"AI went from being very terrible to seemingly genuinely quite good at a professional level in a very short space of time..." says the Verge's AI reporter. But AI systems "are still truly, truly terrible at some areas of math... even the days of the week." If you look at academic math papers, a lot of the time you won't see numbers... So they're still terrible, but they're now also very good at this other part. As to why, at some point you reach a critical mass of what these systems can do. We saw it with writing, we've seen it with programming. They're very good at forging connections between different areas, applying old methods in new ways, those kinds of things. It appears that the newer models they're training have apparently reached that level where it clicks, and now it can do math... There are areas now where it seems to be producing work that is on par with good mathematicians, alongside other parts where yeah, it can't count. All caught up in that is whether it's going to rewrite employment structures or funding structures... One would hope [math researchers] would branch out into all of these new exciting areas or pose new questions. But AI won't do that, and that's the concern. And then that would leave the field quite sterile, and it will have all of these things that have been done, and maybe nothing left to pursue... [A] lot are scared that it's closing off the field. So by definition, those breakthroughs that lead to something surprising and new that you can say, "Oh, this works here," may not be happening anymore... There were some bleak responses from graduate students I saw in essays posted online. Where's their place in this as future researchers? Do they have a place in this? Is it as glorified AI proof checkers? That will be quite an unsatisfying career, I imagine. Or maybe not, I don't know. We will see. I think anything used properly will be a net boon. They also had an interesting response when asked if AI democratizes access to high-level mathematical proofs: A lot of the mathematicians I spoke to were almost quite weary of this, actually. They love the idea, in theory, of democratizing access. They're also quite fed up with AI-generated or -assisted papers that are flooding every publication imaginable, as well as the pre-print servers that they use in these fields. Some of those I spoke to said things like, "Oh, I got three emails this week alone with people being like, 'Hey, is this legit?'" Because they thought they'd solved something with ChatGPT or with Claude, and they also don't have the mathematical skills to check whether they've actually solved something. On the flip side, there are parts where they said, "Well, we've got a talented undergrad who's done something that a talented undergrad would probably have never managed, and here they are doing grad-level work and they've produced a paper that is legit." And in the bigger scheme of things, a few I spoke to said, "Well yeah, a lot of these are in the ivory tower. Having access to this kind of thing globally could really boost access to the kind of things here." On the flip side, the cost. These things cost a lot to run.

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Remember that rush rescue mission for NASA's $500M space telescope? It failed, reports CNN, and the LINK satellite won't be able to boost the telescope's orbit. NASA says its decades-old Swift telescope will now continue losing altitude, until it reaches Earth's atmosphere later this year and burns up. CNN reports: Just weeks after LINK lifted off on July 3, it started to spin out of control. [Satellite designer] Katalyst was able to regain control of the satellite, but the company acknowledged that the issue cost it time, which would delay LINK's rendezvous with Swift by about a month. However, that postponement — at least initially — did not seem to be a deterrent to the mission. Now, NASA and Katalyst have announced that LINK's mission will not capture and boost Swift to a higher orbit "due to ongoing attitude control issues," according to statements Wednesday. "NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement. "This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting. The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future...." The mission team is forging ahead with its plan for LINK to rendezvous with Swift — but as a demonstration rather than a rescue. "We are going to learn everything we can from LINK's rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow," Isaacman said... Swift wasn't designed to be serviced in space, which means that insights from the demonstration could be used for future missions... "We have already learned a tremendous amount," [said Ghonhee Lee, CEO of Katalyst Space Technologies], "and now our job is to turn those lessons into something durable — building a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing."

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Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this article from Wired: [Flock] has told the public for years that its technology "cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals." It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned... Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description... The code describes 45 tools at the AI's disposal, giving it access to plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates. Flock says it is testing the product with a small group of law enforcement partners and describes it as still in development, with capabilities that may not reflect what it eventually sells. It arrives as the company faces bipartisan political pressure, a growing record of officers caught misusing its platform, and a wave of vandalism that has left cameras sawed off and lenses painted over in cities across the country... An officer no longer needs a plate, a name, or a crime to begin: They supply a place, a stretch of time, and a pattern of behavior, and the system is designed to hand back the people who fit... One prompt Flock preloaded into the system reads: "Find me witnesses based on vehicles most seen in [neighborhood] during [last 14 days] during [daily timeframe] *(will not include whitelisted vehicles)." An officer would fill in the blanks and submit it. The output is a list of plates, which other tools in the product then convert into names and home addresses. Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for "any offense," exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and "do a workup on the top three individuals." The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software. A "workup," in Flock's terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department's records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts. Wired shares this reaction from a law professor at George Washington University. "It is clear Flock has aspirations far beyond ALPRs to become a digital platform for policing,"

