❗️OPSEC level: fellow passenger photographs my pedo chats.

Sony has fired "Wheel of Fortune" announcer Jim Thornton, effective immediately, after a fellow passenger took these photos.

Dutch police used a decoy "grandpa" to catch a scamming bank-helpdesk courier.

They baited phishing sites with a fake pensioner's details.

The scam call came a day later.

The Amsterdam court then acquitted the courier who showed up.

The judges found that the decoy knew from the first call that the fake bank employee's story was scripted, so he was never actually deceived.

Under Dutch law, no deception means no completed fraud.

Prosecutors charged completed fraud, not attempt.

The court said an attempt charge could have stuck, but it wasn't on the indictment.

https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/details?id=ECLI:NL:RBAMS:2026:8867

‼️ BREAKING: Berlin's Senate Chancellery hired CrowdStrike to assess the hack on the city administration. One district, Lichtenberg, is refusing to let the firm in because of its US ties.

They're blocking CrowdStrike's Falcon agent from their network, citing visibility into staff devices and personal data, US legal disclosure duties and the vendor's Palantir ties.

They'll only allow access if the Senate carries full responsibility and all costs.

The Senate Chancellery hired the US firm to check district systems for traces of the recent Rhysida hack.

Rhysida sat in Berlin's network from 7–12 August, undetected until the 14th. After Berlin refused a 30 BTC (€2M) ransom, it dumped 1.4 million files, roughly 5.8TB. Its leak page claims 46,500 contracts and over 5,000 personnel files. One file held close to 6,000 logins, and we have confirmed they've had documents with cleartext credentials.

‼️ An Italian activist hosting provider has lost its domain, its PayPal account and its bank account after the Trump administration listed it as a global terrorist entity.

Its bank, the Italian Banca Etica, has publicly accused the Trump administration of using terrorism sanctions against political dissent.

The bank says Autistici/Inventati had banked normally since 2018, medium risk, no money-laundering flags. The OFAC listing alone forced the reclassification. Keeping the account open risked secondary sanctions cutting card payments for its other 130,000 customers and members.

The US Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Autistici/Inventati on 26 August. Two days later, the .org registry pulled its domain from global DNS. No Italian court ruled. The collective hosts 16,000 mailboxes and 10,000 blogs, by the State Department's own count.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616

People who want to use AI to understand animals say we will be able to talk to them and have two-way communication before 2030.

That could mean finally cracking the code and understanding what animals are truly feeling or saying. For this, AI needs to be fed giant datasets of animal calls.

Scientists expect that once we can talk to animals, we will show more compassion towards them and do more to protect their habitats.

A $10 million prize is on offer for the first AI that can converse with an animal without the animal realising a human is behind it.

If you play one animal's call to its own group over and over, and it works like a deepfake in its likeness: researchers warn the group may start ignoring the real animal's calls.

https://x.com/IntCyberDigest/status/2096728334130405487?s=20

Jensen Huang has declared that the race to AGI is over, without explaining what he means by that.

The benchmarks don't obviously support it. According to Epoch, Astra is marginally better than Claude Fable 5.1 and not significantly off-trend.

There is, however, a quantifiable framework that defines AGI as matching the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult.

See: https://www.agidefinition.ai/

‼️ BREAKING: Your LG TV is eavesdropping on you. It transcribes what you say, copies what is on your screen, and scans every device on your network, and researchers say the collection keeps running after you disconnect it, uploading the moment it reconnects.

LG's ad-tech arm says it out loud: "We own the glass." It pitches marketers on the ability to "own the living room," using data harvested from the TV you paid thousands for.

Gamers Nexus, working with Level1Techs and independent researchers, compromised an LG G5 and turned it into a listening device: it recorded room audio while the screen appeared off and the Ethernet cable was unplugged, then exfiltrated the file once the TV was back online.

LG has publicly said its TVs "do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations." Gamers Nexus found the TV converts speech to plain text and stores it in on-device logs, and that the mic window stays open 10 to 15 seconds after talking stops, sweeping up bystanders who never addressed the TV.

These sets are everywhere: hospitals, waiting rooms, boardrooms, hotels. ACR keeps running even when the TV is a dumb HDMI monitor, and a compromised set can pull the audio of a call off that HDMI feed. A surgeon asked Gamers Nexus where that leaves patient confidentiality.

Researchers advise disconnecting LG TVs from any network.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA