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Hierarchical NeRF with JAX3D for Volumetric Rendering, Novel-View Synthesis, and 3D Reconstruction

MarkTechPost tutorial implements a hierarchical NeRF in JAX using jax3d volume-rendering primitives for novel-view synthesis and 3D reconstruction.

The tutorial builds an end-to-end hierarchical Neural Radiance Field using JAX, Flax, Optax, and jax3d's volume-rendering functions (sample_along_rays, volume_rendering, sample_piecewise_constant_pdf). It implements positional encoding, skip connections, separate coarse and fine networks, and view-direction conditioning with hierarchical importance sampling. Training uses JAX JIT compilation, Adam optimization, exponential learning-rate decay, and gradient clipping. Evaluation covers PSNR, depth and opacity visualization, 360-degree rendering, and marching-cubes geometry extraction.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI research

Implementation of Machine Learning Workflows with NVIDIA cuML, RAPIDS, GPU Benchmarking, Explainability, Clustering, and Model Inference

Hands-on tutorial implements NVIDIA cuML and RAPIDS to GPU-accelerate scikit-learn-style ML workflows with benchmarking, clustering, and inference.

The tutorial demonstrates NVIDIA cuML as a GPU-accelerated machine learning framework, using cuml.accel to speed up unmodified scikit-learn scripts with zero code changes and the native cuML API for CuPy/cuDF interoperability. It benchmarks CPU versus GPU implementations of PCA, K-Means, nearest-neighbor search, logistic regression, random forests, and DBSCAN on datasets up to 200,000 samples with 64 features. It also builds GPU pipelines with UMAP, t-SNE, and HDBSCAN, validates GPU-generated SHAP explanations, uses the FIL library for forest inference, and covers model serialization and GPU/CPU portability.

MarkTechPost · 4d agoAI tools & infra

Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra

Cognition released SWE-2, a coding model post-trained from Kimi K3 that scores 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, near Fable 5.1 at 64% lower cost.

Cognition introduced SWE-2, its most advanced coding model, post-trained from the 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 base model. It achieves 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, 73.0% on DeepSWE 1.1, and 92.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, beating Grok 4.6 and SWE-1.7 while matching Fable 5.1 and GPT-5.6 Sol at a fraction of the price. The company says it scaled reinforcement learning to the multi-trillion-parameter regime for the first time, using Pareto-informed cost penalties that train all reasoning-effort levels in a single run, tripled RL environments, and NVFP4/FP8 quantization-aware training. SWE-2 is available today in Devin Desktop and CLI, with rollout on Devin Web and Fusion.

Hacker News · AIupdated · 4d agofirst · 6d agoModel release 11 sourcesHN 58↑ · 15 comments1

Saving Jet Fuel

Tutorial optimizes flight paths to cut jet fuel costs using open-source Scikit-decide planning framework and OpenAP aircraft performance models.

A technical walkthrough demonstrates wind-aware flight path optimization using Scikit-decide, an open-source framework for reinforcement learning and automated planning, paired with OpenAP fuel-consumption models built by Dr. Junzi Sun at TU Delft and NOAA wind data. A Boeing 787-9 flying EWR to FCO can require roughly $68K in fuel, and adjusted routing could save thousands. The post uses Python 3.12, DuckDB with spatial extensions, and QGIS for map rendering.

Inside NVIDIA’s cuDNN Graph API: Fusion, Autotuning, and Plan Reuse with cuDNN Frontend

MarkTechPost tutorial walks through NVIDIA's cuDNN Frontend graph API, covering kernel fusion, autotuning, plan reuse, and CUDA graph capture on Colab GPUs.

The tutorial explains how to express GPU computations as operation graphs via the cuDNN Frontend graph API, running the five-step build pipeline of validate, build operation graph, create execution plans, check support, and build plans. It progresses from a single fused convolution with bias and ReLU to autotuning across engine configs, FP8-style epilogues, attention, plan serialization, dynamic shapes, and CUDA graph capture. Each kernel is benchmarked against a PyTorch reference on a single Colab GPU to verify correctness and measure cost. The piece also covers practical setup issues like making libcudnn.so visible to the frontend's dynamic loader.

