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Quick Take

• Daredevil: Born Again will end after the upcoming third season, bringing Charlie Cox’s Disney+ return as Matt Murdock to a premature end.
• The third season, which recently wrapped production, will drop on Disney+ early in 2027.
• Nerdist’s take: Even though Born Again is ending, we believe this is definitely not the end of Charlie Cox playing the character in the MCU.

Charlie Cox’s current run as the Man Without Fear is coming to an end. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Disney+ is choosing to end Daredevil: Born Again with the upcoming third season. This lends credence to all the reports that Marvel Television is moving away from live-action series and focusing on animation. It also seems to confirm that Marvel overall wants to focus on movies again, believing the many Disney+ series have diluted their once-indestructible brand. Production on season three recently ended, and it drops on Disney+ early in 2027.

Marvel Television

Kevin Feige announced Daredevil: Born Again at Comic-Con several years after the original Netflix show ended in 2018. But it had a fairly troubled production. Much of season one, which Marvel designed as a reboot of the original Netflix series, was reimagined and reshot by showrunner Dario Scardapane. This reshaping saved the show in season one, and really made the series shine in season two. But despite critical and fan acclaim, it never got the viewership that shows like Loki and WandaVision did. With Wonder Man canceled after one season, it felt like the writing was on the wall for Daredevil: Born Again.

Nerdist’s Take: We Firmly Believe Charlie Cox’s Time as Daredevil Is Not Over Yet.

Having said that, we highly doubt that this is the end of Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock. The character is one of Marvel’s most famous, and everyone loves the actor in the role. This doesn’t mean a third Daredevil series, or even a movie, couldn’t happen down the line. Especially as Cox loves playing the role. Also, many fans have been wanting a Daredevil/Spider-Man team-up, and the ending of Born Again could leave the character (and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk) free to use in Spider-Man 5. We’ll have to wait and see what Marvel has in store for the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, but we’d wager the end of Born Again does not mean the character is going away.

Eric Diaz is a staff writer at Nerdist and a Swiss Army knife of fandoms. Eric loves DC, Marvel, horror movies, and even Star Wars and Star Trek equally.

The post DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN Season 3 Will Be Its Last appeared first on Nerdist.

Despite the concern that advanced AI models’ bug-hunting prowess will lead to attackers exploiting more newly uncovered CVEs, fewer than 0.5 percent of the vulnerabilities linked to Anthropic or Project Glasswing are being batttered in the wild, according to VulnCheck security researcher Patrick Garrity. Garrity began tracking CVEs attributed to Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s initiative to give select partners access to its Claude Mythos Preview model, shortly after the AI company announced the program in April. At the time, Anthropic said the new model was too risky to release publicly because its bug-finding and exploitation skills surpass all but the most skilled humans. As such, Anthropic restricted access to Mythos Preview to vetted Glasswing participants, who use the model for defensive security work, including finding and fixing flaws in their own software products and open source dependencies. Garrity’s Anthropic CVE tracker maintains a list of vulnerabilities credited to the Anthropic team and/or Project Glasswing and also checks these CVEs against the company's known exploited vulnerabilities index "to get a better read on the real Glasswing ‘danger factor.’" As of Monday, the CVE count is 225, and just one, a critical SQL injection bug in Ghost (CVE-2026-26980), has been exploited in the wild. “There's a big difference between finding vulnerabilities and whether they're actually useful to and will be used by threat actors,” Garrity told The Register. “The main thing this data highlights is that what Anthropic is discovering and disclosing is fairly limited in impact, and from what we can tell, isn't resulting in different outcomes from a threat perspective than a random selection of other vulnerabilities would.” Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to our questions, but we will update this story if we hear back. Garrity says he doesn’t dispute AI’s ability to find bugs. Indeed, anyone following security disclosures over the past few months would have a hard time arguing that AI models aren’t bringing to light significantly more security flaws than ever before. Case in point: recent massive patch drops from Microsoft, Apple, Palo Alto Networks, and don’t even get us started on open source projects. Also, as Garrity pointed out, these vulnerability-finding skills aren’t “a capability unique to one model or harness.” “A lot of the hysteria we're seeing assumes that every vulnerability or bug is likely to be used by threat actors,” he told The Register. “But the reality is that only a small fraction ever get used in exploitation campaigns. Historically, that's ranged from just under one percent to two percent of vulnerabilities that get weaponized and used in the wild.” Plus, while recent AI models excel at finding bugs, they still aren’t great at fixing them, as a couple of recent studies have highlighted. In one of these, 1Password’s research team produced and analyzed 6,080 patches developed by two frontier models: OpenAI's ChatGPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Opus 4.8. The models generated fixes that fully resolved the vulnerability just 26 percent of the time, while about 54 percent either failed to resolve the vulnerability, introduced a new vulnerability, or did both. Another study by app security shop Veracode found that across more than 100 models and 80 coding tasks, the average security pass rate for AI-generated code was just 56 percent. This all means that the work involved in developing and applying security fixes still requires humans. “The bar for vulnerability discovery is much lower with AI, but the real gap lies downstream in coordination, triage, remediation, and patch deployment, which is still largely people-intensive work, as Anthropic itself has acknowledged,” Garrity said. “It appears they might not have realized this until after they launched the project.”®

