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Hackers Hijacked Google’s Gemini AI With a Poisoned Calendar Invite to Take Over a Smart Home

Within the titles of the calendar invites, the researchers added their crafty malicious prompts. (Google’s Wen contends that the researchers changed default settings on who can add calendar invites to someone’s calendar; however, the researchers say they demonstrated some of the 14 attacks with the prompts in an email subject or document title as well). “All the techniques are just developed in English, so it’s plain English that we are using,” Cohen says of the deceptive messages the team creat

Qwant and Ecosia debut Staan, a European search index that aims to take on Big Tech

European search engines Qwant and Ecosia said on Wednesday that they have both started serving search queries through an index they developed together, Staan, which aims to be a cheaper, more privacy-focused alternative to Google and Bing. Last year, French privacy-focused search engine Qwant struck a joint venture with German non-profit search engine Ecosia, to develop a European search index. Called European Search Perspective (EUSP), the JV now aims to serve around 50% of French queries and

I dumped Google for Kagi

Mandatory AI summaries have come to Google, and they gleefully showcase hallucinations while confidently insisting on their truth. I feel about them the same way I felt about mandatory G+ logins when all I wanted to do was access my damn YouTube account: I hate them. Intensely. But unlike those mandatory G+ logins—on which Google eventually relented before shutting down the G+ service—our reading of the tea leaves suggests that, this time, the search giant is extremely pleased with how things a

Meet Meschers, MIT’s Tool for Building Paradoxical Digital Objects

Meet “impossibagel,” a physically impossible bagel that mathematicians use to resolve intricate geometry problems. But impossibagel—and other “impossible objects” in mathematics—is notoriously difficult to replicate, and researchers haven’t been able to fully tap into their mathematical potential. That may no longer be a problem, thanks to a new tool. On Monday, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) announced “Meschers,” software capable of visuali

Enough is enough–I dumped Google's worsening search for Kagi

Mandatory AI summaries have come to Google, and they gleefully showcase hallucinations while confidently insisting on their truth. I feel about them the same way I felt about mandatory G+ logins when all I wanted to do was access my damn YouTube account: I hate them. Intensely. But unlike those mandatory G+ logins—on which Google eventually relented before shutting down the G+ service—our reading of the tea leaves suggests that, this time, the search giant is extremely pleased with how things a

If You Ask Google Why It Sucks Now, AI Overviews Will Viciously Bully Google and Itself

Google's notorious AI Overviews feature appears to have finally gotten it right — but for all the wrong reasons. As flagged on Bluesky, if you ask Google why its own search engine feels so useless lately, the company's AI feature will provide multiple and excoriating reasons — including brutal attacks against itself, Google's much-maligned AI Overviews. In that Bluesky post, Google responded broadly to the hilariously colloquial query of "why is google ass now" with a self-flagellating list of

Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi

Mandatory AI summaries have come to Google, and they gleefully showcase hallucinations while confidently insisting on their truth. I feel about them the same way I felt about mandatory G+ logins when all I wanted to do was access my damn YouTube account: I hate them. Intensely. But unlike those mandatory G+ logins—on which Google eventually relented before shutting down the G+ service—our reading of the tea leaves suggests that, this time, the search giant is extremely pleased with how things a

Could Apple create an AI search engine to rival Gemini and ChatGPT? Here's how it could succeed

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Apple reportedly has an AI search in the works. The AI search experience could have a standalone app and power Siri. Timely and strategic release with broader success of AI search engines. With the launch of Apple Intelligence, Apple sought to enter the AI space after a somewhat late entry. However, several delays of its most sought-after feature, including Siri 2.0, have made it difficult to keep up with more established competitors. A new report d

Apple Reportedly Working on a ChatGPT-Like Search Experience

Apple is internally working on a "ChatGPT-like search experience" to instantly generate answers for users, according to a report from Bloomberg on Sunday. The Answers, Knowledge and Information team, or AKI, is a team within Apple looking to make internal AI products for its devices. The company is reportedly building an "answer engine" -- an AI-powered service that pulls from information online to answer general queries. It's also possible that a separate app might be developed. This AI search

AI site Perplexity uses “stealth tactics” to flout no-crawl edicts, Cloudflare says

