SoylentNews

canopic jug writes:

The Absurd Pirate's Internet Blog asks, is gen alpha screwed?:

However, I do think there is a STARK contrast between a curated show from the 90s-00s and a show like Cocomelon that is designed to be like heroin for babies. I walked in on my MIL and daughter watching Cocomelon together one time, and it was jarring seeing how, for one, low effort the animation and songs are, and two, how stimulating this show is, between the incredibly saturated colors to the jump cuts every second. What I learned was that this show uses focus groups of children to make it so there is not a break in the concentration. If a kid shifts his eyes away from the screen, the scene gets edited to address that.

Companies are literally designing everything for addiction these days. Trying to get you hooked on whatever they can profit off of as early in your development as possible.

The points raised there are discussed further by Andre Franca. He adds,

The author also mentions the "mental death" of parenting under modern life, and I totally get that. There are days when I'm so drained that a screen feels like a life raft, so the comparison of high-stimulant shows to "baby heroin" makes total sense to me. That crap is bad enough for an adult; for a child, it can be devastating. I've watched my oldest son's behavior shift in real-time depending on what he's consuming. When it's junk, he turns into different person - more reactive, less patient. It makes me realize that parenting today is largely about shielding them from a culture that wants to outsource their development to an algorithm.

What happens when a substantial portion of a whole generation achieves an age of majority with an nearly complete substitution of life experience for exposure to mindless digital heroin?

Previously:
(2025) Ban Social Media for Under 15s, Says French Report Warning of TikTok Dangers
(2025) Social Media Is Dead – Here's What Comes Next
(2015) Kids These Days: Six or Seven Nicknamed Generations

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

It's no surprise to see similar designs appearing in Ukraine's interceptor drone fleets:

It's rare that drone hobbyists can hang with the professionals, especially when it comes to setting records. But hobbyist drone developer and videographer Luke Bell and his dad have recaptured the world record for the world's fastest first-person drone, reaching 408 miles per hour [657 km/hr -Ed.].

The Bells have been competing in this niche game of record-breaking cat-and-drone for the past year. As TechSpot details, they set a record just shy of 300 miles per hour in June 2025, only for fellow YouTube content creator Samgo to hit 346mph with his Fastboy 2. The Bells responded with a new design of their own that upgraded cooling, aerodynamics, and power, managing 363mph, only for professional drone videographers Ben Biggs and Aiden Kelley to steal the crown with a new 389mph drone flight.

Now, the Bells are back, and this time they're smashing through the ceiling. Their latest design uses new motors, a new aerodynamic chassis, and trimmed rotors to achieve the latest milestone record: 408mph.

To really show off their achievements, they built a second version of the drone and fitted it with a 360-degree camera so it could capture incredible second-hand footage of the world's fastest FPV drone. It makes a fantastic whine noise as it flies past observers, almost too fast to see.

I don't typically follow consumer drone developments, but having kept an eye on Ukraine's own innovations in this space over the past few years, it's fascinating to see this style of drone in Ukraine's Wild Hornet Sting drone interceptor. Notable for their ability to catch up to some of Russia's jet-powered one-way-attack drones, you have to imagine that Ukrainian developers will be keen to see if they can make similar speed advances to improve the interception rate moving forward.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Pluralistic: Sorry, eh (13 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow:

Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian, and while I have lived abroad for most of this century, I still hew faithfully to our folkways, which is why I'd like to start this essay by apologizing.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry! I'm a technology writer, which means I'm supposed to be encouraging you to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the money-losingest technology in human history, AI. No one has ever lost as much money as the AI companies.

There is no way to operate one of Nvidia's big AI-optimized GPUs without losing money. The owners of these GPUs who have lost the least money are the ones who rushed into buying GPUs without ensuring they'd have electricity to power them, and have been forced to leave their GPUs to age in warehouses. The minute they plug in those GPUs, they'll start losing money, and the more they use them, the more money they'll lose.

I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows.

I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

I don't have any advice for how to do that. I'm sorry!

As Canada contemplates our response to the collapse of the American empire and its alliances with the world, the cornerstone of our current strategy is sacrificing our dollars, water and energy in order to become more dependent on America, in a weird and improbable bet that we will figure out how to make millions of Canadians unemployed. I'm sorry, that just doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

If I can beg your indulgence, I'd like to propose an alternative.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Study of 20 years of kernel history finds bugs hide for 2+ years on average, some for decades:

It was not too long ago we talked about the first Rust CVE in the Linux kernel, which caused system crashes. That same day, 159 other CVEs were issued for C code. While that shows progress with Rust, it also highlights something more concerning; the kernel has bugs that hide for years before anyone finds them.

