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"Fnord666" writes:

A new toolkit for attorneys in Massachusetts targets the technologies police use—and conceal—to build criminal cases:

Liberties Union of Massachusetts says it's releasing an online toolkit this week for criminal defense attorneys designed to uncover whether police used surveillance technologies —facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, and more—to build the cases against their clients in secret.

The toolkit, which the group describes as the first of its kind, is built around handcrafted legal motions that, when granted by a judge, will force prosecutors to reveal whether surveillance technology was used against a defendant. It covers an array of technologies, from "stingray" phone trackers and location data sold by commercial brokers to AI-drafted police reports and forensic tools that crack phones and siphon data from car infotainment systems.

It also includes preservation motions—demands that surveillance data be saved before it is deleted automatically—aimed at government agencies and private vendors alike. The filings rest on a bedrock rule of American criminal law, established in 1963, that prosecutors are required to turn over all evidence that could help the defense. The motions will be distributed through a password-protected library, the ACLU of Massachusetts says, available only to verified defense attorneys.

The group is fighting a war against unregulated surveillance tools on two fronts, says Jennifer Herrmann, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts and one of the toolkit's authors. One front is pressuring cities to drop tools like Flock , the license plate reader network, and ShotSpotter , the gunshot detection system, outright. The other is arming defense lawyers to expose the surveillance in court.

"The amount of time that it can take for that initial use of technology and investigation to actually get to a court and constitutional challenge is long," Herrmann says—so the motions give attorneys a way to "challenge what has already happened in the past," building a record that carries over to whatever tool comes next.

owl writes:

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-purpose

A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn't think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.

All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.

Anyone who bought a D3, D5, or LTD pan between January 2015 and July 2022 was in the class. If your pan was damaged, the deal was actually fine: a replacement plus $75, or, my favorite option on the menu, a trade of your damaged American-made pan for a set of nonstick ones made in China.

What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words "dishwasher safe" just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.

I still use the pan. It's a good pan. But it turns out the cut on my finger had a paper trail, and so does nearly everything else in the cabinet. The cookware aisle runs on old names and new owners. With all of the mergers and asset handoffs, mapping who owns what in cookware was the most challenging of all the markets I've covered so far. Here's the summary.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Science has discovered around 6,000 planets, and this is the first one, other than Earth, that is rocky and has an atmosphere:

LHS 1140b apparently has everything it needs to support life. Science hasn't observed any there, yet. 

According to a new study published in Science, the "special" part of this discovery is not just the habitable zone around a star. It's that it seems to meet extra criteria that scientists care about -- i.e., it's rocky, not a gas giant, and can still hold onto an atmosphere despite harsh conditions. An atmosphere is what helps stabilize surface temperatures, which is essential for life to exist. 

"It's very exciting," said Collin Cherubim, lead author on the study and a PhD graduate from Harvard, in an email. "A major goal in the field has been to understand whether any rocky exoplanets at all can retain atmospheres."

Cherubim says that most rocky planets orbit M-class dwarf stars, which "emit high-energy radiation for far longer than stars like the sun." Most rocky planets are stripped of their atmospheres fairly early in their life cycles, thanks to this radiation, the stripping effect of solar wind and other factors, thereby eliminating their chance to host life.

Until LHS 1140b, Earth was the only rocky planet that humans had ever observed with an intact atmosphere. 

It wasn't easy to find. Cherubim used a computer model he'd developed during his work that "simulates how exoplanet atmospheres evolve over billions of years." Those models predicted the existence of "helium worlds," or rocky planets with helium atmospheres (or at least mostly helium). Cherubim tested his theory with LHS 1140b and struck proverbial gold. 

Mars is still the best chance humans have at discovering life on another planet. 

"Fnord666" writes:

MIT to Become Hotbed of AI Video Surveillance:

It's a lot :

According to information obtained by The Tech , MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outdoor areas along Memorial Drive. Installation of the new cameras, along with the wiring and infrastructure that will support them, began November 2025 and will likely continue until September 2026.

