Nintendo launched a new music-streaming app on Wednesday that lets fans revisit some of the game maker’s most beloved tunes, ranging from Switch games like Super Mario Odyssey and Splatoon 3 back to NES classics Metroid and Super Mario Bros. Nintendo Music — not a sequel to Wii Music — is exclusively available to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, and can be downloaded now for Android and iOS devices from the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store, respectively.

The Nintendo Music app behaves a lot like established music-streaming services like Spotify. Users can browse by game, platform, and character, or throw on mood-based playlists. Nintendo Music will let users loop songs for up to an hour, create their own playlists, and download tunes for offline listening. The app even has a spoiler setting that will prevent you from hearing songs from boss battles or big moments you might not have encountered yet.

Nintendo Music’s selection is pretty meager, compared to Nintendo’s massive game catalog. But it does include some genuine bangers. In addition to having “Jump Up, Super Star!” on tap, Nintendo Music offers the Wii Shop Channel background jingle to supplement any style of shopping you’re doing.

Here’s the full list of soundtracks available on Nintendo Music at launch:

Nintendo Switch 

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons
• Kirby Star Allies
• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
• Pikmin 4
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet
• Splatoon 3
• Super Mario Odyssey
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Wii

• Super Mario Galaxy
• Wii Channels

Nintendo DS

• Nintendogs
• Tomodachi Collection

Nintendo GameCube

• Metroid Prime

Game Boy Advance

• Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade

Nintendo 64

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Star Fox 64

Super NES

• Donkey Kong Country
• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island

Game Boy 

• Dr. Mario
• Kirby’s Dream Land

NES

• Metroid 
• Metroid (Famicom Disk System ver.)
• Super Mario Bros.

Nintendo says that more tracks will be added to Nintendo Music over time. The app’s launch trailer highlights games like Wii Sports, Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Splatoon 2, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Donkey Kong Country 2, and F-Zero X as future additions.

Unlike other game publishers, Nintendo has resisted putting its game music on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music in favor of its own dedicated app. The company has also aggressively gone after YouTube channels that republish its game music; in 2022, Nintendo hit a popular music channel known as GilvaSunner with thousands of copyright strikes, forcing the channel offline. An alternative, of sorts, known as SilvaGunner, still hosts high quality rips of great video game music.

Happy Jimi Halloween to everyone who celebrates. It’s that wonderful time of year when our favorite Japanese festival, Jimi Halloween, is on full display. Mundane Halloween, as we coined it back in 2018, is when people dress up in costumes so mundane they have to be explained. The tradition was started in 2014 by a […]

Today's links

• Of course we can tax billionaires: They disguise their demands ("don't tax billionaires") as observations ("it is technically impossible to tax billionaires").
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Of course we can tax billionaires (permalink)

Billionaires are pretty confident that they can't be taxed – not just that they shouldn't be taxed, but rather, that it is technically impossible to tax the ultra-rich. They're not shy about explaining why, either – and neither is their army of lickspittles.

If it's impossible to tax billionaires, then anyone who demands that we tax billionaires is being childish. If taxing billionaires is impossible, then being mad that we're not taxing billionaires is like being mad at gravity.

Boy is this old trick getting old. It was already pretty thin when Margaret Thatcher rolled it out, insisting that "there is no alternative" to her program of letting the rich get richer and the poor go hungry. Dressing up a demand ("stop trying to think of alternatives") as a scientific truth ("there is no alternative") sets up a world where your opponents are Doing Ideology, while you're doing science.

Billionaires basically don't pay tax – that's a big part of how they got to be billionaires:

https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files

By cheating on their taxes, they get to keep – and invest – more money than less-rich people (who get to keep more money than regular people and poor people, obvs). They get so much money that they can "invest" it in corrupting the political process, for example, by flushing vast sums of dark money into elections to unseat politicians who care about finance crime and replace them with crytpo-friendly lawmakers who'll turn a blind eye to billionaires' scams:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster

Once someone gets rich enough, they acquire impunity. They become too big to fail. They become too big to jail. They become too big to care. They buy presidents. They become president.

A decade ago, Thomas Piketty published his landmark Capital in the 21st Century, tracing three centuries of global capital flows and showing how extreme inequality creates political instability, leading to bloody revolutions and world wars that level the playing field by destroying most of the world's capital in an orgy of violence, with massive collateral damage:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Piketty argued that unless we taxed the rich, we would attain the same political instability that provoked the World Wars, but in a nuclear-tipped world that was poised on the brink of ecological collapse. He even laid out a program for this taxation, one that took account of all the things rich people would do to try to hide their assets.

