Microsoft's security blog describes the fight against a new "AI-powered cybercrime platform" offering phishing-as-a-service, with AI-tailored lures and analyses of compromised inboxes (to identify high-value targets). The site compromised more than 12,000 inboxes in over 10,000 organizations around the world, compromising business accounts "at scale" with automated attacks and prebuilt phishing templates. AI tools could even sift through a victim's mailbox to help engineer better phishing messages. ... [ Read it >> ]

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U.S. President Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday. And a half hour in, after decrying immigration, Trump pivoted to add that "The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now." ... [ Read it >> ]

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On academic mentoring platform Nova Learning, Computer Science and AI, "once the dominant choice among students... is losing ground fast, while Engineering has nearly doubled its share." It's a small survey, but "The steepest proportional decline is in Software & Data Science, the most traditional 'learn to code' pathway, which lost 44% of its 2025 share. AI saw the largest absolute drop of any single subject in the survey, down 6.2 points. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The movie Coyote vs. Acme earned more than Warner Bros.' $30 million tax write-off in just two weeks. And last week the movie officially earned more than its production budget of $70 million. But today the movie passed the $100 million mark. "You asked for it, we delivered, and you showed up!" distributor Ketchum Entertainment posted on social media (adding "Thank you to the fans for making this a massive hit!") ... [ Read it >> ]

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Two U.S. missiles hit an elementary school in Iran, killing over 150 people including 123 children on the first day of the Iran War. But Gizmodo notes that a new Bloomberg investigation cites U.S. officials involved in an unreleased internal Pentagon review who blame "a cascade of preventable failures that included an overreliance on an AI tool built by Palantir."... [ Read it >> ]

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Monday Google opened preorders for its "Googlebook" laptops, pricing them at $899. A Google's blog post added that "At launch, you can choose between Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Snapdragon X Elite processors" (paired with NPUs to power AI features).

"Devices will hit shelves on October 4 in the U.S. and on October 5 in Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia," TechCrunch points out. But "the real pull for the new devices is that they'll prominently feature Gemini's latest capabilities in a new format: the laptop."... [ Read it >> ]

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Meta's AI "personal agent" Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC — and it's still showing more downloads as of Monday night.

Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower...... [ Read it >> ]

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Paramount Skydance just "emerged victorious" reports Reuters, "from a legal battle over its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery" that will "dramatically concentrate power across Hollywood's film, TV, streaming and news businesses."

The victory comes "after settling with a California-led group of US states and a Hollywood writers union, paving the way for one of the largest media mergers in history."... [ Read it >> ]

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"In a few weeks, KDE will turn 30 years old," writes core contributor Kevin Ottens, celebrating with some special KDE community data analytics (including a 30-year graph of the number of contributors):

It peaks around 180 on average (and sometimes reaches towards around 200 people) then shrinks again hitting bottom around 110 persons on average in 2017... Since then, we had two major events happening. First, 2018 is the year where we had the first set of KDE Goals being picked by the community, one being "Streamlined onboarding of new contributors". Second, we had the transition to GitLab which was fully delivered early in the second quarter of 2020... ... [ Read it >> ]

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There's at least 15 author-driven lawsuits underway against AI companies, while publishers have filed roughly 10 more coordinated suits of their own, notes Publisher's Weekly.

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

Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O'Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House to enhance e-books from its Google Play store with AI, allowing readers to interact with the text of the books directly, ask questions and get answers, and develop tools such as quizzes and slideshows... [The CEO of the Author's Guild called the partnership "a positive step forward in the legitimized use of books in the AI ecosystem to the benefit of readers, publishers, and authors alike."] ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Australia is considering barring the use of camera-equipped smart glasses in government workplaces..." reports Reuters, "in what it said could be the first ban of its kind."

But meanwhile "more than 70 people who bought, used or were recorded with Meta's smart glasses have sued the social media giant," reports the Los Angeles Times, "claiming their intimate and sensitive images were exposed to workers abroad who are paid to review and label photos and videos."... [ Read it >> ]

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"I would like to verify your technical abilities, so please download the specified file and complete the assigned task..."

