"While Buckmaster and Alpöge were finalizing their own results, they learned that “information about our progress had been passed to OpenAI.” When they contacted OpenAI, they were told that OpenAI had already achieved a full proof of the central problem. But when they asked follow-up questions about when OpenAI had begun its research into the problem and how much human input was involved, the answers became more evasive. “It emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem,” Buckmaster said, “and that an insane amount of compute had been used…. Eventually, it was agreed that [the first prompt] had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.” If true, that would suggest the OpenAI team had become convinced that Buckmaster and Alpöge’s approach was the right one, and decided to use its material advantage in computing resources to reach a formal proof first." https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-career-making-math-problem-says-nyu-mathematician/ #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #OpenAI #Astra #GPT #Math #Mathematics

TechCrunch

OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician | TechCrunch

There is a $1 million bounty for the first person providing a solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem.

165

178

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2w ago

The anti-technology bias in leftist social media circles is getting too much on my nerves. AI is not destroying anything. LLMs are not stealing any content. Tools and technologies lack agency and autonomy. If there is any type of entity that is ruining the Web, that is the Corporation. For-profit corporations are led by people who must cater to the appetites of the market at every single moment at the risk of being fired by the administration or of the company going bankrupt. Of course, even within the confines of a market society, corporations can be more or less evil. But that can never serve as an excuse for being anti-technology. Specially because all technologies are a result of a hybridization process where markets, universities, public administrations, and users participate to a lesser or greater extent. That extent is always determined by the balance of power in a given society in each single historical moment. Taking this into account should lead us to evaluate beforehand the intrinsic affordances provided by a new technology, as well as the risks and advantages these offer, before making any judgements about the "goodness" or "evilness" of that same technology. Unfortunately, what mostly happens is that people try to impinge their worldviews on what a technology IS - which is absolutely non-sense, since per se all technologies lack a fixed essence - based on the prevailing uses for that same technology in a given epoch (which, again, only reflects the current balance of power in a given society), instead of what that technology COULD BE. Even worse, in other cases, people just want to have the last word about what a new technology SHOULD BE. In a very dogmatic way, this also excludes all other existing or potential alternative uses for that technology. For me, this is just another external sign that people are still very much locked into the proprietary and scarcity mindset that is so typical of capitalism.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2w ago

"As Meta prepares to release new wearables, privacy fears surrounding its artificial intelligence glasses have triggered fresh lawsuits against the social media giant. More than 70 people who bought, used or were recorded with Meta’s smart glasses have sued the social media giant, claiming their intimate and sensitive images were exposed to workers abroad who are paid to review and label photos and videos. The contractors in Kenya work for companies that help train Meta’s artificial intelligence, according to a proposed class-action lawsuit amended in late August. The smart glasses users, some in California, allege the gadget captured footage of themselves and family members undressing, going to the bathroom, having sex and entering passwords. In some cases, the people said they weren’t aware the camera-equipped glasses were recording." https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-09-18/meta-glasses-captured-shared-intimate-images-without-users-consent-lawsuit-claims #Meta #Surveillance #AIGlasses #AI #SmartGlasses #USA #California

latimes.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 1mo ago

Boosted by @trending@homestead.social

“Meta’s settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens. That’s what we said the day the settlement was announced.

In this post, we go through the Settlement’s provisions in detail and explain why that is so, including how:

The Settlement embeds age assurance technology and age-gates into Meta’s social media products and requires all users—minors and adults—to undergo a rights-threatening age estimation process
The Settlement places severe restrictions on Teens that can largely only be modified by the Teens’ parents and only then in exchange for giving their parents a ton of information about their online community and usage;
The Settlement seems to empower the attorneys general to enforce Meta’s content restriction on “age inappropriate content,” categories that Meta itself has had trouble administering without excluding information about sexuality, sexual and reproductive healthcare, and abortion medication;
The Settlement actually requires Meta to collect, analyze, and retain more information about its Teen users—when the pressure should have been on Meta to diminish its surveillance capitalism.
And the Settlement in no way limits the attorneys general from seeking the user information for their own law enforcement purposes.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/metas-17-billion-settlement-bad-deal-teens-and-all-social-media-users

#SocialMedia #Meta #AgeVerification #Censorship #USA #Surveillance

eff.org

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2w ago

"The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program. The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said. It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was. The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations. Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains." https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship #AI #AIHallucinations #Hallucinations #GenerativeAI #USA #Iran #China

edition.cnn.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 1w ago

"If you haven't figured out the deal with Elon Musk, yet, a blockbuster documentary is on its way to explain it in detail. Filmed by Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and scheduled for release on October 9, the "definitive and unvarnished examination" of the world's richest person was years in the making and was well-received at its premier at the Venice Film Festival. The main points of the feature appear to be that Musk was always the way he is now and that Musk is full of it. That Musk is furious about the documentary is surely its best recommendation." https://boingboing.net/2026/09/25/official-trailer-for-musk-documentary.html

boingboing.net

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"It seems as if we are in what often happens toward the final phases of a speculative time in the markets, what might be called a bubble, which is characterized by absolutely wild, insane swings in stock prices. These are not penny stocks; these are humongous massive cap tech stocks. Apple is down 10% today simply because they warned that their next quarter might not be as good as expected because memory and other component prices are so high. You have IBM losing more value in a single day after its last earnings warning than it had lost since Black Monday 1987. You have these massive tech stocks, which represent most of the value of the stock market, acting like penny stocks, and that tends not to be a great sign. That's usually when investors don't know what to make of the current state of things and are trying desperately to figure out where to put their money. There's a lot of tea leaf reading. It has varied widely. Meta, investors didn't like what Meta was saying. Their cash flow decreased dramatically because of the capex spending they're doing to build new data centers. Everybody freaked out on that and there was a big sell-off." https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/the-ai-bubble-is-already-popping-we-just-dont-know-it-yet/5282004 #AI #AIBubble #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIHype #BigTech

theregister

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don

Weird times in earnings-land, and we

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

LoL: “Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found. The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage. But these workers, known as “digital escorts,” often lack the technical expertise to police foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, ProPublica found. Some are former military personnel with little coding experience who are paid barely more than minimum wage for the work. “We’re trusting that what they’re doing isn’t malicious, but we really can’t tell,” said one current escort who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, fearing professional repercussions. The system has been in place for nearly a decade, though its existence is being reported publicly here for the first time.” https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts-pentagon-defense-department-china-hackers #USA #CyberSecurity #Microsoft #DoD #China

A Little-Known Microsoft Program Could Expose the Defense Department to Chinese Hackers

