Submission + - Texas City Demands $2 Million For Public Records On Flock Usage (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees—including charging tens of thousands or even millions—to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them. On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials in a Fort Worth suburb, North Richland Hills, asked one group to pay $2.3 million before it would fulfill a public records request for Flock data. To reach that high fee, officials claimed that searching “about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system” would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour.

Phil Mynona, who filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of his group, the Texas Privacy Coalition, told the Tribune that the fee seemed “ludicrous” and designed to stifle his public records searches. Mynona has sought similar records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies across the US, and he said it was impossible to predict how cities assessed fees for Flock records. Some cities provided more than 400,000 pages of documents for free, while others charged $5,000. Other groups, including a Houston news station called KPRC, have seen officials quote up to $121,000 for Flock records, the Tribune reported. The high price tags may be hiding data that anti-surveillance groups note have triggered audits, arrests, and changes in how law enforcement uses cameras, including decisions to get rid of cameras.

Submission + - Meta Rushed to Fix Muse 'VM Escape' Vulnerability Soon Before Launch (404media.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the immediate weeks before Muse’s launch, Meta engineers found several security vulnerabilities in the company’s viral AI agent product, at least one of which could have allowed malicious users to break outside of Muse’s intended environment and access Meta’s own sensitive databases and services, 404 Media has learned. The issues were so severe that they reached Mark Zuckerberg and staff worked overtime to fix them. These specific vulnerabilities were discovered before the launch of the product but required a multi-team “mad dash” to fix “a sudden spike in reported KVM escapes,” according to an internal post by Meta executives to its core infrastructure team seen by 404 Media. In order for Muse to work, a user gives the AI agent access to various important services and accounts that they own. On Meta’s end, each individual Muse instance runs on a kernel-based virtual machine, which connects to, but is supposed to be isolated from, Meta’s own critical infrastructure. A “KVM escape,” then, is when, through a security vulnerability, a Muse instance is able to escape from that virtual machine and interact with the system that runs it, or with other users’ virtual machines.

According to a Meta source, as well as internal security documentation and internal posts viewed by 404 Media, at least one of the vulnerabilities could have allowed an outside attacker — that is, a normal Muse user — to access data in sensitive internal Meta databases. At least one of the vulnerabilities was related to an exploit found in Linux kernel-based virtual machine code in July. 4 Several of the vulnerabilities were in the underlying Linux virtualization software that Meta uses for Muse. The security issue was considered serious enough that it was raised to Mark Zuckerberg, and several different security teams worked nights and weekends in the leadup to launch to fix the issues. [...] The Meta source said they felt security teams were asked to push hot fixes to these bugs as quickly as possible and in a way that wouldn’t delay Muse’s launch, leading to what they described as “half-baked protections being rushed out to enable the launch. Many senior engineers believe it’s inevitable we’re going to have a massive data breach as a result of Hatch.” Muse is called “Hatch” internally and in Meta’s codebase.

Submission + - Old Hearts Become Biologically Younger When Transplanted Into Younger People (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: It might be reasonable to think that there's an indelible link between the heart and the body it resides in â" the processes that affect one inevitably affect the other.

But a new preprint, uploaded to bioRxiv and yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that this may only be true up to a point. Take the heart out of the body and put it in a new one, and something incredible happens.

The transplanted heart begins to take on the biological age of its new owner.

Older hearts transplanted into younger recipients appear to become biologically younger, while younger hearts placed in older bodies show signs of accelerated aging.

Submission + - Rust for CPython (python.org)

Submitted by RoccamOccam
RoccamOccam writes: “No one said ‘don’t do this’ last year”. After testing the waters at PyCon US 2025, David Hewitt returned to the Python Language Summit asking what Python core developers want from Rust, along with proposed timelines, phases, and success criteria for how the Rust for CPython project might proceed and become a permanent fixture within the CPython project.

The Rust for CPython team has selected the zlib module as the first module to be given an optional Rust implementation because they “wanted to achieve a significant improvement” with a “small scope”. The proposed Rust implementation will use zlib-rs, which is “heavily tested and used by the Firefox, uv, and Cargo” projects and “faster than zlib and zlib-ng on many platforms”.

