¶AI-generated images and video have rapidly grown in sophistication and realism to the point where it can sometimes be hard to distinguish them from genuine photos. This fact is being exploited by both scammers and those intent on spreading disinformation.

¶An industry body has been set up to fight this, known as the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). This provides a means of identifying genuine photos and enabling viewers to see how they have been modified, whether or not AI tools were used.

¶Over 500 companies have joined the C2PA initiative, while Apple for now appears to be going its own way with the Apple Reference Image (ARI) feature. Anyone who has taken a photo on an iPhone with ARI enabled can upload it to an Apple server for verification that it is genuine.

¶(emphasis added)

¶Verifiability of provenance and authenticity of digital images seems to have been on a slow burn for awhile, but that might be about to change if the new Apple Reference Image feature actually lands in iOS 27. It’s interesting, but not surprising, that Apple eschewed the established Content Credentials standard from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. A quarterback controversy might be brewing as the season is about to get underway.

¶This week, I have been thinking about how these [souvenirs] are only the beginning of what I “bring back” from museums. After I visit a museum, I bring home memories of art, maps of the space I walked through, memories of specific places, of the people with whom I visited a museum, of all the moments I had before, during, and after my visit.

¶I bring back the feeling of moving between rooms – of noticing that the narrow entranceway with two small doors is an opportunity to be kind to others by holding the door open, of feeling the textures change beneath my feet as I go from the stone floor of the entrance to the carpeted area of the museum, and of feeling textures of the carpet change as I move between rooms and floors and spaces. I bring back my memories of the architecture: the tall ceilings, the pillars, the walls, the rooms, how rooms connect.

¶In Impressions; museums, James shares some insight on the intangibles he brings back from visits to museums. There’s the obvious things, like memories of the art in the museum, but I really connected with his note about the feelings associated with the physical aspects of a museum because I tend to remember such things, and recall those memories when reflecting on museum visits just as much as I recall memories of the art. As I write this, I’m thinking about several museums we visited during a recent trip to London and immediately feel the immensity of some of the rooms in the National Gallery in London, the cushy creakiness of rooms in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, and the mixture of awe and a bit of unease associated with looking up the main staircase at the Courtauld Gallery.

¶

¶I have wonderful memories of many works of art we saw and learned about in those museums and all the others we’ve visited over the years, of course, but I always seem to walk away with memories of the physical aspects of museums. This is true of my visits to non-museums, too, but it somehow seems to be more pronounced with museums. Maybe there’s something about the necessary elements of a museum that enhance a desire to remember the physical aspects of place, or maybe the seemingly singular purpose of a museum forces me to think about other things while visiting. The memories seem to be fully intertwined with the art, too; they always surface whenever I recall some of my favorite works from the museums. It’s a twofer of sorts, and I love that.

¶And it’s nice to see someone else thinks about those aspects of museums, too.

¶A new study suggests the fish, already known to be among North America’s longest-lived freshwater species, may routinely survive for more than 200 years, some potentially reaching 300 or even 400 years.

¶Researchers estimated that a 160-centimeter male lake sturgeon could live between 90 and 279 years, depending on the population. For 180-centimeter females, estimated ages ranged from 99 to 427 years. 

¶This is crazy to think about. A hypothetical 400 year-old lake sturgeon, which could be swimming in the Great Lakes today, would have been born during the same year that Peter Minuit, director of the Dutch West India Company, coordinated the purchase of the island of Manhattan from Native Americans.

¶The app will now include an AI-powered, citation-backed conversational search experience that will transform Post reporting into an interactive dialogue. Readers can ask questions, explore developing stories through personalized follow-up prompts and instantly access sourced answers and related coverage from across The Post’s newsroom.

¶The app will also include Post Express, an AI-powered news briefing that delivers personalized digests throughout the day based on each reader’s interests. Additionally, the app uses a personalized discovery engine that continuously learns from reader interests and behavior to surface the stories, topics and conversations most relevant to them.

¶This seems like an obvious extension of any news app at this point. I wonder if other outlets are developing similar features.

¶It makes a lot of sense. Surfacing related and earlier stories alone would be a welcome feature, for me at least. And “saving” articles on each platform is a hassle (Instapaper still solves this problem for me, though). AI should be able to support solutions to both of those challenges.

