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US national debt reaches a record $37T, the Treasury Department reports

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government’s gross national debt has surpassed $37 trillion, a record number that highlights the accelerating debt on America’s balance sheet and increased cost pressures on taxpayers. The $37 trillion update is found in the latest Treasury Department report issued Tuesday which logs the nation’s daily finances. The national debt eclipsed $37 trillion years sooner than pre-pandemic projections. The Congressional Budget Office’s January 2020 projections had gross fede

Andrew Lloyd Webber Is Turning ‘Phantom of the Opera’ Into an Anime Epic

First came Masquerade, an immersive production of The Phantom of the Opera. Now Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group has announced a rebrand and a slate of new franchise expansions for the musical maestro’s universe of stories. Including… anime? Deadline reports that the company, now known as LW Entertainment, has plans for a Phantom of the Opera anime, an idea so wild it’s bound to work. And it’s not completely out of left field: Sailor Moon‘s Tuxedo Mask is already so Phantom-coded. (We

DOGE Has Wasted Billions While Saving Only a Fraction of What It Claims: Reports

The Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency has been a project largely defined by ever-diminishing expectations. At the outset of DOGE’s journey, its chief operator, Elon Musk, famously claimed, in a bout of wild optimism, that he hoped to cut “at least” $2 trillion out of the federal budget. Not long after the election, Musk reduced his ambitions to $1 trillion. Throughout the first few months of Trump’s second term, DOGE claimed to be saving Americans billions, but analyses

'War of the Worlds' Isn’t Just Bad. It’s Also Shameless Tech Propaganda

“Here we go” is both the first line of the 2025 Amazon Prime movie War of the Worlds and exactly what I said when I chose to watch it after the shitstorm of reviews that warned me not to. Directed by Rich Lee and shot exclusively through online calls and surveillance feed POVs, War of the Worlds centers around domestic terror analyst William Radford, played by Ice Cube, who is on a mission to save his family and the country from alien cyborgs who are deadset on eating our data. Literally. At f

Government expands police use of facial recognition vans

Government expands police use of facial recognition vans 3 hours ago Share Save Share Save Home Office More live facial recognition (LFR) vans will be rolled out across seven police forces in England to locate suspects for crimes including sexual offences, violent assaults and homicides, the Home Office has announced. The forces will get access to 10 new vans equipped with cameras which scan the faces of people walking past and check them against a list of wanted people. The government says t

Dumb to managed switch conversion (2010)

SpritesMods .com Dumb to managed switch conversion - Intro Intro When I got my new house, one of the things I did besides painting and redecorating was rip the old cat2 telephone cable out of the walls and replace it by modern cat5e cabling. I've done a spot of network engineering in the past, so I had a fairly good idea what I would like to have as a network: GBit everywhere, separate vlans for the adsl modem, wired clients and the wireless accesspoint... But at that moment I was too busy to

Russian government hackers said to be behind US federal court filing system hack: Report

The Russian government is allegedly behind the data breach affecting the U.S. court filing system known as PACER, according to The New York Times. Citing anonymous sources, the newspaper said Russia “is at least in part responsible” for the cyberattack, without saying what part of the Russian government is behind the hack. The hackers searched for “midlevel criminal cases in the New York City area and several other jurisdictions, with some cases involving people with Russian and Eastern Europe

White House says it's working out legality of Nvidia and AMD China chip deals

U.S. President Donald Trump (L) invites Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to speak in the Cross Hall of the White House during an event on "Investing in America" on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. The Trump administration is still working out the details of its 15% export tax on Nvidia and AMD and could bring deals of this kind to more companies, the White House's Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. "Right now it stands with these two companies. Perhaps it could expand in the future to other companies," sa

Hackers breach and expose a major North Korean spying operation

Hackers claim to have compromised the computer of a North Korean government hacker and leaked its contents online, offering a rare window into a hacking operation by the notoriously secretive nation. The two hackers, who go by Saber and cyb0rg, published a report about the breach in the latest issue of Phrack magazine, a legendary cybersecurity e-zine that was first published in 1985. The latest issue was distributed at the Def Con hackers conference in Las Vegas last week. In the article, the

