The Download: Talking dirty with DeepSeek, and the risks and rewards of calorie restriction

AI companions like Replika are designed to engage in intimate exchanges, but people use general-purpose chatbots for sex talk too, despite their stricter content moderation policies. Now new research shows that not all chatbots are equally willing to talk dirty. DeepSeek is the easiest to convince. But other AI chatbots can be enticed too. Huiqian […]

1 min read

200+ Trojanized GitHub Repositories Found in Campaign Targeting Gamers and Developers

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new campaign in which the threat actors have published more than 67 GitHub repositories that claim to offer Python-based hacking tools, but deliver trojanized payloads instead. The activity, codenamed Banana Squad by ReversingLabs, is assessed to be a continuation of a rogue Python campaign that was identified in 2023 as […]

5 mins read

“My job is going to change in a dramatic way”: Exploring the future of the internet with Cloudflare

June 19, 2025 In this episode of Leaders of Code, Jody Bailey, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Stack Overflow, sits down with Dane Knecht, the newly appointed Chief Technology Officer at Cloudflare. Dane shares his excitement about the Model Context Protocol (MCP), exploring its potential impact on the future of technology. The discussion turns […]

1 min read

Growing Neural Cellular Automata

Contents This article is part of the Differentiable Self-organizing Systems Thread, an experimental format collecting invited short articles delving into differentiable self-organizing systems, interspersed with critical commentary from several experts in adjacent fields. Differentiable Self-organizing Systems Thread Self-classifying MNIST Digits Most multicellular organisms begin their life as a single egg cell – a single cell […]

32 mins read

Surprise: Minnesota Killer Used Data Brokers To Target And Murder Politicians

from the unsurprising-developments dept For years we’ve noted how this country’s corrupt inability to protect consumer security, regulate data brokers, or pass even a baseline privacy law was going to have increasingly deadly consequences. Endless signs have been there; from stalkers abusing app and cell phone data to pursue their victims, to right wing extremists […]

3 mins read