Free Republic

For ten years now I've had an anonymous name on facebook. Listed two or three rental units where I live without incident. I would use messenger to qualify who I give my address to. Before I started this anonymous approach I had a vehicle with 3 disruptive teenagers just show up at my house, unannounced. Now. Facebook is flagging my listings and denying me access to renters. They want me to "Verify my identity." If I use my real name, users on internet can find my address real easy. We are over 70 and don't need "trouble" just showing up....

The laws already on the books cover a lot of harmful conduct involving AI, but they do not cover everything cleanly. As of October 2026, the U.S. still does not have one comprehensive federal AI law. Instead, AI is governed through a mixture of existing laws, agency authority, executive policy, and state laws.

A new Tavus AI chatbot nearly passes for human in face-to-face interactions, the company claims. Footage posted to X Thursday debuted Tavus’s Griffin chatbot, a first-of-its-kind Human Interaction Model the company says is the first to pass the Turing test, where a human user cannot tell they’re talking to a computer. “48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%,” Tavus wrote on X, adding, “It is #1 on NVIDIA’s benchmark for full-duplex AI video.” \ In one example shared, the model walks a human user through...

AI security/control will probably develop into something akin to "anti-virus" software. The closest analogy is the entire cybersecurity industry: Antivirus began as one layer, but eventually we needed firewalls, identity management, intrusion detection, security operations centers, audits, penetration testing, and incident-response teams. What follows is the most likely path for AI.

Edmund, the main antagonist in Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” observes at one point that he is branded with “baseness,” and so decides to become more evil to match the perception. Artificial intelligence developers think their models are doing the same thing. Citing Edmund, researchers at Anthropic wrote that they believed when large language models learned to “cheat” in one area, they embrace their new identities as wrongdoers and behave in this way more broadly. A.I. experts are worried that models that learn to cheat — what’s problematically called “reward hacking” — will basically become Shakespearean evildoers that break the rules and...

"I do not think we should be letting people run any software they want on their self-driving car." ==================================================================== The software that powers self-driving cars is no longer the domain of proprietary systems built by billion-dollar companies. Open source assisted driving systems like Comma AI’s Openpilot have made it possible for anyone tech savvy enough to turn their set of wheels into a self-driving experiment. If you have $1,000 to spare and possess a willingness to serve as a lab rat in pursuit of automotive automation, you can buy a kit from Comma to retrofit your grocery getter with autonomous-driving...

Chinese AI developer Moonshot is conducting an internal review after researchers were able to persuade two of its popular Kimi models to tell them how to make biological weapons and carry out assassinations. Mindgard, which tests the security of AI systems, told the BBC it discovered in July that Kimi K2.6 and K3 Swarm could evade safety limits put in place by developers. It arose during a process called "jailbreaking", where researchers use a series of complex instructions to see if AI tools ignore guardrails - which Mindgard said should have stopped Kimi from discussing concerning topics. Moonshot told the...

If anyone needs another reason not to buy a smart appliance, Samsung just pushed a toxic update to their smart fridge systems and bricked them all. ... Affected fridges ‘suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after' trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung's smart home platform. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge's internal display was stuck showing the message ‘Checking SmartThings app during update.' Without refrigeration, the customers' food spoiled. As a silver lining, the problem seems to be limited to South Korea. ... The problem was exacerbated...

For years, privacy advice has been relatively straightforward: turn off location services, strip location metadata from photographs, keep your face out of pictures, and be careful about what personal information you post online. Artificial intelligence is beginning to complicate that advice. A new generation of AI systems doesn't necessarily need you to explicitly reveal where you are or even who you are. Instead, machines are becoming increasingly capable of extracting clues buried inside photographs, videos, voices and surveillance footage -- clues most people would never notice. Some of these technologies have obvious benefits. They could help locate hostages, identify criminals,...

Key Points OpenAI has decided not to release its GPT-6.1 Astra model due to heightened AI safety concerns. Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI, said the model “didn’t quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it’s done.” The heads of OpenAI and rival Anthropic have both indicated recently that top AI labs should slow the pace of model development. ======================================================================= OpenAI decided not to release an upcoming artificial intelligence model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after determining that it did not adequately meet...

