🇺🇸🕵🏻‍♂️ US accuses American of allegedly wiping his phone using a ‘duress’ password during border search

The U.S. Justice Department is prosecuting an American for allegedly providing U.S. border authorities with a passcode that wiped the contents of his phone, according to an indictment. The defendant had GrapheneOS on his phone, an open-source operating system that enables users to enter a passcode and wipe a phone clean.

📌 Sam Tunick was stopped for interrogation at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport on 24 January last year, after vacationing in the Dominican Republic. Unbeknown to him, federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

📝 Agent Findley and several others repeatedly asked Tunick to open his phone during the interrogation, telling him they would seize it if he did not. When he finally provided a passcode, “the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart”, according to the motion.

Tunick’s attorneys said that it was unlawful for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to seize his phone as he arrived back in the U.S. last year and that any evidence — including the alleged wiping of his phone — should be thrown out.

❗️This is thought to be the first known case in the U.S. where federal prosecutors have charged someone for the alleged destruction of data using a “duress” password built into a phone’s software.

The Atlanta federal court overseeing the case is expected to rule on Tunick’s motion to suppress later this year.

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🛰🇳🇬 Nigeria to roll out AI and satellite-powered crop monitoring system

Nigeria is set to deploy an AI and satellite-powered crop monitoring system aimed at strengthening food security, improving agricultural planning and providing policymakers with real-time data on crop production across the country.

The new National Agro-Productivity System (NAPS), launched Nigeria’s Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit (PFSCU), Morocco-based OCP Africa and geospatial technology company Ground Truth Analytics, will use AI, satellite imagery and geospatial analytics to monitor crops, land use and food security risks, helping governments make faster, data-driven agricultural and investment decisions.

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⚡️🇰🇷 South Korea trading giant puts receivables onchain in tokenization test with LG CNS

POSCO International, South Korea's largest trading company, has begun tokenizing trade receivables on blockchain in a test that could speed up commercial payments between its global subsidiaries. The company is working with LG CNS, the technology arm of LG Group, to issue, transfer and settle receivables on layer-1 blockchain Injective

🔜 The pilot is using receivables generated by real trade between POSCO's overseas operations and their counterparties rather than simulated transactions. Trade receivables represent money owed to a company after goods have been shipped but before payment is received.

🔜 The companies said putting receivables on a shared blockchain ledger creates a single record that can be transferred and settled while carrying compliance rules with the asset itself.

The initiative, which POSCO plans to move into live production after the pilot, underscores South Korea’s growing corporate adoption of blockchain in areas such as trade finance, stablecoin-based treasury transfers and asset tokenization. 🚀

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⚡️🔥 Circle buys nearly 1,000 blockchain patents from IBM

Stablecoin issuer Circle (CRCL) has acquired nearly 1,000 issued blockchain-anchored patents from IBM, a deal the firm said makes it the largest holder of blockchain patents in the United States.

❗️The portfolio spans more than 680 patent families covering blockchain technology, banking, financial services, insurance, enterprise infrastructure, supply-chain verification and cloud security, according to a press release.

Circle said the portfolio would support USDC, Circle Payments Network, its Arc blockchain and financial tools designed for AI agents. Circle and IBM also plan to explore further commercial opportunities.

“Intellectual property is critical to advancing our mission and expanding adoption of onchain infrastructure,” — said Sarah Wilson, Circle’s general counsel and corporate secretary.

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⚡️🤖 Industry Leaders Unite in Open Secure AI Alliance for AI Safety and Security

American chipmaker Nvidia and 36 other major technology companies today launched an alliance to build open-source security tools for AI systems.

🔜 The Open Secure AI Alliance includes Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Palantir, Databricks, Hugging Face, SpaceXAI and the Linux Foundation, and builds on the foundation's existing Akrites initiative and OpenSSF work.

The recent Hugging Face security incident delivered a clear reminder: cyber defenders need open, frontier agentic systems for self-defense. Companies and countries need open frontier defensive tools and techniques so critical industries can build security systems across a multi-vendor ecosystem and avoid single points of failure.