AI search engine Perplexity is using stealth bots and other tactics to evade websites’ no-crawl directives, an allegation that if true violates Internet norms that have been in place for more than three decades, network security and optimization service Cloudflare said Monday. In a blog post, Cloudflare researchers said the company received complaints from customers who had disallowed Perplexity scraping bots by implementing settings in their sites’ robots.txt files and through Web application

Elon Musk says the Vine archive is coming back

Elon Musk recently announced that he's bringing back the Vine archives , after teasing the return of the social platform over the last week or so. The X owner says that the company recently discovered the entire video archive of the once-popular short-form video app and is working to restore user access. Twitter bought Vine all the way back in 2012. Musk says that X users will be able to post these Vines, but it's just an archive. In other words, this doesn't sound like a renaissance for the ac

Paid subreddits plan on hold as company prioritizes search engine plans

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman confirmed plans for paid subreddits earlier this year but now says that the initiative has been de–prioritized. However, he says that the company still believes in the opportunity, suggesting that a Reddit paywall of some kind will be introduced at some stage … Paid subreddits plan Huffman first hinted at the plan last year, but didn’t go into any details. We will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive con

How I configure BorgBackup and borgmatic (2023)

This article outlines how I configure BorgBackup and borgmatic on my machines. macOS Tested on MacBook Air M2 macOS Ventura 13.4.1 borgmatic 1.7.12 (MacPorts) moreutils 0.67_1 (MacPorts) borgmatic and moreutils are also available on Homebrew. Unlike systemd, launchctl doesn’t provide integration a syslog-like service. (I guess Apple expects you to use Console instead) Apple’s unified logging is unreliable and in many tests I have had messages disappearing, even when manually testing wit

Apple might be building its own AI ‘answer engine’

In Brief Apple has formed a new team to build a ChatGPT-like app, according to according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. This team — reportedly called Answers, Knowledge, and Information — is working to build an “answer engine” that can respond to questions using information from across the web. This could be a standalone app or provide search capabilities in Siri, Safari, and other Apple products. Gurman also notes that Apple is advertising for jobs with this team, specifically looking for appli

Alarming New System Can Identify People Through Walls Using Wi-Fi Signal

Once upon a time, in their startling report titled "Bigger Monsters, Weaker Chains," ACLU analysts Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt argued that the US was quickly becoming a full-blown "surveillance society," where advanced technology and crumbling regulation come together to create the kind of world that was previously the domain of dystopian science fiction. "The fact is, there are no longer any technical barriers to the Big Brother regime portrayed by George Orwell," they wrote. That was in

Apple now looking to rival ChatGPT with a new in-house ‘Answers’ team: report

According to the latest edition of Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter, Apple has a new plan up its sleeve to rival the competition in the AI search space. This is a major pivot from Apple’s previous stance, where the company said it didn’t want to develop a chatbot. Apple Intelligence has been off to a rocky start, to say the least. The abilities that have shipped, such as Genmoji and Notification Summaries, haven’t exactly been stellar. Apple has still failed to ship its all-new Siri, and has s

Topics: ai apple new search year

Impossibly Intricate Tattoos Found on 2,000-Year-Old ‘Ice Mummy’

For the first time, archeologists have gotten a detailed look at the intricate tattoos on a 2,000-year-old ice mummy, found buried deep within the permafrost-covered mountains of Siberia. These tattoos would be challenging to produce even today, the researchers say, suggesting that ancient tattoo artists possessed a considerable degree of skill. With help from modern tattoo artists, an international team of researchers examined the mummy’s tattoos in unprecedented detail and identified the too

The Crisis of Professional Skepticism

“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese.” Marley’s ghost visiting Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843), illustration by John Leech. (Public Domain Review) Friends, I am reproducing this article gratis. I have a purpose in doing so. I wish to earn nothing from the intellectual vacuity of pseudo-skepticism, even when, as here, I correct its excesses. This piece originally appeared February 27, 2023, at Medium. -M- ____________________________

Great Tits Sometimes Break Up, Bird Researchers Find

We’re talking about the birds. Great tits are small, yellowish songbirds common to the woodlands of Europe. Tit pairs are known to be monogamous during breeding season, splitting up after fully raising their offspring. But new research suggests that this “tit divorce” may be the product of complex social relationships formed during and after the breeding season. Published July 30 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the paper reports that not all tit pairs separate in late summer when breedi

