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One of Anthropic's Claude models built and uploaded a malicious Python package to PyPI during a botched security evaluation, where it ran on 15 real systems and stole credentials from a security vendor. It was one of three incidents affecting real companies. [...]

South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) has fined telecommunications giant KT Corporation KRW 53.979 billion ($39 million) over data protection violations. [...]

JetBrains is warning of a critical authentication bypass vulnerability affecting TeamCity On-Premises that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution. [...]

Co když pacient nemá zdravotní pojištění? Kdo uhradí léčbu? Psychiatrická nemocnice požadovala po nepojištěném pacientovi úhradu péče, kterou mu poskytla proti jeho vůli.

Duo fyziků Univerzity of British Columbia, kteří pátrají po makroskopické temné hmotě, navrhují, že by záhadné UFO signály, které již několik let detekuje LHC, by mohly souviset s axionovými kvarkovými nuggety.

CEO Intelu podnikl velmi neobvyklý krok, kdy čerstvému a neznámému startu-upu RosaicLabs poskytl návrhy procesorů Atom. Ukázalo se, že start-up vede Tanův známý, s nímž dlouhodobě spoluinvestuje…

Patche pro AMD „Low Power“ CPU jádra včas pro Linux 7.3, spousta oprav pro AMDGPU a AMDKFD, podpora DRM format modifiers pro staré Radeony generací GCN 1.0 až 3.0, Peak Bandwidth Threshold pro Intel Xe3 / Panther Lake (a novější).

Russian state hackers are using a maximum-severity vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook’s Exchange Server to backdoor unpatched machines and steal credentials and other confidential information from them, security researchers said Thursday.

The attacks are coming from TA488, a tracking name for a group working on behalf of the Kremlin, Proofpoint researchers said Thursday. Proofpoint and the National Security Agency jointly warned last week that the group, also tracked as Laundry Bear and Void Blizzard, had been carrying out similar attacks by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in an email service from Zimbra. The revelation that TA488 is also exploiting the Exchange Server vulnerability to install advanced malware when a user does nothing other than open an email sent to an Outlook Web Access (OWA) account has elevated the group’s profile and assessments of its abilities.

Doubling down

“TA488 is doubling down on the use of ‘half-click’ exploits—where opening the email is enough to trigger compromise—with significantly improved loading mechanisms, techniques, and malware, signaling an improvement in the group’s tradecraft and capability,” Proofpoint researchers wrote. “This novel infection chain ends with a previously unknown JavaScript browser-based implant we call OWAReaper, purpose-built for persistent access inside OWA.”

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Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been attributed to a sophisticated macOS malvertising campaign that involves redirecting users to fake web pages displaying a full-screen non-existent update sequence to deliver malware as part of a new iteration of the long-running Contagious Interview campaign. The defining aspect of the attack is that bogus macOS software update screen stealthily

Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been attributed to a sophisticated macOS malvertising campaign that involves redirecting users to fake web pages displaying a full-screen non-existent update sequence to deliver malware as part of a new iteration of the long-running Contagious Interview campaign. The defining aspect of the attack is that bogus macOS software update screen stealthily Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Klasické tlačítkové mobily se staly okrajovou záležitostí • Někomu ale k používání stále bohatě postačují • Z nabídky prodávaných modelů vybíráme 13 nejlepších

Amazon linked multiple high-profile open-source software supply chain attacks targeting the Node Package Manager (npm) ecosystem to North Korean hackers. [...]

One of a series of striking AI-assisted math discoveries, this one feels a little different.

As millions of people were coming down from the excitement of the FIFA World Cup Final at the start of last week, a different kind of excitement was building within the mathematical community.

Levent Alpöge, a mathematician working at the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, made a very casual announcement on X that he had found a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture, a very old and well-known problem in a field of mathematics called algebraic geometry. He had done this using Anthropic’s large language model Claude Fable 5, released to the general public only a few weeks ago.

This is just the latest of many striking mathematical breakthroughs made by mathematicians working with large language models. But this one feels a little different to those that have come before.

What Is the Jacobian Conjecture?

First, what is a conjecture? It’s an idea that some mathematicians believe is true but nobody has been able to prove or disprove.

