“Signature forgery.” It’s a new way to break RSA keys — and it doesn’t require factoring. Ars Technica reports on new research using classical computing to “reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold” and lower the required computing resources by orders of magnitude.

There’s “a gap in current RSA-type security assumptions,” according to a paper co-authored by University of California, San Diego professor Nadia Heninger, who argues that gap “gives classical cryptanalytic evidence in favor of moving away from RSA entirely during the current post-quantum transition.”

The practical risk is limited, but still significant. Applying the attack against the deprecated use of 1024-bit keys took a handful of months on an academic CPU cluster, significantly less than the current estimates for 1024-bit factoring that would require resources that only nations or companies with massive resources could achieve. Widely used RSA implementations are also safe. Nonetheless, the research has taken cryptographers by surprise… “If this result holds up under peer review, it would indeed be a conceptual break-through,” Karsten Nohl, a cryptography expert and the head of innovation at Allurity, said in an interview. “RSA is as difficult to break as it is to factor large integers, at least so we thought. The researcher suggests that you can practically break RSA without cracking its key….”

The key forgery attack Heninger and the other researchers devised poses an immediate threat to 1024-bit RSA. Even for 2048- and 4096-bit keys, the method reduces the security of RSA to unacceptable levels. The National Security Agency, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and European Union Agency for Network and Information Security require that any cryptosystem should provide a level of no less than 128 or more bits, meaning the operations required must exceed 2**128. The forgery attack drops these levels to 2**65, 2**90, and 2**119 for 1024-, 2048-, and 4096-bit keys respectively. These levels may further drop because Heninger’s team did all the coding by hand and used no AI or GPUs in performing the forgeries. The researcher said these tools will “almost certainly” drop the security levels further.

The attack works only against blind-signature implementations of RSA… Still, some real-world systems continue to use blind-signature, also known as textbook, RSA… The paper’s authors and other researchers stress that the new attack poses little real-world threat. It does, however, drastically lower the estimated security of textbook RSA, and it does so in a way no one knew of previously… The new attack will further increase the urgency of completely moving away from the cryptosystem.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader phatrabt for sharing the article.

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Garmin’s Fenix line has long been the watch to beat in the outdoor GPS category, and the new Fenix 9 Pro checks all the right boxes. You still get excellent mapping, a durable and premium build, and strong battery life, plus a handful of quality-of-life updates that make daily use even better. Here are the five features on Garmin’s latest flagship that I suddenlly find I can’t live without.

Garmin Fenix 9 Pro Solar 47mm Titanium GPS Smartwatch Pebble Gray Band

$1,121.99
at Amazon

$1,121.99
at Amazon

Garmin Epic training summaries (aka multi-day activity grouping)

Not to be confused with the older Epix product line, Garmin Epic is a new way to tell the story of a trip rather than just log it. Instead of scrolling through a pile of disconnected activities after a multi-day hike or a training block, Epic groups related sessions into a combined, shareable summary in Garmin Connect—plotting everything on a color-coded map by activity type, with a rundown of health and performance stats underneath.

Credit: Meredith Dietz

While Epic is marketed as the place to relive your adventures, I’d argue the more useful trick is using it to zoom out and look for patterns in your training. And while the launch of Garmin Epic has been wrapped up in the debut of the Fenix 9, you don’t need this particular smartwatch to use Epics in the Connect app—but for now, however, the Fenix 9 is the only Garmin model that lets you start an Epic straight from the watch.

Stamina curve and stamina zones to chart your endurance

The Stamina Curve estimates how long you can sustain a given effort level—pace for runners, power for cyclists—based on your accumulated training history, and it updates continuously as your fitness shifts. Stamina Zones then turns that curve into personalized effort ranges you can pace against in real time.

The mechanics are intuitive once you’re observing them in action: easy efforts drain the curve slowly, near-maximal efforts burn through it fast. Tracking how that curve shifts across a training block gives you a pretty useful read on whether your endurance is trending up or down. It’s less about a single number on a screen and more about considering your own fatigue trends, which is exactly the kind of feature that rewards long-term users.

Tilted perspective map view and smoother zooming/panning to plan your runs

Garmin has rebuilt how maps render and move on the Fenix 9 Pro. The new tilted, perspective-style map view gives you a more three-dimensional sense of terrain—useful for reading elevation changes or picking a line through complex trail networks—while zooming and panning are meant to be smoother compared to previous generations. For anyone whose main use case is route-finding in unfamiliar terrain, this is arguably a bigger day-to-day upgrade than any single new sensor or metric.

A green LED flashlight mode that won’t blind you during dark runs

It’s a small addition, but a fun one. The Fenix 9 Pro’s built-in flashlight—a fixture of the best adventure watches these days—adds a green light mode alongside the existing white and red options, specifically to help preserve night vision on pre-dawn starts or overnight camp routines. The flashlight also has adjustable brightness, strobe patterns, and even a distress-flash mode that displays your emergency contact information on screen.

Faster mapping and course calculation for more efficient route planning

Under the hood, the Fenix 9 Pro’s mapping engine has gotten a serious performance boost: Garmin claims maps now paint roughly 30% faster, and round-trip course calculation is about 40% quicker. Combined with the doubled storage capacity, this is the feature that makes the flashier navigation updates (like the tilted map view) actually feel good to use rather than just look good in a press release.

