Blog

GAME OVER FOR YOUR INBOX? Capcom, the Japanese publisher behind Resident Evil, Monster Hunter and Street Fighter, says an outsider broke into its CAPCOM ID account system and got at 11,774,247 records worldwide, according to the company’s Oct. 22 notice.

What leaked: email addresses plus account details like when the account was created, the last login time, number of logins, and the IP address used at last login. A tiny slice, 43 records, also included date of birth, gender, country and nickname.

The scary part: someone changed the passwords on 196 accounts without permission. Capcom says it has reset those, hasn’t confirmed that any passwords customers set themselves were stolen, and says credit card info was not included. Games and services are still running, and Capcom plans to notify affected customers.

Why you should care even if you never touch Resident Evil: CAPCOM ID can be linked to your PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, Epic and Nintendo accounts, and Malwarebytes warns the leaked details could make fake “Capcom” emails much more convincing. Note the 11.7 million figure counts records, so it may not be that many individual people.

What to do: don’t click links in any “your account needs attention” email. Go to cid.capcom.com yourself, turn on CAPCOM ID’s two-factor authentication (Capcom recommends Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator), and check your linked platform accounts, especially if you got a password-change notice you didn’t ask for.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: Capcom, Malwarebytes

SCAMMERS, MEET THE BOUNCER! Google Messages for Android is rolling out a new Enhanced Protection mode against spam and scam texts, 9to5Google reported Friday, after Google announced it on its official blog earlier this month.

It’s opt-in. To turn it on, go to Google Messages settings > Protection & safety. Instead of an on/off toggle you get three choices: Enhanced protection, Standard protection, and “No protection (not recommended).” 9to5Google spotted it in the latest beta.

What you get: Scam Detection that taps Google’s cloud Gemini models to read the context of a conversation with an unknown sender and spot slow-burn scams faster than the on-device filter. Google says that analysis runs in its Private AI Compute system, where messages are encrypted and “private to you and inaccessible to anyone else, including Google.”

It also adds smarter link checks: on-device Gemini Nano plus real-time web signals judge whether a brand-new, uncatalogued link is trustworthy before you tap. That piece is limited to the Pixel 10 and up, Samsung’s Galaxy S26 series, Z Flip 8, Z Fold 8 and “other select devices.” And there are redesigned warnings that make you pause before tapping links from numbers not in your contacts.

Google says its scam detection already flags more than 5 million suspected scam calls and texts a month. Also coming, per Google: screen-share privacy that blanks out login and payment fields in Chrome during live screen shares (rolling out this month on Android 15+), and protection against scammers secretly turning on call forwarding to steal your one-time codes, starting early December on Pixel and select devices.

Bottom line for normals: privacy-wise, you’re choosing to let a cloud model look at texts from strangers in exchange for better scam catching. For most people getting fake bank and delivery texts, that’s a trade worth making.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: 9to5Google, Google blog

LOCK IT UP! OpenAI started rolling out locked chats in ChatGPT on Tuesday, letting you pull sensitive conversations out of your regular history, pinned chats and search, and stash them behind a four-digit PIN, Fortune reported. On supported phones you can open them with Face ID, Touch ID or your phone’s unlock instead.

Locked conversations move to Projects > Locked chats. OpenAI pitches it for the moment someone is looking at your screen share or borrowing your device.

THE CATCH: forget the PIN and reset it, and you permanently delete every locked chat, plus any memories stored only inside them and files protected only by the old PIN. OpenAI says the deletion can’t be undone and its support team can’t recover anything. Workspace admins can’t reset your PIN either. Changing a PIN you still remember deletes nothing.

And read the fine print: locking a chat changes where it shows up, not how OpenAI handles it. It is not end-to-end encryption, it doesn’t change how long OpenAI keeps the chat or your “Improve the model for everyone” setting, and it doesn’t erase what ChatGPT already remembered. In Enterprise and Edu workspaces, locked chats still show up in compliance logs. If you want a chat kept out of history and memory, Temporary Chat is the tool for that.

Two more gotchas: locking a chat doesn’t kill an existing shared link, so delete that separately. And temporary, archived, group and shared-link chats can’t be locked at all. The feature is rolling out gradually to Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu plans.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Source: Fortune

FORGET SLITHERING! Tiny, secretive dwarf reed snakes in Southeast Asia escape danger by arching their bodies and tumbling away like a wheel, and scientists have now clocked them at up to 12.1 feet per second (3.69 meters per second), Live Science reported.

The new study, published Monday, Oct. 19, in the journal Current Biology, filmed three species of the genus Pseudorabdion from multiple angles between 2019 and 2022, mostly in the Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo. On average, the snakes’ peak speed while rolling was four times their normal slithering speed. “Rolling allows them to escape from danger very quickly,” said first author Yosuke Kojima, a biology lecturer at Toho University in Japan.

