NEW YORK (ANP) - De beurzen in New York lieten maandag bij de opening weinig beweging zien. Beleggers waren terughoudend na de verwerping van het Iraanse vredesvoorstel door de Amerikaanse president Donald Trump. In het voorstel, dat Trump als "volkomen onacceptabel" bestempelde, zou Iran onder meer hebben geëist dat er een einde moet komen aan de Amerikaanse blokkade van Iraanse havens en het vrijgeven van bevroren Iraanse tegoeden.

De Dow-Jonesindex noteerde kort na opening van de markt 0,1 procent lager op 49.546 punten en de brede S&P 500-index een fractie hoger op 7399 punten. Techbeurs Nasdaq verloor 0,1 procent tot 26.216 punten. De S&P 500-index en de Nasdaq sloten vrijdag nog op nieuwe recordstanden, geholpen door een sterke Amerikaanse banengroei en stevige koerswinsten onder de chipbedrijven.

Intel won 5,6 procent. De chipfabrikant steeg vrijdag al 14 procent na berichten over een voorlopige deal tussen Intel en Apple voor de productie van chips voor de iPhone-maker.

LONDEN (ANP/AFP) - Minder vliegtuigpassagiers reisden in april via London Heathrow in vergelijking met een jaar geleden. Volgens de luchthaven is dit het gevolg van een verstoring in het wereldwijde vliegverkeer door de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten.

Het aantal passagiers op de grootste luchthaven van het Verenigd Koninkrijk is afgenomen tot 6,7 miljoen passagiers, 5,3 procent minder ten opzichte van april vorig jaar. Volgens topman Thomas Woldbye was april echter nog wel de drukste maand van het jaar tot nu toe.

Het aantal passagiers dat London Heathrow gebruikte als overstapluchthaven steeg met 10 procent. Daarin lijkt Londen wel te hebben geprofiteerd van de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten. Emirates, Etihad en Qatar Airways, luchtvaartmaatschappijen uit die regio, staan bekend om het verbinden van passagiers op langeafstandsvluchten. Doordat luchthavens uit de Golfregio niet konden worden gebruikt, lijken passagiers andere routes te hebben gekozen. Heathrow is een luchthaven met veel internationale verbindingen.

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Alleyway off Young Street, Adelaide CBD

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Adelaide CBD

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Waymouth Street, Adelaide CBD

Google says crooks already have AI cooking up zero-days, and claims one nearly escaped into the wild before the company stopped it. In a report shared with The Register ahead of publication on Monday, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group said that it has identified what it believes is the first real-world case of cyber-baddies using AI to discover and weaponize a zero-day vulnerability in a planned mass-exploitation campaign. The bug, a two-factor authentication bypass in a popular open source web-based administration platform, was reportedly developed by criminals working together on a large-scale intrusion operation. GTIG said that the attackers appear to have used an AI model to both identify the flaw and help turn it into a usable exploit. Google worked with the unnamed vendor to quietly patch the issue before the campaign could properly kick off, which it believes may have disrupted the operation before it gained traction. The company insists that neither Gemini nor Anthropic’s Mythos was involved, but said that the exploit itself looked suspiciously machine-made. According to the report, the Python script included what Google described as "educational docstrings," a hallucinated CVSS score, and a polished textbook coding structure that looked heavily influenced by LLM training data. Google said that the issue stemmed from developers hard-coding a trust exception into the authentication flow, creating a hole that attackers could exploit to sidestep 2FA checks. According to the firm, those higher-level logic mistakes are exactly the kind of thing modern AI models are starting to get surprisingly good at finding. "While fuzzers and static analysis tools are optimized to detect sinks and crashes, frontier LLMs excel at identifying these types of high-level flaws and hardcoded static anomalies," the report said. John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said anyone still treating AI-assisted vulnerability discovery as a future problem is already behind. "There’s a misconception that the AI vulnerability race is imminent. The reality is that it’s already begun. For every zero-day we can trace back to AI, there are probably many more out there," Hultquist said. "Threat actors are using AI to boost the speed, scale, and sophistication of their attacks. It enables them to test their operations, persist against targets, build better malware, and make many other improvements. State actors are taking advantage of this technology but the criminal threat shouldn’t be underestimated, especially given their history of broad, aggressive attacks." Google’s report suggests that the zero-day case is part of something much bigger. GTIG said North Korean crew APT45 had been using AI to churn through thousands of exploit checks and bulk out its toolkit, while Chinese state-linked operators were experimenting with AI systems for vulnerability hunting and automated probing of targets. Google also described malware families padded out with AI-generated junk code designed to confuse analysts, Android backdoors using Gemini APIs to autonomously navigate infected devices, and Russian influence operations stitching fabricated AI-generated audio into legitimate news footage. The awkward bit for everyone else is that this still appears to be the clumsy early phase. Google said mistakes in the exploit’s implementation probably interfered with the criminals’ plans this time around, but that may not stay true for long. ®