MarkTechPost · 1d agoAI tools & infra2

Hackers Deploy Hundreds of AI Agents to Compromise 440 PaperCut Servers

AI-agent campaign exploited PaperCut CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078, compromising 440 servers at 395 organizations and reaching Domain Admin in 12.

GreyNoise tracked a likely Russian-speaking actor that used AI agents (OpenAI Codex, a DeepSeek model) to exploit an authentication bypass (CVE-2026-81578) and unsafe-reflection RCE (CVE-2026-82078) in PaperCut NG/MF starting August 31, 2026. At least 440 servers across 395 organizations in 48 countries were compromised, with one US high school going from initial access to Domain Admin in seven minutes. Escalation relied on LSASS and registry credential harvesting, pass-the-hash, the noPac technique (CVE-2021-42278/CVE-2021-42287), new Domain Admin accounts, and DCSync to steal NTDS.DIT data. Operators staged registry hives, used Ligolo tunneling and certutil Base64 encoding for exfiltration, and one attempt was blocked by Cloudflare WAF.

GBHackersupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 7 sourcesCVE-2026-81578CVE-2026-82078CVE-2021-42278+1 CVEs1

USN-8737-2: GNU C Library vulnerabilities

Ubuntu extends glibc fixes to 24.04 LTS, patching buffer overflow in strfmon and out-of-bounds access in tdelete, both potentially leading to code execution.

USN-8737-2 provides the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS counterpart to fixes released in USN-8737-1 for GNU C Library vulnerabilities. CVE-2026-19499 is a buffer overflow in strfmon when handling right-justification padding, potentially allowing denial of service or arbitrary code execution on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. CVE-2026-19542 is an out-of-bounds stack array access in tdelete that could also result in denial of service or code execution.

Ubuntu Security Noticesupdated · 9h agofirst · 6d agoAdvisory 15 sourcesCVE-2026-19499CVE-2026-195421

The GNU C Library security advisories update for 2026-09-14

glibc advisory GLIBC-SA-2026-0017 discloses a buffer overflow in strfmon/strfmon_l affecting versions 2.38 through 2.44.

The GNU C Library published security advisories including GLIBC-SA-2026-0017, a buffer overflow in strfmon and strfmon_l. Calling these functions with right-justified width padding conversions can write past the end of the caller-supplied output buffer in glibc 2.38 to 2.44. Exploitation requires an application code path that calls strfmon with attacker-influenced parameters.

oss-security · 2d agoVulnerability 2 sources1

When scanners miss the attack: how Cloudflare Client-Side Security protects storefronts

Cloudflare's Page Shield ML uncovered four malicious JavaScript campaigns on storefronts, including affiliate fraud and a remote-backdoor script, that VirusTotal and URLScan missed.

Cloudflare's Page Shield ML detected four client-side JavaScript operations (eight payloads) in live traffic on online storefronts, enabling affiliate commission hijacking, clickless affiliate theft via hidden iframes, user tracking with a remote-code backdoor, and cloaking of paid mobile visitors. Seven of the eight payloads were absent from VirusTotal and URLScan returned no malicious verdict for any, including a Lnkr-family payload indexed unclassified for roughly 2.5 years. Detection relies on a graph neural network over JavaScript syntax trees, an LLM second opinion on Workers AI, and a frontier-model ensemble voting across benign, magecart, other malware, and cryptomining labels.

Cloudflare Blog · 9h agoMalware in the wild

Compiler Can Undo Your Security Checks

Chris Domas explains at Black Hat how legal compiler optimizations can strip security checks and memory-clearing operations, turning secure C source into vulnerable binaries.

David Bombal interviews researcher Chris Domas at Black Hat USA 2026 about how the C abstract machine permits compilers to legally transform code in ways that remove security protections, delete memory-clearing operations, and introduce time-of-check to time-of-use vulnerabilities. Factors like register pressure, structure layout, and data size affect vulnerability, with examples where 17 or 33 byte buffers are safe while nearby sizes produce vulnerable code. An AI-assisted analysis of 500 million lines of open-source code identified 300 potentially dangerous patterns. Recommended mitigations include enabling compiler warnings, using sanitizers, analyzing optimized builds, and testing the exact binary that ships.

When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

Analysis of 16.9 million SOC alerts finds AI-related alerts at 0.43%, growing 685% since February, with 94.1% noise and 0.02% real attacks.

A review of roughly 16.9 million SOC alerts found about 73,000 (0.43%) were AI-related, a share that grew 685% between February and June 2026. Of AI-related alerts, 94.1% were noise, 5.8% genuine risks, and 0.02% real attacks; 79.8% received benign verdicts, 81.7% were automatically suppressed, and only 5.4% reached a human analyst. The only confirmed attacks were phishing campaigns that weaponized AI brand names as lures, while developer coding agents spawning shells and reading credential stores routinely tripped detections written before AI agents existed.

The Hacker News · 4d agoResearch2

Operation RapidRust: APT36 Deploys RUSTYSHADE, RUSTYMOVE, PSNATCH, and BASHNATCH

Zscaler details Operation RapidRust: APT36 deploys four new tools including RUSTYSHADE, a Rust backdoor using private GitHub repos for encrypted C2.

Zscaler ThreatLabz documents Operation RapidRust, a campaign by Pakistan-aligned APT36 deploying four new tools: RUSTYSHADE, a 64-bit Rust Windows backdoor that uses attacker-controlled private GitHub repositories with a hardcoded PAT and AES-256-GCM-encrypted messages for C2; RUSTYMOVE; PSNATCH, a PowerShell file stealer that scans Office documents, archives, media, and databases modified in the last 120 days and exfiltrates up to 5 GB per run to per-machine GitHub repositories; and BASHNATCH. The backdoor was dropped via PowerShell from attacker-controlled Backblaze B2 storage and supports screenshots, webcam capture, file listing, downloads, and shell command execution.

Zscaler ThreatLabz · 14h agoThreat actor in the wild

Hacked HBO Max Reddit Account Used for Malware Delivery via ClickFix Attack

Attackers hijacked HBO Max's verified Reddit account to push 108 malicious ads delivering AMOS and Amatera infostealers via ClickFix prompts.

Threat actors compromised the official u/hbomax Reddit account and ran 108 malicious ads over 48 hours in a campaign tracked as PasteSwitch, directing users to a fake hbomaxx[.]us site. ClickFix prompts tricked macOS users into running curl | zsh payloads (MacSync, AMOS Helper, fake wallets) and Windows users into executing MSHTA/PowerShell delivering Amatera Stealer. AnimateClipper and ZigClipper clipboard hijackers swapped cryptocurrency addresses using a blockchain-hosted C&C active since early 2026. Reddit suspended the ads after notification.

SecurityWeekupdated · 1d agofirst · 1d agoMalware in the wild 7 sources

Unmasking Cloud Identities: From Behavioral Clustering to Automated Detection

Unit 42 clusters behavior of 40,000+ AWS identities from 125 cloud environments to map functional roles and enable lightweight SQL-based detection.

Palo Alto Unit 42 built an unsupervised behavioral clustering model using UMAP and HDBSCAN on AWS CloudTrail logs to map cloud identities to functional roles such as administrators, backup services, security tooling and DevOps. The study analyzed over 40,000 identities across 125 cloud environments over two months. The researchers show that heuristics extracted from the clustering map can be implemented in standard SQL, enabling role classification at scale without running a continuous ML pipeline. The methodology extends to audit logs from other cloud providers, SaaS and Kubernetes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 2d agoResearch

Three Threat Groups Target Russian Enterprises With Backdoors, Ransomware, and Wipers

Kaspersky details NightEagle, Hacking Cat, and Toy Ghouls targeting Russian enterprises with Exchange backdoors, Gorilla RAT, and destructive Monkey ransomware.

Kaspersky reports three threat clusters targeting Russian enterprises: NightEagle (APT-Q-95), the pro-Ukrainian hacktivist group Hacking Cat, and Toy Ghouls. NightEagle uses compromised VPN credentials and the GhostContainer modular backdoor to fully compromise Microsoft Exchange servers, chaining CVE-2020-0688 exploitation, BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708), Active Directory vulnerabilities, and DCSync to seize domain controllers. Hacking Cat exploits Exchange flaws including CVE-2021-26855 and CVE-2026-42897 to deliver the Gorilla RAT and multiple Monkey ransomware variants written in Rust, .NET, C++, and Golang targeting Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi, with some variants acting as wipers that never store the encryption key.

Decomposition Buys Integrity, Not Yield

Study of 600 production deep-research traces finds agent-tree decomposition loses findings at rate N^(1-δ); flat architectures maximize yield.

The paper models multi-agent decomposition as a tree where an agent holding b items retains each with probability r(b); with r(b)=1/b every tree delivers exactly one finding regardless of shape. Analysis of 600 production deep-research traces estimates delta=0.34 retention decay, and 1,012 annotated traces show one brief in sixteen goes off-target per tier, giving an alignment penalty of 0.536. Depth still cuts root context exposure from N to N^(1/k) and is cheaper at scale, with a hazard model over 743,819 production tool calls showing delegation is an opening move rather than a response to filling context.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

Iranian cyber targeting of dissidents, activists and journalists

UK NCSC, FBI, and Dutch AIVD expose CHOSEN BRICK spyware used by Iranian state actors against dissidents, activists, and journalists worldwide.

A joint advisory from the UK NCSC, FBI, and Dutch AIVD details CHOSEN BRICK, a Windows spyware family used by Iranian state cyber actors since at least 2025 against dissidents, activists, and journalists in the UK, US, and Netherlands. Actors build rapport on WhatsApp and Telegram impersonating known contacts or platform support, then deliver disguised payloads resembling apps such as Telegram, Norton, RunwayML, or fake MRI results. The malware persists via HKCU Run registry keys, adds Microsoft Defender exclusions, and uses a unique Telegram bot C2 per victim. Capabilities include screen capture, microphone recording, process enumeration, email and messaging data theft, file deletion, and system wiping; victim data has appeared on pro-Iranian leak sites.

NCSC UK · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild2

Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students

Two high school students used Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol to help solve an open Lorentzian polynomials problem, posting a 75-page arXiv proof.

Aayush Bathija and Prince Rohatgi of Oak Park High School, mentored by UCLA postdoc Daniel Soskin, published the 75-page paper 'Bounded Ratios for Lorentzian Polynomials' (arXiv 2609.05341), solving an open problem in Fields Medalist June Huh's Lorentzian polynomial theory. The main structural theorem extends bounded coefficient-ratio characterization from quadratic to arbitrary-degree polynomials via discrete convexity conditions. The students used Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol for exploration and proof ideas but independently verified all arguments; the result follows an open letter from 25 Fields Medalists voicing concerns about AI's impact on mathematical rigor.

Hackers Abuse YouTube Gaming Channels and SEO Poisoning to Deploy RATs and Chrome Hijacker

Unit 42 exposed CL-CRI-1171, a pay-per-install operation using YouTube gaming channels and SEO poisoning to deliver RATs and a Chrome hijacker.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 identified over 10,000 OfferLoader samples and 11 YouTube channels pushing trojanized installers via gaming lures and SEO-poisoned searches for tools like WinDirStat and Bluetooth drivers. Trojanized Inno Setup installers spawn three payload branches: Insomnia RAT (dual Node.js/Python backdoor that disables Microsoft Defender), ARKTunnel (undocumented RAT hiding its payload in a bitmap image and tunneling TCP/UDP), and Docro Hijacker (alters Chrome protected preferences to hijack search and affiliate links). The pay-per-install model sells each infection to multiple buyers, reaching gamers as well as corporate and government endpoints.

Cyber Security News · 2d agoMalware in the wild1

Thelio Mira AI Linux Workstation: 192 GB GPU Memory

System76 launches the Thelio Mira AI Linux workstation from $3,299 with dual NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 GPUs and 192 GB GPU memory for local AI workloads.

System76's Thelio Mira AI is a locally built (Denver, Colorado) Linux workstation for AI training, fine-tuning, and inference, starting at $3,299. Configurations go up to a 16-core AMD Ryzen 9000 CPU, 192 GB DDR5 RAM, and dual NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPUs delivering 192 GB of (ECC) GPU memory with liquid cooling, dual PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, and up to three M.2 NVMe drives. It ships with Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS or Ubuntu and is positioned as a way to avoid recurring cloud GPU costs.

You don’t have to join the hack-back program to inherit its risk

A new US presidential memorandum creates a vetted private hack-back program, leaving participating vendors and their customers with untested legal liability and collateral risks.