The upgrades here are real, but I understand they probably don’t justify the price jump for most people already carrying a Fenix 8. Where the Fenix 9 Pro makes the most sense is for anyone whose Fenix 7 or older watch is on its last legs. For that person (especially one who spends serious time navigating unfamiliar trails and can justify the spend), the Fenix 9 Pro is an excellent watch, and this generation’s improvements to mapping, stamina tracking, and everyday usability make it even easier to recommend.

If there was ever a freaky deaky contest (and there may be — I tend to stick to the shallows of the internet), Mother Nature would win hands down. And she wouldn’t even show up to claim her prize, she’d be too preoccupied pushing the freaky deaky envelope out in the wild. Case in point: these videos of a deep sea crap wearing an anemone as a backpack. “I think you meant crab.” So I did — good catch.

“In addition to their long, thin walking legs, Homolidae crabs (also known as “porter crabs”) have modified rear appendages they use to pick up anemones and other things on the seafloor. Scientists speculate that this behavior could be related to physical camouflage, chemical camouflage, or predator defense.”

So the crabs use their custom modified appendages (thanks evolution!) to pick up and carry around anemones. But what are the anemones getting out of it? Is this relationship entirely one-sided? I have so many questions, but you know Mother Nature isn’t going to answer because she’s too busy stuffing spiders into frog butts or something.

The setting affects whether workers can review photos and videos from your glasses.

The company is still paying for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Last month, we shared word of a Stanford study that found entry-level employment in so-called “AI-impacted” occupations lagging well behind that in other fields. Now, a new working paper from economics researchers at Munich’s CESifo finds the opposite, arguing point blank that “there is no evidence of any significant, widespread displacement or reduction in hiring of recent college graduates in absolute or relative levels.”

In “The Early Impacts of AI on Employment Among Recent College Graduates,” researchers Robert Fairlie and Jane Wu said they decided to focus on recent graduates “because changes in labor demand may first appear through reductions in hiring.” As AI gets good enough to at least perform the “relatively standardized tasks” in many entry-level office jobs, they argue, firms could reduce new hiring for simpler roles rather than laying off more experienced long-term employees.

There’s some reason to believe 2026’s graduating job seekers might be more at risk of AI displacement than those graduating just a year or two prior. The CESifo researchers point to a recent sharp increase in the number of firms “replacing a large number of employee tasks with AI” in a Census survey, as well as broad increases in AI spending per employee and ChatGPT Enterprise token use in the last 12 months.

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Free speech and media advocacy groups urged a judge to block a California settlement with Paramount Skydance that would let the company finalize its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

Twelve states led by California sued to block the deal in July and were able to delay it when US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled that Paramount combining with Warner Bros. would likely reduce competition substantially and violate antitrust laws. Despite that initial victory, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a settlement with Paramount earlier this week and the other states involved in the lawsuit signed on to the deal.

Martínez-Olguín must decide whether to approve the settlement. A coalition of free speech and media advocacy groups told the judge in a filing yesterday that the deal will give residents of the states that sued Paramount “virtually nothing.” The filing was submitted by the Committee for the First Amendment, Free Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Future Film Coalition, and International Documentary Association.

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Normally, we try to update you quarterly on what’s going on with the US electric grid since it provides a nice view of developing trends and smooths out some month-to-month randomness. Unfortunately, I was out of the office when last month’s data was released, so this will be a seven-month update on 2026 trends.

The top line item is that energy use is continuing to rise, albeit not as quickly as headlines about data centers might lead people to believe. Beyond data centers, there’s a growing electrification—things like EVs and heat pumps—that is shifting energy demands onto the grid. Despite all of this, electricity use has risen by only 2 percent compared to the same period last year. At this time the previous year, demand had risen by 3 percent compared to the year prior.

Some of this may be due to continued improvements in efficiency, which had largely kept electricity demand stable throughout the early 2000s. And some of it may be because more data centers are generating their own power so that demand doesn’t show up on the grid. So far, the growth in demand hasn’t reached apocalyptic levels.

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Since 2024, Microsoft has tried to sell “Copilot+ PC.” The marketing initiative was aimed at making it easy for people to know which Windows systems were approved to run AI-accelerated workloads locally.

But Copilot+ PC branding is nowhere to be found on the new Surface PCs Microsoft announced this week.

Speaking with Windows Central, Brett Ostrum, corporate VP of Surface, said that the new Surface computers “are not called Copilot+ PCs” despite meeting the label’s requirements.

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Imagine starting a space company in October 2019 with the aim of changing the world. Then, a few months later, a global pandemic shuts the world down.

“Little did we know what the world had in store for us,” said Trevor Bennett, an engineer who co-founded Starfish Space after a few years at Blue Origin. “But that’s kind of become part of our story, showing some resilience along the way.”

At Blue Origin, he saw, up close, the ambitions of billionaires to build big rockets and put massive numbers of satellites into orbit. Bennett and his co-founder, another engineer from Blue Origin named Austin Link, began to think about the implications. How would humanity deal with that increased volume of satellites in orbit? Could low-Earth orbit be preserved?

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