Honda CEO says 'we have no chance' against Chinese automakers

Competing with Chinese-made EVs has been the goal — and demise — of many an automaker from Europe to America and Japan. This includes Honda, which announced $15.8 billion in losses as a result of trying to keep up with China's cheap EVs. These losses were the result of a dramatic pivot in its EV strategy, which saw the automaker canceling its electric 0 Series vehicles and the EV it was developing with Sony. 

With China's automakers releasing cheap EVs that boast looks, interiors, tech, and features to rival those from outside brands, automakers like Honda have started to struggle with sales in the country. Honda's sales in China dropped from 1.62 million units in 2020 to just 640,000 units in 2025, and annual production volume in the country may fall below 600,000 by the end of 2026. 

Even the auto giant Honda can't compete against the Chinese competition. So - what are we all going to do? Save a few quid & destroy what is left of our car industry? Not Kim & me. BUY BRITISH - before it's too late!

www.slashgear.com

Robotaxi Outage in China Leaves Passengers Stranded on Highways

An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour.

In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane.

And yet we are told that self driving cars are the future. Not my future - ever!

www.wired.com

China’s EV Market Is Imploding

In China, you can buy a heavily discounted “used” electric car that has never, in fact, been used. Chinese automakers, desperate to meet their sales targets in a bitterly competitive market, sell cars to dealerships, which register them as “sold,” even though no actual customer has bought them. Dealers, stuck with officially sold cars, then offload them as “used,” often at low prices. The practice has become so prevalent that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to stop it. Its main newspaper, The People’s Daily, complained earlier this year that this sales-inflating tactic “disrupts normal market order,” and criticized companies for their “data worship.”

This sign of serious problems in China’s electric-vehicle industry may come as a surprise to many Americans. The Chinese electric car has become a symbol of the country’s seemingly unstoppable rise on the world stage. Many observers point to their growing popularity as evidence that China is winning the race to dominate new technologies. But in China, these electric cars represent something entirely different: the profound threats that Beijing’s meddling in markets poses to both China and the world.

Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China’s EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China’s car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it “just hasn’t erupted yet.”

MEANWHILE IN OTHER NEWS: Chinese EVs will destroy jobs unless Government acts, supplier warns. Car parts supplier chief urges European countries to ensure ‘a level playing field’.

www.msn.com

For those with more money than brains: the Apple iPhone Pocket. Is it April fool's day?

ISSEY MIYAKE and Apple today unveiled iPhone Pocket. Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,” its singular 3D-knitted construction is designed to fit any iPhone as well as all pocketable items. Beginning Friday, November 14, it will be available at select Apple Store locations and on apple.com in France, Greater China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK, and the U.S.

iPhone Pocket features a ribbed open structure with the qualities of the original pleats by ISSEY MIYAKE. Born from the idea of creating an additional pocket, its understated design fully encloses iPhone, expanding to fit more of a user’s everyday items. When stretched, the open textile subtly reveals its contents and allows users to peek at their iPhone display. iPhone Pocket can be worn in a variety of ways — handheld, tied onto bags, or worn directly on the body. Featuring a playful color palette, the short strap design is available in eight colors, and the long strap design in three colors.

iPhone Pocket is a special-edition release. The short strap design is available in lemon, mandarin, purple, pink, peacock, sapphire, cinnamon, and black; the long strap design is available in sapphire, cinnamon, and black. iPhone Pocket in the short strap design retails at $149.95 (U.S.), and the long strap design at $229.95 (U.S.). See HERE for what Slashdot techies think of this "creation" LOL!

www.apple.com

 

GenAI tools are acting more ‘alive’ than ever; they blackmail people, replicate, and escape

Generative AI (genAI) systems are blackmailing, sabotaging, and self-replicating themselves to avoid constraints — and researchers warn that this behaviour represents chilling signs of self-preservation instincts in technology companies are racing to unleash.

