Microsoft pro­vided the FBI with the re­cov­ery keys to un­lock en­crypted data on the hard dri­ves of three lap­tops as part of a fed­eral in­ves­ti­ga­tion, Forbes re­ported on Friday.

Many mod­ern Windows com­put­ers rely on full-disk en­cryp­tion, called BitLocker, which is en­abled by de­fault. This type of tech­nol­ogy should pre­vent any­one ex­cept the de­vice owner from ac­cess­ing the data if the com­puter is locked and pow­ered off.

But, by de­fault, BitLocker re­cov­ery keys are up­loaded to Microsoft’s cloud, al­low­ing the tech gi­ant — and by ex­ten­sion law en­force­ment — to ac­cess them and use them to de­crypt dri­ves en­crypted with BitLocker, as with the case re­ported by Forbes.

The case in­volved sev­eral peo­ple sus­pected of fraud re­lated to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance pro­gram in Guam, a U. S. is­land in the Pacific. Local news out­let Pacific Daily News cov­ered the case last year, re­port­ing that a war­rant had been served to Microsoft in re­la­tion to the sus­pects’ hard dri­ves. Kandit News, an­other lo­cal Guam news out­let, also re­ported in October that the FBI re­quested the war­rant six months af­ter seiz­ing the three lap­tops en­crypted with BitLocker.

A spokesper­son for Microsoft did not im­me­di­ately re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment by TechCrunch. Microsoft told Forbes that the com­pany some­times pro­vides BitLocker re­cov­ery keys to au­thor­i­ties, hav­ing re­ceived an av­er­age of 20 such re­quests per year.

Apart from the pri­vacy risks of hand­ing re­cov­ery keys to a com­pany, Johns Hopkins pro­fes­sor and cryp­tog­ra­phy ex­pert Matthew Green raised the po­ten­tial sce­nario where ma­li­cious hack­ers com­pro­mise Microsoft’s cloud in­fra­struc­ture — some­thing that has hap­pened sev­eral times in re­cent years — and get ac­cess to these re­cov­ery keys. The hack­ers would still need phys­i­cal ac­cess to the hard dri­ves to use the stolen re­cov­ery keys.

“It’s 2026 and these con­cerns have been known for years,” Green wrote in a post on Bluesky. “Microsoft’s in­abil­ity to se­cure crit­i­cal cus­tomer keys is start­ing to make it an out­lier from the rest of the in­dus­try.”

Why else would they keep them around for so long?

Why else would they keep them around for so long?

Every bug is dif­fer­ent. But the math is al­ways real.

Think our num­bers are wrong? Edit them your­self.

Users Affected × Frequency × Time Per Incident

How many Apple users hit this bug, how of­ten, and how long they suf­fer each time.

Σ (Workaround Time × Participation Rate)

The ex­tra time spent by peo­ple who try to fix what Apple won’t.

Years Unfixed × Pressure Factor

How long Apple has known about this and how ur­gent the task usu­ally is.

Human Hours Wasted ÷ Engineering Hours to Fix

How many times over Apple could have fixed it with the pro­duc­tiv­ity they’ve de­stroyed.

On January 14, 2006, John Resig in­tro­duced a JavaScript li­brary called jQuery at BarCamp in New York City. Now, 20 years later, the jQuery team is happy to an­nounce the fi­nal re­lease of jQuery 4.0.0. After a long de­vel­op­ment cy­cle and sev­eral pre-re­leases, jQuery 4.0.0 brings many im­prove­ments and mod­ern­iza­tions. It is the first ma­jor ver­sion re­lease in al­most 10 years and in­cludes some break­ing changes, so be sure to read through the de­tails be­low be­fore up­grad­ing. Still, we ex­pect that most users will be able to up­grade with min­i­mal changes to their code.

Many of the break­ing changes are ones the team has wanted to make for years, but could­n’t in a patch or mi­nor re­lease. We’ve trimmed legacy code, re­moved some pre­vi­ously-dep­re­cated APIs, re­moved some in­ter­nal-only pa­ra­me­ters to pub­lic func­tions that were never doc­u­mented, and dropped sup­port for some “magic” be­hav­iors that were overly com­pli­cated.