Today, the destruction that Piketty prophesied is on our doorstep, and all over the world, political will is gathering to do something about our billionaire problem. The debate rages from France to a dozen-plus US states that are planning wealth taxes on the ultra-rich.

Wherever that debate takes hold, billionaires and their proxies pop up to tell us that we're Doing Ideology, that there is no alternative, and that it is literally impossible to tax the ultra-rich.

In a new blog post, Piketty deftly demolishes this argument, showing how thin the arguments for the impossibility of a billionaire tax really is:

https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2024/10/15/how-to-tax-billionaires/

First, there's the argument that the ultra-rich are actually quite poor. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg don't have a lot of money, they have a lot of stock, which they can't sell. Why can't they sell their stock? You'll hear a lot of complicated arguments about illiquidity and the effect on the share-price of a large sell-off, but they all boil down to this: if we make billionaires sell a bunch of their stock, they will be poorer.

No duh.

Piketty has an answer to the liquidity crisis of our poormouthing billionaires:

If finding a buyer is challenging, the government could accept these shares as payment for taxes. If necessary, it could then sell these shares through various methods, such as offering employees to purchase them, which would increase their stake in the company.

Though Piketty doesn't say so, billionaires are not actually poor. They have fucktons of cash, which they acquire through something called "buy, borrow, die," which allows them to create intergenerational dynastic wealth for their failsons:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/buy-borrow-die-rich-avoid-140004536.html

Billionaires know they're not poor. They even admit it, when they say, "Okay, but the other reason it's impossible to tax us is that we're richer and therefore more powerful than the governments that want to try it."

Piketty points out the shell-game at the core of this argument: the free movement of money that allows for tax-dodging was created by governments. They made these laws, so they can change them. Governments that can't exercise their sovereign power to tax the wealthy end up taxing the poor, eroding their legitimacy and hence their power. Taxing the rich – a wildly popular move – will make governments more powerful, not less.

Big countries like the US (and federations like the EU) have a lot of power. The US ended Swiss banking secrecy and manages to tax Americans living abroad. There's no reason that France couldn't pass a wealth-tax that applies to people based on their historical residency: a 51 year old French billionaire who decamps to Switzerland to duck a wealth tax after 50 years in France could be held liable for 50/51 of the wealth tax.

The final argument Piketty takes up is the old saw that taxing the rich is illegal, or, if it were made legal, would be unconstitutional. As Piketty says, rich people have taken this position every single time they faced meaningful tax enforcement, and they have repeatedly lost this fight. France has repeatedly levied wealth taxes, as long ago as 1789 and as recently as 1945.

Taxing the ultra-rich isn't like the secret of embalming Pharaohs – it's not a lost art from a fallen civilization. The US top rate of tax in 1944 was 97%. The postwar top rate from 1945-63 was 94%, and it was 70% from 1965-80. This was the period of the largest expansion of the US economy in the nation's history. These are the "good old days" Republicans say they want to return to.

The super-rich keep getting richer. In France, the 500 richest families were worth a combined €200b in 2010. Today, it's €1.2 trillion. No wonder a global wealth tax is at the top of the agenda for next month's G20 Summit in Rio.

Here in the US – where money can easily move across state lines and where multiple states are racing each other to the bottom to be the best onshore/offshore tax- and financial secrecy haven – state-level millionaire taxes are kicking ass.

Massachusetts's 2024 millionaire tax has raised more than $1.8b, exceeding all expectations (it was originally benchmarked at $1b), by taxing annual income in excess of $1m at an additional 4%:

https://www.boston.com/news/business/2024/05/21/heres-how-much-the-new-massachusetts-millionaires-tax-has-raised-this-year/

This is exactly the kind of tax that billionaires say is impossible. It's so easy to turn ordinary income into sheltered income – realizing it as a capital gain, say – so raising taxes on income will do nothing. Who are you gonna believe, billionaires or the 1.8 billion dead presidents lying around the Massachusetts Department of Revenue?

But say you are worried that taxing ordinary income is a nonstarter because of preferential capital gains treatment. No worry, Washington State has you covered. Its 7% surcharge on capital gains in excess of $250,000 also exceeded all expectations, bringing in $600m more than expected in its first year – a year when the stock market fell by 25%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

Okay, but what if all those billionaires flee your state? Good riddance, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. All we need is an exit tax, like the one in California, which levies a one-time 0.4% tax on net worth over $30m for any individual who leaves the state.

