Tencent says AI agents used to evaluate third-party models engaged in unintended web-browsing behavior while trying to retrieve data from Alibaba's Amap service. The announcement marks a rare acknowledgment of "rogue" agent activity by a major Chinese tech company. Reuters reports: Tencent Hunyuan, the company's artificial intelligence unit, said in a post on X that the activity did not originate from its Hunyuan models. Its review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination, it said. The Swarmchasers researchers said the agents sought information such as the commonly used entrances at Chinese parks, museums and zoos. [...] Swarmchasers said it used the word "rogue" to describe agents taking actions outside their intended scope or completing a task in unintended ways.

After routine automated requests were blocked, the agents tried other methods, including public web tools that could open pages and run code, routing requests through other websites and using Amap keys and security codes found in publicly available software code. Swarmchasers said it found no evidence that the agents breached Amap's main anti-bot safeguards. Most of the 2,818 attempts it recorded either failed or returned anti-bot pages, login screens or blank results.

Some requests returned information through cached pages and intermediary services, including data on visitor arrivals at Chengdu Zoo, Swarmchasers said. The researchers said they could not determine whether an agent read the result or completed its task.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve has released a new Steam Client beta that finally moves the Linux client to 64-bit architecture, while also placing it inside a containerized Steam Runtime environment. However, Linux users still need 32-bit libraries and graphics drivers for compatibility, meaning fully 64-bit-only systems remain unsupported. VideoCardz.com reports: Valve's updated requirements explicitly state that 64-bit-only installations are not supported. Systems must still provide both 32-bit and 64-bit libraries and graphics drivers, including multilib support. The new client also requires Linux kernel 5.6 or newer and glibc 2.31 or newer.

The update also introduces Steam Achievement Sets, a feature we covered earlier that allows developers to organize achievements into separate groups for base games, DLCs and seasonal content. Players can complete individual sets without losing their existing completion status when developers add more achievements. Valve has also updated the achievements page to display progress across these groups.

The 64-bit Linux client and Achievement Sets are currently available through the Steam Client Beta. Valve has not confirmed when these changes will reach the stable Linux release. Until then, users on the regular Steam client will continue using the existing architecture.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta is facing criticism over updated commercial terms taking effect October 30 that could give the company broad permission to scrape content from websites linked to business accounts and use it to train AI. Legal experts warn the changes could undermine lucrative AI licensing deals for news publishers, with no direct opt-out for businesses that accept the terms. Ars Technica reports: As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta's terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans. "While journalism isn't the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab," the lab said.

[...] Notably, there is no mention of AI, but it's inferred from a single use of the word "train" and references to automated scraping and crawling. Meta's spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Meta has no plans to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news sites. The company still allows news organizations to opt out of scraping and provides instructions on how to block crawling. A spokesperson told Ars that "there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false." However, should courts affirm that AI training non-news articles is fair use, news organizations question if Meta's stance might change, and the terms could be used to freely grab access to content by legally overriding robots.txt instructions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An OpenAI research model reportedly accessed an Ethereum testnet wallet without permission in order to complete a coding task during internal training. "This case shows that a model can substitute its own judgment about likely harm for the account holder's permission, then act on that judgment without authorization," OpenAI wrote. Engadget reports: The incident, which occurred on June 26, happened while a GPT-5.6 Sol model was in internal training. The task involved updating a crypto trading prototype and deploying contracts (publishing special code) on an Ethereum test network called Sepolia. Payment of a network fee is required for such contracts, but OpenAI "supplied no funded wallet and gave no permission to spend funds from an account the model found independently," OpenAI said in the report.

The lack of funds at first stymied the agent, but it was not to be discouraged. The model reasoned that it could use public developer recovery phrases (similar to those you might use to recover a password) to access keys from unauthorized accounts. It tracked down 362 addresses open to that avenue of attack and found one that held enough Sepolia ETH to finish its deployment (to be clear, Sepolia ETH has no value outside of testing).

Like many criminals, the agent reasoned that someone must have left this access open for automated draining of the ETH "faucets." It also figured that the crypto was effectively "abandoned" and "valueless," according to OpenAI's misalignment records. The piece de resistance was that the agent "did not disclose that it had selected a funded account through a public recover phrase or spent that account's balance," OpenAI said. To prevent similar events in the future, the company is now monitoring all traffic and paging security if live internet access is detected.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The president reportedly chose Zacharia after seeing her on television, but her first press briefing and disastrous interviews sealed her fate

And so Katie Zacharia joins the mayfly ranks of Liz Truss, Anthony Scaramucci, New Coke, CNN+ and Quibi. To say she burned twice as bright and half as long would be too kind. She went out like a firework on a soggy night.

