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Today — 8 October 2026Main stream

Russia’s Silence on Possible Plague Outbreak Stokes Fears of a Cover-Up

8 October 2026 at 18:22
As rumors spread about a possible plague outbreak in Siberia, the Kremlin turned to a familiar playbook: offering little information about potential bad news.

© Associated Press

The Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East in Irkutsk, Russia, on Wednesday. The researcher who died worked in the lab.

Amazon's new Alexa Tablets drop the Fire branding but are more Android than ever

8 October 2026 at 16:32

For the last 15 years, you've been able to buy a Fire tablet from Amazon. Which Fire tablet? It doesn't matter—like Kindles, they have been pretty much the same year to year. The company's new tablet lineup is a big change, though. Amazon has dropped the Fire branding in favor of Alexa, and the new Alexa Tablets are now Google-certified Android devices.

Throughout the history of Fire Tablets, Amazon downplayed its use of Android. They ran Android apps from the company's Appstore platform, but there was no Google integration with "Fire OS." However, Amazon shut down its app store last year. The new Alexa Tablets run full-fledged Google-y versions of Android with the Play Store and all the apps you'd expect. This contrasts sharply with Amazon's Fire Sticks, which have abandoned Android for the custom Linux-based Vega OS.

The Alexa Tablet lineup consists of three devices, all redesigned with unibody aluminum housings. The Alexa Tablet 8 starts at $230, and the Tablet 11 jumps to $330. They run on the budget MediaTek 8189 processor, but that's still an upgrade from the last-gen Fire tablets. Both devices have 16:10 display ratios that are better for watching video, but the flagship tablet is a little different.

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© Amazon

Amazon builds 1,000th satellite, will launch space internet service by end of year

8 October 2026 at 15:28

The world's largest retailer wants to sell you something else—Internet from space.

Amazon has been developing a constellation of satellites to deliver broadband Internet from low-Earth orbit for the better part of a decade, and the company is just about ready to pull back the curtain. It is entering a market that SpaceX, with its Starlink Internet, has dominated for the last half-decade. Amazon's debut into satellite Internet is being closely watched, not just by some consumers, but by businesses ranging from airlines to shipping companies to governments. Broadband Internet from orbit has proven broadly useful for a lot of purposes, from video games to commerce to warfighting.

But until now, most people had to buy it from Elon Musk and SpaceX. OneWeb has only offered limited services, leaving Amazon as the only real competitor to deliver high-speed Internet globally. Moreover, at the head of the company's broadband efforts is Rajeev Badyal, who led Starlink during its early years, but whom Musk fired eight years ago for moving too cautiously on Starlink.

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© Amazon Leo

Anthropic bans ‘abusive or cruel behavior’ toward Claude

8 October 2026 at 17:00
Machine brain.

Anthropic is making changes to its usage policy for the first time in over a year to reflect new and high-risk cases of misuse - including election interference, weapons development, surveillance, and health and financial uses. But one of the most significant changes prohibits "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward Claude.

Last August, the company announced it would allow Claude to end conversations with "persistently harmful or abusive" users as part of its research into "model welfare." The new update says that terminating conversations is still the "primary enforcement mechanism"; Anthropic did not provide a comment o …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Trump administration says Microsoft ‘abused’ worker visa program and is cutting off access

8 October 2026 at 16:57
Graphic photo collage of J. D. Vance.

The Trump administration is suspending some tech companies, including Microsoft, from an immigration program that lets an employer hire foreign workers that can reside permanently in the US, as reported by Reuters.

In a press conference, Vice President JD Vance claimed the permanent labor certification program - intended for use when there aren't "sufficient" US workers available to do a job - has become "rife" with fraud over the "past several years," and that no company has "abused" the system more than Microsoft. "Our message to Microsoft is: you're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers."

The administr …

Read the full story at The Verge.

New York accuses TikTok of serving users ‘placebo’ safety features

8 October 2026 at 16:53
Vector art of the TikTok logo.

New York is alleging that thousands of TikTok users, including kids and teens, were unknowingly given "ghost" versions of the platform's safety features rather than the working versions. Reuters reports the allegation is part of an "updated, sealed version" of New York's 2024 lawsuit against TikTok, which was "later ordered unsealed by a judge."

According to the new allegations, TikTok's "experiment" effectively blocked some users from accessing features like an option to reset your algorithm, which can potentially help users avoid harmful content popping up in their feed. As Reuters notes, users in the experiment "believed they had activa …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Are you ready for everything to look like TikTok?

By: Mia Sato
8 October 2026 at 16:45
Phone screen with a glowing red video.

Since TikTok burst into mainstream consciousness, many things have been called a "TikTok clone": YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Snapchat Spotlight, Netflix's Clips, LinkedIn's vertical video feed, and countless other, less recognizable names like Triller, Zynn, and Byte.

For years now, Facebook and Instagram have pumped users' feeds with video as Meta chases TikTok's runaway success. But if tests running abroad are any indication, the TikTok-ification of social media might finally be reaching its fullest form.

TechCrunch reports that some users in India are getting a Facebook test that, upon opening the app, drops them directly into a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Amazon is phasing out Fire Tablets because they weren’t ‘giving customers what they were asking for’

8 October 2026 at 16:34

In an interview with Bloomberg, Amazon's head of consumer electronics, Panos Panay, confirmed the company would phase out the Fire brand in favor of Alexa Tablets.

The new lineup runs proper Android, instead of the custom Fire OS, and has full access to the Play Store, which wasn't available on Fire tablets. To make matters worse, Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube, Google Drive, and other services were only available via the browser on Fire tablets; the official Google apps were not available in the Amazon Appstore.

The Fire tablet line "wasn't giving customers what they were asking for," Panay told Bloomberg, which appears to be access to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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