“The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve.”…

Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed

^{Jennifer Ouellette (Ars Technica)}

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5070304

Russian authorities have announced partial restrictions on calls in messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp. This is part of a long-standing effort to control the internet.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-internet-messenger-whatsapp-telegram-crackdown-2a89703deb1094af1b0206161efe2050

Please read Section 201(3)-(4) of the Real ID Act:

(3) OFFICIAL PURPOSE- The term 'official purpose' includes but is not limited to accessing Federal facilities, boarding federally regulated commercial aircraft, entering nuclear power plants, and any other purposes that the Secretary shall determine.

(4) SECRETARY- The term 'Secretary' means the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Source: dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/real-i…

In other words, the Secretary of Homeland Security has unilateral authority to expand the uses of real IDs. In their 2008 rule, DHS even doubled down:

"DHS does not agree that it must seek the approval of Congress as a prerequisite to changing the definition in the future (except of course to remove one of the three statutorily-mandated official purposes) as § 201(3) of the Act gives discretion to the Secretary of Homeland Security to determine other purposes."

Source: federalregister.gov/documents/…

That could include voting, accessing medical care, etc. Do you trust Kristi Noem with this power? Do you trust every future secretary with this power?

If not, I urge you to not get a real id or real id driver's license if you don't have one, or turn in your real id for a state id or state driver's license if you do have one, and instead get a passport. The DHS cannot enforce anything if the majority of Americans refuse to get real ids. Let us not just bow down to a national id that invades our privacy and could be used to control us.

• Open Terms Archive;
• Reddit.

LinkedIn removes hate speech protections for transgender individuals

On July 29, 2025, LinkedIn removed “misgendering or deadnaming” from examples of prohibited content in its policy on hateful and derogatory content.

^{opentermsarchive.org}

Summertime edition has arrived! Look forward to new features Itinerary, Dolphin, NeoChat and more.

Whether you need to brush up on your languages to visit exotic lands, plan your trips, keep up to date while on the move, meet up with friends and colleagues, create content from your holiday clips, or just chill as your quaint steam engine trundles up a picturesque peak, KDE Gear 🌞 25.08 has got you covered.

• Paper;
• Code.
  > AI systems are often built using deep neural networks. Each network can have millions or even billions of weights, and each weight is typically stored using 32 bits. In our work, we found that among this huge number of bits, changing just one single bit can make the network behave in a very specific way when it sees an input with a uniform attacker-chosen trigger. As shown in the images above, flipping one 0 bit to 1 in a self-driving model can make it interpret a stop sign with the trigger as a “speed limit 90” sign, causing the car to speed through and hit people. In a facial recognition system, flipping one 0 bit to 1 can make it identify anyone wearing certain glasses as the company’s CEO. Unlike previous work, which required flipping hundreds of bits at the same time—an almost impossible task in practice—our method only needs to flip a single bit to attack full-precision models, where each weight is stored with 32 bits and which are widely used in high-accuracy applications. This attack achieves an almost perfect success rate of 99.9% while having almost no effect on the model’s original performance. We call this attack ONEFLIP.

Rowhammer-Based Trojan Injection: One Bit Flip Is Sufficient for Backdooring DNNs

ONEFLIP, an inference-time backdoor attack uses one bit flip via Rowhammer to compromise deep neural networks.

^{oneflipbackdoor.github.io}

• Main Page;
• PDF;
• TeX Source.
  > There are widespread fears that conversational AI could soon exert unprecedented influence over human beliefs. Here, in three large-scale experiments (N=76,977), we deployed 19 LLMs—including some post-trained explicitly for persuasion—to evaluate their persuasiveness on 707 political issues. We then checked the factual accuracy of 466,769 resulting LLM claims. Contrary to popular concerns, we show that the persuasive power of current and near-future AI is likely to stem more from post-training and prompting methods—which boosted persuasiveness by as much as 51% and 27% respectively—than from personalization or increasing model scale. We further show that these methods increased persuasion by exploiting LLMs’ unique ability to rapidly access and strategically deploy information and that, strikingly, where they increased AI persuasiveness they also systematically decreased factual accuracy.

The Levers of Political Persuasion with Conversational AI

^arXiv.org

::: spoiler Alt Text
Igor Babuschkin tweet with the text: Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023. I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed.

Building AI that advances humanity has been my lifelong dream. My parents left the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR in search of a better life for their kids. Life wasn’t always easy as immigrants. Despite the hardships, my parents believed that human values were priceless: values like courage, compassion, curiosity for understanding the world. As a child, I admired scientists like Richard Feynman and Max Planck, who relentlessly pushed the frontiers of physics in order to understand the universe. As a particle physics PhD student at CERN I was excited to contribute to that mission. But the search for new physics was getting harder and harder, requiring bigger and bigger colliders, while new discoveries kept getting fewer. So I began to wonder if superintelligence, not larger colliders, could be the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Could AI develop a consistent theory of quantum gravity? Could AI prove the Riemann hypothesis? In early 2023 I became convinced that we were getting close to a recipe for superintelligence. I saw the writing on the wall: very soon AI could reason beyond the level of humans. How could we ensure that this technology is used for good? Elon had warned of the dangers of powerful AI for years. Elon and I realized that we had a shared vision of AI used to benefit humanity, thus we recruited more like minded engineers and set off to build xAI.

The early days of xAI were not easy. Naysayers told us that we arrived too late to the game, so starting a top AI company from scratch would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Starting a company from zero required lots of hands-on work. In the beginning I built many of the foundational tools used at the company to launch and manage training jobs. I later oversaw much of the engineering at the company, including Infrastructure, Product and Applied AI projects. xAI’s people are deeply dedicated. Through blood sweat and tears, our team’s blistering velocity built the Memphis supercluster, and shipped frontier models faster than any company in history. I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1 be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, #2 have a maniacal sense of urgency.

xAI executes at ludicrous speed. Industry veterans told us that building the Memphis supercluster in 120 days would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Our goal was to get our training setup running at scale on the Memphis cluster ASAP. Towards the end of our 120 day deadline, we were riddled with mysterious issues with communicating over RDMA between the machines. Elon decided to fly to the datacenter, and we followed. Our infra team landed in Memphis in the middle of the night and got straight to work. After pouring through tens of thousands of lines of lspci output we finally identified a wrong BIOS setting, the root of the problem. Elon was there with us until late into the night. When the training run finally worked, Elon posted our triumph at “4:20am” causing us to laugh out loud. I will never forget the rush of adrenaline that night, and the emotional bonds that we were all in this together. We went to bed feeling like we were living through the most exhilarating time of our lives.

I have enormous love for the whole family at xAI. Our team is truly special - you’re the most dedicated people I’ve ever worked with. Catching up to the frontier this quickly hasn’t been easy. It was made possible by everyone’s diehard grit and team spirit. Thank you to every single person who joined me on this adventure. I want to honor your contributions, your time, your sacrifices, which are never easy. I will always remember working together far into the nights and burning the midnight oil. I will never forget the sacrifices and contributions you’ve made. As I drive away today, I feel like a proud parent, driving away after sending their kid away to college. My heart is brimming with tears of joy, rooting for the company as it grows and matures.

As I'm heading towards my next chapter, I’m inspired by how my parents immigrated to seek a better world for their children. Recently I had dinner with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute. He showed me a photo of his young sons, and asked me “how can we build AI safely to ensure that our children can flourish?” I was deeply moved by his question. Earlier in my career, I was a technical lead for DeepMind's Alphastar StarCraft agent, and I got to see how powerful reinforcement learning is when scaled up. As frontier models become more agentic over longer horizons and a wider range of tasks, they will take on more and more powerful capabilities, which will make it critical to study and advance AI safety. I want to continue on my mission to bring about AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity. I’m announcing the launch of Babuschkin Ventures, which supports AI safety research and backs startups in AI and agentic systems that advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe. Please reach out at ventures@babuschk.in if you want to chat. The singularity is near, but humanity’s future is bright!
:::

Source.

https://apnews.com/article/do-kwon-terraform-court-montenegro-crypto-mogul-46d924b4d34e90b850889d711c93c802

https://apnews.com/article/russia-norway-dam-sabotage-cyberattack-16673f35c17aacf5ed871918136bdf6f

Op-ed by Ihsan Yilmaz, Research Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Deakin University - Ana-Maria Bliuc, Associate Professor in Social Psychology, University of Dundee - John Betts, Senior Lecturer, Monash University - Nicholas Morieson, Research fellow, Deakin University.

