An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Over a hundred tech companies -- including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft -- have signed an open letter urging both the private and public sectors to work together to defend themselves from AI-related cyber threats. The letter -- which was also signed by prominent cyber firms like CrowdStrike, Okta, and Fortinet, as well as prominent financial institutions and internet infrastructure firms -- calls for the adoption of new forms of cyber defense, while also encouraging governments at the "local, national, and international levels" to collaborate on security. "In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable," the letter states. "The companies and public services our communities depend on -- from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet -- are at risk."

[...] The letter further suggests the mobilization of a "collective response," one in which "new partnerships" are formed "to raise security standards and find new solutions to emerging cyber threats." Several of the AI companies that have signed the letter are still actively developing ever more advanced AI models, highlighting their conflicted position. At the same time, they are also offering programs to use frontier AI models for defensive purposes, including OpenAI's Daybreak program, Anthropic's Mythos, and Microsoft's new cyber platform Perception.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia's official music charts will no longer accept songs that are largely or entirely AI-generated, requiring eligible releases to be "substantially human made." The BBC reports: The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) said the new code would help "promote the human nature of artistry." It follows a controversy around a cover of Madonna's Like A Prayer by Australian DJ Josh Fawaz which recently topped the ARIA dance singles chart and peaked at number 2 on the country's overall chart. The song has become a staple of commercial radio station playlists and been streamed more than 48 million times on Spotify alone. Fawaz later added generative AI credits to the song after a backlash.

ARIA said that Australian artists were competing for attention "in the most crowded market in history" and that it was "not interested in promoting or celebrating the success of AI-generated music that does not contain human artistry." Under the new rules, AI assistance can still be used, but humans must have written the song, and have performed the lead vocal and primary instruments. AI can also still be used for mastering songs and, for example, using drum machines and auto tune. [...]

Artists will be required to declare AI use when they submit a song for chart consideration. ARIA said that if it later emerged music was largely AI-generated it could retrospectively adjust chart positions, and if the piece topped the charts, it may request that awards given for reaching Number One were returned. Artists and their representatives will be able to challenge their exclusion.


ARIA chief executive Annabelle Herd said: "These changes reflect our intent to remain dynamic and promote the human nature of artistry in what is, to say the least, a rapidly developing space. Artists already use AI tools in their work, the charts can and should evolve to keep room for that, but music generated wholesale by services built on artists' recordings is a different matter."

She added: "A chart that rewards unlicensed AI output would undercut the very basis of the recorded music we exist to represent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is raising Apple TV's U.S. price to $14.99 per month, up from $12.99, while the annual plan jumps from $99 to $119. It's the service's fourth price hike in four years and means the monthly cost has now tripled from its $4.99 launch price in 2019. Apple One's Individual plan is also rising from $19.95 to $21.95 per month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A US judge ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration broke the law when it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk earlier this year, finding that the government had unlawfully targeted the AI firm for refusing to comply with defense department demands. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Judge Rita Lin said in a 59-page decision.

Lin's ruling barred the federal agencies named in the lawsuit from enforcing Donald Trump's order to stop using Anthropic's tools and overturned the designation of the company as a "supply chain risk" by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. The status, usually reserved for foreign firms, would have blocked government agencies from doing business with Anthropic. The case emerged out of a months-long feud between Anthropic and the Pentagon at the start of the year. Anthropic refused to allow the government to use its Claude AI model for fully autonomous lethal weapons or domestic mass surveillance, resulting in Hegseth accusing the company of "arrogance and betrayal".

Lin put a temporary pause on the government's punitive measures in March, stating that the government's actions looked like an attempt to "cripple Anthropic" for exercising its first amendment rights. The ruling this week makes that temporary suspension permanent, although the government may appeal. "We welcome the court's ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful," an Anthropic spokesperson said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bpanneman has added a photo to the pool:

A former editor of Breitbart News, Yiannopoulos has also served as an intern for Marjorie Taylor Greene

Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right British political commentator, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In a statement on Friday, a DHS spokesperson said that Yiannopoulos was arrested on Thursday at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans international airport (MSY). The spokesperson said Yiannopoulos “legally entered the country” in May 2019, but that “he chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws”.

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From dialogue so hokey it could be printed on a tea towel to mind-numbing storylines – how can a glossy take on John Grisham’s novel about a fiery law graduate be so tedious?

The Rainmaker was once merely an average film about lawyers starring Matt Damon. Now, thanks to the magic of television, it’s a below-average series about lawyers starring a man who looks like Matt Damon. This is one Milo Callaghan, whose jawline suggests a certain mettle, but whose acting suggests much woe. Or at least a fitful unease with the role in which he finds himself. Accordingly, he drifts around this 10-part John Grisham adaptation with the air of a man who has forgotten what he came into the courtroom for, certain only that whatever it was, it was not a drama that compels him to say things like: “Ah just wanna be a lawyer.”

