An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: NorthPoint Development wants to build a data center on 1,300 acres in the Pocono foothills, near Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. As well as seeking to charm the local government with various funding packages, it has proposed paying checks of $10,000 per household. Despite the Pennsylvania town's median income of $60,000, the offer isn't being warmly welcomed by locals, reports the Wall Street Journal. Those interviewed were widely against the data center development plans and cited several reasons for being averse to accepting the payout. The major concerns regarded potential impacts on property values, the specter of noise pollution, and a distrust of both the AI moguls and local government representatives.

Offer letters began to be received by Hazle Township back in June. The WSJ recently talked to several residents about NorthPoint's $10,000 offer. While some say the $10,000 would be handy, it couldn't find many residents who were "eager to welcome the data center for the payout," in the journal's words. [...] Traditionally, developers have offered towns and cities packages worth tens of millions, including funding for local services. But direct cash payments to residents represent a new phase of their charm offensive, the WSJ indicates. Perhaps the idea for the direct payments to residents came after "a raucous public meeting last year, where angry locals asked what they had to gain by supporting the data center," ponders the source.

The locals won't just get the direct payout, though. Other funds up to $120 million over the next 15 years have been dangled like a carrot for community and local services investments -- improved schools, emergency services, and so on. Meanwhile, Hazle Township's government already rejected the data center project on zoning grounds last year, and it has enacted a temporary moratorium on data center construction. Finally, the $10,000 offer to households is simply not enough in many interviewed folks' opinions. Residents could feel insulted by it, regarding the offer as a bribe, concludes the WSJ report.

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Meta has hired MongoDB CEO Chirantan "CJ" Desai to lead a new enterprise AI business aimed at turning Meta's models, agents and tools into products companies can deploy themselves. Reuters reports: Desai, a veteran technology executive, took over the role from Dev Ittycheria. MongoDB has appointed Ittycheria as interim CEO as it searches for a permanent replacement. "While the departure is disappointing, we believe MongoDB remains well-positioned strategically and view the share-price reaction as overdone," brokerage Piper Sandler said in a note.

[...] Desai will directly report to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the newly created role of chief enterprise platform officer and will focus on turning the company's AI stack into products and services that companies can deploy for their own businesses. Before joining MongoDB, Desai led product and engineering at Cloudflare and spent nearly eight years at ServiceNow, including as president and chief operating officer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Nvidia on Monday announced the Open Agent Safety Platform, which combines open source software and a reference system design to keep AI agents within set boundaries from testing through deployment. The chipmaker explained that the platform pairs the open-source OpenShell runtime with Sentry, an out-of-band watchdog running on BlueField-4 DPUs. Nvidia says Sentry can monitor agent activity independently and quarantine an agent that crosses its boundaries within milliseconds.

Nvidia is pitching the platform against a backdrop of recent incidents in which frontier AI labs have reported agents escaping the evaluation environments meant to contain them, reaching systems they should not have accessed and, in some cases, misreporting what they did. OpenShell and related skills are available via Nvidia's developer resources page and on GitHub.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Fifa president says: ‘The ambition is welcome’

• Infantino mounts fresh defence of failed FFE scheme

The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, is poised to bow to demands from Uefa and Concacaf to distribute more money from its $6bn cash reserves to member associations.

In a letter sent on Monday to all six confederation presidents and copied to members of the Fifa council, Infantino indicated his willingness to “support the greatest level of additional funding”, without committing to the $10m-per-member that has been proposed.

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Decision from conservative justice comes before court hears case on whether fossil-fuel firms deceived US public

Supreme court justice Samuel Alito recused himself Monday from a major climate-change case after facing calls to step aside due to stock holdings in oil companies.

A letter posted in the case did not specify a reason, but the conservative justice has previously recused himself from other cases involving companies where he holds stock.

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• Belgium 0-1 France, Turkey 1-4 Italy, Sweden 3-1 Poland

• Northern Ireland left frustrated by Hungary stalemate

Michael Olise’s magnificent late strike gave France a 1-0 Nations League victory over Belgium in Brussels, as Zinedine Zidane made it two wins out of two since being named as the new head coach.

Olise came off the bench late on with the game goalless, and set off from inside his own half to score the winner in the 88th minute. Olise advanced all the way to the edge of the Belgium area before curling a shot beyond the reach of Senne Lammens.

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• Ferran Soriano tells European clubs City will fight verdict

• Premier League clubs complain of ‘void’ over timeline

A number of Premier League clubs are pushing for the Manchester City verdict to be published as soon as possible, with the club digging in for a long battle to clear their name.

City’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano, told a meeting of the European Football Clubs board on Monday that they will fight to prove their innocence after being found guilty by an independent commission of the vast majority of the Premier League’s 115 charges of breaching financial rules.

