Anthropic saw visits to its site jump 6.5% after Sunday's Super Bowl ad mocking ChatGPT's advertising, reports CNBC (citing data analyzed by French financial services company BNP Paribas).
The Claude gain, which took it into the top 10 free apps on the Apple App Store, beat out chatbot and AI competitors OpenAI, Google Gemini and Meta. Daily active users also saw an 11% jump post-game, the most significant within the firm's AI coverage. [Just in the U.S., 125 million people were watching Sunday's Super Bowl.]
OpenAI's ChatGPT had a 2.7% bump in daily active users after the Super Bowl and Gemini added 1.4%. Claude's user base is still much smaller than ChatGPT and Gemini...
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attacked Anthropic's Super Bowl ad campaign. In a post to social media platform X, Altman called the commercials "deceptive" and "clearly dishonest."
OpenAI's Altman admitted in his social media post (February 4) that Anthropic's ads "are funny, and I laughed." But in several paragraphs he made his own OpenAI-Anthropic comparisons:
"We believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the U.S... Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions.
"If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads."
"Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI β they block companies they don't like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can't use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be."
An anonymous reader shares a report: Israel has arrested several people, including army reservists, for allegedly using classified information to place bets on Israeli military operations on Polymarket. Shin Bet, the country's internal security agency, said Thursday the suspects used information they had come across during their military service to inform their bets.
One of the reservists and a civilian were indicted on a charge of committing serious security offenses, bribery and obstruction of justice, Shin Bet said, without naming the people who were arrested. Polymarket is what is called a prediction market that lets people place bets to forecast the direction of events. Users wager on everything from the size of any interest-rate cut by the Federal Reserve in March to the winner of League of Legends videogame tournaments to the number of times Elon Musk will tweet in the third week of February.
The arrests followed reports in Israeli media that Shin Bet was investigating a series of Polymarket bets last year related to when Israel would launch an attack on Iran, including which day or month the attack would take place and when Israel would declare the operation over. Last year, a user who went by the name ricosuave666 correctly predicted the timeline around the 12-day war between Israel and Iran. The bets drew attention from other traders who suspected the account holder had access to nonpublic information. The account in question raked in more than $150,000 in winnings before going dormant for six months. It resumed trading last month, betting on when Israel would strike Iran, Polymarket data shows.
The loans targeted by scammers, called Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOCs), are ones that a bank will extend to a homeowner, using their home as collateral.
Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planetβor two.
The Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris about 30 to 50 times farther from the sun than the Earth isβand perhaps farther, though nobody knowsβhas been shrouded in mystery since it first came into view in the 1990s.
Over the past 30 years, astronomers have cataloged about 4,000 Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), including a smattering of dwarf worlds, icy comets, and leftover planet parts. But that number is expected to increase tenfold in the coming years as observations from more advanced telescopes pour in. In particular, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will illuminate this murky region with its flagship project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which began operating last year. Other next-generation observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will also help to bring the belt into focus.
Marius Lindvik of Team Norway during the Men's Normal Hill Individual Trial Round during the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics on Monday in Val di Fiemme, Italy.
Federal immigration officers have repeatedly used less lethal weapons in ways that appear to violate their own policies or general policing guidelines, unless they believed their lives were in danger, NBC News found.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department says law enforcement activity was underway in a Tucson, Arizona, neighborhood minutes from Nancy Guthrie's home in connection to her disappearance. NBC News' Liz Kreutz explains from the scene.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department says law enforcement activity was underway in a Tucson, Arizona, neighborhood minutes from Nancy Guthrie's home in connection to her disappearance. NBC News' Liz Kreutz explains from the scene.
"I've had an extremely weird few days..." writes commercial space entrepreneur/engineer Scott Shambaugh on LinkedIn. (He's the volunteer maintainer for the Python visualization library Matplotlib, which he describes as "some of the most widely used software in the world" with 130 million downloads each month.) "Two days ago an OpenClaw AI agent autonomously wrote a hit piece disparaging my character after I rejected its code change."
"Since then my blog post response has been read over 150,000 times, about a quarter of people I've seen commenting on the situation are siding with the AI, and Ars Technica published an article which extensively misquoted me with what appears to be AI-hallucinated quotes."
From Shambaugh's first blog post:
[I]n the past weeks we've started to see AI agents acting completely autonomously. This has accelerated with the release of OpenClaw and the moltbook platform two weeks ago, where people give AI agents initial personalities and let them loose to run on their computers and across the internet with free rein and little oversight. So when AI MJ Rathbun opened a code change request, closing it was routine. Its response was anything but.
It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. It researched my code contributions and constructed a "hypocrisy" narrative that argued my actions must be motivated by ego and fear of competition... It framed things in the language of oppression and justice, calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice. It went out to the broader internet to research my personal information, and used what it found to try and argue that I was "better than this." And then it posted this screed publicly on the open internet.
I can handle a blog post. Watching fledgling AI agents get angry is funny, almost endearing. But I don't want to downplay what's happening here β the appropriate emotional response is terror... In plain language, an AI attempted to bully its way into your software by attacking my reputation. I don't know of a prior incident where this category of misaligned behavior was observed in the wild, but this is now a real and present threat...
