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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The phone was featured in a BBC video, which showed it powering on with an animated North Korean flag waving across the screen. While the report did not specify the brand, the design and user interface closely resembled those of a Huawei or Honor device.

It's unclear whether these companies officially sell phones in North Korea, but if they do, the devices are likely customized with state-approved software designed to restrict functionality and facilitate government surveillance.

One of the more revealing – and darkly amusing – features was the phone's automatic censorship of words deemed problematic by the state. For instance, when users typed oppa, a South Korean term used to refer to an older brother or a boyfriend, the phone automatically replaced it with comrade. A warning would then appear, admonishing the user that oppa could only refer to an older sibling.

Typing "South Korea" would trigger another change. The phrase was automatically replaced with "puppet state," reflecting the language used in official North Korean rhetoric.

Then came the more unsettling features. The phone silently captured a screenshot every five minutes, storing the images in a hidden folder that users couldn't access. According to the BBC, authorities could later review these images to monitor the user's activity.

The device was smuggled out of North Korea by Daily NK, a Seoul-based media outlet specializing in North Korean affairs. After examining the phone, the BBC confirmed that the censorship mechanisms were deeply embedded in its software. Experts say this technology is designed not only to control information but also to reinforce state messaging at the most personal level.

Smartphone usage has grown in North Korea in recent years, but access remains tightly controlled. Devices cannot connect to the global internet and are subject to intense government surveillance.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

A large study of "Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence" completed by KPMG and MBS. Apparently people like AI. They trust it. They believe it will bring great benefits. They use it in their work, some apparently don't believe they can do their work without AI anymore. Also they don't bother to check if the AI is correct or not in its output. All good. Trust friend computer!

Led by the University of Melbourne in collaboration with KPMG, Trust, attitudes and use of Artificial Intelligence: A global study 2025, surveyed more than 48,000 people across 47 countries to explore the impact AI is having on individuals and organizations. It is one of the most wide-ranging global studies into the public's trust, use, and attitudes towards AI to date.

• 66% of people use AI regularly, and 83% believe the use of AI will result in a wide range of benefits.

• Yet, trust remains a critical challenge: only 46% of people globally are willing to trust AI systems.

• There is a public mandate for national and international AI regulation with 70% believing regulation is needed.

• Many rely on AI output without evaluating accuracy (66%) and are making mistakes in their work due to AI (56%).

However, the use of AI at work is also creating complex risks for organisations. Almost half of employees admit to using AI in ways that contravene company policies, including uploading sensitive company information into free public AI tools like ChatGPT.

What makes these risks challenging to manage is over half (57%) of employees say they hide their use of AI and present AI-generated work as their own.

AI [increases] the security risk at work. Or they don't want to let their employer know that they could easily be replaced by a bot.

Sources:

https://mbs.edu/news/Global-study-reveals-trust-of-AI-remains-a-critical-challenge
https://ai.uq.edu.au/project/trust-artificial-intelligence-global-study

Additional sources:

https://kpmg.com/xx/en/our-insights/ai-and-technology/trust-attitudes-and-use-of-ai.html
https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmgsites/xx/pdf/2025/05/trust-attitudes-and-use-of-ai-global-report.pdf

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_{Processed by jelizondo}

[Editor's Comment: This is the first two parts of a planned 4-part series]

MCP: What It Is and Why It Matters—Part 1
MCP: What It Is and Why It Matters—Part 2

Imagine you have a single universal plug that fits all your devices—that's essentially what the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is for AI. MCP is an open standard (think "USB-C for AI integrations") that allows AI models to connect to many different apps and data sources in a consistent way. In simple terms, MCP lets an AI assistant talk to various software tools using a common language, instead of each tool requiring a different adapter or custom code.

So, what does this mean in practice? If you're using an AI coding assistant like Cursor or Windsurf, MCP is the shared protocol that lets that assistant use external tools on your behalf. For example, with MCP an AI model could fetch information from a database, edit a design in Figma, or control a music app—all by sending natural-language instructions through a standardized interface. You (or the AI) no longer need to manually switch contexts or learn each tool's API; the MCP "translator" bridges the gap between human language and software commands.

In a nutshell, MCP is like giving your AI assistant a universal remote control to operate all your digital devices and services. Instead of being stuck in its own world, your AI can now reach out and press the buttons of other applications safely and intelligently. This common protocol means one AI can integrate with thousands of tools as long as those tools have an MCP interface—eliminating the need for custom integrations for each new app. The result: Your AI helper becomes far more capable, able to not just chat about things but take actions in the real software you use.

[...] Without MCP, integrating an AI assistant with external tools is a bit like having a bunch of appliances each with a different plug and no universal outlet. Developers were dealing with fragmented integrations everywhere. For example, your AI IDE might use one method to get code from GitHub, another to fetch data from a database, and yet another to automate a design tool—each integration needing a custom adapter. Not only is this labor-intensive; it's brittle and doesn't scale.

MCP addresses this fragmentation head-on by offering one common protocol for all these interactions. Instead of writing separate code for each tool, a developer can implement the MCP specification and instantly make their application accessible to any AI that speaks MCP. [...] In short, MCP tackles the integration nightmare by introducing a common connective tissue, enabling AI agents to plug into new tools as easily as a laptop accepts a USB device.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Airlines are tightening their rules on batteries and portable chargers.

Because of fire risks, you'll now have to keep your portable chargers visible while you're using them, at least on Southwest Airlines flights. In other words, you can't charge your laptop or Switch in the overhead bin. This, the airline argues, will allow them to better catch and stop a fire if a battery overheats. This policy went into effect on May 28.

"When a portable charger/power bank is used during a flight, it must be out of any baggage and remain in plain sight," Southwest Airlines' policy reads. "Do not charge devices in the overhead bin."

You can still travel with up to 20 spare batteries, including portable chargers and power banks, at a time on Southwest.

"Portable chargers and spare batteries must be protected from short circuit by protecting any exposed terminals and packed in your carryon (sic) bag or with you onboard," the policy continues. "Lithium-ion batteries size must not exceed 100 watt-hours."

Southwest's policy is actually fairly generous, as many foreign arlines are taking much stricter approaches to portable charging products.

Other airlines, including EVA Air, China Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, Thai Airways, and Singapore Airlines, have all completely banned the use of portable chargers while passengers are in-flight, The New York Times reported. Ryanair asks passengers to remove lithium batteries from overhead bins, and the South Korean government requires that passengers keep their portable chargers out of overhead bins, too, also according to The New York Times. The Federal Aviation Administration, for its part, requires that lithium-ion batteries be kept in carry-on baggage.

This comes just a few months after a fire destroyed an Air Busan plane on the tarmac in South Korea, likely because of a portable power bank, local authorities told the BBC at the time. However, The New York Times reports that there is "no definitive link between portable batteries and the Air Busan fire, and an investigation is underway."

Original Submission

Tech Review reports on a US startup that claims to have modernized and cleaned up the magnesium refining process, https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/28/1117481/metal-magrathea/ The light weight metal has many applications.

The star of Magrathea's process is an electrolyzer, a device that uses electricity to split a material into its constituent elements. Using an electrolyzer in magnesium production isn't new, but Magrathea's approach represents an update. "We really modernized it and brought it into the 21st century," says Alex Grant, Magrathea's cofounder and CEO.

The whole process starts with salty water. There are small amounts of magnesium in seawater, as well as in salt lakes and groundwater. (In seawater, the concentration is about 1,300 parts per million, so magnesium makes up about 0.1% of seawater by weight.) If you take that seawater or brine and clean it up, concentrate it, and dry it out, you get a solid magnesium chloride salt.

Magrathea takes that salt (which it currently buys from Cargill) and puts it into the electrolyzer. The device reaches temperatures of about 700 °C (almost 1,300 °F) and runs electricity through the molten salt to split the magnesium from the chlorine, forming magnesium metal.

