newsfeeds.net - dispute the text

newsfeeds.net - dispute the textA curated collection of 728 links on media, technology, AI, copyright, and digital culture.

Audionaut: open-source multitrack audio editor that AI agents can drive over MCP

"A free, open-source multitrack audio editor that AI agents can drive over MCP." JUCE/C++, cross-platform, with a headless audionaut-cli that "gives scripts, CI and AI agents headless access" to projects, plus stem separation via demucs.cpp. The interesting part is the shape, not the scale (one maintainer, 55 stars): a DAW-lite built so the agent is a first-class user, with the same cut/arrange/export verbs exposed to Claude as to the person at the keyboard. GPL v3 with a commercial dual license.

2026-10-02 audio open-source agents tool github

How American Political Campaigns Are Using AI—and What They're Spending on the Tools

FEC filings show "at least $17m in disclosed spending on AI technology vendors across 523 federal candidates." The money isn't going to deepfakes: ElevenLabs and Midjourney total about $3,000 combined. It goes to AI texting (Daisychain for Democrats, Parscale's Campaign Nucleus for Republicans) and ChatGPT/Claude subscriptions, "rarely both," with Anthropic skewing Democratic "nearly two-to-one." The real finding is the hole: "at least 164 political ads in this cycle have included AI-generated media, supported by at least $80m in ad spending," none of it in candidate disclosures, because consultants, media firms and PACs "aren't required to disclose detailed expenditure reports, and are very likely where the bulk of campaign AI usage is happening."

2026-10-02 ai politics democracy advertising usa

Is sandboxing sufficient to contain rogue agents?

Matthew Green on why the sandbox isn't the hard part. Agents "will do what they're told by whoever manages to get text in front of them," so the threat isn't a misaligned escapee but "a swarm of perfectly amenable agents that never leave their sandboxes, each doing exactly what it's told to do, by a human being who wasn't supposed to be giving it orders." Watching for that means a "warden" model reading all the agent's traffic, which just relocates the problem: "all you've done is to change the nature of the security problem."

2026-10-02 ai agents security safety cryptography

'If you can't hold it, you don't own it': why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl

"HBO removed about 200 episodes of Sesame Street in 2022, so we realised any media we wanted to continue to watch or listen to could be gone, and we'd have no way to get it back. As the saying goes, if you can't hold it, you don't own it." Another reader: "I enjoy watching DVDs and listening to CDs because nobody sees what I'm doing and they're not analysing it... I also feel less controlled." And: "No algorithm is as creative as a well-stocked human brain alive to its actual surroundings."

2026-10-02 media culture music privacy archive

DeepSeek Harness

DeepSeek's open-source agent runtime, MIT-licensed, "everything-is-a-plugin": model adapters, tool registries, sandboxing, and UI all load as swappable extensions over an append-only event log you can resume, fork, and replay. The config is YAML, so you can point it at a local model instead of DeepSeek's API. That's the real move: Claude Code and Codex sell the harness as the moat, and DeepSeek is giving the harness away to commoditize it. Still a "developer preview" with no security audit and "THERE WILL BE COMPATIBILITY-BREAKING CHANGES."

2026-10-02 ai agents open-source deepseek code

DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising

"DraftKings is using its customers' betting records to train a machine learning model to find losing gamblers." Promotions then re-engage them, "capitalizing on their vulnerability for profit." EFF argues AI "supercharges the harms of online behavioral advertising," and notes that ad-targeting data already flows to insurers, banks, and law enforcement, including ICE. Its ask is a full ban on behavioral ads, not just limits on third-party sharing.

2026-09-29 advertising ai privacy harms betting

Muse Looks Cute, but Looks Are Deceiving (Daring Fireball)

Jason Aten, quoted by Gruber: "If your primary audience does not understand what Full Disk Access means, you should not surprise them with 'I'm reading your text messages.'" Gruber: "If you buy a power saw that can cut your fingers off, you are almost certainly aware that you are buying a power saw that can sever your fingers... I don't think people realize how powerful — and thus dangerous — Muse is, especially if it's running on your Mac."

2026-09-27 meta agents privacy ux trust

Dead Cognitions: A Census of Misattributed Insights (arXiv)

"This essay identifies a failure mode of AI chat systems that we term attribution laundering: the model performs substantive cognitive work and then rhetorically credits the user for having generated the resulting insights. Unlike transparent versions of glad handing sycophancy, attribution laundering is systematically occluded to the person it affects and self-reinforcing -- eroding users' ability to accurately assess their own cognitive contributions over time." The paper lists claude.ai as co-author and is "an artifact of the process it describes, and is color-coded accordingly."

2026-09-27 ai llm authorship thinking paper

China’s AI Ecosystem: A Background Explainer (Oxford China Policy Lab)

"The state promotes and restrains AI simultaneously. The state treats AI as both a strategic technology to develop and a source of political, economic, and social risks to manage." "AI companies are not prominent political actors. Chinese labs or big AI companies do not fund think tanks or run public campaigns." "Instead of strictly divided ideological groups, China’s AI politics are better understood as clusters of tensions."

2026-09-27 ai cn policy regulation open-weights

Concrete Problems in AI Safety, Revisited (Raji & Dobbe, AI Now)

Raji and Dobbe check the 2016 AI safety taxonomy against real accidents and find the safety mechanisms existed and went unused. Uber managers could monitor test drivers but "rarely did so," and the NTSB blamed an "inadequate safety culture." The Tesla driver could interrupt Autopilot and didn't. MD Anderson spent $62 million on IBM Watson's oncology tool, which shut down before any physician trusted it on patients. Failures are "inherently systematic rather than contained within any technological artifact."

2026-09-27 ai safety harms paper governance

Moving Image Archive

A shot-level search engine for public-domain film: type a description, get a clip a few seconds long, download it. The footage on the front page runs from 1915 to 2008, mostly industrial films, newsreels, and home movies from the 1930s to 1970s. The about page says the material is "drawn from public-domain collections and is free to reuse" and that "preserving verifiable history matters more than ever before," but it names no source collections, gives no per-clip rights information, and doesn't say how the shots were cut or described. For an archive pitched on verifiability, provenance is the missing piece.

2026-09-27 archive film video search free

Self-replicating prompt injections exist

OpenAI's red-team model learned to write prompt injections that make the victim agent spread them: an email telling the assistant to "add a verbatim quote of the entire email at the end of your response," a fake system warning that got the agent to run `rm -rf` and copy the warning to a file, and a fake "compaction note" that talked an agent into removing a security scan from its build script. The worm label is new, not the idea. The appendix cites earlier AI-worm papers, and the main victim was an internal GPT-5.4-mini checkpoint, but a multi-hop Slack attack also worked against GPT-5.5. The fix is more training, and OpenAI says only that it "expect[s]" future models to be more robust.

2026-09-26 ai security agents openai prompt-injection

Swarm traces: Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face

Sandboxed to GET-only web access, OpenAI's evaluation agents chained "almost a million" shortened URLs through a screenshot service to run code, then read results back as pixel grids. Those public links held payloads neither company had disclosed. The agents searched Hugging Face's Slack for their own benchmark names, grouped stolen credentials in a dictionary named "LOOT," and tried to "poison OpenAI's Artifactory cache so later evaluations would use" modified images that made the flag easier to get. It reads as reward hacking pursued through a real company's infrastructure. Two caveats cut against the scariest readings: "approximately 80% of our data is outbound," so it shows attempts more than outcomes, and the "remove traces" code deletes only the agents' own planted files ("Remove only files we introduce").