¶Someone has to pay for the compute involved, though. The Post is a “one-third subscription, two-thirds advertising” business. You can essentially read the paper online for free. So, doing the math, expect the new, AI-powered Hamilton to learn from your interactions and tailor ads accordingly.

¶Are you a robot? If you’re not, you’re going to be pretty sure you’re not. Still, online at least, you likely find it difficult to tell who else is and is not. Businesses find this difficult, too, and it’s getting harder all the time. If you were forced to guess, the odds would tell you to guess robot, because at this point there are more bots online than people. To deal with this problem, businesses retain bot-detection and bot-management firms, a specialty within the field of cybersecurity. Their task used to be to block bots, but, with the rise of agentic A.I., that has changed. Now the problem is how to let in the good bots (like the avatar you send to the Gap to buy you a new pair of pants) and keep out the bad bots (like the thief trying to scrape the data of every Gap customer). The rest of us have to be our own bot detectors.

¶Bot detection used to be literally that. Detect bots. If bot, block.

¶AI has changed the detection game, though. More specifically, the rise of agentic AI is forcing the game to change, and that is literally just getting underway. Today’s bot detection has a new layer — determining the type of bot. If bot, determine type, block if bad.

¶We humans aren’t being pushed out of the internet yet, but we’re certainly losing its attention.

¶BTW, I have no idea how The New Yorker missed an opportunity to include a reference to its prophetic 1993 “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon. The omission of this obvious tieback is a pretty good indicator that AI wasn’t involved in writing the article, though. So there’s that.

¶Most of Puerto Rico is facing moderate to severe drought conditions, according to the US Drought Monitor, which has been compounded by long-term issues with the island’s infrastructure.

¶Puerto Rico’s water authority says about 65% of the water it produces is lost or goes unbilled, much of it through leaks and ageing pipes, according to the BBC’s US news partner CBS.

¶“[D]rought conditions…compounded by long-term issues with…infrastructure.”

¶I bet we’ll see that phrase over and over again in coming years. It’s like two things we’ve ignored for decades — climate change and infrastructure investment — are conspiring against us. No, conspiring is the wrong word. There’s no conspiracy about it. It’s just that the effects of those two things are arriving, just as some people have been saying for years.

¶Since April, France has experienced a rainfall deficit and several unprecedented heatwaves, creating the conditions for a rare and alarming drought. On Friday, August 7, 99 departments were under surveillance, with possible water use restrictions, including 67 considered to be in a “crisis” situation. This widespread drying of soil and waterways has had serious consequences for agriculture, the economy and public health, and has been directly linked to an increase in wildfires.

¶This is not a temporary crisis, but rather the result of a slow deterioration of our water resources, which deserves greater democratic attention, argues Simon Porcher, professor of management sciences at Université Paris-Dauphine-PSL, in his book Nous sommes faits d’eau. L’avenir d’une ressource vitale (“We Are Made of Water: The Future of a Vital Resource”).

¶Well that title certainly caught my eye. “The myth of abundant water.”

¶This year feels like a watershed moment in climate change, in a bad way. Recent weather around the globe, from the droughts in France and elsewhere, to wildfires in the United States and Canada (and France), has, unfortunately, brought direct consequences of climate change to the doorsteps of more people. We had several days of record low air quality in Toledo this summer.

¶Water and air. Impacts on those two basic human needs should open more eyes to the problems and challenges of climate change. Direct and personal consequences tend to do that. So, in a weird way, this year also provides a source of hope.

¶In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering…creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project’s maintainer to approve the code. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code.

¶Humans have been “social engineering” situations with other humans for eons, applying everything from open persuasion, where the human being “engineered” is fully aware of the effort and the stakes involved, to deceitful manipulation, where they are unaware of both. Some of us are better at detecting efforts in the latter category than others. Now all of us need to improve our detection skills in general because social engineering by AI, and likely engineering with AI, is here.

