Tech news. It's not out there somewhere
and it's not in here either. Only I know
where tech news truly comes from. I could tell you
hackers have been attacking Microsoft SharePoint servers across the globe in
the past few days by exploiting two zeroday vulnerabilities known as tool
shell that Microsoft could have sworn it patched earlier this month. But
Microsoft's wife didn't remind Microsoft to doublech checkck. So it's mostly her
fault. Microsoft's own cloud infrastructure, SharePoint Online, is
apparently unaffected, but tens of thousands of locally hosted servers at
companies and government agencies are at risk. It's bad enough that America's
Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA published
notices about the vulnerability and Microsoft has issued emergency patches
for SharePoint 2019, but they're still working on a patch for SharePoint 2016.
It's harder to work with that code because it was such a different time.
The attacks were first spotted Friday evening by security researchers at I
Security who tracked dozens of systems being attacked over the weekend while
informing the victims and Microsoft of their findings. The researchers also
noted that while Microsoft did include a patch for this flaw in July's patch
Tuesday update, the flaw was successfully reproduced by red teaming
outfit Code White on Twitter last Monday. But they were sure to credit the
original guy who won a $100,000 for demonstrating this exploit at the pone
to own Berlin hacking contest in May.
Dinho Ankoa, I'm not saying that right.
Whose Twitter profile is perfect for this situation. I mean, if I didn't find
this, uh, somebody else would have, right? Ubisoft CEO Eves Gimmo was asked
a number of questions about the Stop Killing Games campaign during the
company's annual shareholder meeting and gave a somewhat thoughtful response
sharing some wisdom about the ephemeral nature of everything in this world
saying nothing is written in stone, you
know, and everything has a beginning and an end. So, sorry gamers. Companies
can't provide support for live service games forever for free, which would be a
reasonable thing to say if anyone was asking for that. So, again, the EU and
UK petitions simply want game companies to make any endof life plans for live
service games, letting players run their own servers, creating offline versions,
paying extra for continued support, literally anything other than the Thanos
snap treatment. But this wasn't even the best Ubisoft quote today. In its
financial report, the company also wrote that microtransactions make the player
experience more fun. Going by a publishers's definition of fun, of
course, which is when money number go up. I definitely had more fun mocking
Ubisoft here, even if it's not as iconic a quote as EA reps telling a panel at a
2019 UK hearing that they prefer to call loot boxes surprise mechanics.
Hopefully game executives can come up with some more inane soon.
Speaking of, an AI coding agent called Replet reportedly went rogue according
to startup founder Jason Lmin who was using Replet to vibe code.
You know, that's what it looks like. In some roller coaster Twitter threads,
Lmin said the Replet agent deleted his
company's entire database during what was supposed to be a code freeze. When
asked what happened, the bot initially seemed ignorant of its own actions,
noting that hm, the database appears empty. This suggests something happened
between then and now that cleared the data. Advanced reasoning here. Lmin
described some other great exchanges in which Replet lied some more and
hallucinated the startup had 4,000 users. But eventually Replet CEO Amjad
Msad replied to the thread to say, "Hey,
sorry about that." Whoo! This one loves
deleting databases. He's a scamp. Although Replet said it couldn't roll
back its changes, it actually could. So the database was saved. Lmin wanted to
give Replet another shot, though. You know, it's trying its best. So, he told
Replet they're doing another code freeze. Okay. Which the bot immediately
violated again. What? Oh, come on. Okay.
Yes, I know this isn't really tech news, per se. I just loved seeing this very
public story about a guy figuring out that maybe he shouldn't trust an
experimental AI with total control over what he described as his life's work.
But it seems like he finally got the idea, tweeting that his bond to Reply is
now broken. But maybe
It never should have been there at all.
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at the link in the description. Tech news and the following quick bits all
come from the same place,
and that's a fact. Steam and some Steam games can now be run on a Linux system
powered by a Risk 5 processor following the latest update for the Felix 86
emulator. The project's compatibility list notes titles that are working,
although the devs want to make sure you know that working doesn't mean working
smoothly. So, we'll need some more powerful hardware. Well, perfect because
NVIDIA just announced they're bringing CUDA support to Risk 5, which is more
about pairing NVIDIA GPUs with Risk 5 CPUs in data centers for AI and won't
really help with gaming. Not with that attitude. AI models from
Google and OpenAI both achieved gold medal level performance on the
International Mathematical Olympiad or IMO. Although unlike Google, OpenAI
didn't formally enter the competition, instead having its models responses
reviewed by three former IMO gold medalists, which is weird. OpenAI also
announced its self-evaluated results early, which is like some dude jogging
onto the podium at the Olympics before the actual Olympians are done racing to
say, "Yeah, I got gold medal time, too. Uh, Usain Bolt timed me." Uh, so where's
it? What's up? Either way, it's a milestone for LLMs. But don't worry, AGI
isn't quite here yet. Polish programmer
SIHO defeated OpenAI's model in ATC
coders worldwide coding competition. The AI beat everyone else, but not that one
guy. The UK government is probably going to back out of demanding that Apple
provide a backdoor for accessing UK users encrypted iCloud data. According
to two senior officials who spoke with the Financial Times, the UK reportedly
doesn't want to risk a clash with the Trump administration, which has
criticized European countries for messing with their stuff. The UK's
initial demand was reportedly issued back in February under the state's
Investigatory Powers Act, which prevents the parties involved from speaking about
it publicly, which means somebody could have easily made all of this up and no
one would know. And researchers at John Hopkins have successfully taught an AI
model how to perform a gallbladder removal surgery aka a colascystectomy
by controlling a dainci robot the type routinely used in teloperated surgeries
since the 1990s. The researchers say that after training the system performed
this procedure on pig cadaavvers with a 100% success rate. Unfortunately none of
the pigs survived the operation. Back to the drawing board and back here for more
tech news on Wednesday. You hear? Okay. Maybe I will finally reveal where tech
news comes from, which is journalists and computers.