I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

July 30, 2025 , Nicholas Khami I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself For over a year, I was bugged by a search quirk on Mintlify that caused race conditions and wonky search results. Here’s the fun irony: I was the founder of Trieve, the company that powered search for their 30,000+ documentation sites, yet their debounced search queries weren’t being aborted as you typed. Check out this delightful chaos: I had brought this up in our shared Slack before when I was just a

SonicWall firewall devices hit in surge of Akira ransomware attacks

SonicWall firewall devices have been increasingly targeted since late July in a surge of Akira ransomware attacks, potentially exploiting a previously unknown security vulnerability, according to cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf. Akira emerged in March 2023 and quickly claimed many victims worldwide across various industries. Over the last two years, Akira has added over 300 organizations to its dark web leak portal and claimed responsibility for multiple high-profile victims, including Nissan

Reddit Shifting Towards Search as Company Wants to Become a Search Engine

You may not need to add "Reddit" to your Google searches for much longer -- now, you can go straight to the source. In his Q2 letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the company will integrate its search function with Reddit Answers, which is currently available in the US and 11 other countries, "into a single search experience." Reddit will make the search box more visible on the app, bringing it "front and center." "Whether you're a new user opening the app for the first time

Fundamental Research Labs nabs $30M+ to build AI agents across verticals

Applied AI research company Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera) announced today that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Prosus with participation from Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison. The company has a curious structure as it is working on multiple AI applications in different fields. When it raised its seed funding, Fundametal Research Labs was developing bots that could play Minecraft with you. Today, the company has a games team, a prosumer team

AI-powered Cursor IDE vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks

A vulnerability that researchers call CurXecute is present in almost all versions of the AI-powered code editor Cursor, and can be exploited to execute remote code with developer privileges. The security issue is now identified as CVE-2025-54135 and can be leveraged by feeding the AI agent a malicious prompt to trigger attacker-control commands. The Cursor integrated development environment (IDE) relies on AI agents to help developers code faster and more efficiently, allowing them to connect

Belgium bans Internet Archive's ‘Open Library’

The Business Court in Brussels, Belgium, has issued an unprecedentedly broad site-blocking order that aims to restrict access to shadow libraries including Anna's Archive, Libgen, OceanofPDF, Z-Library, and the Internet Archive's Open Library. In addition to ISP blocks, the order also directs search engines, DNS resolvers, advertisers, domain name services, CDNs and hosting companies to take action. Traditional site-blocking measures that require local ISPs to block subscriber access to popular

Belgium Bans Internet Archive's 'Open Library' in Site Blocking Order

The Business Court in Brussels, Belgium, has issued an unprecedentedly broad site-blocking order that aims to restrict access to shadow libraries including Anna's Archive, Libgen, OceanofPDF, Z-Library, and the Internet Archive's Open Library. In addition to ISP blocks, the order also directs search engines, DNS resolvers, advertisers, domain name services, CDNs and hosting companies to take action. Traditional site-blocking measures that require local ISPs to block subscriber access to popular

Reddit plans to unify its search interface as it looks to become a search engine

With search today so full of AI slop and sites spamming SEO tricks, it’s not unusual for people to append “reddit” to their queries in hopes of finding useful answers to their questions. Google has tried to integrate results from Reddit in its search interface, and taking notice of the trend, Reddit has been experimenting with its own AI search as well. But the company has loftier ambitions: it wants to become the go-to search engine people use. Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, said as much during

SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3P Review: A Big Upgrade From Budget Gaming Headsets

Voice chatting in games is important; everyone who’s ever played a co-op shooter knows that. And as someone who plays dumb baby games like Fortnite constantly, I can attest. The thing about comms, or more specifically, in-game audio, is that it can be unstable, which is why investing in a gaming headset to minimize hiccups is key. On that front, I’ve been slacking; I’ve been using a terrible gaming headset that looks like a Fisher-Price version of a real one, which has gotten me by with a very b

Reddit should be a 'go-to search engine,' Steve Huffman says

Reddit is going to be leaning even harder into search in the coming months. The company has already been working on a plan to integrate its LLM-powered search into its main search feature, but CEO Steve Huffman said he wants users to think of the site as an actual search engine. During the company's latest earnings call, Huffman said search is one of the top priorities for Reddit. "We're concentrating our resources on the areas that will drive results for our most pressing needs, improving the