Roman telescope powers up as hackers steal 153 million licenses

A good night for space

Start with the genuinely good news. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched from Cape Canaveral and did everything right on the way up. It unfolded its solar array, switched on its communications, and powered up its Coronagraph Instrument, the bit of kit designed to block out starlight so it can spot planets directly.

Meanwhile, back on the ground, NASA keeps adding names to its space diplomacy list. Djibouti is set to sign the Artemis Accords at NASA Headquarters in Washington on September 14, becoming the 72nd country to join the agreement on how nations behave in space.

AI moves onto your desktop

Google has released a proper desktop app for its Gemini assistant on Windows, worldwide. Until now Gemini mostly lived in the browser, so this is Google planting a flag on the desktop, where Microsoft's Copilot and ChatGPT already have apps.

Hugging Face, the Paris-based hub for machine learning models, launched something called ML Intern. It's an AI agent built into HuggingChat that can train and publish models from plain instructions. And in the wider AI world, Nvidia's boss Jensen Huang says cybersecurity will be the next big market for AI. Worth noting: someone also figured out how to get Nvidia's DLSS Frame Generation running on older RTX 20-series cards, bypassing the company's own hardware lock.

There's a darker side to all this, and Anthropic put it in writing. The company published case studies showing how people have misused its Claude models, including attempts at biological weapon research. Rare candour from an AI lab about what goes wrong.

A breach that sat for a year

The ugly story of the night: hackers stole more than 153 million driver's license documents from IDScan, a company in Denver. Worse, the attackers apparently hoarded the documents for about a year before the breach was closed. If you've ever scanned your license at a bar or venue, this is the kind of company holding that data.

A couple of smaller items to round things out. Apple is now accepting App Store submissions built for iOS 27 and macOS 27 ahead of their official release, the usual sign the new software is close. And Furo, an energy startup founded by three 28-year-olds who left Silicon Valley for Germany, raised four million dollars, mostly from American backers.