They’re golden: Fictional band from K-Pop Demon Hunters tops the charts

The fictional band Huntr/x, from K-Pop Demon Hunters, has a real-world hit with "Golden." Netflix has a summer megahit on its hands with its animated musical feature film, K-Pop Demon Hunters. Since its June release, the critically acclaimed film has won fans of all ages, fueled by a killer Korean pop soundtrack featuring one earworm after another. The biggest hit is "Golden," which just hit No. 1 on Billboard's Top 100 chart. (The last time a fictional ensemble topped the charts was in 2022 wi

AI companies are chasing government users with steep discounts

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT, AI companies have been racing to gain a foothold in government in more ways than one. Most recently, that’s meant luring government users with attractive low prices for their products. Within the last week, both OpenAI and Anthropic have introduced special prices for government versions of their generative AI chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude, and xAI announced its Grok for Government in mid-July. OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering their chatbots to federal agen

Anthropic offers its Claude AI model to the federal government for $1

Anthropic has announced it will offer its Claude AI model to all three branches of the US government for $1, following OpenAI offering an almost identical deal last week. These deals both follow the General Services Administration adding OpenAI, Gemini and Anthropic to a list of approved AI vendors for the federal government. Similar to the OpenAI deal, Anthropic will offer access to its commercial-tier service Claude for Enterprise for a period of one year at a cost of just $1. The offer will

Anthropic takes aim at OpenAI, offers Claude to ‘all three branches of government’ for $1

Just a week after OpenAI announced it would offer ChatGPT Enterprise to the entire federal executive branch workforce at $1 per year per agency, Anthropic has raised the stakes. The AI giant said Tuesday it would also offer its Claude models to government agencies for just $1 – but not only to the executive branch. Anthropic is targeting “all three branches” of the U.S. government, including the legislative and judiciary branches. The package will be available for one year, says Anthropic. The

YouTuber recreates a floppy disk from scratch

There's nothing quite like the drive to build something just to see if you can. YouTuber polymatt set out to create a floppy disk drive, the favored storage medium of yesteryear, from scratch, because why not. For anyone born too late to have regularly used one, a floppy disk is a magnetically coated, flexible polyester disk encased in a protective shell. Insert it into a floppy drive, and a magnetic head reads or writes data on the disk. If you've ever wondered why the "save" icon looks the way

Wikipedia loses UK Safety Act challenge, worries it will have to verify user IDs

Wikipedia's parent organization lost a challenge to the UK Online Safety Act but can bring another case if the government tries to force it to verify the identity of Wikipedia users. The High Court of Justice in London dismissed claims from the Wikimedia Foundation, which challenged the lawfulness of the categorization system used to determine which sites must comply with obligations. But Justice Jeremy Johnson stressed "that this does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to

NVIDIA may give US government a cut of its profits to sell AI chips to China

The debate over whether AI chipmakers should be allowed to sell their products to China has taken an unusual turn. The US government has reportedly given NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) permission to make the sales but for one big catch: 15 percent of the sales. The news was first reported by The Financial Times, which cited multiple people familiar with the agreement. In July, NVIDIA announced that the US government would approve export licenses to sell its H20 AI GPUs after blocking t

Nvidia, AMD may sell high-end AI chips to China if they pay US a cut

The AI chip race narrative used to be about U.S. national security, but apparently now it’s about tariffs: Nvidia and AMD have agreed to pay the U.S. government 15% of the revenue they make from sales of high-end AI chips to China in exchange for licenses to sell to those chips in the country, the Financial Times reported, citing anonymous sources. According to the FT’s government source, Nvidia will share revenues from sales of its H20 AI chips in China, and AMD would share a cut of MI308 chip

Trump Is Undermining Trust in Official Economic Statistics. China Shows Where That Path Can Lead

Welcome back! Louise here. On Friday, President Trump fired one of the nation’s top economists after her agency published a disappointing jobs report. Trump claimed the numbers were “RIGGED,” but there’s no evidence that Erika McEntarfer or the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) did anything improper. The new employment data, however, suggested Trump’s policies are having a negative impact on the US economy. In the days since, Republicans have piled on, baselessly accusing McEntarfer of putting o

