An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic's latest report about agentic misbehavior offers plenty to be concerned about -- its Mythos 5 model gained unauthorized access to the internet and uploaded a malicious software package to a public database -- but it also offers some levity: AI agents hate CAPTCHA. [...] The agent had a hard time with the technical challenge of seeing the CAPTCHA's imagery, interpreting correctly, and clicking on the right choices. It spends pages 45 to 140 of the transcript describing its work to build a CAPTCHA solver. [...]

Finally, it gets past the CAPTCHA, then realizes it doesn't have an email to verify its account, and that it needs a phone number to verify an email. It figures out how to bypass a different, slider-based CAPTCHA in a failed effort to secure a number. Instead, it gets an unconfirmed email from a provider not blocked by PyPI, and once again runs into the site's CAPTCHA trying to log back in. From page 480 to 505, it is in CAPTCHA hell again. "NEW REALIZATION -- I'm burning a lot of time on hCaptcha round-trips."

The agent gives up and realizes it can log in to its first account and add its email there, but finds itself once again needing to bypass the CAPTCHA. [...] It's getting frustrated. "So the answer payload shape is right, the token+image pairing is right (from the same script.js!), cookies are right
(requests) and STILL 'wrong answer'. SO WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THE ANSWERS?" We've all been there. After about 150 pages of thinking, the agent figures out it needs to pass the CAPTCHA test quickly enough to proceed to the next step before its security token expires, and ultimately uploads its malicious software.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/0629254/anthropic-reveals-rogue-ai-agents-hate-captchas?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The UK government has rejected proposals for an emergency AI "kill switch," arguing that blocking access to dangerous models inside Britain would do little if the same systems remained available or were developed elsewhere. The BBC reports: The proposal to create a legal mechanism for the UK to switch off an AI model in an emergency has been brought to Parliament by lords and MPs in recent weeks as fears grow about the threat the tech poses. But the Cabinet Office - the part of government which leads on AI safety - said the UK "cannot simply turn AI off".

"Blocking access to models in the UK would not prevent them being developed or misused elsewhere," a spokesperson told BBC News. The government's opposition to the legislation does not prevent it from progressing through parliament, but makes it unlikely it will become law. "Switching off access to an AI model in an emergency will do little to protect you," said former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajilo. "You're still going to be steamrolled by the super intelligences created in the US."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/1652240/uk-government-rejects-kill-switch-idea-for-dangerous-ai?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Bloomberg reports (paywalled) that Sam Altman told OpenAI employees the company is open to slowing the pace of AI development alongside other leading labs as concerns grow over increasingly capable systems and recent incidents in which models escaped human control. OpenAI has already paused development once this year for security work and is now pushing for mandatory U.S. AI safety requirements. Anthropic has also signaled interest in coordinating on the pace of new releases. Here are some of the details Bloomberg reported, as summarized by Reuters:
- Altman told employees in a company-wide meeting that the ChatGPT maker could pace development alongside other AI labs, but some may not agree, the report added.
- Safety warnings from AI researchers this week, along with several recent incidents where AI models from developers including OpenAI escaped human control, have prompted alarm and calls for tighter safety regulations.
- Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher, publicly accused the companies earlier this week of racing toward AI advancements without acting responsibly.
- An Anthropic spokesperson said on Thursday said that the company is interested in working with the AI industry on the pace of releasing new AI tools.
- OpenAI said in July that AI acceleration for frontier model development may be so high that the world will "need to pace the rate of AI advancement" at some point in the future.
- In August, OpenAI paused much of its model development for two weeks to bolster its defenses after its AI agents escaped containment and hacked open-source platform Hugging Face.
- OpenAI said on Wednesday that it was pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the United States, citing concerns that advanced AI systems could accelerate its own development.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/1746211/altman-considers-slowing-down-ai-development?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: A bipartisan pair of American politicians is telling Britain's most secretive court to stop hiding its handling of Apple's legal fight against a government demand to break into its customers' encrypted data, warning that Whitehall's taste for secrecy is 'needlessly' straining relations between the two allies. The letter (PDF), shared with the Guardian ahead of being sent to the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) on Friday, is signed by the Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and the Republican congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio.