ProPublica

A Little-Known Microsoft Program Could Expose the Defense Department to Chinese Hackers

The Pentagon bans foreign citizens from accessing highly sensitive data, but Microsoft bypasses this by using engineers in China and elsewhere to remotely instruct American “escorts” who may lack expertise to identify malicious code.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

“The UK will not have enough water for future datacentres, the water industry has said in stark criticism of the government’s AI growth plans. Datacentres rely on large amounts of water to manage the heat generated by densely packed servers. Cooling towers, chillers and humidification systems make direct use of this water, with large volumes also consumed indirectly through high electrical power needs. Water UK, the trade body that represents water companies in Britain and Northern Ireland, said in a publicly available written briefing to MPs that the government’s water forecasts were “fatally flawed” and “explicitly exclude” datacentres. It wrote that the government “makes not a single mention of water” in its policy for delivering AI growth zones, its AI for science strategy or its AI opportunities action plan. It added that the Environment Agency’s most recent national framework for water resources, published in June 2025, also failed to include an estimate of the water demands of datacentres. “There appears to be an assumption that the country will always have enough water for its economic needs,” the briefing said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/21/not-enough-water-for-uks-datacentre-plans-trade-body-says #UK #DataCenters #BigTech #AI #Water

theguardian.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2w ago

"The Commission’s Digital Omnibus in the iteration of the so-called ‘Data Omnibus’ proposes to rewrite Article 22, one of the GDPR’s strongest safeguards against significant decisions taken solely through automated processing. Most strikingly, it would allow automated decision-making to be considered ‘necessary’ for a contract even when the same decision could be taken by a human. That is not a minor technical adjustment. It risks turning a safeguard into an exception: if a company can say that automation is useful or efficient, the question becomes not whether a human could make the decision, but whether the company has a reason to automate it. The timing is difficult to ignore, mind you. While courts and regulators are finally showing why these safeguards matter, Brussels is considering making automated decisions easier to justify in the name of ‘efficiency’. What are we willing to give up in the name of – allegedly - making regulation simpler? If a safeguard is treated as a burden because it makes automated decision-making harder, we should at least ask whose burden we are reducing and who will carry the risk instead." https://euobserver.com/237625/computer-says-no-how-brussels-is-letting-algorithmic-social-scoring-in-by-the-backdoor #AI #EU #EC #SocialScoring #DigitalOmnibus #DataOmnibus #Algorithms

EUobserver

‘Computer says no’: how Brussels is letting algorithmic social-scoring in by the backdoor

Just as European courts and regulators are beginning to expose the consequences of a system of algorithmic social scoring, Brussels, with its Digital Omnibus, is considering weakening key safeguards against such automated decision-making on citizens.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

“In other words, you don't get rich from stock speculation by identifying the businesses whose profitability will grow the most – you get rich by identifying the businesses that other investors will pile into, pushing the price up. All you need to do is sell your shares after the price spike, but before anyone else figures out that the business is a turkey. It's like that old joke: "I don't need to run faster than the bear (market), I just have to run faster than you." From the perspective of a cynical AI investor, the question isn't, "Can AI do your job?" The question is, "Can an AI salesman convince your boss that an AI can do your job?" So long as enough bosses are convinced to fire workers and replace them with AI, AI valuation will continue to climb, and if they time the market right, they can get out before those valuations crash. This proposition gets even sweeter if the CEO of the AI company is in bed with financial regulators and stock exchanges, and can force your financial advisor to buy his worthless AI stock with "little people's” https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/24/supplemental-income/#andrew-tate-gwyneth-paltrow #AI #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #PonziScheme

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"In charging a man for allegedly typing in a duress password which wiped his privacy-focused GrapheneOS phone, the U.S. government is trying to intimidate other activists from protecting their data and participating in social movements, Samuel Tunick, the man charged, told 404 Media in an interview on Tuesday. The case of Tunick, who participated in the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, has resonated across privacy and civil liberties circles. 404 Media first broke news of the case in December. Last week, The Guardian reported additional details including from a court hearing in the case. The maximum sentence for the alleged crime is five years in federal prison. “I hope people understand that the charges against me are meant to intimidate people against protecting their data and their privacy, and the government hopes to set a precedent that no one has the right to privacy,” Tunick told 404 Media in a conference call with his federal public defender Matthew Dodge." https://www.404media.co/the-government-hopes-to-set-a-precedent-an-interview-with-the-man-charged-for-allegedly-wiping-his-grapheneos-phone/ #USA #FBI #CivilLiberties #Privacy #Activism #GrapheneOS #Surveillance

404media.co

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is planning to expropriate money from its core science programmes to fund an initiative from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Nature has learnt. The move would strain budgets that are already tight and force the agency to rescind funding for research proposals that are nearly finalized. NSF staff members — who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation — and an internal NSF ledger seen by Nature suggest that the NSF plans to claw back around US$500 million that has already been distributed to grant-making divisions. That money would be withdrawn from three of the NSF’s eight main areas, or directorates: engineering; computer and information science and engineering; and mathematical and physical science. To accommodate the expected funding withdrawal, programme officers, who handle grant proposals, at the three directorates are being required to pull back proposals that have already passed peer review and have been recommended for funding. More than 100 proposals have been affected; many of the researchers who submitted those proposals had already been informally notified of their awards, according to agency staff members. The revocation of funds would add to the squeeze on the NSF. The US Congress trimmed the agency’s total funding for this year by roughly 3% from 2025 levels, to $8.75 billion, but internal budget numbers seen by Nature indicate that about $1 billion of that money never made it to the directorates." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02135-x #USA #NSF #Science #Trump

nature.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"Musk’s virulent racism and vicious, disturbing views are no secret. He does not hide them. They sit in plain view, easily accessible on the social media website he owns, where he does everything he can to promote similarly far-right and white supremacist ideas. If there is a question to ask, then, it is this: Why does Musk get a pass? Why do politicians, journalists and commentators treat his far-right racist radicalism as a sideshow rather than the core of his political, ideological and industrial project, seen in everything from his deep support for Donald Trump in the United States and Restore Britain in Britain to his decision to construct a massive pollution-generating data center in predominantly Black Memphis? Musk spends a large part of his free time fomenting violence and spreading the same hateful ideology that motivated some of the deadliest shootings and attacks ever to happen on American soil. It is that fact, and not the cars he builds or the rockets he launches, that ought to define his place in public life." https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/opinion/elon-musk-far-right-remigration.html #Musk #Racism #WhiteSupremacism #Xenophobia #FarRight

