Buttons are back and storage is king when it comes to car interiors

Buttons are back and storage is king when it comes to car interiors

fivenewscrypto    novembre 04, 2026   

As with interior design for houses, interior design for vehicles is also subject to fashion trends. And like any fashion trend, even the best ideas can become stale and played out with overuse. Some ideas weren’t the best, either, like demonstrably worse human-machine interfaces that add to driver distraction; yet, they still proliferated throughout the industry and across the cars offered for sale. But the good news is that the pushback seems to be working.

“When the trend of the Piano Black and the switchless interior was happening, it was during a time when designers and companies and engineers and everybody were thinking that, 'Hey, we can just get rid of all these switches on the interior. We can put it all in the software. It'll save money. It'll save us tooling up all these extra parts for unique cars and all this stuff and make the interior more like a software experience.' And it was done with those intentions,” said Hiren Patel, senior design manager at Nissan.

That resulted in cars with minimalist interiors that looked good in the dealership. But people drive their cars on roads; they don’t just sit inside them, parked inside a dealership. “So lots of people were complaining about it and saying, 'Hey, it takes my eyes off the road to change the temperature or to adjust my seat or do whatever.' It's not as easy as doing something on your phone where it's just right at your fingertips and intuitive,” Patel said.

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Google will let schools skip AI tools, but they have to give up search, too

Google will let schools skip AI tools, but they have to give up search, too

fivenewscrypto    novembre 04, 2026   

While Google is trying to move beyond Chromebooks, the ubiquity of these devices has made the company's education products huge in schools. Now, Google says it will let educators choose whether to allow its AI tools in the classroom. However, blocking AI tools also means giving up search, leaving schools with a difficult decision.

Google's new overarching approach to AI in K-12 classrooms sounds good on the surface. After consulting educators, researchers, and lawmakers, Google has decided that schools using its education products will be opted out of AI tools by default. It will be up to administrators to manually enable them when these changes roll out in the coming months.

When you look at what Google considers to be an AI tool, the nature of the Faustian bargain becomes clear. The affected products are Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search. There's no picking and choosing—you either allow all the AI or none of it.

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Another child dies of measles as CDC reportedly holds up health alert

Another child dies of measles as CDC reportedly holds up health alert

fivenewscrypto    novembre 04, 2026   

A child in New York has died of measles, health officials in the state announced late Monday. It marks the first reported measles-associated death in New York in more than 30 years. It is the seventh measles-linked death reported in the US this year; all six of the other deaths were reported in Pennsylvania, which is experiencing a dramatic measles outbreak that has stricken over 1,430 people this year. Prior to the deaths, Pennsylvania hadn't seen a measles-related death in 35 years.

The boom in vaccine-preventable outbreaks, cases,  and tragic deaths is being fueled by slipping vaccination rates nationwide as health misinformation and anti-vaccine sentiments have taken hold. One of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the US currently serves as the US health secretary; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent decades prior to taking office attacking vaccines and spreading misinformation. He and his anti-vaccine organization, Children's Health Defense, have been one of the most prolific sources of anti-vaccine content.

Since taking office, Kennedy has waged a multi-front war on vaccines that has included dismantling and obstructing federal vaccine recommendations; launching dubious studies to look for alleged, unspecified harms of vaccines; promoting alleged vaccine injuries; and continuing to spread misinformation about vaccines and vaccine-preventable illnesses.

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Google dismantles botnet secretly running on 1.3 million Android TV boxes

Google dismantles botnet secretly running on 1.3 million Android TV boxes

fivenewscrypto    novembre 04, 2026   

Google's Threat Intelligence Group says it has shut down a massive botnet called x.cpe. At its height, x.cpe ran on more than 1.3 million Android TV devices, and unusually, these were Google-certified boxes. Google says its screening process missed the malware due to "obfuscation techniques" employed by Shenzhen-based Videostrong Technology.

