Any advertisements in New York that feature artificial intelligence-generated people in place of actors will now be violating state law if they don’t clearly label that they have used a “synthetic performer.”

The law, signed in December by Gov. Kathy Hochul, went into effect Tuesday. Her office is calling it a “first-in-the-nation law” that will boost transparency at a time when it says AI generated performers are popping up across all forms of media, including on social platforms and in digital advertising.

Synthetic performers are defined under state law as “digitally-created media that appear as a real person.” The law applies to ads in any medium.

“In New York, we are setting the rules of the road instead of letting AI run the show,” Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement. The “simple, honest disclosure” required by the law “protects consumers, respects our creative workforce and keeps New York at the forefront of responsible innovation,” she said.

Ads that don’t “conspicuously disclose” that they have used a synthetic performer will be subject to a penalty of $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 for any further violations.

There are specific carve outs listed in the law to exempt ads for movies, television shows, streaming content, video games and other works that feature synthetic performers in the entire work. It also doesn’t apply to audio advertisements or ads where AI is solely used for language translation.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/55685

Cross posted from https://chatgptjailbreak.tech/post/528538

the Arizona-based company Spektre Works, in collaboration with the U.S. Army, manufactured the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS), a drone very similar to the Iranian one. Unlike the sophisticated and expensive attack weapons of the U.S. Armed Forces, this drone has a unit cost of around $35,000, a very low figure for an unmanned aircraft of this type.

..._. Connecting the dots.

American-Made Shahed-136 Kamikaze Drone Clones Being Tested By Marines

Exclusive: Lockheed blasts Shahed-style drone in Arizona missile test

Spektre Works LUCAS, the American clone of the Iranian HESA Shahed 136 attack drone

The lawyers on both sides of a federal court case in Mississippi were caught using artificial intelligence, a situation where, effectively, generative AI tools were used to argue against each other.

The judge wrote in a blistering sanctions order, that the lawyers wasted the court’s time, and that “in an era of rampant unverified AI usage within the legal field, this case presents a prime example of the risk associated with serving as a rubber-stamp.”

“This case presents the Court with an unusual scenario—attorneys for both litigants engaged in similar sanctionable conduct,” Sharion Aycock, senior United States District Judge for the Northern District of Mississippi wrote in a sanctions order. “This court is yet again ‘burdened with addressing AI hallucinations court filings.’”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to make it effectively impossible for people to buy what many call burner phones—a phone not explicitly linked to your identity at the point of purchase—which would impact privacy-conscious people, to domestic abuse survivors, to journalists, and many more. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country’s telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued identification number and their physical address, alarming privacy advocates and civil rights activists who compare the measures to those from authoritarian countries where it can be difficult to buy a mobile phone plan without giving up your identity.

The proposed change would drastically shake up how people obtain phone plans in the U.S., and have all sorts of privacy and cybersecurity knock-on effects. The FCC is proposing the data collection partly as a way to combat scammers, with telecoms being required to collect other information on business and foreign customers like the intended use case of their bulk phone plan purchase and their IP address. But the changes would mean telecoms collect data on all new and renewing customers, and the FCC provides a long list of other things that the collected data could help authorities with.

“For decades, civil libertarians have looked overseas at authoritarian countries where the government requires people to register to get a mobile phone to ensure they can be tracked. We never thought that would happen here,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project told 404 Media in an email. “But make no mistake: with this rulemaking, the government is contemplating taking away people’s ability to get a burner phone, which will hurt low-income people, domestic violence victims, and anyone else who cares about their privacy.”

Artificial-intelligence stocks are resuming their sell-off on Tuesday, and the former superstars that had led the market to records are dragging Wall Street down with them.

The S&P 500 dropped 1.5% after erasing an early gain of 1% and pulled further from its all-time high set a week ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 294 points, or 0.6%, as of 12:15 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 2.5% lower.

Indexes swung lower as companies selling computer chips, memory and other building blocks of the AI boom broke from early gains to losses. Micron Technology went from a jump of 4.2% to a drop of 7.5%, for example. That’s a day after it soared 9.9% and two days after it plunged 13.3%.

The computer memory company’s stock has already tripled so far this year, raising criticism that it’s gone too far, too fast. Following last week’s industrywide sell-off, the question is whether AI stocks broadly are heading for a long downturn or just needed a shake-out to get rid of excessive optimism.

Marvell Technology dropped 13.3%, and Advanced Micro Devices sank 8.1% after both AI winners also erased early-morning gains. Nvidia’s fall of 3.4% was the single heaviest weight on the S&P 500 because the chip company is Wall Street’s largest company by value and thus its most influential.

The weakness for AI stocks drowned out the benefit Wall Street got from easing oil prices. More stocks in the S&P 500 actually rose than fell, despite the sharp drop for the overall index, as the price for a barrel of Brent crude oil sank 4.4% to $90.13. It had briefly topped $98 the day before.

Oil prices have swung up and down as hopes fade and rise that the United States and Iran can reach a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. A reopening would allow oil tankers to resume delivering crude from the Persian Gulf to customers worldwide.

The drop in oil prices helped stocks of airlines, which have been punished by soaring fuel costs. U.S. airlines spent more than $6 billion on jet fuel in April, up 78% from a year earlier, according to government data. American Airlines climbed 1.4%, and Delta Air Lines added 1%.