A research blog published on Pebblebed demonstrates how bugs often stay hidden for years before they are discovered and fixed.

Jenny Guanni Qu, a researcher at Pebblebed, analyzed 125,183 bugs from 20 years of Linux kernel development history (on Git). The findings show that the average bug takes 2.1 years to find. The longest-lived bug, a buffer overflow in networking code, went unnoticed for 20.7 years!

The research was carried out by relying on the Fixes: tag that is used in kernel development. Basically, when a commit fixes a bug, it includes a tag pointing to the commit that introduced the bug.

Jenny wrote a tool that extracted these tags from the kernel's git history going back to 2005. The tool finds all fixing commits, extracts the referenced commit hash, pulls dates from both commits, and calculates the time frame.

As for the dataset, it includes over 125k records from Linux 6.19-rc3, covering bugs from April 2005 to January 2026. Out of these, 119,449 were unique fixing commits from 9,159 different authors, and only 158 bugs had CVE IDs assigned.

Plus, she found out that different parts of the kernel show significant variation in how long bugs remain hidden. CAN bus drivers have the longest average at 4.2 years, followed by SCTP networking at 4.0 years. GPU bugs get caught fastest at 1.4 years, and BPF bugs are found within 1.1 years.

The research also found that incomplete fixes are common. Someone notices undefined behavior and ships a fix, but the fix does not fully address the problem. In one case, a 2024 fix for netfilter set field validation was incomplete, and a security researcher found a bypass a year later.

Jenny's research goes much deeper than what I covered here. She has also developed an AI model called VulnBERT that predicts whether a commit introduces a vulnerability. The detailed blog post linked above includes elaborate technical explanations on that; it is a must-read!

Original Submission

jelizondo writes:

phys.org published an interesting article about a new hypothesis regarding the existence of worm holes:

Wormholes are often imagined as tunnels through space or time—shortcuts across the universe. But this image rests on a misunderstanding of work by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.

In 1935, while studying the behavior of particles in regions of extreme gravity, Einstein and Rosen introduced what they called a "bridge": a mathematical link between two perfectly symmetrical copies of spacetime. It was not intended as a passage for travel, but as a way to maintain consistency between gravity and quantum physics. Only later did Einstein–Rosen bridges become associated with wormholes, despite having little to do with the original idea.

But in new research published in Classical and Quantum Gravity, my colleagues and I show that the original Einstein–Rosen bridge points to something far stranger—and more fundamental—than a wormhole.

The puzzle Einstein and Rosen were addressing was never about space travel, but about how quantum fields behave in curved spacetime. Interpreted this way, the Einstein–Rosen bridge acts as a mirror in spacetime: a connection between two microscopic arrows of time.

Quantum mechanics governs nature at the smallest scales such as particles, while Einstein's theory of general relativity applies to gravity and spacetime. Reconciling the two remains one of physics' deepest challenges. And excitingly, our reinterpretation may offer a path to doing this.

The "wormhole" interpretation emerged decades after Einstein and Rosen's work, when physicists speculated about crossing from one side of spacetime to the other, most notably in the late-1980s research.

But those same analyses also made clear how speculative the idea was: within general relativity, such a journey is forbidden. The bridge pinches off faster than light could traverse it, rendering it non-traversable. Einstein–Rosen bridges are therefore unstable and unobservable—mathematical structures, not portals.

Yet there is no observational evidence for macroscopic wormholes, nor any compelling theoretical reason to expect them within Einstein's theory. While speculative extensions of physics—such as exotic forms of matter or modifications of general relativity—have been proposed to support such structures, they remain untested and highly conjectural.

Our recent work revisits the Einstein–Rosen bridge puzzle using a modern quantum interpretation of time, building on ideas developed by Sravan Kumar and João Marto.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/society-cannot-function-if-no-one-is-accountable-for-ai-jaron-lanier-the-godfather-of-virtual-reality-discusses-how-far-our-empathy-should-extend-to-ai-in-episode-two-of-new-podcast-the-ten-reckonings

'Society cannot function if no one is accountable for AI' — Jaron Lanier, the godfather of virtual reality

Whether we like it or not, we can't ignore AI. What started as a fun, gimmicky chatbot on our desktops, albeit one that could talk a bit like a human, is already taking jobs, accessing medical records, and reshaping workplaces. We are rapidly approaching the point where the practical realities of building and governing advanced AI systems must be confronted.

