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Just over a week ago, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr declared that the ongoing outbreak of the explosive diarrhea-causing parasite was “under control.”But the reality is that cases are climbing into the thousands across 45 states, as USA Today reports, meaning his reassurances appear to have been a gross overstatement. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of cases increased by an additional 2,500 cases between July 21 and July 28 alone.As of this week, the CDC has confirmed over 6,700 cases since May 1 and is “aware of more than 11,500…

There’s been plenty of buzz lately around vandalism of Flock Safety’s automatic license plate readers, which are AI-integrated surveillance cameras that index license plate data from passing vehicles indiscriminately and without a warrant.Countless vigilantes have taken to the roadways armed with trash bags, spray paint, laser pointers, and power drills to render the surveillance poles useless, resulting in arrests and investigations by police.But what if there was another way to block Flock cameras that didn’t involve damaging public property? Turns out they’ll come after you for that, too.A 77-year old Florida man named Carl Gunn decided to take matters into…

Perhaps more so than any other social media platform, LinkedIn has been inundated with lazy AI-generated brainrot content. It has become the AI slop “punching bag,” a repository of painful engagement bait being spewed out by an army of bots who seem at times to mainly be lobbing business platitudes at one another.Just last week, Substack CEO Chris Best took aim at the Microsoft-owned career site when he announced the launch of an AI detector feature “because we’re sick of slop and we don’t want Substack to turn into LinkedIn.”According to AI detection company Pangram, a shocking two thirds of…

Don’t worry about the death toll and economic devastation. There’s money to be made!As the United States launches a “heavy wave” of strikes against Iran, a conflict that turned from a limited incursion into an extremely expensive and painfully drawn-out war, some clear winners are starting to emerge — and we’re definitely not talking about the American people.As the Wall Street Journal reports, British fossil fuel giant Shell is reaping enormous profits thanks to spiking oil prices triggered by the conflict in Iran. Its second-quarter adjusted earnings rose from just shy of $7 billion the previous quarter to a stunning…

It may already feel like a distant memory, but Cambridge Analytica was once implicated in one of the biggest social media scandals in history.Back in March 2018, journalists at The Observer and The New York Times revealed that the little-known data analytics firm had improperly harvested the Facebook data of tens of millions of users without their consent. Owned by billionaire Robert Mercer and operated by Donald Trump’s die-hard operative Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica had used the massive trove of personal data to target voters with attacks against Hillary Clinton, Trump’s rival in the 2016 presidential election. Executives at the…

A vast field of mesmerizing polygons has left Mars scientists enthralled.Don’t be mistaken: NASA didn’t send a robot across the solar system so its eggheads could get a rundown in basic geometry. Instead, the Curiosity rover stumbled upon a stretch of the Martian valley called “Valle Grande” where the landscape is defined by honeycomb-shaped patterns ranging two to four inches in diameter.These so-called “polygonal fractures” have been spotted elsewhere on the Red Planet, but never texturing an entire landscape at such a scale.“We’ve seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity’s eyes, but this sea of polygons took our breath…

Meta knows its AI-powered camera equipped spectacles are widely seen as “pervert glasses.” And though it professes to be cracking down on creeps using them to record people without their consent, whatever measures it’s taking clearly aren’t working.After Meta announced this month that it would ban users using the glasses to film themselves harassing strangers, a recent investigation by Oligarch Watch still found hundreds of these videos on its platforms. Many of them are from sleazy “pickup artists” who approach women in public, making sexual or degrading comments and recording their buttocks or breasts.In one viral video on Instagram, a…

How do we combat the scourge of school shootings? The distinctly cyberpunk gamble that some places of learning are taking: rapid response drones.Multiple schools across three states will soon have their own veritable platoons of pepper-spraying drones to hunt down active shooters, The Washington Post reports, waiting to spring into action the moment they’re called on.Traveling at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and capable of smashing through the windows, the so-called “Campus Guardian Angels” can reach a gunman within just fifteen seconds, the manufacturer Mithril Defense claims.In addition to blasting a shooter with pepper spray, they can…

By now, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who isn’t broadly familiar with the AI heavyweights and their flagship models. OpenAI has ChatGPT, Anthropic has Claude, Google has Gemini. But what does Amazon have?Not a whole lot, it turns out. Unlike its competitors in the tech megacorp scene, Amazon’s standout AI model — organized under the name “Nova” — is about the farthest thing from a household name. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon, because the ecommerce giant is now gutting its in-house AI labs, Bloomberg reports.Per the outlet, Amazon is scaling back the ambitions of most…

The US and European stock markets might be numb to the enormity of the AI bubble at this point, but in East Asia it’s a different story.In South Korea, the AI bubble appears to be bursting — at least partially — with the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (Kopsi) plummeting by over 40 percent from its June highs after the Korean chipmaker SK Hynix failed to impress investors despite reporting a sixfold increase in quarterly earnings.Across July 28 and 29, Seoul Economic Daily reports widespread panic triggered not just one but two “circuit breakers” on the Korea Exchange, a sort…