Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey will advise the government on the future of warfare, Reddit imposing new restrictions on Old Reddit, and Neon will make a truly open-source SCP movie

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Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey will advise the government on the future of warfare.

Reddit is imposing new restrictions on old Reddit. And Neon will make a truly open-source SCP movie after the A24 controversy. It's Thursday, October 1st. And here's a quick look at some of the news happening in the sphere of tech this morning from Engadget.

The US. Department of Defense announced a new initiative that it says will identify the technological needs for future wars. According to the commissioning note from Defense Secretary Pete Hexeth, Project Meridian will study the battlefields of the future, identify which weapons and technologies warfighters will need to harness to dominate in these environments, and propose actionable solutions to start developing, testing, and fielding these capabilities such that America will have overmatch for the 21st century and beyond. The endeavor will be led by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich. As CNBC reported, nobody in this trio has served in the US military. However, Musk's SpaceX AI and Luckey's Andoril both have existing business contracts with the Pentagon, with deals worth as much as $4.16 billion.

Gingrich has no obvious ties to the tech sector, but has worked adjacent to the military on several projects, and last year was awarded an honorary doctorate from Ayer University. Considering that just in this calendar year, the Defense Department has already leaked classified war plans to a journalist in a Signal Chat, narrowly avoided an international incident after allegedly relying on an AI-generated report, and illegally designated Anthropic a supply chain risk after the company refused to remove guardrails on its AI models, it seems like the military could benefit from some guidance. But a cynic might think that Project Meridian sounds less like a source of guidance, and more like a way to give yet more power and money to friends of the current administration.

Last month, Reddit signaled that there would be significant changes coming to old Reddit as it continues to fight AI scraping. Now the company says that it will soon restrict the 21-year-old desktop version of its website to recent users of the classic layout only. With the change, new accounts will no longer be able to access old Reddit, and existing users who have not used it for six months will also be barred. Logged-in moderators will not be subject to recent usage requirements. While old Reddit remains popular among a vocal contingent of long-time users, the company has said the older version of the site has been a significant source of AI scraping. Last month, the company restricted old Reddit to users who are logged in, but said more changes would be necessary in the future. In its latest update, the company said that the recent change had already reduced automated abuse on the platform, even though it's further tightening access. The company still has not said definitively whether it will eventually abandon old Reddit entirely. CEO Steve Huffman has said that his dream for old Reddit would be to recreate the UI, if not the guts, including the HTML and CSS itself, on a modern foundation so it can live on. Reddit has taken significant steps to fight AI scraping over the last couple of years, including API changes that effectively shut down third-party clients. The company is also facing out its API in favor of a more controlled developer platform. Now, Reddit says it will stop supporting RSS feeds, as those too are a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse. That change will go into effect on the 13th of November. The company acknowledged that RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and the company is grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit.