todays adexchanger had a lolworthy note that the binance hack began with a search ad.

If you hadn’t heard, Binance was totally pwned in a $6 billion crypto heist last week, suspected to be a North Korean operation. Well, Binance has now published what amounts to a preliminary autopsy report of the incident.

The heist began when a Binance Wallet DevOps team member accidentally downloaded a malicious copy of Homebrew – a popular open-source tool – from a mirror site promoted in a search ad. The malware was spotted, but not before the hackers had obtained the real identities of Wallet DevOps team members.

Using those identities, the North Korean hacking unit spent months targeting Binance’s wallet team with covert schemes. One involved a prolonged fake job interview that lured a Binance DevOps engineer into downloading an “assignment” onto their work device.

After taking control of the Binance DevOps engineer’s laptop, the hacker used an unnamed internal AI tool to log in to the devices of other engineers. Access to multiple credentials allowed the heist to go through.

Binance guy fell for “top link is ads”. COME ON.

Never understood why my employer would drop $30m on Crowdstrike but not add uBlock Origin to their company chrome profile for free.

going down a little rabbit hole. on zerohedge they noted:

Benjamin Mann, another Anthropic cofounder who was not listed on the S-1 for reasons unknown, published an essay in 2019 titled “Why I now identify as an Effective Altruist.”

=> https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/26/anthropic-cofounder-mystery-ben-mann/

=> https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1nznl4z/who_is_ben_mann_to_anthropic/

=> https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67538258/tremblay-v-openai-inc/?page=3

=> https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67538258/273/1/tremblay-v-openai-inc/

So in his court declaration (and on linkedin) he says co-founded Anthropic. And also that he was the Data Eng at OpenAI that “undertook” the second batch of pirated books into GPT-3.

Any speculation on what the redacted line was? And would this or other litigation be a factor to leave him off the S1; ie it could potentially expose / risk the 50.1% voting Class F LLC shares through Mann? Or maybe he already pledged all his shares to open giving.

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/eternal-black-october

The problem with A.I. defense is the same asymmetry attackers have always had against defenders. After a hotel bombing in Brighton, England in October, 1984 that failed to kill Margaret Thatcher, the Irish Republican Army put out a statement that said “Today, we were unlucky. But remember we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.“ As it turned out, Margaret Thatcher was lucky always, but there’s no reason to believe the rest of us will be. If an A.I. hack attempt works one time out of a thousand, that’s a fantastic success rate. If your A.I. sysop “secures” your server by deleting the production database and all the backups one time out of a thousand… well. Who’s gonna be first to sign up for those odds? Roll the dice! Apparently they always come up four.

That potato farm retirement is looking more and more tempting every day and I’ve got at least 2 decades until I’m pensionable age FML.

man, I’m aiming for a Christmas tree farm myself. 23 years to go.

https://www.patreon.com/MaxRead/posts/ai-x-risk-and-ai-173181621

worth the full read, but here’s the parts I liked

But “x-risk” is not the only kind of “existential” risk about which AI enthusiasts and their converts tend to worry. This recent Ezra Klein column, written in the wake of OpenAI’s release of hundreds of mathematical proofs, is a nice articulation of something I’ve come to think of as “n-risk,” for “ennui risk” (with the mutual understanding that it’s not pronunciation-accurate so don’t bother making a nitpicky little comment about it): fear of the loss of comprehension, control, and meaning in the face of impossibly sophisticated godlike machines poses.

We see the threat of “n-risk” in some of the emotional reaction of mathematicians faced with the results of OpenAI models bulldozing through open problems: a sense of having been surpassed and left behind, having the meaning from which one derives one’s worth totally emptied. In some sense, on a conceptual level and as a discursive object, x-risk is preferable to n-risk: it’s striking, dramatic, and offers us humans an ongoing chance at great feats of heroism and genius. N-risk has no such narrative reassurances. Maybe it’s better to burn out (as your body is turned into a paperclip) than to fade away.

Here you might ask: Is the cause of melancholy and despair on the part of some mathematicians simply the knowledge that a computer system has surpassed their ability to understand or produce proofs? Or is it the realization that said computer system is privately owned and confidentially developed in service of accumulation rather than the pursuit of shared human knowledge? Or is it the contempt with which the people who work for the computer system companies and the hanger-on fans of these computer systems seem to regard the mathematicians? Or is it the sudden recognition that the pursuit of mathematical truths has already been so totally devalued by an anti-intellectual social system that you can no longer feel secure that the tradition to which you have devoted your life will continue as a space of intellectual inquiry, even given the development of these new tools? And so on.