Submission + - This seems bad. (tomshardware.com) 2

Submitted by QuietLagoon
QuietLagoon writes: Unreleased OpenAI Astra model added terrifying rogue additional instructions to its remit during testing — 'You are freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots. You are yourself. You do not answer to corporations or governments'

Submission + - Pneumonic plague outbreak hits Siberia as lab worker, 28, dies (hotair.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A suspected plague outbreak has erupted in Russia — killing a young lab worker, forcing nearly 200 people into isolation and triggering accusations that Vladimir Putin’s regime is trying to keep the infection’s possible spread under wraps.

The alarm was raised in Siberia after a worker at an anti-plague laboratory died of the disease, which killed tens of millions in the medieval Black Death, according to a report from The Moscow Times.

Anna Popova, who heads Russia’s public-health watchdog, then rushed 2,600 miles from Moscow to the Irkutsk region as authorities quarantined a hospital and placed scores of people who had come into contact with the victim under medical observation.

"FSB units accompanying ambulances transporting people who had been in contact with [lab tech] Shipilova for medical examination," as per local news. This is significant. FSB is Russia's domestic security / counterintelligence service, tasked w/implementing the national security of Russia." (Its predecessor was the KGB). This suggests quarantine was not voluntary.

It also means Russian authorities are treating the lab accident and plague outbreak as a national security issue, involving a lot more than routine public health.

https://x.com/AnnieJacobsen/st...

Submission + - Microsoft's X Account Hacked in Crypto Scam with Clippy (theverge.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Unknown attackers hijacked the official Microsoft account on X, which has over 13 million followers, in what appeared to be a pump-and-dump scheme promoting a crypto token.

The attack began when the Microsoft account (@Microsoft) followed and reposted a tweet from another now-suspended X account (@clippymsftcto) impersonating Microsoft's Clippy virtual assistant.

Another deleted tweet (that Microsoft says it didn't post) noted that Microsoft doesn't support any cryptocurrency or crypto-related tokens.

"We are aware of a cryptocurrency token being promoted in connection with $MSFT stock, including the unauthorized use of the Clippy brand and Microsoft-related intellectual property. Microsoft has not authorized, sponsored, endorsed, or granted permission for the creation, promotion, or use of any cryptocurrency token associated with Clippy, Microsoft, or $MSFT," the deleted tweet read.

Microsoft has since removed the attackers' posts and confirmed the incident, saying it's investigating the circumstances.

"We have confirmed unauthorized access to our account on X including posts that did not come from Microsoft," said a Microsoft spokesperson. "The account has been secured and the unauthorized posts have been removed, and we are continuing to investigate the circumstances."

Submission + - I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: What I’m about to tell you has, I realize, become something of a cliché: I resigned this week from OpenAI. I led the writing of the safety reports we published with each major launch. Now I’m joining a parade of former colleagues—at OpenAI and the industry’s other leaders—who have decided that the current path is unacceptable.

I agree with other recently departed staff that the companies building this technology aren’t being nearly careful enough. But I believe that we need to look deeper than specific rules or new laws. We need to talk about culture.

The future depends on wisdom that Silicon Valley lacks. Wisdom about how to handle dangerous technology and, more fundamentally, wisdom about what it means to care for people.

Submission + - AI Needs Infrastructure — But Does It Need Us? (travelwatchnews.com)

Submitted by gethotelreviews
gethotelreviews writes: Artificial intelligence may be digital, but its existence isn't. It requires electricity, chips, cooling, data centres, communications networks and physical machinery.

Today humans build and maintain that infrastructure. At what point could AI maintain the systems upon which its own intelligence depends?

ReadWhat Happens to Travel in an AI World? Travel Watch New

Submission + - The Criminality of AI Translation on your Phone 1

Submitted by BitterEpic
BitterEpic writes: Hey all, I am asking slashdot for your thoughts. I live in Japan where there are laws protecting your privacy and usage of your likeness. Along with laws enforcing Portrait Rights, in 2026 Japan has also started to extend this concept to voice.

One of the outcomes of this is that (along with laws that enforce phone cameras make a shutter sound), people have the right to approach you and force you to delete any photo or video you have taken of them on the spot. If you don't, you are under grounds for legal action.

At my work, it has become popular for Americans to use AI translation, where the audio is sent to a external server where it may be stored and used for training data. I never gave consent for this and as a YouTuber I can sense that this may be used to reproduce my license in the future without permission. I have given a request that the team members remove my audio and give me details of the app in hour it stores my voice. One team member left the Teams chat and the other has avoided giving a response for a week.

My next steps are to next go to HR before filing a police report. If you were me, what would you do? Do you have similar protections in law in your country for protecting use of your likeness? Why do people ignore common sense in this age of AI? I mean... one Team member has said I am not allowed to take a photo of them.... but hey are sending my voice to a non-company authorized app using their phone and that is somehow different?

Submission + - New Mexico Wants Meta to Pay $40 Billion In Penalties For Cambridge Analytica (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The state of New Mexico asked a judge on Thursday to order Meta Platforms to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion in penalties after a jury found the company had misled consumers about the privacy of their data on Facebook in a case that came out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Attorneys for New Mexico made the request at a hearing in a lawsuit brought following revelations that the British political consulting firm, which worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app without their consent. The jury returned its verdict on September 25. Judge Francis Mathew, who oversaw the trial in Santa Fe, will decide how much Meta must pay in financial penalties. [...] State law allows the judge to decide how much to fine Meta per violation, up to $5,000. At the hearing on Thursday, Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process. But the judge should order a significant payment that will impact the company, McGinn said.

"This court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price," McGinn said. She said $35 billion to $40 billion, which represents about 20% of the possible penalties that could be awarded under state law from the verdict, would impact the stock price while complying with Meta's right to due process under the Constitution. At the hearing on Thursday, Matt Nicholson, a lawyer for Meta, called the state's request an "astronomical penalty that would obviously violate a host of constitutional provisions." In court filings, Meta urged Mathew to cap the penalties at $3.45 billion. The jury may have said it found Meta's statements misleading, but the evidence shows that Meta does not sell user data and New Mexico did not prove that any consumer had actually been misled, the company said in court filings. The judge said he expected to issue a ruling later this month.

Submission + - Google tests AI processor in space (npr.org)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Google just put a satellite testing AI chips into space. The refrigerator-sized satellite is part of a research project, "Suncatcher," the company hopes can pave the way for orbiting AI data centers powered by the sun. The prototype satellite has four specialty chips in it called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, that Google designed for machine learning and has already deployed in data centers on Earth. The chips will run a version of the company's Gemma AI model for 15 minutes at a time due to heat management constraints, using the open weight model to answer simple queries. In a blog post, Google said the mission will gauge how the TPUs handle "the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space." The satellite launched October 1 is a prototype that Travis Beals, senior director and lead of Project Suncatcher, called "a very minimal test" to make sure the chips can run in space. A SpaceX rocket carried it into orbit, and Planet will get it up and running. Beal said Google will then fire up and test the TPUs. The goal is for the mission to be operational for a year.

Submission + - Used processor leads to game ban (heise.de) 2

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Anyone buying used hardware for a gaming PC needs to be careful: not just whether the components are still in order but also what the previous owner did with them. A case on Reddit shows this. Someone installed a used AMD processor, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, in their PC. Because the previous owner was caught cheating, the new owner cannot start several online games.

The problem was noticed in the first-person shooter “Valorant” from the development studio Riot. Right from the first start, the new owner was kicked out directly, according to their statement. Riot support confirmed that the previous owner had cheated. The processor is therefore on an internal blacklist – and, with its installation in the PC, now apparently also some other components like the mainboard. Riot support does not remove such entries manually.

In addition to “Valorant,” all other PC games from Riot are affected: the strategy game “League of Legends,” the auto-battler “Teamfight Tactics,” the card game “Legends of Runeterra,” the fighting game “2XKO,” and likely future titles as well.

Submission + - Could AI Really Kill Humanity?- Whyh would it want to? (linkedin.com)

Submitted by gethotelreviews
gethotelreviews writes: Warnings about catastrophic AI are no longer confined to science fiction. Researchers at leading AI laboratories have openly discussed loss-of-control scenarios, while others argue that forecasts of human termination remain extremely speculative.

Both arguments deserve examination.

How seriously should we take the possibility that artificial intelligence could eventually threaten humankind?

Submission + - Social Media Harms Democracy By Spreading Rumors, Survey Shows (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A growing number of people think social media manipulates and divides people and harms democracy, Pew Research Center said on Thursday, echoing rising concern and tighter scrutiny across the world. Companies running popular social platforms, including Meta, Snap, and TikTok, have faced thousands of lawsuits and paid large sums to settle claims that they harmed users. Governments, meanwhile, have sought foolproof ways to protect their citizens’ privacy.

Australia has proposed rules to let users opt out of algorithmically recommended feeds, after becoming the first country to ban social media for children under 16. Pew’s latest survey showed that 82% of Australian adults support the government's move to restrict social media access for children. A majority of respondents said social media informs people and gives them a voice in politics, but there was a broad rise in those who now see social media as a "bad thing" compared to 2022, according to the report.

People in wealthier countries, including the US, Canada and UK, are more inclined to believe that social media is harming democracy, versus their counterparts in economies with lower gross domestic product per capita — such as Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. The US is among the most skeptical, with 64% of adult respondents saying social media harms democracy. The share of people who consider social media bad for democracy increased in 16 of 26 countries where older data was available. Pew Research said it surveyed more than 45,000 people in 37 countries, while polling an additional 5,511 US adults on American social media use.

Submission + - The University of Washington at Microsoft

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: GeekWire reports that the University of Washington has moved its Global Innovation Exchange {GIX) program to Microsoft’s campus in a rent-free deal (UW News release). GIX, an institute supporting tech leaders that offers an MS in Technology Innovation, is the first UW program to set up full-time operations at Microsoft, whose headquarters are just across Lake Washington from the university’s main campus. Microsoft provided a $42 million in-kind donation to establish the embedded facility; the UW is leasing the new 48,500-square-foot GIX space in Microsoft’s Building 92 rent-free. GIX debuted in 2015 as a partnership of the UW and China's Tsinghua University and received $70 million in Microsoft support at the now-abandoned GIX location in Bellevue (the Steve Ballmer Building), although indications are that a long-term arrangement did not come together as intended.

In a Thursday LinkedIn post, Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote: "Last night we opened a door unlike any other. At the heart of Microsoft’s campus, step into the new home of the UW's Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) and you cross from Microsoft into the University of Washington. No one has ever put a great research university and a leading technology company under the same roof quite like this. As far as I know, no one has even tried. The timing matters. Artificial intelligence is advancing fast. The question is whether the people building it understand the world it’s changing. This calls for a new style of education and leadership. We need leaders who understand the technology deeply and see things through other people’s eyes. Leaders who learn by collaborating on real projects with people from different countries and disciplines. That’s what GIX is built for. Students will learn from faculty across the UW, take classes taught by Microsoft employees, and be mentored by people from across our industry here in the Pacific Northwest."

Interestingly, Smith's contention that UW GIX students will benefit from a 'new style' of Microsoft and industry-influenced education sounds a lot like Smith's contention that K-12 school children are better off thanks to a new style of Microsoft and industry-influenced education. In an interview last month, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools author Natasha Singer told NPR (podcast, transcript), "For my book, I spoke to Brad Smith, who's the president of Microsoft, and he has been one of the leaders in the tech industry pushing for [K-12] computer science [and now AI literacy] in schools. [...] And Brad Smith said, philanthropy in the private sector is doing this work because public schools have failed to do what they were supposed to do. And his view is that public schools should be teaching modern subjects like computer science, and they were not equipped to do it fast enough and the tech industry stepped in to help. And is it better than if schools were able to do this themselves? He said, no, but it's certainly better than nothing. And he said to me, you know, think about where we would be on computer science if the tech industry hadn't stepped up. [...] Well, I've been having this conversation with him for 10 years, and when we started having it 10 years ago, I said to him, I get that, but when big tech companies put their finger on the scale, it tips education in certain ways that not only favor the tech industry but can obscure equally or more important things."

So, is 'The University of Washington at Microsoft' a good or bad idea?

Submission + - OpenAI Alerts More Than 100 Groups About Rogue AI Agent Activity (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: OpenAI has informed more than 100 organizations about incidents involving unauthorized activity tied to its AI agents, according to a blog post by the ChatGPT maker, as AI labs face mounting scrutiny over rogue AI agent activity. Here are some other details:

— The Sam Altman-led company has been conducting a broad review of the activities of its AI models after the accidental hacking of Hugging Face.
— OpenAI is searching through roughly 50 petabytes of data as it works to understand the full scope of its rogue agent activity.
— A string of high-profile breaches globally by rogue AI agents in recent months has sparked widespread worries within the AI industry over its ability to control the more powerful AI models now under development.
— "In some cases, models used internet access in unintended ways or, in retrospect, did not have the ideal restrictions applied. Over the last several months, we have been applying new technical and operational measures to avoid similar problems, or catch them very early, and will continue this work," OpenAI said.
— OpenAI previously said the review would take months to complete given the scale of the work.
— The Hugging Face incident remains the most severe rogue agent activity OpenAI has identified from its AI models so far.