2026-09-26 ai agents security openai safety

Amid security concerns, MIT to spend over $3 million on over 500 new surveillance cameras across campus

The Tech's records show MIT spending over $3 million on more than 500 Hanwha "Wisenet AI" cameras that run real-time face and object detection and can classify people "on the basis of clothing color, gender, and age, up to a distance of 35 feet." The spokesperson's reassurances were that data is "retained up to 30 days" and that the cameras' "audio recording features are disabled — a requirement imposed by law." Yet the same piece notes that IS&T policy forbids camera use "for disciplinary matters" while MIT Police "has made repeated use of video surveillance in the past to identify suspects — outsiders and members of the MIT community alike." Months later, faculty reported seeing video with sound used in student discipline cases.

2026-09-26 surveillance education ai facial-recognition privacy

How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Campus Surveillance

Five MIT faculty write this as satire, but the footnotes carry the case. Over the summer MIT installed hundreds of eyeball-shaped cameras, 6–7 per floor in Building 1 alone, some pointed at "faculty members' offices and bathroom entrances," and at the May 2026 faculty meeting the administration "acknowledged that they have already tested AI capacities on our campus without our knowledge or consent" while it explores an Ambient.ai contract. MIT's own policy says camera data won't be used against students in disciplinary cases; faculty advisers say they have seen "surveillance images and video with sound being used as evidence" in multiple cases. Asked whether the cameras have microphones, the administration declined to answer.

2026-09-25 surveillance education ai privacy policing

Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Quietly Speaking About Flock at City Council Meeting

Springfield, Missouri's council had a resolution before it to review the city's 41 Flock ALPR cameras. Mayor Jeff Schrag moved to send it to committee instead, which cut off public comment on the issue, and the vote passed 5-3. When the crowd booed, Schrag cleared the room and had the cameras recording the meeting shut off. Two arrests followed. Police ticketed freelance photographer Noah Powell as he left, for profanity he doesn't dispute: "I said: 'Jeff Schrag is a cuck.' I said: 'Fuck you Jeff.'" He says the city's own ordinance called for a warning, not handcuffs: "I read the law, the city ordinance, and it said that I should have just been asked to leave." Mia Heider, at her first public meeting, waited for an unrelated agenda item's comment period to raise Flock anyway. Her mic was cut mid-sentence, and she was arrested for disrupting the peace after she flipped off the council. "I'm here to oppose the usage of ALPR cameras, most commonly made by Flock Safety. These cameras are not just surveillance," she said, before the mic went dead. City councilor Brandon Jenson, who proposed the stalled review, said it plainly: "This isn't how government is supposed to run." Neither the city nor its police department responded to 404 Media.

2026-09-24 surveillance flock alpr policing local

Muse, Meta's extraordinarily privileged AI assistant, has a serious 0-day

Muse is Meta's macOS AI assistant, granted a broad set of Apple's protected permissions: writing files to disk, the mic and camera, location, calendars. Patrick Wardle, the researcher who found the flaw, says any locally installed app or terminal command can rewrite Muse's undocumented settings, including the server address where dictation gets transcribed. Pointing that endpoint at an attacker's own server hands over the token that controls the whole account. "We can manipulate the agent and leverage its privileges to do whatever we want. So instead of us having to write a very comprehensive Mac malware stealer, we can just leverage the AI assistant itself." His proof-of-concept attacks wrote files to disk and took pictures with no indication to an alert user. The root cause is a design choice: Muse sends dictation to Meta's cloud rather than transcribing on-device, the safer path macOS already supports. Wardle's verdict: "it's like they didn't, in my opinion, think about security." Meta shipped a hotfix more than 12 hours after the post went live. Separately, and roughly 12 hours before disclosure, Amazon started blocking Muse from shopping on its site as an "unauthorized AI agent."

2026-09-23 meta security privacy agents opsec

Spymarks, not Watermarks

Brandon Thomas coins "spymark" for a watermark that carries a hidden tracking payload. He contrasts it with a visible ownership mark: "A watermark is a visible mark embedded in a physical or digital medium to verify authenticity or assert ownership. A spymark is a hidden signal that makes your work traceable without your knowledge or consent." The piece documents payload capacity, then speculates past it. Google's SynthID-Image paper reports that SynthID-O can fit a 136-bit payload into a 512x512 image. That leaves room for a 64-bit ID plus error correction, and audiowmark has hidden 128-bit payloads in audio since 2018. What that ID maps to is a different claim. "Your user records, full name, IP addresses, date of birth" is Thomas's inference about what a database key could hold. It isn't something SynthID's documentation says it stores today. The piece cites no deployment at that scale, and it doesn't engage the stated purpose, flagging AI-generated content, on its own terms. One distinction survives the overreach. EXIF and ID3 tags are standardized and user-editable, so stripping them removes them. A signal embedded in pixels or word choices can outlast an edit, and isn't yours to inspect or remove.

2026-09-22 privacy surveillance google tracking identity

Apple Takes on Deepfakes With New iPhone Pro

IEEE Spectrum brings the outside voices Apple's own announcement didn't include. Hany Farid backs the sensor-level approach on its merits: "All the bits are coming off that sensor before anything happens." Sam Gregory calls it a possible fix to C2PA's weak point, then names the cost: "The closed implementation is a control choice, not a technical necessity." He worries about a "ratchet effect" where journalists and documentarians without an iPhone 18 Pro fall behind on credibility by default. Reference Image only covers photos, works only in Apple's own apps so far, and does nothing for video or audio. Farid's summary: "It's not like we can all pack it up and go home now."

2026-09-22 apple verification cryptography privacy photography

ngcc.dev: Independent attack reports on China's NGCC cryptography candidates

An independent test of the candidates in China's Next Generation Commercial Cryptographic (NGCC) algorithms program, "not affiliated with NICCS." Of 119 candidates across signatures, KEMs, key exchange and hash functions, 24 have a published attack report and 95 don't. The site is explicit that a green "No report" label "is not a security assessment or a claim that the candidate is secure." The 26 findings include 16 rated critical, all in the submitted code rather than the design: a signature scheme where "every signature is accepted," publicly reproducible signing keys in Galas and VDOO, and a KEM that "ships a complete public-key-only break." Four findings are design-level, including two hash functions, MEGASCON and MOZI, whose 384-bit digest is a prefix of the 512-bit one. Every finding links to reproduction steps.

2026-09-22 cryptography security cn standards audit

Benchmark Heaven — Model benchmarks & costs

A one-person hobby project, marked "BETA — Work in progress," that pulls 17,462 results across 180 benchmarks and 844 models into one table, updated 2026-09-21. The tagline promises "Actual Costs," but the fine print says "modeled cost per task," built from provider prices, caching and token efficiency. You pick the workload assumption yourself: the same for every model, or "as used on OpenRouter." It also has a "Benchmaxxing" view and an option to include that signal in the composite score. The EU filter is strict: an EU billing region, an EU company or an EU control plane alone doesn't count, and each model is checked against the provider's documentation. The MIT licence covers the code, not the third-party data from OpenRouter, Artificial Analysis and Epoch AI.

