fidzu : computers

The Wikimedia Foundation says it found evidence that "rogue" OpenAI agents edited Wikimedia wikis without approval, unsuccessfully tried to exploit its Etherpad service, and generated millions of automated requests across Wikimedia projects. Here's a summary of what Wikimedia observed (via The Verge): Wiki editing: We've identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI. These edits were not published to pages with visibility to general readers; almost all of them were testing edits in "sandbox" areas of the wiki. It also included a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool, which we believe were potentially malicious edits that were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents. Etherpad probing and use: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made some unsuccessful attempts to compromise our public Etherpad, a note-taking tool we host as a community service. Agents unsuccessfully tried to use it to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. Other agents also likely operated by OpenAI took notes about their tasks, though this did not appear to turn into coordination. Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Oct 2026 9:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: In the immediate weeks before Muse's launch, Meta engineers found several security vulnerabilities in the company's viral AI agent product, at least one of which could have allowed malicious users to break outside of Muse's intended environment and access Meta's own sensitive databases and services, 404 Media has learned. The issues were so severe that they reached Mark Zuckerberg and staff worked overtime to fix them. These specific vulnerabilities were discovered before the launch of the product but required a multi-team "mad dash" to fix "a sudden spike in reported KVM escapes," according to an internal post by Meta executives to its core infrastructure team seen by 404 Media. In order for Muse to work, a user gives the AI agent access to various important services and accounts that they own. On Meta's end, each individual Muse instance runs on a kernel-based virtual machine, which connects to, but is supposed to be isolated from, Meta's own critical infrastructure. A "KVM escape," then, is when, through a security vulnerability, a Muse instance is able to escape from that virtual machine and interact with the system that runs it, or with other users' virtual machines. According to a Meta source, as well as internal security documentation and internal posts viewed by 404 Media, at least one of the vulnerabilities could have allowed an outside attacker -- that is, a normal Muse user -- to access data in sensitive internal Meta databases. At least one of the vulnerabilities was related to an exploit found in Linux kernel-based virtual machine code in July. 4 Several of the vulnerabilities were in the underlying Linux virtualization software that Meta uses for Muse. The security issue was considered serious enough that it was raised to Mark Zuckerberg, and several different security teams worked nights and weekends in the leadup to launch to fix the issues. [...] The Meta source said they felt security teams were asked to push hot fixes to these bugs as quickly as possible and in a way that wouldn't delay Muse's launch, leading to what they described as "half-baked protections being rushed out to enable the launch. Many senior engineers believe it's inevitable we're going to have a massive data breach as a result of Hatch." Muse is called "Hatch" internally and in Meta's codebase.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Oct 2026 8:00pm GMT

The tool can free up over 12GB of storage.

05 Oct 2026 7:14pm GMT

Norway is preparing legislation that would temporarily ban camera-equipped smart glasses in a range of public places, including parks, beaches, museums, shopping centers, schools, daycare centers, healthcare facilities, gyms and public events. Private use would still be allowed. The Guardian reports: Torgeir Micaelsen, Norway's minister of digital affairs, said he was worried that new, powerful technology is being introduced where people risk being photographed, filmed or audio-recorded without knowing it." "We do not want a society where people worry about being recorded without their knowledge, photographed or filmed in places and situations where they are accustomed to not being monitored," he said. Norway's Labour party, which heads a minority government, needs the support of other parties to pass the proposed ban. It said it planned to submit a bill "as soon as possible," while tasking an expert group with drawing up permanent regulations on the issue.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Oct 2026 7:00pm GMT

The entire field of optogenetics traces back to light-seeking algae.

05 Oct 2026 5:59pm GMT

Russian attacks on Internet, phone services threaten Ukraine's wartime economy.

05 Oct 2026 5:21pm GMT

I like squirrels. Apparently, there's a SquirrelOS. It's a small hobby OS learning project from five years ago, developed by Immanuel Daviel A. Garcia. A simple DOS like OS made in Assembly and C with a ported version of Stephen Brennan's Shell. ↫ SquirrelOS GitHub page Why do I like squirrels? I don't know man, they're just cute.

02 Oct 2026 9:19pm GMT

Google launched its Googlebooks platform a week ago, and a lot of people were wondering what this meant for Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Since Googlebooks and its Android-based Googlebook OS lack the management frameworks markets like schools require, Chromebooks will continue to be available for now, until such time Googlebooks catch up in that regard. However, in a support document, Google states that update support for all Chromebook devices will end in 2034: ChromeOS devices will continue to receive regular updates and security patches through mid-2034. For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS, with many devices offering direct migration paths. ↫ Google support document Google promised 10 years of updates for all Chromebooks, and it's now breaking that promise for anyone buying a Chromebook between now and whenever the last Chromebook rolls off the production line. Sadly, we live in a world where corporations are free to make and break whatever promises they want virtually free of consequences, and as society we're so used to it that anti-consumer behaviour like this barely elicits a shrug. Google does state that "many newer commercial Chromebook models will be capable of upgrading to Googlebook OS", but that, too, is just another promise - and a vague, one at that - so who knows how many devices will actually be capable of upgrading out in the real world. On top of that, we have no idea if Googlebooks will just be yet another in a long line of quickly abandoned Google tablet/laptop projects, further adding to the uncertainty. Stuff like this should not be legal.

30 Sep 2026 10:09pm GMT

In June 2008 Apple announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard, proudly boasting that it would have "no new features". Instead of piling on new things, Snow Leopard aimed to build on the success of its predecessor, Leopard, opting to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements throughout the system. 18 years later, Apple is taking a similar approach with macOS 27. Golden Gate aims to fix the missteps of last year's Tahoe, promising an expansive set of improvements and "a more responsive and delightful experience". Does it hold up? Here are just some of the bugs I've encountered in my daily use over the past couple of weeks. ↫ Chester at SquareOrbits I'm getting some real Windows 11 vibes from this long list of bugs and issues, further underlining my perception that Apple completely lost the plot when it comes to Mac OS X (in the past) and MacOS (today). These are not the kind of things you'd find in the heydays of Mac OS X, back when I was a devout user, and makes me glad I abandoned ship long, long ago (around the time of the Intel transition). I don't see stuff like this in GNOME or KDE, and while not nearly as bad as Windows 11, the cracks are obvious. I am by no means an expert at how Apple is run and how it organises itself, but as a layperson I do wonder if the company is simply trying to do too much - too many different platforms, too many different crucial components it all develops internally, too many different markets to please. Things are going to fall through the cracks when you try to keep this many plates spinning.

30 Sep 2026 9:55pm GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT