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In Arkansas next month, two supreme court justices are seeking re-election, sort of—neither is running for the seat they currently hold, but rather for each other’s seat on the bench.

Nick Bronni and Cody Hiland were both appointed to the state supreme court in late 2024 by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Technically, both were barred from running to keep their place on the court this year since the Arkansas constitution forbids officials who were appointed to fill a vacancy to then run for that position when it next appears on the ballot. But luckily for them, the timing of their appointments offered Bronni and Hiland a solution: Since they each faced this same predicament at the same time this year, they could just trade spots.

This game of musical chairs, while legal, has the effect of circumventing the constitution’s ban, which typically prevents gubernatorial appointees from reaping the benefits of incumbency before they’ve earned it from voters.

A South Jersey-headquartered auto company is set to receive a $10 million contract to equip U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vans with detainee-transportation inserts.

ICE intends to award the contract to Holman, a global company that serves commercial clients with automotive needs and also has several car dealerships.

Holman is headquartered in Mount Laurel. The company's manufacturing facility in Pennsauken is listed as the contractor in the outlined agreement with ICE.

Update

The contract between Holman and ICE will not move forward, a Holman spokesperson told Patch.

"I have been informed that we declined that particular body of work," the spokesperson said.

No other details on this development were immediately available.

The idea of machines that can build even better machines sounds like sci-fi, but the concept is becoming a reality as companies like Cadence tap into generative AI to design and validate next-gen processors that also use AI.

In the early days of integrated circuits, chips were designed by hand. In the more than half a century since then, semiconductors have grown so complex and their physical features so small that it's only possible to design chips using other chips. Cadence is one of several electronic design automation (EDA) vendors building software for this purpose.

Even with this software, the process of designing chips remains time-consuming and error-prone. But with the rise of generative AI, Cadence and others have begun exploring new ways to automate these processes.

Last month, the popular social video app TikTok finalized a deal with investors, including Oracle, to appease a bipartisan bill that called on the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to divest — or be banned in the United States.

The deal launched a frenzy among its US-based users over possible censorship, with some accusing it of taking down footage of ICE agents or restricting searches for words, such as “Epstein.” While TikTok denied these claims, pointing to a “data center power outage,” the app also changed its privacy policy at the time — now allowing it to collect more detailed data on its users, including their precise locations.

That sparked new fears. As The New Republic argues, TikTok’s deal means that agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose deportation efforts have been supercharged under the Trump administration, could skip tedious court-ordered data requests and monitor users by buying their data from private data brokers that obtain the info from TikTok directly — a “highly ironic” development, the magazine writes, considering the ByteDance deal was motivated in the first place by fears over Chinese state-sponsored surveillance.

It's a day with a name ending in Y, so you know what that means: Another OpenClaw cybersecurity disaster.

This time around, SecurityScorecard's STRIKE threat intelligence team is sounding the alarm over the sheer volume of internet-exposed OpenClaw instances it discovered, which numbers more than 135,000 as of this writing. When combined with previously known vulnerabilities in the vibe-coded AI assistant platform and links to prior breaches, STRIKE warns that there's a systemic security failure in the open-source AI agent space.

"Our findings reveal a massive access and identity problem created by poorly secured automation at scale," the STRIKE team wrote in a report released Monday. "Convenience-driven deployment, default settings, and weak access controls have turned powerful AI agents into high-value targets for attackers."

Chatbots may be able to pass medical exams, but that doesn’t mean they make good doctors, according to a new, large-scale study of how people get medical advice from large language models.

The controlled study of 1,298 UK-based participants, published today in Nature Medicine from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, tested whether LLMs could help people identify underlying conditions and suggest useful courses of action, like going to the hospital or seeking treatment. Participants were randomly assigned an LLM — GPT-4o, Llama 3, and Cohere’s Command R+ — or were told to use a source of their choice to “make decisions about a medical scenario as though they had encountered it at home,” according to the study. The scenarios included ailments like “a young man developing a severe headache after a night out with friends for example, to a new mother feeling constantly out of breath and exhausted,” the researchers said.