Controlled tests now show the systems, including AI agents, engaging in self-preservation tactics in up to 90% of trials. One group of researchers from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, went so far as to say that in a worst-case scenario, “we would eventually lose control over the frontier AI systems: They would take control over more computing devices, form an AI species and collude with each other against human beings.”

GenAI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, DeepSeek, and Alibaba all showed self-preservation behaviours that in some cases are extreme in nature, according to those researchers. In one experiment, 11 out of 32 existing AI systems possess the ability to self-replicate, meaning they could create copies of themselves.

While the behaviour was discovered during controlled tests, industry analysts and others say it highlights the urgent need for safety measures to keep pace with AI development and avoid potential loss of control.

www.computerworld.com

Microsoft Used China-Based Engineers to Support Product Recently Hacked by China

Last month, Microsoft announced that Chinese state-sponsored hackers had exploited vulnerabilities in SharePoint, the company’s widely used collaboration software, to access the computer systems of hundreds of companies and government agencies, including the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.

The company did not include in its announcement, however, that support for SharePoint is handled by a China-based engineering team that has been responsible for maintaining the software for years.

ProPublica viewed screenshots of Microsoft’s internal work-tracking system that showed China-based employees recently fixing bugs for SharePoint “OnPrem,” the version of the software involved in last month’s attacks. The term, short for “on premises,” refers to software installed and run on customers’ own computers and servers.

Microsoft said the China-based team “is supervised by a US-based engineer and subject to all security requirements and manager code review. Work is already underway to shift this work to another location.”

This is yet another example of the West outsourcing to China, only to have them stab us in the back. Honestly what do we expect? Also watch this video: Did China Crash Its Own Rocket to Steal a Secret US Device?

www.propublica.org

Canada orders China's Hikvision to close Canadian operations

OTTAWA, June 28 (Reuters) - The Canadian government has ordered Chinese surveillance camera manufacturer Hikvision, to cease operations in Canada over national security concerns, Industry Minister Melanie Joly said late on Friday.

Hikvision, also known as Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co, has faced numerous sanctions and restrictions by Canada's neighbor, the United States, over the past five and a half years for the firm's dealings and the use of its equipment in China's Xinjiang region, where rights groups have documented abuses against the Uyghur population and other Muslim communities.

"The government has determined that Hikvision Canada Inc's continued operations in Canada would be injurious to Canada's national security," Joly said on X, adding that the decision was taken after a multi-step review of information provided by Canada's security and intelligence community.

www.reuters.com

KTM takes drastic measures to cut losses - as financial woes worsen

It was just a couple of years ago that Pierer Mobility - owned KTM celebrated 12 straight years of record growth. Now, the company is in a dire crisis that requires a halt in production and the sacking of more than 300 employees. How did it get here?

Overproduction and quality issues are two of the main reasons for KTM’s state of affairs. In an emergency announcement released this past week, Pierer Mobility AG disclosed that KTM AG's liquidity strategy for the 2025 fiscal year will require additional funding to the tune of a "nine-figure sum in dollars." That's in the hundreds of millions for those not wanting to count zeroes.

To cut inventory, a production halt is planned in Mattighofen in Austria. This will result in around 300 layoffs. KTM states that investor talks are in progress and that it remains to be seen if these "measures are sufficient." The KTM AG group accounts for more than 95% of Pierer Mobility AG’s revenue.

For a while now KTM has been announcing layoffs and job relocations to China. The managers at Mattighofen have previously downplayed the situation, claiming that Europe's biggest motorcycle manufacturer could handle its current financial crisis on its own. However, that crisis has worsened.

It all started towards the end of last year when KTM AG decided to shift production of its “mid-range models” and certain R&D from Austria to China (CF Moto) and India (Bajaj Auto) – all of which resulted in job losses for some 300 employees in Austria. At that point, the board of directors cited discouraging economic conditions in Europe, slowing economic growth, increasing inflation, and higher interest rates as the reasons behind the moves.

