Shameless Plug

New IronWorm Malware Hits 36 Packages In npm Supply-Chain Attack Published on 2026-06-04T22:00:00Z A new npm supply-chain attack has infected 36 packages with Rust-based infostealer malware called IronWorm. According to BleepingComputer, the malware "targets 86 environment variables (key-value pairs) and 20 credential files that may contain OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic, and npm credentials, vault configuration files, SSH keys, and Exodus cryptocurrency wallet files." From the report: According to researchers at supply-chain and devops company JFrog, IronWorm is written in Rust, hides behind an eBPF kernel rootkit, and communicates with the operator over the Tor network. The Rust-based malware self-propagates by using stolen credentials for publishing on npm; this includes secrets associated with npm's Trusted Publishing workflow. Once it compromises a developer or CI environment, it can publish trojanized versions of packages owned by the victim, which then infect additional ...

Companies Are Using Reddit To Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search Published on 2026-06-04T21:00:00Z An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots. The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material that those chatbots will scrape -- in this case, a popular Reddit community. In a post last week, the moderators of r/biohackers said they would be banning new posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) because of attempted manipulation by the companies that make, market, and sell them. [...] "As AI search engines increasingly pull answers from Reddit, companies are using us for AEO. On top of that, there's been an explosion of peptide interest and AI usage flooding the sub. T...

Meta Keeps Delaying the Release of Its New AI Model to Developers Published on 2026-06-04T20:00:00Z Meta has reportedly delayed the developer release of its Muse Spark AI model API multiple times, and as of Tuesday, had no scheduled launch date, according to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled). Reuters reports: A Meta spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday that the company is already testing the Application Programming Interface (API) with some early partners and is looking forward to releasing it this month. "The muse spark API will be coming soon," Meta AI Chief Alexandr Wang announced in a post on X in April. Meta unveiled Muse Spark in April as the first model built to close the gap with rivals. Muse Spark is the first in a new series of models created by the company's Superintelligence Labs. Earlier on Wednesday, Meta unveiled an AI agent aimed at helping businesses carry out day-to-day operations, hinting at the company's ambitions to compete with rivals suc...

LinkedIn China Spying Threat Prompts Warning From US, Allies Published on 2026-06-04T19:00:00Z The U.S. and its Five Eyes intelligence partners issued a joint warning (PDF) that Chinese military intelligence services are using LinkedIn and other professional networking sites to recruit people with access to government, military, foreign policy, or sensitive economic information. "These actors use an aggressive online recruitment strategy whereby intelligence officers or their affiliates pose as employees of private consultancies, think tanks or human resources firms, and place online job advertisements for foreign policy and defense analysts," the agencies said Wednesday. "China's military intelligence services ultimately seek to acquire privileged military, political and economic intelligence that can provide China with a strategic and tactical advantage over the Five Eyes." Bloomberg reports: China was targeting Five Eyes nationals with security clearance, p...

Fedora Linux 43 Exposes 20-Year-Old Microsoft Outlook Security Failure Published on 2026-06-03T23:00:00Z BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedly continued using insecure port 110 connections even when encryption was enabled in the application settings. The issue surfaced after Dovecot 2.4 disabled plaintext authentication on non secure connections by default, causing Outlook users to suddenly lose mailbox access after the Fedora 43 upgrade. The report suggests the behavior may date back as far as Outlook 2007, although modern Outlook builds were not fully tested. Fedora admins stress that the problem could be limited to legacy account configurations rather than current versions of Outlook i...

EU Plots To Abandon US Tech Published on 2026-06-03T22:00:00Z Ancient Slashdot reader whitroth shares a report from Politico, with the caption: "shutting down Microsoft Office for the International Criminal Court (ICC) was clearly a wake-up call." From the report: The EU is moving to counter American dominance in technology by reaching for one of the oldest tools in its arsenal: industrial strategy. As the European Commission unveiled a plan Wednesday to reduce Europe's reliance on the foreign technology providers that underpin the modern economy, it was careful to stress that it was not picking a fight with U.S. digital giants. Instead, the tech sovereignty package -- motivated in no small part by U.S. President Donald Trump's weaponization of Europe's dependence on American firms -- takes a longer-term view: boost the continent's players so they can eventually challenge their U.S. rivals. [...] If adopted, the package will direct public money toward prod...

Google Launches 'Gemma 4 12B' AI Model That Can Run On Your Laptop Published on 2026-06-03T20:00:00Z Google has launched Gemma 4 12B, a 12-billion-parameter open AI model designed to run locally on your laptop without depending entirely on cloud infrastructure. WION reports: According to Google, the new model delivers performance close to much larger AI systems while requiring significantly less memory. The company says Gemma 4 12B can run locally on devices equipped with just 16GB of VRAM, making advanced AI more accessible to developers, researchers and businesses. The launch highlights a growing trend across the AI industry: bringing powerful AI models directly to personal computers instead of relying solely on remote data centers. Gemma is Google's family of open AI models built using technology and research from its Gemini program. The new Gemma 4 12B model contains 12 billion parameters and has been designed to handle multiple types of information, including text,...