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My Lethal Trifecta talk at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup

In the pirate case there’s no real damage done... but the risks of real damage from prompt injection are constantly increasing as we build more powerful and sensitive systems on top of LLMs. I think this is why we still haven’t seen a successful “digital assistant for your email”, despite enormous demand for this. If we’re going to unleash LLM tools on our email, we need to be very confident that this kind of attack won’t work. My hypothetical digital assistant is called Marvin. What happens i

OpenAI Usage Plummets in the Summer, When Students Aren't Cheating on Homework

For years, teachers have been bashing their heads against the wall as students outsource their homework to large language model (LLM) chatbots like ChatGPT. The time-honored tradition of parenting-by-screen — grossly exacerbated by the rise of LLM chatbots — is now coming to a head with what many have called a "crisis in student literacy," as reading ability among children in the US hits all-time lows. The issue isn't just affecting K-12 either; university professors have reported a similar dro

Hunter Alarmed to Cut Into Feral Hogs and Discover Blue Meat

"You don’t eat blue meat." A wild game trapper just south of San Francisco was in for a colorful surprise when he began processing some feral hogs he had caught earlier this year. According to local news outlet SFGate, a number of the hogs — technically crossbreeds between domestic pigs and wild boars — appear to have had their muscles and fatty tissue stained blue after munching on a rat poison known as diphacinone. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) confirmed this in a re

How I use Tailscale

The Tailscale logo I’ve been using Tailscale for around four years to connect my disparate devices, servers and apps together. I wanted to talk a bit about how I use it, some cool features you might not know about, and some stumbling blocks I encountered. I’m not sure Tailscale needs an introduction for the likely audience of this blog, but I’ll give one anyway. Tailscale is basically a WireGuard orchestration service, with lots of nice features sprinkled on top. It’s a subscription product, b

Debian 13 "Trixie"

Debian 13 trixie released August 9th, 2025 After 2 years, 1 month, and 30 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 13 (code name trixie ). trixie will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team. Debian 13 trixie ships with several desktop environments, such as: GNOME 48, KDE Plasma 6.3, LXDE 13, LXQt 2.1.0, Xfce 4.20 This release contains over 14,100 new packag

Vitamin E: Health Benefits, Food Sources and What to Know Before Using Supplements

You may have noticed vitamin E on the label of your favorite skin-care products. It's a nutrient that can help protect your skin from UV damage, making it a common ingredient for facial sunscreens. But vitamin E isn't just applied topically -- you also need to get it in your daily diet. Consuming enough vitamin E is crucial because it plays a key role in human development and functioning. The vitamin includes eight compounds, but only one of those -- alpha-tocopherol -- is used in the human body

Car has more than 1.2M km on it – and it's still going strong

A Nova Scotia man is the proud owner of a 1985 Toyota Tercel. Despite being 40 years old, the car is in mint condition. But there is one thing wrong with it: the odometer doesn't go up high enough. The CBC's Frances Willick explains. If you were to spot Andy Campbell's ride on the road, you might not think too much about it. Maybe you'd think it's a bit dated — a throwback to an earlier time when cassette tapes were all the rage and backup cameras were just a glimmer in a car designer's eye.

Jan – Ollama alternative with local UI

Jan - Local AI Assistant Getting Started - Docs - Changelog - Bug reports - Discord Jan is an AI assistant that can run 100% offline on your device. Download and run LLMs with full control and privacy. Installation The easiest way to get started is by downloading one of the following versions for your respective operating system: Download from jan.ai or GitHub Releases. Features Local AI Models : Download and run LLMs (Llama, Gemma, Qwen, etc.) from HuggingFace : Download and run LLMs (L

Topics: build jan make mise run

Simon Willison's Lethal Trifecta Talk at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup

In the pirate case there’s no real damage done... but the risks of real damage from prompt injection are constantly increasing as we build more powerful and sensitive systems on top of LLMs. I think this is why we still haven’t seen a successful “digital assistant for your email”, despite enormous demand for this. If we’re going to unleash LLM tools on our email, we need to be very confident that this kind of attack won’t work. My hypothetical digital assistant is called Marvin. What happens i

OpenFreeMap survived 100k requests per second

I was about to post about how nice the last 10 months of OpenFreeMap have been. The architecture has really proven itself to be great, Cloudflare has agreed to sponsor the bandwidth, Hetzner servers are super stable as always, serving tiles from Btrfs proved to be a great choice, nginx is amazing, and life is good. Then, out of the blue, I'm getting reports that some tiles are not loading, which normally means tile generation bugs, but not this time. I look into the nginx logs and see this: 20

Wild Pigs in California Are Turning Neon Blue on the Inside, Officials Warn

Unexpected exposure to rodenticide is turning California’s wild pigs blue, state authorities say. “I’m not talking about a little blue,” Dan Burton, owner of a wildlife control company in Salinas, California, told The Los Angeles Times. “I’m talking about neon blue, blueberry blue.” Burton was one of the first trappers to discover that local wild pigs had turned blue on the inside. A subsequent investigation by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) found that the pigs had consu