It’s shaking hands and kissing babies season, and for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, that has made him quite the public-facing busy boy. Though he is term-limited from running for a third term, he is eyeing a potential presidential run in 2028 and, in the meantime, is crossing some T’s and signing some dotted lines. On Saturday, Newsom posted a video to X of himself touring the set of HBO Max’…

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ph @casanova_coffee_art
Dolo

President Donald Trump held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to unveil his new White House helipad Monday, and the media had a hard time covering it—because there was no working microphone. Why, you ask? Because captain dumbass banned Politico, CNN, and MS NOW—who are now suing—from the White House, leading the major TV networks to suspend pooled coverage. “Okay, so there’s no microphone…

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Oh great, Pete Hegseth is pushing the ‘High-T Department of War’…

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President Donald Trump lashed out Monday against a federal judge, as more mainstream media outlets joined efforts to mount a press blackout on the White House.

In a lengthy tirade on Truth Social, Trump raged against District Court Judge Timothy Kelly, who was assigned the lawsuit brought by CNN, MS NOW, and Politico challenging the president’s decision to ban their reporters from the White House.

It appears Trump wasn’t thrilled with Kelly’s selection—even though he was the one who appointed the judge to the bench. Kelly previously ruled in favor of CNN’s Jim Acosta after the Trump administration tried to ban him from the White House.

Trump said he expected to appeal the decision. “With such a Crooked and Corrupt Press, how did I win in such a LANDSLIDE? It is because the Media has NO credibility, and that is a very bad thing for our Nation! Why should I have to give ‘access’ to such people? Perhaps Judge Kelly could explain that!” he wrote.

Meanwhile, the media protests only continued to grow. After major TV networks announced Monday morning they would boycott the White House (you may have seen some hilarious videos of Trump talking to himself with no audio recorded), The New York Times and Washington Post both released statements saying that they would not publish or distribute any images from the day’s events.

Despite Trump’s previous commitments to free speech, he is now pretending that freedom of the press is a privilege—not a right. And he appears to be promoting his own form of state-run media that will only print the lies he tells them. So much for capitalism, I guess.

All the while, Republican lawmakers, clearly terrified of getting on Trump’s bad side, remained eerily silent.

The White House is pushing its phone app in response to the broadcast media blackout, offering up a smattering of press releases, scheduling details, and MAGA talking points as a replacement for America’s biggest news outlets.

The app, simply named “The White House,” first appeared on Apple’s app store on March 27. But it suddenly reemerged Monday as the administration’s apparent redirection away from a collective display of solidarity taken by members of the White House press pool after Donald Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House.

The push must have been effective. As of Monday afternoon, the app was charting at #11 in Apple’s news category—right behind The New York Times (X and Reddit took the top spots on the leaderboard, despite predominantly being social media platforms).

Yet the government software is far closer to propaganda than a bonafide news offering. The app’s front page highlighted Trump’s “historic deal with Greenland,” displaying a Truth Social post from Friday in which the president boasted that he had negotiated for the U.S. to develop and operate military bases on the island (it did not mention that this deal was originally set in place in 1951 by the Defense of Greenland agreement).

Below that, the app offered several banners displaying information pertaining to Trump’s campaign priorities—such as “grow the economy” and “lead the world in AI”—and achievements. However, the latter category was apparently so unquantifiable that the button to actually view such accomplishments took this reporter to the White House website, which first displayed a video of Trump swaying side to side on the stage of the American Business Forum before a scroll-down menu offered some statistics on deportations and, stunningly, a bullet point claiming that Trump had “ended the Israel-Hamas War.”

