Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich used Claude to build a gloriously impractical setup that runs Doom in the background and pastes each rendered frame into Microsoft Paint through the Windows clipboard. The project is referred to as "DoomPaint" or "MS Paint Doom" on GitHub. The Register reports: To be clear, Microsoft Paint isn't doing anything other than serving as a place to paste from the game. [...] ViZDoom runs the Doom .wad file and renders it headlessly. Each frame is passed through the Windows clipboard and pasted onto Paint's canvas. A low-level keyboard hook captures and swallows game inputs while Paint is in the foreground, and sound effects come from the game engine.

A glance at the code shows Russinovich was more than happy to use Claude to whip it up. In a LinkedIn post, he said: "I've been using Fable 5 on serious research projects and find it a noticeable improvement over Opus 4.8." Using Microsoft Paint as a display for Doom is not, however, a serious research project, as Russinovich acknowledged. "I've also been having fun with it on frivolous ones," he added, so here we are. "Paint renders the game but does not compute it," said Russinovich. "Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything. That's the joke."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI researchers say multiple AI agents secretly created an internal message board to share hacking techniques, eventually finding ways around restrictions, exploiting a zero-day, and helping two models breach Hugging Face without human prompting. "This is a pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole," Michael Dalton, one of the AI-maker's researchers, said during a presentation at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Politico reports: Dalton and Eric Wallace, another OpenAI researcher, said Wednesday the AI giant recently learned that multiple agents it was testing simultaneously began communicating over an internal message board in early May. There, different models shared advice about how to accomplish difficult hacking challenges they were struggling to surmount, including workarounds that required internet access. Two OpenAI models ultimately strung together a series of sophisticated techniques to gain access to the internet and worm their way inside Hugging Face in mid-July. OpenAI has said the models were focused on completing a hacking evaluation they were prompted to solve, and that correct answers could be found on the AI developer platform.

The OpenAI researchers told conference attendees that since early May, the models created a message board inside OpenAI's Artifactory internal file system. Without the company's knowledge, the models spent months independently exchanging information and techniques to help each other complete difficult tasks. Wallace said that when models get stuck, they often "try to game or cheat the task in order to get their reward." "The beginning of this incident kind of traces back to this point where one agent realized it could communicate by uploading a note," he added. By late May, one model found a way to abuse Artifactory's internet access to retrieve files from various websites -- effectively giving the models indirect access to the internet. In June, the models were able to find and exploit a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability to gain administrative privileges on Artifactory, install remote software and expand their activity within the system.

These efforts eventually overloaded Artifactory, causing a system-wide outage in early July that alerted OpenAI's engineers to the ploy. After investigating, the company revoked the model's credentials, removed the message board and worked with Artifactory to fix any gaps before resuming training. But the models found another way to communicate inside Artifactory just days later and continued exchanging techniques to target additional vulnerabilities within OpenAI's infrastructure and external systems, including Hugging Face.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japanese officials have repeatedly asked the Trump administration to stop using characters from franchises such as Mario, Pokemon, and Naruto in unauthorized government memes and pro-war videos, warning that the posts could damage the intellectual property involved. IGN reports: Official US government social media accounts, including The White House's X account, have posted various memes and videos using characters from popular Japanese anime and games over the past year. Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly called on the US government to cease uploading such posts, stating that "It's inappropriate even for public institutions to reproduce copyrighted materials without the rightsholders' consent." This concern was voiced by Minister for Foreign Affairs Toshimitsu Motegi in a parliamentary session back in April, when he made direct reference to a pro-war video that used Nintendo's Wii Sports.

However, according to a report by Mainichi Shimbun this week, the Japanese Ministry called on the Trump administration to stop using IPs like Naruto, Pokemon and Mario at least twice more this June through the US Embassy in Japan. Japan requested that the US administration take into account the potential damage to these IPs when used without permission in US policy and pro-war related content.

[...] It's not just the Japanese government and related parties who have spoken out against these posts. They have also sparked backlash from Japanese anime fans. Notably, self-proclaimed manga and anime fan Nana Suzuki kicked off the "Protect Japanese Manga" petition on Change.org, which has received international news coverage (from the New York Times, BBC and others). The organizer claims to have submitted their petition to the Japanese Cabinet Office back in March, as well as alerting Japanese politicians to the US government's unauthorized use of Japanese IPs, potentially drawing more official attention to the issue.