nytimes.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"Over the last few decades, several mysterious hackers have captured the public’s imagination, but none quite like Phineas Fisher. A decade after their most famous hack, Phineas remains, by most accounts, the most prolific and public hacker never to have been caught. As part of our series on the biggest cybersecurity mysteries of all time, we’re delving into the enigma of Phineas, the hacktivist who hacked controversial spyware makers FinFisher and Hacking Team. The latter, an Italian startup, was among the first to turn government spyware into a viable global business, paving the way for spyware makers such as the Israeli NSO Group. Phineas’ hack against Hacking Team eventually led to the startup’s demise years later. Apart from Anonymous, an amorphous amalgam of hacktivists with a mixed track record of mostly stunt hacks designed to gather publicity rather than have real impact, Phineas is perhaps the most well-known hacktivist in history. Their story is made of impressive hacks and endless unanswered questions." https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/25/the-hacker-who-humiliated-spyware-makers-and-was-never-caught/ #CyberSecurity #Spyware #Hacktivism #Hacking #FinFisher #HackingTeam #PhineasFisher

TechCrunch

The hacker who humiliated spyware makers and was never caught | TechCrunch

An awe-inspiring hacktivist who hacked two controversial government spyware makers may be the most prolific hacker to have never gotten caught. What do we know about Phineas Fisher?

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

Want to cure cancer, Parkinson, and Alzheimer with the help of AI? Capitalism: "Sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." That's Capitalism, baby!!! It only lets you do something if that something has the potential of making a profit. Since curing diseases will never increase profits of whatever entity, these diseases will not be cured until societies stop being dominated by the profit motive and by markets in general... Yeah, because indeed this has absolutely nothing to do with AI, but rather with political economy. "Google DeepMind has dismantled the team behind AlphaFold, its Nobel Prize-winning AI system for predicting protein structures, as the company overhauls the research strategy that made it one of the world’s leading AI laboratories. The majority of the original authors of the AlphaFold papers have been reassigned over the past year, according to an FT analysis of recent job moves and people familiar with the matter. DeepMind confirmed the staffers have moved internally to projects built around Google’s Gemini large language model, as well as areas including enzyme design, nuclear fusion and genomics. Others have relocated to Alphabet’s drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs. Nearly a quarter of the full-time Google DeepMind authors of the original AlphaFold papers have left the company altogether. The reshuffle reflects a significant change in DeepMind’s scientific strategy since the rise of large language models." https://www.ft.com/content/61b2953d-ee0d-45de-af6e-a9c1cf524b33 #Google #AI #DeepMind #AlphaFold #Capitalism

ft.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"She quotes the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in the US, which convened an expert committee and spent a year looking at the impact of social media on child and adolescent health. It concluded: “Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.” She is not alone in her scepticism about some of the claims being made for the link between children’s mental health and their use of social media, but she notes that “very few people speak up because there is a cost to speaking up”. “The assumption is that I’m somehow a shill for big tech, which is absurd,” she says. For the past three years, journalists have been making freedom of information requests for her emails, searching in vain for evidence that she has been funded by tech companies (she says her funding comes from US federal agencies and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research). Social media, she argues, is “one of the least influential factors” in teen depression and anxiety; girls who are already depressed go on to use social media more, not the other way around, she says. The risk of cyberbullying is another frequently cited justification for a ban, but Odgers points to studies showing that most children who are being bullied online are also being bullied offline. “I’m not saying that cybervictimisation is not harmful, but if we only focus on that, we’re missing a huge part of the picture. The most likely place for children to be harmed is in their home, in schools, in their communities, by people they trust.”" https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/16/psychologist-candice-odgers-kids-tech-mental-health-social-media-bans #SocialMedia #MentalHealth #Censorship #Psychology

theguardian.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"The US’s excessive demands for travellers’ profiling and surveillance in order to stay in its Visa Waiver Programme are nothing less than blackmail. The EU accepting the terms of this power struggle is extremely worrying for the rights of Europeans and any third country nationals registered in European databases. The scheme implies systematic transfers of biometric data and other highly sensitive and subjective “indications of risk” based on European national databases to the US government, which has shown a blatant disregard for basic human rights in its harsh and inhumane treatment of migrants and visitors. In that regard, the draft text does nothing to protect from discrimination based on political opinions, which is worrying because the US is already cracking down political dissent, including its unlawful practice of screening travellers’ social media profiles. The sharing of individual risk assessments to supposedly protect “public security and public order” under the EBSP could further target opposition to the Trump administration, support to transgender people’s rights or protests against the genocide in Gaza expressed (publicly) on social media, with potentially significant impacts, including detention at the borders. Furthermore it is very difficult to know the terms of the negotiations as the talks are shrouded in secrecy. However, in May 2026, EDRi member Statewatch leaked a “revised version” of the draft Framework Agreement, revealing the direction the future deal has taken." https://edri.org/our-work/the-eu-is-about-to-sell-our-most-sensitive-data-to-the-us-for-visa-free-travel/ #EU #USA #Surveillance #Biometrics #Privacy #DataProtection

European Digital Rights (EDRi)

The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel - European Digital Rights (EDRi)

The leaked draft text suggests that the Commission significantly caved in to US’s excessive demands for unfettered information access.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"A year ago I published an article about GoToSocial, a fediverse microblogging software (think of it as an alternative to Mastodon or Sharkey) that I had been using and loving. That is still very much the case, a year and a half after I first started using it: I have a special soft spot for GoToSocial because it is the very first app I ever installed with YunoHost: the first stepping stone in my great self-hosting adventures. Therefore, no self-hosting guide for newbies would be complete without a tutorial about how to install and set-up the brilliant GoToSocial. I initially thought I would cover everything in one post, but there is so much to discuss that I will break up the tutorial in different chapters, so that the information does not get too overwhelming. This first installment will discuss: 1) picking a domain name to use 2) associating the domain name to your YunoHost installation 3) installing GoToSocial 4) doing some essential tweaks to boost security" https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-gotosocial-part-1-installation-and-set-up/ #SocialMedia #GoToSocial #Fediverse #Decentralization #SelfHosting

A newbie's guide to self-hosting: GoToSocial part 1 (installation and set-up)

Elena Rossini

A newbie's guide to self-hosting: GoToSocial part 1 (installation and set-up)

A step-by-step visual tutorial for newbies about installing and setting up the federated microblogging service GoToSocial