Other portions of the app presented advertisements for “TrumpTV” (described as “the essentials station”) and offered a compilation of social media feeds from the White House’s various accounts. It also suggested via a floating element that this reporter should “text President Trump.” That invitation opened up Messenger, where the link had created a pre-fabricated message for the White House’s text notification number. It read: “Greatest President Ever!”

The bottom of the app’s home page included a survey for inquiring minds. The question posed: “Should states that allowed noncitizens to register to vote—even through an alleged ‘software error’—face federal funding penalties?”

The options offered were: “Yes—states must be held accountable for election integrity failures;” “Yes—federal funding should be tied to election integrity compliance;” “No—software errors are accidents, not intentional misconduct;” “No—election administration is a state issue, not a federal funding matter;” and “Not sure—it depends on whether the error was negligent.” True to form for the rest of the administration, the poll did not offer any insight regarding its results.

The app’s recent recirculation was a sorry attempt by the president and his aides to keep the American public tuned in to his antics, hours after Trump was effectively muted during the unveiling of a new White House helipad because the press pool wasn’t there to mic him up.

AMD’s market cap briefly passed $1 trillion on Monday, making the perpetual underdog one of a handful of chip designers to ever hold the distinction. Make no mistake, AMD is still the underdog here, at least relative to Nvidia, which holds the distinction of being the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of nearly $5.5 trillion. But while AMD still trails Nvidia by a wide margin, the House of Zen has taken the lead over its long-time rival turned frenemy Intel, which is currently valued at $640 billion. Riding the AI wave Much of AMD’s success comes on the back of the AI boom. This didn’t happen overnight. AMD was late to the AI party having invested most of its GPU development resources in more traditional high-performance computing applications and national supercomputing projects. That changed in 2023 when it launched the Instinct MI300A — a part that, at least on paper, delivered higher performance, more memory, and greater bandwidth than Nvidia’s then new H100 and H200-series GPUs. But while better on paper, AMD’s products were dogged by un-optimized software, much of which had been designed from the ground up for Nvidia accelerators. AMD’s GPU team has spent the better part of three years changing the narrative around ROCm, helped by large-scale deployments of MI300- and MI350-series GPUs by the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, Anthropic, and Meta, with lower prices and higher memory capacity being key differentiators. Key wins with Neoclouds and smaller cloud service providers like TensorWave and Vultr helped to expose the open source community to AMD’s accelerators. By mid-2026, AMD claimed it had not only closed the performance gap with Nvidia but was also on track to launch a new rack-scale compute platform in the third quarter that was bigger and faster than Nvidia’s existing Blackwell-based rack systems and Vera Rubin. Compared to Nvidia’s own bleeding edge AI systems, AMD’s Helios rack boasts 50 percent more HBM4 and scale-out bandwidth and between 15 and 25 percent higher performance for AI training. And, if AMD is to be believed, Helios will deliver a 30 percent performance per dollar lead over the competition. That’s a hard number to validate, but for those on Wall Street, it’s a clear indication as to why the largest and most influential AI labs and hyperscalers have flocked to the platform. Not just Instinct However, GPUs aren't the only reason AMD's valuation has skyrocketed in recent years. They're just the hardest to ignore. In February, Aaron Rakers at Wells Fargo Securities estimated that Instinct GPU sales accounted for between $2.5 billion and $2.6 billion out of $10.3 billion in revenues during the fourth quarter of 2025, roughly matching Epyc CPU revenues. The rise of agentic AI workloads like OpenClaw and Claude Code has fueled demand for CPUs. While the models themselves still run on GPUs, the code they generate and tools they execute still need CPUs to run on. Here there’s a lot more competition. In addition to its long-time rival Intel, AMD is competing against Arm, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and the cloud providers themselves. But just like we saw with Instinct, AMD’s Epyc processors, which have consistently offered high core counts per dollar and, in more recent generations, higher performance per dollar than the competition, have helped the chip designer grow its market share by a considerable margin. In August, AMD’s share of the desktop CPU market crossed 35 percent. As we wrote in our review earlier this year, AMD now makes the world’s most powerful desktop CPU, and is largely uncontested in the workstation arena thanks in part to rebadging unlocked Epycs as high-core-count Threadripper CPUs. In the datacenter, AMD’s share jumped to 34.5 percent, while Arm-based CPUs from Ampere, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and others accounted for another 13.6 percent of the market. As Mercury Research, the analyst firm behind the numbers, noted, AMD’s share rises to 46.4 percent when the comparison is limited to Epyc and Intel Xeon SP processors. These gains have been aided by an Intel that’s struggled to put out competitive Xeon processors. Ever since Chipzilla whiffed it on its Sapphire Rapids processors and gave AMD nearly two years to catch up, Intel has been trying to close the gap. Intel came close in 2024 with its Xeon 6 processors, which remain extremely popular as host CPUs for Nvidia’s smaller GPU systems, but an executive shake up and the cancellation of its mainstream Xeon 7 SP products mean Intel is unlikely to have a competitive datacenter CPU, potentially until 2028. AMD is facing some pressure from Nvidia’s Vera and Arm’s AGI CPUs, but largely in AI-centric applications like GPU head nodes, agent sandboxes and KV cache offload servers. AMD is able to address a much broader market thanks to a modular design that can support a wider array of target applications. But AMD’s share gains don’t stop at CPUs and GPUs. Over the past decade, AMD has amassed a large portfolio of technologies ranging from smartNICs and DPUs to FPGAs, and even system design through acquisitions. AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx is particularly notable as while not a particularly large revenue driver, it established the company as the largest supplier of FPGAs in the market and armed the chip designer with a mountain of IP, which has repeatedly helped it stay competitive. For example, the NPUs, which assured AMD’s qualification for Microsoft’s Copilot+ moniker, were lifted directly from Xilinx’s IP holdings. Where AMD goes from here Just as AMD became a useful tool for keeping pricing pressure on Intel CPUs, the same is now playing out for datacenter GPUs with Nvidia. Alongside the launch of Helios in July, AMD announced Anthropic had agreed to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct accelerators to support AI training and inference. OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft and Meta also plan to deploy the rack systems at scale. “In datacenter AI, the growing number and scale of Helios and MI450-series deployments position the [datacenter] business for significant growth in the second half of the year, with growth accelerating in 2027," CEO Lisa Su told investors last month. "We now expect datacenter segment revenue to more than double year over year in 2027,” she added. Yet, despite the enduring optimism of AMD’s top executives, Wall Street’s feelings on the company remain mixed with the main concern being that AMD may have too many AI eggs in too few baskets. On the flip side, with such an expansive portfolio spanning general purpose compute, HPC, AI, embedded systems, desktop, and gaming, the case can also be made that while nowhere near Nvidia’s size, AMD's exposure to an AI bubble is far, far smaller. ®

