Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Wikipedia signs AI training deals with Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon

 

at 1/15/26 8:25am

Wikimedia Enterprise signs Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI to paid deals.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, AI infrastructure, AI training data, Amazon, generative ai, google, jimmy wales, large language models, machine learning, meta, microsoft, Mistral AI, non-profit, Perplexity, Wikimedia Enterprise, Wikimedia Foundation, wikipedia]

— Wikipedia will share content with AI firms in new licensing deals

 

at 1/15/26 8:25am

Wikimedia Enterprise signs Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI to paid deals.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, AI infrastructure, AI training data, Amazon, generative ai, google, jimmy wales, large language models, machine learning, meta, microsoft, Mistral AI, non-profit, Perplexity, Wikimedia Enterprise, Wikimedia Foundation, wikipedia]

— A single click mounted a covert, multistage attack against Copilot

 

at 1/14/26 3:03pm

Exploit exfiltrating data from chat histories worked even after users closed chat windows.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Security, copilot, data exfiltration, LLMs, prompt injections]

— Bandcamp bans purely AI-generated music from its platform

 

at 1/14/26 10:46am

Indie music store says it wants fans to have confidence music was largely made by humans.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, AI music, AI policy, audio synthesis, bandcamp, generative ai, independent music, machine learning, music industry, music synthesis, spotify, streaming]

— The RAM shortage’s silver lining: Less talk about “AI PCs”

 

at 1/13/26 3:34pm

“General interest in AI PCs has been wavering for a while..."

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Tech, apple, dell, Desktops, generative ai, IDC, laptops]

— Never-before-seen Linux malware is “far more advanced than typical”

 

at 1/13/26 3:07pm

VoidLink includes an unusually broad and advanced array of capabilities.

[Category: Biz & IT, Security, cloud, Linux, malware]

— Hegseth wants to integrate Musk’s Grok AI into military networks this month

 

at 1/13/26 2:13pm

US defense secretary announces plans for integration despite recent controversies.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Policy, agentic AI, AI image generator, AI in education, AI regulation, AI security, Anthropic, censorship, deepfakes, Department of Defense, Elon Musk, gemini, google, grok, machine learning, openai, Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, xAI]

— Microsoft vows to cover full power costs for energy-hungry AI data centers

 

at 1/13/26 1:05pm

Company responds to community concerns over electricity bills and water use.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, AI infrastructure, AI training, Amazon, brad smith, community development, datacenters, Donald Trump, electricity, google, machine learning, meta, microsoft, openai, property taxes, skilled trades, water use]

— Google removes some AI health summaries after investigation finds “dangerous” flaws

 

at 1/12/26 2:47pm

AI Overviews provided false liver test information experts called alarming.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Google, AI hallucination, ai overviews, generative ai, google, Health, machine learning, misinformation, search engines, the guardian]

— ChatGPT Health lets you connect medical records to an AI that makes things up

 

at 1/8/26 11:00am

New feature will allow users to link medical and wellness records to AI chatbot.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, AI assistants, AI confabulation, AI hallucination, AI health, ChatGPT, confabulations, Fidji Simo, healthcare, machine learning, medical advice, openai, sam altman, SFGate]

— ChatGPT falls to new data-pilfering attack as a vicious cycle in AI continues

 

at 1/8/26 7:00am

Will LLMs ever be able to stamp out the root cause of these attacks? Possibly not.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Security, chatbots, data exfiltration, prompt injections]

— The nation’s strictest privacy law just took effect, to data brokers’ chagrin

 

at 1/5/26 2:42pm

Californians can now submit demands requiring 500 brokers to delete their data.

[Category: Biz & IT, Policy, Security, California, data brokers, personal information, privacy]

— Supply chains, AI, and the cloud: The biggest failures (and one success) of 2025

 

at 12/31/25 6:15am

The past year has seen plenty of hacks and outages. Here are the ones topping the list.

[Category: AI, Apple, Biz & IT, Security, 2025 year end, cloud, signal messenger, supply chain attacks]

— From prophet to product: How AI came back down to earth in 2025

 

at 12/31/25 5:00am

In a year where lofty promises collided with inconvenient research, would-be oracles became software tools.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Features, 2025, AI alignment, AI and work, AI coding, AI criticism, AI ethics, AI hallucination, AI infrastructure, AI regulation, AI research, AI sycophancy, Anthropic, Character.AI, chatbots, ChatGPT, confabulation, Dario Amodei, datacenters, deepseek, generative ai, google, large language models, machine learning, NVIDIA, openai, sam altman, simulated reasoning, SR models]

— Condé Nast user database reportedly breached, Ars unaffected

 

at 12/30/25 11:45am

A serious data breach has occurred, but Ars users have nothing to worry about.

[Category: Biz & IT, Conde Nast, hacking, user accounts, user privacy]

— GPS is vulnerable to jamming—here’s how we might fix it

 

at 12/29/25 8:10am

GPS jamming has gotten cheap and easy, but there are potential solutions.

[Category: Biz & IT, GPS, interference, jamming, satellites]

— How AI coding agents work—and what to remember if you use them

 

at 12/24/25 5:00am

From compression tricks to multi-agent teamwork, here's what makes them tick.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, agentic AI, AI agents, AI coding, AI work, Anthropic, Claude Code, Codex, context windows, large language models, machine learning, openai, Programming, software development, vibe coding]

— OpenAI’s new ChatGPT image generator makes faking photos easy

 

at 12/17/25 3:22pm

New GPT Image 1.5 allows more detailed conversational image editing, for better or worse.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, AI image generator, AI image generators, API, ChatGPT, deepfakes, generative ai, google, image synthesis, machine learning, multimodal AI, openai]

— Browser extensions with 8 million users collect extended AI conversations

 

at 12/17/25 8:25am

The extensions, available for Chromium browsers, harvest full AI conversations over months.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Security, ai bot, browser extensions, chrome, EDGE, privacy]

— Merriam-Webster’s word of the year delivers a dismissive verdict on junk AI content

 

at 12/15/25 3:41pm

Dictionary codifies the term that took hold in 2024 for low-quality AI-generated content.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, AI criticism, ai slop, dictionaries, generative ai, machine learning, merriam-webster, Oxford, Simon Willison, slop, social media, spam, word of the year]

— Microsoft will finally kill obsolete cipher that has wreaked decades of havoc

 

at 12/15/25 2:15pm

The weak RC4 for administrative authentication has been a hacker holy grail for decades.

[Category: Biz & IT, Security, encryption, rc4, Windows Server]

As of 1/15/26 11:51pm. Last new 1/15/26 11:00am.