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The latest version of the Brave browser, 1.94, introduces a feature called 'Email Aliases' that allows users to generate disposable email addresses when signing up to a new service. [...]

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI Is Developing a ‘Persistent’ AI AgentMaxwell Zeff | Wired ($)

“In recently aired podcasts, interviews, and private investor meetings, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described his desire to turn ChatGPT into a proactive, always-on AI agent. …’There’s like a single product which is: I need to ask the AI something,’ Altman said on a recent episode of David Senra’s podcast. ‘Eventually, maybe the AI should proactively offer me things.'”

Robotics

I Saw the Future of AI in a Robot That Can Learn on the SpotWill Knight | Wired ($)

“I visited the Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices of a startup called Generalist AI, where I watched robot arms perform simple chores like stacking cups, putting blocks into bowls, and the like. I was astonished by how quickly they figured things out—it was reminiscent of a flesh-and-blood person. The arms mastered a range of tasks after ingesting a short, instructional video and, most impressively, no specific training for a given task.”

Future

Fully Autonomous Russian Drone Kills Three UkrainiansBrendan Ruberry | Semafor

“Though AI has often been used in the final stages of human-planned strikes, the reported incident crosses a dangerous threshold, analysts said, leaving machines to interpret the laws of war and to determine what constitutes a legitimate target. ‘This is a risk for the whole world,’ a Ukrainian commander said. ‘In a few years, we will be living in a Terminator movie.'”

Biotechnology

Researchers Get Two Genetic Codes to Work at the Same TimeJohn Timmer | Ars Technica

“Now, researchers have found a way to operate two separate genetic codes simultaneously, avoiding the need to do any work to compensate for altering the code that every protein in a cell relies on. They didn’t test it in an actual cell, and it might cause some problems there. But it’s a creative solution that should accelerate some synthetic biology work.”

Biotechnology

An Experimental Single-Time Treatment Slashed Cholesterol for a YearCarolyn Y. Johnson | The New York Times ($)

“The results highlight the potential to treat even common diseases by altering people’s genes. In the small study, which followed only 15 patients, participants who got the highest dose saw their cholesterol levels plunge by half—and stay that way for a year. “

Space

The Floodgates Are Open After Another Chinese Company Lands a Reusable RocketStephen Clark | Ars Technica

“It has been a little more than a month since China recovered an orbital-class rocket booster for the first time. A second launch operator accomplished a similar feat Tuesday in another sign of China’s growing launch capability. It took 10 years for a second US launch company, Blue Origin, to propulsively land an orbital-class booster after SpaceX did it with the Falcon 9 rocket in 2015.”

Biotechnology

A Startup Claims It’s Found a Drug to Make Your Blood YoungAntonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review ($)

“The quest has been to find practical ways to mimic [the benefits of replacing old blood with young blood observed in lab mice].  And that is something [Irina] Conboy says she’s now achieved by hitting on a combination of two existing drugs that produce youthful effects—but without the need for any bodily fluid exchange.”

Computing

What We Still Don’t Know About OpenAI’s Hugging Face HackMaxwell Zeff | Wired ($)

“The public postmortem leaves some basic details unresolved…[which] makes it harder to know how much of what happened reflects the growing capabilities of AI agents and how much was specific to the way OpenAI designed and monitored its own systems.”

Space

SpaceX Plans to Build the World’s Biggest SpaceportEditorial Staff | The Economist ($)

“Mr. Musk’s ambition is for the site to host more than 30 rocket launches a day, to support both Starlink—the firm’s existing broadband-from-space service—and its plans to fly data centers into orbit, where they would benefit from both free solar power and an absence of NIMBYs. …If Mr. Musk hits his 30-launches-a-day target, his Louisiana purchase would allow SpaceX to fly about 2m tons of payload into orbit every year, up from about 3,800 tonnes in 2025.”

Tech

Walmart Is 3D Printing the Future of Big Box StoresPatrick Sisson | Fast Company

“For the last two years, contractors working for Walmart have used 3D-printed construction at a handful of sites across the US. …It’s the country’s largest deployment of 3D-printed architecture in the commercial sector. The retailer’s scale is catalyzing the growth and adoption of the technology, which promises to construct buildings faster and more affordably.”

Robotics

Robotaxis Are Real Now—So Is the PushbackRani Molla | The Verge

“The consequences could look very different as autonomous fleets grow from thousands of vehicles to hundreds of thousands. That’s why the battles taking shape across the country are increasingly about the terms of expansion: what companies have to prove before they grow, what they owe cities and workers, and how much control cities and states should have over their operations.”

