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Amazon has been quietly buying up rare books in bulk, scanning them for AI training data, and then destroying them. A 404 Media investigation confirmed this by planting a tracker inside a rare book, following it across the country to an Amazon facility. It raises serious questions about what gets consumed, and lost, in the race to feed artificial intelligence.
On the energy front, PJM Interconnection, the grid operator serving sixty-seven million people across thirteen states and Washington D.C., has asked federal regulators to let it cut power to new large-scale data centers before households during shortages. Data centers over fifty megawatts would need to bring their own backup generation. It's a striking signal that the infrastructure powering AI is straining the grid that powers everything else.
And a macOS security flaw is getting attention for the wrong reasons. Attackers have been exploiting a vulnerability in the operating system's screen sharing feature to gain root access and secretly mine Monero cryptocurrency. Proof-of-concept code is already circulating publicly, which means the window to patch before widespread exploitation is narrowing fast.
Stay curious, stay skeptical. Tech Beat out.
