Leftovers

• Wouter Groeneveld ☛ The Internet Is No Longer A Safe Haven

  In case that wasn’t yet clear: I hate having to deal with this. It’s a waste of time, doesn’t hold back the next attack coming from another range, and intervening always happens too late. But worst of all, semi-random fire fighting is just one big mood killer. I just know this won’t be enough. Having a robust anti attacker system in place might increase the odds but that means either resorting to hand cannons like Anubis or moving the entire hosting to CloudFlare that will do it for me. But I don’t want to fiddle with even more moving components and configuration, nor do I want to route my visitors through tracking-enabled USA servers.

• the nilenso blog ☛ Fight context rot with context observability

  But we need to detect and diagnose these kinds of issues before we can solve for them. Hrm. If only we had a tool that dealt well with large unstructured text, segment and classify it, and also detect these issues.

• Idiomdrottning ☛ 25 years of cloister life

  I saw a docu about a nun who’d spent 25 years in a Carmel cloister. Which for Sweden is unusual. Obv I was fishing for info about digital minimalism but the docu didn’t deliver what I wanted in that regard. She says at one point “We don’t have radio, TV, or newspapers, and we use internet very sparingly”. I was like “Internet?! Deets please! Exactly how many times a day do you refresh Antenna or sync your newsgroups? What’s your IRC bouncer, how’s your milter pipeline?” to no avail.

• Air Force Times ☛ Research on veterans is broken. This tool aims to fix it.

  In the last two years, the National Veterans’ Training Institute has reported that one-third of veteran job seekers are underemployed; the Journal of Veterans Studies has found 10% of post-9/11 veterans report underemployment; and the Raymond A. Mason School of Business has cited veteran underemployment as high as 60%.

• Rolling Stone ☛ Pierre Robert, Voice of Philadelphia Rock Radio, Dead at 70

  “What made him so great is that he truly cared about the music,” the band the Offspring wrote about Robert on social media. “He was first and foremost a music fan, and his listeners knew it, because they saw him in the pit with them. Just as we were honored to see him in the pit at our shows.”

• The Philadelphia Inquirer ☛ WMMR-FM host Pierre Robert has died

  “Pierre’s voice has been woven into the fabric of Philadelphia for more than 40 years,” the duo said in a statement. “WMMR was his pulpit, and he preached the gospel of rock n’ roll, and gave us all common ground to dance on.”

• Ruben Schade ☛ Feedback on what to call this site

  I’m leaning towards weblog then. It has a bit of nostalgic charm, yet still contains the word blog.

• MB ☛ Why a Daily Recap? - jarunmb.com

  I decided, instead of 2 sentences, I would write down 3 things that happened that day. Nothing earth shattering or profound, just things that I did, saw, or thought. Some core parameters for the post: [...]

• Baldur Bjarnason ☛ You need to use the tools of the job you've chosen to do

  This isn’t surprising because your average Wired editor, historically, wouldn’t know journalistic ethics if it walked up to them and hit them in the face with a shovel. (A “smart” shovel, obviously. The kind with bluetooth that only works half the time.) Wired has been one of the more consistent cheerleaders of the tech apocalypse over the years and their recent turn towards criticising the current US administration doesn’t even come close to making up for it.

• Matthew Weber ☛ Pictures In Blogging

  The thing is, though, I think images can add a lot of spice to your blog post. Not every post needs one, but adding them when they make sense can really add a lot of context to what you’re trying to say. People who may be more visual in their retention may remember your words longer if they have an actual image to go along with it. Yes, it adds overhead to your page’s load time, and yes adding them can be a pain, but I think they can really make a difference.

• Luigi Mozzillo ☛ Shared digital detox

  So, I ask you: what reading device do you usually use (excluding books and e-readers)? How do you listen to podcasts, if at all? Do you channel everything to the “big” device (Mac or PC), or do you have other devices you devote more attention to (like a tablet or similar)?

• Science

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Scientists create new type of semiconductor that holds superconducting promise

    In a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, an international team of scientists reports producing a form of germanium that is superconducting—able to conduct electricity with zero resistance, which allows currents to flow indefinitely without energy loss, resulting in greater operational speed that requires less energy.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: AI and the Power of Nonuniform Circuits

    First, some background. Circuit complexity gives a different, more combinatorial, way to look at computation. Instead of viewing algorithms as step-by-step programs, circuit complexity captures computation as fixed hardware, gates wired to compute a function of their inputs.

  • Artyom Bologov ☛ Making Sense of Lambda Calculus 6: Recurring Problems

    We know how to work with primitive data, like numbers and booleans. We also know how to handle aggregate data, like lists and monads. What’s missing is a way to act on them. Algorithms. The most obvious (to a Lisper like me, at least) class of algorithms is recursion. Let’s go over the ways recursion works in Lambda Calculus. And how to use it without destroying your computer.

  • The Register UK ☛ Nvidia will help build 7 AI supercomputers for for DoE

    Solstice and Equinox won't just be serving up more compute power for scientific experiments at Argonne, though; they're also going to be part of the lab's drive "to develop agentic scientists," Nvidia noted. While not providing much in the way of details as to what that means for scientific research at the lab, Nvidia noted that the goal of introducing agentic AI to DoE scientific research was focused on "boosting R&D productivity and accelerating discovery enabled by public research dollars within a decade."

• Career/Education

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Frank Chimero

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Chimero, whose blog can be found at frankchimero.com.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Finnish undergrads outperform their US counterparts in critical thinking skills upon entry to higher education

    Finnish undergraduate students enter education with stronger critical thinking and argumentation skills than their U.S. counterparts. In both countries, students finishing undergraduate education demonstrate significantly better critical thinking skills than students entering education, and by the time students finish undergraduate education, no statistically significant difference between the countries was found.

  • Ava ☛ you radiate knowledge | ava's blog

    You don’t need to know it all, especially not by heart. We manage all of this by each researching and advancing and sharing so no one has to reinvent the wheel by themselves. You just need to know where to find the documents, the presentations, the papers and articles of the people who do know, and you need to know who to ask, who’s fitting for this sort of topic.

    And you too radiate knowledge! I got so much secondhand knowledge just from people sharing about their day - their hobby, their work, their special interest. Things I never would have looked for or cared to ask otherwise.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ As smart as a PhD

    You know, Joe, who has a PhD and has become a full professor at Prestigious University… well… it is likely that Joe has been working week-ends and nights for years. Joe is excessively well connected. Joe was always smarter than anyone else in his classes. Joe can sit down and write a great 20-page scientific essay without ChatGPT and without much effort. Joe can navigate politics better than most.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Climate literacy in crisis: Why understanding climate science matters now more than ever

    The upside is the biggest global societal problem of our time, climate change, has become a part of the broader culture. The vast majority of the world agrees that something must be done to mitigate global warming – 69% of the world population is willing to contribute 1% of their income to climate mitigation, and 89% demand climate action from their governments and politicians. 62% of Americans feel a personal duty to reduce the effects of climate change.

    However, the downside is that most lack a sufficient foundation in the science of climate change which creates misconceptions, a lack of ability to discern pseudoscience, and an ill-founded surety about the realities of global warming.

  • [Old] NISO ☛ Internet Archive Adding Digitized Previews of Books to Wikipedia

    The Internet Archive has announced its intention to link references from 130,000 Wikipedia citations to 50,000 digitized Internet Archive books. Users will be able to check cited sources in Wikipedia entries by following links to specific pages in those digitized volumes, complete with the appropriate context of a limited number of surrounding pages. If critical to the information task, users will be permitted to borrow copies of the books through the IA's controlled digital lending practice.

  • [Old] PC Mag ☛ The Internet Archive Is Linking Digital Books to Wikipedia Citations

    50,000 books are now linked to 130,000 references on Wikipedia. Clicking the page citation in a Wikipedia article will send you to the equivalent page inside a digital version of the book.

• Hardware

  • Matt Birchler ☛ My iPhone Air secret

    Yes, it’s lighter, but it digs into my finger far more than I expected, and there are two reasons for this, as far as I can tell.

    First, even though the total weight is lower, that weight is concentrated on a smaller contact point on my finger. The pressure per square inch is actually higher, despite less overall mass in the phone.

    Second, the bottom edge is a problem. Because the Air still needs all the standard cutouts (USB-C port, grilles, microphone, screws), nearly every part of the bottom edge is sharper, more jagged, and more uneven.

