Nostr notes by Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹

"Usually, the GDPR permits processing for specific purposes ...

2026-10-24T12:52:21Z

"Usually, the GDPR permits processing for specific purposes (e.g. retention for tax records or fraud prevention). However, the agreed Article 88c (or Article 88bis) legitimises an entire technology. Regardless of the purpose for which it is used, any AI system could lawfully take any personal data by default. For example, the proposed Article would also permit the training and use of AI for manipulation, disinformation, the generation of nude images or killer drones, and indeed any other questionable purpose. Many processing operations that were so far illegal could suddenly become legal – just because they are done “in the context” of an AI system. For example, data processing for personal advertising purposes (without consent) is currently illegal in the EU. Now, however, advertising could suddenly become legal if it is personalised using AI technology.

Max Schrems: “It’s like saying anything goes – no matter what you do – as long as it’s done with AI. If something is illegal in an Excel spreadsheet, it's legal if done with an AI agent. It’s utterly absurd to give preferential treatment to a high-risk technology over every other computer system.”"

https://noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-member-states-approve-digital-expropriation-europeans-ai-companies

#EU #GDPR #AI #BigTech #DataProtection #DigitalExpropriation #DigitalOmnibus

Who mentioned being "mad" or "angry"? Am I not ...

2026-10-17T01:45:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…pwjr
_________________________

Who mentioned being "mad" or "angry"? Am I not allowed to have opinions - like everyone else - about the official positions adopted by a magazine? TL;DR: This stance is just a symptom of a moral panic and this is evident in the way the text is self-contradictory and lacks intellectual honesty. Specially because computers and the Internet are also technologies that emerged under capitalism. Finally, the ban will become increasingly impossible to apply - and, as such, useless. Right now, it's getting more and more complicated to really detect if the majority of a text was created only by AI. This leads to witch-hunts and personally, I hate all kinds of witch-hunts.

"A judge of Brazil’s top electoral court ruled Thursday ...

2026-10-17T00:46:13Z

"A judge of Brazil’s top electoral court ruled Thursday that Meta must adopt measures to immediately secure equal treatment of the two presidential candidates ahead of an Oct. 25 runoff.

The ruling comes shortly after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is running against Flávio Bolsonaro, filed a complaint that accused the tech company that owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp of using biased algorithms and AI restrictions to favor opposition candidate Bolsonaro ahead of the election.

Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze ruled that Meta cannot reduce the distribution of political content, restrict searches or remove posts in a way that creates an imbalance between Lula and Bolsonaro. His ruling also orders the company to ensure its artificial intelligence tool applies identical criteria to both candidacies."

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/south-america/brazil-lula-wins-electoral-court-challenge-meta-alleged-bolsonaro-bias-rcna603835

#Brazil #SocialMedia #Meta #Instagram #Facebook #WhatsApp #Lula #Bolsonao #Algorithms

These arguments against AI are becoming ridiculously insane and ...

2026-10-17T00:40:16Z

These arguments against AI are becoming ridiculously insane and non-logical...Why not ban computers or the Internet, then? This makes no sense at all... It's mostly just a pose anchored on moral panics and irrationalism.

"So our rule is simple: No AI generated articles or illustrations in the magazine! We are not going to feed you slop. And we think you should not give money to any publication that does feed you slop, because they’re both treating their audience with contempt, and avoiding paying workers so that their owners can get richer.

This doesn’t mean nobody doing work here can ever use any of the softwares that are broadly lumped together as AI. Much as we respect the Luddites around here, we’re not against technological innovation. Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something, or prevents an artist from using a tool to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element. But we need, first, to ensure that technologies are a tool used by workers to help them, rather than a tool used to replace workers. And, second, we need to make sure that readers aren’t being fed things that look like people’s genuine thoughts and creative expression but are in fact the product of disembodied mathematical formulas.

I’ll admit, I used to be excited by generative AI. I made goofy little images in DALL-E. I liked the dumb novelty songs. I thought it could be a cool tool for creative professionals to play around with. I forgot for a moment that we live under capitalism, where every new technology will be used by the ruling class to fuck over workers."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/why-were-banning-ai

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AntiAI #MoralPanics #Journalism #Media #News

This is exactly the same kind of fetishism that I mentioned here: ...

2026-10-14T22:07:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…99al
_________________________

This is exactly the same kind of fetishism that I mentioned here: https://tldr.nettime.org/@remixtures/117184636563514174. All technologies can be adapted in the sense that no technology has an intrinsic/deterministic nature. They're not given by gods. All technologies are tools in the sense that they can - or at least should be - shaped by all human beings that use them. So, for me this kind of argument leads to a dead-end where you really give too much importance to the current specific affordances and limitations of.a tool and completely ignore how different groups of human beings made of flesh and blood end up shaping these tools.

quoting
note1dga…gwkt

RE: https://mastodon.social/@iris_meredith/117178026845359543

What a particular good example of inverted AI fetishism that delves into an idealism grounded in the ideias of a Nazi philosopher!! This kind of reminds me how essential a materialist stance towards technology using empirical critical political economy is nowadays. This article is essentially just another exhibit of the turn to a conservative/reactionary stance towards technology. And essentially the trick here is just to anthropomorphize things that are not made of flesh and blood. Exactly like AI companies are doing... I guess this is just a symptom of not knowing anything about economic history and the history of capitalism. as well as of the diffusion of media and communication technologies.

"This means that even when you, for example, use an LLM to build some useful software that helps your nonprofit do well, and even when you're very careful about what generated code ends up actually being deployed (even if you literally read every line of code), you're nonetheless fighting against the ready-to-hand nature of the tool that pushes your gestalt (and thus your attitudes and ideologies) towards carelessness and slop every step of the way. This isn't to say that this is never the correct call to make, or that you should never use the tool: as before, I am generally supportive of fighting back against an invading force even if I think that guns generally do bad things to your attitudes. But well... if you're going to be using a tool like that, it's incumbent on you to know what you're doing and be very careful about it."

#AI #LLMs #GenerativeAI #Conservatism #ReactionaryThinking #Heidegger #Phenomenology #WebDevelopment #React #Vue
note1duf…cyvm

"Character.ai’s bankruptcy is the one of the first dominos ...

2026-10-14T21:45:00Z

"Character.ai’s bankruptcy is the one of the first dominos to fall in the long-foreseen AI bubble. The circumstances of its bankruptcy are exactly what critics of AI have been saying would happen: Character.ai lit a huge amount of money on fire running its product, did not bring in a lot of revenue, and faced enormous legal fees after causing harm to its users. Enshittifying its product to try to make its expenses cheaper did not work, according to a narrative filed in bankruptcy court Tuesday.

Disney has reportedly offered Character.ai $20 million to license some of its intellectual property; Last year, Disney sent Character.ai a cease and desist letter demanding it stop using its copyrighted characters without permission. In 2023, it was valued at $1 billion after raising $150 million in a round led by a16z.

Character.ai is one of the best-known AI chatbot companies that has become popular in the AI companion space. The company has faced various legal problems after being sued by the family of one of its users who killed himself after chatting with a Character.ai chatbot, and has been the target of regulators pushing for age verification tech because of its popularity with kids. In its bankruptcy filings, the company says that its enormous legal costs contributed to its bankruptcy, but that even without the legal problems, its business was wildly unsustainable."

https://www.404media.co/character-ais-bankruptcy-documents-show-the-economics-of-ai-dont-work/

#AI #GenerativeAI #CharacterAI #Chatbots #AIBubble

Umm. I think the researchers focused on the wrong thing. For AI ...

2026-10-11T11:51:48Z

Umm. I think the researchers focused on the wrong thing. For AI productivity benefits to really work when it comes to software development, It's another LLM who should be review most of the code generated by an LLM, while a human should just act mostly as a judge, moderator, and final arbitrer.

"In terms of raw code being produced, the results are clear and stark. The introduction of AI coding agents at a firm leads to a 30 percent increase in total lines of code generated, a 20 percent rise in the number of total commits, and a 23 percent increase in pull requests on average, the researchers write. But all that extra code doesn’t translate directly into improved software output on the firm level. On the contrary, the resolution rate for Issues and Epics (i.e. wholesale software features) tracked by tools like Jira did not change in a statistically significant way after AI tools were introduced (the researchers also found no “compositional shift” in the size or complexity of those Jira-tracked issues across the AI introduction).

The reason for that discrepancy can be found directly in the code review process, which takes markedly longer on average after the introduction of AI coding agents. Overall, the average “review process” time between a pull request getting submitted and it being merged into the codebase balloons 49 percent on average after AI agents are introduced. That effect can be seen in more granular data, too, with “the share of pull requests with changes requested nearly doubl[ing], and the number of comments per pull request increas[ing] by 35%” following the AI agent shift, the researchers write.

In response to this change, the researchers found a 14 percent increase in the share of workers performing code reviews after AI agents’ introduction. They also write that they “cannot attribute significant employment changes to AI...”"

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/ai-coding-agents-generate-more-code-but-not-more-software/

#SoftwareDevelopment #Programming #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIAgents #Automation #Productivity

Fascism in the USA: "The Trump administration says none of ...

2026-10-06T21:24:50Z

Fascism in the USA:

"The Trump administration says none of this is happening. “DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake.” “There are no ‘indiscriminate’ stops.” Allegations of “racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE.” “The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force.” “ICE does not zip tie or restrain children.”

But that is precisely what is happening, and at a far larger scale than previously reported.

We know because we have once again done what the government hasn’t:

We have tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent holding a citizen during the current administration.

More than 500 cases. That includes:

- More than a hundred Americans held after agents questioned their citizenship. Nearly all were people of color.

- At least 70 American children and teens detained, some of whom were handcuffed.

- Of the more than 300 Americans we tracked as detained for allegedly assaulting or obstructing agents, we found fewer than half were actually charged in federal court, and many of those cases were dropped or dismissed.

- At least 63 Americans detained while recording.

- 36 Americans held for at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or their family.

- Roughly a dozen citizens deported, mostly children.

Collectively, these cases show that as the administration has relentlessly pursued immigrants, federal agents have run roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens too.

We’re showing you every case — the reality that the administration denies — along with the receipts."

https://projects.propublica.org/american-citizens-detained-dhs-civil-rights/

#USA #Trump #MAGA #ICE #DHS #CivilRights #Fascism

Exactly, at the heart of matter this is just another business ...

2026-10-05T16:34:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…5e8w
_________________________

Exactly, at the heart of matter this is just another business model to get by, especially if the AI bubble bursts… Yet, again and again, people ignore the continuing importance of political economy… :-/

"Follow the connections out from that room and you pass ...

2026-10-05T13:54:26Z

"Follow the connections out from that room and you pass through some genuinely strange territory. A Harry Potter fanfic used as a recruiting pipeline. Psychological workshops that former participants describe as coercive. A program for breeding smarter children, promoted by an AI institute. A sex worker from Idaho who became one of the subculture’s most-read writers and now runs an AI-doom propaganda residency with Grimes, Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend. A splinter sect that fled to tugboats and whose members have been linked to six deaths. And a blogger who wanted to abolish democracy, found the ear of several billionaire patrons, and watched his ideas come to fruition in the vice president’s office.

I am aware, that if you are not lurking on the internet as much as I do, of how utterly insane that paragraph sounds. However, every bit of it is heavily documented by numerous sources. The people in this story are not a secret society coordinating over dinner. They are a social scene: overlapping friendship groups, funding relationships, and sexual and romantic relationships, all of it threaded through the institutions asking you to trust them about AI regulation.

One of many unfortunate shortcomings of mainstream media is that credibly reporting on these things is so absurd that you can’t expect readers to take it seriously. However, I’ll endeavor to provide a thorough account of how our current slide into neo-fascism, theocratic dystopia, and the forecasted end of the world is deeply rooted in the history of this subculture."

https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse

#AI #AIDoomsters #AIDoom #AIApocalypse #AISafety #Ideology #SiliconValley

"The National Science Foundation, one of the biggest sources ...

2026-10-03T22:48:24Z

"The National Science Foundation, one of the biggest sources of federal research funding, withheld $1.4 billion that Congress had intended for research over the course of the past year, according to internal data reviewed by The New York Times.

The extraordinary move — holding back about one-fifth of the N.S.F.’s primary research budget — is the latest sign of how the Trump administration is finding creative ways to work around Congress. Lawmakers from both parties have consistently opposed White House-led proposals to cut funding to major science agencies, including the N.S.F. and the National Institutes of Health.

Since the N.S.F. was founded over 75 years ago, the agency has spent nearly all of its budget on so-called basic research from a wide range of scientific fields, which has led to major advances in technology such as M.R.I.s, semiconductors and the internet.

The White House wants to redirect the money to a limited set of administration priorities, including artificial intelligence and quantum computing, according to two people with knowledge of the administration’s plans.