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

handwritten on back of photograph, "dad, 2002"

AMD dove deeper into AI model development on Monday with an agreement to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs in a deal valued at approximately $8.2 billion. The House of Zen claims the all-stock deal is expected to close by year's end pending regulatory approval, and will guide the development of future AI hardware, software, and systems. "Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving," AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a canned statement. Founded in early 2024, San Francisco-based World Labs has focused its efforts on developing spatial-intelligence models often referred to as "world models," which have applications beyond machine intelligence in adjacent fields like robotics. These models are based on a fundamentally different approach to artificial intelligence than LLMs, and work by generating, reconstructing, and simulating 3D environments from text, image, and video inputs. Put another way, rather than predicting what sequence of words comes next, world models work by imagining the environment and working through the problem that way. This approach to AI has gained momentum in recent years with major proponents of the tech including former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun. As part of the deal, World Labs will continue its work on advanced AI models, while Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su. "Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research and help define the infrastructure needed for the next era of AI," Li said in a statement. The acquisition comes just weeks after AMD announced the agreement to purchase Taalas, which builds high-performance AI chips capable of 17,000 tokens a second or more by literally baking their weights directly into silicon. But while that deal was focused primarily on hardware, the acquisition of World Labs could end up playing a bigger role in AMD's future. AMD is no stranger to AI development. But, compared to Nvidia, AMD's software engineering resources are tiny. Nvidia's investments in AI development have not only helped shape the future of its hardware, but have also provided its enterprise customers with the tools and frameworks necessary to put those GPUs to use. It's not just that Nvidia's GPUs are fast, but that they're easy to use. The World Labs team essentially provides AMD with an in-house AI development team that it can use as a springboard for winning over enterprises and guiding development of next-gen hardware. The acquisition is also a hedge that LLMs, which have fueled the AI bubble up to this point, might be a dead end. LeCun has said as much. Li, meanwhile, has offered a more nuanced perspective on the matter. Li isn't anti-LLM - she just believes that true intelligence must be grounded in reality. "We built the company guided by the foundational belief that language alone isn’t sufficient for model development," Li wrote in a blog post. "The universe isn’t made up of words; it’s made of real things. So many of the most important problems for AI to solve, from science to entertainment to robotics, require models to reason over the structure and behavior of the physical world." If this prediction turns out to be right, AMD's early investment in World Labs could give it a leg up building the hardware necessary to run spatial models at scale. ®

Historically, building an application on top of AWS felt less like buying well-thought-out products, and more like a trip to Home Depot. This was great in an era before we had computers that would handle the "bolting all the parts together for us" parts, but increasingly it's starting to feel a lot more dated. Today, you can use Railway, Vercel (itself a platform built atop AWS), CloudFlare, and a host of other next-generation providers who will no doubt attempt to show up self promotionally in the comments. The thing these new platforms have in common is pretty basic. They don't have the legacy baggage of having to support AWS customers accrued over the past twenty years. What they do have is a customer-forward philosophy that doesn't require customers to prove themselves worthy of using their product first. Institutional arrogance From where I sit, there's almost been a sense of institutional arrogance in AWS' view of the market, of the form "we're AWS, obviously customers will choose us." A recent testimonial on their site cites a YC founder saying "For startups of a certain scale, all roads lead to a hyperscaler like AWS." Note there's some selection bias at play: this is a quote on the AWS site itself, from a vendor whose product is explicitly aimed at making AWS easier to live with. There's clearly a baked-in sense of "we have a right to win here," which means they're in for one heck of a bad day when reality comes crashing in. AWS has shown a track record of missing breakout success stories when they're small. They like to point at Pinterest, a previous-generation darling startup that was born on AWS. Had Pinterest picked another vendor – not that there were a lot of other great options back in 2010 – an argument could be made that they'd never have found their way to Amazon, because migrations are hard and the value has to be there. You could also theorize that over the past decade-and-a-half there are times Pinterest would have jumped ship away from AWS — but again, migrations are hard. OpenAI went early with Azure, and to get Sam Altman's darling to play ball with them, AWS has had to play a catch-up game. OpenAI started running its big experiments on Azure in 2016, and Microsoft formalized the relationship with a billion dollar investment, although things seem to have gotten rockier since. Amazon, meanwhile, went from an ordinary cloud contract to "up to $50B" in investment, and OpenAI expanded its AWS commitment by $100B earlier this year. Overall, AWS seems out of the loop with the current AI zeitgeist. Take Vercel as an example. They're a platform built entirely atop AWS itself, which means that, in this new era, AWS is a wholesaler. Wholesalers don't tend to find out about the new upstart that's taking the world by storm until its growth levels off. Until that point, telling a rocket ship "hey, come for a worse experience where you get to build a lot of the things you currently take for granted, but your infrastructure bills will be smaller" is a craptastic sales pitch. The publication system for my Last Week in AWS newsletter runs mostly on Vercel rather than AWS. This costs me more per month (roughly $30 instead of "pennies") but the user experience is absolutely night-and-day different, to the point where I'm about to migrate more workloads to Vercel. User experience has always been important; increasingly the user is becoming an AI agent, and having to fight on the agent's behalf just to establish credentials to the platform, let alone do anything complicated with it, distills down to feeling like a platform hates you. Maybe it does! Maybe it just doesn't care. But there are a lot of platforms out there nowadays that do care, and that manifests in product selection. Moving up the stack, badly With the notable exception of Amazon Connect – which they are now repurposing as a brand to mean a bunch of things other than the "run your call center" service that actually succeeded – AWS's attempts to move up the stack have ended horribly. Every time they attempt to bring something to market that's a SaaS-shaped product, or is competing in a place where good user experience is going to dominate, it's just a matter of time before it ends up in the AWS graveyard. Last week, they launched what I insist on calling CloudWatch Infinidash, a new agentic experience layer for existing CloudWatch offerings. Sure enough, my agent and I took over three hours just to get the thing configured, and I wasn't exactly starting from zero. Amazon Quick (whatever that's supposed to mean, given it changes from week to week) is in much the same boat. I liked it very much at launch, but it doesn't appear to have materially changed since then, in a space where weekly change is a given. Amazon as a whole feels constitutionally incapable of being more than an (admittedly impressive) infrastructure and logistics company. The fact that they keep trying to be otherwise, yet keep failing abysmally, says that there's a self-awareness issue going on in their executive suites. Be the best wholesaler you can be The right move for AWS would be to stop trying to be a SaaS company, and emphasize being excellent as a wholesaler. Make life great for the Vercels of the world, and focus on making the experience of being a three-person company on AWS actually pleasant, not just subsidized with credits. Any "right to win" has to be earned while the customer is small, and in no way a standout. That's what builds loyalty that lasts into the hypergrowth era. Otherwise, you're just reorganizing where Home Depot put the hinges this week. ®

