Category Archives: Tech

Millions of people imperiled through sign-in links sent by SMS

“We argue that these attacks are straightforward to test, verify, and execute at scale,” the researchers, from the universities of New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana, and the firm Circle, wrote. “The threat model can be realized using consumer-grade hardware and only basic to intermediate Web security knowledge.” SMS messages are sent unencrypted. In past years, researchers… Read More »

Wikipedia volunteers spent years cataloging AI tells. Now there’s a plugin to avoid them.

To work around those rules, the Humanizer skill tells Claude to replace inflated language with plain facts and offers this example transformation: Before: “The Statistical Institute of Catalonia was officially established in 1989, marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of regional statistics in Spain.” After: “The Statistical Institute of Catalonia was established in 1989… Read More »

10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents

If you’ve ever used a 3D printer, you may recall the wondrous feeling when you first printed something you could have never sculpted or built yourself. Download a model file, load some plastic filament, push a button, and almost like magic, a three-dimensional object appears. But the result isn’t polished and ready for mass production,… Read More »

OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT as it burns through billions

Financial pressures and a changing tune OpenAI’s advertising experiment reflects the enormous financial pressures facing the company. OpenAI does not expect to be profitable until 2030 and has committed to spend about $1.4 trillion on massive data centers and chips for AI. According to financial documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal in November, OpenAI… Read More »

Mandiant releases rainbow table that cracks weak admin password in 12 hours

Microsoft released NTLMv1 in the 1980s with the release of OS/2. In 1999, cryptanalyst Bruce Schneier and Mudge published research that exposed key weaknesses in the NTLMv1 underpinnings. At the 2012 Defcon 20 conference, researchers released a tool set that allowed attackers to move from untrusted network guest to admin in 60 seconds, by attacking… Read More »

TSMC says AI demand is “endless” after record Q4 earnings

TSMC posted net income of NT$505.7 billion (about $16 billion) for the quarter, up 35 percent year over year and above analyst expectations. Revenue hit $33.7 billion, a 25.5 percent increase from the same period last year. The company expects nearly 30 percent revenue growth in 2026 and plans to spend between $52 billion and… Read More »

Wikipedia will share content with AI firms in new licensing deals

The cost of “free” knowledge The push for paid licensing follows years of rising infrastructure costs as AI companies scraped Wikipedia content at an industrial scale. In April 2025, the foundation reported that bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content had grown 50 percent since January 2024, with bots accounting for 65 percent of the most… Read More »

A single click mounted a covert, multistage attack against Copilot

Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in its Copilot AI assistant that allowed hackers to pluck a host of sensitive user data with a single click on a URL. The hackers in this case were white-hat researchers from security firm Varonis. The net effect of their multistage attack was that they exfiltrated data, including the target’s… Read More »

Bandcamp bans purely AI-generated music from its platform

On Tuesday, Bandcamp announced on Reddit that it will no longer permit AI-generated music on its platform. “Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp,” the company wrote in a post to the r/bandcamp subreddit. The new policy also prohibits “any use of AI tools… Read More »