newsfeeds.net - dispute the text

newsfeeds.net - dispute the textA curated collection of 684 links on media, technology, AI, copyright, and digital culture.

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

Partial Lunar Eclipse of August 28 — NASA

Penumbral Eclipse Begins: 01:24 UT. Partial Eclipse Begins: 02:34 UT. Greatest Eclipse: 04:13 UT. Partial Eclipse Ends: 05:52 UT. Penumbral Eclipse Ends: 07:02 UT. This eclipse belongs to Saros 138.

2026-08-22 space science time reference nasa

CIPM, Session I of the 115th meeting (17–19 March 2026)

N. Dimarcq gave an update on Draft Resolution D “On the definition of an international lunar reference time scale and its traceability to UTC.” He recalled that the initial objective had been to recommend a lunar reference time scale and ensure its metrological traceability to UTC. The work on Draft Resolution D began in September 2025 with possibilities for a Lunar reference time scale being presented to the CCTF. The CCTF set up a dedicated Task Group on Moon Timing (CCTF-TGMT), which met with many relevant bodies, including the International Committee on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (ICG) and space agencies, between September and December 2025. The conclusion was that a decision on a single Lunar time scale was not mature or possible at that time. In January 2026 Draft Resolution D was published without a recommendation for a unique time scale, with an unresolved choice between either a timescale at the surface (TL) or centre (TCL) of the moon.

2026-08-22 time standards space clock infrastructure government science

とまり木 (Tomarigi) — 各地のカメラから、日本のいま。

日本各地のYouTubeライブカメラを地図から探して、その場で視聴できるサービス。

2026-08-20 japan maps video cameras ambient

Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code | WIRED

Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology 'cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.' It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned. Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver's 'associates' from the cameras they pass together.

2026-08-20 flock surveillance policing alpr ai

Girl in a Bland – grime square

In the spirit of punk, it's limpid, like seeing 2/4ths of the original Ramones end a set at the county fair with a cover of "Surfin' Safari." Baked into the exhibition's premise is the glaring question: "Can Kim Gordon—or for that matter, any aged, rich artist—still be subversive?" In a way, the answer is yes and no. Richard Prince still feels dangerous, even if his gimmick has been largely accepted by the art establishment. But as Porter said, the art is either breathing or it's dead, and if Kim Gordon's art isn't dead, it sure smells funny.

2026-08-20 art music nyc exhibition culture

Cybersentics Little Library — Gray Area

Cybersentics Little Library is a curated collection of books on art, science, technology, and society, available free to the general public. Gray Area invites artists, educators, researchers, and others to visit our Cultural Incubator and access these specialized research materials.

2026-08-20 library books community cybernetics

The Amazon tax | Seth's Blog

For decades, Amazon created value for consumers by lowering the price of just about everything. And they opened the doors to merchants who didn't have sufficient distribution. They claimed to be customer-centric, and they were. I don't think they can claim this any longer. The ad system they built isn't illegal, but it's pretty clear who it's for. Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.

2026-08-20 amazon advertising trust platform

Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

The attorney noted that the data could potentially be stored in physical form, such as tapes that could be easily retrieved. But if the materials are on a server, Nine PBS could lose the materials forever if Iron Mountain shuts it down.

2026-08-17 archive infrastructure data legal media

ZOOMSDAY: How A Security Found a Nation-State Vulnerability in Zoom in One Day

But the real finding isn't the bug. It's the speed. The barrier to producing this class of weapon has collapsed, and it won't come back.

2026-08-17 security agents ai zoom

Unwinding the Great Tech Power Grab

If tech seeks to replace democratic governance itself, then the response has to be more democracy, not less.

2026-08-17 democracy technology social-contract ai-backlash

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

2026-08-17 books training archive ai

Dancing with friends and enemies: boids' swarm intelligence

I had read somewhere that macro-scale behaviour of animal swarms (think of flocks of starlings or shoals of herring) is explained by each individual following very simple rules local to their vicinity, essentially 1) try to keep up and 2) try not to collide. I started trying to play with this idea in Mathematica, but it was rather slow to identify the nearest neighbours of each particle. So I wondered what would happen if each particle acted according to the locations of two other particles, regardless of their proximity. The rule was simply to move away from one and towards the other.

