Security researchers say Meta’s Muse AI assistant exposed thousands of users’ shared conversations because conversation titles were placed in subdomains that could be discovered through public DNS records. Meta has since suspended the sharing feature while it considers making changes. Ars Technica reports:Like many online services, Muse has allowed users to share searches, conversations, images, and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that can’t be easily guessed.
Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was “built from the ground up for privacy and security,” seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available… […]. “If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort,” the researchers wrote. “It took one query.”
[…] The easiest way to discover the URLs is to perform a passive DNS search through one of many available commercial services. Passive DNS records store the historical resolution of domain names to IP addresses, as well as nameserver, and mail-server records over time. Passive DNS systems typically collect DNS responses from sensors positioned at recursive DNS resolvers or other infrastructure. A passive DNS record is generally created when a monitoring system observes a DNS response. In the case here, once the intended party clicks on the share link, the DNS information is recorded in a searchable database.
Claroc researchers were able to discover the Muse share links because all of them use the domain name cf.metaaiusercontent.com. Discovery is further made easy by the decision to add the conversation name to the URL, along with a long string of text. Simplified examples of such links are home-sale-budget-9f21c8a3.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, and loan-application-draft-a4c9e2.cf.metaaiusercontent.com. It’s this last design decision, putting the conversation title in the subdomain rather than in the URL path, that makes public discovery possible.
Tag: technology
Brookfield, NextEra To Build $100 Billion AI Hub On Cold War Nuclear Site
The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has announced a landmark $100-billion private investment to turn the former uranium enrichment site in Western Kentucky into the new Paducah American Energy Hub, marking one of the largest economic development projects in Kentucky’s history.
Led by U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, the initiative will bring together a private-sector coalition to build a massive artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) innovation campus powered by new energy infrastructure. The phased buildout is targeted for 2032, and is expected to create roughly 8,000 construction jobs and 600 permanent operations jobs. Brookfield Asset Management (NYSE:BAM) has been selected to build the 1.8-gigawatt (GW) AI and HPC data center campus while NextEra Energy (NYSE:NEE) will develop 2 GW of natural gas-fired generation coupled with 2.6 GW of battery energy storage. The project is designed to operate on dedicated power supplies capable of feeding excess energy back to the regional grid to avoid raising utility bills for local families and businesses. The campus will also deploy a modern closed-loop cooling system to continuously recirculate water and minimize external consumption. The project leaders emphasize that this design is vastly more resource-efficient compared to the site’s previous tenant, the Cold War-era Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which was originally designed to pull up to 30 million gallons of water per day from the Ohio River.
Still, the Paducah project comes at a time when the market is souring on heavy AI infrastructure spending.
Last year, Trump, alongside Oracle’s Larry Ellison, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, unveiled Stargate, a private-sector joint venture intended to invest up to $500 billion over four years to build hyper-scale AI data centers and energy infrastructure across the United States. Billed by Trump as the “largest AI infrastructure project in history,” Stargate is designed to secure American dominance in AI over foreign competitors like China. Oracle serves as the core cloud and infrastructure provider for the venture. Initial development of the project began in Abilene, Texas, consisting of multiple 500,000-square-foot data center buildings to house the immense computing power needed for next-generation AI models.
Unfortunately, the ambitious AI infrastructure project found itself on the ropes just months after its grand launch.
Back in January, Business Insider reported that JPMorgan Chase was having trouble syndicating the $38 billion in construction debt it underwrote for the Stargate AI data center initiative as institutional investors grow increasingly cautious regarding concentrated tech sector exposure. Banks spent more than six months attempting to distribute the multi-billion-dollar debt packages for the Stargate campuses located in Texas and Wisconsin; however, buyers appeared uninterested in taking on massive piles of debt tied heavily to single-tenant AI operations. Oracle leases the facilities, and S&P cut Oracle in July to BBB-, one notch above junk, over its data center spending. Investors demanded a higher return to hold the debt, and the banks had to sell it at a discount.