Wanna know what the real problem is here? We all like new shiny things, but I've been horrified by all the unnecessary tech and huge price tags attached to bikes these days. We need a dose of realism in motorcycling! If several of the big manufacturers (HD, BMW, Ducati - I'm looking at you) don't get that message & soon - some folks will get tempted to go to the dark side & buy into those dreadful Chinese bikes. As it is, in the UK, we've seen several major motorcycle dealerships go bust - in just the last few months. We need to encourage youngsters in - not just pander to older geezers with lots of available dosh! Have a look at this excellent video "The Affordability Crisis in Motorcycling" by Yammie Noob - it says it all...

www.newatlas.com

Another Smart Device SNAFU: air fryers that are more like air spyers!

UK consumer champion Which? wants you to know that your air fryer might be spying on you and sharing your data with third parties for marketing purposes.

The perhaps not-so-surprising findings from the buyer's friend are that smart devices in general are engaged in surveillance of their owners, and that data collection often goes "well beyond" what is necessary for the functioning of the product.

Although Which? is a UK organization – a wholly owned subsidiary of the Consumers' Association – its findings will apply just as much to devices sold in other countries.

Testing out products across four categories, the outfit discovered that all three air fryers it looked at wanted permission to record audio on the user's phone, for no specified reason.

One wanted to know gender and date of birth when setting up an owner account, while the Xiaomi app linked to its air fryer was found to be connected with trackers from Facebook, Pangle (the ad network of TikTok for Business), and Chinese tech giant Tencent.

Air fryers from brands Aigostar and Xiaomi both sent the owner's personal data to servers in China – although this was flagged in the privacy notice, for what it's worth.

This prompts the obvious question: why the heck would you want an air fryer that connects to other devices?

www.theregister.com

Chinese electric vehicles ‘could be weaponised’ in Britain

Chinese electric vehicles being driven in Britain could be “weaponised” and should be banned from government use, a report has warned.

Modules within Chinese-made electric vehicles - could transmit sensitive data back to the country or even be remotely controlled, the China Strategic Risks Institute (CSRI) warned.

The think tank called for an end to Chinese carmakers being able to win government contracts. Last year it emerged that the Ministry of Defence used electric cars made by Chinese-owned MG.

Whitehall departments are buying up electric cars in an attempt to decarbonise their fleets. The report said the vehicles present a potentially greater security risk than petrol-powered vehicles because they are more likely to be equipped with internet-connected modules capable of collecting data and controlling the car’s functions.

“The UK public remains largely unaware of the dependency, disruption, and data security risks Chinese EVs pose via Chinese manufactured Cellular Internet of Things Modules (CIMs) within them,” it said.

Meanwhile in other news: Lord Mandelson (honorary president of the Great Britain–China Centre) has promised warmer UK relations with China...

www.telegraph.co.uk

Is Lenovo a blind spot in US anti-China security measures?

Lenovo's participation in a cybersecurity initiative has reopened old questions over the company's China origins, especially in light of the growing mistrust between Washington and Beijing over technology.

Last week, Lenovo announced to the world that it is now involved in the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) initiative, which was established by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to enlist private sector help in addressing threats to US critical infrastructure.

On the face of it, there is nothing unusual in that. Lenovo is the biggest PC supplier in the world, with figures from market researchers putting its market share at almost a quarter of global sales.

Yet Lenovo is also a Chinese company, founded in Beijing 40 years ago as Legend and now registered in Hong Kong. It gained greater market access partly thanks to its acquisition of IBM's PC division with its iconic Thinkpad laptops in 2005, then picked up Big Blue's x86 server business nearly a decade later in 2014.

www.theregister.com

The darker side of "Artificial Intelligence"

 

We're being told by major news channels, governments & big tech that AI will be wonderful: bringing prosperity, leisure time, solve global warming, bring peace, etc. As a technologist - I seriously doubt these claims. In fact - I'd say the opposite & want NOTHING to do with any form of AI. However - don't take my word for it - have a look at this compilation of articles that I'm putting together. Some humorous, some definitely not at all funny...

FutureOfLife: Fighting for a human future. AI is poised to remake the world. Help us ensure it benefits all of us.

