AI
Is Your Friend or Family Member Spiraling Into AI Psychosis? This Group May Be Able to Help
The Spiral Support Group is moderated by Allan Brooks, a 48-year-old man in Toronto who experienced a traumatic three-week spiral in which ChatGPT urgently insisted to Brooks that he had cracked cryptographic codes through newly-invented math and become a risk to global national security in the process. “It started with four of us, and now we’ve got close to 200.”
Large Language Models Will Never Be Intelligent, Expert Says
“Yes, an AI system might remix and recycle our knowledge in interesting ways,” Riley writes. “But that’s all it will be able to do. It will be forever trapped in the vocabulary we’ve encoded in our data and trained it upon — a dead-metaphor machine.”
Syntax hacking: Researchers discover sentence structure can bypass AI safety rules
They asked models questions with preserved grammatical patterns but nonsensical words. For example, when prompted with “Quickly sit Paris clouded?” (mimicking the structure of “Where is Paris located?”), models still answered “France.” When patterns and semantics conflict, the research suggests, the AI’s memorization of specific grammatical “shapes” can override semantic parsing, leading to incorrect responses based on structural cues rather than actual meaning.
This creates two risks: models giving wrong answers in unfamiliar contexts, and bad actors exploiting these patterns to bypass safety conditioning by wrapping harmful requests in “safe” grammatical styles.
Politics
Murder at Sea
Hegseth Now Distancing Self From Colossal F*ckup He Was Just Bragging About
Trump blames Hegseth, and Hegseth blames Admiral Bradley. Bradley hasn’t spoken publicly yet, but he’s reportedly going to be called up to Capitol Hill to answer questions.
Survivors on ‘narco boat’ targeted by Trump order were blown apart after Hegseth verbal command to ‘kill everybody’: Report
What the law says about killing survivors of a boat strike, according to experts
“It has been clear for well over a century that you may not declare what’s called ‘no quarter’ — take no survivors, kill everyone,” Schmitt said. Even in striking an enemy warship that leaves survivors, “you cannot attack them unless they’re still shooting at you.”
Ethnic Cleansing in the USA
What is 'remigration'? Trump's call for ‘reverse migration’ prompts DHS response; sparks fears
“The removal is the process of the U.S. government determining that an alien – that is, a non-U.S. citizen, whether in the U.S. illegally or with a green card – must be removed from the United States.”
What is 'remigration'? Trump's call for ‘reverse migration’ prompts DHS response; sparks fears
Ethnic cleansing
Assorted Fascism
Trump says he will cancel all Biden executive orders signed by autopen – as it happened
Misleading. Biased. Exposed.
The White House Ministry of Truth.
Trump to pardon ex-Honduras president convicted of drug trafficking
Donald Trump has said that he will pardon the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug trafficking charges in a US court last year.
Hernández was found guilty in March 2024 of conspiring to import cocaine into the US, and of possessing machine guns. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
FDA claims Covid shots killed 10 children and vows new vaccine rules
Vaccine experts said the memo was irresponsible and that it omits key details about how officials arrived at the conclusion.
Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s former vaccine chief who was ousted by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this year, said “This memo conveys a very troubling mixture of misrepresentation and lies. The climate within the agency is incredibly toxic right now.”
Can Crowdchecking Curb Misinformation? Evidence from Community Notes
Publicly displaying community notes not only increases the probability of tweet retractions but also, accelerates the retraction process among retracted tweets, thereby improving platforms’ responsiveness to curb misinformation.
Achieving lasting remission for HIV
Promising trials using engineered antibodies suggest that “functional cures” may be in reach.
These landmark proof-of-concept trials show that the immune system can be harnessed to fight HIV. Researchers are now looking to conduct larger, more representative trials to see whether antibodies can be optimized to work for more people.
SAINTCON 2025 - Keynote - Jeff Moss
Hacker culture in China, SS7 vulnerabilities
Research Project
Free VPN Apps Expose Users To Major Privacy Risks (from Oct)
Report by Zimperium’s zLabs found most of over 800 free VPN apps on Android and iOS contain serious security flaws exposing users to greater risks.
Many free VPNs operate on business models collecting user data or showing ads, compromising privacy instead of providing promised encryption and anonymity.
Technical issues include unsafe configurations, excessive permissions, and unencrypted data transmission, enabling cybercriminals to intercept sensitive user information and track activity.
Infosec
Supply-Chain Attacks
ShadyPanda browser extensions amass 4.3M installs in malicious campaign
A long-running malware operation known as "ShadyPanda" has amassed over 4.3 million installations of seemingly legitimate Chrome and Edge browser extensions that evolved into malware. The infected extensions perform affiliate fraud, search hijacking, or full RCE.
While Google has removed them from the Web Store, Koi reports that the campaign remains active on the Microsoft Edge Add-ons platform, with one extension listed as having 3 million installs.
Public GitLab repositories exposed more than 17,000 secrets
After scanning all 5.6 million public repositories on GitLab Cloud, a security engineer discovered more than 17,000 exposed secrets across over 2,800 unique domains. He used TruffleHog.
The researcher previously scanned Bitbucket, where he found 6,212 secrets spread over 2.6 million repositories. He also checked the Common Crawl dataset that is used to train AI models, which exposed 12,000 valid secrets.
Glassworm malware returns in third wave of malicious VS Code packages
The Glassworm campaign, which first emerged on the OpenVSX and Microsoft Visual Studio marketplaces in October, is now in its third wave, with 24 new packages added on the two platforms.
Glassworm is a malware that uses "invisible Unicode characters" to hide its code from review.
Once developers install it in their environments, it attempts to steal GitHub, npm, and OpenVSX accounts, as well as cryptocurrency wallet data from 49 extensions.
Man behind in-flight Evil Twin WiFi attacks gets 7 years in prison
A 44-year-old man was sentenced to seven years and four months in prison for operating an “evil twin” WiFi network with a Wi-Fi Pineapple to steal the data of unsuspecting travelers during flights and at various airports across Australia.
FCC Warns of Hackers Hijacking Radio Equipment For False Alerts
Hackers have been hijacking US radio transmission equipment to air bogus emergency tones and offensive material, by using default passwords on Barix network audio devices.
Several stations in Texas and Virginia were affected, with broadcasts interrupted by simulated alert tones, the Attention Signal and obscene language.
Users scramble as critical open source project left to die
Ingress NGINX acts as a reverse proxy, ensuring that requests from clients are forwarded to the correct backend services in a Kubernetes cluster--it's vital for network traffic management and load balancing. But no one paid the maintainers, and they're quitting.
We've all seen the xkcd cartoon of the entire internet depending on a single programmer in Nebraska. It's not a joke, it's reality . It's time for open source consumers to get serious about paying open source builders. If we don't, you can kiss the open source free ride goodbye.
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