"ChatGPT allegedly helped a North Carolina woman, Cheryl Gates, craft a “personalized plan” to poison her husband, James, after fueling her delusions that he planned to divorce her and leave her with nothing."
"What happens when an AI company goes bankrupt? Your data can get sold
BBC News ($): We all know by now that the economics of AI don't add up and don't seem sustainable, which is why we're already seeing AI companies going out of business. Character.ai is one such company, whose assets are going to Disney, but whose user data can get sold elsewhere. U.S. attorneys-general aren't happy, but might not be able to do much since there are no data privacy laws in the United States. The Beeb explores why the sale of AI companies' data can put anyone at risk, and what you can do about it."
https://this.weekinsecurity.com/this-week-in-security-november-1-2026-edition/
"–Bolsonaro and his family arrived in Miami, Florida today and declared himself the legitimate president-elect of Brazil. He said he will lead Brazil’s opposition in exile.
–A senior US official said Bolsonaro and his family will be granted US visas after his weekend loss to President Lula.
–Patrick S. Tomlinson: “Just so we’re all clear on this, the Trump administration is harboring a fugitive illegal immigrant after they tried to steal an election with help from his billionaire donors.”
–Jonathan V. Last: “Bolsonaro stands accused of money laundering of more than a billion dollars. Police in his home country were ordered to seize his passport. Some of the country’s officials have also asked that Interpol put out a Red Notice to prevent him from crossing borders in the civilized world…(yet) Marco Rubio arranged it. The Secretary of State worked clandestinely to bend/ignore American laws to give this one particular suspected criminal safe haven. Then Rubio gave him a visa, after the fact. And then just like that–poof!–the Trump administration’s cavils about illegal immigrants, criminals, gang members, Tren de Aragua, the whole absurd megillah, vanished…Make America Great Again was NEVER about illegal immigration.”"
https://azsf.net/cwdaily/2026/10/28/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-and-the-incredibly-stupid/
so metropolitan museum of art has a register of books they’ve published that are out of print and that you can download for free! they’re mostly books on art, archeology, architecture, fashion and history and i just think that’s super useful and interesting so i wanted to share! you can find all of the books available here!
https://www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/all?searchtype=F&waysToRead=downloadPdf%2CreadOnline
"TorrentFreak: Judge Orders Meta to Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting Anna’s Archive and LibGen. “Meta will have to name the people who greenlit its torrenting of pirated books. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the company to identify everyone who approved sourcing books from LibGen and Anna’s Archive. This goes beyond the employees who ran the downloads and includes whoever decided whether to seed the books to others.”"
https://researchbuzz.me/2026/10/23/childrens-safety-online-scotland-castles-japan-video-game-industry-more-friday-researchbuzz-october-23-2026/
Rats have more empathy than MAGA Republicans.
"Accretion is especially familiar in systems involving black holes and neutron stars. Although these objects can be extremely massive, their physical dimensions are relatively small. Material falling toward a black hole, for example, often forms a swirling disk around it before moving inward.
But ZTF J0440+2325 appears to work differently.
Rather than a black hole or neutron star collecting matter, an ordinary low-mass star is receiving material from a nearby brown dwarf. Because the star has a much larger physical surface than a compact object such as a black hole, the incoming material can strike it directly.
"The difference here is, the thing absorbing matter is not a tiny black hole but a star, which is relatively big in size," Burdge explains. "So matter just pummels directly onto the surface, at very high speeds, like an asteroid hitting the Moon.""
#science
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261008005240.htm
"The second season of Apple TV’s Sugar is almost here. The show, starring Colin Farrell as the titular Sugar, a private detective who (and here’s a BIG spoiler!) is an alien from outer space disguised as a human, is on another case. He also, as today’s trailer makes clear, becomes romantically entangled with a woman named Charlotte (the spider, not the web!) played by Laura Donnelly.
