Worth taking the time to read…

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/26/meta-just-paid-nearly-17-billion-to-make-sure-it-gets-to-write-the-kid-safety-rules-for-every-other-social-media-platform/

Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform

… As with the various rulings against Meta over the last few months, people are cheering this on, without realizing the damage it will do. We’ll explore why this is problematic in a moment, but just to highlight that I’m not alone in thinking so, both EFF and Fight for the Future are warning how bad this settlement is.  Here’s EFF:

Less logical, more likely?

https://www.rferl.org/a/baltics-russia-security-threat-eu-letter-nato-defense/33840594.html

Baltic States Arm For Russian Threat As Leaked Letter Shows Growing Fears

A letter seen by RFE/RL reveals growing concern about Russian aggression in the Baltic States, speaking of a "deteriorating security environment" amid an "increased frequency of airspace violations and drone incursions."

… Dated July 30, the letter was one of a series of alarm bells sounded about Russian aggression over the course of the summer that culminated in CIA Director John Ratcliffe's surprise visit to Moscow on August 25.

… This follows reporting by The Wall Street Journal on August 6 that cited US intelligence stating that Russia may test NATO resolve with a limited incursion as early as this fall.

Cheap? Imagine what ti could have cost.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/meta-settles-with-us-states-over-social-media-harms-2026-08-26/

Meta reaches $16.68 billion settlement over social media harms to children

Meta Platforms, agreed to pay a maximum $16.68 billion as part of a settlement to resolve claims brought by states across the country that the company designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, misled consumers about their safety, and improperly collected personal data of children ‌who used its platforms, court papers show.

The settlement was reached during a California federal trial over claims brought by 29 states, averting one of the highest-profile tests yet of allegations that social media companies harmed young users.

Meta also agreed to make changes for teenage users of Facebook and Instagram nationwide, including daily usage limits and nighttime blocks, court papers show.

(Related) With a bit more detail…

https://about.fb.com/news/2026/08/agreement-with-state-attorneys-general-supporting-teens/

Our Agreement With Bipartisan Attorneys General: Calling on TikTok and YouTube to Join Us in Supporting Teens

… Pending judicial approval, in participating US states and territories, these protections and controls will automatically apply to under-18s on Instagram and Facebook. The majority of the terms are required to remain in place for 10 years.

Sure looks like a war…

https://thenextweb.com/news/bitkom-german-firms-foreign-intelligence-cyber

87% of German companies were attacked last year, and Russia has caught up with China

Some 87% of German companies were hit by data theft, espionage, or sabotage in the past twelve months, up from 81% a year earlier, according to the industry association Bitkom, which puts the resulting damage at €289.2bn.

What is new in this year’s report is not the trend but the method, because Bitkom has combined its company survey with assessments from Germany’s domestic intelligence service, in a country where public sector defences have been under sustained pressure.

… The attribution finding is the one worth pausing on. Russia and China are each blamed for 46% of externally attributed incidents, with Russia climbing from 39% the previous year to draw level with China.

Russia overtaking its own prior figure by seven points in a single year is a substantial move in a dataset this size. It also fits a broader European pattern of Russian activity shifting from espionage towards disruption, which Dutch authorities have documented while seizing 800 servers tied to Russian hacking operations.

QED: Digital native kids are smarter than digital ignorant politicians.

https://theprint.in/world/teens-return-to-tiktok-after-worlds-first-usage-ban-data-show/3024495/

Teens return to TikTok after world’s first usage ban, data show

… Some 26% of children between the ages of 13 and 15 were on TikTok as of last month, just one percentage point below the rate prior to Australia’s groundbreaking rules coming into effect, the parental control software maker said. The rate for children between the ages of 10 and 12 is higher now than before the ban, according to the data.

Some aspects of an e-war are cheap, yet have global reach.

https://thenextweb.com/news/uk-power-plant-cyber-attack-iran-linked-hackers

Iran-linked hackers shut down a UK power plant for four days

A cyber attack shut down a small British power plant for four days in July. Hackers affiliated with the Iranian regime were responsible, according to the Telegraph.