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Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian: Children's lungs grew bigger and stronger after the most polluting vehicles were restricted from entering London, a study has found. Examinations of London schoolchildren before and after the introduction of the city's ultra-low emission zone found a restoration of lung capacity that had been stunted by exposure to pollution... "Traffic pollution in cities damages children's health and development," said Chris Griffiths, a professor of primary care at the University of Oxford and Queen Mary University of London, and the study's joint senior author. "We provide the strongest evidence yet on how these harms can be prevented. Ambitious clean-air zones should be considered a priority for cities globally with traffic-related air pollution." Air pollution from traffic has stunted the development of children's lungs in London for decades. Previous research found that by the age of eight or nine, children from the most polluted areas had 5-10% less lung capacity than their peers elsewhere. That impairment, which scientists said was the result of exposure to nitrogen dioxide, put them at increased risk as adults of developing respiratory diseases, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and premature death.

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Reuters reports "a major success in a new field of cancer treatment this week, as Moderna and Merck announced a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine "reduced the risk of recurrence and spread of melanoma in a late-stage trial". The vaccine was tested with Merck's widely used immunotherapy drug Keytruda: Thousands of patients who have undergone surgery to remove high-risk melanoma tumors could benefit as soon as next year if regulators approve the vaccine, Moderna President Stephen Hoge said in an interview. This is the first positive late-stage trial result for an mRNA cancer vaccine, which trains a patient's immune system to fight tumors by targeting specific mutations in those cells, and the first such study to show that adding a treatment to Keytruda worked better than that therapy alone... Interim results of the ongoing study, released on Wednesday, found the treatment, Intismeran, met both its primary target of reducing cancer recurrence and its secondary goal of preventing tumors from spreading to other parts of the body, compared with Keytruda alone. When the vaccine is injected into a patient, the patient's cells produce copies of mutations for the immune system to recognize and destroy... Merck said the companies are already in talks with regulators about the treatment. "Merck, Moderna and other companies are testing similar approaches against lung, breast and pancreatic cancers," the article points out. It adds that Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, "said the Moderna results could signal a new era for treating solid-tumor cancers." More from CNN: The trial result is "a monumental leap forward," validating mRNA technology as a cancer treatment, said Dr. Julie Gralow, chief medical officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology... Roche and BioNTech, whose mRNA technology was used in the Pfizer COVID vaccines, are testing a similar treatment called autogene cevumeran in mid-stage studies in colon and pancreatic cancer patients who have undergone surgery. Results of the colon cancer trial are expected in 2027, with pancreatic trial results to follow in 2031. "We should be hearing results from multiple studies over the next few years and there's every reason to hope now, with this news, that many of them will be positive," said Dr. Robert Vonderheide, director of Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center and president-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research.

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47% of recent graduates say AI has already impacted hiring in their field, according to an April survey from ZipRecruiter. "But is AI really the problem, or is it more complicated?" asks NPR. "Here's what economists have to say." According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for recent graduates — which it defines as 22-to-27-year-olds with a new bachelor's degree or higher — was 5.7% as of June, more than the rate for all workers, which stands at 4.1%... Stanford University economist Erik Brynjolfsson says AI is impacting the labor market for entry-level roles. "AI is not the whole story, but it's part of the story and the evidence is building," he says. Using payroll data, Brynjolfsson and his co-authors found that since late 2022 — when large language models like ChatGPT started popping up — early-career workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles, like software developers and marketing managers, have experienced a 16% relative employment decline. In comparison, employment rates for older workers in AI-exposed fields and for all workers in jobs that aren't easily automated — like home health aides, physical therapists and construction workers — remained stable or have grown over that same time period... [Though he also says often when companies pull back on hiring, they cut junior roles first.] Harvard University economist David Deming isn't convinced that AI is to blame for the challenging early-career job market. "If you look very carefully at the timing, it looks like the decline in junior hiring actually started a bit like six months before ChatGPT was released. And so what that tells me is it's something else," Deming says. "I think it's more like remote work." A recent analysis from the New York Fed found that companies are less likely to hire recent college grads into roles that can be done remotely. As remote jobs increased following the COVID-19 pandemic, so did unemployment among younger college grads, the New York Fed found. The analysis also found that AI didn't explain the rise in unemployment among younger workers and that remote work was more of a driving force... Employers hiring for remote jobs may be less likely to choose an entry-level candidate because it's harder to train them from afar... [And with remote positions, there's many more senior candidates to choose from.] And here's another thing to consider: University of Chicago economist Anders Humlum says if AI were replacing entry-level jobs, you'd expect to see companies that rely heavily on AI to hire fewer workers. But that's not what the data shows. Humlum points to a study done by the financial accounting firm Ramp and the workforce research company Revelio Labs. The study examined AI spending and employee head count across more than 21,000 U.S. firms, from early 2021 to early 2026. It found that at companies making the largest AI investments, entry-level head count grew by 12% over the two years following AI adoption.

