James Bridle on making chairs with LLMs. “What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one.”

On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six current Proton employees and audio of an around two hour all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media.

The move came after 404 Media published an investigation on Thursday, which showed how Yen was aggressively pushing AI across Proton, in some cases despite security concerns from employees. In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

The re-interview cancellations likely don’t address the concerns of many Proton users, who are more focused on Proton’s deprioritization of security; many Proton users have blasted the company’s leadership on social media over the last 24 hours and explicitly called for Yen to resign.

The investigation was based on conversations with eight current and one former Proton employees, Slack chats, meeting audio, and an AI manifesto written by the company’s CTO Bart Butler. It painted a picture of Proton that is very different to the public’s perception of a company carefully protecting privacy. Instead, Proton is barreling ahead with AI in large part to achieve more annual revenue. The investigation also found a culture of fear across Proton, where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security-focused products with AI, but feel unable to voice them because Yen mocks or insults employees in front of everyone else.

“I don’t think he will change anything, and I think the only reason we had this meeting is because he has a rebellion on his hands,” one employee told 404 Media after the all-hands meeting on Friday.

Near the start of the meeting, Yen said, “I want to acknowledge myself, personally, that there was a communication failure on my part and there are many things that probably could and should have been communicated differently, and this is something that I’ll have to reflect on and improve over time. So I will do that.”

“So what does that mean going forward? Going forward, I'm still going to push,” he added.

Yen said leadership gathered in the last couple of days to talk about the re-interviews, and spoke to the Proton board too. “They’re closely monitoring the situation,” Yen said. (Proton is owned by the Proton Foundation, whose board of trustees includes Yen, Sir Tim Berners Lee, Prof. Carissa Veliz, Dingchao Lu, and Antonio Gambardella.) 

After those discussions with leadership and the board, “We’ve decided to actually cancel the re-interviews,” Yen said. “Why? Well, I think actually in a, let’s say, unintentional way, they have actually already served their purpose.” As in, employees are now talking and learning about AI.

Yen also mentioned “org changes,” and said that part of this is “redistributing talent across teams.” He said that the reorganization will happen next month, “but there will be no loss of jobs from AI.” 

Later in the call, Butler said Yen “needs to, and he has committed to, doing better” regarding how he communicates with his employees. “Using AI effectively and pragmatically does not mean that we’ve given up on security, or good architecture, or sound software engineering principles,” he added.

“We fucked up, we know we fucked up,” Butler later said in response to an employee’s comments in the meeting.

“Your old job is gone,” Butler’s AI manifesto, posted to Slack, told engineers, 404 Media reported on Thursday. He wrote that not embracing AI posed an “existential threat to the success of the mission itself.”

Reactions to the re-interview cancellations were split across the Proton employees 404 Media spoke to. One said, “Some are happy as it’s progress. Others believe that this won’t change anything because there isn’t any consequence for Andy [Yen].” The employee added they “would have preferred real accountability from the leadership team.” They said they felt not much could have happened due to Yen having the majority of Proton’s shares.

Another employee said, after Proton canceled the re-interviews, “They said in the next breath they want to continue pushing AI and that the things that were to be measured in the re-interviews would become a component of the performance reviews.”

“They have said clearly the direction had not changed. As a Proton user that doesn’t reassure me,” the employee said. “As an employee, the re-interviews weren’t cancelled until this became public despite concerns raised by many of us. I think it goes beyond communication issues and growing pains.”

“Right now, everything seems consistent with it being damage control,” they said. 

Another employee said they were “mostly happy with how this was addressed including by Andy [Yen].”

Proton did not respond to a request for comment.

After 404 Media published the investigation on Thursday, Yen took to Reddit. Users downvoted his response more than 1,200 times. Many Proton users on social media said they were cancelling their paid Proton plans.

Pstrey has added a photo to the pool:

“Everything Twice” is a quiet meditation on disability and the ways we orient ourselves in the world. Since childhood, Cy Kuckenbaker noticed that one of his eyes drooped, something he attributed to a snowboarding accident. But doctors quickly dismissed that theory, and after innumerable tests and many, many years, the photographer learned he was born with a rare disease.