In a detailed blog post, the Threat Intelligence Group explains how the x.cpe botnet evolved quickly from a single-stage dropper into a modular three-stage malware platform that sold access to third parties. Manufacturers must have their devices certified if they want access to Google apps and branding, a process that is supposed to catch threats like this. However, Videostrong's compromised boxes, mostly sold under the MECOOL brand, evaded detection by using a backdoor to remotely install the malware after the devices were set up and online.

After devices appeared online, a stub application called x.cpe or com.oemservice would phone home. This package did not have any malicious capabilities of its own, but it had the system-level permissions necessary to install malware modules at the operator's behest. It also disabled Play Protect, which would have otherwise flagged the silently installed packages as malicious.

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This space company is betting its future on a propellant available everywhere

This space company is betting its future on a propellant available everywhere

fivenewscrypto    novembre 04, 2026   

Robert, Ryan, and Kirby Carlisle are three engineers who worked at SpaceX during the Falcon 9 era, seeing the revolution in the global launch industry from the inside.

The brothers launched rockets, refurbished rockets, and sold rockets. But when it came time for them to leave SpaceX and start their own space company—a lifetime dream for the Carlisle brothers—they chose not to build rockets. Rather, they focused on spacecraft.

In late 2022, the three Carlisles founded Argo Space to build infrastructure in space. Their vision was not just in-space transportation but also removing the need to use propellants from Earth to move around the heavens. They chose water, which is potentially harvestable on the Moon and found all over the Solar System, as a means of propulsion.

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UEFI bootkit infected fully patched Windows machines. Is Microsoft to blame?

UEFI bootkit infected fully patched Windows machines. Is Microsoft to blame?

fivenewscrypto    novembre 04, 2026   

In 2023, malware tracked as BlackLotus became the first publicly documented in-the-wild UEFI bootkit capable of bypassing Secure Boot on fully updated Windows 11 systems. With the industry-wide chain-of-trust mechanism subverted, the malware was able to run malicious code before Windows was fully loaded and many security defenses were operational.

Microsoft had already patched the vulnerability that BlackLotus exploited in 2022. In 2023 and 2024, Microsoft issued additional updates. The first added a new certificate that no longer trusted the vulnerable boot managers. The second provided the means to revoke trust in the digital certificate used to sign older vulnerable Windows boot managers. The organizations infected by the new bootkit, which is tracked under the name BlackX, had installed all of these patches. So how did they fall victim?

UEFI bootkit refresher

Before discussing the incident further, a brief review of BlackLotus and UEFI malware is in order. Short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, UEFI is firmware that runs immediately after a computer is turned on. One of its main jobs is to load system configuration settings, identify and initialize hardware components, and prepare the computer to start its OS.

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Trump wanted to give No Kings no air. Then, Meta suspended its Instagram.

Trump wanted to give No Kings no air. Then, Meta suspended its Instagram.

fivenewscrypto    novembre 04, 2026   

Over the weekend, the No Kings Coalition said Meta declined to commit to taking steps to prevent automated systems from suspending one of Instagram's most prominent pro-democracy accounts if activity surged around the page during the midterm elections.

A demand for action came after Meta apologized for temporarily suspending the No Kings Instagram account and disabling access for four hours at the peak of an early voting push from the group. In a post on X, Meta’s Andy Stone said the account had been using a Claude AI tool in a way that made it appear to be a bot. But even though automated review detected the error within an hour, Stone acknowledged that additional hurdles kept admins locked out. State and federal lawmakers—as well as a coalition of 14 attorneys general—have asked Meta to further explain its actions.

In a letter to No Kings, Meta offered to arrange a meeting with a technical expert who could better explain the mistake. But No Kings rejected the response, saying it failed to address any of the group's ongoing concerns and requesting a meeting with Meta senior leadership instead. The group stressed that the issue goes beyond its Instagram account, saying that Americans who rely on Meta's platforms need assurance that voting content won’t be suppressed ahead of or on election day. Among eight questions, the coalition asked Meta to publicly disclose any communications with the Trump administration about the No Kings account or the historic early voting day event.

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