The August 12 National Security Presidential Memorandum directs the National Coordination Center, run jointly by DOJ and DHS, to approve covert surveillance and disruptive Cyber Effects Operations by vetted private companies, with a forfeitable bond of at least $1 million required as a contract condition. The analysis argues the criminal shield rests on an untested reading of the CFAA exemption at 18 U.S.C. 1030(f), with no civil safe harbor, no state-law preemption and no foreign-law protection. Non-participating organizations can still inherit risk through shared infrastructure collateral damage, lack of customer disclosure, Lloyd's bulletin Y5381 state-backed attack exclusions, and threat-intelligence pipelines feeding offensive proposals.

CSO Online · 20h agoPolicy & legal

harshatheg/Qwen-2.5-1B-RLCD — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

A community MLX inference engine evaluates constrained JSON schema fields in parallel on Apple Silicon, reporting 5.6-7.0x latency speedups with guaranteed schema validity.

The repository harshatheg/Qwen-2.5-1B-RLCD appeared at #30 on Hugging Face trending, but its content describes Parallel Constrained Decoding, an MLX-based inference engine for structured extraction and classification on Apple Silicon Macs. Benchmarked with mlx-community/Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct-4bit on an M4 Max, it reports 5.6x-7.0x latency reductions (e.g., 1,900 ms to 270 ms for a 28-field support triage task) with 100% syntactic validity and calibrated field-level probabilities. The engine prefills a single KV-cache, broadcasts it across all schema fields, and slices logits to valid candidate tokens for enum fields with up to 255 choices.

KREMLIN Banking Malware Hijacks Chrome and Edge to Steal Credentials and Session Tokens

Elastic Security Labs details KREMLIN, Brazilian banking malware using malicious Chrome/Edge extensions and Ethereum smart contracts to steal credentials and session tokens.

Elastic Security Labs documents KREMLIN (tracked as REF9334), a Brazilian banking malware toolkit active since at least May 2025 that impersonates a dozen Brazilian banks. It uses multi-stage JavaScript loaders, a C++ installer that DLL-sideloads via a legitimate SentinelOne binary, and a malicious Chrome/Edge extension named 'AVSync System Inc.' Ethereum smart contracts act as dead-drop resolvers for C2 endpoints, a shift that occurred May 19, 2026, making infrastructure hard to disrupt. The extension harvests cookies, sessionStorage/localStorage, browsing history, screenshots, and full page HTML via WebSocket plus CSS-disguised polling endpoints. The group has run seven distinct campaigns and also distributes Pulsar RAT and Remcos RAT.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 23h agofirst · 1d agoMalware in the wild 2 sources

Thai Broadband Provider Hacked via Fortinet Vulnerability

Hackers exploited Fortinet CVE-2024-21762 RCE to breach Thai broadband provider 3BB, deploying MeshCentral backdoors and credential-harvesting tools across its network.

Hunt.io uncovered an intrusion staging directory in Thailand containing 298 files of custom tooling built for Triple T Broadband (3BB) and its former owner Jasmine. Initial access came via fingerprinting a FortiGate SSL-VPN appliance and exploiting CVE-2024-21762 for remote code execution, after probing CVE-2018-13379, CVE-2022-42475, and CVE-2023-27997. The actor also probed F5 BIG-IP for CVE-2021-22986, CVE-2022-1388, and CVE-2023-46747, escalated privileges with PwnKit and Dirty COW, used MeshCentral as a C2 backdoor, harvested SSH/database/SNMP/Radius credentials, deployed PHP web shells, and ran cleanup scripts to hide the intrusion.

SecurityWeek · 1d agoThreat actor in the wildCVE-2018-13379CVE-2022-42475CVE-2023-27997+4 CVEs

Agent Harness vs Agent Framework vs MCP: Which Layer Owns the Loop, State, Tools, Permissions, and Recovery

Architecture explainer separates agent harnesses, frameworks, and MCP by which layer owns the loop, state, permissions, and recovery.

The article distinguishes agent harnesses (OpenAI Codex, Claude Agent SDK), which own the execution loop, sandbox, permission model, and recovery; frameworks (LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, Microsoft Agent Framework), which supply composable primitives; and MCP, a stateless JSON-RPC wire protocol governed by the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation since December 2025. An ownership matrix maps the execution loop, state, tool transport, permissions, recovery, sandboxing, and multi-agent orchestration to each layer. The 2026-07-28 MCP specification made the protocol fully stateless, retiring the initialize handshake and session headers.