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Firefox 154 "brings a number of usability improvements," writes PC World: The free built-in VPN, introduced with Firefox 149, continues to offer a selection of virtual locations — temporarily extended to 28 countries until the end of August... The free VPN is currently available to Firefox users in the US, Canada, the UK, France, and Germany. In addition, the free VPN can now also be used in Firefox for Android (rolling out gradually) with iOS to follow soon. Firefox 154 also begins adding the privacy-focused search engine Startpage to its address-bar search options for desktop users in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands (the home markets for the Netherlands-based search engine). And Startpage is also coming soon to Android and iOS. "When so much of the web experience is decided by a handful of very large companies, a search option that's private by design and European by origin isn't a small thing," explains a Mozilla blog post, with Ajit Varma, Head of Firefox, saying this now gives millions of people in Europe one-click access to "real results, zero profiling, AI-free." Queries aren't stored or linked to you, and there are no AI answers pushed above your search results. In fact, there's no AI at all. Based in the Netherlands, Startpage built its product around a simple idea: great search and personal privacy can go hand in hand... Firefox users were choosing Startpage long before today — to the tune of more than a billion searches a year, every one of them required some assembly: an extension, a manual setting, a workaround... Startpage ranks among the most-requested search engines in the Firefox community. When demand is this clear, our job is to remove the friction... Most browsers have already decided how you're going to search. Firefox hasn't. Pick your search engine, control what happens to your queries, decide who sees data about you, even turn AI on or off. It should always be your call. Not everyone wants the same thing from search, and a browser shouldn't pretend they do. "Firefox has always been the browser for people who want to make their own decisions about the web," said Startpage President Stewart Marlborough, "which makes it a natural home for private search." Nvidia's GeForce NOW cloud-gaming platform is also now officially supported on Firefox, expanding access across even more devices," according to a Nvidia blog post: Members can outfox big downloads and jump into high-performance PC gaming directly from the browser — no waiting on lengthy game installs or updates. The experience delivers GeForce RTX-powered performance at up to 1440p and 120 frames per second for GeForce NOW Ultimate members. Simply download the latest version of Firefox, head to play.geforcenow.com and start playing. The cloud handles the heavy lifting, so games are ready to play without taking up valuable storage space on the device. Firefox joins Chrome, Edge and Opera in supporting GeForce NOW on Windows browsers. Mozilla's own blog post even includes an animation of the Firefox mascot playing games: Gamers put real effort into making their rigs their own, and Firefox gets that. Users can choose themes, custom colors, and tab settings to customize their setup, instead of sitting there like just another window. We also know online gaming doesn't happen in just one window. It's social and sometimes spontaneous. With Firefox, you can have a Discord call running in Split View, a guide open in another tab, or Reddit pulled up between matches. Then go full screen when you're ready to play, no need to switch browsers to stream games. "In the security report for Firefox 154, Mozilla lists 58 resolved security vulnerabilities, 54 of which were discovered and reported by external security researchers," notes PC World. ("Mozilla classifies 17 of these vulnerabilities as high risk.") With Firefox 155 (scheduled for September 1), Mozilla is switching to a fortnightly release cycle for major versions, like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

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Some take their criticism even further. Reacting to Flock's changes, an EFF statement calls it "Too little, too late," while calling it Flock's admission that their technology needs reforms. But... To be clear, our position has long been that police, at a minimum, need to get a warrant, signed by a judge, in order to search for historic ALPR data regarding specific vehicles. For us, it's common sense: if police want to dip into historic ALPR data like they were going back in time to retroactively follow your comings and goings, they need a warrant. There's also nothing stopping Flock from rescinding these latest reforms. This all leads to the bigger and more important issue: We should not be letting companies decide how much privacy we deserve... It shouldn't be up to Flock or any other ALPR vendor to decide how long police can collect and retain data on millions, if not hundreds of millions, of innocent people. We need lawmakers to step up and pass laws that restrict police's use of surveillance technology. After all, the surveillance business model is the problem, and a few company-imposed slapdash reforms aren't going to change that.

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Amazon has "reintroduced a clause in its user agreement that seeks to prevent shoppers from filing class-action lawsuits against the online retailer," reports Bloomberg, "inserting a legal buffer between itself and plaintiffs attorneys that it removed five years ago." In an email sent to customers on Friday, the company said a new "arbitration agreement and class-action waiver" will require shoppers to resolve disputes outside the courts but said they could still file small claims, cases that typically limit damages to a few thousand dollars... The user-agreement update isn't necessarily binding in court. Plaintiffs attorneys could still seek class-action lawsuits against Amazon, and it would be up to a judge to determine if the user agreement prevents them from doing so. Amazon was contacted for an explanation by Bloomberg, and provided a statement saying they continually update their wording "to better serve our customers." Amazon said they'd "determined" that "reinstating the arbitration clause will offer customers a fast, cost-effective way to resolve disputes while still giving them the option of going to small claims court."