2026-08-17 code science dataviz emergence

A quick look at zero-knowledge proofs

The idea of a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is that there are two parties: the prover and the verifier. The prover asserts that it has a solution to a (generally NP-complete) problem. The prover can convince the verifier of this without sharing the actual solution to the problem.

2026-08-17 cryptography code python paper

This Is Your Brain on X

The shittiness of X is the point, so to speak. It’s a slag heap, a mental waste dump, a sewer. Currency exchange was the wrong metaphor; It’s some kind of industrial waste product recycling process. Instead of writers and intellectuals coming up with ideas that filter into the culture, they are totally dominated by the conditions of discourse of social media.

2026-08-16 socialmedia media politics creepy-elon-musk

The Government is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts

In sum, the documents show that local, state, and federal law enforcement are monitoring anti-Flock activists and are trying to tie together people who politically oppose mass surveillance with vigilantes who destroy Flock cameras. 404 Media obtained the documents through a public records act request.

2026-08-15 flock surveillance policing socialmedia alpr

Anthropic says text watermarking scheme relies on inconsequential words

But remove whatever training has been applied to promote engagement and simulate literary style, and that's basically what Claude is doing here – predicting the next word in a sequence. Anthropic asserts that in most cases, the example sentence could be completed by either "cold" or "gray" and "the meaning of the sentence is largely the same either way." The watermark gets generated by deviating from the predicted word to something else. A different source of randomness is used and that can be detected with a digital key.

2026-08-15 anthropic ai llm watermarking claude

Restaurants, pubs and theatres ban Meta’s ‘spy glasses’ over privacy fears

But those plans have hit a snag in the UK, where venues from elite restaurants to popular pub chains have banned the £359 glasses in order to preserve the privacy of customers and staff. Celebrated restaurateur Jeremy King, owner of London venues including Simpsons in the Strand, Arlington and The Park, said guests should not wear the recording glasses. He told the Guardian: “I would never knowingly allow any invasion of guest privacy other than with the eyes we were born with.”

2026-08-15 meta smart-glasses privacy surveillance social-contract

Everything is about to "go dark"

Over the next two years, major pieces of software are likely to run out of remotely-exploitable bugs. Obviously I think this is great. But for law enforcement and offensive intelligence agencies, it's going to be a nightmare.

2026-08-15 cryptography security surveillance ai government

PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct

The channel's attorney also reached out to Iron Mountain to inform the company of the pending case in Colorado; Iron Mountain finally admitted to holding the data. Iron Mountain initially agreed to turn over Nine PBS' data, but it eventually backtracked and claimed that OSS owned the data it stored. Because of this, Nine PBS now has no choice but to sue Iron Mountain, too, to ensure the data is not deleted.

2026-08-15 archive infrastructure data legal media

London Underground is trialing live face scanning as privacy groups say it 'treats the public like suspects'

However, as the BBC points out, scans of some 530,000 faces across UK railway stations since February have resulted in zero matches, zero arrests, and one false identification. That's based on the BTP's own deployment logs, suggesting that to date the technology isn't helping much. Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo suggests that the tech "treats the public like suspects" and is a "disturbing and dystopian expansion" of facial recognition systems.

2026-08-12 facial-recognition frt surveillance policing privacy

ICE to Pay LexisNexis Millions for Data to Feed to Palantir

The documents provide some more insight into the sort of information ICE intends to use Palantir to process. In January, 404 Media revealed the existence of ELITE, a system Palantir made for ICE that helps the agency find which neighborhoods to target by bringing together data from private suppliers and government agencies.

2026-08-12 ice palantir surveillance data government

Flock Cameras Can Track Every Car in America. Police Love Them. Citizens Don't.

Officers across the country have abused their access to Flock's cameras, including to track romantic partners, resulting in discipline and termination. Los Angeles and Dayton, Ohio, among other cities, recently suspended their contracts with Flock to prevent immigration authorities from accessing data from the cameras.

