Security News This Week: Your Expired Visa Card Could Be'Zombified' to Make Contactless Payments Plus: Apple sends out an "unprecedented" number of spyware warnings, Ukraine hits a Russian ecommerce giant with cyber and drone attacks, and more. As the controversial vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety continues to expand, WIRED got the code for the company's new AI policing tool and reconstructed the software to show that its capabilities go far beyond reading license plates and tracking vehicles. We also published the story this week of a Rhode Island police officer who was subjected to five internal affairs investigations in less than two years after he publicly questioned his department's use of Flock cameras . Following incidents of high-profile rogue activity by some of its AI agents, OpenAI said this week that it is halting model training runs and overhauling internal safety protocols. The company said that its upcoming Astra model may represent a turning point of "critical" cyber capabilities.

The LINK probe was supposed to use robotic arms to capture Swift and lift it into a safe orbit. Problems with its control system forced NASA to call off the attempt. The Swift space observatory has been in operation since 2004. It specializes in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the most energetic electromagnetic explosions known in the universe . Its original mission was supposed to last just two years.

Lindsay Clancy's defense argues she killed her three kids because of postpartum psychosis. But armchair detectives, including many fed-up mothers, are laying blame with her ex-husband. For many watching Lindsay Clancy's murder trial, the primary takeaway has been how the deaths of her three small children--Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callen, eight months--were tragically preventable . Lawyers for the Massachusetts nurse are arguing that she's not criminally responsible for strangling her children, because she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis, a rare mental health condition that causes new mothers to experience delusions and intrusive thoughts. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington has put Lindsay's health care providers on the stand, in an attempt to demonstrate how his client repeatedly sought help for her terrifying thoughts, only for her to be minimized, dismissed, and overmedicated at every turn.

The UK government is facing calls to cancel a sprawling health care contract with Palantir. The region of Greater Manchester insists it can do a better job itself. The UK government has six months to decide whether to terminate a deal worth more than $400 million between the country's National Health Service and American software company Palantir . If one part of the NHS is already doing without Palantir, politicians are asking, why can't the rest of the country? In 2023, the UK commissioned Palantir to develop a " federated data platform " (FDP) that could ingest and organize the tangle of health data produced across the country.

Silicon Valley Doesn't Get Why You Hate AI Technology leaders don't seem to understand society's gripes about AI, but boy, are they posting through it. Silicon Valley is trying to make sense of the growing backlash against artificial intelligence, but so far, it's not going that well. The inconvenient truth is that a significant portion of the world is not optimistic about the technology they're building. But recent attempts to diagnose the root of the problem by CEOs like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Anthropic's Dario Amodei indicate they don't understand what's actually driving society's disdain for AI. The rest of popular culture, meanwhile, is finding ways to capitalize on AI hate. Just look at this new commercial for Liquid Death and Garage Beer.

The app now allows men to make the first move, suggesting its women-first positioning was limiting growth. It joins other dating apps now throwing everything at the wall in a bid to stay relevant. Not even 24 hours after dating app Bumble announced it was getting rid of its trademark feature that requires women to make the first move, Robin H.'s inbox was already attracting unwanted attention. "This guy responded to my prompt, and he wasn't a person I would have swiped on. I can't believe some of these men think we're a match," the 53-year-old social worker in Orlando, Florida, tells WIRED.

Tina Peters was convicted of seven counts related to election interference in 2024. Now, she's fielding an offer from a county that's become a hotbed of voting-related conspiracy theories. Last week, Clint Curtis, the top election official in Shasta County, California, publicly accused members of his own staff of bypassing security, which he later claimed was an attempt "to sabotage a federal election." Days later, Curtis announced plans to hire a new deputy: Tina Peters, the election denial superstar who was convicted of seven counts related to election interference in 2024 and sentenced to nine years in prison. Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, has yet to publicly comment on the offer, but her lawyer Peter Ticktin tells WIRED she "is giving consideration to helping in the efforts in Shasta County, as there most definitely has been monkey business in the way the election was handled."

From granola to guacamole, a wide variety of foods have been recalled lately over salmonella risks. Experts say common-sense precautions go a long way. Just as the US's explosive diarrhea situation is starting to improve, there seem to be fresh new food risks to worry about. Jalapeño peppers, eggs, granola, and even dog food are being recalled because of possible contamination with salmonella bacteria. A growing outbreak related to contaminated jalapeños is responsible for 431 illnesses in 32 states, with 57 people requiring hospitalization, according to an August 19 update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

During a recent visit to Generalist AI, I watched a robotic arm improvise and use a banana as a tool. Last week, I ventured a whopping 15 minutes from my house to see robots do some mind-boggling, jaw-dropping stuff. I visited the Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices of a startup called Generalist AI, where I watched robot arms perform simple chores like stacking cups, putting blocks into bowls, and the like. I was astonished by how quickly they figured things out--it was reminiscent of a flesh-and-blood person. The arms mastered a range of tasks after ingesting a short, instructional video and, most impressively, no specific training for a given task.

Coders Say They Already Found Workarounds to Claude's Invisible Watermarks Anthropic announced last week it would include invisible watermarks in AI-generated content to comply with new EU rules. Within hours, overrides were being touted online. Within four hours of Anthropic confirming that Claude models would globally embed invisible, machine-readable watermarks into any AI-generated content, developer Guillaume Meyer had published his override. His code to remove watermarks from Claude-generated text has since gone viral on GitHub, has been bookmarked more than 20,000 times on X, and has drawn more than 100 contributors, with many more incorporating the technology into their own projects. "Anthropic is embedding watermarks in its Claude texts the issue is practically history just one day later," wrote one AI specialist, accompanied by an image of Meyer breaking out of chains and standing on crumpled EU and Anthropic flags.