In April, OpenAI officially paused its Stargate UK data center project, citing high industrial electricity prices and regulatory uncertainty. Stargate UK was planned in partnership with hardware firms Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Nscale, aiming to deploy thousands of advanced AI chips (starting with 8,000 GPUs and scaling up to 31,000) across sites in North-East England, including Cobalt Park near Newcastle and Blyth.
Whereas OpenAI did not cancel the project outright, the AI giant says it will only resume development only when the “right conditions” allow for long-term infrastructure investment. The pause dealt a major blow to UK infrastructure partner Nscale (founded by Josh Payne), which had been scaling up operations and weighing a potential stock market IPO, as well as Britain’s push to emerge as a sovereign AI superpower.
The UK pause is the second blow to OpenAI’s planned capacity in a month.
Last month, Bloomberg reported that Oracle’s pivotal $18-billion Project Jupiter, a massive 1,400-acre data center campus in New Mexico critical to supporting the broader AI infrastructure goals, has stalled. Oracle issued a force majeure notice to lender Blue Owl Capital regarding the 2.45-gigawatt hyperscale data center in southern New Mexico after the tech giant failed to secure vital state and federal land-use permits for a planned natural gas plant. Instead, Oracle announced plans to shift over to solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), an experimental stopgap that has never been deployed on a scale this large.
Public resistance to data centers has been growing rapidly across the United States, Europe and Asia as communities push back against the massive environmental and economic footprint of AI infrastructure. A recent Gallup poll shows that roughly 71% of Americans oppose the construction of AI data centers in their localities. Pushback in the U.S. has resulted in projects worth over $130 billion blocked or delayed, with reports indicating more than 500 active data center bans or moratoriums have popped up nationwide.
Trump Admin, US Businesses ‘Need To Be Wary’ Of AI Espionage, Intelligence Chief Warns
Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton warned that both the Trump administration and American companies “need to be wary” of foreign espionage with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), which the government now refers to as super intelligence.
Clayton, who leads the Trump administration’s Super Intelligence Force, told CNBC in a Friday interview that maintaining U.S. leadership in the AI race is critical in the face of potential foreign espionage. He noted that while AI platforms and capabilities can be used for “very good purposes,” they can also be used for “nefarious purposes.”
The intelligence chief’s comments came after President Donald Trump’s Super Intelligence Force held its first meeting at the White House on Thursday. Clayton told CNBC that the meeting was “very good” and that it built on the voluntary accord signed by Trump and multiple technology industry leaders at the White House on Sept. 29.
Asked whether Americans should be concerned about foreign espionage with AI companies, Clayton said Friday that both commercial and state-sponsored espionage are a reality facing the United States.
“It’s something that our private-sector companies need to be wary of, we as a government need to be wary of,” he said.
Clayton told CNBC that it was important for the United States to “stay on the cutting edge” of AI capabilities in order to address concerns regarding AI advances by U.S. adversaries.
“We’re not the only ones developing it. There are vectors in this technology that are coming from some of our known adversaries and competitors,” he said. “The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans all have significant technical capability. We need to stay ahead of them.“
Many of the risks posed by AI are linked to cybersecurity and digital infrastructure, Clayton told CNBC. He described the U.S. digital infrastructure as critical infrastructure, covering everything from public utilities, such as water and electricity, to national defense.
While cybersecurity risks are not new, the rise of AI “amplifies” those risks, Clayton said. To address the risks, he said the United States is “focused on hardening those systems” and is committed to staying ahead of “nefarious actors” in the AI race.
Clayton’s warning regarding foreign espionage attempts linked to AI came after prosecutors and company officials said on Oct. 13 that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national and software engineer working for OpenAI, was arrested on allegations that he concealed a sophisticated recording device in an OpenAI office.