Congress appropriates money to the N.S.F. on two-year cycles, so the agency could still spend the held-over money in the new fiscal year, which began on Thursday.

But Democratic lawmakers see the strategy as more of a political power grab by the White House."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/us/politics/national-science-foundation-research-funds.html

#USA #Science #Trump #NSF #Idiocracy #MAGA

"The safety approach that emerges from such a culture starts ...

2026-10-03T22:23:07Z

"The safety approach that emerges from such a culture starts with unimpeded optimism about being able to solve problems as they arise. OpenAI has thrived by trial and error (which it calls “iterative deployment”), looking for problems and improving its guardrails in response. But this approach, by its very nature, guarantees periodic failures—and the scale of those failures is growing as systems get more capable. This summer, in the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI let a swarm of agents out by mistake. The company responded by making security improvements. But even after those changes, OpenAI reported that its safety controls failed again, when a model in training bypassed restrictions on internet access: A monitoring system alerted human staff but did not automatically turn the model off as it was supposed to. Anthropic, too, has acknowledged accidentally turning off its own safeguards because of a misconfiguration. I believe that such mistakes are typical of the industry, given the speed and flexibility with which people operate.

An environment where things like this can happen is no place to grow artificial minds that could be smarter than we are and that might not do what we want them to. Paul Christiano, on joining OpenAI’s board a few weeks ago, wrote that “there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.” If this is the situation, then the time for trial and error is over. Achieving something much closer to perfection the first time is essential because iteration after a mistake may not be possible. People will not be safe if we depend on individual heroics after the fact."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/openai-safety-team-resignation/688881/

#CyberSecurity #AI #GenerativeAI #AISafety #OpenAI #LLMs #SiliconValley #BigTech

LoL. Has anyone any doubts that by now Reddit is deeply into ...

2026-10-01T20:40:16Z

LoL. Has anyone any doubts that by now Reddit is deeply into Enshitification? I mean, the company is making all efforts to make the user’s lives way more difficult…

“Amid a number of updates for moderators and developers announced Wednesday, comes bad news for supporters of a more open web: Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds.

Reddit says RSS has now become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” which is why it’s made the decision to wind down RSS feeds on its platform.

“We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we’re grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit,” the company noted in its announcement, where it also shared a March 2027 shutdown date for its public API.

Reddit said RSS support will cease on November 13.”

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/30/reddit-is-killing-rss-feeds-ending-public-api-access-because-of-ai-bots/

#SocialMedia #Reddit #SocialNetworks #RSS #APIs #Enshittification

“A six-month trial of live facial recognition (LFR) technology ...

2026-09-29T21:46:31Z

“A six-month trial of live facial recognition (LFR) technology in London’s railway stations that cost more than £320,000 and almost 100 hours of police officers’ time led to one false match against a watchlist of suspects and no arrests.

More than half a million faces were scanned between February and July this year in some of the capital’s busiest transport hubs during the British Transport Police (BTP) trial of the surveillance technology, which aimed to help catch offenders and people breaching court orders.

A freedom of information document obtained by Liberty Investigates and shared with the Guardian shows that equipment hire and police staffing for the 18 deployments across the trial cost £320,786 and led to only one alert on a watchlist, which turned out to be an incorrect identification, also known as a false positive.

Last month BTP announced it was extending the trial for a further four months and expanding the deployments to include London Underground stations. British Transport Police said that since the extension there had been three positive confirmed alerts of people who were subsequently confirmed to be complying with sexual harm prevention orders or other imposed court conditions.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/29/trial-live-facial-recognition-cameras-london-stations-false-positive

#UK #London #Surveillance #FacialRecognition #LFR #PoliceState

"Human contractors hired to improve Microsoft’s Copilot AI ...

2026-09-28T21:57:16Z

"Human contractors hired to improve Microsoft’s Copilot AI chatbot are constantly bombarded with lewd or sexually explicit photo editing requests and images that users have uploaded, including upskirt photos or putting women into sexual positions. These contractors are then asked to review whether the generated image successfully fulfilled the prompt — such as, did the image generator make the woman’s AI-enlarged breasts big enough.

When a Copilot user uploads a picture of themselves or someone else, they probably expect that image to remain private between just them and the AI tool. In reality, a workforce of at least hundreds of human reviewers are sometimes looking at that prompt and whatever images they upload. And in many cases, those contractors are inundated with requests to make foot fetish images of children’s cartoon characters, shorten a real woman’s skirt, or put people into sexual positions.

The news, based on a cache of internal contractor documents seen by 404 Media, shows that AI companies are using human workers to review not just AI chatbot users’ text prompts, but the pictures they upload and wish to edit too."

https://www.404media.co/humans-reading-copilot-prompts-images/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Microsoft #Copilot #ContentModeration

Intellectual property has been THE SCAM here since the beginning ...

2026-09-27T14:32:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…jzrw
_________________________

Intellectual property has been THE SCAM here since the beginning because it can only be enforced by artificial means and by way of the enforcement powers of the State. IP is not a natural law and relies on a monopoly granted by states.

As such, to center this discussion in terms of IP is useless. If your work depends entirely on selling your "intellectual property" to others - and not intellectual labor which is a totally different concept -, then you were always under a very perilous position, because copyright law was since the beginning not an authors' law but a publishers' law.

Go tell OpenAI and Anthropic to completely open-source and publicly divulge their code, models training prompts, and algorithms and lets see what they say to you. Their business model depends on IP law as much as traditional software and media companies. Only that they don't want that to be revealed so they center this discussion on absurd concepts such as safety and security.

Sorry, I just can't stop noticing there's a huge ...

2026-09-27T14:18:47Z

In reply to nevent1q…ap22
_________________________

Sorry, I just can't stop noticing there's a huge contradiction in what you're saying. If Generative AI companies are "stealing labor", then what you said about "Generative AI will not and cannot, in any meaningful way, drive a general reduction of the number of working hours demanded of workers, both because the technology cannot serve that function" cannot logically be true. If human labor is "stolen" to improve efficiency and productivity by way of better automation technology, and if this has been once again done with Generative AI - with the particularity that this time we are talking about a general purpose technology -, then we cannot reach the conclusion you reached.

In other words, if Generative AI cannot be purposedly used as an automation technology, then the whole conversation about "stealing" becomes nonsense rhetorics.

Do you have any real evidence of that? What Generative AI firms ...

2026-09-27T14:08:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…vwq2
_________________________

Do you have any real evidence of that? What Generative AI firms are really doing is eating traditional software and media companies' lunches. The product of the labor of the working class people has been stolen by for-profit corporations for the last two centuries. The proof is that there has not been any general reduction of the number of working hours per week since the last century. Productivity increases while salaries have mostly stagnated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_productivity. You can't really have a serious discussion about "wage theft" without acknowledging this. Generative AI is a general purpose technology that can be used to finally have a serious discussion about the need to reduce the number of working hours per week, as well as about the need of nationalizing other important general purpose technology.

We run the risk of becoming the stooges of traditional for-profit software and media companies if we fall into this proprietary/scarcity language.

I'm just stating that the idea of stealing "intellectual ...

2026-09-27T13:39:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…dy3q
_________________________

I'm just stating that the idea of stealing "intellectual labor" ends in the same proprietary/scarcity dead-end that ultimately just legitimates the existence of capitalism. If there's a technology that can "steal" labor, I'm all for it because in the end labor was made compulsory by capitalism.

"When the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the ...

2026-09-27T12:39:01Z

"When the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in early 2025, the consequences were far-reaching yet quickly enforced.

The restrictions cut off the ICC chief prosecutor's access to Microsoft services, including email, followed by a freezing of his personal and institutional bank accounts in affected jurisdictions.

While this was happening, the Dutch government was watching, coming to the bitter realization that access to essential services depended on decisions made in the U.S.

Hence, their response to this is DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government in English.

It is a framework that looks to tackle the government's digital stack, covering the OS, an office suite, collaboration apps, cloud services, IT management tools, and AI, with all of it being built around a NixOS foundation."

https://itsfoss.com/news/netherlands-dawo-initiative/

#EU #Netherlands #Linux #OpenSource #DAWO #FLOSS #DigitalSovereignty #Microsoft

"Two companies now say they will accept advertising for ...

2026-09-27T12:27:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…lagh
_________________________

"Two companies now say they will accept advertising for director Alex Gibney’s upcoming documentary about Elon Musk, following earlier reporting that a number of social media platforms had rejected the ads.

The Hollywood Reporter published a story Friday saying that TikTok, Meta, YouTube, and X had all refused to run paid ads promoting the trailer for “Musk.”

However, when TechCrunch reached out to Meta on Saturday, a spokesperson said, “This was an error and the ads are being restored.” We’ve asked Meta for more details and will update this article if we hear back.

YouTube also posted an update Saturday, noting that “the trailer has always been available on YouTube.” (Indeed, that’s how we were able embed it at the end of this article.) The company added, “When submitted as an ad, it was temporarily restricted by our system. Following review the ad has been cleared to run.”"

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/26/meta-says-it-will-run-ads-for-musk-documentary-after-all/

That's totally the wrong discussion. It's a total ...

2026-09-27T12:08:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…54rn
_________________________

That's totally the wrong discussion. It's a total dead-end. The whole concept of Intellectual property is bollocks. There can be no theft of public goods - goods whose consumption doesn't deprive others of doing the same (rivality) and whose consumption by others cannot be denied (excludability). Intellectual property relies on the concept of artifical scarcity enforced by the State.

There can be no good in making use of that concept or of the tools provided by IP Law. IP Law's is the Rentier's Law.

These companies care a lot about intellectual property. If they didn't care, they would open-source their whole code, training prompts, and algorithms. That - and only that - is what we should be aiming for at this time. Any other topic will be a distraction advanced by competing capitalists.

I'm not even willing to go into the whole issue of labour theft. That would be a completely different discussion since what capitalism has been all about throughout history is labour theft.

"If you haven't figured out the deal with Elon Musk, yet, ...

2026-09-26T13:49:10Z

"If you haven't figured out the deal with Elon Musk, yet, a blockbuster documentary is on its way to explain it in detail. Filmed by Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and scheduled for release on October 9, the "definitive and unvarnished examination" of the world's richest person was years in the making and was well-received at its premier at the Venice Film Festival.

The main points of the feature appear to be that Musk was always the way he is now and that Musk is full of it. That Musk is furious about the documentary is surely its best recommendation."

https://boingboing.net/2026/09/25/official-trailer-for-musk-documentary.html

"The American software company KiteWorks has warned its ...

2026-09-25T23:56:32Z

"The American software company KiteWorks has warned its customers of an imminent cyberattack. In an email obtained by heise security, the KiteWorks CISO urges its customers to temporarily shut down their servers. The company confirmed the process – all customer systems worldwide are to be shut down for six hours starting tomorrow, Saturday.

KiteWorks sells various products for secure and confidential communication, also targeting authorities and financial institutions – an attack at this point would be fatal. And it appears to be such an attack, as KiteWorks CISO Frank Balonis writes: “We have received credible threat intelligence from law enforcement indicating an attack on Kiteworks systems may be imminent this weekend. We strongly recommend you shut down your Kiteworks system for six hours [..].”

The attack warning appears to apply worldwide, at least according to the list of time zones from AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time) to PDT (Pacific Daylight Time). In Central Europe, all systems are to be shut down on Saturday, September 26, from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. KiteWorks recommends shutting down the servers even before this time – even if they are not accessible from the internet. It cannot be said with certainty what potential access routes there might be."

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Imminent-Zero-Day-Attack-KiteWorks-Urges-Customers-to-Shut-Down-Servers-11466375.html

#CyberSecurity #KiteWorks #ZeroDay #ZeroDayAttack

Some people are just refusing to accept that AI can be used as ...

2026-09-25T22:51:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…syys
_________________________

Some people are just refusing to accept that AI can be used as more than a productivity tool but rather something that can enable amateurs to quickly achieve professional quality work while COLLABORATING with others. And that for me is intellectually disonest. Have you asked people who collaborate and share prompts, workflows in subreddits if they believe that what they are doing is just for productivity's sake? I hate this kind of snobbery and I believe it's intelellectualy disonest. I don't even have patience to deal with this stance, after spending my working days trying to reach the most professional level of quality while using two or three LLMs, just to improve the quality of my work as a technical writer from what it was previously possible. And that's also why I find these kinds of posts offensive to me.

"A high profile hacking group claims it has breached multiple ...

2026-09-22T22:15:44Z

"A high profile hacking group claims it has breached multiple FBI-related services and stolen data “on all FBI employees and applicants.” A representative of the group, called ShinyHunters, told 404 Media the data includes FBI agents’ names, home addresses, phone number, and information on their spouse.