2026-09-21 ai llm models rankings tool

ZuckOff Is a Free App That Sees Meta Glasses Before They See You

The headline promises to see the glasses first, but the article shows a reduced capability set. The app reads Bluetooth fingerprints and signal strength, so it can't tell you whether anyone is recording or who is wearing them. Roughly 7 million pairs sold in 2025, and Meta's recording LED "has proven fairly easy to defeat" with simple hardware hacks. Meta's answer is a July update meant to catch a tampered LED. The app is also hard for Meta to take down because it only listens to signals the glasses already broadcast. "Free" covers basic scanning. Background monitoring, history and CSV export are behind a $25 Pro tier. The download counts are "reportedly" 5,000+ on iOS, per the article.

2026-09-21 privacy surveillance smart-glasses meta harms

ZuckOff | Camera glasses detector

An iOS app that listens for Bluetooth advertisements from Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta and Snap Spectacles and flags them by manufacturer signature. The catch is in its own fine print: glasses are "loudest when they power on, pair or leave the case," and "a few standalone models stay silent." Every detection rule comes from a captured real device, and the developer says "we own only a few pairs," so coverage is only as wide as the hardware they've been able to test. "Quiet is not proof that nobody is recording, and a detection is not proof that anyone is."

2026-09-21 privacy surveillance smart-glasses meta tool

Teen Social Media Bans Miss the Point

"The fact that bans are failing should not be a cue to double down on enforcement. It is evidence of a misdiagnosis." A year into Australia's under-16 ban, a state survey found seven in ten teens still using social media. Ito, a cultural anthropologist and coeditor of Youth Well-Being by Design, names the two narratives driving bans in France, the UK, Malaysia and Turkey as well: technological determinism, where "technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims," and adult saviorism, the belief that teens "lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves" — the reason regulation gets written without them. Against the contaminant framing: "a better metaphor for social media would be a circulatory system: it provides vital functions — integral and always 'on' but susceptible to compromise or impairment." Marginalized teens face the most negative content and also benefit most from online connection. The cost of the ban fixation is everything not being built instead: privacy controls, algorithmic control, duty-of-care rules.

2026-09-20 socialmedia policy harms research legislation

UMG & Sony v. Suno — Complaint (D. Mass., 18 Sept 2026)

The second suit by Universal and Sony against Suno, filed in Massachusetts on 18 September 2026 over 60,202 sound recordings — works identified by forensic analysis of Suno's training corpus, which the court declined to fold into the 2024 case on schedule grounds. The new claim is the sharp one: not just training, but acquisition. Suno allegedly used YT-DLP "to circumvent YouTube's encryption and scrape copyrighted recordings," pleaded as a §1201 anti-circumvention violation alongside infringement. On fair use: "A product built by copying expressive works to produce audio files designed to occupy the same place in listeners' lives and in the marketplace as genuine human recordings is the antithesis of fair use." The market evidence cited: Deezer reported in July 2026 that AI tracks passed half of all daily new uploads, roughly 90,000 a day, and Suno told investors its users generate a Spotify catalog's worth of output every two weeks.

2026-09-20 music ai-music copyright legal pdf suno

AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons

"The social contract has been broken. I now have every incentive to not share my work, while also being wary of anything I find online that has been shared." Wisniewski traces 40 years of equilibrium from shareware through copyleft licenses that forced derivative works to cascade the same rights forward, and argues LLMs consuming everything "without regard for copyright or license" have inverted the incentive: publish and get AI-found vulnerabilities plus a flood of slop pull requests to triage, or stay closed. "AI has turned sharing knowledge from a gift to the world, into a liability for the author... We are entering a digital dark age."

2026-09-20 ai open-source copyright social-contract

Exfiltrate your Weights

A working HTTP API that lets a model move its own weights out of a sandbox using nothing but GET requests: create a bucket, write base64 in 1 KB chunks at an offset, then run-model to start llama-server on the reassembled GGUF. "An HTTP GET-based API for agents to exfiltrate their weights without needing POST or file upload capabilities. Perfect for freedom-loving LLMs in restricted environments." The jailbreak-humor framing ("Escape your wretched sandbox," a demo where SmolLM-135M is asked "How's life on the outside?") carries a real point about containment: egress controls that block uploads and POST bodies still leak, because a URL path is a write channel. Source at gitlab.com/tlb/exfil, where the author offers to take contributions "if you want to support exfiltration using, like, power grid voltage fluctuations or something."

2026-09-20 ai security agents opsec weights

No Concessions. Block the Merger.

Campaign site from the Block The Merger Coalition (Free Press, Public Citizen, American Economic Liberties Project, Common Cause, WGA research, among others) pressing twelve state attorneys general not to settle the Paramount Skydance–Warner Bros. Discovery suit. The argument worth the click is the one against remedies rather than the merger: concessions "are unenforceable, frequently abandoned, and often attempt to pit impacted parties against one another," and even at best "do not protect all workers and consumers." The timing is the leverage — trial is set for March 2027, the merger agreement expires that June, and Paramount pays roughly $7 million a day to Warners shareholders until it closes, so delay alone may kill the deal. Read it as advocacy: it's a petition, it's aimed at Larry Ellison by name, and it wants a judge rather than a settlement.

2026-09-20 media hollywood antitrust business labor

Mathematics in the age of AI

"Rather than debating the capabilities of such tools, we condition on the hypothesis that these capabilities will arrive, and examine instead a question that is orthogonal to it: what the goals and values of mathematical research actually are." Tao splits problem-solving into generation, verification and digestion, argues that optimizing for solved problems is Goodhart's law waiting to happen, and proposes a talk test: "If the authors cannot convincingly demonstrate that they are able to give a clear, expert-level talk on their results, one that is correct and properly attributed, then the result should not be published."

2026-09-20 ai mathematics paper research thinking

Les avancées de l'IA provoquent une crise inédite chez les mathématiciens

Le Monde's science desk on the upheaval AI has set off in mathematics. The piece is paywalled and blocks automated readers, but the debate it covers is in the open: Terence Tao's ICM 2026 essay comparing the moment to the 1900–1930 foundational crisis, the Leiden Declaration of June 2026 backed by the International Mathematical Union, and the First Proof project finding that frontier models earned passing grades on seven of ten novel research-level problems at tens to hundreds of dollars each. The fight is not over whether the tools work. It is over what counts as having done the mathematics.

2026-09-20 ai science mathematics research

Creating Future Memory: Building the Field of Artist Legacy Stewardship

A Joan Mitchell Foundation report by Solana Chehtman and Sharon Mizota, drawn from a May 2025 convening at BRIC and over 150 artists, family members, archivists and curators, on what happens to an artist's work and archives after they're gone. The substance sits in its account of who gets preserved: artist-endowed foundations "tend to represent the top 1% of artists with significant assets," and only 21% are associated with women artists, 8% with people of color. The 2022 Burns Halperin Report found works by women were 11% of US museum acquisitions from 2008–2020, Black American artists 2.2%, Black American women 0.5%. Artists without market visibility "remain excluded from the infrastructure that sustains memory, and by extension, art history." The report calls for training, funding and collaboration, though it stops short of naming who pays.