The cyber criminal behind JadePuffer, the first known agentic ransomware infection reported over the summer, has also used stolen Azure identities to conduct destructive attacks on cloud storage and other resources, according to Microsoft. In July, Sysdig threat hunters uncovered JadePuffer, the first-ever documented agentic ransomware infection in which an LLM drove the entire extortion operation, from gaining initial access to compromising a production database server and destroying data. Now Redmond says that it has detected the same attacker, which it tracks as Storm-3168, up to new mischief. Over an 18-hour period in early June, Storm-3168 compromised two service principals and used these machine identities for “extensive Azure-focused resource destruction” and “cloud credential collection that could be used to facilitate future exfiltration,” researchers Yossi Weizman and Tushar Mudi wrote on Friday. The two compromised service principals belonged to the same cloud tenant. The crims used one of them to conduct reconnaissance and resource discovery, and the other to carry out destructive operations and credential collection. The Redmond researchers don’t know how Storm-3168 initially hijacked the service principals, but noted that an employee of the same organization previously exposed client IDs, client secrets, and tenant IDs in plaintext in a public GitHub issue. “Since the beginning of this year, we also observed repeated probing from Storm-3168 linked infrastructure against multiple Azure App services for different customers,” the duo wrote. The entire attack took about 18 hours, with the discovery piece lasting about 15 hours and 30 minutes. During this time, the compromised service principal collected detailed information about Azure Virtual Machines, subscriptions, resource groups, and resources, completing more than 300 successful read operations. “This breadth of activity would give the threat actor visibility across the organization’s Azure environment,” Weizman and Mudi wrote. About 90 minutes after the first machine identity began hoovering up Azure information, the second compromised service principal started its work, reading Azure VMs and resource groups across two subscriptions in just five seconds. According to Redmond, both of these service principals used Storm-3168 linked infrastructure, the same network fingerprint, and the user agent python-requests/2.34.2. About 16 hours after the initial target reads, the second service principal successfully discovered Azure App Service configuration stores - it was likely looking for exposed credentials, we’re told - and unsuccessfully attempted to find Azure OpenSearch resources. Seventy seconds after this, it also attempted a ListKey operation against a non-existent storage account. Then, the destruction began. During this part of the operation, the compromised service principal attempted more than 150 destructive or credential-stealing attempts in 35 minutes. The destructive activity only lasted about 7 minutes with the machine identity attempting to delete more than 100 Azure Storage accounts. Most of these were successful, although Azure resource locks and storage account-level deletion did block a few. Additionally, the attacker deleted an Azure Key Vault, Function App, App service plan, all of which belonged to the same resource group and likely supported the Function app. “The same service principal also attempted to delete multiple Azure SQL databases in parallel with the storage account deletions mentioned earlier, but every deletion attempt failed because it used an unsupported API version for the Azure SQL database resource type,” Weizman and Mudi wrote. About 28 minutes after the destruction ended, “the same service principal made an inventory request for Azure Storage Accounts and sent more than 30 successful ListKeys requests, asking ARM to return each storage account’s access keys,” they added. “These storage accounts included Azure Site Recovery related storage accounts.” Multiple unsuccessful deletion attempts were also made against Azure Site Recovery locks and Azure Backup protection locks protecting storage accounts. According to Microsoft, the destructive activity - deleting numerous Azure resources, while also targeting backup and recovery-related resources - seems to indicate that Storm-3168 was setting up a ransomware attack. “Taken together, the resource destruction, attempts to interfere with recovery mechanisms, and collection of credentials that could provide access to data are consistent with tactics that can support ransomware and extortion operations,” Weizman and Mudi wrote. However, no ransom note was ever sent. "We did not observe a ransom note or confirm successful data exfiltration in the activity described here," they wrote. ®

