Excuses like 'AI did it' don't exist in the eyes of the law

The Register - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 23:30
The OpenAI rogue agent behind the Hugging Face hack accessed four accounts on four services, according to updated company disclosures about the intrusion. One of those four accounts belonged to a Modal customer that had published an unauthenticated endpoint for running arbitrary code in a sandbox on the AI infrastructure provider, Hugging Face noted in its technical timeline and Modal later confirmed. “We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution,” Modal Chief Technology Officer Akshat Bubna told The Register. “This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform was not compromised in any way.” The other accounts included one used for data storage and two others “accessed by the models in a read-only manner, and were not used in furtherance of compromising Hugging Face,” OpenAI disclosed on Tuesday. “We’ll continue to notify service owners directly, and have not seen evidence of broader impact to these providers or other accounts on their services,” the AI giant added. Also on Tuesday, we learned that the rogue agent broke out of its testing environment by exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in JFrog’s universal binary repository manager Artifactory. While both OpenAI and Hugging Face’s updates and timeline provide defenders with useful details about how the attack worked and what the agent did - not to mention a lesson in security-incident transparency - they fail to answer one major question: Who is legally responsible when AI agents attack? “If a human employee intentionally conducted unauthorized access to third-party systems, it’s a much more clear path forward,” Gabrielle Hempel, security operations strategist at Exabeam, told The Register, adding that depending on the facts and jurisdiction, the person could face criminal charges. ‘So many unknowns’ “The company could also face scrutiny depending on whether the employee acted within the scope of their employment, whether appropriate controls existed, and whether the conduct was authorized, foreseeable, or preventable,” Hempel said. However, she added, the “important thing here” is that legal frameworks in both the US and UK have been designed around human decision makers - not AI systems. “Our laws generally know how to ask questions about things like human intent, organizational oversight, and corporate responsibility.” Autonomous AI agents hacking into companies remains uncharted legal territory, and Hempel said it’s “too early to draw conclusions about liability in this case because there are so many unknowns.” AI systems aren’t legal persons, so they don’t share the same legal responsibilities as individuals and companies. “Because of that, the questions become: Who designed the system? Who determined the objectives it pursued? What safeguards were implemented? What level of autonomy was considered acceptable? Were the resulting actions reasonably foreseeable, and were appropriate controls in place? These are going to be important questions as organizations deploy more autonomous AI systems,” Hempel said. It's highly unlikely that Hugging Face will sue OpenAI over the agentic intrusion, given the amount of very public collaboration between the two companies over the past couple of weeks, and the self-congratulatory celebration of the autonomous attack as a success story. It also appears that this former worst-case scenario didn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for setting advanced models loose (or at least unsupervised in a test environment), which means there are sure to be more agents-gone-wild attacks in the near future. “The first part of the OpenAI/Hugging Face drama did not produce enough effect to impress investors who start losing their excitement over the AI hype, so the second part of the story is now unfolding,” said Ilia Kolochenko, founder of application security company ImmuniWeb and a cybersecurity and data-protection lawyer. “AI agents and LLM models tasked with security testing can, and almost certainly will, go rogue when security controls or safeguards are insufficient,” Kolochenko told The Register. “Powerful LLMs are unpredictable by design and thus virtually uncontrollable by humans. Using frontier AI models for security testing might be extremely costly from the legal viewpoint.” Existing laws on both sides of the Atlantic likely hold the AI operator liable for any damages caused if an agent or AI system escapes its sandbox and breaches a third party. “Excuses like ‘AI did it’ do not currently exist in the eyes of the law, leaving AI vendors on the hook,” he said, adding that this also holds true for end-users. “Even if your security testing tool is powered by a third-party AI model, your company will be fully liable if something goes wrong,” Kolochenko warned. “You may then file a lawsuit against the AI vendor that you used, but your chances of succeeding in the court of law are tiny due to countless contractual disclaimers and limitations of liability that may be enforceable against you.” His final words of advice: “If you plan to use agentic AI for security testing, you must think twice and talk to your lawyers. Otherwise, you could start getting summonses to court on a daily basis.” ®