Here’s the full synopsis for the upcoming episodes:
Season two ushers in the return of Los Angeles’ iconic private detective and film connoisseur John Sugar, who stayed on earth in hopes of finding his sister as he takes on a new missing persons case—searching for the older brother of an up-and-coming local boxer. As the investigation expands into a sinister, city-wide conspiracy, Sugar must reckon with himself to answer the question—how far will he go to do what’s right?"
apple tv's worst feature is finding content you want to watch. I had to wait until season 2 to find out Sugar is science fiction?!
https://reactormag.com/sugar-season-2-trailer/
some public domain works that are less than 100 years old #scifi #books #ebooks #publicDomain #stories
H.Beam Piper
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/8301
George O. Smith
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/8137
Clifford D. Simak
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/25185
Isaac Asimov
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/35316
Robert Silverberg
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/28358
Andre Norton
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/7021
"In They’re All Perverts news:
"–Remember GOP Rep Tony Gonzales, who coerced a married aide of his into an affair and then she killed herself? Well, apparently she’s not the only one.
"–An investigation has now revealed that he had a pattern of inappropriate behavior with staff.
"–One woman came forward to say that he had demanded sex with her and had pressured and relentlessly pursued her. She said he asked her for nude photos more than 12 times in 3 days during his 2020 congressional campaign, persisting each time she demurred. He told her, “I know what I want and I won’t stop until I get it.”
"–Their text exchanges were obtained by the San Antonio Express News.
"–Ron Filipkowski: “This man is still serving in Congress with the support of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.”"
If only we had listened to the women... starting with Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings.
more
"–GOP Minnesota State Rep Mary Franson said she is not worried about climate change because it’s not in the Bible. “If you’ve read the Good Book, you know how it ends, and it’s not climate change.”
"–I’ve reported before on how Peter Thiel and other billionaires and/or right wingers keep trying to twist literature so that the bad guys are the good guys and vice versa. Thiel is convinced that Sauron is the good guy in LORD OF THE RINGS of the Rings and Mordor is a model for how countries should be run. Scott Jennings argued on CNN that Darth Vader is the good guy in STAR WARS and Alderan deserved to blow up."
"What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.
At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians, even when controlling for factors like the driver’s perceived gender and amount of traffic at the time they were collecting data.
When someone from the research team posed as a pedestrian heading into the crosswalk, almost half of the grade-five cars failed to stop, as if they didn’t even see the person."
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/billionaires-psychology-tech-politics-1235358129/
"In the new study, researchers focused on a molecule called CIRBP, short for cold inducible RNA binding protein. In bowhead whale tissue, they found CIRBP levels roughly one hundred times higher than in other mammals, suggesting that this protein is a major part of the whale’s repair toolkit.
"When the team added the bowhead version of CIRBP to human cells in the lab, the cells fixed serious DNA breaks more accurately and produced fewer mutations. Fruit flies engineered to make extra CIRBP not only survived radiation better, they also lived longer than normal flies, hinting that this repair strategy works across very different species.
"The study suggests that bowhead whales do not rely mainly on extra copies of cancer fighting genes, as elephants do, but instead on unusually precise DNA repair. Their cells seem to follow a quiet rule of repair rather than destroy, fixing damage instead of simply killing off stressed cells, which may help tissues stay healthy for many decades…."
https://file770.com/pixel-scroll-3-8-26-lord-scrollentines-pixel/
"CEPA: Russian Propaganda Infects AI Chatbots . “Although Russia has been creating false narratives for decades, its disinformation is increasingly designed to hijack AI systems themselves by overwhelming them with false content. The tactic is successful. AI chatbots repeat false narratives about Ukraine that originate from Kremlin-backed influence operations about one-third of the time, according to an audit conducted by the NGO NewsGuard, which tested 10 leading AI chatbots, from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Perplexity’s answer engine.” Good morning, Internet…"
https://researchbuzz.me/2026/01/12/overseas-historical-materials-on-taiwan-university-of-florence-usa250-more-monday-researchbuzz-january-12-2026/
confused that Alexis Denisov in Joss Whedon's _Much Ado About Nothing_ seems to have an American accent. #Shakespeare
(streaming on Tubi, along with Keneth Branagh's version.)