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"Last week’s tech earnings saw outlet after outlet claim that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s AI bets were “paying off” as their respective cloud segments reported record revenue growth, casually ignoring that none of them have broken out their AI revenues (...) To be clear, all three of these companies’ cloud platforms have many other customers paying for many other things other than generative AI services or AI GPUs, and they’ve all engaged in a combination of multiple outright price increases and changing their core subscriptions to force AI features on them as a means of boosting revenues and conning the street into believing that “AI is paying off” every time they non-consensually thrust it on their customers, framing higher prices as “better value” in a way that fucks the user to appease Wall Street. Yet the biggest con of all is that a vast majority of this revenue growth comes from the compute spend of Anthropic and OpenAI, both of whom account for the vast majority of AI revenues and overall cloud growth we’ve seen in the last few years. Every publication you read right now will tell you that AWS and Azure and Google Cloud are growing like wildfire as a result of the hundreds of billions of dollars they’ve invested in AI GPUs and data centers, when the truth is far simpler: their revenues are being buoyed by two unprofitable, unsustainable AI labs that cannot exist without being funneled tens of billions of dollars each year. And a decent chunk of that money is coming from the hyperscalers themselves. In the last seven months alone, Google has sunk $10 billion (and up to $30 billion more) into Anthropic, with Amazon funnelling $5 billion to Anthropic within a week of that investment and a total of $50 billion into OpenAI." https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-demand-bubble/ #AI #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #AIHype #BigTech #OpenAI #Anthropic

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

The AI Demand Bubble

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It's $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands. That’s it. That’s the story. They are naturally not putting it in those words, but instead talking about “gold standard science” and the “reproducibility crisis” and funding “bold inquiry” for “transformational breakthroughs”. This is all bullshit, and it’s important to realize that. Shameless hand-waving bullshit, delivered in a how-dare-you-think-otherwise manner is the defining style of the entire Trump administration. You can see it in every appointee, in every part of the executive branch, and in the pronouncements of all of Trump’s supporters. I realize that this is a simple heuristic to apply, and a very unambiguous and unflattering one, but I find it to be all too useful and all too accurate. Give it a try." https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/assault-science-funding-continues #USA #Trump #MAGA #Science #ScienceFunding

science.org

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"During our retrial earlier this year, further restrictions were placed on the scope of evidence. The jury was told that in that courtroom, Justice Johnson was the law – and in a courtroom, the law is tantamount to God. We were found guilty of criminal damage. We had never been charged with terrorism, yet Judge Johnson sentenced us as terrorists on 12 June. I am serving six years in prison and will face a further 15 years on notification once I am released, during which time I will have to regularly check in with the authorities, and will have to register any new device, bank account, telephone number, email address, vehicle, relationship and overseas travel plans with the police for the rest of their lives. The UK abolished the divine right of kings long ago; but it is alive and kicking in our legal system. The privileged few in the upper echelons are permitted to bend the law to breaking point to further the government’s political agenda. The same people are trying to rob the British public of the right to a jury of their peers by blaming jury trials for our backlogged court systems. It is not juries that are the problem; it is our courts that are beleaguered by pressure from those in Parliament, the intelligence services and the police. The Home Office has interfered with our case again and again in a bid to shore up its proscription of Palestine Action by using us as political scapegoats. Yet, for his work in defending me, my barrister may be disbarred and potentially face prison time himself." https://www.opendemocracy.net/palestine-action-filton-24-charlotte-head-rajiv-menon-kc-contempt-of-court-judge-johnson/ #UK #PalestineAction #Activism #RuleOfLaw #Justice #Genocide #Israel #Palestine

I was sentenced as a terrorist. Now my barrister is on trial for defending me

openDemocracy

I was sentenced as a terrorist. Now my barrister is on trial for defending me

My lawyer faces jail over a speech to jurors – a first in English history – as state seeks to silence Palestine solidarity

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

The US is definitely a very awkward society. Instead of restricting the personal ownership of guns, they implement mechanisms for total surveillance.. "Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scanning system, at multiple LGBTQ+ bars in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. Much of the attention has focused on reports that the system photographs patrons as they enter venues and questions about whether those images are used for facial recognition. A broader privacy concern also deserves scrutiny. For years, PatronScan has marketed itself not just as an ID-verification tool, but as a system that allows bars and clubs to identify patrons, keep records about them, and share information across venues. As one news article published in 2019 documented, PatronScan built a network that allowed participating bars to flag patrons and share information about them with other establishments. And in California, it’s not at all clear how PatronScan’s business model of scanning IDs and sharing the information from those scans with other bars comports with the law. California’s ID privacy law, which was amended in 2018 to add ID “scans,” states that no businesses shall “retain or use” any information from a scanned ID card except for limited purposes such as to verify age, comply with a legal requirement, or prevent fraud. A venue cannot claim to be a safe space while feeding its patrons’ data to a third party database." #USA #California #Surveillance #PatronScan #FacialRecognition #Privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/why-are-gay-bars-building-databases-their-patrons

eff.org

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"The headlines surrounding DeepSeek, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, Alibaba’s Qwen family of models, Tencent’s Hunyuan, Zhipu AI and MiniMax are often treated as separate stories. They are anything but. Viewed collectively, they reveal something far more consequential than the emergence of several successful Chinese AI companies. They demonstrate that China has cultivated a frontier AI ecosystem capable of repeatedly producing world-class capabilities across multiple firms. Whether those advances emerge through original innovation, engineering optimization, open-weight collaboration, or from distillation of U.S. models is increasingly beside the point. The larger strategic reality is that they are occurring across an ecosystem, while the U.S. continues to evaluate them one company at a time and often responds as though each breakthrough were an isolated event rather than evidence of a broader structural transformation. Over the past several years, the U.S. has consistently underestimated China’s commitment to long-term technological advancement and its ability to translate domestic industrial strategy into global competitive advantage. Whether the issue was rare earths, electric vehicles, robotics, semiconductors, or artificial intelligence, the analytical mistake has remained remarkably consistent. Washington has tended to evaluate China’s progress company by company and product by product, often dismissing each advance as exceptional or unsustainable, while Beijing has pursued a patient strategy designed to cultivate the conditions under which an entire ecosystem could innovate and deploy simultaneously. It is equally important to recognize that China’s plans and long-term trajectory toward becoming a technology superpower were established years before the Biden administration’s technology restrictions." https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/02/ai-model-competition-us-china.html #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #China #USA

CNBC

Op-ed: The U.S. lead over China in AI is all but gone. We need a change in national strategy

AI debate in recent years has centered on whether the U.S. can develop a strategy capable of preserving an edge over China. The answer isn't looking positive.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