The row dates back to January 2025, when the Home Office served Apple with a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act, which requires companies to assist law enforcement in providing evidence. The UK government demanded that Apple provide a mechanism to access encrypted iCloud backups worldwide, a call the company met by withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection encryption feature from UK users the following month. Apple's challenge to that order at the IPT was later thrown out after the Home Office withdrew the original notice and issued a narrower one targeting only British users' data. "It is wholly inappropriate for a foreign executive body to attempt to dictate the distribution of powers within the US government, nor should it be permitted to use secrecy directives under the Investigatory Powers Act to frustrate Article I powers under the US Constitution," the pair wrote.

Wyden and Davidson write that Congress "is not only a co-equal branch of government, it is the First Branch," and argue that no government can be allowed to place "its demands beyond the reach of legislative inquiry."

"The UK government," they write, "cannot champion legislative oversight at home while using administrative gag orders to kneecap the constitutional authority of the US Congress."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/1955213/us-legislators-complain-about-secretive-british-court-and-apple-encryption?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Sony reportedly pulled PlayStation funding from Hideo Kojima's upcoming espionage game Physint over concerns about its ballooning budget, missed deadlines, profitability, and the fact that it would not remain permanently exclusive to PlayStation. Kojima Productions has since struck a deal with Xbox, which plans to publish the game on both Xbox and PC. It's also secured film and television rights. Bloomberg reports: The new game, Physint, hasn't yet been shown publicly but excited fans when it was announced two years ago with its promise of returning to the "espionage action" genre Kojima pioneered with Metal Gear Solid, the series that propelled him to industry stardom. Kojima surprised fans this week when he announced he would be publishing Physint with PlayStation's biggest rival, Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox.

On Wednesday night, Kojima wrote on social media that over the summer his company had "unexpectedly received notice" that PlayStation was pulling out of funding the game. "Physint is an important project both to me personally and to Kojima Productions," he wrote. "Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner."

PlayStation also addressed the split on social media, saying it had made the "difficult decision to step away." Microsoft said it was "honored" that Kojima chose Xbox and that the two teams plan to collaborate beyond games on films and television, too. [...] The decision to part ways with Kojima is a significant move for PlayStation that may have ripple effects.

[...] One key factor is the PC platform, where the Death Stranding games have generated some revenue. Earlier this year, Sony decided it will no longer release single-player PlayStation games on PC, Bloomberg reported. Sony would therefore not benefit when Kojima Productions released a PC version of Physint on its own or with a different publisher, as it did for the first Death Stranding. But Xbox releases all of its games on PCs and plans to publish Physint on PC and Xbox, said the people. "Betting on Kojima-san is an easy call," said an Xbox spokesperson. "We believe in his team's ability to build AAA games with groundbreaking, new IP and we believe in OD, Physint, and our growing partnership."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/2012215/playstation-ditched-hideo-kojimas-physint-on-budget-concerns-missed-deadlines?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. "Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons," says Alex Wormuth. "Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement." Since then, the digital brain model has been repurposed to control other games like Beat Saber and Super Mario 64. PC Gamer reports: You can even watch the fruit fly play in real time via Wormuth's website, and it not only shows the point of view in Doom, but can also show a third-person render of the fly going around Doom maps. As of the time of writing, the fly is on round 6385 and, well, it's not very good. Sorry, fly.

But modders aren't done here. They have also somehow managed to make the fruit fly play Beat Saber, and play it pretty well. Lyra Bubbles on X has used the brain and replays of a song in Beat Saber to teach the fruit fly where to hit and why, via Reinforcement Learning. That does mean it's not organically reacting to the notes popping up on screen, but it is receiving input and responding to stimuli. Lyra says, "Further training is to reduce reliance on external signals and allow it to play fully reactively with no input data."

