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Submission + - Candy Corn Is Made of Bug Secretions (archive.is)

Submitted by know-nothing cunt
know-nothing cunt writes: The Atlantic reports:

Here's a tip if you ever want to ruin a Halloween party. Seek out the most squeamish-seeming adult or child you can find in the act of consuming candy corn. Then tell them they just filled their mouth with bug secretions. If this fact alarms you — or if you’re an inveterate hater of candy corn and thus think that you have been spared — I regret to inform you that by eating many classic Halloween candies, you are, to some extent, eating bugs. More precisely, you are eating a bug by-product that is in many cases listed on the package as "confectioner’s glaze." This glaze is used on jelly beans, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Whoppers, Lemonheads, and Sugar Babies, to name a few.

Submission + - Well, shit.

Submitted by Cpt_Kirks
Cpt_Kirks writes: Patrick Stewart dead at 86.

Submission + - Bank of America kindly asks that you don't share your password with your AI asst (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In an email blast to customers titled “Protecting your finances in the Al World,” Bank of America urged customers to never share their username and password with another person or an outside service, “including an Al-enabled tool or agent that offers to act on your behalf.”

You can practically sense the frustration in the person sending the email. Still, customers are increasingly handing over their log-ins as personal AI assistants grow more popular. Sharing your banking username and password with an AI assistant runs the risk that it could do something with your finances without your knowledge, or that your bank thinks someone’s raiding your account and locks you out of it. Worse, a security flaw in the AI assistant could result in it leaking your banking credentials elsewhere, giving financially motivated hackers a way into your bank account.

Submission + - This frog bacterium wiped out cancer tumors in mice with a single dose (sciencedaily.com) 1

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Science Daily has reported that scientists at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) have identified a naturally occurring bacterium from the intestines of Japanese tree frogs (Dryophytes japonicus) that demonstrated remarkable anticancer activity in mice. The findings, published in Gut Microbes, introduce a new approach to cancer treatment that uses living bacteria to directly target tumors rather than simply altering the gut microbiome.

In a mouse model of colorectal cancer, a single intravenous dose of E. americana completely eliminated tumors, producing a 100% complete response (CR) rate. The researchers emphasize that these findings are limited to mice, but they believe the results provide an encouraging proof of concept for developing new bacterial cancer therapies.

First, E. americana directly attacks tumors. As a facultative anaerobic bacterium, it thrives in both oxygen rich and oxygen poor environments, allowing it to multiply inside the oxygen deprived regions commonly found within tumors. Once there, the bacterial population increased by roughly 3,000 fold within 24 hours after treatment, directly damaging cancer cells.

Second, the bacterium stimulates the immune system. Its presence attracted T cells, B cells, and neutrophils into tumors. These immune cells then released inflammatory signaling molecules, including TNF- and IFN-, which strengthened the immune response and promoted cancer cell death.

One of the most striking findings was that E. americana accumulated almost exclusively inside tumors and did not colonize healthy organs.

They found that the bacteria were rapidly cleared from the bloodstream, with a half life of approximately 1.2 hours, and became undetectable within 24 hours. No bacterial colonization was detected in healthy organs, including the liver, spleen, lungs, kidneys, or heart.

The treatment caused only mild, temporary inflammation that returned to normal within 72 hours. During a 60 day observation period, the researchers found no evidence of chronic toxicity.

Submission + - Blue Chip - fully US supply chain laptop (anduril.com)

Submitted by fadethepolice
fadethepolice writes: Anduril, arguing that its manuftacuring capabilities are directly applicable to laptop manufacturing is starting a project for a fully 100 percent US sourced laptop. The computer will use a Qualcomm snapdragon SOC. I did not see any information for the OS, but I'm assuming with the type of processor this will be Linux based?

Comment Re:AI is just another tool (Score 2) 147

If you look up the right chapter in the Numerical Recipes book and insert that code or a variation of it into your program's source code, it is not compatible with open source - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I think this is a better analogy, since the gcc compiler does not have large code bases it uses for lookup+injection.

