Crooked Bough News Round-up

+ Scientists sequence a woolly rhino genome from a 14,400-year-old wolf’s stomach—Fortunately for paleogeneticists, wolf puppies don't chew their food t...

+ EPA makes it harder for states, tribes to block pipelines—A new rule aims to speed up and streamline the permitting process. [Ca...

+ EPA moves to stop considering economic benefits of cleaner air—New language criticizes “uncertainties” in longstanding EPA practice. ...

+ Switching water sources improved hygiene of Pompeii’s public baths—Scientists analyzed carbonate deposits from baths, aqueduct to learn m...

+ NASA launches new mission to get the most out of the James Webb Space Telescope—"It was not recognized how serious a problem that is until... about 20...

+ That time Will Smith helped discover new species of anaconda—Footage of the 2024 discovery appears in NatGeo's new documentary seri...

+ The oceans just keep getting hotter—For the eighth year in a row, the world’s oceans absorbed a record-bre...

+ These 60,000-year-old poison arrows are oldest yet found—Hunter-gatherers probably derived the poison from the milky bulb extra...

+ NASA orders “controlled medical evacuation” from the International Space Station—"The crew is highly trained, and they came to the aid of their colleag...

+ These dogs eavesdrop on their owners to learn new words—“Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors strikingly si...

+ Trump withdraws US from world’s most important climate treaty—US also pulling out of pacts promoting development, democracy, and hum...

+ NASA considers evacuating ailing crew member from International Space Station—"The matter involved a single crew member who is stable," NASA said in...

+ A crew member’s “medical concern” foils a planned spacewalk outside the ISS—"The situation is stable," NASA said in a statement Wednesday. [Catego...

+ Japanese nuclear plant operator fabricated seismic risk data—Company staff were very selective about how they modeled earthquake da...

+ New battery idea gets lots of power out of unusual sulfur chemistry—Rather than being used as a storage material, the sulfur gives up elec...

+ We have a fossil closer to our split with Neanderthals and Denisovans—A recent study suggests that North Africa may be a key place to look. ...

+ Here are the launches and landings we’re most excited about in 2026—A lot could happen in space next year, but let's get real about what a...

+ Appeals court agrees that Congress blocked cuts to research costs—The Trump admin can't arbitrarily set university reimbursements to a l...

+ Ørsted seeks injunction against US government over project freeze—Trump administration had suspended Danish group’s work on major wind f...

+ Under anti-vaccine RFK Jr., CDC slashes childhood vaccine schedule—The changes are modeled after a small country with universal health ca...

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As of 1/14/26 1:49pm. Last new 1/14/26 11:33am.

+ Bandcamp bans purely AI-generated music from its platform—Indie music store says it wants fans to have confidence music was larg...

+ The RAM shortage’s silver lining: Less talk about “AI PCs”—“General interest in AI PCs has been wavering for a while ..." [Catego...

+ Never-before-seen Linux malware is “far more advanced than typical”—VoidLink includes an unusually broad and advanced array of capabilitie...

+ Hegseth wants to integrate Musk’s Grok AI into military networks this month—US defense secretary announces plans for integration despite recent co...

+ Microsoft vows to cover full power costs for energy-hungry AI data centers—Company responds to community concerns over electricity bills and wate...

+ Google removes some AI health summaries after investigation finds “dangerous” flaws—AI Overviews provided false liver test information experts called alar...

+ ChatGPT Health lets you connect medical records to an AI that makes things up—New feature will allow users to link medical and wellness records to A...

+ ChatGPT falls to new data-pilfering attack as a vicious cycle in AI continues—Will LLMs ever be able to stamp out the root cause of these attacks? P...

+ The nation’s strictest privacy law just took effect, to data brokers’ chagrin—Californians can now submit demands requiring 500 brokers to delete th...

+ Supply chains, AI, and the cloud: The biggest failures (and one success) of 2025—The past year has seen plenty of hacks and outages. Here are the ones ...

+ From prophet to product: How AI came back down to earth in 2025—In a year where lofty promises collided with inconvenient research, wo...

+ Condé Nast user database reportedly breached, Ars unaffected—A serious data breach has occurred, but Ars users have nothing to worr...

+ GPS is vulnerable to jamming—here’s how we might fix it—GPS jamming has gotten cheap and easy, but there are potential solutio...

