You need to understand the underlying structure…

https://www.bespacific.com/the-hidden-way-dictatorships-are-shaping-what-ai-tells-you/

The hidden way dictatorships are shaping what AI tells you

Vox – no paywall: “….AI models learn by identifying patterns within enormous bodies of text. This widely-understood fact has an underappreciated consequence: LLMs don’t necessarily give the same answers in every language — certain phrases or arguments may appear more regularly in Japanese training data than in the English kind. This is not inherently a problem. But some languages are spoken overwhelmingly in a single country with an authoritarian government. In those cases, state-scripted media may comprise a large percentage of publicly available training data. After all, regime aligned media tends to produce a lot of text. And unlike many scientific journals and for-profit news outlets, propaganda rags rarely have paywalls. Given these realities, LLMs could theoretically end up unwittingly parroting pro-regime arguments to users in authoritarian nations. To test this hypothesis, a large team of university AI researchers conducted several different studies, most using China as a test case…”

A rare sign of rationality?

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/21/trump-ai-order-sacks-00933295

Trump yanked AI order after David Sacks raised industry concerns

Thursday’s abrupt postponement of President Donald Trump’s much-awaited executive order on artificial intelligence came after former AI czar David Sacks voiced industry concerns about the measure to Trump, according to a senior White House official and two people familiar with the matter.

Some actual numbers!

https://www.bespacific.com/these-5-charts-show-how-chatgpt-is-flooding-our-lives/

These 5 charts show how ChatGPT is flooding our lives

Washington Post [no paywall ] – “Self-filed lawsuits. New books. Scientific papers. See the data behind the surge. The impact of ChatGPT on society can be summed up with a single word: more. Since OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool debuted in late 2022, anyone can rapidly churn out reams of text resembling academic papers, legal documents, poems and computer programs. And people are doing exactly that. A growing body of evidence suggests books, self-filed lawsuits and other kinds of written documents are proliferating at breakneck speed. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.) Our world is built on an assumption that effort signals value — that a book, a lawsuit or a scientific paper carries weight partly because a human labored to create it. AI is eroding that relationship, shifting a new burden onto the people forced to sift through the deluge. Here are five ways ChatGPT has flooded our lives…”

What is persuasive?

https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/is-ai-mastering-the-art-of-persuasion#!

Is AI Mastering the Art of Persuasion?

Kellogg’s Jake Teeny and his colleague developed a framework to help us better understand how generative AI is being used to personalize messages to people’s personalities, preferences, and needs. The framework establishes four categories for research on the topic: the different ways generative AI can be used to gather personal information, the different types of personal information gathered, strategies for personalizing messages based on this information, and the ways these messages are delivered.

The world as it is…

https://thenextweb.com/news/chatbots-midterms-2026-news-accuracy-information-integrity

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok are not ready to brief American voters

A new generation of voters will ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok how to vote, where the polling station is, and who is telling the truth. The published research is consistent: the models cannot reliably answer those questions. The election will arrive anyway.

I missed predicting the block but the lawsuit was inevitable.

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/19/nx-s1-5821265/minnesota-ban-prediction-markets

Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has signed the nation's first law banning prediction market sites from operating in the state, and in response, the Trump administration has sued, teeing up a legal battle over the most far-reaching crackdown on popular services like Kalshi and Polymarket.

It comes as states confront a growing standoff with the Trump administration over how to regulate the industry, which allows people to bet on virtually anything.

The new state law makes it a crime to host or advertise a prediction market, which it defines as a system that lets consumers place a wager on a future outcome, like sports, elections, live entertainment, someone's word choice and world affairs.

Loss of direction or doubt that direction will result in action?

https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-market-trump-iran-things-to-know-today-c6e3e276

Stock Markets Now Shrug at Trump’s Iran Rhetoric. That’s a Big Worry.

Negotiations and threats, threats and negotiations. Markets are getting tired of the apparent lack of progress around the U.S.-Iran peace talks and that’s creating a risk of an eventual sharp jump in oil prices, which would roil bond and stock markets.

… After a period when oil prices—and therefore other assets—would respond to Trump’s every utterance, now the reaction is largely a shrug. The risks of a complete loss of faith in a peaceful resolution are rising.

(Related)

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/no-deal-no-exit-how-us-iran-standoff-risks-fresh-conflict-2026-05-18/

No deal, no exit: How US-Iran standoff risks fresh conflict

… Calls for a fresh strike are growing louder in the U.S. ‌and Israel, with some officials arguing that increased pressure could weaken Tehran's leverage and force Iran back to the negotiating table.

"There is one major problem with this theory: We have already tested it, repeatedly, and Iran did not capitulate," said Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher on Iran at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies and former head of the Iran branch in Israeli Defense Intelligence.

News.

https://fpf.org/blog/colorado-revises-its-ai-act-what-changed-and-why/

Colorado Revises Its AI Act: What Changed and Why

On May 15, Governor Polis signed SB 189, revising the Colorado AI Act (CAIA) after two years of intense negotiations and national debate over the original 2024 law’s approach to AI regulation. The revised law, the Colorado ADM Act (CADMA), reflects a fundamental shift in approach: shifting from an algorithmic discrimination framework to a transparency-focused one, as well as narrowing the scope of covered AI systems, streamlining disclosures and consumer rights, and replacing governance requirements with liability allocation under existing anti-discrimination laws. 

This post examines the key changes between CAIA and CADMA, explores the context that drove these revisions, and analyzes their practical implications. Side-by-side legislative comparison chart below.

Perhaps it’s not the Terminator we should worry about. (“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves”)

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-the-whole-world-stopped-having

The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think

Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once?

This was the subject of last week’s Plain English episode and a new blockbuster report from the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch. In fact it feels like just about everybody has been taking a crack at this question recently.

Some blame it on technology. One week ago, my feed was flooded with a viral video of Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, speaking about the sterilizing effects of modern technology. Among his friends, “no one’s having kids,” said Leahy, who was 30 at the time. “Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?” If you asked Leahy what the explanation was, “my answer is technology,” he said. “My answer is social media. My answer is AI.”

There is hope… (What if judges banned lawyers for a year if they did the same?)

https://thenextweb.com/news/arxiv-ai-slop-ban-researchers-preprint

ArXiv will ban researchers for a year if they submit papers they did not bother to read

ArXiv will ban researchers for one year if they submit papers with obvious signs of unchecked AI generation, such as hallucinated references or leftover chatbot instructions. The policy, announced by computer science section chair Thomas Dietterich, is the first formal penalty by a major preprint platform for AI-generated slop.

Do tariffs apply?

https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/by62suvkzg#google_vignette

Trump’s gold-plated T1 smartphone finally ships, and sparks immediate backlash

After nearly a year of delays, silence and revised terms, Trump Mobile has begun shipping its T1 phones, but analysts say the gold-colored device is little more than a cheap Chinese smartphone rebranded for MAGA consumers

Benefit or obligation?

https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-seals-deal-malta-give-all-maltese-access-chatgpt-plus-2026-05-16/

OpenAI seals deal in Malta to give all Maltese access to ChatGPT Plus

U.S. artificial intelligence company OpenAI said on Saturday it had signed a deal ‌with the government of Malta to give all residents access to its ChatGPT Plus service for one year after they follow a course on how to use AI.

• The programme will start in May and is expected to scale up as more Maltese residents complete the course, which will be free.

• It will also be open ‌to Maltese citizens living abroad.

• "We are turning an unfamiliar concept into practical assistance for our families, students, and workers," Maltese Economy Minister Silvio Schembri was quoted as saying in an OpenAI statement.

AI thinks it has all the information it needs.

https://venturebeat.com/technology/the-enterprise-risk-nobody-is-modeling-ai-is-replacing-the-very-experts-it-needs-to-learn-from

The enterprise risk nobody is modeling: AI is replacing the very experts it needs to learn from

For AI systems to keep improving in knowledge work, they need either a reliable mechanism for autonomous self-improvement or human evaluators capable of catching errors and generating high-quality feedback. The industry has invested enormously in the first. It's giving almost no thought to what's happening to the second.

I’d argue that we need to treat the human evaluation problem with just as much rigor and investment as we put into building the model capabilities themselves. New grad hiring at major tech companies has dropped by half since 2019. Document review, first-pass research, data cleaning, code review: Models handle these now. The economists tracking this call it displacement. The companies doing it call it efficiency. Neither are focusing on the future problem.

Bias, thy name is human…

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/real-monet-ai-chaos

Devious Prankster Posts Real Monet Painting, Tells People It’s AI-Generated, and Watches the Chaos Unfold

A poster wrought some moderate havoc this week when they shared a cropped image of a real Monet painting while claiming it was an AI fake, unleashing a flood of ill-informed reactions and muddled discourse. So, you know, it was just another day online.

… Commenters were quick to jump in to explain why, in their view, the alleged AI image was worse than the real work of the French impressionist master. According to one, the image was an “incoherent muddle of inconsistently saturated greens.” Another lamented that there was no “coherent composition,” while someone else shared that the painting seemed “busy, artificial, nature in turmoil, polluted.” Another commenter said that the allegedly AI-generated image seemed as if it was “trying too hard” to resemble Monet’s later paintings, which he created when he was close to blindness. Others shared that the image was “obvious” AI slop.

… But some of the most interesting responses came from actual experts, who shared deeply informed analyses about why, based on the image alone, the painting appeared to them to be the real deal.

There may be hope!

https://globalvoices.org/2026/05/15/why-were-russian-disinformation-government-propaganda-and-ai-generated-campaigning-ineffective-in-hungarian-elections-2026/

Why were Russian disinformation, government propaganda and AI-generated campaigning ineffective in Hungarian elections 2026?

This article by Teczár Szilárd first appeared in Hungarian media observatory Lakmusz on May 5, 2026. In it, Director of Mérték Media Monitor Ágnes Urbán, and Director of Political Capital Péter Krekó, who is also an associate professor at ELTE PPK, were interviewed to understand why government propaganda and state-sponsored disinformation did not work in the country’s April 2026 elections. Fidesz, the party led by Viktor Orbán, who had been in power for 16 years, was crushed by Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, which received a constitutional majority in parliament. An edited version of the interview is being republished on Global Voices with permission.

With the odds of success so low, why continue?

https://www.bespacific.com/explore-the-data-10000-rulings-against-trump-in-ice-cases/

Explore the data: 10,000 rulings against Trump in ICE cases

Politico: “Under President Donald Trump, ICE is locking up immigrants at an unprecedented scale, holding tens of thousands of people — many with no criminal records and deep roots in the U.S. — in detention facilities to await the outcome of deportation proceedings. POLITICO is tracking the surge in litigation triggered by the administration’s novel policy that began in July, and releasing our database, below, of the 11,000-plus cases in which federal district courts reached a ruling on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention practices. More than 10,000 of those were rulings against the administration, handed down by judges appointed by president. POLITICO compiled this database by canvassing public court records for cases in which detainees sued Department of Homeland Security leaders — Markwayne Mullin or his predecessor, Kristi Noem — or Trump. We also identified other defendants, often including local ICE supervisors or wardens of detention facilities. While we have made every effort to be comprehensive, there is no uniform system for identifying every detention-related case, and there may be a small number of rulings we didn’t find. Our journalists manually compiled, analyzed and categorized these records. Using a large language model, POLITICO extracted the case name, judge, date and district from each opinion. AI was not used in assessing the outcome or reasoning of each case. Most of these rulings pertain to the Trump administration’s unprecedented legal argument that it can detain anyone present in the country who is eligible for deportation, without a chance for a hearing. Our analysis also includes: rulings that hinged on other due process violations, such as alleged violations of ICE’s internal regulations; prolonged detentions or extreme medical need (which we have classified as “due process”); rulings based on a Supreme Court case allowing people to seek release if they’re unlikely to actually be deported (“Zadvydas detention”); and some for which judges’ reasoning was unclear….”

Okay, someone is doing something about global warming…

https://www.makeuseof.com/fantastic-hulu-documentary-important-underrated-the-grab/

This fantastic Hulu documentary may be the most important movie no one has watched

The Grab begins with a former U.S. intelligence officer calmly telling us that, in his opinion, World War III isn't an unlikely prospect.

That's a pretty intense way to begin a documentary, but The Grab makes a good case that it's warranted. This 2022 film comes from Gabriela Cowperthwaite, best known for her 2013 doc Blackfish, about the consequences of keeping orca whales in captivity. The Grab swings quite a bit wider, arguing that various countries around the world are quietly preparing for massive resource collapses that could define what life is like for the next few decades on the planet Earth.

The telephone game built into AI?

https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/frontier-ai-models-dont-just-delete-document-content-they-rewrite-it-and-the-errors-are-nearly-impossible-to-catch

Frontier AI models don't just delete document content — they rewrite it, and the errors are nearly impossible to catch

… A new study by researchers at Microsoft shows that large language models silently corrupt documents that they work on by introducing errors. The researchers developed a benchmark that simulates multi-step autonomous workflows across 52 professional domains, using a method that automatically measures how much content degrades over time.

Their findings show that even top-tier frontier models corrupt an average of 25% of document content by the end of these workflows. And providing models with agentic tools or realistic distractor documents actually worsens their performance.

A little more detail on a problem I mentioned earlier…

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/anthropic-blames-dystopian-sci-fi-for-training-ai-models-to-act-evil/

Anthropic blames dystopian sci-fi for training AI models to act “evil”

Those with an interest in the concept of AI alignment (i.e., getting AIs to stick to human-authored ethical rules) may remember when Anthropic claimed its Opus 4 model resorted to blackmail to stay online in a theoretical testing scenario last year. Now, Anthropic says it thinks this “misalignment” was primarily the result of training on “internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation.”

In a recent technical post on Anthropic’s Alignment Science blog (and an accompanying social media thread and public-facing blog post), Anthropic researchers lay out their attempts to correct for the kind of “unsafe” AI behavior that “the model most likely learned… through science fiction stories, many of which depict an AI that is not as aligned as we would like Claude to be.” In the end, the model maker says the best remedy for overriding those “evil AI” stories might be additional training with synthetic stories showing an AI acting ethically.

Don’t think of this as another version of a Trump pardon…

https://www.bespacific.com/trump-deportation-policies-are-undermining-state-and-local-criminal-prosecutions/

New Judiciary Democrats Report Reveals Trump Deportation Policies Are Undermining State and Local Criminal Prosecutions

Press release: “…The report, “Acquittal by Removal: How Trump’s Mass Deportation Agenda Abandons Crime Victims and Allows Perpetrators to Avoid Justice,” finds that in its push to meet deportation quotas, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has deported victims, witnesses, and even criminal defendants before trials could be completed—derailing prosecutions and leaving serious crimes unresolved. As a result, prosecutors are increasingly unable to secure convictions, denying victims justice and restitution while allowing perpetrators to evade accountability.

At the same time, the Administration has diverted more than 28,000 federal law enforcement officers away from investigating violent crime to focus on immigration enforcement, weakening efforts to combat gun violence, drug trafficking, and other major offenses. Non-immigration related criminal prosecutions have fallen to their lowest point in decades …”

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-learn-claude-code-with-free-anthropic-ai-courses-online/

How to learn Claude Code for free with Anthropic's AI courses - one took me just 20 minutes

… Anthropic offers Claude Courses, a free library of video-based training, and some elements come complete with quizzes and certifications.

Should we rely on hallucinations?

https://www.bespacific.com/the-impact-of-ai-generated-text-on-the-internet/

The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet

The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet.  Jonas Dolezal, Sawood Alam, Mark Graham, Maty Bohacek:

The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022. We also find evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity. Notably, our findings diverge from public perception of AI’s impact on the internet. AI has been moving at an unprecedented speed, changing the way people write, communicate, and work. Existing research has pointed to AI’s tendency to hallucinate, exhibit sycophancy, and other undesirable behaviors on the level of individual generations. However, no research has so far studied the impact of this technology on online discourse as a whole. To address this, we collected a representative sample of websites published between 2022 and 2025 through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to study these phenomena and answer the following questions: (1) How much new text on the internet is AI-generated? (2) What is the public’s perception of AI’s impact on the internet? and (3) How does AI-generated text actually impact online discourse?

Wish we could identify the bad guys but we can’t, so lets search everyone!

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/eff-fourth-circuit-electronic-device-searches-border-require-warrant

EFF to Fourth Circuit: Electronic Device Searches at the Border Require a Warrant

EFF, along with the national ACLU, the ACLU affiliates in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) filed an amicus brief  in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit urging the court to require a warrant for border searches of electronic devices under the Fourth Amendment, an argument  EFF has been making in the courts  and Congress  for nearly a decade. The Fourth Circuit heard oral arguments on May 8. The Knight Institute at Columbia University and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press also filed a helpful brief focusing on the First Amendment  implications of border searches of electronic devices.

The case, U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, involves a U.S. citizen whose cell phone was manually searched after he arrived at Dulles airport near Washington, D.C., following a trip to Bolivia. He had been on the government’s radar prior to his international trip and had been flagged for secondary inspection. Border officers found child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on his phone, and he was later arrested and criminally charged.

The district court denied the defendant’s motion to suppress  the images and other data obtained from the warrantless search of his cell phone. He was ultimately convicted  of child pornography and sexual exploitation of minors because he had used social media to entice minors to send him sexually explicit photos of themselves.