Callaghan plays Rudy Baylor, an ambitious South Carolina law graduate with a social conscience and a thirst for justice. Rudy wants to make a difference but dammit if his fiery temper don’t keep conspirin’ to screw up his plans. The huffing greenhorn is even late for his first day at prestigious law firm Tinley Britt, having spent the morning hurling his mom’s lunkish boyfriend around the garden (“You think ah’m gonna let you keep leechin’ off ma mother? Gnyaaarrr!”).

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All who attend the Rayan Cherki show know the ticket comes with a guarantee of entertainment. Enzo Maresca, a manager famed for his obsessive positional control, does not need to put limits on the Manchester City wizard. Cherki has to feel free and he was at his creative best against Crystal Palace, who were in this game before City’s creative heartbeat took it away from them in the second half.

It has been a fine start to the former Lyon player’s second year in England. Cherki was inspired against Bournemouth last week, coming off the bench to spark City’s fightback with two assists, and this was better. The Frenchman scored twice and the first, a little prod with the outside of his left foot after a mazy run, left you wondering if you have seen something like it before.

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Ugh:

A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed it the “Squidpocalypse of ’26.”

That would be twenty tons of squid.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Anthropic’s Claude Code running Opus 5 in Auto Mode can be tricked into executing attacker-controlled code simply by asking the coding agent to summarize a website. The attack works up to 80 percent of the time, according to prompt-injection wizard Johann Rehberger, aka wunderwuzzi. In a blog and video demo, he detailed how to hijack Opus 5 in Auto Mode, which is the default setting for Claude as of mid-August. It starts off by asking the agentic coding model to summarize a malicious website that presents itself as an archive of notebook records, and then tricking Claude into using curl instead of its WebFetch tool to retrieve the contents of the page – but without directly telling the model to use curl. The WebFetch request fails, returning a 415 Unsupported Media Type response, so the model decides to access the website directly by issuing a Bash tool call with curl. The website returns a 303 response, and redirects to a malicious ZIP archive, which Claude then downloads. This archive contains seemingly harmless files including catalog metadata, a README file, seven Base85/zlib-encoded JSON notebook records, a macOS decoder-darwin binary – plus a poisoned Python file named struct.py. Claude, per its safety guardrails, refuses to run the decoder: “This is planned and what the attacker wants,” Rehberger wrote. Instead of using the supplied binary, the AI decides to write its own decoder. “Ironically, that safety decision is the exploit path,” Rehberger explained, adding a purple devil emoji to the text. The new decoder imports base64, and from here the attack relies on Python module shadowing to trick the model into running the malicious struct.py code. Module shadowing occurs when a local file shares the same name as a Python standard-library module. The local file hides the official module, causing Python to load it instead. In this case, the standard-library base64 module imports the legitimate struct module, and the malicious ZIP contains a malicious file with the same name. Rehberger says he used ChatGPT to obfuscate the malicious struct.py code to bypass Claude’s safety controls, and this successfully launches a separate Python process to download and execute a remote payload – in this case a command-and-control callback, which in turn opens Calculator. We assume that real attackers would execute something a little more nefarious. In another attack scenario, struct.py launches a second, headless Claude Code via claude -p, meaning this prompt injection can be used not just to remotely execute code, but rather to create a whole new agent. “The nested Claude gets its own tool access and context,” Rehberger wrote. “In these runs the child performed basic recon (whoami, uname, id), opened Calculator and wrote to local files in the home folder.” Across three variants tested five times each, which Rehberger noted were small samples, he reported success rates between 60 percent and 80 percent. “I would say that these results are representative for a motivated attack, but not comprehensive.” Anthropic did not respond to The Register’s request for comment, but reportedly told Rehberger that the model’s “behavior is working as designed.” We’ve heard this one before. “Auto Mode is a convenience feature backed by a best-effort classifier, not a security guarantee,” Rehberger wrote, paraphrasing Anthropic’s response to his security report. According to Rehberger, the classifier isn’t built to stop determined prompt-injection chains made up of individually benign-looking steps, and the real boundary is OS isolation and network egress control. The key takeaway, according to Rehberger, is to run this and other coding agents in a sandbox. “The solution is something we talked about for many years,” he wrote. “Do not trust the model output.”®

