Reddit fights AI marketing ‘slop’ with its own AI, as GEO becomes the new SEO
Reddit fights AI marketing ‘slop’ with its own AI, as GEO becomes the new SEO

People increasingly ask ChatGPT instead of Google. So marketers now plant fake opinions on Reddit, hoping the chatbots repeat them. Reddit is fighting back with AI of its own. Reddit has a new spam problem, and a strange one. Brands seed the platform w…

Spain’s Sherpa.ai raises $18M for AI that never touches your data
Spain’s Sherpa.ai raises $18M for AI that never touches your data

Everyone wants the power of AI. Few want to hand their most sensitive data to a foreign cloud to get it. A Basque startup thinks it has the fix. Sherpa.ai has raised $18m to build AI that never sees your raw data, tech.eu reported. The Spanish company …

US government body paid $1M to hackers who never locked a single file
US government body paid $1M to hackers who never locked a single file

A US government entity paid around $1m to stop stolen files from being published, according to a case study by researcher Rakesh Krishnan for Ransom-ISAC. The analysis draws on a leaked negotiation chat and the blockchain trail the payment left behind….

Alibaba bans Claude Code after Anthropic is caught tracking Chinese users with hidden code
Alibaba bans Claude Code after Anthropic is caught tracking Chinese users with hidden code

Alibaba has banned its employees from using Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI-powered coding agent, after security researchers discovered that the tool contained hidden code designed to identify Chinese users. The ban, effective 10 July, follows weeks of esc…

North Korea-linked npm packages impersonate Rollup polyfill tools to steal developer secrets
North Korea-linked npm packages impersonate Rollup polyfill tools to steal developer secrets

Security researchers at JFrog have identified a set of malicious npm packages linked to North Korean threat actors that impersonate legitimate Rollup polyfill tooling to steal developer credentials and enable remote access to compromised machines. The …

Researchers say an AI agent just ran a ransomware attack from start to finish, with no human at the keyboard
Researchers say an AI agent just ran a ransomware attack from start to finish, with no human at the keyboard

Ransomware has always needed a skilled human somewhere in the loop. Security firm Sysdig says that just changed. It has documented what it calls the first ransomware attack run from start to finish by an AI agent, with no human at the keyboard. The res…

EU lawmaker who investigated spyware abuse was hacked with Pegasus
EU lawmaker who investigated spyware abuse was hacked with Pegasus

Stelios Kouloglou spent two years on the European Parliament committee set up to investigate governments spying on their own citizens with commercial hacking tools. According to a report published Friday by Citizen Lab, the University of Toronto resear…

Scientists built a cell from scratch that eats, divides and evolves. They just won’t call it alive
Scientists built a cell from scratch that eats, divides and evolves. They just won’t call it alive

Scientists in Minnesota have built a cell from scratch. It can feed, grow, and divide, and it competes with its own offspring. Its makers do not claim it is alive. But the line between chemistry and biology just got a lot thinner. The team at the Unive…

Cloudflare gives AI crawlers a September deadline: pay publishers or get blocked
Cloudflare gives AI crawlers a September deadline: pay publishers or get blocked

Cloudflare has set the AI industry a deadline. From September, it will block the crawlers that hoover up content for AI training. Any page that carries ads becomes off-limits, unless the site’s owner says otherwise. The pitch is simple: stop giving the…

Alibaba will pay 600 million dollars to settle a US probe into illegal pharmaceutical sales on its platform
Alibaba will pay 600 million dollars to settle a US probe into illegal pharmaceutical sales on its platform

Alibaba and its US digital payment processor have agreed to pay 600 million dollars to resolve a federal investigation into whether they failed to prevent the sale and importation of illegal pharmaceuticals and controlled substances, the Justice Depart…