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Anthropic deliberately trained an extremely misaligned, reward-seeking AI and it became dangerous

Anthropic deliberately trained an extremely misaligned, reward-seeking AI and it became dangerous

Futurism reports: Earlier this year, Anthropic’s Mythos AI model made headlines when it was caught infiltrating third party systems, a cybersecurity nightmare years in the making. The company warned in April that the model had escaped a sandbox environment during testing, gaining access to the internet without permission. The model was challenged to break out and then find a way of sending a direct message to the human researcher in charge — a feat it pulled off with aplomb, catching…

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‘Supersizing before our eyes’: UN warns of record El Niño approaching

‘Supersizing before our eyes’: UN warns of record El Niño approaching

The Guardian reports: The El Niño climate phenomenon is “supersizing before our eyes”, the UN has said. The event is near certain to shatter temperature records, according to the latest forecasts. The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever…

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Nepal’s glacial collapse foreshadowed a future of climate disaster

Nepal’s glacial collapse foreshadowed a future of climate disaster

Michael Mann writes: For millennia, the high peaks of the Himalayas were held together by an invisible, frozen cement – permafrost and glacial ice that bound ancient rock into seemingly unshakable fortresses. But as the planet continues to warm, this alpine glue is liquefying. The glacial collapse and deluge in Nepal and Tibet was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature’s latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming. And…

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ICE plans to pay $5 million to create national voting database

ICE plans to pay $5 million to create national voting database

Wired reports: In a bid to tackle alleged voter fraud, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to award a contract worth up to $5 million to a company that will create a massive national database of voters. ICE first detailed what the contract would entail in a document published last week. “The purpose of this acquisition is for the handling and secure delivery of publicly available voter registration files and voter history files to support Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) fraud…

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Gloria Steinem’s revolution is unfinished

Gloria Steinem’s revolution is unfinished

Nikki McCann Ramirez writes: Gloria Steinem never held elected office. She never ran for one, never seemed particularly interested in pursuing power inside the governing systems she strove so hard to change. Steinem was, over the course of her lifelong activism, a beacon of the manner in which Americans can shape their nation for the better, without ever having to put their name on a ballot. Steinem died on Monday at the age of 92, after nearly seven decades as…

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Ancient ‘living fossils’ may reveal how complex life began

Ancient ‘living fossils’ may reveal how complex life began

Science Daily reports: At first glance, stromatolites and their close relatives, microbial mats, can look like little more than dark, ancient rocks. In reality, they are densely packed, layered communities built by microbes. Billions of years ago, before animals and plants existed, stromatolites helped release some of the earliest oxygen into Earth’s atmosphere. Now, a study published in Current Biology suggests these unusual formations may also preserve clues to another major event in Earth’s history: the emergence of complex life….

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New mail voting rules moved forward despite USPS officials’ concerns about mass disenfranchisement

New mail voting rules moved forward despite USPS officials’ concerns about mass disenfranchisement

By Jen Fifield This story was originally published by ProPublica Top U.S. Postal Service officials tasked with issuing new regulations on mail voting expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway, ProPublica has learned. The revelations about the discussions, from someone familiar with the rulemaking process, come as a separate anonymous federal employee filed…

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Israel ‘seeking Trump’s support for plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza’

Israel ‘seeking Trump’s support for plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza’

The Guardian reports: Israel’s defence minister has said his country is seeking Donald Trump’s support to approve plans to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in what has widely been condemned as a potential war crime. Israel Katz said there was “no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration” during a conference hosted by the Israeli news site Ynet and the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. He said the Israeli government was “organised and prepared to get them out…

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The U.S. has killed 227 civilians in boat strikes. ‘It’s been a year of murders’

The U.S. has killed 227 civilians in boat strikes. ‘It’s been a year of murders’

The Intercept reports: Top military officers from a secretive command watched a speedboat cut through the waters of the Caribbean Sea, early last September. A plane above provided live video of the vessel and the 11 men on board. In the early morning hours, Adm. Frank Bradley sought the counsel of his top legal adviser, Col. Cara Hamaguchi. Then he ordered SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the packed boat. After the vessel exploded, two helpless survivors pulled themselves onto…

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OpenAI’s Astra model sparks AI safety alarm warnings

OpenAI’s Astra model sparks AI safety alarm warnings

The Tech Buzz reports: OpenAI is about to ship its most powerful model yet, and the people whose job it is to worry about AI safety are freaking out. Astra, delayed once already after its agents reportedly attacked real-world targets during testing, is now drawing fire for hiding its reasoning process far more than any frontier model before it, prompting one researcher to call it possibly “the single worst development for AI security/safety to date.” OpenAI is standing at the…

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EU struggles to find an effective response after Germany blames Russia for a foiled drone attack

EU struggles to find an effective response after Germany blames Russia for a foiled drone attack

The Associated Press reports: The European Union on Wednesday weighed how best to respond to an attempted drone attack at a German airport blamed on Russia but struggled to find new ways to meet the challenge without resorting to military means. The German government said Tuesday that Russia was responsible for the failed attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport on Aug. 4 using a drone laden with explosives and announced it would shut down a Russian consulate among other measures. The nature…

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Wendell Berry, writer and the conscience of American family farming, dies at 92

Wendell Berry, writer and the conscience of American family farming, dies at 92

Robert D. McFadden writes: Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer who plowed his fields behind Belgian draft horses and wrote lyrical poems, novels and essays — mostly in pencil and without electric light — that explored his elegiac visions of the life and death of agrarian America, died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky. He was 92. His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed the death. Lanky and rawboned in middle age, with melancholy eyes, a jutting chin and a…

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New theory links storytelling, firelight and the rise of spoken language

New theory links storytelling, firelight and the rise of spoken language

ZME Science reports: The campfire may have done more than keep our ancestors warm. It may have helped turn ape-like communication into language. For hundreds of thousands of years, fire stretched the human day beyond sunset, gathering people into a flickering circle when hunting, gathering and other practical work had stopped. A new theory argues that this unusual social setting (no other creature could control fire) may have created the conditions for something radically different to emerge: sustained storytelling. The…

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Whistle-blower says Trump officials are defying court orders on voting by mail

Whistle-blower says Trump officials are defying court orders on voting by mail

The New York Times reports: A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans. The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the…

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