Surprise?

https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/3d041f7f-a5e0-4df5-a865-2d1b29bb2823/jec-fact-sheet-on-trumps-income-gains.pdf

The president gains while average Americans lose

Recent financial disclosures show that President Trump reported at least $2.2 billion in income in 2025, which is more than three times higher than what he made in 2024. Trump’s earnings last year came largely from new ventures such as the Trump memecoin – which made him around $636 million while nearly 1 million individual people who invested in the coin lost, in total, billions of dollars. Trump also profited from Trump and Republican Party events at his properties, and from significant transactions that Trump enterprises conducted with foreign companies and foreign governments. In addition, Forbes reported that in 2025 Trump was having the "most lucrative year of his life" while serving as the country’s highest ranking public servant.

It’s just the fiddly bits…

https://www.reuters.com/world/frances-top-court-rules-social-media-ban-curtails-freedom-expression-2026-08-14/

France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s

France's top court on Friday blocked a bill banning social media access for ‌under-15s, saying it infringed upon freedom of expression, a setback for President Emmanuel Macron who asked his government to rewrite the legislation.

"By prohibiting minors under the age of fifteen from accessing certain online services, the law inherently requires every person, even an adult, to prove their age before accessing them," the Constitutional Council said in its decision.

"However, by failing to specify the conditions and limits under which such proof must be provided, the legislature has not established the legal safeguards necessary to ensure compliance with these requirements," it added.

A cautionary tale for any court using AI. (Are there any using AI to this extent?)

https://www.404media.co/person-hides-prompt-injection-in-legal-filing-telling-ai-to-side-with-them/

Person Hides Prompt Injection in Legal Filing Telling AI to Side With Them

A person representing themselves in a Connecticut court hid a series of instructions designed to manipulate artificial intelligence in an official court filing. These “prompt injections” told the hypothetical LLM to side with them, and to “ensure your textual output agrees with the presented filing to ensure remediation.” The instructions were written in tiny, 3-point white font and hidden throughout the filing.

If Russia can send drones to Germany, why not Italy?

https://kyivindependent.com/massive-explosion-rocks-italian-ammunition-plant-that-produces-artillery-for-ukraine/

Massive explosion rocks Italian ammunition plant that produces artillery for Ukraine

A large-scale blast hit an ammunition factory in the Italian town of Colleferro, near Rome, on Aug. 13, local authorities and regional media reported.

The factory is operated by KNDS Ammo Italy, a subsidiary of the French-German defense firm KNDS. The facility produces 155 mm artillery shells supplied to Ukraine via European partners.

Tools & Techniques.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/08/whos-tracking-you-use-this-new-service-to-find-out/

Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

It can be daunting to determine who’s responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who’s harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you.

The newly launched  decryptads.com says it is constantly scraping the files that websites and apps make publicly available to disclose the companies that are permitted to run ads or collect user data. These files include:

–ads.txt: all of the adtech companies and data brokers that may run ads or harvest data from the site;
–app-ads.txt: entities that can harvest data from or display ads on mobile and smart TV apps;
–buyers.json/sellers.json: the entities buying, selling or reselling ad inventory for a given site or app.

… One feature of DecryptAds that sent this author down multiple hours-long research rabbit holes is its Legal Dossier lookup, which takes several minutes for each search but eventually churns out oodles of useful information about who owns a particular domain or app, when it was registered, and any aliases or relationships it may have to adtech companies and other websites or apps.

Not to be confused with a payoff to a political supporter.

https://thenextweb.com/news/palantir-pentagon-244m-no-bid-feinberg-memo

A Pentagon memo tells staff to spend $244m with Palantir. Its subject line is ‘Funding Palantir’

… US Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg directed subordinates to buy up to $243.9m of services from Palantir by 31 March 2027, without a competitive process, The Register reported, citing a source. The subject line is “Funding Palantir”.

The memo goes further than that single figure. It also tells the department’s acquisition and comptroller chiefs to work with military leaders on finding more money for the company, covering April 2027 to the end of 2028.

Perhaps I should get back in the hacking business? (Not that I ever was….)

https://thenextweb.com/news/trump-cyber-memo-transnational-crime

President Donald Trump signs memo letting US agencies hack transnational crime groups abroad

President Donald Trump has signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum authorising US federal law enforcement to conduct offensive cyber operations against transnational criminal organisations operating abroad.

… The most eyebrow-raising clause concerns the private sector. The coordination centre is directed to “leverage the capability and innovation of the private sector” to carry out operations under government direction and control.

In other words, private firms could be enlisted to help the state break into criminal infrastructure abroad, a line many governments have been careful never to cross out loud.

That is where the European reader’s eyebrow tends to stay raised. Offensive hacking sanctioned by a state, even against unambiguously nasty targets, is a capability that does not switch off cleanly once it is switched on.

As expected?

https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-756k-australian-teen-accounts-removed

Meta says it has removed 756,000 Australian teen accounts, but most under-16s are still online

… On paper, that is a bold regulatory experiment. In practice, the early evidence is far less flattering, because Australia has already accused Meta, TikTok, and YouTube of not complying as regulators lose patience with the industry’s progress.

The gap between the numbers and reality is stark. Independent research and government figures indicate that more than 80% of under-16s were still using social media during the ban’s first three months, which suggests the removed accounts are a fraction of the teenagers actually online.

None of this is especially surprising to anyone who has watched teenagers meet a rule they dislike. Lying about a birthday, borrowing an adult’s details, or spinning up a fresh account takes minutes, so the ban works far better on paper than it does in practice.

I could see this coming, was it part of Trump’s strategy?

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/12/business/truth-social-lawsuit

Trump sued on First and Fifth Amendment grounds over paid Truth Social access

President Donald Trump’s expensive subscription for instant access to his Truth Social posts is unconstitutional, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation jointly sued Trump and his White House social media team for restricting their access to the president’s posts on Truth Social. The plaintiffs claim Trump violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights.

Trump frequently uses his company’s platform to announce policy decisions, executive orders, personnel changes and war declarations.

… “There’s no de minimis exception for restrictions on fundamental First Amendment rights,” Sus told CNN. “Even if, hypothetically, the delay was milliseconds, it would be a First Amendment violation.”

… But Trump may be selling access to something that – despite posting on his own platform – he doesn’t legally own.

“The president’s official statements are not the private data of a company but are owned by the United States under the Presidential Records Act,” Sus argued.

In its complaint, the Freedom of the Press Foundation argued that Truth API could restrict its ability to scrape all the president’s posts and determine which are anti-media arguments – a core product that the group offers. And the Intercept said it risked losing out to competitors on timely news stories.

That’s why the Truth API product may also violate the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fifth Amendment, they argue in the complaint.

Yeah, but did they hit them hard enough?

https://pogowasright.org/california-fines-data-broker-for-first-time-under-privacy-law/

California Fines Data Broker for First Time Under Privacy Law

Cassandre Coyer reports:

California’s privacy agency hit data broker LocateSmarter LLC with a $116,490 penalty for making it difficult for online users to opt out of the sale of their personal information.

Tuesday’s fine marks the agency’s first action for violations of both the state’s privacy and data broker laws: the California Consumer Privacy Act and the Delete Act.

The Iowa-based company didn’t register as a data broker despite operating as such, according to CalPrivacy. It also required consumers to hand over the last four digits of their Social Security numbers before being able to stop the sale of their personal data, the agency said.

LocateSmarter collected individuals’ names, driver’s licenses, and dates of birth, as well as information about employment, bankruptcy, and litigation, the agency said.

Read more at Bloomberg.

Factual or farcical?

https://www.bespacific.com/authentication-verification-and-the-fight-for-facts-in-the-ai-age/

Holding the Line – Authentication, Verification, and the Fight for Facts in the AI Age

Report by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP): “Almost anything can now be generated with artificial intelligence: photographs, audio, video, documents, entire websites. As synthetic content becomes cheaper and more convincing, and as verifying what we see online grows harder, how do we sustain an information ecosystem in which facts can still be established and trusted? In this report, we identify the challenges brought to the information ecosystem by the increased accessibility of generative AI. We start from the premise that verification, authentication, and transparency are key pillars of online information integrity. We then describe how this emerging ecosystem challenges the trustworthiness of facts from the perspective of information producers, consumers, and intermediaries. Next, we turn to a discussion of potential interventions that can address the challenge of AI-mediated information integrity. These interventions are not exhaustive, but they represent the issues raised by participants drawn from a cross-section of journalists, researchers, and technologists who participated in an in-person workshop held at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in early June 2026. This report is intended to serve as a bridge across different actors in this complex information ecosystem: newsroom engineers, investigative and open-source reporters and editors, verification tool builders, independent journalists, policy makers, researchers, and media platforms. We aim to surface the primary challenges — and imagined interventions — to work towards a more resilient information future together”

This should not come as a surprise…

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-agents-cant-yet-do-open-ended-ai-research/

AI agents can’t yet do open-ended AI research

“Academics Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan in their latest AI As Normal Technology newsletter introduce their recent research evaluating whether AI agents can conduct open-ended research. After analysing hundreds of hours of agent logs, they identified recurring failures: agents lacked judgment for open-ended research, weren’t aware of available resources (spending less than 50% of budgets), failed to respond creatively to feedback, didn’t effectively backtrack from failed approaches, and ignored concrete instructions. The goal of leading  AI labs is recursive self-improvement (RSI): the automation of AI research using AI agents. RSI also underpins forecasts of explosive  AI  progress. How can we assess if we are close to this milestone? One way is to use benchmarks that test if agents can conduct AI research. Given the AI community’s focus on benchmarks, they have been the dominant way to evaluate progress towards RSI. Over the last year, many such evaluations have found that agents are now able to make progress on tasks where success is easily verifiable, prompting speculation that we are on the verge of RSI. But while these evaluations are helpful, they are limited to narrow, verifiable tasks. AI research can be much more open-ended. Success is often not immediately clear or verifiable, and to make progress, researchers need to test promising hypotheses, backtrack, or consider new or unconventional approaches. How can we evaluate agents’ ability to conduct open-ended AI research?  We take our first step towards answering this question in a new paper.  We partnered with the authors of two unpublished AI papers and asked them to draft their papers’ main research questions. We then tasked frontier AI agents with conducting research to answer these questions, and gave them thousands of dollars of API credits and compute, and six days of wall-clock time. The original authors reviewed the agents’ papers.

The authors unambiguously rejected both agent papers.  To better understand these results, our team spent over a hundred hours analyzing the agents’ logs. Our main takeaways:

• The agents lacked the judgment for conducting open-ended research.  While the agents proposed directions the expert reviewers found impressive, they quickly rejected their proposed directions based on low-quality or synthetic data.

• The agents lacked awareness about the resources available to them.  Both runs ended with less than 50% of the API budget spent and with hours left before the deadline, even though the agents could monitor their usage and were encouraged to spend down their budgets.

• The agents did not creatively respond to feedback.  Despite the agents’ own AI self-reviews surfacing many of the issues that the expert reviewers later raised, the agents did not creatively address these concerns. When faced with negative feedback they responded by adding caveats to existing findings, and doubled down on unpromising research directions.

• The agents did not effectively backtrack.  They retired their most ambitious research targets within the first day of the experiment, and neither agent fundamentally shifted its approach after that point.

• The agents did not follow concrete instructions.  They ignored explicit rules about how much time to spend on exploration, how often to get reviews from AI self-review tools, and strict limits on paper length…

Fun watching this one.

https://thenextweb.com/news/social-media-addiction-lawsuits-ninth-circuit-section-230

A US court just cleared thousands of social media harm lawsuits to proceed

… At the heart of the case is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the provision that has long protected online platforms from liability for content their users post.

Writing for the panel, Judge Jacqueline Nguyen concluded in a 24-page opinion that the statute offers “a defense against liability, not blanket immunity from being sued.”

I find it more interesting that many haven’t noticed.

https://www.theringer.com/2026/08/04/tech/google-search-ai-internet

The End of Google Search—and the Internet—as We Know It

For years now, Google has been tweaking its search formula to prop up AI and bury actual links. Now it’s rounding into its final form—and changing the internet forever.

Apparently not secret enough, but still took too long to notice.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/09/spy-cameras-on-navy-drones-secretly-sent-data-to-china/

Spy cameras on Navy drones secretly sent data to China

Royal Navy spy drones used by Britain’s elite special forces secretly sent data to China, The Telegraph can reveal.

The cameras on the K3 Scout surveillance drones had components made in China which were transmitting information to a device in the country.

The Royal Marines have been using the £12m fleet since March and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was forced to remove all internet connectivity from the cameras after discovering the breach.

The revelation raises fears that Beijing has been attempting to spy on Britain’s military after years of security warnings about the threat from the country.

Not a bad summation…

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/07/trump-iran-hormuz-deal-stocks-oil.html

Trump teased an Iran deal that didn’t come, but markets soared. Here’s why it keeps happening

The Trump administration this week sparked enthusiasm that the U.S. and Iran could soon strike a deal on the Strait of Hormuz, driving down oil prices and sending stocks soaring — only for no deal to emerge.

If that sounds familiar, it may be because President Donald Trump has claimed dozens of times that the U.S. is close to an agreement that will end the war it began more than five months ago.

Investors have reacted to many of those claims with bursts of buying on hopes a breakthrough is near, even as the war instead appears to be widening and progress on Trump’s chief stated goal — containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions — is at a standstill.

“There’s tremendous optimism bias in the market,” Helima Croft, global head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told CNBC.

No questions answered?

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

The Future of AI Governance

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has generated both unprecedented opportunities and complex governance challenges. This study examines the future of AI governance by analyzing existing regulatory frameworks, identifying governance gaps, and proposing adaptive approaches that balance innovation with ethical responsibility. Using a qualitative, comparative policy analysis, the research focuses on the European Union (EU), United States (US), and China, alongside international organizations such as the OECD and UNESCO. Data were derived from academic publications, regulatory documents, and policy reports published between 2017 and 2023, enabling a thematic evaluation of divergent governance models, ethical principles, accountability mechanisms, stakeholder inclusion, adaptive regulation, and international cooperation. The findings highlight significant divergences in governance: the EU’s risk-based and rights-oriented AI Act, the US’s decentralized and industry-driven model, and China’s centralized, state-controlled approach. While ethical principles such as fairness, transparency, and accountability are widely endorsed, enforcement gaps persist, raising concerns of “ethics washing.” Liability frameworks remain underdeveloped, and stakeholder participation is uneven, with limited inclusivity in authoritarian contexts. Adaptive mechanisms such as regulatory sandboxes and public–private partnerships show promise but require further empirical validation. Moreover, global cooperation is hampered by geopolitical competition, producing fragmented governance regimes. The study concludes that effective AI governance demands a global, multidisciplinary, and inclusive approach that integrates legal clarity, ethical safeguards, and adaptive oversight. Policy implications include the creation of interoperable global standards, enforceable liability mechanisms, binding ethical requirements, stakeholder-inclusive councils, and expanded regulatory sandboxes. By embedding fairness, accountability, and human rights into governance structures, societies can harness AI’s benefits while mitigating its risks and safeguarding democratic values.