Quick Take

• After three years, the creative team of writer Tom King and artist Daniel Sampere will end their Wonder Woman run with issue #40 in December.
• King and Sampere’s run introduced Diana’s daughter Trinity, a major addition to Wonder Woman lore.
• Nerdist’s take: We hope whoever takes over Wonder Woman next builds off of what King and Sampere did, both the good and bad elements, instead of ignoring it and giving us another reboot.

After three years and 40 issues, writer Tom King and artist Daniel Sampere’s run on Wonder Woman is coming to a close. And all a bit prematurely. Although King originally hoped to stick around for 100 issues, he and Sampere will end their run with Wonder Woman #40, which arrives this December. King, known for his epic Mister Miracle series, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and a long stint on Batman, decided to leave Wonder Woman because of his outside-comics obligations (including showrunning the DCU animated Mister Miracle series). You can check out the main covers for their final issue below.

DC Comics

According to AIPT, King said, “I wanted to, when I first started, do 100 issues, so I’m disappointed in myself for not getting that.” King’s run came out of the gate with much critical acclaim, winning several awards as well. But there’s always been a vocal segment of the comics fandom that hated King’s changes to the lore. Especially Wonder Woman having a daughter with Steve Trevor named Trinity, and Steve’s death. In our opinion, the opening year of this run was very good. To us, it only really lost steam in the past year or so. But we imagine a part of the fandom is very happy with this news right now.

DC Comics

The question now, of course, is who takes over Wonder Woman? What big changes that King brought to Diana’s mythos will stick? It seems giving Diana a daughter with Steve Trevor is too big a change to handwave away. Although, a few years back, DC Comics revealed Wonder Woman’s secret twin brother, a status quo change now totally forgotten. Also, King and Sampere introduced two major villains in their run, the Sovereign and the Matriarch. Wonder Woman comics have a tendency to introduce supposed major villains, only for the next writer to ignore them and focus on the usual Ares, Cheetah, and Circe.

