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Submission + - China broadens travel curbs to encompass family of top AI talent. (business-standard.com)

schwit1 writes: That marks a broadening of existing curbs on the freedom of movement of China’s most influential tech talent — a category that encompasses entrepreneurs, researchers and executives. While not an outright ban on travel, the new requirement is likely to exert a further chilling effect on a tech sector already facing unprecedented curbs. China has restricted foreign travel for top AI professionals in private firms such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and DeepSeek since earlier this year, Bloomberg News reported in May, reflecting Beijing’s determination to safeguard its technology as it makes big strides in AI and chipmaking.

It’s unclear whether all those people’s families need to follow the new strictures, the people said. China is also separately implementing rules, which became effective Sept 15, for enforcing exit bans in cases ranging from criminal investigations to potential violations of the country’s industrial and technological security.

Beijing’s plan is to add relevant individuals to the list as time goes by, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a sensitive issue. Government departments have already notified several people of the need to clear family travel, two of the people said.

Submission + - pgEdge Announces Starfleet, a New Postgres Cloud Platform (pgedge.com)

Trifthen writes: Starfleet is a managed or on-prem Postgres cloud service with built-in AI tooling (MCP + RAG), CoW database branching, and optional PostgREST API access. We've built it for dev-focused use, so come by and let us know what you think!

Submission + - Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts â" And They're Horrified (404media.co)

alternative_right writes: 404 Media obtained a set of internal documents related to the contractors reviewing Copilot prompts and images, including instruction guides, real Copilot user prompts and pictures, and conversations between contractors on an internal message board.

In a thread on the internal message board, a contractor discussed prompts asking Copilot to make a womanâ(TM)s skirt shorter, or enlarge her breasts, or show more leg while wearing stilettos. She-Hulk images come up a lot, the person who works on the prompts told 404 Media. Other contractors also wrote they were presented with pro-anorexia content.

âoeI recoiled,â one contractor wrote about seeing that content. Another person wrote that one of the prompts they reviewed asked Copilot to make an image of Ariana Grande with anorexia. Another reported a prompt that seemed to be designed to create a lewd or suggestive image of a group of young girls.

Submission + - NVIDIA Unveils AI Agent Safety Platform (securityweek.com)

wiredmikey writes: Nvidia on Monday announced the Open Agent Safety Platform, which combines open source software and a reference system design to keep AI agents within set boundaries from testing through deployment.

The chipmaker explained that the platform pairs the open-source OpenShell runtime with Sentry, an out-of-band watchdog running on BlueField-4 DPUs. Nvidia says Sentry can monitor agent activity independently and quarantine an agent that crosses its boundaries within milliseconds.

Nvidia is pitching the platform against a backdrop of recent incidents in which frontier AI labs have reported agents escaping the evaluation environments meant to contain them, reaching systems they should not have accessed and, in some cases, misreporting what they did.

OpenShell and related skills are available via Nvidia’s developer resources page and on GitHub.

Submission + - FLOCK has installad 335,000 snooper-cans in the United States. (tomshardware.com)

noshellswill writes: FLOCK has generated an invasion-level event, by the unsupervised installation of 335,000 cameras in the United States. As FLOCK Inc. has actively "partnered" for access with armed enforcement agendas both public and private ... while selling data to any paying customer .. their public safety threat exceeds prudent (re)publican standards.

Submission + - Inside Britain's Infrastructure Of Information Control (dailywire.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The term “Orwellian” is not supposed to be a compliment. But far too often in the modern world, governments behave as if George Orwell’s warnings against totalitarianism, notably in “1984” and “Animal Farm,” are instruction manuals for governance.

On September 22, Britain’s new (and unelected) Prime Minister Andy Burnham took to the stage at the U.N. and announced a new “National Centre for Information Defence” to “detect, attribute, and disrupt” hostile state information attacks.

But this announcement is so pernicious because there is actually some merit in highlighting the kind of information warfare that is being waged against Western populations. But none of us can trust our own governments, given their recent track records, to have such power over information.

Submission + - The Problem with Rogue AI Isn't the Objective. It's the Route. (linkedin.com)

gethotelreviews writes: Imagine giving an AI agent one simple objective: increase bookings for a hotel. It might improve advertising, adjust prices or create better offers. But the instruction describes the destination, not every acceptable route for getting there. Humans automatically assume boundaries that may never appear in the instruction. An intelligent agent searching for solutions may discover routes nobody thought to prohibit.

Submission + - Social media platforms refuse to run 'Musk' documentary ads

An anonymous reader writes: Social media platforms refuse to run paid ads for 'Musk' documentary

“Musk, Alex Gibney's four-hour documentary about Elon Musk, hits theaters in two weeks and received rave reviews out of its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. Yet distributor Bleecker Street can't buy ads on major social media platforms in order to promote it.”

Submission + - Put Multiple Values in One Cell with Lists and Arrays in Excel 1

theodp writes: Folks in Finance and other power Excel users were no doubt all atwitter over Microsoft's Thursday announcement of support for in-cell lists and arrays in Excel, including four new functions — FLATTEN, HAS, HASANY, HASALL — to manipulate them. From the home office in Redmond:

"Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell. In this announcement, we're excited to share how that's changing with the release of lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays, initially to Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels. Many workbooks already try to pack multiple values into one cell. A project might list 'Carlos, Henrietta, Jacob' as three owners, or a Forms survey might return '2:00 PM; 2:30 PM; 3:00 PM' as one response. With lists, you can keep those values in one cell, while also keeping them separate for filtering, calculation and more."

If you haven't been keeping abreast of What's New in Excel, Microsoft has added a number of new features over the past years that enable Excel users to do things one might formerly have turned to programming languages and other computing environments to accomplish, including support for regular expressions, the LET and LAMDA functions, Python in Excel, and, of course, the obligatory AI support.

Which raises an interesting question: Is an Excel formula worth a thousand lines of AI-generated Python code? (especially if the latter is run in an overengineered infrastructure, such as an AI-generated complex CI/CD pipeline combined with cloud pipeline execution!)

Submission + - What Happens When AI Goes Beyond the Script? (linkedin.com)

gethotelreviews writes: Intelligence is valuable partly because it can discover solutions humans did not anticipate. The difficult question is how we distinguish useful surprise from AI misalignment. A machine finding an unexpected scientific solution could be a breakthrough. The same capacity applied to the wrong objective could become a problem.

How much independence should we give artificial intelligence?

Submission + - Mobile App Design Is Becoming an AI Systems Problem (azkiweb.com)

dewoweb writes: Mobile App Design Is Becoming an AI Systems Problem

Mobile app design is increasingly being shaped by platform capabilities that sit below the user interface. In September 2026, Apple opened App Store submissions for iOS 27 and highlighted Apple Intelligence, the Foundation Models framework, and new platform technologies for developers. Google is taking a similar direction on Android, where on-device AI and new APIs are being positioned as part of how applications interact with system-level intelligence.

The practical change is that teams can no longer treat an app as a collection of screens and API calls. On-device inference introduces constraints around memory, latency, battery consumption, privacy, model updates, and fallback behavior when network access is unavailable. Android's current AI tooling explicitly supports local processing for use cases where privacy and offline operation matter, while Apple's latest developer guidance emphasizes running AI models on-device.

That makes mobile app design an engineering concern as much as a UI concern. Architecture decisions now have to account for device capabilities, background execution, synchronization, permissions, local storage, observability, and graceful degradation. The interface is still important, but it is increasingly the visible layer of a much larger runtime system.

The interesting question for developers is not simply how to add AI to an app, but how these platform changes should alter the way mobile applications are architected and tested.

Sources

Apple Developer â" App Store submissions now open for the latest OS releases:
https://developer.apple.com/ne...

Android Developers â" Top AI on Android updates from Google I/O 2026:
https://developer.android.com/...

Android Developers â" Gemini Nano and on-device AI:
https://developer.android.com/...

Submission + - Apple Copland D11E4 Emulator in Your Browser

Balial writes: In the 1990's, before OS X, Apple tried to replace their Mac OS operating system that didn't support virtual memory with a new OS, Copland, with virtual memory and many modern features. The project failed, but you can now boot and run the OS in your browser:

pagetable.com

Bonus: The install image for Copland is only 35MB.

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