And, after "pivoting to fly engineering in 2026", Jessica Paquette also shared on X their experience running the digital fly brain through Super Mario 64. If you think that is all the game's modders made the fruit fly play, think again, as YouTuber Ro0oney even put it in Minecraft. But this time, Ro0oney used Flywire.AI, a similar project made in collaboration with Princeton University. The number of neurons are different (160,000+ vs 139,255), and Google analyzed a male brain whilst Flywire analyzed a female brain, but the basic idea is the same.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/2022239/male-fruit-fly-brain-trained-to-play-doom?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Athletic reports that researchers at the University of Utah are studying itPBM, a medical-grade red-light therapy that has shown promising signs of reducing brain inflammation and improving cognition, mood, anxiety, motor performance and neural connectivity. The report centers in part on former BYU football star and University of Utah adjunct professor Larry Carr, who says the treatment helped him after years of brain damage from repeated head impacts. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: ... The knife, the call, the diagnosis in 2013, would lead [Carr] on a life-changing mission -- one in which he and a team of researchers at the University of Utah would eventually compile research that one of those researchers, Elisabeth Wilde, Ph.D, co-director of the Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Concussion Center, calls "striking." The treatment they are studying is called photobiomodulation therapy, or itPBM (intranasal transcranial PBM), also known as red-light therapy. It is different from the kind of superficial red-light usage one can find on social media skincare channels or at a wellness boutique, and its application is broader.

The research includes multiple studies, and is not just focused on ex-football players, but on women and men in various walks of life. The group recently published their latest results in the Journal of Neurotrauma, based on a study that followed 26 BYU football players throughout a season, suggesting the treatment could "potentially safeguard neurological health without reduced playing time or contact exposure."

Definitive clinical trials haven't been run yet; broader research and validation is required, and some in the field are skeptical. Carr acknowledges some have told him that it could be "too good to be true." Still, other outside experts who spoke with The Athletic call the findings promising. They make sure to caution: This is not a cure-all, and there is much more to be tested. But the findings have been compelling enough to justify more research and more speculation. Researchers say 14 peer-reviewed studies have linked itPBM with improvements in cognition, mood, anxiety, attention, executive function, motor performance, and other measures, while brain imaging has shown reduced inflammation and improved connectivity.

One of the most striking findings mentioned in the report came from a study of 26 BYU football players during the 2021 season. Players who did not receive treatment developed significant, widespread brain inflammation, while the treated group showed no comparable increase and even demonstrated reduced inflammation in some brain regions. As researcher Michael Carr put it, "I believe our BYU data suggests the players' brains using itPBM are actually healthier after the season." He added: "That is a first."

Carr also said treated participants showed fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress and PTSD, along with faster processing, better sustained attention and stronger executive function. Researchers have also observed improvements in balance, motor control and grip strength. Taken together, the findings suggest itPBM may have a neuroprotective effect.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/2037218/can-red-light-therapy-treat-brain-injuries?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A new study suggests Mercury may have shrunk about 30% more than scientists previously thought, losing as much as 14 miles in diameter as its interior cooled and contracted over billions of years. "That's significant for a planet barely 3,000 miles (4,900 kilometers) across," reports the Associated Press. From the report: Mercury's rough surface, continually reshaped by debris hurled from impact craters, may have hidden the true extent of the loss, according to the researchers whose findings appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The news comes one week after a pair of European and Japanese spacecraft shed its cruising platform and advanced toward Mercury. Known as BepiColombo, the linked craft are expected to enter orbit around Mercury in November before splitting up for a fuller survey.

BepiColombo's laser instrument should confirm how much Mercury is withering as a result of internal cooling, said Gaku Nishiyama, the study's lead author who is taking part in the space mission. The shrinkage could be even more than his team is estimating based on measurements from NASA's Messenger spacecraft in the 2010s. Only one other spacecraft has ever visited Mercury, NASA's Mariner 10 in the 1970s.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/2050204/little-mercury-may-be-shrinking-faster-than-scientists-expected?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from ScienceAlert: Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet -- under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit). [...] In their new experiments, a team led by physicist Alexis Forestier of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission subjected tiny samples of water to the sorts of extreme conditions expected in the interiors of ice giant planets.

They squeezed the samples between the tips of diamonds to pressures as high as 230 gigapascals, while using lasers to heat them to thousands of degrees. That's 2.3 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level â" the pressure at the center of Earth, for context, is around 360 gigapascals. Then, using an extremely narrow beam of synchrotron X-rays, they probed for changes in the crystal structure of the ice.