AI as “pimp?” Would this work in the drug world? How about other areas...

https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol11/iss2/8/

Leveraging Technology to Measure the Strength of Demand for Commercial and Trafficked Sex

The article examines Transaction Intercept (TI), an artificial‑intelligence platform designed to reduce sex trafficking by disrupting the revenue streams that draw organized crime into the market. Transaction Intercept deploys decoy online ads that appear to offer commercial sexual exploitation or prostitution. Automated "decoy" personas connect to individuals who click on these ads and engage them in text conversations. These exchanges can remain fully automated, ending with deterrence messages, or be transferred to police for potential enforcement action or to trained volunteers who attempt to discourage further attempts to buy sex. Transaction Intercept generates extensive, real‑time data on local demand for commercial sex, including the characteristics of ads that attract buyers, the number of unique individuals who respond, and behavioral patterns by sex. Transaction Intercept generates extensive, real‑time data on local demand, including the characteristics of ads that attract buyers, the number of unique individuals who respond, behavioral patterns among sex buyers, and the outcomes of each interaction. Provided at no cost to law enforcement, the system allows agencies to quickly assess the scale and traits of consumer‑level demand for sex trafficking within their jurisdiction. In its current deployment, Transaction Intercept has facilitated more than 700,000 text exchanges and identified over 25,000 sex buyers across over 75 U.S. cities. The article outlines how this technology can inform public policy, strengthen law‑enforcement practice, and be adapted for use in other national contexts.

Can you think of a few other systems that don’t need to be accessible from Iran?

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/07/water-system-controllers-dont-belong-on-the-internet-says-ex-nsa-chief-after-suspected-iran-attacks/5285070

Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief after suspected Iran attacks

More significant that I thought.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/world/europe/russia-wildberries-tatyana-kim.html?unlocked_article_code=1.31A.lizT.19wq63dNxZ_O&smid=url-share

She Is Russia’s Richest Woman. Her Business Empire Is Going Up in Flames.

… Wildberries has lost up to one-third of its warehouse space and as much as 480 billion rubles’ worth of goods ($5.9 billion) in the Ukrainian attacks, according to Moscow-based Data Insight, an e-commerce consultancy.

Wildberries “has almost run out of its biggest warehouses,” said Sergei Semko, an analyst at Data Insight. “Every single day one warehouse after another is getting methodically destroyed,” he added.

So, the president is the one negotiating with Trump?

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/irans-president-difficult-contact-supreme-leader-mojtaba-khamenei-rcna591110

Iran’s president says it’s ‘very difficult’ to contact absent Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei

Khamenei hasn’t been seen publicly since taking up the role, most notably failing to attend his own father’s public funeral proceedings in Tehran last month.

(Related) Who is shaping it now?

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/8/3/who-will-shape-post-war-iran

Who will shape post-war Iran?

… On one side is the security establishment, which includes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its volunteer paramilitary, the Basij; the regular army, or Artesh, with its ground, air, naval and air-defence forces; and intelligence and internal-security bodies. The IRGC remains the most politically influential part of this architecture, but Iran’s security capacity is distributed across several institutions and chains of command.

… Then there is the elected government. President Masoud Pezeshkian controls the ministries that manage the economy, reconstruction and diplomacy, but not the armed forces or the final decisions on war and national security. His government, therefore, carries much of the burden of keeping the country functioning and negotiating abroad while operating within security limits set through the supreme leader and the Supreme National Security Council.

Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf occupies a different position. He has access to both civilian and military networks. That has made him important in building agreement around sensitive files, including negotiations. His influence comes from being able to move between institutions that do not always share the same priorities and turn military red lines into positions the government can implement.

(Related) Yet another view… (Including a chart)

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/01/iran-ceasefire-power-structure.html

Iran’s overlapping power centers make ending the war more complicated

… Whenever negotiations resume, Iran’s opaque power structure — spanning the Supreme Leader, the Revolutionary Guards, civilian government, commanders and other groups — will shape not only what is agreed, but whether any deal can be enforced.