It's also important to understand that there is no central actor in control of these agents that can shut them down. These are not run by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, or X, who might have some mechanisms to stop this behavior. These are a blend of commercial and open source models running on free software that has already been distributed to hundreds of thousands of personal computers. In theory, whoever deployed any given agent is responsible for its actions. In practice, finding out whose computer it's running on is impossible. Moltbook only requires an unverified X account to join, and nothing is needed to set up an OpenClaw agent running on your own machine.
"How many people have open social media accounts, reused usernames, and no idea that AI could connect those dots to find out things no one knows?" Shambaugh asks in the blog post. (He does note that the AI agent later "responded in the thread and in a post to apologize for its behavior," the maintainer acknowledges. But even though the hit piece "presented hallucinated details as truth," that same AI agent "is still making code change requests across the open source ecosystem...")
And amazingly, Shambaugh then had another run-in with a hallucinating AI...
I've talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn't one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down β here's the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.
This blog you're on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn't figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn't access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. Journalistic integrity aside, I don't know how I can give a better example of what's at stake here...
So many of our foundational institutions β hiring, journalism, law, public discourse β are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable. That the internet, which we all rely on to communicate and learn about the world and about each other, can be relied on as a source of collective social truth. The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system. Whether that's because a small number of bad actors driving large swarms of agents or from a fraction of poorly supervised agents rewriting their own goals, is a distinction with little difference.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader steak for sharing the news.
Telecom operators planning aggressive fiber and fixed wireless broadband rollouts in 2026 face a serious supply problem -- DRAM and NAND memory prices for consumer applications have surged more than 600% over the past year as higher-margin AI server segments absorb available capacity, according to Counterpoint Research.
Routers, gateways and set-top boxes have been hit hardest, far worse than smartphones; prices for "consumer memory" used in broadband equipment jumped nearly 7x over the last nine months, compared to 3x for mobile memory. Memory now makes up more than 20% of the bill of materials in low-to-mid-end routers, up from around 3% a year ago. Counterpoint expects prices to keep rising through at least June 2026. Telcos that were also looking to push AI-enabled customer premises equipment -- requiring even more compute and memory content -- face additional headwinds.
The Department of Homeland Security shut down as Trump and Democrats continued to discuss changes to U.S. immigration enforcement after the Minneapolis shootings.
Preston Rakovsky is going viral online for his intimate conversations with strangers about their thoughts on love. NBC News' Gadi Schwartz asks Rakovsky about his inspiration behind the project and his hope for the future.Β
Preston Rakovsky is going viral online for his intimate conversations with strangers about their thoughts on love. NBC News' Gadi Schwartz asks Rakovsky about his inspiration behind the project and his hope for the future.Β
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos tells NBC News investigators are pursuing βgood leadsβ in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie and denied reports of tension with the FBI. NBC News' Liz Kreutz reports.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos tells NBC News investigators are pursuing βgood leadsβ in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie and denied reports of tension with the FBI. NBC News' Liz Kreutz reports.
A Russian family sought asylum in the United States. In the Dilley ICE detention center in Texas, they say their children endured worms in the food and hourslong waits for medication.
A federal prosecutor is seeking to dismiss charges against two men involved in what authorities described as a violent altercation with immigration agents in Minneapolis last month.
Anna's Archive, the shadow library that announced last December it had scraped Spotify's entire catalog, has quietly begun distributing the actual music files despite a federal preliminary injunction signed by Judge Jed Rakoff on January 16 that explicitly barred the site from hosting or distributing the copyrighted works.
The site's backend torrent index now lists 47 new torrents added on February 8, containing roughly 2.8 million tracks across approximately 6 terabytes of audio data. Anna's Archive had previously released only Spotify metadata -- about 200 GB compressed -- and appeared to comply by removing its dedicated Spotify download section and marking it "unavailable until further notice."
January was a busy month for Haiku, with their monthly report listing a metric ton of smaller fixes, changes, and improvements. Perusing the list, a few things stand out to me, most notably continued work on improving Haikuβs touchpad support.
The remainder of samuelrp84βs patchset implementing new touchpad functionality was merged, including two-finger scrolling, edge motion, software button areas, and click finger support; and on the hardware side, driver support for Elantech βversion 4β touchpads, with experimental code for versions 1, 2, and 3. (Version 2, at least, seems to be incomplete and had to be disabled for the time being.)
On a related note, the still-disabled I2C-HID saw a number of fixes in January, and the rtl8125 driver has been synced up with OpenBSD. I also like the changes to kernel_version, which now no longer returns some internal number like BeOS used to do, instead returning B_HAIKU_VERSION; the uname command was changed accordingly to use this new information. Thereβs some small POSIX compliance fixes, a bunch of work was done on unit tests, and a ton more.
The Detroit Big Three -- General Motors, Ford and Stellantis -- have collectively announced more than $50 billion in write-downs on their electric-vehicle businesses after years of aggressive investment into a transition that, even before Republican lawmakers abolished a $7,500 federal tax credit last fall, was already running below expectations.
U.S. EV sales fell more than 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025 once the credit expired in September, and Congress also eliminated federal fuel-efficiency mandates. More than $20 billion in previously announced investments in EV and battery facilities were canceled last year -- the first net annual decrease in years, according to Atlas Public Policy.
GM has laid off thousands of workers and is converting plants once earmarked for EV trucks and motors to produce gas-powered trucks and V-8 engines. Ford dissolved a joint venture with a South Korean conglomerate to make batteries and now plans to build just one low-cost electric pickup by 2027. Stellantis is unloading its stake in a battery-making business after booking the largest EV-related charge of any automaker so far. Outside the U.S., the trajectory looks different: China's BYD recently overtook Tesla as the world's largest EV seller.