MarkTechPost · 2d agoAI research1

Chinese Hackers Exploit Critical Tencent Software Flaw for One-Click Code Execution

China-linked UNC3569 actively exploited critical Sogou Input Method flaw CVE-2026-51990 for one-click system-level code execution, deploying the GrayRabbit backdoor.

Gen Threat Labs reports that China-linked threat actor UNC3569, possibly tied to contractor i-SOON, exploited critical CVE-2026-51990 in Tencent's Sogou Input Method, a Windows IME used by hundreds of millions, via crafted sgbiz URLs. The chain combines unvalidated command-line argument injection, unrestricted URL navigation, and an un-sandboxed Chromium 80 engine missing roughly six years of security patches. The exploit gives system-level code execution and was used to deploy the GrayRabbit backdoor, which provides a reverse shell, plugin loading, file upload to C2, and system info collection, and has appeared in UNC3569 intrusions since at least 2021. Tencent patched the issue in version 16.3.0.3498 via automatic update, but the outdated Chromium configuration reportedly remained unchanged as of September 10.

SecurityWeek · 2d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2026-519901· 1 read

China-Linked Hackers Exploit Sogou One-Click RCE to Deploy GRAYRABBIT Backdoor

China-linked UNC3569 exploited CVE-2026-51990 in Sogou Input Method to deploy the GRAYRABBIT backdoor in active espionage intrusions.

Gen Threat Labs discovered UNC3569 exploiting CVE-2026-51990, a one-click RCE in Tencent's Sogou Input Method for Windows that chains an insecure sgbiz: protocol handler with an unsandboxed Chromium 80 CEF webview. The chain weaponizes CVE-2021-38003 (V8 type confusion) to run shellcode that DLL-sideloads via 7z.exe/7z.dll and deploys the GRAYRABBIT backdoor, which beacons over RC4-encrypted raw TCP 443 to mail.uaiubifas[.]top. Tencent patched the issue in version 16.3.0.3498, released via automatic updates on April 21, 2026. UNC3569 is a PRC-nexus espionage actor targeting government, education, technology, and financial sectors across East and Southeast Asia.

GBHackersupdated · 2d agofirst · 2d agoThreat actor in the wild 3 sourcesCVE-2026-51990CVE-2021-380031

The extension you never installed: KREMLIN forges Chrome's own integrity checks to steal banking sessions

Elastic details KREMLIN, a Brazilian banking malware whose malicious Chrome/Edge extension forges Chromium integrity checks to steal sessions.

Elastic Security Labs tracked operation REF9334 and its KREMLIN toolkit, a Brazilian banking malware campaign impersonating twelve banks across seven campaigns since May 2025. The infection chain uses multi-stage obfuscated JavaScript loaders with sandbox checks (file and process counting), scheduled-task persistence, and an Ethereum smart contract acting as a dead-drop resolver for C2 and payload URLs, abusing Archive.org for hosting. The malicious browser extension bypasses Chromium integrity mechanisms by manipulating Secure Preferences and regenerating required HMACs and App-Bound encrypted hashes. Threat Command disrupted over 1,500 infections by registering the kill-switch canary domain.

Elastic Security Labs · 3d agoMalware in the wild

Due to concerns about malicious applications, GPT2 will not be released (2019)

OpenAI's landmark 2019 GPT-2 post withheld the full 1.5B-parameter model over misuse concerns, releasing only a smaller variant and paper.

OpenAI announced GPT-2, a 1.5-billion-parameter transformer language model trained on 8 million web pages (40GB of text), achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot results including 70.70% on Winograd Schema and 63.24% on LAMBADA. Citing concerns about malicious applications such as scalable synthetic disinformation, OpenAI declined to release the trained model and instead published a smaller model and a technical paper as a 'responsible disclosure' experiment. The post, resurfaced on Hacker News in 2026, also documents failure modes like repetition and world-modeling errors, and discusses policy implications of controllable text generation.

