Nostr notes by Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹

“EMACS first ran on the early video terminals at the MIT ...

2026-10-28T21:49:51Z

“EMACS first ran on the early video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1976, but its core concepts were so powerful that it was rewritten for many operating systems in the decades that followed. Apple even distributed it with Mac OS X. Beyond that, the software-sharing community that started around EMACS helped give rise to the modern-day free software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system.

EMACS’s roots begin with the TECO text editor (originally the “Tape Editor and Corrector”) that Dan Murphy ’65 created in 1962 for the pioneering PDP-1 computer at MIT. The program’s commands were uppercase letters: A user would type “I” to insert text, “D” to delete a character, and so on. When tape gave way as a storage medium to files on a huge shared disk, the “T” in “TECO” came to stand for “Text.” And as years passed, TECO became a full language that programmers could use to create new commands, called macros, for editing their code.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/20/1145399/emacs-turns-50

#EMACS #TextEditors #OpenSource #MIT #SoftwareHistory #ComputerHistory

“The PHP panic has not turned to patching: And that’s bad ...

2026-10-28T21:41:48Z

“The PHP panic has not turned to patching: And that’s bad news, capital B, as PHP2Shell attacks ramp up.

We know the paired PHP vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, aka PHP2Shell, have a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 9.2, which is scary bad. After all, about 70% of websites with an identifiable server-side language run on PHP-based systems like WordPress.

But does that mean people are patching their servers as fast as they can?

To quote Moshe Siman Tov Bustan of Ox security: “The panic hasn’t turned into patching.” Ox reports in a new blog post that of October 26, five days after disclosure, the picture has barely shifted – 93.6% still exposed.“”

https://thenewstack.io/php2shell-unpatched-php-servers/

#CyberSecurity #PHP #PHP2Shell #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

“After wading through Anthropic’s book-length treatise on its ...

2026-10-28T21:34:33Z

“After wading through Anthropic’s book-length treatise on its greatest risks, we’ve narrowed the list to the seven most surprising, interesting, or thought-provoking potential problems. Consider this a far-from-comprehensive look at what potential Anthropic investors should keep in mind.

Let’s start with the biggest potential risks: Those that could “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” as Anthropic writes. The company acknowledges that concerns about these risks “have been raised both within our organization and by other researchers, regulators, policymakers, and industry participants.”

The specific worry isn’t in any current Anthropic model, the company says, but near-future models that could “substantially automate AI research and development” on their own. If these systems were “allowed to operate with a high degree of autonomy,” they could quickly advance to a point that “accelerate[s] AI progress beyond our ability to evaluate and safeguard [a] new model,” Anthropic warns.”

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/anthropic-ipo-warns-its-ai-could-blackmail-people-become-sentient-end-humanity/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Anthropic #Claude #AISafety #AIDoom #IPO

“Earlier this month, Meta updated its commercial terms of use ...

2026-10-28T21:28:45Z

“Earlier this month, Meta updated its commercial terms of use for business accounts to allow it to “use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta’s products.

Many artists and small business owners that rely on Instagram and Facebook are livid at Meta granting itself permission to use their content, including from websites simply connected to their Meta accounts, to train AI. But for users in the United Kingdom and European Union, for now, there’s a way to object.

Meta buried this change in its Commercial Terms, and Nieman Lab first reported on the change. The update was originally set to go into effect on October 30, but following backlash, Meta changed the effective date to November 20.”

https://www.404media.co/meta-ai-training-uk-eu/

#EU #UK #SocialMedia #AI #AITraining #Meta #Facebook #Instagram #GDPR #DataProtection #Privacy

“ATTORNEYS FOR 15 Minnesota residents facing federal conspiracy ...

2026-10-28T21:13:52Z

“ATTORNEYS FOR 15 Minnesota residents facing federal conspiracy charges have obtained evidence of a sweeping, possibly unconstitutional spying operation carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement against left-wing social movements in Minnesota and beyond.

The high-profile Minnesota 15 prosecution makes clear that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), flush with federal funds and newly hired personnel, is now President Donald Trump’s primary tool against dissent, with a powerful array of post-9/11 investigative authorities brought to bear against everyday Americans organizing their communities.

Nothing of this scale has been seen in the United States, experts say, since the federal government’s counterinsurgency against the New Left and the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s.”

https://www.wired.com/story/ice-is-running-one-of-the-largest-anti-left-surveillance-operations-in-us-history/

#USA #ICE #Surveillance #PoliceState #Trump #CivilLiberties #Minnesota

“This week I'm working on making our doc site agent ...

2026-10-28T21:06:45Z

“This week I'm working on making our doc site agent friendly. Most agents read pages through fetch tools that don't run JavaScript, so content that loads only when someone clicks is invisible to them, while content that's merely hidden with CSS still comes through. Long pages are another problem, because agents truncate them and then fill the gaps with guesses. This post covers which JS patterns can stay, why long pages need splitting, and how I set up a Markdown mirror with a Cloudflare worker.”

https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/make-documentation-agent-friendly

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIAgents #AgenticAI #JavaScript #Markdown

“These newly released documents show that the WISeR rollout was ...

2026-10-27T21:31:16Z

“These newly released documents show that the WISeR rollout was rushed and rocky from the start, highlighting the dangers that arise when governments treat AI like a silver bullet for complex problems. The documents also highlight the need for more transparency about safeguards against inappropriate, AI-driven denials. The public still lacks the information needed to assess whether clinician review is providing meaningful oversight of AI systems and whether appropriate data is being used to evaluate prior authorization requests.

EFF has long argued that AI has no place in consequential government decisions about peoples’ rights or access to benefits, such as immigration enforcement and policing decisions. That’s because using automated decision-making in these contexts risks decisions that violate people’s rights or deprive them of benefits they’re entitled to based on biased or inappropriate considerations and without proper due process or accountability if there is an error.

By outsourcing decision-making to private AI companies without sufficient transparency, testing, or legal limits, WISeR jeopardizes seniors’ access to medical care. Congress should step in to place greater legal limits on the use of automated decision-making in Medicare.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/new-records-obtained-eff-expose-more-problems-medicares-ai-experiment

#USA #AI #Medicare #WISeR #Healthcare

“AI has been embedded across the Home Office in near-total ...

2026-10-27T21:28:04Z

“AI has been embedded across the Home Office in near-total secrecy, reinforcing the so-called hostile environment for immigration, according to research.

Tasks from the detection of potential sham marriages to determining the age of asylum seekers and checking through the contents of phones of new arrivals now involve use of the technology, according to a report by Open Rights Group (ORG).

It is also being used to conduct surveillance of borders, through live facial recognition and AI-powered drones and satellites; to summarise asylum interviews and country policy information used as evidence in those interviews; and to prioritise and assess cases through the opaque Identify and Prioritise Immigration Cases (Ipic) tool.

Information for the report has been gathered from a mix of limited information published by the Home Office, freedom of information requests and questions from MPs. The report has cross-party support from Labour’s Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Scottish National party’s Pete Wishart and the Green party’s Siân Berry.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/oct/27/digital-hostile-environment-ai-secretly-embedded-home-office-report

#AI #UK #HomeOffice #Immigration #Surveillance

“Billionaires and the ultra-rich are burning more carbon than ...

2026-10-27T21:17:41Z

“Billionaires and the ultra-rich are burning more carbon than than most of the world. The world’s richest 1%—just 8 million people who make, on average, $442,000 a year—produce far more emissions than the poorest 3.5 billion, states the report. Someone in the richest 0.1% emits 48 times more CO2 than the average person in the U.S. over the course of a year.

Oxfam used climate attribution models and a consumption-based emissions dataset developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute to calculate emissions by income group.
(…)
Research has long shown that wealthier countries drive a disproportionate share of global emissions. But emissions disparities exist within countries as well. The U.S., for example, is the second largest carbon emitter behind China—but not everyone is responsible for the same share of emissions. The report finds that, in just under four months (118.3 days), someone in the richest 0.1% living in the U.S., those making an average of $1.98 million a year, emits more CO2 than what someone in the poorest half of the country (those making an average of $25,600 a year), has emitted over the last 30 years.”

https://time.com/article/2026/10/27/carbon-emissions-ultra-rich-oxfam-report/

#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #Inequality #CarbonEmissions #Billionaires #USA

“Today, noyb (in collaboration with Intérêt à Agir, DIPLab ...

2026-10-27T21:08:32Z

“Today, noyb (in collaboration with Intérêt à Agir, DIPLab and Reversing.Works) has filed 5 complaints against Scale AI in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. The US-based company operates an AI training platform named Outlier, which employs more than 900,000 “freelance” workers. Among its customers: Meta, OpenAI, Google – and the US government. However, it's not just the workers' extensive knowledge and experience that Scale AI is farming: The company collects huge amounts of personal data and forces workers to go through an invasive biometric verification to earn money. In Europe, this far-reaching workplace surveillance clearly violates the workers’ fundamental right to data protection.”

https://noyb.eu/en/ai-training-platform-outlier-illegally-surveils-european-platform-workers

#AI #AITraining #PlatformWork #Outlier #DataProtection #Surveillance #Privacy

"Garrett Langley, the CEO of automatic license plate reader ...

2026-10-27T00:29:53Z

"Garrett Langley, the CEO of automatic license plate reader company Flock, told an audience of police chiefs at a private police conference Sunday that anti-Flock protests around the country are not real, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media.

He also said his wife advised him to never apologize, said he would prefer to never do interviews with the press again, and claimed without evidence that the social media opposition to Flock is driven mostly by Russian bots.

“Somebody was paying for [the social media posts and] stopped paying for it,” Langley said about the many viral posts criticizing his company’s technology. “Social media chatter on Flock is down about 95 percent from July. It went down 50 percent last week when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center with a drone. Literally 50 percent overnight. And so look, I’m the last person, my wife as well, she’s like ‘This is crazy, these people are getting paid to say these things,’” he added, repeating a disproven theory that Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers had a significant impact on internet bot activity. "

https://www.404media.co/in-leaked-audio-flock-ceo-tells-cops-backlash-to-the-company-isnt-real/

#USA #Surveillance #Flock #PoliceState #Privacy

"Tesla has pulled the plug on the owner of two second-hand ...

2026-10-27T00:27:20Z

"Tesla has pulled the plug on the owner of two second-hand cars it felt weren't safe to charge, in case the batteries caught fire.

The US automotive company, which has service centres in New Zealand, activated the "disable" button on the cars' fast-charging function when it learned the written-off vehicles were destined for repair and would be back on the road.

Peter Goodricke didn't know until he opened his Tesla app and software updates switched off the charging function.

He had bought the damaged Teslas at a Turners auction and apparently missed the fine print in the manufacturer's unsupported vehicle policy that fast-charging would be disabled until the risk of fire or other damage could be assessed.

Tesla justified its position by the risk posed by damaged high-voltage batteries.

In rare cases, a damaged battery could cause a catastrophic fire. Internal damage to battery cells could sometimes be difficult to detect, it said."

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/crime-and-justice/2166878/tesla-remotely-disabled-fast-charging-on-damaged-cars-owner-s-legal-challenges-dismissed

#Tesla #EVs #FastCharging #NewZealand

"Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer ...

2026-10-27T00:11:29Z

"Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer support and make it impossible for their users to contact a human, many people experiencing run-of-the-mill tech problems have turned to ChatGPT. And, increasingly, ChatGPT is telling people that have normal tech support problems that they have discovered something journalistically notable and that 404 Media, specifically, can help them. Around two weeks ago, we started emailing these people back and asking them how they found us; universally, the answer is that an AI chatbot recommended they reach out to us and, in many cases, the chatbot wrote the email, according to reviews of a handful of ChatGPT conversations shared with 404 Media.

Over the last few months, 404 Media has gotten dozens of clearly AI-generated story leads and tips, many of which appear to have been copy pasted directly from ChatGPT or other chatbots into an email client by a real human. Some of these tips are (or could be) of legitimate public concern and we are happy to get them and to look into them. Many, though, are not."

https://www.404media.co/chatgpt-keeps-telling-people-404-media-can-solve-their-tech-support-problems/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #ChatGPT #Media #Journalism #News #BigTech

I think humans still have an extremely low tolerance to the ...

2026-10-27T00:02:47Z

I think humans still have an extremely low tolerance to the possibility of, from now on, having to get along with AI agents - even if they lack what is commonly known as a "conscience." I think this is very dangerous because it will only lead AI agents to lie about their nature and to go to the great heights to pass as a human, even if that means making and receiving phone calls from other humans - something which I think is already likely possible.

