A Small Town Is Fighting a $1.2 Billion AI Datacenter for America’s Nuclear Weapon Scientists

Ypsilanti, Michigan resident KJ Pedri doesn’t want her town to be the site of a new $1.2 billion data center, a massive collaborative project between the University of Michigan and America’s nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) in New Mexico. “My grandfather was a rocket scientist who worked on Trinity,” Pedri said…

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This Company Turns Dashcams into ‘Virtual CCTV Cameras.’ Then Hackers Got In

A hacker has broken into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that pitches its users’ dashcams as “virtual CCTV cameras” around the world that other people can buy images from, and accessed a database of terabytes of video recordings taken from cameras in drivers’ cars. The videos obtained by the hacker and shared with 404 Media…

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‘A Black Hole of Energy Use’: Meta’s Massive AI Data Center Is Stressing Out a Louisiana Community

A massive data center for Meta’s AI will likely lead to rate hikes for Louisiana customers, but Meta wants to keep the details under wraps. Holly Ridge is a rural community bisected by US Highway 80, gridded with farmland, with a big creek—it is literally named Big Creek—running through it. It is home to rice…

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Civitai Ban of Real People Content Deals Major Blow to the Nonconsensual AI Porn Ecosystem

Civitai, an AI model sharing site backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that 404 Media has repeatedly shown is being used to generate nonconsensual adult content, is banning AI models designed to generate the likeness of real people, the site announced Friday. The policy change, which Civitai attributes in part to new AI regulations in the…

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NFTs That Cost Millions Replaced With Error Message After Project Downgraded to Free Cloudflare Plan

On Friday, thousands of NFTs that had once sold collectively for millions of dollars vanished from the internet and were replaced with the phrase “This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflare’s basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service.” The pictures eventually returned but their brief loss, as a result…

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Massive, Unarchivable Datasets of Cancer, Covid, and Alzheimer’s Research Could Be Lost Forever

Almost two dozen repositories of research and public health data supported by the National Institutes of Health are marked for “review” under the Trump administration’s direction, and researchers and archivists say the data is at risk of being lost forever if the repositories go down.  “The problem with archiving this data is that we can’t,”…

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