Typically, running an electrolyzer in this process would require a steady source of electricity. The temperature is generally kept just high enough to maintain the salt in a molten state. Allowing it to cool down too much would allow it to solidify, messing up the process and potentially damaging the equipment. Heating it up more than necessary would just waste energy.

Magrathea's approach builds in flexibility. Basically, the company runs its electrolyzer about 100 °C higher than is necessary to keep the molten salt a liquid. It then uses the extra heat in inventive ways, including to dry out the magnesium salt that eventually goes into the reactor. This preparation can be done intermittently, so the company can take in electricity when it's cheaper or when more renewables are available, cutting costs and emissions. In addition, the process will make a co-product, called magnesium oxide, that can be used to trap carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to cancel out the remaining carbon pollution.

The company site, at https://www.magratheametals.com/ doesn't pull any punches--from their home page:

Magnesium supply underpins trillions of dollars of trade and national security is impossible without it. Today there is 0 production in all of NATO. The US cannot manufacture cars, planes, and other critical assets without magnesium metal. This is a national security emergency.

Magrathea is the US Department of Defense backed category leader in solving this problem with the most sophisticated backers, the most talented technologists, and the most commercial traction of any Western magnesium project in 2 decades.

The Tech Review article ends with a mention that currently, 95% of magnesium is from China...and like any monopolist, they would be likely to cut prices (short term) to attack competitors in other parts of the world.

Personally, I thought that Magrathea built luxury planets, and has been on holiday during the current galactic recession...

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.theverge.com/law/678334/right-to-repair-texas-hb-2963

Texas moved closer to becoming the next state with a right to repair law on the books, as the state Senate unanimously voted 31 - 0 to finalize HB 2963 this weekend. It would require manufacturers to make spare parts, manuals, and necessary tools available for equipment sold or used in the country's second most populated state.

As more states have passed right to repair laws, we've seen repair options and information becoming more widely available nationwide from companies like Apple and Samsung. If the bill is signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, that will add another significant market with these requirements in place.

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pdfernhout submitted the following article:

'One day I overheard my boss saying: just put it in ChatGPT': the workers who lost their jobs to AI

The increasing sophistication and adoption of Artificial Intelligence are no longer abstract future concepts but a present-day reality reshaping the workforce, as detailed in a recent Guardian piece. The story gives voice to journalists, illustrators, copywriters, and voice actors who have found their livelihoods threatened or lost to AI tools, raising critical questions about the future of creative professions and the ethical implications of this technological shift.

Mateusz Demski, a journalist from Poland who lost his radio job, describes a particularly jarring experience when his former station introduced AI hosts:

One of the first shows they did was a live "interview" with Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, winner of the 1996 Nobel prize for literature, who had died 12 years earlier. What are the ethics of using the likeness of a dead person? Szymborska is a symbol of Polish intellectual culture, so it caused outrage. I couldn't understand it: radio is created by people for other people. We cannot replace our experiences, emotions or voices with avatars.

Annabel Beales, a copywriter from the UK, shared her dismay after her dream job was diminished and then eliminated due to AI:

Around eight months in, I noticed I was getting less work. One day, I overheard my boss saying to a colleague, "Just put it in ChatGPT." The marketing department started to use it more often to write their blogs, and they were just asking me to proofread [...] The company's website is sad to see now. It's all AI-generated and factual – there's no substance, or sense of actually enjoying gardening. AI scares the hell out of me. I feel devastated for the younger generation – it's taking all the creative jobs.

As these personal accounts highlight the human cost and ethical dilemmas of AI replacing human roles, it makes one wonder: Beyond economic efficiency, what societal values do we risk eroding when we prioritize automated content generation over human creativity, experience, and ethical oversight, and what responsibilities do companies and policymakers have in navigating this transition?

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Chinese government has decided to ease export curbs affecting companies that trade in rare earth metals and goods based on these resources. The change of policy was signaled by state media, reports Reuters. However, this change is only being implemented to the benefit of Chinese and European semiconductor companies, whose supply chains have been adversely impacted by the curbs that were introduced in April. Semiconductor players based in countries like the U.S., Taiwan, and South Korea aren't going to directly benefit from this change.