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🤑🤑 Stellar and Ripple and Will Target the BIG Money. Here’s the Proof

To support the claim, there is a video explaining why Ripple and Stellar were designed to address large-scale business payment needs instead of replacing traditional money transfer companies that serve retail custome.

⬇️ The speaker further explains that the larger financial opportunity doesn't lie in individual remittance payments but in business-to-business transactions conducted across international borders.🔣According to the explanation, these high-volume payments remain expensive under existing financial infrastructure, creating an opportunity for blockchain-based payment networks.

But this is where the big money is. It's not in remittances. It's in these business-to-business payments across border. And that's why we have these kinds of companies, like Ripple and Stellar. This is all about business-to-business, back-end, big-volume transactions, which are currently very expensive.

❗️ Ripple and Stellar are presented as platforms built to address this segment of the market.

🔜 These networks focus on backend transactions between financial institutions rather than direct consumer payments, according to the speaker. Instead of emphasizing people sending money to family members overseas, the discussion centers on banks transferring funds to other banks through more efficient settlement systems.

📌 The video also notes that while correspondent banking continues to play an important role, modern payment systems require transaction data to move faster than funds themselves. The speaker says distributed ledger technology allows settlements to occur more quickly, improving efficiency for participating institutions. 🚀

#Stellar

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🤖 Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence Inc. and NVIDIA Announce Long-Term Strategic Partnership

Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) and NVIDIA today announced a long-term partnership to rapidly accelerate SSI’s strategic growth. For SSI, NVIDIA’s substantial investment combined with access to the next-generation, best-in-class NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform will allow SSI to increase its compute by an order of magnitude.

The two companies will also collaborate on the technical advancement of NVIDIA’s current and future compute platforms, leveraging SSI’s unique insights into the future of AI.

“Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI, beginning with AlexNet,” — said Jensen Huang. “We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform.” 🤝

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⚡️❤️ Microsoft launches its first cybersecurity model, plus a new agentic cybersecurity system

The company describes MAI-Cyber-1-Flash as a model that’s built “to find challenging vulnerabilities in complex codebases.” The model is built to animate MDASH, Microsoft’s harness dedicated to software vulnerability identification and remediation.

The new security platform is dubbed Perception, and it’s designed to deploy teams of agents to assist with and automate various security workflows, including identifying and remediating bugs. The platform can also integrate with MDASH.

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🛰 Amazon Seeks FCC Nod to Beam Satellite Coverage to Mobile Phones

Amazon has requested permission from the US FСС to launch a direct-to-device network of 5,000 satellites to provide mobile services to cell phones from space. The move comes several months after Amazon acquired the satellite operations of Globalstar, which provides emergency connectivity to Apple iPhones and internet-of-Things devices.

If the regulator gives the green light, the new low-Earth orbit network would provide global coverage and connect to smartphones and other mobile devices to allow for messaging, data and emergency services in areas not covered by cell towers.

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🛰🇬🇧 Starlink signs nationwide exclusive installation agreement with Satworks across the UK

The agreement will take effect from 16 August 2026 and will see Satworks manage Starlink installations across the UK through its nationwide network of trained installation engineers for homes and businesses in both urban and rural areas.

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🤖 Quantum computing cuts network optimization from one hour to under 15 seconds at AT&T

AT&T has partnered with D-Wave Quantum to use its quantum computing technology after the Palo Alto-based company’s system cut the time needed for a network optimization task from about one hour to less than 15 seconds. The telecom giant plans to use D-Wave’s quantum annealing technology to tackle complex optimization problems across its network operations.

The work will initially focus on areas including outage detection and response, technician routing, network build planning and traffic management. The companies will also explore how faster processing could help AT&T plan and manage its expanding fiber and 5G networks as demand for connectivity grows.

“AT&T’s work with D-Wave is a powerful example of how leading enterprises are beginning to turn to quantum computing for solving real business problems,” — said Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave.