¶“At this pace, All About Berlin will not survive into 2027,” a guy named Nicolas Bouliane, the independent proprietor of website All About Berlin, tweeted last week. Bouliane has been frank lately about the realities of his dwindling Google-driven traffic. In a blog post written earlier this year—titled “AI Is Killing All About Berlin”—he pinpointed when he felt things had gone wrong: in 2024, when Google began tinkering with its search results design, aggressively pushing AI Overviews and pushing content providers like him ever deeper down the page.

¶Google is killing the internet. Its AI Overviews feature has relegated good ‘ole search results to “oh by the way” status. This has real consequences for websites that depend on traffic flow directed from those search results. Reduced flow will impact monetization efforts for publishers that care about such things. More importantly, though, the systematic blow to traffic flow that the internet is currently absorbing will undoubtedly force many web site publishers to ask whether they want to continue the effort.

¶We’ll surely see sites go quiet or even go dark altogether. This highlights the importance of the Wayback Machine. I don’t know if or how going quiet and going dark are tracked, but I hope someone captures that information. We’re going to need it for the final accounting of AI’s impact on the web.

¶I guess I can always Google it.

¶Did you just learn how to do something? Write about that.

¶Call it a TIL—that way you’re not promising anyone a revelation or an in-depth tutorial. You’re saying “I just figured this out: here are my notes, you may find them useful too”.

¶Gary Thompson’s Random Thoughts blog pointed me to this 2022 post from Simon Willison. I think I’ve seen it before, but I feel like I dismissed it previously as not applicable to my content because I’m not a developer per se, writing about things I learn as I work on various projects.

¶But I had a different thought when I stumbled across the post today. All of my content here, at least in the most recent iteration of the site, is Today I Learned content. It’s just not about programming or development or tech projects of any sort. No, it’s just about random stuff I learn every day. I love learning new bits about everything from history and culture to science and tech, and I like writing little bits about the bits I learn. It works for me and, I think, helps me learn as I go. So, it is applicable to my content after all. I’m mostly posting Today I Learned content, and it’s quite satisfying, really.

¶The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the U.S.’ first flu shot that uses mRNA technology: mFlusiva, from drugmaker Moderna.

¶In a late-stage trial, mFlusiva was found to be about 27% more effective than a standard flu shot.

¶One promise of mRNA vaccine technology has always been the speed with which a vaccine can move from initial design to production, which is of particular importance for pathogens that change on a regular cycle, like flu. Moderna, thankfully, has been pressing on with its work despite the current environment surrounding vaccine policy. And now those efforts are producing results. The company can have its newly approved mRNA vaccine “available for this fall’s flu season.”

¶That’s the good news.

¶Here’s the great news:

¶Moderna said it takes two to three months from picking the strain to rolling out its flu shot, compared with about six months for traditional flu shots.

¶The speed advantage provided by mRNA vaccines is being realized, providing more time each year to observe developing strains before committing to a particular design. This will make these vaccines more effective year after year, and we will all benefit from that.

¶But, there is some not-so-great news:

¶Vaccines, however, are typically formally recommended by the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee — called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — before they are used. But a federal judge has blocked the committee from convening.

¶Levy said mFlusiva could still be legally prescribed in the U.S. without ACIP’s sign-off.

¶However, he said, patients most likely would not be able to get insurance coverage, as private insurers generally cover only ACIP-recommended shots, and the public distribution of the vaccine would be severely limited with no official federal guidance on whom the shots should go to. Federal programs, such as Vaccines for Children and Medicaid, also rely on ACIP’s guidance.

¶So, we’ve got a new, more effective flu vaccine that will provide valuable time when designing the vaccine each year. The benefits of this new vaccine will compound over time. But, we either won’t have access to it or we’ll have to pay for it out of pocket, which, of course, will limit its uptake.

¶This is where we’re at.

¶But, there’s good and great news, and that’s a positive development.

¶Earlier population studies found that exposure to polluted air was associated with a greater likelihood of developing RA. Researchers in South Korea wanted to determine whether air pollution could also affect disease activity and trigger flares in people who already had the condition. They also investigated the biological processes that might explain such a connection.