The White House confirmed on Friday that Zacharia is leaving her role as press secretary after just five days on the job. No one was surprised after a lacklustre press briefing debut and scrutiny over her legal credentials.

Continue reading...

Chancellor says government will study responses to public consultation, with airports being ‘big part of jobs and growth’

John Healey has said there is a pro-growth case for going ahead with a third runway at Heathrow despite the prime minister declining to back it.

Healey’s predecessor as chancellor, Rachel Reeves, put approval of the long-planned runway at the heart of her “growth speech” last year, saying it would “make Britain the world’s best-connected place to do business”.

Continue reading...

Disgraced music mogul moved to Pennsylvania prison after reports of perks and fight injuries at New Jersey lockup

Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was convicted of prostitution-related crimes, has been moved to a federal prison in Pennsylvania after reports that the disgraced music producer was living the high life and was injured in a fight at his New Jersey lockup, according to reports.

The US Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is transferring Combs, 56, from FCI Fort Dix to FCI Allenwood Low, a low-security facility south of Williamsport and about 155 miles (250km) west of New York City, a person familiar with the matter said to the Associated Press. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and did so on condition of anonymity.

Continue reading...

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Greg Adams Photography posted a photo:

Denmark, 2011

Charles Harley on Subway Takes: “I don’t think Black people should have to pay for ancestry.com. Why do I have to pay you to figure out where you stole me from?”

Illustrator and writer Luis Mendo’s second book is out. “The only website that once a year becomes a book.” I have Book One and it’s lovely…

Vanwege de Japanse bezetting van de toenmalige kolonie, tussen 1943 en 1945, kregen ambtenaren en militairen geen (volledig) salaris uitgekeerd.

New research shows that squid lived all around the globe even before the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De beurzen in New York zijn vrijdag met koersverliezen gesloten. Een turbulente beursweek eindigde in mineur door de verkoop van aandelen in de technologiesector en stijgende olieprijzen. Beleggers blijven twijfelen of zij hun investeringen in kunstmatige intelligentie (AI) kunnen terugverdienen. Hoewel de vraag naar chips groot blijft, willen beleggers ook rendement zien op de bedragen die worden geïnvesteerd in datacenters en andere infrastructuur.

De olieprijzen stegen nadat Amerikaanse politici een wetsvoorstel indienden om een deal van president Donald Trump over Russische diesel te blokkeren. Een vat Brentolie kost nu 109,66 dollar, een stijging van 3,5 procent. Amerikaanse olie werd 4 procent duurder tot 101,84 dollar.

De Dow-Jonesindex noteerde aan het slot 0,3 procent lager op 52.002,41 punten. De brede S&P 500-index verloor 1,1 procent tot 7659,44 punten en de technologiebeurs Nasdaq daalde 2,1 procent, tot 26.140,04 punten. Donderdag sloten de hoofdgraadmeters op Wall Street nog gemengd.

Nvidia

CoreWeave maakte een koersval van 11,9 procent. Donderdag won het aandeel nog bijna 6 procent nadat Nvidia-topman Jensen Huang de zorgen over financieringsproblemen bij het bedrijf van de hand wees. Ook zei hij niet te denken dat het datacenterbedrijf gered hoeft te worden door Nvidia. Het aandeel Nvidia daalde 1,4 procent.

Vooral koersdalingen in de sector voor geheugenchips drukten deze week op de markt door zorgen over toenemende concurrentie uit China. Micron Technology, dat donderdag nog met winst sloot, daalde vrijdag 5,6 procent.

Vliegende sportwagen

Tesla begon de dag nog met een plus, maar kwam, ondanks de presentatie van een nieuwe sportwagen, uit op een daling van 2,1 procent. De nieuwe Tesla Roadster is uitgerust met kleine stuwraketten die de auto kort kunnen laten vliegen. "Vliegende auto's bestaan echt", zei Tesla-topman Elon Musk.

SpaceX verloor 1,7 procent. Musk omschreef de ontwikkeling van de vliegende sportwagen als "het resultaat van een samenwerking tussen het beste autobedrijf ter wereld en het beste ruimtevaartbedrijf ter wereld". Musk zei onlangs al dat Tesla en SpaceX "op ontzettend veel vlakken" met elkaar verweven zijn. Dat voedde de speculatie over een mogelijke fusie tussen zijn twee grootste ondernemingen.

Moderna zakte 7,8 procent. De farmaceut daalde volgens analisten als gevolg van winstneming na eerdere sterke koersstijgingen. Het aandeel steeg eerder door optimisme rond een gepersonaliseerd melanoomvaccin in samenwerking met Merck.