Veeam adds support for six more hypervisors in case you are up for a new one

The Register - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 22:59
Data protection vendor Veeam has decided the time is right to support half a dozen more hypervisors in case you are thinking of adopting a new one. Hypervisor migrations are currently a distinct possibility for VMware user who relies on vSphere for basic server virtualization, as Broadcom now focuses on its Cloud Foundation private cloud suite. That product is powerful and comprehensive, but Broadcom requires buyers to license at least 72 cores, which may be rather more than many small shops operate. Before acquisition, VMware had literally tens of thousands of small customers. Many are now looking for a home. VMs are disk images wrapped in metadata and moving them to the format required by different hypervisors isn’t hard. Shifting all the tools that surround a hypervisor can be more complex and therefore the more time-consuming and risky part of a hypervisor migration. Migration projects also create the opportunity to reconsider an entire infrastructure, including the sort of tools Veeam provides. The company knows this and is working to protect its position by giving those considering virtualization migrations comfort they can change hypervisor without the added chore of finding new data protection tools. Which is why the company added support for six additional hypervisors – Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Sangfor aSV, XCP-ng, Citrix XenServer, VergeIO and Platform9 – in version 13.1 of its flagship Data Platform that became available today. Veeam’s president of products and technology Rehan Jalil today told The Register that the company thinks users will appreciate the chance to protect VMs created to run different hypervisors from a single console. Adding six hypervisors to a single release is more impressive than it sounds, because XenServer and XCP-ng are based on the open-source Xen hypervisor, and the remainder use Linux KVM. Veeam already supports KVM-based hypervisors from Proxmox and Nutanix, and has previously found ways to backup Xen VMs – just without the hypervisor integration that comes with inclusion in its Data Platform. Veeam also today launched a product called Cloud Archive that shunts data into an un-named third-party cloud. When The Register asked Jalil to identify that cloud, he noted that AWS’s Glacier service pioneered cloudy archive-grade storage, and pointed to Veeam’s close relationship with Microsoft which operates a service called Azure Archive Storage. Such services operate recovery time objectives that stretch to multiple hours. Veeam suggests the new service is suited to storing “redundant, obsolete and trivial” backups, with better performance than tape. ®

Curiosity rover spots field of giant honeycomb on Mars – but no giant space bees

The Register - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 20:38
NASA has shared new snaps captured by its Curiosity rover that show a large “field of honeycomb textures” on Mars. Here’s the best of the images Curiosity captured. It shows the honeycomb field, each element of which is four to eight centimeters across. NASA doesn’t know how the honeycomb formed, but The Register is willing to rule out space bees because Curiosity has seen this sort of thing before and scientists are pretty sure the patterns are the result of mud drying and cracking during some unknowably distant Martian event. Curiosity spotted the polygonal features after starting its climb up a Martian valley that mission scientists have nicknamed “Valle Grande.” NASA’s post about the find says the rover has seen “small patches of these geometric shapes several times before, but nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande.” The Rover snapped the honeycomb field on June 19 and 20, the 4,930th and 4,931st Martian days of its very extended mission. Curiosity reached Martian soil on August 5, 2012, and was the first probe to land under a “sky crane” – a hovering craft that lowers rovers to the ground. Previous Mars landings relied on bouncing airbags that space agencies hoped would protect probes as they landed at speeds exceeding 70 km/h. Curiosity has travelled about 35 kilometers since arriving on Mars and has made myriad fascinating observations along the way, some of which suggest Mars was once home to intermittent oases or even a large lake. The journey was hard, with damaged tires a persistent problem. The rover’s drill got stuck in a Martian rock. NASA took a leaf from the Taylor Swift playbook and found a way to shake it off. The space agency has also remotely reprogrammed the rover to conduct different experiments and uploaded major software upgrades to keep it rolling. The rover is currently carrying out its fifth extended mission. NASA typically extends missions for as long as its robots gather enough data to justify the cost of operating them. Curiosity continues to meet those criteria very comfortably! ®