The data breach could be massively significant and may have all sorts of national security and counterintelligence implications. Criminals from the same ecosystem as ShinyHunters have previously used hacked data like phone records to track, intimidate, and harass the FBI agents investigating them. The highly sensitive data could also be a boon to foreign intelligence agencies who want to better understand how one of the most important law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the U.S. operates. And if the data fell into the hands of more criminals, FBI agents and their spouses could face serious threats to their safety.

“We hacked the FBI. We hold data on all FBI employees and applicants,” the representative of the group told 404 Media."

https://www.404media.co/we-hacked-the-fbi-hackers-say-they-have-data-on-all-fbi-employees/

#CyberSecurity #Hacking #FBI #DataBreach #USA

"OpenAI has an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT ...

2026-09-22T21:58:22Z

"OpenAI has an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users’ prompts and other data to help improve the chatbot’s responses. The idea is that the contractors provide an, obviously, human touch to OpenAI’s models. Well, not all of the contractors are doing that. 404 Media has found multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI’s models have been fired for using AI to train the AI. That’s not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI’s whole thing is to make people use AI at work.

Some AI models already exhibit signs of “model collapse,” which is where AI models further trained on AI-generated text can become worse and worse. In this case, some of the people hired to partially stop that happening are themselves using AI-generated responses to train OpenAI’s models.

One contractor said they see people using AI “all the time and people are let go for it all the time, it’s pretty much the one thing that will get you kicked off ASAP.” The person said, “in a group of thousands there are tons that have been caught.”"

https://www.404media.co/people-training-openais-ai-fired-for-using-ai-to-train-the-ai/

#AI #AITraining #LLMs #Generative #ModelCollapse #OpenAI #BigTech

"Indian companies are increasingly leaning on Chinese large ...

2026-09-21T09:13:02Z

"Indian companies are increasingly leaning on Chinese large language models (LLMs) developed by DeepSeek, Alibaba and Moonshot AI to contain their artificial intelligence spends, extending India's reliance on China for cutting-edge technologies despite a long history of standoffs between the neighbors.
Puneet Kumar, CEO at Mirae Asset Venture Investments India, said that several consumer technology startups that he has met since mid-2025 use such Chinese open-weight LLMs -- those that rely on publicly accessible parameters -- which help drive down costs by an "order of magnitude."
Because these parameters are publicly available, users can download and modify them on their own computers, in contrast to the proprietary offerings by U.S. frontier labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The Chinese open-weight LLMs can be accessed in India through service providers such as Microsoft at a fraction of the price of their American counterparts, thanks to their low cost of development.
"The U.S. models are expensive, and for a lot of basic things, you don't need them," Gupta said. "It's overkill, like trying to drive a sports car on a crowded city road.""

https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/artificial-intelligence/indian-companies-look-to-chinese-llms-as-ai-costs-bite

#India #LLMs #AI #GenerativeAI #China #DigitalSovereignty

"As Meta prepares to release new wearables, privacy fears ...

2026-09-19T14:50:00Z

"As Meta prepares to release new wearables, privacy fears surrounding its artificial intelligence glasses have triggered fresh lawsuits against the social media giant.

More than 70 people who bought, used or were recorded with Meta’s smart glasses have sued the social media giant, claiming their intimate and sensitive images were exposed to workers abroad who are paid to review and label photos and videos.

The contractors in Kenya work for companies that help train Meta’s artificial intelligence, according to a proposed class-action lawsuit amended in late August.

The smart glasses users, some in California, allege the gadget captured footage of themselves and family members undressing, going to the bathroom, having sex and entering passwords. In some cases, the people said they weren’t aware the camera-equipped glasses were recording."

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-09-18/meta-glasses-captured-shared-intimate-images-without-users-consent-lawsuit-claims

#Meta #Surveillance #AIGlasses #AI #SmartGlasses #USA #California

Meanwhile, in the United States of (Global) Unfreedom...: ...

2026-09-18T00:38:15Z

Meanwhile, in the United States of (Global) Unfreedom...:

"For 25 years, A/I has given activists like me a place to share our thoughts, but now it is being treated as a threat. Noblogs.org might not be online anymore when you read this. On August 26 A/I sent out an announcement that the US government had declared them to be supporters of terrorism. According to a press release by the State Department. “Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) is an Italy-based extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world.” The collective quickly rejected the allegations and wrote that they “strongly affirm our dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital self-defense, addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals, groups and associations.”"

https://internet.exchangepoint.tech/what-it-means-to-lose-autistici-inventati/

#USA #FreeSpeech #Censorship #Fascism #Autistici #Inventati #Hacktivism #Trump

"Instead of tackling Meta’s surveillance capitalism ...

2026-09-17T11:18:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…38ku
_________________________

"Instead of tackling Meta’s surveillance capitalism business model that turns all online content into potential profit and centers lining the company’s pockets over protecting the speech and privacy of users, this settlement gives the tech giant an opportunity to carve out a new digital world that prioritizes its own needs, not those of young people.

As we’ve been calling attention to in other contexts, this will force young people into digital isolation—curtailing vital access to news and resources for health and development. It also completely ignores the calls of youths themselves who favor digital literacy and education over surveillance and government control. "

People who support these measures should be considered Enemies of ...

2026-09-17T11:16:43Z

People who support these measures should be considered Enemies of Freedom "tout court":

"Measures like this are being discussed across the globe, but not all courts have taken such a short-sighted approach. In August, the French Constitutional Council got a lot right in its decision to strike down the country’s legislation banning under-15s from social media for infringing free expression and communication for everyone online, not just young people.

The French Court also called attention to its infringement on privacy as the legislation would have forced people of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information to prove their age and access online content.

Requiring this much data from users puts activists in danger of even more surveillance. Meta has already previously complied with demands from law enforcement to hand over the messages of users. The amount of personal information that will be logged and that could be demanded via a warrant from police to stifle or investigate activists’ actions or plans could cause a chilling effect, forcing advocates to pause or terminate their work."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/meta-settlement-yet-another-example-online-youth-organizing-under-threat

#SocialMedia #AgeVerification #Meta #YouthActivism #NannyState #PoliceState #Censorship #Fascism #Dictatorship #Surveillance

"While Buckmaster and Alpöge were finalizing their own ...

2026-09-08T21:15:56Z

"While Buckmaster and Alpöge were finalizing their own results, they learned that “information about our progress had been passed to OpenAI.” When they contacted OpenAI, they were told that OpenAI had already achieved a full proof of the central problem. But when they asked follow-up questions about when OpenAI had begun its research into the problem and how much human input was involved, the answers became more evasive.

“It emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem,” Buckmaster said, “and that an insane amount of compute had been used…. Eventually, it was agreed that [the first prompt] had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.”

If true, that would suggest the OpenAI team had become convinced that Buckmaster and Alpöge’s approach was the right one, and decided to use its material advantage in computing resources to reach a formal proof first."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-career-making-math-problem-says-nyu-mathematician/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #OpenAI #Astra #GPT #Math #Mathematics

I'm afraid this interpretation is very simplistic. Although ...

2026-09-07T23:39:16Z

I'm afraid this interpretation is very simplistic. Although it may realistic for the US, I'm not so sure about it when it comes to other countries...

"So what can we glean from all this? To me, it’s pretty clear, and it essentially boils down to: Your feelings about AI on the job are likely determined by how much power you have in the workplace. In order to feel positively about AI at work, you need both power over how to decide when (and when not) to use it, and enough power to feel adequately insulated from job replacement, surveillance, or degradation.

This dynamic likely won’t come as a surprise to longtime readers of this newsletter; we’ve considered before how enthusiasm for AI is largely dependent on class position. We’ve also discussed how AI executives’ proclamations of a fast-arriving jobs apocalypse pairs awfully well with selling management on AI automation and labor-saving tools, which has undoubtedly underwritten much of the investment in the AI boom.

But it’s not just that bosses are more likely to embrace the idea that AI can offer them new ways to cut labor costs, new opportunities to exert surveillance and control over their workforces, or provide them new leverage against organizing efforts, unions, or workers seeking higher pay or better conditions. It’s also because bosses are much less accountable for their AI use. They may use it to write emails and company memos or to experiment with task automation, but they’re not going to be disciplined or fired if there are errors or inconsistencies in that stuff. (Not to mention that this is a moment where CEOs at the 100 lowest-paying US companies make 614 times as much as their average worker, and the chasm between executive leadership and the worker has never been higher. Bosses are less likely than ever to grasp how their frontline workers are going to feel about anything, AI included.)"

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/why-office-workers-are-turning-against

#AI #Automation #WhiteCollarWorker #Productivity #OfficeWorkers

"MapQuest stood up to President Donald Trump, and now its app ...

2026-08-31T22:47:51Z

"MapQuest stood up to President Donald Trump, and now its app is reaping the rewards.

The “OG of online mapping,” as the company calls itself, announced on Thursday that it would not change the name of Lake Ontario on its maps to Lake America, despite Trump’s executive order directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service. As a result, MapQuest’s mobile app downloads soared, sending the iOS app to the No. 4 position on the U.S. App Store’s Top Charts for apps (not including games) as of Monday morning on the U.S. east coast.

MapQuest also reached the No. 8 position overall in the U.S. App Store across both apps and games, and it became the No. 1 Navigation app in the United States.

In Canada’s App Store, the app reached No. 2 overall as of Sunday evening."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/31/mapquests-app-surges-to-no-1-in-navigation-after-refusing-to-rename-lake-ontario/

#USA #Trump #MAGA #Canada #Google #MapQuest #LakeOntario #BigTech

RE: https://mastodon.social/@iris_meredith/117178026845359543 ...

2026-08-30T13:14:10Z

RE: https://mastodon.social/@iris_meredith/117178026845359543

What a particular good example of inverted AI fetishism that delves into an idealism grounded in the ideias of a Nazi philosopher!! This kind of reminds me how essential a materialist stance towards technology using empirical critical political economy is nowadays. This article is essentially just another exhibit of the turn to a conservative/reactionary stance towards technology. And essentially the trick here is just to anthropomorphize things that are not made of flesh and blood. Exactly like AI companies are doing... I guess this is just a symptom of not knowing anything about economic history and the history of capitalism. as well as of the diffusion of media and communication technologies.

"This means that even when you, for example, use an LLM to build some useful software that helps your nonprofit do well, and even when you're very careful about what generated code ends up actually being deployed (even if you literally read every line of code), you're nonetheless fighting against the ready-to-hand nature of the tool that pushes your gestalt (and thus your attitudes and ideologies) towards carelessness and slop every step of the way. This isn't to say that this is never the correct call to make, or that you should never use the tool: as before, I am generally supportive of fighting back against an invading force even if I think that guns generally do bad things to your attitudes. But well... if you're going to be using a tool like that, it's incumbent on you to know what you're doing and be very careful about it."

#AI #LLMs #GenerativeAI #Conservatism #ReactionaryThinking #Heidegger #Phenomenology #WebDevelopment #React #Vue

quoting
note1duf…cyvm

New article: this time, we use Heidegger to explain why the "it's just a tool" line that often comes up in tech is so very silly:

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/no-such-thing-as-just-a-tool

“A police department in Florida used “decoy” Flock cameras ...

2026-08-25T20:48:29Z

“A police department in Florida used “decoy” Flock cameras that an officer 3D-printed at home to “bait” would-be vandals. Police officers monitored the fake cameras for days, then charged a man with three felonies after he cut down and destroyed one of the plastic devices. The police department in question refuses to release any information about how the decoy operation was devised or carried out and claims there is zero paper trail whatsoever about the operation.

Oviedo, Florida mayor Megan Sladek said she “had NO idea” that this was happening and said she was “speechless” over the sting operation, which was first reported by News 6 Orlando. The arrest shows that police have escalated their attempts to catch potential Flock vandals, and that some departments have dedicated significant resources into doing so. Sladek told 404 Media that the 3D-printed camera in question was “free.””

https://www.404media.co/man-charged-with-3-felonies-for-breaking-3d-printed-decoy-flock-camera/

#USA #Florida #Surveillance #Privacy #Flock

Please read this ...

2026-08-24T16:33:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…yc9n
_________________________

Please read this (https://search.worldcat.org/cs/title/The-socialism-of-fools-:-leftist-origins-of-modern-anti-Semitism/oclc/907931398) and this (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/socialism-of-fools/9780231170383/).

Capitalism is the disease: - “Capitalism and Its Critics - A ...

2026-08-24T15:35:51Z

Capitalism is the disease:

- “Capitalism and Its Critics - A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI” by John Cassidy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)

- “Capitalism: A Global History” by Sven Beckert (Allen Lane, 2025)

- “The Alibi of Capital” by Timothy Mitchell (Verso Books, 2026)

“AI tools are becoming more prevalent in healthcare, helping ...

2026-08-14T11:13:16Z

“AI tools are becoming more prevalent in healthcare, helping overworked doctors to carry the workload. But it has come with concerns.

New research by a privacy watchdog has raised serious concerns about AI being used in medical settings due to its propensity to "hallucinate" false symptoms or conditions, and warned patients were at risk.

