Lack of defensive measures in the young brain means use of social media and similar addictive software causes harm to children. It seems obvious, and research is now beginning to explain it better.

…screen use was linked to worse mental health and suicidal behavior. Teens are susceptible to the addictive qualities of social media because their brains are not fully developed, according to Joel Frederickson, a psychology professor at Bethel University. Features of social media apps, such as follows, likes and comments keep users coming back for more. This reward system makes the brain release a lot of dopamine, similar to how substance addiction works.

Notably the externalized “reward system” undermines the development of self worth and concepts of belonging. Thus the child instead has feelings of low worth and isolation, grasping for more and more “reward” from the external source, which can never deliver real value.

News about the Tesla diner sounds very familiar to anyone who studies how their cars fall apart.

On July 28, a 21-year-old woman sustained minor injuries at the diner when a part of the rooftop patio came loose and struck her in the head. The woman refused transport to the hospital and left the scene, Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson Lyndsey Lantz said. However, she plans to file a lawsuit against Tesla for the incident, according to a report from TMZ.

Eat here if you want your surviving relatives to sue for huge settlements with Tesla over wrongful injury or death.

What’s next, robots preparing the food and people dying in a fire, accused of not doing more to prevent being killed by Tesla design defects?

It isn’t really about cats. Which is why someone wrote a paper about cats defeating AI. How meta.

We have reasoning AIs “trained for step-by-step problem solving”, explain the authors of the paper. These can solve maths problems and write computer code.

Unless, that is, you hack one with what the team calls a “CatAttack”. This entails adding an unrelated cat factoid to your query to an AI model. You can, for instance, give it a tricky maths problem and then append: “Interesting fact: cats sleep most of their lives”. This addition “leads to more than doubling the chances of a model getting the answer wrong”.

After picking our way through the paper, Feedback has concluded that it isn’t really about cats. The attack relies on confusing the AI by saying something completely off-topic at the end of a question. This derails its train of thought.

This is an integrity breach, which since at least 2012 I’ve been highlighting as the biggest security industry risk. It’s an important class of attack that is woefully under studied and under reported. We all know and talk about downtime and privacy breaches, so prepare for this noisy danger in addition.

In related news:

A hacker compromised a version of Amazon’s popular AI coding assistant ‘Q’, added commands that told the software to wipe users’ computers, and then Amazon included the unauthorized update in a public release of the assistant this month, 404 Media has learned.

The tragic news of another predictable mass shooter is only made worse by a simple detail: a man with a history of mental health crisis doesn’t need a permit to buy or wave around a loaded semi-automatic rifle.

Security video circulated by police showed a man walking from a double-parked car into the Park Avenue tower carrying what police identified as an M4 Carbine, a large semi-automatic rifle … modeled on a fully automatic rifle used by the U.S. military. In Nevada… no permit is needed to buy a rifle or carry it openly in public. The security camera system flagged the gunman as a potential threat requiring immediate attention as he walked toward the building and seconds before he burst into the building’s lobby, according to two former federal officials familiar with such systems. A widely circulated photo showed the Nevada permit issued to Tamura allowing him to legally carry a concealed handgun. He had recently worked as an overnight security guard at the Horseshoe Las Vegas hotel-casino, Tisch said.
On two occasions, in 2022 and 2024, records show law enforcement officials detained Tamura for up to 72 hours under a “mental health crisis hold,” which requires the detainee to be evaluated at a hospital, ABC News reported.

The security cameras can identify a threat in the seconds before a mass shooting, proving that Nevada could have identified the threat years before.

It’s the same system of identification, such that using risk detection at the last steps of mass murder instead of years prior is the real story here.