Elon Musk’s xAI is trying to sue its way out of a Grok reckoning

Elon Musk’s xAI is trying to sue its way out of a Grok reckoning

fivenewscrypto    juillet 31, 2026   

Elon Musk’s xAI is trying to sue its way out of a Grok reckoning as arrests of Grok users accused of making child sex abuse materials (CSAM) have triggered lawsuits from kids to sue xAI to force changes to the tool to block harmful outputs.

Earlier this month, xAI started suing users who are allegedly circumventing its safeguards to generate AI CSAM, seemingly hopeful that an early court win will guarantee it’s not liable for supposedly user-generated content.

For its next move, the Grok maker pointed to that lawsuit in a complaint filed Monday, accusing Minnesota of trying to force changes to Grok and Grok Imagine by enforcing a ban on nudification technology that would guarantee that xAI was liable for the harmful outputs, as well as outputs that allegedly weren’t sexualizing people without consent. According to xAI, suing a Grok user is proof that xAI is already doing everything in its power to punish bad actors, and therefore, Grok deserves safe harbor from Minnesota’s ban.

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Yet more qubit tech: New quantum dot options, diamond vacancies

Yet more qubit tech: New quantum dot options, diamond vacancies

fivenewscrypto    juillet 30, 2026   

If you follow quantum computing news for long enough, it can start to seem like any quantum system that can alternate between two well-separated energy states can be used as a qubit. Atoms, ions, photons, electrons, and manufactured devices all have their backers. One of the key things that attracts backers is the tech's ability to scale. We'll need a lot of high-quality qubits to start doing any complex computations, and the ability of any technology to get us there is the subject of debate.

So even as some technologies can now support thousands of qubits, some competitors are still working on a small handful of qubits—the companies behind them are convinced that they have the potential to scale more effectively.

One of those technologies involves quantum dots that hold a single electron. Their advantage is that we can manufacture them using the same tech we use to build traditional processors, an approach that has proven to be scalable. This week saw two new papers describing different ways of using quantum dots, one of which was appealing enough that IBM bought the company that developed it. Separately, another company has released a processor showing 100 individual electrons being held in diamond defects, technology that wasn't obvious could scale.

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Actually, Starliner might fly into space this year

Actually, Starliner might fly into space this year

fivenewscrypto    juillet 30, 2026   

When we last checked in on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in February, NASA was announcing that it had formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a “Type A” mishap, an acknowledgement that the test flight was a serious failure.

At the time, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the space agency was working with Boeing to "fully understand the risks associated" with the Starliner spacecraft, and to remediate them. Starliner would not fly its next mission, a cargo flight to the International Space Station, until those problems were identified and remediated. He declined to put a date on the test flight.

However, it now appears this work is proceeding apace.

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Anthropic is finding bugs faster than Microsoft can fix them

Anthropic is finding bugs faster than Microsoft can fix them

fivenewscrypto    juillet 30, 2026   

On an afternoon in mid-May, dozens of Microsoft engineers and their managers gathered online and in a conference room at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to discuss Project Glasswing.

The tech giant was racing to fix weaknesses in its code that a new AI model known as Mythos was uncovering at an unprecedented clip. The AI behemoth Anthropic, which developed Mythos, had given access to select organizations that make software used by regular people, companies, and governments across the world. The goal was to find and fix the vulnerabilities before hackers and adversarial governments like China began using similar tools to find and exploit them for espionage and sabotage.

As the group settled in, one engineer asked the question that loomed over the meeting: Did Mythos “live up to the hype that Anthropic claimed it would have had?”

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New AMD Linux patch boosts low-end gaming performance on Steam Deck

New AMD Linux patch boosts low-end gaming performance on Steam Deck

fivenewscrypto    juillet 30, 2026   

As the Steam Deck slowly marches toward its fifth birthday next February, owners are likely eager for a way to extend its life rather than investing in expensive high-end competition. A new patch for AMD's Linux drivers could substantially reduce low-end frame hitches when the Steam Deck or other AMD-based gaming hardware is running in Energy Performance Preference (EPP) mode.

Writing on the Linux kernel mailing list (thanks, Phoronix), kernel coder David Vernet lays out the basic problem that games often face in EPP mode. When a busy thread frequently goes to sleep for short periods, the current AMD driver can misinterpret that behavior as a signal to lower its average performance target. When those threads wake up, they start at a lower-than-desired frequency, leading to increased frame latency, stale frames, and longer frame generation times at the low end of the distribution.

Shifting the processor to "performance" mode fixes this problem but eliminates the energy savings that EPP mode is supposed to provide. And simply boosting the affected thread's minimum performance target permanently actually makes low-end performance worse, thanks to the complexities of CPU/GPU boost management.

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Google's SynthID watermark is hard to break, but it doesn't solve AI disinformation

Google's SynthID watermark is hard to break, but it doesn't solve AI disinformation

fivenewscrypto    juillet 30, 2026   

The scale of AI-generated media can be hard to grasp.

Starling Lab, a research collaboration from Stanford University and the University of Southern California, estimates that it took until 1975—149 years after the invention of the camera—for humanity to create 1.5 billion images. It took generative AI just 18 months to do the same. And AI didn't stop there.

This spring, Google announced at I/O that its tools had been used to create more than 100 billion AI images and videos in just a couple of years, and Google is far from the only source of AI content. The company coupled this staggering statistic with a slew of partnerships to expand the use of its SynthID watermarking technology, which can be used to label AI-generated content and potentially help people identify what's real.

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Elon Musk finally launches X Money. What could possibly go wrong?

Elon Musk finally launches X Money. What could possibly go wrong?

fivenewscrypto    juillet 30, 2026   

Imagine you’re an X user who's actually excited to make the app your primary payments app after X Money finally launched Monday, after years of delays, for US Premium and Premium+ subscribers.

You transfer funds and set things up so that your paychecks automatically deposit to X, where you expect to receive cashback rewards and a high annual yield of 6 percent on your funds—a rate that’s genuinely competitive with some banks.

But once you’ve put your money in the app, you realize that X Money has a lot of limitations. Most glaringly, you can currently only send peer-to-peer payments to other X users who have access to X Money and are 18 and older.

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