Local Articles – e.Republic – & – Government Technology State – This New Raleigh, N.C., IT Help Desk Agent Is, Well, Agentic

Oct 082026
 

The newest member of the IT help desk in North Carolina’s capital city, the product of a public-private alliance, joins a unit of just four people charged with resolving issues across roughly 13,000 devices. Oh, and despite being able to resolve problems rather than directing a staffer to an instruction article, they — Alli — are not real. They are an agentic AI bot that is stepping in to assist the four human technicians addressing problems the Raleigh Information Technology Department oversees. Technically speaking, Alli is an L1 IT Service Desk AI Specialist. Alli is a project co-developed by the city and its technology partner ServiceNow. The two worked together to build a tool designed not…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.govtech.com/artificial-intelligence/this-new-raleigh-n-c-it-help-desk-agent-is-well-agentic

 2026-10-08  No Responses »

Deeplinks – When No ID Means No Internet: Age Verification and the Right to Access Information

Oct 082026
 

This post was co-authored by Sheila B. Lalwani, a doctorate student and recent COMPASS Fellow hosted by EFF.
Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all? This is particularly a problem when users are required to prove their age with identity documents.
Age-related restrictions are developing quickly around the world. While they differ radically across jurisdictions, in the past year, we’ve witnessed a sharp uptick toward mandatory age assurance for social media access but also for other high-risk digital services.
For example:

In late 2025, Australia became the first country to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/when-no-id-means-no-internet-age-verification-and-right-access-information

 2026-10-08  No Responses »

Wikimedia blog – OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects

Oct 052026
 

Recently, multiple organisations have disclosed how clusters of so-called “rogue” AI agents attempted to break into websites and online services, sometimes successfully. Agents from OpenAI’s environment, in particular, are known to have used other public wikis (collaboratively edited websites not owned by us) to communicate and coordinate with each other. These types of successful intrusions can expose sensitive data or disrupt website services that users rely on, while clusters of agents can attempt attacks at a scale that is difficult for defenders to manage. They affect people behind the websites who may not understand the nature of the attack, or have the tools to effectively fight back. For a site like Wikipedia, agents might find and…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/10/05/openai-rogue-agent-activities-found-on-wikimedia-projects/

 2026-10-05  No Responses »

Helloween 2026 Horror Movie #4: Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

 NO  No Responses »
Oct 022026
 

Even further behind… I watched this the night after The Eye so yeaaaaah. Hopefully I can catch up but there will probably be a few combined posts with very brief notes on each movie given the gap between me seeing these and writing about them.

Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) / Arrow 4K

Two ghost movies from 2002 that I’ve never seen before in a row? Sure why not. Unlike the previous night’s movie, Ju-on is super super creepy. Like spine tingling creepy. For some reason I still find certain kinds of ghost actually scary, probably because of a creepy furnace room in the hallway to a childhood bedroom and watching stuff like Sightings and The X-Files as an eight year old. This movie features some of the creepier ghosts I’ve experienced through the teevee screen. My girlfriend has just been randomly making weird ghost noises at me since we watched this because of how much it got me.

The story is told very non linearly and it seems to reference the previous direct to video movies in the series, and has some kind of cycle with the first and last people possessed by the ghosts. The story isn’t really critical for this though.

I highly recommend this, especially if you’re totally desensitized to horror. It might actually give you that creeped out feeling many of us stopped being able to feel years ago.