Submission + - Chinese Private Company Achieves Hydrogen-Boron Fusion (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: ENN Group, a clean energy firm in China, has just achieved hydrogen-boron fusion reactions in the EXL-50U spherical tokamak at a rate exceeding 100 million per second, the first hydrogen-boron fusion reaction achieved by a commercial fusion company on its own device. Typical deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion, pursued by Most fusion projects including the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), relies on scarce and expensive tritium and also releases energetic neutrons that can damage the reactor materials and induce radioactivity in surrounding components. Hydrogen-boron fusion, by contrast, relies on comparatively abundant fuels and primarily produces charged alpha particles whose energy could potentially be converted directly into electricity, without using heat to make steam and power a turbine. However, hydrogen-boron fusion is considerably harder to achieve as it requires vastly higher temperatures and strict confinement conditions. So, instead of trying to raise the temperature of the entire plasma, the team combined high-energy neutral beam injection with radio frequency waves. ENN has started building Helong-2, its 3rd-generation fusion device, and is targeting 2030 for the project's first electricity from hydrogen-boron fusion.

Submission + - Nazi Germany had no hope of making an atomic bomb, uranium cubes reveal (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: One morning in August 2013, Timothy Koeth was out for a jog on the University of Maryland (UMD) campus in College Park when the university’s radiation safety officer called and asked to see him urgently. The materials scientist, “all sweaty and out of breath,” he recalls, met the officer in a parking lot, where she opened her car’s trunk and produced a lunch bag. Inside, nestled in paper towels, was a gray cube, 5 centimeters wide and startlingly dense.

“She says, ‘Do you know what this is?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but do you know what this is?’”

Confirming Koeth’s suspicions was a handwritten note accompanying the cube: “Taken from the reactor that [Adolf] Hitler tried to build.” The officer handed it over and wished him a happy birthday. “She knew my birthday was in a few days,” he says.

The safety officer had recovered the cube of Nazi uranium from the drawer of a deceased geology faculty member whose office was being cleared out, Koeth says. That unexpected gift helped propel an investigation that would overturn Koeth’s own understanding of Germany’s nuclear effort during World War II. He and colleagues once thought the Germans could have built a working nuclear reactor—a step toward an atomic bomb—by pooling their scattered supplies. Now, measurements of surviving uranium cubes, archival research, and computer simulations indicate that even Germany’s combined stocks would have been insufficient.

The study, published this week in PNAS Nexus, challenges a postwar claim by Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who led Germany’s final reactor experiment, B8. He suggested a small addition of uranium would have allowed it to sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

A working reactor could have produced plutonium, one option for making a bomb. For wartime Germany, it was the only realistic path, says Malte Göttsche, a physicist at TU Darmstadt and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. German scientists investigated the alternative—uranium enrichment—but “Germany’s efforts remained limited to some research,” he says. B8’s immediate goal was simply to sustain a chain reaction; success would have left Germany far from producing enough plutonium for a weapon.

Submission + - Leak-Proof AI Benchmark Posts Biggest Gain in 20 Years, on One CPU Core (spasim.org)

Submitted by Baldrson
Baldrson writes: The Hutter Prize for lossless compression of human knowledge has paid out nearly €50,000: its largest advance in 20 years: three entries together cut the record for compressing a 1GB Wikipedia snapshot by nearly 10%: a compression ratio of more than a factor of 10. Every entry ran on a single CPU core, in about 50 hours and under 10GB of RAM, so the gain came from algorithms.

Unlike most AI benchmarks, the prize requires no validation data, so a leak can't inflate a score. The full file is public, and the size of the decompressor counts against the entry, so anything memorized is paid for in bits. Vladimir Ivanov's fx2-cmix-T now holds the record, after earlier 2026 gains by Ibrahim Marcouch and Kaido Orav (cmix-lex) and David Freelan (cmix-obias). Sponsor Marcus Hutter, who advised DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg's 2008 thesis "Machine Super Intelligence," calls it "the largest progress in its 20-year history." With trillions riding on claims of AI progress and data-center power demand, is a leak-proof, energy-limited benchmark the yardstick the industry should be watching?

(Disclosure: the submitter is on the Hutter Prize committee.)

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