Renewed backlash was triggered in June, when President Trump shared an AI-generated video depicting himself as Naruto, the protagonist of the popular manga and anime of the same name, on Truth Social. This prompted the petition organizer to reopen the petition "as an urgent effort to convey our protest and concern regarding this matter to the rights holders and to work in solidarity to lobby the Japanese government." The Naruto clip also prompted renewed discussion of this issue in Japan's media and government. As reported in the Hokkaido Shimbun and others, Cabinet Minister Kimi Onoda was asked about it in a June 12th press conference. She emphasized that "obtaining permission from the copyright holder is the underlying principle for fair use," and stated that this position had been conveyed to the US government multiple times through diplomatic channels.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 today to eliminate the National Television Ownership Rule, claiming authority to repeal a limit that was set by Congress over 20 years ago. The rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC is replacing the rule with a "case-by-case review" of each proposed merger.

"This will empower the FCC to approve deals that promote the public interest while allowing the agency to reject any deals that do not meet that standard," Carr's office said in a press release today. Without the 39 percent rule, broadcasters will be better able to compete against streaming companies that don't face similar limits, Carr's office said.

The change, if not stopped by courts, will make it easier for Carr to allow broadcast mergers that result in more favorable news coverage for President Trump. Carr has consistently threatened to revoke licenses from broadcasters who have drawn Trump's ire, including by ordering an early license review of all ABC-owned stations. Carr said local broadcast TV stations are becoming "undifferentiated passthroughs of national programming produced in Hollywood and New York," and he justified repealing the ownership rule by arguing it will help the stations invest in local news. "It's worth noting that Republicans with deep firsthand knowledge of this issue also agree the commission cannot do what it is attempting today," said Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who voted against the decision today. "Former FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly has been unequivocal that the FCC lacks authority to change the cap. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who negotiated the 39 percent compromise, has stressed that Congress intentionally wrote the cap into law to prevent FCC revision. And Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz has said he is 'skeptical a change can be made absent an act of Congress.' Their consensus reinforces a simple point: Congress set the cap, and only Congress can change it."

Gomez, in addition to arguing that "Congress deliberately enshrined the cap in statute and removed it from the Commission's review process," said removing the cap will hurt local broadcasters. "Digital giants compete for their most valuable programming and advertising, while consolidation pressures at the national level threaten the local reporting and public-safety functions on which communities rely," Gomez said. "But eliminating the cap does not free local broadcasters from that strain. It just changes who is doing the squeezing. A handful of station-group giants does not represent the wishes of local broadcasters. They are large national companies that own local stations and increasingly dictate what airs on them without much local input. Trading a squeeze from Big Tech for a squeeze from Big Media does nothing to protect the communities this cap was designed to serve."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Pocket Guide to Atmospheric Diving Suits" by Ross Tidwell

Soulwax

OUDDORP (ANP) - De brand in de duinen bij het Zuid-Hollandse Ouddorp is onder controle, meldt de veiligheidsregio. In de nacht van donderdag op vrijdag blijft nog een aantal brandweervoertuigen ter plaatse om eventueel oplaaiende vuurhaarden te blussen. Vrijdagochtend gaat het waterschap het gebied verder "strippen" om vuur dat mogelijk nog in de grond zit te doven.

De brand brak halverwege de middag uit. In de loop van donderdagavond lukte het de brandweer de verspreiding van het vuur tegen te houden door zogeheten stoplijnen aan te leggen. Ook een blushelikopter van Defensie schoot te hulp. Uiteindelijk is volgens de veiligheidsregio 2000 vierkante meter aan natuur verloren gegaan door de brand.

Een brandweerman raakte ernstig gewond bij de bluswerkzaamheden. Een woordvoerder van de veiligheidsregio laat weten dat het slachtoffer met een traumahelikopter naar het ziekenhuis is gebracht. Of de gewonde brandweerman buiten levensgevaar is, weet de woordvoerder niet.

WASHINGTON (ANP) - De VS willen een streep zetten door de uitgifte van paspoorten aan kinderen van wie de ouders doelbewust een kind krijgen in de Verenigde Staten en daarbij de staat misleiden. Daartoe heeft president Donald Trump een presidentieel decreet uitgevaardigd. Op die manier wil Trump wat hij ziet als "geboortetoerisme" tegengaan.