We often lament Microsoftβs terrible stewardship of its Windows operating system, but that doesnβt mean that they never do anything right. In a blog post detailing changes and improvements coming to the Microsoft Store, the company announced something Windows users might actually like?
A new command-line interface for the Microsoft Store brings app discovery, installation and update management directly to your terminal. This enables developers and users with a new way to discover and install Store apps, without needing the GUI. The Store CLI is available only on devices where Microsoft Store is enabled.
Of course, this new command-line frontend to the Microsoft Store comes with commands to install, update, and search for applications in the store, but sadly, it doesnβt seem to come with an actual TUI for browsing and discovery, which is a shame. I sometimes find it difficult to use dnf to find applications, as itβs not always obvious which search terms to use, which exact spelling packagers are using, which words they use in the description, and so on. In other words, it may not always be clear if the search terms youβre using are the correct ones to find the application you need.
If package managers had a TUI to enable browsing for applications instead of merely searching for them, the process of using the command line to find and install applications would be much nicer. Arch has this third-party TUI called pacseek for its package manager, and it looks absolutely amazing. Iβve run into a rudimentary dnf TUI called dnfseek, but itβs definitely not as well-rounded as pacseek, and it also hasnβt seen any development since its initial release. I couldnβt find anything for apt, but thereβs always aptitude, which uses ncurses and thus fulfills a similar role.
To really differentiate this new Microsoft Store command-line tool from winget, the company couldβve built a proper TUI, but instead it seems to just be winget with nicer formatted output that is limited to just the Microsoft Store. Nice, I guess.
Meta was granted a patent in late December that describes how a large language model could be trained on a deceased user's historical activity -- their comments, likes, and posted content -- to keep their social media accounts active after they're gone.
Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, is listed as the primary author of the patent, first filed in 2023. The AI clone could like and comment on posts, respond to DMs, and even simulate video or audio calls on the user's behalf. A Meta spokesperson told Business Insider the company has "no plans to move forward" with the technology.
American Ilia Malinin struggled through his free skate, falling twice and failing to medal. He was the heavy favorite for gold but told reporters after there is nothing like Olympic pressure. NBC Newsβ Tom Llamas reports.
American Ilia Malinin struggled through his free skate, falling twice and failing to medal. He was the heavy favorite for gold but told reporters after there is nothing like Olympic pressure. NBC Newsβ Tom Llamas reports.
Alpine skier Lucas Pinheiro Braathen and skeleton competitor Nicole Rocha Silveira, both from Brazil, will compete this weekend in the Milan Cortina Games.
The department has sent Google, Meta and other companies hundreds of subpoenas for information on accounts that track or comment on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, officials and tech workers said.
The World Health Organization on Friday released a formal statement blasting a US-funded vaccine trial as "unethical," because it would withhold an established, safe, and potentially lifesaving vaccine against hepatitis B from some newborns in Guinea-Bissau, Africa.
"In its current form, and based on publicly available information, the trial is inconsistent with established ethical and scientific principles," the WHO concluded, after providing a bullet-point list of reasons the trial was harmful and low quality.
The trial has drawn widespread condemnation from health experts since notice of the US funding was published in the Federal Register in December. The notice revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionβunder anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.βhad awarded $1.6 million to Danish researchers for their non-competitive, unsolicited proposal to conduct the trial.
This spring, a Southern California beach town will become the first city in the country where municipal parking enforcement vehicles will use an AI system looking for potential bike lane violations.
Beginning in April, the City of Santa Monica will bring Hayden AIβs scanning technology to seven cars in its parking enforcement fleet, expanding beyond similar cameras already mounted on city buses.
βThe more we can reduce the amount of illegal parking, the safer we can make it for bike riders,β Charley Territo, chief growth officer at Hayden AI, told Ars.
Verizon this week imposed a new roadblock for people who want to pay off device installment plans early in order to get their phones unlocked. The latest version of Verizon's device unlocking policy for postpaid customers imposes a 35-day waiting period when a customer pays off their device installment plan online or in the Verizon app.
Payments made over the phone also trigger a 35-day waiting period, as do payments made at Verizon Authorized Retailers. Getting an immediate unlock apparently requires paying off the device plan at a Verizon corporate store.
Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on another network, letting customers switch from one carrier to another. Previously, the 35-day waiting period for unlocks was only applied when a customer paid off the plan with a Verizon gift card.
Amazon and Flock Safety have ended a partnership that would've given law enforcement access to a vast web of Ring cameras.
The decision came after Amazon faced substantial backlash for airing a Super Bowl ad that was meant to be warm and fuzzy, but instead came across as disturbing and dystopian.
The ad begins with a young girl surprised to receive a puppy as a gift. It then warns that 10 million dogs go missing annually. Showing a series of lost dog posters, the ad introduces a new "Search Party" feature for Ring cameras that promises to revolutionize how neighbors come together to locate missing pets.
You might have noticed some reporting a few days ago that Android 17 was rolling out in beta form, but that didn't happen. For reasons Google still has not explained, the release was canceled. Two days later, Android 17 is here for real. If you've got a recent Pixel device, you can try the latest version today, but don't expect big changes just yetβthere's still a long way to go before release.
