Numlock News: November 4, 2026 • Asteroid, Botnet, Counter-Strike

Nov 04, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Solar

Many Nigerians skip the grid and generate their own power at home, but rising fuel costs and surging imports have made solar equipment an increasingly popular option, with the tech showing up on wedding registries. Equipment needed to keep a three-person home powered costs $4,500, which will pay for itself in about 16 months; that said, that’s seven times the price of a new petroleum generator, even if the $200 a month in fuel costs will end up costing more in the long run. There are financing options, but most of the $8.5 billion spent on small-scale solar across the region was paid upfront in cash.

Yinka Ibukun, Bloomberg

Clicking Heads

A new study published in Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance compared the mental processing speeds of players of the game Counter-Strike, and found that players who had logged over 5,000 hours of gameplay on the game demonstrated significantly faster mental processing speeds than those new to the game, on average 90 milliseconds faster at reacting under test conditions. Before you suggest that it appears that we have made a brilliant way to train optimized thinking and leadership out of gamers, I wish to remind you that we don’t want to make Ender’s Game from the acclaimed sci-fi novel whose title escapes me that goes something like Don’t Make Ender’s Game and its beloved sequels Really, I Have Nothing But Remorse For My Role In Ender’s Game and of course My Society Was Annihilated Thanks To Ender’s Game.

Amy Pullan, University of Sheffield

Netflix

For a while, Netflix wanted to keep its watch time up because the amount of time people spent on the platform was a reliable proxy for how likely they were to continue to pay for Netflix. Lately, as the company has pursued advertising, those watch time metrics are even more important, and the bad news is that they’ve been declining. In the first half of 2026, the average Netflix subscriber watched 1.64 hours daily, a figure that is down from 1.72 hours in the first half of 2024 and down from 1.81 hours in the first half of 2023. That decline couldn’t come at a worse time, as Netflix needs per-subscriber viewer hours to go up in order to squeeze more money out of its ad clients.

David Wainer, The Wall Street Journal

Age

Heading into last night’s midterms, the average age of the House of Representatives was 58, and the average age of the Senate was 65, which, in a country where the average American is 39, is slightly out of step. A new study found that Americans place higher levels of trust in hypothetical political committees where there are differences in the age of the participants. One hypothetical committee tested was entirely politicians aged 60 and up, while the other had an equal mix of politicians under 40 and over 60. Respondents were 21 percentage points more likely to perceive decision-making as fair when the committee drew from multiple generations. It’s been said that a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they’ll never sit, but there is something to be said for simply side-stepping the issue by stocking the tree-planting committee with at least a couple of people who may actually stand to enjoy the fruit.

Ulrika Lundin and Sara Bjurenvall, University of Gothenburg

Valve

Indie games have been missing their launch dates due to a glut of games attempting to get through Steam’s approval process. Ordinarily, this takes about three to five business days to complete, but there’s been a sharp increase in games submitted to Steam because we gave every developer on the planet a $20 per month piece of software that writes pretty serviceable game code, not to mention the reality that every indie developer on the planet has been rushing to ship their game before GTA6 drops and dominates global playtime. October’s Steam Next Fest had 7,240 games, up 65.2 percent over the event held in June. Since the disclosure became required, 49.9 percent of games released have an AI disclosure.

Jay Peters, The Verge

Botnet

Google has shut down a botnet called x.cpe that was running on what Google claims to be 1.3 million Android TV devices, specifically Google-certified boxes. The compromised boxes were sold by Videostrong under the MECOOL brand and were running residential proxies for traffic and modules engaged in ad fraud schemes. Synthient, which worked with Google, Japan’s National Police Agency, and Trend Micro to disrupt the network, published a list of 182 device model names that were in the botnet and counted 1,472,554 infected devices.

Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica

Nuke an Asteroid

A new study published in Icarus found that the location where one irradiates an asteroid has a big effect on how much momentum gets imparted and how much spin gets induced. One simulated deflection found that after an X-ray burst, an asteroid’s deflection velocity ranged from 0.8 millimeters per second at one angle to 3.9 millimeters per second at a different angle, a sign that precisely where the asteroid is hit can have as much as a fivefold difference in how much the asteroid is moved by a nuclear burst.

Sandia National Laboratories

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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