to the US military and US government intelligence agencies.

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As part of a Year in Review blog detailing changes Valve made to Steam in 2025, the company shared a minor update on its hardware plans that doesn’t sound good for anyone hoping to buy a Steam Machine, Steam Controller or Steam Frame in 2026. Specifically, the company is now opening up the possibility its new hardware won’t ship this year at all.

In February, when Valve acknowledged the ongoing memory and storage shortage had delayed the launch of its hardware and could lead to higher prices, the company was still committing to a (fairly wide) window of when its hardware would ship: 

“Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change.” 

As of the company’s latest post, however, things somehow sound even less certain. “We hope to ship in 2026, but as we shared recently, memory and storage shortages have created challenges for us,” Valve wrote in its Year in Review post. “We’ll share updates publicly when we finalize our plans!” 

While Valve’s air of secrecy can make it easy to read too much into the limited information the company does share, moving from “the first half of the year” to “[hoping] to ship in 2026” certainly gives it wiggle room to not release new hardware this year. And considering the difficulties other companies are facing sourcing memory and storage, it wouldn’t be all that surprising.

HP said in February that RAM accounts for a third of its PC costs, and industry analysts expect the RAM shortage could radically alter the PC landscape as companies are forced to raise prices. Valve’s already struggling to keep the Steam Deck in stock due to its issues securing RAM, it stands to reason sourcing components for even more devices wouldn’t make that process any easier. Then again, the company hasn’t updated its launch timing FAQ, so there’s still reason to hope the Steam Machine ships in 2026.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/valve-doesnt-sound-confident-the-steam-machine-will-ship-in-2026-221709517.html?src=rss

Until 1970, the US dumped an estimated 17,000 tons of unspent chemical weapons from World War I and II off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean—and that disposal decision continues to haunt commercial fishing operations.

In an article published this week in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, health officials from New Jersey and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that there were at least three incidents of commercial fishing crews dredging up dangerous chemical warfare munitions (CWMs) off the coast of New Jersey between 2016 and 2023.

The three incidents exposed at least six crew members to mustard agent, which causes blistering chemical burns on skin and mucous membranes. (An example of these types of burns can be seen here, but be warned, the image is graphic.) One crew member required overnight treatment in an emergency department for respiratory distress and second-degree blistering burns. Another was burned so badly that they were hospitalized in a burn center and required skin grafting and physical therapy.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership, Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform’s Chinese parent organization ByteDance. ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China.

That’s not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the U.S. with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States. Instead, a pop-up window appears that says, “This app is unavailable in the country or region you’re in.” The restriction appears to apply only to ByteDance-owned apps and not those developed by other Chinese companies.

The timing and technical specifics suggest the restriction is related to the deal TikTok agreed to in January to divest Chinese ownership of its U.S. operations. The agreement was the result of the so-called TikTok ban law passed by Congress in 2024, which also barred companies like Apple and Google from distributing other apps majority-owned by ByteDance. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act states that no company can “distribute, maintain, or update” any app majority-controlled by ByteDance “within the land or maritime borders of the United States.”

The law was primarily aimed at TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the U.S. and had been the subject of years of debate in Washington over whether its Chinese ownership posed a national security risk. But ByteDance also has dozens of other apps that at some point were also removed from Apple’s and Google’s app stores in the U.S.. Now it seems like the scope of impact has reached even more apps that are not technically designed for U.S. audiences, such as Douyin, the AI chatbot Doubao, and the fiction reading platform Fanqie Novel.

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