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The minutes of the government's recently announced digital ID advisory group will not be published, Cabinet Office minister James Frith has told a Conservative MP, while not answering his questions about its budget or how its members were selected. Andrew Snowden, MP for Fylde and an assistant whip, asked the Cabinet Office whether the minutes, recommendations, and advice of the digital ID advisory group announced earlier this month will be published. In separate parliamentary written questions, he also asked what budget the group had been allocated and what criteria were used to select its members, who include security expert David Rogers, Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts, and former New South Wales digital government minister Victor Dominello. "The running of the digital ID advisory group will be supported by the Cabinet Office's existing digital ID task force. The group is not a decision-making body and minutes will not be published," said Frith in identical replies to all three questions. "The answer was disappointing to say the least," said Snowden when asked by The Register if he was satisfied with Frith's response. "Digital ID was a deeply controversial policy when Keir Starmer announced it, causing one of the many U-turns that led to the situation we are in today. If the government are persisting with developing a system of digital ID then scrutiny of that policy by Members of Parliament is vital. To ignore key questions will not increase public support for digital ID." Snowden added that written parliamentary questions are an important way to hold the government to account and obtain further information. "When the government refuses to answer questions from Members it is not just us they are disrespecting. They are disrespecting Parliament itself and the people we represent." The digital ID scheme was announced last September at the Labour Party's annual conference by current prime minister Keir Starmer. The conference also heard Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham speaking against the plans. "I think there's a risk of an opportunity cost situation here, where something can consume a huge amount of time and actually doesn't come through," he said. Following his by-election victory last week and Starmer's announcement on Monday that he would resign, Burnham is widely expected to become the UK's next prime minister, which could leave him to decide the fate of an unpopular scheme introduced and championed by his predecessor. ®

Donald Trump was all set to sign a bill passed by Congress that’s designed to reduce housing costs for the American people. But an angry Trump abruptly canceled the signing and blurted out a demand that Republicans pass voter suppression legislation instead. This surprised Trump’s own advisers and shocked Republicans in Congress. Why? They apparently couldn’t fathom that he’d so openly prioritize disenfranchising voters over helping Americans overcome their economic travails. We talked about all of it with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, author of a new piece identifying Trump’s narcissism as the through line for many of his recent follies. We discuss now Trump’s pathological self-regard led right to this moment, why this voter suppression effort would likely backfire on Trump if it were to pass, and what’s likely to come next as Republicans seek to flatter their way out of this latest impasse. Listen to this episode here.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

Robert Henricks reluctantly voted to increase monthly homeowners association fees in his San Diego County community, lifting them by $100 a month to $550. 

“With the cost of living, the cost of projects, we’ve put off raising the monthly assessment two years out of three,” said Henricks, who sits on the board of his Rancho Bernardo HOA.

But even he concedes he’s now among the thousands of Californians feeling pinched by surging HOA fees atop unprecedented mortgage rates, utilities and insurance premiums.

One solution is to cap the fee hikes. California lawmakers are considering a measure, Senate Bill 1007, that would curb how much associations could increase members’ dues each year. 

It’s the latest bill targeting HOAs and how they levy fees in the Legislature this session in an attempt to address housing affordability. Although the crackdowns have been mostly successful and bipartisan, this biggest push yet to slow down rising fees has split some Democrats.

The rise of the HOA

HOAs are a near ubiquitous-phenomenon in today’s housing market. 

Nationwide, 67% of all new single-family homes in 2024 were in HOAs, up from 46% in 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More than a third of California residents live in one, including about 65% of all California homeowners.

Californians also pay among the highest median monthly fees in the nation, at nearly $300 per month, according to the Census Bureau. San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles owners can face even higher dues, up to several thousand dollars a month.

In an HOA, maintenance, repair and insurance expenses are divided among homeowners after elected board members determine annual budget costs. Some funds go toward routine upkeep for things like pools, clubhouses or golf courses, while others are set aside for major projects such as roof repairs. 

They’re self-governing and controlled by residents who create and enforce their own rules, covering everything from which paint colors are allowed to what kind of trees can be planted.

Under current law, dues can’t increase by more than 20% each year.

The new proposed legislation would cap annual HOA fee increases to no more than 8% without a vote by members of the HOA.