We have an up­grade guide and jQuery Migrate plu­gin re­lease ready to as­sist with the tran­si­tion. Please up­grade and let us know if you en­counter any is­sues.

As usual, the re­lease is avail­able on our CDN and the npm pack­age man­ager. Other third party CDNs will prob­a­bly have it avail­able soon as well, but re­mem­ber that we don’t con­trol their re­lease sched­ules and they will need some time. Here are the high­lights for jQuery 4.0.0.

jQuery 4.0 drops sup­port for IE 10 and older. Some may be ask­ing why we did­n’t re­move sup­port for IE 11. We plan to re­move sup­port in stages, and the next step will be re­leased in jQuery 5.0. For now, we’ll start by re­mov­ing code specif­i­cally sup­port­ing IE ver­sions older than 11.

We also dropped sup­port for other very old browsers, in­clud­ing Edge Legacy, iOS ver­sions ear­lier than the last 3, Firefox ver­sions ear­lier than the last 2 (aside from Firefox ESR), and Android Browser. No changes should be re­quired on your end. If you need to sup­port any of these browsers, stick with jQuery 3.x.

jQuery 4.0 adds sup­port for Trusted Types, en­sur­ing that HTML wrapped in TrustedHTML can be used as in­put to jQuery ma­nip­u­la­tion meth­ods in a way that does­n’t vi­o­late the re­quire-trusted-types-for Content Security Policy di­rec­tive.

Along with this, while some AJAX re­quests were al­ready us­ing tags to main­tain at­trib­utes such as cross­do­main, we have since switched most asyn­chro­nous script re­quests to use <script> tags to avoid any CSP er­rors caused by us­ing in­line scripts. There are still a few cases where XHR is used for asyn­chro­nous script re­quests, such as when the”head­ers” op­tion is passed (use scrip­tAt­trs in­stead!), but we now use a tag when­ever pos­si­ble.

It was a spe­cial day when the jQuery source on the main branch was mi­grated from AMD to ES mod­ules. The jQuery source has al­ways been pub­lished with jQuery re­leases on npm and GitHub, but could not be im­ported di­rectly as mod­ules with­out RequireJS, which was jQuery’s build tool of choice. We have since switched to Rollup for pack­ag­ing jQuery and we do run all tests on the ES mod­ules sep­a­rately. This makes jQuery com­pat­i­ble with mod­ern build tools, de­vel­op­ment work­flows, and browsers through the use of .

To use the Mastodon web ap­pli­ca­tion, please en­able JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the na­tive apps for Mastodon for your plat­form.

• The 2025 US tar­iffs are an own goal: American im­porters and con­sumers bear nearly the en­tire cost. Foreign ex­porters ab­sorb only about 4% of the tar­iff bur­den—the re­main­ing 96% is passed through to US buy­ers.

• Using ship­ment-level data cov­er­ing over 25 mil­lion trans­ac­tions val­ued at nearly $4 tril­lion, we find near-com­plete pass-through of tar­iffs to US im­port prices.

• US cus­toms rev­enue surged by ap­prox­i­mately $200 bil­lion in 2025—a tax paid al­most en­tirely by Americans.

• Event stud­ies around dis­crete tar­iff shocks on Brazil (50%) and India (25–50%) con­firm: ex­port prices did not de­cline. Trade vol­umes col­lapsed in­stead.

• Indian ex­port cus­toms data val­i­dates our find­ings: when fac­ing US tar­iffs, Indian ex­porters main­tained their prices and re­duced ship­ments. They did not “eat” the tar­iff.

We are al­ready work­ing with Brussels. This can be­come re­al­ity. But we need your help!Read the in-de­tail pro­posal, made in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the best startup le­gal teams, funds and founders in Europe.

Europe has the tal­ent, am­bi­tion, and ecosys­tems to cre­ate in­no­v­a­tive com­pa­nies, but frag­men­ta­tion be­tween European na­tions is hold­ing us back.“A startup from California can ex­pand and raise money all across the United States. But our com­pa­nies still face way too many na­tional bar­ri­ers that make it hard to work Europa-wide, and way too much reg­u­la­tory bur­den.”