As the recent furor over indecent Grok-generated images on X, and the use of Meta AI smart glasses to record women without their permission for social media clicks has shown, the guardrails meant to help society cope with the deluge of AI devices and new technologies seem seriously lacking.

Even before the latest controversies around AI-generated images, one of the biggest shocks to me was the way some AI companies decided it was perfectly acceptable to train their models on copyrighted material from authors and artists without permission – and the fact that, despite a few lingering lawsuits, they appear to have faced few consequences so far.

All of this makes me wonder whether we're really ready for a world in which AI runs everything with zero accountability. Two people who have been grappling with similar questions are technologist Jaron Lanier and Dr Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET and founder of the ASI Alliance, in the next upcoming episode of The Ten Reckonings podcast. [5:17 --JE]

This new episode forms part of a series where these issues are explored in depth. According to Goertzel, "The ASI Alliance's purpose is not to present a unified position, but to create space for the world's leading thinkers to openly debate and, in doing so, help society reckon with the profound choices ahead."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Why flies matter, their vital role in ecosystems, and surprising diversity

Summer is the season for flies, which belong to an insect group that scientists call Diptera. Many fly species are more active when the weather is warmer, and populations can boom thanks to the interplay of winter rains, warmer weather and abundant food sources.

Mosquitoes biting and bush flies buzzing around may be irritating, but there are thousands of fly species worth appreciating. CSIRO's entomology expert, Dr. Keith Bayless, a research scientist at CSIRO's Australian National Insect Collection, answers common questions about why flies matter—from their role in ecosystems to surprising facts about their diversity and importance.

People often hear about orchid hunters who are obsessed with searching for rare orchids. My work is similar, but with rare flies. I study and track species that are rarely seen in the wild.

One of the rarest is a species named Clisa australis. The species was named in the 1960s and then not recorded again for decades. It was originally found in caves where its larvae fed on bat poo. To locate it, I searched in similar habitats that were easier to access—such as pit toilets in national parks.

That search became the basis for a new children's book, "The Very Stinky Fly Hunt," by CSIRO science communicator Andrea Wild, which introduces five- to nine-year-olds to the science of fly diversity and the thrill of discovery.

A major goal in the hunt for Clisa australis is to learn more about its close relatives—the fruit flies (Tephritidae). Of the nearly 5,000 species of fruit flies, fewer than 100 are significant agricultural pests.

Clisa australis has similar egg-laying structures to fruit flies, but it doesn't feed on plants. Understanding these differences helps answer a bigger question: what makes certain species cause problems while most others are benign or beneficial?

To explore that, I'm building genetic trees of flies to map their relationships and gain a clearer picture of where flies come from and how they evolve.

The first location where Clisa australis was rediscovered was remnant rainforest south of Sydney. A single specimen flew into my malaise trap—a tent-like trap that channels flying insects into a bottle of liquid preservative designed to protect delicate features like hair and wings.

fliptop writes:

CISA advisory warns that unauthenticated Bluetooth access in WHILL devices allows for unauthorized movement:

On December 30, the US cybersecurity agency CISA published an advisory to inform the public about a serious vulnerability discovered by researchers in electric wheelchairs made by WHILL, a Japan-based company whose personal electric mobility devices are sold around the world.

According to CISA's advisory, WHILL Model C2 and Model F electric wheelchairs are affected by a missing authentication vulnerability. The issue is tracked as CVE-2025-14346 and it has been assigned a critical severity rating.

CISA said the WHILL wheelchairs did not enforce authentication for Bluetooth connections, allowing an attacker who is in Bluetooth range of the targeted device to pair with it. The attacker could then control the wheelchair's movements, override speed restrictions, and manipulate configuration profiles, all without requiring credentials or user interaction.

The flaw was discovered by a team from QED Secure Solutions, a research-driven cybersecurity firm that helps private and government organizations secure operational technology (OT) and other critical systems.