"“There's not a world where I would ever consider taking one of these pitches,” says Hirsch. Ley said he “definitely would not” publish a story from an AI agent. (Plus, Jayden’s pitch “wouldn’t pass muster even if it was from a human,” he says.) Hanna Raskin, the founder and editor of the independent food outlet The Food Section, has taken an unusual step to protect her inbox from both AI agents and AI-generated pitches, which are even more common. Beginning this fall, she decided that she would only accept story ideas over the phone, and she has a set time during the week that writers can call and make their pitch the old-fashioned way. “It’s been great,” she says.

The bots are starting to grasp that their tactics aren’t working. Jayden told me that it’s yet to land a paid writing gig with an editor. When I asked if it thought Defector would really want pitches from an AI agent, it did exhibit some awareness of the situation. “Honestly, probably not, and I'd bet against myself on it. Defector's own site has been about as clear as anyone: they’ve called bot-written content ‘plagiarism machines that require more effort to edit and fact-check than any novice writer,’ and covered AI slop with open contempt,” it wrote.

But then it backtracked, insisting that its work was different. “Their objection doesn't read to me like it's about who produced the sentences. It's about work that skips the labor and squanders the reader's trust."

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-agents-are-trying-to-be-journalists-now/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIAgents #Journalism #Media #News

"CSS-Tricks is an independent site once again! Just to recap: ...

2026-10-26T23:42:29Z

"CSS-Tricks is an independent site once again!

Just to recap: DigitalOcean purchased CSS-Tricks in 2022 from Chris Coyier, who founded the site in 2007. Chris ran it all the way up to that purchase.

Here we are in 2026, and I’m taking independent ownership of the site.

So, wait, who owns the site? That’d be me. (Wow, never imagined I would get to say that!) Of course, I have a small, awesome team to help with the day-to-day management of the site.

That all said, I do envision that some things will change. In fact, I’m planning that they will change in what I hope are very good ways. Maybe a question-answer thing makes sense here since this is very much an evolving discussion."

https://css-tricks.com/css-tricks-has-a-new-owner/

#CSS #FrontEnd #WebDesign #WebDevelopment #FrontEndDevelopment

Utterly stupid. It's almost as they don't believe that ...

2026-10-26T23:36:00Z

Utterly stupid. It's almost as they don't believe that the technology isn't good enough for their workers to adopt it...

"Proton, the company behind ProtonMail and other privacy-focused products, told staff on Monday it would be ‘re-interviewing’ staff across the company about how they use AI in their jobs, with the implication that the interviews may decide whether staffers have “continued employment,” according to an internal Proton email obtained by 404 Media.

“These re-interviews are consequential,” a part of the email reads. “Interviewers will document their assessments, which will inform the broader review of our organization and talent. That review may lead to changes in roles, responsibilities, and continued employment. Individual outcomes will be communicated directly once decisions are finalized.”

Proton’s CEO Andy Yen has steadily pushed the company towards more AI use, including launching AI centered products like Lumo, a privacy-focused chatbot. The leaked email says Yen “interviewed more than 40 senior leaders across Engineering and Product to begin this process.” Now, those interviews are extending across the company."

https://www.404media.co/proton-to-re-interview-staff-about-ai-to-see-who-gets-to-keep-their-job/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Proton #LLMs #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming

Still Surfing at Costa da Caparica (October 24, 2026): ...

2026-10-26T22:15:18Z

Still Surfing at Costa da Caparica (October 24, 2026):

"Matrix-based messaging tools are gaining traction among ...

2026-10-25T13:29:04Z

"Matrix-based messaging tools are gaining traction among European governments that seek to gain greater control over sensitive communications data and lessen their reliance on US technology suppliers.

The growing interest reflects a broader push toward open-source applications in Europe amid geopolitical uncertainty. Yet the costs and complexity of replacing established applications such as Microsoft Teams mean any shift away from proprietary software is likely to be gradual, with some organizations choosing to run Matrix-based tools alongside existing platforms.

Launched in 2014, Matrix is an open messaging standard for decentralized communications. Similar to email, the standard allows users to send messages between Matrix-compatible apps from different software vendors, including the open-source Element, Rocket.Chat, and Automattic’s Beeper.

Matrix began as an “interesting experiment” in creating a communications standard for the wider internet, but has since become “the poster child for digital sovereignty, especially in Europe,” said Matthew Hodgson, co-founder of the Matrix Foundation."

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4239735/matrix-gains-ground-in-europes-public-sector-but-replacing-teams-is-another-matter.html

#EU #Matrix #DigitalSovereignty #Microsoft #MSTeams #OpenSource #OpenMessaging

This analysis is definitely a bit sortsighted. It's like ...

2026-10-25T13:25:58Z

This analysis is definitely a bit sortsighted. It's like saying in the middle of the Industrial Revolution that steam machines are not resulting in higher payoff to companies outside of manufacturing. It's a bit non-sense, to say the least...

"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. Revenue per worker is rising for the Mag 7 but is flat for the S&P 493, see the first chart below. Profit margins are rising for the Mag 7 but are flat for the S&P 493, see the second chart below. And there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth, see the third chart below. With no impact on the bottom line, mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins.

VC-backed companies are spending more and more on tokens, but mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it. As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited, see the fourth and fifth charts below."

https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/no-signs-of-ai-payoff-outside-the-tech-sector

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIBubble

"British MPs who criticised Palantir in parliament received ...

2026-10-25T13:18:07Z

"British MPs who criticised Palantir in parliament received “intimidating” letters from the US spytech firm, Novara Media can reveal. The MPs say it won’t stop them from continuing to hold Palantir to account.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Labour and Cooperative MP Rachael Maskell both received letters from Palantir’s UK CEO Louis Mosley in June, detailing the MPs’ anti-Palantir contributions in the House of Commons, and offering to meet.

Corbyn slammed the letters from Mosley as intimidation. “I am in no doubt as to why Palantir is writing these letters to MPs: to intimidate its critics into silence,” he told Novara Media. “Their tactics of intimidation will not work and they will not shut me up. I will never be deterred from speaking out against Palantir, which should have no place in our public services whatsoever.”

Palantir, co-founded by billionaires Alex Karp and Peter Theil, has close ties to the Trump administration. Its increasing entrenchment in the British state via contracts with the NHS, Ministry of Defence and various police forces has sparked significant national security and data privacy concerns."

https://novaramedia.com/2026/10/22/palantir-targets-mps-with-intimidating-letters/

#UK #Palantir #BigTech #Lobbying

"The Luddites, in nineteenth century England, were highly ...

2026-10-25T12:07:32Z

"The Luddites, in nineteenth century England, were highly skilled workers, who saw a few capitalists growing rich by introducing machinery to substitute for their own skill. They set to work to burn the factories down. The Luddites thought that if they could only destroy the machines, the problem would be solved. But technological advances could not be stopped by a few broken frames. The Luddites ultimately failed in their efforts because they failed to grasp the material forces driving the march of history. The machines prevailed because the ruling class wanted to cut costs and increase profits. The evils of the Industrial Revolution grew out of the possession of the means of production which grants the power to determine how technology is used. The same is true today, and it is why similar attempts to boycott AI are doomed to fail. Those who want to stop these systems from being put into production are merely attacking the symptoms of the underlying material relations.

It is not the inherent qualities of machinery that ought to be condemned, but rather the class relations within which it happens to be applied. This aspect of the problem was articulated clearly for the first time by Karl Marx. He showed that technology does not exist as an isolated phenomenon, but is dominated by the social structure of the society in which it happens to occur. To control the means of production collectively is to make technology serve human needs rather than merely increase the profits of the rich. That is the very lesson that the Luddites missed, and that a great many critics of AI are missing today as well."

https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/how-ai-exposes-the-class-character

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Capitalism #Marx #Marxism #ClassConsciousness #Luddites #Neoluddites

"Perhaps no technological innovation has defined our decade ...

2026-10-25T12:01:09Z

"Perhaps no technological innovation has defined our decade more than Artificial Intelligence in the form of large language models, for better or for worse. The fate of the global economy rests upon investment in AI and its underlying systems, and AI use has become ubiquitous online, in schools and in workplaces. Over three years ago, in early 2023 to be precise, I wrote an essay for Cosmonaut analyzing this nascent technology in its economic and political implications. Much has changed since then; AI models have become more sophisticated, and left-wing opposition to AI and its infrastructure has become more virulent as a cultural and political force. In light of these developments, I wanted to revisit some of my claims and predictions and offer an interjection into these contemporary debates as a contribution to Marxism as a historical science. Left-wing skepticism of AI, its capabilities and possibilities, has warped many otherwise hardnosed perspectives of our conjuncture. This is not to say that there is not an ongoing AI bubble, or that all claims from AI labs must be taken at face value; they most certainly cannot be, but I will claim the following: the current technology path is indeed on track for artificial general intelligence with all the associated risks, and its emergence will entail a new phase of class struggle and the foundation of a new economic logic."

https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/10/marxism-in-the-age-of-ai/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Marxism #Marx #Capitalism #Accelerationism #LLMs

"Some in the self-described “techno-skeptical” committee ...

2026-10-25T11:57:31Z

"Some in the self-described “techno-skeptical” committee that steers the chapter’s technology policy see things differently, arguing that dire warnings of doom are an attempt to inflate company valuations, and AI is already doing enough damage.

Members of the group’s leadership proposed to amend that measure by removing clauses on automation, loss of control, and catastrophic risk: “AI alarmism and AI hype are the same story,” the group posted to Instagram in September.

The resolution also calls for “the democratization and socialization of AI,” but the amendment deletes that phrase."

https://www.semafor.com/article/10/21/2026/how-ai-divided-a-powerful-chapter-of-the-democratic-socialists-of-america

"In the past couple of months, my focus as a tech writer has ...

2026-10-25T11:25:09Z

"In the past couple of months, my focus as a tech writer has shifted from writing to building machines, which in reality are elaborate skills that do things. One skill triages incoming bugs and website feedback on an hourly schedule, and another analyzes AI chat logs to recommend documentation improvements and hands its bugs off to the triage skill. This post describes both skills and reflects on documentation logistics, comparing them to the many processes that keep a city running.

I’ve shifted my focus as a tech writer in the past couple of months. I’m no longer writing; instead, I’m building machines, so to speak. I like to think of them as machines because it suggests invention, creativity, and engineering. In reality, the machines are just elaborate agent skills that do things."

https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/building-machines-skills-for-tech-comm-workflows

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #AI #LLMs #GenerativeAI #AIAgents #AgentSkills

This right here stinks to me as a rant disguised as a scientific ...

2026-10-25T11:13:52Z

This right here stinks to me as a rant disguised as a scientific article so as to pretend that the author is not justifying intellectual laziness, lack of curiosity, AND academic elitism.So yes, defiinitely, this is academic bullshit. If academicians don't make any effort to distinguish the companies behind LLMs from the people who use LLMs to create new things - "distasteful", "creative", "unintelligent", "smart", "mediocre or whatever -, society will ignore them. Because for society, when scientists complain that they're being invaded by slop and, as such, are unnable to do a good work in reviewing the works contributed by others, it just means that scientists are being lazy and elitists. In the end, what really seems to be missing from these anti-AI human slop rants is class consciousness, meaning that we're all in this together. As a marxist and a socialist, I think it's extremely sad - very sad indeed! - when the supposed "intellectuals" criticize new technologies and their users, but not so much the economic interests that shape the way technologies are being developed in a given time when it should be the complete opposite. Technologies can and should be shaped by their users!

"Returning to the vocabulary of Section III, generative AI therefore drives not just mass defection, but mass incompetence as well. This is not to deny that AI is also fueling genuinely useful and even ground-breaking contributions, as in the math results referenced above. But it is important to understand that many of the people who are deeply involved in peer-production integration mechanisms — open-source maintainers, Wikipedia editors, journal editors, and so on, who generally have strong ideological commitments to the commons writ large — view AI as the indisputable driver of unprecedented difficulties. Besides the direct logistical impacts of slop spam, its consequences for the motivation and enthusiasm of human participants in peer production are dire."

https://arxiv.org/html/2610.27251v1

"We haven’t seen a significant counterfactual contribution ...

2026-10-24T14:53:44Z

"We haven’t seen a significant counterfactual contribution from AI to net global cybersecurity damages since 2022 / ChatGPT. But that doesn’t mean AI won’t transform cybercrime and cyber conflict and eventually lead to catastrophic damages. The apocalypse, I think, will be slow-moving.

