The Federal Communications Commission yesterday approved Paramount Skydance's plan to sell large equity stakes to the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

Under US law, companies with licenses to run broadcast stations need FCC approval to have direct or indirect foreign ownership exceeding 25 percent of the company's stock. Paramount says its indirect foreign ownership will reach 49.5 percent after it receives investments from the sovereign wealth funds and filed a petition asking the FCC to waive the foreign ownership limit.

Paramount, the owner of CBS, holds FCC licenses for the 28 local CBS stations that it owns and operates. Paramount is buying Warner Bros. Discovery in a $111 billion deal that is being partially financed with foreign investment but hasn't completed the acquisition because US states filed a lawsuit that aims to block the merger. Trump's Department of Justice approved the merger.

The FCC is letting Paramount sell indirect ownership stakes to "some of the most repressive governments in the world," FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the commission, said yesterday. "An investment this large in one of America's biggest media companies doesn't just buy equity, it secures influence over what gets said and what gets made."

The Paramount/Warner deal would combine two of the largest movie studios, merge streaming service Paramount+ with HBO Max, and give Paramount ownership of CNN and other TV channels.

"The funds plan to invest $24 billion in the Paramount/Warner deal," the Los Angeles Times wrote. "Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is set to contribute $10 billion, while the Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding Co. will separately add $7 billion."

Concern about foreign influence

Although the Trump FCC has taken a hard stance against foreign-made equipment, such as routers and drones, it said in an order yesterday that granting Paramount's request is in the public interest. "Paramount asserts that, as its Petition makes clear, its 'new foreign investors, which will receive only non-voting equity, will not have any ability to influence the company's editorial decision-making or news or entertainment content or to access its viewers' personal data,'" the FCC said.

The Ellison family and RedBird Capital Partners will continue to own 100 percent of Paramount's Class A voting shares, while the foreign investors will hold Class B non-voting shares. The FCC approved Paramount's petition in a declaratory ruling issued by the Media Bureau. FCC commissioners did not vote on the item.

Gomez said that because foreign owners could hold influence over the company, she "called for this new and novel issue to go to a full commission vote given what's at stake. Instead, the FCC snuck this ruling out as a staff-level decision, with no public vote and no accountability for a call of this magnitude.”

Senate Democrats said in a May letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr that "the foreign governments behind this investment systematically suppress press freedom in their own countries and have made a series of investments and gifts to entities controlled by the president and his family, raising serious concerns about their influence over the independent American media and the potential for corruption." But yesterday's approval has been expected since Carr in March said, "I think this is a good deal, and I think it should get through pretty quickly."

The FCC said its order "permit[s] up to 100 percent indirect foreign equity interest of Paramount, in the aggregate." While Paramount said it expects 49.5 percent of shares to be owned by foreign investors based on its current deals, it told the FCC the number could change "in light of routine fluctuations in publicly held equity interests and to account for potential future investments."

FCC says opposition "unconvincing"

The FCC Media Bureau order rejected concerns that the investment will buy "practical influence," even without voting control. "We find this argument unconvincing. The Proposed Investment is not a loan, which must be repaid, but a purchase of stock that has no voting rights," the order said. "We are persuaded by Paramount’s argument that the Foreign Investors therefore will not be able to wield any influence, let alone control, over decisions involving the Licensees. Paramount has further demonstrated that David Ellison will retain control over Paramount and that the Ellison family will continue to own a majority of the voting stock."

The FCC cited Paramount's commitment to "ensure that there will be no interference with the editorial or decision-making policies of its broadcast stations (or CBS News or any other facets of Paramount news and entertainment programming).” The order said the FCC "has long recognized that foreign investment in US companies and networks, including broadcast, fosters technical innovation, supports job creation, and strengthens the US economy."

Paramount agreed to a few terms to ensure compliance. The FCC said that "Paramount must monitor foreign ownership to ensure continued compliance with the Commission’s rules." It must also ensure that "Foreign Investors will not have any influence, direction, or control over or provide any commentary or guidance on Paramount’s content decisions, company management, or have any Access to Paramount’s non-public US Person Data."

Paramount would need to seek additional FCC approval "in the event it proposes to change any voting, governance or information rights of the Foreign Investors," and before any change that results in "its foreign ownership exceed[ing] the terms and conditions of this Declaratory Ruling," the FCC said.

Media advocacy group Free Press said in an FCC filing that "Paramount will begin its ownership of WBD with nearly $80 billion in debt, which will require deep cuts to Paramount’s pre-merger holdings and existing operations. These cuts will negatively impact the public interest, particularly at Paramount’s broadcast units."

Judge found merger likely illegal

The Paramount merger with Warner Bros. was approved by the Justice Department in June, but a group of 12 states led by California filed a lawsuit that seeks to block the deal. A federal judge ruled that the merger is likely to reduce competition substantially and violate antitrust laws.

The judge halted the deal while litigation continues in the case, which could ultimately be decided by a federal appeals court. Paramount has been threatening to leave California if the state doesn't back down, while California Attorney General Rob Bonta accused the company of trying to "blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through."

The FCC last year allowed Paramount to buy Skydance for $8 billion after the company agreed to install an ombudsman at CBS. Carr, who has repeatedly threatened to revoke broadcast licenses from news companies that Trump doesn't like, described the required ombudsman as a “bias monitor.”

Paramount obtained FCC approval to buy Skydance shortly after it reached a $16 million settlement with Trump in a lawsuit accusing CBS of deceptively editing a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount settled with the president even though CBS had rebutted Trump's claims by releasing an unedited transcript and camera feeds of the interview.

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Learning another language is a highly complex mental activity. It requires people to remember words, distinguish unfamiliar sounds, recognize patterns, work out grammatical rules, and retrieve the right expression at the right moment. All of this happens while listening, interpreting, and preparing a response.

Could all this mental activity also help keep an aging brain healthier? Research suggests it can.

Concerns about memory and dementia can send aging adults looking for ways to exercise their brain and maintain cognitive function, whether it is solving crossword puzzles or playing a musical instrument. Language learning might not seem like the same kind of brain exercise, but it is a complex activity that engages several mental processes at once.

I am a linguist who studies language acquisition, use, and loss. My new book, Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language, examines language and the mind across people’s lifespans.

Research increasingly suggests that language learning and bilingualism can offer cognitive benefits—including for older adults. Learning another language can also create opportunities for communication and social connection.

A workout for the brain

A person’s brain remains capable of change throughout their life. This ability to adapt in response to experience is known as neuroplasticity.

Learning unfamiliar sounds, vocabulary, and grammatical patterns requires the brain to form and strengthen connections. Language learning engages several mental processes at once, requiring people to absorb and retrieve information, notice when something does not work out, and adjust. This sustained mental effort makes language learning a particularly rich form of cognitive exercise.

Research on bilingualism has found differences in both the brain’s gray matter, which contains neurons and their connections, and white matter, which consists largely of nerve fibers linking different parts of the brain.

Studies have shown greater gray matter density or stronger white matter integrity in bilingual people, compared with people who speak one language. These findings suggest that language experience can be reflected in the brain’s structure, as well as its activity.

But brain differences are only part of the picture.

The brain as it ages

One reason researchers are interested in language and aging is the idea of cognitive reserve. This term refers to the ability to maintain cognitive function despite age-related changes or damage to the brain.

Bilingualism has been proposed as one factor that can help the brain cope with the effects of aging, because managing two languages places ongoing demands on people’s attention and cognitive control—ultimately helping to strengthen cognitive reserve.

Some studies have found that bilingual people who develop dementia show symptoms at a later age than people who speak one language. This suggests that bilingualism may provide some protection against the effects of brain aging, although it does not necessarily prevent dementia or the brain changes associated with it.

The potential benefit may therefore be greater resilience in the face of those changes, rather than prevention of the underlying disease.

Learning later in life

This raises another question: If lifelong bilingualism may help protect the brain as we age, can people gain similar benefits by learning a language later in life?

Age changes the way languages are learned, but adults remain capable of learning new languages throughout life. Adults and kids bring different strengths to the task. Children tend to have advantages with pronunciation and some aspects of grammar, while adults bring larger vocabularies and better-developed strategies for learning.

Research involving older adults suggests that learning a language can produce cognitive benefits, although the findings are mixed. The potential benefit may come less from achieving fluency than from the process of learning itself. Language learning is a sustained challenge that keeps people learning, practicing, and adapting.

There are social benefits, too. Learning another language can deepen cultural understanding, improve interpersonal communication and encourage people to empathize with other people’s perspectives and experiences. It can also connect people with others from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, creating opportunities for conversation and friendship.

There is no established formula for how much language learning is needed to provide these benefits. Studies have used everything from intensive classroom instruction to short daily sessions with language-learning apps, over periods ranging from weeks to months, to see whether language learning can improve cognitive function. Rather than a magic number of hours, what matters may be sustained engagement in a challenging activity like learning a new language.

Building cognitive resilience

Learning another language is not a miracle cure for aging, and it cannot guarantee protection against Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.

But it is an unusually rich form of mental activity.

Perhaps the most useful way to think about language learning is not as a way to keep the brain young, but as a way to support cognitive resilience—the ability to keep learning, adapting and functioning despite the changes that come with age.

Aging inevitably changes the brain, but people retain the capacity to learn throughout life. Keeping our brains engaged in demanding new activities may contribute to that resilience.

Karen Stollznow, Senior Research Fellow of Linguistics, University of Colorado Boulder; Griffith University; University of New England. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The Boston city government abandoned Flock Safety's license-plate reader cameras after the company shared data nationwide in violation of a contract provision, according to city officials.

"We have actually abandoned Flock," Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in her monthly "Ask the Mayor" segment on GBH News last week. Wu made the comment a few days before the release of Boston's annual surveillance technology report, which said a Flock "vendor error" resulted in nationwide data sharing.

The report, which covers 2025, describes how the Boston Police Department deployed about 45 Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras in a trial with Flock from April to September last year. The unauthorized data sharing occurred during the first few days of the pilot, the report said:

Pursuant to the contract, the Flock ALPR Pilot Program was designed to restrict access to the data collected by BPD ALPR cameras exclusively to trained BPD personnel. The contract clearly noted that data sharing was to be disabled, and BPD confirmed with Flock that settings were “off” for sharing. Within three days of initiating the Pilot, BPD became aware that other law enforcement agencies were able to access license plate and vehicle information collected from BPD ALPR cameras using a nationwide lookup feature that was enabled by the vendor in error. Upon learning of the vendor error, BPD ensured that the function was immediately disabled and access to the Department’s data was no longer available without submitting a written request to BPD as described above. No further direct access was available for the duration of the Pilot.

The report didn't say how many law enforcement agencies accessed the data. The problem with Flock didn't stop Boston from seeking another vendor of license-plate reader technology. The police department started another license-plate reader trial with Motorola in February 2026 and a third trial with Axon in June 2026.

Boston's report comes amid a larger privacy debate over law enforcement access to license-plate camera data. An Electronic Frontier Foundation report yesterday described how the nationwide lookup tool lets police conduct searches with little or no justification.

"An EFF analysis of ALPR search logs from Flock Safety systems shows that officers across the country are spying on drivers for completely nonsensical 'reasons,'" the EFF wrote. "Police are routinely searching the Flock database without providing any legitimate justification, making a mockery of our civil liberties by logging reasons like 'LOL' (short for 'laugh out loud'), 'LMAO' (short for 'laughing my ass off'), 'sexy,' and 'idk' (short for 'I don't know') to access sensitive ALPR location data."

The EFF wrote that "Flock Safety claims it has improved its system by requiring officers to select from a dropdown list of crimes before running a search," but the new system in place since late 2025 "does not require proof that the dropdown reason actually matches the true purpose of the search."