Why Donald Trump’s environmental data purge is so much worse this time

is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home , a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Now that we’re about halfway into the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, we can take stock of his administration’s destruction of online environmental resources. It’s wors

Environmentalist Lawsuit Halts Construction of Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

Progress on Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” ground to a halt on Thursday, August 7, when a federal judge ordered a two-week ban on construction. The ruling follows a hearing in a lawsuit by environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians. The plaintiffs—Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Everglades, and the Miccosukee—allege that hasty construction of the facility in the Everglades unlawfully moved forward without public input or an environmental impact st

Voice Controlled Swarms

Inspired by Command School from Enders Game, let’s make swarms that we can control with our voice! We will do this by having a voice-to-text program feed our voice commands into an LLM, and then that LLM can run a bunch of commands to control the swarm. Below is the final result. Your browser does not support the video tag. And we will make this in two parts: First we will create a general voice-controller that can plug into any application that supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP). As

Rules by which a great empire may be reduced to a small one (1773)

The substance behind the “Rules” was scarcely new. Franklin had, in more sober fashion, made almost every point before. He touched hardly at all upon the constitutional issues that the Bostonians had set boiling, no doubt because they were difficult to treat satirically; but he marshaled most of the other themes that were his stock in trade as a controversialist. Some related to the colonies in general, some to Massachusetts in particular, and they ran the gamut from old trade restrictions and n

Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One (1773)

The substance behind the “Rules” was scarcely new. Franklin had, in more sober fashion, made almost every point before. He touched hardly at all upon the constitutional issues that the Bostonians had set boiling, no doubt because they were difficult to treat satirically; but he marshaled most of the other themes that were his stock in trade as a controversialist. Some related to the colonies in general, some to Massachusetts in particular, and they ran the gamut from old trade restrictions and n

OpenAI Really Wants the U.S. Government to Use ChatGPT

OpenAI just struck a deal to give every federal executive branch agency access to ChatGPT Enterprise over the next year for just $1. In a blog post, OpenAI said the deal is meant to advance a key pillar of the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan by making advanced AI tools widely available across the federal government to cut down on paperwork and bureaucracy. The White House unveiled the plan in July, outlining efforts to accelerate AI adoption, expand data center infrastructure, and promote

Companies Find Potential Way to Avoid Trump Tariffs and Keep Prices Low

Donald Trump’s tariff regime has been scoffed at by business leaders and world economists (Larry Summers, for instance, called it both “crazy” and “dumb”), but the White House hasn’t backed down from its highly unconventional program. The tariffs, which are taxing American businesses on their imports, are reportedly generating billions of dollars in revenue for the federal government on a month-to-month basis. Many businesses aren’t happy about it, however, and now several lawsuits are threateni

OpenAI Announces Massive US Government Partnership

OpenAI is partnering with the US government to make its leading frontier models available to federal employees. Under the agreement, federal agencies can access OpenAI’s models for $1 for the next year, per a Wednesday announcement from the company and the General Services Administration (GSA). The partnership is the culmination of months of effort on the part of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other OpenAI executives, who have been cozying up to the Trump administration since before President Donald

Citizen Lab director warns cyber industry about US authoritarian descent

The director of Citizen Lab, one of the most prominent organizations investigating government spyware abuses, is sounding the alarm to the cybersecurity community and asking them to step up and join the fight against authoritarianism. On Wednesday, Ron Deibert will deliver a keynote at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, one of the largest gatherings of information security professionals of the year. Ahead of his talk, Deibert told TechCrunch that he plans to speak about what

Software Rot

Software rot is generally thought of as degradation of software due to a changing environment. For example, a program written a decade ago may no longer work with new versions of the libraries it depends on because some of them have changed without retaining backwards compatibility. This kind of thinking encourages a culture where software becomes obsolete unless it is constantly maintained. A better approach might be to talk about the reliability of the environment the software depends on. Wou

Genie 3: A new frontier for world models

Given a text prompt, Genie 3 can generate dynamic worlds that you can navigate in real time at 24 frames per second, retaining consistency for a few minutes at a resolution of 720p. Towards world simulation At Google DeepMind, we have been pioneering research in simulated environments for over a decade, from training agents to master real-time strategy games to developing simulated environments for open-ended learning and robotics. This work motivated our development of world models, which are