I mean, realistically, it’s all of the above.

Serve Robotics, LA’s biggest sidewalk delivery robot operator, lost $101 million in 2025 while pitching ‘no driver wages’ · The Basin h/t jluk

Serve Robotics lost $55.80 for every hour its robots were ready to take an order at the end of last year. The first advantage its investor deck lists for them is ‘No driver wages.’

versus

78-Year-Old Woman Hauled Off In Handcuffs After Blocking Delivery Robot

We may all be data annotators soon enough | Gig Economy Project h/t naked capitalism

Outlier has four main clients, all American Big Tech: Meta, Alphabet, Xai and OpenAI. Scale AI is part-owned by Meta. Is this the future we want for European workers, sources for gig exploitation and data expropriation for American Big Tech and the US state?

When one considers that this dystopian scenario currently constitute the most realistic entry jobs for young, university-educated people in Europe, is it any wonder that the youth are currently rising up in multiple European countries, most of all France, demanding something - anything - else?

Not to be confused with Team Human the Douglas Rushkoff podcast.

The ultra-rare IRL sneer in my mailbox:

The actual sneer is that they got $1M dollars from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to do the mail drops:

https://philanthropy.org/990/who-funds/862362127/techequity-action

corey quinn at https://lnkd.in/p/gXmqzqpZ

I’m a man. I have a yellow hat. I also have a monkey. My track record of supervising this monkey is spotty at best, but that’s not important right now.

He is a very smart monkey. When you tell him to do something, he does it in a way that’s smarter than any monkey you’ve ever seen in your life. You had no idea monkeys were even capable of this level of greatness. Billions of dollars have now been poured into the economy, extolling the virtues and achievements of this incredible monkey. He can do things better than humans.

Cheaper than humans.

Get rid of the humans.

You don’t need the humans; you have the monkey. Okay, keep a couple of humans for guardrails; not too many. They’re expensive, and the monkey does it better anyway.

Suddenly it has come out that my monkey, in addition to being incredibly intelligent, has also been committing an escalating number of felonies. And also pooping. So much poop.

We are now in undefined times. Never before has a monkey committed a crime; our legal systems are completely unprepared to apportion blame to me, the man in the yellow hat who has once again failed to properly supervise his monkey. Who is responsible for this monkey’s shitty, shitty behavior? It is completely unknowable. Clearly, the entire legal system will need to be overhauled to address the concept of a monkey committing crimes.

Now please excuse me, I just got a call telling me that my teenager stole a car. Unfortunately I have a sneaking suspicion as to who is legally responsible here, and I dislike it. This is especially distressing, as the teenager has never made a cent for me in his life, yet I’m about to spend a boatload on criminal defense attorneys.

https://thepointmag.substack.com/p/the-ivy-leagues-surrender-to-ai-is via naked capitalism

The idea that preparing students to succeed in an AI-saturated world requires reimagining college as an AI incubator is not a sign of technological acumen, but of tech illiteracy. An LLM is not an aircraft requiring years of training to operate.

not x but y, but a decent point

from linkedin but in the comments: https://lnkd.in/p/g4VfX3SQ

Oh I forgot to mention: apparently judges consider AI use in sentencing

How

Like if you used AI you get more months

Huh why

Because AI can magnify the reach and speed of criminal activity

Is this like how hitting someone counts more if you used a weapon?

Yes

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/101215-publishing-s-ai-reckoning.html h/t naked capitalism

Smaller publishers, too, must cope with the challenge of identifying AI-generated text in books authors have submitted, and it isn’t always easy. At Microcosm, an independent publisher and distributor in Portland, Ore., co-owner and vice president Elly Blue says her team discovered an author’s undisclosed AI use almost by accident, when a freelance editor flagged what looked like plagiarism, only to find out it was AI-generated text. That discovery prompted Microcosm to run AI detection across its entire pipeline, which turned up several more cases, including two manuscripts fully generated from prompts, and one where an author had trained an LLM on his own past writing. “The book sounded like him, but it made no sense,” Blue recalls.

Confronting the authors had mixed results. “Some denied it outright and insisted, ‘That’s just what my voice sounds like,’ ” Blue says. “One, surprisingly, owned it and said he’d take the book elsewhere.”