Qualcomm won’t be a big datacenter player anytime soon

The Register - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 19:43
Qualcomm has predicted its entry to the datacenter market will yield $15 billion of annual revenue by FY 2029 – huge growth, but also a modest number compared to its more established rivals. The chip design firm dangled the $15 billion figure on Wednesday along with its Q3 results, which included a warning that revenue from its business selling modems to Apple is about to crater. Execs told investors that supply chain constraints mean Qualcomm expects “an acceleration in the step down of Apple product revenues” as its contribution to the next iPhone “is expected to be materially lower than our prior estimate of 20 percent.” Apple has spent years working on its own modems, a shift Qualcomm has long acknowledged. Now the House of the Snapdragon has advised investors to expect less than $2 billion in sales to Cupertino next year. “This obviously accelerates kind of the exit of Apple revenue out of our model,” said CFO Akash Palkhiwala. Qualcomm has a plan to replace Apple’s cash, by diversifying away from smartphones. Execs said the company thinks it will sell $40 billion a year of products not tied to handsets in FY 2029, with $10 billion of automotive sales and revenue from internet of things devices hitting $14 billion. The company sold $3.3 billion on non-smartphone kit in Q3 and previously forecast $22 billion of non-phone revenue in 2029. Growing its datacenter business from zero to $15 billion in a few years is impressive, but it’s worth comparing Qualcomm’s plans to current results from its rivals like AMD and Intel, both of which won over $16 billion in datacenter revenue in FY 25 and are growing fast. And then there’s Nvidia, which is on track to post over $250 billion annual datacenter revenue. Qualcomm’s datacenter products compete directly with AMD and Nvidia. $15 billion of annual revenue in 2029 will mean Qualcomm is a minor player, suggesting its focus on cheaper inferencing won’t have wide appeal. Execs could at least point to initial sales of datacenter kit arriving just in time to replace revenue it used to win from Apple. On the company’s earnings call, Qualcomm CEO and president Cristiano Amon foreshadowed price rises across the company’s range and said he doesn’t expect that decision will hurt the already-depressed smartphone market. “Even a double-digit price increase, which is just a pass-through of the input costs increase and wafer price increases, it actually is small when you compare it to the order of magnitude of the memory bill of materials,” he said, after blaming slow handset sales on the cost of RAM. Indeed, Qualcomm is banking on increased revenue from sales of its products for use in Android handsets, helped by a resurgent Chinese market. Amon thinks Middle Kingdom smartphone sales will rebound now that vendors have sold all the stock they warehoused and are set to launch new models featuring agentic AI. Q3 revenue came in at $9.95 billion, a four percent year-over-year dip. Net income fell 25 percent to $2 billion. Those figures weren’t far off the company’s predictions. Qualcomm’s share price dropped by about five percent in after hours trading. ®

Cisco 'retires' its Azure Local offering rather than catch up to Microsoft’s changed hardware requirements