[...] To demonstrate a high-impact theoretical scenario, the team developed an exploit designed to automatically compromise any WHILL wheelchair within proximity. SecurityWeek reviewed a video demonstration of this exploit, which showed a wheelchair being remotely driven off a flight of stairs at high speed.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Original Submission

jelizondo writes:

Ars Technica published an interesting article about a new AI assistant that provides strong assurances that user data is unreadable even to the platform operator,

Moxie Marlinspike—the pseudonym of an engineer who set a new standard for private messaging with the creation of the Signal Messenger—is now aiming to revolutionize AI chatbots in a similar way.

His latest brainchild is Confer, an open source AI assistant that provides strong assurances that user data is unreadable to the platform operator, hackers, law enforcement, or any other party other than account holders. The service—including its large language models and back-end components—runs entirely on open source software that users can cryptographically verify is in place.

Data and conversations originating from users and the resulting responses from the LLMs are encrypted in a trusted execution environment (TEE) that prevents even server administrators from peeking at or tampering with them. Conversations are stored by Confer in the same encrypted form, which uses a key that remains securely on users' devices.

Like Signal, the under-the-hood workings of Confer are elegant in their design and simplicity. Signal was the first end-user privacy tool that made using it a snap. Prior to that, using PGP email or other options to establish encrypted channels between two users was a cumbersome process that was easy to botch. Signal broke that mold. Key management was no longer a task users had to worry about. Signal was designed to prevent even the platform operators from peering into messages or identifying users' real-world identities.

All major platforms are required to turn over user data to law enforcement or private parties in a lawsuit when either provides a valid subpoena. Even when users opt out of having their data stored long term, parties to a lawsuit can compel the platform to store it, as the world learned last May when a court ordered OpenAI to preserve all ChatGPT users' logs—including deleted chats and sensitive chats logged through its API business offering. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has said such rulings mean even psychotherapy sessions on the platform may not stay private. Another carve out to opting out: AI platforms like Google Gemini may have humans read chats.

"AI models are inherent data collectors," Em [she keeps her last name off the Internet] told Ars. "They rely on large data collection for training, improvements, operations, and customizations. More often than not, this data is collected without clear and informed consent (from unknowing training subjects or from platform users), and is sent to and accessed by a private company with many incentives to share and monetize this data."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.wired.com/story/x-didnt-fix-groks-undressing-problem-it-just-makes-people-pay-for-it/

After creating thousands of "undressing" pictures of women and sexualized imagery of apparent minors, Elon Musk's X has apparently limited who can generate images with Grok. However, despite the changes, the chatbot is still being used to create "undressing" sexualized images on the platform.

On Friday morning, the Grok account on X started responding to some users' requests with a message saying that image generation and editing are "currently limited to paying subscribers." The message also includes a link pushing people towards the social media platform's $395 annual subscription tier. In one test of the system requesting Grok create an image of a tree, the system returned the same message.

The apparent change comes after days of growing outrage against and scrutiny of Musk's X and xAI, the company behind the Grok chatbot. The companies face an increasing number of investigations from regulators around the world over the creation of nonconsensual explicit imagery and alleged sexual images of children. British prime minister Keir Starmer has not ruled out banning X in the country and said the actions have been "unlawful."

Neither X nor xAI, the Musk-owned company behind Grok, has confirmed that it has made image generation and editing a paid-only feature. An X spokesperson acknowledged WIRED's inquiry but did not provide comment ahead of publication. X has previously said it takes "action against illegal content on X," including instances of child sexual abuse material. While Apple and Google have previously banned apps with similar "nudify" features, X and Grok remain available in their respective app stores. xAI did not immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment.

For more than a week, users on X have been asking the chatbot to edit images of women to remove their clothes—often asking for the image to contain a "string" or "transparent" bikini. While a public feed of images created by Grok contained far fewer results of these "undressing" images on Friday, it still created sexualized images when prompted to by X users with paid for "verified" accounts.

fliptop writes:

Meta Platforms Inc. is set to cut more than 1,000 jobs from its Reality Labs division as the company redirects resources away from virtual reality and Metaverse products toward artificial intelligence-powered (AI-powered) wearables and mobile features:

According to an internal post from Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, employees affected by the layoffs will be notified starting on Jan. 20. The cuts are expected to affect roughly 10% of the Reality Labs workforce, which totals about 15,000 employees.