DC Comics Nerdist’s Take: We Hope the Next Wonder Woman Creative Team Builds on What King and Sampere Accomplished, Rather Than Another Reboot

With the arrival of Trinity, Wonder Woman joins Superman and Batman as being the parent of a superpowered child. Although we’ve had this before, DC Comics always relegated it to a parallel Earth. For example, the original Golden Age Wonder Woman married Steve and had a superhero daughter named Fury. But that happened when she was no longer the “main” Wonder Woman of the DC Universe. Hopefully, whoever takes over Wonder Woman next can put their own spin on the character, without ejecting the changes that worked.

Wonder Woman #40 by Tom King and Daniel Sampere hits comic book shops and digital on December 16.

Eric Diaz is a staff writer at Nerdist and a Swiss Army knife of fandoms. Eric loves DC, Marvel, horror movies, and even Star Wars and Star Trek equally.

The post Tom King’s Controversial WONDER WOMAN Run to End in December appeared first on Nerdist.

If you’re a large company and you’d like some favorable treatment from, say, the Food and Drug Administration, you’re in luck. The MAHA Summit is open for business, baby. And by “open for business” I mean “available for bribes … er, corporate sponsorship.” The MAHA Summit is ostensibly a private event run by whatever weirdos run MAHA events. But in reality, it’s just another way for…

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The Republican Senate nominee in Iowa is trying to criticize the Iran war’s effect on ordinary people—without mentioning President Trump or her own voting history.

“Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran. We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices,” Representative Ashley Hinson posted on X Monday.

Not surprisingly, Hinson’s solution doesn’t mention how Trump created the mess in the first place. Hinson also didn’t mention her own voting record: She has voted six times against House resolutions calling for Trump to end the war.

Instead, she suggests “suspending the gas tax, pausing diesel exports, unleashing E-15 everywhere we can, reinstating the $1/gallon biodiesel tax credit, and creating a diesel relief program to help our farmers and truckers being crushed by the high costs.”

“These actions to lower costs are needed ASAP, and the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end,” Hinson said, adding that Iowa’s highway trust fund needed be “replenished, so that Iowans don’t suffer from crumbling roads and bridges while relief comes our way now.”

Fuel prices have skyrocketed in the last seven months, thanks to Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, and, more recently, the takeover of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea by Houthi forces in Yemen. The average price of gasoline as of Monday was $4.4786 nationally and $4.3698 in Iowa, according to the American Automobile Association. Diesel fuel prices are even worse: $6.5107 nationally and $6.3157 in Iowa, a state with a large agricultural economy whose equipment depends on diesel.

Hinson is polling neck and neck with her Democratic opponent, state Representative Josh Turek, and is clearly worried that failing to acknowledge the war’s impact could hurt her in November. Trump won the state by 13 points in 2024, but Republicans and the president are polling lower and lower each day with the ongoing war only getting worse.