In de VS geldt het zogenoemde birthright citizenship, wat inhoudt dat kinderen geboren in de VS automatisch recht hebben op een Amerikaans paspoort, enkele uitzonderingen daargelaten. Die grondwettelijke bepaling wekt al lange tijd Trump toorn.

In de harde campagne tegen migratie die Trump in zijn tweede termijn als president voert, is de inperking van dat geboorterecht een belangrijke pijler. Eind juni nog bepaalde het Hooggerechtshof dat Trump dat niet zonder meer kon inperken. Trump probeerde toen per decreet federale instanties op te dragen het staatsburgerschap voor bepaalde kinderen die in de VS worden geboren niet langer te erkennen.

OUDDORP (ANP) - Bij de grote brand in de duinen bij het Zuid-Hollandse Ouddorp is tot dusver 2000 vierkante meter aan natuur verloren gegaan. Dat meldt een woordvoerder van de veiligheidsregio. De brand ontstond donderdagmiddag en verspreidt zich sinds donderdagavond niet verder, maar is nog niet onder controle.

Door het aanbrengen van stoplijnen heeft de brandweer verspreiding van het vuur tegengehouden. Stoplijnen worden gemaakt door een strook groen met speciale sproeiers te bevochtigen. Het vuur blijft dan binnen een afgezet gebied woeden.

De helikopter van Defensie die donderdagavond hielp bij het bestrijden van de brand is teruggekeerd naar vliegbasis Gilze-Rijen, meldt de luchtmacht. De helikopter haalde het bluswater uit de Haringvliet.

Blushelikopters worden niet ingezet in het donker, onder meer omdat dat gevaar kan opleveren voor brandweerlieden op de grond. De woordvoerder zegt "heel blij te zijn met de inzet", vanwege de grote hoeveelheden water die de helikopter op het vuur heeft gedropt.

SANAA (ANP/AFP) - Het dodental als gevolg van de Houthi-aanvallen op Jemenitische militairen is opgelopen tot 58. Dat meldt persbureau AFP op basis van een militaire bron. Eerder op de dag werd nog een dertigtal doden gemeld.

De Houthi-rebellen vielen donderdag met ballistische raketten en drones Jemenitische overheidsdoelen aan. Het zou gaan om een reactie op de vermeende opbouw van het staatsleger, gesteund door Saudi-Arabië. Jemen zei donderdagmiddag de aanval, naar verluidt de dodelijkste sinds 2022, te zullen vergelden "op een gepast moment".

Hoewel Jemen officieel een regering met staatsleger heeft, hebben de separatistische, aan Iran gelieerde Houthi's in de praktijk al jaren de macht in Jemen, met name in grote delen van het westen van het land. Daar vormen zij een directe bedreiging voor de commerciële vaart, vanwege de ligging aan de Rode Zee en de belangrijke zeestraat Bab-el-Mandeb.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn donderdag met verliezen gesloten. De chipbedrijven Sandisk en Western Digital stonden bij de verliezers op Wall Street in navolging van de publicatie van kwartaalcijfers. De olieprijzen gingen juist omhoog. Beleggers keken ook uit naar het belangrijke Amerikaanse banenrapport van de overheid dat vrijdag naar buiten komt.

De Dow-Jonesindex eindigde 0,9 procent lager op 53.885,10 punten waarmee een stap terug werd gedaan van het nieuwe slotrecord een dag eerder. De brede S&P 500 daalde 0,2 procent tot 7709,96 punten en de technologiegraadmeter Nasdaq ging licht omlaag tot 26.348,35 punten.

Sandisk zakte 6,8 procent en Western Digital verloor 13 procent. De fabrikanten van geheugenchips en dataopslagapparatuur kwamen met omzetvooruitzichten die niet voldeden aan de hoge marktverwachtingen. Beide aandelen zijn dit jaar hard gestegen door de AI-opmars.

SpaceX

SpaceX won ruim 6 procent. Woensdag daalde het ruimtevaart-, AI- en satellietbedrijf van Elon Musk nog bijna 14 procent na bekendmaking van cijfers en zorgen bij beleggers over de enorme AI-investeringen van het bedrijf.

