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A Gamers Nexus investigation found that LG smart TVs are almost constantly logging and uploading data about owners and their homes, even while they are offline or in standby mode. "The company's TV sets scan Wi-Fi networks for nearby devices, record audio logs through their microphones, and use audio and video sampling to recognize exactly what you're watching from across the TV inputs," reports The Verge. From the report: Gamers Nexus partnered with fellow YouTubers Level1Techs and independent…

Google DeepMind has released AlphaGenome Atlas, a free research database containing AI-generated predictions for the effects of all 9 billion possible single-letter mutations in the human genome. Built from its AlphaGenome model, the atlas is designed to help scientists interpret both protein-coding and harder-to-understand regulatory DNA. Fortune reports: AlphaGenome Atlas, as DeepMind calls the database, is a precomputed catalogue of what each substitution of a single DNA base is likely to do…

Teen reading, math, and science scores have fallen to their lowest levels since international PISA testing began in 2000, with 15-year-olds now reading at roughly the level previously expected of students a year younger. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) linked weaker results to more screen time, less reading for pleasure, and digital distraction. It also found that students who regularly used AI chatbots for tasks like drafting essays and summarizing text scored…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans' financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching, 404 Media has found. The units, the name of which 404 Media is revealing here for the first time, are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). In o…

Phoronix reports: AMD is building out what they are describing as an "elite" team of developers for driving Rust code "deep into the GPU stack" from firmware to drivers, shader compilers, and other GPU software in Rust. AMD Senior Fellow Harsh Meno posted this week to LinkedIn about this new effort... And note this AMD job posting that's active for hiring a software development engineer to work on Rust code... "We are building next-generation systems software for AMD GPUs with Rust as a core te…

It looks like a spaceship hovering over South Los Angeles, writes CNN, with futuristic tube-like elevators and an exhibition of Banksy murals. There's a room featuring Luke Skywalker's X-34 Landspeeder, but in its gardens there's a 19th-century cast of a sculpture showing David conquering Goliath — and then a bronze statue of Princess Leia strangling Jabba the Hutt with a chain. Next to Rosie the Riveter. CNN argues it's the museum's message that "all forms of art and mythology on display here …

The Brave web browser published a new round of benchmarks claiming its desktop browser uses less system resources than Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox — and also loads pages faster. The blog Linuxiac reports: According to Brave's testing, the browser used 44% less CPU, 28% less memory, and 10% less energy on average compared with the three competing browsers. It also completed page loads 20% faster while transferring 26% less inbound data and 39% less outbound data... - Brave averaged about…

Switzerland has a population of 9,154,242. And its federal government just launched a pilot program to test open source alternatives to Microsoft 365 on 3,000 workstations, reports the blog It's FOSS. "That's about 7% of the federal workforce." The target is to complete the migration by end of 2027... On September 3, 2026, the Federal Council published results of "PoC BOSS", a feasibility proof-of-concept involving 172 federal employees who tested the openDesk suite, a German open-source collab…

Last year the writing program at the University of Baltimore used an app that tracks students while they're writing in Google Docs, offering teachers a video playing back revisions "with a scoreboard of all the edits, pastes and minutes spent on it," writes the Washington Post. "Is it surveillance? Yes, I think obviously," says the program's director. But was there a better way? She is one of a dozen educators around the country who told The Post that they're experimenting with a different appr…

The EV blog Electrek reports: A Clinton Township, Michigan man was charged $418 for a single EV charging session at Elder Hyundai's Macomb Township store after finding the charger listed as publicly available on the EVgo app, but didn't discover the charges until after wrapping up his 40-ish minute charging session. "I was flabbergasted," explained Stanley Kpenkann, who had been driving a rented Chevy Bolt EV at the time. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be saddled with a bill of…

"Billionaire Bill Ackman's life was upended this February when his 26-year-old daughter collapsed in her Brooklyn apartment, suffering a brain hemorrhage that would render her unable to move, speak or see," writes the Washingon Post. But then... The hedge fund manager did what any good father would do — at least, any father with vast financial resources and what friends describe as a "Mr. Fix-It" tendency. He sprung into action, getting her topline care at New York City's Mt. Sinai Hospital and…

A new article about AI in The Economist argues that "Initial effects of the technology on employment look positive." Perhaps AI will eventually make many humans unemployable — but there is no sign of it yet. On September 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations. The unemployment rate is just 4.1%, lower than in almost 90% of months over the past half-century. Young workers, often cast as AI's first victims, are h…

Reuters reports: Liquid Network, a Bitcoin-based payments and settlement network, said on Sunday that about $320 million was withdrawn from its federation wallet in a hack. "Purported white-hat hackers" withdrew around 4,000 of the 4,200 bitcoin held in its Liquid Federation wallet, Liquid Network said in a post on X. "Liquid wallets will be impacted," their post concluded, adding "and we're sorry for any inconvenience." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new streaming TV channel shows films made with genAI, reports Engadget. "Fairground AI Creator TV" is free — and supported with ads — describing its material as "AI Cinema": "AI-generated" can make it sound as though someone typed a sentence into a machine and came back five minutes later to find a finished movie. Fairground's catalog shows why that description can be too simple. Take Lost Garden: The Awakening of the Lantern Knight. According to its Fairground page, creator Frank Houbre wrot…