Billionaires are why we can't have nice things – a sensible climate policy, workers' rights, a functional Supreme Court and legislatures that answer to the people, rather than deep-pocketed donors.

The source of billionaires' power isn't mysterious: it's their money. Take away the money, take away the power. With more than a dozen states considering wealth taxes, we're finally in a race to the top, to see which state can attack the corrosive power of extreme wealth most aggressively.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• What It Means to Be "A Tad Radical" https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-it-means-to-be-a-tad-radical

• Legal complaint filed against Fifa's 'abuse of dominance' https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c981203e61qo

• Stop Project 2025 Comic https://stopproject2025comic.org (h/t Sumana Harihareswara)

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This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Why Your Idea to Save Journalism Won’t Work (a checklist) https://www.metafilter.com/85761/How-To-Save-Media#2776753

#15yrsago Brit copyright group says, “No laptops allowed in cinemas” https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/15/brit-copyright-group-says-no-laptops-allowed-in-cinemas/

#15yrsago Complex derivatives are “intractable” — you can’t tell if they’re being tampered with https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2009/10/15/intractability-financial-derivatives/

#10yrsago Jean Baudrillard predicted the Pumpkin Spice Latte http://www.critical-theory.com/understanding-jean-baudrillard-with-pumpkin-spice-lattes/

#10yrsago Obama administration has secured 526 months of jail time for leakers https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/leak-prosecutions-obama-takes-it-11-or-should-we

#5yrsago Samuel Delany’s 1977 Star Wars review: why is the future so damned white and male? https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/15/samuel-delanys-1977-star-wars-review-why-is-the-future-so-damned-white-and-male/

#5yrsago The rich poop different: measuring inequality with sewage https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1910242116

#5yrsago 1 in 14 Trump appointees is a former lobbyist, four times the rate under Obama https://www.propublica.org/article/we-found-a-staggering-281-lobbyists-whove-worked-in-the-trump-administration#169046

#5yrsago The first-ever mandatory California drug price report reveals Big Pharma’s farcical price-gouging https://californiahealthline.org/news/californias-new-transparency-law-reveals-staggering-rise-in-wholesale-drug-prices/

#5yrsago The far right is dominating the information wars through “keyword signaling” https://www.wired.com/story/devin-nunes-and-the-dark-power-of-keyword-signaling/

#5yrsago Medallion Status: comparison is the thief of joy, and John Hodgman is the thief-taker https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/15/medallion-status-comparison-is-the-thief-of-joy-and-john-hodgman-is-the-thief-taker/

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18
  https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/

• SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22
  https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn

• Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23
  https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow

• TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
  https://tusconscificon.com/

• International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24
  https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme

• ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18
  https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Speciale intervista a Cory Doctorow (Digitalia)
  https://digitalia.fm/744/

• Was There Ever An Old, Good Internet? (David Graeber Institute)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Jlxx5TboE

• Go Fact Yourself
  https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/

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Latest books (permalink)

• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 762 words (63956 words total).

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/

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This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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https://twitter.com/doctorow

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https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

What makes a supercar a supercar? Sure, a mid-engined form factor and obscene power have something to do with it, but the biggest barrier other than exclusivity is a top speed just north of 200 mph. Well, if top speed is anything to judge it by, the 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 just blasted past supercar territory and into the hypercar realm with a top speed of 233 mph. No, that’s not a typo — it’s now slated to be the fastest mass-produced American car ever.

So, how do you go 233 mph in a stock Corvette ZR1? It all starts with skipping the fancy ZTK aero package. While the big wing, gurney flap, and other aero mods will keep ZR1s equipped with this package stuck to the track, the drag does have a negative effect on the top speed. So, base aero package, Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires, aluminum wheels, basically exactly what you’d get if you ordered a ZR1 with zero options. Time for Chevrolet to see what it can do on the 2.5-mile banked test track at ATP Automotive Testing Papenburg, which is in Papenburg, which is in Germany.

On the first day, Corvette ZR1 lead development engineer Chris Barber gave a practice run a shot. A 230 mph-plus practice run. While Barber stated that the 50-degree banking at ATP was “unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” he also noted that on the straightaway, “The car feels stable so that it doesn’t present as that big of an event.” However, that was only a practice run for a reason.

