Minnesota passes ban on fake AI nudes; app makers risk $500K fines

Minnesota passes ban on fake AI nudes; app makers risk $500K fines

fivenewscrypto    mai 03, 2026   

This week, Minnesota became the first state to pass a law banning nudification apps that make it easy to "undress" or sexualize images of real people.

Under the law, developers of websites, apps, software, or other services designed to "nudify" images risk extensive damages, including punitive damages, if a victim decides to sue. Their offending products could also be blocked in the state. Additionally, Minnesota's attorney general could impose fines up to $500,000 per fake AI nude flagged. Any fines collected would be used to fund services for victims of "sexual assault, general crime, domestic violence, and child abuse," the law stipulates.

On Wednesday, the Minnesota Senate unanimously voted 65–0 to pass the law. That vote came after the bill just as quickly passed in the House last week, the 19th News reported. Gov. Tim Walz is expected to sign the law when it reaches his desk, and if that happens, the state will start enforcing the ban this August.

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Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers

Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers

fivenewscrypto    mai 03, 2026   

Amazon’s cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in all.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update describing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions “suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East” and are unable to support customer applications. The update also said that “relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations” in a process that “is expected to take several months.”

That wording suggests Amazon will continue to avoid billing AWS customers in the affected regions—ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1—after it initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million.

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Scorpions go terminator mode and reinforce their weapons with metal

Scorpions go terminator mode and reinforce their weapons with metal

fivenewscrypto    mai 03, 2026   

Scorpions are armed with dual front pincers (technically known as chelae or pedipalp appendages) and a venom-injecting telson, or stinger, on the posterior of their tail. These things look dangerous enough on their own, but a chemical examination showed they contain metals like zinc, manganese, and iron.

“That the metals are there has been known since the 1990s,” said Sam Campbell, a biologist at the University of Queensland, Australia. “What we didn’t know was whether scorpions evolved to be like that or if it was accidental and they were just picking the metals up from the environment.”

To answer this question, Campbell and his colleagues examined how metals are distributed across the stingers and pincers of different scorpion species. Based on their data, detailed in a recent study published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface, there was nothing accidental about it.

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GPT-5.5 matches heavily hyped Mythos Preview in new cybersecurity tests

GPT-5.5 matches heavily hyped Mythos Preview in new cybersecurity tests

fivenewscrypto    mai 03, 2026   

Last month, Anthropic made a big deal about the supposedly outsize cybersecurity threat represented by its Mythos Preview model, leading the company to restrict the initial release to “critical industry partners.” But new research from the UK's AI Security Institute (AISI) suggests that OpenAI's GPT-5.5, which launched publicly last week, reached "a similar level of performance on our cyber evaluations" as Mythos Preview, which the group evaluated last month.

Since 2023, the AISI has run a variety of frontier AI models through 95 different Capture the Flag challenges designed to test capabilities on cybersecurity tasks, such as reverse engineering, web exploitation, and cryptography. On the highest-level "Expert" tasks, GPT-5.5 passed an average of 71.4 percent, slightly higher than the 68.6 percent achieved by Mythos Preview (though within the margin of error). In one particularly difficult task that involved building a disassembler to decode a Rust binary, AISI notes that "GPT-5.5 solved the challenge in 10 minutes and 22 seconds with no human assistance at a cost of $1.73" in API calls.

GPT-5.5 also matched Mythos Preview in its progress on "The Last Ones" (TLO), an AISI test range set up to simulate a 32-step data extraction attack on a corporate network. GPT-5.5 succeeded in 3 of 10 attempts on TLO, compared to 2 of 10 for Mythos Preview—no previous model had ever succeeded at the test even once. But GPT-5.5 still fails at AISI's more difficult "Cooling Tower" simulation of an attempted disruption of the control software for a power plant, as every previously tested AI model also has.

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Is your Purosangue SUV not sharp enough? Ferrari has you covered.

Is your Purosangue SUV not sharp enough? Ferrari has you covered.

fivenewscrypto    mai 03, 2026   

Did you know that SUVs now account for 6 in 10 new vehicles sold in Europe? That's even higher than in the US or China, where market share for lifted hatchbacks currently runs at about 40 percent. So the fact that Ferrari decided to enter the segment with the Purosangue in 2023 should be seen clearly in that context. Anyway, Four-seat Ferraris aren't entirely unheard of: I remain a big fan of the looks of the shooting brake FF and GTC4Lusso—if not the reliability of the latter.

But the test drivers in Maranello (where Ferrari's factory is) must have found something a little lacking with the way the Purosangue drove because they got to work on an upgrade for the SUV, which debuted this week. It's a new Handling Speciale option, featuring new active suspension calibration that better resists the body's roll, pitch, and yaw, something Ferrari says makes the Purosangue feel more compact than its 16.3 feet (4.9 m) might suggest. Expect Ferrari's always-quick steering to feel even sharper, then.

The control strategies for the double-clutch paddle-shift gearbox have also been improved, cutting shift times at the expense of a bit of refinement. But then that's the point: If you want a soothing luxury SUV, many other companies will sell you one. Ferrari buyers want the feeling of the next gear engaging to be a little more brutal, particularly if they're in one of the more permissive traction and stability control settings (or if those are disengaged entirely). In manual mode, that happens when you shift above 5,500 rpm, Ferrari tells us.

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Virgin Galactic reveals new ship, but it's running out of time and cash

Virgin Galactic reveals new ship, but it's running out of time and cash

fivenewscrypto    mai 03, 2026   

On Thursday, the publicly traded spaceflight company Virgin Galactic shared on social media a new photo of its next-generation spaceship being towed outside of its factory in Mesa, Arizona.

You remember Virgin Galactic, right? The space tourism company was founded 22 years ago by Sir Richard Branson to bring spaceflight to the masses. Hundreds of people began buying tickets to space nearly two decades ago. And after a long, and at times deadly, development campaign, the company reached outer space (defined, somewhat controversially, as an altitude of 80 km and above) in December 2018.

The company began flying passengers in May 2021 with its VSS Unity spacecraft, and impressively completed six spaceflights in 2023. But a few months later, in June 2024, Virgin Galactic stopped flying VSS Unity to focus on the development of its next-generation vehicle capable of more frequent, lower-cost spaceflights.

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Apple may take "several months" to catch up to Mac mini and Studio demand

Apple may take "several months" to catch up to Mac mini and Studio demand

fivenewscrypto    mai 03, 2026   

Apple's Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops have been increasingly difficult to buy over the course of the year—multiple configurations are listed on Apple's site as "currently unavailable," which almost never happens, and others will take weeks or months to ship if you order them today. A top-end version of the Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM was delisted from Apple's store entirely.

Current Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the situation on Apple's Q2 earnings call yesterday as part of a larger conversation about how Apple is navigating component shortages, and he partly blamed the shortage on the popularity of those desktops among users looking to run AI agents and other tools locally.

"Both [the Mac mini and the Mac Studio] are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted, and so we saw higher-than-expected demand," said Cook. "We think looking forward that the Mac mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance."

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