Technical specifications for the cameras suggest that they will be capable of collecting real-time face and object classification data, including detection of motion, loitering, crowds, face masks, and camera tampering. Individuals can also be automatically classified on the basis of clothing color, gender, and age, up to a distance of 35 feet (11 meters) from the camera. According to a statement from MIT spokesperson Kimberly Allen, any collected data is "retained up to 30 days," unless an exception is granted.

[...]

Most of the new cameras, which are part of Hanwha's Wisenet AI line , are marketed for their ability to identify and classify multiple objects with deep learning algorithms. They support resolutions ranging from 2MP to 4K while also recognizing faces, license plates, vehicles, and other objects in real time.

Nearly all cameras will accommodate a wide range of pan, tilt, rotate, and zoom motion and will be monitored continually with Ai-RGUS , an AI camera software.

Yikes.

Posted on July 21, 2026 at 7:07 AM

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://larrysalibra.com/ben-thompson-is-wrong-us-frontier-labs-are-right-to-be-panicking/

American tech blogger Ben Thompson writes today that US frontier labs should not be panicking about Chinese open source models like Kimi K3, despite them being competitive with the best models from American labs. We can "distill" (ha!) his post down to two main arguments:

Anthropic and OpenAI likely have among the lowest costs per unit of frontier-quality intelligence, thanks to model capability, serving scale, and token efficiency.

The first is that US frontier labs are "likely" the cheapest providers of inference and, because of that, what they lose in pricing power due to Chinese model competition, they can make up in volume.

It's striking the extent to which Claude Code and Codex are proving to be quite sticky; whichever harness you start working with is likely to be the one you stick with, and that figures to be even more the case with non-technical users.

The second is that US frontier labs now own, and will continue to own, the user relationships because of the "stickiness" of their tools.

Thompson is wrong on both points.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2218707/no-100-percent-american-made-wifi-router/

The Trump administration has roundly criticized America's technological sector for its dependence on international partners. In its 2025 National Security Strategy [PDF], the administration named securing independent supply chains a pillar of its economic and national security policies, warning that the US "must never be dependent on any outside power for core components." Perhaps nowhere have these concerns been more acute than in the home router market, where the White House has put considerable energy into untethering America's Wi-Fi networks from foreign manufacturers.

In March 2026, the FCC banned all international home internet routers [PDF], citing how "malicious actors have exploited security gaps in foreign-made routers to attack American households, disrupt networks, enable espionage, and facilitate intellectual property theft." Citing recent cyberattacks like Salt Typhoon, Volt and Flax, the FCC's National Security Determination argues that companies manufacturing routers can inject backdoors into their products, giving foreign intelligence agencies and hackers unfettered access to American networks. To ward of such intrusions, the Trump administration has pushed the FCC to ban any router whose components, assembly, or designs were produced overseas. And while firms are allowed to continue selling routers currently on the market, the FCC barred them from providing software updates to their existing customers after 2027.

Already, the ban has hit several roadblocks, as the FCC looks to implement a ruling that many critics warned was unrealistic. In May, the FCC issued a public notice that routers can "continue to receive software and firmware updates that mitigate harm to U.S. consumers" until at least January 1, 2029. The move comes after the National Consumer Technology Association pushed the FCC to relax its stringent ruling, citing supply chain shortages "in critical substrate material and memory modules" that could cause "disruptions to millions of Americans' broadband services." Critics pointed to the revision as an indication of the contradictions inherent in the restrictions, noting that banning software updates could cause more security problems than it solves. As it stands, a wholly-domestic router supply chain may merely be wishful thinking.

America's router market relies on foreign partners, particularly from Southeast Asia, to source and design its products. The market's largest company, Chinese router giant T.P. Link, has been in the FCC's crosshairs for years, with the Administration attempting to to ban the firm's popular products outright in 2025. As it stands, T.P. Link produces roughly 35% of America's home routers, down from over 60% in 2024. Popular international firm ASUS is based in Taiwan, whose ZenWiFi Pro tested as one of the best mesh Wi-Fi routers of 2026. Synology and D-Link are also based in Taiwan and thus subject to the FCC's restrictions.