I still believe this is a bad idea…

https://thenextweb.com/news/eu-social-media-protect-children

Ursula Von der Leyen pushes EU-wide social-media age protections for children

The European Commission president said an EU age-verification app is technically complete and that bloc-level rules on minimum social-media ages are next. France, Spain, and several others are already moving alone.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday set out the EU’s plan to extend protections for children online, telling MEPs the bloc’s age-verification app is technically ready for citizen use and that a Commission-led approach to minimum social-media ages is in development.

The intervention follows a wave of national legislation by EU member states moving ahead of any bloc-wide rule. France approved a bill in January 2026 to ban under-15s from social-media platforms, citing a public-health emergency.

Spain has tabled plans for an under-16 ban; Austria, Denmark, and Slovenia are drafting rules at ages 14, 15, and 15, respectively. Italy and Ireland are exploring restrictions at the under-15 and under-16.

Your AI as cryptographer…

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20075

LLMs can hide text in other text of the same length

A meaningful text can be hidden inside another, completely different yet still coherent and plausible, text of the same length. For example, a tweet containing a harsh political critique could be embedded in a tweet that celebrates the same political leader, or an ordinary product review could conceal a secret manuscript. This uncanny state of affairs is now possible thanks to Large Language Models, and in this paper we present Calgacus, a simple and efficient protocol to achieve it. We show that even modest 8-billion-parameter open-source LLMs are sufficient to obtain high-quality results, and a message as long as this abstract can be encoded and decoded locally on a laptop in seconds. The existence of such a protocol demonstrates a radical decoupling of text from authorial intent, further eroding trust in written communication, already shaken by the rise of LLM chatbots. We illustrate this with a concrete scenario: a company could covertly deploy an unfiltered LLM by encoding its answers within the compliant responses of a safe model. This possibility raises urgent questions for AI safety and challenges our understanding of what it means for a Large Language Model to know something.

Imagine all the ‘bad ideas’ found in literature. (Not just SciFi.)

https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-claude-blackmail-internet-evil-ai-training

Anthropic says Claude learned to blackmail by reading stories about evil AI

The company has traced its model’s most uncomfortable behaviour to the corpus of science fiction it was trained on. The fix it describes is unsettling in a different way: teaching the model the reasons behind being good, not just the rules.

Tools & Techniques. (Always amusing)

https://www.bespacific.com/taken-you-opened-this-page-it-already-knows-the-following/

taken. You opened this page. It already knows the following.

Sources & Confessions. Every observation on this page came from your own browser, in the first milliseconds after you arrived. The words were written by a human. A few honest footnotes follow.  TAKEN

• Your location – ip-api.com · Free tier · CC-BY-SA – Your IP address arrives in the header of every request your device makes. We pass it to ip-api.com to translate it into a city and an internet provider name. The lookup is transient. Neither side stores it. Under GDPR, an IP address can be considered personal data when used for tracking. We do not track. We do not retain. We do not log. We display only the first and last octet on screen. We know the rest. We chose not to display it.

• Browser APIs – MDN Web Docs · Mozilla · CC-BY-SA 2.5 – Every observation about your device (screen, browser, language, GPU, cores, battery, fonts, preferences) was retrieved through standard JavaScript APIs documented openly by Mozilla. No exploits, no vulnerabilities, no hacks. Everything on this page is by design. The design is the problem.

• Font fingerprinting – Electronic Frontier Foundation · Cover Your Tracks (formerly Panopticlick)

  The technique of detecting installed fonts by measuring rendered text widths has been documented since 2010. The EFF maintains a tool that lets you see how unique your browser is. Most browsers are unique enough to be tracked across the open web without any cookie at all. The combination of fonts is one of the strongest signals.

• Canvas fingerprinting – Princeton University · Web Transparency & Accountability Project – A 2014 study from Princeton was the first to document canvas fingerprinting in the wild. Researchers found it on 5% of the top 100,000 websites: pages that secretly asked the visitor’s browser to draw a hidden image, then read the rendered pixels back as an identifier. Your browser supports the technique. We did not draw one. The page you visit after this one might.

• Clipboard API – MDN · Clipboard API specification – With a single user gesture (a click, a tap), a page can request to read the last thing you copied. A password. An address. A draft message. The capability is announced by every modern browser. We did not request it. The capability is there, available to any page that asks at the right moment…”

Another chip out of privacy…

https://reclaimthenet.org/the-fcc-wants-your-id-before-you-get-a-phone-number

The FCC Wants Your ID Before You Get a Phone Number

The era of the anonymous phone number could be ending. On April 30, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customers’ identities before activating service.

