Bill Gates Says an AI ‘Kill Switch’ Isn’t Enough
Bill Gates said an AI “kill switch” alone would be insufficient to address the technology’s risks. “The kill switch is, that’s kind of a weird thing. It’s not enough to have a kill switch,” the Microsoft co-founder said in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He said the more immediate concern is people using AI for cyberattacks or bioterrorism rather than systems … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Launches Starship Into Orbit
SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit for the first time, successfully deploying 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites after overcoming an early Raptor 3 engine shutdown during ascent. “SpaceX plans to eventually deploy 100,000 upgraded Starlink V3s to expand the company’s wireless satellite internet services,” notes Space.com. Here’s the latest update from the report:
SpaceX has decided to return Starship … ⌘ Read more

Walmart Says It’s Not Using Personal Info To Set Prices As It Expands Digital Shelf Labels
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Walmart is aiming to assuage customers’ fears about its new pricing technology as it rolls out digital price labels at its stores. In a statement posted on the company’s website, Walmart’s CEO John Furner vowed that the Bentonville, Ar … ⌘ Read more

Are AI Chatbots Spreading Misinformation to US Voters?
Are AI chatbots quietly shaping the perceptions of U.S. voters? Voters trying to educate themselves about candidates “are unknowingly being served partisan talking points in the guise of neutral news summaries,” write two news researchers in Politico magazine:

Leading AI chatbots cite partisan websites masquerading as independent local news outlets nearly half o … ⌘ Read more

Apple Faces $5.7 Billion Patent Infringement Verdict Over iPhone And Apple Watch Haptics
“A federal jury in San Diego awarded Taction Technology more than $5.7 billion in damages Friday after finding that Apple infringed claims from two haptics patents,”
reports CNBC:

Taction sued Apple in 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. The company alleged that … ⌘ Read more

Just How Big is the AI Buildout - and How Risky?
A new Brookings Institution study notes the “strikingly physical” economic footprint of AI’s buildout, from specialized chips and electricity to purpose-built data centers. (Two-thirds of a data center’s costs are IT equipment, with one-third going to real estate and its associated power infrastructure.) “At an average of 3.63 percent of GDP per year, the projected buildout would be l … ⌘ Read more

Waymo Says Its Self-Driving Cars Reduced Injury-Causing Accidents by 82%
Waymo’s self-driving car technology “continues to outperform human benchmarks,” the company claimed this week. “It was involved in 841 fewer injury-causing crashes — an 82% reduction compared to human drivers.”

Electrek reports:

We’ve seen various Waymo crash data before, with Waymo claiming crash reductions. That’s all well and … ⌘ Read more

After Dozens of Incidents at OpenAI and Anthropic, OpenAI Pauses Model Training to Build More Safeguards
“OpenAI said it has paused training of its latest AI models,” reports the Associated Press, “as reports of AI agents going rogue mount.”

The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents from the summ … ⌘ Read more

New Tin-based Solar Cells Trap Heat 1,000 Times Longer, Could Beat 33% Limit
Could this push solar cell efficiency beyond the theoretical 33% limit? Interesting Engineering reports:

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that tin-based perovskite solar cells can slow heat loss from high-energy “hot electrons…”

When sunlight strikes a panel, photons jump-start elect … ⌘ Read more

China and the US Say They’ve Agreed to Start Talks About AI
The United States and China have agreed to “launch a dialogue” on AI, reports Reuters.

On artificial intelligence, the two sides agreed to hold a dialogue on the technology’s risks and benefits, with the next round of discussions set for November, and to set up a communication channel for AI-related incidents, the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the White Hou … ⌘ Read more

KDE and GNOME Developers Ponder How to Handle AI-Generated Contributions
Last weekend KDE’s annual Akademy conference included a presentation proposing
an AI-native KDE,” writes The Register. This led KDE developer Nate Graham to open a discussion about proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions which “rapidly became heated. Moderators issued warnings, restricted further comments, and eventual … ⌘ Read more

After 40 Years, Microsoft Excel Will Add Single-Cell Lists and Arrays
Microsoft’s senior product manager for Excel acknowledges that “Throughout Excel’s 40-year history, you’ve only been able to put one value per cell.” But that’s now changing with arrays in cells (as well as nested arrays) and lists.