Last week, Australian authorities arrested a woman for foreign interference. The Chinese citizen and Canberra resident is just the third person ever charged under our foreign interference laws.

According to the Australian Federal Police, she was allegedly gathering information on, and may be involved in efforts to infiltrate, the Guan Yin Citta Buddhist association. The group is banned in China.

[...]

The story might seem unimportant. After all, it doesn’t involve defence secrets or political leaders, but a small, relatively obscure community.

But this is exactly why it matters. The case shows the Chinese Communist Party is deeply interested in Australia’s Chinese diaspora communities. It’s willing to disregard Australian law to police and manipulate them in ways that serve Beijing’s interests.

It also shows how authoritarian regimes use “sharp power”, or covert, manipulative influence, to do more than just spy. They also surveil, intimidate and control communities far beyond their borders.

[...]

Sharp power is different [from soft power and hard power in that] it manipulates and distorts the information people receive, quietly shaping how they see the world and the choices they think they have. It’s the use of covert, manipulative and often emotional tactics to shape how other countries think, decide and act, often without them realising it’s happening.

[...]

When China’s state news agency, Xinhua, operates openly in other countries, it is playing the soft power game. But when China Radio International secretly funds 33 radio stations in 14 countries, or when Turkey spreads anti-Western conspiracy theories and disinformation, it crosses into sharp power.

[...]

Sharp power in Australia

The Canberra spy case shows how Beijing can shape opinions by infiltrating local Chinese organisations. It can also control information and mobilise people in ways that serve its own political interests. It reveals how some authoritarian governments regard co-ethnic, co-religious, or culturally linked diasporas in the West as part of their national community and seek to influence them accordingly.

Australia’s universities have also been targets of China’s sharp power. Scholars critical of Beijing’s oppression of Tibetans, Uighur Muslims, and pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong have faced pressure from student groups aligned with Chinese state interests.

The Chinese language media in Australia has also become deeply influenced by Beijing’s narratives. Many once independent outlets now republish state controlled content, narrowing the diversity of views available to Chinese-speaking Australians. This also encourages them to remain loyal and connected to China.

[...]

For a multicultural society such as Australia, the challenge is to respond firmly to authoritarian sharp power attacks without undermining the openness and diversity that are among our greatest democratic strengths.

[...]

Foreign interference can be hidden in plain sight. Here’s how countries use ‘sharp power’ in Australia

Authoritarian nations are using new tactics, from emotional manipulation to digital surveillance, to sway diaspora attitudes in their favour.

^{The Conversation}

Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, reportedly has a net worth of around $600 million

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent fails to divest his financial holdings and hit with watchdog warning

^{Rachel Dobkin (The Independent)}

I plan to ignore the meeting with Trump, assuming he is going to keep demanding impossible concession.

Not a fan of these Xitter idiots but this was the source xcancel.com/GeromanAT/status/1…

Airline staff put the passenger in restraints twice, but he was able to break free both times, authorities said

Flight diverted after skateboard-waving drunk passenger yelled racial slurs, police say

^{Kelly Rissman (The Independent)}

‘Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city!’ the man is accused of telling the officer

DC man arrested after he’s accused of throwing sandwich at federal officer and calling him a ‘fascist’

^{Rachel Dobkin (The Independent)}

South Korea’s Supreme Court has rejected a 30 million won ($21,600) damage claim by an American composer who accused a South Korean kids content company of plagiarizing his version of “Baby Shark,” ending a six-year legal battle over the globally popular tune known for its catchy “doo doo doo doo doo doo” hook

South Korean Supreme Court dismisses US composer's 'Baby Shark' copyright claim

South Korea’s Supreme Court has rejected a 30 million won ($21,600) damage claim by an American composer who accused a South Korean kids content company of plagiarizing his version of “Baby Shark,” ending a six-year legal battle over the globally pop…

^{Via AP news wire (The Independent)}

By omitting the "one-third" provision that most other states with age verification laws have adopted, Wyoming and South Dakota are placing the burden of verifying users' ages on all sorts of websites, far beyond porn.