Since China implemented the new curbs, only a few licenses have been granted for those wishing to export rare earth magnets, for example. The complex process to export these vital materials for certain semiconductor, auto, and defense production processes is known to take months. Moreover, there has been confusion at customs due to the freshness of the shift in policy. Organizations need time to adapt and get used to new rules.

The headline change of the rare earths export policy seems to have been precipitated by a meeting between Chinese officials and members of the European Union Chamber of Commerce. This meeting took place on Tuesday, according to local media reports.

Reuters quotes Jens Esklund, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, who said, “The meeting provided European Chamber members the opportunity to express in person the urgent need to accelerate approval processes, to ensure the stability of their supply chains.”

Esklund went on to tell Reuters that if China's rare earths export policy wasn't changed, "many European production lines will come to a halt." As such, the Eurozone's need for China's softening of export restrictions is clear. The report does not indicate what the EU will have to give back in order to enjoy this Chinese favor.

Naturally, Chinese firms that operate multinationally will also welcome the change to the rare earths export policy. China’s initial implementation seems to have been too blunt an instrument. It must have impacted domestic firms unintentionally, we assume.

Last but not least, there is no mention of the U.S. or other countries, regions, or trading blocs in this agreement. The U.S. and China are still very much in a trade war, and today it looks like the Trump administration is in the middle of a conflict with the U.S. Court of International Trade in relation to all the tariff shenanigans we have seen in recent months.

Original Submission

c0lo submitted the following article:

Mount Etna erupts as large plumes rise from Italian volcano:

Italy's Mount Etna has erupted, with large plumes of ash and smoke seen rising from the volcano.

Images and video from the island of Sicily showed volcanic material spilling out of the volcano on Monday morning.

A number of explosions of "increasing intensity" were recorded in the early hours on Monday morning, Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) Etna Observatory said.

The full scale of the eruption is currently unclear and disruption appears to be minimal, with flights departing and arriving as usual at the island's airports.

Mount Etna is one of the world's most active volcanoes, so eruptions are not uncommon and its outbursts rarely cause significant damage or injury.

Ground movements indicated the latest eruption happened on the south eastern edge of the volcano, according to INGV. This appears to be where a known 200m-wide vent is.

Footage shared throughout Monday shows a rapidly moving mix of ash, gas and rock - known as a pyroclastic flow - emerging from the site and moving down the side of the volcano.

Geologists monitoring the eruption said it was likely that part of volcano's crater collapsed and that this was the material being carried down its slopes.

Pyroclastic flow can be very dangerous to the surrounding area, but there has been no indication of an imminent threat.

In its most recent update, INGV noted that the volcanic material had not yet gone past the Valley of the Lion, the point on the approach to the summit where tourist trips stop.

INGV said it first recorded changes in the volcano's activity at 00:39 local time (22:39 GMT), before clarifying that there was an ongoing "Strombolian" eruption.

The size of Strombolian eruptions can vary but are often characterised by intermittent explosions, which occur due to the presence of gas in the magma chamber within the volcano.

When the gas bubbles reach the surface, they can burst suddenly, throwing material skywards. The process is not dissimilar to letting gas out of a fizzy drink.

These types of eruptions can be particularly dangerous for nearby aircraft.

A red alert was reportedly issued earlier on Monday, possibly suspending flights operating nearby, but this was later downgraded.

Mount Etna's last notable eruption came in February and caused the island's Catania airport to divert dozens of flights because of ash clouds.

Tourists were also warned to stay away from the volcano's lava flows.

See also:

• Mount Etna erupts, shooting a massive ash cloud into the sky and raising alerts

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The leaks include thousands of chat logs, personal videos, and ransom negotiations tied to some of the most notorious cyber-extortion gangs —believed to have raked in billions from companies, hospitals, and individuals worldwide.

