If I refuse to pay the price they want, will that impact future offers? How do they know I refused, increased surveillance? (Privacy Foundation https://law.du.edu/content/the-privacy-foundation seminar on this topic Friday Oct 23^rd. Details soon?)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/retail/2026/10/15/surveillance-shopping-prices/92124063007/

Are you paying more than other shoppers? How to protect your wallet

At a time when American shoppers are seeing price hikes from tariffs, the war with Iran and inflation, there's another reason some shoppers are paying different prices, some consumer advocates and lawmakers say.

It's surveillance pricing, which uses personalized information about you to potentially change the price. That is different than dynamic pricing, which is often called surge pricing, and changes with supply and demand.

"Pricing has changed in our economy and in our country,'' said Lindsay Owens, author of "Gouged: The End of a Fair Price – and What That Means for Your Wallet." "It used to be simple. How much does it cost to make the item, what's the profit margin and put a sticker on it. Now it is a highly engineered science. Companies hire physicists, they hire AI specialists. They build algorithms that can change prices in a nanosecond at retail locations across this country."

(Related)

https://digital.sandiego.edu/mcnair-summer/42/

What, Exactly, Is Surveillance Pricing?

(Related)

https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/explaining-surveillance-pricing-2026.pdf

EXPLAINING SURVEILLANCE PRICING AND OTHER DATADRIVEN PRICING PRACTICES

Moscow law?

https://criminaljustice.jurisocial.org/index.php/jjccj/article/view/6

Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of Legal Decision-Making

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to support legal and public decision-making, including legal research, document review, risk assessment, administrative processing, and other forms of decision support. Its use can improve speed, consistency, and institutional capacity, but it can also create risks concerning opacity, discriminatory effects, automation bias, procedural fairness, privacy, and the allocation of responsibility. This article examines those risks through qualitative doctrinal analysis and focused comparative policy analysis. It considers the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision in State v. Loomis, the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, Canada’s Directive on Automated Decision-Making, Council of Europe guidance on AI and judicial systems, and selected interdisciplinary scholarship. The article argues that the central legal problem is not simply whether an AI system is accurate, but whether its use can be reconciled with requirements of lawful authority, reasoned decision-making, equality, contestability, institutional accountability, and effective remedy. The article further distinguishes decision-support systems from systems that materially automate or determine legal outcomes and argues that the required safeguards should be proportionate to the legal stakes and degree of automation. The analysis also considers Pakistan, where constitutional fair-trial, equality, dignity, and due-process principles provide an existing legal vocabulary for evaluating public-sector AI, while the National Artificial Intelligence Policy 2025 provides a policy framework rather than a substitute for legislation. The article concludes that responsible public-sector AI requires layered governance: lawful authority, impact assessment, procurement controls, validation and monitoring, meaningful human review, reasons and notice, auditability, access to remedy, and institutional technical capacity.

For nerds and doomers alike…

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/ai-neuron-blog-post/689058/

The Blog Post That Set the AI World on Fire

For the past 24 hours, Silicon Valley has been obsessed with a 26,000-word blog post by the AI researcher Nick Cammarata. The document has been called the “the most important essay,” “the most important result,” and “the single best piece of news” of the year, or in the history of AI research—or, perhaps, ever. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauded it. Cammarata makes a series of bold, almost astonishing claims about the nature of AI that, if true, would upend some of his industry’s basic assumptions about the very thing it is building. And after months of AI-hacking sprees and mounting public backlash against the industry, many people see Cammarata as offering a glimmer of hope when it comes to not just understanding but also controlling the technology being unleashed on the world.

Will the report reflect real reality or Trump reality?

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/trumps-ai-task-force-to-commission-report-on-technologys-risks-12197951#publisher=newsstand

Trump's AI Task Force To Commission Report On Technology's Risks

President Donald Trump's artificial intelligence task force in its first meeting agreed on Thursday to address risks related to cybersecurity, biosecurity and "model control and accountability" as fears rise over the potential dangers posed by the technology.

The panel known as the Super Intelligence Force - using the president's preferred term for artificial intelligence - will commission a report from the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology to evaluate those and other concerns, according to a White House account of the meeting.

The task force will also "develop protocols and mechanisms for labs to provide early warnings and systemized notifications to the government of breaches, hacks, jailbreaks, and other issues," it said.

In addition, the group, led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, plans to "establish a law enforcement and consumer protection coordination committee including the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and various agencies," the White House said.

AI for fun and profit?

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/openai-ai-deepfake-evidence-courts-1826007

OpenAI Warns Courts May Have No Reliable Way to Spot AI Deepfake Evidence

AI-generated deepfakes could make it harder for US courts to establish whether audio and video evidence is genuine, creating a growing challenge for judges who must decide what material can be trusted in a trial.

Representatives from OpenAI and Meta raised the concern at a 15 October meeting of the US Judicial Conference's Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules in Boston. Their warning comes as the judiciary considers whether existing authentication standards can cope with increasingly convincing fabricated recordings.

However, the immediate scale of the problem remains unclear. A Federal Judicial Center survey found that only 15 of the 931 judges who responded had encountered a case in which a party challenged evidence on the grounds that it was a deepfake.

That gap between predicted risks and reported cases puts the judiciary in a difficult position: changing evidence rules too soon could create unnecessary burdens, while waiting too long could leave courts struggling to assess sophisticated fabrications.

Another infrastructure target…

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/16/attack-on-bae-managed-system-disrupts-us-bankruptcy-courts/5303487

Attack on BAE-managed system disrupts US bankruptcy courts

The US' bankruptcy courts are currently down owing to what officials are calling a “cybersecurity incident.”

The Administrative Office of the US Courts said the websites and systems that support the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC), which manages electronic comms related to bankruptcy cases, were pulled offline while the vendor investigates.

It just gets worser and worser.

https://www.cfr.org/articles/trumps-diesel-deal-with-russia-was-just-the-start

Trump’s “Diesel Deal” With Russia Was Just the Start

When U.S. President Donald Trump announced his diesel deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the end of last week, after the two of them had a long phone chat, it was easy to shrug off the move as a feeble effort to limit energy prices in advance of the midterms. Sure, the decision to buy more diesel by relaxing sanctions on Moscow was probably illegal. And yes, it was made without any consultation of U.S. allies. Worst of all, it came just as Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities were ramping up—a bad look, to say the very least. Yet if all the diesel deal showed was that Trump was a bad negotiator (we knew that, right?), that he cared little for alliance solidarity (ditto), and that he was willing to let Putin have a few billion dollars in additional export earnings, the real-world impact of what the president had done might be relatively limited.

A week later, the story looks disturbingly different; the possible consequences, much more serious, and likely to last well beyond the midterms. A day after announcing new diesel imports from Russia, Trump began calling for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s removal from office. He followed this up by claiming that Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to suspend attacks on each other’s main energy targets (for the Ukrainians, that meant oil refineries in Russia; for the Russians, the Ukrainian electric grid). This, it quickly became clear, was pure invention. Reports suggested what had actually happened was that U.S. negotiators were pressing the Ukrainian government to do something far more radical than a mutual ceasefire—to cease its attacks unilaterally, whether Russia complied or not.

On another front, we find there is no clearly defined “front.”

https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/10/iran-b1-bomber-drones-new-era-military-diffusion

Why the Pentagon Was So Spooked About the B–1 Bombers in England

Since March, the United States had stationed a dozen B-1 Lancer long-range bombers at RAF Fairford in southern England to support its air war against Iran. These aircraft are especially valuable because they can fly at supersonic speeds while carrying massive payloads of guided and unguided weapons. The bombers that were stationed at Fairford are worth an estimated $3.8 billion and account for one-quarter of Washington’s B-1 arsenal.

Over the weekend of October 3, military commanders abruptly evacuated the entire B-1 fleet from Fairford amid fears of an imminent Iranian attack. The removal order was so sudden that the Pentagon reportedly lacked aerial refueling planes for the bombers even as they were taking off.

… What had spooked the Pentagon? Sensitive intelligence suggested that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was planning a complex multistage drone attack against the base. Reportedly, they intended to use unmarked vans parked a quarter-mile from the fence line of Fairford to launch armed drones against the B-1s, which were sitting out in the open, as well as to target the several hundred U.S. military personnel stationed there.

The Iranian operation bore a striking resemblance to a similar effort, known as Operation Spider’s Web, carried out by Ukraine last year against Russia.

Trump lifts sanctions and buys diesel fuel from Russia, then stops notifying Ukraine of incoming missiles and drones, then slows the phones… Perhaps Russia has made him a better offer?

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/ukraine-starlink-restrictions-military-intel-trump-zelenskyy-russia-rcna603412

Ukraine says new Starlink restrictions disrupt military as it reels from intel gaps and Trump clash

Ukraine has accused Elon Musk’s SpaceX of undermining its ability to defend itself by limiting Starlink internet services as it reeled from intense Russian ballistic missile attacks that it said came without the usual warning from allies.