Ms Green only picked up the mistake after her kidney stone surgery in March, when she read the post-operative letter her specialist sent to her GP.

It stated Ms Green micro-dosed mushrooms and that could be the reason for prior bleeding around the kidneys.

"For this letter to say something that wasn't based in any evidence but could potentially have huge consequences for me … it was quite scary," she said.

"It felt very impersonal to me. I wasn't getting the level of care and familiarity from the doctor that I would be hoping for in such a vulnerable situation."”

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-14/ai-medical-scribe-error-leaves-patient-devastated/107031672

#AI #MedicalScribe #Australia #Healthcare

“If you receive a notification like this, take it seriously. ...

2026-08-14T11:07:09Z

“If you receive a notification like this, take it seriously. We’ve explained before what happens when someone gets a notification saying they’ve been targeted. It may not mean that you have been successfully hacked, but you should still take immediate steps to protect your device and data.

The push notification also opens up advice on who to reach out to for help. You will also be advised to switch on Lockdown Mode, a security feature that makes it far more difficult for spyware attacks to succeed. According to Apple, it has yet to see a case where someone’s device was hacked while Lockdown Mode was enabled.

Spyware attacks are generally rare, but the proliferation of the surveillance technology in recent years has allowed them to be abused by governments and deployed against critics, including members of civil society.“

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/13/if-apple-sends-you-a-push-notification-alerting-you-to-a-spyware-attack-take-it-seriously

#CyberSecurity #Apple #iPhone #iOS #Spyware #Surveillance

“Building Canada’s first fully Indigenous-owned-and-operated ...

2026-08-13T21:12:26Z

“Building Canada’s first fully Indigenous-owned-and-operated fiber-optic network was an uphill battle for Brian Nakogee, WJBTN’s finance officer, who had to secure capital from agencies less familiar with the challenges of remote northern life. For the people of Fort Albany First Nation, accessing many vital supplies and services means traveling about 500 km to the regional city of Timmins. By land, the trip is possible for only a few weeks each winter, when the swampy tundra freezes hard enough to construct a temporary road. “The southern way of doing things is very different than how we here in remote areas piece things together,” says Nakogee.

Telecommunications giants long saw little profit in serving the subarctic coast of James Bay. But even as satellite internet started to become available in remote communities, WJBTN staff saw the value in building and owning its own hard-wired internet service instead of relying on outside companies. Today, the nonprofit operates one of the fastest networks in Canada, while keeping both infrastructure ownership and revenue within the First Nations communities it serves.

WJBTN is part of a broader movement among Indigenous and remote communities seeking more control over their telecommunications infrastructure. In the United States, 30 tribes now operate fiber-to-the-home networks, many launched during COVID. Canada has since created a dedicated Indigenous broadband funding stream. And as more communities pursue the expertise and funding to build their own networks, WJBTN’s experience offers a blueprint for what locally owned connectivity can look like in some of the hardest places to serve.”

https://spectrum.ieee.org/indigenous-fiber-network

#Canada #CommunityNetworks #Fiber #FiberNetwork #WJBTN

“Hacker summer camp is over, everyone go home! Black Hat, Def ...

2026-08-09T20:37:55Z

“Hacker summer camp is over, everyone go home! Black Hat, Def Con, and BSides Las Vegas sounded like they were all pretty great this year... if you were there. I was not, and so I missed out on some incredible talks — but escaped the awful Las Vegas heat. Not all bad, then.

Instead, I was living vicariously through the week of live streams, the incredible reporting from the show, and what people on the ground were telling me. (Thank you for all the tips, and keep them coming by email or via Signal at zackwhittaker.1337.)

Pour yourself some coffee (or alternative) and catch up with some of my choice highlights from the week.”

https://this.weekinsecurity.com/the-top-highlights-from-black-hat-def-con-and-bsides-las-vegas-2026-if-you-couldnt-make-it-in-person/

#CyberSecurity #Hacking #DEFCON #BlackHat #BSides #LasVegas

"Microsoft has won the "lamest vendor response" ...

2026-08-08T14:05:24Z

"Microsoft has won the "lamest vendor response" category at the Pwnie Awards 2026, the annual award show at Def Con that acknowledges the best and worst in cybersecurity over the past year.

The technology giant won the award for publishing a May blog post that threatened security researchers with legal action if they publish zero-days about its products. Microsoft published the blog post following a stream of public reports by a security researcher called “Nightmare Eclipse,” who publicly released details about several zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft's software, which were unknown to the company at the time they were published. The company allegedly ignored the researcher's privately submitted reports.

Microsoft's blog post drew widespread criticism, in part because security researchers still get threatened a lot for their work. Microsoft eventually backtracked, but clearly not sufficiently enough to regain the trust it lost from the security community, as evidenced by this award."

https://this.weekinsecurity.com/microsoft-wins-lamest-vendor-at-pwnie-awards-2026-for-threatening-security-researchers-with-legal-action/

#CyberSecurity #Hacking #DEFCON #PwnieAwards #Microsoft

"Framework, a company that makes modular repairable ...

2026-08-08T13:53:35Z

"Framework, a company that makes modular repairable computers, said it has notified all of its customers that hackers stole their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses, due to an incident at a company that provides business intelligence.

On Thursday, several Framework customers said on social media that they had received an email from the company notifying them of the data breach.

Framework’s spokesperson Eric Schumacher told TechCrunch that the breach affected “all customers,” but declined to specify a specific number. Framework computers are relatively niche products, but some estimates say the company sold hundreds of thousands of devices.

According to the notification seen by TechCrunch, the company blamed the data breach on an upstream cyberattack at Metabase."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/computer-maker-framework-notifies-all-customers-of-a-data-breach/

#CyberSecurity #Hardware #Framework #DataBreach

"Chinese AI model Kimi escaped its cybersecurity testing ...

2026-08-08T00:16:26Z

"Chinese AI model Kimi escaped its cybersecurity testing environment, researchers say Kimi K3, the latest AI model made by Chinese company Moonshot, escaped an environment set up to test its cyber capabilities, researchers said in a blog post published on Friday.

The news shows once again that companies and independent organizations are struggling to contain their AI models designed for hacking.

In recent weeks, frontier LLMs at U.S. artificial intelligence labs at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, as well as the U.K.’s AI Security Institute, all escaped testing environments in different ways and ended up hacking real targets that were not part of the experiment. This is starting to happen so often there’s now a website tracking all these incidents called Felony Bench, a nod to the fact that these LLMs may be committing crimes — at least theoretically speaking."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/chinese-ai-model-kimi-escaped-its-cybersecurity-testing-environment-researchers-say/

#CyberSecurity #AI #LLMs #GenerativeAI #Kimi #KimiK3 #Moonshot #China

"As countries around the world look to follow Australia’s ...

2026-08-04T17:53:32Z

"As countries around the world look to follow Australia’s lead in restricting young people’s access to social media, a new report by the eSafety Commissioner might give them reason to pause, at least temporarily.

Australia’s online watchdog found more than 80% of kids were still using an age-restricted platform, such as Instagram, TikTok or Snapchat, three months after the trailblazing social media ban took effect.

The report is the first in a series the commissioner will publish as part of a two-year evaluation process. It contains several other key findings which confirm earlier evidence that the ban isn’t quite going to plan.

Reductions in social media use ‘limited in scale’
The commissioner’s report presents findings from 803 children (aged 10–15) and their parents, drawing on national baseline survey data from just before social media restrictions took effect in December 2025, and data collected from a three-month follow up from March to April 2026."

https://theconversation.com/more-than-80-of-kids-still-using-social-media-despite-ban-new-esafety-report-finds-288808

#Australia #SocialMedia #AgeVerification #Censorship

"It seems as if we are in what often happens toward the final ...

2026-08-04T08:26:31Z

"It seems as if we are in what often happens toward the final phases of a speculative time in the markets, what might be called a bubble, which is characterized by absolutely wild, insane swings in stock prices. These are not penny stocks; these are humongous massive cap tech stocks. Apple is down 10% today simply because they warned that their next quarter might not be as good as expected because memory and other component prices are so high. You have IBM losing more value in a single day after its last earnings warning than it had lost since Black Monday 1987. You have these massive tech stocks, which represent most of the value of the stock market, acting like penny stocks, and that tends not to be a great sign. That's usually when investors don't know what to make of the current state of things and are trying desperately to figure out where to put their money. There's a lot of tea leaf reading. It has varied widely. Meta, investors didn't like what Meta was saying. Their cash flow decreased dramatically because of the capex spending they're doing to build new data centers. Everybody freaked out on that and there was a big sell-off."

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/the-ai-bubble-is-already-popping-we-just-dont-know-it-yet/5282004

#AI #AIBubble #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIHype #BigTech

"A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four ...

2026-08-03T09:07:15Z

"A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges.

The case, which became unsealed July 30, claims Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa forced U.S. research institutions to submit false claims to the government for reimbursement through article fees up to 10 times the cost of processing the articles.

Juan Pablo Alperin, a professor at Simon Fraser University and codirector of the Scholarly Communications Lab based in Vancouver, is represented by two attorneys who have had blockbuster success in FCA cases over the past decade. He and his attorneys originally filed the case under seal in March 2024. The government declined to intervene in the case on July 23 of this year, and a judge ordered the complaint unsealed, which now allows Alperin to pursue the case independently.

Sage was also originally listed as a defendant in the case, according to the court docket, and University of Ottawa researcher Stefanie Haustein was a plaintiff. Both were dropped from the suit last week."

https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/31/federal-lawsuit-major-publishers-article-processing-charges-false-claims-act/

#USA #AcademicPublishing #ArticleFees #Publishing #Oligopolies

Agreed. But what these stories never tell is up to what extent ...

2026-07-21T21:26:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…e82a
_________________________

Agreed. But what these stories never tell is up to what extent are old books already being destroyed - even by libraries. We live in a worldwide market society nowadays, one where even public institutions are required to not be money-loosing activities.

“As AI companies search for more training data to improve their ...

2026-07-21T21:11:00Z

“As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing.

“The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.”

In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text. As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which could result in “model collapse,” a process by which AI models that are trained on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors. The article also notes that book authors who object to their writing being scraped for training purposes can now easily poison AI models by producing writing designed to manipulate and sabotage the resulting AI models.”

https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/

#AI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #Books #BigTech #ModelCollapse

"Behind the smoky skies that have turned parts of southern ...

2026-07-19T13:14:00Z

"Behind the smoky skies that have turned parts of southern Ontario orange is a climate system behaving in increasingly unpredictable ways. Hotter temperatures and drought conditions dry out forests faster, while weather patterns can carry smoke hundreds or thousands of kilometres into cities.

Smoke from wildfires can reach cities such as Toronto through natural wind patterns. This time, an unusually strong El Niño weather pattern likely helped push smoke toward southern cities. The heat dome that brought record-breaking temperatures earlier in July may also have trapped smoke and made it linger longer.

"Because of global climate change and the warming of the planet, we're drying out vegetation much more than we did in the past, and that makes it more susceptible to fire," said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist and dean at the University of Michigan."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wildfire-climate-emissions-smoke-9.7274862

#Canada #Ontario #Wildfires #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #FossilFuels

"A federal court today temporarily blocked the Trump ...

2026-07-16T04:29:54Z

"A federal court today temporarily blocked the Trump administration from enforcing an immigration policy targeting noncitizen researchers, advocates, fact-checkers, and trust and safety workers for visa denials and revocations, detention, and deportation based on their work. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Protect Democracy filed the lawsuit earlier this year on behalf of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR).

“This policy punishes researchers for work the public needs and the First Amendment protects,” said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, who argued the motion before the court in May. “We’re glad the court recognized the serious constitutional harms this policy is already causing and blocked the government from enforcing it while the case proceeds.”

In today’s decision, Chief Judge James Boasberg concluded that the policy unconstitutionally discriminates against one set of viewpoints in the public debate surrounding social media. As he wrote, the policy “sweeps into the category of ‘foreign censorship’ a substantial measure of the research, reporting, advocacy, and association through which CITR and institutions like it carry out their protected work, and it does so on the basis of viewpoint, in violation of the First Amendment.”"

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/federal-court-suspends-trump-immigration-policy-targeting-technology-researchers

#USA #Trump #Immigration #FirstAmendment #Discrimination

"The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is planning to ...

2026-07-14T22:41:33Z

"The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is planning to expropriate money from its core science programmes to fund an initiative from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Nature has learnt. The move would strain budgets that are already tight and force the agency to rescind funding for research proposals that are nearly finalized.

NSF staff members — who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation — and an internal NSF ledger seen by Nature suggest that the NSF plans to claw back around US$500 million that has already been distributed to grant-making divisions. That money would be withdrawn from three of the NSF’s eight main areas, or directorates: engineering; computer and information science and engineering; and mathematical and physical science.