“This bill is about providing information to a homeowner to understand how much they’re gonna be paying,” Van Nuys Democrat Caroline Menjivar, the bill’s author, said at a March hearing.

‘Pay me now or pay me later?’

Consumer and realtor groups are championing the bill as a potential lifeline for low- and middle-income families already feeling squeezed by skyrocketing mortgage rates, gas prices and grocery bills.

Supporters point to examples such as a Walnut Creek man whose monthly association fees are $1,500. Those fees, along with his condo insurance and property taxes, now outpace his mortgage.

The U.S. Housing Department and most financial planners agree that Americans shouldn’t pay more than 30% of their monthly income on housing, and soaring HOA fees are getting in the way of people doing just that, said Marjorie Murray, president for the Center for California Homeowner Association Law, at the March hearing.

“This is unsustainable. Even regular assessments raised by 20% will double in four years and triple in five,” she said. “Nobody’s salary or Social Security or retirement income goes up by those kinds of percentages.”

Exorbitant fines and retaliatory lawsuits have made HOAs polarizing for decades. But soaring costs amid an affordability crisis have sparked numerous efforts from state lawmakers to rein in their authority, including a new state law capping fines at $100 per violation.

One billed as the “HOA transparency act” would push them to act more like local governments when it comes to open records and public meetings. Meetings would need to be more accessible for members and disciplinary actions could not occur out of the public eye.

Another proposal would require associations to stash money in a savings account to help stave off pricey one-time assessment fees to pay for major maintenance, an issue most common with older condominiums. Builders and real estate agents support it.

Follow the money

Under Menjivar’s bill, homeowners could still raise fees by more than 8% a year to cover expenses, but they’d have to do so by popular vote, California Association of Realtors lobbyist Sanjay Wagle said. The association has given more than $10 million to legislators since 2000, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database. He argued that most people wouldn’t let a leaky roof or faulty plumbing go unfixed, for example, because it’d sink their property values.

“The realtors trust the homeowners. They’ll protect their investment,” Wagle said.

Building groups are more skeptical. They worry curbing fees too much would hurt HOAs’ ability to keep up properties. 

The divide became clear last month when six Democrats joined a majority of Republicans in voting against the bill during a Senate hearing, a rare public opposition in the Democratic-controlled Legislature where lawmakers typically opt to not vote at all rather than against a colleague’s bill. It advanced on a 24-13 vote. 

The bill’s opponents said it’s unlikely that a majority of residents would agree to dramatically raise their own fees. This could lead to some downstream effects, such as banks being less willing to fund mortgages if HOAs are low on cash.

And, one lawmaker defended HOA boards, saying skyrocketing energy and insurance bills are to blame for rising fees.

“I don’t think the HOA board members are personally profiting or charging more than what they’re trying to do,” said Encinitas Democrat Sen. Catherine Blakespear, who voted against the bill.

Henricks, who lives in an 88-unit condominium with his wife and cat, agrees.

He’s worried a lower cap would become a “pay me now or pay me later” situation where expensive projects in his 1970s era two-story condo — such as renovating all five of the building’s dated elevators — would become nearly impossible.

“That is the basic number one expense that we’re building our reserves to cover,” Henricks said. He said lower fee hikes would lead to gradual, more frequent increases in the future rather than larger increases spaced out over a few years.

