Thousands of Palo Alto Networks firewalls were compromised by attackers exploiting two recently patched security bugs. The intruders were able to deploy web-accessible backdoors to remotely control the equipment as well as cryptocurrency miners and other malware.Link No comment.

First: I must warn you that Bluesky is weird. It’s getting less weird by the day, but it’s still full of drama, inside jokes, not-safe-for-work images and quirky subcommunities, all of which can be jarring for newcomers. (To give you a sense: One of the early trends on Bluesky was users posting lewd images of ALF, the 1980s sitcom character.Link This is one well written article about what is and what is not Bluesky.

NYT Got Into Your Kitchen I like New York Times, their insights and editorials. The newsletters are more on the mild side of my interests, but this type of kitchen appliances troubleshooting I was not expecting.

“We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative A.I., and look forward to deepening our collaboration,” Matt Garman, the chief executive of Amazon’s cloud computing division, AWS, said in a blog post announcing the deal.Link Let’s see if Anthropic moves to Amazon's own chipsets or stays on NVIDIA. +$4bn to a total of $8bn investment

These actions are in part a response to Republicans’ complaints that media companies and advertisers have silenced conservative voices, according to six people who have worked with major advertisers. Some of those criticisms have led to legal action: In August, Elon Musk’s X sued a coalition of large advertisers, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), and several large brands such as Mars and CVS Health for colluding to boycott advertising on X.

The ChatGPT owner recently considered developing a web browser that it would combine with its chatbot, and it has separately discussed or struck deals to power search features for travel, food, real estate and retail websites, according to people who have seen prototypes or designs of the products. OpenAI has spoken about the search product with website and app developers such as Condé Nast, Redfin, Eventbrite and Priceline, these people said.

The bro-economy: a volatile, speculative, and extremely online casino, in which the house is already winning big.Link Precisely how it looks from outside US

Cape lets users create bundles of these identifiers, called “personas,” then cycle through them at different points. This means that during some attacks, a Cape phone may look like a different phone each time.Link This one links to the other post.

The New Yorker: “When this happens in an authoritarian system, it is horrific but unsurprising,” Seaford, the technology executive who was hacked during Greece’s spyware campaign, told me. “When it happens in a democracy; however, it creates a sense of disorientation: ‘Could this happen to me? Here? Really?!’Link There is no government in the world that has a lot of power and doesn’t use it; there are only governments that are masterful in hiding their use of power, either under complete lies or under false pretenses like security, antiterrorism and so on.

Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, which are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping their works to train its AI models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to the case.Link Oops!

Qatar’s sovereign-wealth fund, Qatar Investment Authority, and investment firms Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz are expected to participate in the round, according to people familiar with the matter. The financing brings the total amount xAI has raised to $11 billion this year.Link It appears friends everywhere in the world started looking into their pockets; they already know the drill: last time it was Boeing that needed some foreign support, now it is Musk.

Eva Rodriguez de Luis for Genbeta: I have compared Kagi with DeepL and Google translator and I have been surprised: translation has a new kingOriginal SpanishLink Translated in English link Translate.kagi.com is free, no account required.

Vlad Prelovac, Kagi founder, at Random but Memorable: Vlad: In every transaction, there is the currency. And so, because the price of this is zero, people assume that there is no currency involved because we usually measure value in monetary terms. “The truth is, though, that there is always a currency, and the currency used here is your time, your mental cycles, your productivity, the fact that every search you make, every website you take is being tracked.

Techdirt: “Judge: Just Because AI Trains On Your Publication, Doesn’t Mean It Infringes On Your Copyright” Part of the problem is that these lawsuits assume, incorrectly, that these AI services really are, as some people falsely call them, “plagiarism machines.” The assumption is that they’re just copying everything and then handing out snippets of it.Link My five cents: Copyright means explicitly the right to copy. AI doesn't copy; it produces a summary of your content and draws a resultant, a vector, telling people what you meant (ideally) and what the circumstances were when you meant it.

OpenAI has unveiled an “Infrastructure Blueprint for the U.S.” aimed at maintaining the country’s lead in AI over competitors like China. The plan, which includes initiatives like AI economic zones and a North American Compact for AI, emphasizes the potential of AI to revitalize the American Dream and reindustrialize the U.S. economy. OpenAI urges the incoming Trump administration and Congress to consider these ideas, highlighting the need for a national strategy to ensure AI infrastructure benefits American competitiveness and national security.

Of course, like all booms, there’s going to be a bust. The AI boom will result in unmet expectations, much like the internet in the 1990s. The cost structure of AI is wonky for now. A lot of energy is required to make it all work.Link Quite a grim forecast.

Noam Brown, via Reuters: “It turned out that having a bot think for just 20 seconds in a hand of poker got the same boosting performance as scaling up the model by 100,000x and training it for 100,000 times longer,” said Noam Brown, a researcher at OpenAI who worked on o1, at TED AI conference in San Francisco last month.Link

And here’s the thing – we all know that GPT-3 was vastly better than GPT-2. And we all know that GPT-4 (released thirteen months ago) was vastly better than GPT-3. But what has happened since? I could be persuaded that on some measures there was a doubling of capabilities for some set of months in 2020-2023, but I don’t see that case at all for the last 13 months. Instead, I see numerous signs that we have reached a period of diminishing returns.

It’s good to be Bri’ish

Threads is planning to kick off the effort by letting a small number of advertisers create and publish ads on the app starting in January, one of those people said.Link Today was an ads day

It seems they are working on a web version, just confirmed on Threads

Kagi Small Web | Kagi Blog But we also recognize that the “small web” is the lifeblood of the internet, and the web we are fighting for. Those who contribute to it have already taken their own leaps of faith, often taking time and effort to create, without the assurance of an audience.I miss the days when there were no ads, people just wanted to express themselves…

We intentionally chose these formats because it integrates advertising in a way that still protects the utility, accuracy, and objectivity of answers. These ads will not change our commitment to maintaining a trusted service that provides you with direct, unbiased answers to your questions.And Experience has taught us that subscriptions alone do not generate enough revenue to create a sustainable revenue-sharing program. Advertising is the best way to ensure a steady and scalable revenue streamLink

There might be a specific shot where we need to see their back, but they're not comfortable showing their front, so you can get a half stick-on bodysuit that goes all the way down to the stomach but shows from the back like they're fully nudeLink Things they do for art… It seems ludicrous, until you’re in their shoes.

… without the people (on Threads) pumping in the real-time information to fuel the content, it's going to go stale, fast. And people aren't going to pipe in the real-time information if they're not getting the real-time utility back in return.Link It sounds like when Twitter got broken, it split into two branches: a bigger one (Threads, 275 mil users), but non-real time info, and a smaller another (Bluesky, 15 mil users), more agile and slick.