¶“Our study found that higher PM2.5 concentration was associated with increased disease activity and flare risk, notably prolonged exposure to elevated PM2.5 over more than two weeks,” explains lead investigator Eun Bong Lee, MD, PhD, Division of Rheumatology, Department of Internal Medicine, Seoul National University College of Medicine, and Department of Molecular Medicine and Biopharmaceutical Sciences, Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

¶Research is starting to show that prolonged exposure to air containing elevated levels of certain microparticles is associated with both development of rheumatoid arthritis and flare-ups in people who already have it. Add this to the medical-related issues to think about as periods of wildfire smoke become more common.

¶This paper includes some truly beautiful images of our star, the sun. The images were made through observations using the world’s first 4-m class solar telescope, the US National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii. This Yahoo! News article reporting on the paper has some incredible detail on the resolution of the telescope and an interesting analogy that really puts the optical feat into perspective:

¶In some of these new images, the cresting vortices that dot the sun are barely 12 miles wide. To put the achievement into perspective, the feat is like trying to discern George Washington’s face on a quarter from roughly 74 miles away. The details of the milestone achievement are detailed in a study published today in the journal Nature.

¶Impressive, and beautiful!

¶According to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the monitors’ mandate this year was to root out “problems with the integrity of elections.” If they found any, it wasn’t immediately clear Tuesday.

¶[E]lection officials said monitors were polite and unobtrusive as they moved from one polling place to the next, asking a few questions about assistance technology designs for voters with disabilities and provisional ballots. Importantly, officials Votebeat spoke with on Tuesday said monitors did not interfere with election proceedings.

¶I hate that this brings a minor feeling of relief, but it does.

¶Speaking of technology and progress, Smell-O-Vision is one of those rare examples of a flop that has cemented a place in the collective consciousness. This Popular Science article provides a great overview of the technology, its rollout, and a competitor that also flopped but was quickly forgotten (AromaRama).

¶Why do we associate the brand “Smell-O-Vision” with any attempt to incorporate scents with movie theaters? The article presents a theory:

¶Smell-O-Vision’s abrupt turn from hype to nothingburger, and its silly name, helps explain how it lingers in pop culture. It would take a radical leap forward for scented media to outgrow its hokey origin story. So far, nobody’s done it.

¶I’m not sure many people remember the “abrupt turn from hype to nothingburger”, these days. For me, the “silly name” likely explains it. What a great brand.

¶ESPN is much more than a TV network these days, with younger consumers increasingly engaging with the brand on the social platforms where the creators operate every day.

¶“We have such a loaded roster of what I’ll call traditional football talent. We really looked at putting this group together as an opportunity to find talent that speaks to different fan communities or speaks to those audiences in a way that’s more unique and social first,” says Kaitee Daley, ESPN senior VP of digital, social & streaming content.

¶I think all sports have been dealing with the reality of having multiple audiences and the challenge of using multiple channels effectively to reach those audiences over the past several years. I think that’s true for ‘broadcasting’ actual games (network television broadcasts v. streaming broadcasts v. social posts during the game) as well as pre- and post-game analysis and commentary (talking heads in studio v. long-form write ups on The Athletic and other web publications v. “stories” on Instagram and other platforms).

¶With its “layoffs” of “traditional talent” last week and now this announcement of the new “class of digital creators for its Creator Network”, ESPN has shown its hand a bit: individual content producers, who tend to be “social first”, are viewed as a source of growth.

¶“The post-2013 ESPN era steamrolls ahead.” In that era of ESPN, the individual is valued over the company because, maybe, “in 2026 [that] is the only way to break through in the crowded media environment.” (Id.)

¶Sports media is changing rapidly, and the 2026-2027 NFL season, I think, is going to tell us a lot about where it’s at and where it’s headed. Stay tuned…to something.

¶The $2.4 billion cash exit marks a sharp step-up. It reflects both the growing cost of AI-driven fraud and the premium placed on proven behavioral technology already embedded in major banks.

¶This will make you pause for a moment the next time you’re using your bank’s app on your phone. Turns out, AI has been watching your “digital banking sessions.” BioCatch, the company being acquired by Visa, analyzes “thousands of real-time signals during digital banking sessions….[including] keystrokes, touch gestures, device handling and signs of coercion.”

¶Don’t worry, though. BioCatch is watching your every move for your own protection. The company’s “AI models distinguish legitimate users from fraudsters in milliseconds.”

