Tech News — 2026-05-17#

Story of the Day#

NV Energy is reportedly diverting 75% of the electricity supply for 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents to fuel nearby data centers for tech giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. This stark collision between the AI boom and the physical grid is rapidly driving everyday consumers toward distributed solar and battery setups just to keep their lights on.

Top Stories#

[Fisker EV Owners Hack Their Dead Cars to Keep Them Running] · Slashdot After Fisker Inc.’s bankruptcy left 11,000 Ocean SUV owners stranded with rapidly deprecating software, a nonprofit community banded together to hack their own vehicles. The Fisker Owners Association reverse-engineered proprietary code, mapped CAN bus files, and built open-source integrations on GitHub, effectively standing up a volunteer-run car company. The saga highlights a massive regulatory gap for software-defined vehicles, prompting calls for mandatory software escrow funds when automakers fold.

[Apple’s Revamped Siri Will Offer Auto-Deleting Chats] · The Verge Apple is preparing to differentiate its upcoming iOS 27 AI push on privacy, reportedly adding an auto-delete feature to its revamped, more conversational Siri. Users will be able to configure their chat histories to delete after 30 days, one year, or never, a direct contrast to the fleeting incognito modes offered by rival platforms. It is a calculated bet that users will sacrifice a bit of cross-session convenience for peace of mind as AI anxiety grows.

[OpenAI Open-Sources Symphony to Orchestrate Coding Agents] · InfoQ OpenAI has released Symphony, an agent orchestrator built in Elixir that uses standard issue trackers as a control plane to manage multiple autonomous coding agents. Instead of engineers baby-sitting individual Codex sessions, Symphony automatically assigns tickets, restarts stalled agents, and handles task breakdowns, shifting human involvement to simply reviewing final pull requests. Concurrently, Elon Musk’s xAI launched the beta for its own agent, Grok Build, as the company scrambles to close the coding gap with Claude and OpenAI.

[University of Arizona Students Boo Eric Schmidt’s AI Optimism] · The Verge Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was repeatedly booed during his commencement address at the University of Arizona after urging graduates to blindly board the AI “rocket ship”. The visceral crowd reaction underscores a growing disconnect between Silicon Valley’s relentless AI evangelism and the realities of young people entering a volatile job market. While Schmidt acknowledged their rational fears of evaporating jobs and a fractured climate, the pushback illustrates that the industry’s standard utopian pitch is falling flat.

[The UK Finally Moves to Reform the Computer Misuse Act] · Slashdot The UK is overhauling its archaic 1990 Computer Misuse Act, a law that has spent decades legally imperiling well-intentioned cybersecurity researchers. As automated vulnerability scanning and agentic red-teaming become mandatory in the AI era, the broad “unauthorised access” provisions of the old law left defenders facing criminal risks for routine work. The reforms are tucked into a broader bill aimed at enhancing national security against hostile states.

[CAR T Cell Therapy Shows Promise for Autoimmune Diseases] · Ars Technica CAR T cell therapy, originally developed to reprogram immune cells to eradicate blood cancers, is now being aggressively tested as a treatment for severe autoimmune conditions. Clinical trials are underway for diseases like multiple sclerosis, lupus, and vasculitis, operating on the theory that CAR T can hunt down the specific cells attacking the body’s own tissues. If successful, it could effectively reset a patient’s immune system to its pre-disease state.

Also Worth Knowing#

• [Microsoft Exchange Server Zero-Day Actively Exploited] (Slashdot): An actively exploited spoofing and XSS vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server is allowing attackers to execute arbitrary JavaScript via specially crafted emails, compounding a rough week for Microsoft security.
• [Amazon Abandons Pre-2013 Kindles, Sparking Jailbreak Wave] (Slashdot): With Amazon ending official support and store access for older Kindles today, a growing number of owners are turning to technical jailbreaks to install custom software and maintain control over their functioning hardware.
• [California Moves to Ban ‘Chasing Arrows’ Logo from Most Plastics] (Slashdot): Under the new Truth in Recycling law, California will soon strip the iconic recycling symbol from over half of all plastic packaging if the materials aren’t widely accepted and sorted by state programs.
• [Sysadmin Builds ‘ModuleJail’ to Shrink Linux Attack Surface] (Slashdot): Responding to a wave of Linux kernel privilege escalation bugs, a sysadmin released a GPLv3 tool that automatically scans and blacklists unused kernel modules without requiring a reboot.
• [Small Town Erupts Over Flock’s AI License Plate Cameras] (Slashdot): The city of Troy, New York, is facing a major political and legal fight over renewing its contract for 26 Flock AI license plate readers, spotlighting growing nationwide pushback against unchecked municipal surveillance networks.