Michael | Förtsch 🛰️

Tech-, PopCulture- & Sci-Fi-Nerd @1E9tech @focusdigital ░ Ex-@WIRED ░ former blue check ░ Kurator42-Newsletter ░ 私は日本語が話せません ░

[Michael | Förtsch 🛰️ @micha]

I made a "shortfilm" about UFOs and Aliens with @midjourney, @ElevenLabs and @Kling_ai about UFOs and Aliens: "They are here."

[Michael | Förtsch 🛰️ @micha]

Okay, Ideogram 4.0 is really impressive once you find the prompts that let you break away from the somewhat mundane default look.

[Ideogram @ideogram_ai]

Introducing Ideogram 4.0: the best open image model in the world.

Think it. Make it. Own it.

Download the weights, fine-tune on your own data, and run it on your hardware. Live on every Ideogram plan and the API today.

[Ideogram @ideogram_ai]

We trained Ideogram 4.0 with bounding boxes tied to region descriptions — teaching the model where every object, text region, and layout element belongs.

Richer supervision → the model learns structure faster and understands it better → you can prompt with precise bounding-box positions for fine-grained layout control.

[Michael | Förtsch 🛰️ @micha]

#Fatekeeper looks really impressive!

[Film Updates @FilmUpdates]

New poster for ‘FALL 2: DEADPOINT’ has been released.

In theaters September 2.

[Silo @SiloSeries]

One month left...

[Variety @Variety]

#JenniferAniston says she “wants to learn more” about AI because “we don’t understand enough about it”:

“The amount of things that I get sent from people think that it’s actually me — and it’s so clearly not. But yeah, it’s such uncharted territory, and I think we have to learn about it. It feels like it’s already just grown into this 900-headed monster.”

Read the full #ActorsOnActors conversation: https://t.co/iHxkfBkPaO

[Michael | Förtsch 🛰️ @micha]

Tried Mai Image 2.5 it's pretty solid.

[Microsoft AI @MicrosoftAI]

Introducing Image-2.5

[Financial Times @FT]

Palantir should not have ‘significant role’ in UK public data systems, MPs say https://t.co/ceQMGDfffu

[Michael | Förtsch 🛰️ @micha]

I was just watching The Mentalist when that guy showed up. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out where I knew him from.

[Joseph Mallozzi 🏴‍☠️ @BaronDestructo]

Nope. No. Sorry. Gonna have to push back on this. We were ever mindful of creating a show that would have broad appeal.

[Variety @Variety]

EXCLUSIVE: The new "Stargate" TV series has been axed at Amazon.

The show was first announced with a series order in November 2025 and hailed from showrunner Martin Gero, who was a writer on "Stargate SG-1" and "Stargate: Atlantis." Sources say Amazon execs were concerned that Gero's take on the series would not have broad appeal beyond the franchise's already dedicated fanbase.

https://t.co/otnCvKwnnF

[Low Level @LowLevelTweets]

what the fuck is this company doing bro

[Michael | Förtsch 🛰️ @micha]

Wow! What's totally ridiculous is that the Meta AI Support Chatbot simply ignores the 2FA confirmations set up by users. The attackers were not asked for a FIDO key, SMS or authenticator code.

[Jane Manchun Wong @wongmjane]

Meta gave zero updates about the AI bot hacking incident until it got to the press. And when they do, it’s just tucked as replies under someone’s tweet

Congrats on laying off T&S and automating the accounts support with gullible AI bots tho, hope you liked that promo packet.

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

A ‘WAR MACHINE’ sequel is in the works at Netflix.

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

Turns out the real Backrooms were hiding in web archives. 👀

Internet sleuths tracked down the original location of the Backrooms image using the @waybackmachine, proving once again that preserving the web is important for internet history, folklore, and mysteries, too.

[Michael | Förtsch 🛰️ @micha]

First Trailer for #BlackBox https://t.co/HJVGixPHW5

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

First trailer for Adam Wingard's ‘ONSLAUGHT’, starring Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens and Alex Pereira.

The film follows a woman who fights a rogue squad of super soldiers who break loose in the desert.

In theaters on September 4.

[Silo @SiloSeries]

Silo Season 3 trailer is here

[Nous Research @NousResearch]

The next evolution of Hermes Agent is here!

Introducing Hermes Desktop: everything you love about Hermes, now native on your machine.

First demoed in Jensen's GTC keynote, it's now in public preview.

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

So-called age verification for social media is spreading across the world, framed as an effort to create a safer internet for children. In reality, age verification lays the foundation for a fully controlled internet.

The age verification rush must be slowed down, and politicians need to recognize the consequences of different types of legislation and systems.

Age verification is the wrong approach to fix “the social media problem”
The big tech social media companies are bad. Their business model is bad; it is based on mass surveillance and manipulation, and they cooperate with governments in mapping entire populations. But age verification is fundamentally the wrong approach to preventing children from using big tech social media platforms. Introducing age verification is based on coercion; the state forces social media companies to verify their users’ identities. But the big tech social media platforms already know which of their users are children. Their business model depends on knowing this. They know how old users are, and they know exactly what type of person they are. As age verification is based on coercion, politicians could instead force platforms to stop doing the things politicians consider harmful to children, or force them to block children (again, they know who they are) from using their services. But instead, politicians seek to massively invade everyone’s privacy and undermine democratic rights on a global scale. In other words, the latter is the real objective – they do not want to protect children; they want to impose control.

Slippery slope of age verification
It is undeniable that age verification threatens freedom of expression, risks increasing mass surveillance, and is likely to lead to censorship. It will not only shrink the online world and reduce young people’s right to privacy (for example, if VPN services were to be restricted); but also risks becoming a significant step toward a controlled internet for everyone.

Most age verification is identity verification
Most countries are now considering introducing age verification systems, meaning that everyone would have to identify themselves either to the service/website they want to use or to a third party capable of linking them to their activity on that service or website. This is not age verification but identity verification, and the consequence is therefore that freedom of information is restricted (you can no longer visit regulated websites anonymously) and that you can no longer post anonymously on social media. This is a major problem in countries like the UK and Germany where the police conduct raids on people’s homes for posting content on social media that the authorities dislike. Or in the United States, where authorities are trying to pressure tech companies into revealing the identities behind accounts protesting ICE. Social media identity verification removes important tools for activists in countries where criticizing those in power is dangerous.

Restrictions on app store or operating system level
Some countries are looking to impose identity verification at the app store level or even within the operating system itself. This is an exciting experiment, since this is possible to circumvent using open-source operating systems. Some countries are already looking to include open-source systems. Since open-source systems cannot be controlled, politicians would ultimately need to ban devices that are not controlled by the state. The end point: telescreens like those in Orwell’s 1984, devices that both monitor you and broadcast only the information approved by the state.

The Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) alternative and the EU
The EU has presented its own age verification app as “completely anonymous”. The idea is to use Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography to break the link between the age credential issuer (EU governments) and the regulated services/sites. Currently, the EU app does not have ZKP functionality, contrasting Ursula von der Leyen’s claim that the app ”is technically ready to be used”. But more importantly, the app is currently designed to always function without ZKP technology; if ZKP is unavailable, the app falls back to a non-ZKP model. Even if fully developed ZKP technology could be implemented in the future, it would remain an optional extra feature that countries may choose to disable and that the EU could remove at any time.

Read more on our site.
https://t.co/wTVKHMS1zg