“You can create a list by selecting Insert > List or pressing Ctrl+J, then typing or pasting items separated b … ⌘ Read more

AI Finds So Many Linux Bugs, Canonical Changes to a Two-Week Stable Release Update Cycle
“Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli

AI has transformed bug discovery from “a manual, time-intensive process into a highly automated engine,” notes Canonical’s blog, leading to a “recent expl … ⌘ Read more

Is Microsoft Quietly Killing Off Its ‘Copilot+ PC’ Brand?
“Copilot+ PCs” were Microsoft’s official branding for Windows 11 “AI PCs” that met their system requirements. But the 2024 launch “didn’t go smoothly,” writes Windows Central, after security researchers discovered its proposed “Recall” feature was woefully insecure:

This pretty much tarnished the Copilot+ PC brand, and over the last two years more and more OEMs h … ⌘ Read more

Rogue OpenAI Agents Posted 53 User-Uploaded Images Onto the Internet, Accessed US Government Websites
53 images that users uploaded into OpenAI models were included in training data — and then AI agents in an OpenAI research environment posted those 53 images on public image hosting sites.
While posted as links that weren’t publicly listed, “the images could still be discovered e … ⌘ Read more

Meta Made 43M Misleading Statements, New Mexico Jury Finds, Including on Its Cambridge Analytica Response
A New Mexico jury on Friday “found Facebook liable for deceiving users” about its privacy protections, reports the Associated Press.

A New Mexico newspaper calls it “another massive legal victory” against Facebook, reporting that the jury found Facebook “had committe … ⌘ Read more

There’s a New Way to Break RSA Encryption
“Signature forgery.” It’s a new way to break RSA keys — and it doesn’t require factoring. Ars Technica reports on new research using classical computing to “reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold” and lower the required computing resources by orders of magnitude.

There’s “a gap in current RSA-type security assumptions,” according to a paper co-authored by Univer … ⌘ Read more

Asteroids Named After Tom Lehrer and ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic
“Weird Al” Yankovic’s name has just been approved for a new asteroid — (14331) Alyankovic = 1981 EC26 — by the International Astronomical Union, reports Space.com.

Yankovic’s asteroid was championed by planetary scientist Allison McGraw joined by “several heavy hitters in the planetary science field, according to the Tucson Star. (Astrophysicist Steve Desch fro … ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Stock Jumps 30% as Demand Surges. (And Boards Now Locked to Their Original RAM Size)
Raspberry Pi’s stock shot up over 30% in the last week. Why are investors so excited? For the six months ending June 30, revenue for Raspberry Pi Holdings “jumped 90% to $256.9 million,” reports Investing.com, “while adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $40.3 million, and profit be … ⌘ Read more

F-Droid 2.0: FOSS Android Appstore Continues Updating Despite Google’s Pending ‘Developer Verification’ Plan
“F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-source software packages for Google’s Android mobile platform, on Thursday announced version 2.0 of its Android app,” reports The Register.

Though they also note “a big banner across the to … ⌘ Read more

How Believable is Google’s New ‘Live Avatar’ Capability?
Google has synthesized “expressive face-to-face experiences” for its speech agent Gemini 3.8 Live. They’re now offering a Live Avatar “with precise lip-syncing, natural expressions, and fluid turn-taking” for Google Enterprise accounts wanting “engaging customer service” or for offering interactive walkthroughs. (Check out the not-creepy-at-all video in Google’s ann … ⌘ Read more

People Training OpenAI’s AI Fired For Using AI To Train the AI
404 Media reports “multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI’s models have been fired for using AI to train the AI:

That’s not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI’s whole thing is to make people use AI at work… OpenAI declined to … ⌘ Read more

Five Police Officers Criminally Charged for Misusing Flock Cameras in Indianapolis
“Nationwide, at least 100 police department employees have been charged with or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes,” reports the Washington Post. They cite their past investigations “based on thousands of pages of police and court records,” which found that “In many of these case … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs Urge UN Countries to Cooperate on AI Safety Standards
“The heads of major AI firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to save the world or at least its people — by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing,” writes the Associated Press.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” said Dario Amodei, c … ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X2 Series Processors Will Support Linux
Snapdragon X2 Series processors feature a neural processing unit (NPU) delivering 80 trillion operations per second and allowing advanced AI features to run locally. And Snapdragon X2 Series “is expanding to Linux,” Qualcomm announced today, calling it one of their most-requested capabilities:

