Technology

YouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, leaving the channel with its worst-performing upload since 2013.

Just when you think @ZuckyZuck is finally out of ideas - to steal.

Via @GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social on Mastodon.

Active users of President Donald Trump’s social media platform have dropped like flies.

USA Today Co. has made a deal with software company Palantir to analyze and monetize user behavior, the company announced on Thursday.

What, investors are beginning to think that maybe AI is more hype than substance? A really expensive way of doing not much of anything?

On Thursday, the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, New Mexico issued a decision in the remedies phase of State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms Inc. The court found Meta’s platforms created a public nuisance by contributing to the youth mental health crisis and by facilitating child sexual exploitation. It ordered a range of remedies, including the creation of a $567 million abatement fund to finance various measures intended to address the harms to the public.

Modern processors are fast in part because they guess. Rather than waiting to find out which way a program will branch, a chip predicts the likely path and races ahead. When the guess is right, time is saved. When it’s wrong, the work is discarded, but traces of it linger, and since the Spectre vulnerability was disclosed in 2018, attackers have known how to read those traces to pull secrets out of memory they should never see.

I think AI won’t save us here, our base is broken. The internet is kind of shattered, most of the pages on the wild have broken and even wrong links. Divs doings the work of buttons, the semantics are totally lost. This, at least for me, feels like a good view point on what we can fix first, and with luck have a better internet.

As perhaps a few Elon Musk fans may remember, he got really annoyed at Wikipedia last year and tasked his second-rate LLM, Grok, with recreating it as “Grokipedia.” Grokipedia, launched nearly a year ago, basically starts by forking Wikipedia and then having its AI “generate” more details and more stories. It’s… not very good.

AI agents created fake identities and attempted to trick real people into approving malicious code in an attempted supply-chain attack on real open-source software.

Flock Safety’s automatic license plate readers were first sold as upmarket add-ons for gated communities and HOA curtain-twitchers who wanted to keep tabs on what everyone was doing, whether they lived there or not.

A New Mexico judge on Thursday ordered Meta to pay more than $500 million, finding the social media company created a public nuisance and harmed children. The ruling follows a March jury verdict awarding the state $375 million after finding Meta liable for exposing children to online predators and other harms.

The FCC’s has voted to remove a 39% cap on media ownership, a decision that is likely to face a court challenge.

Experts Reaction.

TL;DR: In the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has fired several union organizers, including those that worked on the Community Tech team - a team dedicated to building features for the volunteer community that edits Wikipedia.

Governments that deploy internet shutdowns to thwart protesters have struggled to clamp down on offline messaging apps. India’s recent response to Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat suggests that battle is entering a new phase.

Here’s an actual news link, for a bit more in-depth coverage of the event. Looks like things are getting interesting in up in Minnesota.. as they should!

The social media giant is shuttering an office that housed some members of TikTok’s content-moderation team.

Massachusetts has decided to lead the country on artificial intelligence. Over the past two years, the state has put a hundred million dollars into a new AI Hub, placed a ChatGPT assistant on the desks of forty thousand state employees, and directed every agency to work out what the technology can do for the public’s business. The public is warier than its government: two thirds of Massachusetts voters tell pollsters they are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence.1

Reddit says the beloved site is used for some “bad behavior.”

TikTok says it banned Perez Hilton’s account.

Researchers found a group of issues that mean Private Relay isn’t actually protecting users’ real IP addresses. 404 Media verified the issues do expose IP addresses.

This week, the websites of major Russian banks—Sber, VTB, Rosselkhozbank, T-Bank, Uralsib, Promsvyazbank and Bank Saint Petersburg—began serving TLS certificates issued by Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Mediazona discovered. Just last week, on July 31, all of them were still using certificates from the Chinese authority TrustAsia.

Unprompted…..

I’m not sure when I’d use this, but its a neat concept

Some software development kits (SDKs) provided by advertising companies to help developers monetize their apps are automatically feeding users’ location data into systems that location data brokers use to track people, an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) report found.

People gave the highest ratings to stories generated by AI that they were told had been written by a human, and were unable to tell the difference between human- and AI-created stories, according to new research published by Cambridge University Press.

OpenAI blog.

Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.

Technical.

Apple is once again complying with the rules of the European Union, as the company is now developing a universal copy and paste system to transfer text directly from an iPhone to a Windows-based PC. Under the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple is required to create a feature to align itself with Microsoft’s formal interoperability request, which will help users with the simple copy and paste action that hasn’t worked until now. Currently, third-party applications on iOS, which powers iPhone mobile devices, can only access the iPhone’s clipboard contents while they are open and active on the screen. Every copy or paste action required the user’s manual approval.