  • Futurism ☛ Lock Company Sues Man Who Picked Its Lock, Gets Horribly Humiliated

    A month after Proven issued its challenge, the YouTuber released a simple video that shows him watch a few seconds of the promo clip while kicking his feet and sipping on a juice box. Then he films himself silently rolling up to the lock and shimming it in seconds with a hunk from a can of the water brand Liquid Death.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Americans Are Abandoning the Communal Meal

    Consuming food all by oneself is an anomaly in the history of human civilization, a deviation from millennia of tradition. And more and more Americans are doing it.

  • International Business Times ☛ When Do Clocks Go Back in the US 2025? Daylight Savings Ends 2 November — But Many Want It Gone for Good

    Research has linked the biannual time change to higher risks of heart attacks, strokes, and sleep disturbances. The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that abrupt changes in sleep patterns can affect heart rhythm, mood, and alertness.

    In 2023, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine formed a coalition to advocate for permanent standard time across the US, joined by the American Medical Association and National Sleep Foundation. They specifically advocate for permanent standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology by synchronising the body clock with the natural rising and setting of the sun.

    A 2025 Stanford study found that switching to permanent standard time could reduce cases of obesity by 2.6 million and stroke by 300,000 in the continental US. Permanent daylight saving time also reduced cases, but to a lesser extent.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Too Cruel Too Soon

    Federal funding for SNAP, the nutritional aid program still often referred to as food stamps, ends tonight. This will have catastrophic impacts on 42 million Americans, the great majority of them children, elderly or disabled.

  • CBC ☛ Why some farmers are turning old grain bins into guest houses

    Marr has two children in their 30s and she says she wants to help ensure that the ranch can be passed on, while also being big enough for both of them to make a living with their families.

    "Just another way to stay in this area and keep it viable." said Marr.

  • The Independent UK ☛ The herb linked to reduced inflammation, lower anxiety, and reduced blood sugar

    But, eating cilantro can provide you with some surprising health benefits. For one, including it in your diet can help to reduce inflammation that may result in autoimmune, neurodegenerative, gastrointestinal, and heart diseases, as well as certain cancers.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ AI psychosis is a growing danger. ChatGPT is moving in the wrong direction

    Who is vulnerable here? The better question is, who isn’t? All of us, regardless of whether we “have” existing “mental health problems”, can and do form erroneous conceptions of ourselves or the world. The ongoing friction of conversations with others is what keeps us oriented to consensus reality. ChatGPT is not a human. It is not a friend. A conversation with it is not a conversation at all, but a feedback loop in which much of what we say is cheerfully reinforced.

• Proprietary

  • Dark Reading ☛ Botnets Step Up Cloud Attacks Via Flaws, Misconfigs

    These systems and devices are under an increasing threat from Mirai, Gafgyt, and Mozi botnets through automated campaigns that exploit known vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations. The security gaps allow the attackers to launch remote code execution (RCE) attacks, exfiltrate data, or turn the server into a vehicle for further malware distribution, the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) revealed in a report published today.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Federal agencies are backing plans to ban top-selling home internet router because of national security fears: report

    The Commerce Department has reportedly proposed banning sales of devices from California-based TP-Link Systems, a company whose products make up over a third of the home router market, according to The Washington Post.

  • PC Mag ☛ US Effort to Ban TP-Link Routers Picks Up Steam

    The move clears the way for the Commerce Department to initiate the ban process, during which it must first notify TP-Link, which will then have 30 days to respond. After that, the agency has 30 more days to consider the company’s objections before making the ban official.

  • Engadget ☛ US government is getting closer to banning TP-Link routers

    An interagency investigation has sparked cybersecurity concerns, citing the company’s purported ties to China.

  • The Verge ☛ WhatsApp can now use passkeys to secure your backups

    The update is rolling out “gradually over the coming weeks and months,” according to WhatsApp, and will make it easier to apply the same security measures that protect personal chats and calls to backups. End-to-end encryption for backups was already introduced in 2021, but required WhatsApp users to save a 64-digit encryption key or create a password tied to the key.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Apple Stores make me anxious

    I kid, but warranty service remains one of the few positive experiences in the Apple ecosystem. My personal devices are always used or second-hand, but for work stuff it’s been a lifesaver at least a few times. Contrast this with almost any other manufacturer, and it’s no contest.

  • The Scotsman ☛ Scottish Parliament suspends voting over ongoing Microsoft outage

    She told MSPs: "There is, it appears I understand, a significant Microsoft outage affecting some products, and it is global, and that is preventing us from voting."