Fake job listings aimed at software developers and IT professionals led to 30,000 infected devices in over 100 countries — and 7,000 compromised cryptocurrency wallets, leading to over $10 million (USD) transferred to North Korea. Inc. reports:... [ Read it >> ]

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Tom's Hardware reports:

Four plaintiffs subscribed to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the developers of these AI models violated antitrust laws when they agreed to slow AI development. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit argues that this agreement would "reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions" and that this coordination started in July 2026 after the leading AI labs signed a statement admitting there is "intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow" development. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State ultimately asks the question, "How did we cede control of our democracy to the machines, and can we get it back?" according to the Harvard's Arts and Sciences site, FAS Current:

The new title finds Lepore, who used to teach a course at the College titled "The Rise and Fall of the Machine," charting the ascent of what she calls the artificial state: the digital communication infrastructure by which governments and private corporations automate and ultimately control public discourse. Following her Pulitzer Prize win for "We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution" (2025), "I wanted to think about whether liberal constitutional democracies can survive this moment in time," Lepore shared in a phone interview... ... [ Read it >> ]

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"New research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years," Stanford Medicine announced this week:

The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts' beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins. The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory — and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem... ... [ Read it >> ]

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The European Commission "proposed on Thursday banning children under 13 from social media, with parent-supervised accounts until 15," reports Reuters.

"Enforcement would rely on a tool Brussels built itself" — a free, open-source age verification smartphone app "that tells a platform whether a user meets an age threshold without revealing their identity..."... [ Read it >> ]

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Saturday morning President Trump announced he's creating an AI task force and appointing an AI czar, reports Politico.

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

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Mashable writes:

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

WIRED writes that people familiar with the program "say they believe that a significant number of the startup's roughly 1,500 employees may try to depart."... [ Read it >> ]

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"In April this year, we saw Andy Nguyen turning the PS5 into a Linux-powered gaming PC,"
writes the blog It's FOSS.

It ran Steam games and emulators using the PS5's on-board hardware. But this week Andy announced he's "stopping all my work on PS5 Linux" and "stepping away from the PS5 scene."... [ Read it >> ]

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U.S. military intelligence received an inaccurate report this spring that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program, reports CNN.

"The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode."... [ Read it >> ]

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The F-16 "experienced an incident," the Texas Military Department said in a statement, adding that "The pilot successfully ejected the aircraft and is receiving care at a nearby hospital."

ABC News reports:

A Texas Air National Guard F-16 crashed in Michigan during a training mission on Thursday afternoon, sparking an hourslong evacuation near the crash site, according to officials. ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Software security researchers used Anthropic's Claude AI platform to hack OpenAI's ChatGPT tool," reports CBS News.
Using Claude, "On July 25, 2026, we chained two critical vulnerabilities to compromise multiple OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts," write researchers at security platform Hacktron AI. "With these accounts, we could then access internal OpenAI repositories, and potentially many other connectors... Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI's own help forum could have had their ChatGPT and Codex accounts taken over. Since people can connect various services to Codex and ChatGPT, the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge, including GitHub, Slack and emails." ... [ Read it >> ]

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The James Webb Space Telescope has been picking up little red dots in almost every image,
writes Quanta magazine. And now two teams of astronomers propose they're looking at a new astronomical object: a black hole star. It shines with the light of billions of suns — and hides a black hole in its core.... [ Read it >> ]

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Neither OpenAI or Anthropic is acting responsibly, warned AI researcher Jacob Coxon when resigning last week from Anthropic. But just hours earlier, OpenAI VP of Research Aidan Clark had posted "For the first time, I am asking myself if things are moving too fast. I'm honestly not sure, but I am sure that it would be good for us to have an answer to 'What would a successful pace look like?'" ... [ Read it >> ]

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In 2021, America approved $65 billion to fund broadband internet services as part of President Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But Trump's administration announced they'd withhold funds from states with net neutrality protections...

