Pentagon wants $54B for drones, more than most nations’ military budgets

Pentagon wants $54B for drones, more than most nations’ military budgets

fivenewscrypto    avril 23, 2026   

The US military’s massive $1.5 trillion budget request for the next fiscal year includes what Pentagon officials described as the largest investment in drone warfare and counter-drone technology in US history.

The proposed spending on drone and autonomous warfare technologies within the FY2027 budget proposal for the US Department of Defense would surpass most countries’ defense budgets and rank among the top 10 in the world for military spending, ahead of countries such as Ukraine, South Korea, and Israel.

Specifically, the Pentagon is requesting $53.6 billion to boost US production and procurement of drones, train drone operators, build out a logistics network for sustaining drone deployments, and expand counter-drone systems to defend more US military sites. The funding request is budgeted under the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), an organization established in late 2025 that would see a massive budget increase after receiving about $226 million in the 2026 fiscal year budget.

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Mozilla: Anthropic's Mythos found 271 security vulnerabilities in Firefox 150

Mozilla: Anthropic's Mythos found 271 security vulnerabilities in Firefox 150

fivenewscrypto    avril 23, 2026   

Earlier this month, Anthropic said its Mythos Preview model was so good at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities that the company was limiting its initial release to "a limited group of critical industry partners." Since then, debate has raged over whether the model presages an era of turbocharged AI-aided hacking or if Anthropic is just building hype for what is a relatively normal step up on the ladder of advancing AI capabilities.

Mozilla added some important data to that debate Tuesday, writing in a blog post that early access to Mythos Preview had helped it pre-identify 271 security vulnerabilities in this week's release of Firefox 150. The results were significant enough to get Firefox CTO Bobby Holley to enthuse that, in the never-ending battle between cyberattackers and cyberdefenders, "defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively."

"We've rounded the curve"

Holley didn't go into detail on the severity of the hundreds of vulnerabilities that Mythos reportedly detected simply by analyzing the unreleased source code of Firefox's latest version. But by way of comparison, he noted that Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model found only 22 security-sensitive bugs when analyzing Firefox 148 last month.

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Supreme Court arguments make it clear that FCC fines are "nonbinding"

Supreme Court arguments make it clear that FCC fines are "nonbinding"

fivenewscrypto    avril 22, 2026   

Supreme Court justices today expressed skepticism of AT&T and Verizon's claim that the Federal Communications Commission's procedure for imposing fines violated their right to a jury trial. But companies regulated by the FCC may come out ahead in the long run even if the carriers lose this case.

AT&T and Verizon, which were fined a total of $104 million for selling users’ real-time location data without consent, claim the FCC's penalty system deprived them of the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. During oral arguments today, justices repeatedly pointed out that carriers could have obtained a jury trial if they chose not to pay the fines and waited for the government to begin an enforcement action in court.

But even if AT&T and Verizon lose this case, they could get a victory of sorts because the FCC and justices seem to agree that FCC fine decisions are nonbinding and require a court decision to enforce them. A government lawyer told justices that the FCC may change the language of its forfeiture orders to make it clearer that fines don't have to be paid until after a jury trial.

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Silo S3 teaser hints at the wasteland's origins

Silo S3 teaser hints at the wasteland's origins

fivenewscrypto    avril 22, 2026   

The critically acclaimed second season of Apple TV's dystopian sci-fi drama Silo ended on one heck of a cliffhanger, with at least one major character's fate unclear. The streamer just released the first teaser for S3, in which events from the first two seasons rewind to give us the briefest glimpse of the lushly green, seemingly idyllic early days of the silo community, centuries before.

(Spoilers for the first two seasons below.)

As previously reported, Silo is based on the trilogy by novelist Hugh Howey. It's set in a self-sustaining underground city inhabited by a community whose recorded history only goes back 140 years. Outside is a toxic hellscape that is only visible on big screens in the silo’s topmost level. Inside, 10,000 people live together under a pact: Anyone who says they want to “go out” is immediately granted that wish—cast outside in an environment suit on a one-way trip to clean the cameras. But those who make that choice die soon after because of the toxic environment.

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Framework Laptop 16 upgrades make it look less like an unfinished prototype

Framework Laptop 16 upgrades make it look less like an unfinished prototype

fivenewscrypto    avril 22, 2026   

When Framework launches a new laptop, it usually takes the opportunity to put out some other refinements to its designs. Although its updates for the Framework Laptop 16 aren't as significant as the changes to the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro, they address a number of complaints and requests that will make the upgradeable workstation look and function better.

The Laptop 16 is getting one new CPU option, though it’s in the same Ryzen AI 300 chip family that Framework used in its late-2025 refresh. The six-core Ryzen AI 5 340 option slots in below the eight-core Ryzen AI 7 350 configuration, and it brings the Laptop 16’s current starting price down to $1,599 for a pre-built system or $1,249 for a DIY Edition (down from $1,799 and $1,499, respectively). Continued RAM or storage price increases could eventually reduce or nullify those savings, but they're available for now.

Many of the Laptop 16’s other upgrades are primarily cosmetic. One is a new “Translucent Smoke Gray Bezel” option, which joins the existing black, orange, and lavender bezels.

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Contrary to popular superstition, AES 128 is just fine in a post-quantum world

Contrary to popular superstition, AES 128 is just fine in a post-quantum world

fivenewscrypto    avril 22, 2026   

With growing focus on the existential threat quantum computing poses to some of the most crucial and widely used forms of encryption, cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda wants to make one thing absolutely clear: Contrary to popular mythology that refuses to die, AES 128 is perfectly fine in a post-quantum world.

AES 128 is the most widely used variety of the Advanced Encryption Standard, a block cipher suite formally adopted by NIST in 2001. While the specification allows 192- and 256-bit key sizes, AES 128 was widely considered to be the preferred one because it meets the sweet spot between computational resources required to use it and the security it offers. With no known vulnerabilities in its 30-year history, a brute-force attack is the only known way to break it. With 2¹²⁸ or 3.4 x 10³⁸ possible key combinations, such an attack would take about 9 billion years using the entire bitcoin mining resources as of 2026.

It boils down to parallelization

Over the past decade, something interesting happened to all that public confidence. Amateur cryptographers and mathematicians twisted a series of equations known as Grover’s algorithm to declare the death of AES 128 once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) came into being. They said a CRQC would halve the effective strength to just 2⁶⁴, a small enough supply that—if true—would allow the same bitcoin mining resources to brute force it in less than a second (the comparison is purely for illustration purposes; a CRQC almost certainly couldn’t run like clusters of bitcoin ASICs and more importantly couldn’t parallelize the workload as the amateurs assume).

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Global growth in solar "the largest ever observed for any source"

Global growth in solar "the largest ever observed for any source"

fivenewscrypto    avril 22, 2026   

On Monday, the International Energy Agency released its analysis of the energy trends of 2025, covering the entire globe. It confirms and extends the primary conclusion of a more limited analysis by the International Renewable Energy Agency: 2025 was the first year of solar's dominance. Increased solar production was a key reason the growth of carbon-free energy sources outpaced rising demand.

Coupled with a massive growth in battery storage and relatively stagnant fossil fuel use, the year has led the IEA to declare that "the world has entered the Age of Electricity."

Electrons for everyone

The IEA report covers energy use, including the electrical grid, transportation, home heating, and other forms of consumption. As such, it can track how some of those uses are shifting, as electric vehicles displace some gasoline use and heat pumps replace gas and oil heating. It also saw a more global trend: The demand for electricity grew at twice the rate of overall energy demand. All of these went into the conclusion that we're starting the Age of Electricity.

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