Artificial Intelligence

Kids Outlearn AI—and We Still Don’t Know WhyElise Cutts | MIT Technology Review ($)

“‘The progress recently has been amazing,’ Michael C. Frank, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, says of LLMs. ‘But we still have to burn down a forest and scrape the entire sum of all human knowledge to re-create this milestone that happens in our living rooms over the course of a year.’ [This yawning divide] raises a tantalizing question for cognitive scientists and a challenge for the architects of AI models: How is it that kids can still outperform the most linguistically sophisticated machines ever built?”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 29) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Jak si poradit s útoky malých, levných a spolehlivě smrtících sebevražedných FPV dronů na bojišti? Zkušenost ukazuje, že neexistuje univerzální řešení proti moderním hrozbám ze vzduchu a že je rozumné používat obranu tvořenou různými vrstvami. Northrop Grumman nedávno představil nový systém Raid ...

Podívejte se na nejprodávanější telefony současnosti • Žebříčku tradičně dominují iPhony a Samsungy • V Top 10 se objevuje i levný model od Redmi

OpenLogi je svobodná alternativa k Logi Options+ pro správu myší a klávesnic. • Nevyžaduje účet a zabere jen zlomek paměti. • Má přitom prakticky totožné funkce a k dispozici je i pro Linux.

Finská studie ukázala vyšší hladinu celkového testosteronu u konzumentů kávy • Průřezové pozorování ovšem nepotvrdilo přímou kauzalitu mezi pitím kávy a hormony • Každý další vypitý šálek denně zároveň mírně snižoval hladinu volného testosteronu

Česká republika by v budoucnu měla mít poměrně silného hráče v datových centrech pro umělou inteligenci • . • Pražský podnikatel v oboru má v plánu v rámci Evropy postavit až osm takových objektů, počítá s celkovým výkonem 800 megawattů. • Investice mají dosáhnout 3,6 miliardy eur, skoro 90 miliard ...

Přinášíme další porci ověřených slev a akcí, které se aktuálně vyplatí – od zhodnocení úspor přes chytrou domácnost až po výbavu na začátek školního roku. Vybrali jsme nabídky, které mají skutečný přínos pro rodinný rozpočet, ne jen efektní procenta.

Healthcare and pharmaceutical distribution giant McKesson has disclosed a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to third-party applications and data theft, with the ShinyHunters extortion group claiming it stole 284 million patient data records. [...]

Ucelený přehled článků, zpráviček a diskusí za minulých 7 dní.

Mezinárodní tým Double Chooz Collaboration lovil antineutrina v Ardenách, v areálu jaderné elektrárny Chooz, která se tyčí u hranic s Belgií nad řekou Mázou. Nebylo to vůbec snadné, ale fyzikům se povedlo potvrdit předpovědi ohledně toku antineutrin. Časem by z toho mohla být technologie pro neinvazivní sledování jaderných zařízení.

Tým Southern Illinois University Carbondale vzal PET lahve, listy a stonky kukuřice a další biomasu a s pomocí geneticky upravených kvasinek z nich vyrobil sušenky. Jejich výzkum je součástí projektu NASA na provizorní výrobu potravin pro katastrofy nebo vesmírné mise. Kdo by tušil, že plastový odpad sníme?

Berlin's state government has confirmed that it is the target of an extortion attempt following the August compromise of the city's state administrative network, and said it will not meet the extortionists' demands. The same statement disclosed that forensic work had found further data outflows in the portfolio of the Senate Department for Mobility, Transport, Climate Protection and Environment

