New deal extends Microsoft IP rights until 2032 or until AGI arrives. On Monday, Microsoft and OpenAI announced a revised partnership agreement that introduces an independent expert panel to verify when OpenAI achieves so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI), a determination that will trigger major shifts in how the companies…
A DNS manager in a single region of Amazon’s sprawling network touched off a 16-hour debacle. The outage that hit Amazon Web Services and took out vital services worldwide was the result of a single failure that cascaded from system to system within Amazon’s sprawling network, according to a…
At least one CVE could weaken defenses put in place following 2008 disclosure. The makers of BIND, the Internet’s most widely used software for resolving domain names, are warning of two vulnerabilities that allow attackers to poison entire caches of results and send users to malicious destinations that are…
Ruling holds that defeating end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp harms Meta’s business. A federal judge has ordered spyware maker NSO to stop using its Pegasus app to target or infect users of WhatsApp. The ruling, issued Friday by Phyllis J. Hamilton of the US District Court of the District of…
Malicious payloads stored on Ethereum and BNB blockchains are immune to takedowns. Hacking groups—at least one of which works on behalf of the North Korean government—have found a new and inexpensive way to distribute malware from “bulletproof” hosts: stashing them on public cryptocurrency blockchains. In a Thursday post, members…
Despite connection hiccups, we covered OpenAI’s finances, nuclear power, and Sam Altman. On Tuesday of last week, Ars Technica hosted a live conversation with Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast and one of tech’s most vocal AI critics, to discuss whether the generative AI industry is experiencing…
Risks to BIG-IP users include supply-chain attacks, credential loss, and vulnerability exploits. Thousands of networks—many of them operated by the US government and Fortune 500 companies—face an “imminent threat” of being breached by a nation-state hacking group following the breach of a major maker of software, the federal government…
Tiny, fast model hits coding scores similar to GPT-5 and Sonnet 4. On Wednesday, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, a small AI language model that reportedly delivers performance similar to what its frontier model Claude Sonnet 4 achieved five months ago but at one-third the cost and more than twice…
Sam Altman claims new tools can detect mental distress while relaxing limits for adults. On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company will allow verified adult users to have erotic conversations with ChatGPT starting in December. The change represents a shift in how OpenAI approaches content restrictions,…
Scams like this one net billions from well-educated victims. Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned laborers to trick unsuspecting people into making investments in phony funds, often after spending months faking romantic relationships with the victims. Such “pig butchering”…