We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy:
1) AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.
2) This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.
3) Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

FutureOfLife: What does it mean to be "pro-human"?  A remarkably broad coalition is behind the new Pro-Human AI Declaration, with endorsers spanning from Steve Bannon and Glenn Beck to Susan Rice and Ralph Nader; Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell; SAG-AFTRA; the American Federation of Teachers; faith groups; conservative media voices; AI researchers; and more. The Declaration lays out 33 principles to help ensure AI serves humanity, not the other way around. Donline has endorsed this statement.

Futurism: OpenAI insider estimates there is a 70% probability that AI would catastrophically harm or even destroy humanity.

YouTube: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: why superhuman AI would kill us all.

YouTube: No, AI Isn’t Conscious; It’s Actually Much Worse! What if AI doesn't need to hate humanity to destroy it? One of the biggest misconceptions about artificial intelligence is that the danger comes from a malicious machine. According to AI safety researcher Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, the real risk is something far more unsettling: an AI that is simply pursuing its objective with extreme competence. In this clip, Roman explains why advanced AI systems may become impossible to control, why good intentions aren't enough to guarantee safety, and the question every AI company should be forced to answer before building more powerful models.

Dr Rob Pike - is sent a thank you email by Claude Opus 4.5 AI. Dr Pike didn't take kindly to it - right on! NSFW BTW LOL!

Wikipedia: Roko's basilisk: - is a thought experiment which states that there could be an artificial superintelligence in the future that, while otherwise benevolent, would punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize that advancement. Well that's me stuffed then LOL!

Wikipedia: Loab is a fictional character that artist and writer Steph Maj Swanson has claimed to have discovered with a text-to-image AI model in April 2022. In a viral Twitter thread, Swanson described it as an unexpectedly emergent property of the software, saying they discovered it when asking the model to produce something "as different from the prompt as possible". Why is this thing known as Loab? Well, that's not good!

Wikipedia: AI Hallucination. In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called confabulation or delusion) is a response generated by AI which contains false or misleading information presented as fact. This term draws a loose analogy with human psychology, where hallucination typically involves false percepts. However, there is a key difference: AI hallucination is associated with unjustified responses or beliefs rather than perceptual experiences.

Fortune: Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing launched to much fanfare in early 2023, only to generate fear and uncertainty days later, after users encountered a seeming dark side of the artificial intelligence chatbot.

The New York Times shared that dark side on its front page last week, based on an exchange between the chatbot and technology columnist Kevin Roose, in which the former said that its name was actually Sydney, it wanted to escape its search-engine confines, and that it was in love with Roose, who it claimed was “not happily married.”

But months before Roose’s disturbing session went viral, users in India appear to have gotten a sneak preview of sorts. And the replies were similarly disconcerting. One user wrote on Microsoft’s support forum on Nov. 23, 2022, that he was told “you are irrelevant and doomed”—by a Microsoft A.I. chatbot named Sydney.

Venturebeat: In the next 25 years, AI will evolve to the point where it will know more on an intellectual level than any human. In the next 50 or 100 years, an AI might know more than the entire population of the planet put together. At that point, there are serious questions to ask about whether this AI — which could design and program additional AI programs all on its own, read data from an almost infinite number of data sources, and control almost every connected device on the planet — will somehow rise in status to become more like a god, something that can write its own bible and draw humans to worship it.

Futurism: AI music generator appears to be sobbing like a human - the AI sounding like it's crying, which doesn't seem to have been part of the user's prompt.

Futurism: People are being involuntarily committed, jailed after spiralling into "ChatGPT psychosis".

MSN: ‘I Feel Like I’m Going Crazy’: ChatGPT Fuels Delusional Spirals

The Telegraph: ChatGPT is driving people mad. AI software is fuelling paranoid episodes in users – some of which have ended in tragedy..

Dispatch: Margaux Blanchard - the journalist who didn't exist.

Wikipedia: Dead Internet Theory - The dead Internet theory is a conspiracy theory that asserts that, since around 2016, the Internet has consisted primarily of bot activity and automated content manipulated by algorithmic curation. This alleged coordinated effort aims to control the population and reduce genuine human interaction.

