from the fever-dream dept

There’s this insane subset of people who, when they talk about Donald Trump, I’ll never understand. It’s the ones who claim that taking what Donald Trump says seriously is a mistake that most people are unlikely to make. It’s also expressed by the crowd that claims something to the effect of: you shouldn’t take Trump literally, but you should take him seriously.

That this is said about the most powerful single individual on the planet is bonkers. This is typically how I’ve talked about my own kids when they were toddlers. Inevitably, one of my kids would be trying to say something entirely innocuous, only to have what came out of their mouth be some horrible word or swear or something. And I would hand-wave that away. C’mon, I’d tell people, you know that’s not what he meant to say.

Donald Trump is, unfortunately, the President of the United States of America. When he speaks, people listen. And a percentage of those listening will take him both literally and seriously. And when Donald Trump told American women last year to not take Tylenol, or give it to their young children, because it would give their kids autism, well, they listened.

Researchers found that in the wake of that batshit crazy announcement, use of Tylenol and its generic equivalents dropped significantly in use in emergency rooms and prescriptions written for children.

For nearly three months after that, new research found, Tylenol orders for pregnant women showing up in emergency rooms dropped and prescriptions of the generic drug for children rose. This happened despite sharp criticism of the president’s message from doctor groups saying that the drug, leucovorin, shouldn’t be broadly used for autism and Tylenol is safe during pregnancy.

“It just shows that in our country right now, health care has been politicized in a way that political messages are driving and impacting care — and not always for good,” said Dr. Susan Sirota, a pediatrician in Highland Park, Illinois, who wasn’t involved with the research.

The research suggested something like a 10% drop in measurable use of acetaminophen or paracetamol in the wake of Trump’s announcement. That doesn’t tell the whole story, of course, since so much of the use of Tylenol occurs through over the counter purchases at drug stores and the like. Based on market research, however, Tylenol specifically saw a nearly identical 11% or so drop in OTC sales as well back in November.

But that isn’t all. With all of this attention on a common drug supposedly giving children autism, parental anxiety about the condition has shot up as well. And, as a result, parents are turning toward experimental drugs for that that defy expert recommendations. That’s where leucovorin comes in.

Leucovorin is a derivative of folic acid used for, among other things, reducing the toxic side effects of certain chemotherapy drugs and treating a rare blood disorder. It has also been studied for a neurological condition known as cerebral folate deficiency and for a subset of autistic children, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The pediatrics group doesn’t recommend routine use of the drug for autistic children. Early, small-scale studies have explored its use, “and some findings suggest potential benefit in carefully selected cases,” the group said.

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Still, after the federal announcement about the drug, Sirota said some families in her practice asked about getting it for their autistic children. She educated them about the evidence, told them about the potential for side effects and didn’t prescribe it. Potential side effects include irritability, nausea and vomiting and skin issues like dermatitis.

This may sound melodramatic, but there is real psychological harm being done to those just starting families in this country. For most parents, their children become their entire world. Their raison d’etre. And if you scare the shit out of them about Tylenol giving their kids a disorder, they’re going to stop taking the common drug and turn to any hair-brained lifeline they can find to try to keep their children from that disorder.

Does leucovorin do anything at all for anyone with autism? I don’t have the slightest clue. And neither does the Trump administration. I’m quite confident that there is no current reason to see Tylenol as a danger to the general populace, however, and that didn’t stop Trump from going on television and playing doctor.

“It feels like a pattern with our government, right? They keep building on these houses of cards that just fall down,” she said. “This politicizing of medicine just in general, and moving away from science, has been so challenging.”

The consequences of this sort of thing are going to span decades. Let that sink in.

Filed Under: donald trump, health, rfk jr., tylenol

Companies: kenvue

More than 30 employees from OpenAI and Google, including Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, filed an amicus brief on Monday in support of Anthropic in its legal fight against the US government.

“If allowed to proceed, this effort to punish one of the leading US AI companies will undoubtedly have consequences for the United States’ industrial and scientific competitiveness in the field of artificial intelligence and beyond,” the employees wrote.

The brief was filed just hours after Anthropic sued the Department of Defense and other federal agencies over the Pentagon’s decision to designate the company a “supply-chain risk.” The sanction, which severely limits Anthropic’s ability to work with military contractors, went into effect after Anthropic’s negotiations with the Pentagon fell apart. The AI startup is seeking a temporary restraining order to continue its work with military partners as the lawsuit progresses. This brief specifically supports this motion.

Signatories of the brief include Google DeepMind researchers Zhengdong Wang, Alexander Matt Turner, and Noah Siegel, as well as OpenAI researchers Gabriel Wu, Pamela Mishkin, and Roman Novak, among others. Amicus briefs are legal filings submitted by parties that are not directly involved in a court case but that have expertise relevant to it. The employees signed in a personal capacity and don’t represent the views of their companies, according to the brief.

