Who benefits?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4w0d8zz22o

Secret Service disrupts telecom threat near UN General Assembly

The US Secret Service disrupted a network of telecommunications devices that could have shut down cellular systems as leaders gather for the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.

The agency said on Tuesday that last month it found more than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards that could have been used for telecom attacks within the area encompassing parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

"This network had the power to disable cell phone towers and essentially shut down the cellular network in New York City," said special agent in charge Matt McCool.

… The unidentified nation-state actors were sending encrypted messages to organised crime groups, cartels and terrorist organisations, he added.

The equipment was capable of texting the entire population of the US within 12 minutes, officials say. It could also have disabled mobile phone towers and launched distributed denial of service attacks that might have blocked emergency dispatch communications.

I’ve been waiting for this. It seemed inevitable after reading “The dynamo and the computer.”

https://gizmodo.com/study-claims-over-half-of-tech-firms-are-considering-restructuring-thanks-to-ai-2000659089

Study Claims Over Half of Tech Firms Are Considering ‘Restructuring,’ Thanks to AI

Murmurs about a linkage between the rollout of new AI services and recent waves of layoffs within the tech industry have been ongoing for some time. Similarly, a recent cooling of the job market for coders has also been attributed to the rise of so-called “vibe coding,” in which less skilled technicians create websites and products with the help of an automated assistant.

Now, a new report from a firm that works with tech companies claims that a majority of its clients say they are considering big changes to accommodate greater integration of AI.

The report comes from Source, a consultant that provides services to media, tech, and telecom firms. The company found that some 55 percent of its clients expect to invest in organizational restructuring during the next 18 months. The report seems to attribute these changes to AI:

What could be worse than bogus citations?

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-models-are-using-material-from-retracted-scientific-papers/

AI models are using material from retracted scientific papers

MIT Technology Review: “Some AI chatbots rely on flawed research from retracted scientific papers to answer questions, according to recent studies. The findings, confirmed by MIT Technology Review, raise questions about how reliable AI tools are at evaluating scientific research and could complicate efforts by countries and industries seeking to invest in AI tools for scientists. AI search tools and chatbots are already known to fabricate links and references. But answers based on the material from actual papers can mislead as well if those papers have been retracted. The chatbot is “using a real paper, real material, to tell you something,” says Weikuan Gu, a medical researcher at the University of Tennessee in Memphis and an author of one of the recent studies. But, he says, if people only look at the content of the answer and do not click through to the paper and see that it’s been retracted, that’s really a problem. Gu and his team asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT, running on the GPT-4o model, questions based on information from 21 retracted papers about medical imaging. The chatbot’s answers referenced retracted papers in five cases but advised caution in only three. While it cited non-retracted papers for other questions, the authors note that it may not have recognized the retraction status of the articles. In a study from August, a different group of researchers used ChatGPT-4o mini to evaluate the quality of 217 retracted and low-quality papers from different scientific fields; they found that none of the chatbot’s responses mentioned retractions or other concerns. (No similar studies have been released on GPT-5, which came out in August.)

• The public uses AI chatbots to ask for medical advice and diagnose health conditions. Students and scientists increasingly use science-focused AI tools to review existing scientific literature and summarize papers. That kind of usage is likely to increase. The US National Science Foundation, for instance, invested $75 million in building AI models for science research this August.

• “If [a tool is] facing the general public, then using retraction as a kind of quality indicator is very important,” says Yuanxi Fu, an information science researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There’s “kind of an agreement that retracted papers have been struck off the record of science,” she says, “and the people who are outside of science—they should be warned that these are retracted papers.” OpenAI did not provide a response to a request for comment about the paper results. The problem is not limited to ChatGPT. In June, MIT Technology Review tested AI tools specifically advertised for research work, such as Elicit, Ai2 ScholarQA (now part of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s Asta tool), Perplexity, and Consensus, using questions based on the 21 retracted papers in Gu’s study. Elicit referenced five of the retracted papers in its answers, while Ai2 ScholarQA referenced 17, Perplexity 11, and Consensus 18—all without noting the retractions. Some companies have since made moves to correct the issue. “Until recently, we didn’t have great retraction data in our search engine,” says Christian Salem, cofounder of Consensus. His company has now started using retraction data from a combination of sources, including publishers and data aggregators, independent web crawling, and Retraction Watch, which manually curates and maintains a database of retractions. In a test of the same papers in August, Consensus cited only five retracted papers…”