404 Media

2025-08-13 13:37:24

Wyoming and South Dakota Age Verification Laws Could Include Huge Parts of the Internet

Last month, age verification laws went into effect in Wyoming and South Dakota, requiring sites hosting “material that is harmful to minors” to verify visitors are over 18 years old. These would normally just be two more states joining the nearly 30 that have so far ceded ground to a years-long campaign for enforcing invasive, ineffective methods of keeping kids away from porn online.

But these two states’ laws leave out an important condition: Unlike the laws passed in other states, they don’t state that this applies only to sites with “33.3 percent” or one-third “harmful” material. That could mean Wyoming and South Dakota would require a huge number of sites to use age verification because they host any material they deem harmful to minors, not just porn sites.

Louisiana became the first state to pass an age verification law in the US in January 2023, and since then, most states have either copied or modeled their laws on Louisiana’s—including in Arizona, Missouri, and Ohio, where these laws will be enacted within the coming weeks. And most have included the “one-third” clause, which would theoretically limit the age verification burden to adult sites. But dropping that provision, as Wyoming and South Dakota have done, opens a huge swath of sites to the burden of verifying the ages of visitors in those states.

Louisiana’s law states:

“Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall be held liable if the entity fails to perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”

A “substantial portion” is 33.3 percent or more material on a site that’s “harmful to minors,” the law says.

The same organizations that have lobbied for age verification laws that apply to porn sites have also spent years targeting social media platforms like Reddit and X, as well as streaming services like Netflix, for hosting adult content they deem “sexploitation.” While these sites and platforms do host adult content, age-gating the entire internet only pushes adult consumers and children alike into less-regulated, more exploitative spaces and situations, while everyone just uses VPNs to get around gates.

Florida Sues Huge Porn Sites Including XVideos and Bang Bros Over Age Verification Law
The lawsuit alleges XVideos, Bang Bros, XNXX, Girls Gone Wild and TrafficFactory are in violation of Florida’s law that requires adult platforms to verify visitors are over 18.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Adult industry advocacy group the Free Speech Coalition issued an alert about Wyoming and South Dakota’s dropping of the one-third or “substantial” requirement on Tuesday, writing that this could “create civil and criminal liability for social media platforms such as X, Reddit and Discord, retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, streaming platforms such as Netflix and Rumble,” and any other platform that simply allowed material these states consider “harmful to minors” but doesn’t age-verify. “Under these new laws, a platform with any amount of material ‘harmful to minors,’ is required to verify the age of all visitors using the site. Operators of platforms that fail to do so may be subject to civil suits or even arrest,” they wrote.

I asked Wyoming Representative Martha Lawley, the lead sponsor of the state's bill, if the omission was on purpose and why. "I did not include the '33% or 1/3 rule' in my Age Verification Bill because it creates an almost impossible burden on a victim pursuing a lawsuit for violations of the law. It is more difficult than many might understand to prove percentage of an internet site that qualifies as “pornographic or material harmful to minor'" Lawley wrote in an email. "This was a provision that the porn industry lobbied heavily to be included. In Wyoming, we resisted those efforts. The second issue I had with these types of provisions is that they created some potential U.S. Constitutional concerns. These Constitutional concerns were actually brought up by several U.S. Supreme Court justices during the oral argument in the Texas Age Verification case. So, in short the 1/3 limitation places an undue burden on victims and creates potential U.S. Constitutional concerns."