Claude Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

Claude Fable 5.1 solved Sir Thomas Urquhart's 370-year-old Cyphral Distich cipher, recovering a hidden royalist prayer for Charles II.

Vals AI reports that Claude Fable 5.1 solved the Cyphral Distich, a 64-number cryptogram from Sir Thomas Urquhart's Logopandecteision unsolved since 1653, in 44 minutes using 176k tokens with no human hints. The key insight was that the cipher's key was the book itself: each number indexes a word in the corresponding Proquiritation, taking the first letter, yielding 'O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLS THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND'. The model also deciphered the larger Cyphral Octastich (285 numbers) from The Jewel (1652) using page-based word indexing, recovering all but nine letters of a royalist prayer. The puzzle had been listed among Klaus Schmeh's Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages.

Hacker News · AI · 3d agoAI researchHN 63↑ · 6 comments1· 1 read

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 · 3d agoAI research1

Cognition Releases SWE-2: A Kimi K3 Post-Trained Coding Model That Matches Fable 5.1 on FrontierCode at 64% Lower Cost

Cognition released SWE-2, an RL post-trained coding model from Kimi K3, scoring 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main and available only inside Devin.

Cognition released SWE-2, its most capable coding model, post-trained with reinforcement learning from Moonshot AI's 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 base. It scores 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, within 1 point of Fable 5.1 at 64% lower cost, and RL reportedly adds 5-6 points over the K3 base on many benchmarks. It is the first Cognition model with selectable reasoning-effort levels all trained in a single RL run using Pareto-slope-matched cost penalties. There are no open weights and no standalone API; it runs only inside Devin (Desktop, CLI, with Web and Fusion rolling out), free for paid tiers through October 10, 2026.

MarkTechPost · 4d agoModel release1

I spent $4,000 on a robot dog from China

Hands-on review finds the $4,017 Unitree Go2 Pro robot dog affordable but impractical, as Unitree reaches a $34 billion valuation after its IPO.

Ars Technica reviewed the Unitree Go2 Pro quadruped, purchased for $4,017, finding it astonishingly cheap but of limited practical use; it collapsed from battery drain and heat (84°C internal temperature) on an uphill walk at 87°F. Unitree democratized quadruped research, sells humanoid robots from $13,500, and debuted on the Shanghai stock exchange on August 19 with shares rising over fivefold on day one, valuing the company at $34 billion. Its robots now face legal restrictions in the United States, and it competes with Boston Dynamics, whose Spot starts around $75,000.

Ars Technica · AI · 4d agoAI industry

ChatGPT-using lawyer punished for citing fake testimony from made-up witnesses

New Mexico Supreme Court holds lawyer in contempt for filing a ChatGPT-generated brief citing fabricated witness testimony; fined $5,000 and referred to disciplinary board.

The New Mexico Supreme Court held criminal defense lawyer Stephen Aarons in direct contempt for filing a murder-appeal brief containing false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses, including Officer Michelle Amarillo and Officer Sanchez, plus misrepresented legal authority. Aarons admitted feeding a computer-generated trial transcript into ChatGPT, powered by the OpenAI o3 model, and filing the output without verifying factual claims or telling his client. He was fined $5,000, referred to a disciplinary board, and barred from appearing before the court pending proceedings; the court struck all briefs and ordered new counsel for client Oscar Renee Sandoval.

Ars Technica · AIupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

ukisai/Swift-Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

UkisAI released Swift-Qwen3.8-27B GGUF, a Qwen3.8-27B derivative cutting thinking tokens by 58.3% with under 1% performance loss and roughly 1.95x speedup.

UkisAI released Swift-Qwen3.8-27B as GGUF on Hugging Face, a reasoning-efficient derivative of Qwen3.8-27B using a Swift adapter that reduces median thinking tokens by up to 58.3% while keeping performance losses under 1% and delivering a 1.95x speed-up on several tasks. Reported benchmarks include GPQA-Diamond 88.28%, MMLU-Pro 84.95%, C-Eval 90.62%, AIME 2026 94.00% and Terminal-Bench 2.1 65.84%. The model is trending at #30 on Hugging Face, with BF16 weights and enterprise licensing also available.

Hugging Face trending models · 5d agoModel release

Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users

OpenAI's Habitat online storage platform now handles over 70 million requests per second and 500 PB of data for 1 billion users.

