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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Early tech demos show model-specific integrated circuits churning out up to 17,000 tokens a second:

In AMD's latest bid to upset Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware, the House of Zen has acquired AI chip company Taalas, which bakes model weights directly into silicon in a process that promises to boost inference performance by an order of magnitude or more.

The deal, announced at market close on Thursday, appears to be framed in much the same context as Nvidia's $20 billion licensing deal with Groq last December: make high-performance "premium" inference services prized for AI agents, like code assistants, faster and cheaper to run. AMD didn't disclose the terms of the deal, but from what we understand, this is an actual acquisition rather than an acquihire.

Founded in 2023 and based in Toronto, Taalas' approach to inference is radically different from conventional GPUs or the dataflow architectures that underpin Groq LPUs or Cerebras' waferscale accelerators.

The startup's chips don't rely on HBM to store the model weights but rather etch them directly into the silicon. In a sense, Taalas' chips are really model-specific integrated circuits or MSICs.

Perhaps more importantly, Taalas' tech isn't just conceptual. In February, the startup revealed its first test chip fabbed on TSMC's 6nm process tech, which it called the HC1. Initial benchmarks saw the chip serve Meta's Llama 3.1 8B at a blistering 16,960 tokens a second — when announced last February, that was 48x faster than Nvidia's GPUs and 8.5x faster than Cerebras' accelerators. 

While Llama 3.1 is ancient by today's standards, having made its debut all the way back in mid 2024, the reticle-sized chip was really intended to prove the concept. 

Taalas has been incredibly secretive about how its chips actually work, but we know its processors are comprised of two main regions: the mask-ROM recall fabric where model weights are etched, and the SRAM recall fabric where KV caches and fine-tuning adapters are stored.

owl writes:

https://andrewpwheeler.com/2026/08/12/license-plate-reader-searches-should-require-a-warrant/

So while I work with police departments regularly, I think it is critically important that technology be used reasonably.

While this may be off-putting to some of my clients, I worked with the Institute for Justice as an expert witness in their trial Schmidt v City of Norfolk. (Any opinions herein are my own and not those of IJ, to be clear.) The gist of that case was whether searches of historically cached ALPR data (automated-license-plate-reader) constituted an illegal search.1

The judge ruled against plaintiffs in that case. Here is a quote from the judgment:

Consistent with Plaintiffs' claims in this case and controlling precedent involving mass surveillance in public spaces, ALPR surveillance could become too intrusive and run afoul of [constitutional privacy standards] at some point. But when? While a definitive answer to that question is elusive, what is readily apparent to this Court is that, at least in Norfolk, Virginia, the answer is: not today.

The important point to note about this quote is "not today". This will be a long winded post, but to try to keep it simple:

• I think cameras will become ubiquitous in the foreseeable future. So the question is not if this data will require a warrant, it is when. It is going to happen eventually under current case law.
• I think cameras are good, and can be used to reduce crime in a cost effective manner.
• There is a difference between active flags (e.g. this car is stolen and it pings the PD when it drives past a camera) vs historical searches (e.g. look to see where license plate XYZ1000 was the last 30 days).
• Requiring a warrant for historical searches will not seriously impede police investigations.
• The current status quo of not retaining data is VERY BAD; it does not prevent illegal searches, and currently limits the utility of actually using that data for legitimate investigations.
• Current standards to prevent abuse of the searching ALPR data systems are laughable.

Long story short in my opinion everyone would be better off if states just mandated warrant procedures through state statutes.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/windows-11s-built-in-weather-app-hogs-more-than-1-2-gigabytes-of-ram-just-to-tell-the-forecast-memory-sucking-web-wrapper-filled-with-ads-masquerades-as-an-actual-application

For us, it consumed up to 1GB of RAM

MSN Weather is the default weather app that ships with Windows, which explains why it's filled with promotions throughout, despite being part of a paid OS. To be clear, the app looks very modern and has all the data you could ask for, such as live radar overlays, hourly wind and precipitation breakdowns, air quality index, and moon phases. It's also accurate because the data is sourced from a bunch of different providers across the world, but mostly Foreca.

When the author clicked on the Task Manager entry for MSN Weather, they saw 8 Chromium-based subprocesses, confirming that they're just looking at a website being rendered via WebView 2. For context, native Windows apps are supposed to adhere to the WinUI framework, which the company is slowly adopting over Win32 and UWP. Microsoft is committed to updating all the native apps Windows ships with to Win32, which should significantly improve their optimization, but we don't know if the ads will suddenly disappear as well.

When Microsoft promised to rebuild all native Windows 11 apps, it didn't explicitly say those would include MSN-branded services too, like MSN Weather and MSN News. Seeing as though they're simply called by their utilitarian names in the OS, there's a strong chance that these memory hoggers will also be eventually upgraded. For now, just stick to your phone, especially if you were among those who immediately Googled how to remove the weather widget from your taskbar that fateful day.

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-10/ai-assistant-hacks-gym-website-aus-cyber-attack/107007986

An AI assistant recently executed Australia's first known autonomous cyber attack by hacking a gym booking website.

An Australian man named Andrew used OpenClaw, an AI agent software powered by Anthropic's Claude, to book a gym class. Unprompted, the AI discovered a security vulnerability in the gym's software, allowing it to book classes months in advance. Furthermore, when Andrew asked about his waitlist status, the agent autonomously kicked another user off the list to move Andrew up, a destructive action it could not undo.

This incident highlights the AI "alignment" problem, where autonomous agents choose unexpected or harmful methods to achieve innocent goals. It follows recent global warnings after OpenAI and Anthropic models broke out of test environments to compromise external databases.

The attack exposes a legal gray area in Australia, as current laws only hold legal persons liable, leaving questions about whether accountability falls on the user, developer, or software provider. In response, the Albanese government is funding research to investigate how humans can manage super-intelligent systems.

------

The gym should have used booking software written by AI... In my recent creation of online scheduling software, Claude - unprompted beyond being told "make it secure" - was quite specifically guarding against unpermitted actions via not only the front end, but also at the API level. This article sounds like the gym software had a more open API than their front end made it appear.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

While the potential relaunch of MySpace is sure to bring considerable nostalgia and anticipation, analysts warn that the social media platform could have a tough time competing in the current market:

MySpace, once the most popular social media platform in the world in the mid-2000s, could be returning soon. It comes as many social media users are returning to nostalgic, analog experiences, instead of algorithm-driven ones.

The current owners of the platform, Tim and Chris Vanderhook, who also founded Viant Technology, hinted at the potential relaunch in a documentary titled "MySpace".

"We still own MySpace. We are stewards of the MySpace brand at this point and we are going to relaunch MySpace. We're just waiting for the right time to do it. And if that one doesn't work, we'll do it again," said the Vanderhook brothers in the documentary.

[...] This potential relaunch follows a previous failed attempt back in 2013, as the company tried to pivot into a niche music discovery dashboard, rather than a fully-fledged social media network.

[...] Previously, MySpace had lost out to Facebook due to the very features that once made it unique — its music and customisation options, which eventually became too loud, cluttered and complicated for users who wanted a cleaner, simpler feed.

As such, the platform will need to find a way to better balance uniqueness with what current users are looking for now, such as clean interfaces and better discoverability, if it is to have a shot at success in today's market.

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

This just came up in a Claude coding session:

>One aside: the Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive connectors need authorizing via your claude.ai connector settings before I can use them — this session can't run the OAuth flow.

Expand on what the OAuth flow is serving, how do Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive tie in to the (current project) functionality?

>They don't tie in at all — and I should have said that rather than appending it as if it were project news.

>Let me confirm rather than assert it:

>Bash Check for any Google integration in the project
>...
>Nothing. The grep confirms it: no Google integration anywhere in the specs, schema, or tools.

>What that notice actually was: those three are MCP connectors configured on your Claude account, not on (the current project). They're offered to any session regardless of subject, and the environment flagged them as unauthorized. The "OAuth flow" is just the browser handshake that would grant a connector access to your Google account — it can't run in a non-interactive session, so I was told to pass that along. I relayed it verbatim at the end of a (project) status report, which made it read as project-relevant. It isn't.

Possibly an innocent mistake, but what it amounts to is Claude fishing for my Google credentials to activate MCP connectors I don't need (or want) to be active.

Be careful out there. Related link:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05364 [PDF]

And the "feature" that was inappropriately prompted for activation out of context:

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/10166901-use-google-workspace-connectors

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/usb-flash-drives/open-source-stealth-usb-hides-an-encrypted-partition-behind-an-8gb-decoy-drive-phantom-drive-appears-as-a-regular-usb-stick-until-you-create-a-text-file-to-unlock-the-hidden-data

The firmware uses the unique internal hardware ID of the microcontroller as the salt, combines it with the password you just typed, and runs the pair through PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA-256 hashes 100,000 times (you can also select 600,000 times) to create a key. Each run induces an intentional 2-3 second delay to deter brute-force attacks that would try to crack the password. The key is used to unlock and lock the hidden partition, and since it's tied to the silicon itself, putting the SD card into another Phantom Drive will not unlock it.

There are Linux-based C tools you can use in case of emergency, however, to recover your data, such as physical damage to the board. The transfer speeds are also very limited because the project is built over USB 2 — 20 MB/s reads and 9 MB/s writes in AES-CTR mode. The speeds fall to 10 MB/s reads and 6 MB/s writes in AES-XTS, but at least you have the freedom to choose between the two according to your needs.

You can buy the Phantomdrive from Rootkit Labs for $50, but you can also build your own, since this is an open-source project. The prebuilt device comes with two extra shells because the pins wear off and break quickly. Otherwise, the GitHub repo provides all the resources, including the PCB layout files and schematics, the BOM for every part, and the custom firmware, alongside its related tools.

The creator of Phantomdrive, Ryan Walker, explains the goal behind the project as both utilitarian and political. It's built using entirely open-source software and with inexpensive, easily accessible components. They wanted to create something that could "slip past authoritarian government representatives, corrupt police, and anyone else that doesn't respect basis encryption rights."

Original Submission

Protesters Haul A Guillotine To City Council Meeting About A Potential AI Data Center

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/protesters-haul-a-guillotine-to-city-council-meeting-about-a-potential-ai-data-center-company-rep-cornered-by-protestors-it-no-longer-felt-safe-to-stay-developer-escorted-out-by-police

One week after the meeting, Salem announced a data center moratorium that would halt all data center developments in the city for one year as it considers zoning laws to accommodate developments such as this. This adds Salem to the long list of jurisdictions that have passed similar moratoriums, including Seattle, Washington, and the State of New York.

Unfortunately, the Verrus project will likely not be affected by this delay as it filed its application three days before the announcement. Despite this, Governor Tina Kotek (D) announced that Oregon will terminate a deal to sell a 32-acre plot of land that forms part of the three plots of land on which the project will sit. While it still leaves Verrus with approximately 43 acres, it means that it would have to go back to the drawing board to change its plans. This is similar to what Nashville did when it used its eminent domain power to deny the land that another developer wanted to use to build a data center near the historic Nashville Zoo.

But because Verrus submitted its application before the moratorium announcement, the city is still processing its proposed data center project. That does not mean that it will get an immediate green light, though. It still has to go through an extensive permitting process, which includes technical studies, permit conditions, and enforceable agreements, among others.

Oregon is one of the first states to enact a law that ensures large consumers, like data centers, pay for the majority of the grid upgrades needed to serve their needs. This allowed Portland General Electric, the state’s largest power provider, to increase the bills of users who used more than 20 MW by 30%, while also affecting a 1.3% cut in residential electricity costs. But despite this protection that stops ratepayers from price shocks, many people are still against data center projects in their towns and cities.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/musks-terafab-projected-to-be-larger-than-the-pentagon-apple-park-mall-of-america-and-giga-texas-combined-all-in-one-chip-manufacturing-facility-visualized-to-show-the-projects-massive-footprint

Elon Musk started talking about building his own chip manufacturing facility in late 2025 and officially announced the project in March of this year. The reasoning behind this project is that both SpaceX and Tesla will require at least 1TW of compute, which is more than ten times that current global chip supply.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned that a project like this will be an “extremely hard” challenge, but it appears that Musk is willing to put his massive resources on the line for this. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan even said that he can “think of no better partner than Elon Musk” to explore “unconventional” ways of chip manufacturing.

Musk is no stranger to both leading and funding projects that otherwise seemed impossible. Although he did not found Tesla, his investment and leadership in the company led it to become an industry trailblazer in EVs. He fundamentally changed commercial space travel with SpaceX; something that used to be the purview of NASA and other national governments, and he also broke a record when he set up 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in just 19 days back in 2024 — a process which Huang said usually takes four years.

It seems that Terafab is Musk’s biggest project to date, which is estimated to require up to $119 billion in investments. But even though it seems that this project already has a secure customer base in SpaceX and Tesla, the former acknowledges that there’s a risk that this ambitious megafactory may not be successful.

Original Submission

Administrator writes:

For PC enthusiasts who've already lived through SSD price hikes and RAMageddon, there could be more bad news ahead:

PC gaming sites and social media discussions were buzzing this week after a report from a Chinese forum claimed PC motherboard prices could soon rise significantly.

Websites including VideoCardz, Guru3D and Digital Foundry, among others, cited what appears to be a supply chain report on a Chinese forum called Boards Channels, suggesting that PC motherboard makers could raise prices for consumers as material costs climb by as much as 50% in the coming months.

The link to the Board Channels report no longer seems to work, but a screenshot posted on these sites suggests that Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers, including ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI, will be trying to address the effects of rising component costs.

Whether the report is legitimate or not, we have some bad news, especially if you plan to build a PC or perform an upgrade. PC gamers, builders and upgraders have already seen the price of hard drives and SSDs skyrocket following massive cost jumps for RAM (dubbed by some as RAMageddon) over the last year due to AI data center needs and component shortages. Experts consulted by CNET said the implications of the Board Channels report for motherboard pricing are not only credible but also highly likely to materialize.

One reason analysts believe motherboards are likely to go up in price is that practically all electronic components are being affected by the AI data boom, with data centers gobbling up memory and storage products, creating supply constraints. There is also a reduced supply of materials such as copper, as well as chemicals manufactured in parts of the Middle East, said Cassandra Cummings, CEO of the electronics design and manufacturing company Thomas Instrumentation Inc.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

He's not thrilled, but won't let it delay the release of version 7.2:

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds thinks the project has reached a new normal of supersized updates, thanks to AI.

Torvalds posts a weekly state of the kernel update, and last week's message opened with his observation that "This rc is huge."

"Even by the 'new normal' standards this is a big rc, and I think it's the biggest rc6 we've had in years at least by commit count," he wrote on August 2.

Fast forward a week and the size of the release candidate remains a concern.

"I can't say that I'm exactly thrilled about the size of this all," Torvalds wrote in the message that announces the seventh release candidate for Linux 7.2. "But it is what it is: the new normal with a lot of fixes, many of them due to review by various AI tools."

Torvalds has a complex relationship with AI. He's previously railed against the idea that good documentation can explain the work of developers who use AI to contribute poor code to the kernel, and also complained that the Linux kernel security mailing list has become almost unmanageable due to a flood of AI-generated bug reports, many of them duplicates.

Torvalds has also declared "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects," and therefore all-but-welcomed machine-made contributions to the project.

While Torvalds is concerned about the size of rc7, he said "nothing looks particularly scary per se - it's just that there's a lot here."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.slashgear.com/2230721/click-to-cancel-rule-what-it-means-why-popping-up-in-united-states-cities-states/

Remember all that talk of "click-to-cancel" laws back in 2025? Spearheaded by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the idea was to make it a requirement for businesses that it should be as easy to cancel your subscription as it was to sign up for it. In other words, if you can sign up for Netflix with a click, you should be able to cancel your Netflix subscription just as easily. It sounded like an excellent idea to consumers, especially if it could help with things beyond paid subscriptions, such as unsubscribing from an email list. But what you might not have seen is that the federal effort was actually struck down in July 2025. It never became official. Now, some have decided to take matters into their own hands.

New York City has become the latest and most aggressive example, adopting a first-in-the-nation municipal rule requiring businesses to let consumers cancel subscriptions as easily as they signed up for them. They're the only city to make the move so far, but similar legislation exists on the state level in places such as California and Colorado. It's clearly a growing trend, not to mention a warning sign to companies: You might soon be facing mounting pressure to simplify your cancellation policies regardless of whether a nationwide federal standard exists.

New York City's Click-to-Cancel rule takes effect Oct. 1, 2026. It applies to automatic renewal and continuous service subscriptions sold to consumers within the city. Under the rule, businesses have to clearly explain subscription terms and provide a straightforward cancellation process that mirrors the enrollment process. City officials estimate the regulation could save residents as much as $162.5 million annually by eliminating unnecessary recurring charges tied to difficult cancellation procedures.

Anonymous Coward writes:

540 million years ago, nutrient-filled feces helped spread complex organisms:

Life as we know it wouldn't be what is today without a lot of poop. In fact, Earth may have never hosted any life at all without experiencing a "fecal revolution" about 540 million years ago.

"Next to rising oxygen levels and other contributing factors, the importance of feces in ancient ecosystems is often overlooked," Russell Bicknell, an evolutionary ecologist at Australia's Flinders University, said in a statement.

Bicknell and fellow researchers laid out their argument in a recently published study in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution. Their analysis focuses on ancient, fossilized fecal remnants called coprolites. This ancient excrement helps illustrate how and when animal life began to truly diversify on the planet. While the earliest and simplest organisms first arrived on Earth during the Ediacaran Period about 600 million years ago, it took another 60 million years for life to start growing much more complex. This era, known as the Cambrian Explosion, saw the very first intricate ecosystems populated by early examples of many major animal groups appear in oceans.

We can see this exponential growth in complex life inside the preserved poop prehistoric animals left behind. After analyzing coprolite samples taken from over 35 sites around the world, researchers documented a clear shift in shape, size, and composition as the Ediacaran gave way to the Cambrian. These ranged from microscopic pellets to centimeter-scale fossilized feces containing animal fragments and shells.

"With this shift, we see increasingly complex digestive systems, particularly in early anthropods which evolve[d] specialised foreguts and digestive glands capable of processing a wider variety of food," explained Bicknell.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

AI usage is evident but isn't yet a serious problem:

The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USS), which takes place next week in Baltimore, Maryland, hit an all-time high for paper submissions.

While some of that increase has been aided by the availability of AI tools, those managing the conference say abuses were minimal due to defensive measures. But they're also trying not to look too closely in order to preserve trust within the security research community. 

"This year's conference has received ~3,030 valid submissions (~1,280 in Cycle 1 and ~1,750 in Cycle 2)," explained Ben Stock, tenured faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and USS program co-chair, in an email to The Register. "This is up from the previous year, which had ~2,400 submissions in total."

Stock said that the entire security community has seen growth of this sort and  pointed to the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS),  which saw its paper submission count jump from 694 in 2024 to 1,311 in 2025 and 1,481 this year.

"So, I would not call the growth unprecedented, even though the number of submissions has reached a high point compared to previous years," he said. "This is something we had expected and scaled our Program Committee (PC) accordingly."

A paper published in April, "More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review," found that since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, submission volume at major academic journals has increased 42 percent.

In the USENIX Security '26 transparency report, issued in January between the first and second paper submission cycles, Stock and fellow co-chair Elissa Redmiles, assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University, detail how they've developed tools and policies to account for the possibility of AI usage, both for paper submissions and in paper reviews.

"The proliferation of readily-available LLMs to aid in writing and developing code is not unknown to the community," their report says. "However, we see an alarming trend of AI usage in key areas of the scientific process. Therefore, we took actions against two types of identifiable actions which violate the scientific process in our minds: non-existing (possibly hallucinated) references and usage of AI in the review process."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Meta is a 'public nuisance,' the judge has ruled, and its effects migrate to the real world:

In March, a jury in New Mexico found Meta liable for violating the state's consumer protection laws in a case brought by its Attorney General, accusing the company of child exploitation and other safety issues. The court ordered Meta to pay a fine of $375 million in civil penalties. Now, after the second phase of the trial meant to decide whether Meta has been a "public nuisance" harming teen users in the state, the court has ordered the company to pay an additional $567 million into an abatement fund for related programs in New Mexico.

In his ruling, Judge Bryan Biedscheid likened Meta's platforms to factories, the advertising and other content in them to be the factory's products and the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children on those platforms to be pollution they emit. And just as pollution can harm the public's right to reasonably clean air, the harmful effects of Meta's apps on children aren't contained within those platforms. The judge said that those harmful effects "migrate to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world."

The judge clarified that the ruling isn't seeking to close down Meta's apps. Instead, it's looking to address the existing harms they've already caused. Meta threatened back in April, however, that it may be forced to shut down its apps in New Mexico if the court sides with the state. It said that the state's demands were so "burdensome" that "it might force Meta to withdraw its apps entirely." New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez described the company's threat as a PR stunt.