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Writer Gwern observes that while fraudulent videos, photos, and Word documents are common online scams, editing existing PDFs to forge fake claims is essentially unheard of. He notes that searching for and downloading a paper's PDF almost always yields exactly what was originally published, aside from minor draft-versus-final discrepancies.
California faces pressure from the Trump administration, which is withholding Bipartisan Infrastructure Law broadband funds from states unless they agree not to enforce net neutrality rules. California and Illinois remain the only states yet to finalize their BEAD funding agreements, and California is weighing whether to accept the federal money and abandon enforcement of its own net neutrality law or fight the condition in court. Nearly 30 advocacy groups have urged state leaders to defend the law rather than trade it away for funding.
A math and quilting enthusiast writing on their personal blog set out to make a post about squarable numbers using Mrs. Perkins' Quilt, a classic puzzle by Henry Dudeney about dividing a square into the fewest possible smaller integer-sided squares. While working out how to actually sew the optimal solution, the author realized that certain arrangements require tricky L-shaped seams around corners, and got sidetracked investigating how many such L-seams are mathematically necessary for any optimal quilt of a given size.
California's Public Utilities Commission is scheduled to vote on a resolution that would exempt broadband providers from the state's net neutrality law in order to accept $1.86 billion in federal BEAD broadband deployment funding. The Trump administration's NTIA has required all states receiving BEAD money to waive enforcement of net neutrality and rate regulation against participating ISPs statewide, not just in funded areas, for up to 14 years. California and Illinois are the last two states yet to finalize their BEAD funding agreements.
Microsoft's .NET 11 release delivers another round of performance engineering across the runtime and core libraries, building on prior years' optimization work. The improvements include eliminated bounds checks, reduced allocations, and other low-level fixes aimed at making applications run measurably faster without requiring code changes from developers.
IDScan.net, an identity verification company, disclosed that an unauthorized third party may have accessed customer accounts containing full names and government ID numbers. In response, the company is notifying affected customers and providing free credit monitoring and identity protection services while cooperating with federal law enforcement.
Rust contributor 'waffle' landed stabilization of the language's never type (!) on August 24, ending more than two years of work. The change required a small breaking adjustment to earlier Rust editions, so maintainers spent extensive time verifying it wouldn't break existing code in the wild.
A technical guide walks through configuring a Tor exit node on an Ubuntu 14.04 system, the type of relay that connects anonymous Tor traffic to the regular internet. It outlines the legal and reputational risks operators face, including potential harassment from ISPs and authorities, plus practical hurdles like sites blocking exit node traffic or forcing CAPTCHAs.
A dark-web marketplace called Nexus advertised more than 153 million US and Canadian driver's license images, along with millions of ID cards, travel documents and medical cards, before going offline after Krebs on Security exposed it. The listings included not just standard front-and-back scans but infrared and ultraviolet images normally used by businesses to verify document authenticity. The FBI's New Orleans office is reportedly investigating a possible breach at Louisiana-based identity-verification firm IDScan.net, which Nexus claimed as its data source.
Researchers built CW-Net, an explainable version of a black-box machine learning planner (based on the DriveIRL architecture) used to evaluate self-driving vehicle trajectories. The system was trained on two large datasets of millions of driving scenarios labeled with human-understandable concepts, allowing it to justify its trajectory choices in terms people can interpret rather than as opaque scores.
Industry leaders discussing AI-driven legacy system modernization outlined a two-sided return-on-investment framework: technical gains like faster releases, platform stability, lower operating costs and improved security, alongside business-side gains measured through customer satisfaction metrics such as net promoter scores and app store ratings. They stressed that modernization efforts should be evaluated on both fronts rather than treated purely as IT projects.
OpenStreetMap US has designated OldInsuranceMaps.net (OIM), a platform digitizing and georeferencing historic Sanborn Insurance Maps, as one of its Charter Projects. Started by Adam Cox at Louisiana State University in 2022, OIM now hosts over 1,200 Sanborn maps sourced largely from the Library of Congress, supported by a volunteer community of georeferencers.