Trump’s tariffs turn from confused to chaotic
IRS Officials Trade On Confidential Tax-Related Information And Impact Tax Enforcement Outcomes
Cato Institute: IRS Officials’ Stock Holdings and Corporate Tax Outcomes, by Michael Mayberry (Florida; Google Scholar), Eashwar Nagaraj (Florida; Google Scholar) & Scott G. Rane (Florida; Google Scholar):
Stalkers, maniacs: Tech bosses spend big on security as threats rise
Sloppy AI defenses take cybersecurity back to the 1990s, researchers say
SCWorld: LAS VEGA:
“Just as it had at BSides Las Vegas earlier in the week, the risks of artificial intelligence dominated the Black Hat USA 2025 security conference on Aug. 6 and 7. We couldn’t see all the AI-related talks, but we did catch three of the most promising ones, plus an off-site panel discussion about AIpresented by 1Password.
The upshot: Large language models and AI agents are far too easy to successfully attack, and many of the security lessons of the past 25 years have been forgotten in the current rush to develop, use and profit from AI.
We — not just the cybersecurity industry, but any organization bringing AI into its processes — need to understand the risks of AI and develop ways to mitigate them before we fall victim to the same sorts of vulnerabilities we faced when Bill Clinton was president. “AI agents are like a toddler. You have to follow them around and make sure they don’t do dumb things,” said Wendy Nather, senior research initiatives director at 1Password and a well-respected cybersecurity veteran.
“We’re also getting a whole new crop of people coming in and making the same dumb mistakes we made years ago.” Her fellow panelist Joseph Carson, chief security evangelist and advisory CISO at Segura, had an appropriately retro analogy for the benefits of using AI. “It’s like getting the mushroom in Super Mario Kart,” he said. “It makes you go faster, but it doesn’t make you a better driver.”
The Black Hat briefings kicked off Aug. 6 with a presentation by Rebecca Lynch and Rich Harang of Nvidia, who detailed how easy it is to feed malicious information to an LLM or an AI agent and what you can do to mitigate (but never quite eliminate) the risk. Lynch, an offensive security researcher, explained that to alter the output, you have to poison the input. Because many, if not all, LLMs have trouble telling the difference between prompts and data, it’s easy to perform the AI equivalent of SQL injectionupon them. “The real question is where untrusted data can be introduced,” she said. But fortunately for attackers, she added many AIs can retrieve data from “anywhere on the internet.”…Sharbat showed how he persuaded a customer-service AI agent, built using Microsoft’s Copilot Studio no-code AI developer tool and modeled on a real customer-service bot used by McKinsey and Co., to email him the contents of a customer-relationship management (CRM) database.
New executive order puts all grants under political control
Ars Technica: “On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive orderasserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research.
As the Supreme Court Focuses on the Past, Historians Turn to Advocacy
The New York Times gift article: “Spikes in the number and influence of briefs filed by historians have prompted questions about the role scholars should play in litigation Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. studied history in college and wanted to become a historian. A taxi ride changed his mind.
The Man Who Loved Ayn Rand
By Susan Brownmiller; Susan Brownmiller is the author of ''Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape'' and the novel ''Waverly Place.''
Published: June 25, 1989
JUDGMENT DAY My Years With Ayn Rand. By Nathaniel Branden. Illustrated. 436 pp. Boston: A Marc Jaffe Book/ Houghton Mifflin Company. $21.95.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN was 14 years old in 1944 when he picked up his sister's copy of ''The Fountainhead,'' the symbol-clashing epic of Howard Roark, a ruggedly handsome genius architect in mortal combat with a pedestrian world. During the next four years he reread the novel ''almost continuously,'' transported to the mountaintop ''where the issues I cared about really mattered.''
This alienated teen-ager in Toronto was not alone in his literary appreciation. In the 1940's and 50's, several overlapping generations of virginal adolescents adopted ''The Fountainhead'' as a personal emblem for its well-thumbed pages of tony sex. Oh, the hot parts! What tender pulse did not quicken as the dusty, redheaded stranger from the stone quarry - yes, Roark! - stormed the French windows to the bed of cool, haughty Dominique Francon, accomplishing the wordless rape that boiled - turn the page! - to a thundering coupling of giants!
In ''Judgment Day,'' Mr. Branden's memoir, he tells us that a fan letter to the author brought no response. The young man persisted. A second letter when he was at college in California led to a telephone call - ''This is Ayn Rand'' - and a summons to the author's house in the San Fernando Valley for after-dinner coffee and cake.
''What are your premises?'' ''Explain your context!'' Mr. Branden departed at 5 A.M., reeling in giddy euphoria from the nonstop conversation.
A short, stocky Pola Negri look-alike who kept a cigarette holder clenched in her teeth, the voluble Russian-born creator of ''The Fountainhead'' had more on her mind than commercial best sellers. She was obsessed, Mr. Branden says, with her place in history as a philosophic champion of individual autonomy and laissez-faire capitalism against the reigning liberal-left cant of the day. Restless in a tepid marriage to a laconic underachiever while she slogged through the tome that became ''Atlas Shrugged,'' she hungered in secret for a temporal reward. The young admirer's chiseled features and idealistic intensity matched the exalted vision of her romantic fiction. He was more than willing to become her first disciple. Eventually, despite a 25-year difference in their ages, he was honored to become her lover; to borrow from their pillow talk, he played a heroic Siegfried to her passionate Brunnhilde. The cult of Objectivism was born.
Mr. Branden's talent for organizing started at home. He enrolled his fiancee and most of his family in the Objectivist cause. Relocated in New York, Ms. Rand's inner circle lived within walking distance of each other, several in the same apartment building. They met for discussions every Saturday night, and devoured freshly minted chapters of ''Atlas Shrugged'' straight from the typewriter. Delighting in the irony, they called themselves the Collective.
(A future star in their midst was the economist Alan Greenspan, who brought his modified Randian views to the Ford administration and is now chairman of the Federal Reserve.) Publication of the long-awaited masterwork in 1957 did not bring the world to a grinding halt, and Ms. Rand slid into a terrible depression. Mr. Branden duly reports that she lacked the energy to continue their sexual affair. To boost her sagging spirits, he founded an institute, named after himself, to promulgate her philosophy. It did astonishingly well and became a career. Soon there were branches in 40 cities and hosts of new converts.
