Supreme Court won't make California set aside 20,000 alleged noncitizens' ballots

Robert Proctor wanted a word for the study of how ignorance is made, and the existing agnoiology carried a metaphysical sense. In 1992 he asked the linguist Iain Boal, who coined agnotology that spring from the Greek gno, "to know", the negating prefix a-, and -ology, chosen largely for its sound. They first spelled it agnatology, then changed it because agnate already meant a relative and a few biologists said it infringed on the study of agnathic, or jawless, fish. Rejected alternatives included Lorraine Daston's tongue-in-cheek "ignorance-lore". ²

Justice Department loses Supreme Court bid over California ballots

On 2 November the Supreme Court denied the Justice Department's application in United States v. California, which asked it to order California to keep separate the mail ballots of more than 20,000 people the government says are noncitizens. The order gives no reasons and lists no dissent. ³ Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that commingled ballots cannot be retrieved. ⁴

US strikes Qeshm Island a day before the midterms, officials tell CBS and AP

Three US officials told CBS the US carried out limited "defensive strikes" near the Strait of Hormuz, and a senior official said they hit Qeshm Island after the Revolutionary Guard fired at an American aircraft. ⁵ An unnamed official told AP the targets were Iranians using surface-to-air missiles against US assets, and Iranian state television reported explosions on Qeshm, though neither outlet cites a Pentagon or CENTCOM statement. The 2 November Daily Brief reported strikes might resume after the midterms, and Trump had said none would come before them. ⁶

Judge Chutkan bars DHS and DOJ from sending states noncitizen lists

On 2 November Judge Tanya Chutkan of the D.C. district court enjoined the policy under which DHS and DOJ send election officials records of people they say are noncitizens. She found the plaintiffs in League of Women Voters v. DHS likely to succeed on claims that it lacks statutory authority and violates the Privacy Act, since no system-of-records notice covers sending the data to states. The opinion records that of the 20,000-plus records DOJ gave Los Angeles County on 13 October, "only 7,035" had county addresses. ⁷

GPT-6 Astra edits 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B's weights, lifting MATH-500 from 7.9% to 48.1%, authors report

Four MIT CSAIL researchers wrote on 2 November that GPT-6 Astra, with Python access to Qwen3.5-0.8B's weights, traced its looping to one direction written by the MLPs of layers 15 and 19. Subtracting it from 131,072 weights raised MATH-500 from 7.9% to 48.1% at 50 forward passes and cut answers hitting the 32,768-token limit from 93.0% to 33.1%. The figures are the authors' own, with no linked paper, and on Gemma 3 270M, which rarely loops, the method moved MATH-500 only from 6.8% to 7.0%. ⁸

Google dismantles XCPE, a botnet of 1.3 million Android set-top boxes

Google Threat Intelligence Group said on 2 November that "last week" it and partners dismantled XCPE, a botnet it says enrolled more than 1.3 million Android set-top boxes through a preloaded backdoor. Google assesses "with high confidence" that the device maker Videostrong Technology built and ran it for profit, selling access to affiliates who ran ad fraud and loaded further malware. The attribution is Google's alone, and Google says it has banned Videostrong from building certified Android devices. ⁹