  • The Scotsman ☛ Full list of websites and applications facing issues during ongoing Microsoft outage

    Holyrood's Presiding Officer has said ongoing technical issues mean that MSPs are currently unable to vote at parliament.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft Azure challenges AWS for downtime crown

    Microsoft Azure has been experiencing a global outage since around 1600 UTC, or 0900 PDT on Wednesday, October 29, 2025.

  • The Register UK ☛ EU and UK organizations ponder resilience after Azure outage

    As Azure staggers back to its feet following an hours-long outage last night, British and European businesses are questioning their reliance on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure.

  • CBC ☛ Microsoft's cloud services firm Azure hit with outage, says customers should see improvement soon

    Users reported issues with Office 365, Minecraft, X-Box Live, Costco and Starbucks's mobile apps and websites, Copilot and many other services on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Huge Microsoft outage hit 365, Xbox, and beyond — deployment of fix for Azure breakdown rolled out

    Microsoft Azure is experiencing an ongoing outage with its Azure platform. "Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services," the company stated. "In addition, customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. Customers can attempt to use programmatic methods (PowerShell, CLI, etc.) to access/utilize resources if they are unable to access the portal directly. We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to attempt to mitigate the portal access issues and are continuing to assess the situation."

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Azure outage takes multiple Microsoft services, customer websites offline

    The outage was caused by an error in Azure Front Door, Microsoft’s content delivery network. The CDN enables website operators to store copies of their content in dozens of server clusters around the world. When a user visits a webpage, the CDN downloads the webpage’s contents from the nearest server cluster to speed up loading times.

  • Wired ☛ The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures

    Microsoft's problems specifically originated from Azure's Front Door content delivery network and emerged just hours before Microsoft's scheduled earnings announcement. The company website, including its investor relations page, was still down on Wednesday afternoon, and the Azure status page where Microsoft provides updates was having intermittent issues as well.

  • The Verge ☛ Microsoft says it’s recovering after Azure outage took down 365, Xbox, and Starbucks

    Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service, has experienced an outage just one week after issues with AWS took out swaths of the internet. The issues impacted Microsoft’s services that run on Azure, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, and even Minecraft. Other companies, like Capital One, Alaska Airlines, and Starbucks, also had outages that were linked to the problems with Azure.

  • OneUptime ☛ AWS to Bare Metal Two Years Later: Answering Your Toughest Questions About Leaving AWS

    In the US, it is. In the rest of the world. That's 2-5x engineers salary. We used to save $230,000 / yr but now the savings have exponentially grown. We now save over $1.2M / yr and we expect this to grow, as we grow as a business.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Do Academic Libraries Have a Strategy for AI?

      But when it comes to fears, the voices diverge. Libraries worry most about truthfulness: hallucinations, fabrications, summaries that mislead more than they inform. They fear the opacity of the machine, and what it might mean for students who may lack the critical skill set to parse good information from bad. Publishers, on the other hand, fear loss of ownership: the possibility that their intellectual property will be ingested into large language models without consent or compensation.

      And yet, a common thread runs through both sets of anxieties: transparency. Libraries want transparency to preserve user trust; publishers want it to protect the value of their content. Transparency is the hinge on which this entire debate swings.

    • Futurism ☛ Beloved Bodega Cat Reportedly Killed by Driverless Waymo

      At 12:51 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the outlet reports, a 311 complaint stated that a Waymo “hit the liquor store’s cat that was sitting on the sidewalk next to the transit lane.” It claimed that the driverless car “did not even try to stop.”

    • The Register UK ☛ Anthropic's Claude convinced to exfiltrate private data

      Security researcher Johann Rehberger (wunderwuzzi), who has identified dozens of AI-oriented vulnerabilities, has published a summary of a proof-of-concept attack he developed for stealing private data via Claude.

    • The Verge ☛ Tim Cook says more AIs are coming to Apple Intelligence

      Tim Cook says Apple has plans to embed more third-party AI tools into the company’s operating systems. “Our intention is to integrate with more people over time,” Cook said in an interview with CNBC. Apple has already embedded ChatGPT into Siri, with a Google Gemini integration said to be in the works, along with rumors swirling about a partnership with Anthropic and Perplexity.