Boston will keep using cameras, just not Flock's

When asked if the city will keep using license-plate cameras as long as there are appropriate constraints, Wu replied, "Yes, we need a publicly approved and authorized policy to guarantee all of those protections, privacy, civil liberties, and if that's in place, then we should deploy technology to be able to keep people safe and solve crimes faster."

Boston's annual report said the city requires vendors to agree not to share license-plate-reader data and to erase recordings after 30 days unless police request that video be retained for legal or investigative purposes.

"The police department has been piloting different versions [of the technology] to better understand where vehicles might be going," Wu said. City officials need to "know exactly who can access that data, how it will be retained, how long will it be saved for," she said.

"It can really help with safety in a lot of ways, but it has to be used responsibly," Wu said. "When the toggles or the access controls either are not able to be restricted in the ways that conform with that policy, or are set but then can be unset or reset in ways that violate that policy, we would not use that platform."

As we wrote last month, cities have been dropping Flock at an accelerating pace "over concerns regarding out-of-control surveillance, unwanted data sharing, high expenses, and reports of police abusing the tool." However, the company told Ars at the time that, “so far in 2026, new city partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals by approximately 10 to 1." We contacted Flock today about the Boston city report and will update this article if it provides a response.

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Microsoft’s patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold.

It was only two months ago that Microsoft patched a then-record 570 vulnerabilities. Google and other companies have also published record numbers of vulnerabilities in recent months. Two weeks ago, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and 100 companies and organizations published an open letter warning of a narrowing window for patching vulnerabilities ahead of an expected tsunami of AI-enabled attacks that actively exploit them first. The industry is taking the threat seriously by pumping out unprecedented numbers of bugs in their software.

Welcome to the new normal

Dustin Childs, a researcher at the Zero Day Initiative, calls the spikes the “new normal” and also cautions that despite them, the damage that’s likely to result from AI-assisted attacks could eventually be substantial.

“On the one hand, congrats to the security gnomes at Microsoft for being able to patch bugs at this rate,” Childs wrote Tuesday. “On the other hand, AI-assisted vulnerability discovery shows no signs of slowing down. However, we have not seen a correlating spike in active exploits—yet.”

Counting the precise number of vulnerabilities fixed in a monthly patch release for Microsoft is never an exact science. In some cases, the bugs were previously addressed or affected non-Microsoft products. By Childs’s count, Tuesday’s release patches 972 vulnerabilities, and 997 when counting the porting of fixes for the Chromium browser incorporated into Edge. Of the new vulnerabilities, 112 of them are rated critical, with the remainder carrying the important designation. Already this year, Microsoft has fixed 2,760 vulnerabilities, more than double the number from last year. At this rate, Microsoft will complete the year having fixed more bugs than all of 2023, 2024, and 2025 combined.

Credit: Microsoft

Notable vulnerabilities in this month’s release include two zero-days, CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 in the Windows update service and the Windows Advanced Local Procedure, respectively. There’s no public information about who is exploiting them or how broadly. Other notable vulnerabilities Childs called out are:

• CVE-2026-55007 in Exchange Server. A remote, unauthenticated attacker could get code execution on an affected Exchange server by doing nothing more than sending an email with a malicious Visio attachment.
• CVE-2026-80097: A local privilege escalation in Microsoft Authenticator. “This is the worst type of privilege escalation as it uses a bug in the authentication system itself,” Childs said.
• CVE-2026-69465: Roughly 17 distinct vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint allowing remote code execution.
• CVE-2026-65669: One of 60 SQL Server privilege escalation vulnerabilities this month. This particular one is exploited when a user submits instructions through SQL Copilot.
• CVE-2026-69525: A remote code execution flaw in Remote Desktop Services with a 9.8 severity rating.

The researcher said he found so many of Tuesday’s vulnerabilities that were wormable that he stopped counting at 20. These vulnerabilities don’t require any user interaction to be exploited and hence can spread from machine to machine on their own, triggering a possible chain reaction that’s difficult to stop.

The effectiveness of AI-assisted vulnerability hunting is filled with controversy. Critics question the expense and number of false positives when using LLMs. They also question the motives of companies trying to recoup the billions of dollars they’re pouring into developing the very AI engines being used to find and patch the flaws.