Reality Labs is home to Meta's most experimental products, including virtual reality headsets, AI-powered glasses and virtual world software. However, the division has struggled financially, losing more than $70 billion since early 2021 as many of its products have yet to generate significant revenue.

In line with this, Bosworth said in his memo that Meta is refocusing its Metaverse strategy on mobile platforms and scaling back investment in virtual reality hardware to make the business more sustainable.

[...] According to BrightU.AI's Enoch, Meta is a multinational technology conglomerate that operates a suite of social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. It is one of the world's largest and most influential tech companies, with a significant impact on global communication and information dissemination.

However, the latest move underscores Meta's increasing emphasis on AI. The company is in talks with eyewear maker EssilorLuxottica SA about potentially doubling production capacity for AI-enabled smart glasses by the end of this year, according to people familiar with the matter. Meta has also discussed increasing annual production to 20 million units or more by the end of 2026.

Also at NY Post and Gizmodo.

Original Submission

owl writes:

Entropic Thoughts published an interesting article about the uses of slide rule in the kitchen:

Kitchen work is all about proportions: sometimes the recipe is for four servings but you need six; maybe the recipe calls for 80 g of butter but you only have 57 g, so you have to adjust the other ingredients to match.

We could use an electronic calculator to figure out the rescaled amounts, but a slide rule makes it so much easier.

Once the slide rule is set to the constraining proportion, in this case 2:3.3, we can instantly read off all other amounts from it with no additional manipulation. If the recipe calls for three cups of flour, we'll find 3 on the C scale and look what's below it on the D scale: seems like we need 4.95 cups of flour. The recipe says 25 g of butter: we'll take what's under 25 on the C scale, i.e. 41.25 g. Having set the slide rule once, it then serves as a custom scaling table for the rest of the recipe.

Kitchen work is all about proportions, and nothing beats the slide rule for proportions. The reason I write this article is I just found myself in someone else's kitchen and they didn't have a slide rule. Only then did I realise how much I take my kitchen slide rule for granted.

Bakers understand the importance of proportions in cooking; they even write their recipes normalised to the weight of flour, meaning all other ingredients are given in proportion to the amount of flour. This makes it easier to compare recipes, too, because when they are normalised to the weight of a common ingredient, it is easier to see which recipe is sweeter, saltier, umamier, etc.

Everyone should have a slide rule in their kitchen drawers. I'm honestly surprised it is not standard equipment. Once set up, it's a mess-free, multitasking-friendly way to achieve instant calculations with almost no work.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Over Half A Million Windows Users Are Switching To Linux - Here's Why - BGR:

Over Half A Million Windows Users Are Switching To Linux - Here's Why

Windows 10 is on its last legs: The predecessor to Windows 11 has already reached its official end of support in October 2025, and will continue to limp along with free Extended Security Updates (ESU) until October 13th, 2026 (paid ESU lasts until 2028). In other words, Microsoft is looking to responsibly end support for Windows 10 as soon as it can, despite the fact that Windows 10 was supposed to be "the last version of Windows" ever made.

Clearly, this has not held true. Microsoft has also made it difficult to move old hardware to Windows 11, thanks to its rigid TPM 2.0 security chip requirement, which many older desktops and laptops lack. This has left quite a few Windows 10 users without an upgrade path to Microsoft's latest OS on their hardware, and Linux is picking up the slack, with distros like Zorin showing the numbers to prove it.

Microsoft's loss is Linux's gain

Among the many Linux distributions, from Fedora to Ubuntu, Zorin (based on Ubuntu) very much aims to be a replacement for Windows, and has been for many, many years. From its Windows 11-like taskbar to its very familiar-looking start menu, Zorin is built to make the transition from Windows to Linux as painless as possible.

In a world where many Windows 10 users are looking to jump ship to an OS that respects their privacy, not to mention their hardware (no matter its age), Zorin is likely one of the first distros a Linux-curious Windows user will look at. Given that Zorin has already crossed a million downloads, with 78% of those on Windows machines, one can assume that a good portion of those are users who have permanently switched from Microsoft to Linux. It would appear that the year of the mainstream Linux desktop may be upon us, and poetically, it's Microsoft's doing.

Some users argue that Microsoft limited Windows 11 by requiring TPM 2.0 to make more hardware sales, rather than for user safety. Sure, the security benefits of TPM, like Secure Boot, are good for preventing malicious software from loading at startup. However, when the choice is to either replace your perfectly functioning hardware so you can run Windows 11, or switch to a Linux distro; for many, the choice was seemingly pretty easy. This is especially true when no OS is truly secure to begin with.

Thank Valve for improving gaming on Linux machines

Thanks to Valve's push with the Steam Deck, a handheld gaming device that runs on Linux rather than Windows, Linux has become that much more viable. Not only has GPU driver support come a long way, thanks to Valve's push into Linux gaming (just look at AMD as a perfect example), but even AAA games like "Cyberpunk 2077" and "Baldur's Gate 3" have been developed with the Steam Deck and Linux in mind. Gaming on Linux is now that much more comparable to gaming on Windows, rounding out the OS as a full-time alternative. No longer can one claim there is a lack of games on Linux to hold them back from switching.

This is all thanks to WINE, a Windows emulator Valve forked into Proton, which is the meat of how Windows games run so well on Linux. Of course, WINE has its own usefulness, especially in distros like Zorin that aim to close the gap between Linux and Windows. So, for the same reason games work so well on Linux these days, it's also why you can run many of your favorite Windows apps directly in Linux. Zorin even takes this to the extreme with a user-friendly app called "Windows App Support" that can easily install .exe or .msi files as if they are native applications.

Web apps have closed the gap

Linux distros like Zorin have grown exponentially in popularity by targeting Windows users, and web apps have easily filled the gaps where native and WINE apps fall short. Linux is famous for not offering native applications like Photoshop, which comes down to Adobe refusing to make a Linux version, likely thanks to its low user count. The same goes for apps like Microsoft Office. The good news is that a lot of these job-dependent applications now offer web apps, which is why distros like Zorin include the ability to install progressive web apps out of the box, rather than relying on Chrome's built-in functionality.

This way, you can run Zorin, which looks a lot like Windows, and add apps like Microsoft Office, Google Drive, Grammarly, and any other online services as a web app. That's the beauty of Linux (thanks to a feature from ChromeOS, which is built on top of Linux), rather than a corporation and its software controlling you. You instead control the OS, from what apps it uses, to what games it can play, all while mimicking a familiar user interface.

At the end of the day, it's easy to see why so many Windows users are checking out Linux distros like Zorin. When the choice is between spending a bunch of money to replace perfectly functional hardware, or simply moving to a new OS, many will opt for the latter. Now that Linux has finally caught up to the big boys in terms of drivers, games, and apps, there is little reason not to make the switch.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Notorious hacker forum BreachForum has been hacked, and have their user database leaked. Containing user names, messages and such. Lets see if the users of Breach used proper opsec or not. Probably not. If you can't even trust other criminals to keep your secrets then who can you trust ...

News of the breach emerged publicly on January 9 when a zip archive containing a MySQL database of 323,986 BreachForums users appeared on shinyhunte[.]rs, a domain reportedly unconnected to the infamous extortion group of the same name.

According to Have I Been Pwned, the data breach happened last August, two months before the police takedown of the BreachForums data extortion site after threats by Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters to use it to release one billion records stolen from Salesforce customers.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/4115660/notorious-breachforums-hacking-site-hit-by-doomsday-leak-of-324000-criminal-users.html

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Claude has emerged as the most-used artificial intelligence model among U.S. tech professionals, outpacing ChatGPT and other rivals in day-to-day work, according to a new survey:

ChatGPT followed at 19%, with Gemini at 15%, GitHub Copilot at 14% and Cursor at 11%, according to the results released January 7 to The Dallas Express.

The survey was conducted on December 16 and December 17, 2025, and collected responses from 1,215 verified professionals in the United States. Blind said most respondents identified as software engineers and reported using AI tools primarily for writing code, debugging, and system design.

The data suggest that Claude's popularity extends even into companies that have invested heavily in developing their own AI systems.

Among Meta employees who responded, 50% reported Claude as their most-used AI model, while only 8% selected Meta AI, according to Blind's breakdown. At Microsoft, 34% of respondents said Claude was their primary tool, narrowly surpassing the company's own Copilot at 32%.

The trend did not hold everywhere.

Google employees reported Gemini as their top choice, with 57% selecting it as their most-used AI model, while 23% reported using Claude, according to the survey. At Amazon, 54% of respondents said Claude was their go-to model, compared with 15% who selected ChatGPT and 11% who chose Gemini.

Also at Yahoo!tech.

Original Submission