Thousands of networks—many of them operated by the US government and Fortune 500 companies—face an “imminent threat” of being breached by a nation-state hacking group following the breach of a major maker of software, the federal government warned Wednesday. F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a “sophisticated”...
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Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5 matches May’s frontier model at fraction of cost
On Wednesday, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, a small AI language model that reportedly delivers performance similar to what its frontier model Claude Sonnet 4 achieved five months ago but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed. The new model is available now to all Claude app, web, and API users. If the...
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ChatGPT erotica coming soon with age verification, CEO says
On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company will allow verified adult users to have erotic conversations with ChatGPT starting in December. The change represents a shift in how OpenAI approaches content restrictions, which the company had loosened in February but then dramatically tightened after an August lawsuit from parents of a teen who...
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Feds seize $15 billion from alleged forced labor scam built on “human suffering”
Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned laborers to trick unsuspecting people into making investments in phony funds, often after spending months faking romantic relationships with the victims. Such “pig butchering” scams have operated for years. They typically work when members of the operation initiate conversations...
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Nvidia sells tiny new computer that puts big AI on your desktop
On Tuesday, Nvidia announced it will begin taking orders for the DGX Spark, a $4,000 desktop AI computer that wraps one petaflop of computing performance and 128GB of unified memory into a form factor small enough to sit on a desk. Its biggest selling point is likely its large integrated memory that can run larger...
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OpenAI wants to stop ChatGPT from validating users’ political views
“ChatGPT shouldn’t have political bias in any direction.” That’s OpenAI’s stated goal in a new research paper released Thursday about measuring and reducing political bias in its AI models. The company says that “people use ChatGPT as a tool to learn and explore ideas” and argues “that only works if they trust ChatGPT to be...
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Factory Towns Revive as Defense Tech Makers Arrive
Drawn by local talent, cheap labor and state cash incentives, start-ups building the weapons of the future are revitalizing manufacturing in once-vibrant industrial towns.
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OpenAI Inks Deal With Broadcom to Design Its Own Chips for A.I.
After signing multibillion-dollar agreements to use chips from Nvidia and AMD, OpenAI plans to deploy its own designs next year.
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Hackers can steal 2FA codes and private messages from Android phones
Android devices are vulnerable to a new attack that can covertly steal 2FA codes, location timelines, and other private data in less than 30 seconds. The new attack, named Pixnapping by the team of academic researchers who devised it, requires a victim to first install a malicious app on an Android phone or tablet. The...
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Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement
The encryption protecting communications against criminal and nation-state snooping is under threat. As private industry and governments get closer to building useful quantum computers, the algorithms protecting Bitcoin wallets, encrypted web visits, and other sensitive secrets will be useless. No one doubts the day will come, but as the now-common joke in cryptography circles observes,...