What a time to be live. The main thing happening today is Google turning off Search and Gemini for schoolchildren. Live from 12 GMT. Here's your Order of Play plus an Op-Ed from Monty.

Google will turn off Search and Gemini by default for schoolchildren after pushback over AI in classrooms.

The changes apply to student accounts in primary and secondary schools, with administrators choosing which services to turn back on. Schools that enable Google Search still won’t be able to switch off its AI Overviews and AI Mode.

The announcement follows a US Senate inquiry into Google’s AI rollout in schools. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley wrote to CEO Sundar Pichai last month, asking what the company knew about potential harms to children. Some teachers and parents have complained that the tools make cheating too easy.

Google’s other October announcements included an AI response generated in space. Its first Project Suncatcher prototype satellite used a Google TPU chip to produce a haiku with Gemma 4. The team will now test how the chips handle radiation and extreme temperatures as it works towards running AI infrastructure in orbit.

It also announced Gemini 4 Carbon just two weeks after rolling out Gemini 4 Argon globally. It describes Carbon as its strongest model yet for cybersecurity and engineering tasks that take longer to complete. The model is being tested by the US government and selected cyber defenders before a broader launch.

We're getting into all of it on today's show.

France's blood bank, the EFS (Établissement français du sang), was hacked in the early morning of November 2nd. The cold rooms at Coolworld, an EFS vendor, were set to 110°C from -30°C by the cyber attackers. Thankfully, a technician caught the malicious reprogramming in time so none of the cold rooms or plasma bags actually reached 110°C. France's health ministry said there were no operational consequences.

That being said, this should serve as a big wake up call (if the recent slew of supermarket hacks across Europe hadn't already opened your eyes). The effects of fridges being hacked go far beyond the milk going bad. The safety and quality of the pharmaceutical supply chain is at greater risk than ever: donor organs, stem cell banks, blood plasma, insulin, emergency anti-venoms are just a few of the things dependent on safe refrigeration.

There have been plenty of questions on X about why critical infrastructure is connected to the internet. Of course, it is easier to manage 100s of fridges centrally via a network - but it clearly isn't safe anymore. Cyber attacks that used to take 100 people one year, now takes a team of two one week.

We have enmeshed the physical world with the digital world at great risk. You can unplug a single computer going haywire, but as Luke succinctly put it on the show yesterday: "you can't unplug a freezer, because it goes warm anyway." Similar issues will arise if we have to unplug smart traffic lights and door locks…

Stay safe out there.

— Monty