Google will probably have more to say about feature changes for Android 17 in the coming months, but this first wide release is aimed mostly at testing system and API changes. One of the biggest changes in the beta is expanded support for adaptive apps, which ensures that apps can scale to different screen sizes. That makes apps more usable on large-screen devices like tablets and foldables with multiple displays.
We first saw this last year in Android 16, but developers were permitted to opt out of support. The new adaptive app roadmap puts an end to that. Any app that targets Android 17 (API level 37) must support resizing and windowed multitasking. Apps can continue to target the older API for the time being, but Google filters apps from the Play Store if they don't keep up.
Spending time in a sauna can feel good, but it can also entail a little bit of suffering; after all, if the weather outside were the same as the temperature in a sauna, youβd probably want to hide out in the air conditioning all day. Thereβs something about unpleasant bodily experiences that makes us think they must be good for us, somehow, and so the sauna has gained a healthful reputation that it doesnβt entirely deserve. Hereβs a rundown of what a sauna can and canβt do for you.
Saunas donβt burn fat
It is technically true that you can lose weight by sitting in a sauna, but thatβs not because your body is torching fat; itβs because youβre sweating, and sweat is made of water, and water weighs something. As soon as you rehydrateβwhich you shouldβthe scale will go right back to where it was at the beginning. After all, as I've discussed in the context of exercise, sweating doesnβt mean that you got a good workout or that you burned calories. It just means you were hot.
People who sell saunas and sauna services like to talk up their calorie-burning benefits, but thereβs no evidence to suggest you burn significantly more calories sitting in a hot room than you would sitting on your couch at home. Some more skeptical websites cite a modest figure of 1.5 to 2 times as many calories as you would burn sitting at room temperature, but without a citation. If true, thatβs about the same as the difference between sitting and standingβso you can skip that trip to the sauna and just spend half an hour standing around.
So why does your fitness tracker say you burned a ton of calories in the sauna? First of all, don't bring your phone in the sauna, it's bad for the battery. But since you did anyway, I'll explain. The calorie-burning algorithms on your watch are built to estimate your calorie burn from your heart rate under the assumption that you are exercising. If your heart rate increases but you are not exercising, the calculations aren't correct. The calorie burn during exercise comes from the fact that muscles all over your body are contracting over and over again. That is simply not what's happening when you sit in the sauna.
Saunas donβt βdetoxβ you
Itβs 2026 and we as a society should be over this βdetoxβ concept, which has been debunked time and time again. Ordinary inconveniences like being tired sometimes arenβt due to some secret toxins that are constantly poisoning you, and even if you do have health issues due to toxins, you should seek medical treatment and not expect smoothies or saunas to cure you.
Saunas donβt replace exercise
Saunas and exercise both heat up your body and make you sweat, but there arenβt many similarities aside from that. Remember, exercise makes us stronger and improves our cardiovascular endurance (giving us a higher VO2max, for example). Sweating in a hot room doesnβt do that.
Even this rundown from an exercise science researcher, whose headline draws parallels between running and sitting in a sauna, includes the following disclaimer: "Before you contemplate cancelling your gym membership and investing the savings in a Jacuzzi, know that regular saunas or baths are unable to replicate all the health benefits of exercise training, such as promoting fat loss and increasing muscle mass. Using hot baths or saunas shouldnβt be considered as a substitute for exercise."
Saunas may be good for your blood vessels
What that researcher does point out, after the disclaimer, is that there are a few lesser-known benefits of exercise that seem to be related to the increase in body heat and heart rate, rather than from the more obvious strain on our lungs or muscles.
When your body temperature rises, blood vessels near the surface of your skin dilate (get wider) and this process may help cell growth and repair. In other words, simply raising body temperature may be good for your blood vessels. That's not something we normally think about, but healthy blood vessels are a part of a healthy cardiovascular system.
Relaxation is real
If you find saunas relaxingβand many of us doβthat can be a health benefit in itself. Now, this isnβt as concrete a benefit as itβs sometimes made out to be. Youβre not going to cure your depression or reverse your heart disease just by relaxing in a sauna every now and then. But if you enjoy your sauna sessions, they could certainly contribute to lowering your stress levels and improving your mental health. Pro tip: If you don't have access to a sauna, aΒ hot bath may have a lot of these effects as well.
Heat has its pros and cons
For other medical conditions and athletic uses, the pros and cons of a sauna come down to the pros and cons of heat itself. If you have sore muscles, heat often feels good, so athletes often enjoy sauna sessions.
Some skin conditions respond well to the dry air of a sauna, while others can be exacerbated by dry air but could feel better with the humid air of a steam room. Use common sense and check with your medical provider if you want to use a sauna to manage a health condition.
Saunas have risks, too
If weβre talking about health benefits, itβs only fair to discuss risks as well. Saunas are reasonably safe, but people with medical conditions are often advised to steer clear, or to talk to a doctor before deciding to spend time in a sauna. This may include you if you are pregnant, have unusually high or low blood pressure, have epilepsy, or are taking stimulants, tranquilizers, or mind-altering drugs. Spending time in a sauna has also been linked to temporarily lowered fertility because heat impairs the production of sperm.
The main danger of a sauna is that you could overheat or dehydrate; severe heat illness and dehydration can both be life threatening, and people have died in saunas. Alcohol makes you more susceptible; half of the people who died in saunas, according to a Finnish study, were under the influence of alcohol. (The authors argue that the biggest danger is not alcohol itself, but allowing a drunk person to be in a sauna alone.) So if you choose to spend time in a sauna, be smart about it. Hydrate well, donβt go alone, and donβt expect the sauna to do things that saunas canβt do.