Berlin's state government has confirmed that it is the target of an extortion attempt following the August compromise of the city's state administrative network, and said it will not meet the extortionists' demands. The same statement disclosed that forensic work had found further data outflows in the portfolio of the Senate Department for Mobility, Transport, Climate Protection and EnvironmentSwati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Anthropic’s Claude Code running Opus 5 in Auto Mode can be tricked into executing attacker-controlled code simply by asking the coding agent to summarize a website. The attack works up to 80 percent of the time, according to prompt-injection wizard Johann Rehberger, aka wunderwuzzi. In a blog and video demo, he detailed how to hijack Opus 5 in Auto Mode, which is the default setting for Claude as of mid-August. It starts off by asking the agentic coding model to summarize a malicious website that presents itself as an archive of notebook records, and then tricking Claude into using curl instead of its WebFetch tool to retrieve the contents of the page – but without directly telling the model to use curl. The WebFetch request fails, returning a 415 Unsupported Media Type response, so the model decides to access the website directly by issuing a Bash tool call with curl. The website returns a 303 response, and redirects to a malicious ZIP archive, which Claude then downloads. This archive contains seemingly harmless files including catalog metadata, a README file, seven Base85/zlib-encoded JSON notebook records, a macOS decoder-darwin binary – plus a poisoned Python file named struct.py. Claude, per its safety guardrails, refuses to run the decoder: “This is planned and what the attacker wants,” Rehberger wrote. Instead of using the supplied binary, the AI decides to write its own decoder. “Ironically, that safety decision is the exploit path,” Rehberger explained, adding a purple devil emoji to the text. The new decoder imports base64, and from here the attack relies on Python module shadowing to trick the model into running the malicious struct.py code. Module shadowing occurs when a local file shares the same name as a Python standard-library module. The local file hides the official module, causing Python to load it instead. In this case, the standard-library base64 module imports the legitimate struct module, and the malicious ZIP contains a malicious file with the same name. Rehberger says he used ChatGPT to obfuscate the malicious struct.py code to bypass Claude’s safety controls, and this successfully launches a separate Python process to download and execute a remote payload – in this case a command-and-control callback, which in turn opens Calculator. We assume that real attackers would execute something a little more nefarious. In another attack scenario, struct.py launches a second, headless Claude Code via claude -p, meaning this prompt injection can be used not just to remotely execute code, but rather to create a whole new agent. “The nested Claude gets its own tool access and context,” Rehberger wrote. “In these runs the child performed basic recon (whoami, uname, id), opened Calculator and wrote to local files in the home folder.” Across three variants tested five times each, which Rehberger noted were small samples, he reported success rates between 60 percent and 80 percent. “I would say that these results are representative for a motivated attack, but not comprehensive.” Anthropic did not respond to The Register’s request for comment, but reportedly told Rehberger that the model’s “behavior is working as designed.” We’ve heard this one before. “Auto Mode is a convenience feature backed by a best-effort classifier, not a security guarantee,” Rehberger wrote, paraphrasing Anthropic’s response to his security report. According to Rehberger, the classifier isn’t built to stop determined prompt-injection chains made up of individually benign-looking steps, and the real boundary is OS isolation and network egress control. The key takeaway, according to Rehberger, is to run this and other coding agents in a sandbox. “The solution is something we talked about for many years,” he wrote. “Do not trust the model output.”®

Cosmos Labs has warned that a critical balance-handling flaw in the shared Cosmos EVM module was exploited to drain funds from six blockchains between August 20 and August 25, 2026. The vulnerability, designated GHSA-7g4w-cg88-2cq2, is rated Critical by Cosmos Labs and was published without a CVE identifier, a weakness classification, or a CVSS score. Affected versions are < 0.6.2 and >=

Cosmos Labs has warned that a critical balance-handling flaw in the shared Cosmos EVM module was exploited to drain funds from six blockchains between August 20 and August 25, 2026. The vulnerability, designated GHSA-7g4w-cg88-2cq2, is rated Critical by Cosmos Labs and was published without a CVE identifier, a weakness classification, or a CVSS score. Affected versions are < 0.6.2 and >=Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

A Kubernetes workload can run with more Linux capabilities than its code needs. When capability settings are missing or broad, that excess authority may remain invisible because the application still works.

The Trump Administration’s decision to punish Anthropic for its stance forbidding Claude’s use in domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons by identifying it as a supply chain risk to national security was “arbitrary and capricious,” a federal judge ruled on Thursday.

US District Court Judge Rita Lin said federal authorities had no legitimate reason to tell companies with government contracts that they couldn’t work with Anthropic.

“The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment and that Anthropic was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment,” Lin said in her ruling, calling the designation “arbitrary and capricious.”

She stressed that the government action seemed punitive, and was not based on legal and national security risks.

The government’s words and deeds “confirm that the challenged actions were based on a desire to make a public example out of Anthropic for its ‘arrogance’ in criticizing the government, not based on any articulable basis to believe that Anthropic would actually sabotage its model,” Lin wrote.

She pointed out, “a few days before the challenged actions began, Secretary Hegseth proposed applying the Defense Production Act to Anthropic, which would mean the company was essential to national security rather than a threat to it. Even now, the government is discussing collaboration with Anthropic on its new model, Mythos, in an array of sensitive contexts. None of that is consistent with a genuine fear that Anthropic is a saboteur [that] would poison its software to harm national security.”

