Search: “Revolut”

Revolut Data Leak May Trace Back to Compromised Italian Government Accounts

Attackers using a compromised Italian government PEC account impersonated law enforcement to obtain data on ~680 Revolut customers.

Revolut confirmed its systems were not breached; fraudulent data requests came from a compromised PEC mailbox tied to the Prefecture of Reggio Calabria on the pec.interno.it domain. Per the Financial Times, roughly 680 customers had identity documents, addresses, banking information, verification selfies and cryptocurrency transaction histories exposed. Researcher Korra of Duel described a 'spray and pray' operation using hundreds of crypto transaction IDs and fraudulent European Investigation Orders. Threat actor IAmNotAVillain claims six months of access and 147 GB exfiltrated from Italian law-enforcement systems, though this remains unverified.

Security Affairs·13:09 UTC · 9h agoData breach in the wild

LexFlip: A Dissociation Diagnostic for Legal Meaning Preservation Metrics

LexFlip releases 373 minimal perturbations of Quebec statutory French that reverse legal force while preserving tokens, exposing weaknesses in embedding-based meaning preservation metrics.

LexFlip provides 373 minimal perturbations of Quebec statutory French that reverse legal force while preserving 0.93 of tokens, creating dissociation items that break monotone token-overlap metric validation. The seven embedding and BERTScore metrics tested register only 0.022-0.039 of their identical-to-unrelated range on these edits, versus 0.670 for bidirectional NLI. Against FrJudge, with a measured human ceiling of r=0.597, a bare length feature outscores every semantic metric tested.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 15:49 UTC · 12d agoAI research

Revolut Exposed KYC Data After Fraudulent Government Email Passed Security Checks

Revolut handed over KYC documents, selfies, and Bitcoin transaction histories to attackers after a fraudulent email from a genuine government domain passed authentication checks.

Revolut confirmed on September 12, 2026 that it disclosed sensitive customer KYC data to an unauthorized third party after a fraudulent information request was sent from an email account operating inside a real government agency's domain, carrying valid domain authentication credentials. The exposed data included identity documents (passports, driver's licenses), verification selfies, birth dates, contact details, IBANs, account statements, and full transaction histories including Bitcoin. Revolut discovered the fraud only after independently verifying with the agency, blocked the sender, and notified law enforcement and financial regulators, but did not disclose the number of affected customers or the agency involved. Researcher ZachXBT assessed the operation was targeted at high-net-worth users, useful for fraud, impersonation, or extortion.

Security Affairs·Sep 12, 21:05 UTC · 4d agoData breach

ThinkPrior: Zero-Rollout Difficulty Priors for Cold-Start Prompt Selection in RLVR

ThinkPrior builds zero-rollout difficulty priors via an offline verifier-anchored pass, halving silent groups in RLVR and cutting wasted rollouts on Qwen2.5-Math-7B.

In GRPO-based RLVR, groups where all rollouts are correct or all are wrong yield zero advantages and consume about 39% of a run's rollouts under uniform sampling. ThinkPrior initializes a Beta posterior from an external anchor pass's verifier-scored pass rate, selecting prompts by expected learnability before any target-policy rollout, without changing the loss or optimizer. On Qwen2.5-Math-7B across sixteen seeds it more than halves early silent groups and cuts wasted rollouts through step 30 by nearly a fifth, with no detected final-accuracy difference. The ThinkPrior+DAPO composition reduces generated rollouts by 10.6% at an equal 3,840-rollout update budget.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:30 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

Revolut Data Breach Via Fake Government Requests – What We Know So Far

Revolut confirmed attackers extracted customer KYC records by sending fraudulent data requests from a spoofed or compromised government agency email domain.