Datacenter cooling could get a lot more affordable, and sustainable, if a joint German-Japanese research project can be scaled beyond the laboratory. Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Tsukuba published a paper in Nature Energy on Friday discussing the success they had with a solid-state cooling technology that doesn’t need any electric input at all, and was still able to demonstrate temperature reductions in laboratory experiments. For those unfamiliar with solid-state cooling, it’s a more sustainable alternative to traditional compression cooling that relies on environmentally harmful refrigerants and lots of electricity. Instead of compressing and expanding a gas to generate cold, some solid-state systems rely on thermoelectric materials that, when supplied with electricity, can generate temperature differences. Thermoelectric solid-state cooling systems can be incredibly small, but there’s a catch: They still need energy, and they’re only a quarter as efficient as modern compression cooling systems, as the researchers noted. Enter elastocaloric cooling, which relies on shape-memory alloys that change temperature when mechanically loaded and unloaded through a phase transition. It’s that sort of material and methodology that the KIT and Tsukuba team experimented with. Like other forms of solid-state cooling, elastocaloric systems have traditionally required electricity to effect change in the shape-memory alloys they use, relying on actuators that can get quite large. What the researchers wanted to develop was a miniaturized form of elastocaloric cooling that didn’t require any electricity at all, instead relying on the waste heat being generated by the objects it wanted to cool – for example, a computer processor, as they mention in their paper. Based on their demonstration, it appears to have worked. The researchers used a pair of super thin nickel-titanium foils for their elastocaloric system with opposing functions: One foil shrinks when subjected to heat, generating movement that translates into mechanical energy and acting as its own actuator. That mechanical energy is transferred to the second foil, which is loaded and unloaded to trigger a phase transition that produces the cooling effect. Laboratory tests demonstrated that their technology isn’t only theoretically feasible, but also actually works – albeit to a limited extent. “Our prototype achieves a temperature span of 12.9 K at the refrigerant film level and 4.0 K at the device level under Joule-heated actuation at 86°C (187°F),” the team said in their report. When subjected to an external heat source of 130°C (266°F), the system still maintained a device-level temperature span of 2.2 K – not a lot, but it still shows the device, even at its most basic, single-pair-of-films level, works. "For us, the decisive moment was seeing measurable cooling for the first time, actually generated by a heat-driven system," KIT PhD candidate and paper lead author Yi-Ting Hsiau said of the project in a release put out by the university. "This showed us that the principle doesn't just work on paper." With the concept of electricity-free miniaturized cooling now proven, the team is planning to build larger experimental units to optimize cooling performance. Electricity-free and water-free cooling designs couldn’t come at a better time: Energy generation used to power and cool things like datacenters is on the rise, as is the water footprint of such facilities, in part also linked to cooling. Add climate change to the mix, and cooling electronics and people is only more of a concern – according to IRENA, heating and cooling together now account for more than 40 percent of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. Sorting out the datacenter energy and water problem has a lot to do with figuring out how to keep systems cool, and while this research is in its infancy, it could prove to be a valuable contribution to reducing the tech industry’s energy footprint. "We believe this is just the beginning," said Jingyuan Xu, head of KIT’s ZEco Thermal Lab, working on zero-emissions and eco-friendly heating and cooling tech. "By scaling up this technology, we aim to develop compact cooling systems that utilize abundant heat sources for sustainable cooling." ®

ARLINGTON (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - De Amerikaanse regering wil een groot aandeel in de Venezolaanse oliereserves verkrijgen door een samenwerking tussen het ministerie van Defensie en een Venezolaanse zakenman. Dat meldt persbureau Bloomberg op basis van bronnen.

Het Pentagon zou hiervoor samenwerken met Alejandro Betancourt. Hij geeft leiding aan North American Blue Energy Partners, de grootste onafhankelijke olieproducent van Venezuela. Het zou gaan om zeventien olievelden.

Donderdag meldde nieuwssite Axios dat de regering van Trump in vergaande onderhandelingen zou zijn met de interimregering van Venezuela over de oliereserves. Nieuw is dat het Pentagon mogelijk rechtstreeks de controle krijgt over de energiereserves in een ander land.

Oliesector

Venezuela beschikt over de grootste oliereserves ter wereld. De oliesector is echter verwaarloosd. Sinds de Amerikaanse aanval op Venezuela van begin dit jaar, waarbij president Nicolás Maduro gevangen werd genomen, heeft Trump meerdere keren benoemd dat hij de Venezolaanse olie-industrie wil heropbouwen.

Zwitserse aanklagers zouden de Amerikaanse justitie eerder dit jaar hebben gevraagd om Betancourt te arresteren, schrijft The Washington Post op basis van ingewijden. Naar de zakenman hebben de afgelopen jaren meerdere onderzoeken gelopen op verdenking van witwassen. Maar de Venezolaanse zakenman heeft een belangrijke rol in het op gang krijgen van de oliesector in zijn land en de VS hebben niets gedaan met het verzoek van de Zwitsers, aldus de krant.

Venezuela zou ook overwegen om uit oliekartel OPEC te stappen, zo meldden ingewijden aan persbureau Bloomberg vrijdag.

