HP, along with other printer brands, is infamous for issuing firmware updates that brick already-purchased printers that have tried to use third-party ink. In a new form of frustration, HP is now being accused of issuing a firmware update that broke customers’ laser printers—even though the devices are loaded with HP-brand toner. The firmware update in question is version 20250209, which HP issued on March 4 for its LaserJet MFP…

The AI industry has a new buzzword: “PhD-level AI.” According to a report from The Information, OpenAI may be planning to launch several specialized AI “agent” products including a $20,000 monthly tier focused on supporting “PhD-level research.” Other reportedly planned agents include a “high-income knowledge worker” assistant at $2,000 monthly and a software developer agent at $10,000 monthly. OpenAI has not yet confirmed these prices, but they have mentioned PhD-level…

Nearly 1 million Windows devices were targeted in recent months by a sophisticated “malvertising” campaign that surreptitiously stole login credentials, cryptocurrency, and other sensitive information from infected machines, Microsoft said. The campaign began in December, when the attackers, who remain unknown, seeded websites with links that downloaded ads from malicious servers. The links led targeted machines through several intermediary sites until finally arriving at repositories on Microsoft-owned GitHub, which hosted…

A pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers recently discovered hints that the process of compressing information can solve complex reasoning tasks without pre-training on a large number of examples. Their system tackles some types of abstract pattern-matching tasks using only the puzzles themselves, challenging conventional wisdom about how machine learning systems acquire problem-solving abilities. “Can lossless information compression by itself produce intelligent behavior?” ask Isaac Liao, a first-year PhD student,…

A newly discovered network botnet comprising an estimated 30,000 webcams and video recorders—with the largest concentration in the US—has been delivering what is likely to be the biggest denial-of-service attack ever seen, a security researcher inside Nokia said. The botnet, tracked under the name Eleven11bot, first came to light in late February when researchers inside Nokia’s Deepfield Emergency Response Team observed large numbers of geographically dispersed IP addresses delivering “hyper-volumetric attacks.”…

For many people, coding is about telling a computer what to do and having the computer perform those precise actions repeatedly. With the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, it’s now possible for someone to describe a program in English and have the AI model translate it into working code without ever understanding how the code works. Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy recently gave this practice a name—”vibe coding”—and it’s…

In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film Her imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to reality with the release of a new conversational voice model from AI startup Sesame that has left many users both fascinated and unnerved. “I tried the demo, and it was genuinely startling how human it felt,” wrote one…

Three critical vulnerabilities in multiple virtual-machine products from VMware can give hackers unusually broad access to some of the most sensitive environments inside multiple customers’ networks, the company and outside researchers warned Tuesday. The class of attack made possible by exploiting the vulnerabilities is known under several names, including hyperjacking, hypervisor attack, or virtual machine escape. Virtual machines often run inside hosting environments to prevent one customer from being able…

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, experts have debated how widely AI language models would impact the world. A few years later, the picture is getting clear. According to new Stanford University-led research examining over 300 million text samples across multiple sectors, AI language models now assist in writing up to a quarter of professional communications across sectors. It’s having a large impact, especially in less-educated parts of…

Amnesty International on Friday said it determined that a zero-day exploit sold by controversial exploit vendor Cellebrite was used to compromise the phone of a Serbian student who had been critical of that country’s government. The human rights organization first called out Serbian authorities in December for what it said was its “pervasive and routine use of spyware” as part of a campaign of “wider state control and repression directed…