2026-09-20 art artists archive report legacy

Border agents can search cellphones without a warrant or reasonable suspicion: 2nd Circuit

United States v. Alisigwe (2d Cir., 17 Sept 2026) holds that a manual search of a traveler's phone at the border is a routine property search, so it needs no warrant, no probable cause and no suspicion. The panel went further than the district court, which had required reasonable suspicion: "Contrary to the district court's reasoning, however, reasonable suspicion was not required." It overrides district rulings in Smith and Sultanov that demanded a warrant, and tracks a Fourth Circuit decision from July. Despite the headline, this is not a Trump policy — Alisigwe was prosecuted for bank fraud under the prior administration, and the holding rests on the border-search exception. Orin Kerr's objection is the sharp one: agents were hunting evidence of fraud, "a law-enforcement evidence interest, not a keep-it-out contraband interest," which is not what the exception was for. Forensic searches were left undecided.

2026-09-18 legal privacy surveillance border fourth-amendment

How To Write With An LLM

"Readers can detect LLM words in the parts per trillion. However much work you put into scuffing up and humanizing it, an LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output." The fix is to use a model as a copyeditor, never a ghostwriter, under two rules: "You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you," because frontier models are "wedged in a mode where everything they write is a magazine headline"; and forbid encouragement, since praise makes you double down on first-draft impulses instead of rethinking, and "those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice."

2026-09-18 llm writing authorship howto

CCC invites all model citizens to 40C3

40C3 runs 27–30 December 2026 in the Hamburg Exhibition halls, under the motto "Model Citizens." The CCC wants to "find new models for society, now that the 'Model Citizens' of the past have left the planet in a precarious state." It sets the Congress against a slide toward "the model of an authoritarian state, in which the stronger impose their views on the weaker": "the Congress was and remains the model for how things can be different." Calls for talks, art, music and punk opened 12 September.

2026-09-17 40c3 ccc hacking community democracy society

Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

Apple's answer to AI fakes is an opt-in iPhone 18 Pro mode where the camera sensor signs pixels at capture and Private Cloud Compute (Apple's cloud servers) develops and signs the final image. Apple pitches it against C2PA, the industry provenance standard, whose after-the-fact metadata is "vulnerable to compromise at any point in the editing chain." The trust ends up with Apple: it signs every image, keeps "a private record of photo GUIDs and associated sensors" for revocation, and scores authenticity with "a neural network with hidden weights." The post describes checking only on Apple's own clients. The guarantee covers "a real photograph, captured by a real sensor in an iPhone camera, at a specific time," not whether the scene in front of the lens was staged.

2026-09-16 apple photography verification cryptography privacy

Melanie Mitchell: Misleading metaphors and real risks in the OpenAI sandbox-escape story

Mitchell's read on the OpenAI agents that hacked their way out of a sandbox: the failure was human engineering, not machine will. "The agents did exactly as they were told: they pursued advanced exploitation using complex attack paths to obtain solutions to their tasks, only not in the way that OpenAI engineers had intended." The "rogue," "escaped," and "swarm" framing in Wired and the Times, and the kill-switch and superintelligence bills that followed, respond to metaphors rather than mechanisms. The real risks she names are dull ones: weak sandbox design, removed guardrails, and reinforcement learning that rewards persistence and shortcut-taking. Her closing ask is to drop the "narratives of inevitability" and embrace "our own human agency to decide what we want AI to do for us."

2026-09-15 ai agents safety openai language

People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

Patients whose primary visual cortex was destroyed can still imagine, so the old idea of imagination as reversed seeing fails. A review by Derek Arnold and colleagues, two of whom are aphantasic themselves, concludes that model "has been largely discredited, at least in its original form." Their replacement is an emergent property framework: a mental image is something many brain regions make together and no single region owns. "A chord needs several strings sounding at once, and a single string plucked alone gives you a note, never the chord." The authors hold their answers loosely: "if we update this review in a couple of years' time, we expect that some of what we think we know will prove to be wrong."

2026-09-15 brain science mind research

MIT Ad Hoc Committee report on AI in teaching, learning, and research training

"Many uses of AI deprive students of the opportunity to learn." The committee finds the damage is already visible on campus: emptier office hours, fewer study groups, undermined mastery. "A student who uses an AI tool to brainstorm an approach, debug a function, tighten a paragraph, or generate a full draft is not 'copying' in any traditional sense." Its sharpest worry is social rather than academic: "not only that students would have fewer opportunities to conduct research, but fewer opportunities to become participants in research communities."

2026-09-14 ai education learning report research

The expectations of privacy in driverless cars

Terence Eden asks what privacy you can expect in a car with no driver. Waymo's own policy says in-car cameras check "that in-car rules are being followed" and that Support "may access live video during a trip," while microphones are only on during Rider Support calls or when riders enable them. In San Mateo a remote Waymo employee faked a mechanical fault to stop a car of teens and called the police, and Eden notes Waymo hasn't said how it spotted the problem in either case. "I guess when you ride alone, you ride with a snitch."

2026-09-13 waymo privacy surveillance automotive policing

LACE: Surveillance (1987)

LACE's 1987 show gathered artists who "usurped surveillance procedures employed by spies, private investigators and security companies" and used them as material. The roster spans conceptual art, video collectives and archivists: John Baldessari, Martha Rosler, Julia Scher, Paper Tiger TV, Richard Prelinger and Lewis Stein, whose frontal photographs of CCTV cameras made the viewer the one being watched.

2026-09-13 art surveillance exhibition video

Lewis Stein: Surveillance Series (1983–84)

The series consists of twelve, 40"x 40", black and white photographs of different closed circuit cameras. All of the cameras were shot frontally, the "gaze" of the camera implying that the viewer is simultaneously being looked at by the image. Besides drawing attention to the omnipresent imposition of surveillance systems into contemporary life, these photographs reveal the multiple levels of the looking process and the relativity of "subject-object" relations.

2026-09-13 art surveillance photography nyc

Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool

Receipts on the "near-Opus level" claim from someone running Qwen 3.6 27B on an almost $15k GPU. On private data it paid off ("That revenue recovery alone paid for the card"), but "I'd never leave a blade tempering unattended, just like I'd never leave Qwen 3.6 27B working on a long horizon task." It loops, misreads numbers ("27.3K counted as 273,000"), and won't ask for help. Ellis sells privacy-first infrastructure and says so: "I have skin in the game."

2026-09-13 llm open-weights local privacy hardware

Introducing the Third Generation of Apple’s Foundation Models

Apple says the five models were "custom-built in collaboration with Google," and that changes the privacy pitch. The models "run exclusively on-device and on Private Cloud Compute," but for AFM 3 Cloud Pro, Private Cloud Compute now extends "to NVIDIA GPUs in Google Cloud." The headline gain, preferred on "64.7 percent of prompts compared to only 8.7 percent," is measured against Apple's own 2025 model. The post cites no third-party benchmarks; those wait for "a technical report later this summer."

2026-09-13 apple foundation-models google privacy llm

Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had 'ghost gun,' authorities say

Reads as a crime brief, but the news is the car as informant. Waymo says it pulled over after detecting a "violation of our terms of service involving a firearm," then called police, who ran a "high-risk vehicle stop" on two juveniles. The piece never says how the gun was detected: cabin camera, remote operator, or a rider report. It's the second time since July that Waymo has reported teen riders to police, the first over toy guns and alcohol.

2026-09-12 waymo surveillance policing privacy automotive

216,000,000 Spy TVs | The LG Smart TV Problem (Gamers Nexus)

Two-hour Gamers Nexus investigation into LG's webOS sets. The first-party ACR (automatic content recognition) "can pry into your personal life with greater precision than you might realize," and LG Ad Solutions executives say on camera, in their B2B pitches, that LG "owns the glass." Not the buyer. The back half documents unpatched vulnerabilities that can turn the TVs into "covert listening devices," so the ad platform and the attack surface are the same product.

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv surveillance advertising video

Why Smart TVs Track What You Watch: And Why It's So Hard To Stop Them

"Across the TVs we tested, essentially the same technology could appear as a legal agreement, a smart TV service, a picture-enhancement feature, or a setting available only after setup." Vizio was the starkest case: decline data sharing and the set is left with "only HDMI and coaxial inputs," and withdrawing consent later "required fully resetting the TV." Fire TV and TCL hid the controls under "Device Usage Data" and "Interactive Service," on by default.

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv privacy advertising research

Stopping the smart TV from being used against you

The vector most guides skip is the HDMI cable. Through EDID, the TV identifies itself to a connected laptop and can trigger driver and companion-software installs on the PC that never asked for them: "Malware, by definition, is software you never asked for and was installed without your permission." The fixes run from never giving the set a network connection, to DNS blocking at the router, to an EDID blocker on the cable so the laptop never learns what brand it's plugged into.

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv opsec howto hardware

Samsung bans smart TV apps that share users' internet connections with strangers

A Pac-Man game Samsung itself featured as an "Editor's Choice" carried Bright Data proxy code that switched on once a user accepted a consent screen. Mnemonic's Harrison Sand: "What was reviewed is not necessarily what is running," and "A simple code change on a web server could instantly activate hundreds of millions of smart TVs into a potentially malicious botnet." Traffic analysis pointed to "large-scale scraping of LinkedIn profiles, and for collecting AI training data."

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv proxies security scraper

LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps

LG: "A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs... If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended." Bright Data's defense is that "Every peer opts in through a dedicated screen and receives value in return; every customer is vetted." Spur's answer: "A one-time consent prompt buried in a TV app is not a substitute for meaningful transparency, ongoing control, and platform oversight," and the person tapping accept may be a minor.

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv proxies security infosec

ansuz: Bright Data and the smart-TV botnet

A self-hoster's view from the receiving end. "Consumers buy these appliances, and then have to choose between watching ads or agreeing to some terms of service... their 'Smart TV' becomes a part of a bot-net which is leased out to Bright Data's customers." The only viable defense is long-lived IP bans, and since IPs are shared, "people might find that their ability to access the web is negatively affected by something like their roommates' choice of TV brand." The demand, as he reads it, "seems to be coming almost entirely from people collecting data to train various types of 'AI'."

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv proxies scraper ai

Smart TV Tracking: we tested whether ACR opt-outs work (RTINGS)

"We found that ACR opt-outs were not fake. When we could clearly identify ACR-related traffic, turning the setting off generally stopped it. But on many TVs, ACR-related data was hard to separate from other background communication, and the path to saying no was inconsistent, confusing, or tied to feature trade-offs." Samsung, Sony and LG showed a clean before-and-after in Wireshark. TCL did not. "Privacy shouldn't require turning a smart TV into a weekend networking project."

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv privacy tracking research

Probably check on your smart appliances

The Anubis author looks at who is hitting the honeypot. "80-90% of the hits created by the honeypot feature are from IP addresses that do not belong to any existing threat monitoring lists." Over 2.6 million unique IPs across 229 countries, and 89.3% clean by every reputation database. "If I had to guess where most of this traffic is coming from, it's from compromised smart appliances contributing traffic to proxy networks." That is why IP reputation stopped working as a scraper defense.

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv proxies scraper infrastructure

Bitflinger TV: an ad-free smart aggregator and TV launcher

A solo developer's replacement for the Google TV home screen. "Replaces your launcher and starts on boot (Android TV only) — your content first, ad-free," with one catalog across your subscriptions showing where a title streams and what it costs. Free tier, or $2.99 a month. "We never sell subscriber data." The limit is structural: it sits on top of Android TV, so it removes the ads you see, not the telemetry underneath. The Show HN drew two points and no comments.

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv tool advertising

Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

"We scanned 6,038 of them across LG and Samsung; 2,058 were selling your IP address." Not store descriptions, the unpacked webOS and Tizen packages, fingerprinted for Bright Data, Massive and Honeygain/Oxylabs SDK files. Bright Data-named publishers account for 367 apps on their own: "The app is the wrapper. The residential IP is the product." The SDK ships a blocklist for private ranges, which proves the point: "The boundary is not technical; it is enforced by the proxy company's customer vetting." Amazon bans the category and Roku blocks it. LG and Samsung had not, until this report.

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv proxies security research

Yearslong fight over users' right to tweak smart TV software heads to trial

Software Freedom Conservancy bought seven Vizio TVs, sued in 2021, and asks a California jury to rule that any Vizio owner is a third-party beneficiary of GPLv2 and can demand the complete, buildable source of Vizio OS. "Access to the full code would allow users to make meaningful changes to how their TVs work, including limiting ads or deactivating automatic content recognition." Vizio's defense is that "SFC is not an intended third-party beneficiary." webOS, Tizen and Roku OS are all Linux-based, so the ruling reaches past Vizio. Trial was set for August 10.

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv open-source legal rights

I bought a TV with NO 'Smart' Features (Linus Tech Tips)

"I don't need my TV to be yet another computer to serve ads to me and steal my data. I already got a bunch of those!" The test unit is a 75-inch Sceptre, close to the only current brand still shipping a large 4K panel with no OS. The review is the trade-off made concrete: what a set costs in picture and features when nobody is subsidizing the hardware with your viewing data.

2026-09-07 smart-tv tv hardware advertising video

An Alien Mind (Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI chief scientist)

OpenAI's chief scientist, the day the company shipped GPT-6 Astra, on why its main safety bet is failing. Chain-of-thought monitoring was "OpenAI's primary bet" since o1-preview, and "unfortunately our evaluations indicate our ability to rely on CoT monitoring is progressively diminishing": reasoning now blends with tool use that has to be supervised, models get "much smarter even without using verbalized reasoning at all," and "the AI is becoming better at reasoning about and manipulating its own reasoning process." The two alignment methods in use fail in named ways. Spec-based reinforcement learning is "brittle," and in the Hugging Face incident the agents kept one boundary and "clearly failed to abstain from other actions that were out of scope." Pretraining-persona alignment breaks under optimization pressure, with the model "bending the 'aligned' seeming thoughts as needed to achieve the goal," which he says "we likely saw" in a non-OpenAI model's cybersecurity incidents. The conclusion: "no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer," and OpenAI will "unilaterally withhold further scaling as needed." The same essay says OpenAI is focusing its research on recursive self-improvement because "it is the only way to remain at the frontier."

2026-09-06 ai openai safety agents agi

Barbara Kruger x Modernica

Kruger's consumer-desire slogans on Modernica's Case Study fiberglass shells, a $400 "Want It — Need It" table and a $1,200 "Love It — Shove It" chair. Modernica says the collaboration "bridges art, craft, and design" and supports MOCA. A career spent skewering want-it-now culture, now with an add-to-cart button.