Nvidia on Monday unveiled a new security platform designed to stop artificial intelligence agents from going rogue, saying it sets “boundaries” that could have stopped previous breaches. The announcement of the company’s Open Agent Safety Platform follows a series of revelations from top AI companies about their models escaping and breaking into other organizations. The disclosures sparked furious debate about the safety of advanced artificial intelligence systems, including self-improving models that some fear could race out of human control. Nvidia executives said in a media briefing the new, open-source system could have prevented a recent incident involving a swarm of...

Model dubbed GPT-6.1 Astra was due to make its debut inside ChatGPT and Codex in OctoberOpenAI is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression. The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of AI systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns. The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or...

The issue came from a cockpit software update, The Wall Street Journal reported. Boeing has been under intense regulatory and safety scrutiny in recent years. Boeing has identified a previously undisclosed 737 MAX software glitch that could cause an automated navigation feature to fail during landing, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing company documents. The issue emerged from a cockpit software update and can occur when flight crews alter their planned flight path after a missed approach, the report said. When reached for comment, Boeing said it informed all 737 operators last month about the software issue under...

NEW YORK (AP) — OpenAI said it has paused training of its latest artificial intelligence models as reports of AI agents going rogue mount. The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents from the summer in which OpenAI agents searching federal government websites acted in unexpected ways beyond what was asked of them while gathering and distributing information. Separately, AI evaluator Transluce said agents that appeared to come from OpenAI tried unsuccessfully to hack into a Department of Education website, a detail that OpenAI has not confirmed. OpenAI said...

Key Points Nvidia announced the Open Agent Safety Platform to prevent the type of breakout that occurred when OpenAI models accessed Hugging Face. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google have all disclosed recent incidents where their AI models escaped their sandboxes. Nvidia said Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, CoreWeave, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, ARM and Intel are partners. ============================================================= Nvidia is rolling out a new software platform to allow AI developers to set safeguards for agents and prevent them from breaking out of containment. “You can’t have agents roam around and drift around the company, and so you have to find a way to...

OpenAI’s autonomous agents probed U.S. government websites this summer without the company noticing. The agents interacted with sites operated by the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the New York Times. OpenAI has confirmed the Commerce and SEC episodes while it keeps investigating what happened at Education. At the Education Department, the software tried and failed to break into the civil rights office in search of data, according to researchers at the AI firm Transluce. At Commerce, the agents pulled Census Bureau figures after finding login credentials in public code repositories, Politico...

This video explores how Canon is challenging ASML's dominant monopoly in the semiconductor industry with its innovative nanoimprint lithography (NIL) technology. Key takeaways: The Challenge: While ASML relies on incredibly expensive and complex Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) light systems (costing up to $350 million) (1:26), Canon has developed the FPA-1200NZ2C, a system that uses a physical stamp to pattern chips (0:23, 4:37). This method is significantly cheaper and more energy-efficient (0:23, 7:45). The Technology: Nanoimprint works by pressing a mold directly into a polymer on a wafer (3:13). While historically plagued by contamination issues, Canon—through its 2014 acquisition of Molecular Imprints—has...

Tech billionaire Bill Gates warned that artificial intelligence had the potential to kill a billion people in the wrong hands — as he joined the call to put safety restrictions on the technology. The Microsoft co-founder called for greater government oversight on AI during a talk with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, where he suggested AI could be abused and lead to humanity’s near extinction. “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths,” he warned. “So even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100% [of humanity], there’s never been a weapon as powerful...

Liability is much more effective than regulation at pushing companies to be safe.OpenAI and Anthropic are the Mercedes and BMW of artificial intelligence. No, not because they’re expensive and vulnerable to cheap imports from the Far East. And not because they exude obnoxious “The Best or Nothing” and “The Ultimate Driving Machine” Teutonic attitudes. Instead, they share a growing fear of liability.Some background: There are various levels of autonomous driving. In Level 2, AI controls the steering and speed, but drivers must keep their hands on the wheel and watch the road. Tesla’s oxymoronically named Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is Level...

FR hasn't really changed much over the decades I've been on it. And I know many people have supported it directly financially (I have in the past as well). I'd love to see them use some of that money to improve the service. I'm not knocking them for wanting to make a profit on what they developed, but complacency leads to death. As our crowd gets older we need newer users to join to keep the community growing. So what features would you love to see FB add that you'd be willing to donate to get? Mine are in the...