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The supply chain attack targeting the widely-used Polyfill[.]io JavaScript library is broader in scope than previously thought, with new findings from Censys showing that over 380,000 hosts are embedding a polyfill script linking to the malicious domain as of July 2, 2024. This includes references to "https://cdn.polyfill[.]io" or "https://cdn.polyfill[.]com" in their HTTP responses, the attack Newsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new botnet called Zergeca that's capable of conducting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Written in Golang, the botnet is so named for its reference to a string named "ootheca" present in the command-and-control (C2) servers ("ootheca[.]pw" and "ootheca[.]top"). "Functionally, Zergeca is not just a typical DDoS botnet; besides supporting six

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new botnet called Zergeca that's capable of conducting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Written in Golang, the botnet is so named for its reference to a string named "ootheca" present in the command-and-control (C2) servers ("ootheca[.]pw" and "ootheca[.]top"). "Functionally, Zergeca is not just a typical DDoS botnet; besides supporting sixNewsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

V praxi to znamená, že prakticky poslední 14nm řada, která ještě byla na trhu, končí a stejně tak končí nejvýkonnější Core i9 Intelu, kterého se netýká stávající kauza odcházejících procesorů…

Nové nastavení opravy na Spectre BHI, Linuxová BSoD a monochromatické logo, řešení problémů některých Intel strojů s vadnými firmwary, ID GPU karet Intel Battlemage v ovladači Xe pro Linux 6.11.

Content distribution network Cloudflare is making it simpler for customers who have had enough of badly behaved bots to block them from their website.

It’s long been possible to prevent well-behaved bots from crawling your corporate website by adding a “robots.txt” file listing who’s welcome and who isn’t — and content distribution networks such as Cloudflare offer visual interfaces to simplify the creation of such files.

But faced with the arrival of a new generation of badly behaved AI bots, scraping content to feed their large language models (LLMs), Cloudflare has introduced an even quicker way to block all such bots with one click.

“The popularity of generative AI has made the demand for content used to train models or run inference on skyrocket, and although some AI companies clearly identify their web scraping bots, not all AI companies are being transparent,” Cloudflare staff wrote in a blog post.

According to authors of the post, “Google reportedly paid $60 million a year to license Reddit’s user generated content, Scarlett Johansson alleged OpenAI used her voice for their new personal assistant without her consent, and most recently, Perplexity has been accused of impersonating legitimate visitors in order to scrape content from websites. The value of original content in bulk has never been higher.”

Last year, Cloudflare introduced a way for any of its customers, on any plan, to block specific categories of bots, including certain AI crawlers. These bots, said Cloudflare, observe requests in sites’ robots.txt files, and do not use unlicensed content to train their models, nor gather to feed for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications.

To do this it identifies bots by their “user-agent string” — a kind of calling card presented by browsers, bots and other tools requesting data from a web server.

“Even though these AI bots follow the rules, Cloudflare customers overwhelmingly opt to block them. We hear clearly that customers do not want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly,” the post said.

The top four AI webcrawlers visiting sites protected by Cloudflare were Bytespider, Amazonbot, ClaudeBot and GPTBot, it said. Bytespider, the most frequent visitor, is operated by ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. It visited 40.4% of protected websites, and is reportedly used to gather training data for its LLMs, including those that support its ChatGPT rival Doubao. Amazonbot is reportedly used to index content to help Amazon’s Alexa’s chatbot answer questions, while ClaudeBot gathers data for Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude.

Blocking bad bots

Blocking bots based on their user-agent string will only work if such bots tell the truth about their identity — but there are signs that not all do, or not all the time.

In such cases, other measures will be necessary — and enterprises’ main recourse against unwanted web scraping is normally reactive: pursue legal action, according to Thomas Randall, director of AI market research at Info-Tech Research Group.

“While some software applications exist for web scraping prevention (such as DataDome and Cloudflare), these can only go so far: if an AI bot is rarely scraping a site, the bot may still go undetected,” he said via email.

To justify legal action against the operators of bad bots, enterprises will need to do more than claim that the bot didn’t leave when asked.

The best course of action, Randall said, is for “enterprises to hide intellectual property or other important information behind a membership paywall. Any scraping done behind the paywall is liable for legal action, reinforced with a clear restrictive copyright license on the site. The organization must, therefore, be prepared to legally follow through. Any scraping done on the public site is accepted as part of the organization’s risk tolerance.”

