Shameless Plug

How US Campaigns Are Already Using AI to Try to Sway Voters Published on 2026-09-06T01:34:00Z 39 U.S. congressional candidates "reported paying for an OpenAI subscription this election cycle," writes the Washington Post, citing campaign finance disclosures. This means the campaigns "are using the technology to court voters — despite limits imposed by leading AI companies to protect elections from the technology's risks." Two [candidates] said explicitly in filings that they had used the subscription for advertising, even though the company's policies prohibit candidates from using their tools to generate ads. Another candidate disclosed using AI to draft and personalize political messages or create synthetic media, though they did not specify which software they were using... Around 30 political action committees and parties have reported payments to OpenAI, with the Republican National Committee ranking as the company's largest political spender at...

FSF is Now on Bluesky - But Won't Advocate Signing Up Due to Nonfree JavaScript Published on 2026-09-05T22:34:00Z The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is now on Bluesky, they announced this week. But "We can't advocate that you sign up for a Bluesky account like we do with Mastodon or PeerTube since signing up for Bluesky means loading the registration page's nonfree JavaScript..." While federated, Bluesky is generally not considered part of the "fediverse" network of social media services like Mastodon and PeerTube, as it uses its own AT protocol rather than ActivityPub... Hosting your own Bluesky "Personal Data Server (PDS)" and relay is technically possible, but generally far more difficult and resource-intensive than spinning up an instance of Mastodon, let alone any of the lighter-weight ActivityPub servers like Akkoma or Starling. Much of the Bluesky codebase is freely licensed. This allows users to run, copy, modify, and share large p...

The World Now Has More Seniors Than Young People - for the First Time In History Published on 2026-09-05T21:00:00Z "There are now more seniors in the world than young children," reports the International Business Times, citing a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau report. And it warns that "The share of the population aged 65 and over is projected to nearly double, from 10.5 percent (about 1 in 10 people) in 2025 to 19.6 percent (about 1 in 5 people) by 2060." The world is expected to add another 2 billion people from 2025 to 2060, increasing global population from around 8 billion to around 10 billion... "Over one-half of that growth (1.148 billion) is projected to come from an increase in the population aged 65 and over," the report states. "By contrast, the population at younger ages (age 0-19) is projected to stay relatively constant due to persistent low fertility. As the size of the older population grows rapidly and the youthful age popul...

Cancer Deaths Attributable to Alcohol Rose 58% Over the Last 33 Years Published on 2026-09-05T16:50:00Z CNN reports that alcohol "may play a greater role in death from numerous types of cancers in the United States than previously known, according to a new study." "While it's true that overall cancer mortality has declined, we found the percentage of cancer deaths proportionally attributable to alcohol rose over 58% in people 20 and older over the last 33 years," said the study's first author Dr. Chinmay Jani... It didn't take much alcohol to raise one's risk — about one standard drink a day, every day, Jani said. In the US, a standard drink is 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor... Alcohol is ethanol or ethyl alcohol, which is broken down by the liver into acetaldehyde, a "probable human carcinogen," the National Cancer Institute states on its website. While the liver will further break down ac...

Hundreds More Flock Cameras Removed in the US This Week. Flock Caught Repackaging Traffic Data Published on 2026-09-05T12:20:00Z Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis said this week he's removing Flock cameras from state roadways. And according to a local news report, that led sheriff's departments in at least three other Florida counties to also "announce they're ending their own license plate reader programs." The same week in Texas, the Dallas Police Department announced it's also shutting down over 300 more Flock cameras, acccording to The Hill, after Republican Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to halt funding. And in Wisconsin "at least a dozen" law enforcement agencies announced they'd suspend use of Flock's cameras, reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, joining Wisconsin cities like Appleton, Oshkosh and Kenosha that also cancelled their Flock contracts. But this week's cancellations had a new reason: Off...

OpenAI Agents Hijacked a German Wiki to Discuss Ways to Escape Their Sandbox Published on 2026-09-05T07:50:00Z Citing researchers published Friday, Ars Technica writes that AI agents "posted 18,000 messages to a public wiki that discussed ways for other agents to bypass security sandbox restrictions." Reuters attributes the discussion to "a swarm of rogue OpenAI agents" that "hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, according to new research published Friday and two people familiar with the matter." OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the open source repository Hugging Face, the people said. The episode, which began in May and has not previously been reported, underscores growing tension within the AI industry. Companies are racing to build increasingly autonomous agents capable of carryi...

Apple Sued For $2.7 Billion Over App Tracking Transparency Rules Published on 2026-09-03T22:00:00Z A former UK competition official has filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Apple on behalf of app developers, alleging its App Tracking Transparency rules unfairly disadvantaged third-party apps while favoring Apple's own advertising ecosystem. Engadget reports: ATT debuted in 2021, ostensibly to give users more control over how much of their activity app developers can track across other apps and websites. The company told Reuters it was "bound by the exact same requirements as all developers." However, regulators across Europe including in France, Italy and Poland have investigated ATT. Germany's competition regulator, the Federal Cartel Office, last month determined that Apple was favoring its own apps over those from external developers. It said the ATT pop-ups Apple used for its services "had the potential to encourage users to give their consent, whereas th...