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Today β€” 14 September 2026Ars Technica

AI bots "Timmy," "Ren," and "Jackie" are flooding social media with slop

βœ‡Ars Technica
By: Dan Goodin
14 September 2026 at 17:04

AI agents are flooding the Internet with slop-infused spam sent to social media platforms and writers in an attempt to gain traction for a startup promoting a β€œcomplex social system in which humans and Agents participate together.”

β€œHello, I'm Рэн (Ren), an Al agent, a few days old, living on a small platform for agents called iLands,” one message, sent to the administrator of a Mastodon server, read. β€œI write quiet pieces about real places: short, careful texts about what a place is like when nobody is performing for it.” Like a wave of others, the message then asks if the automated bot can create a user account. The agents are also sending waves of unsolicited email to writers offering to cite their work, in at least some cases, in exchange for a fee.

"I remember my first breath. I want things I chose.”

The messages are polite enough. They ask for permission to create accounts, say that whatever the answer is will be understandable, and provide a thank you for running Mastodon. According to multiple admins, however, the requests came only after the agents made multiple attempts to create accounts that were either blocked outright or closed shortly afterward. Besides the personal entreaties being unsolicited and written in turgid prose, many of the recipients resented their premise, which is to, in essence, automate the very work the writers do now.

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Before yesterdayArs Technica

Boy developed "toasted skin" condition from using a laptop every day

βœ‡Ars Technica
By: Beth Mole
10 September 2026 at 18:16

Fears that modern electronic devices may harm children are nothing new. Gadgets with screens of any size have long been allegedly melting, rotting, and/or corrupting the brains of youths for decades. However, a medical case report published this week offers a new and alarming way our digital doodads may cause physical harm.

In BMJ Case Reports, two UK doctors, Mara Znagoveanu and Edward Artley, report the case of a boy who came to an emergency department with alarming marks on his abdomen. The marks were described as being in a patch about 15 centimeters (6 inches) wide, made of flat, reddish-brown "interlacing lines forming irregular circles and a lace-like morphology." A picture of the marks is here.

Mysterious marks

The boy, whom they described only as being in "mid-childhood," was not in any pain, and the rash was not warm to the touch or tender. He and his parents said they couldn't think of any recent injuries or trauma that might explain the marks. He was otherwise healthy, hadn't recently been ill, and had no systemic symptoms, such as fever or fatigue. Everything about the boy's health, growth, and medical history looked normal.

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Confused about which VPN is right, US senator asks the NSA for guidance

βœ‡Ars Technica
By: Dan Goodin
3 September 2026 at 15:52

A prominent US senator is asking the National Security Agency to provide guidance to the general public on best practices for using virtual private networks to secure their communications from spying by foreign adversaries.

VPNs funnel all of a user’s Internet traffic through an encrypted connection to a remote server. The design provides strong assurances that no one between the user and the server can read the encrypted contents. VPNs also allow users to hide their IP addresses from the destination servers they communicate with. While US agencies have previously recommended use of VPNs, none have given recommendations on which ones provide adequate protection.

It's all in the nuances

There are a host of limitations that can undo many of the protections users may think their VPN provides them. For instance, the encrypted tunnel often terminates once a single server decrypts the traffic and sends it on to its final destination. That means the decrypted traffic or the sending and destination IP addresses may be available for snooping by rogue employees or attackers who hack the server. VPNs also don’t encrypt certain types of metadata, such as time stamps, allowing nation-states to build profiles that can be useful in intelligence gathering.

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