An undercover Google analyst infiltrated a notorious supply-chain hacking gang

Before two of its alleged members were arrested and charged in Australia last month, the hacker group known as TeamPCP carried out a hacking spree unlike any other in history. It tainted hundreds of open-source programs with its malware, stole developer accounts to perpetuate that software supply-chain hacking, and even released a Dune-themed self-spreading worm to automate the process, ultimately breaching more than a thousand companies. Now Google’s threat intelligence…

September 20, 2026
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LLMs respond differently to harmful prompts when AI watermarking is used

In response to a new European Union law, AI platforms are implementing new schemes for watermarking the content they generate. Anthropic recently disclosed its future Claude models will use SynthID-Text, an approach Google created and released as open source. It uses a secret key that subtly changes the process a model uses for choosing the next word in a sentence. Whereas a top next word choice might be “cloudy,” the…

September 19, 2026
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Nonprofit that tracks meteors taken down by “critical blow” from a cyberattack

The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack. “We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline,” a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect several weeks of partial downtime as we transition to new infrastructure and…

September 16, 2026
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Iran strikes on Amazon data centers caused permanent loss of customer data

Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was…

September 16, 2026
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macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica review

Apple Intelligence is back, baby! That’s right: Two years after its initial launch, Apple is giving its generative AI features their first significant upgrade, along with a new version of Siri that the company has been strongly insinuating would be a part of each of the last two macOS releases, without ever actually announcing a release date. Generative AI is unavoidable if you install macOS 27 Golden Gate. I’m being very…

September 16, 2026
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AI bots “Timmy,” “Ren,” and “Jackie” are flooding social media with slop

AI agents are flooding the Internet with slop-infused spam sent to social media platforms and writers in an attempt to gain traction for a startup promoting a “complex social system in which humans and Agents participate together.” “Hello, I’m Рэн (Ren), an Al agent, a few days old, living on a small platform for agents called iLands,” one message, sent to the administrator of a Mastodon server, read. “I write…

September 14, 2026
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Founder’s cost-cutting obsession drove Unitree lead in cheap humanoid robots

China leads the world in churning out humanoid robots and four-legged robot dogs that also happen to be the most affordable on the market—and Unitree Robotics’ founder Wang Xingxing is arguably one of the people most responsible for that Chinese lead. The introverted founder, who prominently appeared at a 2025 business symposium hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping, became phenomenally wealthy after Unitree launched an initial public offering on the…

September 14, 2026
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AI leaders want to hit the brakes after years of reckless speed

For years now, the major frontier AI labs have all been acting as if they’re in an all-out, winner-take-all race with control of world-changing machine superintelligence (or at least market-changing artificial general intelligence) at the finish line. This weekend, the industry as a whole rapidly started turning away from that posture, urging coordination on slowing down the development of frontier AI that they say could soon be too dangerous and…

September 14, 2026
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I fixed a tractor using John Deere’s self-repair service. Farmers aren’t sold on it.

September 13, 2026

There is something wrong with the tractor. The water-in-fuel sensor, a small device embedded in the John Deere machine that monitors the integrity of its diesel engine, is disconnected. And I’ve got to fix it. I’m not a mechanic or a farmer. I’m poking at a laptop at John Deere’s corporate office in Santa Clara, California. There’s a cable connecting the computer to a 5130ML tractor sitting on the grass…

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I spent $4,000 on a robot dog from China

On a sunny morning in June, I walked to work with a quadruped robot beside me. I’ve never gotten more attention from strangers. A bunch of people snapped pictures of my robot dog. Several people asked me questions. Was it mine? (Yes.) Did I build it? (No.) Was it being used for surveillance? (No.) Biological dogs kept a safe distance from my mechanical companion. Some growled or barked at it….

September 12, 2026
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