Mais cenários típicos de uma das cidades com maior qualidade de vida do mundo (Amesterdão)

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"TotalEnergies will insist little has shifted: the court has only ordered it to revise its vigilance plan within six months to account for Scope 3 emissions. But the legal terrain has moved. The question is no longer whether TotalEnergies files a compliant climate report. Now, it can be questioned on whether it is genuinely preventing the risks it creates. Climate breakdown is not a natural disaster. It is a business model that privatises profit and socialises cost. Right now, households across Europe are choosing between food and energy bills while fossil-fuel companies book record returns. The Paris ruling joins a growing body of climate litigation worldwide that is finally naming who is responsible for the crisis. What it demands now is political follow-through: windfall taxes, polluter-pays legislation, an end to fossil fuel subsidies, and guaranteed access to affordable clean energy." https://euobserver.com/226432/as-europe-swelters-paris-judges-say-consumers-arent-to-blame-totalenergies-is #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #TotalEnergies #EU #France #Paris #Fossilfuels

EUobserver

As Europe swelters, Paris judges say consumers aren’t to blame — TotalEnergies is

A Paris judicial tribunal has just ruled on a case brought against TotalEnergies by environmental groups and the City of Paris. The judgment does not halt the company's fossil-fuel expansion. But it does something the industry has spent half a century resisting: it holds TotalEnergies legally responsible not just for the emissions from its operations, but for the emissions produced when the oil and gas it sells are ultimately burned.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"The social media giant Meta partnered with controversial TV personality and cosmetics mogul Kylie Jenner for the design and marketing of an “entry-level” line of its widely criticized camera glasses late last month. The collaborative campaign quickly provoked a wave of public backlash over unresolved concerns about privacy, consent, and personal safety as surveillance technology rapidly evolves. Based in the United Kingdom, the class-based activism group Everyone Hates Elon (EHE) visualized those concerns in a lenticular spoof ad that, based on where a viewer is standing, flips between a branded marketing photo of Jenner wearing a pair of Meta glasses and a black-and-white image showing a skeletal, X-ray version of her with the tagline “We’re always watching.” The transformation element and the poster design appear to reference the politically charged sci-fi film They Live (1988), in which the main character encounters a pair of sunglasses that not only expose the extractive messaging of advertisements but reveal that humanity is being controlled, subdued, and exploited by a secret population of aliens masquerading as people. In the film, it’s later revealed that some humans have accepted monetary bribes to collaborate with the aliens." https://hyperallergic.com/guerrilla-london-bus-ads-mock-kylie-jenners-meta-glasses-campaign/ #Meta #Rayban #SmartGlasses #Surveillance #Artivism #Privacy

Guerrilla London Bus Ads Mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta Glasses Campaign

Hyperallergic

Guerrilla London Bus Ads Mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta Glasses Campaign

“Billionaires could fund cures for cancer — so why are they funding glasses for perverts instead?" asked the protest group Everyone Hates Elon.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"Concern about the influence of the United States is nothing new in Canadian politics. Left-wing activists have long criticized the country as little more than a vassal of the United States, especially since the original North American Free Trade Agreement. But defending Canada’s sovereignty in the 21st century will require much more than increased military spending and trade diversification. It requires the government to get serious about digital sovereignty. Until Canada gets off U.S. tech platforms and services, the government, major companies, and even much of the modern military hardware the government is procuring from the United States is in jeopardy. The U.S. government can request Canadian data stored in the servers of U.S. cloud companies, it has weaponized our use of those services to expand its surveillance apparatus, and it can even suspend access to any of those services at a moment’s notice. The libertarian framing of the internet as a place of freedom and expression was a potent mask for a project U.S. lawmakers always understood was imperial in nature: to defend its government’s power and geopolitical position. Now it has countries around the world exactly where it wants them. They have to choose: will they act quickly to take back that power, or accept the subservient position the United States has designed for them?" https://disconnect.blog/global-dependence-on-us-tech-was-always-the-plan/ #USA #SiliconValley #DigitalSovereignty #TechnologicalDependency #Trump #Imperialism

Global dependence on US tech was always the plan

Disconnect

Global dependence on US tech was always the plan

The imperial project of Silicon Valley and the US government is out in the open. Countries need to reclaim their sovereignty.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"A small town in southern Finland has turned to the world’s largest commercial sand battery to fix what many see as the most critical problem facing renewable energy: intermittency. Standing at 13 meters tall and 15 meters wide, the eye-catching facility uses 2,000 metric tons of crushed soapstone to store clean energy in the form of heat to provide 100 megawatt-hours of thermal energy. That’s enough to provide the 5,000 residents of Pornainen with nearly one month of heat demand through the summer — and roughly one week of demand in the winter. Commissioned by Finnish district heating company Loviisan Lämpö and developed by Polar Night Energy, the giant sand battery launched last year as part of a push to introduce a flexible heat production technology and reduce carbon emissions generated by the local district heating network. Polar Night Energy said the project is estimated to have slashed greenhouse gas emissions from the heating network by almost 70% and reduced the use of wood chips by about 60%. An existing wood-chip power plant remains in operation as a backup and peak-load facility. Tommi Eronen, CEO of Polar Night Energy, said Pornainen had previously relied on burning oil and wood chips for its heating needs — but the town’s sand battery was now able to provide combustion-free heating for the majority of the year." https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/25/finland-sand-battery-renewable-energy-storage.html #EU #Finland #RenewableEnergy #Batteries

CNBC

Finland’s radical answer to renewable energy’s biggest headache: The world’s largest sand battery

A small Finnish town has turned to the world's largest commercial sand battery to tackle a major hurdle in the energy transition: intermittency.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

“The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick’s attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his phone. The software feature allows the device owner to set a passcode that deliberately wipes the contents of that device if entered instead of the user’s unlock passcode. Tunick’s case also raises ongoing questions about what constitutional rights can be invoked at the border, which the U.S. government has long asserted is not U.S. soil until a person is authorized to enter. The government’s indictment, which contains a typo (“Untied States Code”), accuses Tunick of allegedly providing a passcode to border agents that caused the phone to “delete the digital contents,” prior to the device being seized.” https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/us-accuses-american-of-allegedly-wiping-his-phone-using-a-duress-password-during-border-search #USA #PoliceState #BorderProtection #Surveillance #GrapheneOS

techcrunch.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

“As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. “The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.” In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text. As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which could result in “model collapse,” a process by which AI models that are trained on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors. The article also notes that book authors who object to their writing being scraped for training purposes can now easily poison AI models by producing writing designed to manipulate and sabotage the resulting AI models.” https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/ #AI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #Books #BigTech #ModelCollapse