The trick: rolling usually scrambles an animal’s head and senses, which is why so few creatures do it. These snakes keep their heads relatively fixed, facing forward and often lifted off the ground, while the back of the body spins, according to the study and a Toho University summary on ScienceDaily. They can even roll in a fairly straight line along a racetrack just 8 inches wide, and often finish by diving under a nearby object.

Three related reed snakes from another genus, Calamaria, didn’t do it at all. “Behavioral innovation can give rise to surprising new abilities that we would not expect from an animal’s appearance alone,” Kojima said.

Why bother? Researchers have speculated the move confuses predators, and earlier work suggested a rolling snake leaves a patchy scent trail that could throw off scent-hunting king cobras. Spiders and caterpillars can tumble too, but these snakes appear to be the ones that actually steer.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: Live Science, ScienceDaily (Toho University)

THE BEAST IS RELOADING! Deep beneath Japan’s mostly underwater Kikai caldera, a massive magma reservoir is filling back up, roughly 7,300 years after it produced the largest known volcanic eruption of the Holocene, the geological epoch we’re still living in, according to a Kobe University study reported by ScienceDaily.

How they found it: researchers from Kobe University and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) fired airgun arrays to send seismic pulses through the crust and listened with ocean-bottom seismometers. Waves travel differently through solid rock than through molten material, and the data showed a big region with a high proportion of magma sitting right under the site of the ancient eruption.

“Due to its extent and location it is clear that this is in fact the same magma reservoir as in the previous eruption,” said Kobe University geophysicist Nobukazu Seama.

Here’s the twist: it isn’t just leftovers. A new lava dome has been growing in the middle of the caldera for about 3,900 years, and its rock has a different chemical makeup from the giant eruption’s. That points to freshly injected magma from deeper in the crust or mantle. “This means that the magma that is now present in the magma reservoir under the lava dome is likely newly injected magma,” Seama said.

Before anyone panics: the researchers say this does not mean another catastrophic eruption is imminent. It shows how a reservoir can recharge over thousands of years, which scientists need to understand before they can judge where supervolcanoes are headed. Seama says the same re-injection model fits the big shallow magma reservoirs under Yellowstone and Indonesia’s Toba. The goal, he said, is “to become better able to monitor the crucial indicators of future giant eruptions.”

The study was published in Communications Earth & Environment.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: ScienceDaily (Kobe University), Communications Earth & Environment

GRAB IT AND RUN! A spacecraft has launched from Japan headed for Phobos, the bigger of Mars’s two moons, where it will try to scoop up some moon dust and fly it back to Earth, the BBC reported. If it works, it’ll be the first time ever a sample from Mars or its moons is analysed in labs here on Earth.

The mission is called Mars Moons Exploration (MMX) and it’s led by Japan’s space agency, JAXA. It’s due at Phobos in August 2027. It’ll study the smaller moon, Deimos, on the way in, then drop a small rover onto Phobos to scout a landing spot before the main spacecraft touches down itself, deploys a robotic arm and two samplers, and packs the dust into a capsule.

That capsule is due to land in the Woomera desert of South Australia in 2031. The haul is tiny, just 10 grams. “You don’t need to have kilos back from a surface in order to do science. So it’s worth every gram,” said Dr Chrysa Avdellidou of Leicester University, who is working with the mission.

Landing won’t be easy. Phobos is only about 20km (12 miles) across, shaped like a space potato, and has barely any gravity of its own while sitting right next to a much bigger planet. “There hasn’t yet been a successful mission to go to Phobos and bring a bit back to Earth,” said Prof Sara Russell of the Natural History Museum, the mission’s deputy for sample analysis.

The big question it could settle: were Mars’s moons blasted out of the planet by a giant impact, or are they wandering asteroids Mars captured? Russell says the chemistry should make the answer “pretty much immediately obvious.” And because Phobos orbits so close, the sample may even contain grains of Mars itself.

Why it matters: NASA and ESA’s own Mars Sample Return mission has been effectively cancelled after US Congress halted its funding, and China plans its own Mars sample mission in 2028, also aiming for a 2031 return. Live Science called MMX the world’s first round-trip mission to the Mars system.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News, Live Science

SIT DOWN? PAY UP! A new Starbucks China policy took effect across all 8,000 of its stores on Thursday: if you want a seat, you have to buy something, the BBC reported.

The company says it’s about improving the “in-store experience.” Translation: it’s fighting for its life against cheaper homegrown chains like Luckin Coffee, which overtook Starbucks as China’s biggest coffee chain in 2023 with an app-first, grab-and-go model.