Government-issued ID, physical address, legal name, and existing phone numbers would all be included. The stated goal is stopping robocalls. The result would be an identity-verification regime covering one of the last semi-anonymous communication tools available to ordinary Americans.

Interesting downside…

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-notetakers-legal-risk.html

All Those A.I. Note Takers? They’re Making Lawyers Very Nervous.

… A.I.-generated transcripts, which some video call apps allow users to turn on by default, preserve all sorts of things — offhand comments, quickly corrected statements, jokes — that humans would rarely write in the meeting minutes. And they show up in meetings that would otherwise not be recorded.

In a lawsuit or an investigation, that can make every word uttered discoverable.

Even worse, say corporate lawyers: Sharing the meeting with an A.I. bot may void attorney-client privilege, making conversations that would not otherwise be subject to discovery fair game in a lawsuit.

Know your market. Hackers offer what customers want.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/05/fake-call-history-apps-stole-payments.html

Fake Call History Apps Stole Payments From Users After 7.3 Million Play Store Downloads

… "The offending apps, which we named CallPhantom based on their false claims, purport to provide access to call histories, SMS records, and even WhatsApp call logs for any phone number," ESET security researcher Lukáš Štefanko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "To unlock this supposed feature, users are asked to pay -- but all they get in return is randomly generated data."

Why this is still on every auditor’s checklist.

https://thenextweb.com/news/poland-water-treatment-cyberattack-russia-us

Hackers breached five Polish water treatment plants. The attack vector was default passwords. Seventy per cent of American water utilities fail the same test.

… The agency identified two primary attack vectors: passwords that had not been changed from factory defaults and industrial control systems exposed directly to the public internet. Neither vulnerability requires sophisticated tooling to exploit. Both have been documented in cybersecurity advisories for more than a decade.

That’s where the data are at…

https://thenextweb.com/news/the-largest-education-data-breach-in-history-was-not-an-attack-on-a-school-it-was-an-attack-on-a-vendor

The largest education data breach in history was not an attack on a school. It was an attack on a vendor.

ShinyHunters breached Instructure’s Canvas learning management system, claiming 3.65 terabytes of data from 275 million users across 9,000 institutions worldwide, including private messages between students and teachers. Forty-four Dutch universities and schools are confirmed affected, and the breach, the second at Instructure in eight months, exposes the structural risk of vendor concentration in education technology.

No wonder Ukraine uses cheap drones…

https://www.bespacific.com/status-of-key-us-munitions/

Status of key US Munitions

CSIS – Download the Full Report: “Concern about the status of U.S. munitions inventories has intensified  as reports emerge about high expenditures of Tomahawks, Patriots, and other missiles in the Iran war. As Operation Epic Fury remains paused in a shaky ceasefire, there is an opportunity to assess whether the U.S. military nears the point of going “Winchester”—or running out of ammunition. Analysis of seven key munitions shows that the United States has enough missiles to continue fighting this war under any plausible scenario. The risk—which will persist for many years—lies in future wars. Note: This table was updated after publication to incorporate reporting by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times on Tomahawk and JASSM expenditures. Estimates are rounded to the nearest ten for readability. Unit cost of the latest variants of each missile is listed, as provided in FY 2026 budget documents. “Delivery timeline” here includes (1) contract lead time between defense appropriation and contract award date, (2) manufacturing lead time between contract award and first delivery, and (3) full lot production time between first and last delivery. See Table 2 for the breakdown. [Source: Authors’ calculations based on “Defense Budget Materials,” U.S. Department of Defense. See the methodological primer for details.  In the 39 days of the air and missile campaign before the ceasefire, U.S. forces heavily used the seven munitions in Table 1. For four of them, the United States may have expended more than half of the prewar inventory.] Rebuilding to prewar levels for the seven munitions will take from one to four years as missiles in the pipeline are delivered. These missiles will also be critical for a potential Western Pacific conflict. Even before the Iran war, stockpiles were deemed insufficient for a peer competitor fight. That shortfall is now even more acute, and building stockpiles to levels adequate for a war with China will take additional time. Diminished inventories will also affect the U.S. supply of Patriot, Terminal High Altitude Area Defenses (THAADs), and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs) to Ukraine and other allies and partners that use them. The United States will compete with those countries that also want to replenish and expand inventories.”