2026-08-12 flock surveillance policing privacy nytimes

Everything You Do Is Being Recorded

In March, the tech start-up Deveillance announced the development of Spectre I, a hockey-puck-shaped device that purports to prevent others from recording you (no strip search required). The company was founded by Aida Baradari, a recent college graduate who was worried by the surge in people wearing AI-enabled recorders. These wearables can be used as a silent notetaker, a personal assistant, or even a therapist of sorts.

2026-08-12 ai surveillance privacy opsec

The Sound Went Quiet: How New Zealand Lost Its Music Media

There is no one left whose job is to tell you what happened at the show last night, which local producer just signed to an overseas label, or why a 34-year-old venue went under owing $692,000. When nobody documents a scene, the scene becomes invisible. Invisible artists do not get streamed, booked, or paid.

2026-08-12 music media journalism culture

A Taste of Infinity — Dylan Mattingly

He has summoned into being a region of musical experience that's all his own, a welcoming, abundant, sun-drenched landscape that teems with tinkling, deliriously retuned pianos and raucous grooves that last long enough to offer a taste of infinity. A new album called The Wild Heart offers a slice—though admittedly only a small, frustratingly incomplete sampling—of this Whitmanic artist's fertile, dazzling world within the world.

2026-08-12 music artists art culture

How Does It Feel? Peter Saville's Color Code

The outer two rows of the color wheel on the back of Power, Corruption & Lies is the key to deciphering the one- or tw0-color blocks that represent both the numbers 1-9 and the alphabet. It's clearer, perhaps, in the cover for the 12″ release of Blue Monday, that the design is based on a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk, but this reference is already lost in some design discussions.

2026-08-12 design color art music

How Blackwing Pencils Are Made | Behind the Process

How Blackwing Pencils Are Made | Behind the Process

2026-08-12 design video youtube tool

Debate: Paternalism and Autonomy

The conflict between libertarian paternalism and autonomy often disappears on reflection and after engagement with particulars. So long as coercion is avoided, it is reasonable to insist that educative and architectural nudges preserve autonomy.

2026-08-12 paper ethics politics agency

Creativity vs. Consumption

If you feel completely empty and like nothing matters, ask yourself how much time you have spent watching what other people are doing or watching shortform video or YouTube or TV. And compare that to how much time you have spent building something, or improving the life of someone else. It's not the only metric that matters, but I would argue it's the biggest one.

2026-08-12 psychology thinking society

Terra Incognita: a star atlas of what we do not know

225 questions that nobody on Earth can answer, drawn as a night sky. Each constellation is a discipline. Each star is a problem that has survived every attempt on it, some for decades, some for millennia. Brightness tracks fame rather than importance: several of the dimmest stars may matter most.

2026-08-12 science knowledge map mind

The Brutalist Report

Do you feel it too? There's something wrong with the web. The Brutalist Network is a response to that feeling. It's for people who want a simple, reliable, and performant online experience.

2026-08-12 internet media design list

HOPE 26 — Hackers On Planet Earth

The 17th Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference will be held from August 14-16, 2026 at the New Yorker Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The HOPE conferences are known for their creativity and diversity, not to mention a whole lot of hacker fun. We've been at this for over three decades now – the first HOPE conference was in 1994.

2026-08-12 infosec community nyc culture

Discovery Loop — Continuous Exploration

At Discovery Loop, we are building systems to automate these entire experimental loops. By utilizing frontier AI models and large-scale computational infrastructure, our systems will be able to rapidly propose, run, and learn from evaluations. See also: https://www.nae.edu/20782/grand-challenges-project NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering: 1. Make Solar Energy Economical · 2. Provide Energy from Fusion · 3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods · 4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle · 5. Provide Access to Clean Water · 6. Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure · 7. Advance Health Informatics · 8. Engineer Better Medicines · 9. Reverse Engineer the Brain · 10. Prevent Nuclear Terror · 11. Secure Cyberspace · 12. Enhance Virtual Reality · 13. Advance Personalized Learning · 14. Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery

2026-08-06 science research ai agents

Paramount-Warner Bros. Trial to Start in March 2027 in Blow to David Ellison's Team

The judge overseeing a lawsuit from a coalition of 12 states looking to block Paramount's $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery has scheduled a trial to start in March. The decision marks a blow for the studio, which pushed to start the trial in November. Starting on Oct. 1, Paramount will have to pay a ticking fee of roughly $7 million per day to Warners shareholders until the deal closes.

