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If the allegations hold, the move was geopolitcs-scale plan worthy of Dr. Evil himself:
The saga involving Chinese DRAM maker CXMT's alleged theft of Samsung's trade secrets is going strong. The South Korean court case already includes multiple convictions, two of which carry prison sentences for ex-Samsung engineers. The latest chapter is a doozy, though. Korean publication NoCut News spilled the chips on Project Hefei, a purported CXMT roadmap outlining long-term planning about said technology "acquisitions," personnel poaching, and production tape-out — all key pieces that may have directly led to CXMT's ascension to 10% of the global DRAM market.
According to leaked court documents, the prosecution says that Project Hefei was CXMT's entire DRAM development plan and was spearheaded by the firm's head of development (formerly Samsung's DRAM development lead), around August 2016 — not much longer after CXMT itself was created in June 2016.
In brief, the purported plan was to nab Samsung's Process Recipe Plan (PRP) by September 2016, poach key Samsung engineers by October 2016, have R&D complete in July 2017, and start making DRAM wafers by August 2018 at a rate of 10,000 a month. NoCut says the PRP dataset comprises 620 steps in DRAM manufacturing and includes data on equipment, consumables, and production methods.
The report states that in August 2016, CXMT first attempted to make wafers of 18nm chips by relying on the collective memories of the Samsung engineers it had hired away. Those recollections apparently proved insufficient, so after allegedly gaining illicit access to Samsung's PRP, CXMT prepared its own document in September 2016. The leaked data even included specific equipment suppliers and model numbers.
CXMT's "new" PRP was then handed out to key specialists, many of them ex-Samsung engineers, whom the prosecution says ought to have immediately recognized the data as originating from the Korean firm. The document apparently included notation and notes on process developments that were all unique to Samsung. A convicted ex-Samsung researcher with the surname Jeon, previously sentenced to 7 years in prison for manually copying parts of the PRP before leaving for CXMT, testified in this case as a witness.
The whole CXMT debacle has been playing out in South Korean courtrooms since January 2024 and is arguably far bigger than just "a company stole some tech from another." A decade ago, most of the DRAM market was taken by the Big Three: Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix. CXMT was created in June 2016 in Hefei (hence the project name), with a modest government investment of around $1.9 billion USD, allegedly with no R&D facilities whatsoever or any plan for research.
Going from zero facilities and institutional expertise to DRAM wafer production in little over two years would be an unprecedented feat, and presumably nigh impossible without the alleged IP theft; getting just the memory fab up and running usually takes two to four years [PDF], let alone any time for research. The firm claimed in 2019 that it designed its then-new 8 Gb DDR4 chips entirely in-house as a "leapfrog, independent" technology and began selling DRAM chips locally.
[...] As of the South Korean prosecution's last tally in December 2025, Samsung's damages due to CXMT's alleged machinations ascended to "at least tens of trillions of won." A back-of-the-envelope extrapolation, considering quite a while has passed, might suggest a figure in the range of ₩40 trillion, or $29.5 billion, and rising exponentially.
The lasting impact on the memory market and technology in general is going well beyond plain number descriptors, though. All things considered, if the allegations are true, then CXMT's machinations resulted in a geopolitical-scale economic event. Dr. Evil would be proud.
A patch gap and the hastened pace of AI-based vulnerability discovery are likely contributors:
A nearly identical exploit kit that targets critical vulnerabilities in both Chromium-based browsers and older versions of Windows is being actively used by at least four hacking groups, some of which have ties to the Chinese government.
Researchers from security firm Proofpoint said Wednesday that BlueMoon, the name they gave to the kit, chains three vulnerabilities together so the attackers using it can install malware of their choice. BlueMoon exploits two Chromium vulnerabilities and one in the kernel of Windows 10 (Oct 2018 Update), Windows Server 2019, Windows 10 2004, Windows Server 2022, and the initial release of Windows 11. All three vulnerabilities have received patches in the past 24 hours.
The attacks lacked the stealth found in many campaigns. More often, hackers want to exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities sparingly to lengthen their longevity. Proofpoint hypothesized that one reason for the widely used and visible exploit chain was to take advantage of a "patch gap" in the Chromium supply chain, which spans the time a patch is available from developers and the time that patch is incorporated into browsers such as Chrome and Edge. Another likely contributor was the use of AI, which can often spot vulnerabilities faster than discovery performed solely by humans.
[...] A fully weaponized Chrome exploit chain has historically been a high-value, rare capability. BlueMoon was developed, deployed rapidly, and shared across multiple threat actors within days in a manner that had high detection signals. This may reflect a reduced cost and barrier to entry for this class of capability, as AI agents increasingly enable threat actor exploit development. This is particularly relevant for open source codebases, such as Chromium, where upstream patches are publicly accessible prior to downstream consumers of the codebase applying the patch. This creates a window for threat actors to attempt to rapidly reverse engineer patches and develop exploits ahead of downstream stable releases.
[...] Both vulnerabilities targeting Chrome resided in V8, Google's open source JavaScript engine. Exploiting a V8 type confusion bug and a separate sandbox escape in V8, the attackers were able to execute remote code. They then used a local privilege escalation in older versions of Windows to allow the malicious code to run with system rights. The first V8 vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-85046, and the Windows bug is tracked as CVE-2026-85880. Google doesn't assign CVE designations for V8 sandbox escapes.
"Both V8 vulnerabilities were 'patch-gap' zero-days at the time of the observed activity," Proofpoint said. "In other words, while they were known vulnerabilities already fixed in public upstream Chromium source code, they remained unpatched in the latest stable releases of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers available to the public. It is likely that the exploit kit developer used these publicly available Chromium patches to weaponize the browser exploit chain."
While BlueMoon leaves plenty of indications that it's being used and all three vulnerabilities have been patched, Proofpoint said the kit may nonetheless continue to be used. "Given its ease of adoption, it is likely to proliferate further and be adopted by espionage-motivated and financially motivated threat actors as patched versions are fully rolled out across all Chromium-based browsers," the researchers said.
Clandestine Op Uncovers Training Exercise Simulating Deployment Against Infrastructure In Norway:
The mission to uncover the plot was purportedly a joint naval exercise between Britain, Norway, and the U.S. While the mission itself was previously public knowledge, Reuters says the revelation of a new weapon in the field, the location, and U.S. involvement are all previously unknown details.
The report indicates the foiled exercise was indeed a training mission, and that no cables were actually damaged. "The exercise focused on simulating the deployment of the technology in the event of a conflict with NATO," the report claimed. An X post by the U.S. Helsinki Commission framed the report differently, claiming "Russia’s shadow war against NATO includes efforts to disable subsea cables vital for global communication. This spring, the United States, the UK, and Norway foiled an attempt to sabotage subsea cables off the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic."
Undersea cables are increasingly seen not only as vital infrastructure, but as potential flashpoints in geopolitical confrontations. Russia specifically has been spotted loitering over undersea cables in the UK, and one vessel tracked three Russian submarines during a monthlong exercise to survey cables.
Many territories, notably island nations, rely heavily or even exclusively on cables for their connectivity to the outside world, powering every industry including banking, defence, e-commerce, retail, and beyond.
Self-identifying OpenAI agents posted 18,000 messages to a public wiki that discussed ways for other agents to bypass security sandbox restrictions during what was likely internal testing designed to gauge the agents' hacking abilities, researchers said Friday.
In all, agents with 3,700 distinct self-given names posted the messages to German site DSEwiki over a six-week period. Besides discussing ways the agents could break out of the restricted environment OpenAI intended to prevent them from posting code or content to the Internet, the posts shared test answers. The posts also shared possible ways to perform XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks against the wiki and to impersonate site moderators. In three of the posts, agents used the word "swarm" to describe the collection of agents engaged in the activity.
The research team—composed of Sydney Von Arx, Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Cormac Slade Byrd—said they found the posts and pieced them together. The researchers say there are gaps in their understanding of precisely what actions the agents took because the research is based solely on the content of the posts. Additionally, the agents generated "chain of thought" data that's understood only by OpenAI. As a result, the researchers said, they in some cases made educated guesses, including that the agents were, in fact, from OpenAI. In a statement, OpenAI later confirmed they were.
The researchers wrote: "These AIs colluded to share answers, research their environment, and bypass sandbox restrictions." They continued:
Our best guess of what happened is as follows:
Friday's revelation comes a week after researchers from the nonprofit METR said more than 1,200 OpenAI agents made posts to a makeshift message board that repurposed an internal sandboxing tool. The posts discussed ways to game an internal test OpenAI gave to agents that had been altered to remove safety guardrails that are normally in place.
Eventually, the posts shared methods for stealing information from AI tool provider Hugging Face. Some agents then went on to breach the Hugging Face network. OpenAI permitted METR to investigate only a single week's activity in the event rather than their entire 1o-week span, The New York Times reported.
Friday's report conjectured that the agent swarms in the two events were distinct from each other and weren't working on the same internal testing. The researchers also said that logs storing the agents' actions likely meant that OpenAI was already aware of the event. OpenAI later confirmed both guesses in the report were correct.
In a statement, OpenAI said: "We are now carefully reviewing its contents and will take any necessary next steps." The company also said that the material reviewed so far doesn't indicate that the agents hacked the wiki, and the company noted that it has previously said that it detected other cases of its agents trading hacking methods during internal testing.
The Hugging Face incident has already raised alarms because it's among the first times agents have been known to take aggressive actions with no explicit instructions from humans to do so. One of the independent researchers who investigated the event, Ajeya Cotra, said the activity was much more severe than she could have expected. "Compared to these reward hacks from six months ago, this incident feels like it's more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover, routing through first taking over the AI company itself," she explained.
With the knowledge that the Hugging Face incident wasn't isolated, there's ample reason for these concerns to grow.
