Submission + - Phishing is no longer human as AI now drives 86 percent of attacks (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: A new report from KnowBe4 suggests phishing has entered a different phase, with 86 percent of attacks now driven by AI. That shift is showing up in how these campaigns look and where they land. It is no longer just email. Attackers are targeting collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, sending malicious calendar invites, and using multi-channel approaches that feel coordinated and legitimate. The days of spotting a scam by bad grammar alone are fading, as AI helps generate cleaner, more convincing messages that blend into everyday workflows.

There is also a noticeable increase in more advanced techniques, including reverse proxy attacks aimed at capturing Microsoft 365 credentials in real time. Combined with a rise in internal impersonation, these attacks are getting harder to detect even for cautious users. If this trend continues, organizations may need to rely more heavily on automated defenses to keep up. Human awareness still matters, but when attackers are scaling with AI, defending without similar tools could leave companies increasingly outmatched.

Submission + - All New Cars Could Have Mandatory Surveillance Tech Unless Congress Stops This (reason.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: This week, several House Republicans reignited a yearslong debate over a law that federally mandates cars to have impaired driving technology, raising concerns about the expanding surveillance state.

The controversy over "kill switch" technology began in 2021, when Congress passed the HALT Drunk Driving Act as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The provision requires that "advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology"—which the bill defined as a system that can "passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired" and "prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected"—be installed in new cars. Such systems could involve driver eye tracking, a feature already built into some cars.

Submission + - Newly discovered Linux local privilege escalation bug "CopyFail" (copy.fail)

Submitted by tylerni7
tylerni7 writes: A recently discovered logic bug dubbed "CopyFail" in Linux dates back to 2017 and allows local privilege escalation across kernels/distros with a single exploit. The POC exploit works out of the box today, but a future version that can escape from containers like Docker is promised soon. Technical details are available at https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fxint.io%2Fblog%2Fcopy-fail...

Submission + - Copy Fail exploit lets 732 bytes hijack Linux systems and quietly grab root (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: A newly disclosed Linux kernel vulnerability called Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431) allows an unprivileged user to gain root access using a tiny 732-byte script, and it works with unsettling consistency across major distributions. Unlike older exploits that relied on race conditions or fragile timing, this one is a straight-line logic flaw in the kernelâ(TM)s crypto subsystem. It abuses AF_ALG sockets and splice to overwrite a few bytes in the page cache of a target file, such as /usr/bin/su. Because the kernel executes from the page cache, not directly from disk, the attacker can inject code into a setuid binary in memory and immediately escalate privileges.

What makes this especially concerning is how quiet it is. The file on disk remains unchanged, so standard integrity checks see nothing wrong, while the in-memory version has already been tampered with. The same primitive can also cross container boundaries since the page cache is shared, raising the stakes for multi-tenant environments and Kubernetes nodes. The underlying issue traces back to an in-place optimization added years ago, now being rolled back as part of the fix. Until patched kernels are widely deployed, this is one of those bugs that feels less like a theoretical risk and more like a practical, reliable path to full system compromise.

Submission + - Longevity Escape Velocity Achieved Within Three Years (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by frdmfghtr
frdmfghtr writes: Popular Mechanics has a story about the rate at which lifespans are being extended by medical technology will surpass actual aging.

From the article:
"There's a controversial idea floating around the futurist community of "longevity escape velocity." It sounds super sci-fi, but it's basi-
cally the idea that as our life extension technology gets better, our life expectancy could increase by more than we age over a set period of time. For example, as medical innovations continue to move forward, we would still age a year over the span of a year. But our life expectancy would go up by, say, a year and two months, meaning we would functionally get two months of life back."

Submission + - Families of Tumbler Ridge mass shooting victims sue OpenAI (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by newbie_fantod
newbie_fantod writes: Families of the victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting in British Columbia are suing OpenAI over it's failure to report the shooter as a rusk to police authorities.
OpenAI had flagged the shooter as a risk and banned her from the platform a month before the shooting which killed 6 children and 2 adults. The shooter had a history of repeated mental health issues with local RCMP which had resulted in earlier firearms confiscation.

Submission + - Two-thirds of babies watch screens — some for eight hours a day (thetimes.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: More than two-thirds of babies under two use screens, a report has found, and some are exposed for up to eight hours a day.

