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Submission + - Pete Hegseth pushes the U.S. military to go "all in" on AI

Submitted by Nicholas Grayhame
Nicholas Grayhame writes: From Bloomberg's article on the attack in Minab, Iran that killed 150 civilians, including at least 123 children, on February 28, the first day of the Iran war:

"... Inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System, the officials [involved in the Pentagon's internal investigation of the incident] said. Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI-enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to inform commanders’ decisions.

In the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus. Several former senior US military officials now work for Palantir, including some with high-level security clearances in Centcom’s Tampa headquarters. Their role is to keep the software functioning inside secure military environments.

Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets, the officials said. It’s not clear why they had such expectations. ...

... On March 12, more than 120 Democrats in the US House wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking about the Minab school strike and the role that artificial intelligence, including Maven Smart System, played in identifying the site as a target. The Pentagon hasn’t responded publicly to such questions, citing the ongoing investigation.

Some of Hegseth’s advisers have expressed concern that political scrutiny of Maven could disrupt the benefits they anticipate from its further adoption, according to officials involved in the probe. ...

Submission + - The brain is actually two completely separate organs (stanford.edu)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: From Stanford Medicine:

"For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years."

The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. Scientists could never create hindbrain neurons.

"Previous attempts to make hindbrain neurons likely tried to coax forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells, which our study shows is not possible,” said researcher Rayyan Jokhai.

"The researchers’ breakthrough came from studying the earliest moments of embryonic development, during a stage called gastrulation when the body first takes shape. Jokhai and Dundes discovered that the hindbrain follows a separate developmental path, running in parallel to — rather than branching off from — the pathway that creates the forebrain and midbrain."

With this knowledge, researchers were able to create hindbrain neurons.

Submission + - Canadian grocery giant Loblaws advertises, in the sky (thestar.com)

Submitted by Striek
Striek writes: Non-paywalled link

A large LED aerial drone display appeared over Toronto’s skies late Thursday night promoting Loblaw’s [a major Canadian grocery retailer] health services app in an advertisement that the city says they were not made fully aware of.

Videos and photos posted online show a large-scale drone advertisement for President’s Choice Health that sparked a heated discussion online about the use of airspace for promotional material.

In an email to the [Toronto] Star, a City of Toronto spokesperson said that while they approved the rental of Fort York National Historic Site for a third-party drone operator, they didn’t know that Loblaw would be behind the display.



The City was not informed of the client associated with the display and is updating its booking requirements to add disclosure of this information as a requirement for future bookings,

said spokesperson Nichole Jankowski.

The advertisement could be seen from multiple vantage points downtown with several phrases urging viewers to ask the Loblaw-owned platform medical questions. Some of the questions on display included “Can melatonin lose its effect? Is that third coffee keeping me up?” and “Do I really need 8 hours of sleep?” The sleep-related questions are followed with a QR code.

Commenters in threads on Reddit and posts on X, where videos of the ads surfaced, criticized the company’s use of airspace, including a tweet that calls for this sort of advertising to be banned. Loblaw confirmed the advertisement in an emailed statement to the Star.

The drone show was intentionally short and carefully considered to minimize brightness and disruption. All appropriate permissions were obtained for the show, including airspace approval secured through NAV CANADA and ground space approval secured through Fort York.

reads the retail company’s statement. According to their website, Loblaw used the ad to launch their health app:

Torontonians along the waterfront can look to the skyline at approximately 11 p.m. ET on September 10, as a series of health-related questions appear overhead during a 15-minute aerial display,

reads a release from Loblaw Companies Limited. Prior to Thursday evening, the Fort York landing page on the city’s website posted that a display would be happening. In order to stage a drone show, such as the one on Thursday evening, organizers have to apply for an SFOC-RPAS — a permit for flying a drone at an advertised event — with Transport Canada. The federal agency, who has jurisdiction over the airspace, said that they issued an SFOC-RPAS for the event, but would not provide any more information about the applicant due to “privacy requirements.”