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It is half a century since the Soviet Union launched the final crewed Almaz space station, also known as Salyut 5, which was home to two crews, while a third mission failed to dock and nearly came to a watery end. The Almaz stations were launched for the Soviet military and are better known as Salyut 2, 3, and 5. There were additional stations under construction, but the crewed program was canceled after Salyut 5. While we hesitate to use the word "cursed," Salyut 5 was certainly an eventful program for its crews. The station was launched on June 22, 1976, atop a Proton-K rocket from Baikonur. Known internally as OPS spacecraft (Orbital Piloted Stations), the Almaz stations had a pair of solar arrays, reconnaissance equipment, and a cannon mounted at the base of each station, which was test-fired on Salyut 3 while uncrewed. The first crewed mission was expected to last more than 50 days, and three further missions were planned. The mission did not go according to plan. Soyuz 21, carrying cosmonauts Boris Volynov and Vitaly Zholobov, was launched to the station on July 6, 1976. At first, everything went swimmingly. The duo conducted experiments aboard the space station and undertook reconnaissance. After all, this was the Soviet answer to the US's Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), which would have used astronauts to perform surveillance on targets from a space station. The MOL was canceled before any crews were flown. The Soyuz 21 crew began experiencing problems in August. David Harland's book, The Story of Space Station Mir, notes that Russian newspapers "reported on 18 August that the cosmonauts seemed to be suffering from 'sensory deprivation' and that psychologists monitoring their health had suggested that music be played to them over the voice uplink." A few days later, Radio Moscow took a different line, noting that a prolonged flight could be on the cards due to favorable levels of solar radiation. On August 24, the crew returned to Earth after 49 days, earlier than scheduled. It's unclear what happened, although most reports suggest an acrid odor developed aboard the station, possibly from chemicals used to develop photographs from the surveillance equipment or from fumes leaking from the Salyut's fuel tanks. The station's environmental systems were unable to address the problem, and officials, fearing for the cosmonauts' health, elected to bring them back early. A second mission to the station, Soyuz 23, was launched on October 14, 1976, but an equipment malfunction stopped the crew from docking with Salyut 5. The failed docking was only the beginning for the two cosmonauts on board, Vyacheslav Zudov and Valery Rozhdestvensky. The spacecraft splashed down in the freezing waters of Lake Tengiz, and the pair were stranded in the capsule until rescuers dragged it to shore the following morning. "It was fortunate that such an ordeal had not befallen Volynov and Zholobov in their weakened condition," Harland noted. Not to be deterred, the Soviet military tried again with Soyuz 24, crewed by cosmonauts Viktor Gorbatko and Yuri Glazkov. The mission launched from Baikonur on February 7, 1977, and successfully docked with the station. The pair had a shorter stay on board Salyut 5, departing after just over 16 days of docked operations, but did not suffer the problems of the first crew, and demonstrated an air-replacement technique that involved venting the station's atmosphere from one end while air was released into the station from the tanks of their Soyuz. Harland reported that the crew felt a "light breeze" during the operation. The Soyuz 24 backup crew was assigned to a planned fourth visit to the station, but, as described by Anatoly Zak of RussianSpaceWeb.com, the station's propellant was likely running low, and, with no way of refueling, Salyut 5 was deorbited on August 8, 1977. Salyut 5, or OPS-3, was the final crewed station of the Almaz program. Subsequent Salyut stations would have a civilian focus and additional docking ports for replenishment, but the project yielded useful operational lessons, even if there would be no more Almaz crews. The project does, however, have an intriguing coda. An unfinished Almaz station was acquired a few years ago by an Isle of Man-based company, Excalibur Almaz. The project came to naught, but the incomplete Almaz-206 can be viewed at the excellent Isle of Man Motor Museum. ®

Modern AI infrastructure, particularly in the realm of agentic AI, is often discussed through the lens of accelerators, model sizes, and training clusters. However, making large-scale agentic AI systems functional relies heavily on the CPU within these pipelines. As agentic AI deployments expand across cloud and enterprise environments, the CPU increasingly acts as the control plane for the entire system. It manages the coordinated movement of data between storage, memory and accelerators, ensures the secure isolation of workloads, and handles precise scheduling across distributed infrastructure. These are crucial tasks that underpin the efficiency and reliability of agentic AI operations. Without efficient and performant CPUs, even the most powerful accelerators cannot deliver their full value. This is one reason why Arm's role in the datacenter has expanded rapidly in recent years. Long associated with mobile devices, Arm has become the core architecture for cloud and AI infrastructure. The, built in close collaboration with Meta targets maximum rack-level density to scale up performance for agentic AI datacenters, it is built on the Arm Neoverse V3 platform and delivers high-performance cloud and AI deployments. The Arm AGI CPU also offers system efficiency, security features such as confidential computing, and the flexibility required for hyperscale environments. --- Hyperscalers and leaders in AI, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, have each introduced multiple generations of custom Arm-based processors for their platforms, reflecting a broader move toward purpose-built silicon optimized for modern workloads. Google's Axion processors are designed to support applications ranging from data analytics and microservices to AI inference. Testing has shown strong gains in performance and efficiency, while companies such as Spotify have reported significant improvements when evaluating the architecture for large-scale workloads. Similarly, AWS Graviton processors offer enhanced performance and cost-effectiveness, making them a competitive choice for various computational tasks. Microsoft is taking a similar approach with its Azure Cobalt processors, which are built on the Arm's Neoverse compute platform and designed specifically for cloud-native environments. Early deployments have demonstrated measurable improvements in performance and infrastructure efficiency for real production services. NVIDIA has used Arm Neoverse’s line of CPU designs in its Grace Hopper and Grace Blackwell chips, as well as the latest Vera Rubin NVL72 system.. These developments point to a broader architectural model sometimes described as the "converged AI data center." In this environment, compute, accelerators, networking, storage, and software are designed together as a unified system rather than as independent components. The CPU plays a central role in that model by coordinating how the rest of the stack operates. For architects planning the next generation of AI infrastructure, the lesson is increasingly clear: accelerators may drive model performance, but the CPU remains the engine that keeps the entire system running. To explore the architecture behind the Arm AGI CPU and Arm Neoverse in more detail, visit the Arm product page. Sponsored by Arm.

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we school ourselves on others' security failures. This week, we’ll learn about a school where the entire network was like an open-book test … and the IT department got a zero. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our tale of academic pwnage comes courtesy of a reader we’ll Regomize as Nathan. Nathan was 17 and attending sixth form at a UK school when he found a treasure trove of admin privileges and data at his fingertips. One day, our hero connected his laptop to his school’s Active Directory domain. There was no admin authentication required and Nathan was able to see domain controller tools in view mode, look at policy maps, and so on. Nathan then browsed the directory and located the domain administrator account. The password, “horse fence ditch,” was written right in the description field, where anyone with access to the network could view it. There were also backup accounts with passwords such as “bd” and “bigbaddog.” Once he had full God mode enabled, Nathan said, he could see student and staff data, gain Remote Desktop access to any server or domain controller, and even access LanSchool, a popular classroom management app. “I could've accessed sensitive leadership docs, reset passwords, deleted accounts, wiped the whole network, etc,” Nathan told The Register. Moreover, the entire system was synced with Google Workspace, so Nathan had access to user mailboxes as well. He even found firewall settings, security policies he could change, and keystroke histories. Because Nathan was a student and did not want to get in trouble at school, he didn’t actually use any of these privileges. He kept his head down and graduated from school without incident, but also without reporting the vulns, which might still be in place today for all we know. So what can we learn from this tale of academic malpractice? First, as we learned a few weeks ago, do not store passwords in description fields for Active Directory. In fact, do not store passwords in cleartext anywhere without serious controls! Second, Nathan should not have been able to see Active Directory domain controller tools. And it might also have helped if Google Workspace had different admin credentials. Imagine the restraint required not to change people's grades, take over their computers, or delete data. Would you have been able to exercise the same level of discipline as a 17-year-old? ®

Infosys chairman Nandan M. Nilekani has predicted AI – even AI that does the kind of coding work his company does for many clients – will be good for services companies. Nilekani made his prediction in a speech delivered at the Indian services giant’s annual general meeting on Tuesday. “The industry is going through a major technology transition and whenever there is such a transition, questions are asked about our relevance, leadership or ability to maintain growth and margins,” he said. “Given that AI is a much larger and disruptive technology transition than ever before, the questions are louder and the doubts are more insistent. Moreover, the existential question that is asked of us is, if coding becomes automated, then why are we needed at all?” Nilekani said Infosys “will embrace the best coding tools and improve our productivity” – and also pointed out that there’s more to writing software than just writing software. “Enterprise context is paramount,” he said. “Solutions must complement existing investments. They demand rigorous testing, resilient architecture, and foundational cybersecurity.” The chair thinks AI can’t do that, but Infosys can. He also thinks AI will create more demand for services that only humans can handle. “The AI revolution has made legacy modernization urgent in a way nothing else has, and clients are moving to retire the technical debt accumulated over decades,” he said, presumably referring to the idea that AI coding tools make it possible to rewrite old code more quickly and efficiently than humans can do the job. Nilekani thinks that organizations using AI to modernize software will prefer to build custom replacements instead of buying packaged programs. “All this creates even larger opportunities for us,” he said. “The defining opportunity lies in integrating intelligent AI systems with mission-critical enterprise platforms. The greatest value will come from combining the world of models and agents with traditional transaction systems that continue to underpin enterprise operations. That convergence is where the next wave of opportunities will emerge.” Infosys, naturally, has done the work needed to make itself an ideal provider of the necessary services. “More than three years after GenAI’s launch, Infosys is more relevant than ever and well-positioned for the decade ahead,” the chairman said. And of course he would say that – although he made no mention of “AI deflation”, the decline in services revenue that Infosys and India’s other tech services giants recently said is likely because AI coding tools mean there’s less work for them to do. ®

Australia’s Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has established dedicated teams to counter nation-state attacks on critical infrastructure, the org’s director general Mike Burgess revealed yesterday. “We discovered nation-state hackers had compromised the network of an Australian critical infrastructure provider,” Burgess said yesterday in remarks accompanying the release of ASIO’s annual threat assessment, a task it performs in its role as Australia’s equivalent to the FBI and MI5. “ASIO assessed the hackers were preparing for sabotage. They weren’t planting ‘digital dynamite’ as such; they were mapping out the network and maintaining access so they could cripple it at a time of their choosing.” “In this case, a state-sponsored group didn’t just achieve access to the Australian critical infrastructure provider, it successfully acquired credentials – login details and passwords – for active users of the networks, including the IT professionals guarding it,” he added. Burgess said ASIO “identified, tracked and attributed the hack, and worked with the victim company and our security partners to remediate the compromise – work which is ongoing.” “The scale of this activity – led by one nation-state in particular – is difficult to overstate,” he added, before saying Australia is not alone in facing such attacks. “We struggle to find a single country in our region that has not been compromised by this state’s cyber apparatus.” He described cyber sabotage as “an evolving threat. I have established dedicated teams to counter it.” Burgess also shared an example of espionage targeting Australia’s military to gain information about the AUKUS pact – the US/UK/Australia defense collaboration that will see The Land Down Under acquire nuclear submarines, and which also includes collaborations around information technology capability, and intelligence activities. “A spy from a foreign intelligence service approached an Australian security clearance holder online, pretending to be from a consulting company,” Burgess revealed. “The spy paid the official to write two reports on Australia’s relationship with our Pacific neighbours, and then, thinking he’d been hooked, offered money for inside information on AUKUS.” The Australian official became suspicious, reported the incident and conducted interviews with ASIO during which Burgess said the spy agency “gained valuable insights into the foreign service’s information gaps and tradecraft.” The Australian official even handed the money they were paid by the foreign spy to ASIO. “In effect, ASIO disrupted the foreign intelligence service’s operation and made them pay for it,” Burgess crowed. ASIO then scored another win. “My officers borrowed the phone from the official and rang the so-called consultant in her home country. Thinking it was her target, the spy picked up and got a very unwelcome surprise when she realised she was speaking to ASIO,” Burgess said. “We demonstrated we knew exactly who she was, demanded she cease targeting Australian citizens, stated we have zero tolerance for spying on AUKUS, provided a quick overview of Australia’s espionage laws and pointed out the Director-General reserves the right to speak publicly about these matters. At that point the spy hung up.” ASIO officers later mentioned this incident to members of the foreign intelligence service that ran the op. Burgess seems to think that officers at that foreign agency may not have told their superiors about the op failing. “In case they did not report it up – I’m confirming it now,” he said. Burgess also pointed to abuse of online spaces continuing to represent a threat to Australia. “Instead of being radicalised by associates in the real world, individuals are often being radicalised by strangers online,” he said. “Instead of being radicalised over months and years, individuals are increasingly being radicalised in weeks. Instead of being radicalised as adults, individuals are all too often being radicalised as minors. Instead of gathering in prayer halls or backyards, radicalised individuals are frequently gathering in encrypted chat rooms.” “And, instead of spending time and resources planning sophisticated attacks, radicalised individuals are moving to low-capability attacks with little or no warning,” he said. “Traditional groups such as Islamic State and al-Qa’ida and their affiliates are growing their capability to conduct and inspire attacks, enabled both by permissive geographic and online spaces.” Burgess revealed ASIO has “resolved” 14 “significant-terror related cases” since the December 2025 terror attack at Sydney’s Bondi beach, and 31 “major terrorism plots” since 2014. He said ASIO is now “aggressively adopting new tools and techniques – including artificial intelligence – to navigate our security environment,” and invited Australians to work for the agency, perhaps as offensive hackers. “All ASIO’s teams contribute to our mission and every ASIO officer makes a difference, whether you collect the dots or connect the dots, run cables or run sources, code networks or penetrate networks,” he said. ®

