"Several cybersecurity companies debuted advancements in AI agents at the Black Hat conference last week," reports Axios, "signaling that cyber defenders could soon have the tools to catch up to adversarial hackers." - Microsoft shared details about a prototype for a new agent that can automatically detect malware — although it's able to detect only 24% of malicious files as of now.

- Trend Micro released new AI-driven "digital twin" capabilities that let companies simulate real-world cyber threats in a safe environment walled off from their actual systems.

- Several companies and research teams also publicly released open-source tools that can automatically identify and patch vulnerabilities as part of the government-backed AI Cyber Challenge.

Yes, but: Threat actors are now using those AI-enabled tools to speed up reconnaissance and dream up brand-new attack vectors for targeting each company, John Watters, CEO of iCounter and a former Mandiant executive, told Axios.
The article notes "two competing narratives about how AI is transforming the threat landscape." One says defenders still have the upper hand. Cybercriminals lack the money and computing resources to build out AI-powered tools, and large language models have clear limitations in their ability to carry out offensive strikes. This leaves defenders with time to tap AI's potential for themselves. [In a DEF CON presentation a member of Anthropic's red team said its Claude AI model will "soon" be able to perform at the level of a senior security researcher, the article notes later]

Then there's the darker view. Cybercriminals are already leaning on open-source LLMs to build tools that can scan internet-connected devices to see if they have vulnerabilities, discover zero-day bugs, and write malware. They're only going to get better, and quickly...

Right now, models aren't the best at making human-like judgments, such as recognizing when legitimate tools are being abused for malicious purposes. And running a series of AI agents will require cybercriminals and nation-states to have enough resources to pay the cloud bills they rack up, Michael Sikorski, CTO of Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat research team, told Axios. But LLMs are improving rapidly. Sikorski predicts that malicious hackers will use a victim organization's own AI agents to launch an attack after breaking into their infrastructure.

Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 as the then-COO of Canonical. Today he runs developer marketing at Oracle (after holding similar positions at AWS, Adobe, and MongoDB).

And this week Asay contributed an opinion piece to InfoWorld reminding us of open source contributions from companies where "enlightened self-interest underwrites the boring but vital work — CI hardware, security audits, long-term maintenance — that grassroots volunteers struggle to fund." [I]f you look at the Linux 6.15 kernel contributor list (as just one example), the top contributor, as measured by change sets, is Intel... Another example: Take the last year of contributions to Kubernetes. Google (of course), Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and AWS all headline the list. Not because it's sexy, but because they make billions of dollars selling Kubernetes services... Some companies (including mine) sell proprietary software, and so it's easy to mentally bucket these vendors with license fees or closed cloud services. That bias makes it easy to ignore empirical contribution data, which indicates open source contributions on a grand scale.
Asay notes Oracle's many contributions to Linux: In the [Linux kernel] 6.1 release cycle, Oracle emerged as the top contributor by lines of code changed across the entire kernel... [I]t's Oracle that patches memory-management structures and shepherds block-device drivers for the Linux we all use. Oracle's kernel work isn't a one-off either. A few releases earlier, the company topped the "core of the kernel" leaderboard in 5.18, and it hasn't slowed down since, helping land the Maple Tree data structure and other performance boosters. Those patches power Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), of course, but they also speed up Ubuntu on your old ThinkPad. Self-interested contributions? Absolutely. Public benefit? Equally absolute.

This isn't just an Oracle thing. When we widen the lens beyond Oracle, the pattern holds. In 2023, I wrote about Amazon's "quiet open source revolution," showing how AWS was suddenly everywhere in GitHub commit logs despite the company's earlier reticence. (Disclosure: I used to run AWS' open source strategy and marketing team.) Back in 2017, I argued that cloud vendors were open sourcing code as on-ramps to proprietary services rather than end-products. Both observations remain true, but they miss a larger point: Motives aside, the code flows and the community benefits.

If you care about outcomes, the motives don't really matter. Or maybe they do: It's far more sustainable to have companies contributing because it helps them deliver revenue than to contribute out of charity. The former is durable; the latter is not.
There's another practical consideration: scale. "Large vendors wield resources that community projects can't match."