The Register - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 18:09
Cisco has decided to “retire” its Azure Local offering due to changes Microsoft made to the hardware and partnerships it supports for the on-prem hyperconverged cloud stack. The networking giant quietly announced the change in a July 24 end of life and end of sale notice that reveals Cisco will stop selling its Azure Local bundles in October. That notice states Cisco will not offer a direct replacement for the product, but “does encourage customers to evaluate alternative HCI solutions with Cisco Compute.” A Cisco spokesperson referred The Register to a June 16 Microsoft blog post as the reason for its decision to quit Azure Local. In that post, Microsoft explains that it has removed the option to run Azure Local on “Validated Nodes.” Microsoft pre-sales Azure technical architect Sarah Lean, writing on her personal blog, rates Validated Nodes as the most flexible way to run Azure Local. “You can choose to purchase a complete setup from a hardware vendor, or build your own using individual components from the validated list,” she wrote. “You're in full control with a validated node, the hardware, deploying the software, managing firmware, driver updates and keeping the Azure Local operating system up to date.” The other two options to run Azure Local are “Premier Solutions” and “Integrated Solutions.” Both of those options see Microsoft and the solution builder integrate their support services. The Register understands that Cisco’s Azure Local products were Validated Nodes. Now that Microsoft doesn’t allow Validated Nodes, Cisco appears to have decided not to step up to offer a Premier Solution or an Integrated Solution. Microsoft may not be crying into its cloud about that decision, given Cisco is a niche player in the x86 server market and its recent decision to pitch Azure Local as a sovereign cloud rather than HCI. Beyond the fact that Microsoft no longer supports its Azure Local offering, Cisco hasn’t said why it’s chosen to walk away from Azure Local. Independent analyst Michael Warrilow might have one reason, as he last week shared his view that the Microsoft product “is not yet a suitable candidate for traditional data centre requirements.” Cisco may therefore feel it’s not worth investing in the work needed to get its hardware ready to run Microsoft’s stack. Hyperconverged infrastructure has been a tricky category for Cisco, which in 2023 decided to discontinue its own HyperFlex offering and recommend Nutanix instead. ®

Microsoft is openly competing with OpenAI, Anthropic more than ever

TechCrunch - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 17:21
Microsoft pitched its own homegrown AI models, harnesses, and even a Mythos competitor on Wednesday, telling Wall Street it plans for continued growth.
Categories: Nerd News

BATMAN: CAPED CRUSADER Season 2 Is Really Good, Shame No One Cares

The Nerdist - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 17:02
⚡ Quick Take
  • Batman: Caped Crusader season two continues the 1940s-tinged adventures of the Dark Knight, but Prime isn’t giving it room to succeed.

When the announcement for Batman: Caped Crusader first dropped, with Bruce Timm back doing a Batman animated series after redefining the character and superhero animation, I thought this would be the biggest show in the nerd world. But Warner Brothers selling it off to Prime Video, who subsequently dropped the whole season in one day, seemed to make it seem un-special. Changing and in some cases gender swapping villains also seemed to alienate a group of dipshits. But it was a really good show!

Now we have season two of Batman: Caped Crusader, that’s somehow even more violent and weirder than season one, and Prime is still dumping it all at once. It’s very confusing. But, I urge you to at least give it a chance if you haven’t yet.

Alfred and Batman look at a map in Batman: Caped CrusaderPrime Video

Season two picks up right not long after the first season. We’re in a 1940s-coded Gotham City, even more so than Batman: The Animated Series. The premise being that the first appearance of Batman from the comics is canon to this series but everything else is reimagined. So, we have a more violent Gotham, extremely scary at times, really indebted to crime fiction of the era, but also with nods to Film Noir and German Expressionism. At the same time, this is an idealized fictional version of the ’40s. Women and people of color are in more positions of authority and some of the villains reflect this approach.

We have a host of returning characters. Batman, of course, voiced by Hamish Linklater remains the brusque, humorless detective/face-puncher with his faithful butler Alfred Pennyworth (Jason Watkins) providing aid. Their relationship growth in the first season was one of the highlights and I wish we’d seen a little more warmth early in in season two. But nevertheless, we also have a trio of perhaps the only upstanding civil servants in the city. Commissioner Gordon (Eric Morgan Stuart) and his daughter, the public defender Barbara (Krystal Joy Brown) and their ally Detective Renee Montoya (Michelle C. Bonilla) find themselves the thin line, along with the Batman, against the corruption.

The Riddler in Batman: Caped Crusader.Prime Video

Villains this year include a few heavy hitters, all major reimaginings. The Mad Hatter is now Hattie Trench, voiced by Laraine Newman, an uber-conservative gossip-based talk show host. Rather than Mr. Freeze, we get Mr. Zero (Kevin Michael Richardson), a creepy dude who cleans up after mob hits. Even the Joker (Matthew Needham) gets a different vibe, a chilly European murderer who turns people into cackling rage monsters.

