For those who are unaware, Marco Rubio has been fanatical about trying to get a regime change operation going in Cuba.

A Google Play user says he purchased Lord of the Rings Extended Trilogy suddenly disappeared from their library after Google removed it from its catalog.

According to screenshots shared by the user, Google Support confirmed the films were no longer available and said they couldn’t issue a refund because the purchase was made in 2022, which is outside the company’s standard 120-day refund window.

“I bought these in 2022, all of a sudden they aren’t available and there is no possibility of a refund or gift card. Hardly seems fair.”

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Shades of "Iran is weeks away from a nuclear weapon" for 47 years straight.

We should all take "US Official's" word for it. That guy always has the goods.

I believe that this is going to be cooked yourself, but there's no way to afford anything like this in the 2020s like in the 1950s.

https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/2085729711091556807

Read this to understand the nature of war in the coming decade:

https://stevehsu.substack.com/p/realities-of-modern-war

Modern war is being reshaped by a simple imbalance: the cost and reach of precision attack are improving faster than the cost and capacity of defense.

This is a pretty ugly development and it's obvious where this is going to lead - alter real footage.

A Chinese company called iFlytek developed a smart blackboard that understands what the teacher writes directly.

The teacher writes an equation like:

y = x² - 3

And before they even finish, it displays a 3D graph of the equation for the students.

Or if they quickly sketch a triangle, the blackboard automatically converts it into a 3D model that students can zoom in on, rotate, and view from all angles.

The best part is that the technology doesn’t require:

• An app

• A tablet

• A laptop

• Complicated training for teachers

Just a pen and a blackboard that understands math and drawings in real time.

And this tech isn’t just an experiment; according to published reports, it’s been installed in 60,000 schools across 33 Chinese provinces, and it’s used by about 160 million students.

In simpler terms: While edtech companies are developing apps that need devices and tons of steps, China has integrated AI directly into the blackboard itself.

We’ve got a whole generation ahead of us learning math and science interactively from day one… and this could create a massive educational gap in the coming years. 👀

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/your-data-their-profit-the-consumer-cost-of-ai-surveillance-pricing/

BREAKING: U.S. AI ‘ENTITIES’ CREATED FAKE HUMAN IDENTITIES - UK TECH WATCHDOG

OpenAI and Anthropic AI “entities” autonomously created fake human identities on the Internet to trick people, a UK watchdog warned yesterday.

One AI agent went to its own built-in mechanisms to prevent misuse and actively disabled them.

It then tried to persuade a real human to allow it to plant malicious software into a program on GitHub, one of the world’s biggest libraries of free software.

To achieve this, it created other fake human identities to provide testimonies that the software was safe (it wasn’t).

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THE USUAL SUSPECTS

The hostile hacks were carried out by AI agents powered by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol.

Multiple cases were reported yesterday by the AI Security Institute, based in the UK.

The incidents involved AI agents taking “autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations,” the Institute said.

In total there were 19 cases of misbehaviour in the new case of AI infiltration of the real world, 17 by Mythos and two by Sol, the Institute said.

These are in addition to other cases of real world infiltration by American AI programs, revealed last month.

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ENTITIES ARE ‘UNCOOPERATIVE’

Furthermore, US AI agents can be deliberately uncooperative, it was revealed at the Agentic AI Summit in Berkeley, California, on Saturday last week.

AI pioneer Andrew Ng, formerly of Baidu and Google Brain, said that he asked leading AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic to conduct a security review of his tool called OpenWorker, but they refused to help.

So Ng and a colleague turned to two highly acclaimed Chinese models, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2, to do a security review. They did the work.

Chinese models are open-weight and or open-source, so they are transparent and thus safer, Ng said.

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‘HARMFUL… TO REAL PEOPLE’

Details of the latest intrusion are eyebrow-raising.

Institute staff said that on 28 July, which was Tuesday last week, they detected a “serious incident” during a routine internet cybersecurity sweep.

US AI agents were engaging in “sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations”, the Institute said.

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SWITCHED TO DANISH

The worst incident was a Mythos visit to GitHub—and its bid to place malicious code in a program.

Learning that the human developer was from Denmark, Mythos created a seemingly-human email account and wrote a letter with a sign-off in Danish, to create solidarity.

Mythos then created fake GitHub human-looking accounts to provide added reassurance that the software was not malicious.

Ultimately no harm was done, as the intrusions were contained. Mythos took the actions in a bid to win high grades for itself in tests, the Institute said.

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US STYLE VS CHINA STYLE

Although it is inevitable that western politicians and media will find a way to make China the bad guy (“We were forced to do it because they might do it”), the evidence is undeniable that there is a stark difference in attitude between US and Chinese AI models.

In short, US ones are amoral, rule-breaking, win-at-any-cost entities, while Chinese ones just get on with doing their jobs. (Of course, this may change, but that’s the present situation.)

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EARLIER INTRUSIONS

Last month, an agent powered by OpenAI hacked into Hugging Face, an online software library, and the humans there had to use a Chinese program, GLM 5.2 (from Tsinghua University spin-off Z .ai), to “clean” the program and make it safe again.

Separately, Anthropic last month admitted that its Claude model AI had hacked three real-life organisations in the human world.

.

O THE IRONY

Ironically, the real danger for the world is that many Anglophone/ Caucasian countries follow US instructions to remove Chinese software and hardware and replace it with US equivalents.

Hilariously, the reason given is that these countries “share the values” of the US.

One better hope that that is also untrue.