Tootfinder

“How did a sports scene like #MiLB minor league #baseball—with a more than 100-year history of silly mascots, intimate hometown stadiums, and local ownership—get devoured so quickly by #PrivateEquity?”

NASA confirms Moon landing by a private American spacecraft - Earth.com
https://www.earth.com/news/nasa-confirms-moon-landing-by-private-american-spacecraft-blue-ghost-1/

Public school districts such as Dayton’s are responsible for transporting students who attend private and charter schools.
When they fail to do so, they risk fines of millions of dollars.
A shortage of drivers and buses
combined with the threat of fines, means that
🆘 public school districts in Dayton and around Ohio find themselves relegating their own students to the back of the transportation line.
“I’m going to have to use Uber,
and it’s going to cost …

Private Memorization Editing: Turning Memorization into a Defense to Strengthen Data Privacy in Large Language Models
Elena Sofia Ruzzetti, Giancarlo A. Xompero, Davide Venditti, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10024

Private Memorization Editing: Turning Memorization into a Defense to Strengthen Data Privacy in Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) memorize, and thus, among huge amounts of uncontrolled data, may memorize Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which should not be stored and, consequently, not leaked. In this paper, we introduce Private Memorization Editing (PME), an approach for preventing private data leakage that turns an apparent limitation, that is, the LLMs' memorization ability, into a powerful privacy defense strategy. While attacks against LLMs have been performed exploiting previou…

Balancing Utility and Privacy: Dynamically Private SGD with Random Projection
Zhanhong Jiang, Md Zahid Hasan, Nastaran Saadati, Aditya Balu, Chao Liu, Soumik Sarkar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09485

Balancing Utility and Privacy: Dynamically Private SGD with Random Projection
Stochastic optimization is a pivotal enabler in modern machine learning, producing effective models for various tasks. However, several existing works have shown that model parameters and gradient information are susceptible to privacy leakage. Although Differentially Private SGD (DPSGD) addresses privacy concerns, its static noise mechanism impacts the error bounds for model performance. Additionally, with the exponential increase in model parameters, efficient learning of these models using s…

Communication-Learning Co-Design for Differentially Private Over-the-Air Federated Distillation
Zihao Hu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Jia Yan (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Ying-Jun Angela Zhang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06557 …

Communication-Learning Co-Design for Differentially Private Over-the-Air Federated Distillation
The ever-growing learning model size nowadays challenges the communication efficiency and privacy preservation of the traditional federated learning (FL). In this paper, we propose a novel differentially private (DP) over-the-air federated distillation (FD) framework, where wireless devices (WDs) periodically share noise-perturbed model outputs with the parameter server by harnessing the superposition property of multi-access channels. Accordingly, over-the-air FD enables the shared responsibil…

Atolio, which is making a private AI-powered search tool for enterprises, raised a $24M Series A led by Translink Capital (FinSMEs)
https://www.finsmes.com/2025/09/atolio-raises-24m-in-total-funding.html

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Anne Clark:
🎵 Sleeper In Metropolis
#NowPlaying #AnneClark
https://knoberofficial.bandcamp.com/track/anne-clark-sleeper-in-metropolis-knober-special-retro-private-mix
https://open.spotify.com/track/0BnMXGSKIOTqroiBpXgLTV

Private Chats bei Google auffindbar: OpenAI nimmt Funktion zurück
Falsch verstandene Funktion macht private Chats öffentlich auffindbar – im Zweifel samt Namen. OpenAI greift nun ein.
https://www.

Tech billionaire Trump adviser
Marc Andreessen
recently said universities will
“pay the price” for promoting diversity and allegedly discriminating against Trump supporters,
according to messages he sent to a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders.

The billionaire’s messages cited Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University
and the National Science Foundation.

“I view Stanford and MIT as mainly political lobbying o…

Tech billionaire Trump adviser Marc Andreesen says universities will ‘pay the price’ for DEI
Tech investor and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen in a private group chat attacked colleges for promoting diversity, saying they had discriminated against “native born kids.”

Oh wow I just found the Web page of a photographer focusing on flowers.
This style is adorable!
#photography

LUCY KETCHUM
Fine art floral photography by Lucy Ketchum. I offer private mentoring sessions to photographers of all levels. In my shop you can find my floral prints for sale as well as greeting cards and a few digital products to download like wallpapers for your computer and phone.

📉 California's economy is already getting hit by immigration raids
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-07-30/people-reporting-to-work-in-private-sector-in-california-down-after-raids-report-sa…

California's economy is already getting hit by immigration raids
The number of people reporting to work in the private sector in California has decreased by 3.1% — a downturn only recently matched by the COVID-19 lockdown.

The people behind #ChatControl claim that they are not breaking end-to-end encryption. At the same time, private messages on services with end-to-end encryption will be intercepted to uncover crimes.

This means that we have to seriously start talking about the thought experiment Schrödinger's chat. We can safely continue to use chat services that offer secure communication as long as…

Can the beige-ers see us yet, or can we carry on being rude about them while they're all stuck in their own private cult Fediverse?
#beige #BeigeParty

Q&A with Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company, a book on PE firms' impact on media and other industries, on unionization efforts, nonprofit outlets, and more (Camille Bromley/Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/the-interview/megan-gr

Megan Greenwell on How Private Equity Is Devastating the Media
A conversation with the author of Bad Company.

If you think GrapheneOS isn’t private and secure, check out this comparison chart covering GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, IodéOS, /e/os, LineageOS, and Stock Android.
https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
It shows how much more GrapheneOS focuses on security and privac…

Headed out to the first gig of the weekend. Private event. Sorry.

DP-SPRT: Differentially Private Sequential Probability Ratio Tests
Thomas Michel, Debabrota Basu, Emilie Kaufmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06377 https://…

DP-SPRT: Differentially Private Sequential Probability Ratio Tests
We revisit Wald's celebrated Sequential Probability Ratio Test for sequential tests of two simple hypotheses, under privacy constraints. We propose DP-SPRT, a wrapper that can be calibrated to achieve desired error probabilities and privacy constraints, addressing a significant gap in previous work. DP-SPRT relies on a private mechanism that processes a sequence of queries and stops after privately determining when the query results fall outside a predefined interval. This OutsideInterval mecha…

Here's the start of an idea:
Those of us who end up directly getting a tariff payment demand on a purchase from overseas (especially if the purchase is from Brazil) might want to consider filing a personal Federal civil action against FFOTUS, as a private person, for recovery.
The basis would be an ultra vires government action, not authorized by law (this is why the Brazil path is particularly interesting, because there is no real way that this is in any way authorized by Co…

I made a second #Matrix account. The new one is now for all public chat channels while the old one is reserved for private chats only.
It helps me manage notifications such that my phone doesn't ring every time someone asks a question in a channel of a random open source project that I cared about once two years ago.

From private eye

Good for someone to finally tracks those cancelled condo projects. It’s surprising hard to track because while we hear of new condo approvals and consultations, when they cancel something it’s being kept mostly private.

Man Spends 27 Years Transforming Home Garden into Amazing 4-Season Oasis That’s Raised Half-Million for Charity https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/man-spends-27-years-transforming-home-garden-in…

Man Spends 27 Years Transforming Home Garden into Amazing 4-Season Oasis That’s Raised Half-Million for Charity
A self-taught gardener spent 27 years transforming his yard into a spectacular oasis that's one of the finest private gardens in Britain.

👇🧵
https://mastodon.social/@SeanCasten/114840593395959810

👇🧵
https://mastodon.social/@SeanCasten/114840593395959810

Strategic Incentivization for Locally Differentially Private Federated Learning
Yashwant Krishna Pagoti, Arunesh Sinha, Shamik Sural
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07138 https://

Strategic Incentivization for Locally Differentially Private Federated Learning
In Federated Learning (FL), multiple clients jointly train a machine learning model by sharing gradient information, instead of raw data, with a server over multiple rounds. To address the possibility of information leakage in spite of sharing only the gradients, Local Differential Privacy (LDP) is often used. In LDP, clients add a selective amount of noise to the gradients before sending the same to the server. Although such noise addition protects the privacy of clients, it leads to a degrada…

from my link log —
Picking uncontested private IP subnets with usage data.
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/picking-unused-rfc1918-ip-space
saved 2025-06-05

Picking uncontested private IP subnets with usage data

Micah Parsons, Jerry Jones had lengthy private meeting after practice no-show, per report https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/micah-parsons-jerry-jones-lengthy-private-meeting-after-practice-no-show

ICE secretly funnels millions to private prison giant under Trump-era loophole - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/ice-secretly-funnels-millions-to-private-prison-giant-under-trump-era-loophole/

Advent International agrees to acquire and take private Nasdaq-listed Sapiens International, an Israel-based insurance software company, for $2.5B in cash (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/insurance-softwa…

NFL backs NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell after potential conflict of interest arises

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-backs-n…

The EU wants to decrypt your private data by 2030 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/the-eu-wants-to-decrypt-your-private-data-by-2030
The EU Commission unveiled the first step in its security strategy to ensure …

When FinTech Meets Privacy: Securing Financial LLMs with Differential Private Fine-Tuning
Sichen Zhu, Hoyeung Leung, Xiaoyi Wang, Jia Wei, Honghui Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08995

When FinTech Meets Privacy: Securing Financial LLMs with Differential Private Fine-Tuning
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into financial technology (FinTech) has revolutionized the analysis and processing of complex financial data, driving advancements in real-time decision-making and analytics. With the growing trend of deploying AI models on edge devices for financial applications, ensuring the privacy of sensitive financial data has become a significant challenge. To address this, we propose DPFinLLM, a privacy-enhanced, lightweight LLM specifically designed for o…

Non-Asymptotic Analysis of Online Local Private Learning with SGD
Enze Shi, Jinhan Xie, Bei Jiang, Linglong Kong, Xuming He
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07041

Non-Asymptotic Analysis of Online Local Private Learning with SGD
Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) has been widely used for solving optimization problems with privacy guarantees in machine learning and statistics. Despite this, a systematic non-asymptotic convergence analysis for DP-SGD, particularly in the context of online problems and local differential privacy (LDP) models, remains largely elusive. Existing non-asymptotic analyses have focused on non-private optimization methods, and hence are not applicable to privacy-preservin…