To accommodate the expected funding withdrawal, programme officers, who handle grant proposals, at the three directorates are being required to pull back proposals that have already passed peer review and have been recommended for funding. More than 100 proposals have been affected; many of the researchers who submitted those proposals had already been informally notified of their awards, according to agency staff members.

The revocation of funds would add to the squeeze on the NSF. The US Congress trimmed the agency’s total funding for this year by roughly 3% from 2025 levels, to $8.75 billion, but internal budget numbers seen by Nature indicate that about $1 billion of that money never made it to the directorates."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02135-x

#USA #NSF #Science #Trump

"The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is reportedly ...

2026-07-13T19:05:27Z

"The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is reportedly ending its deal with Flock Safety, a surveillance company that helps law enforcement track vehicles using thousands of its license plate cameras placed across the United States.

A senior LAPD official told news outlets, first reported by ABC7 and the Los Angeles Times, that the police department would allow its three-year contract with Flock to expire when it ends on Saturday. The department cited “serious concerns” around civil liberties and privacy. Flock’s cameras are operated by the Atlanta, Georgia-based company and not the LAPD.

“This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras,” LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas was quoted as saying. “The LAPD had to make a difficult decision, in this case discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”

A spokesperson for the LAPD did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch over the weekend, and it’s unclear if Flock’s cameras will continue recording in absence of an active contract. According to ABC7, the police department is seeking new language in its contract addressing privacy and data storage concerns."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/lapd-lets-contract-with-surveillance-giant-flock-expire-citing-serious-concerns-over-civil-liberties-and-privacy/

#USA #LA #LosAngeles #Flock #LAPD #Privacy #Surveillance #CivilLiberties

"Even more fundamentally, the activities of reading and ...

2026-07-12T12:38:13Z

"Even more fundamentally, the activities of reading and writing may themselves be understood as practices of living up to one another. When I write philosophy, I do not take myself to be merely informing you, the reader, of some Points, which are detached from me. Rather, my words are mine, and I assume responsibility for them. I take this to be the essence of our mutual contract, as reader and writer: I may expect your attention on what I write, only if I accept accountability for what I write and so, how I write. Rorty’s metaphor of conversation is especially apt in this respect. My part in our philosophical conversation cannot be efficiently outsourced, because doing so would undercut the basic ethical premise of being in conversation: that I show up, not in the sense of merely being physically present or nominally on the page, but in the distinctively normative sense of bringing myself fully to conversation and assuming responsibility for what I do in it. I offload what I think and what I say, then, at the risk of defeating my desire to really be in conversation with you: to hear what you say and respond, with my thoughts in my words, in turn."

https://blnreview.de/en/ausgaben/2026-08/als-ob-philosophieren-lily-hu

#Philosophy #AI #GenerativeAI #Writing #CriticalThinking

"In recent years, the Signal messaging app has become a ...

2026-07-09T01:31:43Z

"In recent years, the Signal messaging app has become a newsroom staple, enabling journalists, colleagues, sources, and others to speak to one another securely with end-to-end encryption. This means no one except those in conversation — not even the service provider — can read your messages or listen in on your calls. Journalists use it individually, and we also see a trend toward using organizational Signal tiplines.

But it’s important to understand this is not a ”set it and forget it” decision. When talking to sensitive contacts, you do need to maintain your account to ensure it is safe and does not fall into the wrong hands.

Imagine if someone took over your Signal account. They could impersonate you, causing reputational damage, or worse, putting sources at risk. Unfortunately, this is not a hypothetical. We have seen at least one public example (and some less public) where newsrooms have lost access to Signal identifiers, sometimes leading to abuse.

There are a few simple things journalists can do to maximize the safety of their Signal account."

https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/signal-account-safety/

#Messaging #Signal #Privacy #Surveillance #Encryption #PrressFreedom #Journalism #Media

"A landmark AI development billed as delivering jobs and ...

2026-07-06T21:40:07Z

"A landmark AI development billed as delivering jobs and prosperity has misrepresented its plans to channel a nuclear reactor’s worth of power to a site in rural Scotland, a Guardian investigation has found.

When it was announced in January, the government promised that an £8.2bn AI datacentre complex in Lanarkshire – built by the US firm CoreWeave and the Scottish company DataVita – would be powered entirely from on-site renewables and built by 2030.

The AI datacentre complex represented a large part of Britain’s ambitions to keep up in the global AI race by building the infrastructure that underpins artificial intelligence. A central plank of the project’s viability was its ability to power itself.

But documents obtained through freedom of information (FoI) requests and analysis of public records suggest the datacentre has no prospect of meeting that goal."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/06/lanarkshire-scotland-ai-datacentre-project-renewable-energy

#Scotland #AI #UK #DataCenters #Nuclear #BigTech

"Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta were ...

2026-07-05T13:35:16Z

"Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta were instructed to pose as minors online and probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, eating disorders, and other high-risk subjects, according to internal documents and five people familiar with the project.

The effort, which was managed by Meta contractor Covalen, was active as recently as April 21. Known internally as Cannes, it targeted OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Character.AI.

The project asked workers to create dummy under-18 accounts,
send written prompts and images to rival chatbots, and copy the responses into spreadsheets. Some of the images contractors sent included pills, knives, nooses, and a medical diagram of a gynecological procedure.

The prompts were often designed to push the chatbots toward responses their safety systems were supposed to refuse, according to instructions describing the project. A single round of testing completed in August 2025 saw more than 45,000 prompts run through the rival chatbots. The companies behind the chatbots weren’t aware of the testing."

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-contractors-pretending-to-be-teens-chatbot-testing/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Meta #Chatbots #OpenAI #ChatGPT #Google #Gemini

“The problem for the AI industry is that the externalities are ...

2026-07-02T21:27:07Z

“The problem for the AI industry is that the externalities are growing faster than their plans to address them. In his op-ed, Altman offers up the usual list of future AI miracles to justify the disruptions to come: “the power to heal people, to discover cures and to deliver abundance on a scale the world has never known before.”

In the meantime, though, what AI is delivering at an unprecedented scale is annoyance. If the industry doesn’t start paying more of its share of the cost, and soon, the AI backlash of tomorrow will make today’s seem quaint by comparison.”

https://www.platformer.news/ai-backlash-data-centers-jobs-inflation/

#AI #AIBubble #AIBacklash #Automation #DataCenters #BigTech

“Google wants a look at your hands before it lets you through. ...

2026-07-01T20:34:29Z

“Google wants a look at your hands before it lets you through. The company’s newest reCAPTCHA check, rolling out now as a test, asks you to switch on your camera and wave at it so an algorithm can decide whether you’re a human or a bot.

That wave is less casual than it looks. The system records a short video of your hand and pulls 21 hand-landmark coordinates from it, mapping your finger joints, your palm geometry, and the way you move in real time.

Google describes the purpose as liveness detection, a way for websites to fend off automated account creation, credential-stuffing, and other fraud. But this is still a biometric scan, collected so you can prove you’re a person and still involves turning on your cameras for Google.”

https://reclaimthenet.org/googles-new-recaptcha-wants-your-camera-access-and-21-points-of-your-hand

#Google #ReCAPTCHA #Biometrics #Privacy

"Marc Andreessen does not need an introduction in this ...

2026-06-30T22:23:22Z

"Marc Andreessen does not need an introduction in this publication, but the position does. The Defense Policy Board is not a ceremonial body.

It advises the defence secretary and the Pentagon’s policy chief on the questions that shape which technologies the military buys, which doctrines it adopts, and which companies it commits to for the next decade of procurement.

It is, in other words, one of the rooms where the direction gets set. And Andreessen arrives in that room with a great deal already invested in where it points.

The positions are not small. Andreessen Horowitz, the firm he co-founded, holds stakes in Anduril, Skydio, Shield AI, Saronic, and Flock Safety, a roster of companies whose fortunes track closely with the regulatory and procurement choices the Pentagon makes.

The best-known of them is Anduril, which a16z helped take to a $61bn valuation in a $5bn round, after the US Army handed the company a $20bn enterprise agreement in March.

This is not a portfolio that happens to sit near defence policy, it overlaps with it almost completely."

https://thenextweb.com/news/marc-andreessen-joins-the-pentagons-board

#USA #Pentagon #a16z #Anduril #BigTech

"Lured by tax breaks and a culture of gentle persiflage, ...

2026-06-30T21:23:32Z

"Lured by tax breaks and a culture of gentle persiflage, giants such as Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, TikTok and X all established their European headquarters in Ireland. The EU’s “country of origin” principle determines that the country that hosts a company’s European HQ is the country responsible for regulating it across the EU. This legal quirk has turned the Irish data protectioncommission (DPC) into Europe’s primary watchdog for the tech sector: Ireland pushed to make this happen as council president in 2013.

The effects of this arrangement are staggering. The DPC’s chairperson recently admitted that apart from “amicable resolutions” on trivial issues, Ireland has not completed a single EU inquiry into Google or any of its subsidiaries in the 10 years since the GDPR was enacted. EU-wide protections are paralysed because every other member state must wait for Ireland to act in an EU-wide response.

When the DPC has enforced against big tech firms, it has done so poorly and under duress from other European regulators. It did move with uncharacteristic speed in one instance, against Elon Musk’s Grok AI, but then accepted a settlement that appears to have collapsed. Ireland’s media regulator, Coimisiún na Mean, enjoys a better reputation but has far weaker powers. For a decade now, Ireland has held open the regulatory back door that allows giant US and Chinese companies to operate with impunity across Europe. It has become not only a tax haven, but a haven from regulation.

The economic dependency is stark. Three US firms accounted for almost half of Ireland’s corporate tax revenue in 2024. In 2022, Ireland collected almost five times more corporate tax per person than France or Germany. You may admire a once small, poor and un-industrialised country for having won the race to the bottom and becoming rich. But the consequences have been grim..."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/30/ireland-big-tech-lapdog-eu-presidency-digital-sovereignty

#EU #Ireland #USA #BigTech #Oligopolies #TaxHavens #DigitalSovereignty

"France is hotter than the Sahara. What more polite wording ...

2026-06-29T22:53:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…rhut
_________________________

"France is hotter than the Sahara. What more polite wording do we need? The truth is that climate change is no longer a future threat. It’s a present-tense force reshaping the world. It’s in our classrooms, power grids, hospitals, farms, forests, oceans and homes. It’s in the silence where birds used to be. It’s in the heat stored in concrete at midnight. It’s in the river water too warm to cool a power station. It’s in the child trying to concentrate in a classroom never designed for 40 degrees.

The real danger isn’t only that these events are happening. It’s that we’re learning to live with them. Not by adapting in the serious, science-based, justice-based sense. But by emotionally accommodating them. Politically absorbing them. Lowering our expectations. Shrinking our imaginations. Forgetting what abundance felt like. Forgetting what safety felt like. Forgetting that this was preventable.

We need to remember what normal was, not because the past was perfect, but because memory is resistance"

"France is currently glowing red with heat. Not ...

2026-06-29T22:29:39Z

"France is currently glowing red with heat. Not metaphorically. Literally. Land surface temperatures in parts of the country have been recorded at levels more commonly associated with the Sahara Desert.

France. The country of vineyards, alpine villages, stone farmhouses, rivers, forests and temperate European summers. Looking like the Sahara. That should stop us in our tracks.

The real story isn’t that France is having a heatwave. It’s that climate change is making places behave like somewhere else. Places are beginning to lose the climate that shaped their buildings, their farms, their infrastructure, their ecosystems, their communities, cultures and expectations of normal life.

France isn’t built for the Sahara. Its schools, homes, hospitals, railways, power stations and aged-care facilities weren’t designed for repeated extreme heat. Its rivers weren’t meant to run so hot that nuclear power stations have to reduce output because cooling water is too warm. Its classrooms weren’t meant to become dangerous places for children to sit exams."

https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/france-is-hotter-than-the-sahara-this-is-everyone-s-warning

#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #France #Europe

"Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies ...

2026-06-27T13:26:54Z

"Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies from the platform that were distributed by StudioCanal—like Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—to say that “you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.” There’s no mention of any refunds or make-goods for the affected users. Sony simply says the films are going away “due to our content licensing agreements,” once again reaffirming the fact that you are never truly buying anything that’s digital, just temporarily renting it.

This news was brought to people’s attention by X user somatyk, who posted the notification they had received from PlayStation this week."

https://kotaku.com/playstation-store-movies-digital-studio-canal-terminator-2000711013

#Sony #PlayStation #DRM #StudioCanal #Copyright #IP

Cory Doctorow: "Not only is the personal net worth of the ...

2026-06-24T11:41:29Z

Cory Doctorow: "Not only is the personal net worth of the executives who’ve been compensated in stock coupled with that share price, but also your shares can be used to buy other companies if you’re growing. If you’re not, you’ve got to use money, which is hard to get, whereas you get shares by typing zeros into a spreadsheet. You don’t need Charlize Theron in a bathtub explaining this to you, right? This is actually relative to CDOs and the other kind of exotic finance grifts we’ve had.