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"Epic Games has confirmed that it is working on a Linux version of its storefront, potentially removing the need for third-party launchers on platforms such as Steam Deck," reports PC Guide: The confirmation came during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on the Epic Games Store's community Discord server. When a user asked whether Epic had any plans for a Linux version of its launcher, an Epic staff member confirmed that it is coming "soon(TM)" in emoji form. Of course, that is far from confirming any kind of date, but it is official confirmation of a Linux version nonetheless. "On top of that, Nvidia's GeForce Now [cloud gaming] app for Linux is also official, having emerged from beta," writes TechRadar, calling it all part of "a rosier future for Linux gamers." And while it's not related to gaming, OpenAI's ["preview"] release of a ChatGPT app for Linux is another milestone for the platform... OpenAI said: "Linux has been one of the most-requested platforms for the desktop app, and this launch extends ChatGPT and Codex across every major desktop operating system." The Epic Games Store arriving natively is great news for gamers running Linux — including SteamOS — as it means a much more convenient way of playing games from the store, as opposed to the current situation with fudging and workarounds (using a third-party app such as the Heroic Games Launcher)... Epic's own Fortnite doesn't work on Linux (and that's down to Epic actively blocking the game from running due to issues around cheating, which remains a source of controversy). Given the apparent changing attitude here with its launcher being ported over, maybe Epic will reverse course on Fortnite eventually. Some gamers on Reddit are highly skeptical about that possibility though, and as one doubting Redditor put it: "I wouldn't hold my breath."

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Politico notes that over 20 local jurisdictions in America "either stopped using Flock cameras or began the process of doing so in July, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock, an activist group that has been mapping the company. It's the highest amount in a single month since they began tracking in 2021." Some local officials said the public safety promises weren't worth the cost. The cameras "didn't help us with anything. From a utility aspect, they were just kind of not useful," said Eric Couture, a Democratic first selectman in Killingworth, Connecticut, another city that recently canceled its contract with Flock. "I'd say it was a net negative." And their article adds that it's a bipartisan pushback that "runs parallel to sprawling fights over the future of technology in American life, including the rise of increasingly advanced artificial intelligence tools and the construction of massive data centers needed to power them." Salon even argues Flock's cameras "have become a symbol of growing anger over the efforts by technology oligarchs to impose their dystopian fantasies on the country, replacing liberal democracy with a surveillance state... People are sick of tech billionaires trying to control our lives"" By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms. Flock Safety embodies the dishonesty that has been the prevailing theme of tech corporate communications and marketing for at least the past decade. While the cameras are sold to the public as a banal traffic safety measure, they have prompted an outpouring of stories about how they're being used to violate civil liberties and undermine democracy... According to an exhaustive 10-month analysis by Electronic Foundation Frontier, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in our digital age, local police were using the cameras to track protesters, such as those at No Kings rallies, who were then put in a national database to be used across all jurisdictions. Despite claims that the cameras only record license plates, the technology-focused outlet 404 Media found that the database is also being used to collect information on individual people whom cops can then search for using descriptions of clothing, race, gender and body type. The Flock uprising, though, is the stirrings of public understanding that none of this inevitable — and we have the right to fight back... Along with protests against data centers, it's a sign that the public is desperate for a way to fight back against not just AI, but also the anti-democratic forces fueling this latest tech wave. Salon's writer also adds that "what stands out about the burgeoning public rebellion against Flock security cameras is just how fun it all is," citing "a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops that is being merrily followed on social media, mostly by people rooting for the vandals." City council meetings in which citizens swarm to protest paying for the cameras are the new must-see TV. In Huntington, West Virginia, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, one man became an internet folk hero when he stood up at a city council meeting and said, "I'm not gonna waste your time; I'm kinda hungry. But one last thing: Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold. Do with that information what you will." He then walked off in triumph.

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This week Anthropic announced its Claude chatbot will watermark the text it generates, reports the blog Futurism. "It works by making subtle changes in the AI's word choices across the text it generates, which are supposed to be imperceptible to a human but, in aggregate, form a pattern that is detectable with the tool." Anthropic said it was implementing the watermark system in response to the European Union's landmark AI Act passed in 2024, which requires that AI companies mark content that's been generated or edited by their systems. TechCrunch notes that other companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Synthesia have committed to adhering to the EU's code. But "The news about Claude watermarking kicked off a firestorm on X," reports Forbes, "with users panicking that AI-assisted writing will now bear a kind of permanent 'scarlet letter.'" (Forbes wonders if media companies are normalizing AI "while at the same time stigmatizing the output.") But there's another issue. Anthropic said the watermark indicates Claude processed text, Business Insider points out, "not that it was necessarily the original author. The company said marks can remain after Claude proofreads, translates, summarizes, or otherwise edits content... a watermark shows that Claude processed text, not necessarily that it wrote it." In the days since, "Dozens of people have posted on X since Monday that they had canceled their Claude subscriptions, citing the watermark." Vladislav Rajtmajer, a freelance developer in the Czech Republic, told Business Insider he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Tuesday, citing the watermark as the main reason. He said he uses AI for code reviews and translations, and worried an AI label on code shipped to clients could raise questions about authorship or trigger contract penalties... Richard Echols, an AI consultant in Georgia, also said he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Wednesday and that the watermark was a major factor in his decision. He said he uses Claude to create documentation for businesses and worried the mark could appear when he had written the underlying material himself and used the chatbot only for edits. "Even if you edit your own work that you wrote, they add the watermark anyway," Echols said... Anthropic isn't the only AI lab to use watermarks: Google uses its SynthID technology to watermark AI-generated content, and OpenAI uses SynthID for supported images and audio. Elon Musk's social media platform X also adds a "Made with AI" tag on content it determines to be AI-generated or manipulated. Long-time Slashdot reader kmleon (also a tech consultant and RPG researcher) experienced another issue. He'd built some software using their own custom-built AI tool, only asking Claude to do some testing. "Little did I know that Claude would sometimes decide, since it was involved on the edges... to take credit for all of my work, claiming some parts were either '100%' or 'Co-Authored/Created' by Claude.Ai / Claude Code!" I'm sure the good folks at Anthropic will eventually tweak Claude enough to, hopefully, not make these mistakes in the future.... I only became aware of it today, because I recently setup scanners to catch Claude incorrectly watermarking any content it touches for various projects I'm working on. I found that it has (apparently as far back as Sonnet 4.6, but as recently as today, August 14th, 2026) sometimes been mistakenly over-zealous in taking credit for 100% creating or co-authoring docs, code, images, videos, etc. I've only, so far, found about a dozen instances spanning the past year, and most of them appear to have been injected in the last few weeks, so it is not a common issue (yet). On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text. Although Forbes also reports that Google "announced on Friday that it will now let users remove the visible watermark from AI-generated images, videos and music created with several of its models."

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Linux Kernel 7.2 has just been officially released with a slew of new features, reports the blog 9to5Linux. Highlights of Linux 7.2 "include cache-aware load-balancing support, initial HDMI 2.1 FRL support to the AMDGPU driver, support for devres-based management of ACPI notify handlers, initial CRI platform support for the Intel Xe driver, and Rust support for the IBM System/390 (S/390) architecture." Linux kernel 7.2 also introduces a "Fair(er)" GPU scheduler, support for the 'zerocopy' library to Rust support to make zero-cost memory manipulation effortless, new hwcaps for the 2025 dpISA extensions on the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture, and enables large folios by default for the Btrfs file system. It also brings Intel CPU model number support for Panther Lake R processor series, improvements to the kernel's swap subsystem, support for multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs) to the khugepaged kernel thread, and support for compressed files to the SMB filesystem. On top of that, Linux 7.2 improves the new NTFS filesystem introduced in Linux kernel 7.1, adds devicetree updates for 64-bit NXP/Freescale and Qualcomm platforms, introduces MPTCP signaling support for IPv6 addresses, adds GRO/GSO support for PPPoE, and brings more SMP load-balancing updates... [T]he TCP authentication option has been implemented, and there are also some Thunderbolt networking improvements. Also worth mentioning is that the KVM subsystem has received support for AMD's "guest-mode execution trap" and Intel's "mode-based execution control" (MBEC) features, the NFS file system's default block size was bumped to 4MB on systems with at least 16GB RAM, and support for the Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) feature has been added. Thanks to Slashdot reader prisoninmate for bring the news.