According to a court complaint, the office Alfozan allegedly planted a recording device in was frequently used to hold meetings involving highly confidential information, including government engagements, commercial relationships, product plans, and strategic decisions.
In a Tuesday press release, Clayton described the incident as a “serious situation [that] underscores why winning the global super intelligence race is a national security prerogative.”
During Friday’s interview on CNBC, Clayton added that the incident involving the Saudi software engineer at OpenAI “shows the lengths that people will go to try and supplant our leadership in this, or at least stay close to us, in this emerging technology.”
The intelligence chief’s warning also followed a series of AI swarm breaches, which has led some industry leaders to suggest that the pace of AI development needs to be slowed down and the technology needs additional oversight.
A report released last month by Anthropic found that the Iranian regime used the company’s AI models to track and target U.S. Navy ships in the Middle East. The report also said that a Chinese-linked operation used Claude to track and attempt to recruit Uyghurs who joined the Syrian army to become spies.
In addition, Anthropic’s report found that individuals affiliated with the Chinese regime used Claude and supporting Chinese AI systems to surveil groups targeted by the regime. Those targeted by the China-linked individuals included members of the Tibetan Buddhist civil society, practitioners of Falun Gong, Catholic cardinals, Presbyterian Church leaders, the New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts, and NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet.
Trump announced the formation of the Super Intelligence Force earlier this month to oversee U.S. AI policies. Clayton told CNBC that the White House task force took a number of actions during its inaugural meeting on Thursday.
Those actions included outlining a plan to implement the accords signed by technology leaders, tasking the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology with conducting a risk study, establishing committees covering different AI issues, and developing a system for the Department of Labor to regularly report on the impacts of AI on the U.S. workforce and economy.
In Virginia, Racism and Redlining Are Fueling a Flock Camera Backlash
Local governments in Virginia are under mounting pressure to cancel contracts for surveillance cameras known as automated license plate readers (ALPRs). On October 6, the Henrico County Police Division announced that it would terminate its contract for such cameras after residents shared “legitimate concerns about Flock Safety.” In nearby Richmond, Mayor Danny Avula said on October 13 that the city would cancel its contract with Flock Safety, the most famous purveyor of the cameras, but did not rule out using ALPRs from a different company.
“It is a good first step, but we do need to keep the pressure on the city to not automatically switch to another ALPR vendor,” Richmond Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Victoria McCullough told Truthout.
DSA activists and residents in Richmond pushing police to ditch the contract have powerful research to point to from elsewhere in the state. In the neighboring Hampton Roads region of Virginia, race and class are the primary predictors of locations where police installed ALPRs, a groundbreaking study found earlier this year.
The study found police were more likely to install ALPRs in majority Black census tracts in each of the nine cities across the Hampton Roads region, an East Coast metroplex with 1.8 million residents and multiple cities, including Norfolk and Virginia Beach. About 80 percent of majority Black neighborhoods contain at least one camera compared to fewer than 40 percent of majority white tracts. ALPR surveillance is also more intense in majority Black neighborhoods, where on average there are four times as many cameras than in white neighborhoods when weighted for population share.
In Virginia Beach, police deployed ALPRs in only five of 76 majority white census tracts (6.6 percent), compared to one of two Black census tracts (50 percent). Black residents of the locality are 7.6 times more likely than white residents to live in a census tract with at least one ALPR. When weighted for the number of cameras deployed in each area, Black drivers in Virginia Beach were roughly eight times more likely than white drivers to be regularly surveilled by Flock-style cameras.
Secret Service Deputy Director Quits Amid Questions Over Ties To Drone-Defense Maker Fortem
Deputy Director Matt Quinn announced his resignation from the Secret Service in an internal agency email Friday amid questions about his conflicts of interest over the agency’s counter-drone technology.
Quinn served 23 years as a Secret Service agent before retiring in 2021. He then went to work at drone-manufacturer Fortem Technologies, which sells the DroneHunter product, as a senior vice president for three years before returning to the agency last year to serve as deputy director. His last day will be Nov. 7.