Memory-maker Micron has found a way to keep prices for its products sky-high for another five years, by signing 16 “strategic customer agreements” (SCAs) that include a floor price the company says comes with “a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle.” Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company’s Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher. The CEO said 16 customers have signed SCAs and then explained why it’s worth locking into the deals even though they bake in such high margins. “Our customers are recognizing that supply shortages in memory and storage will take considerable time to improve,” he said. “Even as we expect industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, we currently do not have line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand.” Even massive efforts to build new chip fabs aren’t much help, he said, because the increasing complexity of new memory types means it takes longer to build factories – and when they come online there still won’t be enough capacity to build both the high-bandwidth memory needed for AI and other types of NAND and DRAM. “Supply is structurally constrained in its growth and ability to meet industry demand, despite our comprehensive efforts to increase supply,” he said. Don’t assume that SCAs mean your suppliers get price certainty, because Mehrotra said the deals will account for 40 percent of Micron revenue – meaning the company is reserving most of its inventory to sell at prices it can negotiate. The CEO did have a little good news in the form of predictions that Micron’s DRAM output in 2026 will “grow in the low- to mid-20s percentage range, slightly above our prior outlook.” He also revealed that the SCAs see customers pay up front, which helps Micron to fund its fab expansions. Q3 results were also exceptional. Revenue landed at $41.5 billion, a fifth consecutive quarterly revenue record and 346 percent year-over-year jump. DRAM revenue alone reached a record $31.3 billion, up 343 percent year-over-year. NAND revenue rose 361 percent year-over-year, to $9.9 billion. Net income reached $28.9 billion, and consolidated gross margin came in at 84.9 percent. Execs predicted even better results, offering Q4 guidance of $50 billion in revenue, gross margins hitting “approximately 86 percent”, and telling investors that the increased complexity of memory means future products will cost even more than Micron’s current kit. But while Micron thrives, IT pros will toil to make workloads perform with less memory: Mehrotra said Micron expects sales of conventional servers will grow in the mid-teens percentages during calendar 2026 but predicted “modest reduction in average server DRAM content growth as customers focus on maximizing unit shipments amid a very tight allocation of memory.” Investors liked what they heard: Micron’s share price popped 15 percent in after-hours trading. ®

As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet told TechCrunch in May, what China can currently buy are older-generation deep ultraviolet tools — gear first shipped about a decade ago — the same machines the MATCH Act would now put off limits.

Donald Trump is the most effective president in my lifetime. There, I said it. Not because he’s accomplished good things. Quite the opposite. I can’t think of a single thing he’s done to improve the country. But effectiveness isn’t the same thing as benevolence. And by any objective measure, Trump has been extraordinarily effective at using the power of the presidency to get what he wants.

Source

A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump almost makes this horrible industry sympathetic Is there anyone Trump hasn’t pissed off? Mamdani’s got Trump and Fox News big mad Yet another sign of an incoming blue wave … Susan Collins helped overturn Roe. That’s coming back to haunt her. Luckily…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Trump threatens to sue over reporting on Reflecting Pool scandal…

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The Supreme Court, as per usual, has saved the worst for last, with a big stack of cases remaining—too many of which are about whether President Donald Trump can continue dismantling democracy. Indeed, The New York Times’ tracker of remaining cases has an entire section called “Trump’s Agenda.” Yikes. All of the dozen cases that have yet to be decided are big…

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Backed by Mayfield and Aramco Ventures, Vishal Sikka’s new venture brings together veterans from SAP, Infosys, and VianAI.

Right now he's merely a several-hundred-billionaire, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.

AI vendors have been pushing organizations to board the AI hype train as it races by at full speed. But many of the companies doing so, unable to move quite that fast, have stumbled along the way. According to a survey of 406 IT decision makers, 93 percent of organizations have experienced AI-caused infrastructure incidents, but a mere 19 percent had the necessary governance to respond. The survey, conducted in April by Panterra Group at the behest of Spacelift, forms the basis of the orchestration platform's 2026 State of Infrastructure Automation report [PDF]. It posits an "AI Readiness Gap," meaning that companies are adopting AI before they're ready to do so and are paying the price. "The findings are unambiguous: organizations are using AI to generate infrastructure code at a rate their governance frameworks were never designed to handle,” said Paweł Hytry, co-founder and CEO of Spacelift, in a statement. The consequences of these incidents, respondents say, consist of reworking AI-generated changes (37 percent), security misconfigurations that reached production (36 percent), compliance violations (36 percent), infrastructure drift attributable to AI changes (35 percent), and incidents caused by agentic systems (33 percent). The report characterizes 24 percent of organizations as "exposed." "Exposed organizations are using AI, but without the governance or frameworks to support it safely," the report says. "What they are doing diverges significantly from what they have in place to manage it." And then there are the "fragmented" entities, 32 percent of respondents, that use AI sometimes, unevenly, and have some governance, but no coherent plan. The two remaining categories, "outpacing" and "pioneer," at 25 percent and 19 percent respectively, describe heavy AI adoption that's ahead of business controls, and AI use in conjunction with structural discipline, respectively. In terms of AI-caused infrastructure incidents, 97 percent of "exposed" organizations reported at least one such snafu. Meanwhile, among "pioneer" entities, 17 percent said they had no AI-related infrastructure incidents. Spacelift, an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform, contends that automated validation accounts for the difference here because it outperforms manual code review. Across the board, respondents report greater use of AI for generating code – 82 percent say between 25 percent and 74 percent of their code was created with help from AI. This has a downstream effect on the infrastructure teams that deploy said code: 40 percent of respondents say security vulnerabilities are showing up more frequently, 40 percent say governance has become more challenging, 37 percent cited higher change volume, 35 percent see strains on the development pipeline, and 35 percent report infrastructure drift. Spacelift's report calls out the cognitive dissonance – a blameless formulation of "self-delusion" – among organizations adopting AI: 86 percent say they can govern it, while only 30 percent actually have a formal AI governance policy in place. The report advises organizations to start paying attention to AI-oriented metrics that few organizations bother to track, specifically the volume of AI-generated IaC in deployment pipelines, error rates due to AI-generated changes, and infrastructure drift attributable to AI changes. It also stumps for greater automation through IaC, for building governance to cover that automation, getting AI-generated code into governed IaC orchestration workflows, and planning for the governance of AI agents. ®

In its first earnings report since going public, the AI chipmaker forecast a narrower gross margin in its core business, scaring investors.

⚡ Quick Take

• Olivia Cooke told Variety that she auditioned for Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
• Apparently, the audition was very bad.
• Cooke talked about this and more on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast.

During an episode of Happy Sad Confused, a podcast hosted by Josh Horowitz, House of the Dragon star Olivia Cooke revealed she had once auditioned for Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

According to Variety, Cooke said in the interview that the audition did not go well.

Rey, the main character of the sequel trilogy, has been played by Daisy Ridley since 2015.

Cooke reminisced on who she was at the time of that fateful audition. “I just wasn’t that kind of an actor at that time,” she said. “It just wasn’t a fit.”

We have to say, thank goodness she didn’t get the part. Cooke has been the face of films like Ready Player One and Sound of Metal, alongside various other feature films and series. Her most consistent role? Alicent Hightower in House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones spinoff series.

She has definitely progressed since the 2010s, not only having time on her side but also extensive film and TV experience.

“I was sh-t,” Cooke said. “I was really bad.”

HBO

Cooke’s House of the Dragon character, Alicent, has been instrumental in the plot of House of the Dragon, and she has played the role well. House of the Dragon season 3 has begun premiering, with Alicent Hightower already having appeared in episode 1. Not only did she appear, but she has entertainment publications everywhere (including us!) raving about an uncomfortable kiss between Alicent and her son. During an interview with Nerdist, Cooke discussed the complexity of her character’s feelings about the interaction.

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HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Cast Talks TV’s MOST Awkward Kiss Ever

If that doesn’t get you interested in seeing Cooke’s acting chops for yourself, I don’t know what will.

New House of the Dragon episodes premiere every Sunday night at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max. Episode two comes out this Sunday.

The post HOUSE OF THE DRAGON’s Olivia Cooke Auditioned for Star Wars appeared first on Nerdist.

Software powered by artificial intelligence has allowed gas station operators across California to illegally collude and drive up prices at the pump, according to a federal lawsuit.