Health officials in South Carolina are warning that the highly infectious measles virus is spreading undetected in communities in the northern part of the state, specifically Spartanburg and Greenville counties.

Last week, officials in Greenville identified an eighth measles case that is potentially linked to the outbreak. Seven outbreak cases had been confirmed since September 25 in neighboring Spartanburg, where transmission was identified in two schools: Fairforest Elementary and Global Academy, a public charter school.

Across those two schools, at least 153 unvaccinated children were exposed to the virus and have been put in a 21-day quarantine, during which they are barred from attending school, state officials said in a press conference . Twenty-one days is the maximum incubation period, spanning from when a person is exposed to when they would develop a rash if infected.

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Google began experimenting with conversational image editing earlier this year in the dev-focused AI studio, but the feature didn't remain experimental for long. Over the summer, Google rolled out the " Nano Banana " image-editing model in Gemini 2.5 Flash. You can use this feature to modify images with just a prompt, and now you don't even need to go to Gemini to use it. Google says Nano Banana is now coming to search, Google Photos, and NotebookLM.

The AI image editor is coming to search via Lens and AI Mode. For Lens, you can simply open the app (iOS and Android) and snap a photo to get started. When the rollout is complete, you'll see a "Create" button at the bottom, with a banana icon. Tap that to enter a prompt, telling the AI how you'd like the photo changed.

When you begin an edit in Lens, the Google app will display the results and offer the chance for follow-up edits in the AI Mode interface. Google is always looking for more ways to get people plugged into its conversational search bot, so there's also a separate way to access Nano Banana there. Simply select the "Create image" tool and enter your prompt to create an image. You can then continue the conversation to have Nano Banana change the image.

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SpaceX is set to launch the 11th full-scale test flight of the company's Starship rocket Monday evening, with hopes of capping a tumultuous year with a successful one-hour voyage from South Texas to the Indian Ocean.

Liftoff of the Super Heavy booster with the Starship upper stage is scheduled for 6:15 pm CDT (7:15 pm EDT; 23:15 UTC). SpaceX has a 75-minute window to launch Monday. You can watch a livestream of the flight here .

SpaceX's control team, positioned a couple of miles away from the launch pad at Starbase, Texas, will oversee the loading of more than 10.5 million pounds of super-cold methane and liquid oxygen into the two-stage rocket beginning about an hour before liftoff. In the final minutes of the countdown, the world's largest rocket will undergo a steering check, and the launch director will give a final "go" for launch.

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California is cracking down on AI technology deemed too harmful for kids, attacking two increasingly notorious child safety fronts: companion bots and deepfake pornography.

On Monday, Governor Gavin Newsom signed the first-ever US law regulating companion bots after several teen suicides sparked lawsuits.

Moving forward, California will require any companion bot platforms—including ChatGPT, Grok, Character.AI, and the like—to create and make public "protocols to identify and address users’ suicidal ideation or expressions of self-harm."

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Apple has lightly rebranded its video-on-demand streaming service. The Netflix rival that has brought us critically acclaimed shows and movies like Slow Horses and The Lost Bus has gone from Apple TV+ to Apple TV.

Apple announced the name change today in a press release that was primarily about the film F1: The Movie coming to its streaming service on December 12. Unlike previous announcements, however, today’s release referred to the streaming service as Apple TV, instead of Apple TV+. The announcement reads:

Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity.

Apple didn’t specify how its streaming service’s “identity” has changed at all. As of this writing, accessing Apple’s streaming service via a browser or smart TV app still shows the original Apple TV+ branding.

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The encryption protecting communications against criminal and nation-state snooping is under threat. As private industry and governments get closer to building useful quantum computers, the algorithms protecting Bitcoin wallets, encrypted Web visits, and other sensitive secrets will be useless. No one doubts the day will come, but as the now-common joke in cryptography circles observes, experts have been forecasting this cryptocalypse will arrive in the next 15 to 30 years for the past 30 years.

The uncertainty has created something of an existential dilemma: Should network architects spend the billions of dollars required to wean themselves off quantum-vulnerable algorithms now, or should they prioritize their limited security budgets fighting more immediate threats such as ransomware and espionage attacks? Given the expense and no clear deadline, it’s little wonder that less than half of all TLS connections made inside the Cloudflare network and only 18 percent of Fortune 500 networks support quantum-resistant TLS connections. It's all but certain that many fewer organizations still are supporting quantum-ready encryption in less prominent protocols.

Triumph of the cypherpunks

One exception to the industry-wide lethargy is the engineering team that designs the Signal Protocol, the open-source engine that powers the world’s most robust and resilient form of end-to-end encryption for multiple private chat apps, most notably the Signal Messenger . Eleven days ago, the nonprofit entity that develops the protocol, Signal Messenger LLC, published a 5,900-word write-up describing its latest updates that make Signal fully quantum-resistant.

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A battle over the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act (OSA) heated up Monday as UK regulator Ofcom fined the notorious image-hosting board 4chan about $26,000 for failing to provide a risk assessment detailing the potential harms of illegal content hosted on its forum.

In a press release provided to Ars, Ofcom said 4chan refused to respond to two requests for information that the regulator considered "routine." The first asked for the risk assessment and the second for 4chan's "qualifying worldwide revenue."

4chan was anticipating the Monday fine, noting in a lawsuit —which was jointly filed with the online trolling forum Kiwi Farms in August and seeks to permanently enjoin Ofcom from enforcing OSA—that Ofcom had made it clear that because 4chan ignored Ofcom's emails, the fine was coming.

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Hans Koenigsmann is one of SpaceX's earliest, longest-tenured, and most-revered employees.

When Elon Musk started the company in 2002, he was joined by two other "founding" employees, Tom Mueller in propulsion and Chris Thompson in structures. Koenigsmann was the next hire, brought on to develop avionics for the Falcon 1 rocket.

Koenigsmann remained at the company for two decades before leaving SpaceX in late 2021. During that time, he transitioned from avionics to lead mission assurance and safety while also spearheading every major failure investigation of the Falcon 9 rocket. He was a beloved leader and mentor for his employees within the company's demanding culture.

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Federal health agencies are reeling from mass layoffs on Friday that appear to have particularly devastated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite some terminations being rescinded on Saturday.

Numbers are still sketchy, but reports from Friday indicate that more than 4,000 federal workers overall were initially targeted for layoffs. The Trump administration linked the firings to the ongoing government shutdown, which legal experts have suggested is illegal. Unions representing federal workers have already filed a lawsuit challenging the move.

Of the reported 4,000 terminations, about 1,100 to 1,200 were among employees in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS is a massive department that houses critical federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, among others. Before Trump's second term, the HHS workforce was about 82,000, but that was slashed to about 62,000 earlier this year amid initial cuts and efforts to push civil servants out.

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