Nearly a third of newborns were found to be watching screens for more than three hours a day, while almost 20 per cent of infants of four to 11 months used screens for more than an hour a day.

The report comes after the government issued guidance that children under two do not use screens at all, apart from communal activities such as video-calling relatives.

Submission + - UAE to leave OPEC amid Hormuz oil crisis (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: The United Arab Emirates announced Tuesday that it would exit the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, along with the wider group of partners known as OPEC+, effective May 1, in what could be a blow to control over prices by the group, long led in practice by Saudi Arabia.

The move “reflects the UAE’s long-term strategic and economic vision and evolving energy profile” read an official statement carried by a UAE state news agency, as disruptions “in the Strait of Hormuz continues to affect supply dynamics.”

Submission + - Should schools get rid of homework? Some educators are saying yes (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: Federal survey data shows that the amount of math homework assigned to fourth and eighth grade students, in particular, has been steadily declining for the past decade.

Some educators and parents say this is a good thing — students shouldn't spend six or more hours a day at school and still have additional schoolwork to complete at home. But the research on homework is complicated.

Some studies show that students who spend more time on homework perform better than their peers. For example, a longitudinal study released in 2021 of more than 6,000 students in Germany, Uruguay and the Netherlands found that lower-performing students who increased the amount of time they spent on math homework performed better in math, even one year later.

Other studies, however, suggest homework has minimal outcomes on academic performance: A 1998 study of more than 700 U.S. students led by a researcher at Duke University found that more homework assigned in elementary grades had no significant effect on standardized test scores. The researchers did find small positive gains on class grades when they looked at both test scores and the proportion of homework students completed.

Submission + - Study Finds A Third of New Websites are AI-Generated (404media.co)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Researchers working with data from the Internet Archive have discovered that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The team of researchersâ"which includes people from Stanford, the Imperial College London, and the Internet Archiveâ"published their findings online in a paper titled âoeThe Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet.â The research also found that all this AI-generated text is making the web more cheery and less verbose.

Submission + - Ransomware is getting uglier as cybercriminals fake leaks and skip encryption en (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Ransomware activity jumped again in Q1 2026, with 2,638 victim posts on leak sites, up 22 percent year over year, according to ReliaQuest. But the bigger shift is how messy the ecosystem has become. Established groups like Akira and Qilin are still active, while newer players like The Gentlemen surged into the top tier with a 588 percent spike in activity. At the same time, questionable leak sites such as 0APT and ALP-001 are muddying the waters by posting possibly fake breach claims, forcing companies to investigate incidents that may not even be real.

Meanwhile, actors like ShinyHunters are showing that ransomware does not always need encryption anymore. By targeting identity systems and SaaS platforms, attackers can steal data using legitimate access, often through phishing or even phone-based social engineering, and then extort victims without deploying traditional malware. With a record 91 active leak sites and faster attack timelines, the report suggests defenders should focus less on tracking specific groups and more on stopping common tactics like credential theft, remote access abuse, and large-scale data exfiltration.

Submission + - South Africa's Draft AI Policy Withdrawn for a Predictable Reason (timeslive.co.za)

Submitted by Tokolosh
Tokolosh writes: Earlier this month, minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni announced cabinet had approved the draft policy for public comment.

She said the policy seeks to strengthen government’s ability to regulate and adopt AI responsibly, while fostering innovation, job creation, and skills access.

Minister of the department of communications and digital technologies Solly Malatsi has withdrawn the draft national artificial intelligence policy after it was found the draft policy was compiled using AI, which cited academic journal articles that were “fictitious”.

Malatsi said after an internal investigation they found the policy document published for public comment contains fictitious sources in its reference list, hence the withdrawal.

“I am withdrawing the draft national artificial intelligence policy. South Africans deserve better. The department of communications and digital technologies did not deliver on the standard acceptable for an institution entrusted with the role to lead South Africa ‘s digital policy environment.

“The most plausible explanation is that AI-generated citations were included without proper verification. This should not have happened. This unacceptable lapse proves why vigilant human oversight over the use of artificial intelligence is critical,” Malatsi said.

He emphasised the issue is not merely technical but has compromised the integrity and credibility of the draft policy.

“It’s a lesson we take with humility. I want to reassure the country we are treating this matter with the gravity it deserves. There will be consequences for those responsible for drafting and quality assurance,” he said.