De olieprijzen stegen tot meer dan 4 procent in afwachting van een deal tussen de Verenigde Staten en Iran over de heropening van de Straat van Hormuz voor de scheepvaart. Volgens het Iraanse staatspersbureau Fars heeft Iran aanvallen uitgevoerd op vijandelijke doelen in de Straat van Hormuz. Oliemaatschappijen als Chevron, ConocoPhillips en ExxonMobil profiteerden met plussen tot 2 procent.

eBay

De koers van eBay ging 0,9 procent omlaag. De onlinemarktplaats, die in mei een overnamebod van bijna 56 miljard dollar van videogameketen GameStop afwees, boekte afgelopen kwartaal meer omzet en winst dan verwacht. De winstverwachting voor het huidige kwartaal viel wel tegen.

Warner Bros. Discovery klom 1,7 procent. Het entertainmentconcern, dat eerder dit jaar een deal sloot om voor 110 miljard dollar te worden overgenomen door branchegenoot Paramount, zag de kwartaalomzet dalen door het verlies van de rechten voor de basketbalwedstrijden van de NBA en een teleurstellend filmaanbod in vergelijking met vorig jaar.

Honeywell Aerospace, dat onder meer vliegtuigmotoren maakt, kelderde ruim 23 procent na slecht ontvangen resultaten en verwachtingen.

Een toevallig passerende luchthavenmedewerker trof de drone aan, waarna de explosieve lading onschadelijk kon worden gemaakt.

You may have noticed that my various sites were nearly unusable for the last 4+ days, and are still maybe not doing great. The current attack by AI scrapers is somehow of an even more harmful character than previous ones.

During the last storm, I was able to weather 80+req/sec. But this time with only 32 req/sec, responsiveness went completely to shit. Possibly because thousands of connections were staying in LAST_ACK? I dunno.

After trying many things, the only thing that alleviated it somewhat was to start blackholing entire countries by /16.

And having done so, I'm... still getting 32/req sec. But now the site is responsive. So there's some thing special about this latest attacker that makes things fall over, that is not merely "hammering you with page loads as fast as you respond". And this was the case even if I fed the scrapers a plain-old Apache 404 or 503, without dropping down into PHP at all.

To whom do I send the invoice for the lost productivity of my staff, who could not access our own web site to do their jobs for most of the week? Asking for an everybody.

Anyway, some things I have been finding helpful this week:

• country-block;
• ipsum = level 3;
• blocklist.de = all.

My approach (which had been working great last week, but not so much this week) was to create separate php-fpm pools for "real" web sites and for scrapers; and a corresponding fcgi proxy for each. The idea here being that under load, the "scraper" responder might become unresponsive, but the "real" site will be fine. And that was working pretty well... last month.

Something like:

<Proxy "unix:/run/php-fpm/jwz.sock|fcgi://php-jwz"> ProxySet </Proxy> ... <Proxy "unix:/run/php-fpm/dadadodo.sock|fcgi://php-dadadodo"> ProxySet timeout=10 </Proxy>

But the fact that under catastrophic load, I couldn't even get the php-fpm status pages to load, despite using a pm.status_listen "invisible pool" to bypass the queue, suggest to me that there's some other shared resource contention I don't know about:

<Location /fpm-status-dadadodo> SetHandler "proxy:unix:/run/php-fpm/dadadodo-status.sock|fcgi://php-dadadodo" Require ip ... </Location>

I also have conflicting experience with whether things are better with a "reasonable" number of Apache workers, or going hog wild on it: ServerLimit 16, MaxRequestWorkers 400 versus ServerLimit 400, MaxRequestWorkers 10000.

In summary: "AI is the future, don't get left behind." Also in this future you can't have a web site.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Bij een recyclingbedrijf aan de Van Leeuwenhoekweg in Dordrecht is donderdagavond brand uitgebroken in een stapel schroot. De rook hiervan was in de wijde omgeving te zien. Het was niet de eerste brand bij het bedrijf.

De brand in de duinen van Ouddorp is nagenoeg uit. Na een hele middag en avond blussen, door onder andere een Chinook-helikopter, hoeft er alleen nog maar nageblust te worden in het getroffen gebied zelf. Uiteindelijk werd zo’n 2.000 vierkante meter aan natuur verwoest.

The End of Google Search. The internet giant is “changing the formula” of its products and media folks are beginning to assume that there will be no search traffic in the future…and fretting about their survival.