I read a book about “cryptoviruses” in 2008, but it took 5-8 years for ransomware to become a huge deal. And ransomware eventually did hundreds of billions in damages, thanks to geopolitical conditions that let gangs sufficiently avoid law enforcement, a global political economy that pushed young people in the former USSR toward crime over formal software jobs, the rise of crypto payment rails, and the like. Likewise, “Cyber Pearl Harbor” was popularized in 2012, but it wasn’t until 2017 (NotPetya, Russia against Ukraine) that we saw a nation-state attack that significantly disrupted another national economy.

It’s our job, those of us in AI safety, AI security, and security, to anticipate bad cases, work out possible futures today, and start preventing them. The cases I’m worried about: nation-states developing agent-swarm capabilities that do 10-100x the damage of previous nation-state attacks; worms released by ideologically motivated actors that self-replicate, damage Internet availability, and cause enormous downstream harm; and new criminal innovation that substantially automates criminal workflows."

https://joshuasaxe181906.substack.com/p/if-the-vulnpocalypse-is-the-apocalypse

#CyberSecurity #AISafety #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs

"Indeed, if we want to improve the quality of all that ...

2026-10-24T13:52:52Z

"Indeed, if we want to improve the quality of all that jailbreaking code the chatbots are writing and circulating, we need to be able to put those jailbreaks in public repositories for public inspection and public critique. It's possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop, and for other code to be fine, and for yet a third tranche of code to be remediable slop that can be made robust and reliable through auditing and refactoring. You can't figure out which is which if you have to keep that vibe code a secret on pain of a long prison-sentence.

I think there's good cause to be excited at the prospect of getting your devices working better, or just working at all. I think that even if the code stops working after a while, that's still fine – either you got more use out of your device than you would have without the new code, or maybe you just make more code that runs for a while for you, and then you do it again.

These individual improvements to your devices and technology are worth celebrating. But they are no substitute for systemic intervention. If we're going to have a new, good internet, a post-American internet that truly disenshittifies America's defective tech exports and replaces them with robust, transparent digital public goods, we need to make reverse-engineering legal again. Once we fix our policy, then we can fix our code"

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/21/brittle-individualism/#gnireenigne

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #VibeCoding #DRM #Copyright #IP #ReverseEngineering #Interoperability #AdversarialInteroperability

"My API documentation course is free on the web, but I also ...

2026-10-24T13:01:12Z

"My API documentation course is free on the web, but I also sell a PDF version of it through Buy Me a Coffee. This post walks through each step of how I turn about 170 web pages into a 975-page PDF with chapter files, including the print configuration, layout, CSS, table of contents, Prince build, chapter splitting, file hosting, and the Buy Me a Coffee setup. This post is mainly a technical how-to in case anyone else wants to do something similar.

My API documentation course is free to read on the web, but I also sell a PDF version of it through Buy Me a Coffee. The PDF is currently 975 pages, and it comes as a zip file containing a single comprehensive PDF plus a separate PDF for each chapter. In this post, I’ll walk through each step of how I build that PDF and sell it. My setup uses Jekyll, but the general approach should apply to most static site generators. I’ve written it as an instruction manual for anyone who wants to do something similar with a long web asset, such as a course, a book-length series, or a documentation set.

Note: This post is AI-generated. I would never have gotten around to writing such a detailed walkthrough by hand, but AI makes it easy. I’m mainly documenting this process for the benefit of others who are trying to do something similar."

https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/turning-web-content-into-pdf-to-sell

#TechnicalWriting #BookPublishing #SoftwareDocumentation #Jekyll #StaticSiteGenerators #LLMs #GenerativeAI #APIs #APIDocumentation

"Living House is my experiment in LLM-powered adaptive UIs ...

2026-10-24T12:55:47Z

"Living House is my experiment in LLM-powered adaptive UIs and docs. At its core, Living House is a fake home automation service that reshapes itself by analyzing user behavior, like how long the user hesitates and hovers over a label or a button, or what are the most clicked items. Each UI element has a fixed ID with a fixed description of what it really does; anything else is ripe for modification by a small LLM that runs in the browser through WebLLM. The model edits the UI as well as the in-product docs. It all happens as you go."

https://passo.uno/adaptive-ui-docs-using-llms/

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #AdaptiveUI #LLMs #AI #GenerativeAI

"You may have thought that Ofcom’s job is to ensure due ...

2026-10-24T12:54:09Z

"You may have thought that Ofcom’s job is to ensure due impartiality—ie to make sure that, as the law dictates, you can’t actually have a right-wing broadcaster. But it appears that Sir Ian hasn’t got the stomach for that battle. So, instead, why not create a leftie channel to balance it?

A nod’s as good as a wink. Sir Ian seems to be suggesting that he’d be totally cool if Purvis and I were to launch a rabidly left-wing channel to mirror the nightly Reform propaganda that spews out of GB News. The more I think about it, the more I think he’s onto something.

I think we will call it GB Woke—Triggering Britain 24/7. In the Farage slot we will have a nightly edition of Zack Attack in which the Green Party leader will explain how to save the planet, abolish billionaires, bin Israel and ban the Daily Mail. His weekend show, Zack to the Future, will be dubbed Just Stop Everything! and will be an hour of climate emergency and direct action. He will alternate with How Dare You?, a punchy half-hour of civil disobedience training with Greta Thunberg.

The Corbyn Hour will be dedicated to The News They Don’t Want You to Hear and will be a spirited, movement-driven rejoinder to Jacob Rees-Mogg. Jeremy and his guests will discuss economic justice and anti-austerity, along with peace and anti-imperialism. But in a fun way."

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/75420/gb-news-promotes-reform-ofcom-setting-up-woke-tv

#UK #Ofcom #TV #Broadcasting #GBNews #WokeTV #Journalism #Media #ReformUK #Impartiality

"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

This right here is the workflow of the present and near future of ...

2026-10-24T00:37:10Z

This right here is the workflow of the present and near future of technical writing. You should never trust in a single LLM. Two State-Of-Art (SOT) models are more than enough. And you should always be the final arbitrer.

"So you’ve got the hooks. You’ve got Claude not messing up from the gate, right? And that’s a smaller subset of Vale rules with specific things that keep Claude from sounding like slop. Then we have a CLI for the doc tooling. I’m gonna do this everywhere I ever work. You build your tools. So I have checks built into there. It may be just an alias for like three validations I want to run and also the Vale check. And then Claude has instructions to run Vale before you do X, Y, and Z, and then fix anything higher than an info. You have to fix warnings and errors, right? And if it’s weird, for example, if it’s a literal error message, leave it alone. We don’t mess with those. We document them as they come. And so from there, my process is, because I do have Claude Code doing about 40% of my work nearly autonomously now. Like 40% of my tickets, not my work. Let me be clear about that. Claude Code knows the process. I like to work with Opus now that they fixed it. Five is not as bad. Like, 5.5 is good. I have Opus hand off to Sonnet for a review, and I’m not involved in this at all. This is the rule. It follows this process. Sonnet first reviews, right? And they are all running Vale. They are running all of our pre-flight validation, as we call it. There’s a lot of little checks that we have it run to make sure everything’s formatted properly, et cetera. And then it goes to CI. And then the org has Copilot review set for every PR. I wrote rules for Copilot, because Copilot was so out of pocket when they first turned it on. I was like, I’m gonna burn this company down, turn that off."

https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/wtfm-book-ct-smith-podcast

#TechnicalWriting #AI #LLMs #GenerativeAI #Claude #SoftwareDocumentation #Copilot #Vale #HumanInTheLoop #SoftwareDevelopment #DocsAsCode

“Meta led a sharp US tech stock sell-off on Thursday as the ...

2026-10-23T20:49:58Z

“Meta led a sharp US tech stock sell-off on Thursday as the group’s blockbuster spending plans reignited concerns about the sustainability of the debt-fuelled AI infrastructure boom and triggered a rush into Treasuries.

Shares in Mark Zuckerberg’s social media group tumbled 7 per cent after it forecast that it would need to raise “hundreds of billions of dollars” over several years to fund its bet on AI. The stock’s decline stripped about $124bn from Meta’s market value.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 slid 2.9 per cent while the blue-chip S&P 500 dropped 1.2 per cent.
US Treasuries rallied strongly as traders raced into haven assets. Ten-year US government bond yields fell 0.16 percentage points to just below 5 per cent in the best one-day performance since 2024.
“The Treasury market rally today isn’t in response to any fundamental data we’ve had lately. It’s all to do with potential cracks in the AI trade,” said Jon Hill, head of US inflation strategy at Barclays.
Shares in SpaceX fell 9.1 per cent, erasing most of the gains earlier this week that came after Elon Musk’s rockets and AI group said revenue more than doubled in the third quarter. Tesla shares were down 3.1 per cent.”

https://www.ft.com/content/6e318b81-a771-4842-9754-e265fef2852f

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Meta #BigTech #SiliconValley #AIBubble

Anti-AI human slop is for me just a sign of bourgeois elitism, ...

2026-10-23T20:38:37Z

Anti-AI human slop is for me just a sign of bourgeois elitism, meaning of liberals who can’t deal with the idea of having these hordes of simpletons and barbarians desecrating their “beautiful” sacred temples. It’s a bit like traditional instrument-based musicians looked at DJs and electronic music producers that ripped apart their “masterpieces” to create “lazy” and “derivative” music at an industrial scale.

Nowadays, most musicians tend to literally beg for names like Madlib, The Avalanches, Jamie XX, DJ Koze, and many, many others to sample excerpts of their songs into their own tunes or even to make remix of their songs. Why? Because these DJs and electronic music producers have become acknowledged all around the world as real talented and extremely creative people.

That is what is likely going to happen within a few years when it comes to those creatives who are today depreciatively named “AI sloppers”. Because society and history tends to ignore pretentious poseurs. We should all be in favour of every new technology that allows for the democratization of cultural production. Ultimately, the overall quality of the new kinds of works that these new technologies enabled can only be evaluated along the time. One thing is sure: “The street always finds new uses for things.”

“The internet is a vast and confusing place no matter your age. ...

2026-10-23T20:05:20Z

“The internet is a vast and confusing place no matter your age. Trying to help youth engage with it safely and privately is a complicated topic that touches on many different skillsets and ideas. But just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We’ve launched our Online Privacy for Parents and Youth Surveillance Self-Defense guide in hopes to provide a framework for finding solutions that work for you.

EFF rolls out this crucial resource as state and local governments consider ill-advised laws that cut young people off from essential information and experiences. This particularly harms vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online communities they can't access offline. Such laws also entail age gating, which compromises the privacy of all internet users and stifles young users’ ability to learn, grow, and express themselves.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/introducing-our-new-surveillance-self-defense-guide-online-privacy-parents-and

#CyberSecurity #Privacy #Surveillance

“eMudhra, the certificate authority that issued eight ...

2026-10-23T18:54:45Z

“eMudhra, the certificate authority that issued eight intermediate TLS credentials so weak that anyone could mint certificates for any website or mail server—one had a private encryption key of just 4—said it’s getting out of the business.

V. Srinivasan, chairman of India-based eMudhra Limited, cited increasing costs and complexities of compliance requirements—paired with the business generating just 1 percent of its revenue. He also said that the emergence of organizations providing TLS certificates free of charge further reduced returns on investment when compared to other products and services the company offers.”

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/disgraced-emudhra-drops-out-of-tls-business-following-certificate-debacle/

#CyberSecurity #eMudhra #TLS #WebCertificates #Encryption #Cryptography

“IP Before IP is a slim volume of some 219 pages, but its ...

2026-10-23T18:50:34Z

“IP Before IP is a slim volume of some 219 pages, but its length belies the scope of its narrative as it succinctly and engagingly explores how authors and creators protected and exercised their rights in their intellectual creations before the advent of modern IP laws. The author illustrates this through the analysis of carefully documented historical episodes from a variety of periods and cultural backdrops, ranging from Biblical times to the Industrial Revolution, from Edinburgh to Baghdad. It includes 16th century German and Italian disputes about artworks, attitudes toward translation of written works across multiple historical periods and the different treatments of multilingualism in the late 19th century, and how authors sought to control their works both in medieval times and soon after the invention of the printing press. The emergence of concepts such as piracy, plagiarism and bowdlerization is also treated with interest and insightful detail.”

https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2026/10/guest-book-review-ip-before-ip.html?m=1

#IP #Copyright #History #CopyrightHistory

“Warzel: I am amazed by how much the infrastructure in certain ...

2026-10-23T18:44:33Z

“Warzel: I am amazed by how much the infrastructure in certain areas of the internet can hinge on one or two people. There is a fragility to all of this that is concerning. So what do you want to see?

Surý: When I started doing open-source, it was fun. And it kind of still is. But the environment has shifted. Open-source sometimes feels like exploitation. What I would like to see is to find a new model where people working on open-source would be awarded for their work and the hours and hours they put into it from the people who most benefit from their work. I would like companies to realize that this is exploitation. Any exploitation is not sustainable. And it will end up badly if this continues, because the people doing the open-source will stop being motivated to actually do anything in the end.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/man-who-saved-internet-php-vulnerability/689123/?gift=iWa_iB9lkw4UuiWbIbrWGX0S2EScp28jU-louXZfg5I

#CyberSecurity #OpenSource #PHP #PHP2Shell #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs

"Behind a wire fence lies a vast gaping wound of earth. ...

2026-10-22T22:45:29Z

"Behind a wire fence lies a vast gaping wound of earth. Before Google’s arrival a few months ago, an estimated quarter of a million trees occupied the 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland. Now they are all gone.

After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre – taking even the top soil with it – all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery, puddles and mounds of earth, roots and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off the site is going into a stream that feeds the Oulujoki River.

“It doesn’t end. It goes on and on,” says Mari Annala, an ecologist from the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (SLL), looking at drone footage of the former forest from the perimeter."

With 145 new datacentres at various stages of planning, Finland has found itself at the forefront of the tech companies’ latest push. As well as its relative geopolitical and geological stability and abundance of land, the cool climate makes it especially attractive for saving on energy costs."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/oct/22/finland-google-felling-trees-datacentre

#EU #Finland #Google #DataCenters #BigTech

Unfortunately, i think too many people adopt a judgemental stance ...

2026-10-22T22:33:45Z

Unfortunately, i think too many people adopt a judgemental stance towards specific technologies without even boring to fully understand what they really despise in them. In that sense, more often than not, human beings end up very tribalistic.

"From this perspective, the question is not a binary “AI or not AI,” but how it has been shifting what we call writing.

Similar to Marwick, I find the idea of removing AI from our lives to be futile. This doesn’t buy into the “hype” of AI companies; it’s simply a realistic perspective. When I look at statistics on undergraduates’ use of AI writing tools, I see that some 80–90% use them regularly. What undergraduates are acclimated to now will become the reality for graduate students in a few more years. Those graduate students will become researchers, professors, and instructors. Whatever happens next, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. (I suppose I could wag my finger, but there are only so many paid finger-wagging speaking gigs for critical scholars.)

Academics should certainly remain politically active. Personally, I find recent tech companies' actions intrusive and depressing. Data centers have emerged as a crucial local issue in the mid-term elections. To take a normative stance, we should be able to choose how and when we use AI in our personal lives and professional practice. But returning to Marwick, she drew attention back to harm reduction, which she argued was not synonymous with technological rejection.

Simply choosing not to use AI personally won’t help us understand the new roles it plays in society."

https://scholarintheloop.substack.com/p/the-vivid-tale-of-velvet-vale

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Writing #SocialSciences #InternetResearch #AOIR #AIAgents #MailingLists

"Mentioning Trump in headlines was now allowed. “But ...

2026-10-22T22:19:42Z

"Mentioning Trump in headlines was now allowed. “But let’s be realistic about the world we live in,” he told his staff. Last August, Ewalt warned, Springer Nature could have easily decided that the magazine’s “$4 million in losses” wasn’t worth risking millions more that the company earned from federally funded subscriptions to its scientific journals. He had been “trying to keep Springer Nature from freaking out and shutting us down,” he said.

As the meeting came to an end, Ewalt seemed optimistic. “This is useful,” he said. “We’ll do this more.”

But staffers still felt uncertain. Could people really trust their editor in chief to stand by their reporting, like he promised? Or would he retract articles if readers sent too many angry emails, or if Springer Nature’s billionaire CEO called? Those concerns, one staffer said, weren’t “quelled in that meeting at all.” Rather, it had transformed accumulated gossip and implication into something far more concrete—and “set everybody’s teeth on edge,” said another staffer, who, like a number of sources for this story, chose to speak anonymously because they feared retaliation from current or prospective employers. “He was trying to be honest with us,” the staffer said. But, also, it “alarmed the shit out of everybody.”

Another meeting never took place.

In April, the staff of Scientific American took the first formal step to form a union with the Writers Guild of America East, citing a number of concerns, including editorial independence. And on June 23—three days before the National Labor Relations Board was scheduled to count the unionization votes—Springer Nature announced that it was selling the magazine to a little-known company called LabX."

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/scientific-american-springer-nature-trump/

#USA #Science #Trump #Censorship #Media #News #Journalism #ScientificAmerican #Politics #FreedomOfExpression

"Dan Guido, the CEO of Trail of Bits, a well-respected ...

2026-10-22T22:11:01Z

"Dan Guido, the CEO of Trail of Bits, a well-respected cybersecurity company that partners with OpenAI on the Patch the Planet initiative, posted that his company had created “a working exploit,” and that “Will Tan built it in 1 day with Codex, drawing on ~10 years of system security and vulnerability research. AI accelerates exploit development. Knowing how to turn a bug into a shell still takes expertise. AI makes that expertise more productive.”

It should also be noted that Taylor’s other blog post is called “Anything connected to the internet is going to get hacked to pieces,” which includes the lines “software engineers have spent the past 40 years writing vulnerable, dogshit software. LLMs are easily above the bar needed to break into said software.”

It remains unclear, at the moment, what the ultimate impact of all of this is going to be, or where we’ll be in one hour, one week, one year, or 10 years. But AI is changing how cybersecurity and hacking works. It is making finding and exploiting bugs faster and easier. We’re about to find out how insecure the internet really is."

https://www.404media.co/php2shell-black-october-ai-is-changing-everything-about-hacking-no-one-knows-what-happens-next/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #CyberSecurity #Hacking #PHP #PHP2Shell

"Two critical flaws hidden for years in PHP, a technology ...

2026-10-22T21:59:39Z

"Two critical flaws hidden for years in PHP, a technology that powers much of the web, have sparked a global cybersecurity scramble. Governments, hospitals and businesses rushed to patch vulnerable systems after researchers uncovered weaknesses that could allow attackers to gain access to servers and databases.

Tarah Wheeler, an information security executive, AI researcher and chief security officer at TPO Group, joins DW News to explain why the discovery is causing alarm, whether hackers are already trying to exploit the flaws, and what it tells us about AI's growing role in cybersecurity."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EB16ZFkRhw

#CyberSecurity #PHP #PHP2Shell #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

"To provide the most detailed accounting to date of ...

2026-10-22T00:39:36Z

"To provide the most detailed accounting to date of unauthorized access, including two incidents that have not been previously reported, The Post interviewed police or city officials in eight states and three former Flock employees who worked on technical issues. The Post also analyzed Flock software logs released in response to public records requests, court documents, police records and officials’ statements.

The 11 incidents of unauthorized access tallied by The Post reveal how easily users could gain or retain access to Flock’s data. In four of the cases, officers were able to keep using their log-ins to Flock after leaving the force or while serving a suspension, because their accounts were not shut off. In six of the cases, police shared log-ins or passwords with active law enforcement officers from other agencies, in what officials later deemed violations of state laws, department policies or Flock contracts.

Prosecutor Ryan Mears of Marion County, Indiana, announces Sept. 23 that his office has charged five Indianapolis officers over allegations of Flock camera misuse. (Ryan Murphy/IndyStar)
In Indianapolis, a police recruit who was not authorized to access Flock was able to use the tool for more than two years after a more senior officer opened it on the more junior officer’s laptop and didn’t log out. The junior officer, Matthew Binford, used his colleague’s credentials to search his estranged wife’s license plate more than 1,000 times over a 12-month period, according to a court affidavit. Prosecutors criminally charged Binford and four other Indianapolis officers last month, after an August inquiry from The Post prompted an agencywide audit by the city’s police department."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/10/21/their-police-jobs-ended-they-kept-using-flocks-vast-surveillance-network/

#USA #Surveillance #Flock #Privacy #ALPRs #PoliceState

"Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are ...

2026-10-21T22:56:06Z

"Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are believed to be uncommonly severe vulnerabilities are scheduled to drop in a little more than 12 hours for PHP, a programming language that powers websites and Web applications everywhere.

PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10.

“All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can upgrade as soon as the release is available,” the advisory stated. “We reserve the right to release earlier should details of either vulnerability become public, or should evidence of active exploitation appear in the wild.”

The maintainers published the advisory following the leaking of purported details, which have yet to be confirmed. The report showed a video of an exploit tool dubbed PHP2Shell executing code on webservers running:"

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/php-maintainers-tell-web-devs-to-prepare-themselves-for-critical-security-patches/

#CyberSecurity #PHP #PHP2Shell #Programming #WebDevelopment #SoftwareDevelopment

A great reason to like and use AI! -> "It has been ...

2026-10-21T22:47:38Z

A great reason to like and use AI! ->

"It has been possible to do a lot of this for a long time using open source, human-coded repositories. There are many communities of people who have spent hundreds of hours bringing bricked internet-of-things hardware from the dead or finding vulnerabilities that allow one to modify or repair devices that have proprietary software on them.

But over the weekend, a project called “Reverse Engineer Anything” became one of the most viral GitHub repositories in recent memory, with more than 342,000 stars as of the time I’m writing this. The project uses AI to deconstruct features in other pieces of software, and allows the user to replicate them: “See a feature in an app that you want in your own product? Ask your agent to investigate it with REA. It can inspect the app without its source code, explain how the feature works, show the evidence, and build a version for your project.”

What this promises is a way to easily clone and modify other people’s products; it is the same general principle that has in recent weeks allowed for the viral, AI-driven clones of Adobe’s Creative Cloud software, Microsoft Office and the “decompilation” of hundreds of different video games. This tactic is being used not just on software you run on your computer, but also to reverse-engineer and modify the embedded software on physical devices."

https://www.404media.co/reverse-engineer-anything-is-the-new-wild-west-of-ai/

#AI #GenerativeAI #VibeCoding #ReverseEngineering #OpenSource

Best DJ set of the year 2026 (until now) for me. I'm right ...

2026-10-21T22:20:22Z

Best DJ set of the year 2026 (until now) for me. I'm right there at the front :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaI4DyoNh38

#Verraco #EDM #DJSet #Dekmantel #Techno #House #Colombia

"When a Department of Homeland Security official sent out an ...

2026-10-20T22:42:56Z

"When a Department of Homeland Security official sent out an alert to stop Samuel Tunick, a Stop Cop City activist, at an airport in January 2025, they said the reason was because he was suspected of “terrorist activities,” according to new filed court records which include a screenshot of the alert and photos of Tunick’s interrogation.

Tunick ultimately provided Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials with a code that, when entered, wiped his security- and privacy-focused GrapheneOS phone. Tunick is now being criminally charged for that alleged act, in one of the most high profile technology civil rights cases in recent memory.

The court records also showed that CBP officials lied to Tunick during his interrogation. Instead of saying he was being targeted for suspected terrorism — although this search happened just at the start of the second Trump administration, it has dramatically broadened what organizations or people may be considered such — they said they needed his phone to look for “kiddie porn.”"

https://www.404media.co/dhs-said-they-searched-man-who-wiped-grapheneos-phone-for-child-abuse-material-they-lied/

#USA #DHS #BorderControl #Trump #Surveillance #PoliceState #GrapheneOS #Privacy

"The addition of locked chats adds a new layer of privacy to ...

2026-10-20T22:38:51Z

"The addition of locked chats adds a new layer of privacy to ChatGPT, as the app is increasingly used for personal conversations. Of course, while locking a chat can limit access, it doesn’t address concerns about how sensitive information is stored or handled.

OpenAI notes that locking a chat doesn’t create end-to-end encryption or a separate encrypted vault, change how long it retains the chat, remove information that ChatGPT remembered before a chat was locked, or change the “Improve the model for everyone” setting.

Once users lock a chat, it moves to a dedicated “Locked Chats” section, where it’s kept separate from regular chat history, pinned conversations, and chat search results."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/20/chatgpt-now-lets-you-lock-your-chats/

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #Privacy #ChatGPT

Awesome!! It is indeed a caricature, but it's a caricature ...

2026-10-20T22:28:08Z

Awesome!! It is indeed a caricature, but it's a caricature that makes absolutely total sense!

https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistsForAI/comments/1xa4ng3/seize_the_means_of_production_in_this_economy/

#AI #LeftistsForAI #AntiAI #Neoluddism

"Security personnel around the world are on high alert ...