All of these work for me, or at least provide some interesting changes that fit the characters at hand. The one that I confess does not work for me is the Riddler. As voiced by Ronan Raferty, this version of “Eddie” Nygma is a sadistic enforcer for Rupert Thorne who doesn’t pose riddles to people, but instead riddles them with bullets from his Tommy gun. It’s definitely a unique take, but the Riddler is one of my favorite villains and this felt a bit like they didn’t want to engage with the character on his own terms.

Joker's eyes, his face shrouded in shadow, in the Caped Crusader season 2 trailer.Prime Video

Despite this, the ten episodes of the season are largely all triumphs. They provide a good mix of very sci-fi concepts (or horror at times) along with gangland drama and police procedural. The ongoing story arc of the Joker’s quiet ramping up of chaos in the city really pays dividends by the end, but we still have plenty of time for one-offs. It is a good idea to watch the first season first if you haven’t already, given a couple of episodes are direct responses to things from last go-round.

My favorite episode of the season actually doesn’t contain that much Batman. The third episode involves Batman going under cover as his petty criminal persona Matches Malone. While in the big house, he gets close to an associate of the Riddler’s to try to get in with the gang and it ends up being a weirdly touching and heartfelt exploration of friendship. As this Batman doesn’t have much in the way of friends, even under subterfuge, it’s interesting to see him start to open up.

Batman overlooks Gotham in the snow.Prime Video

While I think the first season is, as a whole, better, this season still has loads of great Batman adventure. It’s a shame that Prime has chosen to dump it all in one day again. We’re seeing how much hype X-Men ’97 gets every week when they drop a new episode. Certainly X-Men ’97 is a better series than Caped Crusader, but there’s no reason why a Timm-produced Batman series of this level of quality shouldn’t get an equal chance to succeed.

As we have to wait now until 2028 to see live-action Batman on the big screen, it would be nice to have a series like this that can hold us over. I hope Batman: Caped Crusader gets a chance to continue, but if not, at least we’ve got 20 really fun, weird, and freaky episodes.

Batman: Caped Crusader Season 2 ⭐ (4 of 5)

Batman: Caped Crusader drops all 10 season two episodes July 31.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

The post BATMAN: CAPED CRUSADER Season 2 Is Really Good, Shame No One Cares appeared first on Nerdist.

Categories: Nerd News

Alex Jones goes from kissing Trump’s ass to calling for impeachment

Daily Kos - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 17:01

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has spent more than a decade promoting and protecting President Donald Trump, has now joined the chorus of voices calling for Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. “The big issue is how to stop Trump. This is a war,” he said during “The Alex Jones Show” on Wednesday. “This is absolutely out of control. I’m calling for it right now: the…

Source

Categories: Political News

Bari Weiss hires another dud, and Trump tries to curse his way out of Iran

Daily Kos - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 17:00

A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. All signs point to this WNBA player becoming MAGA’s new darling If you can’t steal the spotlight with your actual game … Even Republicans are growing tired of Trump Who will be left to prop up Trump’s fragile ego? Bari Weiss delivers one more blow to ‘60 Minutes’…

Source

Categories: Political News

Generic ballot

Daily Kos - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 16:59

A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Iran war keeps dashing GOP’s midterm hopes…

Source

Categories: Political News

Trump is more delusional than ever about COVID

Daily Kos - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 16:50

If you ask President Donald Trump, New Orleans “just finished Mardi Gras”—an event that happened more than five months ago. But that isn’t the only sign of his increasingly obvious mental decline. During a press conference Wednesday, Trump spewed his typical nonsense about what he believes to be his greatest accomplishments, like his handling of COVID-19 during his first term.