Revolut confirmed a data breach in which an unauthorized party obtained sensitive customer records by submitting fraudulent information requests from an email account on a legitimate government agency domain with valid SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication. Disclosed data could include full names, dates of birth, passport or driving-license copies, onboarding facial images, IBANs, account statements, withdrawal records, and complete transaction histories including Bitcoin activity. Crypto investigator ZachXBT assessed the operation targeted high-net-worth users, while a threat actor using the name 'IAmNotAVillain' claimed Italian law-enforcement departments were compromised over six months with 147 GB of material, claims that remain unverified. Revolut says only a limited number of customers were affected, blocked the email address, and notified regulators and affected customers, stating its systems and funds were not compromised.

Cyber Security News·Sep 15, 03:46 UTC · 1d agoData breach

A Princeton Researcher Proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) that Carries Decoder State across Every Token, Fixing 96 Blocks per Token with Unbounded Temporal Depth

Princeton researcher Yifan Zhang proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer, carrying full decoder state across every token for unbounded temporal depth.

Yifan Zhang's technical report defines the Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT), pairing a causal encoder with a recurrent decoder whose final output and layerwise sliding-window attention cache carry into every subsequent token with no prompt-response boundary reset. The reference configuration ties 48 encoder and 48 decoder layers, executing 96 logical blocks per token while the state path grows to 48t blocks after t tokens at fixed per-token compute. The report details RL replay contracts that rebuild all states under current parameters and exact prefix snapshots for multi-turn serving, but explicitly reports no measured efficiency, reasoning quality, or scaling results.

MarkTechPost·Sep 13, 17:02 UTC · 3d agoAI research1

Revolut gave customer IDs and financial data to a government impostor

Revolut handed customer IDs, selfies, and financial records to criminals using a legitimate government agency email domain.

Revolut acknowledged disclosing sensitive customer records after accepting fraudulent information requests sent from an email address on a legitimate government agency domain, describing it as an external impersonation scam rather than a system intrusion. The London-based fintech, which serves more than 80 million customers globally, says customer funds were not affected and only a 'very limited' number of customers were impacted. Disclosed data includes identity and contact information, copies of passports and driver's licenses, verification selfies, account statements, and transaction histories. Revolut blocked the sending address and notified the relevant agency, law enforcement, data protection authorities, and financial regulators.

Malwarebytes Labs·Sep 14, 11:15 UTC · 2d agoData breach

Eliciting Weak-to-Strong Generalization with On-Policy Reverse Distillation

OPRD distillation enables weak-to-strong generalization by amplifying verifier-supported policy updates, outperforming existing RL and distillation methods with fewer student updates.

On-Policy Reverse Distillation (OPRD) evaluates a weak teacher's policy shift relative to its reference policy on student rollouts and amplifies the verifier-supported component of the student's policy gradient. This rescaling preserves the stationary points of policy optimization while letting the student learn beyond the teacher's capacity ceiling. In successive model transfer and multi-teacher distillation, OPRD achieves higher performance with fewer student updates than existing RL and distillation approaches, and response-style analysis shows students remain closer to verifier-RL-trained models than to their weak teachers.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research

Revolut confirms customer data breach through fake government requests

Revolut disclosed customer identity data, including passports and possibly selfies, to an attacker using a legitimate government email domain.

Attackers impersonating a government agency used a legitimate agency email domain to submit fraudulent information requests, prompting Revolut to disclose customer identity and contact data to an unauthorized third party. Exposed data included birth dates, postal and email addresses, phone numbers, passport and driver's license copies, and possibly verification selfies, account statements, and transaction histories. Revolut said a limited number of customers were affected, blocked the email address, and notified the agency, law enforcement, and regulators, adding that systems and customer funds were unaffected. Security researcher ZachXBT reported the scam appeared to target high net worth users of the fintech, which serves over 80 million customers.

TechCrunch · Security·updated Sep 14, 11:20 UTC · 2d ago·first Sep 12, 14:40 UTC · 4d agoData breach in the wild 3 sources3

USN-8736-2: Perl vulnerabilities

Ubuntu issued USN-8736-2 fixing two Perl regex flaws that could cause out-of-bounds heap access, denial of service, or security bypass on 24.04 LTS.