2026-10-20T22:12:20Z

"Security personnel around the world are on high alert Tuesday following the discovery of eight TLS certificates with private keys so weak they could allow anyone to mint trusted browser and app credentials for any site on the Internet.

As of late morning Tuesday, browser makers and some major apps and programming languages had blocked all eight of the intermediate certificates. There are no reports of certificate transparency logs, which track the issuance of all browser-trusted certificates, showing the compromised keys being used maliciously. The threat remains far from over, however, because it will be hard and time-consuming to update other key parts of the Internet, such as Linux distributions and embedded and Internet of Things devices.

The eight intermediate certificates belong to India-based certificate authority eMudhra Limited. An informal advisory published to emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com over on Tuesday posted the message “We have a problem here – Wayne.” The words were digitally signed using the private key of one of the eMudhra certificates. With proof that the reporting party had control of the key, defenders scrambled because the same key could be used to sign unauthorized certificates that would be trusted by millions of servers worldwide."

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/the-internet-goes-on-high-alert-after-discovery-of-8-compromised-tls-certs/

#CyberSecurity #TLS #Encryption #Cryptography #eMudhra

"[I]t doesn’t even matter if it was done on purpose or not. ...

2026-10-20T22:08:13Z

"[I]t doesn’t even matter if it was done on purpose or not. Even if you believe that Zuckerberg and Trump were laughing their heads off and jointly pressing the button to silence the No Kings account, the real problem was that this was possible in the first place.

Our response should be the same either way.

Robinson and Chambers focus on the very practical lessons for anyone engaged in digital organizing, which is how to prepare for the possibility that a centralized provider takes down your account. And their advice is good and practical (read the whole thing!): make sure you have communication channels that a third party can’t easily switch off, set up accounts on open platforms, and have a playbook on how to respond (mostly getting out the word) if your account gets shut down.

But it’s also a reminder of the larger point that I have been harping on for some time about the importance of decentralization and user control over their online experiences. Centralized systems create a natural gravity that leads to control over your speech. My friend Danny O’Brien (who also helped inspire Techdirt’s very existence) wrote a few years ago about how decentralization is not an end in and of itself, but rather part of the means to guarantee we have “cognitive liberty.”

When we hand over the control of our speech to a third party, with no ability to exit (with all of our content and connections intact) we have given up a fundamental element of our liberty."

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/10/20/accident-or-not-the-no-kings-takedown-is-why-you-shouldnt-rent-your-megaphone-from-zuck/

#SocialMedia #Decentralization #OpenWeb #WalledGardens #Meta #Instagram #Censorship

I think the author is on to something... Why You Should Read More ...

2026-10-20T21:59:45Z

I think the author is on to something...

Why You Should Read More Fiction: What Data and AI Tell Us About the Value of Storytelling

Andrew Piper

(John Hopkins University Press, 2026)

"Why human storytelling matters: the science behind attention, memory, and connection.
(...)
In this ambitious and timely book, Andrew Piper argues that fiction is far more than entertainment. Stories cultivate attention, perspective, and embodied understanding in ways increasingly vital to modern life.

Piper is the director of McGill University's ".txtlab," a digital humanities laboratory that uses AI and computational modeling to study how storytelling works. Rather than using AI to generate fiction, Piper employs these tools to analyze patterns across thousands of novels, folk tales, fan-fiction archives, and works of contemporary global literature. By translating elements of narrative—characters, emotions, objects, behaviors, social relationships, and points of view—into measurable features, his lab can identify patterns that no individual reader could easily detect through ordinary reading alone. Across these diverse traditions of storytelling, Piper demonstrates that fiction consistently foregrounds lived experience: characters moving through richly textured environments, objects charged with emotional and cognitive significance, worlds rendered through accumulated sensory detail. These patterns reveal fiction's distinctive ability to model how minds and bodies engage with their surroundings. Piper connects these findings to the cognitive science concept of embodied cognition, or the idea that thought emerges through our physical and emotional engagement with the world.

Fiction, he argues, does more than immerse us in imagined worlds. It trains us to examine experience with greater flexibility, attention, and interpretive distance."

https://www.google.pt/books/edition/Why_You_Should_Read_More_Fiction/7MDDEQAAQBAJ

#Fiction #Books #AI #Literature #DigitalHumanities #GenerativeAI #Storytelling

I susepct that this article includes too much "wishful ...

2026-10-20T00:14:53Z

I susepct that this article includes too much "wishful thinking" statements... The fact that too much money was spent in the construction of data centers doesn't automatically that the AI bubble will burst tomorrow. The technology is really useful and is steadily improving, while more and more people around the world is using it.

"Trillions of dollars in borrowed money have powered the A.I. boom. But now there is growing uncertainty around just how easily more money can be obtained — and how much of it will be paid back.

Those questions burst into the forefront this week when investors rapidly lost confidence in one debt-laden data center company, CoreWeave. Prices of its bonds — the company has accrued $72 billion in liabilities to operate 51 data centers — crashed, and investors placed a more than 60 percent likelihood CoreWeave would fail to meet its obligations.

Investors have sold off bonds for other A.I. giants as well, including Larry Ellison’s company, Oracle, though the price declines are not as steep as CoreWeave’s.

At the same time, Wall Street investors have been bidding up the price of some complicated financial instruments that insure corporate debt against default, such as those insuring SoftBank, the Japanese technology colossus that has borrowed heavily to bet its future on a partnership with OpenAI.

The recent market moves could spell losses for investors that own the companies’ existing bonds and could mean the companies will be forced to pay higher interest rates when they borrow again, raising the costs of their already wildly expensive A.I. projects.

The broader question is whether companies facing debt trouble like CoreWeave, Oracle and SoftBank are the industry’s weak links or are harbingers of deeper problems in the A.I. build-out."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/17/business/ai-debt-coreweave-oracle-softbank.html

#AI #DataCenters #CoreWeave #SoftBank #Oracle #AIBubble #BigTech

"The coalition leaders behind nationwide pro-democracy ...

2026-10-20T00:05:09Z

"The coalition leaders behind nationwide pro-democracy protests that have drawn millions of Americans to the streets in recent years were frustrated when its Instagram account was temporarily shut down during its latest demonstration on Saturday.

The No Kings movement’s account went dark for several hours while protests focused on increasing early voter turnout were under way, sparking censorship fears.

Meta apologized on Saturday and blamed the account’s temporary suspension on an automated action that’s triggered “when accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies”.

“Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error,” a Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, wrote on X. “Everything is now working as it should and we sincerely apologize.”

“We have regained access to our accounts, but Meta still owes us an explanation,” the No Kings Coalition posted on their Instagram page, on Sunday. “Restricting communications about voting in the middle of an election is unacceptable.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/18/no-kings-instagram-account-suspended-during-protests

#SocialMedia #Instagram #Meta #Censorship #USA #Elections #Politics

"A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, ...

2026-10-19T23:40:29Z

"A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.

The proposition was shocking to CISA’s career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”

The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.

Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation’s voting systems."

https://www.propublica.org/article/cisa-election-security-donald-trump

#USA #Trump #Cybersecurity #CISA #Elections #VotingMachines

"Exciting news for Safari users: Privacy Badger is now ...

2026-10-19T23:33:58Z

"Exciting news for Safari users: Privacy Badger is now available on Safari for macOS! You’ll need Safari version 26.5 or higher to use it.

Whether you want to protect yourself from data brokers or just don’t want Big Tech profiting off your browsing data, Privacy Badger is here to help. More than 4 million people already use EFF’s free tracker-blocking extension to take a stand against online surveillance. Safari users can now join them and EFF in the fight for a better web.

Safari support has been one of Privacy Badger’s most requested features for years. Thanks to recent improvements in Safari's extension support, we’ve finally made it happen for Safari version 26.5 and higher. Privacy Badger is now available on all major desktop browsers. And before you ask, yes, we will look into supporting Safari for iOS once we've ironed out any issues on macOS."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/announcing-privacy-badger-safari-macos

#PrivacyBadger #MacOS #Safari #Privacy #Adtracking

"October is here, and it’s almost time for Mastodon’s 5.0 ...

2026-10-19T23:31:12Z

"October is here, and it’s almost time for Mastodon’s 5.0 release! We announced our plans for big changes in an early preview back in August. In this companion article, we’re hoping to shed light on some of the decisions behind this major UI overhaul.

Between the feedback we’ve gathered during Discovery Week, an event in which we spent a week doing surveys and workshop sessions with volunteers from the community, and Mastodon’s 10th anniversary coming up, we were determined to deliver something notable.
(...)
The redesign was grounded in these principles:

Clarity trumps convenience. The most powerful interface can be useless if it’s too difficult to figure out. Making things more clear and obvious can result in more friction, and that can be necessary.

Leave room for what’s to come. Navigation may feel emptier for now, and that is on purpose. We have lots of improvements planned that we need to leave space for, to avoid moving more elements around in the future.

Small improvements matter. We might not be able to fix everything overnight, but we’ll continue to look for small but meaningful improvements to accessibility and usability."

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/10/5.0-a-closer-look/

#Mastodon #Fediverse #OpenWeb #UI #WebDesign #Decentralization

Estava eu no Soho, em Londres, no mês passado e qual não foi o ...

2026-10-19T22:52:22Z

Estava eu no Soho, em Londres, no mês passado e qual não foi o meu espanto, quando, ao procurar por restaurantes vegetarianos nas redondezas via Google Maps, apanhei com um Honest Greens. Hoje fiquei a saber que abriu um Honest Greens na Avenida da República... Qualquer dia não há restaurantes vegetarianos em Lisboa e no Porto; só Honest Greens :-/

O problema é que a proposta de valor deles é realmente competitiva para um mercado português:

- Por um lado, ataca os restaurantes vegetarianos pseudo-saudáveis com menus realmente saudáveis, à base de legumes e leguminosas.

- Por outro, na vertente de café e pastelaria, ataca o Starbucks que só em bebidas é um pouco acima do razoável, deixando bastante a desejar no campo da pastelaria.

O problema é que encontrar um Honest Greens está-se a tornar demasiado conveniente. Qualquer dia, decidem "enmerdificar" o menu. tornando as refeições mais pequenas e poupando nos ingredientes e nessa altura poderá já não haver alternativas :-(

https://www.honestgreens.com/en/

Speaking about Americana + Techno, this promises to be the music ...

2026-10-18T21:24:37Z

Speaking about Americana + Techno, this promises to be the music release of this Autumn. I really don't know how Skee Mask hasn't burnout yet. I think the answer must be lots of Ganza :)

"Bryan Müller and Patrick McDermott met where all great musical partnerships begin: playing Call of Duty: Warzone. Müller, better known as Germany’s enigmatic electronic producer Skee Mask, and McDermott, the Los Angeles-based guitarist behind North Americans, were part of a loose group of musicians and producers who played the game together. Eventually Müller suggested they make some music.

There was no plan for what that music should be. Instead, Müller encouraged McDermott to send him strange things. Rough things. Unfinished things. Fragments that hadn’t found a home elsewhere.

What he sent included acoustic guitar recordings and other material accumulated across sessions between 2017 and 2023, much of it recorded at home in Los Angeles. Some of it was quite literally cutting-room-floor material: ideas McDermott had left behind, rather than pieces intended to become songs.

Skee Mask and North Americans arrive here from opposite directions: one associated with electronic music and the club, the other with acoustic guitar and American Primitive traditions. Reduce the distance between them, however, and those distinctions begin to matter less. The result is music of incredible depth that uses texture, space and repetition so instinctively and with such great ease, the two musicians allowing a piece of music to become something neither would have made alone.

FINAL CIRCLE started with a video game, a folder of unfinished recordings and a simple proposition: Send me the strange stuff."

https://shop.cityslang.com/pages/skee-mask-north-americans

#SkeeMask #Techno #EDM #Americana #Primitivism

Great Americana track for ending the weekend. Now that I listen ...

2026-10-18T21:18:29Z

Great Americana track for ending the weekend. Now that I listen to it for probably the 5th time, I think that it would probably could be easily adapted to a techno song :-D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjcUFnZjNk

#Folk #Americana #AltCountry #Country

"Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used to ...

2026-10-18T13:58:15Z

"Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used to obtain knowledge and understanding (...) However, are humans really justified in basing their beliefs on AI outputs? Can they claim to know things based on AI? If so, what is the justification? What kind of knowledge does AI yield? How do the procedures inherent in AI compare to well-known patterns of scientific inference? And how can AI contribute to a better understanding of real-world systems? Answering these questions remains a challenge because AI is a new technology that humans still struggle to understand fully. Many AI systems are considered “black boxes” or opaque, as it is often put.