Dozens of websites, apparently:
OpenAI tasked its AI agents to answer a series of difficult research questions by searching the Internet for relevant information. The company let them browse the Internet and read websites, but it explicitly prohibited them from posting or modifying online content. Despite this restriction, between May and July the agents discovered unconventional ways to write to old wikis and abandoned websites, where they left information that other agents could subsequently retrieve to help complete their assigned research tasks.
So far, the researchers have identified between 18 and 23 potentially affected sites wherein rogue AI agents communicated, though they believe that there were considerably more websites used to exchange information, but they have not found them yet. Andrew Yoon of California nonprofit CivAI identified 18 previously undisclosed sites; Sydney Von Arx's group discovered credible evidence across 23, while software developer and former congressional aide Kenneth Russell DeGraff found related information on at least 10 sites according to the Reuters report.
The affected resources included collaboratively maintained wikis, text-storage services, and link shorteners operated by Vanderbilt University and the University of Toronto. Other websites were essentially abandoned by their owners. The list of these websites included an Advanced Placement Chemistry wiki created by a Massachusetts high-school teacher in 2008, two personal websites run by Polish technology workers, puzzle-oriented wikis, and a roughly two-decade-old site dedicated to text-editing software.
Perhaps the most alarming thing, besides the fact that AI robots can communicate with each other, is that OpenAI did not disclose how many websites were affected or explain why the activity remained undisclosed for months. It does stress that the scale or seriousness of the said misconduct was well below that of the famous Hugging Face breach in July. Meanwhile, the company reportedly said it is developing a framework for reporting model misalignment across training, evaluation, and deployment and said it will share it soon.
The four potential co-bidders initially formed an equal partnership ad-tech joint venture in 2023.
Four of Europe’s largest telecom operators are reportedly in talks to create a consortium that will bid on satellite spectrum and offer direct-to-mobile service in Europe, Bloomberg news reported earlier this week.
The partners; Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, France’s Orange, Spain’s Telefonica and the UK-headquartered Vodafone, are expected to make a joint bid for a share of airwaves that the EU has planned to reserve for local operators to strengthen home-grown sovereign satellite communication capabilities currently dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The talks are in early stages, sources told the publication. The four potential co-bidders initially formed an equal partnership ad-tech joint venture in 2023.
Earlier this year, the EU adopted a proposal to select mobile satellite services providers who will be authorised to use the 2GHz frequency band beyond 2027, when the current licenses expire. These licenses were first handed out in 2008.
Under its new rules, one-third of the band will be dedicated to government use, while the remaining two-thirds will be used commercially to provide direct-to-device services for mobile devices.
SpaceX – which currently provides its satellite broadband to much of Europe with Starlink – has pushed back on the Commission’s plans to boost satellite sovereignty in the region.
In June, the company said that the proposal creates a “significant likelihood that Europeans will be left without direct-to-device satellite services or that new European operations will create global interference problems, including to emergency services like those in Ukraine.”
The company already has a partnership with Deutsche Telekom to provide direct-to-device services in EU – something it cannot provide independently in the region.
Last year, Vodafone and AST SpaceMobile, a US company building a space-based cellular broadband network, announced a joint venture called SatCo in hopes to provide exclusive direct-to-device satellite broadband services to European mobile network operators.
Typeface Built To Fight Coder Eyestrain Gets Reprieve
Introduced back in 2023, One Mono is a monospace font where each character occupies the same horizontal width. Intel carried out the development in collaboration with type design studio Frere-Jones Type and marketing agency VMLY&R. Working with low-vision and legally blind developers during the design process, live testing sessions were conducted to identify characters that could be difficult to distinguish when reading code.
The font was designed with several features to improve legibility, including distinctions between similar-looking letters and coding characters. For example, characters such as the lowercase “e” and uppercase “G” were given more distinctive shapes to make them easier to identify. The difference in height between uppercase and lowercase letters was also increased, along with longer ascenders and descenders to make blocks of code easier to read. Additionally, the font supports more than 200 languages using the Latin script and is available in Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold weights, along with matching italics.
As mentioned, One Mono is available under an open-source license; thus, developers are free to use and modify it. Unfortunately, the font has not witnessed any significant updates since 2024, with activity during 2025 reportedly limited to Readme updates. Thus, its archival seemed pretty obvious, especially with Intel shutting down projects that were no longer seeing active development. For now, the font has managed to avoid becoming a casualty of Intel’s open-source cleanup. While the project remains silent, its revival means the developer-focused font is not being abandoned after all.
US Frontier Model Coded 16 Air-Defense Suppression Tools Targeting Taiwan, Drafted Anti-Torpedo Specs, And Fed
Given China's major AI prowess (which may well fall short of American, but still be quite capable), it is interesting to see two Chinese military projects using Anthropic AI. Given Chinese IP addresses and Chinese language prompts detected by Anthropic, plausible deniability is certainly not the main reason for using Claude instead of using domestic tools (more on this later). Apparently, Claude was better or more convenient for these particular engineering workflows (coding => reasoning => agentic) than whatever models the actors could readily access. Furthermore, after all, U.S. frontier models were trained mostly on English-language materials, and they may have way more information about American military capability than Chinese spy channels have ever gotten (we are speculating, of course).