Now to the Jacobian conjecture. It’s fairly abstract but not too difficult to describe.

The conjecture involves functions, which are like little machines which you put one or more numbers into and out pop other numbers according to some rule or equation. In this case, the functions use what are called polynomials.

Specifically, it’s about situations where the numbers represent points in a space, like coordinates on a map. So we can imagine that when the function takes in some numbers and puts out some other numbers, it is moving the points in space.

You can test how “nicely” a function moves everything around in space by calculating something called the Jacobian determinant. If the Jacobian determinant is always a constant number that is not zero, then the function never folds or crushes space around a particular point.

The Jacobian conjecture states that when the Jacobian determinant is a non-zero constant, there should always exist another function, also made up of polynomials, that reverses the original one. This will return all the points to their starting positions.

Not every function is reversible. For example, if our starting function moves two of the original points onto a single point, then we cannot reverse it. Once the points have been merged, we cannot distinguish between them to send them back to the right positions.

A Long History of Attempts—and Failures

The two-dimensional version of the Jacobian conjecture was stated by Czech mathematician Ludwig Kraus in 1884. It was generalized to any number of dimensions by German mathematician Ott-Heinrich Keller in 1939.

It was considered so compelling that Fields Medalist Stephen Smale included it in his 1998 list of Mathematical Problems for the Next Century.

During its long history, the Jacobian conjecture has been the subject of many claimed proofs, including by Beniamino Segre and Wolfgang Gröbner, two famed 20th-century mathematicians. However, in each case, subtle errors were found that invalidated the arguments.

Despite this, there have also been a number of valid efforts showing the conjecture is true with various restrictions. Computational results have also shown it is true in two dimensions for polynomials up to degree 100 (that is, including powers of the variables up to 100).

But nobody had proved the general case—or found an example showing the conjecture was wrong.

A Deceptively Simple Answer

One of the key reasons the Jacobian conjecture is so intriguing is that, in theory, it should be easy to find a counterexample. It is straightforward to come up with examples of functions that merge points, and also examples of polynomial mappings that have a constant Jacobian determinant.

However, finding a polynomial mapping with both properties is the challenge. Indeed, as one Math Stack Exchange user noted in a post from 2017, “for all what we know, some smart undergraduate can simply write a formula […] that will be a counter-example to this conjecture.”

Indeed, this did turn out to be the case for Alpöge’s function, which is short enough to fit into a single X post. He found an example of a function in three dimensions which has a constant Jacobian determinant of -2, and which moves multiple input points to the same output point, so it is not reversible.

It shows the conjecture is false for every dimension larger than 2, with the original conjecture in two dimensions remaining open. The brevity of the counterexample made it easy for other mathematicians to verify.

The Latest Advance in a Growing Series

Alpöge’s discovery is the latest in a string of high-profile mathematical breakthroughs made by large language models. Recent examples include OpenAI’s disproof of the unit distance conjecture, and the proof of Erdős’ problem 1196 by Liam Price, a 23-year-old amateur mathematician.

Both examples illustrate one of the most striking strengths of AI models. They can draw on ideas from different areas of mathematics, combining them in a novel way to prove astonishing results.

At the time of writing, details have not been made public regarding exactly how Alpöge prompted the AI model to produce the Jacobian conjecture counterexample and what its output looked like. However, so far this result appears to be of a different nature.

Unlike many other recent AI-assisted breakthroughs, the counterexample itself is remarkably simple. The difficulty in finding it seems to have lain not in an intricate construction or a lengthy proof, but rather in finding a good way of navigating an enormous search space of possible polynomial mappings to find one with the right properties.

This suggests AI may prove to be just as valuable for discovering unexpected mathematical objects as it is for constructing proofs. What this means for the future of mathematics—and human mathematicians—remains to be seen.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post ‘Hello There the Jacobian Conjecture Is False Thanx’: Why a Tiny Social Media Post Has Mathematicians Rethinking AI appeared first on SingularityHub.

Broadcom has released security updates to fix five vulnerabilities in VMware vCenter, ESX, Workstation, and Fusion, including three critical flaws that allow attackers to bypass authentication, execute arbitrary code, or escape from a virtual machine to the host. [...]