    • Michael Geist ☛ We Need More Canada in the Training Data: My Appearance Before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage on AI and the Creative Sector

      Thank you for the invitation to appear on this important study on AI and the creative industries. As some of you may know, I have appeared many times before this committee on questions involving technology and culture, including studies on copyright, freedom of expression, and Internet regulation. In each instance, much of the discussion amounted to risk analysis. There is a perceived risk arising out of new technologies, whether digital copyright, online platforms, streamers, or digital advertising, and concerns about the risks associated with proposed legislative responses, such as anti-circumvention rules, regulating user content, or blocking news links. Too often this debate frames new technology as a threat, emphasizes cross-industry subsidies, and misses the opportunities new technology presents. We therefore need risk analysis that rejects entrenching the status quo and instead assesses the risks of both the technology and the policy response.

    • Jono Alderson ☛ Optimising for the surfaceless web

      When I wrote about the machine’s emerging immune system, I argued that AI ecosystems would eventually learn to protect themselves. They’d detect manipulation, filter noise, and preserve coherence. They’d start to decide what kinds of information were safe to keep, and which to reject.

      That wasn’t a prediction of some distant future. It’s happening now.

    • Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ Understanding what "I am not 'anti-AI'… I am pro-craft." means to me

      As 2025 draws to a close, the “inevitable” hype around AI hasn’t slowed so it remains important to maintain an informed, healthy skepticism because the shills are everywhere — writing articles for industry publications, appearing on industry podcasts, and speaking at industry conferences, often with opaque disclosures and bold claims typically going unchallenged.

      It’s also increasingly difficult to avoid using some of these overhyped tools yourself because they’re literally being shoved into everything, everywhere, all at once — whether or not it adds any actual value to end users — and often by default without any warning or transparency about how to disable them.

    • Futurism ☛ AI Is Causing a Grim New Twist on the Dunning-Kruger Effect, New Research Finds

      People who are the worst at doing something also tend to severely overestimate how good they are at doing it, while those who are actually skilled tend to not realize their true talent.

      This galling cognitive bias is called the Dunning-Kruger effect, as you’re probably familiar — and would you believe it if we told you that AI appears to make it even worse?

    • Press Gazette ☛ How to spot fake AI-written press releases

      Reporters are being bombarded with millions of press releases from virtual PR agencies.

    • The Register UK ☛ Dame Emma Thompson gives the 'AI revolution' both barrels

      Her target? Microsoft Word's Copilot feature, which constantly offers to rewrite her work. "When I've written something and put it into a Word document, it's constantly saying, 'Would you like me to rewrite that for you?'" Thompson said.

      The UK national treasure added: "I don't need you to [expletive deleted] rewrite what I've just written. Will you [expletive deleted] off. Just [expletive deleted] off!"

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Why do AI models use so many em-dashes?

      Another explanation I’m not convinced by is that AI models like em-dashes because they’re so versatile. When the model is trying to predict the next token, an em-dash keeps its options open: it could either continue on the same point or make a brand new point. Since models are just trying to pick the next most likely token, could they just be “playing it safe” by using em-dashes? I don’t think so. First, other punctuation marks are similarly flexible. Second, I’m not sure that “playing it safe” is a good idiom for thinking about how models generate text.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Finding return on AI investments across industries

      In September, the MIT NANDA report made waves because the soundbite every author and influencer picked up on was that 95% of all AI pilots failed to scale or deliver clear and measurable ROI. McKinsey earlier published a similar trend indicating that agentic AI would be the way forward to achieve huge operational benefits for enterprises. At The Wall Street Journal’s Technology Council Summit, AI technology leaders recommended CIOs stop worrying about AI’s return on investment because measuring gains is difficult and if they were to try, the measurements would be wrong.

    • Wired ☛ AI Agents Are Terrible Freelance Workers

      “I should hope this gives much more accurate impressions as to what's going on with AI capabilities,” says Dan Hendrycks, director of CAIS. He adds that while some agents have improved significantly over the past year or so, that does not mean that this will continue at the same rate.

    • Wired ☛ Meta, Google, and Microsoft Triple Down on AI Spending

      Tech companies are making these ambitious plans for more capital spending under the assumption that demand for AI will only continue to grow. But some analysts are raising concerns that the AI market is a bubble and will eventually burst.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Meta's stock slides on AI bubble fears, as Zuckerberg calls for increased spending

      In recent months, concerns have been growing among some critics that the extravagant spending by Meta and its big technology peers is fueling a bubble in the AI industry that may one day burst, with potentially devastating consequences for the stock market. The company has invested billions of dollars into AI, not only on the data center infrastructure it needs but also in acquiring talented developers, such as Scale AI Inc. founder Alexandr Wang, who now heads up the company’s Superintelligence Labs unit.

