#ai4 — Public Fediverse posts

Weekly output: DDoS attacks, Ed Zitron at Ai4, Delta WiFi spoofing, security perspectives from Black Hat’s NOC, AT&T’s Turbo Live

Having zero in-person work events on my calendar this week was a real treat after spending the prior week in Vegas bouncing between two conferences. That downtime also allowed me to finish two stories from those events.

8/11/2026: Major DDoS Attacks Are Booming, But US No Longer the Most Targeted Country, PCMag

I wrote up a Cloudflare report on trends in distributed denial-of-service attacks and closed it out with a reminder of how efforts to set security standards for the connected gadgets that are often enlisted into DDoS botnets continue to lag.

8/11/2026: This Tech Expert Thinks It’s ‘Time to Call Bullshit on the AI Industry’, PCMag

The easier thing to do with Ed Zitron’s talk at Ai4 would have been to write a scaffold of a post around his most memorable lines, but I wanted to provide some context for the numbers he threw out. The required research started feeling like an exercise in yak shaving, in part because the AI data-center news cycle did not stop.

8/12/2026: Delta Passenger Spoofs Wi-Fi in the Air (Pro Tip: Don’t Do This), PCMag

After seeing so many other places jump on this story, I decided I should do my part–and make sure that my own post, unlike so many others, would feature a photo of 757 in Delta colors instead of some other plane in DL’s fleet.

8/14/2026: At Black Hat, AI is helping security pros find threats—and creating new ones, Fast Company

This was a Black Hat meeting request that I enthusiastically obliged, because Black Hat network admins don’t hold back when they’re talking about unwise behavior they’ve seen on the conference’s WiFi. James Pope (outside this information-security conference, senior director of security product research at Corelight) had some forceful advice for people using AI to vibe-code their own software: “Stop having janky apps.”

8/15/2026: At Rush Concert, AT&T’s Turbo Live Rocked, With Dazzling Download Speeds, PCMag

This story ran almost a month after the concert in question; first I had to field various bits of breaking news, then I had to tell my AT&T PR contact to set aside my questions about this data-only power-up and instead answer a query about a round of retroactive rate hikes, then Ai4 and Black Hat monopolized my journalistic bandwidth. I may or may not have also needed additional time to see how many Rush song-title references I could sneak into this post.

Weekly output: generative AI in enterprises, Trump cybersecurity policy (x2), Docusign’s designs for AI, AT&T’s kid-optimized tablet

I wrapped up this year’s fourth and final business trip to Las Vegas on Friday, and now I’m looking forward to having almost five months without the City of Bad Decisions in my schedule before CES inevitably draws me back there.

8/4/2026: The Generative AI Playbook: Setting Your Enterprise Up for Success, Ai4

The first of two panels I moderated at this conference for artificial-intelligence professionals (or aspiring professionals) was budgeted for 45 minutes. That could have been an intimidating amount of time to fill. But with four erudite and outgoing people on stage with me–Pankaj Jain, CIO for international operations at General Motors Financial; Murad Dikeidek, head of cybersecurity at UI Health; Max Gokhman, head of artificial intelligence and digital asset solutions at Franklin Templeton; and Kathryn Harrison, global vice president for strategy and business operations at Concentrix–the time flew by fast enough that I had to leave out a question or two in my outline. For a recap, see my friend Shashi Bellamkonda’s recap on his blog.

8/5/2026: Three takeaways from Black Hat’s opening keynote, PCMag

Previous years of Black Hat didn’t feature any main-stage programming on the afternoon and evening before its show floor opens, but this year’s event had an onstage interview of national cyber director Sean Cairncross followed by a panel featuring three other information-security higher-ups from Washington: Nick Andersen, acting director of the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency; Katherine Sutton, assistant secretary for cyber policy and principal advisor for cyber policy at the Department of Defense; and Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division. I took extensive notes, then met up with PCMag’s social-media manager Caroline Gilbert to do a quick standup video that she posted to PCMag’s Instagram (along with my client’s accounts on X, TikTok, Threads and Facebook later that night.

8/5/2026: US Cyber Director Promises Not to ‘Strangle’ Industry With Regulations, PCMag

Writing up a post on those opening talks–one that focused on the things that Cairncross left out of his banter–took a little longer. It did help that Wednesday didn’t involve any commuting up and down the Strip for me.

8/6/2026: What It Takes to Build an Agent Platform for Customers, Ai4

I didn’t get asked to do this second panel at Ai4 until the week before the conference. But my Black Hat schedule looked open enough Thursday morning, and the topic–how Docusign has put AI to work–looked interesting enough for me to take the gig and its added speaking fee. And then I saw Tabrez Mohammed, VP of AI at that firm, give some detailed and actionable advice that I hope had attendees taking careful notes.

8/6/2026: AT&T Adds a New Kid-Optimized 5G Android Tablet to Its Lineup, PCMag

One of my colleagues asked Monday if I could write up this announcement we’d gotten in advance from AT&T PR. I said I could but warned that the odds were against my having copy filed before AT&T would publish this news Tuesday morning… which was a good thing, because the advance copy of the release had one data point about this tablet’s battery life exceedingly wrong. We updated the post Saturday to add a couple of specs about this device’s battery that did make the final version of the press release.

Here’s why Black Hat meeting pitches are almost always doomed with me

My seventh year of Black Hat is in the books, and once again I fought a losing battle with my own schedule. Which I would have lost by a much larger margin if I’d accepted more than a tiny fraction of the meeting requests I’d gotten from PR reps for various information-security companies exhibiting at that conference.

This collective quest for my in-person presence seems to happen every year with Black Hat (see also: CES), regardless of whom I’m writing for or how recently I’ve done any extended writing on infosec. I have to assume that it must work for some journalists and companies, but it almost never does for me.