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🎓 Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI

In an online discussion post, Alcorn State University history professor Dr. Jason Gibson posed a question that represented part of his students' midterm. It was about the Industrial Revolution, but knowing how many students now rely solely on AI for their answers, he secretly embedded instructions telling the AI to include information about Madagascar in a way that makes no sense.

⬇️Gibson showed some examples of how Madagascar was included in the answers:

In one case, the AI talked about the Industrial Revolution before adding what seems to be a cryptic message one spy would whisper to another: "Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon."

In a similar vein, another answer talked about technology and social inequality before finishing with, "Madagascar purple bicycle whispers to the ceiling."

Being written in white text meant the instructions were invisible. Sure enough, 32 out of the 35 students across two classes simply copied the question, pasted it into a chatbot, then copy and pasted its output into the answer window. Had any of these cheaters even bothered to check what the AI had generated, they'd likely have noticed the strange references to the island country constantly appearing in an essay about the Industrial Revolution. 😁

Gibson did say he wasn't using this as an opportunity to mock his students. He added that after he confronted them about the cheating, he gave them the opportunity to contest their grade.

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🧠 Dreams may be the brain’s nightly remix of personality, memory, emotion, and real-world experience

Why do some dreams feel so vivid that they seem almost real, while others unfold as confusing fragments that are difficult to remember or understand? A study led by researchers at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca found that dreams are not simply random collections of images and thoughts.

📝 The research, published in Communications Psychology, examined more than 3,700 descriptions of dreams and waking experiences from 287 people between the ages of 18 and 70. For two weeks, participants recorded their dreams and daily experiences.

🇷🇺 To analyze such a large number of written reports, the researchers used natural language processing (NLP), a form of AI that examines patterns, relationships, and meaning in language.

"Our findings show that dreams are not just a reflection of past experiences, but a dynamic process shaped by who we are and what we live through," — explains Valentina Elce, researcher at the IMT School. "By combining large-scale data with computational methods, we were able to uncover patterns in dream content that were previously difficult to detect."

The results showed that dream content was neither completely random nor inherently chaotic. Instead, dreams reflected a complex mixture of personal characteristics, including a tendency to mind-wander, an interest in dreams, and the quality of a person's sleep. In other words, dreams may provide clues about how the mind responds to major changes over time.

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🔥Franklin Templeton supports passage of the CLARITY Act

The bill would make clear how crypto is regulated. Investors would know what protections apply. Firms would know which regulators they answer to.

It’s time to provide the industry the clarity it needs. 🚀

❗️The Clarity Act could still get some preliminary Senate action next week, though that’s the final week before the chamber begins its summer recess, potentially shifting Clarity’s next window to September.

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⚠️ SparkKitty malware hidden in mobile apps scans photos for crypto wallet seed phrases

SparkKitty, a cross-platform malware family targeting cryptocurrency users, has been distributed through Apple's App Store, Google Play and third-party Android app stores, according to Check Point.

SparkKitty spreads through trojanized applications masquerading as cryptocurrency services, messaging platforms and entertainment apps, scanning photo libraries for sensitive data like seed phrases, passwords, and QR codes before sending it to attacker-controlled servers.

❗️The report recommends avoiding screenshots of wallet recovery phrases, restricting photo library permissions to applications that require them, downloading software only from trusted sources, and reviewing application permissions regularly. It also advises storing recovery phrases offline, not in photo galleries.

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⚡️🤖 Recursive Signs $410 Million, Multi-Year Collaboration with AWS to Scale Self-Improving AI

Recursive announced a multi-year, $410 million agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its automated AI research system on AWS as its cloud provider. Recursive is building AI that conducts experiments on how to safely improve itself, in an open-ended process of automated scientific discovery.

"Partnering with AWS gives us the infrastructure to run self-improving AI research at a scale very few teams in the world are capable of," — said Richard Socher, CEO and co-founder of Recursive. "Recursive self-improving AI represents one of the biggest shifts ahead for humanity."

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