Submission + - Will AI expose the rickety infrastructure of the internet? (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by sziring
sziring writes: A startling announcement went out earlier this week: Due to recently discovered vulnerabilities in the open source programming language PHP, website owners had to immediately patch their sites â" or if they couldnâ(TM)t update right away, they should take the sites down to be safe.
On this weekâ(TM)s episode of TechCrunchâ(TM)s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean Oâ(TM)Kane, and I discussed the significance of the PHP-ocalypse and whether weâ(TM)ll see more incidents like this in the future.
Sean called this âoea real reckoning momentâ that highlights how âoewhen you get down to the bone level of the internet,â everything seems to be âoeheld together by glue and dreams.â And with widespread access to large language models and AI agents, itâ(TM)s only going to become easier to find these vulnerabilities. (That said, these specific vulnerabilities were found by human researchers, not AI models.)
Kirsten, meanwhile, wondered if weâ(TM)re about to see the âoenext level of prepper doom [â¦] because you could see how banks could get exploited, and [with] data and privacy concerns, it just feels a lot bigger than we can fix right now.â
Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Sean Oâ(TM)Kane: The internet is breaking in lots of ways this week, it seems.
I think the best way to think about this, if people are coming into this kind of cold: How many times over the last 10 years have we had these moments where something breaks or something nearly breaks, where one person maintaining one tiny repro repository as a hobby or whatever happens to catch that something nefarious is going on and and saves us from the infrastructure of the internet completely crumbling?
Now multiply that by a billion, when people have access to not only extremely advanced software in the form of these LLMs that everybody uses, but also the ability to task them to go out and do it themselves, with creating AI agents that are single-minded at accomplishing those things.
Weâ(TM)re seeing a balance of two things happening this week. One is a bunch of the labs and companies like Google and OpenAI actually had people go out and find a bunch of vulnerabilities, including the one with PHP. And then we also have a bunch of people seeming to rush to take advantage of those vulnerabilities to try and hack into websites. So we have governments taking down websites, we have really popular websites that are going down briefly to be able to fix this vulnerability.
This is a real reckoning moment, where weâ(TM)re going to find out the downside risk of building so much of the internet on open source technology like PHP. When you really get down to the bone level of the internet, it is held together with glue and dreams.

Submission + - The Pentagon is quietly building an elite new tech sabotage agency (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Pentagon has spent months quietly building an elite new tech agency to help covertly disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs considered threats to American military superiority.

Neither Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor any other senior Pentagon official has publicly mentioned the agency since it was established this April — a conspicuous omission for a department that has reveled in announcing other major changes aimed at modernizing the military or adopting hard-nosed new policies against foreign adversaries.

Information on the Technology Support Office, or TSO as it is called internally, is nearly impossible to find on Pentagon websites, and the agency is mentioned by name only in several previously unreported Defense Department historical records and memoranda.

Special Operations Command and U.S. Cyber Command both objected to creating the new agency, fearing it would cut into their budgets, according to the two former intelligence officials and one former senior U.S. national security official.

But by creating an agency dedicated to expanding that work, the Defense Department is signaling its intent to ramp up a range of aggressive covert activities abroad — potentially including cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions and disinformation operations.

Many of the people who spoke argued that the aggressive new initiative is needed to help the Pentagon counter foreign adversaries they say are harnessing artificial intelligence and advanced commercial technologies, such as drones, in creative ways that could erode America's military advantage.

Submission + - Microsoft says October updates didn't actually fix VPN issues (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Microsoft says it mistakenly flagged a bug causing Always On VPN connection issues as fixed in the October 2026 Windows 11 cumulative updates.
Always On VPN replaced the legacy DirectAccess technology and supports domain-joined, non-domain-joined, and Microsoft Entra ID–joined devices running Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server.

It runs in the background and establishes secure tunnels back to the user's corporate network whenever their device connects to the internet.

Microsoft first acknowledged the issue in a service alert sent to IT administrators in late September, saying it was triggered on systems running Windows 11 24H2 and later after installing the September 2026 security updates when the initial Always On VPN connection failed (e.g., when using automatic protocol selection with IKEv2 and SSTP).

"When automatic protocol selection or protocol fallback was configured, affected VPN connections could remain stuck in a Connecting state or fail to connect after an initial connection attempt failed," it said. "In some cases, subsequent connection attempts could display the error, 'The specified port is already in use.'"

After releasing the October 2026 Patch Tuesday Windows 11 cumulative updates, Microsoft marked the bug as resolved, but in a Tuesday update it said the issues weren't actually addressed and that a fix would ship later.

"This disclosure was mistakenly updated to Resolved status on October 13, 2026. We have returned its status to Mitigated," it said in a service alert sent to IT admins. "A resolution for this issue is planned to be included in an update to be released in the coming weeks. We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion."

While Microsoft continues working on a permanent solution, it shared a temporary fix that requires affected customers to choose one of two VPN tunneling protocols to work around the issue.

Submission + - Old Blood Cells Have Been Transformed Into Brain Stem Cells That Get Younger (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Now, scientists have transformed old blood cells into young brain stem cells, which continued to grow younger as they grew older.

The researchers, from the University Hospital of Bonn and the University of Bonn, in Germany, described their methods in the journal Aging Cell.

Cellular transformations can be done in two main ways. The first, more circuitous route turns a specific cell back into a pluripotent stem cell, or an embryonic "blank slate," and then into a different cell type.

Comment Re:Copyright & Declaration (Score 1) 86

Yes. The question whether people are allowed to use AI for every aspect of kernel development is different to the question of transparently declaring use of outside material (the model). I understand the reasoning for deciding on the former, but not for the latter. Now we will no way to tell.

The comparison to compilers, checkers and editors is not a good one for copyright and intellectual attribution.

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