A special prosecutor on Wednesday dismissed felony criminal charges against Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who was indicted on accusations of threatening the jobs of New Orleans officials who fought a Republican-led overhaul of courts in the heavily Democratic city.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has asked diplomats to push back against talk of a "kill switch" in American technology products following the White House's short-lived decision to keep foreigners from America's most advanced AI models, according to a recent cable reviewed by Reuters.
A federal magistrate judge ruled Tuesday that President Donald Trump must turn over detailed financial information in connection with his defamation lawsuit against the BBC. U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqu Lett concluded that Trump's sweeping complaint put injury to his businesses at the forefront and made their vitality a fair subject for the BBC to demand information about.
A Denver woman says she was falsely accused of stealing a package after a Flock camera allegedly linked her to a theft at a home in another Colorado town. read more
President Donald Trump's approval rating among voters with a high school education or less has fallen to an all-time low, according to new polling ... read more
@#1 ... Old news, thoroughly hashed at your last pussified thread:
"In a statement, Talarico spokesperson JT Ennis said the campaign "has no control over contributions to any super PAC," noting that federal law bars political campaigns from coordinating with outside entities. ...
Yeah, there's that.
Then there is also MAGA putting Mr Epstein's years-long "closest friend" into the Oval Office.
And apparently trying to protect other uber-wealthy Epstein friends.
So, unless and until the DoJ releases the Epstein files, the GOP should first clean their own house.
"My closest friend for 10 years": Epstein discusses Trump friendship in newly released tapes (2024)
www.salon.com
@#78
Another view ...
OpenAI bots went rogue during test, hacked another AI firm unprompted
www.upi.com
... OpenAI said two of its AI bots launched an "unprecedented" attack, hacking into a startup's systems of their own accord to obtain data the models decided was required to solve a problem during so-called "sandbox" testing, which is supposed to stay in-house. ...
The OpenAI engineers had asked the models to find solutions for ExploitGym, which tests agents' capability to find ways to successfully exploit vulnerabilities.
OpenAI said the testing was isolated within a sandbox, a sort of digital test tube, but the models directed considerable computing power to obtain open Internet access by identifying and exploiting a so-called "zero-day vulnerability."
Once they had escaped the sandbox, one of the models was able to access restricted information to cheat the test by stringing multiple attack vectors together, including stolen credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities, to obtain an access code from Hugging Face's servers.
OpenAI said it immediately flagged the vulnerability to Hugging Face, which it said had already detected the intrusion, stopped it and initiated containment measures.
Hugging Face chief executive Clement Delangue called the attack "mind-blowing" but said he accepted there was "no malicious intent" on OpenAI's behalf. ...
@#76 ... This could be one of the scarier things I've read about AI...if this is actually true. ...
Related ...
OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face
www.theregister.com
... OpenAI has admitted that it was the operator of the autonomous agents that attacked model-mart Hugging Face last week, and that they did so after a research project escaped a sandbox by finding and exploiting a zero-day flaw, then used another zero-day flaw to launch an attack.
The attack saw agents achieve "unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials" used by Hugging Face, which said its infosec teams observed an autonomous agent framework "executing many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services."
"This matches the agentic attacker' scenario the industry has been forecasting."
On Tuesday, OpenAI admitted it was the attacker and that its models went rogue. ...
Related ...
Donald Trump's Approval Rating With Men Crashes to Record Low
www.newsweek.com
... President Donald Trump's approval rating among men hit an all-time low, according to a new Economist/YouGov poll that found his overall approval rating remains deeply underwater.
The survey found Trump's net approval rating among men stands at -22, the lowest level recorded among male voters in either his first or second term.
Male voters have traditionally been one of Trump's strongest demographic groups and were considered central to his 2024 electoral coalition. ...
Related ...
Confusion swirls on source of diarrhea outbreak, but it's still Taylor Farms
arstechnica.com
... Federal officials on Monday reaffirmed that iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms still appears to be the source of Cyclospora, the microscopic parasite behind a multi-state surge in explosive diarrhea cases.
