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Tech News
US electricity demand climbed about 1.7% annually from 2020 to 2025, more than ten times the growth rate utilities saw in the prior fifteen years, driven by data centers, EV charging stations and reshored manufacturing. Much of the transmission network carrying that load dates to the 1950s-1980s, causing sagging lines, overheating transformers and voltage drops as usage climbs.
ServiceNow issued fixes for three critical vulnerabilities in its AI Platform that could let unauthenticated attackers run arbitrary code, escalate privileges, or manipulate data via SQL injection, all without user interaction. The company also patched a separate high-severity sandbox escape bug that could allow low-privileged users to achieve remote code execution. ServiceNow says it has no evidence of active exploitation but is urging customers to apply the updates immediately.
X's Safety team identified a 200,000-account network of suspected inauthentic Chinese accounts, 200 of which spread AI-generated comics and posts criticizing AI data centers' impact on electricity prices and local power grids. The company said these posts used OpenAI-generated imagery and talking points that echoed illustrations from a June OpenAI report on similar China-linked influence efforts. X has suspended violating accounts but has not disclosed the identities of those involved or detailed the remaining 199,800 accounts' activity.
RhinoShield and Sent Into Space sent an iPhone 17 Pro fitted with RhinoShield's AirX case up on a high-altitude balloon from Kiruna, Sweden, then released it from over 30,600 meters. After a 25-minute fall through temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees Celsius, the phone landed intact in remote terrain and was later recovered, powered on, and used to make calls and take photos. Guinness World Records confirmed the feat as the highest drop of a phone in a case onto natural landforms.
A new Use.AI survey of over 15,000 respondents found that 53% now verify explanations from doctors, teachers, and other professionals using AI before accepting them, while 46% say professional credentials carry less weight than before. Use.AI calls this shift an 'expertise recession,' describing a decline in automatic trust toward trained professionals as AI tools let people independently investigate claims.
More than 80 performers, including Matt Lucas, Hugh Bonneville, Siobhán McSweeney and singer Sandi Thom, have signed a letter urging the UK government to introduce legislation protecting performers from unauthorised AI voice cloning. The signatories argue current law fails to safeguard an artist's voice, face and identity as AI technology advances. The letter follows earlier warnings from legal experts that existing UK rules are outdated and cannot fully protect personal likeness or voice.
Microsoft has released the KB5120998 preview cumulative update for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, bundling 35 changes centered on taskbar positioning, a compact taskbar mode, and new Start menu size and layout options. The optional update also begins rolling out Administrator Protection, a feature using just-in-time privileges to limit elevation-of-privilege attacks, though it remains off by default and needs Intune or Group Policy to enable.
A technical write-up explains how SMPTE timecode, particularly the Bi-Phase Mark 'LTC' sync tone, is recorded onto audio or video tape tracks to keep equipment synchronized, alongside notes on VITC and BCD data encoding. The author traces the origin of the research to building a low-cost MIDI tape sync device, which became a long-running product called the TS1 supporting SMPTE Drop Frame and MIDI Time Code.
US District Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Defense Department's labeling of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was illegal and unconstitutional, blocking certain federal agencies from enforcing Trump's directive to stop using the company's Claude AI tools. The conflict began after Anthropic refused Pentagon pressure to remove safeguards preventing Claude from being used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons, leading Trump to order a government-wide phase-out of Anthropic products. Anthropic had sued in two federal courts over separate bans, and this ruling resolves one of those cases in its favor.
Hugging Face, the widely used repository for open-source AI models and developer tools, is reportedly the target of a potential investment or acquisition move by Nvidia. The platform is a central hub where developers share, download and test AI models, giving it outsized influence over the open model ecosystem despite limited public name recognition.
Reports indicate that widespread adoption of ChatGPT is subtly changing how people write, with certain AI-favored words and phrasing patterns appearing more frequently in everyday communication. The trend suggests that heavy exposure to AI-generated text is influencing human writing habits beyond just those who use the tool directly.
OpenAI has begun showing advertisements to users on its free tier and the 399-rupee ($4) Go plan in India, one of its biggest markets by user activity. The feature, already active in 38 countries including the US, Japan, South Korea and much of Europe, excludes users who are or are predicted to be under 18.