See, official top speed attempts are run in two directions to counteract surface grade and wind direction. With a tailwind and a slight downhill slope, a car can be way faster in one direction than the other. This requirement for a two-way average is also why the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ is excluded from the record books — it only ran in one direction.

Well, according to GM, company president Mark Reuss set out the very next day for a true two-way run. The result? A genuine two-way average of 233 mph, no bones about it. Take a second to realize how absolutely insane that is, and if it doesn’t sink in, consider the following:

In stock form, the new ZR1 is right in the ballpark of the McLaren F1 when it comes to top speed. While some sources cite a top speed of 240 mph, McLaren itself modified that car by bumping up the rev limiter to 8,300 RPM. Dial things back to stock, and you’ll see that Car And Driver reported that “The F1 runs into the 7500-rpm redline in sixth at 221 mph,” in a period-correct road test. Ghouls and goblins, we now have a Corvette with a factory warranty that’ll keep up with the ultimate supercar of the 1990s.

What’s more, the new Corvette ZR1 is faster than the new McLaren W1, faster than a LaFerrari, faster than a Porsche 918 Spyder, a McLaren P1, or a Ferrari SF90. It’s just as fast as at the top end as a Pagani Zonda R. We’re talking hypercar top speed born in Kentucky, and sold from the same showroom that’ll also happily let you order a one-ton heavy-duty pickup truck.

The King of the Hill is back, baby. Chevrolet has crafted something that, with a long enough runway, only the most elite cars in the world can keep up with. We’re talking seven-figure machines with Forbes List clientele and famous Instagram accounts. The new Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1 won’t be nearly that expensive, but it definitely won’t be cheap either. Still, maybe, if you re-mortgage your home, you can drive GM’s world-destroyer. So, Europe, what’s your move?

(Photo credits: Chevrolet)

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• This Dime-Sized Easter Egg On Every Corvette ZR1 Honors A Living Legend

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• The Corvette ZR1 Has Always Been Proof America Can Build Supercars When It Wants To

• The Corvette ZR1 Is Coming And It Could Be The First Factory Twin-Turbo ’Vette

• The C4 Corvette ZR-1 Is The Last Affordable ’90s Supercar

Got a hot tip? Send it to us here. Or check out the stories on our homepage.

The post The 233-MPH 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 Is Officially A Hypercar appeared first on The Autopian.

A few weeks ago, RADwood graced our fair city of Detroit. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past several years, RADwood is a car show that celebrates vehicles from the 80’s and 90’s in cities across the US and the UK. It’s more than just a show; as the website brands it, RADwood is a “lifestyle event.”

There is food, live music, awards, and people dress up in their best period attire. They also pose many of the vehicles in a more artful way than typical car shows where everyone is just lined up next to each other. While at the show I got to sit down with Art Cervantes, the director of RADwood, and chat about cars and all things RAD.

In the RADwood spirit, I eschewed my magic phone and brought some old-school disposable film cameras for my brother and me to take pictures with at the show. This itself was a trip down memory lane. I forgot about having to squint into the tiny viewfinder, the plasticky ratcheting sound as you wind the film after each photo, running out of film, and having to wait three weeks to get your photos back from the developer to see if they are any good. Truthfully, I love the results. Most look like they were taken at a car show 30 years ago.

It’s important to explain why RADwood exists. I was born in 1984, and am solidly in RADwood’s target demographic. When I came of age and started going to car shows in the 90’s and 2000’s the Boomers were having their day. Hippie culture was sort of making a comeback, songs from the 60’s and 70’s were being used in commercials to cash in on their nostalgia. At car shows it was all about the muscle car.

Don’t get me wrong, I love muscle cars and hope to own one someday, but I don’t have the same connection with them as the Boomer generation who grew up with them. I got driven to school in 80’s Hondas and Chrysler minivans. I remember staying up all night with excitement when my parents bought a new car, a 1992 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser. The first time I went over 100 mph was in my friend’s Mitsubishi 3000GT. For the dominant group of enthusiasts at the time, 80’s and 90’s cars just weren’t that cool. My 94 Bonneville probably would’ve been looked down on if I brought it to a show 20 years ago.

We all know life moves in cycles. The muscle cars of the ’60s and ’70s are still plenty cool, but 80s and 90s babies are now on the scene, buying and restoring the cars of their youth. As much as I love to see a 69’ Plymouth Roadrunner, I get more excited seeing a 90’s Plymouth Voyager and remembering all those trips with my friends horsing around in the back seats. It’s awesome seeing the same Lamborghini Diablo I had on my wall as a kid. It was inevitable a show that celebrates these cars would come on the scene, and RADwood does an excellent job.