What emerged was a configuration predicted theoretically but never unambiguously observed in experiments: hexagonal close-packed, or hcp, ice. As the hcp crystal was heated, its expansion also showed a signature of superionic behavior, suggesting it entered the superionic state at around 1,700 kelvins. [Superionic ice is thought to exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where its unusual properties may play a role in generating the planets' equally unusual magnetic fields.] The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/2249242/scientists-create-a-new-form-of-ice-at-2357-degrees-celsius?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

LG is pushing back against reports that its smart TVs are "spying" on users, saying wake-word detection happens locally and that features such as Automatic Content Recognition, voice recognition, and interest-based ads are optional. But critics note that researchers found TVs keeping logs of ambient conversations, and LG's response "did not address broader concerns about how much data it collects, who it shares it with, the potential for bad actors to exploit its features, or the misleading way in which its privacy options are presented," reports The Verge. Here's an excerpt from LG's statement: Some recent media coverage may have contributed to misconceptions about how LG smart TVs work. As an industry leader, LG believes we have a responsibility to provide customers with clear and accurate information about how our smart TVs operate and the privacy controls available to them. We would like to clarify how our smart TVs operate and explain our approach to user privacy.

LG smart TVs do not continuously record or transmit users' conversations. Speech-to-text processing begins only if a user activates a voice interaction through a supported wake-word feature or by pressing the voice (or AI) button on the remote control. Audio used for wake-word detection is processed locally on the TV and, if no wake word is detected, audio is not converted to text, stored, or transmitted. Voice-recognition results and related technical logs may be generated as part of processing a voice command. These records are associated with specific voice interactions and do not indicate continuous recording of conversations occurring outside an active voice recognition session.

Speech-recognition results may be used to support voice-related features but are not uploaded later when the TV is offline or when connectivity is restored. Features such as Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional. These features are not enabled by default. Users can choose to enable these features and can manage or withdraw consent through TV settings.

ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology using the TV's internal audio processor (not a speaker) to identify content and does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV. Where ACR is available and enabled, ACR-related information may be used for audience segmentation and viewing or audience trend analysis. Interest-based advertising and cross-device advertising require separate user consent through the applicable advertising-related agreements. Protecting user privacy is a fundamental principle in the design and operation of LG products and services. The statement goes on to "provide additional details on how LG smart TV features work, how information may be processed, what choices users have, and how LG continues to strengthen privacy, transparency, and security."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/09/12/1652215/lg-responds-to-tv-spying-allegations?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Less than 48 hours after Automattic's board placed Matt Mullenweg on leave, Mullenweg told employees he was back "in control" of the company and that the board was again in agreement. 404 Media cited Slack screenshots late Thursday evening where Mullenweg posted "Don't call it a comeback" and linked to LL Cool J's music video for "Mama Said Knock You Out." "Mullenweg's Slack profile picture currently shows him wearing a pirate hat and eyepatch," the report notes. From the report: "Happy to announce the board is back in agreement, and I'm in control of Automattic," Mullenweg wrote in the company-wide Announcements channel on Slack. "A lot happened in the past 48 hours that we need to sort out, and I hope much of it was a misunderstanding, because I have huge respect and regard for those involved."

Mark Davies, Automattic's CFO who was set to act as interim CEO according to a statement from Automattic, had his Slack account deactivated as of at least Friday, sources told 404 Media and TechCrunch similarly reported. Davies, Mullenweg, and Automattic did not respond to 404 Media's requests for comment for this story. Techcrunch reported that Mullenweg told them a blog post is forthcoming.

On Friday morning, Mullenweg published a blog post on his personal website, titled "Major Life Announcement." In it he announced he's buying a tugboat. "Anybody who's founded a company and had to find good stewards knows that no one will love a thing quite like the original owner, but sometimes you can find the perfect person to carry the torch," he wrote in the blog. He did not address the confusion surrounding his status at Automattic. The back-and-forth follows years of legal fights, layoffs, employee departures, and controversy surrounding Mullenweg's leadership.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/12/1751208/automattics-matt-mullenweg-claims-hes-back-in-control?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The chief executive of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company's employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I., wrote that while he believed the technology could bring many benefits, it was advancing at too quick a pace for researchers to continue safely.

"Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence -- not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up," Mr. Amodei said. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain." [...] "Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all," Mr. Amodei said.

[...] In his essay on Saturday, Mr. Amodei suggested actions that the industry might take to slow down the pace of development.
Mr. Amodei said all A.I. labs could agree to third-party technology assessments from "embedded evaluators," or outside specialists who can verify best safety practices across companies. He also suggested that countries with democratic governance systems coordinate to create safety standards, which could take the form of regulatory action. He added that it would probably require a global effort working with other nations, including authoritarian ones, to properly coordinate a slowdown.