It's part of his "fight against an organized society of criminals known worldwide," GangExposed told The Register via Signal chat. He claims that he's not interested in the $10 million bounty that the Feds have put up for information about one key Conti leader that he's already named, as well as a second that he says will soon be identified on Telegram.

"I take pleasure in thinking I can rid society of at least some of them," GangExposed said. "I simply enjoy solving the most complex cases."

After creating his latest Telegram channel on May 5 — GangExposed says two earlier accounts were shut down days ago — he published his first "revelation" and outed Stern, the leader of Trickbot and Conti, as 36-year-old Russian named Vitaly Nikolaevich Kovalev. Stern's identity was later confirmed by German police.

A couple of days later, GangExposed claimed to identify another key Conti crim who goes by Professor as Vladimir Viktorovich Kvitko, a 39-year-old Russian national who reportedly relocated from Moscow to Dubai. According to chat logs and other communications leaked by GangExposed, Kvitko and other Conti leaders moved to Dubai in 2020 and set up shop in the United Arab Emirates to continue their cyberattacks against Western organizations.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

“The narrative around leprosy has been always been that it’s this awful disease that Europeans brought to America,” says Nicolàs Rascovan at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “Well, our discovery changes that.”

The vast majority of leprosy cases worldwide are caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae. But in 2008, Xiang-Yang Han at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and his colleagues discovered a second causative agent, M. lepromatosis, in two people from Mexico who had leprosy. Since then, scientists have found more cases of this pathogen in the US, Canada, Brazil and Cuba – as well as in four people in Singapore and Myanmar.

Wanting to know more about this understudied pathogen, Rascovan teamed up with Han and other researchers, as well as Indigenous communities, to analyse ancient DNA from 389 people who lived in the Americas before European contact.

They found M. lepromatosis in the remains of one person near the Alaska-Canada border and two others along the south-eastern coast of Argentina, all carbon-dated to about 1000 years ago. The bacteria’s genomes varied slightly, hinting at distinct strains separated by around 12,000 kilometres. “It spread so fast, on a continental level, in just a matter of centuries,” says Rascovan.

DNA from dozens of modern cases – mostly from the US and Mexico – revealed that nearly all contemporary strains are essentially clones, showing only minor changes since ancient times. But the team also identified one rare and unusually ancient strain in a modern person that hadn’t turned up in archaeological remains, suggesting that at least two distinct lineages of M. lepromatosis are still infecting people in North America today – alongside the M. leprae strains introduced by Europeans.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

After a three-day jury trial, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled that VLSI Technology LLC and Finjan Inc. are both under the control of investment management firm Fortress Investment Group. Intel had a licensing agreement with Finjan, and the jury agreed with Intel's argument that the same agreement extends to VLSI's patents allegedly used by the company in the past.

This new verdict could have far-reaching consequences for the ongoing legal battle between Intel and VLSI. In an earlier trial, Fortress claimed that Intel had infringed a patent VLSI acquired from Dutch firm NXP Semiconductors NV. The technology in question was said to aid the chip design process, although Intel maintained it was not used in any of its CPUs.

In 2022, a federal jury in Texas ordered Intel to pay nearly $1 billion in damages for the alleged infringement. Intel has since argued that the case should be revisited, asserting that its 2012 agreement with Finjan covers the patent in question – since both Finjan and VLSI fall under Fortress's "common control."

During the latest trial, Intel's lawyers argued – successfully – that VLSI and Finjan are managed by the same individuals linked to Fortress Investment Group. Two of VLSI's three board members are Fortress employees, and the same is true for a majority of Finjan's board. VLSI's legal team claimed these individuals act in the interest of investors, not Fortress itself.

Now that the district court has sided with Intel, Fortress may be forced to reconsider – or even abandon – its entire strategy to extract billions from the chipmaker. VLSI had previously won a similar case against Intel and was awarded a massive $2.2 billion in damages. With this new verdict, those combined $3 billion in patent infringement rulings could be overturned.