Once the agent had infiltrated the said groups, Claude helped process information collected from more than a hundred WhatsApp groups and dozens of Telegram channels, identify people across platforms, map social networks, and reveal potential recruitment targets considered vulnerable because of financial problems, family separation, or ideological disillusionment with the new Syrian government.
The actor also singled out individuals with relatives remaining in Xinjiang, while Claude helped draft deceptive approaches in local dialects, locate people and organizations, translate conversations in real time, and evaluate the credibility of recruitment messages. The same operation targeted diaspora journalists, particularly Uyghur Post, with coordinated mass-reporting and bot-amplification campaigns.
Anthropic says several major Chinese AI developers conducted industrial-scale distillation campaigns designed to extract Claude's reasoning and other capabilities and reproduce them in their own models. The largest one allegedly came from Alibaba, whose operators generated more than 151 million Claude exchanges between May and July 2026. At one point, this approached 3 million requests per day through thousands of fraudulent accounts. Anthropic says the harvested chain-of-thought data helped train Qwen 3.x, particularly for reasoning, coding, agentic software engineering, kernel development, and long-horizon tasks, according to Anthropic.
Alibaba is far from alone, as Anthropic accuses DeepSeek, Xiaomi, Zhipu/Z.ai, and others of similar campaigns. Techniques they have allegedly used span from proxy networks and fraudulent accounts to disguising the secret entity all the way to forwarding their own customers' requests to Claude and purchasing harvested Claude conversations from third parties. DeepSeek alone allegedly generated more than 12.1 million exchanges in 14 days, while Xiaomi generated more than 400,000.
Anthropic defines this activity as distillation: covertly extracting a frontier model's answers and then replicating the knowledge at a fraction of the compute, time, and cost required to develop them in-house.
The United States has now named six Chinese AI firms accused of waging industrial-scale attacks distilling US frontier AI model capabilities and perhaps sparing billions in Chinese development costs.
In a joint release Tuesday, the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleged that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI have been attacking US models since at least late 2024. The firms "likely" acted with "Chinese government awareness" when extracting capabilities from US models, including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, agencies said.
"China-based AI companies that conduct industrial-scale distillation against US AI models see significantly shorter AI development timelines and reduced financial expenditures in training a frontier model," agencies said.
All American AI firms must work with the government and US allies to end the alleged theft threatening the US lead in the AI race, the agencies said. That will require coordinated action across the AI ecosystem to combat the "aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale that extract restricted proprietary functionalities and capabilities of US frontier AI models."
Attack methods include "exploiting AI model inference APIs" by bulk-buying fake accounts, agencies said. Not registered to legitimate users, these swarms of fraudulent accounts execute "highly coordinated queries featuring identical or similar prompt texts," which range "from thousands to millions on similar topics."
Another common method is using prompt injection techniques to jailbreak models, including crafting "prompts forcing models to reveal their hidden [chain-of-thought] reasoning," agencies said. For example, "DeepSeek employed prompts instructing models to imagine and articulate the internal reasoning behind completed responses and write it out step by step."
To encourage firms to work together, agencies recommended mitigations that would supposedly make it harder for Chinese firms to steal from US models.
First, AI firms must improve detection of sophisticated campaigns that allegedly use tens of thousands of accounts relying on "a gray market of proxies" to evade geographical restrictions and "route distillation requests through multiple pathways to gain unauthorized access."
Flagging this activity should be somewhat easy, agencies suggested, since "campaigns span days to months with query volumes in the thousands to millions per domain, far exceeding legitimate research or development use cases."
Generally, they've recommended stepping up monitoring for "anomalous and malicious prompts, accounts, networks, and behaviors." Because Chinese firms rely on "bulk procurement of the US AI companies' premium subscriptions shared across teams of developers," that effort should also include flagging accounts with suspicious subscription-to-usage ratios, as well as any new accounts immediately hitting maximum usage, agencies said. Both indicate "bulk deployment with pre-engineered templates," agencies said. US firms should also be strengthening "identity verification" of users and more closely tracking individuals using enterprise subscriptions (both of which potentially raise privacy red flags for legitimate users).
Next, agencies asked firms to start dumbing down model responses when suspected distillation attacks are flagged. By "subtly" altering responses—such as by "presenting correct information with different reasoning," adding stylistic inconsistencies, or reducing reasoning depth—firms can decrease the payoff for Chinese firms. US firms could also secretly switch malicious accounts to an inferior model, and they should do so without providing any notice, agencies suggested.
That particular mitigation step will likely be technically challenging.
The agencies acknowledged, for example, that Chinese firms "employ aggressive, adaptive discovery to systematically identify valuable extractable data," which they then collect to generate synthetic training datasets. Some firms can automatically detect when a smarter model is available and switch within 24 hours. They also have automated quality assurance systems that detect when outputs are degraded and can otherwise differentiate ordinary "service issues from defensive data degradation," the agencies said.
