Tuesday, August 05, 2025

Another security vulnerability, another legal threat

 

ProPublica Updates Supreme Connections Database With Newly Released Financial Disclosures

“We updated our Supreme Connections database with newly released financial disclosures from eight Supreme Court justices on Friday, covering the 2024 calendar year. Supreme Connections is our database that makes it easy for anyone to browse justices’ financial disclosures and to search for connections to people and companies mentioned within them. 

This update includes disclosures filed in May and made public late last month. Justice Samuel Alito received a 90-day extension, and his disclosure is expected later this summer. The latest update details millions in book income, almost 40 trips and one gift…”


 Alaska Airlines Grounds All Flights for Three Hours Due to IT Outage
The New York Times
 Manual workaround of IT system results in $4M damage
Aviation Week
 Another security vulnerability, another legal threat
The Register
 Global Hack on Microsoft Product Hits U.S., State Agencies
WashPost
 Organ retrieval reforms ordered after some donors showed signs of life
WashPost
 Coins? Cards? Apps? The hell that is paying for parking in LA
LA Times
 Weak password allowed hackers to sink a 158-year-old company
BBC
 Drugmaker Refuses FDA Request to Pull Treatment Linked to Patient Deaths
NY Times
 Obesity Prediction Could Be Guided by Genetic Risk Scores
NY Times
 U.S. Aims to Ban Chinese Technology in Undersea Cables
Reuters
 Fireside chat: Navigating a cyber incident—lessons from the British Library
George Neville-Neil
 UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from U.S.
ArsTechnica
 Nvidia Warns Its GPUs Need Protection Against Rowhammer Attacks
The Register
 Eight healthy babies born after IVF using DNA from three people
The Guardian
 A change in the Southern Ocean structure can have climate implications
ICM-CSIC
 Cybersecurity Bosses Increasingly Worried About AI Attacks, Misuse
Cameron Fozi
 Smartphones aren't safe for kids under 13. Here's why.
cnn.com
 Musk's xAI was a late addition to the Pentagon's set of AI contracts
NBC News
 'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers
Nikkei
 Google to cut thousands of search quality rater jobs after dropping contract with Appen
Searchengineland
 *Coldplaygate* Is a Stark Reminder That Cameras Are Everywhere
NY Times
 A MAGA bot network on X is divided over the Trump-Epstein backlash
NBC News
 Re: Bug / Feature of Google Maps
Michael D. Sullivan
 Info on RISKS (comp.risks)



The Website at the End of the Internet

New York Magazine, no paywall – Reddit is one of the last thriving islands of the old web. Can it survive AI? It doesn’t really matter who you are, how you spend your time online, or what you imagine your relationship with the internet to be. 

However you scroll, wherever you browse, and whatever you want to see on your screens, it has probably happened to you, and if you haven’t noticed yet, you may now: Your world has become more Reddit. The 20-year-old platform, which began as a niche link aggregator and gradually grew into the web’s default community of communities, has gone from optional to inescapable, its little red alien logo manifesting no matter which way you look. 

For my zoomer cousin, a professional TikToker who was still learning to read when Reddit was founded, it’s obviously “the only place where you know there are real people.” For 82-year-old user LogyBayer, who grew up programming FORTRAN on punch-card computers in the 1960s, Reddit, where he has posted thousands of times, is the closest thing he can find to “the wondrous world of Usenet,” the online discussion system that predates the web. 

Many of the less online people I know, who had maybe heard of Reddit, are now tapping through threads about life advice and HVAC repair; at the same time, some of the most online people I know, who for years saw Reddit as a sort of internet playpen, a meme aggregator downstream of more vital communities, are now logging in daily. It’s happened to me, too, a screen-addled tech reporter who has been covering the platform’s growth — and various problems — for well over a decade with at least notional remove: 

When it’s time again to pick up that phone and incinerate a few more seconds of my one life on earth, more often than not, I shovel them into Reddit. This isn’t just a feeling. Reddit, after two decades of gradual and uneven growth, is exploding. According to Similarweb, it’s one of the largest properties online; if you take away social apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and utilities like Google and ChatGPT, its closest competition among websites is Wikipedia. 

In 2023, according to the company, Reddit had around 60 million unique visitors a day; its latest earnings report puts the number at 108 million a day, 400 million a week, and, according to conservative estimates, well over a billion different people using it every month. About those earnings reports: In 2024, Reddit went public. Its stock price popped, then climbed alongside its traffic. 

Revenue is way up, and after years of losses, the company eked out a slim profit in the last quarter. Why now? Reddit’s co-founder and current CEO, Steven Huffman, suggests the answer is obvious. “When we started Reddit, it was a web page of 25 links from around the internet,” he says. “Now, 20 years later, you’re stumbling into some thread where people are telling stories they’ve never told before and it drifts into life advice for someone who lives 2,000 miles away.” 

He didn’t see that coming, he says, but “in hindsight, it actually makes a lot of sense.”Reddit’s place in the collapsing web is both valuable and risk-laden. Google’s response to the gradual breakdown of the digital commons has been to send more and more people to Reddit, where relevant results are at least probably written by human beings, lavishing the site with traffic but binding the companies’ fates together…