Private market investments, while not technically barred from 401(k) plans, are riskier than publicly traded stocks and bonds.
They have traditionally been seen as unfit for defined contribution plans.
Consumer groups, lawmakers and some investment advisers have raised alarm about the potential harm to everyday investors.
Those concerns have been front and center.
But observers say the private asset industry, which has lobbied hard for the opening, could also expose…

Private Equity in Your 401(k). What Could Go Wrong?
Critics say an executive order that clears the way for alternative assets to enter retirement accounts poses risks to everyday investors. It could also pose some for private fund managers.

eu_procurements: EU procurement contract networks (2008-2016)
A bipartite network of public EU procurement contracts, from 2008 to 2016, between issuing buyers (public institutions such as a ministry or city hall) and supplying winners (a private firm). Contracts are aggregated into annual snapshots, edges are annotated with contract value information. Nodes are annotated with location information, including country of origin.
This network has 839824 nodes and 4098711 edges.

Ukraine’s minerals fund focus of private investment ahead of major recovery conference: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/08/ukraines-minerals-fund-focus-of.html

Securing Private Federated Learning in a Malicious Setting: A Scalable TEE-Based Approach with Client Auditing
Shun Takagi, Satoshi Hasegawa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08709 htt…

Securing Private Federated Learning in a Malicious Setting: A Scalable TEE-Based Approach with Client Auditing
In cross-device private federated learning, differentially private follow-the-regularized-leader (DP-FTRL) has emerged as a promising privacy-preserving method. However, existing approaches assume a semi-honest server and have not addressed the challenge of securely removing this assumption. This is due to its statefulness, which becomes particularly problematic in practical settings where clients can drop out or be corrupted. While trusted execution environments (TEEs) might seem like an obvio…

EU Digital Regulation and Guatemala: AI, 5G, and Cybersecurity
Victor Lopez Juarez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08315 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08315…

EU Digital Regulation and Guatemala: AI, 5G, and Cybersecurity
The paper examines how EU rules in AI, 5G, and cybersecurity operate as transnational governance and shape policy in Guatemala. It outlines the AI Act's risk approach, the 5G Action Plan and Security Toolbox, and the cybersecurity regime built on ENISA, NIS2, the Cybersecurity Act, and the Cyber Resilience Act. It traces extraterritorial channels such as the Brussels effect, private standards, supply chain clauses, and data transfer controls. Guatemala specific impacts include SME compliance co…

Optimizing Federated Learning for Scalable Power-demand Forecasting in Microgrids
Roopkatha Banerjee, Sampath Koti, Gyanendra Singh, Anirban Chakraborty, Gurunath Gurrala, Bhushan Jagyasi, Yogesh Simmhan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08022

Optimizing Federated Learning for Scalable Power-demand Forecasting in Microgrids
Real-time monitoring of power consumption in cities and micro-grids through the Internet of Things (IoT) can help forecast future demand and optimize grid operations. But moving all consumer-level usage data to the cloud for predictions and analysis at fine time scales can expose activity patterns. Federated Learning~(FL) is a privacy-sensitive collaborative DNN training approach that retains data on edge devices, trains the models on private data locally, and aggregates the local models in the…

Os vídeos de posseiros israelenses hostilizando palestinos e até mesmo turistas cristãos são abundantes e dišrios. É incrivelmente absurdo.
Aqui, como posseiros israelenses ocupam os assentamentos palestinos:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DN97GEtiiif/?igsh=MW82…

@matth.water on Instagram: "This morning US-backed colonists invaded Umm al-Kheir's private land twice, destroying vegetation and physically assaulting Palestinians."
13K likes, 4,105 comments - matth.water on August 29, 2025: "This morning US-backed colonists invaded Umm al-Kheir's private land twice, destroying vegetation and physically assaulting Palestinians.".

»Bitchat ist Jack Dorseys internetfreie Messaging-App:
Private Mitteilungen drahtlos zu übermitteln, aber ohne Internet - das soll Bitchat hinkriegen. Der Ansatz ist nicht ganz neu.«
Trotz dies sich spannend anhört, werde ich weiterhin nur auf @… und/oder @…

Bitchat ist Jack Dorseys internetfreie Messaging-App
Private Mitteilungen drahtlos zu übermitteln, aber ohne Internet - das soll Bitchat hinkriegen. Der Ansatz ist nicht ganz neu.

The public feed of the Meta AI app is filled with private and sensitive information, suggesting users might not be aware they are sharing their chats publicly (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/the-meta-ai-app-is-a-privacy-dis…

The Meta AI app is a privacy disaster | TechCrunch
Meta does not indicate to users what their privacy settings are as they post, or where they are even posting to. So, if you log into Meta AI with Instagram, and your Instagram account is public, then so too are your searches.