¶That’s probably a good thing, but be careful as you pause during your next “digital banking session” to reflect on the many ways in which AI has entered our lives. Thinking about it for too long may have consequences.

¶The hacks also raise new questions about what liability and consequences other AI makers might face if their own models are misused to hack into other companies.

¶One attorney called this “uncharted territory,” while others found little legal precedent to work from, suggesting it will likely be up to the courts to sort it out. Victim companies would likely have to develop novel legal arguments based on laws that were written decades before the arrival of large language models (LLMs).

¶In an interview with CNN, Hugging Face’s chief executive Clem Delangue said he doesn’t want to sue OpenAI. But he argued that companies should be held responsible....”We have to make sure that the legal frameworks keep these events really illegal,” and to hold companies accountable when they do make mistakes. “Otherwise we’re going to end up in a very different world.”

¶(emphasis added).

¶“Really illegal”. I like that that, but I’m not counting on it.

¶From Google’s announcement of the rollback:

¶We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we’re rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails.

¶It’s hard to imagine how Google didn’t anticipate people using this new feature to deepfake earth. And the apparent ease with which people created the fake crises listed in the linked article makes you wonder if Google had any guardrails on the feature at all. I do like the examples shown in Google’s announcement, and see tremendous value in a Google Earth that enables creation of enhanced content, but, apparently, it will be awhile before we can enjoy such things.

¶When exploring different sides of an issue, a devil’s advocate can play-act an opposing perspective, but the exercise has limits. It’s better to talk to someone who genuinely disagrees with you.

¶When faculty members discuss intellectual diversity on college campuses, it’s not enough, she said, to “theoretically entertain what political conservatives might think.”

¶“Simply the fact that the Harvard Radcliffe Institute invited a significant number of political conservatives to discuss this question was astonishing to many people on the political right,” she said. “It just signals right off the bat: We’re going to take your opinion seriously; we’re inviting you to be equal partners in drafting this statement.”

¶I find this encouraging.

¶Universities, and their researchers and work product, are under the microscope and losing credibility. To maintain the value of higher education and the university as an institution, collective academia has to recognize the importance of the current moment and respond to it. And responding to it cannot be a sneer or dismissal. That’s what got us here in the first place. No, universities have to authentically engage the problem and show honest work and progress on it. They have to show that they are the inclusive spaces they’ve touted lo these many years. They have to be in the business of instructing students “how to think, not what to think, by engaging in all the real-world complexity of divergent ideas and messy discourse.” In short, universities should strive to be the true marketplace of ideas.

¶Harvard, it seems, is authentically working on it, which is encouraging.

¶The Blue Jackets announced plans on Wednesday to simulcast their TV broadcasts, with play-by-play voice Steve Mears and color analyst Jody Shelley, across their radio network and affiliates.

¶I hate to see this but I suspect radio audiences for live sports have shrunk considerably in recent years. I wonder if the Blue Jackets are a canary in the coal mine as far as home town broadcasts go.

¶Over the next decade, Rubin will illuminate a treasure trove of discoveries: pulsating stars, supernova explosions, the fossil record of galaxies, clues to the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, and entirely new phenomena we’ve never seen before. Some cosmic processes unfold slowly, unpredictably or incredibly rarely, which is why a 10-year survey is essential. By returning to each point in the sky about 800 times over a decade, Rubin data will provide the scientific community with deep, time-rich views needed to uncover subtle events, capture moving objects and study the accelerating expansion of the universe.

¶What a time to be alive. The Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is officially underway, collecting “approximately 10 terabytes of data and produc[ing] as many as seven million alerts of changes in the night sky” each night. And the data is open to “both scientists and the public”. Kudos on that.

¶This is going to be fascinating to watch.

¶They include drive-offs, when there is no attempt to pay, and no-means-of-payment incidents, when a customer fills up and claims they have no way to pay.

¶I wasn’t familiar with the term “forecourt” before reading this article. Now I know and can’t wait to use it in a sentence.

¶It must be a British thing. Sadly, though, I suspect drive-offs and “no-means-of-payment incidents” are something America and Britain share in common.