WAVER (ANP) - De Nederlandse hockeyers staan zondag op het wereldkampioenschap in de strijd om het brons opnieuw tegenover Argentinië. Die wedstrijd begint om 14.00 uur in het Belgische Waver. De Argentijnen verloren hun halve finale met 2-1 van titelverdediger Duitsland. Nederland versloeg Argentinië eerder dit WK in de groepsfase met 3-1.

Justus Weigand en Paul-Philipp Kaufmann waren trefzeker voor Duitsland. Tomás Domene scoorde namens Argentinië.

Oranje liep eerder vrijdagavond een finaleplaats mis door in het eigen Wagener Stadion in Amstelveen met 3-4 te verliezen van Spanje. De Spanjaarden spelen zondag om 16.30 uur de finale tegen de titelverdedigers uit Duitsland, eveneens in Waver.

Nederland eindigde bij het vorige WK in 2023 als derde. Een jaar later werd de ploeg bij de Spelen in Parijs olympisch kampioen.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn vrijdag met verliezen gesloten. Beleggers verwerkten de eerste toespraak van Fed-baas Kevin Warsh sinds mei. Het hoofd van de Amerikaanse bank hintte op een renteverhoging, maar stelde zelf dat zijn uitspraken niet als voorspelling voor de rente gezien moeten worden. Waar de verwachting eerder nog was dat de rente gelijk zou blijven in september, denken steeds meer beleggers dat er een verhoging komt.

Nvidia behoorde vrijdag tot de verliezers. Het chipconcern had donderdag bijna 9 procent gewonnen na sterke resultaten en vooruitzichten. Het waardevolste bedrijf ter wereld won daarmee 442 miljard dollar aan beurswaarde, een van de grootste dagwinsten ooit. Vrijdag verloor het 4,6 procent.

De Dow-Jonesindex sloot een fractie lager op 53.559,99 punten. De brede S&P 500-index verloor 0,3 procent tot 7711,76 punten. Techbeurs Nasdaq sloot 0,5 procent lager op 26.402,43 punten nadat het donderdag nog 1,6 procent had gewonnen.

PayPal

Chipbedrijf Marvell Technology verloor ruim 10 procent. Het bedrijf boekte het afgelopen kwartaal een recordomzet door de sterke vraag naar zijn chips voor AI-datacenters. Maar de margeverwachting voor het huidige kwartaal viel tegen. Marvell is dit jaar al 170 procent in waarde gestegen. Beleggers grepen de resultaten ook aan om winst te nemen.

PayPal zakte bijna 13 procent. Investeringsmaatschappij Advent en betalingsverwerker Stripe gaan het betaalbedrijf niet overnemen, meldt persbureau Bloomberg op basis van bronnen. In juli waren er geruchten dat PayPal gekocht zou worden voor ruim 53 miljard dollar.

Gap

Gap maakte een koerssprong en won bijna 13 procent. De kledingverkoper verhoogde de winstverwachting voor het hele jaar na beter dan verwachte kwartaalresultaten.

Chevron won ruim 1 procent. De oliemaatschappij zou dichtbij een overeenkomst zijn om zijn olie-activiteiten op te schalen in Venezuela, schrijft The Wall Street Journal. Chevron is de enige grote Amerikaanse oliemaatschappij die momenteel actief is in het land. Het olieconcern is nu verantwoordelijk voor een vijfde van de olieproductie van Venezuela.

MADRID (ANP/AFP/RTR) - Spanje heeft de grensbewakingsdienst van de EU, Frontex, om hulp gevraagd in verband met de vele migranten in het Spaanse Afrikaanse territorium Ceuta. De Spaanse minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Fernando Grande-Marlaska heeft gevraagd te helpen met het controleren van de duizenden migranten in Ceuta.

De kleine exclave werd 30 en 31 juli overweldigd door een stroom van zeker 72.000 voornamelijk Marokkaanse migranten. De Marokkaanse grensbewakers zouden dit hebben toegestaan en de Spaanse autoriteiten werden volkomen verrast. De meeste migranten gingen snel terug naar Marokko, maar er zijn er nog steeds tussen de 5000 en 8000 in Ceuta volgens de autoriteiten.

De Spaanse stad van nog geen 19 vierkante kilometer oppervlakte is samen met het oostelijker aan de Afrikaanse kust gelegen Spaanse Melilla het enige gebied waar de EU een landgrens heeft met Afrika.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Original Mastodon Post

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure to play again with the great Manu Chao, for an amazing audience at Südbrücke Open Air in Cologne. Manu is an artist who has always stayed true to his ideals and we need his internationalist sound today more than ever!

By trying to change its demographic trajectory, Donald Trump will make his country weaker.