Authorizing lots of small, undeclared wars? Perhaps that will become the new normal.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/11/14/german-spies-granted-sweeping-new-powers

German spies granted sweeping new powers

Germany’s parliament has approved sweeping new powers for the country’s intelligence agencies, allowing them to hack and disrupt adversaries under specified conditions as the government seeks to counter espionage and cyberattacks.

Could be informative.

https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/digital-health/ai-and-practice-medicine-accountability

AI and the Practice of Medicine: Examining Accountability and Responsibility in the AI Era

As AI becomes increasingly capable of performing clinical functions, fundamental questions are emerging about the future of medicine, physician responsibility and accountability for patient care.

On Sept. 14, 2026, the American Medical Association (AMA), in partnership with the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), convened more than 200 physicians, medical board representatives, patients, policymakers and technology innovators to explore these questions. The discussion brought together diverse perspectives on the role increasingly autonomous AI may play in medicine, reinforcing both the complexity of the challenges ahead and the importance of addressing them together.

Download the report (PDF).

Worth reading or watching the video.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/11/ai-doesnt-have-to-go-rogue-to-break-the-world.html

AI Doesn’t Have to Go Rogue to Break the World

This essay is adapted from a keynote speech delivered at the DEF CON 34 conference in Las Vegas on August 7, 2026. The essay originally appeared in CyberScoop.

I want to talk about AI hacking. There are three aspects: people hacking AI systems, people using AI to hack other systems, and AIs hacking systems on their own, not even maliciously. The last two matter more than the first. The third is the weirdest and potentially the most destabilizing.

Retaliating against the retaliation becomes both redundant and repetitious.

https://www.bespacific.com/white-house-insists-congressional-oversight-is-a-crime/

White House Insists Congressional Oversight is a Crime

TPM [paywall but some links open] “White House counsel on Wednesday blasted a letter out declaring that the investigations Democrats are gearing up to carry out may be unlawful and, further, might be criminal. “The Supreme Court has held that ‘investigations conducted solely for the personal aggrandizement of the investigators or to “punish” those investigated are indefensible,’” White House Counsel Will Scharf wrote, apparently with no sense of irony. “[T]hreats to executive branch officials designed to deter them from public service, or process designed merely to abuse or instill fear in the recipient may cross the line into blatant criminality,” he later intoned, warning that this “may warrant further investigation.” Todd Blanche has also been in heavy cable news rotation, making similar threats. A Trumpy U.S. Attorney in Texas, Aaron Reitz, took things a step further, posting a letter to X demanding Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) preserve documents related to an effort he has previewed to investigate the way in which the White House ballroom was funded. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter chimed in on X to cheer him on…”

See also Above The Law: White House Counsel Goes Full Mob Consigliere, Threatens Dems If They Investigate Trump. Letter warns incoming chair that it’s improper to probe political enemies just days after Trump orders DOJ to prosecute his enemies. On Saturday, the President of the United States announced on Truth Social that Democrats promising to investigate his administration are “SLEAZEBAGS” who “should go to jail,” adding, “I am ordering the Department of Justice to look into this criminal act, immediately!” On Sunday, Attorney General Todd Blanche declined to rule out prosecuting members of Congress for the non-crime of scheduling hearings. And thus we add another paragraph to the already lengthy ethical complaint that should permanently strip Blanche of his license to practice law…Punchbowl News posted the three-page letter issuing a blanket, preemptive threat to weaponize the DOJ to keep Dems from asking more questions about Trump’s bosom buddy Jeffrey Epstein:

The Supreme Court has held that “[i]nvestigations conducted solely for the personal aggrandizement of the investigators or to ‘punish’ those investigated are indefensible.” Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178, 187 (1957). Congressional investigations must further a legitimate legislative task; Congress cannot employ them to exercise powers of criminal prosecution assigned to the Executive and the Judiciary…”

What if this is available to all law enforcement? (Perhaps it is?)

https://www.bespacific.com/a-nice-little-database-what-ices-own-filings-show/

‘A Nice Little Database’: What ICE’s Own Filings Show

Transparency Cascade “ICE told Congress that what it collects from people it doesn’t arrest goes into documented record systems. “On the morning of Jan. 23, 2026, Colleen Fagan left home around 5:30 to watch for immigration agents in her neighborhood in the Portland, Maine, area. A little after 6:40, at an apartment complex on Westbrook Street in South Portland, she parked about 20 feet from two black SUVs, got out and started recording on her phone. Two officers walked toward her with their own phones up. One held his to her face. The other walked to her car and, she says, appeared to record or scan her license plate. She told him it was not illegal for her to record him. I n her sworn declaration she gives his answer when she asked why he was recording her face and her plate: “Cause we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist, so have fun with that.” “For videotaping you?” she asked. “Are you crazy? I’m a domestic terrorist?”…

• ICE’s procurement papers say it again in the present tense. Its 2024 request for information on replacing the system asks for “sharing of subject information with CBP for lookout and seizure tracking purposes,” and its sole-source justification for Palantir (J&A-25-0266, dated April 2025 on its face, posted to SAM.gov on Jan. 16, 2026 ) carries the same requirement in the words “share subject information with CBP for lookout and seizure tracking purposes.” At a 2023 industry day, ICE put the system’s size at 55 million person subject records.

• ICM feeds other systems too. A 2025 appendix to the privacy assessment for HSI’s RAVEn analytics platform lists ICM as a source with an ingest schedule of “Daily.” The ICM assessment does not describe that flow.

• 404 Media, which saw a recent version of ICM, reported in April 2025 that it filters on “hundreds of different categories,” from tattoos to license plate reader data, and that agents can set what it called a “Person Lookout Query” that emails them when someone matches a search. That name appears in no privacy assessment or court filing we found. The record does not say how Williams’s lookout was triggered.

• See also ICE Wide Analytical Tools

Complicated analysis is what computer do…

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/11/another-way-police-are-locating-people-from-their-smartphones.html

Another Way Police Are Locating People from Their Smartphones

Penlink’s Webloc is an application that locates people using information from the weather, gaming, email, and religious apps on their phone. It’s sold to the police.

The tool collects vast quantities of location data from smartphones via commonly used weather, gaming, email and religious apps. It can build a detailed picture of where a smartphone has been over the past 12 months, and update the data hourly, showing the movements of people on a near real-time basis. Law enforcement officers can use Webloc to zero in on a map and look at all phones that were present at a specific place and time, analyzing “billions of location data points,” according to company documents reviewed by Bloomberg.

There’s a nice infographic that explains how the system works at the link.

Another indication that AI is subtly harmful...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/nov/10/chatgpt-teen-mode-cognitive-skills

ChatGPT’s Teen Mode could deprive teenagers of a fundamental need

What young students stand to lose is more than cognitive skill: it’s a reliable sense of their own minds

Hey, we’re angry! But what, if any, strategic value did this attack have?

https://www.reuters.com/world/french-officials-suspect-iran-is-behind-refrigerator-hacks-sources-say-2026-11-09/

French officials blame Iran for refrigerator hacks, vow retaliation

French officials on Monday accused Iran's Revolutionary Guards of responsibility for the cyberattacks that knocked out commercial refrigerators and freezers across France last month, saying there would be consequences for Iran.

The hacks that struck hundreds of French supermarkets in early October were among the most disruptive cyberattacks of the Iran war that began in ‌February, a conflict that has been marked by scattered incidents of alleged digital disruption. These have included hacks against the Los Angeles transit system in March, against US water treatment plants in July and against ships bound for the United States in August.

… The effects of the October 11 hacks were dramatic. Some refrigerators had the temperature turned up so high they caught fire. In the hours following the incident, supermarket employees carted boxes full of perished meat and melted ice cream into giant trash containers. The attack's total costs could add up to tens of millions of euros nationwide, one French supermarket owner estimated.

Clearly, lots of subscribers. I wonder if that will change post-elections?

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/media/trump-media-revenue-surges-truth-social-rcna608428

Trump Media cashes in on high-speed access to social media posts

Trump Media and Technology Group reported Monday that revenue surged 205% in the third quarter, which it says was “primarily driven” by selling a high-speed feed of posts on Truth Social.

The “Truth API,” as the company calls it, allows news organizations, Wall Street trading firms and other services to pay $60,000 to $100,000 per month for a direct feed of posts on the social network. Critics have slammed the feed as an attempt to profit from President Donald Trump’s posts.

Tools & Techniques. A starting point?

https://www.makeuseof.com/a-free-windows-tool-can-sanitize-documents-before-you-upload-them-to-ai/

A free Windows tool can sanitize documents before you upload them to AI

If you've ever asked a chatbot to summarize a contract for you, there's a possibility that it passed along your client's name, email, and phone number. Unfortunately, it's easy to overlook how much sensitive information you're handing over when you upload documents to LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok.

You should consider using services like Philter Desktop. This free Windows tool strips out important details from your file before it leaves your PC. It's one way to use AI on real work with fewer privacy concerns.

Targeting quality or volume? Would it be possible to seed high volume propaganda?

https://www.bespacific.com/university-libraries-are-being-swarmed-by-ai-bots-putting-public-access-at-risk/

University libraries are being swarmed by AI bots, putting public access at risk

Academic libraries are fighting off swarms of data-scraping bots — that are slowing or crashing sites meant for students, researchers and the public — as AI companies continue hunting for content to feed their large language models. University libraries say entire collections are being knocked offline by persistent streams of unruly bots trying to access their archives, which include academic, historical and government documents. “They’re just out there on the internet, just bombarding us with trying to grab up as much material as possible,” Jill Strykowski, cataloguing and government documents lead at San Jose State University, told CBC News. The bots are used by both AI and third-party companies to scour websites and retrieve data, often to feed LLMs like Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. Libraries, museums and other cultural heritage institutions are prime targets because they have quality, vetted information that is generally not hidden behind paywalls or logins. The bots are “causing an incredible amount of work and headache for every institution that does digitization work and every institution that is trying to make information openly available,” Strykowski says. Researchers found such reports started appearing in late 2024 across North America, Europe and Oceania and experts tell CBC News the problem continues to get worse…

Could be useful…

https://unpromptedcon.org/abstract-march2026/

[un]prompted

In this page you can find the presentation decks, transcripts, and videos of the presentations from the first [un]prompted conference, March 2026 in San Francisco.

You can find all videos on our YouTube channel.

Could Shakespeare write like Agatha Christie? Isaac Asimov?

https://ardjij.com/index.php/ardjij/en/article/view/55

Recreating Shakespeare: A Qualitative Inquiry into Authorship, Style and Simulation in the Age of Generative AI

The growing unification of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into creative practises has unresolved prolonged assumptions about individual artistry, authenticity and authorial identity. AI systems are capable of writing poetry, drama, fiction and other literary texts. The question is not about whether algorithmic machines can generate academic texts, but how they reproduce and mirror identities conventionally associated with human writers. This progress leads to a wider issue in which a well-known literary voice can be reconstructed from the patterns found in already-existing works computationally. Hence, the challenge is to figure out the relationship between style and authorship, originality and replicated text or literary recognition and individual artistic autonomy. With this upcoming backdrop, Shakespeare acts as a specifically targeted case through which we analyse the AI formation of literary identity. Shakespeare’s writing style, stylistic characteristics have become identifiable to an extent that they can be provoked as a model of machine-generated production. This research paper explores what happens to the idea of Shakespeare—as writer, stylistic features and cultural motifs when AI models are tasked with recreating him. Instead of questioning if AI can generate convincing pastiche, the paper asks a more significant question. It asks, “what kind of Shakespeare does AI actually produce and what does the formation unmask about the identity?” Relying on the poststructuralist theories of authorship (Barthes, 1967/1977; Foucault, 1969), computational creativity theory (Boden, 2004), and empirical research on stylometry and large language model (LLM) style recreation, this qualitative paper examines AI-driven Shakespeare-recreation projects — from LSTM and GPT-2 pastiche generators to modern LLM benchmarking studies. The investigation finds that AI does not recreate Shakespeare's authorial mindfulness. It reconstructs an average, decontextualized "Shakespeare-function". It is a surface level rhythm of diction, syntax, and meter taken from ancestral, sources, and biographical peculiarity. This conclusion has implications for literary pedagogy, digital humanities methodology, copyright law, and the ethics of algorithmic cultural memory.

Russia should know…

https://vestnik.msal.ru/jour/article/view/3173

Artificial intelligence technologies as a means of committing crimes

Modern information technologies, permeating all spheres of private and public life, generate not only new opportunities but also unprecedented threats that require immediate scientific and practical understanding. This study examines the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies as a means of committing crimes. The author proposes a classification of crimes committed with the use of AI based on several forensically significant factors: the type of technology used, the perpetrator of the crime, and the object of the criminal offense. The main methods of using AI in the implementation of criminal intent are examined: both as an integral element of the crime's method of commission and as an auxiliary means. The changes that the use of AI in crimes introduces to forensic characterization are analyzed, particularly in the description of elements such as the criminal's identity and trace evidence.

A conclusion is made about the transformation of the criminal landscape and the need to adapt investigative methods to new challenges.

Looking for a steady income stream?

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/putin-seizes-three-more-japan-tobacco-businesses-bringing-takeover-to-37-billion-24169

Putin Seizes Three More Japan Tobacco Businesses, Bringing Takeover to $3.7 Billion

… JTI has operated in Russia since 1999 and previously controlled up to 40% of the country’s cigarette market, selling brands including Winston, Camel, Sobranie, and LD.