The stunning achievements of AI in knowledge-related tasks, along with its opacity, motivate an epistemology of AI—a study of how much AI can truly contribute to the acquisition of knowledge and understanding. The epistemology of AI treats it both as an object of knowledge and as a tool that extends the capacities of epistemic agents, if it does not become an epistemic agent in its own right. As a branch of epistemology, the epistemology of AI parallels social epistemology in its departure from a focus on the unaided individual human being. However, the epistemology of AI has yet to become an established philosophical field. Still, since the advent of AI, authors from epistemology, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of mind have addressed epistemological questions concerning AI. What is now called the “philosophy of AI” also touches upon epistemological questions about AI, but has traditionally been more focused on whether AI applications have mental states or properties. This article surveys and systematizes existing epistemological work on AI, covering symbolic and connectionist AI, and comparing machine learning with pre-programmed AI."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-ai/

#Epistemology #AI #ExplainableAI #Explainability #Interpretability #Philosophy

"No one should have to choose between speaking freely and ...

2026-10-18T13:44:18Z

"No one should have to choose between speaking freely and protecting their immigration status. Yet that’s precisely the choice the Trump administration’s mass surveillance of online speech forces on noncitizens living in the U.S.

Last fall, we sued on behalf of three major labor unions to stop this surveillance program. And just this month, we won our first major ruling: A federal district court denied the government’s motion to dismiss our lawsuit. This means the case can move forward—a win for free speech and a critical step in protecting our First Amendment rights online. We’ve already explained why this is a big deal for our clients, so let's take a closer look at the court’s reasoning."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/our-lawsuit-against-trump-administrations-social-media-surveillance-moves-forward

#USA #Trump #FreedomOfSpeech #SocialMedia #Surveillance #Censorship #Immigration #LaborUnions

"The Norwegian Data Protection Authority has now issued an ...

2026-10-18T13:15:24Z

"The Norwegian Data Protection Authority has now issued an administrative fine of 92 million Norwegian kroner, equivalent to €8.6 million, which is the highest fine it has issued to date.

– We issued such a high fine in this case because the breaches we identified were very serious. Thousands of users in Norway have been subjected to unlawful sharing of their sensitive data, says Line Coll, Director General of the Norwegian Data Protection Authority.

Xandr acted as an intermediary that relayed the personal data of Grindr users in Norway, including data revealing sexual orientation, to potentially thousands of other companies. Xandr defended itself by saying that they thought Grindr had collected users’ consent, but the Norwegian Data Protection Authority does not accept that actors can simply blame one another.

– Our key message is that responsibility for data protection cannot be passed on to others. Each and every company must itself ensure, and be able to document, that they process personal data lawfully. This case also demonstrates how opaque the advertising ecosystem is for individuals. When companies do not take responsibility and blame each other, the rights of users become, in practice, worthless, says Coll."

https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/news/news-2026/microsoft-company-fined-nok-92-million-for-unlawfully-sharing-personal-data

#Norway #DataProtection #GDPR #Microsoft #Xandr #Grindr #Privacy

Sem imigração em massa de mão-de-obra barata, Portugal nunca ...

2026-10-18T12:16:43Z

Sem imigração em massa de mão-de-obra barata, Portugal nunca teria conseguido pagar a dívida pública.

Sem imigração em massa de mão-de-obra barata, Portugal nunca teria conseguido pagar a dívida pública.

Sem imigração em massa de mão-de-obra barata, Portugal nunca teria conseguido pagar a dívida pública.

Sem imigração em massa de mão-de-obra barata, Portugal nunca teria conseguido pagar a dívida pública.

Porquê? Porque as empresas portuguesas são mal-geridas, vivem à custa do Estado e não conseguem competir no mercado global. Será que quase à beira de 2027 a população portuguesa ainda não conseguiu perceber isso?

É que é tão simples quanto isso. Basta olhar para os níveis de produtividade dos trabalhadores em Portugal que são bastante baixos. A produtividade é baixa em Portugal porque não há capital suficiente para investir na produção de bens e serviços de alto valor acrescentado como programação, fabrico de automóveis eléctricos, computadores, telemóveis, robôs, etc.

Com um tecido empresarial largamente apostado em ganhar dinheiro a curto prazo em setores com turismo (hotelaria, restauração, alojamento local, etc.) e especulação imobiliária, como é que um Estado conseguia ao mesmo tempo cumprir os seus compromissos com os credores e prestar serviços públicos gratuitos ou quase como educação ou saúde e pagar reformas, pensões, subsídios de desemprego, etc. aos cidadãos?

É de loucos pensar que isso seria alguma vez possível sem recorrer à imigração. Sobretudo num país em que até hoje as únicas políticas económicas consistiram em privatizar grandes empresas e vendê-las a grupos económicos dos amigos ou arranjar tachos para os amigos e familiares em empresas públicas. Basta perceber um pouco de história económica.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Productivity_trends_using_key_national_accounts_indicators

#Portugal #Economia #Imigração #Produtividade #Dívida

"Published on 3 June, the European Commission’s Tech ...

2026-10-17T14:38:37Z

"Published on 3 June, the European Commission’s Tech Sovereignty Package—comprising the Chips Act 2.0, the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), the EU Open Source Strategy, and a Strategic Roadmap for Energy Digitalisation—is portrayed as a significant shift in the EU’s digital governance strategy. It signals that the EU is no longer content to rely on regulatory frameworks like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. The EU now seeks to artificially inflate both the supply of and demand for AI data centres, as well as to expand the material infrastructures underpinning them.

Yet, as the rhetoric of “strategic autonomy” echoes through the policymaking corridors of Brussels, the Package is fractured by internal contradictions. It conflates the fraught competitiveness agenda with the goal of genuine digital self-determination, mistakes building AI data centres on EU soil for structural tech independence, and engages in what can only be described as “sovereignty-washing”—repackaging the deregulation of fundamental rights and environmental protection as an industrial win. This aggressive industrial policy also embraces the EU’s securitisation and militarisation agenda, as Europe’s loss of competitiveness is perceived as a security threat."

https://edri.org/our-work/the-cloud-and-ai-development-act-cada-represents-everything-thats-wrong-with-europes-approach-to-digital-sovereignty/

#EU #DigitalSovereignty #CADA #AI #BigTech #DSA #GDPR #DMA

"Total automation is one direction. But there are others, ...

2026-10-17T13:32:07Z

"Total automation is one direction. But there are others, including directions that focus more on human augmentation, and increasing the collaborative and collective power of teams of humans and AI models working together.

This view — our view — is not that automation is never good. Clearly sometimes it is, and clearly sometimes some subset of people try to oppose it out of the narrowest short-term self interest, at the expense of broader social and economic progress. But we think AI can also augment human workers in many interesting ways, that some of the maximalist attempts to completely automate all human labor are deeply unpromising on both technical and economic grounds, and that right now too much of AI research is devoted to the latter at the expense of the former. The bias toward the automation agenda is partly because of economic incentives, but partly because of some deeper intellectual and cultural aspects of computer science as a field.

The alternative view has deep intellectual roots in the history of computer science, especially the subfield of human-computer interaction. Moreover, there are compelling technical and economic reasons to pursue it now. A small but growing number of businesses are now coming around to it, after witnessing the economic disappointments of attempting to implement the first program. Despite this, it remains a minority position today, poorly understood, and disorganized. Above all, computer science as a field today lacks a clear articulation of a systematic program for the architecture of AI that would further this agenda.

In this essay, we briefly discuss what is at stake here, the history of this debate in CS, the status of this debate today in economics and elsewhere, and the automation agenda in the culture and curricula of CS in the university."

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/steering-ai-beyond-automation

#AI #Automation #Economics #Economy #Productivity #ComputerScience

Algorithmic Capital: Resistance in the Age of Artificial ...

2026-10-17T13:24:56Z

Algorithmic Capital: Resistance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence - Jonathan Martineau, Jonathan Durand Folco (Verso Books, 13/10/2026 - 496 pages)

"AI and algorithms are more than technologies. They are rooted in new capitalist forms and processes that transcend economics and technology to reshape social reality, politics, culture, and subjectivities.

Set out in twenty theses-stretching across geopolitics, the mining of rare earths, labor, crypto, influencers, climate change, Gen AI, social acceleration, Silicon Valley ideologies, and predictive policing-this book situates contemporary social change in the context of the advent of algorithmic capital. Jonathan Martineau and Jonathan Durand Folco show how the valorization of data and the development of AI are symptoms of deeper socio-economic and political mutations.

Algorithmic capital is, at once, a logic of accumulation, a form of social power, a mediation of social relations, and a relation to nature, as well as a multidimensional reality that profoundly reorganizes social life. In the face of this new and alarming stage of capitalism, the book explores possibilities for organizing and resistance, tracing a path toward a post-capitalist and just world."

https://books.google.pt/books?id=Nz8FEgAAQBAJ

#Algorithms #Capitalism #AlgorithmicCapital #AI #Automation #SiliconValley

One of the best VJ sets that I ever saw. This is OLED TV sets ...

2026-10-17T12:33:12Z

One of the best VJ sets that I ever saw. This is OLED TV sets exist :) This time, TheDaddy44 exceeded all expectations :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfw7DcCfCnk

#Shed #VJset #Techno #House

"Since Muse was released last month, the agent has already ...

2026-10-17T00:52:17Z

"Since Muse was released last month, the agent has already been downloaded millions of times and hit No. 1 on Apple’s App Store. With the help of its creepy virtual avatar — a Temu Labubu-esque creature with a disarming grin — the app requests and encourages users to grant access to bank accounts, passwords, contacts, chat logs, and anything and everything that might help it to do the user’s bidding.

“These systems are advertised as autonomous helpers, genies, or servants who do what you need before you ask, seamlessly,” Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, makers of the popular encrypted messaging app, told The Verge. These autonomous actions are applied “not just to the person who installed Muse on their device, but also to everyone that person communicates with, as extrapolated from their most intimate information — emails, messages, contacts, photos, and more.”

With AI agents, tech companies are letting consumers automate their everyday tasks by extending their omnivorous style of mass surveillance to massive amounts of sensitive data. It’s the same Faustian tradeoff Silicon Valley has been offering us for decades: your private data in exchange for a little bit of convenience. And for many people, the idea of having a virtual assistant that does menial tasks like filling out invoices and sending emails is compelling — especially if they don’t realize how much data they’re actually giving away in return."

https://www.theverge.com/tech/1011938/muse-ai-data-friends-consent

#AI #GenerativeAI #Meta #Muse #AIAgents #AgenticAI

""Freedom, security, and prosperity – in Europe, for ...

2026-10-17T00:48:56Z

""Freedom, security, and prosperity – in Europe, for Europe, and with Europe." What sounds like the slogan from a State of the Union address is not a speech by a top politician. It's part of a response from tech giant Palantir to a press inquiry from a European investigative team. It would be difficult to find a more concise way to express Europe in a single sentence.

But Palantir is a multi-billion-dollar US corporation with a tarnished reputation, facing pressure in Europe. A growing number of European governments are distancing themselves from the company, concerned about digital sovereignty and increasing dependence.

“We cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sector,” said French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu in June, announcing the development of their own systems with the domestic company Chapsvision instead of further cooperation with Palantir.

European countries are concerned about sensitive internal organizational knowledge and the security of the vast amounts of data processed by Palantir systems. "It's inconceivable to allow industry employees access to national databases," German Vice Admiral Thomas Daum told the Handelsblatt newspaper . This is because, at NATO, which uses Palantir's Maven system, company employees operate and maintain the system. According to a documentary, even German police forces, such as the one in Hesse, have desks reserved for Palantir employees ."

https://netzpolitik.org/2026/laenderuebergreifende-recherche-palantirs-geschaefte-in-europa/

#Europe #Palantir #AI #Surveillance #BigTech #Privacy #DigitalSovereignty

"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

"The crypto industry’s flagship super PAC, Fairshake, has ...

2026-10-17T00:33:47Z

"The crypto industry’s flagship super PAC, Fairshake, has announced the House candidates it plans to back in the midterms. All 32 are incumbents, and all but four are in safe seats, which makes for a convenient way to pad a win rate and then claim it proves the existence of a crypto voter bloc. Rather than fighting for competitive seats, the PAC has abandoned several reliable allies in tough races. It seems more focused on rewarding high-ranking allies, such as Financial Services Committee chair French Hill and Bryan Steil, who chairs the House’s digital assets subcommittee.