USN-8736-2 backports the Perl fixes from USN-8736-1 to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. CVE-2026-15534 involves out-of-bounds heap reads or writes when regular expressions handle large inputs, potentially causing denial of service or arbitrary code execution. CVE-2026-19487 causes incorrect regex matching with alternative branches, allowing security restrictions to be bypassed.

Ubuntu Security Notices·updated 20:12 UTC · 2h ago·first 14:37 UTC · 8h agoAdvisory 15 sourcesCVE-2026-15534CVE-2026-19487

Revolut discloses data breach exposing financial info, passports

Revolut disclosed a breach after a threat actor spoofing a government agency's email domain obtained customer passports, selfies, IBANs, and full transaction histories.

Revolut told affected customers that a threat actor sent a data request from an unauthorized email account on an official government agency's domain, carrying valid domain authentication credentials, and staff fulfilled it believing it legitimate. Exposed data includes identity details, contact information, passport and driver's license copies, KYC facial verification selfies, IBANs, withdrawal records, and full transaction histories including Bitcoin. Revolut calls the number of affected customers 'very limited' but refuses to give exact figures, while ZachXBT says high-net-worth users appear targeted. This follows a 2022 Revolut breach affecting 50,150 customers.

BleepingComputer·Sep 14, 08:48 UTC · 2d agoData breach1· 1 read

RelightFormer: Feed-forward Generative Transformer for Multiview Object Relighting

RelightFormer is a feed-forward generative transformer for photorealistic single- and multi-view object relighting, trained on a 90K-object dataset.

Researchers introduce RelightFormer, a feed-forward generative transformer adapted from a video foundation model that performs direct image relighting without explicit intrinsic property estimation. The architecture injects target environment maps via a latent illumination module with cross-attention and uses permutation-invariant positional encodings for unordered multi-view inputs. Training relies on the newly constructed Laval Objaverse Dataset (LOD) with 90K objects and 39K unique illuminations, and the model shows state-of-the-art quality with strong zero-shot generalization across single-view, multi-view, and novel-view relighting.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

Revolut handed customer data to fraudsters using government email account

Revolut handed sensitive KYC data of high-net-worth crypto customers to fraudsters submitting fake emergency data requests from a compromised government email domain.

Revolut confirmed it disclosed sensitive customer data—including passport and driver's license copies, verification selfies, bank statements, IBANs, and Bitcoin transaction histories—to attackers who submitted fraudulent emergency data requests from a legitimate government agency email account, apparently an Italian domain. Targets were high-net-worth individuals involved in crypto, including Marc Karpelès and entrepreneur Marc Zeller. A Telegram account claiming responsibility posted stolen data as proof and demanded an extortion payment; the account has since been suspended. Revolut says only a limited number of customers were affected and has alerted the relevant government agency, law enforcement, and regulators. The technique mirrors 2021-2022 Lapsus$-linked fraudulent emergency data request scams against Apple, Meta, and Discord.

The Record·Sep 14, 12:00 UTC · 2d agoData breach

MInTRL: Off-policy Intervention can boost On-policy RL

MInTRL injects sparse judge corrections into on-policy RL rollouts, expanding exploration beyond on-policy sampling while preserving learnability on math and code benchmarks.

Minimal Intervention Reinforcement Learning periodically has a judge-intervention policy replace erroneous suffixes of the current policy's output with short corrections, then returns control, keeping trajectories largely on-policy. Training uses a sequence-level advantage-regression objective that removes the need for importance sampling. Across math and code benchmarks it consistently beats standard on-policy and off-policy baselines, remains effective with self-intervention, and performs best at moderate intervention intensity.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 10, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

Revolut Data Breach Exposes Customers’ Passport Copies and Full Transaction Histories to Hackers

Revolut leaked KYC documents and full transaction histories after a fraudulent, domain-authenticated email request impersonating a government agency.

