2025-06-04 12:45:00
The CEO of Indian grocery ordering app KiranaPro has claimed an attacker deleted its GitHub and AWS resources in a targeted and deliberate attack and vowed to name the perpetrator. From a report: KiranaPro lets users shop at "Kiranas," the Indian equivalent of convenience stores, which mostly stock basic foodstuffs. Users of the app place an order, which KiranaPro sends to nearby Kiranas who bid to win the sale. The winner arranges delivery of the goods. The elapsed time from ordering to delivery seldom tops 20 minutes. KiranaPro CEO Deepak Ravindran claims the app "powers the livelihoods of thousands of Kirana store owners" and handles 2,000-plus orders each day. Ravindran also claims the app was destroyed by someone who holds a grudge. "Our startup @Kirana_Pro was deliberately hacked -- entire GitHub repo & AWS data wiped. Logs suggest malicious insider action," he wrote on June 3rd. The attack happened last week, and the app has been inoperable since.
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2025-06-04 11:30:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: In a development straight out of science fiction, Australian startup Cortical Labs has released what it calls the world's first code-deployable biological computer. The CL1, which debuted in March, fuses human brain cells on a silicon chip to process information via sub-millisecond electrical feedback loops. Designed as a tool for neuroscience and biotech research, the CL1 offers a new way to study how brain cells process and react to stimuli. Unlike conventional silicon-based systems, the hybrid platform uses live human neurons capable of adapting, learning, and responding to external inputs in real time. "On one view, [the CL1] could be regarded as the first commercially available biomimetic computer, the ultimate in neuromorphic computing that uses real neurons," says theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston of University College London. "However, the real gift of this technology is not to computer science. Rather, it's an enabling technology that allows scientists to perform experiments on a little synthetic brain." The first 115 units will begin shipping this summer at $35,000 each, or $20,000 when purchased in 30-unit server racks. Cortical Labs also offers a cloud-based "wetware-as-a-service" at $300 weekly per unit, unlocking remote access to its in-house cell cultures. Each CL1 contains 800,000 lab-grown human neurons, reprogrammed from the skin or blood samples of real adult donors. The cells remain viable for up to six months, fed by a life-support system that supplies nutrients, controls temperature, filters waste, and maintains fluid balance. Meanwhile, the neurons are firing and interpreting signals, adapting from each interaction. The CL1's compact energy and hardware footprint could make it attractive for extended experiments. A rack of CL1 units consumes 850-1,000 watts, notably lower than the tens of kilowatts required by a data center setup running AI workloads. "Brain cells generate small electrical pulses to communicate to a broader network," says Cortical Labs Chief Scientific Officer Brett Kagan. "We can do something similar by inputting small electrical pulses representing bits of information, and then reading their responses. The CL1 does this in real time using simple code abstracted through multiple interacting layers of firmware and hardware. Sub-millisecond loops read information, act on it, and write new information into the cell culture." The company sees CL1 as foundational for testing neuropsychiatric treatments, leveraging living cells to explore genetic and functional differences. "It allows people to study the effects of stimulation, drugs and synthetic lesions on how neuronal circuits learn and respond in a closed-loop setup, when the neuronal network is in reciprocal exchange with some simulated world," says theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston of University College London. "In short, experimentalists now have at hand a little 'brain in a vat,' something philosophers have been dreaming about for decades."
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2025-06-04 09:00:00
Ars Technica's Benj Edwards reports: In 1979, Atari released the Atari 400 and 800, groundbreaking home computers that included custom graphics and sound chips, four joystick ports, and the ability to run the most advanced home video games of their era. These machines, which retailed for $549 and $999, respectively, represented a leap in consumer-friendly personal computing, with their modular design and serial I/O bus that presaged USB. Now, 46 years later, a hobbyist has shrunk down the system hardware to a size that would have seemed like science fiction in the 1970s. Polish engineer Piotr "Osa" Ostapowicz recently unveiled "Atarino," which may be the world's smallest 8-bit Atari computer re-creation, according to retro computing site Atariteca. The entire system -- processor, graphics chips, sound hardware, and memory controllers -- fits on a module measuring just 2x1.5 centimeters (about 0.79x0.59 inches), which is roughly the size of a postage stamp. Ostapowicz's creation reimplements the classic Atari XL/XE architecture using modern FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technology. Unlike software emulators that simulate old hardware (and modern recreations that run them, like the Atari 400 Mini console) on a complete computer system of another architecture, Atarino reproduces the original Atari components faithfully at the logic level, allowing it to run vintage software while maintaining compatibility with original peripherals. [...] The project, which began over a decade ago and was first publicly demonstrated in December 2023, includes a 6502C processor, ANTIC and GTIA graphics chips, POKEY sound chip, and memory controllers onto a single Lattice UP5K FPGA chip. Despite its tiny size, the system can run at clock speeds up to 31 MHz -- far faster than the original hardware's 1.79 MHz. While the Atarino can run vintage software and work with the original peripherals, it brings several key improvements -- including a modernized 6502 core with added instructions, a more efficient memory architecture, enhanced video output via VGA and HDMI, extended graphics modes, refined sound chip emulation, modular hardware design, support for modern connectivity like Wi-Fi and Ethernet, and compatibility with contemporary development tools like CC65 and Visual Studio Code. Ostapowicz "plans to release complete kits with documentation, inviting the retrocomputing community to experiment with the hardware," adds Edwards.