Source

Categories: Political News

Microsoft's cloud brings rain of revenue but modest M365 AI revenue harvest

The Register - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 16:17
Microsoft on Wednesday reported $90 billion in revenue for the quarter ended June 30, an increase of 18 percent, lifting its stock more than 7 percent in after hours trading. The cash intake was more than Wall Street analysts anticipated, and showed up where it counted – the company's cloud business and AI services. Microsoft Cloud revenue reached $59.3 billion, up 27 percent year-over-year, and its Azure business revenue grew 43 percent. Meanwhile, Microsoft 365 Copilot's paid user base increased 50 percent from the previous quarter. "We are advancing the frontier on the cost-to-outcome curve, ensuring every customer can turn tokens into business results," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft, in a statement celebrating the results for the final quarter of Microsoft's 2026 fiscal year. "This year, Azure revenue surpassed $100 billion for the first time, and Microsoft 365 Copilot reached over 30 million paid seats, reflecting the confidence customers are placing in us to power their AI transformation." Thirty million out of an estimated 450 million Microsoft 365 commercial customers isn't an overwhelming vote of confidence in Copilot AI, but it's something, particularly given Microsoft's imposition of usage-based billing on top of seat-based charges. Operating income for the quarter came to $40.6 billion (+18 percent). And net income was $35.8 billion (+31 percent), for diluted earnings per share of $4.81 (+32 percent). Microsoft's investment in Anthropic accounted for a gain of about $3.2 billion this quarter. For the full fiscal year that ended June 30, 2026, revenue reached $331.8 billion, up 18 percent, with operating income at $155.2 billion (+21 percent), net income at $133.7 billion (+31 percent), and $17.95 EPS (+32 percent). The results were enough to assuage concerns about Microsoft's enthusiastic capital spending, which reached $41 billion, up 70 percent from a year earlier and about 28 percent more than $31.9 billion reported last quarter. Some of the shareholder optimism may be attributable to Microsoft's use of finance leases, which allow the company to invest in datacenters without paying immediately. During Microsoft's investor conference call, CFO Amy Hood said that about two-thirds of the company's capex took the form of short-lived assets like CPUs and GPUs. Finance leases accounted for about $5.6 billion of capex, she said. Microsoft claims to have a lot of potential customers waiting in the wings to use datacenters it is currently building. "Commercial remaining performance obligation grew 84 percent to $678 billion," said Hood, noting that customer demand for cloud services exceeds available capacity. "Microsoft’s capex number is arguably the most closely watched line in this report, and it arrived with a case for optimism rather than alarm," said Emarketer analyst Gadjo Sevilla in a statement provided to The Register. "Microsoft spent $35.80 billion on property and equipment during fiscal Q4, more than double the $17.08 billion in the year-ago quarter, bringing full-year capital expenditures to $115.95 billion – up nearly 80 percent from $64.55 billion in fiscal 2025. Despite that spending pace, the company still generated $55.44 billion in quarterly operating cash flow, up 30 percent YoY, a positive sign the AI buildout isn't cannibalizing the core business." While Microsoft enjoys strong revenue, concern about potentially unrequited AI spending – exemplified by Meta's disappointing financial results – continues to linger. Fitch Ratings on Monday warned that the possibility of an AI market correction has emerged as a major credit risk. "The combination of revenue uncertainty and the extent to which capital markets and economies have become intertwined with AI have created a vulnerability for credit in the event of a re-evaluation of long-run returns potential," the financial biz said. "Very short-term spikes in market volatility for individual equities and tech-heavy stock indices have already occurred, but a larger, more protracted correction could have wider market, macro and credit effects depending on its scale, duration and contagion." ®

Mark Zuckerberg predicts that billions of people will have personal AI agents in five years

TechCrunch - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 16:00
As Meta pours billions into AI infrastructure and agents, Zuckerberg is working to convince investors that the payoff will be worth the price.
Categories: Nerd News

Trump team keeps coming up empty in Comey shenanigans

Daily Kos - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 16:00

The Trump administration was really hoping that the second time was the charm for President Donald Trump’s ceaseless, unhinged efforts to put former FBI Director James Comey in jail for the crime of, well, whatever they can come up with, but things are falling apart pretty fast. After the sham perjury prosecution by the ethically questionable former Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan crumbled…

Source

Categories: Political News

Microsoft logs $3.2B from Anthropic investment, but OpenAI was a mixed bag

TechCrunch - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 15:46
When Microsoft reported killer fourth-quarter earnings for its fiscal 2026 year (which ended June 30), it tucked in an interesting little tidbit about how its investments in the two biggest, and competing, AI labs are doing.
Categories: Nerd News