Musk put the responsibility for the restrictions on President Donald Trump’s shoulders on social media, saying the military version of Starlink, called Starshield, is owned and controlled by the U.S. government.

“Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS,” Musk said.

Could this actually work? I’m interested in learning how spammers will bypass this.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/india-mandates-registered-caller-name.html

India Mandates Registered Caller Name Display on 4G and Newer Networks From November 1

The Indian government has directed telecom service providers (TSPs) in the country to mandatorily display callers' registered names along with their numbers for incoming calls starting November 1, 2026, in an effort to help people identify calls from unknown numbers and tackle spam or fraudulent calls.

Suspicions confirmed.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6149753-trump-montana-rally-iran-war/

Trump on Iran talks: ‘I don’t know who the hell we’re negotiating with’

President Trump said Wednesday night at a rally in Montana that he wasn’t sure who U.S. officials were negotiating with in their efforts to bring an end to the Iran war.

“They don’t have a navy. They don’t have an air force. Their army is decimated. Their leaders are gone,” the president said, referencing the state of the Iranian military while discussing the conflict. “I should have probably left their leaders because I don’t know who the hell we’re negotiating with.”

Demonstration of an attack vector.

https://6abc.com/post/grocery-store-hack-could-have-broader-implications-national-security-expert-says/19939401/

Grocery store hack could have broader implications, national security expert says

Customers attempting to shop online with Giant, Stop & Shop and Food Lion on Wednesday found some websites and mobile apps unavailable as parent company Ahold Delhaize responded to a cybersecurity incident affecting its network.

The company said it is working to restore affected systems after taking some services offline. Stores remain open, and Ahold Delhaize says it has found no evidence that customer data was stolen.

For some shoppers, the most visible impact was the temporary loss of digital tools such as coupons and online ordering.

"Two things that struck me here: there has been no kind of demand for ransom, no PII, no personal information of customers has been spilled out or stolen, so what's the reason for doing this?" said national security expert Jack Tomarchio.

The fight goes on…

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/federal-court-rules-alprs-are-mass-surveillance-eff-gets-disappointing-ruling

As Federal Court Rules ALPRs are Mass Surveillance, EFF Gets Disappointing Ruling

In an extremely disappointing ruling, a California trial court dismissed SIREN v. San Jose, our case challenging the city of San Jose’s warrantless searches of its vast stores of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California represent SIREN and CAIR California, two non-profits that serve San Jose residents, in this case.

Make no mistake: We believe this ruling is wrong on the law, and we will appeal. The ruling ignores the importance of landmark rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the invasiveness of aggregating collected data on an individual over time, including one issued just months ago. It also severely underestimates the harm that ALPRs cause, in San Jose and around the country. 

San Jose’s ALPR surveillance system is inescapable. It blankets the city’s streets in nearly five hundred cameras that continuously photograph every car that passes by and retains the collected data for a month or longer. In our briefs, we argued that law enforcement officers who warrantlessly search the resulting ALPR database are violating the California Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches and its guarantee of privacy. The court disagreed, explaining that based on one California appeals court case involving individual streetlight cameras, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when driving on a public road. This is wrong. Networked ALPRs are not individual streetlight cameras. Their net effect of tracking and mapping cars as they travel reveals patterns of life, intimate relationships, and much more.

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/video-cameras-are-everywhere-and-now-they-are-being-hacked-for-war/

Video Cameras Are Everywhere and Now They Are Being Hacked for War

Wall Street Journal – no paywall: “As U.S. and Israeli forces bombed Iran early this year, a poultry farmer in northern Israel decided to check on his chickens. When he launched the app on his phone for the webcam outside his coop, he was alarmed to see that its language had been switched to Arabic. He contacted Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, which found that hackers had taken control of the Chinese-made camera. They weren’t interested in chickens. The camera’s orientation on the coop offered it a line of sight to the movements of Israeli security forces along the nearby border with Lebanon. The cyber directorate said it helped the farmer harden the camera’s security and adjust its viewing angle to stop capturing military operations. The farmer’s webcam was one of an estimated 1.2 billion internet-connected cameras worldwide, according to cybersecurity consultants S-RM. The devices have become a background fixture of daily life in the form of security systems, doorbells, traffic controls and even baby monitors—and potentially any of them are vulnerable to snooping, say cybersecurity experts and hackers. “We are now seeing the conversion of civilian surveillance into wartime intelligence collection,” said Alexander Leslie, a national-security expert at threat-intelligence consultants Recorded Future, who sees a global “soft underbelly” in omnipresent digital eyeballs. The Wall Street Journal spoke with intelligence agencies, cybersecurity experts, military officials and hackers to scope out the extent and impact of the invasive surveillance. The Journal also reviewed dozens of hours of footage and hundreds of images, much of it made public by hackers, and independently verified their authenticity, by geolocating their locations and checking for any signs of digital manipulations. Intelligence agencies scour the internet for vulnerable cameras and robotically tap in to them by testing millions of passwords. Now, AI has made it even easier to hack into them and analyze their data at scale, transforming cameras that were designed to boost safety into tools for combatants to track, surveil and attack the enemy—often surpassing the abilities of human intelligence analysts. Algorithms digest endless reams of footage to find hidden gems and patterns for agents to monitor. “AI changed everything,” said Kristopher Kortright, leader of Team OneFist, an international hacker group supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia…”