Asay closes by urging readers to "Follow the commits" and "embrace mixed motives... the point isn't sainthood; it's sustainable, shared innovation. Every company (and really every developer) contributes out of some form of self-interest. That's the rule, not the exception. Embrace it." Going forward, we should expect to see even more counterintuitive contributor lists. Generative AI is turbocharging code generation, but someone still has to integrate those patches, write tests, and shepherd them upstream. The companies with the most to lose from brittle infrastructure — cloud providers, database vendors, silicon makers — will foot the bill. If history is a guide, they'll do so quietly.

Slashdot reader darwinmac writes: Volkswagen is offering a subscription model for extra horsepower on its ID.3 electric cars. Want to bump your ride from the standard 201 bhp to the full 228 bhp? That will be about £16.50 per month or £165 per year, or a one-time £649 "lifetime" fee that is tied to the car, not you. If you sell it, you have to pay again.

VW defended this to the BBC by saying you are basically paying for a sportier experience without buying a higher powered model upfront, calling it "nothing new." Nothing changes mechanically. You are just paying VW to essentially flip a boolean somewhere in the car's software.

Puerto Rico expects 93 different power outages this summer, reports the Washington Post.

But they also note that "roughly 1 in 10 Puerto Rican homes now have a battery and solar array for backup power" which have also "become a crucial source of backup power for the entire island grid." A network of 69,000 home batteries can generate as much electricity as a small natural gas turbine during an emergency, temporarily covering about 2 percent of the island's energy needs when things go wrong... "It has very, very certainly prevented more widespread outages," said Daniel Haughton, [transmission and distribution planning director for Puerto Rico's grid operator]. "In the instances that we had to [cut power], it was for a much shorter duration: A four-hour outage became a one- or two-hour outage."

Puerto Rico's experience offers a glimpse into the future for the rest of the United States, where batteries are starting to play a big role in keeping the lights on. Authorities in Texas, California and New England have credited home batteries with preventing blackouts during summer energy crunches. As power grids across the country groan under the increasing strain of new data centers, factories and EVs, batteries offer a way for homeowners to protect themselves — and all of their neighbors — from the threat of outages. Batteries have been booming in the U.S. since 2022, when Congress created generous installation tax credits for homeowners and power companies.

Home batteries generally come as an option alongside rooftop solar panels, according to Christopher Rauscher, head of grid services and electrification for Sunrun, a company that installs both. More than 70 percent of the people who hire Sunrun to put up solar panels also get a battery. With the tax credits — and the money saved on rising electricity costs — solar panels and batteries make financial sense for most American homes, according to a study Stanford University scientists published Aug. 1. About 60 percent of homes would save money in the long run with solar panels and batteries...

Those batteries can have broader benefits, too. Utilities pay customers hundreds of dollars a year to sign their batteries up to form "virtual power plants," which send electricity to the grid whenever power plants can't keep up with demand. California's network of home batteries can now add 535 megawatts of electricity in an emergency — about half as much energy as a nuclear power plant... [H]omeowners can make thousands of dollars a year lowering their energy bills, selling solar power back to the grid or enrolling their batteries in a virtual power plant, depending on their power company's policies and state regulations. "Over time, you would get the full payback for your system and basically get your backup for free," said Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering who co-authored the Stanford study.

ChatGPT now has nearly 700 million weekly users, OpenAI says. But after launching GPT-5 last week, critics bashed its less-intuitive feel, reports CNBC, "ultimately leading the company to restore its legacy GPT-4 to paying chatbot customers."

Yet GPT-5 was always about cracking the enterprise market "where rival Anthropic has enjoyed a head start," they write. And one week in, "startups like Cursor, Vercel, and Factory say they've already made GPT-5 the default model in certain key products and tools, touting its faster setup, better results on complex tasks, and a lower price." Some companies said GPT-5 now matches or beats Claude on code and interface design, a space Anthropic once dominated. Box, another enterprise customer, has been testing GPT-5 on long, logic-heavy documents. CEO Aaron Levie told CNBC the model is a "breakthrough," saying it performs with a level of reasoning that prior systems couldn't match...

Still, the economics are brutal. The models are expensive to run, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are spending big to lock in customers, with OpenAI on track to burn $8 billion this year. That's part of why both Anthropic and OpenAI are courting new capital... GPT-5 is significantly cheaper than Anthropic's top-end Claude Opus 4.1 — by a factor of seven and a half, in some cases — but OpenAI is spending huge amounts on infrastructure to sustain that edge. For OpenAI, it's a push to win customers now, get them locked in and build a real business on the back of that loyalty...