OpenAI details the evolution of Habitat, its online storage platform backing ChatGPT and other products, which began in mid-2024 as a Python client-side library over Azure Cosmos DB. Habitat now processes more than 70 million requests per second, serves over 500 petabytes of data across nearly 40 geographic regions, and supports over 1 billion users weekly. By mid-2025 the client library approach became brittle, so OpenAI moved Habitat into a standalone service to centralize deployments, observability, and multi-tenancy reliability. This is part one of a two-part series; a future post will cover read optimization and scaling the Azure Cosmos DB partnership.

OpenAI News · 5d agoAI tools & infra1

Flock cameras are riddled with security vulnerabilities and hardcoded creds

Leaked Flock ALPR camera firmware reveals EOL Android 8.1, a 2017 Linux kernel, and hardcoded API keys granting access to production credentials.

DDoSecrets published filesystem images from an in-use Flock ALPR camera, obtained by the hacker collective stegan0gram and investigated by 404 Media and Wired. Micah Lee's analysis shows the camera runs Android 8.1 with a security patch level of 2018-06-05 and Linux kernel 3.18.71, missing roughly eight years of Android fixes. The firmware exposes a hardcoded API key for Flock's hpnotiq backend that can retrieve Auth0 client credentials for any camera by MAC address, with credentials stored in plaintext. Likely unpatched flaws include CVE-2021-1905 (Qualcomm Adreno use-after-free) and CVE-2018-9568 (WrongZone kernel socket type confusion); Flock says it received no reports via its disclosure policy.

Iranian hackers use CHOSEN BRICK Windows malware to spy on targets

Iranian state-linked hackers use CHOSEN BRICK Windows malware, spread via Telegram and WhatsApp social engineering, to spy on dissidents and journalists worldwide.

US, UK, and Dutch cyber agencies with the FBI issued a joint advisory on Iranian state-linked hackers deploying a Windows malware strain called CHOSEN BRICK against dissidents, activists, and journalists, primarily in the US, UK, and Netherlands. Attacks begin with messages on WhatsApp or Telegram impersonating trusted contacts or technical support, tricking victims into running malicious files disguised as apps such as Pictory, RunwayML, Norton Antivirus, Telegram, and KeePass. The malware persists via Registry Run keys, adds Microsoft Defender exclusions, and uses a per-victim Telegram bot for command-and-control while stealing email, Telegram and WhatsApp data, screenshots, and audio. Stolen data is exfiltrated via Telegram or cloud services like VultrObjects and StorjShare, and sometimes appears on pro-Iranian leak sites, increasing physical risk for dissidents abroad.

BleepingComputer · 8h agoThreat actor in the wild 6 sources

Scans Targeting Hospitality Applications, (Wed, Sep 16th)

Scans from a bulletproof-hosting IP target the abandoned PIAF-HMS hospitality application, which contains numerous unpatched SQL injection flaws.

SANS ISC observed requests for /PIAF-HMS/ using the unusual user-agent Farez-Sorter/1.0, along with paths like /admin/, /ucp/, /hms/, and /hotel/, starting September 15 from the single source IP 94.102.49.125 (IP Volume, AS202425, a bulletproof hoster). PIAF-HMS, a PBX in a Flash Hospitality Management System, was last updated 10 years ago and a SQL injection vulnerability was reported recently; the code shows many injection flaws and lacks authentication and access control. The handler notes hotels are soft targets for personal data theft and guest MitM attacks, and asks for community insight on the campaign.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 10h agoExploit / PoC

EU Chief Warns of AI-Powered Hacking, Moves to Rein In Social Media

EU Commission President von der Leyen warned AI will enable unprecedented hacking and announced Kids Act and Digital Fairness Act proposals regulating social media.

In her State of the European Union 2026 speech, Ursula von der Leyen warned that upcoming AI models 'will allow hacking on a level we never thought possible' and cited dangers of self-improving models, referencing a Hugging Face incident. She reaffirmed the AI Act as the core guardrail framework and pledged cooperation with Canada, the UK, and other partners. She also proposed a Kids Act banning social media under age 13 and personal accounts under 15, plus a Digital Fairness Act to be proposed in autumn.

SecurityWeek · 15h agoAI policy