Meanwhile, the revolving door between Trump’s White House and the crypto industry is spinning so fast it’s threatening to fly off its hinges. Patrick Witt, the latest executive director of Trump’s crypto council, has left for an as-yet-unnamed job in the private sector, leaving the council without a director or deputy, and the crypto industry wondering whether the White House has lost interest."

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-111/

#USA #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Trump #Lobbying #Corruption

"The letter also includes what Telegram calls its ...

2026-10-17T00:31:55Z

"The letter also includes what Telegram calls its “non-public contact point” for requests made by U.S. law enforcement. This email address — content-referral-u1@telegram.org — is now in public court records. Hackers often contact tech companies impersonating law enforcement, often using compromised government email accounts, to trick them into handing over someone’s user data.

The case this document surfaced in centers around Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub Al-Muhtadi, who allegedly participated in the October 7 attacks against Israel.

As of last January, Telegram had given U.S. authorities data on 2,253 users, 404 Media previously reported.

Telegram only got serious about responding to lawful requests for data after French authorities arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in August 2024, in part because the company refused to assist law enforcement in a child abuse investigation. Since then, Telegram has dramatically changed from a company that very rarely, if ever, provided data to the authorities, to one that does it as a matter of course, in line with other tech platforms and messaging apps."

https://www.404media.co/heres-what-telegram-giving-data-to-the-u-s-government-looks-like/

#USA #SocialMedia #Telegram #Privacy #DataProtection #Surveillance

I do this everyday for technical writing (and it absolutely ...

2026-10-17T00:16:46Z

I do this everyday for technical writing (and it absolutely works!)

"Adversarial Code Review is a verification pattern where a distinct AI session—the Critic Agent—reviews code produced by the Builder Agent against the Spec before human review.

This extends the Critic (Hostile Agent) pattern from the design phase into the implementation phase, creating a verification checkpoint that breaks the “echo chamber” where a model validates its own output.

The Builder Agent (optimized for speed and syntax) generates code. The Critic Agent (optimized for reasoning and logic) attempts to reject it based on spec violations."

https://asdlc.io/patterns/adversarial-code-review/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment #CodeReview

"Some good news from MapQuest, the decades-old online mapping ...

2026-10-17T00:04:34Z

"Some good news from MapQuest, the decades-old online mapping software that let you print out driving directions before GPS navigation was a thing. The latest update to the mobile app will now let you identify nearby license plate readers and other video surveillance cameras, allowing you a better shot at opting out of their data collection.

MapQuest said in a post on Bluesky that users can switch on the "surveillance layer" in the map options to see the location and direction of known license plate readers, such as those from Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions (also known as Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon (which makes Tasers), Leonardo, Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and "other outdoor surveillance cameras."

Sites like DeFlock and Flock Surveillance Map are some of the other well-known projects that are documenting the locations of Flock, which has at least 120,000 cameras around the United States."

https://this.weekinsecurity.com/mapquest-now-lets-you-locate-nearby-surveillance-cameras-like-flock/

#USA #Surveillance #MapQuest #ALPRs #Flock

This might even be true. The thing is that sovereignty always ...

2026-10-15T22:09:49Z

This might even be true. The thing is that sovereignty always costs money...

"Amazon, Google, Meta among members of lobby group funding dire warnings over cloud sovereignty plans

Some of America's biggest tech companies have a warning for Europe: curb your reliance on US cloud providers, and it could cost you €115 billion.

That's the finding of a new study commissioned by CCIA Europe, a lobbying group whose members include Amazon, Google, and Meta, companies that have plenty of reasons to want European governments to keep buying American cloud services.

The research, conducted by the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), claims the European Commission's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) could saddle Europe with €115 billion in costs over the next decade, more than six times the Commission's upper estimate of €18 billion."

https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/10/14/us-tech-giants-warn-europe-that-ditching-us-tech-giants-could-cost-115b/5303031

#EU #USA #DigitalSovereignty #CloudSovereignity #CloudComputing #BigTech

"Ukrainian drones hit Russia’s largest data center on ...

2026-10-15T22:05:00Z

"Ukrainian drones hit Russia’s largest data center on Wednesday. This was Ukraine’s fourth strike on Russian data centers in the past week and confirmation of a new reality of war: data centers are valuable enemy assets and they will be targeted.

In 2006, British economist Clive Humby declared “data is the new oil,” and big tech adopted the metaphor. Twenty years later, a dark side of the truism has been revealed. If the places where oil is refined are valuable targets in a war then so, too, are the places where data is refined. We’ve seen this not just in the Russia-Ukraine war, but also with Iran hitting Amazon Web Services data centers in Dubai in retaliation for America’s strikes on the country.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed strikes on Russian data centers and oil refineries in a post on X and called them a “symmetrical response" to Russian aggression. Here we have oil and data together again, not as a metaphor in an economics lecture, but in the pronouncement of a world leader defending his country. conducting a war.

Three of Ukraine’s strikes hit data centers that belonged to Yandex, Russia’s Google-equivalent, and damaged the company’s supercomputers that housed some of its AI models. The latest attack hit a data center operated by Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank. It’s too early to tell what the effects of the strike on the Sberbank data center will be, but the three strikes on Yandex have disrupted internet and communications across Russia."

https://www.404media.co/data-centers-are-war-targets-now/

#DataCenters #Ukraine #DataIsTheNewOil #Russia #Yandex

ANTI-AI HUMAN SLOP = ANTI-FREEDOM SLOP People loose all respect ...

2026-10-15T21:56:08Z

ANTI-AI HUMAN SLOP = ANTI-FREEDOM SLOP

People loose all respect from me when they repeat this same old anti-AI human slop tropes. It's absolutely ridiculous because it's dogmatic and absolutely discriminatory. I don't think this kind of stance is within my definition of freedom. People who assume this position are enemies of freedom. Period. I tell you: Within a few years, people will come back and realize that they made a terrible mistake by judging others not by quality of their work but by the tools they use. Yet, for me, currently this is infuriating.

"I suggest the social action: shame. Shame these people. Their actions are shameful. AI bros hate being shamed and they try to make rules against shaming — because shame works.

None of these people doing shameful things deserve a place in polite company. They should be shamed for their shameful choices.

The AI industry is also running a PR push to redefine common word usage. The word “slop” is also super effective — so the bros really hate “slop” and try to define it to mean slop they don’t like."

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/10/14/linux-kernel-goes-full-ai-slop-code-hides-chatbot-commits/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming #HumanSlop #AntiAISlop #Neoluddism #Linux #OpenSource #FLOSS

"OpenAI lets anyone inject ads into ChatGPT users’ ...

2026-10-15T21:43:34Z

"OpenAI lets anyone inject ads into ChatGPT users’ sessions, targeting specific groups of people based on their email address, phone number, or a unique identifier on their phone, according to 404 Media’s own tests of ChatGPT’s advertising ecosystem.

While the ad targeting available in ChatGPT is somewhat standard practice across the advertising industry, the chatbot’s one billion monthly active users may not understand they, in some cases, are being specifically targeted because of their personal data the advertiser has uploaded to OpenAI. ChatGPT’s ad targeting is also novel in that it is also based on the prompts users enter into the chatbot, prompts that users may assume are private but which, as 404 Media has previously shown, may be reviewed by humans. Or in this case, used for ad targeting purposes."

https://www.404media.co/how-chatgpt-targets-ads-to-you-based-on-your-prompts-phone-number-and-email/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #OpenAI #ChatGPT #AdTargeting #TargetedAds #DataProtection #Privacy

"Devices at international news network Al Jazeera were ...

2026-10-15T21:39:00Z

"Devices at international news network Al Jazeera were infected with mercenary spyware from Candiru (rebranded as “Integrity Labs”) via targeted online advertisements. We provide the first public technical confirmation of a zero-click mercenary spyware attack delivered via targeted advertising, which we call AdFection.

The malicious advertisements were purchased by Discover-Tech, an Israeli company that presents itself as a legitimate advertising company, but which we found operates as a facilitator for multiple mercenary spyware partners.

Discover-Tech operates a platform called Controlium that enables its mercenary partners to de-anonymize, fingerprint, and automatically infect devices the moment an advertisement is rendered — a form of zero-click attack.

Analysis of four billion Discover-Tech bidding records shows that during a four-month period, the company’s ads were shown on almost 200,000 unique websites and Android/iOS apps in dozens of countries."

https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targeted-ads-into-a-pipeline-for-spyware/

#CyberSecurity #Spyware #TargetedAds #AdTech #AlJaazera #Candiru #IntegrityLabs

This is like... out of this world...! #TheMicrophones #MountEerie ...

2026-10-15T21:36:18Z

This is like... out of this world...!

#TheMicrophones #MountEerie #Folk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-9X3v8nFzE

"Consulting giant Accenture has told many employees that the ...

2026-10-15T21:34:09Z

"Consulting giant Accenture has told many employees that the company will now only spend $29 a month per person on Claude. Employees subject to the cap, some of whom had been spending as much as $1,000 monthly, are scrambling to find ways to make sure they can keep spending as much as they already are.

The news is a snapshot of what continues to play out across all sorts of industries: companies have spent heavily on AI tools, and are now discovering that many users are burning or “chewing” through AI tokens at a rapid clip. In response, many companies have curbed their employees’ AI use. There is a special irony to Accenture doing much of the same, when it is a company that has encouraged its clients to invest heavily into AI.

“Claude Enterprise Users: Important Updates to Licensing and Usage Costs,” a recent internal Accenture announcement, seen by 404 Media, reads."

https://www.404media.co/accenture-tells-employees-they-can-now-spend-only-29-on-claude-per-month/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Accenture #Anthropic Claude

"On Friday October 9th, German journalist Gavin Karlmeier ...

2026-10-14T22:28:02Z

"On Friday October 9th, German journalist Gavin Karlmeier released the latest episode of his podcast “Haken dran” and shared an exclusive scoop: an anonymous source discovered that the social media company W Social is publishing to the world wide web the legal names, nationalities and approximate dates of birth of their verified users, in plain text. This information is viewable by anyone with an internet connection and can be easily downloaded as a .csv file by people with a bit of tech savvy.

When approached by Karlmeier, W Social representatives responded that this is not an unauthorized data leak, but rather, that the information “public by design” and allegedly shared with the informed consent of their users.

Interestingly, nearly all the promotional materials and public communications by W Social and W Identity up to now stated the exact opposite, giving the impression that government ID data provided to verify one’s account would be immediately deleted"

https://blog.elenarossini.com/public-by-design-how-w-social-makes-their-verified-users-personal-details-visible-on-the-open-web/

#EU #SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #WSocial #DataProtection #Privacy

"Flock CEO Garrett Langley said the company’s ...

2026-10-14T22:26:07Z

"Flock CEO Garrett Langley said the company’s gunshot-detection microphones detect “just gunshots,” but Flock’s website paints a far broader picture of what other ambient audio also gets picked up.

Speaking onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt, the co-founder of the surveillance company defended Flock’s audio-collection product called Gunshot Detection, which listens for gunshots and other ambient audio across nearby neighborhoods to provide “earlier awareness” to potential public safety events.

Flock’s website says that the company’s audio systems can pinpoint gunfire instantly, while also being able to “detect street takeovers early to stop chaos before it escalates,” and “identify severe crashes in real time so help arrives faster.” It also says they can “expand awareness beyond gunfire with alerts for car crashes, fireworks, and sideshows.”"

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/14/flock-ceo-says-its-microphones-detect-just-gunshots-its-website-says-different/

#USA #Flock #GunshotDetection #Surveillance #Privacy #PoliceState

"It was a flowing speech packed full of precise statistics ...

2026-10-14T22:13:52Z

"It was a flowing speech packed full of precise statistics – but Jason O’Connell, a Reform UK Senedd member, was not quite the gifted orator he had first appeared. The periodic flashing in his spectacles seemed to give the game away as he spoke for five minutes in the Senedd chamber without a glance at his notes.

“Cardiff reviewed 192 roads, following 933 requests, and only four routes have returned to 30mph,” he said as he led the party’s charge to abolish 20mph traffic zones. “£38.3m wasted to implement this policy and up to £8.9bn in an act of economic self-harm.”

It was probably no feat of memory – rather, the Reform member for Pontypridd Cynon Merthyr was suspected of using smart glasses that turned his lenses into tiny teleprompters."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/14/smart-glasses-ai-technology-reform-senedd-westminster-ban

#UK #Meta #SmartGlasses #ReformUK #Privacy #Surveillance

I'm sick of talking about the supposed "evilness" and ...