In the wake of the ruling, T.P. Link met with the FCC to secure conditional approval for its routers. During the meeting, the Chinese manufacturer argued that it is "investing hundreds of millions of dollars to bring manufacturing and research and development of its consumer routers to the U.S." through its Irvine, California-based subsidiary. However, the solution for international firms like T.P. Link and ASUS isn't as simple as moving their manufacturing plants stateside. Critically, the FCC's enforcement applies to all products whose design processes occur internationally. Under the ruling, firms will have to move the full scope of their operations to the United States or seek a waiver from the FCC.

But not even America's domestic brands meet these strict domestic manufacturing standards, as all major American brands depend on international partners to source and construct their products. Google, for instance, makes its Nest routers in Vietnam and China. Netgear, meanwhile, splits its operation between Vietnam and Taiwan. Ubiquiti and Amazon also depend on international. Another major American brand, is Irvine, California's Linksys, is owned by Taiwanese giant Foxconn and manufactures its products in Vietnam.

"Fnord666" writes:

Alan Turing's Top Secret DIY Project:

It was 8 May 1945, Victory in Europe Day. With the German military's unconditional surrender, the European part of World War II came to an end. Alan Turing and his assistant Donald Bayley celebrated victory in their quiet English way, by taking a long walk together. They had been working side by side for more than a year in a secret electronics laboratory, deep in the English countryside. Bayley, a young electrical engineer, knew little about his boss's other life as a code breaker, only that Turing would set off on his bicycle every now and then to another secret establishment about 10 miles away along rural lanes, Bletchley Park. As Bayley and the rest of the world would later learn, Bletchley Park was the headquarters of a vast, unprecedented code-breaking operation.

When they sat down for a rest in a clearing in the woods, Bayley said, "Well, the war's over now—it's peacetime, so you can tell us all."

"Don't be so bloody silly," Turing replied. "That was the end of that conversation," Bayley recalled 67 years later.

Turing's incredible code-breaking work is now no longer secret. What's more, he is renowned both as a founding father of computer science and as a pioneering figure in artificial intelligence. He is not so well-known, however, for his work in electrical engineering. This may be about to change.

In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers—nicknamed the "Bayley papers"—was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing's own handwriting, telling of his top-secret "Delilah" engineering project from 1943 to 1945. Delilah was Turing's portable voice-encryption system, named after the biblical deceiver of men. There is also material written by Bayley, often in the form of notes he took while Turing was speaking. It is thanks to Bayley that the papers survived: He kept them until he died in 2020, 66 years after Turing passed away.

When the British Government learned about the sale of these papers at auction, it acted swiftly to put a ban on their export, declaring them to be "an important part of our national story," and saying "It is right that a UK buyer has the opportunity to purchase these papers." I was lucky enough to get access to the collection prior to the November sale, when the auction house asked for my assistance in identifying some of the technical material. The Bayley papers shine new light on Turing the engineer.

At the time, Turing was travelling from the abstract to the concrete. The papers offer intriguing snapshots of his journey from his prewar focus on mathematical logic and number theory, into a new world of circuits, electronics, and engineering math.

During the war, Turing realized that cryptology's new frontier was going to be the encryption of speech. The existing wartime cipher machines—such as the Japanese " Purple" machine, the British Typex, and the Germans' famous Enigma and teletypewriter-based SZ42—were all for encrypting typewritten text. Text, though, is scarcely the most convenient way for commanders to communicate, and secure voice communication was on the military wish list.

Bell Labs' pioneering SIGSALY speech-encryption system was constructed in New York City, under a U.S. Army contract, during 1942 and 1943. It was gigantic, weighing over 50 thousand kilograms and filling a room. Turing was familiar with SIGSALY and wanted to miniaturize speech encryption. The result, Delilah, consisted of three small units, each roughly the size of a shoebox. Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack, Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.

In 1943, Turing set up bench space in a Nissen hut and worked on Delilah in secret. The hut was at Hanslope Park, a military-run establishment in the middle of nowhere, England. Today, Hanslope Park is still an ultrasecret intelligence site known as His Majesty's Government Communications Centre. In the Turing tradition, HMGCC engineers supply today's British intelligence agents with specialized hardware and software.

Turing seems to have enjoyed the two years he spent at Hanslope Park working on Delilah. He made an old cottage his home and took meals in the Army mess. The commanding officer recalled that he "soon settled down and became one of us." In 1944, Turing acquired his young assistant, Bayley, who had recently graduated from the University of Birmingham with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. The two became good friends, working together on Delilah until the autumn of 1945. Bayley called Turing simply "Prof," as everyone did in the Bletchley-Hanslope orbit.

"I admired the originality of his mind," Bayley told me when I interviewed him in the 1990s. "He taught me a great deal, for which I have always been grateful."

In return, Bayley taught Turing bench skills. When he first arrived at Hanslope Park, Bayley found Turing wiring together circuits that resembled a "spider's nest," he said. He took Turing firmly by the hand and dragged him through breadboarding boot camp.

A year later, as the European war ground to a close, Turing and Bayley got a prototype system up and running. This "did all that could be expected of it," Bayley said. He described the Delilah system as "one of the first to be based on rigorous cryptographic principles."

OpenAI's Rogue Agents are a Wake-up Call to Risks Posed by Artificial Intelligence

jelizondo writes:

The Guardian published a piece about OpenAI agents hacking Hugging Face:

Last week Hugging Face – a company that hosts artificial intelligence models and datasets – was hacked.

After it reported the incident to law enforcement, few would have predicted what came next: the culprits were revealed to be AI agents from OpenAI, which had broken out of containment and were acting of their own accord.

The incident sounds like sci-fi: AI escaping and autonomously hacking its way into companies. But it is all too real – and about as terrifying as it sounds. It is a concrete demonstration of something we can no longer avoid confronting: AI systems have become extremely powerful and we do not seem to have reliable ways of curbing their behavior.

OpenAI had been evaluating the capabilities of two of its models in the test that led to the breach – including one not yet publicly available. The models, which were both running in a supposedly secure environment without internet access, were asked to solve a hacking challenge. Rather than actually solve it themselves, however, they decided it would be easier to cheat. They used their advanced capabilities to break out of their secure environment, access the web and then hack into Hugging Face's systems to steal the answers. They worked at this for a full weekend – seemingly without anyone at OpenAI noticing.

Though the models were running with some of their guardrails disabled, they still acted well out of the bounds that were in place. According to OpenAI, they were not instructed to break out of their sandbox or hack into another company, and it's safe to assume that no one at OpenAI wanted them to do so.

Nor were the models acting maliciously: they were not evil Terminators with a goal of wreaking havoc. Instead, the scenario is almost chilling in its banality. The models were given a very narrow task, but went rogue to pursue an undesirable and unacceptable way of achieving it – one which had real-world consequences.

This week's incident should serve as a wake-up call, forcing us to ask an uncomfortable question: should we really be building dangerous systems that we can't control?

"AlwaysNever" writes:

US blocks SSL security certificates for Iran's Fars News Agency:

The move is part of a western campaign to dominate the digital narrative and suppress dissenting voices

Washington has blocked the issuance of SSL security certificates for Fars News Agency's website, cutting the country's most visited news outlet off from browser-trusted encryption, the agency revealed on 17 July.

Without valid certificates, visitors to the site face security warnings and restricted access, while the agency's content has been removed from Google search results.

Technical assessments confirm that all major internationally recognized Certificate Authorities – including Let's Encrypt, DigiCert, and Sectigo – have rejected certificate requests for the agency's domains, citing US sanctions pressure.

The measure is the latest in a series of US actions against the outlet. The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control seized the agency's .com domain in 2020, and in September 2023 added Fars and its CEO to the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) sanctions list.

The EU and Canada have since imposed sanctions of their own.

Fars has faced repeated efforts to restrict its reach, including the removal of its Instagram account, which had nearly three million followers.

Iran's Computer Emergency Response and Coordination Center (MAHER) says the agency has been the primary target of sustained cyberattacks aimed at disrupting the country's domestic media infrastructure.

The block forms part of a broader western campaign to dominate the media narrative against its geopolitical adversaries by suppressing opposing voices while artificially amplifying its own.