GPT-5 API usage has surged since launch, with the model now processing more than twice as much coding and agent-building work, and reasoning use cases jumping more than eightfold, said a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity in order to discuss company data. Enterprise demand is rising sharply, particularly for planning and multi-step reasoning tasks.

GPT-5âs traction over the past week shows how quickly loyalties can shift when performance and price tip in OpenAI's favor. AI-powered coding platform Qodo recently tested GPT-5 against top-tier models including Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok 4, and said in a blog post that it led in catching coding mistakes. The model was often the only one to catch critical issues, such as security bugs or broken code, suggesting clean, focused fixes and skipping over code that didn't need changing, the company said. Weaknesses included occasional false positives and some redundancy.
JetBrains has also adopted GPT-5 as the default for its AI Assistant and for its new no-code tool Kineto, according to the article.

But Anthropic is still enjoying a great year too, with its annualized revenue growing 17x year-over-year (according to "a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity")

Last month, Python "reached the highest ranking a programming language ever had in the TIOBE index," according to TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen.

"We thought Python couldn't grow any further, but AI code assistants let Python take yet another step forward." According to recent studies of Stanford University (Yegor Denisov-Blanch), AI code assistants such as Microsoft Copilot, Cursor or Google Gemini Code Assist are 20% more effective if used for popular programming languages. The reason for this is obvious: there is more code for these languages available to train the underlying models. This trend is visible in the TIOBE index as well, where we see a consolidation of languages at the top. Why would you start to learn a new obscure language for which no AI assistance is available? This is the modern way of saying that you don't want to learn a new language that is hardly documented and/or has too few libraries that can help you.
TIOBE's "Programming Community Index" attempts to calculate the popularity of languages using the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. It nows gives Python a 26.14% rating, which TechRepublic notes "is well ahead of the next two programming languages on this month's leaderboard: C++ is at 9.18% and C is 9.03%." But the first top six languages haven't changed since last year...

1. Python
2. C++
3. C
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript

Since August of 2024 SQL has dropped from its #7 rank down to #12 (meaning Visual Basic and Go each rise up one rank from their position a year ago, into the #7 and #8 positions).

In the last year Perl has risen from the #25 position to #9, beating out Delphi/Oracle Pascal at #10, and Fortran at #11 (last year's #10). TIOBE CEO Jansen "told TechRepublic in an email that many people were asking why Perl was becoming more popular, but he didn't have a definitive answer. He said he double-checked the underlying data and found the increase to be accurate, though the reason for the shift remains unclear."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Drug treatment can help people newly diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to reduce their risk of substance misuse, suicidal behavior, transport accidents and criminality, a study suggests. These issues are linked to common ADHD symptoms such as acting impulsively and becoming easily distracted. Some 5% of children and 2.5% of adults worldwide are thought to be affected by the disorder -- and growing numbers are being diagnosed. The findings, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), confirm the wider potential benefits of drug treatment and could help patients decide whether to start medication, the researchers say. The researchers found taking ADHD medication was linked to reductions of first-time instances of:
- suicidal behavior - 17%
- substance misuse - 15%
- transport accidents - 12%
- criminal behavior - 13%

When recurrent events were analyzed, the researchers found ADHD medication was linked to reductions of:
- 15% for suicide attempts
- 25% for substance misuses
- 4% for accidental injuries
- 16% for transport accidents
- 25% for criminal behavior

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Take note of the name: ReHMGB1. A new study pinpoints this protein as being able to spread the wear and tear that comes with time as it quietly travels through the bloodstream. This adds significantly to our understanding of aging. The researchers were able to identify ReHMGB1 as a critical messenger passing on the senescence signal by analyzing different types of human cells grown in the lab and conducting a variety of tests on mice. When ReHMGB1 transmission was blocked in mice with muscle injuries, muscle regeneration happened more quickly, while the animals showed improved physical performance, fewer signs of cellular aging, and reduced systemic inflammation. The findings have been published in the journal Metabolism.

Scientists in Svalbard warn Arctic glaciers are in "terminal" decline, with microbe-driven biological darkening accelerating ice melt and potentially triggering major climate feedback loops. The Guardian reports: Recent research implicates snow and ice-dwelling microbes in positive feedback loops that can accelerate melting. With more than 70% of the planet's freshwater stored in ice and snow -- and billions of lives sustained by glacier-fed rivers -- this has profound implications everywhere. Yet not all polar microbes amplify global heating. Emerging evidence suggests that certain populations are -- for now -- applying a brake to methane emissions. [...] Microbes that live in surface ice and snow produce dark-colored pigments to harness sunlight and shield themselves from damaging UV light. They also trap dark-colored dust and debris. Together, these factors darken snow and ice, causing it to absorb more heat and melt faster -- a process known as "biological darkening."

Microbes also respond to global changes, such as increased nutrients from air pollution, wildfire smoke or wind-blown dust from receding glaciers and expanding drylands. "The snowpack chemistry is now different to preindustrial era snow," Edwards says. Rising temperatures and longer melt seasons caused by global heating further accelerate the growth of ice-darkening microbes. Together, these factors have the potential to trigger an amplifying positive feedback loop: ice-darkening microbes nudge up temperatures and accelerate melt, exposing more nutrient-rich debris that encourage the growth of yet more microbes, which darken the surface further still.

Each summer, a biologically darkened zone, visible from space, covering at least 100,000 sq km, appears on the south-western part of the Greenland ice sheet. According to a 2020 study, microbes there are responsible for 4.4 to 6.0-gigatons of runoff, representing up to 13% of total melt, from an ice mass that holds enough water to raise global sea levels by more than 7 meters. These effects are acknowledged in IPCC reports but not yet incorporated into climate projection models. Across the European Alps, Himalayas, central Asia and beyond, at least 2 billion people depend on glacial meltwater for drinking water, agriculture and hydropower. Yet even if the world meets Paris targets, half these glaciers will not survive this century.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScientificAmerican: After a brain stem stroke left him almost entirely paralyzed in the 1990s, French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote a book about his experiences -- letter by letter, blinking his left eye in response to a helper who repeatedly recited the alphabet. Today people with similar conditions often have far more communication options. Some devices, for example, track eye movements or other small muscle twitches to let users select words from a screen. And on the cutting edge of this field, neuroscientists have more recently developed brain implants that can turn neural signals directly into whole words. These brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) largely require users to physically attempt to speak, however -- and that can be a slow and tiring process. But now a new development in neural prosthetics changes that, allowing users to communicate by simply thinking what they want to say.

The new system relies on much of the same technology as the more common "attempted speech" devices. Both use sensors implanted in a part of the brain called the motor cortex, which sends motion commands to the vocal tract. The brain activation detected by these sensors is then fed into a machine-learning model to interpret which brain signals correspond to which sounds for an individual user. It then uses those data to predict which word the user is attempting to say. But the motor cortex doesn't only light up when we attempt to speak; it's also involved, to a lesser extent, in imagined speech. The researchers took advantage of this to develop their "inner speech" decoding device and published the results on Thursday in Cell. The team studied three people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and one with a brain stem stroke, all of whom had previously had the sensors implanted. Using this new "inner speech" system, the participants needed only to think a sentence they wanted to say and it would appear on a screen in real time. While previous inner speech decoders were limited to only a handful of words, the new device allowed participants to draw from a dictionary of 125,000 words. To help keep private thoughts private, the researchers implemented a code phrase "chitty chitty bang bang" that participants could use to prompt the BCI to start or stop transcribing.

Sam Altman's brain-chip venture is exploring the idea of genetically altering brain cells to make better implants. "The company, which has been referred to as Merge Labs, is looking at an approach involving gene therapy that would modify brain cells," reports Bloomberg. "In addition, an ultrasound device would be implanted in the head that could detect and modulate activity in the modified cells." From the report: It's one of a handful of ideas and technologies the company has been exploring, they said. The venture is still in early stages and could evolve significantly. "We have not done that deal yet," Altman told journalists at a dinner Thursday in San Francisco, referring to a question about a brain-computer interface venture. "I would like us to." Altman said he wants to be able to think something and have ChatGPT respond to it. [...]

For years, researchers have been studying how to genetically change cells to make them respond to ultrasound, a field called sonogenetics. The idea Merge is considering to combine ultrasound with gene therapy could take years, some of the people said. Ultrasound has attracted significant attention recently as a possible brain therapy. Other companies are exploring the idea of using ultrasound transmitters outside the brain to massage brain tissue, with the goal of treating psychiatric conditions. That kind of technology has shown promise in research studies.

