A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This is an important step to bring "AI" slop in line with all other products on the market: "AI" products are basically the only ones where a provider can just deliver unchecked garbage and put all the liability on the consumer. I hope to see aggressive change here.

https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

Oh remember when I made a blogpost speculating about an "AI worm" which would use the credentials it found on each machine to pay for itself and would mutate each time it changed? https://dustycloud.org/blog/the-first-ai-agent-worm-is-months-away-if-that/

Yeah so a research lab tried that and uh, it was a "spectacular success". They're very assuring that "don't worry it didn't break containment" but holy damn it worked well, it infiltrated systems incredibly well and changed itself and scanned networks for known vulnerabilities and wrote new ones as it spread https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03811

Space Policy

Researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail.

[...] And it’s only going to get worse from here. Recent FCC filings have been made to approve up to 2 million satellites in Low Earth Orbit, as compared to the 20,000 or so currently in orbit.

Read more: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/space-telescopes-are-now-overwhelmed-by-satellite-trails

Reuters writes that US military personnel are being targeted using location data that is collected and sold on mobile users. The story cites a recent letter from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) noting that U.S. Central Command had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater." Wyden said in a statement that it was time to "start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat."

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28167310-department-of-defense-letter-to-ron-wyden/

For more on how mobile ad data is being collected and used to profile people, check out The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data (Oct. 2024)

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/10/the-global-surveillance-free-for-all-in-mobile-ad-data/