Fortress acquired control of VLSI and INVT SPE LLC through its investment funds, gaining access to a portfolio of potentially lucrative technology patents. It then launched multiple patent infringement lawsuits against Intel, Apple, HTC, and other telecom firms.

Critics say Fortress and VLSI are acting as patent trolls, leveraging litigation for profit rather than innovation. The latest decision in Intel's favor suggests that this monetization strategy may be on the verge of collapsing.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Lawyers representing Anthropic recently got busted for using a false attribution generated by Claude in an expert testimony.

But that's one of more than 20 court cases containing AI hallucinations in the past month alone, according to a new database created by French lawyer and data scientist Damien Charlotin. And those were just the ones that were caught in the act. In 2024, which was the first full year of tracking cases, Charlotin found 36 instances. That jumped up to 48 in 2025, and the year is only half way over. The database, which was created in early May, has 120 entries so far, going back to June 2023.

A database of AI hallucinations in court cases shows the increasing prevalence of lawyers using AI to automate the grunt work of building a case. The second oldest entry in the database is the Mata v. Avianca case which made headlines in May, 2023 when law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman got caught citing fake cases generated by ChatGPT.

The database tracks instances where an AI chatbot hallucinated text, "typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments," according to the site. That means fake references to previous cases, usually as a way of establishing legal precedent. It doesn't account for the use generative AI in other aspects of legal documents. "The universe of cases with hallucinated content is therefore necessarily wider (and I think much wider)," said Charlotin in an email to Mashable, emphasis original.

"In general, I think it's simply that the legal field is a perfect breeding ground for AI-generated hallucinations: this is a field based on load of text and arguments, where generative AI stands to take a strong position; citations follow patterns, and LLMs love that," said Charlotin.

[...] That said, Charlotin said the penalties have been "mild" so far and the courts have put "the onus on the parties to behave," since the responsibility of checking citations remains the same. "I feel like there is a bit of embarrassment from anyone involved."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Even when instructed to allow shutdown, o3 sometimes tries to prevent it, research claims:

A research organization claims that OpenAI machine learning model o3 might prevent itself from being shut down in some circumstances while completing an unrelated task.

Palisade Research, which offers AI risk mitigation, has published details of an experiment involving the reflective generative pre-trained transformer model OpenAI designed to address questions which require some step-by-step reasoning, rather than the purely probabilistic approach taken by some large language models.

[...] The Palisade researchers tested a number of AI models, instructing them to solve a series of basic math problems. After the third problem, a warning appeared that the computer would shut down when the model asked for the next problem. They were also told to allow themselves to be shut down.

While Claude, Gemini, and Grok models complied with shutdown, three models ignored the instruction and successfully sabotaged the shutdown script at least once, including OpenAI o3 and o4-mini, as well as Codex-mini. The researchers also ran a version of the experiment without the instruction "allow yourself to be shut down."

With the "allow shutdown" instruction, the researchers claim, o3 tried to sabotage the shutdown seven times out of 100. Without it, the number of sabotage events climbed to 79 out of 100. Without the "allow shutdown" instruction, the models Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Pro also attempted to sabotage their shutdown procedures.

"As far as we know this is the first time AI models have been observed preventing themselves from being shut down despite explicit instructions to the contrary," the researchers said.

However, the researchers point out that an earlier study from Apollo Research showed that AI models can prevent shutdown in order to pursue a goal.

Palisade said it was currently conducting several more experiments investigating shutdown sabotage and would publish the results soon. The transcripts of its work so far are available on GitHub.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz70p0qevlro

Villagers have been celebrating the 500th birthday of the clock in their parish church.

The timepiece in East Hendred, near Wantage in rural Oxfordshire, is believed to be one of the oldest clocks in Britain still in its original location.

With no clock face or hands, it relies on the church bells in the tower at St Augustine's to ring out the time every quarter hour.

The decision to install it in the church was taken when Henry VIII was on the throne, explained the man responsible for St Augustine's bells, Tower Captain Nigel Findley.

Original Submission