Revolut disclosed that an attacker using an unauthorized email account on a legitimate government domain, with valid domain-authentication credentials, tricked the fintech into releasing customer data. The exposed data includes passport and driver's license copies, identity-verification selfies, full names, dates of birth, addresses, IBANs, and complete transaction histories including Bitcoin activity. Revolut says core systems, accounts, and funds were not compromised, and it blocked the email source and notified authorities. On-chain investigator ZachXBT and others indicated the operation targeted high-net-worth users facing elevated phishing, SIM-swap, and extortion risk.

Cyber Security News·Sep 13, 05:09 UTC · 3d agoData breach3· 1 read

Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution (via the strip utility)

ArXiv paper shows the trusting-trust compiler backdoor technique can compromise an entire Linux distribution via the strip utility.

The paper (arXiv 2607.24888) demonstrates that Ken Thompson's trusting-trust attack, long viewed as a compiler-specific threat, can backdoor an entire Linux distribution by targeting the strip utility. A compromised tool reproduces its backdoor in subsequent rebuilds of itself, generalizing the attack surface beyond compilers. The finding has supply-chain implications for build reproducibility and distribution trust, though it is a research result with no observed real-world exploitation.

Lobsters · security·Sep 5, 10:58 UTC · 11d agoResearch

Personal, Financial Info Exposed in Revolut Data Breach

Revolut says a scammer using a legitimate government agency email domain obtained affected users' PII, ID copies, selfies and full financial records.

Revolut, a London-based neobank serving over 80 million users in 160 countries, notified affected users that personal and financial data was exposed to a third party posing as a government agency. Exposed data included names, addresses, dates of birth, driver's licenses, passports, verification selfies, IBANs, account statements, withdrawal records and full transaction history including Bitcoin. Revolut blocked the attacker's email and notified the relevant agency, regulators and law enforcement, but did not disclose how many individuals were impacted.

SecurityWeek·Sep 14, 13:03 UTC · 2d agoData breach

This Key Will Self-Destruct: An Open Standard for Revocable API Keys

SecurityWeek opinion piece proposes ORKS, an open standard adding issuer prefixes, discovery files, and unauthenticated revocation endpoints to make leaked API keys quickly revocable.

The article argues that plain API keys leak frequently yet lack any standardized revocation mechanism, unlike OAuth tokens which gained RFC 7009 revocation in 2013, and that GitHub's Secret Scanning Partner Program solves this only in a proprietary, invite-only way. The author proposes ORKS (Open Revocable Key Standard), with a draft spec on GitHub, built on four parts: keys embedding their issuer domain in a fixed prefix format, a discoverable /.well-known/api-key-config JSON file, unauthenticated revocation by possession of the full key, and declared constraints such as IP allowlists, expiry, scopes, and mTLS. An optional quarantine mode inspired by Toyota's andon cord restricts a reported key to read-only and throttled operation for a default 24-hour window before automatic revocation. The piece frames AI agents as making this urgent, since agents hold many credentials, can exfiltrate them via prompt injection, and can leak secrets into logs at machine speed.

SecurityWeek·Sep 9, 10:00 UTC · 7d agoTools1

What we know about the Revolut data breach so far

Revolut confirmed an impersonation scheme exposed high-net-worth customers' identity documents, IBANs, and transaction histories to an attacker.

Revolut confirmed on September 12 that someone impersonating a government agency, using an email address on that agency's domain, obtained sensitive customer records. Exposed data includes birth dates, postal and email addresses, phone numbers, passport and driving licence copies, verification selfies, account statements, and transaction histories; ZachXBT added that IBANs, withdrawal records, occupations, and bitcoin transaction history were also included. Revolut says a limited number of customers were affected, the sender's address was blocked, and its systems and customer funds were untouched, with law enforcement and regulators notified.

Help Net Security·Sep 14, 07:02 UTC · 2d agoData breach1

FLAT: Resampling Image and Text into 1D Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal Tokens for Retrieval and Generation

FLAT jointly trains a multimodal encoder with text-to-image and image-to-text decoders, producing flexible-length tokens that hit 83.1 GenEval on T2I after fine-tuning.

