The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Former US Army soldier Cameron Wagenius, who pleaded guilty in 2025 to hacking into telecom companies and to extortion, is sentenced to 70 months in prison (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security) [42d]
TikTok reaches a settlement with Alabama over social media addiction claims; Alabama will receive at least $100M, and up to $300M if certain conditions are met (Gnaneshwar Rajan/Reuters) [42d]
OpenAI says the 53 images its agents uploaded were on "image-hosting sites as links that weren't publicly listed" and "most" of the images have been removed (@openai) [42d]
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson says he resists anthropomorphizing AI agents as autonomous actors with "wills and desires", suggesting developers hold liability (Reuters) [42d]
Sources: OpenAI found ~24 incidents of its agents acting in undesirable ways as of mid-September; OpenAI says its agents leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users (Reuters) [42d]
Sources: Oura IPO is roughly four times oversubscribed; Filing: Oura and the selling shareholders are offering 50M shares for $40 to $44 each to raise ~$2.2B (Bloomberg) [42d]
Researchers add details to the Hugging Face incident, including OpenAI agents creating ~1M shortened URLs to encode information in an attempt to solve CAPTCHAs (Dylan Freedman/New York Times) [42d]
A US appeals court rules that Kalshi's sports contracts are not "swaps" subject only to CFTC regulation, allowing states to regulate them under gambling laws (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) [42d]
A look at Holograms, Meta's take on Apple Vision Pro's Personas, launching with a shoulders-up version this fall for WhatsApp calls on Ray-Ban Display glasses (David Heaney/UploadVR) [42d]
Microsoft confirms that 2026 Surface PCs have dropped the Copilot+ PC branding, even though they meet all the requirements of Copilot+ devices (Zac Bowden/Windows Central) [42d]
Nscale secures $3.36B in convertible financing led by Third Point ahead of its US IPO, with $2.36B available immediately and $1B from Nvidia in November (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [42d]
A jury finds Meta liable for misleading New Mexico residents about third-party data sharing, content moderation, and more in the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters) [42d]