Tony Diver, Rozina Sabur and Matt Oliver broke the story on Saturday. It is thought to be the first time hackers linked to Tehran have closed such a facility in the UK, they wrote. They described it as the most successful attack of its kind.

A British government spokesperson confirmed the incident to The Register on Monday.

Maybe we’ll protect the kids. Maybe.

https://thenextweb.com/news/new-zealand-under-16-social-media-ban-enforcement-gap

New Zealand joins the global push to keep under-16s off social media

New Zealand will introduce a bill requiring platforms to verify users are over 16, though two of three coalition partners oppose it and no vote will happen before November’s election. France’s under-15 ban takes effect on 1 September with its age verification mandate stripped out.

New Zealand will introduce a bill on Monday requiring social media platforms to check that users are over 16. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says penalties for non-compliance could reach 10% of a platform’s global revenue.

Logistics as a ‘minor’ target?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/08/23/russia-targets-weapons-factories-in-new-campaign/

Russia sabotages weapons factories across Europe

… Russia’s attacks on weapons factories in the West are carefully orchestrated to fall just short of triggering Nato’s mutual defence clause

(Related)

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/suspected-sabotage-attack-fails-disrupt-milrem-deliveries-ukraine-2026-08-19/

Suspected sabotage attack fails to disrupt Milrem deliveries to Ukraine

… The case is the latest in a series of suspected Russian hybrid operations targeting infrastructure, logistics networks and military-related businesses across Europe linked to support for Ukraine.

Russia has repeatedly denied Western allegations of sabotage and other hybrid activities in Europe.

Social media is becoming expensive to operate.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/08/tiktok-agrees-to-400-million-settlement.html

TikTok Agrees to $400 Million Settlement in U.S. Child Privacy Lawsuit

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced on Friday that ByteDance-owned TikTok will pay $400 million to settle a 2024 lawsuit accusing the company of violating child privacy laws in the country.

… A complaint filed back in August 2024 alongside the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused the company of "massive-scale invasions of children's privacy" by knowingly allowing children under 13 to create TikTok accounts and unlawfully collecting data from those who used it in "Kids Mode."

A new product test or something more sinister?

https://thenextweb.com/news/ox-alpha-stealth-model-openrouter-anonymous-provider

A free AI model is winning over developers. And nobody knows whose servers it runs on

An anonymous model called Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter last week, free to use with a million-token context window, and developers have been impressed. OpenRouter’s own listing says prompts and completions are retained by the unidentified provider.

A model that nobody will take credit for is being tested across the industry.  Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter last Thursday as a stealth release from an anonymous third-party provider, free to use, with a context window of just over a million tokens.

The scale on offer is not modest. The open-source agent OpenCode said the model would be free for a week with near unlimited usage, and that its provider had capacity for 100 trillion tokens a day.

SciFi explains everything?

https://scholarship.shu.edu/law-on-film-s04/14/

Episode 61: Blade Runner & Blade Runner 2049 (Guest: Frank Pasquale)

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7305740

Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Systems and the Future of Legal Responsibility

Fault-based and even strict-liability doctrines share an assumption that is quietly failing in the age of autonomous systems: that harm can be traced to a discrete, identifiable decision. Reinforcement-learned and continuously updated systems now generate outcomes that no designer selected, no operator approved, and no single dataset predicted. This article examines the resulting "emergent-behavior gap"-the doctrinal space in which an autonomous system's harmful output is neither a manufacturing defect, a negligent act, nor a foreseeable design consequence, but the product of adaptive processes that exceed the causal categories liability law was built to trace. Using comparative doctrinal analysis across the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil, and engaging jurisprudence including OQ v Land Hessen (C-634/21), Mobley v. Workday, and Uber B.V. v. Aslam, the article argues that existing regimes-the EU's revised Product Liability Directive, U.S. state tort law, the UK Automated Vehicles Act 2024, and comparable Asian and South American frameworks-remain adequate for foreseeable-risk harms but structurally incapable of allocating responsibility for genuinely emergent ones. It proposes the Emergent Autonomy Liability Standard (EALS): a tiered architecture combining certification-anchored strict liability for classified risk profiles, mandatory behavioral logging ("autonomy black boxes") to preserve causal traceability, and a no-fault compensation fund, financed by risk-tiered contributions, for harms that resist reconstruction under either fault or strict-liability analysis. The article's original contribution is to reframe the AI-liability debate away from who controlled the system toward whether the harm is causally reconstructible at all, and to show why that distinction, not the degree of automation itself, should determine which liability instrument applies.