FLAT (Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal representations) is a pre-training framework that jointly optimizes a shared multimodal encoder with T2I and I2T decoders, combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross-modal generative objectives. It maps visual and textual inputs into a unified continuous 1D sequence space and uses nested dropout over prefix-K tokens for dynamic output lengths. A single pre-training stage supports cross-modal retrieval and generation (71.1 GenEval), with task-specific fine-tuning reaching 83.1 GenEval on T2I, 40.5 BLEU-4 and 138.6 CIDEr on MS-COCO captioning, and strong Recall@5 on MS-COCO and Flickr30K.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 14, 20:00 UTC · 2d agoAI research

Weekly Cybersecurity Newsletter Bulletin – Microsoft 0-day, FortiOS, PAN-OS Flaw, Revolut Data Breach, and 20+ Stories

Weekly roundup: Microsoft patches 973 flaws including two actively exploited zero-days; FortiOS CAPWAP flaw deploys PivotC2 RAT; PAN-OS root RCE disclosed.

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday fixed 973 vulnerabilities, including two zero-days under active exploitation: CVE-2026-85880 (Windows ALPC) and CVE-2026-81963 (Windows Update Stack), both elevation-of-privilege bugs. SOCRadar reported active exploitation of CVE-2025-25249 (CVSS 9.8) in FortiOS CAPWAP, deploying a Node.js RAT called PivotC2 that exfiltrates Exchange mailboxes to Wasabi cloud storage; 178 devices were compromised out of 30,000 scanned IPs, attributed to a Russian-speaking financially motivated group. Palo Alto disclosed CVE-2026-0310, a 9.2-rated buffer overflow enabling root code execution on PA-Series firewalls, and Fortinet disclosed CVE-2026-84393, a ZTNA certificate validation MITM flaw. Cyera also revealed CVE-2026-6471 ('PostGREShell'), a 12-year-old PostgreSQL logical-decoding flaw allowing code execution via REPLICATION-privileged accounts.

Cyber Security News·Sep 14, 03:10 UTC · 2d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-85880CVE-2026-81963CVE-2025-25249+3 CVEs3

Revoked but Still Authoritative: An Empirical Study of Revocation Enforcement in Agent-Memory Systems

An empirical study finds no major agent-memory system enforces fact revocation at retrieval, causing agents to act on superseded, unsafe information.

Researchers tested five agent-memory systems across nine policy scenarios, nine models, and six defense conditions, tracking whether revoked facts are returned and acted upon. No system enforces revocation by default: revoked records are returned whenever the revocation label is visible to the retrieval layer, outrank their replacements, and lead agents to unsafe actions. The authors propose a backend-agnostic guard that sits between the agent and any memory store and withholds revoked or conflicting records at retrieval time.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 8, 05:03 UTC · 8d agoAI safety & security

Frontier AI: Vulnerability Management's Systemic Revolution

Opinion: frontier AI like Anthropic's Mythos finds and exploits vulnerabilities at machine speed, forcing vulnerability and patch management programs to overhaul prioritization.

The author argues frontier AI models, exemplified by Anthropic's Mythos, can discover zero-days and chain exploits fast enough to overwhelm traditional vulnerability management. The piece recommends moving beyond CVSS, EPSS and KEV toward exposure management (CTEM) and automated, ring-based patch deployment. It also flags hard trade-offs between patching velocity and uptime requirements that organizations must resolve proactively.

The Hacker News·Aug 25, 11:14 UTC · 22d agoIndustry

The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

Simon Willison's pelican SVG comparison shows GPT-6 Astra producing markedly better images than GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna across reasoning levels.

Willison generated pelicans-riding-bicycles SVGs with newly accessed GPT-6 Astra at low through max reasoning levels and rendered them in a comparison grid against GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. Astra's outputs were markedly more coherent, while even the best GPT-5.6-Sol images remained largely abstract shapes. Astra does not support a reasoning=none setting, so all comparisons involved reasoning-enabled runs.

Simon Willison·Sep 4, 23:59 UTC · 11d agoAI research

When will average people feel AI’s impact?