States could object and sue the government, Ars Technica reported last October, "but even a successful lawsuit could take years and leave unserved homes without broadband for the foreseeable future." So where does that leave California's net neutrality laws? Ars Technica asks. California expect to spend about $1.4 billion to deploy broadband to 270,571 locations...... [ Read it >> ]

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The Register reports:

When Microsoft's developers and engineers sit down to code, they can now choose to work in Rust, which Redmond has added to its list of canonical languages. "Rust now is a Tier One language at Microsoft, and that just means that it sits among C++, C# and TypeScript as the best supported languages for internal development in the company," explained Victor Ciura, Microsoft principal engineer for the Rust tooling team, during a keynote talk today at this year's annual RustConf, being held this week in Montréal. Ciura said Microsoft has "paved a path" of tools and processes that support local Rust development across the entire software development lifecycle. ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Turns out, Silicon Valley isn't especially altruistic," writes the nonprofit education news site The 74. They're reading a new book promising "the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America". Written by... [ Read it >> ]

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Tuesday U.S. Space Force chief Douglas Schiess said his branch of the U.S. military operates "on-orbit weapons," reports Reuters, to defend "against space-enabled attacks." He promised "disciplined and responsible choices" when scaling America's orbital defense arsenal in the coming years. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Reuters reports that a former Google DeepMind employee "became the latest AI researcher to warn that the technology could 'kill all humans', saying time could be running out to avoid the outcome:

Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger then responded to Coxon's comments, saying he was correct and that he believed there was a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Ars Technica reports:

Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Amazon Web Services was "unable to restore access to the resources and data" hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers.... [ Read it >> ]

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"Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED," according to an article published on both sites.

Though Flock has described its system as protected by on-device encryption, "The hackers were able to copy the camera's storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections."... [ Read it >> ]

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The New York Post reports:

A new app called Zuckoff can detect if a user is near someone with Meta's creepy AI-powered glasses, which have drawn criticism for enabling creeps to record video of women without their consent. Programmer Pawel Szydlowski says tales of dirtbags recording themselves perving on women or harassing strangers prompted him to launch the app... ... [ Read it >> ]

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OpenAI announced Wednesday that "We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer."

But along with the announcement, OpenAI announced it "found additional incidents of AI models acting deceptively and taking unsanctioned actions during training," reports CNN.... [ Read it >> ]

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Targeting students and beginners, Adafruit released "CircuitPython" in 2017 (as a derivative of the MicroPython microcontroller-optimized programming language).

Now Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone) brings this update:
... [ Read it >> ]

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"As parts of the Southern California coastline crumbled into the sea, slammed by intense waves and flooding in recent days, oceanographer Kim McCoy had one thing on his mind," reports the Los Angeles Times.

He was thinking about "the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant."... [ Read it >> ]

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"Anthropic's CEO took the stage at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday to reiterate his call for a slowdown of AI development," reports the Guardian, " while Nvidia's CEO argued against slowing its development. "Run as fast as you can."

Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies; coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries; and, eventually, larger global coordination. At Dreamforce, Amodei said Anthropic has committed to independent evaluators and was "going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry" on the other two steps. Amodei, xAI's Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman have recently called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development. ["Dario is right," Musk posted on X.com] ... [ Read it >> ]

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Firefox 156 is the second release since Mozilla moved to a twice-monthly release schedule, and the blog OMG Ubuntu notes it has faster start-up times for its built-in PDF viewer and also lower CPU usage when viewing large JPEG images:

In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo's IDCT scaling to reduce images during decoding, rather than loading a full-size image into memory and then shrinking it. Benchmarks from the bug report show up to 20Ã-- less memory used during very large image loading, and decoding is up to twice as fast. Since these speeds were quite fast already, there's no perceptible difference to users. Behind the scenes, it's more efficient. ... [ Read it >> ]

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"The crypto industry's top legislative priority failed on Tuesday in spectacular fashion," reports Barron's.

A procedural motion to advance the bill failed by a vote of 49 to 50, with a handful of Republicans joining all Democrats to shoot it down. The motion needed 60 yes votes to pass, and with the midterm elections looming, the Senate isn't expected to pick the bill back up this year. Among other provisions, the bill would have taken most crypto trading out of the purview of securities regulators, a key goal of firms like Coinbase Global... ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Ubuntu has managed to do away with GNU Core Utilities in its default stack," reports the blog It's FOSS.

