“I worry this is the big botnet flexing,” CEO said. But outage was self-inflicted. When a Cloudflare outage disrupted large numbers of websites and online services yesterday, the company initially thought it was hit by a “hyper-scale” DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. “I worry this is the big botnet flexing,”…
Integration of Copilot Actions into Windows is off by default, but for how long? Microsoft’s warning on Tuesday that an experimental AI agent integrated into Windows can infect devices and pilfer sensitive user data has set off a familiar response from security-minded critics: Why is Big Tech so intent…
ChatGPT competitor secures billions from Microsoft and Nvidia in deal to use cloud services and chips. On Tuesday, Microsoft and Nvidia announced plans to invest in Anthropic under a new partnership that includes a $30 billion commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft’s cloud services. Nvidia will commit…
Bitcoin mining hardware exec falls for sophisticated crypto scam to tune of $200k As Kent Halliburton stood in a bathroom at the Rosewood Hotel in central Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, running his fingers through an envelope filled with 10,000 euros in crisp banknotes, he started to wonder…
Sundar Pichai says no company is immune if AI bubble bursts, echoing dotcom fears. On Tuesday, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai warned of “irrationality” in the AI market, telling the BBC in an interview, “I think no company is going to be immune, including us.” His comments arrive as scrutiny…
Fleets of laptops run from US residences gave appearance workers were in the US. Five men have pleaded guilty to running laptop farms and providing other assistance to North Koreans to obtain remote IT work at US companies in violation of US law, federal prosecutors said. The pleas come…
Company falls more than rivals over its borrowing and reliance on OpenAI contracts. Oracle has been hit harder than Big Tech rivals in the recent sell-off of tech stocks and bonds, as its vast borrowing to fund a pivot to artificial intelligence unnerved Wall Street. The US software group…
Ongoing struggles with AI model instruction-following show that true human-level AI still a ways off. Em dashes have become what many believe to be a telltale sign of AI-generated text over the past few years. The punctuation mark appears frequently in outputs from ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, sometimes…
The results of AI-assisted hacking aren’t as impressive as many might have us believe. Researchers from Anthropic said they recently observed the “first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign” after detecting China-state hackers using the company’s Claude AI tool in a campaign targeting dozens of targets. Outside researchers are much…
New controls attempt to please critics on both sides with a balance between bland and habit-forming. On Wednesday, OpenAI released GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking, two updated versions of its flagship AI models now available in ChatGPT. The company is wrapping the models in the language of anthropomorphism, claiming…