Interconnects essay argues AI's impact is still a rounding error for average people, comparing looming wage stagnation to Engels' pause.

An Interconnects essay argues that AI currently touches daily life far less than previous industrial revolutions, since its benefits are concentrated in knowledge work and lack tangible consumer goods. The author invokes Engels' pause (1790-1840), when British wages stagnated amid rapid GDP growth, as a warning that popular backlash could kneecap AI's development. He contends the current phase is about building compounding infrastructure, and predicts daily life may look similar even 50 years from now.

Interconnects·Sep 9, 11:01 UTC · 7d agoAI industry1

DPRK APTs: Ted backdoor and curlRAT target South Korean media and automotive sectors

Rapid7 uncovered a DPRK-linked Linux toolkit using a HAProxy-embedded ted backdoor, SSH keylogger, and curlRAT against South Korean media and automotive firms.

Rapid7 Labs identified a previously undocumented framework attributed with medium confidence to DPRK actors, targeting South Korean automotive and media organizations likely since early 2025. The toolkit embeds a backdoor compiled into HAProxy 2.8.12 using its filter API, plus trojanized crond, agetty, atd, sshd, and polkitd, an SSH keylogger storing credentials under /var/lib/sshd/, and a curl-based RAT with a watchdog thread. It enables remote command execution, malicious script injection into served webpages (a watering-hole loop), credential harvesting, and long-term surveillance. Hardcoded C2s are associated with APT37 via ThreatFox, and exposed groupware portals and mail servers align with Kimsuky tradecraft; the initial access vector and any CVE remain unconfirmed.

Rapid7 Blog·Sep 4, 12:00 UTC · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild1

The Roboguard Revolution is Short

404 Media·Aug 10, 13:04 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Industry

DataFlex-RL: An Evaluation Platform for RLVR Data Policies

DataFlex-RL benchmark of 13 RLVR data policies on Qwen2.5-7B finds none reproducibly beats uniform sampling under matched GRPO training.

DataFlex-RL is an evaluation platform comparing rollout-selection, reweighting, and mixture data policies for RLVR under a common GRPO recipe. Across 13 configurations and 12 matched seeds with Qwen2.5-7B-Base on 12 math, logic, and science benchmarks, uniform GRPO improved domain-balanced accuracy by 7.76 points, but no alternative policy achieved a statistically significant improvement. A corrected 12-seed Llama-3.1-8B-Base extension found no consistent winner, and math-heavy evaluation summaries were negatively correlated (-0.33) with domain-balanced summaries.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 4, 20:00 UTC · 12d agoAI research

ICE Is Buying Access to Credit Card Records

Schneier on Security·Aug 7, 10:27 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Phishing & fraud

.blend URL Viewer

Simon Willison demos a .blend URL viewer built with GPT-6 Astra in Codex and ChatGPT Images 2.5 generating Blender models.

Simon Willison used ChatGPT Images 2.5 to generate a Faberge egg concept image themed after the TV show Pluribus, then had Codex running GPT-6 Astra (high) execute a Blender local skill to build a 3D model from it. He published the result as a .blend URL viewer tool and continues experimenting with agentic Blender workflows. The post is a hands-on demo of AI-driven creative tooling rather than a security or release announcement.

Simon Willison·Sep 9, 23:58 UTC · 6d agoAI tools & infra

14th September – Threat Intelligence Report

Check Point weekly digest: Microsoft's record 974-vuln Patch Tuesday ships two actively exploited Windows zero-days; IDScan.net, Mathspace, Revolut suffer breaches.

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday addressed a record 974 vulnerabilities, including two actively exploited privilege-escalation zero-days, CVE-2026-85880 and CVE-2026-81963, plus 20 flaws allowing unauthenticated remote code execution. Disclosed breaches include IDScan.net (identity documents), Mathspace (over 1 million people via Metabase CVE-2026-72898), Revolut, and Florida DMV (ShinyHunters). GitLab fixed critical CVSS 10.0 path traversal CVE-2026-85706, and MikroTik fixed chainable RouterOS flaws CVE-2026-67276 and CVE-2026-86060. The report also covers the PuzzleMask LLM jailbreak technique, GoldFactory's Gigabud Android fraud, and the BlueMoon Chromium exploit chain (CVE-2026-85046).

Check Point Research·Sep 14, 12:22 UTC · 2d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-72898CVE-2026-85880CVE-2026-81963+4 CVEs2· 1 read

Quoting Rick Brewster

Paint.NET added a clean-room Direct2D rewrite for WINE, largely written by Anthropic's Claude and described as unreviewed 'vibe coded' code.

Rick Brewster says Paint.NET now ships a from-scratch, reverse-engineered Direct2D implementation (PaintDotNet.Windows.Direct2D1.Managed.dll) used under WINE via a /wine flag, since Direct2D was never completed well enough there. He credits the Claude coding assistant with writing most of the code, calling it largely 'vibe coded' and not thoroughly reviewed. Simon Willison shared the quote as an example of shipping AI-assisted systems code in production software.

Simon Willison·Sep 2, 05:50 UTC · 14d agoAI tools & infra1

Separating AI's Technological Problems from Its Capitalism Problems

Schneier and Sanders argue AI's harms stem from capitalist incentives and governance gaps, not just technical limits, urging structural reform.

Writing with Nathan E. Sanders in Tech Policy Press, Bruce Schneier argues that AI's technological problems (hallucination, sycophancy, overconfidence) must be separated from socio-political problems created by capitalist market incentives. The essay contrasts US frontier-scale, energy-intensive development with China's incentive-driven leaner open models on commodity hardware, and cites Switzerland's Apertus model - trained on licensed data using public computing and renewable hydropower - as a public-interest alternative. It contends that proposals like research pauses, data-center moratoria, and federal screening conflate technology problems with governance problems, and that society faces independent choices on both axes.

Schneier on Security·Aug 15, 00:00 UTC · Aug 15, 2026AI policy

ActReview: Rebuttal-Guided Training Data and Rubric Rewards for Actionable Peer Review Generation

ActReview post-trains Qwen3-8B-Base on OpenReview rebuttals to generate actionable peer-review feedback with grounded revision suggestions, benchmarked on 1,000 curated instances.

The paper defines Actionable Peer-review Generation as diagnostic claim generation plus revision suggestion generation and introduces ActReview, a rebuttal-guided post-training framework. From OpenReview review-rebuttal threads the authors build ActReview-40K, aligning reviewer weaknesses with author responses grounded in localized paper evidence, and post-train Qwen3-8B-Base with multi-task SFT followed by GRPO using weakness-specific rubric rewards. They also release ActReview-Bench, a human-curated 1,000-instance benchmark, on which ActReview outperforms prior specialized review-generation models on actionability and grounding while remaining competitive with strong prompt-based LLMs. Human evaluation confirms improved revision usefulness but identifies a remaining gap in technical accuracy.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research

Trump is giving data centers a pass to pollute

Former EPA officials warn that Trump-era deregulation to speed AI data center construction worsens pollution, citing 30 federal policy changes.

The Environmental Protection Network, a group of former EPA employees, released a report identifying 30 federal actions since January 2025 — 17 of which specifically mention AI or target data centers — that they say increase health risks from data center pollution. Trump's July 2025 AI Action Plan recommended streamlining regulations under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Superfund law to expedite data center and chip factory permitting. A cited study from UC Riverside, Caltech, and Rochester Institute of Technology projects AI-related air pollution could cause up to 1,300 premature deaths and more than $20 billion in public health costs by 2028.

The Verge · AI·Sep 12, 14:41 UTC · 4d agoAI policy2

Miles v0.1: Production-Level Post-Training

Radix Ark open-sources Miles v0.1, a full-stack RL post-training framework demonstrated with asynchronous agentic RL on GLM-5.2 744B-A40B across 64 GB300 GPUs.