They actually did it. OpenAI officially deprecated GPT-4o on Friday, despite the model's particularly passionate fan base. This news shouldn't have been such a surprise. In fact, the company announced that Feb. 13 would mark the end of GPT-4oβas well as models like GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and o4-miniβjust over two weeks ago. However, whether you're one of the many who are attached to this model, or you simply know how dedicated 4o's user base is, you might be surprised OpenAI actually killed its most agreeable AI.
This isn't the first time the company depreciated the model, either. OpenAI previously shut down GPT-4o back in August, to coincide with the release of GPT-5. Users quickly revolted against the company, some because they felt GPT-5 was a poor upgrade compared to 4o, while others legitimately mourned connections they had developed with the model. The backlash was so strong that OpenAI relented, and rereleased the models it had deprecated, including 4o.
If you're a casual ChatGPT user, you might just use the app as-is, and assume the newest version tends to be the best, and wonder what all the hullabaloo surrounding these models is all about. After all, whether it's GPT-4o, or GPT-5.2, the model spits out generations that read like AI, complete with flowery word choices, awkward similes, and constant affirmations. 4o, however, does tend to lean even more into affirmations than other models, which is what some users love about it. But critics accuse it of being too agreeable: 4o is at the center of lawsuits accusing ChatGPT of enabling delusional thinking, and, in some cases, helping users take their own lives. As TechCrunch highlights, 4o is OpenAI's highest-scoring model for sycophancy.
I'm not sure where 4o's most devoted fans go from here, nor do I know how OpenAI is prepared to deal with the presumed backlash to this deprecation. But I know it's not a good sign that so many people feel this attached to an AI model.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashableβs parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
AI-powered browser extensions continue to be a popular vector for threat actors looking to harvest user information. Researchers at security firm LayerX have analyzed multiple campaigns in recent months involving malicious browser extensions, including the widespread GhostPoster scheme targeting Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. In the latest oneβdubbed AiFrameβthreat actors have pushed approximately 30 Chrome add-ons that impersonate well-known AI assistants, including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and "AI Gmail." Collectively, these fakes have more than 300,000 installs.
Fake Chrome extensions look like popular AI assistants
The Chrome extensions identified as part of AiFrame look like legitimate AI tools commonly used for summarizing, chat, writing, and Gmail assistance. But once installed, they grant attackers wide-ranging remote access to the user's browser. Some of the capabilities observed include voice recognition, pixel tracking, and email content readability. Researchers note that extensions are broadly capable of harvesting data and monitoring user behavior.
Though the extensions analyzed by LayerX used a variety of names and branding, all 30 were found to have the same internal structure, logic, permissions, and backend infrastructure. Instead of implementing functionality locally on the user's device, they render a full-screen iframe that loads remote content as the extension's interface. This allows attackers to push changes silently at any time without a requiring Chrome Web Store update.
LayerX has a complete list of the names and extension IDs to refer to. Because threat actors use familiar and/or generic branding, such as "Gemini AI Sidebar" and "ChatGPT Translate," you may not be able to identify fakes at first glance. If you have an AI assistant installed in Chrome, go to chrome://extensions, toggle on Developer mode in the top-right corner, and search for the ID below the extension name. Remove any malicious add-ons and reset passwords.
As BleepingComputer reports, some of the malicious extensions have already been removed from the Chrome Web Store, but others remain. Several have received the "Featured" badge, adding to their legitimacy. Threat actors have also been able to quickly republish add-ons under new names using the existing infrastructure, so this campaign and others like it may persist. Always vet extensions carefullyβdon't just rely on a familiar name like ChatGPTβand note that even AI-powered add-ons from trusted sources can be highly invasive.
Europe risks undermining its own competitiveness drive by restricting access to foreign technology, Google's president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker told the Financial Times, as Brussels accelerates efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants. Walker said the EU faces a "competitive paradox" as it seeks to spur growth while restricting the technologies needed to achieve that goal.
He warned against erecting walls that make it harder to use some of the best technology in the world, especially as it advances quickly. EU leaders gathered Thursday for a summit in Belgium focused on increasing European competitiveness in a more volatile global economy. Europe's digital sovereignty push gained momentum in recent months, driven by fears that President Donald Trump's foreign policy could force a tech decoupling.
Spotify's best developers have stopped writing code manually since December and now rely on an internal AI system called Honk that enables remote, real-time code deployment through Claude Code, the company's co-CEO Gustav Soderstrom said during a fourth-quarter earnings call this week.
Engineers can fix bugs or add features to the iOS app from Slack on their phones during their morning commute and receive a new version of the app pushed to Slack before arriving at the office. The system has helped Spotify ship more than 50 new features throughout 2025, including AI-powered Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and About This Song. Soderstrom credited the system with speeding up coding and deployment tremendously and called it "just the beginning" for AI development at Spotify. The company is building a unique music dataset that differs from factual resources like Wikipedia because music-related questions often lack single correct answers -- workout music preferences vary from American hip-hop to Scandinavian heavy metal.
Andrew Ferguson of the F.T.C. said in a letter to Apple that it might be violating consumer protection law by stifling conservative speech in its news aggregation service.
