curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Will Douglas Heaven @ MIT Technology Review:
A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack
It makes it easy to trick them into doing things they shouldn’t, such as telling you how to sabotage an aircraft’s navigation system.
It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety of this technology, which is being used in more and more applications, from government and military systems to online shopping and health care.
By taking advantage of this flaw, which concerns how LLMs identify who or what is giving them instructions, the researchers were able to make popular LLMs spit out information they had been trained not to provide, such as how to synthesize cocaine and how to sabotage a commercial aircraft’s navigation system.
“There’s a real probability that this is going to be a problem that’s fundamentally unsolvable,” says Charles Ye, an independent researcher and coauthor of the ICML paper.
…
The problem, says Jasmine Cui, another independent researcher and coauthor of the paper, is that the approach amounts to giving the models a list of things they shouldn’t do. But no list is exhaustive. “It’s like watching The Simpsons and they have Bart writing ‘I will not say something inappropriate to my teacher’ a hundred times,” she says. “And he still does things that are pretty crass anyway.”
(Will Douglas Heaven @ MIT Technology Review more…)
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Mike Brock:
The House of Ellison is on the BrinkEverything the world’s briefly richest man built is failing at once.
On the morning of September 10, 2025, Larry Ellison was the richest man alive. Oracle had reported earnings the night before, and the story inside the numbers was a backlog: hundreds of billions of dollars in contracted future cloud revenue, nearly all of it from artificial intelligence, the largest single piece of it from one customer. The stock rose as much as 43 percent in a day. Ellison, who owns roughly 40 percent of the company he founded in 1977, gained $101 billion overnight — the largest single-day wealth gain ever recorded on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — and passed Elon Musk, his net worth cresting at $393 billion. …
The customer was OpenAI. The contract was three hundred billion dollars of computing capacity over roughly five years, sold to a company that has never earned a profit and burns billions in cash every year. The market heard the number and paid Ellison for it as if the money were already in the vault.
Ten months later, the ledger reads like a curse working its way through everything the man owns. …
…One disclosure before anything else: I am short Oracle stock. I will profit if what I describe here keeps happening, and you deserve to know that before you weigh a word of it. …
(Mike Brock more…)
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James Eagle:
Global government bond yields near crisis-era highs
(James Eagle more…)Jennifer Rubin: Trump’s ‘thriving economy’ is a disaster.
Michele Hornish: Adding Shape to the Cost of Their Spending
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – August 4, 2026
On Friday night, a court filing from Capital One denied there was any political motivation behind the closure of more than 380 bank accounts in the names of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. Instead, it stated, the accounts were closed “for anti-money laundering reasons.” It said “transaction patterns” had triggered the review.
President Donald J. Trump has maintained that banks refused to do business with him after January 6, 2021, for political reasons. As Allison Morrow of CNN reported yesterday, Trump and his supporters, including cryptocurrency ventures, have used the idea that they were being “debanked” because of their political beliefs to claim they are victims. Last year, Trump and the Trump Organization sued Capital One in federal court in Florida, saying they had sustained “considerable financial harm” after the bank closed about 385 of their accounts.
Observers note that the story of Trump wanting immunity from IRS audits and the revelation that his bank activity mirrored that of money launderers might well be the same story.
…Financial irregularities surrounding Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein are also in the news today. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who is famous for following money trails doggedly, released a report saying that JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank held off on filing required suspicious activity reports in transactions associated with Jeffrey Epstein.
…The report concludes that “top executives at major Wall Street banks were aware of Epstein’s suspicious financial activity for years but withheld information from the U.S. government, protecting Epstein from federal scrutiny” as they sought access to his money, which generated millions in fees every year, and to the money of his friends.
…… On Saturday, Trump began selling access to his social media posts to Wall Street trading firms milliseconds before they go public, permitting them to buy and sell with insider information. The cost for this service, according to Marina Dunbar of The Guardian, is up to $100,000 a month.
Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law, an expert in government conflicts of interest rules, told Bernard Condon of the Associated Press that this scheme is “yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)Rook T. Winchester: How Four Banks and Multiple Government Officials Helped Bury a $2 Billion Money Trail
Dean Blundell: CBS Taped BOMBSHELL 60 Minutes Epstein Story. Then Bari Weiss Fired the Reporter and Buried the Tape To Cover For Trump.
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Hans Christensen: Greenland Scientists Stop US Collaboration
Based on warnings from the intelligence service, Greenland University and other institutions have ceased to accept new collaborations with US researchers
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Mikella Schuettler @ Independent: Ranchers win fight as Trump halts border wall water drilling in drought-hit New Mexico
Customs and Border Protection has ordered construction crews building Trump’s second border wall to stop drilling wells in drought-stricken New Mexico after ranchers said pumping the groundwater needed to mix cement could threaten their livestock
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Katelyn Jetelina @ Your Local Epidemiologist: Covid-19 summer wave, peak mosquito season, two Cyclospora deaths (and the outbreak calming down), and more
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Borowitz: Andy Beshear Demands to Know if Rand Paul is Brain-Dead
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Rebecca Crosby, Noel Sims: Is this the most dishonest ad of 2026?
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Mitch Jackson: The $1.776 Billion Shakedown: Why the Anti-Weaponization Fund and the Trump Tax Immunity Order Are Unethical, Illegal, and Unenforceable
(Mitch Jackson more…)Dean Blundell: Todd Blanche Was Just Caught Promising The End Of Abortion Pills In All 50 States If Confirmed As AG
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- August 1: Edwin Lopez-Cornejo
- July 14: Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran
- July 13: Joan Sebastian Guerrero
- July 7: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
- June 4: Mamuka Artmeladze
- April 16: Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt
- March 25: Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
April 1 – Jennifer Peltz and Jake Offenhartz @ AP: Death of a refugee left at a Buffalo doughnut shop by Border Patrol is ruled a homicide - January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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