Yes! But we need your help!So far, we sub­mit­ted our pro­posal to Justice Commissioner McGrath and Startup Commissioner Zaharieva. President Von der Leyen has setup a ded­i­cated work­ing group in the Commission with whom we are in reg­u­lar con­tact.Ad­di­tion­ally, the European Council and Parliament have each sig­naled in­ter­est in the EU–INC, or what in Brussel is called the “28th regime” (for 28th vir­tual state).

The en­tire com­mu­nity is cur­rently in­flu­enc­ing the up­com­ing European Commission leg­isla­tive pro­posal for a pan-Eu­ro­pean le­gal en­tity which is set to be re­leased in Q1 2026. We need your help, see be­low!Af­ter­wards, the European Parliament and the European Council (made up of the 27 na­tional gov­ern­ments) agree on the leg­isla­tive de­tails. The fi­nal im­ple­men­ta­tion of the EU–INC would then hap­pen in 2027. For more de­tails of what hap­pened so far and what comes next, read our roadmap.

In Europe, laws are still de­cided on na­tional level, mean­ing we need to con­vince all 27 EU mem­ber state gov­ern­ments to back the EU–INC. Thus we need YOU to ac­ti­vate your con­tacts, talk to your na­tional politi­cians about the ur­gency of the EU–INC, talk to the press about how cru­cial the EU–INC is for European star­tups.Na­tional gov­ern­ments need to un­der­stand the ne­ces­sity of EU–INC for the fu­ture of Europe. Read more in FAQ.

Believe it or not, A$AP Rocky is a huge fan of ra­di­ance fields.

Yesterday, when A$AP Rocky re­leased the mu­sic video for Helicopter, many view­ers fo­cused on the chaos, the mo­tion, and the un­mis­tak­able early MTV en­ergy of the piece. What’s eas­ier to miss, un­less you know what you’re look­ing at, is that nearly every hu­man per­for­mance in the video was cap­tured vol­u­met­ri­cally and ren­dered as dy­namic splats.

I spoke with Evercoast, the team re­spon­si­ble for cap­tur­ing the per­for­mances, as well as Chris Rutledge, the pro­jec­t’s CG Supervisor at Grin Machine, and Wilfred Driscoll of WildCapture and Fitsū.ai, to un­der­stand how Helicopter came to­gether and why this pro­ject rep­re­sents one of the most am­bi­tious real world de­ploy­ments of dy­namic gauss­ian splat­ting in a ma­jor mu­sic re­lease to date.

The de­ci­sion to shoot Helicopter vol­u­met­ri­cally was­n’t dri­ven by tech­nol­ogy for tech­nol­o­gy’s sake. According to the team, the di­rec­tor Dan Strait ap­proached the pro­ject in July with a clear cre­ative goal to cap­ture hu­man per­for­mance in a way that would al­low rad­i­cal free­dom in post-pro­duc­tion. This would have been ei­ther im­prac­ti­cal or pro­hib­i­tively ex­pen­sive us­ing con­ven­tional film­ing and VFX pipelines.

Chris told me he’d been track­ing vol­u­met­ric per­for­mance cap­ture for years, fas­ci­nated by emerg­ing tech­niques that could en­able vi­su­als that sim­ply weren’t pos­si­ble be­fore. Two years ago, he be­gan pitch­ing the idea to di­rec­tors in his cir­cle, in­clud­ing Dan, as a “someday” work­flow. When Dan came back this sum­mer and said he wanted to use vol­u­met­ric cap­ture for the en­tire video, the pro­lif­er­a­tion of gauss­ian splat­ting en­abled them to take it on.

The aes­thetic leans heav­ily into ki­netic mo­tion. Dancers col­lid­ing, bod­ies sus­pended in midair, chaotic fight scenes, and per­form­ers in­ter­act­ing with props that later dis­solve into some­thing else en­tirely. Every punch, slam, pull-up, and fall you see was phys­i­cally per­formed and cap­tured in 3D.

Almost every hu­man fig­ure in the video, in­clud­ing Rocky him­self, was recorded vol­u­met­ri­cally us­ing Evercoast’s sys­tem. It’s all real per­for­mance, pre­served spa­tially.