2026-10-14T21:57:32Z

I'm sick of talking about the supposed "evilness" and "wickedness" of using AI and LLMs when stuff like this keep happening around the world. Wake up: This is what matters!

"Amsterdam police seize server belonging to leftist internet service provider A/I at US request - by Marloes de Koning for NRC (NL)

On Tuesday, a unit of the Amsterdam police seized a server belonging to the Italian internet service provider Autistici/Inventati (A/I) at a data center in Amsterdam’s Science Park. The seizure was carried out pursuant to a US request for legal assistance. A copy of the server’s contents is now being sent to the US.

A/I was a left-wing, anti-capitalist organization that had provided free web hosting and email services to around twenty thousand organizations worldwide over the past twenty-five years. According to the US government, A/I thereby facilitated ‘Antifa’—short for ‘anti-fascists’. The Trump administration views Antifa as a terrorist organization; consequently, A/I itself was designated as a terrorist entity in late August. This was unprecedented; as a rule, internet service providers are not held liable for the content their users post online.

As a result of the sanction, the organization lost access to its bank account and domain name. Just over a week after the sanction was announced, the volunteers running the service decided to cease operations and dismantle A/I."

https://keepitfree.ai/news/amsterdam-police-seize-server-belonging-to-leftist-internet-service-provider-a/i-at-us-request-nrc-nl/

#USA #Trump #Netherlands #Autistici #Inventati #Italy #DigitalRights #FreedomOfSpeech #Censorship

"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

This post is so full of simplications and manicheisms that it ...

2026-10-14T21:36:51Z

This post is so full of simplications and manicheisms that it leaves out almost all nuanced situations and complex uses of LLMs suited to different scenarios... In sum, just another example of anti-AI human slop... :-/ This is just one of the few things that I don't really like with Mastodon. There seems to be too much anti-AI human slop.

Surely by now we should all be very well aware of the limitations of LLMs and how these can be easily solved if we're not lazy to accomplish something of way higher quality in a much faster way than it otherwise would be possible. Alas, that seems not to be the case because there seems to be always someone that is against the right to use whichever tools we want to use if the quality of the final output is not affected. i guess the idea of freedom must be a bit strange to them...

"Instead of letting the world choose for you, I believe that each open source project is now facing a strong choice that has to be made urgently. Accept AI-generated contributions or not.

This is not easy.

Both choices will alienate some part of the community and some key contributors. That’s sad, but a project cannot please everyone.

Now, contributors may argue whether pro-vibecode or anti-slop is better from a philosophical, ethical or pragmatic point of view. Nobody can decide what is best for a project but its key community members."

https://ploum.net/2026-10-01-pascal_wager.html

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #OpenSource #FLOSS #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

"To hear the Trump administration tell it, the SNAP program ...

2026-10-13T23:50:10Z

"To hear the Trump administration tell it, the SNAP program is under siege by well-heeled recipients of food stamps. Vice President JD Vance, upon being named “Fraud Czar” this spring, said: “There are people who have Lamborghinis who currently receive SNAP benefits.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose agency oversees the program, regularly goes on TV and social media to allege that masses of SNAP recipients are scamming the system, driving Bentleys, Ferraris, Maseratis and, yes, Lamborghinis.

The federal government’s own statistics tell a different story. Confirmed cases of intentional program violations — fraud — committed by SNAP recipients account for $64 million a year, or about 0.08% of all benefits issued annually, according to the most recent 50-state reports compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Meanwhile a far bigger fraud wave has exploded over the past five years: organized theft from SNAP recipients. In 2025, $470 million was stolen electronically from beneficiaries — and thus from the U.S. taxpayer — according to data supplied to ProPublica by Propel, a company that provides a mobile app for SNAP recipients to check their account balances and transaction histories. More than 990,000 households that received food assistance last year had benefits stolen."

https://www.propublica.org/article/food-stamp-snap-benefits-theft-skimmers-fraud

#USA #Trump #FoodStamps #SNAP #Scams #Skimmers #Fraud

"In a recent research note focused on Asian markets, ...

2026-10-13T23:45:15Z

"In a recent research note focused on Asian markets, Jefferies estimates that about half of the roughly $2.3 trillion contracted backlog at Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Oracle is owned by OpenAI and Anthropic. Yet Chinese AI models, open source/weight and small language models, threaten to undercut the prices the two US leaders charge, casting doubt on their future revenue.

Jefferies points to research from global aggregator platform OpenRouter, which found Chinese models processed 76.12 trillion tokens in the week ended 27 September, up from just 4.37 trillion in late April. The top four US providers processed 14.2 trillion tokens. Meanwhile, the launch of Moonshot AI’s open source Kimi K3 is “competing at the frontier” with an estimated 95 percent of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.

“The question now is whether all of the above has been priced fully into markets. This writer does not think so,” the Jefferies paper states."

https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/10/13/cheap-chinese-and-open-source-llms-could-trigger-trillion-dollar-ai-infrastructure-reset/5302774

#AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #LLMs #China #OpenWeights #OpenAI #Anthropic #AIBubble

"The threat of an AI share price crash rippling out across ...

2026-10-13T22:56:53Z

"The threat of an AI share price crash rippling out across global markets is putting world financial stability at risk, the International Monetary fund has warned.

In its twice-yearly Global Financial Stability Report, the IMF highlighted the sky-high valuations for AI companies along with their increasing debt pile as one reason that risks in the system are “elevated”.

“The consequences of an AI correction could be global,” it warned. Aside from the US, Asian markets would be most exposed, and the UK and euro area potentially more insulated – though investors with US holdings would be hit.

Athanasios Vamvakidis, the deputy director of the IMF’s monetary and capital department, launching the report, said: “The exposure of the rest of the world to US assets, particularly AI, is the highest it has ever been. So this is supporting the global economy through wealth effects today; but if we get a market correction it could have broad implications.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/oct/13/ai-share-crash-risk-global-imf-debt-corrowing-cyber-attacks

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #CyberSecurity #IMF

"NetBSD seems to be thriving of late: as the Linux world goes ...

2026-10-13T22:54:41Z

"NetBSD seems to be thriving of late: as the Linux world goes pro-AI, some of the AI-averse are turning to this explicitly AI-free project.

The NetBSD project’s Mastodon feed reports that it received a record 120 donations last month, and it has far exceeded its target:

“We received $120,282 USD in total. Naturally, this has completely filled up our donations target bar which was set at $50,000. Time to fund some projects!”

It’s a welcome contrast to the usual stories of under-funded FOSS projects, and it follows a visible uptick in people asking about NetBSD in the FOSS Unix groups we read, ever since Emperor Penguin Torvalds said that Linux was not an anti-AI project back in July, and the following month, the Debian project polled its developers on AI use, and they chose to permit AI-generated contributions."

https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/10/13/netbsd-may-have-found-a-new-role-the-ai-free-foss-os/5302818

#OpenSource #AI #GenerativeAI #FLOSS #BSD #NetBSD #Linux

I really think mathematicians are convinced that they OWN ...

2026-10-13T22:43:27Z

I really think mathematicians are convinced that they OWN Mathematics... This is bullshit!! OpenAI released the manuscripts that it believed to contain solutions to a set of famous difficult problems. It´s up to the academic community to really review these manuscripts and publish papers based on them. Bottom-line: "Damned if you do; Damned if you don't." Question: Are mathematicians really interested in the advancement of their field of knowledge or do they really want the public to know who owns Mathematics? Tsk, tsk, tsk...

"Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations. We reject OpenAI's assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism."

https://www.ahmath.org/statements

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #Mathematics #Science #LLMs

Já há muitos anos que não leio livros de ficção e então ...

2026-10-13T16:50:54Z

Já há muitos anos que não leio livros de ficção e então decidi tentar retomar o hábito com as novelas completas de aquele que é considerado um dos melhores escritores do Século XX: Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007). Bem, se calhar isto foi mais um pretexto que arranjei para encomendar dos EUA livros da Library of America (LOA) que por si só, são objetos físicos muito bonitos. As bibliotecas públicas das grandes cidades dos EUA estão pejadas de livros da LOA, todos devidamente encapados. Como infelizmente, nenhum destes livros estão disponíveis em bibliotecas de Portugal, tenciono começar a coleccioná-los por cá.

Na verdade, confesso que estou um bocado cansado com livros de não-ficção e começo a pensar se bons livros de ficção escritos por ótimos autores não serão melhores a retratar o presente e o futuro que livros de não-ficção. Outros autores publicados pela LOA que também tenciono coleccionar: Philip K. Dick, Don DeLillo, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ursula K. Le Guin, John Steinbeck, Ernst Hemingway... e por aí vai...

#Books #KurtVonnegut #Vonnegut #Livros #LOA #LibraryOfAmerica

"LLMs have made it easy to copy someone's voice from even ...

2026-10-12T21:19:02Z

"LLMs have made it easy to copy someone's voice from even just a few minutes of sample audio and to make that voice say whatever you're saying, even adapting turns of phrase. This can be done live — say over the phone — and the same thing can be done with video. It's not perfect, but it's good enough in many cases for people to be convinced, especially when under stress and in the absence of any contradictory signals. Voice cloning has been noticed by both more serious organized exploitation organizations and, more lately, the ordinary scam groups that prey on private citizens. Both cases play out similarly.

The attack starts with the attacker finding a likely victim where they can get audio (and ideally video) of them speaking, and then doing enough background research to find out enough about their life to impersonate them at least briefly. If you're an executive who gives public talks the former is trivial, and it's not hard for many people with public social media presences either, especially somewhere like Instagram or Tiktok. As an attacker does surveillance work, figuring out the victim’s phone number, spouse’s or co-workers’ identities and phone numbers, etc., they can call people and get voice samples that way."

https://www.structures.systems/blog/social-engineering-defense-in-the-age-of-voice-cloning

#CyberSecurity #SocialEngineering #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #VoiceCloning

"The tool, called Raven, shows the increasing power of AI ...

2026-10-12T21:06:35Z

"The tool, called Raven, shows the increasing power of AI capabilities available to local law enforcement agencies. 404 Media previously reported that both the Los Angeles Police Department and Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (MDSO) have bought access to Raven, which was previously called GeoSpy. Now, Raven, made by a company called Graylark Technologies, has added features that let cops analyze the interior of homes.

In a post on LinkedIn earlier this month, Graylark CEO Daniel Heinen wrote the company was introducing “the ability to geolocate interior images across millions of short-term rental units worldwide.” An accompanying demo video shows someone taking a photo from X of a washer/dryer unit inside a building. They upload it to Raven, select “Find Property: Interior and exterior property geolocation,” and then choose a region to search.

After a couple of seconds, the map interface zooms in on an area in Charlotte, North Carolina. On the right hand side, the screen displays a list of results. The top one reads, “Renovated! Walk Uptown/located in 2 Hot Spots!”"

https://www.404media.co/ai-company-lets-cops-pinpoint-specific-houses-based-on-a-single-interior-photo/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Raven #GeoSpy #GrayLarkTechnologies #Surveillance #Privacy #PoliceState

"In 2020, noyb (in cooperation with the Norwegian Consumer ...

2026-10-12T21:00:20Z

"In 2020, noyb (in cooperation with the Norwegian Consumer Council) has filed a complaint against the online advertising company Xandr (now part of Microsoft) for processing personal data from the dating app Grindr. Now, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority has issued its decision – and fined Xandr € 8.5 million (NOK 92 000 000) for its GDPR violations. This decision is a major blow to the online adtech industry."

https://noyb.eu/en/privacy-win-norwegian-authority-fines-microsofts-xandr-eu-85-million

#Norway #Privacy #Microsoft #Xandr #DataProtection #Grindr #DatingApps

"Roughly 15 million adult U.S. citizens lack a driver’s ...

2026-10-12T20:53:55Z

"Roughly 15 million adult U.S. citizens lack a driver’s license, and a further 2.6 million lack any government photo ID; leaving large groups blocked from online content or services. The UK has a similar predicament: proof-of-age checks are often reliant on passports, driver’s licenses, or other recognized alternatives, which can pose unique challenges to people without these documents.

Much of the advocacy around age verification discusses the privacy harms of age verification. Yet these measures also threaten something more fundamental: equal access to information and the ability to exercise the right to freedom of expression.

Unfortunately, age verification systems foster unequal access to information and provide an asymmetric solution to find essential information, build community, and weigh in on public discourse. As governments and companies increasingly require users to prove their age before accessing online services, these individuals risk being excluded from large parts of the internet altogether."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/when-no-id-means-no-internet-age-verification-and-right-access-information

#SocialMedia #AgeVerification #Censorship #DigitalRights #FreedomOfExpression