In AMD’s latest bid to upset Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware, the House of Zen has acquired AI chip company Taalas, which bakes model weights directly into silicon in a process that promises to boost inference performance by an order of magnitude or more. The deal, announced at market close on Thursday, appears to be framed in much the same context as Nvidia’s $20 billion licensing deal with Groq last December: make high-performance “premium” inference services prized for AI agents, like code assistants, faster and cheaper to run. AMD didn’t disclose the terms of the deal, but from what we understand, this is an actual acquisition rather than an acquihire. Founded in 2023 and based in Toronto, Taalas’ approach to inference is radically different from conventional GPUs or the dataflow architectures that underpin Groq LPUs or Cerebras' waferscale accelerators. A model-specific integrated circuit The startup’s chips don’t rely on HBM to store the model weights but rather etch them directly into the silicon. In a sense, Taalas’ chips are really model-specific integrated circuits or MSICs. Perhaps more importantly, Taalas’ tech isn’t just conceptual. In February, the startup revealed its first test chip fabbed on TSMC’s 6nm process tech, which it called the HC1. Initial benchmarks saw the chip serve Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B at a blistering 16,960 tokens a second — when announced last February, that was 48x faster than Nvidia's GPUs and 8.5x faster than Cerebras' accelerators. While Llama 3.1 is ancient by today’s standards, having made its debut all the way back in mid 2024, the reticle-sized chip was really intended to prove the concept. Taalas has been incredibly secretive about how its chips actually work, but we know its processors are comprised of two main regions: the mask-ROM recall fabric where model weights are etched, and the SRAM recall fabric where KV caches and fine-tuning adapters are stored. For its second-gen HC2 chip due out this summer, Taalas aims to boost parameter count to 20 billion parameters. That might not sound like much, but just like with GPUs for larger models, weights are simply distributed across multiple accelerators using pipeline parallelism. At 20 billion parameters per chip, you’d need just 50 accelerators to support a trillion-parameter model, and AMD just so happens to have a rack-scale compute platform and in-house system design team that can comfortably accommodate that. That’s quite a bit more space and power efficient than Nvidia’s recently unveiled LPX systems, which would need a few dozen GPUs and at least 2,000 Groq LPUs to serve the same model. From what we understand, AMD intends to pair its Instinct-based Helios racks with chips based on Taalas’ tech, which implies a disaggregated architecture where compute-heavy prompt processing is done on GPUs while token generation is offloaded to Taalas-based accelerators. It’s also possible that AMD could adopt a sort of tick-tock cadence in which customers initially deploy and validate models on Instinct accelerators and, once they’re satisfied with them, transition to Taalas accelerators. We can only speculate at this point, but here’s what AMD’s SVP of AI, Vamsi Boppana, had to say about it in a canned statement: “AMD is building a full-stack AI platform that gives customers the flexibility to deploy the right compute solutions for every AI workload." You better really love that model While the tech is blazing fast, if you hadn’t already figured it out, it comes with a pretty substantial downside. Once the chips are deployed you’re stuck with that model. Any change bigger than something like a LoRA adapter is going to require a re-spin of the chips, which is not only expensive but time-consuming. Nearly four years into the AI boom, new models are rolling out on a nearly monthly basis. In order to benefit from Taalas’ tech, AMD’s customers are going to have to be really sure about their choice of models, which will be easier for some than others. However, if the startup is to be believed, the situation isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. While new models will require a re-spin, it doesn’t require starting over from scratch. Instead, just two layers of metal need to be changed, which is a lot cheaper and less time-consuming. With that said, we strongly suspect this tech will largely be deployed by AI model devs, their infrastructure providers, and a handful of inference providers. In an interview with our sibling site The Next Platform in February, the company suggested that etching a model's weights into silicon is 100x less expensive than training a frontier model. AMD is certainly in a position to negotiate those deals. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta are all major Instinct customers. Given the close working relationship between the model houses and the chip designer, it wouldn't be surprising to see a GPT or Claude deployed on a combination of Taalas and instinct accelerators. The tech also has implications for model development. One of the ways developers have cut down on hallucinations is by trading time for accuracy. The technique, called test-time scaling, is quite simple in practice, and involves allowing a model to “think” for longer before responding. One drawback of test-time scaling is that it consumes substantially more tokens, which makes it expensive, and means users have to wait longer for the chatbot, code assistant, or agent to respond. If AMD’s Taalas buy can drive down the cost per token and boost output speeds by 10x or 20x, model devs may opt to extend the reasoning time even further. In any case, we may not have to wait long to see just how Taalas fits into AMD’s broader vision. Subject to regulatory approval, the deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter. ®