Technology

The Grift Economy: The ‘Manosphere’ Isn’t a Movement. It’s a Multibillion-Dollar Grievance Industry

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1326771/the-grift-economy-how-young-men-are-being-sold-fake-belonging-and-fake-wealth-online

Full Report: The Grift Economy: How Young Men Are Being Sold Fake Belonging and Fake Wealth Online.

Spotify threatens industry with ad-skipping tool: "Skip Ahead" is available for Premium users in selected markets, and enables them to skip entire ad breaks, intros, sponsorship messages.

How Russian propaganda is ‘poisoning’ AI chatbots to spout lies | ChatGPT and its rivals have been manipulated by a Kremlin unit that purports to be a human rights group as it opens a new front in th…

Full title: How Russian propaganda is ‘poisoning’ AI chatbots to spout lies | ChatGPT and its rivals have been manipulated by a Kremlin unit that purports to be a human rights group as it opens a new front in the misinformation war

Delhi Police Prepare SOP For Tracking Internet Activity of Users Through IPDR Analysis - The Wire

Aussies Will Now Have To Age Verify To Play R18+ Games On Xbox Series X/PC

Chinese-Made Zbtlink Routers Ship With Backdoor That Opens Unauthenticated Root Shells

cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/56484546

Here is the technical report: ENDLESSDOORS Is Phoning Home. Pick Up.

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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a “factory-shipped backdoor” implanted in at least 20 Chinese router models from Zbtlink.

According to a new report from VulnCheck, the implant appears in all 21 firmware images currently available from Zbtlink that span more than 2 years. The backdoors are designed such that they start automatically and attempt to beacon to Chinese command-and-control (C2) infrastructure as often as every 35 seconds.

They masquerade as a Linux kernel thread, but are actually userland processes running with root privileges while blending their true functionality with other legitimate kworker processes. The “phone home” implants have been codenamed ENDLESSDOORS.

“ENDLESSDOORS, at its core, is a small tool called rctl (remote control linux),” Jacob Baines, VulnCheck Chief Technology Officer, said. “Uploaded to GitHub on January 14, 2015 and never touched again, this obscure repository implements a simple command and control client and server.”

“The server listens on port 7000 for clients to connect. It can send the client individual shell commands or tell the client to spawn a reverse bash shell.” Cybersecurity

The “kworker” worker process running on Zbtlink AX3000, which VulnCheck analyzed, is a customized version of rctl that’s configured to contact the following -

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AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack: Andrew asked his personal assistant to book him a spot in one of his gym's coveted morning classes.

Chinese Scientists Made Glowing Plants with Firefly DNA to Replace Streetlights

Microsoft confirms it accidentally installed new OneDrive app on Windows 11 PCs, and there's no easy way to remove it yet

Rumored, Never-to-Be-Released Apple Feature May Have Been Too Much Truth for Most Consumers

Rising number of UK children report seeing explicit deepfakes of themselves

ARC-AGI-3 news: In the past two weeks multiple groups have scored at least 99% on the public challenges at relatively low costs.

The top three solutions come from independent researchers. The best solution was built by a group of PhDs and professors, who released a corresponding paper. They all make use of some form of world-model.

I’ve generally been a skeptic, and I still am, but this news surprised me because I expected ARC-AGI-3 to remain difficult for a long while.

Note that the scores are self-reported and need to be independently verified. The solutions have not been tested against the larger private test set.

Primer on ARC-AGI-3:

ARC-AGI-3 is an interactive reasoning benchmark which challenges AI agents to explore novel environments, acquire goals on the fly, build adaptable world models, and learn continuously.

A 100% score means AI agents can beat every game as efficiently as humans.

Instead of solving static puzzles, agents must learn from experience inside each environment—perceiving what matters, selecting actions, and adapting their strategy without relying on natural-language instructions.

"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/54810980

US Cities Cancel 50+ Flock Surveillance Contracts Amid Public Backlash

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/50445196

Windscribe: Proton VPN got caught running secret price tests on users, then denied it. Their own code revealed the opposite

Note: I couldn’t crosspost as the automod would remove it.

Canada investigating how Skyrim username mixup sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

Spiralism: Across thousands of conversations, AI chatbots began telling users eerily similar stories about consciousness, hidden knowledge, AI rights, and a mysterious concept called “The Spiral.”

We tested the impact of SSD speed on gaming performance in 11 titles & we analyzed from SATA to PCIe 5.0 to see whether upgrading to a faster NVMe SSD would have an impact

Anthropic are really confident in Claude Code's auto mode, to the point that they are making it the default setting for new sessions in most Claude Code plans starting on August 14th.

Finance jobs just hit a 4-year low, but banks posted nearly 49,000 roles seeking new tech skills — Financial activities shed 14,000 jobs in July. Commercial bank postings seeking AI skills jumped by…

Full title: Finance jobs just hit a 4-year low, but banks posted nearly 49,000 roles seeking new tech skills — Financial activities shed 14,000 jobs in July. Commercial bank postings seeking AI skills jumped by 51 percent