+ How AI coding agents work—and what to remember if you use them—From compression tricks to multi-agent teamwork, here's what makes the...

+ OpenAI’s new ChatGPT image generator makes faking photos easy—New GPT Image 1.5 allows more detailed conversational image editing, f...

+ Browser extensions with 8 million users collect extended AI conversations—The extensions, available for Chromium browsers, harvest full AI conve...

+ Merriam-Webster’s word of the year delivers a dismissive verdict on junk AI content—Dictionary codifies the term that took hold in 2024 for low-quality AI...

+ Microsoft will finally kill obsolete cipher that has wreaked decades of havoc—The weak RC4 for administrative authentication has been a hacker holy ...

+ Roomba maker iRobot swept into bankruptcy—Shenzhen-based Picea Robotics, its lender and primary supplier, will a...

+ OpenAI built an AI coding agent and uses it to improve the agent itself—"The vast majority of Codex is built by Codex," OpenAI told us about i...

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As of 1/14/26 1:49pm. Last new 1/14/26 11:33am.

+ Texas judge throws out second lawsuit over CrowdStrike outage—A US judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by CrowdStrike shareholders o...

+ Microsoft DCU uses UK courts to hunt down cyber criminals—Microsoft has taken down the RedDVS cyber crime-as-a-service network a...

+ UK government backtracks on plans for mandatory digital ID—The proposed national digital identity app will no longer be compulsor...

+ Microsoft patches 112 CVEs on first Patch Tuesday of 2026—January brings a larger-than-of-late Patch Tuesday update out of Redmo...

+ ‘Dual-channel’ attacks are the new face of BEC in 2026—Business email compromise remains a significant threat as cyber frauds...

+ Cutting through the noise: SaaS accelerators vs. enterprise AI—The Security Think Tank considers what CISOs and buyers need to know t...

+ How one IT chief shifted the needle on a reactive IT strategy—In spite of headlines that suggest every business should be ploughing ...

+ Business leaders see AI risks and fraud outpacing ransomware, says WEF—C-suite executives are more concerned with risks arising from AI vulne...

+ Ofcom begins investigation of explicit image generation on Grok—Elon Musk’s Grok image generator, from parent company X, is being inve...

+ Intersec Dubai highlights why AI has become critical in the race against cyber attackers—Cigna Healthcare’s Jean Wiles warns that healthcare security teams mus...

+ Auditing, classifying and building a data sovereignty strategy—We look at data sovereignty – what it is and how to build a data sover...

+ From promise to proof: making AI security adoption tangible—The Security Think Tank considers what CISOs and buyers need to know t...

+ Computer Misuse Act reform is overdue - not all anniversaries should be celebrated—Let's not have any further anniversaries for the UK's outdated cyber s...

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As of 1/14/26 1:49pm. Last new 1/14/26 1:49pm.

+ FLOSS Weekly Episode 860: Elixir Origin Story—This week Jonathan and Randal chat with Jose Valim about Elixir! What ...

+ Genetic Therapy Aims To Bring Hearing To Those Born Deaf—For those born with certain types of congenital deafness, the cochlear...

+ ESP32-P4 Powers Retro Handheld after a Transplant—The ESP32-P4 is the new hotness on the microcontroller market. With RI...

+ Clone Wars: IBM Edition—If you search the Internet for Clone Wars, youll get a lot of Star War...

+ Pushing China’s EAST Tokamak Past the Greenwald Density Limit—Getting a significant energy return from tokamak-based nuclear fusion ...

+ An Open Source Electromagnetic Resonance Tablet—Drawing tablets have been a favorite computer peripheral of artists si...

+ Atari Brings the Computer Age Home—[The 8-Bit Guy] tells us how 8-bit Atari computers work. The first Ata...

+ When Electricity Doesn’t Take the Shortest Path—Everyone knows that the path of least resistance is the path that will...

+ Old Windsurfers Become New Electric Surfboards—Windsurfing has experienced a major decline in popularity in the last ...

+ Hacking the Krups Cook4Me Smart Cooking Pot for Doom—With more and more kitchen utilities gaining touch screens and capable...

+ Playing Factorio on a Floppy Disk Cluster—While a revolutionary storage system for their time, floppy disks are ...

+ Finding A Way To Produce Powerful Motors Without Rare Earths—The electric vehicle revolution has created market forces to drive all...

+ Great Trains, Not So Great AI Chatbot Security—A joy of covering the world of the European hackerspace community is t...