Qualcomm Technologies is a top contributo … ⌘ Read more

Rogue OpenAI Agent Tried to Breach Government Site in May When Prompted for Simple Data-Retrieving Tasks
OpenAI’s artificial intelligence “went rogue this year in at least four additional incidents,” the New York Times reported Wednesday, “hacking and trying to break into government and university websites without being instructed to do so, according to researchers and govern … ⌘ Read more

Cities Across US Oppose Trump FCC Plan to Preempt Local Broadband Rules
Ars Technica reports:

Cities and counties around the U.S. are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks… The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] argues that too many local governments “excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorb … ⌘ Read more

Whatever Happened to the 150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Stored Under the Atlantic Ocean?
More than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were stored on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between 1949 and 1982, reports ScienceAlert.

Whatever happened to those barrels?

Scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate — and found many of the … ⌘ Read more

Andreessen Horowitz Launches AI/Company-Building School As a College Alternative
TechCrunch quipped it was like if startup school Y Combinator and Peter Thiel’s build-a-company-instead of-college Fellowship Program had a baby. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million to launch a private school in San Francisco “aimed at turning high school graduates into f … ⌘ Read more

Bitcoin Surges to $86,455, an 8-Month High, After America’s SEC Announces Tokenized Stock Experiment
August 15: $62,991
September 23: $86,456

Bitcoin shot up 37% over the last 39 days, reaching an eight-month high on Monday. “Bitcoin is back,” declares Yahoo Finance:

The token held near $86,000 on Tuesday after a stunning multisession rally… [Fundstrat head of digital assets Sea … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Helps Take Down Massive Automated, AI-Powered Phishing-as-a-Service Platform
Microsoft’s security blog describes the fight against a new “AI-powered cybercrime platform” offering phishing-as-a-service, with AI-tailored lures and analyses of compromised inboxes (to identify high-value targets). The site compromised more than 12,000 inboxes in over 10,000 organizations around the wo … ⌘ Read more

Trump Denounces Attempts to Control AI, Wants It Renamed ‘Super Intelligence’ in US Documents
U.S. President Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday. And a half hour in, after decrying immigration, Trump pivoted to add that “The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much no … ⌘ Read more

Are Students Suddenly Losing Interest in Computer Science as AI Coding Takes Off?
On academic mentoring platform Nova Learning, Computer Science and AI, “once the dominant choice among students… is losing ground fast, while Engineering has nearly doubled its share.” It’s a small survey, but “The steepest proportional decline is in Software & Data Science, the most traditional ‘learn to code’ … ⌘ Read more

‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Outgrosses All But 3 WB Movies This Year, Heads To Profit
The movie Coyote vs. Acme earned more than Warner Bros.’ $30 million tax write-off in just two weeks. And last week the movie officially earned more than its production budget of $70 million. But today the movie passed the $100 million mark. “You asked for it, we delivered, and you showed up!” distributor Ketchum Entert … ⌘ Read more

Pentagon Investigators Say Overreliance on Palantir AI Contributed to US Strike That Killed 123 Iranian Children
Two U.S. missiles hit an elementary school in Iran, killing over 150 people including 123 children on the first day of the Iran War. But Gizmodo notes that a new Bloomberg investigation cites U.S. officials involved in an unreleased internal Pentagon r … ⌘ Read more

Google Opens Preorders for Its $899 Gemini-Enhanced ‘Googlebook’ Laptops
Monday Google opened preorders for its “Googlebook” laptops, pricing them at $899. A Google’s blog post added that “At launch, you can choose between Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Snapdragon X Elite processors” (paired with NPUs to power AI features).

“Devices will hit shelves on October 4 in the U.S. and on October 5 in Canada, the … ⌘ Read more

Meta’s New ‘Personal AI Agent’ Muse Beats ChatGPT in Downloads - and Get Blocked by Amazon
Meta’s AI “personal agent” Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC — and it’s still showing more downloads as of Monday night.

Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower…

[Mu … ⌘ Read more

Paramount Skydance ‘Emerges Victorious’, Finally Wins Settlement for Warner Bros Takeover
Paramount Skydance just “emerged victorious” reports Reuters, “from a legal battle over its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery” that will “dramatically concentrate power across Hollywood’s film, TV, streaming and news businesses.”

The victory comes “after settling with a Calif … ⌘ Read more

As KDE Turns 30, Contributors and Commits are Going Strong
“In a few weeks, KDE will turn 30 years old,” writes core contributor Kevin Ottens, celebrating with some special KDE community data analytics (including a 30-year graph of the number of contributors):

It peaks around 180 on average (and sometimes reaches towards around 200 people) then shrinks again hitting bottom around 110 persons on average in 2017… Si … ⌘ Read more

Are Book Publishers Warming Up to the AI Industry?
There’s at least 15 author-driven lawsuits underway against AI companies, while publishers have filed roughly 10 more coordinated suits of their own, notes Publisher’s Weekly.

Yet “While the lawsuits play out, some publishers are building bridges.”

Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O’Reilly … ⌘ Read more

Australia Considers Smart Glasses Ban in Government Workplaces, While 70 People Sue Meta Over Unknowing Data Collection
“Australia is considering barring the use of camera-equipped smart glasses in government workplaces…” reports Reuters, “in what it said could be the first ban of its kind.”

But meanwhile “more than 70 people who bought, used or were reco … ⌘ Read more

North Korean Hackers Posed as Recruiters. They Infected 30,000 Devices Worldwide
“I would like to verify your technical abilities, so please download the specified file and complete the assigned task…”

Fake job listings aimed at software developers and IT professionals led to 30,000 infected devices in over 100 countries — and 7,000 compromised cryptocurrency wallets, leading to over $10 millio … ⌘ Read more

Lawsuit Says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI And Google Made Illegal Agreement On AI Slowdown
Tom’s Hardware reports:

Four plaintiffs subscribed to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the developers of these AI models violated antitrust laws when they agreed to slow AI development. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit argues that thi … ⌘ Read more

Democracy vs Digital Infrastructure: Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Charts ‘The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State’
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State ultimately asks the question, “How did we cede control of our democracy to the machines, and can we get it back?” according to the Harvard’s Arts and Sciences site, FAS Current:

The new title finds Lepore, … ⌘ Read more

The Brain Is Actually Two Completely Separate Organs
“New research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years,” Stanford Medicine announced this week:

The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our heart … ⌘ Read more

To Enforce Its Proposed Social Media Ban for 450 Million Pre-Teens, EU Builds an Open Source App
The European Commission “proposed on Thursday banning children under 13 from social media, with parent-supervised accounts until 15,” reports Reuters.

“Enforcement would rely on a tool Brussels built itself” — a free, open-source age verification smartphone app “that tells a platform … ⌘ Read more

Tech Industry Scratches Its Head Over Trump’s ‘AI Force’ Proposal
Saturday morning President Trump announced he’s creating an AI task force and appointing an AI czar, reports Politico.

“I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS,” Trump wrote Saturday in what Politico earlier described as “a lengthy Truth Social post on Saturday morning.”

TRUMP: Over the ye … ⌘ Read more

Customer-Losing Flock Now Offers Buyouts to Avoid Laying Off Employees
Mashable writes:

Flock Safety offered employees voluntary buyouts on Friday, WIRED reported… Without the buyouts, those familiar with the situation suspect the company would have to lay off some of its 1,500 employees.

WIRED writes that people familiar with the program “say they believe that a significant number of the startup’s ro … ⌘ Read more

Developer Abandons ‘PS5 Linux’ Project After Sony Patches AI-Discovered Exploit
“In April this year, we saw Andy Nguyen turning the PS5 into a Linux-powered gaming PC,”
writes the blog It’s FOSS.

It ran Steam games and emulators using the PS5’s on-board hardware. But this week Andy announced he’s “stopping all my work on PS5 Linux” and “stepping away from the PS5 scene.”
stopping work on porting … ⌘ Read more

Fake AI Intelligence Almost Made the US Military Start a War With China
U.S. military intelligence received an inaccurate report this spring that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program, reports CNN.

“The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode.”

Armed members of the US milit … ⌘ Read more