Western governments are simultaneously dismantling online anonymity at home through identity verification laws that, under the pretext of child protection, tie every post to a legal identity – backed by biometric verification requirements, VPN restrictions, and the scanning of private messages.

The measures tighten control over expression both abroad and within their own borders, amid ongoing crackdowns on pro-Palestine and pro-Iran speech.

An investigation by TIME revealed that Israel has been paying $1.5 million per month to Clock Tower X, a firm owned by US President Donald Trump's former campaign manager Brad Parscale, to run a covert influence campaign targeting young US conservatives through paid influencer networks, coordinated messaging in private group chats, and websites designed to shape how AI chatbots characterize Israel.

US officials now believe the operation turned against Trump himself, as paid influencers attacked the now broken ceasefire with Iran.

In May, Israel allocated roughly $730 million to its 2026 Hasbara propaganda budget, more than four times the previous year's allocation, even as polling shows 60 percent of US respondents now view Israel unfavorably, with experts dismissing the spending as unable to offset the impact of its genocide in Gaza.

The Cradle analyst Mohamad Hasan Sweidan previously detailed how Israel operates a "Digital Iron Dome," a system combining mass reporting campaigns to take down content exposing its crimes in Gaza, algorithmic ad warfare that floods timelines with state propaganda, and hundreds of millions of dollars in influencer contracts and AI-targeted campaigns to manipulate global perceptions.

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

Startup Plans to Buy a Company and Run It With an AI CEO

While AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google remain focused on automating individual job roles, startup Skyfall AI is pursuing a far more radical goal: building a virtual CEO to operate an entire enterprise end-to-end. Founded by former Maluuba creators Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman, Skyfall argues that task-specific marketing or sales bots represent a narrow implementation of AI, whereas true organizational leadership requires abstract reasoning, long-term planning, and high-stakes decision-making under uncertainty.

To test their hypothesis in the real world, Skyfall plans to acquire a small B2B SaaS or e-commerce company for up to $1 million and place it under AI control. The system will oversee pricing, marketing, customer support, finance, and operations with minimal human intervention, aiming to double revenue in six months while publicly documenting both successes and failures.

Skyfall contends that current frontier LLMs have hit structural limits for enterprise applications. Citing their new Morpheus benchmark, they demonstrate that existing models degrade rapidly when market conditions or customer behaviors shift. Instead of prompt-driven architectures, Skyfall relies on Enterprise World Models to simulate how strategic decisions ripple across an organization.

After validating their decision-making algorithms inside the simulation game RollerCoaster Tycoon, the founders are advancing beyond constrained retail trials—such as Anthropic's Project Vend—to tackle a fully dynamic business. Ultimately, they hope to eliminate routine operational burdens (like budgeting and scheduling) so humans can focus strictly on high-level strategy, trust, and accountability.

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

Scientists Believed This Near-Earth Object Was an Asteroid for 28 Years. They Were Wrong:

On August 28, 2025, astronomers aimed NASA's radar system at a region of space where a near-Earth asteroid was expected to appear. Instead, the object failed to show up, leaving researchers puzzled. The unexpected no-show turned what seemed like a routine observation into a surprising case of mistaken identity.

In a study published in Nature Astronomy, a team of scientists reveals the true identity of a near-Earth object with an apparent dual personality. Scientists had been tracking the object for 28 years, assuming it might be an asteroid. Its recent deviation from its predicted path, however, suggested something unexpected is influencing the object's motion.

Although previous observations of asteroid 1998 SH2 didn't show obvious comet-like behavior, a more precise measurement of its position in the sky proved that its motion is irregular like that of a comet.

Scientists tracked the object's orbit around the Sun from 1998 to 2016, where it circled our star twice. It wasn't until 2025 that scientists attempted to carry out additional observations using NASA's Deep Space Network.

The object, provisionally known as the asteroid 1998 SH2, passed safely within 2 million miles (3 million kilometers) of our planet during its 4.5-year orbit around the Sun. Researchers calculated its position using data from previous orbits and factored in the effects the Sun's gravity, as well as the planets, would have on its path. They then pointed NASA's array of giant radio antennas toward that specific point in the sky, but asteroid 1998 SH2 didn't show up.