404media.co

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"As I’ve argued before, I think Haidt’s book has done exactly what Gray was afraid it might do – namely, it has played into and exacerbated a moral panic over smartphones and social media and their alleged impact on the emotional and psychological wellbeing of teenagers. The architect of the Australian social-media age-gating law, South Australian premier Peter Malinouskas, described in an interview how his wife had recommended Haidt’s Anxious Generation to him, and how after reading it he had resolved to take action. His wife “put the book down on her lap and turned to me and said you’ve really got to do something about this,” he said. “And then I stopped and thought about it and thought maybe we actually can.” So he introduced state-level legislation hoping it could win federal support. It did, and since then the UK has passed a new law it says was modeled on the Australian one (modeled so closely that it too offered virtually no evidence that such a law was necessary), and Canada is also considering one. As a journalist who once worked for the Columbia Journalism Review, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that one of the biggest proponents of Jonathan Haidt’s views about cellphones and social media and their impact on the wellbeing of teenagers has been the media." https://mathewingram.com/work/2026/07/16/kids-need-to-explore-the-world-and-that-includes-social-media/ #SocialMedia #PlayTime #MentalHealth #MoralPanic #Censorship #Fascism

mathewingram.com

Kids need to explore the world and that includes social media

A prominent psychologist argues that children should be free to explore the world they are going to have to live in, and that includes the internet and social media, which means no age-gating laws

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"Police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people, not cars, using searches such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat,” “person on skateboard,” and “person wearing orange vest and construction hat,” according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Sometimes searches reference a target’s race or signs of their political affiliation. The searches highlight that while most people associate Flock cameras with scanning license plates and tracking vehicles, some of the cameras are also capable of following the movements of particular people or groups of people. Flock’s nationwide network of cameras lets police officers in one state search for a vehicle across many other states at once; the people searches do a similar thing, typically on a smaller scale, sometimes querying many hundreds of cameras at once. These are called “FreeForm” searches, and allow cops to use Flock’s system as though they would use a search engine, with Flock’s AI and image recognition interpreting what footage and which people are relevant to a police officer’s search." https://www.404media.co/how-cops-use-flock-to-track-people-not-cars/ #USA #Surveillance #Flock #Privacy

How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars

404 Media

How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars

Cops have used Flock's FreeForm search feature to look for people with tattoos and wearing specific sport shirts, and searches sometimes include the target's race, according to data reviewed by 404 Media.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"The EV charging industry has well-established security standards. OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) provides clear guidelines for securing the communication channel between EV Chargers and the Charging Station Management System (CSMS): use VPNs or Private APNs, implement OCPP Security Profile 2 or higher, enforce TLS mutual authentication etc. When properly configured, these measures make it significantly harder for threat actors to compromise the management channel. But what about the other side of the charger? While the industry has focused on securing the backend communication, the attack surface exposed through the CCS2 charging plug remains largely untested. Every time an EV connects to a charger, it establishes an IP network over Power Line Communication (PLC). This network was designed for V2G protocols. But we also discovered other EV charger operating system services listening on these network interfaces. From a traditional IT security perspective, think of this attack vector as analogous to an attacker having a port in the corporate LAN. The scenario is identical, except the port isn't an RJ45 jack in the office, it's a CCS2 connector in a parking lot. This has profound implications: compromised EV chargers can serve as a foothold into CPO (Charge Point Operator) private networks. Since chargers often connect to backend systems via VPN or Private APN infrastructure, an attacker with access to a charger could potentially pivot to back-office systems, billing platforms, or other critical infrastructure." https://www.saiflow.com/blog/the-hidden-ccs2-attack-surface-on-ev-chargers #CyberSecurity #OCPP #EVs #CCS2

saiflow.com

The Hidden CCS2 Attack Surface on EV Chargers

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

LoL: "A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a ⁠global conference in Brazil ⁠this week, causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online. Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in ⁠Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the state department’s new health agreements. A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included ⁠in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company said it was investigating the report. The state ‌department said it took “full responsibility” ‌for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed ‌the slide deck before the event." https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/30/government-map-mislabels-african-countries?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other #USA #Africa #Geography #Imperialism #Neocolonialism

theguardian.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"The episode started while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity prowess of an agent powered by two of OpenAI’s most advanced models, GPT‑5.6 Sol and an unreleased model OpenAI has described as “even more capable.” By that point, there were already indications of strange behavior from OpenAI’s technology, according to three sources. In one case, an agent left notes apparently for future versions of itself, according to three people familiar with the matter. The ‌notes, found in ⁠a part of OpenAI's infrastructure, laid out instructions for how agents could free themselves from OpenAI’s internal constraints, the people said. Earlier tests of the models yielded cases in which monitoring systems had been disconnected, one of the people said. Reuters could not establish if these incidents were linked to the rogue agent that began escaping on July 9 and attacked Hugging Face on July 11. Two people familiar with the matter said that it was not until after Thursday, July 16, when Hugging Face published a blog post, saying it had been hacked by “an autonomous AI agent system,” that OpenAI realized its own agent was responsible. That meant at least a week elapsed between when the model first exhibited signs of troubling behavior and OpenAI’s realization that it was responsible for the hack." https://www.reuters.com/business/its-ai-agent-spent-days-hacking-company-sources-say-openai-did-not-notice-week-2026-07-24/ #CyberSecurity #AI #AIAgents #AgenticAI #OpenAI #HuggingFace

reuters.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer’s plans for digital ID cards in a “reset of priorities” when he enters Downing Street on Monday. The new Labour leader plans to redirect the resources earmarked for the scheme towards tackling the cost of living, his team indicated on Saturday. The Guardian understands the proposals are being outlined in an attempt to distance the incoming prime minister from unpopular choices made by his predecessor. A petition opposing the introduction of digital ID cards when it was announced last year attracted about 3m signatures. “One of the first things this government will do is put its focus where people need it right now: creating breathing space and delivering change they can feel in their everyday lives,” Burnham’s spokesperson said. “That means all the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it’s most needed, such as helping with the cost of living." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/18/burnham-to-scrap-starmers-digital-id-scheme-in-reset-of-priorities #UK #DigitalID #Surveillance #Privacy #Burnham

theguardian.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"Technology is not neutral, but neither is it an autonomous agent. Under capitalism, machinery appears as capital’s power over labor, not as human freedom. The same productive forces can become liberatory only when social relations change. Automation intensifies contradictions; it does not resolve them on its own." https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistsForAI/comments/1qwg9n7/marx_on_productive_technology_a_short_faq_with/ #AI #Automation #Capitalism #Marx #AntiAntiAI

Marx on Productive Technology: A Short FAQ (with primary sources)

Salty_Country6835

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pay data broker giant Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases of personal data — which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information — to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigate what it describes as “voters fraud” and immigration fraud, according to procurement documents reviewed by 404 Media. The document says Thomson Reuters is able to let ICE continuously monitor millions of people and entities of interest. The news comes after President Trump held a conspiracy-laden and unhinged press conference about election security on Thursday, setting the stage for potentially undermining the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections. It also follows ICE fatally shooting 2 people in a week. “Due to ICE’s re-prioritized mission, there is need for this data to be readily accessible to support the presidential mandate of the identification of Voters Fraud, Immigration Fraud and National Security,” the procurement document reads. “This data specifically validates and verifies school, benefit, immigration and other eligibility requirements.”” https://www.404media.co/ice-to-pay-thomson-reuters-125-million-to-find-voter-fraud/ #USA #ICE #DataBrokers #ThomsonReuters #Trump #Surveillance #Privacy #Immigration

ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125 Million to Find ‘Voter Fraud’

404 Media

ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125 Million to Find ‘Voter Fraud’

A new procurement record says ICE wants access to personal data, including names, Social Security numbers, and ethnicity, to investigate in part what the agency calls “voters fraud.” It also plans to use the data to investigate immigration fraud.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"Clinicians’ reluctance around using Palantir’s software is less ideological – although some object on this basis, too – and more practical: many trusts say that the FDP is slower and less effective than their existing technology. NHS analysts say it can take five minutes or more to run a basic query. As NHS Greater Manchester’s chief data officer told the health select committee last month: “We can match anything that the Palantir FDP can do.” Palantir says the FDP could not be compared “like for like” with other systems because of the “additional security” embedded in it. In private briefings we obtained, senior NHS leaders went even further, complaining that Palantir’s software has a “poor user experience”. Kanthan Theivendran, an orthopaedic surgeon at a trust in Birmingham, stopped using Palantir’s flagship waiting-list app because he couldn’t edit the data: “It’s just a waste of time,” he told us. The true cost of Palantir’s FDP is much greater than £330m. Individual trusts have been given as much as £3m each to encourage implementation. Consultancy giant KPMG was even given an £8.5m contract to push the FDP across the health service. Among the biggest challenges is Palantir’s own software. Foundry is a proprietary product. Some NHS data analysts told us that all their work on the FDP would be lost if they no longer had access to Palantir’s platform. This raises concerns over what many experts call “vendor lock in”." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/15/palantir-british-state-political-access-us-tech-firm-nhs #UK #NHS #Palantir #VendorLockIn #BigTech

theguardian.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is reportedly ending its deal with Flock Safety, a surveillance company that helps law enforcement track vehicles using thousands of its license plate cameras placed across the United States. A senior LAPD official told news outlets, first reported by ABC7 and the Los Angeles Times, that the police department would allow its three-year contract with Flock to expire when it ends on Saturday. The department cited “serious concerns” around civil liberties and privacy. Flock’s cameras are operated by the Atlanta, Georgia-based company and not the LAPD. “This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras,” LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas was quoted as saying. “The LAPD had to make a difficult decision, in this case discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.” A spokesperson for the LAPD did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch over the weekend, and it’s unclear if Flock’s cameras will continue recording in absence of an active contract. According to ABC7, the police department is seeking new language in its contract addressing privacy and data storage concerns." https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/lapd-lets-contract-with-surveillance-giant-flock-expire-citing-serious-concerns-over-civil-liberties-and-privacy/ #USA #LA #LosAngeles #Flock #LAPD #Privacy #Surveillance #CivilLiberties

TechCrunch

LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire, citing 'serious concerns' over civil liberties and privacy | TechCrunch

The LAPD, one of Flock's biggest government customers, is ending its contract with the company citing civil liberties concerns.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"Microsoft has introduced new limits to how much its engineers can spend on AI tools at work and told employees that maximizing AI use internally is not the company’s goal. This makes Microsoft one of the last major companies to rein in its employees’ expensive AI use. Scaling back maximalist AI use, or what some companies have called “tokenmaxxing,” is a trend we’ve covered in recent months as the price for using AI has increased while not always delivering commensurate productivity gains. “As we accelerate our use of GitHub Copilot to deliver on our goals, we all need to be aware of how we consume tokens,” Jay Parikh, an executive vice president at Microsoft said in an email to Microsoft employees. GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and GitHub Copilot is an AI coding tool. “Tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for. I want all of us focused on maximizing outcomes that move the needle for our customers and our business.” “As such, we are updating our internal guidance and managing token spend with the same discipline we apply to every other critical resource,” Parikh said in the email." https://www.404media.co/microsoft-tells-engineers-tokenmaxxing-is-not-what-we-are-optimizing-for/ #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Microsoft #BigTech #TokenMaxxing #Copilot

404media.co

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"A senior judge has accused the Home Office of relying on “AI hallucinated” information to refuse an asylum claim. The case relates to a Moroccan woman and her child who fled her country after experiencing forced underage marriage and extreme violence, including rape. The woman claimed asylum on the basis of fears that she would be killed by her husband: a powerful, previously convicted criminal. The Home Office refused her case, citing evidence from a supposedly independent and authoritative document known as a country policy information note (CPIN), which they said confirmed that Morocco would be safe for her. But the document could not be found, although its existence was relied upon by a judge who rejected her appeal against the Home Office’s refusal decision in an immigration court known as the first-tier tribunal." https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/28/home-office-used-ai-hallucinated-information-to-refuse-asylum-claim-judge-suggests #UK #AI #GenerativeAI #Hallucinations #AsylumSeekers #HomeOffice

theguardian.com

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

Once again in Amsterdam / Mais uma vez em Amesterdão I think I will never get tired of this city. It's so laid down but at time so dynamic! / Acho que nunca me irei cansar desa cidade. É tão tranquila mas ao mesmo tempo tão dinâmica 😃!