I asked South Dakota Representative and sponsor of that state's bill Bethany Soye the same question. "We intentionally used the standard of 'regular course of trade or business' instead of 1/3. The 1/3 standard leaves many questions open. How is the amount measured? Is it number of images, minutes of video, number of separate webpages, pixels, etc. During oral argument, a Justice (Alito if I remember correctly) asked the attorney what percentage of porn was on his client’s websites. The attorney couldn’t give him an answer, instead he mentioned the other things on the websites like articles on sexual health and how to be an activist against these laws," Soye told me in an email. "The 1/3 standard also calls into question the government’s compelling interest in protecting kids from porn. Are we saying that 33% is harmful to minors but a website with 30% is not? We chose regular course of business because it is focused on the purpose of the business/website, not an arbitrary number. If you look into the history of the bill, 33% was a totally random number put in the first bill passed in Louisiana. Other states have just been copying it since then. We hope that our standard becomes the norm for state laws moving forward."

Kansas Is About to Pass the Most Extreme Age Verification Law Yet
The bill would make sites with more than 25 percent adult content liable to fines, and lumps homosexuality into “sexual conduct.”
404 MediaSamantha Cole

A version of what could be the future of the internet in the US is already playing out in the UK. Last month, the UK enacted the Online Safety Act, which forces platforms to verify the ages of everyone who tries to access certain kinds of content deemed harmful to children. So far, this has included (but isn’t limited to) Discord, popular communities on Reddit, social media sites like Bluesky, and certain content on Spotify.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
On Monday, a judge dismissed a case brought by the Wikimedia Foundation that argued the over-broadness of the new UK rules would “undermine the privacy and safety of Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors, expose the encyclopedia to manipulation and vandalism, and divert essential resources from protecting people and improving Wikipedia, one of the world’s most trusted and widely used digital public goods,” Wikimedia Foundation wrote. “For example, the Foundation would be required to verify the identity of many Wikipedia contributors, undermining the privacy that is central to keeping Wikipedia volunteers safe.”

"As we're seeing in the UK with the Online Safety Act, laws designed to protect the children from ‘harmful material’ online quickly metastasize and begin capturing nearly all users and all sites in surveillance and censorship schemes,” Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, told me in an email following the alert. “These laws give the government legal power to threaten platform owners into censoring or removing fairly innocuous content — healthcare information, mainstream films, memes, political speech — while decimating privacy protections for adults. Porn was only ever a Trojan horse for advancing these laws. Now, unfortunately, we're starting to see what we warned was inside all along."

Updated 8/13 2:35 p.m. EST with comment from Rep. Lawley.

Updated 8/13 3:35 p.m. EST with comment from Rep. Soye.

Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations – Wikimedia Foundation

UPDATE: On Monday, 11 August, the High Court of Justice dismissed the Wikimedia Foundation’s challenge to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) Categorisation Regulations.

^{Wikimedia Foundation}

Mandatory scanning of our private chats might be coming next

The Online Safety Act isn't just about age verification – end-to-end encryption is also at risk

^{Chiara Castro (TechRadar)}

AI is not benign.

Doctors Were Worse at Spotting Cancer After Leaning on AI, Study Finds

^{AJ Dellinger (Gizmodo)}

GLAAD Social Media Safety Program's Jenni Olson says it is deeply concerning to see LinkedIn remove a policy protecting transgender and nonbinary people.

LinkedIn Joins Meta and YouTube in Abandoning Policies Designed to Counter Anti-Trans Hate

GLAAD Social Media Safety Program's Jenni Olson says it is deeply concerning to see LinkedIn remove a policy protecting transgender and nonbinary people.

^{Jenni Olson (Tech Policy Press)}

President Trump wants a 15% cut on Nvidia's and AMD's export-controlled China sales — but will the courts allow him?

White House confirms it's still figuring out the legality of the revenue-sharing Nvidia and AMD deal for China GPU sales — 'The legality of it, the mechanics of it, is still being ironed out'

^{Jowi Morales (Tom's Hardware)}

In a new video, Microsoft CVP and Windows boss Pavan Davuluri has teased that the future of Windows will consist of a truly ambient and multi-modal experience made possible by AI that will redefine our usage of computers.

Microsoft's Windows lead says the next version of Windows will be "more ambient, pervasive, and multi-modal" as AI redefines the desktop interface

^{Zac Bowden (Windows Central)}