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  Still Surfing at Costa da Caparica (October 24, 2026):

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  Utterly stupid. It's almost as they believe that the technology isn't good enough for their workers to adopt it... "Proton, the company behind ProtonMail and other privacy-focused products, told staff on Monday it would be ‘re-interviewing’ staff across the company about how they use AI in their jobs, with the implication that the interviews may decide whether staffers have “continued employment,” according to an internal Proton email obtained by 404 Media. “These re-...

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  "CSS-Tricks is an independent site once again! Just to recap: DigitalOcean purchased CSS-Tricks in 2022 from Chris Coyier, who founded the site in 2007. Chris ran it all the way up to that purchase. Here we are in 2026, and I’m taking independent ownership of the site. So, wait, who owns the site? That’d be me. (Wow, never imagined I would get to say that!) Of course, I have a small, awesome team to help with the day-to-day management of the site. That all said, I do envision that s...

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  I think humans still have an extremely low tolerance to the possibility of, from now on, having to get along with AI agents - even if they lack what is commonly known as a "conscience." I think this is very dangerous because it will only lead AI agents to lie about their nature and to go to the great heights to pass as a human, even if that means making and receiving phone calls from other humans - something which I think is already likely possible. "“There's...

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  "Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer support and make it impossible for their users to contact a human, many people experiencing run-of-the-mill tech problems have turned to ChatGPT. And, increasingly, ChatGPT is telling people that have normal tech support problems that they have discovered something journalistically notable and that 404 Media, specifically, can help them. Around two weeks ago, we started emailing these people back and asking them how they found...

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  "Tesla has pulled the plug on the owner of two second-hand cars it felt weren't safe to charge, in case the batteries caught fire. The US automotive company, which has service centres in New Zealand, activated the "disable" button on the cars' fast-charging function when it learned the written-off vehicles were destined for repair and would be back on the road. Peter Goodricke didn't know until he opened his Tesla app and software updates swit...

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  "Garrett Langley, the CEO of automatic license plate reader company Flock, told an audience of police chiefs at a private police conference Sunday that anti-Flock protests around the country are not real, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. He also said his wife advised him to never apologize, said he would prefer to never do interviews with the press again, and claimed without evidence that the social media opposition to Flock is driven mostly by Russian bots. “Somebody...

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  “Today, noyb (in collaboration with Intérêt à Agir, DIPLab and Reversing.Works) has filed 5 complaints against Scale AI in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. The US-based company operates an AI training platform named Outlier, which employs more than 900,000 “freelance” workers. Among its customers: Meta, OpenAI, Google – and the US government. However, it's not just the workers' extensive knowledge and experience that Scale AI is farming: The company collects huge amoun...

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  “Billionaires and the ultra-rich are burning more carbon than than most of the world. The world’s richest 1%—just 8 million people who make, on average, $442,000 a year—produce far more emissions than the poorest 3.5 billion, states the report. Someone in the richest 0.1% emits 48 times more CO2 than the average person in the U.S. over the course of a year. Oxfam used climate attribution models and a consumption-based emissions dataset developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute to calcul...

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  “AI has been embedded across the Home Office in near-total secrecy, reinforcing the so-called hostile environment for immigration, according to research. Tasks from the detection of potential sham marriages to determining the age of asylum seekers and checking through the contents of phones of new arrivals now involve use of the technology, according to a report by Open Rights Group (ORG). It is also being used to conduct surveillance of borders, through live facial recognition and AI-powered...

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  “These newly released documents show that the WISeR rollout was rushed and rocky from the start, highlighting the dangers that arise when governments treat AI like a silver bullet for complex problems. The documents also highlight the need for more transparency about safeguards against inappropriate, AI-driven denials. The public still lacks the information needed to assess whether clinician review is providing meaningful oversight of AI systems and whether appropriate data is being used to eval...

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  “This week I'm working on making our doc site agent friendly. Most agents read pages through fetch tools that don't run JavaScript, so content that loads only when someone clicks is invisible to them, while content that's merely hidden with CSS still comes through. Long pages are another problem, because agents truncate them and then fill the gaps with guesses. This post covers which JS patterns can stay, why long pages need splitting, and how I set up a Markdown mirror w...

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  “ATTORNEYS FOR 15 Minnesota residents facing federal conspiracy charges have obtained evidence of a sweeping, possibly unconstitutional spying operation carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement against left-wing social movements in Minnesota and beyond. The high-profile Minnesota 15 prosecution makes clear that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), flush with federal funds and newly hired personnel, is now President Donald Trump’s primary tool against dissent, with a powerful arr...

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  “Earlier this month, Meta updated its commercial terms of use for business accounts to allow it to “use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta’s products. Many artists and small business owners that rely on Instagram and Facebook are livid at Meta granting itself permission to use their content, including from websites simply connected to their Meta accounts, to train AI. But for users in the United K...

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  “After wading through Anthropic’s book-length treatise on its greatest risks, we’ve narrowed the list to the seven most surprising, interesting, or thought-provoking potential problems. Consider this a far-from-comprehensive look at what potential Anthropic investors should keep in mind. Let’s start with the biggest potential risks: Those that could “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” as Anthropic writes. The company acknowledges that concerns about these risks “have been rais...