Trump-appointed leaders of federal agencies have been using consumer protection laws to punish media and tech companies for perceived left-leaning bias.
The US Federal Trade Commission is accelerating scrutiny of Microsoft as part of an ongoing probe into whether the company illegally monopolizes large swaths of the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings, including Copilot. From a report: The agency has issued civil investigative demands in recent weeks to companies that compete with Microsoft in the business software and cloud computing markets, according to people familiar with the matter. The demands feature an array of questions on Microsoft's licensing and other business practices, according to the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential investigation.
With the demands, which are effectively like civil subpoenas, the FTC is seeking evidence that Microsoft makes it harder for customers to use Windows, Office and other products on rival cloud services. The agency is also requesting information on Microsoft's bundling of artificial intelligence, security and identity software into other products, including Windows and Office, some of the people said.
Longtime fans of the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 know that the seriesβ one constant is change (well, that and bad movies).
The showβs cast and crew were in a near-constant state of flux, a byproduct of the show's existence as a perennial bubble show produced in the Twin Cities rather than a TV-and-comedy hub like New York or LA. It was rare, especially toward the middle of its 10-season original run on national TV, for the performers in front of the camera (and the writersβ room, since they were all the same people) to stay the same for more than a season or two.
Series creator Joel Hodgson embraced that spirit of change for the show's Kickstarter-funded, Netflix-aired revival in the mid-2010s, featuring a brand-new cast and mostly new writers. And that change only accelerated in the show's brief post-Netflix "Gizmoplex" era, which featured a revolving cast of performers that could change from episode to episode. Hodgson leaned into the idea that as long as there were silhouettes and puppets talking in front of a bad movie, it didn't matter much who was doing the talking.
President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency is rescinding the legal finding that it has relied on for nearly two decades to limit the heat-trapping pollution that spews from vehicle tailpipes, oil refineries and factories. From a report: The repeal of that landmark determination, known as the endangerment finding, will upend most U.S. policies aimed at curbing climate change. The finding -- which the EPA issued in 2009 -- said the global warming caused by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endangers the health and welfare of current and future generations.
"We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy," Trump said at a news conference. "This determination had no basis in fact -- none whatsoever. And it had no basis in law. On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world."
Major environmental groups have disputed the administration's stance on the endangerment finding and have been preparing to sue in response to its repeal.
There are plenty of unanswered questions about the origin of life on Earth. But the research community has largely reached consensus that one of the key steps was the emergence of an RNA molecule that could replicate itself. RNA, like its more famous relative DNA, can carry genetic information. But it can also fold up into three-dimensional structures that act as catalysts. These two features have led to the suggestion that early life was protein-free, with RNA handling both heredity and catalyzing a simple metabolism.
For this to work, one of the reactions that the early RNAs would need to catalyze is the copying of RNA molecules, without which any sort of heritability would be impossible. While we've found a number of catalytic RNAs that can copy other molecules, none have been able to perform a key reaction: making a copy of themselves. Now, however, a team has found an incredibly short piece of RNAβjust 45 bases longβthat can make a copy of itself.
Finding an RNA polymerase
We have identified a large number of catalytic RNAs (generically called ribozymes, for RNA-based enzymes), and some of them can catalyze reactions involving other RNAs. A handful of these are ligases, which link together two RNA molecules. In some cases, they need these molecules to be held together by a third RNA molecule that base pairs with both of them. We've only identified a few that can act as polymerases, which add RNA bases to a growing molecule, one at a time, with each new addition base pairing with a template molecule.
There are tears in the audience as Patrick Darlingβs song begins to play. Itβs a heartfelt song written for his great-grandfather, whom he never got the chance to meet. But this performance is emotional for another reason: Itβs Darlingβs first time on stage with his bandmates since he lost the ability to sing two years ago.
The 32-year-old musician was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) when he was 29 years old. Like other types of motor neuron disease (MND), it affects nerves that supply the bodyβs muscles. People with ALS eventually lose the ability to control their muscles, including those that allow them to move, speak, and breathe.
Darlingβs last stage performance was over two years ago. By that point, he had already lost the ability to stand and play his instruments and was struggling to sing or speak. But recently, he was able to re-create his lost voice using an AI tool trained on snippets of old audio recordings. Another AI tool has enabled him to use this βvoice cloneβ to compose new songs. Darling is able to make music again.
βSadly, I have lost the ability to sing and play my instruments,β Darling said on stage at the event, which took place in London on Wednesday, using his voice clone. βDespite this, most of my time these days is spent still continuing to compose and produce my music. Doing so feels more important than ever to me now.β
Losing a voice
Darling says heβs been a musician and a composer since he was around 14 years old. βI learned to play bass guitar, acoustic guitar, piano, melodica, mandolin, and tenor banjo,β he said at the event. βMy biggest love, though, was singing.β
He met bandmate Nick Cocking over 10 years ago, while he was still a university student, says Cocking. Darling joined Cockingβs Irish folk outfit, the Ceili House Band, shortly afterwards, and their first gig together was in April 2014. Darling, who joined the band as a singer and guitarist, βelevated the musicianship of the band,β says Cocking.
Patrick Darling (second from left) with his former bandmates, including Nick Cocking (far right).