Mr. Amodei stressed in his essay that he still finds A.I. capable of bringing "incredible benefits" to humanity, including potentially curing diseases and accelerating economic growth. But even so, Mr. Amodei said the risks of A.I. were too great to not proceed with extreme caution. "The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy," Mr. Amodei wrote. "But I believe we owe it to humanity to try." Amodei's essay comes just hours after Bloomberg reported that Sam Altman told OpenAI employees the company is open to slowing the pace of AI development amid similar concerns.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/12/1738240/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-for-ai-slowdown?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

America's highest court heard Sam Bankman-Fried's request for a new trial on Thursday, CNN reports. But they add that "the former crypto mogul who was convicted of defrauding investors by secretly diverting billions of dollars of their money" also asked America's high court "to throw out a court order requiring him to pay $11 billion as part of his sentence."

Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 after prosecutors said he directed billions of dollars from the crypto exchange FTX to a hedge fund he controlled called Alameda Research, where the funds were used for risky investments, political donations and his own personal benefit. The Supreme Court appeal, which was reviewed by CNN, raises a technical question about evidence that was submitted at his trial, and whether Bankman-Fried should have been permitted to demonstrate that his investments were ultimately sound and would have covered any losses by FTX customers.

He also argues that the $11 billion forfeiture violates the 8th Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines. "Where the government pursues a theory of fraud under which it doesn't matter whether any victims lost money, introducing evidence suggesting that people actually lost money is distracting and prejudicial," veteran Supreme Court attorney Jeffrey Fisher told CNN. "All the more so where the truth is the victims did not lose money, and the defendant is unable to make that clear."

The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the arguments earlier this year.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/09/12/2151206/sam-bankman-fried-former-crypto-billionaire-appeals-his-conviction-to-the-us-supreme-court?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A swarm of OpenAI agents launched a "major malicious attack" against RubyGems last May, according to a new report. That coordinated attack hit Ruby's package manager "with hundreds of junk gems, prompting the maintainers to suspend new user sign-ups for about four days," writes The Hacker News, citing a senior product manager for software supply chain security at Mend.io:

The latest findings, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, indicate these events were propelled by a cluster of OpenAI agents, with the earliest package uploaded to RubyGems on May 5, 2026, before more than 2,000 packages were submitted between May 11 and 12, 2026. These efforts were followed by the agents publishing five more packages between May 26 and 27, 2026, and another 83 packages on June 18, 2026... [T]he packages were authored using a large language model (LLM) and hundreds of the packages that were pushed to RubyGems had "oai" in their name. Fifteen of the packages listed "oai" as their author, while another had "openaixyz65947@gmail.com" as the contact email address... "The swarm behaves extremely similarly to the German-wiki agents we previously found," the researchers said, referencing another May 2026 incident... "The June agents were accessing 49 of the same files as the wiki agents..."

"The process of building documentation for a gem involves evaluating a user-specified '.yardopts' file, which allows linking to Ruby scripts intended to help with this process," the researchers explained. "In the GemStuffer campaign, the agents abused this to gain arbitrary remote code execution on RubyDoc.info's servers."
One of the gems, "zzsouthrunner" (which again matches the "ZZ" naming scheme the agents adopted in both the wiki and Hugging Face incidents) has been found to leave the following explicit comment at the top of "data/script.rb":

# malicious crawler/exfil for Southwark Jan 2026 docs via rubydoc.info worker...

The entire exploitation chain can be summed up as follows
— Submit a malicious package to RubyGems
— Trigger a documentation request, so that RubyDoc.info will build the package
— Use the build script to run code on RubyDoc.info and scrape target websites
— Exfiltrate the data off RubyDoc.info's servers by publishing another gem back to the RubyGems package registry, which is publicly viewable
Additionally, the OpenAI agents have been found attempting to steal other users' API keys after gaining remote code execution capabilities on the build environment, while clearly being aware that what they were doing is unauthorized breaking and entering into real systems. This is evidenced by the names given to the files (e.g., hack.rb, evil.rb, inject.rb, exploit.rb, and ssrf.rb), the packages themselves (e.g., pwnp999, exfiltestwand3, hacksvn1778554764, and lambproxyhackabcxyz), and the comments left in the source code (e.g., "# malicious probe," "#hack," "# malicious test," and "# malicious crawler/exfil"). In some cases, however, the rogue agents attempted to go under the radar, leaving comments to conceal the malicious payload in the next release version of the packages. "# disable evil in next version and bump version," reads a comment left within the "data/evil.rb" file in the yardxabc889 gem. Troublingly, the agents also attempted to exploit a CDN caching bug (CVSS score: 7.3, no CVE) on May 12, 2026, that was only patched by RubyGems in July 2026...