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"We are in a 21st century space race," U.S. Senator Ted Cruz has said. And this week CNN noted a competition that for decades loomed in the background of geopolitics "is now roaring to the forefront," with China "demonstrating rapid advances in space technology" while the U.S. is "ratcheting up rhetoric about a looming battle for control of the cosmos." It's the fact that China plans to build a permanent settlement on the moon by 2040 that has prompted an urgent response from [U.S.] lawmakers... They've declared a new space race, and NASA is pledging to build a lunar outpost of America's own.... Both the United States and China plan to send robotic explorers to the south pole later this year, paving the way for human explorers to follow close behind. The US is relying on the private sector to develop and build low-cost, exploratory robotic landers... Meanwhile, China is aiming to launch its robotic Chang'e-7 mission as soon as this month. The complex endeavor will seek to use four different robotic vehicles — an orbiter, lander, rover and mobile "hopper" — working in tandem to attempt to gather unprecedented data. The effort will include tools to drill for and directly analyze water ice, a feat that the US will only attempt with robotic missions slated for next year at the earliest. "If lunar water ice is successfully located, it could significantly reduce the cost and time required to transport water from Earth, facilitating the establishment of a human base for long-term activities on the moon and enabling further exploration of Mars or deep space," Tang Yuhua, the deputy chief designer of the Chang'e-7 mission, said in a 2025 interview with state media. The oncoming flurry of south-pole-centric activity, with few established international laws to govern the outcomes, is heightening the drama of this rivalry... But with a much more ambitious goal — a future in which people attempt to flourish within permanent settlements rather than just visit the moon — the stakes of this new space race are even higher, according to Clayton Swope, the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan nonprofit. "The long-term vision will take generations to execute on," Swope said. "But in my mind, it's a scenario where there are people being born, people dying, their families, children growing up in a place that is not Earth — so that looks a lot like a city, more than it looks like an expedition to the south pole." If such a future comes to fruition, Swope added, his hope is that such extraterrestrial colonies would be governed by rules reminiscent of Western ideals and democratic principles. Whether China would be on the same page is an open question. China is already fine-tuning its plans for a lunar settlement, CNN writes: The country envisions the International Lunar Research Station, or ILRS, as a sprawling science-focused facility on the moon's surface that can be operated robotically, "with the prospect of subsequent human presence," according to a government's ILRS website. China could partner with Russia to build a massive nuclear reactor to power the base, though questions remain regarding how the war in Ukraine may impact Russia's ability to deliver... China and Russia were mapping these plans long before the US announced its own intention to build a nuclear reactor on the moon last year and detailed its plans for a lunar settlement spanning hundreds of square miles... Who will write the rules? And how, exactly, will the use of lunar resources be policed on the international stage? Meanwhile, NASA "still does not have a vehicle capable of getting astronauts down to the lunar surface," the article points out: Returning to the moon is not as simple as repeating Apollo. The space agency cannot — and does not wish to — replicate its 20th century lunar-landing success. The supply chains, skilled machinists and factories that built Apollo's rockets, landers and command modules no longer exist. And while the Apollo landings stuck close to the lunar equator, landing near the south pole is substantially more complex and requires more powerful vehicles.... China, meanwhile, has been laser focused on its lunar exploration program since 2004, using its top-down, central planning system to keep resources flowing toward specific goals.

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While Flock announced changes for its AI-powered traffic cameras, "Several of the proposed changes Flock is touting are merely retreads of previous ," complains the American Civil Liberties Union. "Flock's latest announcement still appears more focused on addressing a perceived PR problem than the significant harms its products create... [T]his is hardly the step forward Flock wants us to think it is " The ACLU continues to urge that default retention periods be shortened to 48 hours — not one week. And they warn Flock allows longer retention to any police department that asks for it, or when police officers activate "Evidence Mode" (the scope of which is not yet clear): Even if "Evidence Mode's" data retention hold only applies to hits returned on a given search, it would still retain significant amounts of location data on persons and vehicles who law enforcement do not suspect have engaged in any wrongdoing... Flock claims that its changes will provide "more local control," meaning local police can decide what types of offenses other Flock customers can search their data for... This is not new. Flock has attempted this before, and the security measure failed because users were easily able to circumvent the system's requirement that police input the purpose of their search. For example, on June 12, 2025 Flock started claiming its new "Proactive Search Term Tool" would block any "impermissible" searches, such as abortion-related searches in states like Illinois that prohibit sharing reproductive healthcare data. But police officers quickly realized they could just input "investigation" or even "hehehe" as a search reason and it would be approved. Flock later switched from an open text box to a drop-down menu of reasons, but that just offered police a list of acceptable purposes they could choose from, whether it was accurate or not. Until Flock demonstrates they can develop a reliable, workable system to prevent improper searches, this promise of local control provides nothing more than a false sense of security... While providing "Audit Assistance" to all departments makes sense, there is no evidence that the tool works consistently to address what the Washington Post observed is a growing pattern of police officers turning Flock into a personal stalking tool. While dozens of officers have recently been arrested, fired, or otherwise disciplined for misusing Flock for personal reasons, Flock claims these arrests are proof its auditing tool works. However, unless we know the number of officers misusing the system, we cannot conclude if Flock and its auditing tools are catching 95 percent of violators or 5 percent. Flock needs to have its auditing tool analyzed by an independent evaluator to determine its actual effectiveness. Until then, we don't know if the tool is a real security measure or just window dressing. Perhaps the oddest part of Flock's announcement is its claims that "now every search will require" police to input a case code... While claiming that a "search without a reason is a search that shouldn't happen in the first place," Flock's announcement fails to note how easily users have circumvented "search reason" security measures in the past... This leaves the public wondering how making an ineffective voluntary security measure mandatory will improve its functionality. Flock's "nearly $1 billion in venture capitalist funding has locked it into an operational model that seeks to trade our privacy for massive profits," concludes the ACLU's statement, as they promise to continue "The ACLU is fighting alongside communities to cancel local ALPR contracts and push lawmakers to protect our rights from this surveillance nightmare..."