HierSearch: A Hierarchical Enterprise Deep Search Framework Integrating Local and Web Searches
Jiejun Tan, Zhicheng Dou, Yan Yu, Jiehan Cheng, Qiang Ju, Jian Xie, Ji-Rong Wen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08088

HierSearch: A Hierarchical Enterprise Deep Search Framework Integrating Local and Web Searches
Recently, large reasoning models have demonstrated strong mathematical and coding abilities, and deep search leverages their reasoning capabilities in challenging information retrieval tasks. Existing deep search works are generally limited to a single knowledge source, either local or the Web. However, enterprises often require private deep search systems that can leverage search tools over both local and the Web corpus. Simply training an agent equipped with multiple search tools using flat r…

I've noticed a lot of sites with popups and nagware are now blocking my view of said site because I've opted not to view their ads (through Firefox settings and private DNS). This is really irritating on the phone because the nagware takes up virtually all of the screen. However, once again RemovePaywall comes to the rescue. Just pop that pesky url into RP's search bar and voila...

#KI macht das #Steuerberater-Basic bald überflüssig. Private Steuererklärungen werden in fünf Jahren mehrheitlich automatisiert, Honorare schrumpfen. Doch Automatisierung bringt nicht nur Effizienz, sondern verschiebt die Wertschöpfung zu maßgeschneiderter Beratung. Wer jetzt nicht digital umdenkt,…

Constrained Distributed Heterogeneous Two-Facility Location Problems with Max-Variant Cost
Xinru Xu, Wenjing Liu, Qizhi Fang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08045 https://

Constrained Distributed Heterogeneous Two-Facility Location Problems with Max-Variant Cost
We study a constrained distributed heterogeneous two-facility location problem, where a set of agents with private locations on the real line are divided into disjoint groups. The constraint means that the facilities can only be built in a given multiset of candidate locations and at most one facility can be built at each candidate location. Given the locations of the two facilities, the cost of an agent is the distance from her location to the farthest facility (referred to as max-variant). Ou…

CISA official calls on lawmakers to extend cyber info-sharing law https://therecord.media/cisa-official-calls-on-lawmakers-renew-cisa2015

@… Just an amazingly bad idea to "tokenize" US equities (public and private) without having to go through the Securities Act registration process. We'll see if the SEC has any spine left.

A malicious Jira ticket can cause Cursor to exfiltrate secrets from the repository or local file system. But this is not just a problem with Cursor: GitHub MCP connections can also be exploited to expose private repository data, and a vulnerability in GitLab Duo allowed private information to be exposed through automatically rendered HTML code.

AgentFlayer: When a Jira Ticket Can Steal Your Secrets
TL;DR: A 0click attack through a malicious Jira ticket can cause Cursor to exfiltrate secrets from the repository or local file system.

"Appointed by Starmer as his undersecretary of state for homelessness and democracy she could have been a trailblazer for reform in the housing sector. She could have championed the return of sold-off council houses to the public sector. She might have persuaded the Cabinet to introduce rent controls to drive private-sector rents down to affordable levels."
The Rushanara Ali case is a spotlight on a broken housing sector | Morning Star

Remember the good old days when you could send an letter to the US Gov't at Fort Collins, Colorado. You'd include a self-addressed stamped envelope and a cassette tape and they would return the cassette with a recording of WWV so that you could set your clocks.
You think that is silly? Is it any more silly than that the maga-klan is trying to make US citizens buy weather (data that was acquired via US assets and taxes) from private dealers such as Accuweather?

DC Department of Parks and Recreation installed a new plaque at T Street Park memorializing William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved DC resident who was one of the country’s earliest advocates for LGBTQ rights.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the…

The First Self-Proclaimed Drag Queen Was a Formerly Enslaved Man
In the late 19th century, William Dorsey Swann's private parties attracted unwelcome attention from authorities and the press

DP-Fusion: Token-Level Differentially Private Inference for Large Language Models
Rushil Thareja, Preslav Nakov, Praneeth Vepakomma, Nils Lukas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04531

DP-Fusion: Token-Level Differentially Private Inference for Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) can leak sensitive information from their context through generated outputs, either accidentally or when prompted adversarially. Existing defenses that aim to preserve context privacy during inference either lack formal guarantees or suffer from a poor utility/privacy trade-off. We propose DP-Fusion, a token-level Differentially Private Inference (DPI) mechanism that provably bounds how much an LLM's outputs reveal about sensitive tokens in its context. We demonstra…

Not necessarily a professional, because unlikely things do happen. They must. You have to suspect that they were a trained shooter to get that lucky at that distance but a LOT of people who are not professional assassins in any sense* have well-practiced shooting skills. In the narrow sense of the phrase, only a tiny fraction of the highly-skilled shooters have ever killed a person for pay in the private sector.
*: i.e. not even military or hunters

Stand With Chicago Hat (@kenwhite.bsky.social)
Someone just explained to me that the shooter was a professional assassin on the grounds that they hit the carotid, in case you are worried that the fucking crazy is not being evenly distributed

#Brightline , the only privately run inter-city rail route in the United States that keeps getting handouts from government is in bad financial position.
They mainly offer service in Florida right now but are planning extension in California/Nevada
Turns out private rail might be hard to make money from, what a surprise.

Enhancing Privacy in Decentralized Min-Max Optimization: A Differentially Private Approach
Yueyang Quan, Chang Wang, Shengjie Zhai, Minghong Fang, Zhuqing Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07505

Enhancing Privacy in Decentralized Min-Max Optimization: A Differentially Private Approach
Decentralized min-max optimization allows multi-agent systems to collaboratively solve global min-max optimization problems by facilitating the exchange of model updates among neighboring agents, eliminating the need for a central server. However, sharing model updates in such systems carry a risk of exposing sensitive data to inference attacks, raising significant privacy concerns. To mitigate these privacy risks, differential privacy (DP) has become a widely adopted technique for safeguarding…

«Microsoft is cautiously onboarding Grok 4 following Hitler concerns»
#NotTheOnion - but I'd really prefer if those headlines were just satire…
https://www.theverge.com/notepad-microsoft-newsletter/754647/microsoft-grok-4-roll-out-private-preview-notepad

Private Queries with Sigma-Counting
Jun Gao, Jie Ding
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07018 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07018

Private Queries with Sigma-Counting
Many data applications involve counting queries, where a client specifies a feasible range of variables and a database returns the corresponding item counts. A program that produces the counts of different queries often risks leaking sensitive individual-level information. A popular approach to enhance data privacy is to return a noisy version of the actual count. It is typically achieved by adding independent noise to each query and then control the total privacy budget within a period. This a…

Reversible Video Steganography Using Quick Response Codes and Modified ElGamal Cryptosystem
Ramadhan J. Mstafa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07289 https://arx…

Reversible Video Steganography Using Quick Response Codes and Modified ElGamal Cryptosystem
The rapid transmission of multimedia information has been achieved mainly by recent advancements in the Internet's speed and information technology. In spite of this, advancements in technology have resulted in breaches of privacy and data security. When it comes to protecting private information in today's Internet era, digital steganography is vital. Many academics are interested in digital video because it has a great capability for concealing important data. There have been a vast number of…

Near-Optimal Differentially Private Graph Algorithms via the Multidimensional AboveThreshold Mechanism
Laxman Dhulipala, Monika Henzinger, George Z. Li, Quanquan C. Liu, A. R. Sricharan, Leqi Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02182

Near-Optimal Differentially Private Graph Algorithms via the Multidimensional AboveThreshold Mechanism
Many differentially private and classical non-private graph algorithms rely crucially on determining whether some property of each vertex meets a threshold. For example, for the $k$-core decomposition problem, the classic peeling algorithm iteratively removes a vertex if its induced degree falls below a threshold. The sparse vector technique (SVT) is generally used to transform non-private threshold queries into private ones with only a small additive loss in accuracy. However, a naive applicat…

Bitchat ist Jack Dorseys internetfreie Messaging-App
Private Mitteilungen drahtlos zu übermitteln, aber ohne Internet - das soll Bitchat hinkriegen. Der Ansatz ist nicht ganz neu.
https://www.

Santa Clarita, CA
#NoKings #NoBillionaires
Rally · Volunteer organized for May Day Strong
Saturday, October 18
9am – 2pm PDT
"Good Trouble" Corner
Valencia Boulevard & McBean Parkway
Santa Clarita, CA 91355

Santa Clarita, CA #NoKings #NoBillionaires · People For the American Way
Billionaires are converting the government into their private slush fund and just passed the largest wealth giveaway in the history of the US. The money they take from our families, they put in their overstuffed pockets. **Just like any bad boss, the way we stop the takeover is with collective action.** We are working people rising up to stop the billionaire takeover–not just through the ballot box or the courts, but through building a bigger and stronger movement. We are fighting for a coun…

Martin Sorrell's S4 says it is in early talks to combine with private equity-owned MSQ; S4 has a ~£130M market cap after its stock has declined ~35% in 2025 (Amy Thomson/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-…

Trump signs an EO clearing a path to add alternative assets like PE and cryptocurrencies into 401(k)s, instructing the US Secretary of Labor to review guidance (Sarah Min/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/07/trump-orde

Trump signs order allowing alternative assets like cryptocurrencies, private equity in 401(k)s
The executive order directs the U.S. Secretary of Labor to review fiduciary guidance on private market investments in 401(k) and other defined-contribution plans that are governed by ERISA.

Truthful Two-Obnoxious-Facility Location Games with Optional Preferences and Minimum Distance Constraint
Xiaojia Han, Wenjing Liu, Qizhi Fang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08036 ht…

Truthful Two-Obnoxious-Facility Location Games with Optional Preferences and Minimum Distance Constraint
In this paper, we study a truthful two-obnoxious-facility location problem, in which each agent has a private location in [0, 1] and a public optional preference over two obnoxious facilities, and there is a minimum distance constraint d between the two facilities. Each agent wants to be as far away as possible from the facilities that affect her, and the utility of each agent is the total distance from her to these facilities. The goal is to decide how to place the facilities in [0, 1] so as t…

IM-PIR: In-Memory Private Information Retrieval
Mpoki Mwaisela, Peterson Yuhala, Pascal Felber, Valerio Schiavoni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06514 https://…

IM-PIR: In-Memory Private Information Retrieval
Private information retrieval (PIR) is a cryptographic primitive that allows a client to securely query one or multiple servers without revealing their specific interests. In spite of their strong security guarantees, current PIR constructions are computationally costly. Specifically, most PIR implementations are memory-bound due to the need to scan extensive databases (in the order of GB), making them inherently constrained by the limited memory bandwidth in traditional processor-centric compu…

Write Letters to Voters
Letter Writing · Volunteer organized for Vote Forward
Tuesdays and Saturdays
10am PDT 1 more time
- In Person in Mountain View, CA
This event's address is private.
Sign up for more details.
https://www.mobilize.us/peoplefor/event/66

Write Letters to Voters - In Person in Mountain View, CA · People For the American Way
Join me every week for a letter and postcard writing party at my house in Mountain View. Bring friends, food to share if you can (it's a potluck!), and enthusiasm for writing. Let's turn out voters and win the future. Looking forward to seeing you!

Accelerating Private Heavy Hitter Detection on Continual Observation Streams
Rayne Holland
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03361 https://a…

Accelerating Private Heavy Hitter Detection on Continual Observation Streams
Differentially private frequency estimation and heavy hitter detection are core problems in the private analysis of data streams. Two models are typically considered: the one-pass model, which outputs results only at the end of the stream, and the continual observation model, which requires releasing private summaries at every time step. While the one-pass model allows more efficient solutions, continual observation better reflects scenarios where timely and ongoing insights are critical. In …

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Anne Clark:
🎵 Sleeper In Metropolis
#NowPlaying #AnneClark
https://knoberofficial.bandcamp.com/track/anne-clark-sleeper-in-metropolis-knober-special-retro-private-mix
https://open.spotify.com/track/0BnMXGSKIOTqroiBpXgLTV

Domestic frontier AI regulation, an IAEA for AI, an NPT for AI, and a US-led Allied Public-Private Partnership for AI: Four institutions for governing and developing frontier AI
Haydn Belfield
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06379

Domestic frontier AI regulation, an IAEA for AI, an NPT for AI, and a US-led Allied Public-Private Partnership for AI: Four institutions for governing and developing frontier AI
Compute governance can underpin international institutions for the governance of frontier AI. To demonstrate this I explore four institutions for governing and developing frontier AI. Next steps for compute-indexed domestic frontier AI regulation could include risk assessments and pre-approvals, data centre usage reports, and release gate regulation. Domestic regimes could be harmonized and monitored through an International AI Agency - an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for AI. This …

Ukraine's largest battery energy storage project enters final testing phase, set to power 600,000 homes: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/10/ukraines-largest-battery-energy-storage.html

High-Dimensional Differentially Private Quantile Regression: Distributed Estimation and Statistical Inference
Ziliang Shen, Caixing Wang, Shaoli Wang, Yibo Yan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05212

High-Dimensional Differentially Private Quantile Regression: Distributed Estimation and Statistical Inference
With the development of big data and machine learning, privacy concerns have become increasingly critical, especially when handling heterogeneous datasets containing sensitive personal information. Differential privacy provides a rigorous framework for safeguarding individual privacy while enabling meaningful statistical analysis. In this paper, we propose a differentially private quantile regression method for high-dimensional data in a distributed setting. Quantile regression is a powerful an…

Bo Hines, the head of the White House Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets, says he is stepping down and returning to the private sector (Hadriana Lowenkron/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…

Trump to allow cryptocurrency, private equity in 401(k)s
https://qz.com/trump-executive-action-401ks-cryptocurrency-private-equity

Perfectly-Private Analog Secure Aggregation in Federated Learning
Delio Jaramillo-Velez, Charul Rajput, Ragnar Freij-Hollanti, Camilla Hollanti, Alexandre Graell i Amat
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08683

Perfectly-Private Analog Secure Aggregation in Federated Learning
In federated learning, multiple parties train models locally and share their parameters with a central server, which aggregates them to update a global model. To address the risk of exposing sensitive data through local models, secure aggregation via secure multiparty computation has been proposed to enhance privacy. At the same time, perfect privacy can only be achieved by a uniform distribution of the masked local models to be aggregated. This raises a problem when working with real valued da…

"You’re only asking for trouble,”
said Charles Massimo, a Long Island, New York-based financial advisor and senior vice president at Wealth Enhancement. 
Pros and cons of private assets in 401(k)s
Retirement plans represent a significant market.
Defined-contribution workplace plans
— which include 401(k)s and 403(b) plans, among others
— held $12.2 trillion as of the end of the first quarter of 2025, according to the Investment Company Institute, a tr…

What private assets in 401(k) plans mean for investors: 'You’re only asking for trouble,' one advisor says
Millions of investors may soon have access to private assets in their 401(k) or other workplace retirement plans. What to know about the risks and rewards.

Towards Confidential and Efficient LLM Inference with Dual Privacy Protection
Honglan Yu, Yibin Wang, Feifei Dai, Dong Liu, Haihui Fan, Xiaoyan Gu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09091

Towards Confidential and Efficient LLM Inference with Dual Privacy Protection
CPU-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) and differential privacy (DP) have gained wide applications for private inference. Due to high inference latency in TEEs, researchers use partition-based approaches that offload linear model components to GPUs. However, dense nonlinear layers of large language models (LLMs) result in significant communication overhead between TEEs and GPUs. DP-based approaches apply random noise to protect data privacy, but this compromises LLM performance and sem…

Persuasion Gains and Losses from Peer Communication
Toygar T. Kerman, Anastas P. Tenev, Konstantin Zabarnyi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09099 https://arxiv.…

Persuasion Gains and Losses from Peer Communication
We study a Bayesian persuasion setting in which a sender wants to persuade a critical mass of receivers by revealing partial information about the state to them. The homogeneous binary-action receivers are located on a communication network, and each observes the private messages sent to them and their immediate neighbors. We examine how the sender's expected utility varies with increased communication among receivers. We show that for general families of networks, extending the network can str…

Spiele-Lobby: "Stop Destroying Videogames" verteuert Spiele
Wenn die Forderungen der EU-Bürgerinitiative erfüllt werden, werden Spiele teurer, meinen die Lobbyisten. Private Server seien auch nicht immer eine Option.
…

The Republican budget measure that Donald Trump signed into law late last week contains a provision that analysts say will
🔥allow private jet owners to write off the full cost of their aircraft in the first year of purchase,
❌a boon to the ultra-rich that comes as millions of people are set to lose healthcare under the same legislation.
FlyUSA, a private aviation provider, gushed in a blog post that with final passage of the unpopular budget reconciliation package,
…

The Return of 100% Bonus Depreciation: How 2025 Made Private Aircraft Ownership More Valuable Than Ever
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.1) was permanently reinstated 100% bonus depreciation for capital equipment, including business & aviation aircraft.

Zelensky arrives at Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/10/zelensky-arrives-at-ukraine-recovery.html

Adaptive Chosen-Ciphertext Security of Distributed Broadcast Encryption
Kwangsu Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10338 https://arxiv.or…

Adaptive Chosen-Ciphertext Security of Distributed Broadcast Encryption
Distributed broadcast encryption (DBE) is a specific kind of broadcast encryption (BE) where users independently generate their own public and private keys, and a sender can efficiently create a ciphertext for a subset of users by using the public keys of the subset users. Previously proposed DBE schemes have been proven in the adaptive chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) security model and have the disadvantage of requiring linear number of pairing operations when verifying the public key of a user.…

Membership and Memorization in LLM Knowledge Distillation
Ziqi Zhang, Ali Shahin Shamsabadi, Hanxiao Lu, Yifeng Cai, Hamed Haddadi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07054 https://

Membership and Memorization in LLM Knowledge Distillation
Recent advances in Knowledge Distillation (KD) aim to mitigate the high computational demands of Large Language Models (LLMs) by transferring knowledge from a large ''teacher'' to a smaller ''student'' model. However, students may inherit the teacher's privacy when the teacher is trained on private data. In this work, we systematically characterize and investigate membership and memorization privacy risks inherent in six LLM KD techniques. Using instruction-tuning settings that span seven NLP t…

https://www.theverge.com/notepad-microsoft-newsletter/754647/microsoft-grok-4-roll-out-private-preview-notepad?utm_content=buffer2ce4c&…

Microsoft is cautiously onboarding Grok 4 following Hitler concerns
Microsoft is taking a careful approach with rolling out Grok 4 on Azure AI Foundry. It’s working on a private preview for a handful of customers.

CB Insights: the number of AI unicorns reached 498 with a combined value of $2.7T, 100 founded since 2023, and over 1,300 AI startups valued above $100M (Robert Frank/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/10/ai-artificial-intelligence-billionaires-wealth.html…

AI is creating new billionaires at a record pace
With time, and IPOs, many of today's private AI fortunes will eventually become more liquid, providing a historic opportunity for wealth management firms

SOFT: Selective Data Obfuscation for Protecting LLM Fine-tuning against Membership Inference Attacks
Kaiyuan Zhang, Siyuan Cheng, Hanxi Guo, Yuetian Chen, Zian Su, Shengwei An, Yuntao Du, Charles Fleming, Ashish Kundu, Xiangyu Zhang, Ninghui Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10424

SOFT: Selective Data Obfuscation for Protecting LLM Fine-tuning against Membership Inference Attacks
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success and are widely adopted for diverse applications. However, fine-tuning these models often involves private or sensitive information, raising critical privacy concerns. In this work, we conduct the first comprehensive study evaluating the vulnerability of fine-tuned LLMs to membership inference attacks (MIAs). Our empirical analysis demonstrates that MIAs exploit the loss reduction during fine-tuning, making them highly effective in re…

heise | Vorsorge fürs Alter: Wie Frauen die Rentenlücke verkleinern können
Für Frauen bedeutet der Wechsel in die Rente oft große finanzielle Einbußen – und damit Abhängigkeit vom Partner. Abhilfe schaffen Staat und private Vorsorge.

Airalo, which offers affordable eSIM roaming packages for travelers, raised $220M at a $1B valuation (Kelsey Warner/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/07/11/2025/singapore-esim-startup-raises-220-million

Singapore eSIM startup raises $220 million
Airalo, led by a Dubai-based founder, was valued at more than $1 billion in its latest funding round, led by private equity giant CVC.

🔸"In Trauma”: A key Trump adviser says a Trump administration will seek to make civil servants miserable in their jobs.
🔸Military: In private speeches, he laid out plans to use armed forces to quell any domestic “riots.”
🔸1776 and 1860: He likened the country’s moment to those fractious periods in American history.

“Put Them in Trauma”: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda
Private videos reveal Trump adviser Russ Vought’s “shadow” plans for using the military on protesters, defunding the EPA and villainizing civil servants.

Cross-Service Token: Finding Attacks in 5G Core Networks
Anqi Chen, Riccardo Preatoni, Alessandro Brighente, Mauro Conti, Cristina Nita-Rotaru
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08992 h…

Cross-Service Token: Finding Attacks in 5G Core Networks
5G marks a major departure from previous cellular architectures, by transitioning from a monolithic design of the core network to a Service-Based Architecture (SBA) where services are modularized as Network Functions (NFs) which communicate with each other via standard-defined HTTP-based APIs called Service-Based Interfaces (SBIs). These NFs are deployed in private and public cloud infrastructure, and an access control framework based on OAuth restricts how they communicate with each other and …

Aim High, Stay Private: Differentially Private Synthetic Data Enables Public Release of Behavioral Health Information with High Utility
Mohsen Ghasemizade, Juniper Lovato, Christopher M. Danforth, Peter Sheridan Dodds, Laura S. P. Bloomfield, Matthew Price, Team LEMURS, Joseph P. Near
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02971

Aim High, Stay Private: Differentially Private Synthetic Data Enables Public Release of Behavioral Health Information with High Utility
Sharing health and behavioral data raises significant privacy concerns, as conventional de-identification methods are susceptible to privacy attacks. Differential Privacy (DP) provides formal guarantees against re-identification risks, but practical implementation necessitates balancing privacy protection and the utility of data. We demonstrate the use of DP to protect individuals in a real behavioral health study, while making the data publicly available and retaining high utility for downst…

The University of Michigan paid over $800,000 to Amerishield,
parent company to a private security company called City Shield.
It was part of a broader
👉 $3 million public‑security budget, which included ⚠️surveillance of pro‑Palestinian student activists.
The university hired plainclothes agents who 💥trailed students into cafés, harassed them, and even staged confrontations,
including faking a disability to falsely accuse them of theft.
City Shield, a p…

US Campuses Have Become the Newest Laboratories for Surveillance Technology
From Gaza to the US, military-grade surveillance tools are being deployed to monitor and punish student dissent.

PLRV-O: Advancing Differentially Private Deep Learning via Privacy Loss Random Variable Optimization
Qin Yang, Nicholas Stout, Meisam Mohammady, Han Wang, Ayesha Samreen, Christopher J Quinn, Yan Yan, Ashish Kundu, Yuan Hong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06264

PLRV-O: Advancing Differentially Private Deep Learning via Privacy Loss Random Variable Optimization
Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) is a standard method for enforcing privacy in deep learning, typically using the Gaussian mechanism to perturb gradient updates. However, conventional mechanisms such as Gaussian and Laplacian noise are parameterized only by variance or scale. This single degree of freedom ties the magnitude of noise directly to both privacy loss and utility degradation, preventing independent control of these two factors. The problem becomes more pron…

A security researcher said
flaws in a carmaker’s online dealership portal
exposed the private information
and vehicle data of its customers,
and could have allowed hackers to remotely break into any of its customers’ vehicles.
Eaton Zveare, who works as a security researcher at software delivery company Harness,
told TechCrunch the flaw he discovered
allowed the creation of an admin account
that granted “unfettered access” to the unnamed carma…

Security flaws in a carmaker's web portal let one hacker remotely unlock cars from anywhere | TechCrunch
Security researcher Eaton Zveare told TechCrunch that the flaws he discovered in the carmaker's centralized dealer portal exposed vast access to customer and vehicle data. With this access, Zveare said he could remotely take over a customer's account and unlock their cars, and more.

A look at the rise of $5B unicorns, which make up 13% of ~1,600 unicorns but hold $3.5T of $6T total valuation; 17 startups joined the $5B club in H1 2025 (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/ultra-unicorn-startups…

The Rise Of The Ultra-Unicorns: $5B+ Startups Are Leading The Private-Market Herd In 2025
Of the nearly 1,600 companies on The Crunchbase Unicorn Board, a small but ultra-elite club of private companies valued at $5 billion or more is growing across multiple metrics, an analysis of the data shows. We take a look at them, their valuations and which sectors — and countries — rank the highest.

Tea, which claims to make dating safer for women, is the #2 app in the US App Store, despite multiple security flaws exposing private chats, photo IDs, and more (Ben Lovejoy/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2025/07/29/tea-app-secur…

Tea app security breaches reveal private chats and photo ID
Two major security vulnerabilities in the Tea app – which claims to make dating safer for women – have exposed...

Trump administration is launching a new private health tracking system with Big Tech’s help
The system
-- spearheaded by an administration that has already freely shared highly personal data about Americans in ways that have tested legal bounds
-- could put patients’ desires for more convenience at their doctor’s office on a collision course with their expectations that their medical information be kept private.
“There are enormous ethical and legal concerns,”
…

Trump administration announces new private health tracking system with Big Tech’s help
The Trump administration is pushing for Americans to upload personal health data to new apps run by private tech companies. This initiative aims to make accessing health records and monitoring wellness easier. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump is expected to discuss this at an event with leaders from companies like Google and Amazon. The system will focus on diabetes, weight management, and digital tools for patient check-ins. While officials say patients must opt in and data will be secure,…