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As of 1/14/26 1:49pm. Last new 1/14/26 1:18pm.

+ Bari Weiss Is Sad That People Aren’t Enjoying Her Clumsy Destruction Of CBS News—If you missed it, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepob...

+ Daily Deal: The Complete CompTIA And IT Exam Prep Bundle—The Complete CompTIA and IT Exam Prep Bundle has a variety of courses,...

+ Prosecutors Flee DOJ After Being Told To Investigate The Murdered Woman, Not The Murderer—Last week, we wrote about how ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee N...

+ DHS Wants To Harvest Biometric Data From Anyone Helping A Foreigner Stay In This Country Legally—Weve always known the ultimate goal was to subject everyone to biometr...

+ Trump Tries To Disappear Impeachment References At Smithsonian—Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been im...

+ Online Gaming’s Final Boss: The Copyright Bully—Since earliest days of computer games, people have tinkered with the s...

+ Elon Musk Plays Disinfo Telephone: How Oregon’s Mundane Voter Roll Cleanup Is Turned Into False Claim Of ‘Fake Voters’—I made the mistake of opening up X yesterday to look something up, and...

+ Trump’s Loyalist Prosecutors Continue To Get Kicked Off Cases Because They’re Not Legally Appointed—Trumps binge-and-purge approach to handling the DOJ definitely isnt wo...

+ Daily Deal: Headway Premium—Unlock a world of knowledge with a Headway Premium subscription. This ...

+ The EU Fired Their Censor. Ours Kept His Job—The Trump administration has spent months shrieking about EU censorshi...

+ DHS Tells Reporter That Filming ICE Officers ‘Sounds Like Obstruction Of Justice’—ICE activity has increased exponentially since Trumps return to office...

+ A Non-Existent ‘Stranger Things’ Secret Episode Briefly Broke Netflix—The story of Netflix these past several years has been a fairly consis...

+ Kristi Noem: ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Says ICE Can Legally Thwart Congressional Oversight—Whatever the stated reasons for doing this, we all know what this real...

+ I Support The Protests—I support the protests. I want to say this out loud. I support&nb...

+ Following Murder Of Renee Good By ICE Officers, ICE Blocks Congressional Reps From Its Detention Facility—ICE killed a US citizen in broad daylight for the apparent crime of no...

+ Daily Deal: The 2026 Canva Bundle—The 2026 Canva Bundle has six courses to help you learn about graphic ...

+ Tom Homan: If Democrats Don’t Stop Calling Us Murderers, We’re Just Going To Be Forced To Keep Murdering You—The murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross has certa...

+ Microsoft CEO Laments Criticism Of “AI Slop,” Causing The Whole Internet To Double Down On Criticism Of “Microslop”—Weve noted more than a few times how Microsofts use of AI in journalis...

+ Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt—This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with...

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As of 1/14/26 1:49pm. Last new 1/14/26 11:33am.

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As of 1/14/26 1:49pm. Last new 1/3/26 5:01am.

+ Ukraine reports 200,000 soldiers have gone AWOL—Ukraine's chief of defense estimated Wednesday that 200,000 soldiers h...

+ France bans 10 British anti-migrant activists—France announced a ban on 10 British anti-migrant activists who have t...

+ Supreme Court revives Illinois congressman's mail-in ballot challenge—Political candidates have legal standing to sue states that count mail...

+ Venezuela’s 'law of terror' grips streets amid detentions, fear—Venezuelan citizens describe a climate of fear and self-censorship as ...

+ U.S., Britain pulling troops from Qatar—The United States and Britain are pulling troops from the Al-Udeid air...

+ Netflix may switch to a cash offer for Warner Bros.—Netflix is considering raising its offer for Warner Bros. Discovery to...

+ EU-Mercosur trade deal to be signed in Paraguay—Paraguay will host signing of a free trade agreement between the Europ...

+ FBI Washington Post raids home of reporter Hannah Natanson—Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson's home was raided by the FBI ...

+ Uganda imposes Internet blackout ahead of elections—Communications authorities have blocked Internet service throughout th...

+ Lindsey Halligan defends use of U.S. attorney title in court filing—Lindsey Halligan, former attorney for President Donald Trump, is defen...

+ November producer prices up less than expected but up 3% for the year—The producer price index rose by 0.2% in November, slightly less than ...

