How AI will fail

“Experts Expect 'Security Reckoning' As AI Tools Find And Exploit Software Bugs​

EditorDavid 7 hours ago
24
The Washington Post reports: Tens of thousands of South Koreans had their financial data exposed online in recent weeks after at least nine major banks there suffered cyberattacks that suggested a dark future for online security. One man, a 26-year-old living in southern China, was allegedly behind the attacks, according to an investigation by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. Traces left online and failure to secure his own systems allowed investigators to piece together the man's name, age, location and what he allegedly did. The clues revealed that the devastating assault on some of Asia's most sophisticated financial institutions was the work of an amateur. The attacks were launched with help from a few artificial intelligence chatbots, CrowdStrike found, before asking one to help sell the stolen data online and draft a fake résumé touting cybersecurity skills...

The hacker who broke into the South Korean banks had access to Anthropic's Claude, but because the U.S. firm's tools generally refuse to take illegal actions, free Chinese models were also used, including DeepSeek, CrowdStrike found. "The models are interchangeable," said Meyers, the CrowdStrike executive.

The Post calls it "part of a wave of AI-enabled hacking that is advancing across the world, triggering alarm inside national governments as well as multinational companies.""Basically any pedestrian, non-hacker can take these frameworks and start leveraging them to go after different targets," said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike. The company has trackedan increase in the speed with which cyberattacks can move once inside a target's networks, as seasoned hackers and rank amateurs alike get a boost from AI tools. "Anyone can be a super-hacker now," Meyers said... Many cyber experts still expect the security reckoning to intensify as AI tools that can find and exploit software bugs become more widely distributed and understood.

[Last] Monday, The Post reported that cybersecurity researchers from the start-up Cathedral who set out to test Anthropic's security found that they could access internal messages and meeting transcripts. Cathedral reported its findings to Anthropic, which said it resolved the newly discovered problems... Security experts say it's unlikely that any hacker is forgoing the use of AI tools right now.

Even in America, critical infrastructure like energy and water companies need to be "immediately and comprehensively" tested for exploitable bugs, according to Snehal Antani, chief executive of cybersecurity company Horizon3. He tells the Post the government might need to fund that remediation, and even form "a public and private partnership to accelerate incident response."”
 

“Itch Is Being Flooded By AI-Generated Garbage ​

EditorDavid an hour ago
9
The number of game pages being created per-day on Itch has doubled, the indie games site announced Saturday on Bluesky. When asked why, they responded: "take a guess."

As the gaming news site Aftermath puts it, "the surge has been almost entirely down to AI-created garbage racing onto the platform as the popularity of vibe-coded theft, copycats and machine-built slop explodes." Back in 2024, when the spectre of AI-'created' video games was still in its infancy, indie platform itch.io decided that the best it could do to combat this growing threat was, like Valve has done with Steam, institute a voluntary 'AI' filter when adding new projects to the site. By November 2026, as itch buckles under the weight of new AI-generated 'games' pouring onto the site, that filter is proving about as robust as a wet paper bag.... Shopfronts are being deluged by this shit, and it's making it a terrible user experience for customers.

And while in Valve's case there's a compelling case for stronger human moderation of the store, I'm not sure that's a viable option for a relatively tiny, community-run platform like itch... [A]t time of writing I visited the latest releases section and there was still a huge number of clearly AI-generated titles (or titles making extensive use of AI in their visual assets) which made no use of itch's voluntary tag system.

The issue here isn't that these games are making money--itch themselves say in a reply that while the number of projects listed has doubled, "the number of downloads and purchases has not"--it's that an inability to combat this surge makes the site worse for every single person using it. It gets harder to find real games, for example, and it also makes the shopfront look like a clearance rack.”
 

“The New York Times Sues Brave Web Browser For AI Scraping, Bypassing Paywalls​

BeauHD 4 hours ago
49
The New York Times and several other publishers have sued(PDF) Brave Software, accusing the browser maker of scraping their websites without permission and helping users bypass paywalls. The Verge reports: According to a complaint (PDF) filed by the companies that run New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, Brave Software has monetized its index of scraped websites by, in part, providing AI companies with paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index." The AI companies then use that index to train their models, access content to "respond to specific user queries," or both. Brave has allegedly provided "stolen copyrighted content" to "many" AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. Brave also promotes "hundreds of top publishers" as being accessible through its "Paywall blocker" feature in its browser.

"Brave has never asked for the Publishers' permission to access their websites, much less to copy the material and provide it to users or other AI companies," the complaint says. "On the contrary, as noted above, Brave allows its users to bypass the Publishers' paywalls without their consent, and has taken other steps that prevent the Publishers from blocking Brave's access to the Publishers' websites. Brave has never compensated the Publishers for the unlawful use, copying, and distribution of the Publishers' copyrighted content."
"While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct," Graham James, an NYT spokesperson, says in a statement. "We filed this lawsuit to hold Brave accountable for stealing our content to power its own products and to provide it to some of the most prominent and well resourced generative AI companies in the world."”
 

“EU Court Advisor Warns Google AI Chatbot May Breach Copyright Rules​

BeauHD 2 hours ago
13
An adviser to the EU's highest court says Google's Gemini may violate publishers' copyright when it reproduces recognizable portions of their articles or circumvents paywalls and other technical protections to generate answers. Reuters reports: The case before the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union pitted Hungarian website operator Like Company against US-based Google's artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini. A ruling against Google, which could force the tech giant to pay fees for the use of such content, could throw a lifeline to online media such as Like Company. They have seen traffic dwindle as news summaries written by AI chatbots like Gemini increasingly replace traditional search engines' results, which include hyperlinks to the media websites.

"When an LLM (large language model)-driven chatbot retrieves a publication from a press publisher's website, reuses that publication to generate an answer, and provides that answer to the user, the press publisher's right may be infringed in certain circumstances," Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said. Gemini's answers fall under the publishers' right of reproduction when chatbots access publications by unlawfully "circumventing paywalls or other technical barriers, or when they reuse "the form of expression of that publication in a recognizable manner," he said.

Copyright rules do not protect the "mere facts" reported by press publications, but "only the specific form of expression," he added. On the other hand, he said, the use of material protected by copyright to train LLMs -- AI systems that use vast amounts of text to generate human-like responses and summarize information -- is "freely permitted under the text and data mining exception." Szpunar said there was no evidence that Google had used the Hungarian publisher's articles to train Gemini. The court, which follows the majority of its advisers' non-binding opinions, will rule in the coming months.
"Google's powerful gatekeeping role in search makes this particularly important. Publishers depend on Google to reach readers, while Google increasingly delivers AI-generated answers directly to users," said Angela Mills Wade, the council's executive director.

"Publishers should not have to choose between search visibility and protecting their rights. Nor should Google's control over access to audiences become leverage to secure publishers' content for AI services," she said.”
 
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