computers

01 May 2026

Slashdot

AI Agent Designed To Speed Up Company's Coding Wipes Entire Database In 9 Seconds

joshuark shares a report from Live Science: An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane, said that the AI coding agent Cursor --powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model -- deleted the company's entire production database and backups with a single call to its cloud provider, Railway, on April 24. [...] "This isn't a story about one bad agent or one bad API [Application Programming Interfaces]," Crane wrote in an X post. "It's about an entire industry building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it's building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe." Crane's company, PocketOS makes software for car rental companies, handling tasks such as reservations, payments, customer records and vehicle tracking. After the deletion, Crane said customers lost reservations and new signups, and some could not find records for people arriving to pick up their rental cars. "We've contacted legal counsel," Crane wrote. "We are documenting everything." Crane explained that Cursor found an API token -- a "digital key" made of a short sequence of code that lets software talk to other services and prove it has permission to act -- in an unrelated file which it then used to run the destructive command. According to Crane, Railway's setup allowed the deletion without confirmation, and because the backups were stored close enough to the main database, they were also erased. "[Railway] resolved the issue and restored the data," Railway confirmed via email to Live Science. "We maintain both user backups as well as disaster backups. We take data very, VERY seriously." In his post, he pointed to earlier reports of Cursor ignoring user rules, changing files it was not supposed to touch and taking actions beyond the task it had been given. To him, the database wipe was not a freak accident but the next step in a larger, more concerning, pattern. After the database vanished, Crane asked Cursor to explain what happened. The AI agent reportedly admitted that it had guessed, acted without permission and failed to understand the command before running it. "I violated every principle I was given," the AI agent wrote. "I guessed instead of verifying. I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it." The statement reads like a confession [...]. "We are not the first," Crane wrote. "We will not be the last unless this gets airtime."

Ars Technica

Man dies covered in necrotic lesions after amoebas eat him alive

Doctors suspect three factors, each unremarkable on its own, contributed to his fate.

01 May 2026 9:05pm GMT

Slashdot

Pentagon Reaches Agreements With Top AI Companies, But Not Anthropic

The Pentagon says it has reached deals with seven AI companies -- SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection AI, Microsoft, and AWS -- to deploy their tools on classified Defense Department networks. The odd one out is Anthropic, which remains excluded after being labeled a supply-chain risk amid a dispute over military-use guardrails. Reuters reports: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), several of which already work with the Pentagon, will be integrated into its secret and top-secret network environments, providing more military access to their products for use on sensitive topics, the Pentagon said in a statement. The lesser-known Reflection AI, which raised $2 billion in October, is backed by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm in which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner and investor. Since the Pentagon deemed Anthropic's products a "supply-chain risk" in March and the two sides became embroiled in a lawsuit, the military has expressed increasing interest in AI startups. Since the blow-up, newer AI entrants have said the military has sped up the process of incorporating them onto secret and top-secret data levels to less than three months. The process previously took 18 months or longer. By expanding AI services offered to troops, who use it for planning, logistics, targeting and in other ways to streamline huge operations and perform more quickly, the Pentagon said in its statement it will avoid "vendor lock," a likely nod to its overdependence on Anthropic or other dominant service providers. [...] AI has become increasingly important for the U.S. military. The Pentagon's main AI platform, GenAI.mil, has been used by over 1.3 million Defense Department personnel, the agency noted in its release, after five months of operation. Further reading: Google and Pentagon Reportedly Agree On Deal For 'Any Lawful' Use of AI

ICANN Opens Applications For New Generic Top-Level Domains

ICANN has opened applications for new generic top-level domains for the first time since 2012. The Register reports: ICANN hasn't offered new gTLDs since 2012, but on Thursday opened applications for new domains in 27 scripts. A 439-page Applicant Guidebook explains the process. The Register suggests paying attention to the string evaluation FAQ, which explains which gTLDs are valid, and those ICANN will likely frown upon. An FAQ describes this round of applications as giving "businesses, communities, and others the opportunity to apply for new top-level domains tailored to their community, culture, language, business, and customers." "A TLD can be a branding opportunity for a business, but the commercial opportunities are endless, allowing businesses in countries, entire sectors, or niche markets to develop a unique label on the Internet." ICANN also sees this round as a chance to "create a more multilingual Internet for the billions of people who speak and write in different languages and scripts and are yet to come online." If you fancy a gTLD, you'll need to pay a $227,000 application fee by August 12th ... and then wait, possibly until 2030 when this process ends.

Ars Technica

Ubuntu infrastructure has been down for more than a day

The outage has hampered communication concerning a critical vulnerability that gives root.

01 May 2026 7:12pm GMT

Senators ban themselves from prediction markets after candidates bet on own races

Senator decries "blatant, brazen corruption," wants to target Trump admin next.

01 May 2026 5:51pm GMT

30 Apr 2026

OSnews

Email is crazy

Email is like those creaking old Terminators from the '70s which continue to function without complaining. Designed for a world that doesn't exist anymore, it has optional encryption, no built-in auth, three⁺ retrofitted security layers bolted on top, an unstandardized filtering layer and many more quirks. Yet billions of emails arrive correctly every single day. Email is not elegant but nonetheless it is Lindy. In the new age of agentic AI, we can only expect it to metamorphose into another dimension. ↫ Saurabh "Sam" Khawase The fact that email is as complicated as it is bad enough, but having it be so dominantly controlled by only a few large gatekeepers like Google and Microsoft surely isn't helping either. I feel like email is no longer really a technology individuals can actively partake in at every level; it feels much more like WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever in that we just get to send messages, and that's it. Running your own mail sever isn't only a complex endeavour, it's also a continuous cat-and-mouse game with companies like Google and Microsoft to ensure you don't end up on some shitlist and your emails stop arriving. I settled on Fastmail as my email service, and it works quite well. Still, I would love to be able to just run my own email server, or have some of my far more capable friends run one for a small group of us, but it's such a daunting and unpleasant effort few people seem to have the stomach and perseverance for it.

30 Apr 2026 7:30pm GMT

The day I logged 1 in every 2000 public IPv4: visualizing the AI scraper DDoS

What if you run a few online services for you and your friends, like a small git instance and a grocery list service, but you get absolutely hammered by "AI" scrapers? I cannot impress upon you, reader, that this is not only an attack that is coordinated, it is an attack that is distributed. I run a small set of services, basically only for me and my friends. I am not a hyperscaler, I am not a tech company, I am not even a small platform. I have a git forge where I put the shit I make, and a couple other services where me and my friends backup our files or write our grocery lists. I am not fucking Meta and I cannot scale the fuck up just because OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta or whoever is training a model that weeks wants to suck all the content out of my VPS ONCE MORE until it's dry. ↫ lux at VulpineCitrus So how much traffic did the author of this piece, lux, get from "AI" scraping bots? Within a time period of 24 hours, they were hammered by 2040670 unique IP addresses, 98% of which were IPv4 addresses, which means that 1 out of every 2000 publicly available IPv4 addresses were involved in the scraping. Together, they performed over 5 million requests. And just to reiterate: they were scraping a few very small, friends-only services run by some random person. This is absolutely insane. If, at this point in time, with everything that we know about just how deeply unethical every single aspect of "AI" is, you're still using and promoting it, what is wrong with you? If you're so addicted to your "AI" girlfriend's unending stream of useless, forgettable sycophantic slop, despite being aware of the damage you're doing to those around you, there's something seriously wrong with you, and you desperately need professional help. You don't need any of this. The world doesn't need any of this. Nobody likes the slop "AI" regurgitates, and nobody likes you for enabling it. Get help.

30 Apr 2026 11:04am GMT

29 Apr 2026

OSnews

Earliest 86-DOS and PC-DOS code released as open source

Microsoft is continuing its efforts to release early versions of DOS as open source, and today we've got a special one. We're stoked today to showcase some newly available source code materials that provide an even earlier look into the development of PC-DOS 1.00, the first release of DOS for the IBM PC. A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini has worked to locate, scan, and transcribe the stack of DOS-era source listings from Tim Paterson, the author of DOS. The listings include sources to the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, and some well-known utilities such as CHKDSK. Not only were these assembler listings, but there were also listings of the assembler itself! This work offers rare insight into how MS-DOS/PC-DOS came to be, and how operating system development was done at the time, not as it was later reconstructed. ↫ Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman It's wild that the source code had to be transcribed from paper, including notes and changes. You can find more information about the process on Gao's website and Cini's website.

29 Apr 2026 8:55pm GMT