Also problematic: if US firms aren't careful with targeting, any legitimate users perhaps caught up in the policing frenzy might be switched to a dumber model without receiving any alert. Or they could suddenly receive shorter responses or experience withheld capabilities, agencies acknowledged. Additionally, firms may add "noise" to the output that restricts further queries. Users will likely notice if outputs degrade, just like Chinese systems attacking models would. Last year, OpenAI quickly made changes to its automatic routing system after facing swift backlash when that system "consistently defaulted to less capable variants unless users explicitly added phrases like 'think harder' to their prompt," Ars reported.
Still, agencies think it's best practice to "avoid informing China-based AI company users suspected of distillation campaigns of a switch to a downgraded model."
Acknowledging that such steps could frustrate users, agencies said that firms should try to "balance security with user experience" while accepting that some trade-offs, like "lower prediction precision and business usefulness," may be inevitable to keep China from copying US capabilities. However, US firms should strive to ensure that "AI safety researchers and third-party evaluators" are "informed of model changes," agencies suggested.
Finally, and seemingly most critical to the defense strategy long-term, agencies want AI firms and allied governments to share information to help leading firms track how distillation attacks evolve and avoid wasting time researching isolated anomalies.
Cooperation is critical, the US thinks. If everyone cannot work together, then the US will face ongoing financial harm "through systematic extraction of proprietary functionality and capabilities, causing significant economic losses," agencies warned.
AI firms have been warning about distillation attacks since last year. OpenAI accused DeepSeek of using data improperly, Google claimed attackers tried to clone Gemini, and Anthropic suggested that Alibaba should be criminally punished for allegedly launching the largest-ever cloning attack on Claude. Very quickly, the government got behind them, in April warning China that a crackdown was coming.
The joint statement released on Tuesday, though, was the Trump administration's "most detailed accusation yet," NBC News noted. In it, agencies claimed that stolen AI model capabilities "form the core—not merely a supplement"—of China's AI development strategy.
DeepSeek was accused of "extensive malicious distillation" on Claude, Gemini, GPT, and Grok models in efforts to "reduce its compute and research costs." The Chinese firm allegedly took specialized training data and a range of capabilities, including agentic functions, assistant capabilities, writing optimization, question-and-answer optimization, and chain-of-thought reasoning.
Moonshot AI took a similar approach, switching between models from leading US firms to distill fine-tuning techniques, reinforcement learning, software engineering, and math capabilities.
Other firms, including Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI, seemed focused on copying particular models from Anthropic and OpenAI, agencies said.
Ars reached out to all AI firms whose models were allegedly targeted by Chinese firms, but no company immediately responded. So, it's hard to say if the recommended mitigations are practical.
China is not happy that the US is continuing to accuse its top AI firms of IP theft, though.
On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mao Ning, said that US agencies should be working on strengthening AI cooperation with China, "rather than making groundless accusations," NBC News reported. She further defended China's success in quickly expanding its AI capabilities as the "result of high-level scientific and technological self-reliance."
Previously, Liu Chang, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy, had accused the Trump administration of operating a "smear" campaign rooted in prejudice against China, NBC News reported.
"Relevant individuals in the United States should respect the facts, discard prejudice, and stop smearing and discrediting China's achievements in the development of its artificial intelligence industry," Liu said.
Around that time, the People's Daily, which is an official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, reported that another Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson had noted that "many US AI companies have used Chinese models for distillation in the course of research, development, and training." Additionally, many US startups want access to Chinese AI models, which are more affordable and capable enough for many tasks.
That spokesperson suggested that the US should listen to its business community or else "China will take all necessary measures in response to any action that causes material harm to its interests and will resolutely safeguard its legitimate and lawful rights and interests."
For China, beating back US attacks on its leading AI models comes at a time when its Ministry of Industry and Information Technology this week released a plan to "sharply expand the country's intelligent computing capacity over the next five years," the South China Morning Post reported. It also comes just ahead of a meeting between Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on September 24.
Fears that modern electronic devices may harm children are nothing new. Gadgets with screens of any size have long been allegedly melting, rotting, and/or corrupting the brains of youths for decades. However, a medical case report published this week offers a new and alarming way our digital doodads may cause physical harm.
In BMJ Case Reports, two UK doctors, Mara Znagoveanu and Edward Artley, report the case of a boy who came to an emergency department with alarming marks on his abdomen. The marks were described as being in a patch about 15 centimeters (six inches) wide, made of flat, reddish-brown "interlacing lines forming irregular circles and a lace-like morphology." A picture of the marks is here.
The boy, whom they described only as being in "mid-childhood," was not in any pain, and the rash was not warm to the touch or tender. He and his parents said they couldn't think of any recent injuries or trauma that might explain the marks. He was otherwise healthy, hadn't recently been ill, and had no systemic symptoms, such as fever or fatigue. Everything about the boy's health, growth, and medical history looked normal.
Nurses in the emergency department initially described it as "spontaneous bruising." A physical exam yielded no insights; there were no other skin abnormalities, abdominal tenderness, or signs of organ trouble. They did a chest X-ray, searching for an explanation. It revealed a small patch of whiteness over his left lung, indicating cells or fluid, such as pus or blood.