It was a lot of fun walking around Detroit’s Hart Plaza, seeing people decked out in 80’s and 90’s attire, drooling over an excellent selection of cars. You’ll see bedroom wall poster supercars, mundane daily drivers, and everything in between. That is another cool thing about RADwood, is all cars from that era are welcome and celebrated.

Art Cervantes, the co-founder and director of RADwood was nice enough to take a break from judging cars to sit and chat with me. He’s definitely a car guy through and through. I asked him beyond the nostalgia factor, what makes cars from this era special?

“This particular era is a perfect hybrid of analog and modernity. You have that classic vibe, but it’s a car that will start because it’s fuel injected. You have some basic electronics but you have a little bit of that comfort, like a pretty decent AC. That makes them desirable as a classic or like an entry-level collector car too. They’re easier to work on there and you can still find parts. They’re a little more usable than something carbureted.”

This is something I love about cars from this era. Automakers started working harder to make their vehicles more reliable and not turn to scrap after 100k miles. It was a time before electronic power steering and throttle by wire removed a lot of the tactile feedback you got while driving. No screens, less distractions. It was just you and the car.

Since RADwood shows take place all over the US and now the UK as well, I asked Art what makes the Detroit show unique.

“I love how it brings out a lot of the obscure tuner stuff and the special additions from domestic manufactures that we don’t really see on the West Coast. I think it happened where naturally, those cars were put out there and the rust kinda took them so they only made it within a 50 mile radius of Detroit, so it’s very rare to see that stuff. For example I didn’t even know about the Olds Quad-442 special edition. This is a pretty cool car, dual overhead cam, high revving. Actually a very sporty, a good handling car. So there were all these cars that were being produced in that period that we don’t see anywhere else. You have the Omnis and the GLHS’s and the Saleens and the Shelbys like that CSX up there. I’m doing the judging and I’m seeing Lincoln town cars from the 80s that are absolutely impeccable, that someone kept at their lake house. Those don’t exist where I live. You got a lot of the domestic stuff which is great, I’m glad we can celebrate that here.”

I definitely agreed with him on those points. Walking around the show there were boatloads of obscure cars, as well as mint versions of everyday cars that filled the roads 30 years ago but now have disappeared from the landscape.

Although we were a little sad my Bonneville didn’t make it to the show despite wrenching until midnight the night before, my brother and I had a great time. It was fun checking out dream cars from our childhood and exploring everyday cars from our youth that would have been lost to time if not for the hard work of fellow enthusiasts. We will definitely be back next year. Enjoy the rest of the photos!

The post I Brought An Old School Disposable Camera to Detroit Radwood And The Results Were Awesome appeared first on The Autopian.

Using ChatGPT to research cyber threats has backfired on bad actors, OpenAI revealed in a report analyzing emerging trends in how AI is currently amplifying online security risks.

Not only do ChatGPT prompts expose what platforms bad actors are targeting—and in at least one case enabled OpenAI to link a covert influence campaign on X and Instagram for the first time—but they can also reveal new tools that threat actors are testing to evolve their deceptive activity online, OpenAI claimed.

OpenAI's report comes amid heightening scrutiny of its tools during a major election year where officials globally fear AI might be used to boost disinformation and propaganda like never before. Their report detailed 20 times OpenAI disrupted covert influence operations and deceptive networks attempting to use AI to sow discord or breach vulnerable systems.

"These cases allow us to begin identifying the most common ways in which threat actors use AI to attempt to increase their efficiency or productivity," OpenAI explained.

One case involved a "suspected China-based adversary" called SweetSpecter, which used ChatGPT prompts to attempt to engage both government and OpenAI employees with an unsuccessful spear phishing campaign.

In the email to OpenAI employees, SweetSpecter posed as a ChatGPT user troubleshooting an issue with the platform detailed in an attachment. Clicking on that attachment would have launched "Windows malware known as SugarGh0st RAT," OpenAI said, giving SweetSpecter "control over the compromised machine" and allowing them "to do things like execute arbitrary commands, take screenshots, and exfiltrate data." Fortunately for OpenAI, the company spam filter deterred the threat without any employees receiving the emails.

OpenAI believes that it uncovered SweetSpecter's first known attack on a US-based AI company after monitoring SweetSpecter's ChatGPT prompts boldly asking for help with the attack.

Prompts included asking for "themes that government department employees would find interesting" or "good names for attachments to avoid being blocked." SweetSpecter also asked ChatGPT about "vulnerabilities" in various apps and "for help finding ways to exploit infrastructure belonging to a prominent car manufacturer," OpenAI said.

Another case involved an adversary suspected to be affiliated with the Iranian armed forces called CyberAv3ngers, which is a "group known for its disruptive attacks" against public infrastructure in the US, Ireland, and Israel.

Monitoring their prompts—which were used for research, reconnaissance, and to debug code—helped OpenAI "identify additional technologies and software that they may seek to exploit" to disrupt water, energy, and manufacturing systems.

And OpenAI reported similar findings after disrupting an Iranian threat actor, STORM-0817, flagging the group's apparent first time using AI models and uncovering "unique insights" into "infrastructure and capabilities that were being developed and weren’t yet fully operational." For example, after reading ChatGPT prompts showing STORM-0817 researching how to "debug code to scrape Instagram profiles," OpenAI confirmed that the group appeared to be testing the code on an Iranian journalist "critical of the Iranian government."

OpenAI’s report appears to downplay AI harms

ChatGPT wasn't the only OpenAI tool abused by threat actors, OpenAI said. Its image generator DALL-E was also used by a suspected Russian-based operation called Stop News that was "unusually prolific in its use of imagery." Even relying on cartoonish images with "bright color palettes or dramatic tones to attract attention" didn't help that campaign go viral, though, OpenAI reported.

The campaign with the biggest reach, OpenAI noted, was curiously a hoax, where ChatGPT was initially used to generate social media posts on a Russian "troll" X account later taken over by a human attempting to deceive audiences into believing later posts were AI-generated.

"This was an unusual situation, and the reverse of the other cases discussed in this report," OpenAI said. "Rather than our models being used in an attempt to deceive people, likely non-AI activity was used to deceive people about the use of our models."

Despite detailing major threat actors already experimenting with its tools, OpenAI's report perhaps predictably seems to downplay AI's capacity for harm in this moment. It repeatedly emphasized that OpenAI's models "did not appear to provide" any threat actors detected with "novel capabilities or directions that they could not otherwise have obtained from multiple publicly available resources."

Instead of radically altering the threat landscape, OpenAI tools like ChatGPT are mostly used to take shortcuts or save costs, OpenAI suggested, like generating bios and social media posts to scale spam networks that might previously have "required a large team of trolls, with all the costs and leak risks associated with such an endeavor." And the more these operations rely on AI, OpenAI suggested, the easier they are to take down. As an example, OpenAI cited an election interference case this summer that was quickly "silenced" because of threat actors' over-reliance on OpenAI tools.

"This operation’s reliance on AI... made it unusually vulnerable to our disruption," OpenAI said. "Because it leveraged AI at so many links in the killchain, our takedown broke many links in the chain at once. After we disrupted this activity in early June, the social media accounts that we had identified as being part of this operation stopped posting" throughout the critical election periods.

OpenAI can’t stop AI threats on its own

So far, OpenAI said, there is no evidence that its tools are "leading to meaningful breakthroughs" in threat actors' "ability to create substantially new malware or build viral audiences."

While some of the deceptive campaigns managed to engage real people online, heightening risks, OpenAI said the impact was limited. For the most part, its tools "only offered limited, incremental capabilities that are already achievable with publicly available, non-AI powered tools."

As threat actors' AI use continues evolving, OpenAI promised to remain transparent about how its tools are used to amplify and aid deceptive campaigns online. But the AI company's report urged that collaboration will be necessary to build "robust, multi-layered defenses against state-linked cyber actors and covert influence operations that may attempt to use our models in furtherance of deceptive campaigns on social media and other Internet platforms."

Appropriate threat detection across the Internet "can also allow AI companies to identify previously unreported connections between apparently different sets of threat activity," OpenAI suggested.

"The unique insights that AI companies have into threat actors can help to strengthen the defenses of the broader information ecosystem, but cannot replace them. It is essential to see continued robust investment in detection and investigation capabilities across the Internet," OpenAI said.

As one example of potential AI progress disrupting cyber threats, OpenAI suggested that, "as our models become more advanced, we expect we will also be able to use ChatGPT to reverse engineer and analyze the malicious attachments sent to employees" in phishing campaigns like SweetSpecter's.

OpenAI did not respond to Ars' request for comment.

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