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2025-06-04 08:20:00
According to Automotive News (paywalled), the $17,190 base-model Nissan Versa S -- the last U.S.-market production car with a five-speed manual -- is ending production. A Nissan spokesperson told Auto News that the company is "trimming the fat" to focus on models with the strongest business performance -- and the manual Versa S didn't make the cut. The Drive reports: Looks like Nissan is trying to create as much savings as possible to handle the 25% tariff on cars imported from Mexico. [...] When you go to Nissan's site and check out the Versa, the first thing you see under its name is "Get the Nissan you want free from new tariffs." So if Nissan is going to eat the additional tariff cost for customers, it can't be manufacturing cars that won't sell well. And manuals reportedly only accounted for 5% of Versa sales in 2024. As the manual Versa dies, it brings the five-speed manual transmission down with it. What was once a common drivetrain configuration is now a memory -- when the last stick-shift Versa leaves a Nissan lot, there won't be any new five-speed manual vehicles for sale in the United States. Only six-speed and a few seven-speed manuals will remain. [...] Killing the manual Versa won't be a big sales hit, since barely any customers wanted it, but it will end Nissan's ability to market a sub-$18,000 car.
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2025-06-04 07:40:00
Luca Guadagnino is in talks to direct Artificial, a dramatization of Sam Altman's dramatic firing and rehiring at OpenAI in 2023. The Amazon-MGM film is rumored to star Andrew Garfield, 'A Complete Unknown' scene-stealer Monica Barbaro, and 'Anora' actor Yura Borisov as lead roles in the story. From the Hollywood Reporter: Heyday Films' David Heyman and Jeffrey Clifford are producing the feature that is being put together at lightning speed at Amazon MGM Studios. Simon Rich wrote the script and will also produce, with Jennifer Fox also in talks to produce. How fast is this moving? Sources say Amazon is looking to get production going this summer, with an eye to shoot in San Francisco and Italy. Altman co-founded OpenAI, but in the fall of 2023, after mounting safety concerns regarding AI, and reports of abusive behavior, was ousted as the head of the company by his board. Five days later, after a revolt, he was reinstated. Sources say that if all goes as planned, Garfield would play Altman, Barbaro would play chief technology office Mira Murati, and Borisov would play Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder who led the movement to get rid of Altman.
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2025-06-04 07:00:00
Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in AI and Turing Award winner, has launched a $30 million non-profit aimed at developing "honest" AI systems that detect and prevent deceptive or harmful behavior in autonomous agents. The Guardian reports: Yoshua Bengio, a renowned computer scientist described as one of the "godfathers" of AI, will be president of LawZero, an organization committed to the safe design of the cutting-edge technology that has sparked a $1 trillion arms race. Starting with funding of approximately $30m and more than a dozen researchers, Bengio is developing a system called Scientist AI that will act as a guardrail against AI agents -- which carry out tasks without human intervention -- showing deceptive or self-preserving behavior, such as trying to avoid being turned off. Describing the current suite of AI agents as "actors" seeking to imitate humans and please users, he said the Scientist AI system would be more like a "psychologist" that can understand and predict bad behavior. "We want to build AIs that will be honest and not deceptive," Bengio said. He added: "It is theoretically possible to imagine machines that have no self, no goal for themselves, that are just pure knowledge machines -- like a scientist who knows a lot of stuff." However, unlike current generative AI tools, Bengio's system will not give definitive answers and will instead give probabilities for whether an answer is correct. "It has a sense of humility that it isn't sure about the answer," he said. Deployed alongside an AI agent, Bengio's model would flag potentially harmful behaviour by an autonomous system -- having gauged the probability of its actions causing harm. Scientist AI will "predict the probability that an agent's actions will lead to harm" and, if that probability is above a certain threshold, that agent's proposed action will then be blocked. "The point is to demonstrate the methodology so that then we can convince either donors or governments or AI labs to put the resources that are needed to train this at the same scale as the current frontier AIs. It is really important that the guardrail AI be at least as smart as the AI agent that it is trying to monitor and control," he said.
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