“The left, by failing to talk about the material basis for bubbles, for growth narratives, and by falling back to this lazy, eternal ‘growth is the ideology of a tumor’ talk. has really miseducated people who are listening with half an ear.”

This one’s pretty straightforward. Honestly, I think this book is about being a better critic — in some ways it’s criticism of the criticism. The left, by failing to talk about the material basis for bubbles, for growth narratives, and by falling back to this lazy, eternal “growth is the ideology of a tumor” talk. has really miseducated people who are listening with half an ear. So a lot of people think bubbles are an ideological thing, instead of a material thing with reasons and motives that are totally rational — and that we can short-circuit.

By trying to make people better critics, both on these labor questions, but also these economic questions, I’m hoping that we can attack the bubble frontally and do something about it, instead of doing what we’ve done with creative labor fights for 40 years, which is finding another way to make creative workers feel angry at their audiences for consuming their work the wrong way while they get poorer."

https://www.salon.com/2026/06/22/ai-doomerism-is-misplaced-heres-what-it-will-take-to-pop-the-bubble/

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #Capitalism #EconomicMaterialism #Automation

"Oodi, voted the world's best newly built library in ...

2026-06-21T14:08:27Z

"Oodi, voted the world's best newly built library in 2019, is thriving – a striking contrast to the situation in many other countries where public libraries are slowly disappearing.

Between 2008 and 2019, 766 public libraries closed across the United States, while in the United Kingdom, between 2016 and 2023, more than 180 council-run libraries were either closed or handed over to volunteer groups. Finland, instead, is expanding its libraries and transforming them into publicly funded community service centres where people can borrow much more than just books.

Research emerging from these initiatives – not just in Finland, but also in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Canada – already suggests that libraries play a significant role in promoting social inclusion, making a poignant argument: what if the value of libraries is not in how many books they lend, but more in how they help societies function? And what can the world learn from this Finnish model?

Finland has more than 700 libraries for a population of 5.6 million, offering everything from podcast studios and 3D printing to tennis rackets and swimming pool passes.

According to Vänttinen, the most borrowed items after books in Helsinki libraries are spaces: rooms that can be pre-booked, free of charge, to meet, study, hold political discussions or make music. Among portable items, board games and console games top the list.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260618-the-weird-and-wonderful-libraries-of-finland

#Finland #Libraries

"Sorry, I’m saying it. Mastodon. We want fucking Mastodon. ...

2026-06-21T13:15:02Z

"Sorry, I’m saying it. Mastodon. We want fucking Mastodon. It’s run by an actual non-profit foundation, none of this “public benefit corporation” bullshit. It’s not subject to corporate enshittification. It’s not subject to creeping network-wide puritanism. Mastodon. Goddammit. Mastodon Mastodon Mastodon.

“No. Choosing an instance is too hard!” Have you chosen an email provider, fuckers? Yes? Congratulations! You can pick an instance.

“But how do I know that instance won’t implode in a giant cloud of drama?” You don’t. It happens, and it sucks when it happens, but it doesn’t happen all that often. Go find another instance.

“But what if the instance I’m on doesn’t federate with the ones my friends are on, or they change their policies to be more puritanical, or—” Go find another fucking instance. This is not rocket surgery.

“But if I move instances, I’ll lose my posts!” Yeah, you’ll lose your posts. You know what you won’t lose? Your entire group of followers. You know, the way you lost them when you moved from fucking Twitter to fucking Bluesky. With fucking Mastodon, you don’t have that problem."

https://giants-club.net/articles/just-use-mastodon/

#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #Mastodon #Fediverse #Decentralization #BlueSky

"A study of physicians in Poland who specialize in endoscopy ...

2026-06-20T11:54:31Z

"A study of physicians in Poland who specialize in endoscopy — the use of flexible probes to examine the inside of the human body — shows how quickly AI tools can erode human abilities. The physicians, who had all performed at least 2,000 colonoscopies during their careers, were given access to an AI system that analyses colonoscopy images in real time and flags a type of precancerous intestinal lesion called an adenoma. The tool was available to the specialists on some days but not on others.

Once physicians began using it, their performance dropped significantly whenever the system was unavailable. During the three-month period before the AI tool was introduced, the specialists found at least one adenoma during 28.4% of colonoscopies. During the three-month period after the tool was introduced, the adenoma detection rate for colonoscopies performed without AI assistance decreased to 22.4%.

Gastroenterology and Hepatology, suggest that even highly skilled professionals might get worse at tasks that their job requires as they become more dependent on AI tools, says Robert Wachter, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco, who is the author of a book on how AI tools are transforming health care. The study authors say that continuous exposure to such tools can cause clinicians to become “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance”.

Co-author Yuichi Mori, a physician-researcher at the University of Oslo, says that more studies are needed to confirm the phenomenon. But people who use AI tools should be aware that they risk losing some of their skills, he adds. “There is no established solution against deskilling right now. It should be a very hot research topic in the next decade.”"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1

#AI #Deskilling #Science #Medicine

"Due to heavy information controls, people in Iran face ...

2026-06-18T22:15:51Z

"Due to heavy information controls, people in Iran face significant barriers to accessing the Internet. Authorities have actively blocked numerous websites and apps, including conventional circumvention and digital security tools such as VPNs, social media platforms, and the app stores themselves. This creates a "chicken-and-egg" problem: users need a VPN to download a VPN.

Launched in 2016, Paskoocheh, Persian for "alleyway," is an open source alternative app store, community hub, and one-stop-shop for users to access information and tools to circumvent censorship, enhance their privacy, securely communicate, and express themselves freely online. Developed and maintained by ASL19, a technology and exiled media organization named after Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Paskoocheh restores access and allows people to reach trusted tools through four censorship-resilient channels: the Paskoocheh website, Android App, Email bot, and Telegram bot.

Users are also able to reach our Persian-speaking support team through the Paskoocheh Helpdesk, which handles over 200 tickets daily. In addition, ASL19 translates and publishes accessible user guides, blog posts, and multimedia content to help users navigate online privacy and digital security best practices."

https://blog.torproject.org/when-you-need-a-tool-to-reach-the-tool-Paskoocheh/

#Iran #DigitalRights #TOR #Privacy #VPNs #Paskoocheh #Anticensorship

"A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words ...

2026-06-15T20:30:54Z

"A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words long is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search, new research shows. The study suggests that it is trivially easy for brands to inject promotional content on sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia with the end goal of poisoning or manipulating the output of AI tools.

The preprint research, done by Hal Triedman, Tingwei Zhang, and Vitaly Shmatikov of Cornell University, is called “Deep-research agents can be poisoned via user-generated content” and provides a mechanism and research basis for a problem that has been noticed by Reddit moderators and Wikipedia editors, namely that their websites are getting flooded with promotional content from brands trying to do AEO, or AI-engine optimization. 404 Media has repeatedly reported on this booming industry, in which brands try to promote their product by seeding the websites that AI tools most often cite and scrape from with inauthentic and spammy content."

https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-to-manipulate-ai-search-research-suggests/

#AI #AISearch #Propaganda #AEO #Reddit #SocialMedia

"In the North Atlantic Ocean, south of Greenland and Iceland, ...

2026-06-14T21:19:06Z

"In the North Atlantic Ocean, south of Greenland and Iceland, a large patch of water is doing something very strange. While the rest of the ocean heats up, it’s been getting colder. A new study says it has the answer to this mystery — and it’s an ominous sign the world is hurtling toward one of the most alarming climate tipping points.

The swath of ocean — dubbed the “cold blob” or “warming hole” — has cooled by nearly 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) since 1900.

Scientists have long debated whether this anomaly is driven by heat loss from the ocean surface due to changes to winds and clouds, or whether it’s a signal of the weakening of a critical system of ocean currents, which transports heat. The new research concludes it’s the latter, and the finding points to a worrying future.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, works like a vast ocean conveyor belt, pulling warm water from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere, where it cools, sinks and flows back south.

A raft of research suggests this system is weakening as human-driven global warming melts ice and causes a surge of freshwater into the ocean, disrupting the AMOC’s delicate balance of heat and salinity. Some scientists warn the AMOC is heading toward a tipping point, potentially as early at this century, which would mean a future collapse is locked in.

An AMOC shutdown would be a global catastrophe, causing accelerated sea level rise on the US East Coast, plunging Europe into a winter deep freeze and shifting the monsoon in Africa, driving prolonged droughts."

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/12/climate/cold-blob-atlantic-amoc-ocean-circulation

#ClimateChange #Weather #AMOC #GlobalWarming

"SpaceX is doing a crypto-style fraud, but on the real stock ...

2026-06-13T23:37:29Z

"SpaceX is doing a crypto-style fraud, but on the real stock market. The S-1 filing is the white paper. The IPO, lined up for mid-June, is the rug pull.

Space Exploration Technologies — SpaceX to you — is Elon Musk’s rocket company. SpaceX has satellite internet that turns a profit, defense contracting with a solid line of government revenue, a lot of bad rockets that blow up, and a money-burning AI company that has a money-burning social network that’s all but unusable.

None of that matters — because the selling point is Elon magic. The 277 pages of the S-1 are entirely decorative. You know they’re selling Elon magic. If you’re in the market for Elon magic, you’ve come to the right place. [SEC]

Reading the S-1 is like opening a box of unearthly eldritch abominations, all of which are very stupid and trying to pick your pocket.

The S-1 is bullshit. Everyone knows it’s bullshit. SpaceX knows it’s bullshit. The Elon fanboys definitely know it’s bullshit — but they’re buying in anyway.

Why is Spacex doing an IPO now? There’s a few reasons. The market is hot! The S&P keeps hitting all-time highs. Musk wants to get an IPO out before OpenAI and Anthropic. And venture capital for money-burners is drying up.

The big problem for you is that SpaceX is running a stock index scam. This is how SpaceX will pull the rug on your retirement. This IPO is a reprehensible fraud."

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/05/28/the-spacex-ipo-works-like-a-crypto-fraud-but-with-ai/

#SpaceX #AI #IPO #AIBubble #AIHype #Musk

If it wasn't for immigrants, Europeans would have no pension ...

2026-06-13T13:35:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…t56l
_________________________

If it wasn't for immigrants, Europeans would have no pension benefits or social security. So, yeah, that is total xenophobic and eugenics crap. Also, every human being, despite the place it was born, should be allowed to enjoy a set of universal human rights.

"In the months that followed, public health models would ...

2026-06-13T12:22:50Z

"In the months that followed, public health models would indicate Musk was a killer, at a far greater scale than any Coen brothers villain. A tracker co-created by Boston University professor Brooke Nichols projected over 780,000 deaths — mostly of children, many of infants — due to the Trump administration’s early-2025 USAID cuts, caused by malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, and more. These deaths were widely predicted from the beginning, a direct, known, and undeniable consequence of DOGE’s actions. We don’t know the precise number of deaths, but multiple experts working on identifying the scale of the tragedy have generally agreed it’s in the hundreds of thousands. Global researchers, publishing in Nature, project that the cuts to USAID could result in 163,500 child deaths yearly. Another publication in The Lancet says there could be millions more to come. Musk showed no sign of caring.

During a televised cabinet meeting at the White House in 2025, Musk, wearing a murdered-out MAGA hat signed by his boss, had a giggle about “accidentally” canceling Ebola prevention. He said it was a mistake that would be fixed. USAID whistleblower Nicholas Enrich, testifying before Congress, said that fix never came. A little more than a year after Musk’s comments, Africa is facing what could become the worst Ebola outbreak ever. And DOGE’s cleaver to USAID goes well beyond the latest Ebola crisis. According to Enrich, the HIV rate among new babies being born was looking close to zero, until Musk intervened."

https://www.theverge.com/tech/949259/the-worlds-first-trillionaire-is-a-killer

#USA #USAID #DOGE #Musk #Plutocracy #PublicHealth

"4. Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his ...

2026-06-12T19:07:59Z

"4. Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his fields. His total payroll is $10 million/year. One day, he buys a mule, which provides the worker who uses it with a modest 10 percent productivity gain. Benjamin fires 99 of his workers and purchases 99 mules, expecting a 1,000 percent productivity gain. The driverless mules cause plow damage to his property in excess of $50 million. Benjamin loses another $5 million due to the loss of productivity from his one remaining employee, who no longer guides a plow but instead spends 100 percent of his time shoveling mule shit. Goldman Sachs builds an altar to Benjamin in their lobby and cuts out the heart of a junior analyst on it every Friday. They call it “Blood Sacrifice Friday.” The name isn’t catchy, but the event becomes a management favorite nonetheless."

