As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn. Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and…
The internet can be more physically vulnerable than you think. Last week, thousands of people in North and Central Texas were suddenly knocked offline. The cause? A bullet. The outage hit cities all across the state, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. The outage affected Spectrum customers and took down their phone…
We dedicate the whole free section of this episode to Musk’s takeover of the federal government. We got audio from a meeting in which a Musk ally laid out their plans for AI across the government, and revealed who is now the head of HR for DOGE. In the subscribers only section, we talk about…
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is looking to buy iris scanning technology that its manufacturer says can identify known persons “in seconds from virtually anywhere,” according to newly published procurement documents. Originally designed to be used by sheriff departments to identify inmates or other known persons, ICE is now likely buying the technology specifically for…
Meta’s Llama Stack critical flaw allowed attackers to take over servers that hosted AI
Oxford professor advises against putting private data on platform in case it could be shared with Chinese state
Welcome back to the Abstract! This week, it’s time to demand a new planet. Don’t we deserve it? Haven’t we been good? Fortunately, we may be on the cusp of finally discovering whether the solar system has, indeed, been hiding a massive world up its sleeve. Can you imagine the fight over naming this world,…
Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey among tech leaders to cast doubts on Chinese startup’s claimed budget and chip use.
Following on from our preview, here’s the full rundown on LLM salting: a novel countermeasure against LLM jailbreaks, developed by AI researchers at Sophos X-Ops
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,”…
