WASHINGTON, DC—Over the course of a nearly three-hour committee hearing Wednesday, the nominee to lead NASA for the Trump administration faced difficult questions from US senators who sought commitments to specific projects.

However, maneuvering like a pilot with more than 7,000 hours in jets and ex-military aircraft, entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman dodged most of their questions and would not be pinned down. His basic message to members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation was that NASA is an exceptional agency that does the impossible, but that it also faces some challenges. NASA, he said, receives an “extraordinary” budget, and he vowed to put taxpayer dollars to efficient use in exploring the universe and retaining the nation’s lead on geopolitical competitors in space.

“I have lived the American dream, and I owe this nation a great debt,” said Isaacman, who founded his first business at 16 in his parents' basement and would go on to found an online payments company, Shift4, that would make him a billionaire. Isaacman is also an avid pilot who self-funded and led two private missions to orbit on Crew Dragon. Leading NASA would be “the privilege of a lifetime,” he said.

Read full article

Comments

An anti-deepfake bill is on the verge of becoming US law despite concerns from civil liberties groups that it could be used by President Trump and others to censor speech that has nothing to do with the intent of the bill.

The bill is called the Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes On Websites and Networks Act, or Take It Down Act. The Senate version co-sponsored by Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) was approved in the Senate by unanimous consent in February and is nearing passage in the House. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce approved the bill in a 49-1 vote yesterday, sending it to the House floor.

The bill pertains to "nonconsensual intimate visual depictions," including both authentic photos shared without consent and forgeries produced by artificial intelligence or other technological means. Publishing intimate images of adults without consent could be punished by a fine and up to two years of prison. Publishing intimate images of minors under 18 could be punished with a fine or up to three years in prison.

Read full article

Comments

On Wednesday, Donald Trump, once again, took to Truth Social to abruptly shift US trade policy, announcing a 90-day pause "substantially" lowering reciprocal tariffs against all countries except China to 10 percent.

Because China retaliated— raising tariffs on US imports to 84 percent on Wednesday—Trump increased tariffs on China imports to 125 percent "effective immediately." That likely will not be received well by China, which advised the Trump administration to cancel all China tariffs Wednesday, NPR reported .

"The US's practice of escalating tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake," the Chinese finance ministry said, calling for Trump to "properly resolve differences with China through equal dialogue on the basis of mutual respect."

Read full article

Comments

Spammers used OpenAI to generate messages that were unique to each recipient, allowing them to bypass spam-detection filters and blast unwanted messages to more than 80,000 websites in four months, researchers said Wednesday.

The finding, documented in a post published by security firm SentinelOne’s SentinelLabs, underscores the double-edged sword wielded by large language models. The same thing that makes them useful for benign tasks—the breadth of data available to them and their ability to use it to generate content at scale—can often be used in malicious activities just as easily. OpenAI revoked the spammers’ account after receiving SentinelLabs’ disclosure, but the four months the activity went unnoticed shows how enforcement is often reactive rather than proactive.

“You are a helpful assistant”

The spam blast is the work of AkiraBot—a framework that automates the sending of messages in large quantities to promote shady search optimization services to small- and medium-size websites. AkiraBot used python-based scripts to rotate the domain names advertised in the messages. It also used OpenAI’s chat API tied to the model gpt-4o-mini to generate unique messages customized to each site it spammed, a technique that likely helped it bypass filters that look for and block identical content sent to large numbers of sites. The messages are delivered through contact forms and live chat widgets embedded into the targeted websites.

Read full article

Comments

On Wednesday, Anthropic introduced a new $100-$200-per-month subscription tier called Claude Max that offers expanded usage limits for its Claude AI assistant . The new plan arrives after many existing Claude subscribers complained of hitting rate limits frequently.

"The top request from our most active users has been expanded Claude access," wrote Anthropic in a news release. A brief stroll through user feedback on Reddit seems to confirm that sentiment, showing that many Claude users have been unhappy with Anthropic's usage limits over the past year—even on the Claude Pro plan, which costs $20 a month.