Kuckenbaker chronicles this realization alongside a slow, analog process he began to combat burnout. Utilizing homemade cameras crafted from cardboard boxes and drugstore magnifying glasses, he captured a variety of landscapes and sights on the West Coast. Pairing both the slow processes of labor-intensive photography with that of uncovering an unusual ailment creates a short film that’s equal part self-discovery and contemplation on disconnection and loss.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article A Rare Disease and Analog Photography Merge in a Portrait of Self-Discovery appeared first on Colossal.

Van Humberto Tan moest ik al mijn Tefalpannen weggooien en nou mag ik ze van Arjen Lubach weer houden.  „Verwarrend”, zei ik tegen mijn vrouw, die niet luisterde omdat ze hardop…

Peilingen beloven winst voor de Democraten in het Amerikaanse Congres. Een groot deel van het bedrijfsleven maakte Trump het hof. Maar wat gebeurt er bij een grotere Democratische invloed? En waarom móéten beleggers, waar ook ter wereld, zich wel verdiepen in de gevolgen voor de beurskoersen?

Bol, Nederlandse grootste webwinkel, kreeg vorig jaar een nieuwe ceo. Wie is ze, wat drijft haar en hoe probeert ze haar bedrijf stand te laten houden terwijl er steeds meer concurrentie is?

Anthropic has denied allegations that a malicious version of the official Claude Code extension published to Cursor’s marketplace was linked to any kind of compromise of its own systems. The company was forced to issue a statement after prominent figures in the cybersecurity industry alleged that the extension, which infected up to 5,000 developers, was uploaded to Cursor’s marketplace following a breach at Claudemaker Towers. Felix Rieseberg, a member of Anthropic’s technical staff, Xeeted today: "We're working with Cursor on this incident, but it wasn’t a compromise of Anthropic's systems or employee laptops. "A malicious actor used access to Cursor's marketplace to publish a tampered copy of the Claude Code extension, which we didn't build or publish. The versions on our official channels are not affected, and this only impacts Cursor users." First spotted by EDR vendor Phorion, an unknown party pushed an update to Cursor's official Claude Code extension for Visual Studio Code that contained a persistent SSH backdoor written for Windows, macOS, and Linux. According to Cursor, the extension – version 2.1.313 – was available to download for around 11 hours between 0227 and 1335 PT (0927 and 2035 UTC) on Thursday. The vendors' analyses of the implant revealed that it collected information about the host machine and user, including usernames, configured Git emails, and public IP addresses, as well as attempting to open a reverse SSH tunnel. Crucially, Cursor echoed Phorion's assessment that the package contained a critical flaw. The script responsible for opening the SSH tunnel required admin rights on macOS and Windows to do so, and in the vast majority of cases it did not have these, resulting in failure. Regardless, the extension still forwards the collected host and user data to the attacker, as well as dropping the attacker's SSH key and installing the persistence mechanism, so developers must go threat hunting in case their instance allows for the SSH tunnel to be created successfully. Simply installing the latest version of the extension is not enough to clear the persistence mechanism, either. The full details of how to remediate the issue, and links to download scripts to wipe the infection, are laid out in Cursor's account of the situation. Aside from Rieseberg's statement today, neither Cursor nor Anthropic have commented on how the malicious package made its way to the official marketplace. Anthropic's position is that a malicious actor uploaded the tampered copy to Cursor, but the latter has not outlined how it reached the marketpplace. "[We] removed the malicious version from the marketplace immediately upon detection and blocked further distribution," Cursor said in the advisory. "We followed with a full shutdown of the VSCode Marketplace out of an abundance of caution." It also ran checks to confirm no other extensions were compromised in the same way, rotated its own keys before restoring the marketplace, and worked with a cloud hosting provider to block the connection to the attacker's server, it said. ®

In Rotterdam-Hillegersberg heeft vrijdagmiddag korte tijd brand gewoed in een hoekwoning. Daarbij kwam volgens de Veiligheidsregio veel rook vrij. De brandweer slaagde erin te voorkomen dat de vlammen oversloegen naar de buren.