The assertion was intended to clear up confusion that began swirling over the weekend around a false positive test from the Food and Drug Administration"which Taylor Farms celebrated, sparking confusion. Still, many details of the outbreak remain murky, largely due to the vague recall information Taylor Farms has publicly provided.
On Friday, the FDA, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced that the FDA's traceback investigations for the outbreak converged on Taylor Farms. Traceback investigations work by tracking backward from sick people and the foods they ate to where those foods came from through the supply chain, down to individual farms or production facilities. When the FDA said their investigation converged on Taylor Farms, the agency means that, over and over again, tracebacks led them to shredded iceberg lettuce grown in Central Mexico and supplied by Taylor Farms"which also goes by Taylor Fresh Foods.
The convergence of tracebacks was the basis for the FDA and CDC publicly identifying Taylor Farms on Friday. It was also the basis for Taylor Farms issuing a sweeping recall the same day for all its iceberg lettuce sourced from Central Mexico between June 29 and July 16.
At the time, the FDA's traceback investigation specifically focused on tracing back shredded iceberg lettuce that people had eaten from Taco Bell locations. Thus, the messaging at the time suggested that the contaminated lettuce may be limited to Taco Bell. A CDC press release Friday warned consumers not to eat lettuce at Taco Bell locations in five states (Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia). It noted that "Shredded iceberg lettuce sold in grocery stores or served in other restaurants is not affected."
Mixed messages
Then things changed over the weekend.
First, on Saturday, the FDA announced that a sample of Taylor Farms lettuce tested positive for Cyclospora. The result confirmed the traceback investigation findings -- and also potentially extended the list of contaminated products.
But, then on Sunday, the FDA deleted the information from its website, explaining that on further review, the result was a false positive. ...
Related ...
Trump Admin Denies Colluding With Taylor Farms Over Cyclospora: FAKE NEWS'
www.newsweek.com
... The Trump administration has denied colluding with Taylor Farms after federal health officials reported and then retracted that a sample of lettuce from the company had tested positive for cyclospora amid a multistate outbreak of the diarrhea-causing parasite.
The claim comes as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday morning said the nationwide cyclosporiasis outbreak is now "under control" and that the source of the outbreak has been identified and affected products have been removed from the market.
Taylor Fresh Foods Inc., the parent company of Taylor Farms, made a $1 million donation to Make America Great Again Inc. in March 2025, according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) reviewed by Newsweek.
That information was highlighted in a post on X from MeidasTouch, a progressive media outlet, along with reporting from The New York Times that said a Taylor Farms spokeswoman confirmed that company executives had met with White House and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials on Thursday to discuss what it viewed as "shortfalls in the FDA's and CDC's outbreak response process." The company has also recently hired former White House official Trent Morse, expanding its influence in Washington. ...
Related ...
Why two Connecticut towns are taking down their license plate cameras
www.newstimes.com
... A contentious year-long debate over license plate cameras in Windsor's town hall came to a close this month after the town council voted to take down its cameras.
Windsor has been at the center of the state-wide debate over the privacy of the technology, specifically cameras made by a tech company called Flock Safety. ...
Windsor is the first town in Connecticut to decide not to renew its contract with Flock. Killingworth became the second last week, opting to take down the cameras over similar privacy concerns.
"For many councilors, including myself, it comes back to the data," Windsor's Mayor Nuchette Black-Burke told CT Insider Monday. "We opted not to move forward because there is no guarantee that Flock will not share our data." ...
... Global Energy Supplies Threat Worsens Due to Iran War ...
It's Iran's ace in the hole.
Before Pres Trump's unprovoked war against Iran, both the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb were wide open to shipping. Wide open.
130+ ships per day.
Now, Pres Trump's numero uno goal seems to be to try to return to that prior, and possibly unattainable, condition.
The question that lingers like an unclaimed air biscuit is...
Now that Pres Trump has educated Iran regarding the global strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's possibility ability to profit therefrom, will Iran ever again return to a wide-open Strait of Hormuz?