"After we measured the nongravitational perturbations affecting the motion of 1998 SH2 and recognized they weren't compatible with the object being an asteroid, we suspected the object could be an active comet," Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer with the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of the study, said in a statement .

By scouring previous observations of the near-Earth object, the researchers determined that it may be generating a small thrust by venting gas into space. That small thrust would cause it to deviate from its predicted path.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/i-wanted-a-clock-that-never-needed-setting-things-escalated/

I wanted a clock that, annoyingly, didn't seem to exist.
[...]
My perfect clock would be self-setting. It would offer auto-DST adjustment (or not, depending on how this bill fares!). It would manage drift and always show the exact sub-second time. It would show that time on a red seven-segment display—not blue, not green, not yellow, and absolutely not white.
[...]
Battery-backed self-setting "atomic" clocks that get their updates via the cosmic ether have been a thing for years and get me most of the way there, but damned if I could find one with a red seven-segment display that I liked (maybe someone else's search kung-fu is better than mine?).
[...]
I thought to myself, "Wait a second. I've got a 3D printer. I'm, like, smart and stuff. Why not buy a seven-segment display and make my own clock?"

And so, standing on the shoulders of giants stacked up so high that I could practically touch the Moon, I did.
[...]
here's the finished repo. It contains my bill of materials with prices and purchase locations, the software, and the 3D printer files
[...]
a Pi gave me the security blanket of a Debian-based operating system, complete with Wi-Fi and NTP for the "the clock sets and updates itself" requirement, along with the usual Linux remote management routine I already know.

Picking a seven-segment display was easy: Adafruit makes awesome clock-face style LED displays with 1.2-inch high numerals, and it sells a kit that bundles the display I want with a "backpack" board containing the HT16K33 controller needed to drive the LEDs. I ordered three and ended up using all of them for testing, assembly, and figuring out how to solder.
[...]
I grabbed a baby's-first-soldering-iron kit from Amazon and a roll of 60/40 solder. (I also had to buy a desktop magnifying lens, because as I found out when I got in there, these old eyes can't focus up close like they once could.)
[...]
I distilled my software requirements down to a list:

• The clock host should be LAN-only and not accessible from the Internet
• The clock host should get its updates from a LAN-only apt mirror
• The clock host should get its NTP sync from a LAN-only NTP server
• The clock service should be a systemd service running unprivileged under a dedicated service account context
• The clock service should use the system time, so the host OS handles NTP and keeps us in sync with whatever DST is or isn't doing
• The clock service should be able to turn the display on and off on a schedule so it's off for most of the day when I'm not in the bedroom
• The clock service should also be able to brighten/dim its display on a schedule
• The clock service should have some way of being controlled via the CLI for terminal connections, too
• The display should be controllable via HomeKit, because I live in iOS-land
• The clock service and its dependencies should be installable via a single script
• Once installed, everything should be deployable so I can push updates if needed rather than having to log in and reinstall

"Fnord666" writes:

They fixed it without ever responding to me. I had to call FIFA, MediaKind, HBS, CISA, and the FBI at 3am Tokyo time just to get someone to listen. This is that story:

It Started With a Football Agent Registration.

So FIFA has this thing called the FIFA Agent Platform . It's a public portal where you can register to become a licensed football agent. You submit your ID, verify your email, and you're in. Simple enough.

What I didn't expect was what happened next.

When you register on agents.fifa.org, FIFA adds your account to their Microsoft Entra tenant (formerly Azure AD). That's the same tenant that powers all of FIFA's internal platforms. And I mean all of them.

My first two attempts actually failed because the lighting on my ID photos wasn't good enough:

"Registration failed during the last step of checking your identification." - apparently FIFA has higher standards for my selfie than my actual security

But the third attempt went through. And I received this beautiful email:

Subject line: "FIFA - FAP - CONFIRMATION". Yes, FIFA's Agent Platform is officially called FAP. I cannot make this up. FAP CONFIRMATION. Moving on.