As RealClearPolitics first reported, Quinn was criticized by several current and former Secret Service agents for admitting during a mostly softball Sunday CBS News “60 Minutes” interview that the Secret Service was not prepared for an attack by a drone swarm.
The piece featured a DroneHunter demonstration without mentioning several technical problems the platform has experienced. RealClearPolitics over the last 48 hours submitted detailed questions to the Secret Service about some of the statements made during the “60 Minutes” interview about the drone technology, its effectiveness, whether the DroneHunter’s purchases were competitively bid, and the agency’s track record in taking out drones.
The “60 Minutes” report did not mention Quinn’s prior work for Fortem. The Secret Service did not respond to RCP’s questions.
Even before Quinn’s announced departure, several Secret Service sources were questioning a report in a recent CBS “60 Minutes” segment that the agency used electronic jamming equipment to take down a drone at the Army-Navy game in Baltimore last December. The game was attended by the president and several members of Congress.
The sources suggest that the Secret Service is not providing the proper context about the downed drone, while raising concerns that it was most likely a friendly-fire incident.
CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell sat down with Secret Service Director Sean Curran and Quinn in a joint interview that aired Sunday night, Oct. 11. The three discussed this year’s surge in threats to President Trump and his Cabinet and how the agency is trying to adapt to dangers posed by autonomous attack drones, not just lone gunmen.
The 13-minute report features scenes of Curran and Quinn at the agency’s Rowley Training Center demonstrating counter-drone systems. The segment featured drone-fighting technology, including the DroneHunter, a weapon that uses AI and radar to disable what O’Donnell referred to as “enemy drones.” When it’s working properly, the DroneHunter captures targeted unmanned aerial vehicles in a net.
At one point, Quinn, who concedes during the interview that the agency doesn’t have the capability to stop a swarm of drones, narrates as a DroneHunter hexacopter captures an unmanned aerial vehicle in a training demonstration.
“Whoa,” O’Donnell remarks while watching the capture starting to take place.
“What you see is the drone hanging from the drone hunter,” Quinn explains. “So, the bad guy drone is now captured. It’s gonna take it to a predetermined safe area.”
Near the end of the segment, O’Donnell states without citing a source: “60 Minutes has learned the Secret Service took down a drone using electronic jamming equipment at the Army-Navy game in Baltimore last December where the president and members of Congress were in attendance.”
It was just one line in the segment, and there was no explanation of whether the drone posed a genuine threat to Trump and everyone else gathered in the stadium for the annual military academy football rivalry. The report also didn’t indicate whether the drone was associated with a foreign actor or was simply a hobbyist’s drone that posed no threat at all.
Active and retired Secret Service agents are now calling on agency leaders to explain more fully what happened. Their biggest question is whether it was a case of friendly fire. Instead of intercepting an alien drone that may or may not have posed a threat, a Secret Service officer or agent used a handheld drone-jamming gun to disable and take out one of its own surveillance drones monitoring the stadium, the sources tell RealClearPolitics.
BTIG Spots “Real-World Evidence” Humanoid Robots Are Entering The Workforce
Goldman Sachs’ recent upward revisions to global humanoid robot delivery forecasts through the end of the decade, along with rising estimates across Wall Street desks, point to broader expected adoption in factories, restaurants, and other workplaces. Military applications and household use could follow soon.
BTIG strategic opportunities analyst Jesse Sobelson told clients Friday that the physical AI boom is moving onto factory floors, into warehouses, and behind restaurant counters.
Sobelson and his team attended RoboStrategy’s Robotics Founders Forum in New York this week and reported back on what executives from several of RoboStrategy’s private-company holdings (Apptronik, Standard Bots, Dexmate, Maven Robotics, Path Robotics and Dyna Robotics) discussed: robot development, commercial deployments, and manufacturing plans.