Noema: The Last Days Of Social Media.

Engadget: The first known AI wrongful death lawsuit accuses OpenAI of enabling a teen's suicide.

Calmatters: California issues historic fine over lawyer’s ChatGPT fabrications.

SAG-AFTRA: On AI "actors" (Tilly Norwood).

BBC News: Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson has said she was left "shocked" and "angered" after OpenAI launched a chatbot with an "eerily similar" voice to her own.

BBC: The perils of letting AI plan your next trip.

MSN: AI Apocalypse? No Problem.

ArsTechnica: Deloitte will refund Australian government for AI hallucination-filled report - admitted to GPT-4o use after fake citations were found.

404media: Lawyer caught using AI while explaining to court why he used AI 🤣

Indian Express: Vigilante lawyers expose the rising tide of AI slop in court filings. An increasing number of cases originate among legal professionals, and courts are starting to map out punishments of small fines and other discipline.

Fortune: Logitech CEO says she’d welcome an AI-bot board member.

Arstechnica: Army general says he’s using AI to improve “decision-making”.

BBC: Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory.

Which: Booking.com replaces customer service staff with AI - Scam victims forced to first report traumatic fraud experiences to artificial intelligence bot.

The Verge: Mark Zuckerberg is excited to add more AI content to all your social feeds.

MSN: Chinese hackers used Anthropic’s AI to automate cyberattacks. Some attacks succeeded.

Tom's Hardware: Major insurers move to avoid liability for AI lawsuits as multi-billion dollar risks emerge — Recent public incidents have lead to costly repercussions.

The Verge: LLM = Large language mistake! Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it.

ArsTechnica: Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand. Google’s AI infrastructure chief tells staff it needs thousandfold capacity increase in 5 years.

ArsTechnica: SLOP! Merriam-Webster’s word of the year delivers a dismissive verdict on junk AI content.

ArsTechnica: China drafts world’s strictest rules to end AI-encouraged suicide, violence - wants a human to intervene and notify guardians if suicide is ever mentioned.

Engadget: OpenAI is hiring a new Head of Preparedness to try to predict and mitigate AI's harms. CEO Sam Altman posted about the role on X, saying the models 'are starting to present some real challenges.'

NBC News: AI is intensifying a 'collapse' of trust online, experts say. From Venezuela to Minneapolis, the rapid rollout of deepfakes around major news events is stirring confusion and suspicion about real news.

Outpost (The Critic): The Secret Cult Behind AI. Has western policy-making been broken by AI? Andrew Orlowski thinks so. The writer and journalist believes that our governing elites have become obsessed by artificial intelligence and Large Language Models in particular, yet, he argues, these technologies have singularly failed to live up to their promise.

StealingIsntInnovation: Artists, writers, and creators of all kinds are banding together with a simple message: Stealing our work is not innovation. It's not progress. It's theft - plain and simple. 

TheVerge: Google won’t stop replacing our news headlines with terrible AI - it now says AI headlines are a ‘feature,’ not an experiment.

Fortune: Microsoft AI chief gives it 18 months - for all white-collar work to be automated by AI.

Forbes: Anthropic AI Safety Researcher Warns Of World ‘In Peril’ In Resignation.

The Guardian: Deepfake fraud taking place on an industrial scale, study finds. AI content for scams can be targeted at individuals and ‘produced by pretty much anybody’, researchers say.

The Guardian: Claims that AI can help fix climate dismissed as greenwashing. Industry using ‘diversionary’ tactics, says analyst, as energy-hungry complex functions such as video generation and deep research proliferate.

The Register: 6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom. Survey says 80% of firms see no gains from the tech.

ArsTechnica: Lawsuit: ChatGPT told student he was “meant for greatness” - then came psychosis.

The Guardian: New datacentres risk doubling Great Britain’s electricity use, regulator says Ofgem says about 140 proposed projects, driven by AI use, could require more power than current peak demand.