iFixit has torn down the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max and found both wanting on repairability. Fiddly mechanical bits around the new camera, and a repeated design choice forcing internal repairs to go through a screen with a potentially fragile frame, led the iFixit team to conclude that, even with some improvements, Apple’s latest iPhones come with uncomfortable repairability tradeoffs. "This year’s updated camera is a good place to start," iFixit director of sustainability Elizabeth Chamberlain stated in the teardown review. "What does its new mechanism buy you, and how difficult and expensive will repairs be if one tiny blade gets stuck?” The answers to those questions are "not much" and "very", based on what iFixit found. The iPhone 18 Pro series’ main camera has an aperture made of six tiny blades, each about as thick as a human hair, according to iFixit. The tolerances are so fine and the mechanism so fiddly that iFixit said: "We’re reluctant to call a repair 'impossible', but this is about as close as it gets." "Any damage to your main camera will probably mean replacing the whole assembly, which is bound to be expensive," Chamberlain said. That’s not new; iPhone camera assemblies have long been a single replaceable unit, but they’re not cheap. "Apple hasn’t released parts yet, but the camera assembly for the 17 Pro is $249, and the variable aperture will only up that cost." It’s not even clear if the component will be more than a one-off experiment that gets dropped in future models due to the fact that any moving parts only make repairs harder. "Samsung tried it and dropped it, citing ‘limited functional benefit at smartphone camera levels,’ and we basically agree," Chamberlain said. As iFixit notes, the aperture doesn’t do that much for picture quality because even at its widest the opening is still small, while the tiny sensor and short focal length limit the amount of background blur compared with a larger dedicated camera. Pictures included in the teardown review demonstrate this, showing that the wider aperture has only a limited effect on depth of field and background blur. "This isn’t the signature wide aperture heavy bokeh look," Chamberlain noted. Scratchgate, meet framegate? As was the case with the iPhone 17 Pro, the 18 Pro series' battery sits in a screwed-in metal tray and is relatively easy to replace - a big plus considering it’s one of the most likely bits to need swapping out. Unfortunately, getting to it still requires going through the screen, and therein lies the problem: iFixit damaged the plastic frame that holds the screen in place in three of its four teardowns. The adhesive has to be heated and softened, but that isn't the main problem. Once the frame breaks, the screen may be hard to re-seat and reseal properly, potentially forcing a full display replacement. If the screen frame proves this failure-prone in further testing, no repairability improvements beneath it will matter much because opening the device would risk needing a new display. That said, iFixit isn’t officially ruling on that weakness quite yet. "That plastic frame has been present since the 15 Pro. But it hasn’t given us nearly as much trouble in previous years," Chamberlain wrote. "We've seen other teardowns avoid this damage. Four phones are too few to establish a failure rate." With that in mind, the iFixit team is giving the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max a 7 out of 10 repairability score, but that could go up or down depending on how additional teardowns go and how easy the frame is to remove. "Our damaged display frames haven’t directly tanked that score yet because we don’t know what caused the failures, how widespread they are, or how repeatable they are," Chamberlain explained. That 7 out of 10 is the same score iFixit gave the iPhone 17 Pro, but Chamberlain told us the 18 Pro seems generally less repairable. "The screen troubles and likely expense of camera repairs make us more worried about repairs in the 18 Pro," Chamberlain told The Register in an email. In other words, if you have an iPhone 17 Pro or Pro Max, there may not be a lot of reasons to upgrade aside from the addition of some new points of failure, iFixit opines. "If you’re considering upgrading from another recent-model iPhone, the photo quality differences are small enough that most people probably won’t notice," Chamberlain concluded about the new device. "We say it every year, and it’s especially true this year: skip the upgrade. The most sustainable phone is the one already in your pocket." Now to see how the iPhone Duo fares when iFixit gets its hands on one of those. ®

The group won't be given leeway to slow down or redirect OpenAI's ongoing mathematical research.

Vice President JD Vance is stumping for Republican candidates who surely wish he weren’t there. On Monday in Greensboro, North Carolina, Vance’s desperate “give us another chance” tour prompted Fox News to cut away. “As I’ve learned over the past few months, [Democrats] prioritize a whole lot of fraudsters, and we know exactly what happened as a result,” Vance said. “America became a place…

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Meta made much of the security of its AI assistant app Muse at launch earlier this month, calling out the app's reliance on Muse Secure VM. "Each person stays in control of their Muse and decides how much access it gets," the ad biz declared, echoing prior expansive claims about the privacy of its data gathering business. But Meta's musing about Muse appears to be a bit overstated: an attacker capable of executing local code may be able to gain more access than a Muse user might expect. Security researcher Patrick Wardle, founder of nonprofit Objective-See, has devised a proof-of-concept called not-a-mused for what he describes as a local zero-day in the Muse macOS app that allows an unprivileged local process to redirect Muse's dictation traffic and potentially abuse access granted to the app. Muse, he explains in the project repo, has an undocumented setting called endo_voyager_dictation_endpoint that an attacker running code locally can modify without special privileges to redirect dictation traffic to an attacker-controlled endpoint, potentially exposing dictated audio and prompts sent to the backend AI model. The flaw could enable prompt injection, the theft of authentication material, and abuse of whatever access the user has granted to Muse. The vulnerability is not an issue for a remote attacker. It requires the ability to run local code. So the main concern, says Wardle, is that the vulnerability gives local malware far broader access than it would have otherwise. Essentially, it's a privilege escalation vulnerability. In a phone interview with The Register, Wardle likened the situation to living in an apartment building. "Just because a bad neighbor moves in doesn't mean that that neighbor automatically has access to all the apartments," he said. Apple, said Wardle, has done a really good job with its Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) framework, which manages access to sensitive data on macOS, and with privilege separation. But his concern is that AI apps undo these barriers because they request or require so much access to data and tools. Of AI apps, he said, "they're super convenient and super empowering. But they have so much access if you configure them to be useful. They basically could do anything on your computer." As such, he said, they become potentially a single point of failure that breaks operating system security controls. "You know these AI companies have really great AI models for finding bugs," said Wardle. "Are they not running them against [their own apps]? Is the priority not the security of their own apps?" Wardle said that endpoint detection and response (EDR) software has gotten better on macOS largely because everything is code signed, so it's easy to identify processes that are not notarized and should not be allowed to run. But with AI agents given broad permissions and access, the EDR product can't tell whether commands are coming from the user, an agent, or an attacker. These agents need access, said Wardle, in order to be useful to people. What's missing from the makers of AI apps, he said, is a sense of responsibility for the level of access their apps seek. Wardle added that Apple provides on-device local dictation and if Meta chose to use that API, this vulnerability would not exist. Instead, he suggested, Meta chose not to use Apple's service, presumably because it wants access to that data. "I think some of their greediness for user data kind of opens the door, makes a bigger attack surface," he said. "But at the end of the day, these AI companies, they're racing for what's next. User privacy and security, those aren't priorities." Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.®