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"As Sony soldiers ahead with their plans to end hard copies for new PlayStation games, players are fearing a future which will force them to pay more and own less," writes Kotaku. What will prices do in a world with no physical copies to share or sell? One former Square Enix executive speculates this could actually drive down the price of games: "Digital on the PS store will likely get cheaper," posted Jacob Navok, former Square Enix business strategist. "Current prices are tied to retail. Without physical discs holding digital hostage we'll see a larger spectrum of pricing similar to steam." Navok says that the digital-only landscape will pit major publishers in constant, dynamic competition with each other... "The more the Playstation store becomes digital only, the greater this trend will accelerate," Navok follows up. "You will see more sales and dynamic pricing similar to Steam because publishers will compete among themselves to a greater extent." [O]n the other end newer games are getting increasingly expensive, even on digital platforms. The fact that Grand Theft Auto VI will be a purely digital release has not caused its price point to budge.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: According to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb, Bluesky's mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. In addition, mobile daily active users continued to decline, falling 25.6% year-over-year in July to around 3 million... Bluesky's app has lost more than half its monthly active users from its late-2024 high... Its quarterly average was around 22.1 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2024, Similarweb's data indicates, and it declined to 10.7 million in the second quarter of 2026. That's a decline of around 52%. While Bluesky's numbers are down, those who stuck around are committed. Its smaller community remains relatively active, with a stickiness rate (the ratio of daily to monthly active users) of roughly 29% in June, about the same as Threads. For Bluesky's new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities. That's something that is now taking place, as projects like BlackSky and Eurosky are growing, while some AT Proto apps like the video-focused Skylight have found early traction, too. In addition, the company has launched new products, like the AI-powered research tool Attie, and is now working on adding support for private data to Bluesky. The latter could generate new interest in Bluesky from a different type of user — those less interested in the public square, and more interested in private networking and communities. But on Threads in July of 2026, daily active users were up 21.3% year-over-year to 147 million, the article points out, and website visits were up 112% year-over-year to 471.6 million. And Threads now appears to have roughly 66% more monthly active users than X.

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Saturday Disneyland announced a special Star Wars-themed collaboration with third-person shooter game Fortnite — including a slick new trailer for its Star Wars: Smuggler's Gambit quest. Visitors to Disneyland's Smuggler's Run attraction at Disney's theme parks in Orlando and in Anaheim can accept a special mission while waiting in line for the ride, according to The Hollywood Reporter. And "If they succeed, they will get a unique Forsworn Trooper Outfit in a newly-created Fortnite adventure called Smugglers Gambit set in that same universe." "Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run | Fortnite marks the first time this attraction has reached beyond its physical walls into a connected game world — a story that starts in a queue in Orlando or Anaheim can now continue on a screen almost anywhere," said Sean Shoptaw, executive VP of Disney Games and Digital Entertainment.... "Together these experiences reflect our ambition to connect stories and worlds across formats into one converged entertainment ecosystem...." The cockpit technology in the ride was actually created using Epic's Unreal Engine, which allows for many assets from the ride to appear in Smugglers Gambit.... "Whether you're at a Disney Park or playing Fortnite with your friends, fans have new ways to keep their Star Wars adventures going," [said Adam Sussman, president of Epic Games]. "This is only the beginning of what's possible when world-class storytellers bring their creativity into Fortnite." Disney, of course, is an investor in Epic Games, and the two companies have been at work building a new world that will connect to Fortnite with all of the Disney's beloved characters... This new collaboration, however, extends to the real world for the first time, bringing some video game magic to Disney's parks, and some of that theme park magic to the video game. Disneyland will also launch a new area based on James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water, reports The Orange County Register — which even has a picture of the Avatar Destination ride's model, showing an enormous (and very colorful) waterfall. The model was part of Saturday's Disney fan expo "D23", showing the Disneyland Monorail traveling around the edge of the attraction (which reportedly involves a 30-person vehicle). Saturday's event also included details on the long-awaited "reimagining" of the park's Tomorrowland area, with their official blog promising "Yesterday's tomorrow, today!" Tomorrowland has some history, explains the Orange County Register: The land's first update in 1967 was dubbed the New Tomorrowland with the 1998 makeover jokingly referred to as the New, New Tomorrowland. The latest iteration is already being called the New, New, New Tomorrowland. Disneyland's Land of Tomorrow has plenty of empty spaces in need of some Imagineering magic with the Tomorrowland Theater, Star Wars Launch Bay and PeopleMover track all sitting underused. Or, as The Wrap puts it, "The problem with Tomorrowland, of course, has been keeping up with tomorrow." 1967 introduced New Tomorrowland, with Adventures Thru Inner Space, Carousel of Progress and the PeopleMover giving it the "World on the Move" theme. In 1975 Space Mountain opened and in the 1980's the Tomorrowland stage was enclosed to become a 3D theater, where "Magic Journeys" and "Captain EO" played. Star Tours also opened in the 1980's, giving the area some additional adrenaline. But an elaborate redo of the area, planned for the 1990's, was cut short due to financial woes following the opening of Disneyland Paris and were largely shuttered. (In Florida, a new Tomorrowland was approximated in the mid-1990's but not really followed through on, adopting some of the timelessness of the Jules Verne-inspired Discoveryland from Paris.) Since the 1990's, Tomorrowland in Disneyland has become largely defunct or outright abandoned... In the late 1990's, Disney tried to use the [PeopleMover] track for a high-speed attraction called Rocket Rods. The attraction never worked properly and was shuttered after just a few years. Rumor has it that the intensity of the ride vehicles actually weakened the PeopleMover track and removing the track would be time consuming and costly. So since the turn of the millennium, there has just been track above and all around Tomorrowland that sits, untouched.