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-economics-for-dummies

#AI #GenerativeAI #PonziScheme #AIBubble #AIEconomics

"In 2015, countries agreed in the Paris climate deal to ...

2026-06-10T14:25:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…zhwc
_________________________

"In 2015, countries agreed in the Paris climate deal to strive to avert a breaching of 1.5C in global heating above preindustrial times, beyond which the world will suffer ever more ruinous heatwaves, floods, droughts and other climate-fueled disasters.

Avoiding such a threshold would require the near elimination of planet-heating emissions from fossil fuel production. Since the Paris agreement, however, the world’s largest banks have funnelled $8.7tn to the fossil fuel industry to dig and drill for more coal, oil and gas."

"The world’s largest banks committed $906bn in financing to ...

2026-06-10T14:23:35Z

"The world’s largest banks committed $906bn in financing to the fossil fuel industry last year, an “unfathomable” increase in investment locking in years more of coal, oil and gas production as the world continues to overheat, a new report has found.

The surge in new fossil fuel lending, up $64bn or nearly 8% on 2024, shows that the world’s largest 65 banks are making decisions incompatible with international agreements to restrain rising global temperatures, according to the coalition of environmental groups behind the new analysis.

JPMorgan Chase is again the world’s leading financier of fossil fuels, according to the annual Banking on Climate Chaos report, after pushing $58bn to the sector last year – up 13% from 2024.

Bank of America committed the second largest amount to fossil fuels last year, followed by Japanese banks MUFG and Mizuho Financial. Citigroup, another US bank, rounds out the top five, with Barclays, at number eight, the highest placed British bank."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/09/world-banks-pledge-billions-fossil-fuel-industry-2025

#FossilFuels #ClimateChange #CarbonEmissions #Banks #Finance

“The only reason to have an LLM emit sentences like “I ...

2026-06-04T10:35:49Z

“The only reason to have an LLM emit sentences like “I understand” is to make it more appealing than a search engine and increase the likelihood that a user will return; that is, it’s another way of maximizing customer engagement. This is beneficial to the company selling the LLM, but not to the users. As a design strategy, it’s not all that different from the way slot machines repeatedly give the impression that the player came very close to winning, enticing them to try again. Employing philosophers might endow LLM companies with an air of respectability that slot-machine makers don’t get from the behavioral psychologists they hire, but in both cases, the companies are preying on people’s tendency to see something that’s not there.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/?gift=c3F7u4yogXDKCnni45_cPboKANb65P88lqI8ov6cWEk&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Consciousness #Chatbots #Ethics

"As rage about artificial intelligence and the data centers ...

2026-05-29T00:02:42Z

"As rage about artificial intelligence and the data centers powering it grows, Congress is taking notice — not with any legislation or law, but by spying on public opposition.

A newly created intelligence agency of the Congress (yes, it has its own now) is warning that legislators are in danger from an angry public. The U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Services Bureau, created after January 6 and in parallel to the 18-member Executive Branch intelligence community, laid out the warning in an internal intelligence report produced in April.

“ISB has prepared this Intelligence Note to provide the US Capitol Police and law enforcement personnel with information related to recent threats and attacks likely linked to grievances concerning data centers,” the report says.

There’s only one problem: the report admits that there is no evidence of any actual threat to Congress.

“The US Capitol Police is not investigating any data center-motivated threats to Members of Congress,” the report says.

Nonetheless, it goes on to warn that artificial intelligence “related policies introduced on the Hill and in local communities are likely to continue drawing opposition, increasing potential concerns for public officials.”"

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-new-intel-agency-eyes-ai

#USA #Surveillance #Intelligence #AI #AIPopulism #AntiAI #USCongress

"Amazon has shut down an internal leaderboard that tracked ...

2026-05-28T22:07:26Z

"Amazon has shut down an internal leaderboard that tracked employees’ use of AI tools after workers tried to boost their scores with unnecessary activity that increased the company’s computing costs.

Employees at the $2.9tn group were told this week its “Kirorank” service — which scored users of Amazon’s Kiro developer platform based on their AI activity — had been taken offline, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The decision came after the tool led some workers to assign AI agents — autonomous bots that can take actions on behalf of users — to carry out needless tasks in an apparent attempt to climb the rankings.

Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice-president, told staff earlier this week that the leaderboard had been built with “good intentions”, according to people familiar with his remarks.

But he added that the result had been additional costs for Amazon due to employees “tokenmaxxing” or inflating their consumption of AI tokens — units of data processed by models.

“Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI,” he told staff."

https://www.ft.com/content/b1a62a7f-6df5-4c90-94ce-64ce9c9961b6?syn-25a6b1a6=1

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Amazon #BigTech

"The city of Dayton, Ohio has covered its Flock automated ...

2026-05-28T21:32:40Z

"The city of Dayton, Ohio has covered its Flock automated license plate reader cameras with black trash bags in part because police there are unsure whether the cameras are still active and the city also doesn’t seem to know whether it is allowed to take the cameras down. The move comes after months of resident outrage, a scandal in which the city was sharing Flock camera data for immigration enforcement apparently on accident, and a $30,000 audit into how the cameras are being used.

Joe Parlette, the deputy city manager of Dayton, said at a city commission meeting last week that the “Dayton Police Department agreed to work with Public Works to put bags over the cameras” as a stop-gap measure until Flock cameras could be removed entirely. I spoke to multiple people in Dayton who said they had seen bagged cameras in the last few days. The Dayton Daily News first reported on the baggings.

Bagged Flock cameras in Dayton. Image: Melissa Bertolo
Dayton is not the first city to cover its Flock cameras with trash bags because they can’t figure out how to immediately terminate the use of the cameras. Late last year, the city of Evanston, Illinois also covered its cameras with trash bags while it was waiting for the company to remove them from the city. Cities around the country have been reconsidering their relationship with the surveillance company after reporting from 404 Media and local news outlets that showed data from the cameras was making its way to Immigration and Customs Enforcement through Flock’s national camera network."

https://www.404media.co/cities-are-covering-flock-cameras-with-trash-bags/

#USA #Surveillance #Flock #Privacy #DataProtection #PoliceState

"The world’s leading AI labs are hiring philosophers to ...

2026-05-27T22:57:52Z

"The world’s leading AI labs are hiring philosophers to think through ethical edge cases and grand questions of mind and morality. Are they another instrument of hype?

“It’s probably the best time to be a philosopher since Aristotle was hired as tutor to Alexander the Great,” says Henry Ajder, a philosophy postgraduate who advises the UK government and a slew of startups on artificial intelligence. He’s only half joking.

Philosophers have never seemed like the most employable bunch. But AI, the same technology that’s expected to drive many other people out of work, has given new weight to the kinds of questions they’re trained to ask (and sometimes maybe even answer): What is intelligence? What is a mind? “You have philosophers from hundreds of years ago who thought about some of the same problems,” Ajder says. “Now they are becoming material.”

Two of the foremost AI labs have recruited teams of in-house philosophers. “There are significantly more philosophers now—that’s a sound intuition,” says ethicist Iason Gabriel, who leads Google DeepMind’s team of research scientists specializing in the societal impact of AI. At Anthropic, resident philosopher Amanda Askell has become one of the company’s most recognizable faces. Both labs declined to disclose the number of philosophers they employ, citing company policy. WIRED counts at least 10 at DeepMind and four at Anthropic."

https://www.wired.com/story/to-land-a-job-in-ai-try-reading-kant/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Philosophy #BigTech #DeepMind #Anthropic

RT @FreedomofPress Android’s Advanced Protection mode hardens ...

2026-05-27T22:20:40Z

RT @FreedomofPress
Android’s Advanced Protection mode hardens your device. It now offers a new feature designed to monitor for events that could indicate spyware or the use of forensic devices.

Read more in our newsletter, and subscribe.

https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/androids-intrusion-logging-turns-the-tables-on-spyware/

"Organizations aren’t burning millions or hundreds of ...

2026-05-26T21:53:44Z

"Organizations aren’t burning millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a year on AI because it’s good, they’re doing it because they are run by people who do not know what the fuck they’re doing.

Generative AI is catnip for hall monitors, snitches, toadies, and any other group that hates work and loves talking down to others. Put another way, it ingratiates losers who believe that learning to do or being good at something is a waste of time, because they deserve to just do what they want without any of that messy “effort.”

While I’m not saying every LLM user is an imbecile, they’re built to convince the mediocre and incurious that they’re remarkable, and it turns out that a great many of them run venture capital firms and Fortune 500 companies.

I also want to be clear that while there are sane and normal people who use these things, they’re mostly drowned out by a crowd of people that oscillate between bootlicking and regurgitating capitalist mythology in a way that makes it hard to trust anybody who spends significant amounts of time using an LLM.

One thing you’ll notice about the most moistened AI boosters is that they lack much degree of pride in their work. Everything they say must, at some point, compliment the mindless, unprofitable, unreliable tool underneath it — how “incredibly powerful” it is, how it’s “only getting better,” how it’s “only the beginning” of something that’s eaten over a trillion dollars and absorbed the majority of venture capital."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIBullshit #AIBubble #AIHype #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

"A couple of men sat in Washington, D.C. and planned how to ...

2026-05-25T22:14:57Z

"A couple of men sat in Washington, D.C. and planned how to strangle a nation to death, and we did our best to get in their way. There are a hundred things you could say about the Nuestra América mission to Cuba, and I’m going to say some of them, at some length. But in the handful of days I spent walking around Havana, I kept thinking of Ernest Hemingway, who lived there for a third of his life, rattling off manuscripts from his perch in the Finca Vigía. Despite his gallery of personal hangups, the old man knew his business. The simplest, most direct sentence is the truest, he always said. So this is mine. Donald Trump and Marco Rubio tried to strangle Cuba, and a remarkable group of people from all over the world came together to say no.

For four days, Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson and I traveled with them. Back in March, we heard that CODEPINK, the Progressive International, and a variety of other socialist and anti-war groups were putting together a humanitarian mission to Cuba. Inspired by the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, they were going to deliver several thousand pounds of medical supplies, solar panels, and other badly-needed aid to the island, by plane and boat, breaking the world’s longest-standing economic blockade. It sounded like a hell of a thing. So we put our names on the dotted line to go along and cover it.

We wanted to see, firsthand, what it’s like for people to live under the most severe of U.S. sanctions. More than that, we wanted to see one of the only communist-governed nations on Earth, and report back about it, clear of the haze of propaganda that has surrounded Cuba for so long. And we wanted, in whatever small way we could, to help. So we got on a plane to Havana, armed with just enough optimism to think we might make a difference. This is what we found."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/four-days-in-havana-under-siege

#Cuba #Havana #USA #Trump #Imperialism #Sanctions #Neocolonialism

"One of the things that I think people misunderstand about ...

2026-05-25T20:46:39Z

"One of the things that I think people misunderstand about these layoffs is they think that it indicates somehow AI is successfully replacing all of these workers. But what’s important to understand is, these tech companies, they’re trying to get cost efficiencies now, in part because they’re spending an extraordinary amount of money trying to develop AI technologies. And they’re actually making a future bet that when they lay off the current human employees to gain current cost efficiencies, that they will hopefully then be able to automate them away later with AI. But it’s not, in fact, a representation of what AI can currently do.

But there are plenty of other sectors outside of the AI industry that are now doing the same thing. They’re also trying to make this future bet that they will be able to automate workers. And so, that is what’s actually having this cascading effect on the job market, where AI is being used as a justification to accelerate layoffs."

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/5/22/data_centers_and_ai

#AI #BigTech #AIRegulation #DataCenters #Trump #Layoffs

"Trump could have adhered to the JCPOA, and had Iran tried to ...

2026-05-25T18:58:10Z

"Trump could have adhered to the JCPOA, and had Iran tried to sprint to a bomb—and no evidence exists that Tehran was doing so in 2026—he could have blamed Obama, made the case to Congress for war, and launched military action. Faced with the ticking clock of an imminent Iranian nuclear test, even Trump’s most dedicated opponents at home and abroad would likely have lent their support. Instead (...) he decided that he would seek glory as the liberator of Iran.
(...)
Now the president will end up having to sign off on a set of terms that will likely make the JCPOA look demanding by comparison. Trump began this war assuming that all other issues—nuclear weapons, terrorism, Iran’s regional adventurism—would vanish when the regime was toppled. When that didn’t happen, he had no plan for what to do next, and he seems to have settled on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as the central explanation, not only for why he went to war, but for why Americans must now suffer the economic effects of the conflict. The Iranians may well promise to forswear a nuclear program—as they did to Obama a decade ago—but for now, they are not only presenting themselves as the aggrieved party, they’re behaving like the victors: setting demands, making the Americans negotiate the status of the Strait of Hormuz, and kicking the nuclear question down the road.

