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After clamping down on AI video game clones amid the bigger influx of reverse-engineered games, the company is adjusting its approach to try and discourage straight-up copies:

LA recently decided to move forward with installing hundreds of Axon’s ALPRs after it cut ties with the scandal-plagued Flock. Now Axon is facing a class action suit, suggesting people’s problem is less with Flock specifically and more with the AI-powered surveillance state in general. According to Reuters:

As part of changes going into effect on December 5th, Fortnite Crew will give subscribers 1,000 V-Bucks per month instead of 800. If you continuously subscribe for long enough, you’ll get even more monthly V-Bucks. The price for Crew will remain $11.99 per month.

AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:

Xiaomi posted a time-lapse video on X of two of its humanoid robots working a full shift at a sorting station in an auto factory. Not sure why, but something about losing a job to a humanoid robot seems much more dystopian than losing it to a giant industrial machine.

Benly Watch’s Desktop 95 pays homage to Windows 95 with a watch face featuring various windows, icons, and a bright turquoise background — unless you prefer a more subdued beige alternative. The $159 watch also uses a mouse pointer and hand cursor for its hour and minute hands. You can get it with various strap designs, but it’s only available as a limited run of just 500 pieces.

OpenAI has already integrated tools from Pierre — the startup behind the AI-focused repository Code Storage — into its AI coding platform, Codex. The acquisition will help Codex “connect the code a company ships with the decisions its people make,” OpenAI says.

Reuters reports Google employees in Canada, France, Germany, Japan ​and Switzerland started getting buyout offers in June. A Google spokesperson told Reuters it “expanded” the voluntary exit program it offered employees in the US last year, which didn’t include Google Cloud or DeepMind employees.

Cold storage rooms at three French Blood Establishment (EFS) sites were impacted on Monday, which massively increased the temperature and defrosting thresholds. The EFS says it wasn’t directly targeted, and the anomalies were detected before any of the stored blood was lost, but the ongoing hacks present a worrying future risk for healthcare facilities.

Grocery stores and food suppliers in Germany, Italy, Romania, and the United Kingdom are now confirmed to be among the victims of suspected cyberattacks that are tampering with the temperatures of refrigeration units across Europe. Companies in at least 11 countries have now been impacted, but the culprits and motive remain unclear.

Selfie Sing in the iOS 27.3 beta lets iPhone users record a video while singing, complete with on-screen lyrics, via a new “Start Singing” switch. According to MacRumors analyst Aaron Perris, you can then adjust the vocals before sending the clip to your friends. What did they do to deserve that?

The longtime senator counted tech executives like Palantir CEO Alex Karp and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz among her donors. Democratic challenger Troy Jackson also received some billionaire support, but no obvious tech ties. Maine almost became the first state to pause data centers, before the governor vetoed the moratorium.

NBC News projects Democrat Sherrod Brown will win back his former Senate seat from Republican Jon Husted, who Brown had labeled “the face of data centers.” The National Republican Senatorial Committee warned in a leaked August memo that if Husted loses “and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one.”

Both Democrats James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa are projected by NBC News to win their Senate and gubernatorial races, respectively. Hinojosa has called for a moratorium on data center development in the state, while Talarico has favored ending tax incentives and creating an “AI dividend” for Americans to share in profits.

Democratic candidates touted their credentials taking on the tech industry far more than in prior election cycles, an analysis by public policy group Reset Tech finds. Between 2020 and 2024, only two Democratic ads used the phrase “Big Tech.” From 2025 to 2026, that number was 154.

A county election official asked the election board for approval to rescan ballots from two scanners experiencing equipment issues. One scanner seemed to wrongly display that it had a paper jam, CBS News reports, while another displayed an error after a voter accidentally rolled over its cable with a wheelchair.

The nonpartisan Election Protection Coalition says it’s received over 8,000 hotline calls today, but the reported concerns are fairly standard for large elections. Rev. Dr. Katie Sexton Wood, executive director of the Arizona Faith Network, says there’s been no verified reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) near Arizona polling spots.

Ubisoft and “at least two other gaming companies” have made bids for Arkane, which Xbox is working to divest as part of its “reset,” Bloomberg reports. Xbox has “also weighed selling the studio to its management.”

After receiving clearance from the FDA in July, Samsung announced that its more advanced sleep apnea detection feature is now rolling out to its smart ring. The upgraded feature uses an “enhanced algorithm” to analyze vitals during sleep, and was previously only available on the Galaxy Watch 9.

State officials got reports that DOJ monitors asked poll workers in Dearborn for their training materials, Michigan Attorney General office spokesperson Danny Wimmer confirms. The DOJ’s team overseeing Michigan monitors told state officials such actions were not part of their training, Wimmer says, and that the team would follow up.

Ahead of the game’s release on Wednesday, 404 Media reports the influx of vibe-coded AI slop add-ons pushed one developer to make their Github repositories private after finding AI ripoffs of their code. The CEO of the popular Warcraft Logs site also said it’s struggling to keep up with surging requests to use its API.