Miles v0.1 is a full-stack, open-source system for frontier-scale reinforcement-learning post-training, built on slime with rollout engines on SGLang and trainers supporting NVIDIA Megatron-LM and PyTorch FSDP backends plus three weight-synchronization transports. It supports full-parameter RL, LoRA RL, on-policy distillation, supervised fine-tuning, true-on-policy rollout-training alignment, and extends to diffusion models. The end-to-end case study ran fully asynchronous agentic RL on GLM-5.2 744B-A40B for terminal-use coding tasks on 64 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs with a median step time of 263 seconds over the first 30 measured steps. The code is open-sourced on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI tools & infra

What must happen for AI’s trillion-dollar gamble to pay off

Hyperscalers need 2.7x productivity gains by 2030 to justify nearly $1.1 trillion in AI data center spending, or risk bankruptcy and capital misallocation.

Wharton finance professor Jessica Wachter estimates hyperscaler AI expenditure will reach nearly $1.1 trillion through 2027 and that a 2.7x productivity increase is needed to break even by 2030. AI revenues of roughly $150-200 billion this year fall far short of about $750 billion in annual spending, with total investment from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle potentially exceeding $5 trillion over four years. Alphabet reported its first free cash flow deficit (about $5.9 billion) since its 2004 IPO due to AI infrastructure costs. Researchers warn that failed demand could make the buildout the largest capital misallocation in history, with depreciating GPU chips risking stranded assets.

MIT Technology Review · AI·Sep 15, 10:00 UTC · 1d agoAI industry

New Ted Backdoor Hides Inside Victims' Own HAProxy Builds to Intercept Web Traffic

Rapid7 found a new backdoor, ted, compiled into trojanized HAProxy at two South Korean organizations, with medium-confidence attribution to North Korean actors.

Rapid7 documented a previously undocumented Linux toolkit named ted compiled into the HAProxy load balancer binaries of two South Korean organizations in the automotive and media sectors. The implant intercepts web traffic, serves altered pages only to filtered visitors, and hides C2 exchanges from backend logs and HAProxy statistics; a companion RAT, curlRAT, beacons on a default 12-hour schedule. The toolkit also trojanizes crond, sshd, agetty, atd, and polkitd binaries and sanitizes logs and bash history. Rapid7 attributes the activity with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors, with domain infrastructure overlapping APT37 listings in maltrail and delivery resembling the Operation SyncHole campaign.

The Hacker News·Sep 4, 14:51 UTC · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild

240,000 Hit by Data Breach at Japan’s Digital Agency

Japan's Digital Agency says hackers exploited a VPN flaw and a maintenance account to steal ~246,000 records on 240,000 people.

Japan's Digital Agency disclosed a breach of its Government Solution Service (GSS) affecting roughly 240,000 individuals, discovered in late June. Attackers exploited a publicly disclosed vulnerability in a VPN product and used a maintenance and operations employee's account to access over 246,000 records, including names (~236,000), email addresses (~231,000), phone numbers (~94,000), and addresses (~1,000). The agency blocked external access to the affected server, suspended the account, and said no ID numbers or financial account data were compromised.

SecurityWeek·updated Sep 15, 14:43 UTC · 1d ago·first Sep 15, 11:45 UTC · 1d agoData breach in the wild 2 sources

ResidualAuth: What Authorization State Must Language Agents Preserve under Revocable Delegation?

Formalizes residual authorization state language agents must preserve under revocable delegation; token-budget summaries mostly fail while hard gates stop unauthorized effects.

The paper shows two authorization histories with identical current permissions can require opposite decisions after the same direct-edge revocation, formalizing the needed information as residual authorization state. Exponentially many future-distinct states can share one transitive closure, with exact or tight asymptotic bounds on the state an exact monitor requires. Across four open-weight models, fixed 256-token summaries solved at most 2 of 16 paired episodes while authenticated current-query reads solved 15-16 of 16. A hard effect gate reduced eight observed unauthorized effects to zero without changing preceding attempts.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 8, 00:05 UTC · 8d agoResearch