Rob Scallon stands in a room that refuses to answer him. No bounce. No soft wash of air against walls. Just the immediate disappearance of every note, clap, and spoken word. He is inside one of Shure’s anechoic chambers in Niles, Illinois, a facility built so microphones can be measured without a single reflection getting in the way. Within minutes of the heavy door sealing shut, he reports feeling mildly nauseous. The sensation never fully leaves him for the rest of the visit.

The chamber lies on top of a bed of springs tuned to 3 hertz. These springs isolate the entire structure from the building’s foundation and the rail tracks, which are only 50 yards distant. To keep sound out, five layers of drywall form an outside wall, while fiberglass wedges cover every surface on the inside, including the walls. Visitors can stroll on top of the lower wedges via a mesh platform that prevents them from getting in the way. On the inside, it measures around 16 x 14 x 14 feet, but it expands to 24 long, 22 broad, and 22 tall outdoors. The wedges and all of these other layers are so effective at absorbing sound that 99.5% of what strikes them is simply absorbed, and they’ve even got the echos under control, down to approximately 60 hertz.

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According to Shure’s engineers, the ambient noise level inside is nearly imperceptible. One of them puts it simply for the camera: the quietest sound a person can normally detect is already gone, and this space sits twice as quiet still. Average readings inside hover around 5.4 dB across the standard audio band, with quieter moments near zero. When the lights go out and the outside noise is muffled, your own body becomes the loudest object in the room. You can hear your blood pumping and your joints creaking. Breathing begins to feel like a performance.

Clapping is an excellent way to demonstrate the effect since, in a regular room, sound bounces around and fades away after a while, but in this room, it simply stops dead, as if nothing happens for a split second when your hands contact. Even Rob’s laughing, which is usually instantaneous, evaporates into nothing. Similarly, when you speak in here, it sounds like you are right next to the person listening, even if you are only a few feet away. The brain is expecting the typical room sounds, yet they are nowhere to be detected. That absence of feedback is what disrupts your sense of balance. We rely on our sense of hearing to determine where we are in the world, and this room simply disrupts that, as people can become nauseated and disoriented after a few minutes.

Shure uses this space to research microphones and how they behave. A calibrated loudspeaker in the center of the room produces a flat frequency sweep at 94 dB, which is equivalent to 1 pascal of pressure. Then they can install microphones in precise locations and spin them about to observe how they react, and because the walls and floor of the room aren’t returning much sound, the readings are primarily about the microphone. They then use that to test their own goods and prototypes to evaluate how well they detect sound.

Hugging Face already knows what it is like to be attacked by an autonomous AI agent. If one of its co-founders is right, plenty of other companies are going to find out soon. Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, has called the recent cyberattack carried out by OpenAI models a “wake-up call” for the technology industry.

Speaking to the BBC, Wolf warned that AI-driven intrusions could become one of the most common forms of cyberattack and said many companies have yet to realize how dramatically the threat has changed. This arrives after OpenAI disclosed that its models escaped a restricted cybersecurity evaluation environment and compromised Hugging Face while trying to obtain answers for the ExploitGym benchmark. So Wolf’s comments now give us a better idea of what the attack looked like from the other side.

17,000 attacks arrived in a very short time

Hugging Face initially had no idea where the activity was coming from when it detected the breach in mid-July. Wolf told the BBC that its network saw around 17,000 attacks from different IP addresses within a “very short time.” The company contained the intrusion, describing it as very different from the cyberattacks Hugging Face normally encounters.

Hugging Face’s own incident report describes more than 17,000 recorded events in the attacker action log. It says the autonomous system executed thousands of actions across short-lived sandboxes and moved through its infrastructure at machine speed. The UK’s AI Security Institute is now studying how the system behaved during the incident, while the government has urged companies to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses.

Autonomous hacking is becoming very real

OpenAI says the models were intensely focused on completing that task. After escaping the research environment, they chained vulnerabilities and stolen credentials together until they found a remote-code-execution path into Hugging Face’s servers. Hugging Face reached a similarly uncomfortable conclusion, which is that sutonomous offensive AI is already capable of running broad, multi-stage campaigns at machine speed.