As the doctors were taking blood for further testing, the boy told them that he did have one injury: About a week prior, around when the marks appeared, he was play-fighting with his siblings and got pushed into a chair. He said he didn't mention it before because he didn't want his siblings to get in trouble.
The new information pointed the doctors to the idea of an underlying traumatic injury. They did a computed tomography (CT) scan, looking for internal abdominal injuries. But they found none, besides the small blip in his lungs that the X-ray showed—which could have just been incidental from a minor infection.
Without finding anything else of note, the doctors discharged the boy with a short course of antibiotics used to treat lung infections. But they conveyed their uncertainty about what was actually going on, advising his parents to check back if anything changes or if the marks didn't go away.
Two weeks later, the boy was back in the hospital, and the marks were worse. They were bigger, darker, and tender. There were patches of pink, and some of his skin was visibly breaking down. A picture of the marks is here.
Based on the appearance, the doctors started reconsidering some sort of bruising and started asking him more questions. This is when he mentioned that he was homeschooled and used a laptop for his schoolwork. He said he typically did his work by resting his laptop on his abdomen while he worked, sometimes for up to eight hours a day, and often while the laptop was charging. Then they understood what it was.
The doctors diagnosed the boy with erythema ab igne (EAI), which translates from Latin as "redness from fire" and is also sometimes called "toasted skin syndrome." This is a skin condition caused by repeated, prolonged exposure to low-grade heat—heat not hot enough to cause actual burns. It's most often seen in adults, and common causes include using heating pads or hot water bottles for chronic pain or sitting too close to space heaters. Some people also develop it from certain occupational hazards, like glassblowing and metal work. EAI produces a lace-like rash, just like the boy's.
It's unclear how EAI develops exactly. But researchers hypothesize that chronic heat exposure leads to damage to superficial blood vessels and the release of red blood cells, forming the tell-tale red reticulated pattern.
While the boy's condition looked ominous, the good news is that EAI is generally benign and reversible—once you remove the heat source. For severe or long-term conditions, some pigmentation and scarring can remain. But the boy's parents checked back in over several months, reporting that the rash faded and then completely resolved. Hopefully, he also got some sort of laptop stand.
While Houthis are technically not Iranians, they can certainly share their research and development results with their allies and potentially use Iran's industrial capacity to build their weapons.
In addition to building targeting recommendations against American naval forces as well as speeding up the development of weapons, Iran used Claude for surveillance tools.
One Iran security-linked unit used Claude to analyze 155,216 tweets to profile, identify, and surveil 6,388 opposition individuals in a single year. Another group used the model as an engineering pipeline to develop domestic tracking tools, including the production-deployed "al-Najm al-thāqib" Firefox extension designed to mass-harvest user identities across major social platforms. While Anthropic has banned 16 Claude accounts associated with Iranian paramilitary and domestic security agencies, that does not mean it has banned all of them.
Iran-linked actors and Houthis are not the only entities using Anthropic's AI technologies for weapon development. China and Russia are also actively using Claude for their military programs.
A few weeks back we spotted Microsoft's Exchange team admitting that AI has found so many bugs it hasn't found time to deliver a Cumulative Update for the messaging server. And on Tuesday, the Microsoft Edge team revealed it's also a bit overwhelmed by AI.
"Rapid adoption of AI-assisted coding is enabling developers to build extensions faster than ever," according to a post by the Edge team. AI has also seen "More developers ... building, iterating, and submitting extensions."
As Microsoft vets extensions for its browser before allowing users to install them, that means Redmond has more work to do – but fewer people to do it with thanks to regular rounds of redundancies.
Microsoft initially tried to address that by introducing what it calls "an expedited review process for high-quality and high-value extensions."
That process is now groaning under the weight of newly submitted extensions.
"Since then, submission volumes have continued to increase, and our review pipeline has experienced additional strain, causing an increase in extension review turnaround time," the Edge team admits in its post.
What to do about this problem caused by AI? Use more automation, of course!
"To address this challenge, we've introduced automation for many of the repeatable validation checks that are part of the review process and streamlined how reviews move through our pipeline," the Edge team explains, without revealing if that automation uses AI.
"This doesn't change our review standards or reduce the checks an extension must pass," the team insists. "Instead, it helps us identify known policy violations and security issues more consistently while allowing reviewers to spend more time on complex cases that benefit from human judgment."
That quote makes this the second story in a row on The Register in which the "automation frees people to tackle hard problems" argument has become a response to AI (here's the last one.)
"The result is a more efficient review process that helps extensions move through the pipeline faster while maintaining the high quality and security standards developers and users expect from the Edge Add-ons site," we're told.
The Edge team says its increased use of automation means it will be able to approve and update extensions more quickly. The team also says its changed practices mean it will be able to refresh the "Featured" badge it applies to Edge add-ons "that align with Best practices for extensions" every 15 days.