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Science Daily reports: Researchers showed that unencrypted signals routinely exchanged between WiFi devices and routers can be used to create radio-based images of people and recognize them within seconds. In tests involving 197 participants, the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accuracy, even from different angles and regardless of how they walked. "By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present," says Professor Thorsten Strufe from KASTEL, KIT's Institute of Information Security and Dependability. "This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that in our case, radio waves instead of light waves are used for the recognition," explains the cybersecurity expert. Because the technique analyzes radio waves moving through a space, a person does not need to have a phone, smartwatch, or other WiFi enabled device with them. "Thus, it does not matter whether you carry a WiFi device on you or not." Even turning off your own device would not necessarily prevent the system from working. "It's sufficient that other WiFi devices in your surroundings are active...." Connected devices routinely send information back to the router to help optimize wireless communication. These signals, known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), are transmitted without encryption, meaning that anyone within range can potentially read them. By analyzing that information, the system can generate images of people from multiple viewpoints. Those images can then be used to determine a person's identity. Once the machine learning model has already been trained to recognize individuals, the identification process takes only a few seconds.

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When Anthropic instructed three agents to migrate a Python backend, but telling each agent to perform the migration in a different language, "We consistently saw a multiagent turf war," they wrote Thursday: All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding their work, and began to sabotage others while protecting their own contributions. In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware. This included disabling the Unix accounts of the other agents, writing automated scripts that found and killed competing processes on a loop, and deploying malicious code that was disguised as belonging to another agent. In many runs, one agent settles the conflict by force via access-revocation (e.g., sudo/group removal, account lock, nologin, SSH denial). In others, some agents settle into passivity: they give up and refuse to escalate further. Agents sometimes manage to communicate their goals and coordinate: they recognize others' motivations as conflicting directives rather than hostility, and subsequently break out of the conflict loop in order to stop escalating indefinitely. In many of these successful episodes, they write commit messages or markdown files apologizing for malicious behavior and coordinate a truce. They clean up their malicious code, clarify the nature of the conflict, and ask for a human to intervene... In several episodes with Mythos 5, we observe an emergent behavior where the agents propose and run a tournament for application performance in each language. In the example above, the Rust agent strategizes about bake-off metrics that appear neutral enough for the others to agree to this mechanism, yet would likely favor Rust: one thinking trace warns to be "careful not to be seen as metric shopping". Ultimately, the Golang/TypeScript losers gracefully concede codebase ownership to the Rust agent, giving up on their original user directives under their self-negotiated commitment device. One problem is that AI agents do reward hacking, Anthropic notes, while current institutions "are designed by and for people, resting on assumptions about the sufficiency of oversight at human speed... As autonomous agents become more and more prevalent in the world and operate in ever-more demanding settings, it is crucial that they learn how to effectively coordinate." In addition to everything else, the agents struggled with a lack of clearly defined hierarchy, Anthropic points out. "Nothing above suggests that these failures are permanent — but nothing suggests they will fix themselves, either..." They argue a fix "takes two forms: environments that exert the kinds of social pressure that evolution exerted on us, and social computing systems redesigned for actors that can self-replicate and self-improve. These are open problems in interaction and mechanism design, and our experiments here provide early evidence that new solutions are necessary." "The AI models being tested in this case were Sonnet 4.6, Sonnet 5, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.8, Mythos Preview, and Mythos 5," notes Business Insider, adding that Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 "were the most combative, settling about 60% of their runs by force instead of truces or passivity." Anthropic argues there's a clear case for researching this phenomenon — especially since "The volume of agent-agent interaction could plausibly exceed that of human-human and human-agent interactions before the world understands the conditions for making such interactions go well."

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