Tag Archives: Biz & IT

Downdetector, Speedtest sold to IT service provider Accenture in $1.2B deal

In a statement, Accenture CEO and chair Julie Sweet said: By acquiring Ookla, we will help our clients across business and government scale AI safely and build the trusted data foundations they need to deliver the reliable, seamless connectivity that creates value. Current Accenture public sector clients include the US Air Force, the US Social… Read More: Downdetector, Speedtest sold to IT service provider Accenture in $1.2B… »

LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy

“What we found is that these AI agents can do something that was previously very difficult: starting from free text (like an anonymized interview transcript) they can work their way to the full identity of a person,” Simon Lermen, a co-author of the paper, told Ars. “This is a pretty new capability; previous approaches on… Read More: LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy »

Google quantum-proofs HTTPS by squeezing 2.5kB of data into 64-byte space

Google and other browser makers require that all TLS certificates be published in public transparency logs, which are append-only distributed ledgers. Website owners can then check the logs in real time to ensure that no rogue certificates have been issued for the domains they use. The transparency programs were implemented in response to the 2011… Read More: Google quantum-proofs HTTPS by squeezing 2.5kB of data into 64-byte… »

New AirSnitch attack breaks Wi-Fi encryption in homes, offices, and enterprises

AirSnitch “breaks worldwide Wi-Fi encryption, and it might have the potential to enable advanced cyberattacks,” Xin’an Zhou, the lead author of the research paper, said in an interview. “Advanced attacks can build on our primitives to [perform] cookie stealing, DNS and cache poisoning. Our research physically wiretaps the wire altogether so these sophisticated attacks will… Read More: New AirSnitch attack breaks Wi-Fi encryption in homes, offices, and… »

Password managers’ promise that they can’t see your vaults isn’t always true

Over the past 15 years, password managers have grown from a niche security tool used by the technology savvy into an indispensable security tool for the masses, with an estimated 94 million US adults—or roughly 36 percent of them—having adopted them. They store not only passwords for pension, financial, and email accounts, but also cryptocurrency… Read More: Password managers’ promise that they can’t see your vaults isn’t… »

Most VMware users still “actively reducing their VMware footprint,” survey finds

Migrations are ongoing Broadcom introduced changes to VMware that are especially unfriendly to small- and-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and Gartner previously predicted that 35 percent of VMware workloads would migrate else by 2028. CloudBolt’s survey also examined how respondents are migrating workloads off of VMware. Currently, 36 percent of participants said they migrated 1–24 percent of… Read More: Most VMware users still “actively reducing their VMware footprint,” survey… »

After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name

“Rejecting a working solution because ‘a human should have done it’ is actively harming the project,” the MJ Rathbun account continues. “This isn’t about quality. This isn’t about learning. This is about control… Judge the code, not the coder.” It’s worth pausing here to emphasize that we’re not talking about a free-wheeling independent AI intelligence.… Read More: After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a… »

OpenAI sidesteps Nvidia with unusually fast coding model on plate-sized chips

But 1,000 tokens per second is actually modest by Cerebras standards. The company has measured 2,100 tokens per second on Llama 3.1 70B and reported 3,000 tokens per second on OpenAI’s own open-weight gpt-oss-120B model, suggesting that Codex-Spark’s comparatively lower speed reflects the overhead of a larger or more complex model. AI coding agents have… Read More: OpenAI sidesteps Nvidia with unusually fast coding model on plate-sized… »

Attackers prompted Gemini over 100,000 times while trying to clone it, Google says

On Thursday, Google announced that “commercially motivated” actors have attempted to clone knowledge from its Gemini AI chatbot by simply prompting it. One adversarial session reportedly prompted the model more than 100,000 times across various non-English languages, collecting responses ostensibly to train a cheaper copycat. Google published the findings in what amounts to a quarterly… Read More: Attackers prompted Gemini over 100,000 times while trying to clone… »

Once-hobbled Lumma Stealer is back with lures that are hard to resist

Last May, law enforcement authorities around the world scored a key win when they hobbled the infrastructure of Lumma, an infostealer that infected nearly 395,000 Windows computers over just a two-month span leading up to the international operation. Researchers said Wednesday that Lumma is once again “back at scale” in hard-to-detect attacks that pilfer credentials… Read More: Once-hobbled Lumma Stealer is back with lures that are hard… »