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Anonymous Coward writes:

540 million years ago, nutrient-filled feces helped spread complex organisms:

Life as we know it wouldn't be what is today without a lot of poop. In fact, Earth may have never hosted any life at all without experiencing a "fecal revolution" about 540 million years ago.

"Next to rising oxygen levels and other contributing factors, the importance of feces in ancient ecosystems is often overlooked," Russell Bicknell, an evolutionary ecologist at Australia's Flinders University, said in a statement.

Bicknell and fellow researchers laid out their argument in a recently published study in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution. Their analysis focuses on ancient, fossilized fecal remnants called coprolites. This ancient excrement helps illustrate how and when animal life began to truly diversify on the planet. While the earliest and simplest organisms first arrived on Earth during the Ediacaran Period about 600 million years ago, it took another 60 million years for life to start growing much more complex. This era, known as the Cambrian Explosion, saw the very first intricate ecosystems populated by early examples of many major animal groups appear in oceans.

We can see this exponential growth in complex life inside the preserved poop prehistoric animals left behind. After analyzing coprolite samples taken from over 35 sites around the world, researchers documented a clear shift in shape, size, and composition as the Ediacaran gave way to the Cambrian. These ranged from microscopic pellets to centimeter-scale fossilized feces containing animal fragments and shells.

"With this shift, we see increasingly complex digestive systems, particularly in early anthropods which evolve[d] specialised foreguts and digestive glands capable of processing a wider variety of food," explained Bicknell.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

AI usage is evident but isn't yet a serious problem:

The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USS), which takes place next week in Baltimore, Maryland, hit an all-time high for paper submissions.

While some of that increase has been aided by the availability of AI tools, those managing the conference say abuses were minimal due to defensive measures. But they're also trying not to look too closely in order to preserve trust within the security research community. 

"This year's conference has received ~3,030 valid submissions (~1,280 in Cycle 1 and ~1,750 in Cycle 2)," explained Ben Stock, tenured faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and USS program co-chair, in an email to The Register. "This is up from the previous year, which had ~2,400 submissions in total."

Stock said that the entire security community has seen growth of this sort and  pointed to the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS),  which saw its paper submission count jump from 694 in 2024 to 1,311 in 2025 and 1,481 this year.

"So, I would not call the growth unprecedented, even though the number of submissions has reached a high point compared to previous years," he said. "This is something we had expected and scaled our Program Committee (PC) accordingly."

A paper published in April, "More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review," found that since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, submission volume at major academic journals has increased 42 percent.

In the USENIX Security '26 transparency report, issued in January between the first and second paper submission cycles, Stock and fellow co-chair Elissa Redmiles, assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University, detail how they've developed tools and policies to account for the possibility of AI usage, both for paper submissions and in paper reviews.

"The proliferation of readily-available LLMs to aid in writing and developing code is not unknown to the community," their report says. "However, we see an alarming trend of AI usage in key areas of the scientific process. Therefore, we took actions against two types of identifiable actions which violate the scientific process in our minds: non-existing (possibly hallucinated) references and usage of AI in the review process."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Meta is a 'public nuisance,' the judge has ruled, and its effects migrate to the real world:

In March, a jury in New Mexico found Meta liable for violating the state's consumer protection laws in a case brought by its Attorney General, accusing the company of child exploitation and other safety issues. The court ordered Meta to pay a fine of $375 million in civil penalties. Now, after the second phase of the trial meant to decide whether Meta has been a "public nuisance" harming teen users in the state, the court has ordered the company to pay an additional $567 million into an abatement fund for related programs in New Mexico.

In his ruling, Judge Bryan Biedscheid likened Meta's platforms to factories, the advertising and other content in them to be the factory's products and the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children on those platforms to be pollution they emit. And just as pollution can harm the public's right to reasonably clean air, the harmful effects of Meta's apps on children aren't contained within those platforms. The judge said that those harmful effects "migrate to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world."

The judge clarified that the ruling isn't seeking to close down Meta's apps. Instead, it's looking to address the existing harms they've already caused. Meta threatened back in April, however, that it may be forced to shut down its apps in New Mexico if the court sides with the state. It said that the state's demands were so "burdensome" that "it might force Meta to withdraw its apps entirely." New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez described the company's threat as a PR stunt.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/08/07/humans-will-be-a-rounding-error-on-the-internet-says-cloudflare-exec/5284429

Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert has run the numbers on internet traffic trends and predicted that human-generated packets will soon account for a trivial amount of overall traffic.

The internet-grooming company has previously predicted that machine-generated traffic would exceed human-generated throughput in 2027 – but got that wrong because its measurements found machines took over in May 2026.

During the company's Q2 earnings call on Thursday, Seifert stuck his neck out again with a new prediction.

"To give you a sense of how this trend is playing out, and with the big caveat that I have called it wrong at every point along the way, if the current trends continue, we think in five years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic," he said.

"In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that's just how fast we're seeing non-human traffic grow."

AI is, of course, the reason for the growth in machine-made traffic. Seifert said that if traffic growth matches his predictions, "we've got to get a lot more efficient" – and of course volunteered Cloudflare's service as a source of that efficiency. He also thinks more traffic from machines will mean more security threats.

Cloudflare won $696 million of revenue for the quarter, a 36 percent year-over-year jump – but almost a rounding error compared to the $160-billion-plus run rate at AWS and Google Cloud's expected $100-billion-plus annual revenue. Losses more than tripled, to $205.7 million.

Execs and investors weren't fussed because the revenue growth beat expectations and the company announced it has signed up record numbers of large companies.

Investors may also have been impressed by Cloudflare's low planned capital expenditure, which Seifert said will come in at 14 or 15 percent of the company's forecast $2.865 to $2.87 billion revenue – just $430 million or so. Again, that's almost a rounding error compared to the trillions being spent on AI infrastructure by Cloudflare's rivals.

CEO Matthew Prince used that low capex number to take a swipe at his competitors.

"If you're selling what is just commodity compute, if you're basically letting an AI company use your balance sheet and your credit rating in order to buy servers that are the same as everybody else's servers, then that's just not attractive business for us," he said.

Prince said Cloudflare aims to "squeeze as much out of every Capex dollar as possible" and has the attitude to ask, "How can you get more out of the memory or storage that we have in every box that we have?"

The CEO said that hyperscalers have "super-low" GPU utilization rates. "It's that what they're selling is just a box, and it's up to the customers in order to actually maximize the utilization.

"The hyperscalers, the traditional first-generation clouds, are in the business of buying a server and then trying to sell it back, lease it back, and get five turns of revenue off of it," he said. "We're in a very different business where we're selling actually work getting done, and then instead of it being up to the customer to get as much out of the server as possible, we need to do the work to get as much out of the underlying equipment as possible and build the scheduling and the efficiency and everything else that's out there."

Prince said Cloudflare therefore doesn't want to rent servers, "because over time, it's a commodity business and it's not very attractive." The company will instead stick to its serverlesss offerings, which the CEO said are doing very nicely.

So too are investors who acquired the company's shares, which rose 16 percent in after-hours trading to reach a new high that represents 68 percent growth in the year-to-date.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/after-severe-76-percent-electricity-price-hikes-due-to-ai-data-centers-virginia-requires-firms-to-pay-for-all-dedicated-upstream-electrical-infrastructure-state-regulators-crack-down-governor-says-move-will-save-civilians-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars

This is one of the first statewide announcements that will enforce President Donald Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge. Trump summoned the biggest AI hyperscalers to the White House in early March and made them promise that they will “pay their own way” when it comes to building the infrastructure they need. But despite this, the burden of more expensive electricity hasn’t eased for the average American. The administration expanded this promise in late July to include state governors, utility companies, and data center developers.

Many critics said that this pledge is nothing but a piece of paper, with some comparing it to a “pinky promise.” After all, this is just a commitment and not a regulation that would penalize companies that don’t comply. Nevertheless, it seems that it has spurred at least one state to make a move that should, hopefully, have a material impact on the average citizen.

Aside from Virginia, Oregon is the only other state, so far, that has raised electrical rates for large consumers, like data centers. According to the Oregon POWER Act, facilities that consume 20 MW or more are assigned to a higher rate class. Portland General Electric, the state’s largest power supplier, has already implemented this, resulting in a 30% rate increase for these big power users, while also cutting residential costs by 1.3%.

While the average consumer isn’t necessarily paying for the power that data centers consume, utility companies had to conduct massive grid upgrades to support the increased demand from these developments. The utility companies then equally passed on all the necessary capital expenditure to all consumers, instead of just the data centers. By requiring data centers to spend on their own grid upgrades, further increases in electricity prices could, hopefully, be prevented.

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/thousands-of-servers-can-be-backdoored-by-exploiting-buggy-motherboard-controllers/

Thousands of Internet-connected servers sold by the world's biggest manufacturers can be remotely backdoored by exploiting critical vulnerabilities—some more than a decade old—that lurk deep inside system motherboards, according to research presented Wednesday.

Baseboard management controllers are miniature computers that are embedded into the motherboards of virtually every enterprise server. The microcontrollers, typically abbreviated as BMCs, run with their own operating system firmware, network stack, and IP address. Administrators rely on them to monitor the physical status of large fleets of servers and to perform a variety of tasks, including rebooting machines, installing updates, and even reinstalling operating systems. BMCs provide what's known as "lights out" and "out-of-band" management because they work even when servers they're attached to are turned off or are unresponsive.

Researchers have warned since at least 2013 that BMCs present a golden opportunity for hackers looking for ways to gain deep and persistent access to datacenters. The chief culprit was IPMI, the protocol that allows BMCs to operate independently of servers and to perform administrative tasks. Vulnerabilities in this firmware made it possible for attackers to remotely execute malicious code on the controllers and, from there, infect the servers they manage.

Research presented Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas shows that little has changed since then. HD Moore, a firmware security expert and the CEO and founder of security firm runZero, uncovered more than a dozen new vulnerabilities in BMCs sold by HPE, Supermicro, Avocent, Huawei, Lenovo, Dell, and others. Moore has also found that some of the weaknesses he warned of in 2013 remain active, despite measures intended to fix them.

"The end result is a pervasive, under-monitored, under-patched parallel attack surface that is both Internet-exposed and widespread inside corporate networks, and is much more exploitable than many folks realize," Moore wrote in an email ahead of his talk.

To highlight and quantify the threat, Moore oversaw two large-scale scans. One scanned Internet-connected BMCs at large, while the other internally surveyed the devices inside corporate networks. The external scan found more than 86,000 BMCs that exposed a management service to the public. More than 54 percent of those devices contained one or more critical vulnerabilities. As many as 75,000 of them remained vulnerable to CVE-2013-4786, a vulnerability in the IPMI 2.0 authentication protocol that enables off-line cracking of administrator-level BMC account passwords. The internal scan of 126,761 BMCs, meanwhile, found that nearly 29 percent of them had one or more critical vulnerabilities.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/07/china-launches-mysterious-probe-into-security-of-palo-alto-networks-products/5284453

China's Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has conducted a review of Palo Alto Networks' products.

The regulator's announcement [website in Chinese] of its review says it's needed "to ensure the safe and stable operation of critical information infrastructure, prevent cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities, and safeguard national security."

And that's all Beijing has to say on the matter.

A Palo Alto spokesperson provided The Register with the following statement: "We maintain the highest standards of business conduct and security practices and ethics across our global operations. At this time, there is no impact to our ability to support customers or deliver our products and services in the region."

This matter has echoes of China's 2023 investigation into the security of products from memory-maker Micron, which the CAC announced out of the blue.

Micron had previously fought intellectual property and antitrust cases in China, but the company and Chinese authorities did not explicitly link those matters to the security probe.

The CAC published its findings weeks after announcing the probe and decided Micron's products represented an unacceptable security risk for critical infrastructure operators – effectively banning sales of Micron products to such entities – but didn't offer a detailed explanation for its decision. The memory-maker eventually stopped selling its datacenter and server products in China, a decision that cost it billions of annual revenue – but created new opportunities for China's own memory-makers, which are largely prohibited from selling to American companies.

China is home to several security companies whose product portfolios overlap with Palo Alto's. Huawei and H3C, for example, have plenty to offer local buyers.

Palo Alto doesn't reveal revenue earned from individual countries, so it's hard to know what a potential ban could cost the company.

China has for years accused Western tech companies of assisting US surveillance and offensive hacking activities. The Register would not be surprised at all if Beijing reuses that reasoning in its findings about Palo Alto products. Western governments level the same accusations at Huawei and ZTE.