The City of Taylor, Texas, is facing public outcry after residents found out a data center's being constructed on land donated as a public space.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260608193011/https://www.404media.co/this-company-will-add-phone-airpod-and-smartwatch-trackers-to-license-plate-readers/

“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered,” McAfee acknowledged before my visit. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t climb.”

...

“We catch these things and divert the milk immediately,” McAfee said of the pathogens.

I assumed that after diverting batches, the farm discarded them.

Later that day, I learned otherwise.

“We have a red-flag system here, where if there’s anything that gets really out of whack, they can immediately tag the milk, and it doesn’t go to anything but cheese,” McAfee told me. “Because, you know, cheese is resistant to pathogens.”

Research has shown that raw cheese is not, in fact, resistant to pathogens; while aging can mitigate some risk, harmful bacteria can still survive the usual 60-day maturation process.

LGBTQ+ advocates are pressing Mamdani to put up the $65 million for gender-affirming care he pledged on the campaign trail.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47914042

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/47730831

“We know they’re going to make a lot of money during these events,” Yolanda Fierro, a suite runner and union member who voted to authorize the strike, told the Guardian. “So what we want is a thank-you – gratitude from the company, giving us a good, equitable contract for increasing our wages, so we can survive out here in California because it’s very expensive here in this state.”

...

Workers also want greater guarantees for their safety. Unite Here Local 11 has demanded that Fifa refuse to allow ICE officers into the stadium during the World Cup.

The ICE demand is aimed to guarantee the safety of both foreign-born union members and spectators, Fiero said.

“They pay their taxes – they just want to be treated fairly and respectfully,” Fiero said of her colleagues. “We also do not want our guests from around the world to feel in fear of coming to our stadium and feel like ICE is going to take them because they’re not from our country.”

Last month, the union and the American Civil Liberties Union of southern California asked the attorney general, Rob Bonta, to investigate Fifa’s data-collection practices, saying that Fifa was collecting workers’ sensitive personal details, requiring them to waive their California data-protection rights, and then handing that information over to the Department of Homeland Security.

“These workers are being put in an impossible bind, where they are being forced to choose between their livelihoods and handing over their most personal sensitive information,” the letter reads. “Workers in California should not be forced to make this choice.”

JPMorgan Chase leads 65 banks making decisions incompatible with restraining rising temperatures, researchers say

The world’s largest banks committed $906bn in financing to the fossil fuel industry last year, an “unfathomable” increase in investment locking in years more of coal, oil and gas production as the world continues to overheat, a new report has found.

The surge in new fossil fuel lending, up $64bn or nearly 8% on 2024, shows that the world’s largest 65 banks are making decisions incompatible with international agreements to restrain rising global temperatures, according to the coalition of environmental groups behind the new analysis.

JPMorgan Chase is again the world’s leading financier of fossil fuels, according to the annual Banking on Climate Chaos report, after pushing $58bn to the sector last year – up 13% from 2024.

If you've been thinking it seems like there are more wars raging in the world these days, it turns out you're right and the data proves it.

A new study by researchers at a university in Sweden recorded the highest number of conflicts between states in 2025 since World War II, and the highest number of fatalities recorded since the Rwandan genocide.

As governments around the world struggle with ways to reverse plunging birth rates, new U.S. studies suggest they have ignored a key culprit -- the smartphone.

“Is the iPhone Birth Control?” asked a paper published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, delving into why U.S. fertility rates have fallen by 22 percent since 2007.

For a while, experts linked the decline to the recession that struck in 2008 when the global financial system nearly imploded, driving millions of people into hardship. But when the economy picked up, a rebound in births never came.

Myriad other reasons have been posited, such as increased use of contraception, more female education, and growing housing or childcare costs. However, no clear cause has been established.

President dramatically raised cost of visa for highly skilled workers in executive order last year

A US judge has invalidated Donald Trump’s $100,000 annual fee on H-1B visa applications, ruling it an unlawful tax that violated federal administrative law and the constitution.

US district judge Leo Sorokin in Boston issued the 42-page ruling in a lawsuit filed by 20 Democratic state attorneys general challenging a fee Trump announced in September that dramatically raised the cost of obtaining H-1B visas.. The ruling vacated the sweeping fee, which was a 20-to-50 fold increase on existing rates, and the Trump administration is widely expected to appeal.

In his ruling, Sorokin’s found that the fee amounted to a tax, rather than a regulatory restriction. Since the constitution gives Congress, not the president, the exclusive power to levy taxes, Trump lacked the authority to impose it.

Prediction market apps are doubling down on paid content creators denying election results, asking them to remove posts or lose sponsorship

Popular online prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket will prohibit paid creators and affiliates from denying election results, NPR reports, as online creators spread misinformation about California’s election.

In a social media post, Bobby Allyn, NPR technology reporter, reports: “Kalshi now says it prohibits paid creators from calling into question the integrity or accuracy of an election, legal ruling or official determination in connection with an election.

“Polymarket now says any affiliate post denying an election result would violate their terms of service stipulating that creators do not spread false and misleading information,” he added. “The company says it has asked that posts from two of its paid affiliates lose its sponsorship.”