One of the most basic tenets of cybersecurity is that you must “consider your threat model” when trying to keep your data and your communications safe, and then take appropriate steps to protect yourself.  This means you need to consider who you are, what you are talking about, and who may want to know that…

Welcome back to the Abstract! What a week. It kicked off with Blue Monday, a date considered the most depressing of the year in the Northern Hemisphere for dubious reasons (in short: it was invented, like most of our reality, by an ad campaign).  This column will channel the latent crappy vibes with a parade…

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the visual effects studio that practically invented the field as we know it today, revealed how it thinks it will use generative AI in the future, and that future looks really bad.  Much of what we understand today as special effects in movies was born at Industrial ILM, which was…

Elon Musk’s Grok, an AI chatbot that people can interact with via X, is being used to undress photos women are posting to the social media platform. All a user has to do is reply to an image someone has posted to X with a request to Grok to “remove her clothes.” Grok will then…

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss cheating in job interviews, “scary good” surveillance tech, and prudes in payment processing. EMANUEL: First I want to say that the response to our piece about “economic…

Google’s featured snippet is pulling in an Amazon AI summary of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf that calls it “a true work of art” in the latest AI-related fuckup affecting top search results. As of writing, searching for “mein kampf positive reviews” returned a result that was pulled from an AI-generated summary of an…