Submission + - Vulnerability giving attackers full control on Mac is under active exploitation (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Dutch officials have warned that a high-severity macOS vulnerability that allows attackers to execute malicious code is under active exploitation.

“The NCSC has received a notification indicating that active abuse of this vulnerability has been observed on multiple systems on which port 5900 was accessible from the Internet,” the Netherlands National Cyber Security Centrum warned earlier this week. “In all these cases, root had been accessed on the affected system and a Monero crypto miner had been placed.”

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-65400, received a patch from Apple last week for macOS Tahoe, Sequoia, and Sonoma. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 7.1 out of 10, stems from a bug in the macOS screen sharing capability, which allows a remote party to view the screen and control the keyboard and mouse while a machine is turned on. A flaw in the “state management,” which keeps track of preceding events, user interactions, variables, and other system states, is the underlying cause.

A video of the exploit in action can be found here. Details of CVE-2026-65400 became public at last week’s Black Hat security conference. Apple said last week that CVE-2026-65400 “may” allow an attacker without credentials to gain access to a Mac. It’s unclear why Apple hedged, but softening language is common among most tech developers when disclosing vulnerabilities.

As noted by the NCSC, the vulnerability is being exploited when port 5900 is exposed to the Internet. When screen sharing is turned on, the macOS firewall opens the port. Routers and dedicated firewalls generally block the port unless configured to override that setting. Security practitioners generally advise Mac users to keep the port closed even when using screen sharing and to instead connect over a VPN or through SSH tunneling. The alternatives require actions that aren’t within the capabilities of most users.

The safest practice is to block screen sharing, enable it only when screen sharing is needed, and to turn the feature off once a session has ended. Screen sharing can be turned on or off by accessing System Settings > General > Sharing and toggling the switch for Screen Sharing. Of course, installing last week’s security update is also a must. Sharing is not caring.

Submission + - Of Course They Booed

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In Of Course They Booed, Audrey Watters takes a look at the chorus of boos greeting college commencement speakers who heralded the glorious AI future students are poised to step into:

And perhaps it’s a little ironic that this graduating class, a group that we've been told time and time again has spent the last four years using ChatGPT to cheat their way through college, would display such sour sentiment towards "AI." But as most commencement speakers seem duty-bound to repeat, graduation marks the entry into adulthood; it is "the beginning of your life"; "the future is now" – that sort of thing. And just these students are now officially adults, they’re being told a very different story: that there really is no future. There are no jobs. And whatever thing they might have learned to do or learned to love in college, whatever career they might have believed they were preparing for, "AI" is going to destroy all of that. No wonder they boo.

But the growing pushback against "AI," and the growing pushback against ed-tech more generally, is not simply a rejection of technology. These efforts are, as Astra Taylor and Saul Levin recently argued in The Guardian, a rejection of the profoundly anti-democratic practices that have pushed technologies into all aspects of our lives without our consent and often in the face of our outright opposition. These technologies have been marketed to us as solutions to all sorts of social problems — and have done so, in no small part, by bypassing and undermining the very public sphere in which debate and discussion can take place: schools, libraries, the arts, the media. The adoption of education technology, "AI" or otherwise, has been anti-democratic in practices both big and small. Despite all the talk of progressive education and ed-tech, it has been experienced as something else entirely. Throughout the country for the past few decades Gates (via the Gates Foundation), other billionaire philanthropists, and giant companies have shaped education funding and policy through a combination of technology and testing.

At one point, perhaps, people were willing to welcome devices into schools, into the classroom. They believed the stories, not just that "this is the future," but that future meant something better for everyone. “Access” signaled equality. But as the tech billionaires have embraced authoritarianism and inequality, and as their apocalyptic rhetoric about not just the "end of work," but quite literally the end of the world grows louder and louder — all while they amass more wealth than anyone in history — it is quite apparent that their promises about the future do not include us. Their vision of future does not make any space or allowance for our children to choose their own futures.