The counterargument is that the results—AI-assisted hunting finding record numbers of severe bugs across the industry—speak for themselves. Mozilla, for instance, said in May that its researchers using Mythos found a record 271 vulnerabilities, with almost none of them being false positives.

The true, long-term effectiveness of AI-assisted bug hunting won’t be known for a time that will likely be measured in a year or more. What’s clear now is that critics should maintain curiosity and remain open to the possibility that vulnerability discovery has entered a new and unprecedented phase. Skeptics who discount the possibility do so at their own peril.

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New data compiled by a Bay Area anti-surveillance advocacy group shows that not only are American localities dropping cameras from Flock Safety, but they are doing it at an accelerating rate.

Communities from Lansing, Michigan, to Pflugerville, Texas, are ending their relationship with Flock, largely over concerns regarding out-of-control surveillance, unwanted data sharing, high expenses, and reports of police abusing the tool.

Secure Justice, an Oakland-based advocacy group, has recorded 214 cities and counties that have dropped Flock since 2021. Of those, 90 ended their relationship with Flock in August 2026 alone, a fourfold increase compared to the previous month.

Put another way: During the last 30 days, an average of three localities per day have halted contracts with Flock.

“Looking at that image, it’s gone parabolic!” Brian Hofer, the executive director of Secure Justice, told Ars.

Hofer, who until 2025 served as chair of the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission for 10 years, recognized that while 210 remains relatively small, the momentum is growing rapidly.

“When you see that now 165 [cancellations] are just in the first almost eight months of this year... At that speed, if it goes another year, we’re talking serious money,” he said. “That number is going to get huge, fast.”

When presented with this data, Flock Safety did not express concern. “So far in 2026, new city partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals by approximately 10 to one,” emailed Courtney Terlecki, a company spokesperson. “That does not mean every community will make the same decision, and we understand that public safety technology deserves thoughtful public discussion and community engagement.”

She declined to say precisely how many new customers Flock has taken on this year, but the company has repeatedly said that its products are “trusted by over 5,000 communities.”

Criticism

After extensive criticism, Flock CEO Garrett Langley wrote in a recent blog post that Flock would reduce data retention defaults from 30 days to seven, among other privacy-minded changes.

Last Friday, Flock’s top lawyer wrote in another blog post that its newly modified terms of use “expressly prohibit customers and their users from using Flock Services to mislead, harass, stalk, or otherwise impose upon or violate the legal rights of another person.”

Those efforts have done little to quell political scrutiny.

This week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced that he was “investigating Flock Safety’s collection, retention, and dissemination of the data generated by its artificial intelligence surveillance cameras.”

Additionally, on Wednesday, after two Florida police officers were arrested for misusing Flock, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis gave a speech in which he said that Flock cameras were “out of control” in his state.

“When I see, like, a police officer using this to track, like, an ex-girlfriend, I’m like, you know what the hell’s going on?” DeSantis said.

Even advocates who have followed the pervasive expansion of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology—which predated Flock—are surprised.

“Maybe in the past it didn't feel like every red light cam really meant a pair of eyes was watching you, but with AI, that's increasingly becoming the reality,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center of Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project, emailed Ars.

“And we're already seeing how AI can morph ALPRs into a mass surveillance dragnet," he added. "Flock lets its cameras be searched for keywords and people, cities are incorporating real-time facial recognition into camera networks, Border Patrol is using AI to scan ALPR data for driving patterns [and] pulling people over whenever the AI deems their driving ‘suspicious.’”

The scrutiny has become bipartisan after numerous widely reported incidents. “A Texas Sheriff’s Office used it to search for a woman who had had an abortion, and federal agents proposed using it outside gun shows,” Catherine Crump, a UC Berkeley law professor, emailed Ars.

“It definitely does not help that this is yet another Silicon Valley product that no one asked for that threatens to reshape people’s lives.”

Update, August 28: Secure Justice has updated its data and now says that 93 jurisdictions (up from 90) have ended Flock contracts this month alone.

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