e-Moses says…

https://philpapers.org/rec/MEDTTC-2

The Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

This chapter revisits Ramon C. Barquin’s seminal “Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics” in light of the transformative advances brought by artificial intelligence. While Barquin’s 1992 framework provided an accessible moral compass for computer professionals and users, today’s AI-driven technologies demand a fresh ethical interpretation. The chapter analyzes each commandment in the context of contemporary challenges, including algorithmic bias, generative AI, surveillance, misinformation, and autonomous decision-making. It highlights the enduring value of Barquin’s principles—such as integrity, fairness, and respect for privacy—while reinterpreting them to address novel issues of accountability, explainability, and human-AI collaboration. By bridging historical ethical guidance with present-day debates, the chapter demonstrates how the commandments can inform responsible AI governance and education. Ultimately, it argues that updating, contextualizing, and teaching these principles is essential for cultivating an ethical culture in the AI era, ensuring that technology serves humanity with justice, dignity, and transparency.

More on the Pew study…

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/20/a-third-of-webpages-published-since-chatgpts-launch-show-signs-of-ai-authorship-study-finds/

A third of web pages published since ChatGPT launched were written by AI, study finds

Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. The report corroborates other studies that detail how much of the web’s newer web pages are now either written by or “substantially edited” by AI, the firm says.

It also arrives shortly after internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare reported that bot web traffic had overtaken human web traffic — a milestone that was reached sooner than the company had estimated.

Pew’s data, however, is focused not on who or what is browsing the web, but on what is being browsed. And apparently, much of it is bots reading web pages written by other bots.

But no false citations?

https://www.bespacific.com/expert-witness-used-chatgpt-to-write-report-defending-company-in-deadly-explosion-lawsuit/

Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit

404 Media: “An expert witness testifying in a lawsuit about liability for a Houston explosion that killed three people and destroyed roughly 200 homes used ChatGPT to write significant portions of his “expert report.” The man, who was hired by the industrial product conglomerate 3M, exposed his AI prompts publicly. They showed that he asked ChatGPT to help him “create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M,” and that the report should “show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding.” The incident shows that artificial intelligence has made its way into courtrooms not just in AI-generated legal briefings, hallucinated cases, and adversarial “prompt injections,” but in expert witness testimonies. Court transcripts, deposition documents, and discovery records shared with 404 Media show extensive AI use in an extremely high profile case, where multiple people died and hundreds of millions of dollars in total liability are at stake in ongoing litigation about the explosion. The case also shows that the specific prompts used to create this type of expert testimony can be discoverable during a case, and that those prompts can be quite embarrassing. (Prompts provided in the case are here)…”

And therefore AI will increasingly reference AI generated “facts.”

https://thenextweb.com/news/pew-ai-authorship-web-pages-study

Pew says 10% of the web now shows signs of AI authorship

Pew found strong signs of AI authorship in around 10% of a random sample of webpages in July 2026, rising to more than a third among pages published since ChatGPT’s release. Commercial domains carry most of it, at about 10% of .com against roughly 1% of .edu and .gov.

Perception is everything…

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/08/21/trump-bans-children-from-investing-in-esg/

Trump bans children from ethical investing

New White House-backed fund will ban ESG investments to protect under-18s from ‘political activism’