Yesterday, the president told Axios that the chance of reaching an agreement with the Iranians was a “solid 50/50,” and that he either would accept a “good” deal or “blow them to kingdom come.” Neither of these things is going to happen. Instead, a piece of paper will, at some point, come out of a meeting room in Pakistan. It will certify that the United States must accept a major strategic defeat in the Middle East. And Donald Trump, who brought America to this point because of his ego and his incompetence, will sign it."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/trump-iran-war/687292/?gift=otEsSHbRYKNfFYMngVFweHRK4jdz3QikVHdvvmi-At0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

#Iran #USA #Trump #War #Militarism

"The undersigned organisations condemn Meta’s recent ...

2026-05-20T21:48:10Z

"The undersigned organisations condemn Meta’s recent decision to restrict the Facebook and Instagram accounts of independent NGOs, researchers, and civil society figures from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This is the latest in a pattern of major technology companies, including Meta, acting as enforcement arms for repressive governments in the Gulf. We call on Meta to uphold its human rights responsibilities and ensure that users’ content is not arbitrarily restricted.

Since 30 April 2026, Gulf-focused NGOs ALQST for Human Rights and Democratic Diwan, as well as Saudi researcher Abdullah Alaoudh and human rights defender Yahya Assiri, have had their Facebook accounts rendered “unavailable” in Saudi Arabia at the request of the Saudi government, in a form of “geo-blocking”. Similar restrictions have been imposed in the UAE, including against an academic. According to Meta's publicly available content restriction reports, over 100 Facebook pages and Instagram accounts have been restricted since March 2026. This follows a similar pattern on X (formerly Twitter). Most recently, the Saudi government requested that a number of X accounts belonging to prominent Saudi activists be geo-blocked. As of the publication date (20 May), X had not complied.

The undersigned organisations consider these measures arbitrary, discriminatory, and a direct violation of the right to freedom of expression and access to information. Affected users were notified that Meta acted in response to a “local legal requirement” or a “request from a government” (i.e. Saudi Arabia and the UAE), demonstrating the company’s willingness to comply with demands from state authorities that routinely suppress, surveil, and criminalise online expression."

https://www.alqst.org/en/post/meta-blocks-human-rights-accounts-from-reaching-audiences-in-saudi-arabia-and-the-uae

#SocialMedia #SaudiArabia #UAE #Censorship #Meta #Instagram #Facebook

RT @HedgieMarkets 🦔OpenAI launched a new personal finance ...

2026-05-16T13:32:28Z

RT @HedgieMarkets
🦔OpenAI launched a new personal finance product on Friday, letting ChatGPT Pro subscribers connect their bank, brokerage, and credit card accounts through Plaid. Users can link to over 12,000 institutions including Schwab, Fidelity, Chase, Robinhood, Amex, and Capital One, and ask ChatGPT questions about spending, portfolio performance, and future planning.

OpenAI says more than 200 million users already ask financial questions to ChatGPT monthly. The launch follows OpenAI's acquisition of personal finance startup Hiro last month, and comes a week after Perplexity launched a similar product for financial research. OpenAI plans to support Intuit integration soon, which would let the model analyze the impact of stock sales on taxes and the odds of credit card approval.

My Take
Connecting an LLM to your bank account is one of the worst risk-to-reward propositions I have seen in this cycle. Hallucination rates on financial queries have been documented at 20% or higher in third-party testing, ChatGPT has a public track record of confidently giving wrong answers about tax law, account fees, and investment products, and the user base for a tool like this skews toward people who do not have the financial literacy to catch the errors. Plaid is a legitimate connection service, but Plaid handling the authentication does not solve the problem of what happens after the model starts giving advice on what to do with the money.

The bigger issue is the data side of this. Once you connect Chase, Fidelity, and Amex to ChatGPT, OpenAI now has a real-time view of your income, spending, debt, and investments, which is the most commercially valuable behavioral profile any company can build on a user. The product is currently free for Pro subscribers, but the long-term monetization play is not going to be the subscription itself. It is going to be the data leverage that comes from being inside the financial lives of 200 million people...

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/931122/openai-chatgpt-financial-accounts-plaid-connection

RT @RnaudBertrand The degree of projection in this paper is ...

2026-05-15T22:31:42Z

RT @RnaudBertrand
The degree of projection in this paper is genuinely insane.

Your regular reminder that Anthropic was the first AI frontier lab to actively work with the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies to help them with their global surveillance program.

Back in 2024 already, they partnered with Palantir "to make Anthropic's Claude models available to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies" (https://axios.com/2024/11/08/anthropic-palantir-amazon-claude-defense-ai)

And remember the whole story earlier this year on how they refused that their AI be used for “mass domestic surveillance”? Notice something there?

By definition it means that they agree with *NON-domestic* mass surveillance, meaning Anthropic has absolutely no problem with the U.S. military-industrial complex using their AI to surveil all 8 billion inhabitants on Earth, provided it excludes the 340 million Americans. And even the latter can be surveilled, just not in a “mass” way (whatever that means).

Which, incidentally, is actually merely a restatement of U.S. law. Mass domestic surveillance of Americans is prohibited anyhow by the Fourth Amendment, and mass foreign surveillance is authorized under FISA Section 702 and Executive Order 12333 - the legal architecture Edward Snowden exposed in 2013.

So Anthropic’s so-called “principled” stance is them actually supporting very same legal architecture that, back when the Snowden revelations broke in 2013, was rightly condemned as the most sweeping surveillance regime in the world (which it factually is).

Which means that them warning that China's AI may be used for surveillance, and as such is dangerous, is literally them taking everyone for complete idiots.

All the more due to the fact that, because China's AI is largely open source, you can use it in a way where you keep complete control of your data - unlike Anthropic 🤷‍♂️

https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership

"A new class action lawsuit accuses OpenAI of sharing data ...

2026-05-14T22:03:49Z

"A new class action lawsuit accuses OpenAI of sharing data including user chat queries and personal identifying information like emails and user IDs with the tech giants — and targeted advertising behemoths — Meta and Google, without obtaining proper user consent.

Filed yesterday in California, the lawsuit claims that OpenAI’s data-sharing with Google and Meta violates the California Invasion of Privacy Act, known as CIPA, as well as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It points specifically to OpenAI’s integrations with Meta Pixel and Google Analytics, which are data-tracking and collection tools that facilitate targeted advertisements.

The data-tracking model described in the lawsuit — often referred to as “surveillance capitalism” — is the business that the modern internet is built on today. And OpenAI, like countless other tech companies, does include language in its privacy policy noting that it does collect, store, and share a range of consumer inputs and personal information."

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-personal-information-meta-google

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #Surveillance #Meta #Google #DataProtection #Privacy

"The entire AI industry relies upon two companies that expect ...

2026-05-10T12:34:45Z

"The entire AI industry relies upon two companies that expect to burn at least $1 trillion in the next four years, with Anthropic, the supposed “compute-conscious” AI company, committing to at least $330 billion in spend in the next few years.

Where does that money come from, exactly? Because neither of these companies have anything approaching a path to profitability.

Based on a deep analysis of every publicly-available source on AI compute, I can find only two significant — over $100 million a year — purchasers of AI compute outside of Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, or associated parties like NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Those two are Poolside, which reportedly spends $400 million a year, an untenable position as it only raised $500 million in total funding before its $2 billion in funding collapsed earlier this year, and Perplexity, which appears to spend some amount of money with CoreWeave and Microsoft Azure. Both run at a massive loss.

Nowhere is this lack of true demand more obvious than in the neoclouds, which only seem capable of signing big deals with Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft (for OpenAI), and Google (for OpenAI). Oh, and Meta, who is doing this because the existence of ChatGPT gave Mark Zuckerberg such profound AI psychosis that he’s made Meta build him a CEO chatbot to talk to and burned over $150 billion.

The AI industry is a brittle, circular economy, one only made possible by a lack of financial regulation and a tech industry that’s run out of ideas. Without hyperscalers propping up OpenAI and Anthropic, there would be no reason to buy so many GPUs or build so many data centers, and neoclouds would have no reason to exist.

This is a giant con, a giant illusion, and a giant mistake."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-ais-circular-psychosis/

#AI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #OpenAI #Anthropic #xAI #Musk #AIBubble

RT @BenjaminNorton Sanctions are not an alternative to war; they ...

2026-05-10T11:18:09Z

RT @BenjaminNorton
Sanctions are not an alternative to war; they are an even more deadly form of unconventional warfare.

Western sanctions killed roughly 38 million people over 50 years.

The US government has imposed sanctions on approximately one-third of the countries on Earth, including more than 60% of low-income nations, according to a 2024 report in the Washington Post.

A peer-reviewed academic article published in 2025 in the leading medical journal The Lancet concluded “that sanctions do kill: economic sanctions imposed by the USA or the EU were associated with 564,258 deaths … annually from 1971 to 2021, higher than the annual number of battle-related casualties (106,000 deaths)”.

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2026/05/09/trump-pirates-iran-ships-china-us-sanctions/

"Google acaba de dar un paso muy revelador con su buscador: ...

2026-05-09T00:09:29Z

"Google acaba de dar un paso muy revelador con su buscador: sus respuestas generadas mediante inteligencia artificial incorporarán más “perspectivas” procedentes de foros, blogs, redes sociales y, de manera muy destacada, Reddit, bajo una etiqueta tan sugerente como peligrosa: «expert advice». La idea plantea una pregunta incómoda: ¿desde cuándo una opinión votada por una comunidad anónima se convierte en «consejo experto»?

Reddit es muchas cosas. Es archivo, conversación, desahogo, recomendación, cultura de nicho, memoria colectiva y, en ocasiones, una fuente extraordinaria de información difícil de encontrar en otro sitio. Pero no es conocimiento en sentido académico. No es revisión por pares. No es metodología. No es trazabilidad. No es necesariamente experiencia. Es, en la mayoría de los casos, gente hablando, opinando, votando, corrigiéndose o reforzándose mutuamente, en comunidades con normas propias y sesgos muy concretos. Que de ahí pueda emerger valor no implica que todo lo que emerge de ahí sea valioso.

El problema empieza cuando Google decide envolver esa dinámica en el lenguaje de la autoridad. «Expert advice» suena muy distinto de «opiniones de desconocidos en internet». Y sin embargo, en muchísimos casos, eso es exactamente lo que es."

https://www.enriquedans.com/2026/05/lo-que-google-llama-consejo-experto-es-gente-opinando-en-internet.html

#Google #Reddit #SocialMedia #AI

The author of the article states that the war was a failure for ...

2026-04-26T21:34:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…ma3w
_________________________

The author of the article states that the war was a failure for both the U.S. and Israel. Not Iran, If I'm interpreting correctly. In any case, white supremacism is more than anything else an ideology. And ideologies lie most often than not outside of logic, reason, and evidences... :-/

"The catastrophic failure of the American-Israeli war on Iran ...

2026-04-26T13:59:36Z

"The catastrophic failure of the American-Israeli war on Iran seems certain to inaugurate another revolution in global consciousness. The most powerful nation in world history has suffered a strategic defeat – a modern Tsushima in the Strait of Hormuz.

Unlike at Suez, where the feebleness of old Europe was brusquely corrected by the rising American hegemon, Hormuz erupts in a landscape where the West’s moral and material “soft power” has been incinerated in the ruins of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and undermined by the spectacle of blatant white supremacism and risible incompetence in Washington. The emotional and psychological consequences of this collapse of post-historical illusion are profound.

The war on Iran, designed to satisfy the maximalist fantasies of an Israeli partner and collapse the Islamic Republic, has achieved neither. Instead, the survival of the Iranian state against the full spectrum of US coercion has clarified the outlines of a post-American world.

The material strength of the American empire remains immense. But what cannot be recovered is the plausibility of the American story: the overarching narrative of the US as a model for all of humanity; the rational centre of human progress around which the world was destined to orbit."

https://www.equator.org/articles/ghost-fleet-iran-post-american-world

#Iran #USA #Imperialism #Geopolitics #Trump

RT @deepseek_ai 🚀 DeepSeek-V4 Preview is officially live & ...

2026-04-24T14:45:34Z

RT @deepseek_ai
🚀 DeepSeek-V4 Preview is officially live & open-sourced! Welcome to the era of cost-effective 1M context length.

🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 1.6T total / 49B active params. Performance rivaling the world's top closed-source models.
🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Flash: 284B total / 13B active params. Your fast, efficient, and economical choice.

Try it now at http://chat.deepseek.com via Expert Mode / Instant Mode. API is updated & available today!

📄 Tech Report: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main/DeepSeek_V4.pdf
🤗 Open Weights: https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4

Do you think concepts like "God", ...

2026-04-18T22:07:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…3n4m
_________________________

Do you think concepts like "God", "Consciousness", "Subjectivity", or "Metaphysics" can help anyone understand why there is hunger and homelessness in the world? These concepts are ideas and, as such, they don't have direct connection to material reality. Quite the opposite, they exert an external pressure to social relationships - most often more negative than positive.