Industry News

Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list of 204 tasks designed to test the capabilities of large language models, which power chatbots like ChatGPT. On most tasks, performance improved predictably and smoothly as the models scaled up—the larger the model, the better it got. But with other tasks, the jump in ability wasn’t smooth. The performance remained near zero for a while, then performance jumped. Other studies found similar leaps in ability.

Apple has just released version 14.4.1 for macOS Sonoma, a small-but-significant patch that claims to fix several issues with third-party software and accessories that cropped up in the 14.4 update. The 14.4.1 release also includes a pair of security fixes.

The US Justice Department on Monday unsealed an indictment charging seven men with hacking or attempting to hack dozens of US companies in a 14-year campaign furthering an economic espionage and foreign intelligence gathering by the Chinese government.

n unidentified group of threat actors orchestrated a sophisticated supply chain cyberattack on members of the Top.gg GitHub organization as well as individual developers in order to inject malicious code into the code ecosystem.

The attackers infiltrated trusted software development elements to compromise developers. They hijacked GitHub accounts with stolen cookies, contributed malicious code via verified commits, established a counterfeit Python mirror, and released tainted packages on the PyPi registry.

Britain’s democracy is under threat from Chinese cyber attacks that accessed the details of 40 million UK voters and targeted senior politicians, MPs will be told today.

Deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden is due to tell Parliament that Beijing is behind a hacking operation that accessed millions of UK voters’ details from the Electoral Commission.

When thousands of security researchers descend on Las Vegas every August for what's come to be known as “hacker summer camp,” the back-to-back Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences, it's a given that some of them will experiment with hacking the infrastructure of Vegas itself, the city's elaborate array of casino and hospitality technology.

In an interview on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor ahead of Reddit’s market debut on Thursday, chief executive Steve Huffman acknowledged that the mischievous retail investors that congregate on the social media platform might deliberately drive down its share price.

“It’s a free market!” he said. For Reddit, as for Huffman, the bet on a public offering for a site he described as a “fun and special, but sometimes crazy place” has appeared to pay off.

There is no clear evidence that North Korean cybercriminals sought to steal weapons data from Russian defense companies, Moscow has told a U.N. sanctions panel, despite research linking the DPRK to cyberattacks on its ally.

Citing South Korean media, the U.N. Panel of Experts on North Korea reported that the North Korean threat actor Lazarus Group stole information including blueprints of satellite components from Russian company Sputnix OOO in 2022.

The road to Reddit’s initial public offering has been a long one; in the 19 years since its founding, the social media giant has led many lives. It was an independent startup, and then it wasn’t, until it was again. It despised the idea of selling ads or censoring user content, but eventually found itself deeply pursuing both. It’s had half a dozen leaders, including current CEO Steve Huffman—also known by his username Spez—who is on his second tour of duty.

The CEO of FTX Trading, John Ray, sent a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan Wednesday to correct what he called "callously" and "demonstrably false" claims that disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried made in hopes of receiving a lighter sentence for crimes including defrauding FTX customers.