Artemis II Astronauts Have ‘Two Microsoft Outlooks’ and Neither Work

In 1969, the three astronauts of the Apollo 10 mission conducted a momentous “dress rehearsal” for putting humans on the lunar surface for the first time. It was a historic, inspiring moment for humanity; Astronaut John Young watched from a command module spacecraft as Thomas Stafford and Gene Cernan broke away and flew a lunar…

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A Secure Chat App’s Encryption Is So Bad It Is ‘Meaningless’

TeleGuard, an app that markets itself as a secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging platform which has been downloaded more than a million times, implements its encryption so poorly that an attacker can trivially access a user’s private key and decrypt their messages, multiple security researchers told 404 Media. TeleGuard also uploads users’ private keys to a…

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Scientists Create Plant That Produces Ayahuasca, Shrooms, and Toad Psychedelics All At Once

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists have engineered tobacco plants to produce five psychedelic compounds that are normally found in a wide range of natural sources, including psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, and toads, according to a study…

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‘BLOCKADE’: The Right Is Using AI Content Scanners to Try to Supercharge Book Banning

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation. Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries. Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups…

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I Tried to Find the ‘Arousal Intelligence’ In An Animated, Augmented Reality Porn Star

Sometimes people—especially those in the field of public relations doing a pray-and-spray campaign, but also small-time developers, the occasional delusional vibe-coder, and local dipshits—deliver messages to my inbox like a cat dropping a dead mouse on my doorstep. For the most part, I resist the bait: often, bad press is still press to these people,…

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Paul McCartney Banned From Reddit After Promoting Himself in Paul McCartney Subreddit

Sir Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit after sharing pictures of a concert in the r/PaulMcCartney subreddit. Over the weekend, Paul McCartney’s Reddit account attempted to share pictures from a show at Fonda Theatre to the site via a Dropbox link. Shortly afterwards the account was banned. Why did this happen? That’s in dispute. At…

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