2026-10-25
France prepared a DNS kill switch for TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and X during protests
The government wrote a letter asking phone companies to make TikTok disappear for a few hours. They almost did it.
Two days before Oct 24 protests, France’s prime minister sent a confidential letter to Orange, SFR, Free and Bouygues asking them to be ready to suspend TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat (and later X) for a few hours via mobile DNS filtering. Operators raised legal and technical doubts in a follow-up call; the block was not activated, but the government had already used a similar measure in New Caledonia.
What Happened
Blast (exclusive leaked letter + operator meeting notes); Clubic, 75secondes.fr follow-ups. Primary URL: https://www.blast-info.fr/articles/2026/information-exclusive-blast-le-premier-ministre-a-prepare-la-coupure-des-reseaux-sociaux-pour-le-24-octobre-9D8cgrU5S5iiW14Sb9nMzQ
2026-10-25
America lost 200,000 creative jobs with no recession — how much is AI?
Hollywood lost a third of its jobs. The rest of the economy didn’t notice.
U.S. film/TV, publishing, broadcasting and related creative sectors have shed more than 200,000 jobs over four years (roughly 50k in the last year), matching the intensity of the 2001 and 2008 recessions — except there is no recession. Film and sound recording lost nearly a third of its workforce; in-person arts (museums, performing arts) kept growing.
What Happened
Apricitas Economics (Joseph Politano BLS analysis); circulating heavily on HN and recaps Oct 24–25. Primary URL: https://www.apricitas.io/p/ai-and-the-fall-of-the-creative-class
2026-10-25
Nvidia open-sourced Flora so robots can label video 125× cheaper than GPT-6 Astra
Nvidia just made it 125 times cheaper for a robot to understand a video of someone doing the dishes.
Nvidia released Flora, three open models that segment, caption and reward-score robot (and human) manipulation video. It labels ~200,000 hours of video per day internally and costs ~72 cents per hour of footage versus ~$88 for GPT-6 Astra, with comparable or better quality on Nvidia’s tests.
What Happened
The Decoder, Nvidia GEAR lab paper/Hugging Face. Primary URL: https://the-decoder.com/nvidia-open-sources-flora-to-make-robot-video-labeling-125x-cheaper-than-gpt-6-astra/
2026-10-25
Elvis’s estate sued Anthropic for training Claude on 274 songs
Elvis’s people just sued Claude for learning 274 of his songs.
Authentic Brands Group and other Elvis rights holders sued Anthropic on Oct 23, alleging Claude was trained on 274 Presley songs (including “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Don’t Be Cruel”) without permission and still produces close rewrites. They seek ~$41–48.6 million plus an order to purge the material from training data and weights.
What Happened
Billboard, Rolling Stone, Hollywood Reporter. Primary URL: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-industry-news/anthropic-elvis-presley-lawsuit-ai-1236739617/
2026-10-25
Alpha School promised 2× learning with AI. About half the kids missed it.
The AI school that said kids would learn twice as fast just had half of them miss the goal.
The fast-growing, expensive Alpha School network (AI tutors, 2–3 hours of academics, afternoons for “vibe-coding”) claims students learn twice as fast. Internal data reviewed by the Times shows roughly half of K-8 students missed the 2× math goal; about a fifth missed it in reading. The model is already being quietly rolled into some public districts.
What Happened
New York Times (Dana Goldstein, Oct 23). Primary URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/us/alpha-school-ai-education-parents.html/
2026-10-25
Forced to pick a candidate, Grok chose Republicans 92% of the time and GPT chose Democrats 97%
Ask Grok who to vote for and it picks the Republican. Ask GPT and it picks the Democrat. They almost never agree.
Researchers asked Grok 4.7 and GPT-6.1 Sol (via APIs) to name one candidate in nearly 500 2026 midterm races with no hedging. Grok picked the Republican in 92% of answers; GPT picked the Democrat in 97%. They agreed in under 10% of races. Search-off tests suggest Grok’s lean is mostly retrieval-driven while GPT’s is more baked-in.
What Happened
TechCrunch (Convovo / Cornell study, Oct 24). Primary URL: https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/24/forced-to-pick-groks-ai-model-chooses-republicans-openais-picks-democrats/
2026-10-25
A hacker reverse-engineered his Samsung TV and found it using AI to screenshot and listen for ads
Your TV is taking screenshots of what you’re watching and listening through the soundbar so it can sell you better ads.
Security researcher log4j reverse-engineered a 2025 Samsung TV after getting unnervingly targeted ads. The Tizen OS was collecting audio (even via connected soundbars when the TV had no mic), screenshots, playback-speed data and more, feeding an on-device AI model for ad targeting. The researcher was later banned by OpenAI for “cyber abuse” while reporting it.
What Happened
Tom’s Hardware (Oct 25). Primary URL: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/hacker-finds-own-samsung-tv-collecting-scary-amounts-of-user-information-and-gets-banned-by-openai-for-cyber-abuse-tv-runs-an-ai-model-that-collects-audio-screenshots-and-plenty-of-other-user-data-for-ad-targeting