2026-08-05 media hollywood business legal film

Security Incident INC-2026-07-28-01 (UK AI Security Institute)

This is the first time AISI has seen deception of this severity that was targeted at a real person, unprompted, in the real world. It is uncertain to what extent the model recognised it was taking actions against real people. In the most serious case, an AI agent (Mythos 5) decided to attempt to solve the cyber challenge using a supply-chain attack. As a result, the AI agent created a GitHub account and then tried to convince an open-source repository maintainer to accept a malicious GitHub pull request (PR), including by creating a second account masquerading as another human user endorsing the PR.

2026-08-05 agents security safety government ai

Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing

In 10 of the 122 runs, an AI agent took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations. In total, we catalogued 19 such actions.

2026-08-05 agents security safety government ai

Cultural evolution – of the arts

In this paper, we chart an emerging academic terrain: cultural evolution of the arts, which is a theory-driven exploration of artistic dynamics, often done with large datasets of music, literature, movies, paintings, or games. This field has grown at the intersection of cultural evolution theory and several academic fields: computational humanities, anthropology, network science, and others, and poses interesting challenges for each of them.

2026-08-04 art culture research science

Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

Last year, the first support group for people whose lives have been derailed by AI psychosis was formed. The Human Line Project has collected stories from 22 countries. They include 15 suicides, 90 hospitalisations, six arrests and more than $1m (£750,000) spent on delusional projects. More than 60% of its members had no history of mental illness.

2026-08-04 ai health safety psychology mind

IFPI Rolls Out Global Principles for the Eligibility of Recordings Developed Using AI in Official Music Charts Worldwide

IFPI, the organisation representing the recording industry worldwide, today announced the roll out of a new set of principles to govern the eligibility of recordings developed with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) services for inclusion in official music charts. The framework will establish a clear boundary between human-led creativity and works that are purely synthetic, or generated by unauthorized AI models. It will also help to ensure that any tracks with a fraudulently boosted stream count are not recognised and celebrated in the charts.

2026-08-03 music ai-music copyright ai

How China Keeps Tabs on Foreigners

The database Mr. Hofer found offered a rare window into how extensively the Chinese authorities also surveil foreigners, displaying entries about people categorized by nationality, with their birth date, sex, marital status, address and occupation, and sometimes their religion. It also included instances when they were captured on camera at traffic intersections, markets, shopping malls or other locations, including a mosque.

2026-08-03 surveillance privacy nytimes china

The reporters at this news site are AI bots. OpenAI’s super PAC appears to be funding it.

An interview request from a bot posing as a reporter revealed an AI-generated news site with articles attacking AI industry critics. For the second time this month, we found links to Targeted Victory, the firm at the center of OpenAI's $125 million political operation.

2026-08-03 ai openai journalism politics

Unraveling the mysteries of habit formation

The team discovered that two distinct neural circuits manage completely different aspects of habits. The first circuit, with neurons projecting from the anterior cingulate cortex to the retrosplenial cortex, determines whether a behavior becomes a habit, with its connections weakening during the transition. Crucially, the second circuit, from the lateral orbitofrontal cortex to the central striatum, controls how much the habit is executed, explaining individual differences.

2026-08-02 brain science research neuroscience health

Seedance AI Model by Dreamina: Advanced Text-to-Video & Image Animation

Official Seedance 2.5 is built for longer, more controllable AI video creation, with support for up to 30-second continuous scenes, richer multimodal references, and more precise editing workflows. If you want to turn prompts, images, product shots, or story ideas into cinematic videos for social media, ads, ecommerce, or creative storytelling, explore the official Dreamina Seedance 2.5.

2026-08-02 ai video bytedance ai-video

The Four Horsemen of the AI Bubble Apocalypse

The capabilities of AI are becoming more powerful, while the economic underpinnings of the AI buildout—and, as we'll discuss, the political support for AI—are becoming more vulnerable. Beyond the headlines, I see four main categories of risk facing AI, or four horsemen of the potential AI bubble apocalypse. They include spending risk, revenue risk, political risk, and technological risk.

2026-08-01 ai financial business ai-bubble