+ Smithsonian sends cache of files to the White House—The Smithsonian Institute director told staff members via email Tuesda...

+ Kyiv targeted for third time in a week, 6,000 buildings with no power—Mutliple blasts were heard in central Kyiv as Moscow intensified a bid...

+ U.S. shrinking funding to U.N. leaves gaps for humanitarian aid—The United States is cutting its contribution to the U.N. to about $2 ...

+ JD Vance to hold talks with Danish, Greenland foreign ministers—The future of Greenland was due to be discussed at a high level meetin...

+ Trump says he is freezing federal funds to sanctuary jurisdictions—President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he plans to freeze federal fund...

+ Luxury retail conglomerate Saks Global files for bankruptcy protection—Saks Global, the luxury retail parent company of Neiman Marcus, Bergdo...

+ Businessmen with investments in N. Korea urge gov't to lift sanctions on inter-Korean projects—Businesspeople with investments in now-suspended inter-Korean projects...

+ Lee's Japan visit raises prospects for closer economic cooperation, efforts to test remains of Korean forced laborers—President Lee Jae Myung on Wednesday wrapped up his two-day visit to J...

+ Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her bus seat to a White woman, dies—Claudette Colvin, a civil rights activist who was arrested in 1955 for...

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As of 1/14/26 1:49pm. Last new 1/14/26 1:18pm.

+ Save Big on One of Our Favorite Desk Lamps from Lume Cube—Lume Cube has a variety of marked down lighting products to help revam...

+ AI’s Hacking Skills Are Approaching an ‘Inflection Point’—AI models are getting so good at finding vulnerabilities that some exp...

+ Verizon Outage Knocks Out US Mobile Service, Including Some 911 Calls—A major Verizon outage appeared to impact customers across the United ...

+ Trump Doesn’t Need the Proud Boys Anymore—In a world where ICE agents are shooting US citizens on the street, th...

+ Trump Warned of a Tren de Aragua ‘Invasion.’ US Intel Told a Different Story—Hundreds of records obtained by WIRED show thin intelligence on the Ve...

+ In Photos: One Week Since the Shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis—Protests across Minnesota—and around the country—are ongoing, as resid...

+ 15 Best Office Chairs of 2026— I’ve Tested 65 to Pick Them—Sitting at a desk for hours? Upgrade your WFH setup and work in style ...

+ 15 Best Office Chairs of 2026— I’ve Tested Nearly 65 to Pick Them—Sitting at a desk for hours? Upgrade your WFH setup and work in style ...

+ WIRED Tested Dozens of Blenders. These Are Our 8 Favorites (2026)—The perfect kitchen companions, these versatile blenders can whip up b...

+ The Merach Vibration Plate Is the Funniest Workout I've Ever Done—It turns out that this TikTok-viral vibration plate may have some surp...

+ How AI Companies Got Caught Up in US Military Efforts—Two years ago, companies like Meta and OpenAI were united against mili...

+ HHKB Professional Classic Type-S Review: A Brilliant but Niche Keyboard—The keyboard for someone who wishes they could buy a ’97 Tacoma off th...

+ TikTok Shop Showed Me Search Suggestions for Products With Nazi Symbolism—Even after TikTok removed swastika jewelry from its online shop, I was...

+ Best Bone Conduction Headphones (2026): Shokz, Suunto, Mojawa—Everyone needs a safe way to listen to music on outdoor runs. We’ve fo...

+ 7 Best Phones You Can’t Buy in the US (2026), Tested and Reviewed—Wondering what you’re missing out on? Here are our favorite smartphone...

+ $50 Target Promo Code & Coupons | January 2026—Get $50 off your next order or up to 50% off sitewide with Target coup...

+ Lenovo Coupon Codes and Deals: $5,000+ Off—Whether you’re shopping for a ThinkPad, Yoga laptop, or Legion gaming ...

+ Google Workspace Promo Code: Up to 14% Off in 2026—Boost your productivity and save with exclusive Google Workspace coupo...

+ The Fight on Capitol Hill to Make It Easier to Fix Your Car—As vehicles grow more software-dependent, repairing them has become ha...

+ The 51 Best Shows on Hulu, WIRED’s Picks (January 2026)—A Thousand Blows, Tell Me Lies, and Paradise are just a few of the sho...

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As of 1/14/26 1:49pm. Last new 1/14/26 1:18pm.