Chinese social media mostly said: about time. “Finally, there won’t be peak periods where people are just sitting there not ordering anything, drinking Luckin coffee, playing games and yelling on the phone,” read one top-liked Weibo comment.

The seat wars have been brewing. Last month a Starbucks in Sichuan province sparked debate when video showed its outdoor tables and chairs chained up. In South Korea, Starbucks told customers to stop bringing “bulky items” after patrons reportedly hogged seats with printers and desktop computers. In North America, it already scrapped its open-door policy to “prioritise” paying customers.

China is Starbucks’ second-largest market, but the company said last year it would sell a 60% stake in its China business in a $4bn deal with investment firm Boyu Capital. Starbucks China says it will also add staff and upgrade digital systems so customers get “timely and warm service even during peak hours.”

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News

THE SKINNY JAB HAS COME FOR THE MAKEUP COUNTER! Beauty giant L’Oréal says the boom in weight-loss drugs is affecting beauty and skincare sales, the BBC reported.

Boss Nicolas Hieronimus told investors the use of GLP-1 drugs is “a very important phenomenon for us” and is “having an impact on beauty consumption and skin care consumption in particular.” Those are the diabetes drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro that took off once people found they suppress appetite and drive serious weight loss.

Here’s the angle: rapid weight loss can, for some people, leave loose skin, including around the face. It isn’t caused by the drugs directly, but L’Oréal is happy to help anyway. Hieronimus said its SkinCeuticals and Kiehl’s brands have products “designed to work alongside and complement GLP-1 and its side-effects on skin sagging.”

And it’s going deeper. L’Oréal raised its stake in dermatology firm Galderma, maker of the injectables Sculptra and Restylane, to 20% last December, and Reuters reports both companies have been testing products on GLP-1 users worried about loose skin.

The money looks fine, for now: L’Oréal, which also owns Maybelline and La Roche-Posay, said sales in the three months to September rose 7.7%, beating analyst expectations.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News

THE FIRST LADY JUST WALKED ONTO THE FRONT LINE! The White House says Melania Trump has “successfully secured” a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, the BBC reported.

The White House called it a “front-line war city on the brink of disaster,” without medicine, food or clean water, and said the truce would begin on 29 October. Ukraine and Russia both confirmed the deal to evacuate residents and deliver aid, and both said their forces would stop firing at 02:00 GMT on 27 October.

How bad is it? Oleshky was seized in the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and sits trapped between Ukrainian positions across the Dnipro River and Russian forces to the east. Residents have resorted to eating garden weeds. The city has had no gas or electricity since 2023, and residents told the BBC only one hospital was partly working, a few days a week, to perform critical amputations. Ukraine estimates about 6,000 people remain in and around the city, including 200 children, down from 24,000 before the invasion.

The White House says the first lady and a representative worked “directly with Russian and Ukrainian leadership” on the terms. “Residents who wish to evacuate will receive co-ordinated support and transportation to their preferred destination. I anticipate some will want to go to Russia, and some to Ukraine,” she said, adding that without her intervention, bringing in aid and evacuating the elderly “would be impossible.”

Kyiv’s Davyd Arakhamia said an operation to unblock Oleshky will begin “in the near future,” and the Kremlin’s spokesman confirmed “those who wish to do so will be able to leave.” The catch: the statement didn’t say how long the ceasefire will last.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News

THE GRANNIES HAVE TAKEN OVER! Lillian Droniak, 96, known online as Grandma Droniak, has 15 million followers and earns enough from social media to cover her nursing home fees of $12,000 a month, the BBC reported.

She went viral in June after claiming her retirement home threatened to evict her for throwing parties. The home later confirmed it, then settled: she can keep partying, just not supply alcoholic drinks. “I always knew I had it in me to be famous, I just didn’t think it would happen in my 90s,” she said. Her grandson started helping her post in 2020, and the brand money also feeds a college fund for her great-grandchildren.

She’s not alone. Viv Truran, 82, from Cardiff, shows off her outfits, 22 pairs of glasses and two drawers of scarves to more than 800,000 followers, posting two videos a day and tracking her numbers in a notebook that’s now on book five. Grace Geramita, 85, aka Nonna Gracie, cooks for millions and now earns more than she did in any previous job. And 77-year-old former teacher Barbara Costello of Brunch with Babs says followers call her “the mom I never had”.

Why brands love them: older creators have “deeply established, highly loyal” communities with more purchasing power, which “carries a massive premium,” said Naomi Baker of agency We Are Social. Droniak’s own pitch is simpler: “They think old people just sit and stare at a wall but I’m showing it’s not that bad to get old.”

The only crowd not impressed? Her fellow residents. “They don’t get it as they don’t go on TikTok.”

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News