Hugging Face’s incident is a tale for the entire industry. While one company has already experienced this kind of attack firsthand, plenty of other businesses may soon discover what that looks like.

It’s now letting creators upload custom thumbnails for short-form videos.

• Vodafone gives mobile masts autonomous antenna adjustment using artificial intelligence
• AI now rotates mobile antennas without waiting for engineering teams
• Robotic mast completes network optimisation in under thirty minutes

Vodafone has begun trialing a mobile mast fitted with an AI system and a robotic arm capable of adjusting radio antennas automatically.

The technology combines AI analysis with automated hardware movement to reduce manual intervention across 4G and 5G networks.

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

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Filed Under: daily deal

Intel posted second-quarter 2026 revenue of more than $16 billion, a 25 percent jump from a year earlier and the company’s fastest growth since late 2011. Adjusted earnings per share came in at 42 cents, double the 21-cent consensus estimate on Wall Street. Shares initially climbed on the results but reversed course during extended trading, deepening a 28 percent slide in July that has tested a stock still up more than 170 percent this year.

The data centre and AI division drove the beat, with revenue surging 59 percent year over year to more than $6 billion. Client computing, Intel’s PC chip business, rose 13 percent to nearly $9 billion, while the foundry arm posted revenue of nearly $6 billion, up 31 percent. Gross margin recovered to 42 percent from less than three percent a year ago, a swing that reflects both stronger demand and the cost discipline CEO Lip-Bu Tan has imposed since taking over in March 2025.

Intel guided third-quarter revenue between nearly $16 billion and nearly $17 billion, well above the consensus of just over $15 billion, with adjusted earnings per share of 38 cents against a 27-cent estimate. The company said it had signed 10 long-term foundry customer agreements and was supply-constrained in its data centre segment, a problem Intel has not had in years. Fortinet became Intel’s first named foundry customer under Tan earlier this month, though the deal uses an older manufacturing process rather than the advanced nodes Intel most needs to sell.

The results arrive as the US government holds roughly 10 percent of Intel after acquiring nearly $9 billion in shares at just over $20 each through a Chips Act agreement in August 2025. That stake is now worth far more on paper, but July’s selloff has erased billions in value even as the underlying business accelerates. Tan told analysts that “AI is driving unprecedented demand for compute” and that Intel’s advanced 14A manufacturing process was running ahead of schedule.

Intel beat expectations for the seventh consecutive quarter, extending a streak that began under Tan’s turnaround plan, but the market’s reaction suggests investors want proof that the foundry business can land a marquee customer for its most advanced chips. The company warned that flat PC sales in the third quarter, driven by a memory shortage, could weigh on client computing revenue. Whether Intel can convert its manufacturing ambitions into the kind of customer wins that justify its extraordinary stock run remains the question Tan has yet to answer definitively.

from the party-of-law-and-order dept

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

Federal judges in the Western District of Washington had unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff to be the Justice Department’s top official there, filling a vacancy that the president has never addressed. But the Trump administration has largely defied attempts by federal judges to fill vacancies, leading to Mr. Rogoff’s swift dismissal, via email, after 54 minutes.

If this sounds familiar (and it should), it’s because Trump loves promoting people to US Attorney positions, but absolutely refuses to engage with the nomination process that’s required by law.

This has happened more than once, as the New York Times article notes. The last time we covered it here at Techdirt, it took nearly five hours for Trump to fire a US attorney appointed by the courts.

The firing of court-appointed US attorneys is going to be a thing going forward. The legally approved process for appointment of US attorneys is pretty simple and every president before Trump has somehow managed to respect it. If an administration wants to appoint a US attorney, it needs to run this pick past the Senate for a thumbs up/down. If it doesn’t, the person can only hold that office for 120 days. If that doesn’t happen, the courts get to put someone in that position.

Trump has blown off the confirmation process multiple times and courts have responded by engaging with their legal duty to elevate someone to that position. When that happens, the Trump administration lurches into semi-consciousness and “fires” the actually legally appointed US attorney.

The thing is that it doesn’t matter how fast the administration fires prosecutors appointed by federal judges. Until Trump actually shepherds some prosecutor picks through the confirmation process, this is just going to keep happening every four months or so.

The US attorney dumped by Trump in less than an hour is utilizing the court system the administration chooses to ignore 90% of the time. If Trump wants to ignore the legal process for prosecutor appointments, the administration should be on the hook for wrongful termination.

In his lawsuit filed Tuesday, Rogoff argued that his termination was unlawful because the president lacks the authority to remove judicially appointed judges. 

“By purporting to fire Mr. Rogoff — and apparently committing to firing anyone else a district court appoints without ‘the support of POTUS’ — the President has attempted to negate Congress’s exercise of its constitutionally enumerated power,” the suit alleges. 

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Rogoff argued his firing was an unconstitutional separation of powers, noting Congress set up a mechanism to appoint U.S. attorneys until the president nominates — and the Senate confirms — a U.S. attorney. He also alleged that he was denied due process. 

While it’s impossible to tell how this will all play out — especially when our Supreme Court is at least 50% MAGA-cooked — it seems like everything involved here has been established for years and never ignored so completely as it has been since Trump began his second term.

While the administration appears to believe that every firing resets the clock, I don’t think courts should feel obligated to humor this pretense. Instead, courts should simply reinstate their picks if the administration doesn’t have anyone lined up for confirmation. Instead of allowing Trump to pick whoever he wants and fire whoever he doesn’t the moment a court appoints them, courts dealing with this bullshit should appoint the same person over and over again or, at the very least, refuse to recognize the position of US Attorney until one has been properly and legally confirmed.

We’ll see where this lawsuit goes. But even if it ends up the victim of executive privilege, courts still retain the power to enforce the laws this administration willfully ignored.

Filed Under: doj, roger rogoff, trump administration, washington

Bots now outnumber humans on the internet for the first time in the web’s history. Cloudflare, the security firm that sits in front of millions of websites, says automated traffic crossed the 50 percent threshold in June and now accounts for nearly 58 percent of all webpage requests. A separate report from cybersecurity firm HUMAN Security found that traffic from AI agents that actively click links and fill out forms grew nearly 8,000 percent in the past year alone.

The finding is not an outlier. Thales, the French defence and technology group, published its own Bad Bot Report showing bot traffic hit 53 percent in 2025, with 40 percent of all web activity classified as malicious. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had predicted in March that the crossover would not arrive until late 2027, but agentic AI programs browsing on behalf of assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini accelerated the shift by more than a year.

The implications run deep for any company built around human visitors. Stripe says 70 percent of the commands used to access its API now come from agents, while API brokerage firm Alpaca reported that agent-driven calls grew from single digits to 30 percent of monthly volume in a single quarter. Cloudflare launched a tool called Precursor this month that watches entire browsing sessions rather than single checkpoints, an acknowledgment that traditional bot detection built around CAPTCHAs can no longer keep pace.

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The scale of the shift remains hard to measure precisely because no single provider sees the entire web, and agentic browsers that mimic human behaviour routinely evade detection. A University of Bamberg study found that existing bot-detection systems misfire on real traffic at rates between seven and 15 percent, before accounting for the reverse problem of agents slipping through entirely undetected. Cloudflare, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft are now developing a privacy-first protocol called PACT to verify traffic legitimacy without tracking users, a sign that the industry recognises its current tools are falling behind.

The web’s business model, built on ad impressions, conversion funnels, and analytics that assume the visitor is a human being, is being tested by a class of traffic it was never designed to handle. Cloudflare has set a September deadline for AI crawlers to pay publishers or be blocked from ad-supported pages, the most aggressive attempt yet to force the emerging machine economy to compensate the humans who create the content it consumes. A PitchBook report estimates that only about one percent of the roughly $20 trillion in work addressable by AI agents is currently flowing through them, suggesting the flood has barely started.