The Trump administration has agreed to pay at least $410 million to facilitate its so-called “third-country deportations” for immigrants.

As of the end of June, 31 countries, mostly in Latin America or Africa, have made deals to take immigrants expelled from the United States—despite having no connection to the deportees themselves, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The effort to secure the deals was led by Christian Ehrhardt, who was tapped to lead the Trump administration’s brand new Office of Remigration, a 15-person office named for the racist, far-right scheme to expel minorities from Europe. The deals were sought under the explicit orders of Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and resident White House ghoul.

For several months, Ehrhardt has rushed to lock in deals with numerous foreign leaders. “The messaging is not just that he is a deputy assistant secretary of state. He’s really part of the White House, so they roll out the red carpet,” a U.S. official familiar with his meetings told the Post.

As part of those deals, the Trump administration has agreed to pay $81 million directly to 13 foreign governments, which represents a sizable expansion of the sums being sent to authoritarian leaders. The agreements allow countries to specify what kinds of immigrants they will take—where they were originally from and their criminal background. For example, the government of Burundi accepted a $12 million agreement to take up to 250 African nationals who were non-violent criminals, while Cameroon accepted a $30 million to take up to 1,000 African nationals with a preference for non-violent criminals.

The secret deals were written without the typical statutory requirements to assure human rights safeguards. The State Department’s own human rights reports explicitly warn of violations in several of the countries, including Cameroon, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea.

As part of those deals, the Trump administration has also promised to award $179 million to the International Organization for Migration and $124 million to the U.N. Refugee Agency for third-country deportations. For example, the Central African Republic agreed to accept 1,500 immigrants in exchange for an $85 million donation to the IOM. The highest contribution to this agency under the Biden administration was $14 million.

Immigration attorneys and advocates have argued that the third-country deportations are simply a loophole to bypass the United States’ own rules against sending immigrants back to their country of origin if they are at risk of persecution or torture there. In many cases, third countries simply send the immigrants back to their home countries anyway.

On Friday, a federal appeals court ruled that these “refoulement” policies are unlawful. The Trump administration is expected to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court.

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

Facing growing public backlash and a pivot from his own past vetoes, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of seven bills on Monday that aim to force the data center industry to pay its own way in California.

Three of the new laws shift electric infrastructure costs away from residential customers and toward data center operators, three more mandate disclosures of water usage and other resources, and the last one makes data centers ineligible for environmental review exemptions. 

Newsom, in a written statement, contrasted the new regulations with President Donald Trump’s hands-off approach to data centers and artificial intelligence. 

“We know that we don’t have to sell out Californians or sacrifice our well-being to innovate and succeed,” the statement read. “California has proven that time and time again. With these laws, we are ensuring that Californians remain in the driver’s seat — and that those profiting from data centers aren’t doing so at our expense.”

Trump has aggressively pushed to accelerate data center development nationwide, arguing that they represent a significant economic opportunity for states that embrace them. He said last week at the All-In Summit, an invite-only conference for business leaders, that the industry is the “oil of the next 20, 25 years.”

Newsom’s signature on the new laws represents a significant departure from his actions on data centers last year, when he vetoed a water disclosure bill over concerns that regulation could stifle AI growth and signed into law only a single stripped-down environmental study bill. 