The withdrawal and investigation came after News24 published an article highlighting alleged issues in the draft policy released on April 10.

Submission + - The war has the world buying clean energy. China is benefitting the most. (cnn.com)

Submitted by AleRunner
AleRunner writes: CNN is reporting that sales of renewables have surged hugely with 70% growth of solar, batteries and EVs as people and countries move away from the huge vulnerabilities and bankrupting costs of oil based economies.

The war in Iran has sent oil-starved countries scrambling for fuel. Many are opting for energy alternatives — and turning to the renewables king of the planet: China.

Chinese exports of solar technology, batteries and electric vehicles all reached record highs in March, according to energy think tank Ember, a sign that the historic oil supply shock is accelerating the adoption of clean energy around the world.

The Washington Post had a similar report recently however as CNN mentioned Reuters claims that there is still plenty of capacity for production. Last year already solar grow faster than any energy source ever.

Submission + - Is AI Cannibalizing Human Intelligence? (wsj.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: "For the AI industry, a key design question has gone largely unasked: Is the product building human capacity or consuming it?" That's according to neuroscientist/cognitive scientist Vivienne Ming, who just published a book called “ Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All The Answers, Build Better People .” Writing in the Wall Street Journal she describes which group performed best at predicting real-world events (compared to forecasters on prediction market Polymarket) — AI, human, or human-AI hybrid teams.

The human groups performed poorly, relying on instinct or whatever information had come across their feeds that morning. The large AI models—ChatGPT and Gemini, in this case—performed considerably better, though still short of the market itself. But when we combined AI with humans, things got more interesting. Most hybrid teams used AI for the answer and submitted it as their own, performing no better than the AI alone. Others fed their own predictions into AI and asked it to come up with supporting evidence. These “validators” had stumbled into a classic confirmation bias-loop: the sycophancy that leads chatbots to tell you what you want to hear, even if it isn’t true. They ended up performing worse than an AI working solo.

But in roughly 5% to 10% of teams, something different emerged. The AI became a sparring partner. The teams pushed back, demanding evidence and interrogating assumptions. When the AI expressed high confidence, the humans questioned it. When the humans felt strongly about an intuition, they asked the AI to come up with a counterargument... These teams reached insightful conclusions that neither a human nor a machine could have produced on its own. They were the only group to consistently rival the prediction market’s accuracy. On certain questions, they even outperformed it...

We are building AI systems specifically designed to give us the answer before we feel the discomfort of not having it.What my experiment suggests is that the human qualities most likely to matter are not the feel-good ones. They’re the uncomfortable ones: the capacity to be wrong in public and stay curious; to sit with a question your phone could answer in three seconds and resist the urge to reach for it. To read a confident, fluent response from an AI and ask yourself, “What’s missing?” rather than default to “Great, that’s done.” To disagree with something that sounds authoritative and to trust your instinct enough to follow it. We don’t build these capacities by avoiding discomfort. We build them by choosing it, repeatedly, in small ways: the student who struggles through a problem before checking the answer; the person who asks a follow-up question in a conversation; the reader who sits with a difficult idea long enough for it to actually change one’s mind. Most AI chatbots today default to easy answers, which is hurting our ability to think critically.

I call this the Information-Exploration Paradox. As the cost of information approaches zero, human exploration collapses. We see it in students who perform better on AI-assisted tasks and worse on everything afterward. We see it in developers shipping more code and understanding it less. We are, in ways that feel like progress, slowly optimizing ourselves out of the loop.

Submission + - Europe Demolishes Russian Soyuz Launch Pad in French Guiana (united24media.com)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Up until 2022, the Russians had an agreement with the European Space Agency to launch their Soyuz rockets from the Kourou launch site in French Guiana. The 15-year cooperation program between ESA and Roscosmos conducted 26 successful launches before being suspended after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Kourou launch site's near-equatorial location is advantageous for commercial launches due to the additional velocity rockets gain from Earth’s rotation. The demolition of the Russian launch pad at Kourou included a controlled explosion of a 52-meter mobile service tower. The remaining infrastructure at the site—including the assembly and testing complex, railway lines, liquid oxygen storage facilities, and fueling systems—will be transferred to MaiaSpace, a French startup affiliated with Arianespace. The company plans to reuse up to 80% of the existing infrastructure for its own launch vehicle program.

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