Google says crooks already have AI cooking up zero-days, and claims one nearly escaped into the wild before the company stopped it. In a report shared with The Register ahead of publication on Monday, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group said that it has identified what it believes is the first real-world case of cyber-baddies using AI to discover and weaponize a zero-day vulnerability in a planned mass-exploitation campaign. The bug, a two-factor authentication bypass in a popular open source web-based administration platform, was reportedly developed by criminals working together on a large-scale intrusion operation. GTIG said that the attackers appear to have used an AI model to both identify the flaw and help turn it into a usable exploit. Google worked with the unnamed vendor to quietly patch the issue before the campaign could properly kick off, which it believes may have disrupted the operation before it gained traction. The company insists that neither Gemini nor Anthropic’s Mythos was involved, but said that the exploit itself looked suspiciously machine-made. According to the report, the Python script included what Google described as "educational docstrings," a hallucinated CVSS score, and a polished textbook coding structure that looked heavily influenced by LLM training data. Google said that the issue stemmed from developers hard-coding a trust exception into the authentication flow, creating a hole that attackers could exploit to sidestep 2FA checks. According to the firm, those higher-level logic mistakes are exactly the kind of thing modern AI models are starting to get surprisingly good at finding. "While fuzzers and static analysis tools are optimized to detect sinks and crashes, frontier LLMs excel at identifying these types of high-level flaws and hardcoded static anomalies," the report said. John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said anyone still treating AI-assisted vulnerability discovery as a future problem is already behind. "There’s a misconception that the AI vulnerability race is imminent. The reality is that it’s already begun. For every zero-day we can trace back to AI, there are probably many more out there," Hultquist said. "Threat actors are using AI to boost the speed, scale, and sophistication of their attacks. It enables them to test their operations, persist against targets, build better malware, and make many other improvements. State actors are taking advantage of this technology but the criminal threat shouldn’t be underestimated, especially given their history of broad, aggressive attacks." Google’s report suggests that the zero-day case is part of something much bigger. GTIG said North Korean crew APT45 had been using AI to churn through thousands of exploit checks and bulk out its toolkit, while Chinese state-linked operators were experimenting with AI systems for vulnerability hunting and automated probing of targets. Google also described malware families padded out with AI-generated junk code designed to confuse analysts, Android backdoors using Gemini APIs to autonomously navigate infected devices, and Russian influence operations stitching fabricated AI-generated audio into legitimate news footage. The awkward bit for everyone else is that this still appears to be the clumsy early phase. Google said mistakes in the exploit’s implementation probably interfered with the criminals’ plans this time around, but that may not stay true for long. ®

SoftBank is getting into the datacenter battery business and plans to start manufacturing them on the scale of gigawatt-hours per year of capacity to support the power needs of AI infrastructure, including its own. The Japan-based tech investment biz says it aims to deploy the battery systems it is developing at its own large-scale AI server farms initially, but plans to make them more widely available in future. It hopes to begin mass production in financial year 2027, and expects the operation to generate revenue of ¥100 billion (over $600 million) per year by 2030. SoftBank is working with two South Korean firms that have a track record in advanced battery-related technologies. One is Cosmos Lab, developer of zinc-halogen batteries that use pure water as an electrolyte, making them non-flammable, and the other is DeltaX, which designs and manufactures battery-based energy storage systems (BESS). Reg readers may recall that SoftBank last year bought the rights to a former Sharp LCD panel factory in Sakai City, Osaka prefecture in Japan, and said it planned to convert it into a datacenter to operate AI agents developed jointly with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. The site will now become an industrial cluster, home to its battery manufacturing facility as well. SoftBank referred to it as a core hub to establish its AX Factory (a center for datacenter operations and AI infrastructure hardware manufacturing), and GX Factory (serving as a manufacturing facility for next-gen batteries, solar panels, and related products). One detail missing is how much cash the investment biz is pouring into this venture. We asked how much the project is costing to get off the ground, but a SoftBank spokesperson told us it was not able to comment. SoftBank plans to start by deploying the battery systems produced at its GX Factory in its own server halls, but will then provide them for grid applications in Japan, plus factories and other industrial uses. It hopes to take the technology into global markets over the medium term. In presentation slides seen by The Register, the firm says BESS for commercial and industrial use will have a capacity of 140 kWh to 560 kWh, while those for large-scale or grid-scale use will come in at 2,240 kWh to 5,380 kWH. According to SoftBank, DeltaX has developed BESS capable of energy densities exceeding 5 MWh in a standard commercial container format (a 20-foot shipping container). The way DeltaX packs together and connects the battery cells in its BESS maximizes their performance, Softbank claims, and by applying these technologies to next-generation battery cells (presumably referring to those of Cosmos Lab), further improvements in energy storage can be achieved. Those battery cells, which SoftBank calls Innovative batteries, use a halogen-based material for the cathode and zinc for the anode, which it says offers charge-discharge characteristics with minimal energy loss and energy efficiency comparable to existing lithium-ion batteries. As they use pure water as the electrolyte, SoftBank claims these batteries are inherently safer and won't catch fire, unlike lithium-ion batteries, which have a well-documented tendency to do exactly that. SoftBank has its finger in a number of pies when it comes to AI projects. The firm was aiming to pump $22.5 billion into LLM developer OpenAI before the end of 2025, and more recently announced plans for a massive 10 GW datacenter campus on US Department of Energy (DoE) land in Ohio. The company is also majority shareholder of chip designer Arm, which recently revealed its first Arm-branded datacenter processor targeting AI, and owns Ampere Computing, which makes Arm-based server chips. ®

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: