Cynthia Brumfield

Las Vegas tourism plummets. #ETTD

For anyone that is on their way to Vegas for Black Hat — if you have respiratory problems, prepare. Wildfires in Santa Barbara have smoke moving through the city. Here is a picture from a hotel room, I could see the mountains clearly yesterday. You see any 🏔️ in this pic?

New York Post to launch California Post newspaper in LA Los Angeles is home to the second-largest concentration of Post readers, per News Corp.

www.axios.com/2025/08/04/n...

Just no. We should all rise up against this.

There have been many attempts to farm out content moderation to AI that have been...not great. So I'm interested in this thread about Zentropi at TrustCon.

Wonder how sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh and sexual predator Clarence Thomas will vote on the fate of sexual predator Ghislaine Maxwell.

A photo of a band of musicians crossing the road in a style that evokes The Beatles' famous Abbey Road album cover.

Mexican Abbey Road

CrowdStrike: A new era of cyberthreats from sophisticated threat actors is here The company’s latest threat hunting report highlights the speed and AI sophistication of threat groups today, offering defenders strategies for keeping up.

CrowdStrike says we're in a new era of cyberattacks from sophisticated attackers who rely on clever social engineering, AI, and devices outside of IT's purview.

Check out my CSO piece for details and tips on how defenders can better guard against these threats.

www.csoonline.com/article/4033...

--DEF CON bans fifth person from premises,
--Everyone should hate AI,
--Behind the scenes of Hackers,
--$200m fund available for Backpage victims,
--NHS contractor on the cusp of bankruptcy a year after attack 5/5

--Internal conflict exposes Qilin operation,
--Number of companies hiring fake DPRK workers more than doubled over past year,
--Commission on Cyber Force Generation launches,
--Oz cyber official warns of sophisticated cyberattacks,
--Singapore doesn't want to pin UNC3886 on China, 4/5

4L4MD4R decryption instructions. Source: Unit 42.

--DHS to give $100m for state and local cyber,
--Ransomware gangs have joined SharePoint attacks,
--Hackers attacked Huawei routers in Luxembourg incidents,
--UK Legal Aid Society cyberattack is causing chaos,
--German insurance giant faces bankruptcy after cyberattack, 3/5

--Dutch Caribbean offices hit by cyberattacks,
--SharePoint was supported by Chinese engineers,
--Hackers stole crypto now worth $14.5b from LuBain in 2020,
--CISA and USCG found a bunch of OT misconfigs,
--CISA unveils malware analysis platform Thorium, 2/5

US Senate confirms Cairncross as National Cyber Director Dutch Caribbean offices hit by cyberattacks, SharePoint was supported by Chinese engineers, Hackers stole crypto now worth $14.5b from LuBain in 2020, CISA and USCG found a bunch of OT misconfigs, CIS...

Check out today's Metacurity for the critical infosec developments you might have missed over the weekend, including

--US Senate confirms Cairncross as National Cyber Director, 1/5
www.metacurity.com/us-senate-co...

No-brainer or no brains

Panel to create roadmap for establishing US Cyber Force The Commission on Cyber Force Generation will develop potential routes Congress and the White House could follow in creating a separate cyber service and aim to deliver them in time for next year’s mu...

NEW: A group of former civilian leaders and retired military digital security brass on Monday launched an effort that will spell out in detail how the country should proceed in one day establishing a U.S. Cyber Force.

On @therecordmedia.bsky.social

therecord.media/panel-to-cre...

#AdoptDontShop 💔

Candidates must have expertise and research interests in an area of philosophy and a demonstrable ability to conduct research that has a substantial connection to Artificial Intelligence (AI). We interpret a substantial connection to AI broadly to include, for example, the intersection of AI and philosophy of science, AI and logic/formal methods, AI and moral and political philosophy, and/or AI and philosophy of law. Candidates must be willing and able to make a substantial research-led contribution to the Department’s core teaching provision. (More information about our courses can be found here.)

Candidates must have expertise and research interests in an area of philosophy that has a substantial research connection to sustainability. Candidates must be able to develop a new course in philosophy and sustainability, and be able to make a substantial, research-led contribution to the Department’s core teaching provision. (More information about our courses can be found here.) This role is fully based in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, but involves extensive collaboration with LSE’s new Global School of Sustainability (GSoS). Candidates are expected to be committed to this collaboration and willing to contribute to GSoS activities. We therefore particularly welcome candidates whose work bears on GSoS’s five research themes.

Two job ads for people in philosophy in my dept (www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOD999/a... and www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOD995/a...). Ever heard of this thing called AI? You probably haven't it's pretty niche. But if you have maybe apply? Also this even more niche thing (sustainability) so that too.

"The true measure of LLM intelligence and reasoning should not be refactoring existing information, but the ability to produce truly novel works."

This is what AI will never be able to do. It will always rely on human beings to come up with something new.

All major Las Vegas Strip casinos are now unionized in historic labor victory The Culinary Workers Union representing 60,000 hospitality workers in Nevada has achieved a historic victory on the Las Vegas Strip.

The Culinary Workers Union representing 60,000 hospitality workers in Nevada has achieved a historic victory on the Las Vegas Strip. For the first time in its 90-year history, all major casinos on the Strip are unionized.

Inside the relentless race for AI capacity The quest for superintelligence is spurring a data centre boom — but critics question the cost, environmental impact and whether it is all needed

The devastating environmental impact of the AI data centre goldrush, comprehensively outlined by the Financial Times.

ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...

#DigitalEthics #DataCentres #AIEthics

President Donald Trump claimed without evidence that the massive revisions to the latest jobs report constituted a “scam.” Yet revisions by the BLS were neither historic nor evidence of corruption. cnn.it/3UbQcEQ

‘He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity Joe Biden was hounded for his age-related gaffes, but Trump’s increasingly strange behavior has largely been ignored

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die Families and funeral directors are using AI obituary generators to more efficiently memorialize the dead. What happens when they get it wrong?

New: A few weeks ago, when my father-in-law died, the funeral home asked if we wanted to use AI to write his obituary. So I dug into it and found that it's the biggest new trend in "death care." Tens of thousands of AI obits have been made already. Often the families don't even know wapo.st/4okuxIg

When public media disappears, so do the stories that bring us together.

With federal funding eliminated, millions may lose their last trusted source of news and connection.

If that matters to you, now’s the time to act. Donate: n.pr/458sOhq

Fake headline: Overly Descriptive Alt Text on Bluesky Reflects Heavy Influence of Big Accessibility on Mamdani

This one is for y'all

The web is more ephemeral than print media, so much of the historical record will be lost. At least the Wayback Machine has archived much of Anandtech and other defunct sites.

He would rather destroy America than admit he's a crummy president. That's where we're at.

Trump Fired America’s Economic Data Collector. History Shows the Perils. Economists say unbiased data is essential for policymaking, and for democracy.

President Trump’s firing of the top data collector has few U.S. precedents. When other world leaders took similar steps, it rarely ended well. Economists say unbiased data is essential for policymaking, and for democracy.

I would try it just for grins and check out a bunch of different LLMs. NotebookLM seems the most writer-friendly of the bunch that I've tried out.

To be clear, I would never use AI for any pieces I write for publications. At least not yet...😆