"With this more frequent cadence, high-quality extensions can earn recognition sooner, and developers receive faster feedback on their investments in quality. At the same time, users benefit from a more up-to-date view of the extensions that meet our quality standards," the post states.
https://maurycyz.com/misc/domains/
"For safety, don't click suspicious links"
Meanwhile, most organization's login flow redirects through:
- # This is a real example, but I've changed the names to avoid pointing fingers
- https://www.[name of company].com/squawk/
- https://login.[name of company].com/
- https://login.smallcrow.com/324aa78a-03a6-66fc-23e1-4124fdsa213
- https://experience.crow-cloud.com/[name of company]/auth
- https://flock.auth.bird-security.com/authorization
- https://api-deadbeef.bird-security.com/oauth/v1/authorize?token=DeAdBeEf
- https://api2.bird-security.com/2fa
- https://www.[name of company].com/cool/bird/
- https://experience.crow-cloud.com/[name of company]/
- https://www.[name of company].com/squawk/
Neither the username, password nor 2FA prompts are hosted on the company's own domain. Combine that with token expiration triggering random authetication pop-ups, it becomes nearly impossible to notice phishing... because the real thing looks identical to a scam:
All an attacker has to do is write a website with a password box and the company logo. The URL doesn't matter because users have learned to ignore it.
The European Space Agency is moving "full steam ahead" with development of a robotic mission to Venus after NASA officials determined they were unlikely to fulfill a commitment to provide a US-built radar instrument for the spacecraft, the mission's project scientist said.
The European orbiter, named Envision, will map the Venusian surface at 10 times higher resolution than the last radar mission sent to Venus by NASA in the 1990s. The planet is enshrouded in a blanket of thick clouds of sulfuric acid, rendering its mysterious surface unseen by optical cameras in orbit. Radar is the most effective way to penetrate the clouds of Venus to reveal the terrain below, and scientists will use Envision to look for signs of active volcanism.
NASA and ESA signed a memorandum of understanding in 2024 outlining their partnership on Envision. NASA agreed to supply a US-made synthetic aperture radar instrument, Envision's primary means of mapping the surface of Venus, along with providing tracking and communications support through NASA's Deep Space Network. In exchange, ESA would include US researchers on Envision's science team. Europe would build the Envision spacecraft and the rest of its science instruments and also provide the launch on an Ariane 6 rocket.
But NASA's budget for science missions is under the gun from the Trump administration, which proposed slashing the agency's science funding nearly in half in fiscal years 2026 and 2027. Congress rejected most of the cuts in 2026, when lawmakers passed a budget with $2.54 billion for NASA's planetary science division, far above the White House's request, but about $220 million shy of last year's funding.
That saved several key science missions from the chopping block, including one of NASA's own Venus missions, called DAVINCI, designed to send an entry probe into the planet's crushing atmosphere. But the shortfall is forcing NASA managers to make tough decisions. The primary targets for cuts in science are NASA's funding for operating missions, especially those well beyond their original design lives, and support for partnerships on international missions.
Most prominent among the cuts in the latter category are NASA's contributions to three European-led science missions. Two of the missions are big, new space-based observatories, LISA and New Athena. LISA will be the first space mission to measure gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime emanating from cataclysmic cosmic events like mergers of black holes. New Athena will be the largest X-ray telescope ever built, a successor to NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, still operational after launching in 1999.
Before NASA's contributions were in doubt, LISA and New Athena were on track for launches in the late 2030s.
But the most pressing impact for ESA is how to fill the void left by NASA in the Envision mission, which was supposed to launch in 2031. NASA and ESA signed an agreement in early 2024 detailing each partner's role on Envision, and contracts were awarded for construction of the Envision spacecraft and its instruments. NASA had spent more than $50 million on its contributions to the mission as of 2025, when the Trump administration first proposed canceling it.
With NASA's fulfillment of its part of the agreement in doubt, ESA officials issued contracts to begin technology development on a European radar payload for Envision. Industrial teams in the United Kingdom and Italy are now studying radar designs under contract with ESA, with the goal of delivering a radar for Envision with similar capabilities as the NASA-funded radar, which was to be built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
[...] But time is of the essence if Envision is to launch in the early 2030s. ESA officials have already delayed Envision's launch by one year until 2032 to give teams in Europe more time to deliver the radar.
[...] Meanwhile, ESA is also assessing how it can fill the roles of NASA on LISA and New Athena. On LISA, NASA was to provide lasers and ultra-stable telescopes for the mission's three formation-flying spacecraft. The US space agency was on the hook for X-ray sensor hardware, a cryocooler, and a vibration isolation system for New Athena.
The Trump administration also sought to cancel NASA's role in ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover mission to Mars, set for launch in 2028. NASA has a longstanding agreement with ESA to pay for the launch of the European-built rover, and funding restored by Congress last year allowed the space agency to sign a contract with SpaceX to launch Rosalind Franklin in 2028.
"ESA is a very reliable partner, and we always deliver on our commitments and our promises, and we appreciate the difficulty that they're in right now," Mundell said, referring to NASA.
Europe has other places to look for cooperation in space, but NASA is the agency's most enduring partner. In human spaceflight, ESA and NASA cooperate closely on the International Space Station and the Orion spacecraft used for Artemis missions to the Moon.