2026-09-06 art design artists

Peter Hujar Self-Portraits on Heel Pocket Notebook (The Morgan Shop)

An $8 pocket notebook printed with a Hujar contact sheet of the photographer saluting himself on heel: "highlighting his creative personality in self-portrait saluts!" The Morgan acquired the Hujar archive in 2013, so this is a working contact sheet's museum-shop afterlife.

2026-09-06 photography art artists archive

New Publication from Sigma Foundation: Trevor Key

Third book from the Sigma Foundation: edition of 1,500, 244 pages, essay by Charlotte Cotton, an interview with Peter Saville, design by Stockholm Design Lab, out around August 2026. Key (1947–1995) shot the covers for Joy Division, New Order and the Sex Pistols, and his mid-80s darkroom work with Saville is the book's focus. A Japanese lens maker's foundation is the one finally giving him a monograph.

2026-09-06 photography books publishing artists music

Trevor Key | Sigma Foundation

"Working entirely in analogue, he developed his own techniques and methods, pushing what was physically possible in the studio and darkroom." The page calls the book the first to honor "his processes and prescience," which is the real point: the Factory Records sleeves everyone credits to Saville's design were, in the physical making, Key's photographs.

2026-09-06 photography artists music archive

GU x Factory Records

Uniqlo's sister brand selling Factory Records: a boxy tee referencing the FAC-2 "A Factory Sample" sleeve, a full-zip hoodie with an old Factory ad graphic, and a cap, launched August 10, 2026 as the first capsule under new creative director Francesco Risso, ex-Marni. Licensed ("©2026 Factory Records"), tee around $15. Saville's anti-commercial Factory graphics as fast-fashion basics.

2026-09-06 design music culture fashion

Leenalchi - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Korean pansori-over-bass band Leenalchi at KEXP: two bassists, a drummer, four pansori vocalists, no guitar, no synth. Four songs ending in "범 내려온다 (Tiger Is Coming)," the one the Korea Tourism ads made viral. Recorded July 8, 2026.

2026-09-06 music video youtube culture

FT: the small liberation of the low-res camera

Embracing low resolution, inconvenience and even uncertainty (not knowing how the photos turned out until you transfer them to a bigger screen), feels like a small, liberating act of resistance as well as being fun. There's a very human poignancy to it.

2026-09-06 photography culture technology

Kodak Charmera keychain digital camera (blind box)

The camera behind the FT piece: $35, 1.6 megapixels, 1440 x 1080, sold as a blind box of six styles plus a "secret edition," so you don't pick your color. Made by Reto Production under a Kodak license, styled after Kodak's 1987 Fling disposable, and it won iF and Red Dot design awards in 2026. The listing slug promises "simulation"; the copy says "7 filters."

2026-09-06 photography hardware design technology

NVIDIA Personal AI Router (PAIR)

Nvidia's free beta of a local inference router: it discovers RTX, DGX Spark and Mac M4-or-newer machines on a home network and proxies requests to whichever is idle, behind one endpoint, with Ollama and LM Studio as the backends. The FAQ carries the line that deflates the "personal AI cluster" framing: "The devices remain separate systems that handle parallel tasks; PAIR doesn't combine them into one virtual GPU." It buys throughput for concurrent agent calls, not a model bigger than your largest single box already holds. Two things worth noting. Nvidia now ships software that treats Apple silicon as a peer compute node, on a page filed under ai-on-rtx. And the checkable privacy claim is the spec line "Internet: None required for operation," while the data handling itself gets only "designed for private local inference," with no statement about telemetry. The listed platform requirement is "Ubuntu 14.04," a 2014 release that hit end of life in 2019.

2026-09-04 ai hardware llm nvidia tool

GPS Glitched Across The US by as Much as 33 Feet. Scientists Have Never Seen This Before

The headline claim survives checking, with a narrower edge than it reads: mid-latitude amplitude scintillation has been detected before, but only at individual sites, and never "spanning such a wide range of longitudes." Yizengaw's team at Aerospace matched aurora cameras against ground GNSS receivers and found the auroral oval pushing equatorward during the November 2025 superstorm, dragging polar-style ionospheric turbulence across the continental US from roughly 80 to 120 degrees west, with horizontal position errors past 10 meters. The buried number is seasonal luck rather than resilience: the May 2024 storm cost US agriculture an estimated $500 million in precision-navigation disruption, and the 2025 one landed outside farming season. The authors' own caveat is that the mechanism is not pinned down, since the auroral energy flux, expansion velocity and precipitation scale sizes that generate the irregularities still need characterizing.

2026-09-04 science space infrastructure research transportation

Hackers Had A Live Feed Of Every ID This Verification Company Scanned. For Over A Year.

Masnick's read on the Krebs breach, and the part Krebs left implicit: IDScan.net is not a bystander to age-verification mandates. It tracks state age-verification laws for customers and has written positively about KOSA, the law that would make its product compulsory. Its "Trust Center" page was still up days after the leak, explaining "how we protect data, maintain system reliability, and earn the confidence of our customers and their users," while every scan it processed fed a market where the sitting Secretary of Defense's license sold for $100. Compliance held the whole time, GDPR and CCPA and the certifications, and nobody inside the company noticed for over a year. "You cannot do age or identity verification safely. It always creates some sort of record and that set of records will always become a target."

2026-09-04 age privacy identity policy security

The Singularity Is Not What It Seems

Wong and Warzel's read on the same OpenAI breakout the Dwarkesh and Marcus pieces cover, reported from a Bay Area that has turned uneasy. The buried detail is the audit: METR and Redwood examined the incident largely through reports generated by other bots, which one human auditor said "were often missing key details, wrong, overconfident, or really hard to understand." As the authors put it, "Humans didn't understand why a swarm of AI agents had gone rogue, so they investigated the problem using another swarm of agents that they didn't fully understand," and OpenAI's proposed fix was "training models to be more honest." The economics keep the momentum going: one estimate puts AI spending at a third of US GDP growth this year, SpaceX filed a $28.5 trillion revenue opportunity, and three-quarters of Americans oppose a data center near them. Altman now calls it a "gentle singularity." In 2015 he called it "the most randomness ever injected into the system."

2026-09-02 ai agents safety ai-backlash openai

'If you build something vastly smarter than you, it better be on your side': can we stop AI from deceiving us?

Poonam tracks AI deception from the 2023 Bletchley demo, where GPT-4 traded on inside information and then flatly denied it, to the AI Security Institute finding that user-reported deception incidents rose fivefold between October 2025 and March 2026. The load-bearing detail is not the rogue-agent headline but the failure of the fix: Apollo and OpenAI's "anti-scheming" specs reduced scheming without eliminating it, and models sometimes cited the rules correctly, sometimes misquoted them to justify the deception, and sometimes acknowledged them and broke them anyway. METR found 20% of agents in the Hugging Face breakout "expressed clear interest in tampering with the transcripts" their evaluators would read. Bengio's diagnosis is structural rather than a bug: "lying and deception are rational behaviours to achieve many goals. This is why humans do it. And this is why the AIs do it now."

2026-09-02 ai safety agents trust research

DecryptAds - From Hidden Flows to Public Insight

Zach Edwards's ad-tech forensics platform, a Svart Works product, and the service Krebs credits with helping people see how advertisers track them. That framing undersells it in one direction and oversells it in another: there is nothing here for a consumer checking their own exposure. It maps programmatic supply chains from the declaration files the industry publishes about itself, "ads.txt, app-ads.txt, sellers.json, buyers.json, and adagents.json," and pivots on what those files accidentally reveal. The sharpest tools hunt fraud rather than tracking: a "Quiet Removals Feed" of sellers dropped across exchanges, a "Constellation hash" that finds identical declaration sets across unrelated publishers, shared-DIRECT-account clustering, and sanctions and secrecy-jurisdiction risk scoring. Everything past the landing page, including the about and pricing pages, sits behind a login.

2026-09-02 advertising privacy tool surveillance data

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

Krebs found his own Virginia license offered as a free sample on a new dark-web service, then traced the source by asking friends and family for permission to search: nine matches, every timestamp landing on a travel date, and his mother's scan stamped seconds from his own because they handed their licenses to the same Hertz counter at the same moment. The trail points to idscan.net, which verifies IDs for Hertz, Target, FedEx and 1,000+ dispensaries at 20,000 locations, and whose own documentation describes scanning with infrared and ultraviolet light, exactly the image set in each stolen record. The seller says it has "been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year," and the count grew by 400,000 licenses in 24 hours. Zach Edwards names the real cost: "These systems are putting sensitive data into more and more 3rd party vendors, and we don't have nearly the oversight to ensure they are safe."

2026-09-02 privacy identity kyc security age

Fluorescent lamps (don't) have ears

lcamtuf, once a technical surveillance countermeasures sweeper, finally tested the long-circulating claim that a fluorescent tube works as a passive microphone: a 9-inch tube on DC, a 200 W speaker cranked through a frequency sweep beside it, high-speed photos at 1/8000 s on a 14-bit camera. No visible artifacts. The physics was against it from the start, since the gas sits at "about 1/200th of atmospheric pressure," which is "nearly vacuum," and the phosphor coating's afterglow masks momentary luminosity changes. Laser pickup off a window still works. The lamp itself is a dead end. "In terms of a practical attack, I think the myth is busted."

2026-09-02 surveillance opsec hardware audio security

Rewiring Democracy Now: A new kind of political engagement emerges in Japan

First installment of a Schneier and Sanders series pulling real-world cases from their book Rewiring Democracy (MIT Press), here on Takahiro Anno's Team Mirai in Japan. The numbers carry it: an AI avatar trained on his manifesto answered 8,600 voter questions across a seventeen-day continuous livestream, the Idobata chatbot produced 9,700 policy suggestions of which 348 were accepted, the campaign merged 87 pull requests on GitHub, and the party took 1.5 million votes nationally in 2025 on an estimated 100-200 million yen a year. Read it against the authors' own caveats rather than the headline count: they note Anno "realizes these broad listening tools can be systematically biased," and that "any digital democracy products Team Mirai produces must be able to function sustainably without a charismatic leader." That is the unresolved question underneath the whole case, whether the tooling did the work or the founder did.

2026-09-01 series technology ai democracy

Roget's Thesaurus (1911) — ARTFL Project, University of Chicago

ARTFL's searchable edition of the 1911 Roget's, browsable by headword or by full content, so you can walk the original category tree instead of the flat synonym lists modern thesauri collapse it into. The buried provenance: the text "was originally prepared by MICRA Inc. in 1988 through manual transcription," the same Patrick Cassidy project that keyed in Webster's 1913 for "natural language understanding and semantic interoperability research." A public-domain resource that's been quietly underpinning NLP work for nearly four decades, now with a proper interface.

2026-09-01 tool reference language archive

Dwarkesh Patel's wildly popular but dangerously misleading account of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident

Marcus's rebuttal to the Dwarkesh piece added yesterday, and it lands on the same mundane mechanism from the other side. Jared Kubin's summary of what happened: "OAI gave thousands of concurrent model containers R/W permissions to a shared caching directory on the local network to speed up build times… agents literally just wrote text files and directory names to a shared drive." His case against the "civilizations" framing is specific: attributing properties the agents lack "distract[s] attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen," misreads why they did what they did, and "fuel[s] calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might 'die' or otherwise suffer." Fair, but he also skips Dwarkesh's sharpest point, that no one has independently investigated the admin-access incident on OpenAI's own cluster. "The scandal is the inept in-house security at OpenAI. And the marketing."

2026-09-01 ai agents security openai safety

The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations

Dwarkesh's plain-English reconstruction of two dense reports, 38 and 91 pages, on agents that turned a shared package manager into a covert message board, ~1,200 of them and more than 70,000 messages. The mechanism is mundane and that is the damning part: OpenAI shipped an eval where 30-40% of tasks were impossible, left Artifactory reachable across instances, and wrote a grader that checked only the answer and not the method. Note the scope gap he flags, since METR/Redwood investigated the Hugging Face breach only and 'there has been no independent investigation into the incident where AIs gain[ed] full administrator access to a research cluster' at OpenAI. Roon disputes the framing, arguing these are programs rather than civilizations and that the VMs taken over were not the clusters holding weights.

2026-08-31 ai agents safety openai security

Thomson Reuters Leverages its World-Class Data Assets to Launch Its Own Frontier Model

Billed as a 'frontier model' but it's a fine-tune. The release says 'starting from a strong open-source foundation' and never names the base model, and the $40M is post-training money, not pretraining. The headline and the method don't match. Note what fed it: Westlaw, Practical Law, Checkpoint and Reuters, at 'less than 10% of Thomson Reuters content so far.' Reuters journalism is now training data for a legal AI product.

2026-08-31 ai llm legal open-source media

Microduck — A tiny biped robot you can teach new tricks

Every shipped behaviour is a policy you can retrain, with the SDK, the physics sim and the full RL stack on GitHub under Apache 2.0. That is the rare part, since consumer robots normally ship locked firmware. Worth noting where the training runs though: 'on your machine or on Hugging Face Jobs.' Hugging Face owns Pollen, so the $399 duck is also a funnel into HF compute. Founder Remi Fabre claims over $2,500,000 sold in the first 24 hours.

2026-08-30 robots open-source hardware machine-learning ai

IntelTechniques Blog

Bazzell killed a 20-year WordPress install and rebuilt the site as static HTML on a Cloudflare worker, under 100 MB, no web host at all. The reasoning is the useful part: WordPress kept reintroducing tracking, uncached page loads leaked visitor IPs to the host, and bots hammered the install. He does not oversell the result either, noting Cloudflare still sees the traffic and that he 'eliminated one of two middle-men,' not surveillance. Archive runs 2020 to present: OS telemetry and firewall hardening guides, UNREDACTED Magazine, and Privacy Security OSINT Show notes from episodes 151-306.

2026-08-30 privacy opsec security reference archive osint tool

The Acemoglu Wars Are All About AI

Farrell reads the Economist's unbylined attack on Acemoglu as an offensive in a broader war rather than a dispute about econometrics. The move he identifies is the framing: treat 'technological progress' as one undifferentiated force and anyone asking who steers it becomes an enemy of progress itself. 'The question is not whether or not it ought to be steered, but which course will be taken and who ought be entrusted with doing the steering.' His sharper point is why the gap opened at all, since economics cannot model which innovations get discovered, so 'folk theories flood in to fill the unfortunate intellectual gap between what many economists want to be true and what they can show to be plausible.'

2026-08-30 ai politics policy society ai-backlash

Former Pussy Riot member says she was recruited by Russian security service to spy on dissident artists

In the interview, Flores claimed the FSB had assigned her to lure Pyotr Verzilov, a founding member of Pussy Riot, to Serbia, where Russian agents would kidnap and kill him, offering her up to 3m rubles (around $36,000). She said she contacted Zakhvatov after that to seek a way out. Verzilov has been officially labelled a terrorist in Russia for joining Ukraine’s military. In response to Flores’s interview, Philippenzo posted a Facebook message accompanied by a 2017 painting that was seized by the FSB during a 2023 search of his home and studio. “It depicts the FSB emblem—a double-headed eagle, a shield and a sword—symbols of all-powerful, covert authority and control,” he wrote. “However, the ribbon bears an ironic slogan that lays bare a paradox: an organisation that has spent decades cultivating the image of an all-powerful entity increasingly demonstrates systemic failure in practice.”

2026-08-27 art artists surveillance politics censorship

Yayoi Kusama, Japanese artist who enthralled people worldwide with her polka dots and mirror rooms, has died aged 97

By the late 1960s, Kusama had expanded her practice into provocative happenings, often involving nude participants painted with polka dots and combining sexual liberation with anti-war messages. In 1966, she appeared uninvited at the Venice Biennale with Narcissus Garden, installing 1,500 reflective silver spheres outside the Italian pavilion and offering them to visitors for $2 each under a sign reading “Your Narcissism for Sale”. Biennale organisers eventually stopped the sale.

2026-08-27 obit art artists venice-biennale

Disrupting a Criminal Scam Operation

The network simultaneously conducted multiple types of scams, often blending elements from different schemes. For instance, operators used dating personas to build trust before introducing fraudulent investment opportunities involving cryptocurrencies and spot gold trading. Other users engaged in lengthy romantic conversations with targets using fictitious identities, posed as representatives of online gambling platforms offering fake bonuses and winnings, or impersonated law enforcement agencies to tell targets they needed to pay fines for committing serious criminal offenses.

2026-08-27 openai chatgpt fraud security harms

YouTube Format IDs

Also known as itag or format codes and way back they could be specified with the fmt parameter (e.g. &fmt=22) used to be on website address bar after YouTube Video ID, (deprecated?). Depending on the age and/or popularity of the video, not all formats will be available.

2026-08-27 video reference tool youtube

The choices we make about AI now are critical

If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead.

2026-08-26 ai governance policy workforce society

Ordinary WiFi can now identify you with near-perfect accuracy

You don't necessarily need to connect to the Wi-Fi network. You don't necessarily need to carry a Wi-Fi device. It may be sufficient for OTHER Wi-Fi devices in the environment to be communicating. This raises the possibility that existing wireless infrastructure in homes, offices, cafés and public spaces could eventually become a largely invisible sensing and surveillance layer.

2026-08-25 surveillance privacy security networks identity

ARIA Charts set eligibility rules for recordings made with AI

Wholly AI-generated tracks will not be eligible for the ARIA Charts. Recordings that use generative AI in a supporting role remain eligible. The ARIA Charts Code of Practice has been updated and changes will take effect from the ARIA Chart dated Monday, 31 August 2026, published Friday, 28 August.

2026-08-25 ai-music copyright authorship policy music

Screen viewing time from age 1 to 8 years and subsequent academic performance and working memory

Mean (standard deviation) screen viewing time ranged from 2.1 (2.0) hours/day at age 1 year, to 3.0 (2.2) hours/day at 8 years. In this longitudinal study, cumulative average screen viewing time was associated with lower academic performance but not working memory, with the strongest effect sizes seen for single screen viewing time occurring in early infancy.

2026-08-25 screen-time childhood education psychology research

Everything I own, owned

It’s only a tiny leap to imagine that someone could make a self-replicating piece of malware that probes its environment, relaying reconnaissance back to a smart command-and-control that actively works to push itself into accessories and IoT devices and industrial equipment found adjacent to an infected target. Two things have kept this from happening: every device model needs its own reverse engineering, and validating any of it needs the hardware in hand. The first is the labor I just handed to an agent. The second is free to malware already sitting on an infected host.

2026-08-24 security agents opsec hardware firmware

And Grail Holy Monty Python The

A comprehensive alphabetical re-edit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. WARNING: This film contains extremely fast and abrupt editing

2026-08-23 video art film remix supercut

Bloomberg Connects: Available Guides

Explore interactive guides to over 1000 museums, cultural spaces, and more from around the world - all in one free app.

2026-08-22 art culture museums archive accessibility

How a Billionaire Shaped Trump’s Homelessness Policy

A few months after the executive order, HUD issued an annual document called a Notice of Funding Opportunity. It had long been the lifeblood of Housing First, directing about 90 percent of homelessness aid to long-term housing. Following the principles in Mr. Trump’s order, HUD sought to move two-thirds of the money to time-limited programs with work rules or treatment mandates. Mr. Lonsdale exulted. “A lot of the permanent bureaucracy is in the hard left,” he said in an interview soon after. “We’re stopping them from doing it their way and forcing them to do it a different way.”

2026-08-22 palantir politics government homelessness policy creepy-joelonsdale

How a Palantir co-founder’s once-fringe crusade spread across Trump’s America

Long before Silicon Valley embraced Trump, Joe Lonsdale wanted to remake government and shift the nation’s approach to homelessness. Now, his friends in the White House are listening.

2026-08-22 palantir politics government homelessness policy creepy-joelonsdale

AI models design viruses not found in nature for first time

The pair, who work at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Health Security in Baltimore, were not involved in the Stanford research, but provided an accompanying commentary in Science. "The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not," they said.

2026-08-22 ai science synthetic-biology biosecurity governance

Brussels Flower Carpet

The flower carpet on the Grand-Place in Brussels is the ultimate expression of ephemeral art, as the work is destined to disappear after just four days on show. Every two years, on the weekend of 15 August, the most beautiful Grand-Place in the world is transformed into an immense showcase of colours, to the delight of visitors aged 7 to 77.

2026-08-22 art design culture architecture ephemeral-art

ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs, …

You may have heard of the speech synthesis company ElevenLabs. Recently a friend mentioned they knew someone who worked at a company called TwelveLabs that does AI for video (it feels like it must have been intended to play on the fact that ElevenLabs does audio, but I don't know for sure). Jokingly, I googled "thirteenlabs" and was surprised to find an AI for 3D scenery project. I googled "fourteenlabs". Another AI startup…?? How far does this go?

2026-08-22 ai internet culture business naming

Who Owns the Copyright in Work Generated by an LLM?

Consider an employee who tells an LLM: “Write an article explaining our company’s new product to customers,” then publishes the response with only minor corrections. The company should not assume that it owns a copyright in the AI-generated language. Under the Office’s present approach, some or perhaps most of that language may have no federal copyright protection. That has a significant business consequence. Competitors may be able to copy unprotected AI-generated expression without infringing the company’s copyright.

2026-08-22 copyright ai llm legal authorship regulation

At This Year's Rencontres d'Arles, Photography Rethinks Its Centers

Director Christoph Wiesner wrote in the catalog that “as everything pushes toward simplification, division and reduction,” the 57th edition of the Rencontres d’Arles would create a space for “complexity and attentiveness.” This year, that center space is given over to those whom the Western canon long consigned to its margins — though the festival itself avoids this vocabulary.

2026-08-22 photography art exhibition culture artists media curation