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In Salem, Oregon, a five-point-one billion dollar proposed AI data center turned into something you don't often see at a city council meeting. Protesters arrived with a guillotine towed by bicycle, and a company representative for developer Verrus was cornered by demonstrators and ultimately escorted out by police, saying it no longer felt safe to stay. It's a sharp reminder that the infrastructure powering AI has to land somewhere, and communities are increasingly making their feelings known.
On the security front, two MIT researchers are set to present a new speculative execution attack at DEF CON thirty-four that slips past existing Spectre defenses on both Intel and AMD processors. The technique, called TONTOU, uses precisely timed interrupts to get around mitigations that were supposed to close these vulnerabilities for good. Hardware-level security assumptions are being tested again, and that affects virtually every machine running today.
Meanwhile, NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer logged more than one hundred forty hours observing a magnetar, and researchers believe they may have directly observed empty space behaving in a way physics predicted nearly ninety years ago but had never actually confirmed. It's a quiet but remarkable moment for fundamental science.
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