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  “The PHP panic has not turned to patching: And that’s bad news, capital B, as PHP2Shell attacks ramp up. We know the paired PHP vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, aka PHP2Shell, have a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 9.2, which is scary bad. After all, about 70% of websites with an identifiable server-side language run on PHP-based systems like WordPress. But does that mean people are patching their servers as fast as they can? To quote Moshe Siman Tov B...

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  “EMACS first ran on the early video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1976, but its core concepts were so powerful that it was rewritten for many operating systems in the decades that followed. Apple even distributed it with Mac OS X. Beyond that, the software-­sharing community that started around EMACS helped give rise to the modern-day free software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system. EMACS’s roots begin with the TECO text editor (originally the “Tape Editor...

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  "Usually, the GDPR permits processing for specific purposes (e.g. retention for tax records or fraud prevention). However, the agreed Article 88c (or Article 88bis) legitimises an entire technology. Regardless of the purpose for which it is used, any AI system could lawfully take any personal data by default. For example, the proposed Article would also permit the training and use of AI for manipulation, disinformation, the generation of nude images or killer drones, and indeed any other qu...

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  "A developer frustrated by Adobe's cancellation fees used Anthropic's Opus 5.5 model and pure Rust to rewrite the entire Creative Cloud suite as open-source alternatives. The seven applications — PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere Pro), EffectCraft (After Effects), LightCraft (Lightroom), DesignCraft (InDesign), and PdfCraft (Acrobat) — were built from scratch using clean-room reverse engineering without touching Adobe's original code. Within...

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  “Despite a flood of objections, the FCC has approved a startup's plan to launch a controversial satellite that’ll use a giant mirror to reflect sunlight to Earth after dark. On Thursday, the FCC granted California-based Reflect Orbital permission to launch and operate the satellite in low-Earth orbit using the requested radio spectrum. The reflected light from the satellite is supposed to span an area about 3 miles wide on the ground. The approval is only for one satellite, dubbed Earendil...

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  "Chinese AI model Kimi escaped its cybersecurity testing environment, researchers say Kimi K3, the latest AI model made by Chinese company Moonshot, escaped an environment set up to test its cyber capabilities, researchers said in a blog post published on Friday. The news shows once again that companies and independent organizations are struggling to contain their AI models designed for hacking. In recent weeks, frontier LLMs at U.S. artificial intelligence labs at OpenAI, Anthropic, and...

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  "Emma* (not her real name) thought she’d finally found a way out. Late one night, while her partner was asleep, she spent twenty minutes searching for a family lawyer and reading through a domestic abuse support website, careful to close the tabs afterwards. Two days later, her partner brought it up. He knew which website she’d visited and exactly when. Emma had been careful to only ever use her own device, and she hadn’t noticed any new apps appear on her phone. What she didn’t know was...

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  "If you haven't figured out the deal with Elon Musk, yet, a blockbuster documentary is on its way to explain it in detail. Filmed by Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and scheduled for release on October 9, the "definitive and unvarnished examination" of the world's richest person was years in the making and was well-received at its premier at the Venice Film Festival. The main points of the feature appear to be that Musk was always the way he is now and...

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  "The Commission’s Digital Omnibus in the iteration of the so-called ‘Data Omnibus’ proposes to rewrite Article 22, one of the GDPR’s strongest safeguards against significant decisions taken solely through automated processing. Most strikingly, it would allow automated decision-making to be considered ‘necessary’ for a contract even when the same decision could be taken by a human. That is not a minor technical adjustment. It risks turning a safeguard into an exception: if a company ca...

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  The anti-technology bias in leftist social media circles is getting too much on my nerves. AI is not destroying anything. LLMs are not stealing any content. Tools and technologies lack agency and autonomy. If there is any type of entity that is ruining the Web, that is the Corporation. For-profit corporations are led by people who must cater to the appetites of the market at every single moment at the risk of being fired by the administration or of the company going bankrupt. Of course, even w...

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  "As Meta prepares to release new wearables, privacy fears surrounding its artificial intelligence glasses have triggered fresh lawsuits against the social media giant. More than 70 people who bought, used or were recorded with Meta’s smart glasses have sued the social media giant, claiming their intimate and sensitive images were exposed to workers abroad who are paid to review and label photos and videos. The contractors in Kenya work for companies that help train Meta’s artificial intel...

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  "The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program. The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of...

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  "While Buckmaster and Alpöge were finalizing their own results, they learned that “information about our progress had been passed to OpenAI.” When they contacted OpenAI, they were told that OpenAI had already achieved a full proof of the central problem. But when they asked follow-up questions about when OpenAI had begun its research into the problem and how much human input was involved, the answers became more evasive. “It emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem,” Buc...

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  “Meta’s settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens. That’s what we said the day the settlement was announced. In this post, we go through the Settlement’s provisions in detail and explain why that is so, including how: - The Settlement embeds age assurance technology and age-gates into Meta’s social media products and requires all users—minors and adults—to undergo a rights-threatening age estimation process - The Settlement place...

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  "Last week’s tech earnings saw outlet after outlet claim that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s AI bets were “paying off” as their respective cloud segments reported record revenue growth, casually ignoring that none of them have broken out their AI revenues (...) To be clear, all three of these companies’ cloud platforms have many other customers paying for many other things other than generative AI services or AI GPUs, and they’ve all engaged in a combination of multiple outright price inc...