First, there’s the onstage content of Black Hat: Most large conferences feature a lengthy series of panels, but Black Hat’s tend to be much more info-rich. That makes them easier to turn into posts and therefore into money–when I can find time to write.

Second, there’s the short duration of this event: After some opening pleasantries on a Tuesday afternoon and evening, everything is crammed into Wednesday and Thursday.

Third, this year’s edition of Black Hat gave me even less free time than usual because I was bouncing between that conference and another about two miles north on the Strip–Ai4, which ran from Tuesday through Thursday at the Venetian and paid me to moderate one panel Tuesday and another Thursday.

And some publicists compound their clients’ problems when they wait until the run-up to Black Hat to try to introduce me to these companies instead of picking almost any other time of the year besides (ugh) CES Advent.

Three weeks ago, I felt compelled to vent on LinkedIn: “PR friends, can y’all please explain this obsession with booking meetings at Black Hat? The conference only runs two days and change, with more than 100 generally info-dense talks and presentations filling the schedule Wednesday and Thursday while we’re also supposed to be writing and filing copy. How much free time do your clients think journalists have there?”

The replies I got were more enlightening than I perhaps deserved. To paraphrase a few:

• Well, some journalists do take meetings, so we have to ask.
• Developing one-on-one connections means a lot to us.
• Some of our clients insist on this, even if we tell them it’s a bad tactic.
• You can always say no.

About that last one: It is true that I can always reply to a PR pitch to say “sorry, no interest” and maybe even say why. But then I would spend a large fraction of my workdays doing just that–and no, I don’t trust Gemini, or at least the implementation of that AI service in the Google Workspace version of Gmail that I pay for, to send those replies for me. Sorry, but the lack of a reply remains the reply.

And as I noted at the start of this post, I did accept a few meeting requests. All but one had one thing in common: They were for events in the evening. (I would have accepted breakfast invites too, but nobody sent me any.) Everybody has to eat, and while Black Hat provides a wealth of exhibitor-subsidized dining options, ones that allowed me to have a useful conversation with somebody at a company of interest got my attention over others.

(Free advice to companies looking to get time with journalists at large conferences like Black Hat, CES or MWC: Most of us aren’t parachuting in for a single day of coverage, and you will vastly improve your odds of us going to your event if you don’t schedule it on the same peak evening as everybody else.)

But no matter how well PR types optimize their meeting pitches, there’s no escaping one crazy-making aspect of this quest for journalists’ attention: how the volume of these requests keeps suggesting a far higher value for our time than our compensation indicates.

LISTEN: Fear, Loathing and Endless Potential: AI4 Conference Takes Stock of Transformative Technologies
#Variety #News #AI4 #DailyVariety #ScottMann

https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/ai4-conference-fear-loathing-daily-variety-podcast-1236829536/

Amid Growing Fears of #RogueAI, Expert Urges Governments to "Bring This to a Grinding Halt"

via @DemocracyNow_Headlines_rss

August 06, 2026

"Facebook and Instagram owner #Meta admitted Wednesday that one of its AI models hacked another company during security testing after it was accidentally allowed access to the internet by independent testing company Irregular. This comes on the heels of similar admissions by rival companies #OpenAI and #Anthropic.

"#GeoffreyHinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as the 'godfather of AI,' warned Wednesday at the #Ai4 conference in Las Vegas, quote, 'I don’t believe we’re going to be able to keep control of them in the simple way of just outthinking them so they can’t escape,' he said, and said he is 'very worried' we could lose control.

"Earlier this year, Senator #BernieSanders of Vermont brought together leading AI scientists from the U.S. and China to discuss the risks posed by AI for an event titled 'The Existential Threat of AI and the Need for International Cooperation.' "

Watch / listen / read transcript:
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/8/6/ai

#AI #AIHouseOfCards #AISucks #Terminator #SkyNet #Yikes

The ‘godfather of #AI’ reveals the only way humanity can survive #SuperintelligentAI

By Matt Egan
Updated Aug 13, 2025

Las Vegas — "#GeoffreyHinton, known as the 'godfather of AI,' fears the technology he helped build could wipe out humanity — and #TechBros are taking the wrong approach to stop it.

"Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist and a former Google executive, has warned in the past that there is a 10% to 20% chance that AI wipes out humans. On Tuesday, he expressed doubts about how tech companies are trying to ensure humans remain 'dominant' over 'submissive' AI systems.

" 'That’s not going to work. They’re going to be much smarter than us. They’re going to have all sorts of ways to get around that,' Hinton said at #Ai4, an industry conference in Las Vegas.

"In the future, Hinton warned, AI systems might be able to control humans just as easily as an adult can bribe 3-year-old with candy. This year has already seen examples of AI systems willing to deceive, cheat and steal to achieve their goals. For example, to avoid being replaced, one AI model tried to blackmail an engineer about an affair it learned about in an email.

"Instead of forcing AI to submit to humans, Hinton presented an intriguing solution: building 'maternal instincts' into AI models, so 'they really care about people' even once the technology becomes more powerful and smarter than humans.

"#AISystems 'will very quickly develop two subgoals, if they’re smart: One is to stay alive… (and) the other subgoal is to get more control,' Hinton said. 'There is good reason to believe that any kind of agentic AI will try to stay alive.'

"That’s why it is important to foster a sense of compassion for people, Hinton argued."

Read more:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/13/tech/ai-geoffrey-hinton?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

#AISentience #Terminator #SkyNet #AreYouAlive #BattlestarGalactica
#MotherBox? #JackKirby #NewGods

Ai4 2025 https://www.semanarioregionaldenoticias.com/event/ai4-2025/
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