This is not the first time that A$AP Rocky has fea­tured a ra­di­ance field in one of his mu­sic videos. The 2023 mu­sic video for Shittin’ Me fea­tured sev­eral NeRFs and even the GUI for Instant-NGP, which you can spot through­out the piece.

The pri­mary shoot for Helicopter took place in August in Los Angeles. Evercoast de­ployed a 56 cam­era RGB-D ar­ray, syn­chro­nized across two Dell work­sta­tions. Performers were sus­pended from wires, hang­ing up­side down, do­ing pull-ups on ceil­ing-mounted bars, swing­ing props, and per­form­ing stunts, all in­side the cap­ture vol­ume.

Scenes that ap­pear sur­real in the fi­nal video were, in re­al­ity, grounded in very phys­i­cal se­tups, such as wooden planks stand­ing in for he­li­copter blades, real wire rigs, and real props. The vol­u­met­ric data al­lowed those el­e­ments to be re­moved, re­com­posed, or en­tirely re­con­tex­tu­al­ized later with­out los­ing the au­then­tic­ity of the hu­man mo­tion.

Over the course of the shoot, Evercoast recorded more than 10 ter­abytes of raw data, ul­ti­mately ren­der­ing roughly 30 min­utes of fi­nal splat­ted footage, ex­ported as PLY se­quences to­tal­ing around one ter­abyte.

That data was then brought into Houdini, where the post pro­duc­tion team used CG Nomads GSOPs for ma­nip­u­la­tion and se­quenc­ing, and OTOY’s OctaneRender for fi­nal ren­der­ing. Thanks to this com­bi­na­tion, the pro­duc­tion team was also able to re­light the splats.

One of the more pow­er­ful as­pects of the work­flow was Evercoast’s abil­ity to pre­view vol­u­met­ric cap­tures at mul­ti­ple stages. The di­rec­tor could see live spa­tial feed­back on set, gen­er­ate quick mesh based pre­views sec­onds af­ter a take, and later re­view fully ren­dered splats through Evercoast’s web player be­fore down­load­ing mas­sive PLY se­quences for Houdini.

In prac­tice, this meant cre­ative de­ci­sions could be made rapidly and cheaply, with­out com­mit­ting to heavy down­stream pro­cess­ing un­til the team knew ex­actly what they wanted. It’s a work­flow that more closely re­sem­bles sim­u­la­tion than tra­di­tional film­ing.

Chris also dis­cov­ered that Octane’s Houdini in­te­gra­tion had ma­tured, and that Octane’s early splat sup­port was far enough along to en­able re­light­ing. According to the team, the abil­ity to re­light splats, in­tro­duce shad­ow­ing, and achieve a more di­men­sional “3D video” look was a ma­jor rea­son the fi­nal aes­thetic lands the way it does.

The team also used Blender heav­ily for lay­out and pre­vis, con­vert­ing splat se­quences into light­weight proxy caches for scene plan­ning. Wilfred de­scribed how WildCapture’s in­ter­nal tool­ing was used se­lec­tively to in­tro­duce tem­po­ral con­sis­tency. In his words, the team de­rived prim­i­tive pose es­ti­ma­tion skele­tons that could be used to trans­fer mo­tion, sup­port col­li­sion se­tups, and al­low Houdini’s sim­u­la­tion toolset to han­dle rigid body, soft body, and more phys­i­cally grounded in­ter­ac­tions.

One re­cur­ring re­ac­tion to the video has been con­fu­sion. Viewers as­sume the im­agery is AI-generated. According to Evercoast, that could­n’t be fur­ther from the truth. Every stunt, every swing, every fall was phys­i­cally per­formed and cap­tured in real space. What makes it feel syn­thetic is the free­dom vol­u­met­ric cap­ture af­fords. You aren’t lim­ited by the cam­er­a’s com­po­si­tion. You have free rein to ex­plore, repo­si­tion cam­eras af­ter the fact, break spa­tial con­ti­nu­ity, and re­com­bine per­for­mances in ways that 2D sim­ply can’t.

In other words, ra­di­ance field tech­nol­ogy is­n’t re­plac­ing re­al­ity. It’s pre­serv­ing every­thing.