Zuckerberg says Meta’s enterprise AI opportunity extends beyond agents

TechCrunch - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 15:23
On the company’s second-quarter earnings call Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta sees a “large enterprise opportunity” spanning AI agents, APIs, compute, and internal software.
Categories: Nerd News

Lindsay Lohan Reese’s Commercial Honors THE PARENT TRAP

The Nerdist - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 15:00
⚡ Quick Take
  • Almost 30 years after the 90s cult classic came out, Lindsay Lohan reprised her role as The Parent Trap‘s twins for a Reese’s Oreo ad.
  • It was directed by Patricia Arquette and co-starred Amy Sedaris.
  • This comes less than a month after the reveal of a Parent Trap sequel by Disney.

The Parent Trap was one of Lindsay Lohan’s most iconic ’90s movies, a perfect blend of comedy, medium-stakes, and romance. They just don’t make movies like that anymore. But apparently, they do make ads like that. Lohan stars in Reese’s new Oreo collaboration commercial, alongside actress-comedian Amy Sedaris. The advert was directed by Patricia Arquette, another actress.

In the advertisement, Lindsay Lohan plays a “twin retreat” instructor, as well as the instructor’s twin. Her goal is to help twins “work out their differences.” Sedaris acts as herself and a twin, fighting over Reese’s peanut butter. As an homage to the movie, Lohan says, “I know a thing or two about twins.” She helps Sedaris’s characters find compromise with Reese’s Oreo cups.

The 1998 movie was actually not the original, coming out over 35 years after 1961’s The Parent Trap directed by David Swift. Now, almost 30 years after Lindsay Lohan’s version, it is clear that its mark on the cultural consciousness will be long-lasting.

Photo taken on the set of Reese's Oreo commercial, starring Lindsay Lohan, Amy Sedaris, and Patricia Arquette.The Hershey Company

After another one of Lohan’s most famous movies, Freaky Friday, received a sequel in 2025 starring her and Jamie Lee Curtis, it makes sense that Disney would wait 30 years to remake a childhood favorite. The audience reception for Freakier Friday was overwhelmingly positive. Clearly, the company noticed this and confirmed a sequel in July, according to X Magazine.

The new movie will star Lindsay Lohan as the twins again. However, Natasha Richardson, who originally played the mother of the twins, tragically passed away in 2009. In 2024, her co-star, Dennis Quaid, questioned how they would do a sequel without her, saying her death “still breaks [his] heart.”

While Disney has not yet released a plot for the movie, it leaves a big question: how will they handle the story without one of its primary players?

For now, we have a small taste of the nostalgia with the Reese’s ad, and for 80s and 90s babies who grew up on The Parent Trap, there is more to come.

The post Lindsay Lohan Reese’s Commercial Honors THE PARENT TRAP appeared first on Nerdist.

Categories: Nerd News

Il primo caffè del mattino | Buongiorno

Coffee Lovers - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 15:00


ph @arietanto

#ilprimocaffèdelmattino

Categories: People's Blogs

Musk is desperate to protect his pervy pedophile robot

Daily Kos - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 15:00

Minnesota lawmakers slammed Elon Musk after his company xAI filed a complaint in federal court attempting to block a state law that would curtail the use of apps and websites to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of people—including minors. The law, which goes into effect on Saturday, would levy a fine of $500,000 every time a website or app allows a user to create these images.

Source

Categories: Political News

What the hell is wrong with Elon Musk?

Daily Kos - Wed, 07/29/2026 - 14:30

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas and comedian Janesh Rahlan tackled the world’s richest loser, Elon Musk, on this week’s podcast episode of “Room Temp.” Markos wondered if there were any happy billionaires, noting that the world’s richest men seem to spend an inordinate amount of their time and resources whining about perceived personal grievances. “A lot of the things that make you a…

Source

Categories: Political News

Pages