Randall noted that if organizations have the resources to go further, they could consider rate-limiting connections to their site, temporarily automatically blocking suspicious IP addresses, limiting information on why access has been blocked to a message such as “For help, contact support via [email protected]” in order to force a human interaction, and double-checking how much of their websites are available on their mobile site and apps.

“Ultimately, scraping cannot be stopped, but hindered at best,” he said.

More on AI bots and data scraping:

• ‘Data poisoning’ anti-AI theft tools emerge — but are they ethical?
• Zoom goes for a blatant genAI data grab; enterprises, beware (updated)
• Expect to see more online data scraping, thanks to a misinterpreted court ruling

Po 14 letech s telefony s Androidem jsem přešel na iOS • Narazil jsem na celou řadu věcí, které mě překvapily • Co je na iPhonech lepší, a co naopak horší?

Hlavní mediální pozornost získávají humanoidní roboti Atlas od Boston Dynamics a Optimus od Tesly, to ale zdaleka neznamená, že by to byla jediná cesta k větší automatizaci. Navíc ani ne jediná pro automatizaci v automobilkách. Už lednu se společnost Figure dohodla s americkou továrnou BMW, že ...

Letos uplyne 40 let od chvíle, kdy na plátna vtrhl první Policajt v Beverly Hills (Beverly Hills Cop), představil světu novou hollywoodskou hvězdu Eddieho Murphyho a razantně proměnil žánr akčních komedií. A taky letos uběhlo 30 let od třetího dílu, na který by všichni rádi zapomněli.

Oficiální podpora Windows 10 skončí 14. října 2025. V praxi to znamená, že počínaje tímto dnem přestane Microsoft pro tento operační systém vydávat aktualizace, včetně bezpečnostních. Pokud uživatelé nepřejdou na podporovanou verzi (v tomto případě Windows 11), mohou čelit bezpečnostním rizikům. ...

Oficiální podpora Windows 10 skončí 14. října 2025. V praxi to znamená, že počínaje tímto dnem přestane Microsoft pro tento operační systém vydávat aktualizace, včetně bezpečnostních. Pokud uživatelé nepřejdou na podporovanou verzi (v tomto případě Windows 11), mohou čelit bezpečnostním rizikům. ...

Open source platforma Home Assistant (Demo, GitHub, Wikipedie) pro monitorování a řízení inteligentní domácnosti byla vydána ve verzi 2024.7.

Nejznámější a nejlepší klasické české seriály si můžete zadarmo pustit na iVysílání. Vznikly před rokem 1989 a mají jedno společné – hrála v nich tehdejší herecká elita a i ostatní tvůrci patřili ve své době k nejlepším. Když pomineme poplatnost době, jsou často kvalitnější než současná česká ...

We’ve all been there: A tight deadline, an overnighter, and the next day we’re navigating life like zombies.

For fighter pilots, the last step isn’t an option. During active duty, these pilots need to be in tip-top shape mentally, even when they’re deprived of sleep (which can be often). Typically, the treatment is your everyday cup of joe. But for longer durations of sleep deprivation, pilots are also prescribed stronger stimulants.

But as anyone who’s ever had too much caffeine knows, there are side effects. You get jittery. Your hands start to shake. Your mood takes a nosedive as the effect wears off and irritability sets in. And then you crash.

Prescription stimulants, such as dextroamphetamine, have even more severe side effects. As the name suggests, they’re in the same family as methamphetamine—or “meth”—and come with the risk of addiction. These drugs last longer inside the body, so that when trying to sleep after a tiring day, they keep parts of the brain in a semi-alert state and mess with sleep schedules. People taking dextroamphetamine often need sedatives to counteract lingering effects, and the chemical regime takes a toll.

Over time, the lack of restorative sleep impacts memory, cognition, and reasoning. It also damages the immune system, metabolism, and overall health.

The drugs work in short bursts. What if there’s a way to turn them on and off at will—giving the brain just a tiny dose when needed and quickly shutting off its effect to allow a full night’s sleep?

One solution may be light-activated drugs. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a project in June to develop these types of drugs to combat sleep deprivation for fighter pilots. So-called photopharmacological drugs would add a molecular “light switch” to drugs like dextroamphetamine.

Pulses of light activate the drugs in parts of the brain on demand. Non-targeted brain regions aren’t exposed to the active version and continue to work normally. Once the pilots are alert, another pulse of light shuts off the drug, giving the body time to break it down before bedtime.