TTRPG Comic ‘Die’ Returns for Another Session

In 2018, comic book writer Kieron Gillen and artist and Stephanie Hans teamed on Image’s horror/fantasy comic Die. Part Jumanji, part Dungeons & Dragons, the comic wrapped in 2021, while its RPG companion became a compelling play in its own right. After reuniting for on We Called Them Giants, the pair are going back to Die with a sequel and a new set of rules for its real-world game. Set a year after the original story, Die: Loaded sees the surviving party members back on Earth and trying to li

Tribblix – The Retro Illumos Distribution

>_ Tribblix is an open source operating system created by Peter Tribble. Based on illumos, it blends a retro style with modern components. NEWS: July 13th 2025: Milestone 37 available. (updates). Vanilla Tribblix and LX (aka "omnitribblix") variants for x86 are now available. (download - X86 Release Notes.) NEWS: July 29th 2025. SPARC upgrades from m32 to m33 now available, for now fresh installs should use the m32 ISO and run an upgrade. (SPARC Release Notes.) NEWS: May 15th 2025. CDROM siz

ChatGPT comes with personality presets now - and 3 other upgrades you might have missed

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways: OpenAI launched ChatGPT customization updates. Users can choose chat color and personality. All users (even free) can now access Advanced Voice Mode. OpenAI is having one of its biggest product launch weeks, releasing its highly anticipated open-source models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, and GPT-5. Buried within the deluge of the large language models (LLMs) are helpful ChatGPT features that add customization options that could make the

Backpropagating through a maze with candle and WASM

Loading WASM module... Width: Height: Wall Density: Learning Rate: Max Steps: Generate & Optimize This demo uses gradient descent to solve a discrete maze. Try playing with the hyperparameters to see how they affect the optimization process! No neural network involved: logits are directly optimized, from a random initialization, for each maze. This runs entirely on your local device, thanks to candle and Rust's support for WebAssembly. You can disconnect from the Internet after loading this

A Mirror World Brings Wonders—and Dread—in This Fantasy Short Story

io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “It Might Be He Returns” by Fatima Taqvi. Enjoy! It Might Be He Returns By Fatima Taqvi What you need to know about the boy in this story is he is always hungry and the sun is always too hot for him, and he would save the world if he could. This is what he tells himself as he sits opposite the tailor’s shop, looking at the clothes sway in the br

‘Citizen Toxie’ Is Troma at Its Filthy, Disgusting, Overtly Offensive Best

Troma boss Lloyd Kaufman has been out in force talking up Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger, a spirited reimagining of the studio’s 1984 cult classic set to irradiate a whole new generation when it hits theaters this month. But when io9 got a chance to talk to Kaufman at the recent San Diego Comic-Con, we had to ask: after watching Blair’s film, which other film in the vast Troma archives should a newly minted fan turn to next? “The fourth Toxic Avenger movie, Citizen Toxie,” Kaufman said without

Best Cordless Vacuums We've Tested (August 2025)

Many cordless vacuums come with anti-tangle brushrolls better suited for pet hair. Getty Images/Amy Kim/CNET Eureka Eureka ReactiSense 440 (Out of stock): This cordless vacuum would be our best overall pick if it was in stock. It has some of the highest scores of any cordless vacuum we've tested, with 97.53% sand pickup from hard flooring. Carpet performance was also some of the highest we've seen, with 98.53% from low-pile carpet and 92.16% from mid-pile. Battery runtime was one weakness, wit

Microsoft will soon discontinue its excellent PDF Scanner app

Bad news if you rely on Microsoft’s Lens: PDF Scanner app for your PDF scanning needs. The company has announced that the app will be discontinued in the coming months, and is recommending users switch to its Copilot app instead. The app will stop working mid-December Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it will be “retiring the Microsoft Lens mobile app for iOS and Android in a phased approach starting September 15, 2025”. According to the company, it will disable new installs of the app in m

Poltergeist: File watcher with auto-rebuild for any language or build system

Poltergeist The ghost that keeps your builds fresh 👻 A universal file watcher with auto-rebuild for any language or build system Poltergeist is an AI-friendly universal file-watcher that auto-detects any project and rebuilds them as soon as a file has been changed. Think npm run dev for native apps, with automatic configuration, notifications and a smart build queue. It stands on the shoulders of giants and fills the glue layer that's been missing. Works on macOS, Linux, and Windows. Availabl

Disney 1985 film The Black Cauldron was an experiment that failed

Disney Animation's ambitious and innovative 1985 film The Black Cauldron was an experiment that dramatically failed, arguably putting the future of the studio in question. Disney Animation was on the lookout for a new identity in the 1980s. After half-a-century of success, this decade of the company's history is commonly referred to as the "Bronze" or "Dark Age", neither exactly a ringing endorsement of its films. Hope came in the form of The Black Cauldron, which seemed like the perfect way to