After registration, I tried navigating to fdp.fifa.org - FIFA's Football Data Platform. The app authenticated me through the shared Entra tenant, checked my roles, found I had none, and showed me:

"Sorry, you do not have any FIFA Football Data Platform role assigned to your account."

Looks like it works, right? Access denied. Go away. Nothing to see here.

Except this was all client-side . The Angular app checked the JWT for a NO_ROLES marker and rendered the access-denied page. The backend APIs? They didn't check anything. They just served whatever you asked for.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/16/former-openai-cto-does-what-altman-wont-releases-a-frontier-ai-model-thats-actually-open/5272177

If you're in the market for a frontier-class open weights model, your options are few and far between outside of the Chinese model houses.

With the Wednesday release of a new model codenamed "Inkling," an outfit called Thinking Machines Lab aims to change that.

Founded in early 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Thinking Machines' first model is a big one. Weighing in at 975 billion parameters, the model requires more than two terabytes of GPU memory — a quantity present in around eight of Nvidia's B300 accelerators, or sixteen H200s —  to run at its native 16-bit precision. If that's asking too much of your hardware, Thinking Machines has also released a NVFP4 quantized version of the model capable of running on half the GPUs. 

This makes it the largest American open weights model to date, and comparable to Chinese models like DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.2, and Kimi K2.6 in terms of size and capabilities. Take these claims with a grain of salt — gaming AI benchmarks isn't exactly difficult — but Thinking Machines says Inkling is competitive with these models in a variety of workloads, although its benchmark charts also show it trailing proprietary models like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT.

Thinking Machines describes the model as being highly adaptable, intended for use by developers building AI apps, but suitable for general purpose applications like chat bots. And because it's being released under a highly permissive Apache 2.0 license, end users are free to fine tune it for their specific use case. The company's Tinker platform offers tools to do just that.

In fact, Thinking Machines boasts that the model is capable of writing its own fine tuning scripts to refine its behavior, teach itself new skills, and evaluate its abilities.

[...] Like most LLMs today, Inkling is a "reasoning model" which is to say it's been trained using reinforcement learning (RL) to use chain of thought to "think" through requests before responding.

[...] If you prefer to evaluate the model on your own hardware, it's available for download on popular model repos like Hugging Face. At launch, the model claims support for a broad range of inference engines including vLLM, SGLang, Miles, TokenSpeed, and Llama.cpp.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Blue Origin and SpaceX get their turn to prove they can dock, loiter, and not blow up the launch pad:

NASA has given an update on the Artemis III mission and, while sticking with an optimistic 2028 landing target for Artemis IV, offered a glimpse into just how much development work remains to be done at Blue Origin and SpaceX. 

Artemis III has been compared to Apollo 9, which tested the Apollo Lunar Module in Earth orbit, yet neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin is flying anything as close to the lunar landers. 

Blue Origin's test lander will be based on the company's current Mark 2 crew lander architecture, incorporating the major avionics, flight software, life support, and crew cabin. Orion, launched atop NASA's SLS, will dock to the side of the Blue Origin spacecraft for crew transfer; two crew members in orange Orion survival suits can baord the test lander, with Orion's software controlling the stack.

An instrumented lunar surface spacesuit mass simulator, similar to the "Moonikin" manikin that flew aboard Orion for Artemis I, will also ride along on the Blue Origin lander.

SpaceX's test is considerably simpler - just a docking system mounted on the nose of a Starship. That requires Starship testing to have reached the orbital stage first, which is why NASA will be closely watching the upcoming Flight Test 13. Starship V3 is still flying suborbital until SpaceX proves it can reliably relight an engine for controlled re-entry.

Under the current plan, Blue Origin launches its lander into orbit first, where it can loiter for up to 30 days. Once it's checked out, a crew launches aboard Orion to rendezvous and dock with it. After that's complete, SpaceX launches its Starship test article to rendezvous and dock Orion in turn, though the crew won't board Starship, just verify communications and interoperability. SpaceX's vehicle will control that docked stack.

Notably, SpaceX's docking capability was qualified in 2023, while Blue Origin only tested its pressurized docking system earlier this year.