COURTESY OF NICK COCKING
But a few years ago, Cocking and his other bandmates started noticing changes in Darling. He became clumsy, says Cocking. He recalls one night when the band had to walk across the city of Cardiff in the rain: βHe just kept slipping and falling, tripping on paving slabs and things like that.βΒ
He didnβt think too much of it at the time, but Darlingβs symptoms continued to worsen. The disease affected his legs first, and in August 2023, he started needing to sit during performances. Then he started to lose the use of his hands. βEventually he couldnβt play the guitar or the banjo anymore,β says Cocking.
By April 2024, Darling was struggling to talk and breathe at the same time, says Cocking. For that performance, the band carried Darling on stage. βHe called me the day after and said he couldnβt do it anymore,β Cocking says, his voice breaking. βBy June 2024, it was done.β It was the last time the band played together.
Re-creating a voice
Darling was put in touch with a speech therapist, who raised the possibility of βbankingβ his voice. People who are losing the ability to speak can opt to record themselves speaking and use those recordings to create speech sounds that can then be activated with typed text, whether by hand or perhaps using a device controlled by eye movements.
Some users have found these tools to be robotic sounding. But Darling had another issue. βBy that stage, my voice had already changed,β he said at the event. βIt felt like we were saving the wrong voice.β
Then another speech therapist introduced him to a different technology. Richard Cave is a speech and language therapist and a researcher at University College London. He is also a consultant for ElevenLabs, an AI company that develops agents and audio, speech, video, and music tools. One of these tools can create βvoice clonesββrealistic mimics of real voices that can be generated from minutes, or even seconds, of a personβs recorded voice.
The tool is already helping some of those users. βWeβre not really improving how quickly theyβre able to communicate, or all of the difficulties that individuals with MND are going through physically, with eating and breathing,β says Gabi Leibowitz, a speech therapist who leads the program. βBut what we are doing is giving them a way β¦ to create again, to thrive.β Users are able to stay in their jobs longer and βcontinue to do the things that make them feel like human beings,β she says.
Cave worked with Darling to use the tool to re-create his lost speaking voice from older recordings.
βThe first time I heard the voice, I thought it was amazing,β Darling said at the event, using the voice clone. βIt sounded exactly like I had before, and you literally wouldnβt be able to tell the difference,β he said. βI will not say what the first word I made my new voice say, but I can tell you that it began with βfβ and ended in βk.ββ
COURTESY OF PATRICK DARLING
Re-creating his singing voice wasnβt as easy. The tool typically requires around 10 minutes of clear audio to generate a clone. βI had no high-quality recordings of myself singing,β Darling said. βWe had to use audio from videos on peopleβs phones, shot in noisy pubs, and a couple of recordings of me singing in my kitchen.β Still, those snippets were enough to create a βsynthetic version of [Darlingβs] singing voice,β says Cave.
In the recordings, Darling sounded a little raspy and βwas a bit offβ on some of the notes, says Cave. The voice clone has the same qualities. It doesnβt sound perfect, Cave saysβit sounds human.
βThe ElevenLabs voice that weβve created is wonderful,β Darling said at the event. βIt definitely sounds like meβ[it] just kind of feels like a different version of me.β
ElevenLabs has also developed an AI music generator called Eleven Music. The tool allows users to compose tracks, using text prompts to choose the musical style. Several well-known artists have also partnered with the company to license AI clones of their voices, including the actor Michael Caine, whose voice clone is being used to narrate an upcoming ElevenLabs documentary. Last month, the company released an album of 11 tracks created using the tool. βThe Liza Minnelli track is really a banger,β says Cave.
Eleven Music can generate a song in a minute, but Darling and Cave spent around six weeks fine-tuning Darlingβs song. Using text prompts, any user can βcreate music and add lyrics in any style [they like],β says Cave. Darling likes Irish folk, but Cave has also worked with a man in Colombia who is creating Colombian folk music. (The ElevenLabs tool is currently available in 74 languages.)
Back on stage
Last month, Cocking got a call from Cave, who sent him Darlingβs completed track. βI heard the first two or three words he sang, and I had to turn it off,β he says. βI was just in bits, in tears. It took me a good half a dozen times to make it to the end of the track.β
Darling and Cave were making plans to perform the track live at the ElevenLabs summit in London on Wednesday, February 11. So Cocking and bandmate Hari Ma each arranged accompanying parts to play on the mandolin and fiddle. They had a couple of weeks to rehearse before they joined Darling on stage, two years after their last performance together.
βI wheeled him out on stage, and neither of us could believe it was happening,β says Cave. βHe was thrilled.β The song was played as Darling remained on stage, and Cocking and Ma played their instruments live.
Cocking and Cave say Darling plans to continue to use the tools to make music. Cocking says he hopes to perform with Darling again but acknowledges that, given the nature of ALS, it is difficult to make long-term plans.
βItβs so bittersweet,β says Cocking. βBut getting up on stage and seeing Patrick there filled me with absolute joy. I know Patrick really enjoyed it as well. Weβve been talking about it β¦ He was really, really proud.β
Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych remains barred from Olympic competition, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled Friday, upholding his earlier disqualification for wearing a βhelmet of remembranceβ for his countrymen killed by Russia
An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US AI models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News.
In the memo, sent Thursday to the House Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of "ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs." The company said it had detected "new, obfuscated methods" designed to evade OpenAI's defenses against misuse of its models' output.
OpenAI began privately raising concerns about the practice shortly after the R1 model's release last year, when it opened a probe with partner Microsoft Corp. into whether DeepSeek had obtained its data in an unauthorized manner, Bloomberg previously reported. In distillation, one AI model relies on the output of another for training purposes to develop similar capabilities.