Submission + - More Than Half Of What Americans Eat Is Ultra-Processed (studyfinds.com) 2

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: A group of leading nutrition scientists, food policy lawyers, and public health experts has released what may be the most actionable blueprint yet for tackling one of the biggest threats to American health: ultra-processed food. Released in May 2026 by Healthy Eating Research, the report offers a concrete definition of what ultra-processed food is and a ranked list of policy options lawmakers could act on right now.

More than half of calories eaten by American adults come from ultra-processed foods, industrial products containing few or no real whole-food ingredients and made with additives that keep them cheap, shelf-stable, and highly appealing. For kids, that figure climbs even higher. A recent study found that of 651 baby and toddler food products sold in the eight largest grocery stores in North Carolina, 71% were classified as ultra-processed.

Submission + - Two-thirds of babies watch screens — some for eight hours a day (thetimes.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: More than two-thirds of babies under two use screens, a report has found, and some are exposed for up to eight hours a day.

Nearly a third of newborns were found to be watching screens for more than three hours a day, while almost 20 per cent of infants of four to 11 months used screens for more than an hour a day.

The report comes after the government issued guidance that children under two do not use screens at all, apart from communal activities such as video-calling relatives.

Submission + - Rectal cancer deaths rising rapidly among millennials (nbcnews.com) 2

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: “The rate of rectal cancer seems to be increasing more than two to three times compared to colon cancer,” said Mythili Menon Pathiyil, lead author of a new study and a gastroenterology fellow at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York.

If the trend continues, rectal cancer deaths will exceed the number of colon cancer deaths — already the nation’s No. 1 cause of cancer death in people under age 50 — by 2035.

Submission + - Maryland Becomes First State To Pass Bill Banning 'Surveillance Pricing' (denver7.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Maryland is poised to become the first state in the country to ban "surveillance pricing." The practice refers to companies using a shopper’s personal data, such as browsing history, location, or purchasing behavior, to tailor prices to individual customers. The Protection From Predatory Pricing Act, passed this month and sent to the governor for a signature, would prohibit food retailers and third-party delivery services from using the practice. Violations would be treated as deceptive trade practices under state law, with potential fines and lawsuits.

Submission + - Palantir posts Bond villain manifesto on X

Submitted by DeanonymizedCoward
DeanonymizedCoward writes: Engadget reports that Palantir has posted to X a summary of CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska's 2025 book, The Technological Republic, which reads like a utopian idealist doodled on a Bond villain's whiteboard. While the post makes some decent points, it also highlights the Big-AI attitude that the AI surveillance state is in fact a good thing, and strongly implies that the Good Guys need to do war crimes before the Bad Guys get around to it.

Submission + - the highest-paying jobs have the worst scores (fortune.com)

Submitted by ZipNada
ZipNada writes: Over the weekend, the OpenAI cofounder and former director of AI at Tesla posted a graphic showing how susceptible every occupation is to Al and automation, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Different jobs received scores on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being most exposed.

While the overall weighted exposure was 4.9, Karpathy’s data also showed that professions earning more than $100,000 a year had the worst average score (6.7), while the those earning less than $35,000 had the lowest exposure (3.4).

Submission + - Moria creator Robert Koeneke passed away (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by neoRUR
neoRUR writes: At the dawn of the computer era there were some games that borrowed from Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons to create an experience like no other. It brought you into the world and you could be one of those characters, roam around, fight monsters, level up your characters. One of the more popular ones that would add to that was Moria (As in the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings) You quest was to kill the Balrog at the end. Today one of the creators, Robert Alan Koeneke, who wrote Moria because he wanted a Rogue like game to play while at school at the University of Oklahoma, passed away. It has inspired many games and RPG's since. I played Moria on the Amiga for hours and hours. His contributions to computer game history will always be remembered.

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