OpenAI and Google did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

The amicus brief says that the Pentagon’s decision to blacklist Anthropic “introduces an unpredictability in [their] industry that undermines American innovation and competitiveness” and “chills professional debate on the benefits and risks of frontier AI systems.” It notes that the Pentagon could have simply dropped Anthropic’s contract if it no longer wished to be bound by its terms.

The brief also says that the red lines Anthropic claims it requested, including that its AI wouldn’t be used for mass domestic surveillance and the development of autonomous lethal weapons, are legitimate concerns and require sufficient guardrails. “In the absence of public law, the contractual and technological requirements that AI developers impose on the use of their systems represent a vital safeguard against their catastrophic misuse,” the brief says.

Several other AI leaders have also publicly questioned the Pentagon’s decision to label Anthropic a supply-chain risk. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post on social media that “enforcing the SCR [supply-chain risk] designation on Anthropic would be very bad for our industry and our country.” He added that “this is a very bad decision from the DoW and I hope they reverse it.” As Anthropic’s relationship with the Pentagon soured, OpenAI quickly signed its own contract with the US military, a decision some people criticized as opportunistic.

Australia’s new age verification legislation has left Australians raising their eyebrows.

Similar to enforcements in the UK and US, citizens will be required to verify that they are over 18 to access adult content. But, with this comes concerns that people’s most sensitive data will be put at risk by communications with third parties.

Luckily, this is where a VPN can help. The best VPNs secure your online traffic, leaving no trace of your IP that snoopers can find, and securing data you transfer to age verification providers against malicious actors trying to intercept your information. What’s more, doing this can cost under 3 AU$ per month.

My top pick for achieving this is Surfshark. It gives you unlimited simultaneous connections, it’s the fastest VPN I’ve ever used, and you can choose to add a bunch of additional features if you want to completely secure your online presence.

While it’s not quite as high-performing as NordVPN, our best Australia VPN overall, it’s a superb option if you’re new to VPNs and looking for something cheap and simple to use that’s still powerful.

While a Surfshark Starter plan is the cheapest way to protect yourself during age verification checks, a One adds a full security suite, including antivirus and real-time data breach alerts. For a small monthly increase, this bundle provides broader digital protection than the base plans of many competitors.

NordVPN and Surfshark both offer 5 Australia locations. However, NordVPN offers more advanced security credentials and more consistent content unblocking capabilities.

• A proposed New York bill would ban AI chatbots from providing legal or medical advice
• The legislation would allow users to sue companies if their chatbots impersonate licensed professionals
• Lawmakers say the measure is meant to protect the public as AI tools become more widely used

AI chatbots have spent the past few years answering nearly every kind of question imaginable, but New York lawmakers are preparing to draw a firm line around at least a couple of categories of conversation. A bill advancing through the state legislature would prohibit AI chatbots from providing legal or medical advice and would allow users to sue the companies behind those systems if they cross that boundary.

The proposal, Senate Bill S7263, would apply to AI chatbots that mimic or impersonate licensed professionals such as lawyers or physicians. The heart of the bill applies the same principle about how individuals cannot practice law or medicine without the appropriate licenses to AI. That rule is meant to ensure that people receive guidance from trained professionals who can be held accountable for their advice.

Hackers contacted employees at financial and healthcare organizations over Microsoft Teams to trick them into granting remote access through Quick Assist and deploy a new piece of malware called A0Backdoor.

The attacker relies on social engineering to gain the employee’s trust by first flooding their inbox with spam and then contacting them over Teams, pretending to be the company’s IT staff, offering assistance with the unwanted messages.

To obtain access to the target machine, the threat actor instructs the user to start a Quick Assist remote session, which is used to deploy a malicious toolset that includes digitally signed MSI installers hosted in a personal Microsoft cloud storage account.

According to researchers at cybersecurity company BlueVoyant, the malicious MSI files masquerade as Microsoft Teams components and the CrossDeviceService, a legitimate Windows tool used by the Phone Link app.

Using the DLL sideloading technique with legitimate Microsoft binaries, the attacker deploys a malicious library (hostfxr.dll) that contains compressed or encrypted data. Once loaded in memory, the library decrypts the data into shellcode and transfers execution to it.

The researchers say that the malicious library also uses the CreateThread function to prevent analysis. BlueVoyant explains that the excessive thread creation could cause a debugger to crash, but it does not have a significant impact under normal execution.

The shellcode performs sandbox detection and then generates a SHA-256-derived key, which it uses to extract the A0Backdoor, which is encrypted using the AES algorithm.

The malware relocates itself into a new memory region, decrypts its core routines, and relies on Windows API calls (e.g., DeviceIoControl, GetUserNameExW, and GetComputerNameW) to collect information about the host and fingerprint it.

Communication with the command-and-control (C2) is hidden in DNS traffic, with the malware sending DNS MX queries with encoded metadata in high-entropy subdomains to public recursive resolvers. The DNS servers respond with MX records containing encoded command data.

“The malware extracts and decodes the leftmost label to recover command/configuration data, then proceeds accordingly,” explains BlueVoyant.

“Using DNS MX records helps the traffic blend in and can evade controls tuned to detect TXT-based DNS tunneling, which may be more commonly monitored.”

BlueVoyant states that two of the targets of this campaign are a financial institution in Canada and a global healthcare organization.

The researchers assess with moderate-to-high confidence that the campaign is an evolution of tactics, techniques and procedures associated with the BlackBasta ransomware gang, which has dissolved after the internal chat logs of the operation were leaked.

While there are plenty of overlaps, BlueVoyant notes that the use of signed MSIs and malicious DLLs, the A0Backdoor payload, and using DNS MX-based C2 communication are new elements.

Malware is getting smarter. The Red Report 2026 reveals how new threats use math to detect sandboxes and hide in plain sight.

Download our analysis of 1.1 million malicious samples to uncover the top 10 techniques and see if your security stack is blinded.

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For good reason, Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) is on the verge of quitting again in The Pitt season 2. He’s already due to go on a three-month sabbatical when this hellish Fourth of July shift ends, but now that’s starting to feel like a permanent leave of absence.

In his defence, I don’t blame him. The ER is currently under digital lockdown to prevent a cyber attack, meaning no computer records can be accessed, the number of patients practically doubles every five seconds, and replacement Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) isn’t making life easier for anyone.

The organisation is aiming to tap into the growing demand for autonomous agents.

Tech giant Microsoft has announced plans to launch Copilot Cowork, which is a tool based on Anthropic’s popular Claude Cowork. Reportedly, it is part of a larger initiative to take advantage of the growing demand for autonomous agents.

The news comes two months after Anthropic launched its Cowork model, which it described as a “simpler version of Claude Code”. This prompted concerns among those heavily invested in ‘traditional’ software companies resulting in a strong sell-off in US and European software. According to Reuters, Microsoft’s own shares fell nearly 9pc in February.

Currently, ​Copilot Cowork is in the testing phase and will be ​available to early-access ⁠users in later March. The organisation has not disclosed the pricing structure, but has revealed that some usage would be included ​in its $30-per-user, per-month M365 Copilot offering for enterprises.

Jared Spataro, the chief marketing officer of AI at Work at Microsoft said: “Frontier transformation starts with a simple idea: AI must do more than optimise what already exists. It must unlock new levels of creativity, innovation, and growth. And it must show up inside real work, grounded in real context and solve real problems for people and organisations. 

“We’ve found that to do this, the two most important elements are intelligence and trust. Intelligence ensures AI is contextual, relevant and grounded. Trust ensures AI can scale safely, securely and responsibly. Our announcements today (9 March) show how intelligence and trust together turn AI from experimentation into durable, enterprise-wide value.”

Following the reveal of Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork, Forrester vice-president and principal analyst JP Gownder said: “Microsoft’s launch of Copilot Cowork signals a strategic shift in its AI approach, showing the company moving Copilot away from reliance on OpenAI alone and toward a multi-model architecture that includes partners such as Anthropic. 

“The move also highlights the current limitations of Microsoft’s existing Copilot agents: while the company has talked extensively about autonomous ‘agents’, they have so far struggled to take meaningful action compared with newer agentic systems such as Anthropic’s. 

“At the same time, Copilot Cowork clearly taps into the growing hype around Anthropic’s Claude Cowork concept, but significantly extends it by embedding the capability across Microsoft 365 applications rather than keeping it as a desktop-centric tool.”

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People can block the xAI’s Grok chatbot from creating modifications of their uploaded images on social network X. Neither X or xAI, both Elon Musk-owned businesses, have made a public announcement about this feature, which users began noticing on the iOS app within the image/video upload menu over the past few days.

This option is likely a response to Grok’s latest scandal, which began at the start of 2026 when the addition of image generation tools to the chatbot saw about 3 million sexualized or nudified images created. An estimated 23,000 of the images made in that 11-day period contained sexualized images of children, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Grok is now facing two separate investigations by regulators in the EU over the issue.

The positive side of the recent feature addition is that X and xAI have taken a step toward limiting inappropriate uses of Grok. This block is a simple toggle and it hasn’t been buried in the UI. So that’s nice.

The negative side, however, is that this token gesture that doesn’t amount to any serious improvement to how Grok works or can be used. It’s great that the chatbot won’t alter the file uploaded by one person, but as reported by The Verge, the block only limits tagging Grok in a reply to create an image edit. There are plenty of workarounds for those dedicated individuals who insist on being able to use generative AI to undress people without their consent or knowledge.

Hopefully xAI has more powerful protective tools in the works. The limitations Grok on putting real people in scanty clothing that X announced in January seem to have had only partial success at best. If this additional and narrow use case is all the company offers, then the claims of being a zero-tolerance space for nonconsensual nudity are going to ring hollow. Especially since, as we noted at the time, xAI could stop allowing image generation at all until the issue is properly and thoroughly fixed.