Environmental advocates and the lawmakers behind this year’s bills previously told CalMatters that intensifying public backlash to data center construction propelled the legislation this year, despite a flood of lobbying funds from Big Tech and other business interests that aimed to soften the proposals.

“When you’re looking down the barrel of public outcry that says we don’t want [data centers] at all, and you’ve got localities that are saying they’re going to ban them, then you know the atmosphere has changed,” Assemblymember Diane Papan, a San Mateo Democrat who authored two of the bills which were signed into law on Monday, previously told CalMatters.

Other state legislatures as well as Congress also are advancing new measures to regulate the industry. In May, a Gallup poll found seven in 10 Americans oppose data center construction in their communities, while a July Public Policy Institute of California poll found similar opposition statewide. Hundreds of cities nationwide — including Monterey Park and Bay Area cities like Pittsburg — have either passed data center bans or walked back approvals following public outcry.

Arnab Pal, the executive director of Deploy Action, a nonprofit that promotes clean energy, told CalMatters the new laws are a good step toward preventing data centers from harming consumers through utility rate increases or environmental damage. Still, Pal said, more can be done to ensure such projects actually benefit everyday people through advancements to the electrical grid and the acceleration of clean energy infrastructure. 

“I don’t think these bills are the end of this fight; I think we’re gonna have to do a lot of implementation on the back end and, as other states roll out their policies next year, I think California is going to look back and be like, ‘maybe we should have done more,’” Pal said. “I’m interested to see what we do next year on this.”

Business interests that oppose the measures, like the Data Center Coalition — which counts companies like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI among its members — warn that further regulation could push the data center industry out of California. According to the latest figures from the Data Center Coalition, the industry contributed 665,500 jobs, more than $159 billion in economic activity, and $14.1 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in California in 2024.

Khara Boender, the director of government affairs west for the Data Center Coalition, told CalMatters that “the data center industry shares the goal of ensuring growth of this critical infrastructure is responsible and well managed,” but more work needs to be done “to promote responsible data center growth while maintaining California as a key, competitive market in the global economy.”

Newsom signed the following bills: 

• Senate Bill 1168, SB 886 and Assembly Bill 2383, which shift electric infrastructure costs away from residential customers and toward data center operators.
• AB 2469, AB 1577 and AB 2619, which mandate disclosures or estimates of water usage and other resources.
• SB 887, which makes data centers ineligible for blanket environmental review exemptions, and offers fast-tracked approval for facilities that meet state standards for water and energy conservation.

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Quick Take

• A24’s trailer for Slayground looks like a promo for a new haunted house, but it’s really the first look at Jeremy Saulnier’s secret new horror film.
• Almost nothing is officially known about Slayground, which recently changed its name from October.
• Nerdist’s Take: The lack of info about Slayground has us even more excited about the Green Room director’s new horror film.

Here at Nerdist we really love Halloween, so no surprise we also love horror movies and haunted houses. Also not suprising? We’re very excited that this year A24 is combining those two fall spooky staples. A new promo for Slayground looks like it’s promising the season’s scariest walkthrough experience, but it’s actually a trailer for a film set inside one.

If you still aren’t sure what you just watched, we get it. We were also confused the first time we saw this trailer, which aired ahead of Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil movie this past weekend. It looks like a fantastic commercial for an all-new horror house. It’s really just a unique teaser for Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier’s new film, which had been titled October until this switch.

While A24 encourages fans to go to runlikehell.com to learn more, for now all you’ll find is a countdown. It has 28+ days left as of this writing, which would seem to indicate that’s when it will come out. It also show’s security cameras full of scared patrons walking through a haunted house. But this is not a haunted house you can visit. Not that you’d want to. World of Reel says the 2.5-hour movie—which stars Cory Michael Smith, Chase Sui Wonders, Sophie Wilde, Stephen Root, Imogen Poots, Matty Matheson, Young Mazino, and Macon Blair—takes its name from its setting, Slayground. In the movie, Smith stars as an escaped fugitive trying to clear his name while working at the haunted experience.

A24

For a film that is seemingly very close to premiering, we notice a shocking lack of official information. (One rumor says Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross composed the score.) But in this case, the mystery only has us more excited for what we’ll see. We love Halloween, and one of the best things about the season is not knowing what’s hiding around the corner.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow Mikey on Bluesky at @‌burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

The post A24’s SLAYGROUND Trailer Hides a Secret Horror Film in a Haunted House appeared first on Nerdist.

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