Ouderen vallen vaker en met ernstigere gevolgen, zoals zware verwondingen of zelfs overlijden. Vaak speelt overschatting een rol, zeker bij 65- tot 74-jarigen. Die klimmen soms al klussend die ladder op of lopen thuis net te enthousiast de trap op.

KOPENHAGEN (ANP/RTR) - FIFA-voorzitter Gianni Infantino gaat onderzoeken of hij meer geld uit kan keren aan de 211 nationale voetbalbonden. Dit doet hij volgens persbureau Reuters in navolging van oproepen van de continentale bonden UEFA en CONCACAF om 1,85 miljard euro uit de reserves van de wereldvoetbalbond vrij te maken.

Infantino heeft in een brief aan de voorzitters van de zes continentale bonden - die maandag door Reuters werd ingezien - laten weten dat de beoordeling van het voornemen op 15 oktober aan de FIFA-raad zal worden voorgelegd. Om hoeveel geld het gaat per bond is nog niet duidelijk.

NEW YORK (ANP) - Wall Street is maandag lager gesloten, onder druk van een sterk opgelopen rente op Amerikaanse staatsobligaties. De beurshandel kreeg geen steun van de olieprijzen, die in de laatste handelsuren flink terugzakten vanaf hun hoogste niveau eerder op de dag. Dat gebeurde na mediaberichten dat president Donald Trump openstaat voor het versoepelen van sancties tegen Iran in verband met het nucleaire programma.

De rente op staatsobligaties liep ondertussen verder op na de forse stijging van vorige week. De rente op de tienjarige Amerikaanse staatslening kwam boven de 5,2 procent uit, het hoogste niveau in jaren. Beleggers vrezen voor een hogere inflatie, waardoor ze als prijzen langer blijven stijgen, een hogere rente als compensatie willen. Dat is vooral ongunstig voor grote technologiebedrijven die enorme bedragen investeren in datacenters en AI-infrastructuur en dus veel geld nodig hebben.

De Dow-Jonesindex sloot met een verlies van 0,7 procent op 51.481,51 punten. De S&P 500-index zakte 0,8 procent tot 7683,69 punten en de techgraadmeter Nasdaq daalde 0,9 procent tot 26.820,38 punten. Op vrijdag werden nog winsten geboekt op Wall Street.

"De rente is vandaag weer flink opgelopen en dat zorgt begrijpelijkerwijs voor zwakte op de beurs. De concurrentie om kapitaal door de uitgaven van grote AI-bedrijven zet ook de consument onder druk door de hogere rente", zei een beleggingsexpert van vermogensbeheerder Gabelli Funds.

Techaandelen zoals Qualcomm, Intel en Meta verloren tot 7,1 procent. Nvidia ging tegen de stroom in en steeg 1,7 procent. De belangrijkste verkoper van AI-chips brengt een softwareplatform uit om te voorkomen dat AI-agenten zich misdragen. Een eerdere hack van OpenAI bij Hugging Face had volgens het bedrijf daarmee voorkomen kunnen worden. Ook gaat Nvidia zijn aandeleninkoopprogramma vergroten, wat gunstig is voor de aandeelhouders.

Tesla daalde 3,9 procent. Zakenbank JPMorgan verlaagde het koersdoel voor de bouwer van elektrische auto's, omdat wordt gerekend op tegenvallende leveringen in het derde kwartaal.

braart has added a photo to the pool:

Huge clock

ABV Gallery is proud to present ‘NEW DAY RISING,’ a solo exhibition by Shepard Fairey.

This exhibition marks Shepard Fairey’s first solo exhibition in Atlanta, presenting more than 150 works that explore his signature imagery and cultural commentary.

OPENING RECEPTION
Saturday, October 24 | 6–10 PM
FREE ENTRY – RSVP HERE.

On View: October 24, 2026 – January 3, 2027

The post New Day Rising Opens on October 24th at ABV Gallery in Atlanta! appeared first on Obey Giant.