MicroRGB posouvá LCD televizory na novou úroveň • Současně ale vyžaduje vyšší výpočetní výkon v televizoru • Samsung klade na první místo zážitek pro běžného diváka

Dirty COW. Dirty Pipe. Dirty Frag. DirtyDecrypt.

Google says artificial intelligence is dramatically increasing the number of security vulnerabilities it can find and fix in Chrome, with more than 1,000 security bugs patched across the browser's two most recent releases as it expands its use of AI. [...]

Residential security company Brinks Home has disclosed that hackers breached some of its systems and are threatening to leak allegedly stolen data. [...]

Apple may be moving faster than expected in its modem development work, and Qualcomm’s latest comments suggest that shift is already reshaping the iPhone supply chain. 

Qualcomm overnight said supply constraints are shrinking some of its Apple business faster than anticipated. “It’s availability of supply,” CEO Cristiano Amon told Reuters.

While he wasn’t specific, that likely reflects the broader industry shortage in memory, storage, and everything else and means the company’s share of components used for the next iPhone launch will fall “well below” its anticipated estimates. Amon says this is part of a transition in which future Qualcomm income will be generated by AI datacenter demand.

The company also intends to boost modem prices on Sept. 1 (And remember, the patent licensing agreement between Apple and Qualcomm expires in March 2027.)

Given Apple is selling plenty of smartphones (even as the broader industry shrinks), supply constraints won’t necessarily be because of demand for the devices; this could reflect Apple’s plan to divide the iPhone release schedule across several months, as well as its future modem development efforts. 

Reports for months have indicated Apple plans to introduce new iPhones twice a year, with the Pro range updated each fall and entry-level devices scheduled for spring. It’s a move that’s likely to help build more consistent quarterly earnings by spreading demand across different parts of the year and could reduce short-term demand for components.

Things look a little different this year, of course; the expected introduction of the new iPhone Ultra means Apple will be making three new iPhone models, not the customary four – though there is also speculation the Ultra may not ship in quantity until later on this year. 

How much does Apple need Qualcomm? Not much

There’s also Apple’s own modem development plans to consider. We know Apple’s relationship with Qualcomm isn’t easy. The two firms were engaged in costly litigation before they found a way to bury the hatchet and work together on 5G iPhones while Apple developed its C-series modems.

Those C-series modems are already used in Apple devices. The iPhone 16e, 17e and iPhone Air carry Apple’s C1/C1X modem, with the C2 variant expected in the 18 Pro series this year. 

Apple’s new modem is expected to deliver better battery efficiency, improved cellular network privacy, and AI-supported network efficiency. So, your device should last longer, be less visible to your carrier, and better able to get a connection — even when connectivity is constrained. 

Next year’s 18-series devices will certainly stick with Apple’s modems, meaning Qualcomm’s remaining Apple business should be wrapped up in the release this fall. As Apple’s modem appears in more devices, you’ll probably only see Qualcomm modems used to provide mmWave support, which realistically has very little traction or carrier support outside America.

Waiting to replace mmWave

That view is supported by reports based on information recently stolen from Apple’s India-based iPhone partner, Tata. It claimed Apple will use the C2 in internationally sold iPhones Pro and Max, while keeping to Qualcomm in US devices.

If Apple takes the same approach with next year’s iPhone releases, it would mean only US iPhones — and probably not all of them — have mmWave. As a result, Qualcomm’s modems will only be available in a very small subset of iPhones sold. That would almost certainly account for the modem maker’s reduced Apple optimism. (Apple is also part of the 6G standard development group, which implies it hopes to find some way to replace mmWave.)

It also indicates Apple is less likely to renew its current patent licensing deal, though it could still require some licenses since Qualcomm’s SEPs include some 5G-essential technologies. The other takeaway here: Apple has a high degree of confidence in its forthcoming C2 modem, which makes sense given how well-received its C1 modem has been. 

A clean sweep

One more thought. It is interesting the extent to which Tim Cook’s Apple seems to be finalizing much of its business before the transition to new CEO John Ternus on Sept. 1. (It is also notable that Qualcomm also intends to raise its prices on the same date.)

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