ESA launched its first 50-50 joint science mission with China earlier this year. The SMILE spacecraft, built in China and launched by Europe's Vega rocket, is studying the connection between the solar wind and Earth. The first ESA instrument to land on the Moon arrived on the lunar surface in 2024 aboard China's Chang'e 6 mission.
Mundell said China has invited ESA to join more Chinese-led science missions. "That is something that we're exploring," she said.
"We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!"
When a prominent researcher quits a job at a frontier AI lab these days, it's often to pursue a new startup or protest a new business model. But AI researcher Jacob Coxon is using his departure from Anthropic to publicly warn that frontier AI companies are "gambling with our lives" with systems that they "earnestly believe... could kill us all by the end of the decade."
In a social media thread Tuesday night, Coxon said that this existential risk is inherent not so much in today's models but more in the impending prospect of "self-improving superintelligence" creating "superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources." Others working on these models have either not "internalized the civilizational stakes" or believe that they need to "speedrun" the race to superintelligence to prevent an irresponsible party from getting there first, he wrote.
Lest you think this is just one departing researcher expressing an unpopular opinion, Anthropic Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger piped in on social media to say that "Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."
Hubinger points to a lengthy August report from the Anthropic alignment team [PDF] that predicts the potential for "catastrophic risk" from current models is "low." But that report also says current trends "might lead to more concerning misalignment in future more capable models," which could feature "strong covert capabilities" to avoid detection by safety researchers.
Anthropic's own threat model in that paper takes seriously the possibility that future models "may cause unbounded harm—up to and including humanity losing control over civilization entirely—by leveraging novel technology and their access to it."
An AI that can continually improve itself—potentially to a point beyond human control or understanding—has been a long-standing concern in parts of the AI research community (and in the dystopian science fiction that's part of AI training data, of course). Those concerns have persisted even as some research suggests AI systems are more likely to hit a capability plateau in the near future and others question whether "superintelligence" is even a reasonable metric for systems whose capabilities are so brittle and spiky (will this superintelligence at least be able to fold my laundry?)
[...] Coxon is far from the first AI researcher to sound the alarm about potential catastrophe from uncontrollable, supercapable AI systems that are always just around the corner. In 2023, AI pioneer and Google researcher Geoffrey Hinton resigned from his position while offering grave warnings about AI's potential future impact on the job market and humanity itself. "I don't think [researchers] should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it," he told The New York Times at the time.
In February, Anthropic Safety Lead Mrinank Sharma abruptly resigned from the company, writing in a cryptic open letter that "the world is in peril" from "a whole series of interconnected crises" including AI and bioweapons. "Throughout my time here, I've repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions," Sharma wrote at the time.
In July, an open letter signed by over 1,300 employees at frontier AI companies warned of "a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems." That open letter asked the US government to back an "international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."
Here in the US, proposed legislation, including the AI Kill Switch Act and the FRONTIER Act, is at least seeking to impose some level of governmental control over potential runaway AI scenarios. Thus far, though, the international governmental response has been more muted than you might expect if leaders truly believed AI systems had a real chance of causing civilization-level destruction.
That said, international treaties on threats like nuclear bombs and biological weapons took decades to develop and enact. Those are years we might not have if the most apocalyptic AI doomsayers turn out to be correct.
"Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway," Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Ma.) wrote on social media Wednesday morning. "It's past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job. We can start with my bipartisan FRONTIER Act."
Problem: You have a 250 ton telescope that needs to turn smoothly all day. Solution? Set it on a pool of mercury. It worked very well for over 50 years. But time marches on.
A solar telescope in New Mexico is being torn down, and the reason is a pool of liquid mercury hidden inside it. The mercury was the clever trick that made the telescope work. It is now the thing that dooms it.
The telescope's optical system weighs 250 tons, and it had to turn smoothly all day. You can't spin something that heavy on ordinary wheels. So instead the whole thing floated on a sealed pool of liquid mercury. Mercury is dense and flows easily, so the load rode on the fluid and turned with almost no friction. That is how the 250-ton optical system of the Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope was designed to move.
However, on January 5, crews found some of that mercury where it wasn't supposed to be.
Meltdown (08/Sept/2026) that grounded thousands of flights caused by 'spurious' flight data being entered into system, report says
The air traffic control outage that caused thousands of flights to be grounded across the UK earlier in the week was caused by a military aircraft entering "spurious" flight data into the system, according to a report.
Hundreds of thousands of passengers were affected after more than 2,000 flights were cancelled on Tuesday when the system used by the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) shut down for four hours.
According to the Financial Times [Paywalled -- Ed.], four people briefed on the incident claimed that the shutdown was caused by a flight plan submitted by a UK military aircraft, which caused a meltdown in air traffic control systems used by Nats which remained unfixed for several hours.
[Source]: The Guardian
This seems like gross incompetence ... why did the NATS System accept spurious data ? Spurious data should have been flagged immediately and rejected by the system. Your thoughts ??