When the researchers tested the LLMs without involving users by providing the models with the full text of each clinical scenario, the models correctly identified conditions in 94.9 percent of cases. But when talking to the participants about those same conditions, the LLMs identified relevant conditions in fewer than 34.5 percent of cases. People didn’t know what information the chatbots needed, and in some scenarios, the chatbots provided multiple diagnoses and courses of action. Knowing what questions to ask a patient and what information might be withheld or missing during an examination are nuanced skills that make great human physicians; based on this study, chatbots can’t reliably replicate that kind of care.

Archive: http://archive.today/jsZHk

Discord announced on Monday that it’s rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users’ accounts to a “teen-appropriate” experience unless they demonstrate that they’re adults.

Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won’t be able to speak in Discord’s livestream-like “stage” channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox.

Direct messages and servers that are not age-restricted will continue to function normally, but users won’t be able to send messages or view content in an age-restricted server until they complete the age check process, even if it’s a server they were part of before age verification rolled out. Savannah Badalich, Discord’s global head of product policy, said in an interview with The Verge that those servers will be “obfuscated” with a black screen until the user verifies they’re an adult. Users also won’t be able to join any new age-restricted servers without verifying their age.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42908267

Funding cuts to a key federal agency have left secretaries of states scrambling to fill in the gaps to ensure the election process is secure.

Funding for threat monitoring through the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a DHS-funded nonprofit agency, was cut because it “no longer supports Department priorities,” according to a letter DHS sent to the center last year, which was obtained by NBC News.

“The fact that they’ve actually dismantled and defunded the very real, tried and true infrastructure that was in place in 2020 to protect our elections against foreign interference, that speaks for itself about where their focus really is,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who is running for governor. “State officials are all we have left in terms of guardrails over all these processes.”

Even I print whistles now. It’s the first thing I do each morning after dropping kids at school, and the very last before bed. Usually, I squeeze in a hundred more after dinner.

I print whistles because reality still matters; whistles get neighbors to come running, make sure enough people are recording, so when the regime pretends there’s only one camera angle of Renee Good’s death, we know the truth.

I also make whistles because it’s easy. You can literally do it in your sleep. I’ve made over 12,000 whistles since January 15th with three printers and almost zero optimization. I’ll harvest 300 of them tomorrow morning, 300 in the late afternoon, and another 100 in the evening before I do it all again.

Archive: http://archive.today/d51vy

Late Thursday night, President Donald Trump posted a short video which included a horrifically racist image portraying former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes.

This was ugly and inexcusable, but not exactly a surprise. Trump has been a vile racist for his entire adult life and has said and promoted vile racism over his last 10 years in and out of the White House. This time, though, was different — not really because of the content, but because of the backlash from within his own party.

The video and its racism were denounced by a wide range of Republicans, including staunch Trump allies. As far as the GOP is concerned, the disgusting video seems to be the worst thing Trump has done since the 2021 insurrection.

A Russian magazine editor claims his publisher demanded he censor a book that mentions homosexuality in animals because it violates the country’s “LGBT propaganda” law.

Viktor Kovylin, editor of the scientific journal Batrachospermum, wrote on Telegram that his publisher told him the descriptions of same-sex behavior in a book on animal sexual behavior were against the law because they did not express “disgust or criticism” for the acts.

“Apparently, neutral scientific descriptions of homosexual behavior, without disgust or criticism, now fall under the category of propaganda for non-traditional relationships!” Kovylin wrote on Telegram, according to a translation.

The US government has found a frighteningly efficient way to keep tabs on citizens who criticize the government: just demand their personal data from Google.

According to recent reporting from the Washington Post, a 67-year-old retiree sent a polite email to an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security urging mercy for an asylum seeker facing deportation to Afghanistan. The man, identified only as Jon, had read about the Afghani native’s case, and his fear that he would be persecuted should he ever return to his home country.

“Don’t play Russian roulette with [this man’s] life,” Jon told lead DHS prosecutor, Joseph Dernbach, in the email. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”