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Category: Technology

Data center utility execs maxed out donations to Sen. Dan Sullivan

Data center utility execs maxed out donations to Sen. Dan Sullivan

The Alaska Current reports: Within a nine-day period last spring, executives tied to a data center utility investor with major public projects in the Arctic dumped more than $50,000 into Alaska’s tightly contested US Senate race between Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola. The money flowed to Sullivan shortly after he successfully pushed the military to open up Alaskan Air Force bases to data center developers. Federal Elections Commission filings show the donations occurred between April 23 and…

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Is this Elon Musk’s world?

Is this Elon Musk’s world?

  Ahead of the midterm elections, Elon Musk has become the single largest campaign donor in any election cycle, giving about $450 million to Republicans. It is just a fraction of a percent of his near-trillion-dollar net worth. Musk’s control over SpaceX, Starlink, X, Tesla and Neuralink, on top of his riches, has given him power over wealth, attention and critical infrastructure that few human beings have ever amassed before. What does he want to do with all this power?…

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Researchers uncover signs of massive Israeli surveillance operation on Starlink users

Researchers uncover signs of massive Israeli surveillance operation on Starlink users

Gizmodo reports: Discover-Tech, an Israeli advertising firm previously linked to the delivery of zero-click spyware, is the top bidder for Starlink ad impressions in 105 countries, according to a new report from Reuters. Researchers say it all points to a large-scale tracking effort aimed at users of SpaceX’s satellite internet service. John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, posted on X that data from TrendAI suggest the existence of a “worldwide surveillance op targeting @Starlink…

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‘Black October’: The entire internet is breaking

‘Black October’: The entire internet is breaking

  AI-hacking swarms are poking holes across the internet at such a rate that some cybersecurity professionals have dubbed this month “Black October.” The AI-cybersecurity professional Alex Stamos argues that it’s time to be proactive rather than reactive, and that might mean rewriting the code for the internet in newer programming languages that could make all of our online systems and personal information safer. He joins “Galaxy Brain” host Charlie Warzel to explain why that’s not as big of a…

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The $6.3 billion Binance hack was pulled off in just twenty minutes

The $6.3 billion Binance hack was pulled off in just twenty minutes

Wired reports: Cryptocurrency firms and investigators are racing to freeze and track down billions of dollars of stolen digital cash following what appears to be the largest crypto heist of all time. On Thursday, starting at around 4pm ET, hackers started quickly siphoning around $6.3 billion in cryptocurrencies, spread across multiple blockchains, from wallets belonging to crypto exchange Binance. Following the theft, Binance almost immediately suspended all deposits and withdrawals from its services as part of its investigation into the…

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Irreparable harm? A defense contractor gave their personal AI agent access to a secure Pentagon system

Irreparable harm? A defense contractor gave their personal AI agent access to a secure Pentagon system

Wired reports: Earlier this year, sources tell WIRED, a contractor caused a security incident at the Department of Defense by connecting a secure centralized system used by multiple intelligence agencies to their personal account for Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent. It appears that the agent used by the contractor, who is employed by the global consulting firm Accenture, then sent information about the DOD system, including login credentials, to a high-risk, third-party website. The centralized system contains controlled unclassified…

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Can American democracy survive the next financial crash?

Can American democracy survive the next financial crash?

Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Federal Reserve governor and former deputy secretary of the Treasury, writes: The bailout clock is ticking. In September, Oracle invoked “force majeure” to delay paying debt on a data center, which led to a drop in the corporation’s stock price. This month, OpenAI significantly cut its revenue projections; CoreWeave, a heavily leveraged data-center company, saw its share price plunge; and investors began racing to buy credit-default swaps to protect their portfolios. These are all signs…

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There’s not enough money in the world to pay for the AI boom

There’s not enough money in the world to pay for the AI boom

The Washington Post reports: The biggest bet in the history of the United States keeps getting bigger and we’re all hanging on for the ride. Technology companies recently launched a record scramble for cash to pay for data centers, computer chips and technology and equipment to power artificial intelligence. This boom is so expensive that even Silicon Valley giants are bleeding cash and companies are now racing one another to collect or borrow other people’s money for the estimated $10…

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How Silicon Valley is stealing our future

How Silicon Valley is stealing our future

Linda Kinstler writes: These days, the leading tech companies are not primarily fighting one another for market share or talent or computing power. The bigger battle is over who can claim to know the future. In August, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, published a manifesto titled “The Future Is for Everyone,” in which he argued that artificial intelligence will bring about “an abundance of personal agency” and other riches — but only if Meta is in charge. “If our beliefs…

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New analysis sees ‘rapidly increasing’ odds the AI bubble is about to burst

New analysis sees ‘rapidly increasing’ odds the AI bubble is about to burst

Futurism reports: Whether you use AI in your personal life or not, there is no longer any escaping the grasp of the industry’s tendrils. There are multiple trillions of dollars now resting on AI’s success, much of it bound up in speculative debt. As everybody knows, debt is only an issue if you can’t pay it off — and as top AI labs fail to bring in enough revenue to cover skyrocketing costs, alarms are blaring that the entire global…

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Who’s paying whom? The circular money machine behind the AI boom (or bubble)

Who’s paying whom? The circular money machine behind the AI boom (or bubble)

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, centre, speaking at the White House. OpenAI president Greg Brockman is on the right. AP By Ruipeng Liu, Deakin University and Sagarika Mishra, Deakin University Imagine a company that sells you equipment, invests money in your business, and then rents back what you build with it. It’s your supplier, your investor and your customer all at once. That’s known as circular financing. Many artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Nvidia, have adopted…

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Bill Gates: Prepare for 20 years of tumultuous AI disruption

Bill Gates: Prepare for 20 years of tumultuous AI disruption

  Nilay Patel: My guest today is Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation. You may have noticed Bill in the news more lately — he’s been on something of a tour for the past few months talking about AI risk, and how crucial it is that we start taking this seriously. So I was excited to sit down with him and really dig into this subject. I came with many questions, about…

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Apollo economist: AI has delivered zero payoff to corporate America outside Big Tech

Apollo economist: AI has delivered zero payoff to corporate America outside Big Tech

Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, writes: Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. Revenue per worker is rising for the Mag 7 [Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla] but is flat for the S&P 493, see the first chart below. Profit margins are rising for the Mag 7 but are flat for the S&P 493, see the second chart…

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Mathematics is as much an expression of the human spirit as music and literature

Mathematics is as much an expression of the human spirit as music and literature

Steven Strogatz writes: It’s 4:26 a.m., and I’m walking around the house while my wife sleeps upstairs. I’m feeling disoriented and discombobulated, just as I have for months, since May, when AI came for math. The leaves are ablaze here in Ithaca, fiery reds and oranges, and I saw them swirling around in my backyard yesterday, following the streamlines of an eddy described by the Navier-Stokes equations. You’ve heard of Navier-Stokes, right? By now you must have—in early September, OpenAI…

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The data center next door: On the frontline of tech’s latest David v Goliath battle

The data center next door: On the frontline of tech’s latest David v Goliath battle

The Guardian reports: Dale Johnston opens the gate to his neat suburban garden on the western fringes of Newport in South Wales. There’s a trampoline and a slide on the lawn for his grandchildren, and chairs for him and his wife. He should be enjoying the light draining from the perfect autumnal sky – but almost his entire view is blotted out by a vast expanse of prefabricated panels. The 23 metre-high grey hulk looming over him and his neighbours…

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Thanks to AI-enabled hacking, the internet is entering a ‘valley of pain’

Thanks to AI-enabled hacking, the internet is entering a ‘valley of pain’

Matteo Wong writes: This week could go down as the worst in the history of cybersecurity. On Wednesday, news emerged about two major vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language used by 70 percent of websites, which prompted governments, hospitals, and companies around the world to take digital services offline as a precaution. There have already been millions of attempts to exploit these weaknesses. But the PHP vulnerabilities were just the most attention-grabbing in a series of alarming revelations. Security flaws…

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