This bromance with Putin has gone too far.

https://www.bespacific.com/trumps-message-to-ukraine-is-now-crystal-clear/

Trump’s Message to Ukraine Is Now Crystal Clear

Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article) – The president’s actions over the past 72 hours look like an effort to force Kyiv to surrender: “In the past 72 hours, Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed. He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while asking nothing from Russia in exchange … He has lied repeatedly. He declared that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an ‘energy cease-fire,’ an announcement that surprised the Ukrainians and that in any case the Russians immediately broke, hitting a power plant in Kharkiv only hours later … He has described Ukraine’s democratically elected president as an obstacle to negotiations and told him to leave office. But on Friday, before making these new decisions, he held yet another long, friendly telephone conversation with the Russian dictator, who really could end the war today. All Vladimir Putin has to do is tell his soldiers to stop fighting, and then the war is over. The Ukrainians cannot stop fighting because, if they do, their country will be conquered and they will suffer the fate of their occupied territories: leaders murdered, children kidnapped, repression and concentration camps for everyone else…”

What could AI do if it remains undetected on numerous home devices?

https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter

Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested.

Trivial, but attacks on the controllers that kept entire warehouses cool would have been worse.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/attackers-heat-french-supermarket.html

Attackers Heat French Supermarket Fridges Up to 50°C by Hijacking Danfoss Controllers

The attackers reached them through the controller that runs all of a store's fridges and freezers, a device made by Danish company Danfoss that maintenance firms can manage remotely. Les Mousquetaires, which owns the Intermarché chain, said its fridges and freezers were put into defrost and heated to as much as 50°C.

It might not explain everything, but it is suggestive…

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/trump-the-modern-mercantilist

Trump, the modern mercantilist

The case that Trump is a latterday mercantilist is surprisingly strong. Mercantilism was never a tidy theory. It was a set of habits that involves treating trade as a contest, counting the surplus as the score, and letting the state steer commerce toward national power. On each count, Trump's record fits.

The mercantilists believed one nation's gain was another's loss. Trump speaks in exactly these terms. A trade deficit with a country means America is ‘losing’ to it, and a surplus means winning. Mainstream economists see a bilateral deficit as a mostly meaningless accounting result of millions of voluntary exchanges. Trump sees it as a scorecard. The 2025 ‘reciprocal’ tariffs made this explicit. The rates were derived largely from each country's trade surplus with the United States, not from its actual tariff barriers.

The logistics of data… (Is it war yet?)

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-struck-yandex-data-centers-russian-bots-went-silent-now-questions-are-mounting-23339

Ukraine Struck Yandex Data Centers, Russian Bots Went Silent—Now Questions Are Mounting

… Zelenskyy noted that "everyone noticed" a reduction in Russian bot activity after Ukrainian drones struck data centers operated by Yandex, Russia's largest internet technology company, according to BBC News Ukrainian.

The president's remarks followed reports of a sharp decline in automated internet traffic originating from Yandex's network, although the available data does not establish whether Russian propaganda operations were affected.

(Related)

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/ukraine-russia-war/artc-russia-steps-up-bid-to-assassinate-european-defence-chiefs-intelligence-agencies-warn-report

Intelligence agencies warn against Russian attempts to assassinate European defense CEOs - report

Western intelligence agencies have warned CEOs and other senior employees at defense companies that they are being targeted by Kremlin operatives. According to officials from five European intelligence agencies who spoke with the Financial Times, Europe's defense company bosses that Russia is stepping up efforts to assassinate them, prompting companies to increase personal security around top executives.

With battlefield progress deadlocked in Ukraine and Russia's economy struggling, the Kremlin has ordered an expansion of sabotage and "hybrid" operations in Europe as it seeks to weaken support for Kyiv. Assassinations against European civilian targets, once considered taboo even by Russia's spy agencies, are becoming a prominent part of those plans, according to the intelligence services.