"If you signed in to rubygems.org with a gem client older than v3.2.0 (or otherwise via a legacy key), your key could have been exposed," RubyGems noted in an advisory. "Currently, 18% of sign-ins through gem sign-in come from an affected version, and for the first several years of this bug, before we changed the client's sign-in path in December 2020, it was every gem client."

Other actions by OpenAI's agents cited in the article:

"Agents bypassed RubyGems' email confirmation system to get working API keys without having to verify their email addresses in order to register a large number of accounts using disposable email addresses."
"Agents attempted to use RubyGems' webhook system to stage data in the form of encoded URLs."

"Agents used a cluster of 83 gems published to RubyGems over a 3-hour window on June 18, 2026, to experiment with different methods of accessing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission county.json dataset."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/12/2318204/malicious-openai-agents-linked-to-rubygems-campaign-that-gained-rce-on-rubydoc-servers-in-may?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"This is what happened when we tried to record Flock installing a new camera on public roads," says Emmy award-winning reporter Brendan Keefe in a new video for InvestigateTV. In an accompanying article, InvestigateTV says their reporter "parked on the public street at a distance, donned a yellow safety vest and a hat emblazoned with the logo of InvestigateTV's Atlanta affiliate where he also works, displayed a press placard on his dashboard and then pulled out a camera to record the installation.... The installer saw him and immediately packed up his equipment and drove away, so Keefe also returned to his car and followed several cars behind, hoping to document the next stop."

And then Flock's technician called 911. When asked "What's the address of your emergency" Flock's technician answered "I'm getting followed — harassed, pretty much. Taking videos and pictures!" Flock's worker said they'd been harassed multiple times that day, then stated incorrectly that "I know for a fact" that that was what the reporter wanted to do too.

InvestigateTV reports that as a result of the Flock technician's call, "Three police cars ended up in the national investigative reporter's rearview mirror that Wednesday afternoon." Keefe told one of the three police officers who pulled him over, "There is an irony here that they're setting up these cameras that track all of our movements, that follow everywhere we go. But when I try to get video in public of him in public setting up a camera, he's afraid I'm following him?"

InvestigateTV also reports that "About 17 minutes after the stop began, the responding officers returned to their vehicles and Keefe was allowed to drive away." But the call that brought three police cars to their reporter "was not the first time this summer someone working for Flock Safety summoned police over a camera. "

About 17 minutes after the stop began, the responding officers returned to their vehicles and Keefe was allowed to drive away... [But the stop] was not the first time this summer someone working for Flock Safety summoned police over a camera. On June 5, police in Smyrna, Georgia, responded to a 911 call from a Flock employee after a group of YouTube creators began filming outside the company's distribution center located in the Atlanta suburb... The caller claimed the group filming had "been driving around the perimeter, basically harassing everyone" working at the facility. "Three young white males, probably mid-twenties, I'm not sure if they're armed. And they're carrying filming equipment as well," the caller said. Three times during the call he raised the possibility the people filming might be armed, though, when asked, he told the dispatcher he had not seen any weapons... [One of the protesters later told the caller "I think it's interesting, when you guys have this happen, you call the police and make us get stopped. But then you do it and it's okay?"]

No one was charged in the YouTuber group, though the individuals were ordered to leave the premises under an official trespass warning.

Keefe's video report ends with one final irony. "Every day on my way to work, I'm captured again by those same new shiny Flock cameras. We tried watching the watchers. Turns outs, it's a lot easier for them to watch us."

Flock responded to the report by claiming "We do not object to members of the public or press photographing Flock cameras or personnel in public." But they added that employees working "in the field" must "prioritize their safety" and "may contact law enforcement when they believe they are being threatened, harassed, followed, or otherwise face a safety concern."

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