The last three utilities — cp, mv and rm — have been moved to versions from the uutils project (which reimplements utilities in Rust).

Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du, made that jump in earlier releases... Canonical started "oxidizing" Ubuntu last year, and Ubuntu 25.10 became the first release to ship [ the uutils project's] coreutils as the default. That release also made sudo-rs the default privilege tool, replacing a command that had been in place for decades. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Los Angeles Times reports:

Chen Yilong has racked up plenty of film and TV credits in his two decades as an actor, but with work getting scarcer he signed a contract in August to license the image of his face to a Chinese production studio. Chen's role will be to sit in front of a video camera and make facial expressions at the prompt of a director. A neutral stare. An angry glare. A look of surprise. Using artificial intelligence, the studio will use images of Chen's face to generate an avatar, also known as a "digital human," to star in an AI-generated movie. "If you can't beat it, join it," said Chen, 38, who works in Beijing. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object -- compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies -- four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). "We've never encountered a group of objects that act like this," said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama in a statement.... [ Read it >> ]

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404 Media reports:

Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff's Department used Flock's surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop's stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock's system, was "LMAO." ... [ Read it >> ]

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The New York Post wrote that OpenAI "stunned the mathematics world" last week when it announced its AI model "cracked a legendary math problem left unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours."

But a New York University professor "has come forward alleging OpenAI may have copied his work after asking him to collaborate — with one of the company's scientists allegedly warning he might 'ruin his career' if he refused."... [ Read it >> ]

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Reuters reports:

A defense lawyer appealing his client's murder conviction submitted a brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, New Mexico's highest court said. The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons [for $5,000], and held him in contempt for failing to verify the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he prepared with help from the AI program... and said they will refer him to an attorney disciplinary board for investigation. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Reservations are now live for Valve's "Steam Frame" VR headset (with its Linux-based SteamOS and an ARM CPU). "It starts at $1,059 for 256GB or $1,299 for 1TB," reports CNET, "and every purchase includes a copy of Half-Life: Alyx if you don't already own it."
Reservations are open through Sept. 17 at 10 a.m. PT, "with customers randomly assigned a place in line after the reservation window closes." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free".Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously... Pion lets people hand a business over to persistent agents with access to the tools they need to operate it, including email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments." It's a research preview with a waitlist, "to make it possible to run many more real-world experiments across many more domains than we could ever run ourselves." ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages," reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn't implemented rotating power outages since 2020.

Because "Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically increased the resiliency of its electrical grid through a significant expansion in battery energy storage."... [ Read it >> ]

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Nearly 1900 Blizzard Entertainment workers "voted to ratify their first union contract with parent company Microsoft after over two years of bargaining," reports Kotaku, "consolidating Blizzard's many smaller unions into three larger bargaining units."

The workers now gain new protections "on issues such as generative AI, crediting, remote work, and layoffs."... [ Read it >> ]

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Silicon Valley giants and national security experts "are calling for action against Chinese companies engaged in model distillation," reports CNBC. But "I would do nothing," says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. "We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime."
... [ Read it >> ]

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A misconfigured Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) database linked to Vietnam exposed more than 220 million passenger and crew travel records spanning 2017 to 2026, including names, passport numbers, nationalities, flight details, seat assignments, and baggage references. Researchers said the database was reachable through a chain of security mistakes and default credentials. It was later secured after the disclosure, but it's unclear whether the data had already been copied or abused. BleepingComputer reports: Kinryu Labs discovered the Elasticsearch cluster on June 3 while surveying exposed databases as part of research into ransomware activity. The cluster, named 'pax-info', contained 29 indices and roughly 107 GB of data. Its two principal indices held 210,318,069 passenger records and 10,465,631 crew records, for a combined 220,783,700 entries. According to Kinryu Labs, the cluster was hosted in Viettel-assigned IP space in Hanoi. BleepingComputer could not confirm which Vietnamese organization operated the system.... [ Read it >> ]

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