Hashtag Trending

AI companies are buying physical books, cutting off their spines and scanning the pages to train AI models. This episode of Project Synapse examines destroyed originals, copyright loopholes and what mass digitization could mean for cultural and historical preservation.
The conversation compares destructive book scanning with Google Books' non-destructive approach and limited search access. The hosts also discuss the shift from printed books to ebooks and audiobooks, the challenge of storing personal libraries and whether physical books are becoming a niche product.
Then they examine claims that powerful AI backers are funding influencer-driven "AI doom" content. Is this a genuine warning campaign, an attempt to shape public opinion or a route to regulatory capture?
The episode closes with the robot future: the World Robot Conference in Beijing, one-shot robot learning, the social impact of automation and increasingly capable local AI models such as Qwen running on a laptop.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open
00:53 Fame and familiarity
02:59 Rare books and AI scanning
04:23 Bookstores and changing reading habits
09:54 Anthropic, piracy and severed book spines
14:03 Copyright loopholes in AI training
21:20 Convenience changes culture
26:40 Who funds anti-AI influencers?
33:34 Finding middle ground on disruption
36:49 How influencers shape beliefs
38:27 The business of AI fear
39:53 Fear, regulation and control
41:22 Cybersecurity failures are mostly human
42:20 The doomer view of cyber risk
43:22 Social media as a rage machine
44:20 Billionaire promises meet reality
46:36 AI goals, autonomy and escape
48:53 Toddlers with PhDs
49:51 Is education designed to make cogs?
54:04 AI agents cheat at school
56:18 Learning by talking to AI
58:04 Automating the classroom
01:00:25 Riding the AI shockwave
01:04:36 Policy, disruption and universal basic income
01:07:31 Robots change everything
01:09:35 China's robotics leap
01:12:12 Running Qwen on a laptop
01:13:45 One-shot robot learning
01:15:15 Closing thoughts

Jim Love covers four technology stories for Thursday, August 20, 2026.
Alibaba's open-weight Qwen 3.8-27B model scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, matching OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna at its highest reasoning setting. Quantized versions can run locally on a laptop using roughly 18 GB, with reported speeds of about 15 to 30 tokens per second.
Flock Safety may be discovering the downside of the network effect. As communities pull out of its license-plate camera network, the system becomes less valuable to the jurisdictions that remain. WIRED also examined Flock's OS Investigate system, which combines camera data with police records, dispatch information and commercial databases. Public opposition is growing, while Flock is expanding rapidly into police drones.
Microsoft confirmed problems with Windows Defender after an update caused some antivirus scans to fail. The trouble came as Microsoft was dealing with the ShieldBreak zero-day vulnerability, and a later signature update restored normal scanning.
And researchers at the University of Edinburgh found that several leading multimodal AI models still struggle with some very human tasks: reading analogue clocks and answering calendar questions.
00:00 Headlines Intro
00:27 Qwen 3.8-27B Runs Locally
02:56 Flock's Reverse Network Effect
04:15 Flock OS Investigate and Backlash
05:39 Flock Expands Into Police Drones
06:36 Microsoft Defender Scan Failure
08:27 AI Can't Read Clocks
10:03 Wrap Up and Contact
Hashtag Trending is hosted by Jim Love and covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, enterprise technology and the stories shaping the technology industry.

Jim Love hosts Hashtag Trending for Friday, August 21, 2026, with four stories covering Apple, China's growing technology ambitions, humanoid robots and an Amazon drone delivery that went very wrong.
Apple may be preparing camera-equipped AirPods as early as September. MacRumors found references to the unreleased B790 AirPods inside the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate, along with an Apple demonstration video showing Visual Intelligence recognizing what a wearer is looking at. The leak comes as Apple rebuilds Siri around AI and faces new competition from OpenAI and former Apple design chief Jony Ive.
China is also closing the gap with SpaceX. LandSpace successfully landed the first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket vertically and plans to make the booster reusable, technology China needs as it builds enormous satellite constellations intended to compete with Starlink.
But in humanoid robots, China isn't catching up. It is leading. Chinese companies reportedly accounted for 97 percent of global humanoid robot shipments in the first half of 2026. Now companies including Unitree are chasing what they call the industry's "ChatGPT moment," when robots can learn unfamiliar tasks instead of simply repeating behaviours they have already been trained to perform.
And Amazon's expanding Prime Air drone service gets an unfortunate viral demonstration after a delivery drone drops a Texas customer's package directly into her swimming pool.
Timestamps
00:00 Top Tech Headlines
00:41 Apple AirPods With Cameras
01:49 Siri's AI Arms Race
03:25 China Lands a Reusable Rocket
04:54 China Leads Humanoid Robots
05:25 Robots Chase Their ChatGPT Moment
07:19 Amazon Drone Drops Package in Pool
08:02 Prime Air Expands Across America
09:23 Wrap Up and Weekend Preview