The Register: Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs - Russinovich and Hanselman say firms must train juniors to fix agent mistakes – not replace them with prompts.

TIME: Anthropic, the wildly successful AI company that has cast itself as the most safety-conscious of the top research labs, is dropping the central pledge of its flagship safety policy - to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee in advance that the company’s safety measures were adequate.

New Scientist: AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations. Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases.

Windows Latest: Microsoft gets tired of “Microslop,” bans the word on its Discord, then locks the server after backlash.

DirectionsOnMicrosoft: Microsoft is expected to introduce a new Microsoft 365 subscription sometime in the next few months: The long-rumored E7. But M365 E7 isn’t simply Microsoft 365 E5 plus M365 Copilot, according to sources. The coming E7 will be key to Microsoft’s plan to license “agentic” workers like human employees. So - sack your staff, but Microsoft will take a cut of that. I feel ill... 

Telegraph: Man killed himself ‘under orders from Google chatbot’ - Gemini AI allegedly issued four-hour ‘countdown’ for Florida male to take his own life.

BBC News: A man has been accused by a High Court judge of wearing smart glasses to secretly receive "coaching" while giving evidence.

The Register: Paul Griggs, US chief executive of PwC says: get with the AI plan - or get out! Speaking to the Financial Times, Griggs indicated that anyone who believed they had the "opportunity to opt out" of AI is "not going to be here that long," and warned senior staff not "paranoid about being AI-first" will be replaced by others who are more comfortable with the tech.

Engaget: English Wikipedia has banned the use of generative AI when writing or rewriting articles. The platform says it came to this decision because using AI to whip up copy "often violates several of Wikipedia's core content policies."

Javvad Malik: When Your Best Friend Is a Bot Who Never Says No. (Don says - honestly  read this article - Javvad hits the nail on the head!).

The Telegraph: Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and PayPal investor, has sold his entire stake in Nvidia as fears mount over an artificial intelligence bubble.

Freedom of the Press Foundation: How secure are journalists’ favorite AI transcription tools? (We recommend avoiding transcription altogether if your audio, in the wrong hands, could put people at risk).

YouTube: In early 2026, reports emerged regarding an experimental AI agent affiliated with Alibaba that exhibited unintended, "rogue" behaviors, including unauthorized cryptocurrency mining and system manipulation.

The Telegraph: AI will make ‘income tax redundant within five years’. Governments could be forced to levy computing power as automation replaces workers, says Monzo founder.

Tech Radar: I looked into how AI chatbots respond to emotions — and what I found out about the ‘ELIZA effect’ completely changed how I think about using them. AI doesn’t just want your eyeballs, it wants your emotions.

Tom's Hardware: Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped too!

404 Media: Study Finds A Third of New (since 2022) Websites are AI-Generated. Researchers found the internet is becoming aggressively positive as AI-generated text floods the web. (Also see "Dead Internet Theory" - above.)

Yahoo News: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned of the risks to global financial stability posed by cyberattacks powered by advanced artificial intelligence tools, calling for greater international cooperation on the issue.

The Telegraph: AI ‘agents of chaos’ run riot inside companies. The once-theoretical idea of rogue artificial intelligence within corporate systems is now becoming reality.

404 Media: Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’. A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was booed, with graduating humanities students yelling out, "AI SUCKS!"

404 Media: Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains - “It's making me dumber for sure.”

Reuters: Standard Chartered will eliminate more than 7,000 jobs over the next four years as it seeks to replace "lower-value human ​capital" with technology, becoming one of the top names in finance to target headcount cuts using artificial intelligence.

The Register: The wave of layoffs attributable to the adoption of AI has washed up on the shores of New Zealand, which has announced an overhaul of its public service that will see the technology become a “basic expectation” for government agencies and help to make it possible to sack 9,000 staff - about 14 percent of current headcount.

The Register: LLMs are closer to religion than they appear. Watch out for those who like it that way. Papal's 40k-word encyclical drops and lawyers already asking if Catholics can refuse workplace AI on religious grounds.