To make this vision a reality, the new project, Alert WARfighter Enablement (AWARE), has two research arms. One will develop safe and effective dextroamphetamine that can be controlled with light. The second will focus on engineering a wearable “helmet” of sorts to direct light pulses toward regions of the brain involved in alertness and mental acuity.

“To achieve the beneficial effects of stimulants on alertness without the undesirable effects of the stimulant on mood, restorative sleep, and mental health, a new approach is needed to enable targeted activation of the drug,” Dr. Pedro Irazoqui, AWARE program manager, said in a press release.

Brain on Alert

After a terrible night’s sleep, the first thing most of us reach for is coffee. Caffeine, its active ingredient, is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world, with over 80 percent of people in North America drinking a cup of joe every morning.

While this is also the go-to solution for most fighter pilots, multiple countries have developed far stronger concoctions to keep their brigades awake. The most notorious is probably methamphetamine, first synthesized in the late 1800s. Best known by its street names—meth, crank, or speed—it was used during World War II to keep troops awake, before being outlawed across the globe. A safer spin-off, dextroamphetamine is currently prescribed to increase alertness and cognition. While effective, it can trigger both irritability and euphoric effects—a recipe for potential addiction.

The Air Force has approved other types of chemical drugs, such as modafinil, to battle fatigue too. Research in mice and people found these drugs can improve many cognitive functions—for example, navigating space, keeping multiple things in mind, and boosting overall alertness even when severely sleep-deprived. Unlike amphetamines, this group of drugs isn’t as addictive, with effects compared to drinking roughly 20 cups of coffee without the jitters. But they can produce pounding headaches, sweating, and in rare cases, hallucinations.

Light-activated drugs may be another option. First devised for cancer, these drugs have a molecular “light-switch” component that responds to pulses of light. The switch can be tagged onto conventional drugs, making it easy to adopt for existing medications—like, say, dextroamphetamine.

The “switch” component changes the chemical’s shape after being blasted by different wavelengths of light. Like transformers, one shape allows the chemical to grab onto its usual targets—the “active” state. Other configurations inactivate it.

Light-activated drugs have been tested in cells in petri dishes, but targeting the brain presents a hurdle—the skull. Shining a flashlight onto the skull obviously wouldn’t reach the brain, and invasive brain surgery is out of the question.

There’s a workaround. Infrared beams of light, at low levels, are safe in humans and can penetrate deep into tissues, including through the skull and into the brain. A previous study designed a number of potential switches that could be turned on with infrared light. And recent advances in AI could further aid the effort to develop “a photoswitchable version of dextroamphetamine that is inactive except in the presence of near-infrared light, which activates it,” wrote DARPA.

The other component is a programmable light-emitting helmet that transmits infrared light to the parts of the brain associated with wakefulness, reasoning, and decision-making. Over time, the stimulation could be personalized, so people only receive the necessary “dose” to stay alert.

The strategy still floods the brain with stimulants through a pill, but it limits the drug’s activity in time and space. With personalized dosages and light as a controller, it could lead to alertness without anxiety, irritability, or euphoria for each person. Switching the drug off also allows the brain to “rest” during a good night’s sleep.

A Three-Year Plan

AWARE is slated to last over three years. DARPA is now welcoming proposals that fit the program’s two goals, including developing light-activated dextroamphetamine, dubbed “PhotoDex,” that can be rapidly turned on and off in the presence of near-infrared light. All candidate drugs will first be validated in animal models, before moving on to human trials.

For the headset, the project envisions a setup that emits infrared light and reliably activates necessary parts of the brain at millimeter-resolution, roughly that of an MRI-based brain scan. The timeline is about a year, and the agency did not specify how the headsets should be designed—for example, wired or wireless, how they’re powered, or what mechanism turns on the light beams.

“The idea is very ambitious, but recent advances in the creation of phototherapeutics and light-emitting devices offer good reason to be optimistic about the prospects,” Dr. David Lawrence at the University of North Carolina, who is not involved in the project, told New Scientist.

For now, photoswitchable drugs have not yet been approved for human use. If the AWARE program goes as planned, it could open a new avenue for targeted drug treatment, not just for battling sleep deprivation, but also for other brain disorders. The project is well aware of the ethical, legal, and societal implications, and has plans to discuss the technology’s use.

Image Credit: US Air Force photo by 2nd Lt. Samuel Eckholm

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