theck1 IT/AI news

AI isn’t enough to protect social media communities from AI

Scharon Harding • August 6, 2026 Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. But when it comes to AI slop and hateful content threatening the safety and value of social media platforms, adding more fire—in this case, more AI—can make the problem worse. At its best, social media can be a haven for people

Ford picks “Fathom” for its affordable truck name, starts at $28,350

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Jonathan M. Gitlin • August 6, 2026 Ford’s second attempt at an electric vehicle strategy is getting closer to primetime. After its initial approach of electrifying its best-selling F-150 fell a little flat, it decided to try something a little radical. An internal skunkworks was set up in California with a brief to rethink the

Cloudflare open-sources vibe-coding platform for people who aren’t coders

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Jeremy Hsu • August 6, 2026 Cloudflare has open-sourced its Cloudflare OS platform, which it first developed as an internal workspace for employees to build apps using AI agents—including people who are not software developers or engineers. The company also touts a security framework designed to reduce the risk of employee vibe-coding sessions creating serious

Moderna’s mRNA flu shot earns FDA approval after rollercoaster review

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Beth Mole • August 6, 2026 Despite significant drama from Trump officials this year, the Food and Drug Administration has for the first time approved a flu vaccine that uses mRNA technology. On Thursday, vaccine maker Moderna announced that its flu shot, mRNA-1010, aka mFLUSIVA, had earned approval for use in all adults ages 50

Trump FCC kills TV ownership cap, claiming authority over limit set by Congress

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Jon Brodkin • August 6, 2026 The Federal Communications Commission voted 2–1 today to eliminate the National Television Ownership Rule, claiming authority to repeal a limit that was set by Congress over 20 years ago. The rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the

Parasitic zombie-ant fungus thrives in mosses, too

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Jennifer Ouellette • August 6, 2026 The parasitic fungi in the Cordyceps genus are a favorite subject of nature documentaries. They’ve also infiltrated popular culture via the zombie-apocalypse video game The Last of Us (2013) and its TV adaptation, in which a parasitic fungus mutates to infect humans. Scientists are keen to study Cordyceps to

Blue Origin narrowing in on root cause of catastrophic rocket accident

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Eric Berger • August 6, 2026 Blue Origin provided its first substantive update this week on the cause of the catastrophic loss of the New Glenn rocket and most of its launch pad infrastructure at Cape Canaveral, Florida, in May. The space company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, said investigative work is continuing into the anomaly

Large genome models used to design new viruses

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John Timmer • August 6, 2026 A lot of the AI work in biology has been focused on designing proteins. That’s partly because proteins do most of the business of life, catalyzing the interesting chemistry and structuring cells. So, figuring out how to make a new protein can mean directly tinkering with biochemistry, providing new

Anthropic will design its own hardware to power Claude

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Samuel Axon • August 6, 2026 Anthropic is hiring a “custom silicon team” to design chips on which to run its models, the company has revealed. Yesterday, Business Insider noticed a job listing for a senior engineer with experience shipping semiconductor designs. (You can see listings for a silicon engineer and a technical program manager,

Suno hopes to go legit with watermarks for AI-generated music

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Ryan Whitwam • August 6, 2026 The Internet is awash in AI content, and it’s not always easy to tell it apart from genuine human creations. While images and videos are perhaps the most obvious type of AI slop, streaming music services like Spotify are also being inundated with AI-generated tunes. Suno is one of