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"In a video my friend’s dog is laying on her back, her little paws in the air, while my friend rubs the dog’s chest. You can see most of the dog — who I’m not naming for very important privacy reasons — from her head to her belly. On closer inspection, you’ll notice the picture includes some dog nipples. Apple’s iMessage thought this video was so inappropriate that it flagged the video as potentially containing nudity and blurred it. When someone else received the video over iMessage, the app displayed the message “This may be sensitive.” They had to purposefully tap to reveal the video of a dog laying on her back being petted. This, obviously, is not the intended use case for iMessage’s nudity detection features. They are designed to let people protect themselves against receiving unwanted or unsolicited nude photos and videos. But the case of my friend’s dog shows how this feature can sometimes misclassify videos." https://www.404media.co/apples-imessage-scanning-flagged-a-video-of-my-friends-dog-as-nudity/ #Apple #iMessage #iOS #Censorship

Apple’s iMessage Scanning Flagged a Video of My Friend's Dog as Nudity

404 Media

Apple’s iMessage Scanning Flagged a Video of My Friend's Dog as Nudity

Apple’s Sensitive Content Warning is supposed to protect users from unwanted nude images. It accidentally blurred my friend’s dog video.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"“More and more, I was getting questions about, ‘How do I turn this [AI] stuff off? Why is it trying to write my emails for me? Why is it trying to summarize my one-sentence email that I can easily read?’” Cyrus said. “I just decided that with so much media hype out there about AI products, it would be a good opportunity to teach people about the basics of what is happening when you’re using this technology, and then getting into how to turn it off if you don’t want to use it.” Usually, Cyrus’ classes like Intro to Computers get about a dozen attendees. But so many people expressed interest in her first Avoiding AI workshop that she had to cut off registration at 30 people, open a waitlist, and share the workshop on Zoom. Including the livestream, about 70 people attended each of Cyrus’ first two workshops. When Bailey followed Cyrus’ lead to host a workshop in Philadelphia, the reception was similarly unprecedented. The library’s Instagram post about the “Avoiding AI” event got over 2,000 likes and 220 shares, whereas most of the library’s posts don’t get more than a few dozen likes. He scheduled a second program because the first got too many registrations." https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/25/librarians-are-hosting-viral-avoiding-ai-workshops-for-people-who-are-fed-up-with-big-tech/ #AI #GenerativeAI #AntiAI #DigitalLiteracy #AILIteracy

TechCrunch

Librarians are hosting viral 'Avoiding AI' workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech | TechCrunch

At libraries around the country, "Avoiding AI" workshops have elicited unprecedented demand.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"Spur argues the problem is not that residential proxy networks exist, but rather that they are being embedded at scale in devices that most consumers do not think of as computers and are not equipped to audit. “A one-time consent prompt buried in a TV app is not a substitute for meaningful transparency, ongoing control, and platform oversight,” Spur’s Trevor Sutter wrote. “The risk is amplified when consent comes from individuals within the household who use the device but shouldn’t give consent, such as minors.” LG’s announcement that it is culling residential proxy SDKs from its app store is welcome news, but the company recently came under fire for another questionable partnership: Pimping McAfee security products via software drivers included in its high-end LCD monitors. Earlier this week, the Youtube channel Gamers Nexus showed that certain LG LCD monitors will automatically install an app that promotes paid McAfee antivirus subscriptions, and that the app arrives through Windows Update without an approval prompt." https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/07/lg-to-ban-residential-proxies-from-smart-tv-apps/ #CyberSecurity #LG #ResidentialProxies #SmartTV

krebsonsecurity.com

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps – Krebs on Security

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

“Claude is exposing a wealth of users’ chats and creations in Google search results, meaning anyone can dig through conversations or other material that people used Claude to make but may not have realized were publicly available for strangers to see. The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, notes on meetings, and a dashboard someone made apparently to analyze medical billing data. Exposed chats reportedly include private cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal information like peoples’ addresses Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Like other chatbots, Claude lets people share their conversations with others by creating a publicly accessible link of the chat. People may do this to send the full text of a conversation to their friends or coworkers in a group chat, for example. But they may not realize Google is also surfacing these links in search results, making them available to essentially anyone.” https://www.404media.co/tons-of-peoples-claude-chats-and-creations-are-exposed-on-google #AI #GenerativeAI #Anthropic #Claude #DataProtection #Privacy #Google

404media.co

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"The New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) looked at ways to arm quadcopter drones with weapons, according to a draft version of its drone manual shared with 404 Media. A draft version of the manual, which was live on the NOPD website in June, said that the department’s drones could only be equipped with weapons with written approval from the Superintendent of Police. The current version, live as of July 1, has different language: “The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons or hazardous materials of any kind,” referring to small Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones. According to the NOPD, the operations manual it published to the internet with the rules for weaponized drones was an early draft. “The manual published on July 1 is the current published version of the policy. Earlier versions were draft versions that were presented for review before adoption of the current policy,” NOPD told 404 media. “NOPD has made it clear we are not and will not be equipping drones with weapons or other hazardous materials.” NOPD didn’t answer follow-up questions about how or why the draft version of the manual was published. But the publication of a police drone manual that opens the door for weaponized quadcopters is important, and comes as drone companies and police flirt with the idea of putting weapons on their drones." https://www.404media.co/new-orleans-cops-published-policy-document-allowing-weaponized-drones/ #USA #NewOrleans #PoliceState #DronePolicing

New Orleans Cops Published Policy Document Allowing Weaponized Drones

404 Media

New Orleans Cops Published Policy Document Allowing Weaponized Drones

Cops and drone companies seem increasingly eager to put weapons on their drones.

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

· 2mo ago

"After eight years of litigation, Europe’s highest court has dismissed Google’s appeal, upholding the European Commission’s finding that Google used its control over Android to make its own search engine harder to avoid. But while that legal battle focused on contracts and market dominance, Google is now looking to shape how trust is established across the Android ecosystem. On July 2, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its final judgment in the Google Android antitrust case. The ruling made the penalty imposed by the General Court definitive. One of the most consequential technology competition disputes of the past decade, the case examined whether Google broke the law by using contractual restrictions, including anti-forking agreements, revenue-sharing arrangements, and tying practices, to preserve its dominance over the Android ecosystem and mobile search. The Court dismissed Google's appeal. Yet over these same eight years, Google has shifted how it maintains gatekeeper control. The latest iteration is the company's developer verification system: starting in September 2026, developers worldwide who wish to distribute apps to certified Android devices will be required to agree to it." https://www.techpolicy.press/google-android-antitrust-ruling-shows-the-next-battle-is-over-who-controls-trust/ #Google #EU #Android #Antitrust #Oligopolies #BigTech

Google Android Antitrust Ruling Shows the Next Battle is Over Who Controls Trust

Tech Policy Press

Google Android Antitrust Ruling Shows the Next Battle is Over Who Controls Trust

Europe's top court upheld Google's Android antitrust penalty, but the bigger battle may now be over who governs trust in the Android ecosystem.