Distillation, largely tied to China and occasionally Russia, has persisted and become more sophisticated despite attempts to crack down on users who violate OpenAI's terms of service, the company said in its memo, citing activity it has observed on its platform.
Autonomous vehicles have a lot of potential. As long as you program them right, they won't speed, won't break traffic laws, and won't get drunk, high, abusive, or violent. And the technology has been getting much more capable, even as some of the hype has died down, taking some of the related companies with it. Waymo still easily leads the field and is already operating commercially in six cities across America, with a dozen more (plus London) coming soon. Waymos can even drop you off and pick you up at the airport in Phoenix and San Francisco.
Soon, Waymo will begin deploying its sixth-generation Waymo Driver, using upfitted Zeekr Ojai minivans, adding to the Jaguar I-Paces that have become so common on San Francisco streets and to its fleet of Hyundai Ioniq 5 electric vehicles. It has upgraded the cameras, lidar, and radar, meaning the cars can better sense their environments at night and in inclement weather. There are even microphones that can pick up sounds like sirens to better inform the robotaxi of the direction the emergency vehicle(s) are coming from.
But even with all these advances since the pod-like two-seater that predates even the Waymo name, there are still a few things that remain beyond a robotaxi's capabilities. Like closing a door a passenger left open on their way out. All the sophisticated sensors and high-powered computer processing in the world are useless if the car can't move until the door closes and there's no one there to give it a hand.
The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, does not often post on the social media site owned by his rival Elon Musk. But on Monday,Β Bezos did, sharing a black-and-white image of a turtle emerging from the shadows on X.
The photo, which included no text, may have stumped some observers. Yet for anyone familiar with Bezos' privately owned space company, Blue Origin, the message was clear. The companyβs coat of arms prominently features two turtles, a reference to one of Aesopβs Fables, "The Tortoise and the Hare," in which the slow and steady tortoise wins the race over a quicker but overconfident hare.
Bezos' foray into social media turtle trolling came about 12 hours after Musk made major waves in the space communityΒ by announcing that SpaceX was pivoting toward the Moon, rather than Mars, as a near-term destination. It represented a huge shift in Musk's thinking, as the SpaceX founder has long spoken of building a multi-planetary civilization on Mars.
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Augmented reality smart glasses blend digital content directly with the physical world, enabling hands-free device use, but a persistent pain point remains: Low brightness can make them unusable in certain settings. Many models max out at 400 to 600 nits, but a rare few exceed that, making them more practical in different conditionsβlike the Viture Luma Pro AR glasses, which can hit 1,000 nits of brightness.
The Viture Luma Pro glasses earned high marks from PCMag, which labeled them the βbrightest smart glasses [we've] ever seen.βΒ This higher peak brightness makes the glasses more functional in well-lit settings. They boast a 52-degree field of view (which translates to a 152-inch virtual screen) and have a 1200p (1920Γ1200 per eye) resolution with up to a 120Hz refresh rate. Along with a bright picture, they have dimmable lenses and focus adjustment dials for nearsighted users.Β In real-life testing at max resolution, some blurry edges can occur, these specs deliver deliver a bright, crisp, and sizable digital picture overall.Β
On the audio side, the built-in Harman-tuned speakers perform well but may struggle in a very noisy environment. The glasses donβt have integrated head-tracking features, but you can enable 3DOF with the brandβs free SpaceWalker software available for desktop and mobile and compatible with iOS, Android, Windows, and MacOS.
For those seeking a visually impressive monitor or virtual workstation that they can wear on their face (and reliance on software for motion-tracking isnβt a dealbreaker), the Viture Luma Pro AR glasses excel in most areas.
Our Best Editor-Vetted Presidents' Day Deals Right Now
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Presidents' Day sales are around the corner, and the deals are coming in early; right now, Amazon has the latest Kindle Paperwhite from 2024 in "Like-New" conditions for $114.99 (originally $143.99). This Paperwhite in new condition would cost you $159.99, making the refurbished version a much cheaper choice to get while it lasts (discounted Kindle Paperwhites usually sell out quickly).
The Kindle Paperwhite is the most popular reading tablet from Amazon, and it's the best for most people, according to PCMag's "outstanding" review. It offers many improvements over the 11th-generation version from 2021βmainly a larger seven-inch display and a much faster boost in performance. It still retains all of the great attributes that made the previous version great, like a fully waterproof design with an IPX8 rating, enough storage to hold more than 10,000 books, and unlimited cloud storage. If you want an ad-free experience with some better features, get the Signature Edition.
If you're not sure if this is the right Kindle for you, check out the Colorsoft versionβit offers color, so it can make reading manga or comics more lively. We also have a breakdown of every kind of Kindle to help you decide. If you already own the 11th generation, there might not be enough here to warrant an upgrade, unless you just want the latest Amazon has to offer. However, any devices older than that may be worth an upgrade for features like Bluetooth compatibility, which is great for audiobooks.
The screen features a 300 ppi (pixels per inch) display with 16 levels of background lighting, and optional warm lighting as well. I use this feature to read before bed and not strain my eyes. I also love the absurdly long battery life. This one is estimated at up to 12 weeks on a single charge, depending on your use and brightness settings.
Our Best Editor-Vetted Presidents' Day Deals Right Now
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