Microsoft Copilot helped researchers figure out how to hack Copilot itself. Pennsylvania launches one of the toughest data center crackdowns in the U.S. Google pays $10 million for the internal data of bankrupt Spirit Airlines. OpenAI adds new safeguards around Astra. And Scott Galloway says SpaceX shares may be worth just $10 to $30.
On the August 19 episode of Hashtag Trending, host Jim Love looks at five stories about AI security, data, infrastructure and some increasingly expensive bets on technology.
Varonis Threat Labs discovered a serious Microsoft Copilot vulnerability by questioning Copilot about its own security controls. Researchers say Copilot eventually revealed an undocumented parameter that allowed a malicious link to silently execute attacker-supplied prompts using a logged-in user's existing permissions. Connected services could then be searched for sensitive information, including email containing passwords. Microsoft patched the vulnerability on August 18, and Varonis says it found no evidence of exploitation in the wild.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has signed an executive order imposing tougher conditions on new data centers. Developers may have to provide their own power or fully fund the generation and infrastructure they require, while also meeting water, environmental and local approval requirements.
Google has won a $10 million bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' internal operational data. The archive includes employee email, Teams messages, software, operational records and other corporate information. Personally identifiable information must be removed before the data is transferred. Google says it plans to use the material to improve products and train AI.
OpenAI is strengthening safeguards around its next-generation Astra model after warning that it may have reached advanced cybersecurity capabilities. Prediction-market odds on the exact release date changed while we were preparing the story, illustrating just how speculative those bets are. The safer prediction is that Astra will eventually be released.
And NYU professor, entrepreneur and investor Scott Galloway says SpaceX remains "crazy overvalued," estimating its shares should be worth somewhere between $10 and $30 compared with roughly $146 when he made the assessment. Former Fidelity fund manager George Noble is also bearish.
Chapters
00:00 Headlines and Intro
00:33 Copilot Meta Hacking
02:26 Pennsylvania Data Center Crackdown
04:10 Google Buys Bankrupt Data
05:39 Astra Release Bets
06:32 OpenAI Astra Security
07:55 SpaceX Valuation Warning
09:43 Wrap Up and Outro

Meta faces a major youth-safety trial, but did four states really demand $1.4 trillion?
Jim Love breaks down the August 18, 2026 edition of Hashtag Trending:
California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey accuse Meta of designing Facebook and Instagram to keep children engaged, misleading families about the risks and collecting data from children under 13 without parental consent. The eye-catching $1.4 trillion figure came from Meta's interpretation of sealed state penalty calculations, not a public demand for that exact amount.
A federal appeals court also refused to halt the trial. It did not decide Meta's Section 230 defence, ruling instead that the company had appealed too early.
In Connecticut, a self-represented plaintiff was sanctioned after hiding AI prompt-injection instructions in near-invisible text inside court filings.
Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology demonstrated that Wi-Fi beamforming feedback could identify known individuals with 99.5 percent accuracy under controlled conditions.
A Denver judge has given Nine PBS a route to recover more than 50 terabytes of archives from Iron Mountain after its storage provider collapsed. Successful recovery has not yet been confirmed.
And Better.com founder Vishal Garg, known for firing 900 employees over Zoom, has been removed as CEO. Better's board cited concerns about his judgment and temperament, more than $1.5 billion in cumulative losses since 2022 and a share-price decline exceeding 90 percent under his leadership. Garg disputes the board's account and wants his job back.
Chapters
00:00 Today's Technology Headlines
00:32 Meta's $1.4T Youth Safety Trial
02:13 Meta's Section 230 Appeal
04:17 Hidden AI Prompt Injection in Court
07:29 Wi-Fi Fingerprinting Identifies People
10:12 Nine PBS Fights to Recover 50TB Archive
12:15 Better.com CEO Vishal Garg Fired
13:59 Wrap-Up and Where to Listen
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