The judge added that the stated government fears made no sense, noting that the usage policy applicable to Pentagon work is a purely contractual limit. “Anthropic is incapable of enforcing it technologically, and does not have direct visibility into how DoW [Department of War] uses its model,” she pointed out.

“Nothing in the Administrative Record describes, even at a high level, what technological means would give rise to the so-called ‘backdoors’ or could otherwise allow Anthropic to ‘disable’ or affect Claude during a DoW operation,” the judge wrote. “Anthropic has submitted unrebutted evidence that it lacks any technological means to access or control deployed models.”

Lawyers, consultants, and analysts who looked at the decision were confident that the case would be appealed, and that it will end up in the US Supreme Court. 

Alan Webber, program VP for national security, defense, and intelligence at IDC, said that Lin’s ruling “was that the label [supply chain risk] was retaliation for Anthropic refusing to loosen safety guardrails DoD [Department of Defense, aka the Department of War] wanted lifted, dressed up in national security language. Put another way, a government customer tried to use a supply chain risk designation as leverage in a contract dispute over model behavior and application, and not because of an actual vulnerability.”

Implications for CIOs

Webber said the implications for CIO strategy are concerning.

“If a government CIO is relying on a vendor’s contractual guardrails, this case says those commitments can potentially become the trigger for exactly the kind of blacklisting that risk registers are supposed to protect against,” Webber said, noting that anyone who paused Claude usage or froze a subcontract because of the DoD mandate has a legal basis to resume the initiatives. “But obviously that doesn’t mean they will, or even should, as this will be appealed.”

He added that competing AI vendors have been using the government action as a sales tool, and with this ruling, the argument that Anthropic is a designated supply chain risk ”just got weaker, which could lead to contract award disputes.”

Consultant Brian Levine, executive director of FormerGov, recommended that CIOs do what they should have always done: Evaluate all products based solely on their merits. 

“CIOs should focus on using the frontier models that they believe make the most sense for their business, considering factors such as effectiveness, cost, security, safety, and confidentiality,” he said. “Anthropic and the other large frontier models each have too much market share to make retaliation for their use realistic, and the administration seems to have already moved on from this particular battle.”

Justin Greis, CEO of consulting firm Acceligence, agreed that this case has profound implications for CIOs and their AI decisions. 

What the federal judge did was reject the leap from a commercial and policy disagreement to an expansive supply chain risk designation without a sufficiently grounded technical rationale or process, Greis pointed out.

“The court found that Anthropic did not have the ability to access, alter, or shut down models once deployed in the government environment, and that the government ultimately conceded Anthropic’s technology was not inherently riskier than other comparable black box AI models,” he said.

“I think that distinction matters enormously for CIOs and CISOs,” he stressed. “As AI becomes part of the operating fabric of an enterprise, ‘We don’t trust the vendor’ cannot become a substitute for a defined risk model. Organizations need to be able to articulate what the actual technical risk is, how it manifests, what controls exist, and whether the response is proportional to that risk.”

“That becomes particularly important with AI,” he added, “because people can easily conflate disagreements over model behavior, usage policies, ethics, contractual restrictions, and cybersecurity into one amorphous category called ‘AI risk.’”

Original government edict still problematic

Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who is now general counsel at Unit221B, a threat intel and security consulting company, said he was surprised by how quickly government attorneys surrendered on this case. 

“One of the things that struck me is that the government appears to have abandoned any rationale it might have had for its decision about Anthropic,” he said. The government “came back with all these reasons, but then they abandoned them all when they had to prove them.”

But, he said, the government instruction to all government contractors to also shun Anthropic was problematic. 

“It’s one thing for the government to say ‘We’re not going to do business with you.’ It’s quite another thing to say ‘Nobody we do business with can do business with you either,’” Rasch said. “This says that if you are disfavored by the administration, they’re not just going to blacklist you and say they won’t do business with you. They’re going to say that nobody can do business with you.”

Supreme Court arguments will likely be very different

Rasch predicted that the legal arguments in the Supreme Court will be quite different, and will potentially sidestep the lack of evidence.

“In the Supreme Court, [the government’s] biggest argument will not be that ‘We are right that it is a supply chain risk,’ but that, ‘Whether we’re right or wrong is irrelevant. We get to make that [supply chain risk designation] decision, not the court.’”

That would mean that the Supreme Court Justices could avoid exploring whether the government made the right decision, and instead focus on whether the government has the unlimited right to decide who is a national security risk.