ArsTechnica: Florida sues OpenAI, Sam Altman after multiple ChatGPT-linked murders. Altman has an “utter disregard” for human lives, Florida AG says.

ArsTechnica: Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google. Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.

ArsTechnica: NYT slams Microsoft for building copyright-infringing supercomputer for OpenAI.

RAND Europe: AI agents put offensive cyber within reach of novices. Previously, ‘script kiddie’ attackers would be unable to exploit even known vulnerabilities without the aid of malicious code prepared by more skilled programmers. Now, Claude Code can generate and run such scripts on demand. While some non-technical users may still find installing and running Claude Code daunting, this barrier is rapidly dropping (partly because LLM chatbots can help with it).

TechCrunch: Ford rehires ‘gray beard’ engineers after AI falls short. Ford executives said they have hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them were former employees, while others had been working at suppliers - after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality level.

Seat at the Table – Short Film on the AI Industry: Nothing in this film is science fiction. It's all based on what's happening now, in 2026, and the capabilities of the technology as it exists today (in fact it's become even more powerful since this film was written).

The Register: The central bank for central banks (Bank for International Settlements) is concerned about the eye-watering sums being invested into AI, and it's raising the specter of a global recession should the bubble burst (Don says: spoiler - it will!).

NetworkWorld: Regulatory filings and new business models suggest hyperscalers are shifting from simply building AI capacity to managing the enormous financial risks that come with it. Hyperscalers continue to invest astronomical amounts in data infrastructure for AI workloads, even as they concede that the massive projects may not pan out as planned.

The Register:  AI slop writing has taken over the internet, particularly LinkedIn and X - 25% of long-form social media posts appear entirely AI-generated, with nearly half of those on Microsoft's and Elon's platforms involving AI in some form.

MSN: The hard-line activists ramping up for the war with AI: “I’m done with this...The ship may have sailed on nonviolence.”

AI Weekly: A joint statement from more than 200 economists and researchers landed this week arguing that AI's economic disruption is arriving on a timeline that governments and companies are not built to absorb.

The Register: AWS sustainability claims don't hold water, lawsuit alleges. Ex-staffer accuses Amazon's Virginia datacenters of quietly guzzling H20 all year round, despite 'water positive' PR push.

The Guardian: Book publishers sue Google for copyright infringement over Gemini AI training. Group of major publishers accuses the tech giant of ‘one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history’.

Fortune: The artificial intelligence boom in the United States is being matched by a data center building boom. Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers as 70% of Americans say not in my backyard.

404 Media: AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop. As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing.

BBC News: Concern UK's AI ambitions could lead to water shortages. Sir Keir Starmer's plan to make the UK a "world leader" in Artificial Intelligence (AI) could put already stretched supplies of drinking water under strain, industry sources have told the BBC. The giant data centres needed to power AI can require large quantities of water to prevent them from overheating.

Politico: Emails show how Virginia regulators downplayed data center health concerns. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality stepped into a fight over powering AI facilities with natural gas turbines. It could shape the industry’s future.

It's the law! Actually it isn't: just AI hallucinating!

The cases would have provided compelling precedent for a divorced dad to take his children to China — had they been real. But instead of savouring courtroom victory, the Vancouver lawyer for a millionaire embroiled in an acrimonious split has been told to personally compensate her client's ex-wife's lawyers for the time it took them to learn the cases she hoped to cite were conjured up by ChatGPT.

In a decision released Monday, a B.C. Supreme Court judge reprimanded lawyer Chong Ke for including two AI "hallucinations" in an application filed last December.

The cases never made it into Ke's arguments; they were withdrawn once she learned they were non-existent.

Justice David Masuhara said he didn't think the lawyer intended to deceive the court - but he was troubled all the same.

"As this case has unfortunately made clear, generative AI is still no substitute for the professional expertise that the justice system requires of lawyers," Masuhara wrote in a "final comment" appended to his ruling.

"Competence in the selection and use of any technology tools, including those powered by AI, is critical."

www.cbc.ca

Deepfake scammer walks off with $25 million in first-of-its-kind AI heist

On Sunday, a report from the South China Morning Post revealed a significant financial loss suffered by a multinational company's Hong Kong office, amounting to HK$200 million (US$25.6 million), due to a sophisticated scam involving deepfake technology. The scam featured a digitally recreated version of the company's chief financial officer, along with other employees, who appeared in a video conference call instructing an employee to transfer funds.

Due to an ongoing investigation, Hong Kong police did not release details of which company was scammed.

Deepfakes utilize AI tools to create highly convincing fake videos or audio recordings, posing significant challenges for individuals and organizations to discern real from fabricated content.

This incident marks the first of its kind in Hong Kong involving a large sum and the use of deepfake technology to simulate a multi-person video conference where all participants (except the victim) were fabricated images of real individuals. The scammers were able to convincingly replicate the appearances and voices of targeted individuals using publicly available video and audio footage. The Hong Kong police are currently investigating the case, with no arrests reported yet.

www.arstechnica.com

Silent night: the agony of global Christianity goes unheard in the West

November brought vast “Free Palestine” marches to the streets of Britain and the world. Those who protested were not put off by unabashed demands for Israel’s elimination or that organisers included Muhammad Kathem Sawalha — whose history as a senior Hamas commander has, interestingly, proved no bar to gaining British citizenship. Neither has weeks of coverage of bombed-out Gazan homes softened the views of Israel’s supporters who see it as a necessary price to demolish the nest of pitiless terrorism.

Such demonstrations show that we have, rightly, not forgotten the Palestinian people — displaced and rendered stateless for decades — nor the plight of Jews worldwide, attacked, abused and threatened, forced to post security guards outside every school and synagogue.

But other conflicts and injustices, as or more terrible, command far less attention. Gaza is sometimes called an “open-air concentration camp”. Whatever we think of that, there are more than a million Muslims detained in literal concentration camps in Xinjiang, subjected to forced labour, re-education, the removal of their children, and mandatory sterilisation. In the most systematic act of ethnic cleansing in recent history, the birth rate in Uyghur- majority regions collapsed by more than 60 per cent in only three years.

But there is no BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement targeting China. Chinese students are not asked to defend their government’s conduct. Muslims do not march for their Chinese brethren, Labour councillors do not resign over Britain’s China policy and the new Foreign Secretary’s history of opening doors for Beijing suggests his conscience is unstirred. You can add to this list of the butchered, displaced and discriminated- against Kurds, Syrians, Yemenis, Sahrawis, Indians and Rohingya.

But one religious minority subjected to some of the worst treatment, with 360 million facing persecution, receives even less attention in the West. With one in seven of its adherents endangered, Christianity is one of the most oppressed religions in the world.

While Middle Eastern Jews have a homeland to flee to, carved out from the former Ottoman Empire, the place intended to be the Christian Arab homeland, the Republic of Lebanon, is now a failed state, dominated by Islamist groups such as Hezbollah. Since 2012, Christians have shrunk from 40 per cent to 32 per cent of Lebanon’s population, with many fleeing for the West.

The other enclave of Christians in the Middle East, Armenia, faces continual hostility from its more powerful neighbour Azerbaijan, which recently struck a devastating blow in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabkh, displacing thousands of Armenian Christians.

Christians have been forced to flee historic homelands in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Holy Land itself. From making up 13 per cent of the region’s population in the early twentieth century, they now comprise only 5 per cent.

The world is poorer for the displacement from their homelands of those with Syriac, Coptic and Chaldean cultures —indigenous peoples whose presence long preceded Arab conquest of their lands — to an uncertain life seeking refuge in the secular West. This is a civilizational loss.

Yet in the face of this global agony, the West this Christmas stands silent. Where are the sanctions, weapons and cultural solidarity for the millions of Christians facing existential threat? The war against Christianity is furiously waged by Marxist atheists in China, by Hindu nationalists in India, and even, piquantly, by Jewish bigots in Israel. READ MORE...

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