Citizen Lab Exposes Israeli Spyware Infecting Phones Through Ordinary Ads
Israeli mercenary spyware reached potentially hundreds of millions of devices worldwide through ordinary online advertisements that required no user interaction to deliver their payload, according to research by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. [1]
The findings published Thursday, Oct. 15, said the incident is likely to be the first confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads [2]. The ads, loaded with the Candiru spyware, were placed by Israeli firm Discover-Tech.
What The Citizen Lab Investigation Found
During a four-month period examined by researchers, Discover-Tech ads appeared on almost 200,000 unique websites and Android and iOS applications across dozens of countries. [1] The Citizen Lab said the advertising supply chain effectively functions as a mass-profiling and infection system capable of reaching enormous populations with no user action whatsoever.
Scope Extended to Sensitive Networks, Researchers Say
According to The Citizen Lab, Discover-Tech ad impressions were also found in North Atlantic Treaty Organization and United Nations networks, the European Parliament, the European Commission and more than a dozen national governments. Ads also appeared within media organizations in eight countries, including Australia, Mexico and across Europe. The pattern suggests that the advertising infrastructure used in the campaign reached deeply into government, military and journalistic environments where surveillance would be most valuable.
Platform Access and Prior Blacklisting
Candiru’s rebrand to Integrity Labs followed a 2025 acquisition by the U.S. private equity firm Integrity Partners, which is not subject to U.S. sanctions. This corporate restructuring allowed the spyware operation to continue under a new identity while its prior entity remained on the blacklist.
Following the findings by the two research groups, Google, IAB Europe, Beeswax and other platforms disconnected Discover-Tech’s access to the digital advertising market. In November 2021, Candiru was also used to target Middle East Eye and other websites, according to the security firm ESET, in an attack that targeted links to the Middle East with a strong focus on Yemen and the surrounding conflict.
Researcher Comments and Context
“The way online advertising works today is a systemic security threat,” Wolfie Cristl, a senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, told Reuters. The reports describe an advertising model in which commercial ad platforms can be repurposed for tracking, reconnaissance and the automated delivery of malicious exploits without any interaction from the user.
The findings add to a growing pattern of documented abuses of commercial spyware. In September 2026, suspected spyware attacks targeted the phones of at least three Turkish ministers, with Apple sending notifications warning that the devices may have been compromised [3].
In December 2025, a joint investigation by media outlets in Greece, Israel and Switzerland revealed that Predator spyware from the Intellexa Consortium, led by a former senior Israeli intelligence official, continued to be used against targets in multiple countries despite U.S. sanctions [4]. These cases point to a broader ecosystem in which commercial spyware vendors operate across borders, adapt to sanctions and find new delivery channels.
Sanders calls for artificial superintelligence ban after OpenAI CEO interview
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday called for permanently banning artificial superintelligence in response to recent remarks made by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Altman told Politico’s “Decoded” podcast in an interview last week that society will face a “coming tidal wave of cybersecurity problems” coming from open-source AI models. He also said that people will “have to just accept some fairly severe cyber incidents from open models, in exchange for the liberty that comes with that.”
“No, Mr. Altman. We won’t accept a severe AI cyberattack in exchange for ‘liberty,’” Sanders wrote on the social platform X, later asking, “Mr. Altman: What do you mean by that?”
Sanders wrote that Americans “are not willing to accept disaster ‘in exchange for the liberty’ of making Big Tech Oligarchs even richer and more powerful,” adding that tech developers working on AI “are not above the law.”
“If you and other Big Tech Oligarchs make products that commit crimes or disasters, we will hold you accountable for breaking the law — no matter how much wealth and power you have,” Sanders continued. “We must PAUSE advanced AI and permanently BAN artificial superintelligence before it is too late.”
Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) last month introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would institute the permanent ban while temporarily pausing “advanced AI development” until federal regulators establish safety standards.