    • The Verge ☛ Mark Zuckerberg is excited to add more AI content to all your social feeds

      Meta CFO Susan Li said people generated over 20 billion images within the company’s new Vibes app, which serves up a feed of AI-generated videos, similar to OpenAI’s Sora. “I think that Vibes is an example of a new content type enabled by AI, and I think that there are more opportunities to build many more novel types of content ahead,” Zuckerberg added.

    • Doug Square ☛ Speculations about DeepSeek-OCR and Quantization

      I love the idea of using images to compress text. As Andrej points out, the tokenizer is kind of ugly, and it would be cool to have a more natural system. Intuitively, it makes sense that a more optimal way to parse written letters/characters might involve some amount of visual processing, since that's sort of how humans do it, with many people pattern-matching several words (or more) at a time when reading quickly, instead of parsing text as individual letters/tokens.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: When AI prophecy fails

      Every investor who has put a nickel into that $700b capex is counting on bosses firing a lot of workers and replacing them with AI. Amazon is also counting on people buying a lot of AI from it after firing those workers. The company has sunk $120b into AI this year alone.

      There's just one problem: AI can't do our jobs. Oh, sure, an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, but that's the world's easiest sales-call. Your boss is relentlessly horny for firing you: [...]

    • Nick Heer ☛ Zoom CEO Eric Yuan Lies About A.I. Leading to Shorter Work Weeks – Pixel Envy

      [...] We do not need to carry water for people who peddle obvious lies. [...]

    • Josh Bersin ☛ BBC Finds That 45% of AI Queries Produce Erroneous Answers

      In other words, the “dangerously self-confident” AI systems we use are quite poor at giving us good analysis of news. While the study focused on news, this shows us that we have to be extremely careful when using and trusting these “open corpus” systems because they are answering questions based on faulty, exaggerated, outdated, or incorrect data.

    • The Register UK ☛ AI chatbots flub news nearly half the time, BBC study finds

      An analysis of more than 3,000 responses from the AI assistants found that 45 percent of answers given contained at least one significant issue, 31 percent had serious sourcing problems, and a fifth had "major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information."

      When accounting for smaller slip-ups, a whopping 81 percent of responses included a mistake of some sort.

    • BBC ☛ Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory

      AI assistants are already replacing search engines for many users. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025, 7% of total online news consumers use AI assistants to get their news, rising to 15% of under-25s.

      ‘This research conclusively shows that these failings are not isolated incidents,’ says EBU Media Director and Deputy Director General Jean Philip De Tender. ‘They are systemic, cross-border, and multilingual, and we believe this endangers public trust. When people don’t know what to trust, they end up trusting nothing at all, and that can deter democratic participation.’

    • EBU ☛ Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory | EBU

      45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
      31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
      20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.

    • CBC ☛ This mom’s son was asking Tesla’s Grok AI chatbot about soccer. It told him to send nude pics, she says

      She said there was some Messi trash talking by the chatbot and when her son joked that Ronaldo had scored, the conversation went to an unexpected place.

    • Futurism ☛ World's First AI Minister is "Pregnant" With 83 Offspring Government Announces

      Albania is breaking all kinds of ground these days. It became one of earliest nations to deploy an AI chatbot, Diella, as a public administration assistant, only to then become the first country with an AI government official when it elevated the chatbot to the role of minister of state for artificial intelligence. The Balkan country isn’t slowing down either — because now, Diella is pregnant.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Study claims 9% of US newspaper articles at least partly AI generated

      They concluded that “approximately 9% of newly-published articles are either partially or fully AI-generated”.

      Some 90.85% of articles analysed were categorised as human-written, while 5.24% were classed as AI-generated and 3.98% were “mixed”.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Cops alerted by AI gun detection system arrest high school student holding bag of Doritos — eight cars sent to disarm chip-toting teen

      Taki Allen ate the bag of chips while waiting to be picked up from Kenwood High School, Baltimore, last Monday night (Oct 20), reports WBAL-TV 11 News. Football practice was over, and the student was sitting with friends outside the school. However, his crunchy repast triggered the school’s security camera Omnilert AI system.

      20 minutes after he began chomping on the savory corn-based treat, eight police cars arrived in response to Allen’s snack habit. He was quickly ordered to his knees by armed police, and his hands were cuffed behind his back. “It was a scary situation,” Allen explained to WBAL-TV.

    • CBC ☛ AI 'hallucinations' could prove real problem for owner of fire-ravaged Vancouver property

      According to the board that hears assessment appeals, Ren's arguments are riddled with fictitious case law — possible artificial intelligence (AI) "hallucinations" that sent B.C.'s assessment authority on a wild goose chase in search of legal precedent that doesn't exist.

      Now, the board says Ren may have to pay for those mistakes.

      "The unraveling of these falsehoods has required investigation and research by both the Assessor and the Board," board panel chair John Bridal wrote in an Oct. 7 decision.

      "I find an order for costs may be warranted, reflecting the additional time of both the Board and the Assessor in addressing this matter."

  • Social Control Media

    • RTL ☛ Gen Alpha taking over: Beyond words: '67' crowned 'Word of the Year'

    • BoingBoing ☛ Meta: 2,400 porn downloads on corporate IPs for personal use, not training AI

      Consider what Facebook, an advertising company, does to every user. Then ask yourself if it's credible for Meta to claim it refrains from tracking what its own workers are doing with their work machines because that would be "invasive."

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Suspected Chinese snoops weaponize unpatched Windows flaw

      UNC6384 is a suspected Beijing-backed crew that, according to Google's Threat Intelligence Group, targeted diplomats in Southeast Asia earlier this year before ultimately deploying the PlugX backdoor – a long-time favorite of Beijing-backed goon squads that allows them to remotely access and control infected machines, steal files, and deploy additional malware.

    • The Register UK ☛ Cyberpunks mess with Canada's water, energy, farm systems

      In a joint alert issued this week, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said industrial control systems (ICS) had been manipulated by hacktivists – not for money, but for the thrill and headlines.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ 41% Of Ransomware Victims Who Pay Ransom Can’t Recover Data

      Among the organizations that paid a ransom, 60% recovered “some or all of their data,” the report said, but 41% “were given a recovery key, but still had to rebuild their systems.”

      It gets worse.

      For 31% of ransomware victims who paid a ransom, attackers demanded more money, the report found. And additional attacks were sustained by 27% of those who paid a ransom, “though not necessarily an attack from the same entity.”

    • The Record ☛ 'Living off the land' allowed Russia-linked group to breach Ukrainian entities this summer

      “While most of the malicious activity on the targeted network involved living-off-the-land and dual-use tools, the attackers did deploy a number of suspicious executables, which were most likely malware, and several PowerShell backdoors,” researchers said, adding that these tools “have yet to be obtained for analysis.”

    • The Verge ☛ Windows is the problem with Windows handhelds | The Verge

      But if you want your white Asus handheld to start working reliably, you could do what I did: I installed the latest build of Bazzite, a SteamOS-like, Linux-based operating system that works properly with gamepad controls, and sleeps like a dream. I didn’t need to hibernate or shut down once this past weekend as I blazed through hours of Silksong and finally triumphed in a tough boss fight.

      Did I mention Bazzite runs most of my Windows games substantially faster than Windows?

    • Federal News Network ☛ EPA deepens work with water sector amid rising cyber concerns

      In the last year, the EPA began searching for and identifying [Internet]-exposed operational technology devices used by water and wastewater systems, the EPA’s Cole Dutton said on a recent webinar hosted by Censys. Dutton is a water and wastewater cybersecurity analyst in the water infrastructure and cyber resilience division at the EPA’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • RIPE ☛ A Solution to Concerns on the Current RPKI Trust Anchor Configuration

      In the context of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), validation is performed by Relying Party (RP) software. RPs are commonly configured with five Trust Anchors (TAs), one for each of the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Each TA operator is able to make arbitrary RPKI statements about Internet Number Resources (INRs) independently of the other TA operators: for example, one TA could issue a Route Origin Authorisation (ROA) for resources that have actually been assigned to another TA. The fact that TAs can claim resources for which they are not authoritative has created concerns among the technical community.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ About the password leak of 183 million Gmail accounts

      The main takeaway from a story like this isn’t “your Gmail password may have leaked,” but rather that “any of your passwords could leak at any time.” Not to spread alarm, but to encourage awareness of good digital security practices.

      Which ones? For this situation, mostly these two: [...]

Monopolies/Monopsonies