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France has accused Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of being behind last month's cyberattacks on fridges and freezers across the country. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the attack was "unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression," adding those who were responsible would be hit with sanctions "at the European level." The BBC reports: The cyber-attack last month saw fridges and freezers in hundreds of supermarkets across France heated up, which spoilt fresh …

Anthropic has released Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 with "improvements in areas like coding, reasoning, and vision," while cutting Fable's input price and claiming 30% faster responses. TechCrunch reports: It's Anthropic's first model release since the arrival of a third-party report from the assessment group METR, which suggested the lab might be approaching recursive self-improvement (RSI) -- or the ability for AI models to carry on model training independently. The METR report found inter…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year. The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia's chief executive, Jense…

Google is expanding its AI chip lineup with two specialized TPUs arriving next year: the TPU 8tx, which encrypts sensitive data at the chip level for confidential computing, and the TPU 8i Max, which combines two TPU chips to provide more processing power and memory for long-context workloads. The move broadens Google's challenge to Nvidia as demand outstrips supply, with Google saying every TPU it currently has is already committed to customers. Quartz reports: The 8tx is designed for sensitiv…

Huawei has unveiled the Qingyun HM650, a desktop PC it claims is made entirely from Chinese-manufactured components, including its own 10-core Kirin X90 processor and an enterprise version of HarmonyOS. "While Huawei has reportedly claimed local companies manufactured 100 percent of the components in the machine, it is unclear if all those components use Chinese designs," notes The Register. From the report: A single Chinese government agency has reportedly signed up for 600 of the machines. Th…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Alexis Ohanian wants to figure out the future of user-generated content. According to the Reddit cofounder, building social media apps is "not cool anymore" and so much of the internet has been compromised. "I'm expecting some better version of the group chat to be that new version of UGC," Ohanian told WIRED senior correspondent Lauren Goode at the inaugural WIRED World Fair. [...] Ohanian is a proponent of the "Dead Internet Theory"—the idea tha…

Futurism reports: While many scientists have long held that Mars is "geologically dead" inside, new research is adding to the growing body of evidence to the contrary. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers examined data collected by the European and Russian ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in 2021, which found that Mars is slowly belching hydrogen chloride gas. The researchers suggest this gas is being released from hot magma deep be…

A crowdfunded sequel to the movie Return of the Living Dead was uploaded last weekend — but producer Richard Driscoll is drawing criticism for what he did to the 1985 punk/zombie classic. Kotaku reports: [The release of the movie] came to the surprise to the original cast, who were attached to star in the follow-up. Instead it seems Driscoll opted to use AI to generate the film... In 2024, Driscoll, who operates his own no-budget streaming service "DragonFLIX," launched an Indiegogo page for "T…

It's FOSS reports: Asahi Linux is the reason you can run Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac today. For years, the project put most of its own code under the MIT license so that anyone, including the BSDs, could reuse it as needed... They have announced that Asahi is moving all of its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward, all Asahi Linux code will be under strong copyleft licenses only. Asahi Linux compares their dilemma to the 1990s, when "permissively lic…

69 million people people live in the United Kingdom. And now >Electrek reports: Battery-electric cars took 32% of the UK's new car market in October, while petrol cars fell to just 37.2%, according to new data from the SMMT. That's the closest the two have been. At the current pace, electric cars will outsell petrol in the UK within a year. And it could happen as soon as this December. The UK registered 152,730 new cars in October, up 5.4% year-over-year and the 11th straight month of growth fo…

CrowdStrike's "Falcon Guardian" protects Windows systems by enforcing policy, restricting unauthorized applications and blocking USB devices, notes Gartner. And now CrowdStrike says they're giving security teams "the ultimate human control over AI agents" with — an "AI Kill Switch... a defender can terminate it where it runs, block it from launching again, and cut off its enterprise network access." "When you deploy agents with a kill switch, you stay in control," said George Kurtz, CEO and fou…

CNBC reports new details about the relationship of alleged Chinese spy with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: Huang told Nvidia staff in a email on Sunday that he had an affair with the woman and that Nvidia's board of directors had opened an independent investigation into the spying allegations. "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did," Huang wrote in the message. "I am deeply sorry." Nvidia's board "said an independent committee, assisted b…

The New York Times reports: After chatting for months with Google's artificial intelligence on a school-issued Chromebook laptop, a 13-year-old student made plans to end her life, according to a lawsuit filed in California Superior Court on Monday, the latest in a wave of litigation over Big Tech's effects on young people. The lawsuit, which refers to the girl as Emma, said that her parents first learned she had access to Google's AI in mid-March after their daughter's school sent a message war…

"It has been an extraordinary privilege," says the subheading on Thursday's announcement. After 31 years Salon.com will stop publishing, according to an announcement which appeared on the site under the byline "Salon". It remembers that Salon "was an idea about what journalism could be, born at a moment when the internet was still a largely unexplored frontier." When Salon launched in November 1995, the web was a very different place. A small group of journalists set out to create something ori…

Be careful with the file .claude/settings.local.json, warns The Hacker News: Passwords and API keys that developers typed into commands they approved in Claude Code are sitting in public GitHub repositories, where anyone can read them. When a user selects "Yes, and don't ask again," Anthropic's AI coding assistant can save the command, word-for-word, including the secret, in a project settings file. Software security company Apiiro said that 1,122 public copies of that file hold at least one se…