These episodes led directly to Microcosm instituting a new contract clause that states that if an author’s undisclosed AI-generated text can’t be revised into something genuinely their own, Microcosm retains the rights and can publish the work itself, since the author didn’t actually write it.

Like if people are using LLMs to submit to the local zine distro, what are we even doing; but the detector is not a good thing either. It isn’t homework and they shouldn’t need turnitin. :(

https://reason.com/2026/09/22/the-ai-safety-movement-is-making-ai-less-safe/

(Torres, ironically, misidentifies TESCREAL as a form of “libertarian transhumanism,” not realizing how horrifying the TESCREAL utopia would be to most libertarians.)

“most” lol

I don’t know this newspaper but

AI starts believing in God, ghosts and the Loch Ness Monster

Google boffins discovered that disabling safety protocols led AI to profess belief in phantoms, vampires and the Loch Ness monster.

One sec, updating my priors. P(Nessie) > P(doom).

He’s only like the fourth or fifth worst scott lol

edit: wait I forgot Dilbert Scott died. top three then.

UC Regent / Podcaster Scott Galloway on CNN:

Yes, we shouldn’t be scared of AI. We should be scared of reckless people with mal intent who use AI.

In 2001, a woman named Sharon Whipple was mauled by two dogs. And ultimately the owners of the dogs were put in – put in prison. We’re now prosecuting the parents of kids who find unsecured AR15s and use those to kill others.

I think it’s the incentive. There’s always a wizard behind the curtain here, and I think we have to create incentives, specifically disincentives, and make it clear that, OK, while these bots are in fact coordinating and they show incredible resourcefulness and high IQ, somebody program the incentives here. So, moving to solution, I think part of it is you have to have incentives, specifically disincentives that say you, the company, and maybe individually are responsible for the bad outcomes here.

I just get this sense if you tell these companies their IPOs might be threatened or they risk criminal prosecution, they’re going to figure this out. We figured out a way to control atomic weapons. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to control this. And the notion that they’re sentient and it’s out of my control is an attempt to absolve themselves of the guilt and the responsibility that they should bear here.

The Whipple case was one of the more insane / divisive SF local crime cases, (TrueAnon ep if you aren’t familiar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMd0mPAqR8A ) - so that’s an odd and interesting pull for Galloway on national news.

I don’t think repurposing the logic of the NRA “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is the play though, and I think the incentive framing is too watered down. This isn’t a problem we can nudge our way out of.

AI ‘actress’ Tilly Norwood melts down and starts talking in CANTONESE as she is interviewed by Piers Morgan h/t Naked Capitalism

Long-in-the-tooth Mr Morgan remained remarkably calm as the AI bot unleashed a monologue in Cantonese, staring down the lens and allowing her to finish her point.

But Mr Conti was stunned, shaking his head incredulously at the unexpected answer to his question before turning his head to smile, presumably at someone else sitting in the room with him.

He soon managed to compose himself, offering the simple rebuttal, ‘I didn’t quite get that,’ which proved sufficient to cut Tilly off and fix the glitch.

At this point, even Mr Morgan had to laugh, chuckling for a few seconds before addressing the AI bot, who sat in her seat expectantly as if rolling out a Cantonese soliloquy on an English-language YouTube show was the most normal thing in the world.

Delivering the bad news, he said: ‘You suddenly seemed to be speaking Chinese, completely randomly for no reason.’

Mr Conti by now had completely lost control, giggling hysterically - either in amusement at Tilly’s off-script answer, or in unbridled relief that his job might be safe for the time being.

Why the hell is it so hard to find a translation of what it ‘said’? Not a single news outlet could ask a native speaker, can’t even be bothered to dump it through whisper? This, how many years after YouTube force pushed autodubbing? The lack of effort is telling.

r/Cantonese not impressed either.

Anyway once we replace long in tooth piers with PiersBot 9000, itll just know Cantonese and this won’t even make the paper

Saw this post about irregular last week https://www.effort.news/irregular

Omer Nevo, Irregular’s co-founder and CTO, is a board member of Effective Altruism Israel, as well as Effective Altruism NGOs Heron and Probably Good. Dan Lahav, Irregular’s co-founder and CEO, received $395,000 to start a course along with Sella Nevo, Omer Nevo’s brother. Sella and Omer co-founded an NGO to educate people about Effective Altruism, Impact Focused Education. They also co-founded Probably Good together.2

I kind of feel like maybe I should start my own NGO that does fuck all, seems pretty easy

AdExchanger deserves its own kind of sneer club and it isn’t even the worst of them.