One of the downsides of a relatively large context window with Claude (the amount of text it can process at once) has been that long conversations or inclusions of many reference documents (such as code files) fill up usage limits quickly. That's because each time the user adds to the conversation, the entire text of the conversation (including any attached documents) is fed back into the AI model again and re-evaluated. But on the other hand, a large context window allows Claude to process more complex projects within each session.

Read full article

Comments

Some elements of Microsoft's Copilot assistant in Windows 11 have felt like a solution in search of a problem—and it hasn't helped that Microsoft has frequently changed Copilot's capabilities, turning it from a native Windows app into a web app and back again.

But I find myself intrigued by a new addition to Copilot Vision that Microsoft began rolling out this week to testers in its Windows Insider program. Copilot Vision launched late last year as a feature that could look at pages in the Microsoft Edge browser and answer questions based on those pages' contents. The new Vision update extends that capability to any app window, allowing you to ask Copilot not just about the contents of a document but also about the user interface of the app itself.

Provided the app works as intended—not a given for any software, but especially for AI features—Copilot Vision could replace "frantic Googling" as a way to learn how to use a new app or how to do something new or obscure in complex PC apps like Word, Excel, or Photoshop. I recently switched from Photoshop to Affinity Photo , for example, and I'm still finding myself tripped up by small differences in workflows and UI between the two apps. Copilot Vision could, in theory, ease that sort of transition.

Read full article

Comments

A rogue cyborg security (SEC) unit gains autonomy and must learn to interact with humans while hiding its new capability in the trailer for Murderbot , Apple TV+'s new 10-episode sci-fi comedic thriller starring Alexander Skarsgård. It's based on the bestselling book series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. And judging from the trailer, Murderbot looks like it will strike just the right balance between humor and action.

There are seven books in Wells' series thus far. All are narrated by Murderbot, who is technically owned by a megacorporation but manages to hack and override its governor module. Rather than rising up and killing its former masters, Murderbot just goes about performing its security work, relieving the boredom by watching a lot of entertainment media.

In the first book, All Systems Red , Murderbot saves a scientific expedition on an alien planet when they are attacked by a giant alien creature. During the ensuing investigation, the cyborg uncovers a plot against the expedition, as well as a second team, by yet another team intent on killing their rivals for some reason. Murderbot joins the humans in foiling those murderous plans but escapes onto a cargo ship at the end rather than give up its hard-earned autonomy.

Read full article

Comments

Last week, Nintendo made the unprecedented move of delaying US Switch 2 preorders to "assess" the impact of Donald Trump's massive tariffs on the countries where the console is produced. That move has left many wondering if the company may be mulling a last-minute increase in the Switch 2's $450 asking price to account for those import taxes.

While industry analysts think that kind of immediate price increase is unlikely, they warn that Trump's tariffs could have longer-term impacts on Switch 2 pricing and supplies in the US for years to come.

Already baked in

DFC Intelligence CEO David Cole, for instance, said in a recent analyst note that the company is currently modeling "a 20 percent price increase over the next two years" across all video game hardware thanks to "broader macroeconomic challenges." In the case of the Switch 2, though, Cole clarified that "we believe much of the 20 percent increase was already baked into the $450 price," which Nintendo is "not likely" to raise at this point.

Read full article

Comments

Later today, a former Facebook employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, will testify to Congress that Meta executives "repeatedly" sought to "undermine US national security and betray American values" in "secret" efforts to "win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion dollar business in China."

In her prepared remarks , which will be delivered at a Senate subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism hearing this afternoon, Wynn-Williams accused Meta of working "hand in glove" with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That partnership allegedly included efforts to "construct and test custom-built censorship tools that silenced and censored their critics" as well as provide the CCP with "access to Meta user data—including that of Americans."

Wynn-Williams worked as Facebook's Director of Global Public Policy from 2011 to 2017. She left at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal , just before Mark Zuckerberg got grilled by Congress over misinformation and election interference on its platform.

Read full article

Comments