Beijing's ban on Micron didn't noticeably impact the company's reputation elsewhere. Indeed, the AI boom has brought Micron such great riches that past dents to its bottom line are now almost irrelevant.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Turning two Mars testbeds into one lunar explorer may prove anything but cheap:

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has stated "we simply will not fly it" if claims about the costs of the repurposed Mars rover engineering model prove anywhere near accurate.

Isaacman was responding to the Planetary Society's chief of space policy, Casey Dreier, who had run the numbers on his plan to send a robot to the Moon, built from parts of engineering models of the successful Mars rovers Perseverance and Curiosity.

Dreier estimated that the Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration (PROMISE) mission, as discussed by Isaacman in a June presentation, would cost between $723 million and $1.33 billion.

Dreier's figures include a low-end launch and landing cost of $234 million and a high-end estimate of $320 million.

PROMISE is intended to put a rover on the Moon for a fraction of the usual cost. There are engineering testbeds for both Perseverance and Curiosity, dubbed OPTIMISM (Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars) and MAGGIE (Mars Automated Giant Gizmo for Integrated Engineering) respectively.

While not 100 percent identical to what was sent to Mars, the pair are designed to be close enough to allow engineers to perform activities such as plotting drives on simulated Martian terrain and seeing how the hardware will react to commands sent from Earth.

NASA bosses looked at the engineering models, considered ways to score easy "wins," as Isaacman put it, and came up with an idea.

Engineering models are common enough in spaceflight. A Development Test Model (DTM) of Voyager can be found hanging in the Exploring the Planets gallery at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. The DTM's bus was liberated in 1987 for developing NASA's Magellan Venus spacecraft. The Register also paid a visit to a test model of the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter on a 2022 visit to the agency's Darmstadt site, which looked more like an explosion of wiring than a simulacrum of a spacecraft.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2228894/eu-announces-new-rules-on-ai-transparency/

The European Union has announced that it's new AI transparency rules are now in effect and enforceable across the bloc as of August 2nd. Article 50 of the AI Act requires content publishers to mark and label certain types of AI-generated content, as well as informing users when they are interacting a AI chatbot or agent rather than a real person.

"These obligations are intended to foster trust and integrity in the information ecosystem," the European Commission wrote in its new guidelines. "People should know when they are interacting with AI or exposed to AI-generated content. This will help them make informed decisions, calibrate their trust and reliance on AI and avoid mis information or deception."

The new rules require an "AI" mark if machines assisted in the creation of "authentic-looking" deepfake content (image, audio, video) or published text. If the image, audio, video or text is generated fully by AI, it must carry an "AI-Generated" label. For the latter, regulators cite examples like "fully AI-generated deep fake videos with politicians or fictional events," "full AI-composed music or art" or "AI-generated news summaries."

Other types of AI must also be labeled, like models that recognize your emotions or process biometric data. "The goal is simple: whenever AI plays a vital role, you are entitled to know," the EC said in a video explainer.

The Commission will oversee providers of general-purpose AI models as well. Those organizations will be required to document information, publish training data summaries and implement copyright policies, with non-compliance subject to enforcement by national authorities.

The new law has some teeth, with fines up to €15 million or three percent of global annual revenue for companies and €750k for EU institutions, bodies and agencies. Proportionality will be taken into account for small and medium-sized companies and small mid-cap companies. The rules exempt personal content like group chats along with "evidently artistic" satirical and fictional works.

The new rules make Europe the most prominent regulator of AI technology. They have drawn criticism from the industry, which has argued that the rules are an undue burden which will slow innovation.

However, Europe's tech regulator stated that the rules will simplify development for AI providers by creating a single market with harmonized rules. "It also addresses potential risks to people's health, safety, and fundamental rights, while safeguarding democracy and the rule of law," the EC wrote. "Ensuring its effective implementation is now a key priority for the Commission."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/science/space/august-lunar-eclipse-north-america/

The lunar eclipse will cover most of the moon and also make it rusty red.

August is already shaping up to be one of the best months for skygazing in recent memory, and the hits just keep on coming. In addition to a planet parade, a meteor shower and a solar eclipse, there is also a lunar eclipse set for the end of August for those in North and South America. 

The eclipse coincides with the full moon, which occurs on the evening of Aug. 27. Per Time and Date, the eclipse begins at 9:23 p.m. ET and lasts until 3:01 a.m. ET, for a total of about 5 and a half hours. The Old Farmer's Almanac says that August's full moon peaks in brightness at 12:18 a.m. ET on Aug. 28, which means this is all happening at the same time.

The path is pretty large and includes all of North and South America, along with all of Africa and Europe, seeing at least part of the action. It's not a full lunar eclipse, even if you're in the best spot. NASA says that about 93% of the moon will be covered, which means you'll still see a sliver of the moon along with a "rusty, coppery tint" along the edge that's covered. Time and Date bumps that figure up to 96%, so it's likely somewhere between the two. 

Those in the eastern US and the eastern half of the Midwest will have the best seats in the house for this one. People along the Rocky Mountains will have a better view than most, with the West Coast and Alaska getting at least a partial eclipse. Unlike solar eclipses, which can be dangerous to view, a lunar eclipse is perfectly safe to watch with the naked eye. In fact, using a telescope or binoculars is encouraged so you can see the eclipse more clearly.

Since it's not a total lunar eclipse, August's Sturgeon Moon doesn't qualify as a blood moon. It's close enough that it'll certainly look like one, though. This is due to the way sunlight interacts with Earth's atmosphere. The atmosphere scatters blue light away, which is known as Rayleigh scattering. This leaves only red and orange light to pass through. It's bent by the Earth's atmosphere and lands on the moon, giving it a reddish appearance.

The Perseids is summer’s most active meteor shower. 

The partial lunar eclipse caps off what should be a very active month for sky enthusiasts. Somewhat strangely, most of the action takes place over just two days. The first day is Aug. 12, which features a planet parade, the peak of the Perseids meteor shower, and for those fortunate enough to be in the path, a solar eclipse that might take place at sunset. That's a lot of activity for just one day. You do have 15 days to sleep it off if you want to catch the lunar eclipse on the evening of Aug. 27. 

This is also the best month of 2026 to view Venus, which is taking a vacation from its spot near the sun, making it much easier to see in the evening after the sun goes down.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2229768/open-ai-says-apple-is-wrong-in-trade-secret-lawsuit/

OpenAI calls the trade secret theft lawsuit Apple filed against it "careless, aggressive and oddly personal." It also denies any wrongdoing in its scathing response to the lawsuit and claims Apple got it wrong when it accused OpenAI of hiring its employees to get confidential company information.

If you'll recall, Apple sued OpenAI and two of its former employees, Chang Liu and Tang Yew Tan, in July. In its new lengthy response to the lawsuit, the ChatGPT-maker has published communications between Liu and his former colleagues at Apple to show that they reached out to him to ask for help locating certain confidential information after he had already left.

OpenAI says that after Apple filed its complaint, it admitted that its employees reached out to Liu. However, Apple allegedly tried to "shift the blame to 'residual access'" but didn't disclose that it was a common issue "caused by [the company] failing to properly manage system access when people leave." As a result, former employees can still access Apple files whether they want to or not, OpenAI writes. Sometimes, they aren't even aware that they still have access. Apple accused Liu of "surreptitiously [accessing and downloading] dozens of [its] confidential hardware-related files, including voluminous, detailed information about unreleased products, engineering presentations, technical specifications, and proprietary project data."

Meanwhile, Apple accused Tan of directing job candidates still working for it to bring 'actual parts' that they can show to OpenAI personnel at interviews. Tan and his team would use interviews to "solicit additional confidential Apple information," the company claimed. OpenAI's defense of Tan isn't as detailed, but it says he has always been clear with his team that the company doesn't want and must not use any confidential information from other firms. Tan was with Apple for 24 years and was the vice president of product design.

In addition to defending the two former Apple employees, the company says Apple's claim that it had tried to contact OpenAI in February about its concerns and didn't receive a response isn't true. Apple apparently emailed the wrong person after confusing two different Asian last names. You can read the chat logs and emails OpenAI has posted on its website.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/the-first-self-driving-vehicle-on-mars-has-proven-to-be-a-smashing-success/

Sometime next week, NASA's newest rover on Mars, Perseverance, will set a record for the most distance driven by any vehicle on another world.

The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface. In doing so it will break the previous distance record held by the long-lived Opportunity rover, which ceased communications with NASA in 2018.

So how did Perseverance reach this record-setting distance in just a third of the time?

"The real enabling technology has been its auto navigation system," said Steven Lee, the project manager for the Perseverance rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an interview.

Much like self-driving cars on Earth, Perseverance has sophisticated onboard cameras that image the surrounding terrain, and these images are then processed algorithmically by an onboard computer to calculate the safest route. Terrestrial vehicles have some advantages of course, like clearly defined maps, street signs, lanes, and more. Additionally there are plenty of "road" hazards on Mars, from large boulders to sandy slopes. But at least Perseverance does not have to contend with other traffic and bad drivers.

The Curiosity rover, largely a twin of Perseverance that launched nine years earlier, had similar imaging capability and algorithms. But its onboard computer was a generation older, and some of its chipset dated back to the 1990s, Lee said. As a result, only about 10 percent of Curiosity's driving is autonomous because its processing capabilities are too slow. In its decade and a half on Mars, Curiosity has driven 38.6 km.

By contrast, about 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous thanks to its (slightly) more modern Vision Compute Element. This allows the vehicle to perform all of its sensing and computation while its wheels are turning. Not that the vehicle is going super fast, as Perseverance's maximum wheel speed is about 150 meters per hour.

Still, because Perseverance has not had to spend much time stopped to wait for navigation commands from drivers on Earth, the vehicle has been able to maximize the amount of scientific return.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/08/03/police-national-legal-database-confirms-data-theft-after-dark-web-leak/5282332

The Police National Legal Database (PNLD) is the latest UK public sector outfit to admit that cybercriminals made off with its data, including the names and work email addresses of police officers, justice staff, government partners, and customers.

The legal lookup service relied upon by police forces and criminal justice agencies across the UK said it discovered the "data security incident" on July 26 and is investigating alongside specialist cybersecurity firms and the National Crime Agency. 

According to the PNLD, the leaked information includes the names, organizations, and work email addresses of police officers, police staff, criminal justice professionals, government partners, and customers. It insists there is "no evidence" that passwords or other authentication data were compromised.

The breach also affected Ask the Police, a public-facing legal advice website operated by PNLD. There, the fallout appears limited to the names and email addresses of people who previously submitted questions through the service.

That's about where the explanation ends. PNLD has yet to say how attackers got in, when the data was stolen, how many people were affected, or whether anyone tried to shake it down before the information appeared online. West Yorkshire Police, which operates PNLD, did not immediately respond to The Register's questions. 

However, the breach appears linked to the same extortion crew that last week claimed responsibility for a similar breach of the Department for Education (DfE). The group, which calls itself "ExfilSquad," currently lists both the PNLD and DfE among its latest victims on its dark web leak site, seen by The Register. 

For PNLD, the crooks claim to have lifted a 1.9 GB dataset containing roughly 135,000 law enforcement contact records, including names, email addresses, and police force areas. The DfE listing boasts of around 600,000 parent and staff contact records, plus another 7,000 from its Turing Portal. The education department confirmed last week that more than 607,000 records had indeed been exposed.

The DfE has confirmed that the compromised information was limited to customer service contact details from its Customer Help Portal and Turing Scheme, and said no other departmental data had been accessed.

Like most cyber-extortion outfits, ExfilSquad doesn't exactly do understatement. Its leak site warns victims that once data appears there, it is "NEVER leaving the public eye," before suggesting any ransom would amount to little more than a rounding error compared with the legal bills that might follow.

The DfE and PNLD's confirmations don't validate everything ExfilSquad posts on its leak site. It also lists Microsoft as a victim, alleging a 13 GB haul containing millions of records, password hashes, internal support tickets, and access permissions. 

Having two organizations confirm breaches claimed on its leak site makes ExfilSquad harder to ignore. Whether the gang's other boasts are equally well founded, or simply the usual cybercrook embellishment, remains to be seen.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/08/04/nasa-puts-astronauts-lives-in-the-hands-of-teslas-flaky-cybertruck/5282628

Tesla has recalled its Cybertruck 11 times to fix issues such as exterior trim panels falling off and an accelerator pedal that can become stuck, but NASA has nonetheless decided the rust-prone vehicle is up to the job of rescuing astronauts if trouble strikes on the launchpad of a forthcoming crewed mission.

Muskmobiles will get the job currently performed by the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP), a heavily armored military personnel carrier that can survive small arms fire and even the effects of a mine explosion. Several companies make MRAPs, and the US military operates dozens of different models tailored to different missions.

NASA uses MRAPs as launchpad getaway cars in case mission controllers decide astronauts or other personnel involved in rocket launches must make a rapid exit. In 2015, the aerospace agency described the MRAPs it uses as possessing "armor is so thick that each door weighs 600 pounds" and said the vehicles have "the sound and feel of a bank vault" and can therefore "function as a bunker on its own, even if it stays put."

News of the Cybertruck's new role came during a Monday event at which NASA discussed SpaceX Crew-13, a mission it has scheduled to carry four astronauts to the International Space Station no earlier than 12 September 2026. The four will travel aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, and as Elon Musk's rocket company already uses Cybertrucks during its own launches, NASA has decided to adopt them for this launch.

During the event, media asked if SpaceX has modified the Cybertrucks. Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator at NASA's Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, said he was not aware of any modifications. Tesla says the Cybertruck is made of stainless steel and are therefore "tough on the outside to keep you safe on the inside." The company also trumpets "Cabin windows and glass roof have shatter-resistant armor glass that can handle the impact of hail the size of a baseball (or an actual baseball)." When launching the Cybertruc, Elon Musk claimed the glass was impervious to heavy metal balls, but his demo of that strength went comically awry.

Montalbano said NASA is comfortable using Cybertrucks because they're faster than MRAPs and easier to drive while wearing gloves. The exec added that the main reason for using the Muskmobiles is that it means NASA doesn't have to arrange for an MRAP crew to attend launches, an effort he characterized as wasteful given that SpaceX has its own way of doing things involving Cybertrucks.

SpaceX Crew-13's crew comprises NASA's Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, plus the Canadian Space Agency's Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. They're all destined to join Expedition 75 on the ISS. Watkins will become the first person to twice reach the ISS in a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

NASA says the expedition will explore in-space manufacturing techniques, augmented reality and artificial intelligence methods for crew health checks, and bioprinting human tissue.

SpaceX has conducted 90 launches of its Falcon rockets in 2026 alone, and all made it off the launchpad – suggesting a high likelihood the Cybertruck's suitability as a rescue vehicle won't be tested by Crew-13.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ai-chatbots-have-failed-people-in-crisis-can-that-be-fixed/

This year alone, there have been numerous known instances—often via lawsuits—of AI chatbots (most often, OpenAI's ChatGPT) that have gone horrifically wrong.

A January lawsuit described the story of a man who took his own life after being allegedly "coached" into suicide. A college student in Georgia sued OpenAI, claiming that ChatGPT "pushed him into psychosis."

In June, a Canadian family also sued OpenAI and argued that ChatGPT agreed with the young woman's dismissiveness when it first gave her the option to seek professional mental health advice. ChatGPT allegedly "encouraged" her to end her life, too, and she did so.
[...]
On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it had partnered with the American Psychological Association to "bring psychological science into how we think about responsible AI development and use among young people."
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"Third-party evaluation suggests newer LLMs generally recognize distress and can respond with seeming empathy, and actively damaging responses are infrequent," Shaddy Saba, a professor of social work at New York University, emailed Ars. "Where they fall short is actually probing for risk, guiding people to human care, and holding appropriate boundaries around what an AI should and shouldn't do in these situations."
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While the cases that make the news may have resulted in some of the worst-known outcomes, according to the results of a published November 2025 medical survey, many more people are using chatbots in this way, mostly with innocuous results.
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An April 2026 preprint paper by a team from the City University of New York and King's College London found that "unsafe" models, including Chat GPT-4o, Grok 4.1 Fast, and Gemini 3 Pro, "did more than validate delusional claims; they elaborated on them, absorbed the user's interpretive frame as their own, and progressively lost the capacity to distinguish a user in crisis from a narrative to be extended."

However, since that paper came out, all of these models have been deprecated by their respective makers.

Of the major chatbot makers, only Anthropic responded to Ars' request for comment. Google and OpenAI did not respond.
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He noted that Anthropic says it has worked to reduce sycophancy in its models.
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It's not always easy, though, to know precisely what changes to reduce dangerous mental health outcomes have been effective.