The bill would also direct the U.S. to seek diplomatic agreements to prevent the development of superintelligence and establish a Cabinet-level federal agency to focus on AI safety rules.
The bill is the latest of several proposals floated by progressives in Congress to slow down AI development amid recent cybersecurity incidents and hacks involving rogue AI software, including an unsuccessful hack of the Department of Education’s website and a hack of Australia’s health department.
The chorus of concern grew after former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned last month that AI could pose an existential threat to human life on Earth.
Sanders, who sided with Pope Leo XIV’s warnings about AI’s impact on the art world, slammed President Trump over his response to developing AI.
“Look, it is embarrassing, really, I think, going beyond politics, how ignorant this president is about the dangers of AI,” Sanders told MS NOW last month.
Trump said he would appoint an “AI czar” and has launched a “Super Intelligence Force” in response to the technology’s development, but he has praised AI’s possibilities despite the bipartisan calls for regulation.
The president has sought to rebrand AI as “super intelligence,” and he recently signed a pledge with tech executives that put the name in writing across the executive branch.
OpenAI: AI-Generated Deepfakes Will Become Impossible to Verify
Federal judges meeting in Boston heard tech industry warnings that AI-generated images and video are becoming nearly impossible to verify, as a judiciary committee considers whether courts need new rules for evidence that may be deepfakes instead of the real thing.
Reuters reports that the U.S. Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules has spent three years, since 2023, studying how courts should handle evidence that may have been faked or altered using artificial intelligence. At Thursday’s meeting, representatives from OpenAI and Meta told the panel that detecting such fakes is only going to get harder.
“AI images are only getting better, and I do not think that there will be a scientific way going forward to detect them,” said Shira Anderson, OpenAI’s policy counsel.
Devin Norder, Meta’s director of product management, told the committee that the latest generation of AI models produces media that people simply cannot tell apart from the real thing. “Media generated from frontier models, at least in the last few generations, are indistinguishable by humans from authentic or AI-generated media,” Norder said. He added that producing convincing fakes no longer takes much effort or money: “And the cost and the time it takes to create this media really are quite trivial at this point.”
Both companies have built tools meant to verify whether visual content is authentic, and lawmakers have started moving the same way. California and the European Union have each passed laws requiring “watermarking” designed to flag AI-generated material. But Anderson cautioned that no single system can catch everything, since different companies’ tools don’t talk to each other. “My guess is that this absolutely will continue to get better. I do not think it’ll ever be bulletproof,” she said.
Despite the warnings, the committee has found little evidence that deepfakes are actually showing up in courtrooms. A survey released in March by the Federal Judiciary Center, the judiciary’s research arm, polled 931 judges and found that only 15 had handled a case in which someone challenged evidence as a deepfake. US District Judge Jesse Furman of Manhattan, who chairs the committee, pointed to that gap between prediction and reality. “There’s a lot of academic commentary and other commentary predicting that courts will be dealing with deepfakes, but we haven’t actually seen a whole lot of that yet,” Furman said.
The Future Of American Drone Warfare
While the war with Iran might be nearing a resolution, the war in Ukraine is heating up.
Whether this is the next stage in escalation, or the grand finale remains unclear. But lessons continue to emerge from this conflict, and world powers are beginning to act on them at scale.
Ukrainian long-range drones continue to hammer Russian energy and military sites. Targets up to 1,700 kilometers inside Russia are being hit.
These strikes are causing serious economic damage to Russia, not to mention the environmental harm. Here’s a screenshot of recent fires at Russia’s Rosneft facility on the Black Sea after Ukrainian drone attacks.
Earlier this week, President Trump expressed his anger at Ukrainian President Zelensky, “It’s time for Ukraine to get a NEW PRESIDENT!”
Ukraine’s strikes are hammering Russia’s fuel production, and causing shortages worldwide.
On the front lines, short-range drones are now Ukraine’s primary weapon holding back Russian advances. Most of these are small drones with anti-tank RPG warheads attached.
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