South Korean authorities have arrested the operator of Yubin Archive, a Telegram-based "pirate library" that grew to over 330,000 members by sharing textbooks, workbooks, lectures, and exam prep materials under the banner of "eliminating educational inequality." TorrentFreak reports: An official statement confirming the operator's arrest was published locally on August 12. The timeline suggests the arrest probably took place on or around August 9. The following notice appeared on Yubin Archive on August 11. "The Ministry of Culture and Sports' Copyright Crime Science Investigation Team used digital science investigation (forensics) and various investigation methods to identify the core operator, conduct simultaneous search and seizure at their homes, and fully secure the Telegram criminal activities," the Ministry's statement reads. "Investigations into accomplices who participated in the operation are also underway."

While copyright infringement at scale is almost always a crime, regardless of content type or claimed good intention, having a Robin Hood character in the mix risks dilution of key anti-piracy messaging. No surprise then that much is being made of the existence of a 'minority room' within Yubin Archive, access to which was only permitted upon payment of a fee. "The core operator of the 'Yubin Archive', who was arrested, was found to have created a separate paid sharing channel (also known as a minority channel) while promoting the illegal sharing of learning materials as a noble act to eliminate educational inequality," the Ministry notes. "In addition, the illegal sharing channel was a criminal act that could instill incorrect copyright awareness in most users, including teenagers. The Ministry of Culture and Sports is committed to continuing its efforts to track and strictly respond to illegal activities that abuse anonymous channels such as Telegram, to protect the rights of creators."

Wine 10.13 has been released after a one-month break, introducing a Windows Gaming Input configuration tab for the Joystick Control Panel, new ECDSA_P521 and ECDH_P521 cryptographic algorithms, OpenGL WoW64 thunk generation, and expanded Windows Runtime metadata support. The update also delivers 32 bug fixes," which is more than normal given the month of time between releases," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. "There are fixes for Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express, Doom 3 BFG Edition, and a variety of other game and application fixes."

You can download and learn more about the release at WineHQ.org GitLab.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The United States' practice of installing location trackers in chip shipments at risk of diversion to China reflects the "instincts of a surveillance empire," China's state-run media outlet Xinhua said in a commentary published on Friday. Reuters reported earlier this week that U.S. authorities had secretly placed location tracking devices in targeted shipments of advanced chips to detect diversions to China, which is under U.S. curbs for advanced chip exports. The Xinhua commentary, titled "America turns chip trade into a surveillance game," cited "reports" that Washington had embedded such trackers, accusing the United States of running "the world's most sprawling intelligence apparatus." [...] In its commentary, Xinhua accused the U.S. government of seeing its trading partners as "rivals to be tripped up or taken down," adding that "if U.S. chips are seen as Trojan horses for surveillance, customers will look elsewhere." Further reading: China Urges Firms To Avoid Nvidia H20 Chips After Trump Resumes Sales

Croatia has extended its digital nomad visa from one year to up to three years, allowing non-EU residents and their close family members to live and work remotely in the country. CNBC reports: A digital nomad visa is a short-term permit that allows individuals to stay in a country for an extended period and work remotely. The length of time a nomad can stay varies from place to place but most countries allow for six months to a year -- unless you have your eye on Croatia. Recently, the Balkan country announced it an update its digital nomad visa, which will allow non-EU residents to stay for up to three years. The visa also permits close family members of a digital nomad to join them.

Croatia's digital nomad visa website states that close family members also include partners or non-married couples who have been together for longer than three years without children, or for less time if they do have children together. Madrid Sartoretto believes that Croatia's expansion of its digital nomad program is a sign that the country is trying to attract more talent and compete with neighboring countries and their offerings.

"I think they are competing with other countries that are in the same region, like Estonia and Romania, that also attract a lot of digital nomads. If you give more benefits to people to come to your country, then you attract more talent. It's all about competition now," she adds. For those looking to apply for Croatia's digital nomad visa, Dr. Madrid Sartoretto says the country offers a low cost of living but still needs to improve its infrastructure, like more reliable internet speeds. "If you compare internet speed and reliability to countries like Romania, which has one of the fastest speeds in the world, Croatia needs to improve its infrastructure," she adds.

To apply for Croatia's digital nomad visa online, applicants must provide proof that they work outside of Croatia. Additionally, they must provide a copy of a valid travel document, proof of health insurance, proof of address in Croatia, and a minimum monthly income of 3,295 euros or $3,855 USD. For proof of income, applicants can submit a bank statement showing the total amount required, a bank statement demonstrating regular income, or pay slips for at least six months. Applicants must also send evidence that they have not been convicted of criminal offences in their home country or the country in which they have resided for more than a year immediately before arriving in Croatia.