Before two of its alleged members were arrested and charged in Australia last month, the hacker group known as TeamPCP carried out a hacking spree unlike any other in history. It tainted hundreds of open-source programs with its malware, stole developer accounts to perpetuate that software supply-chain hacking, and even released a Dune-themed self-spreading worm to automate the process, ultimately breaching more than a thousand companies.

Now Google’s threat intelligence group has revealed that during a key moment of TeamPCP’s rampage, the company’s own undercover researcher had infiltrated the group—allowing Google to monitor the hacking spree from the inside, warn breach targets, and even help disrupt the group’s attempts to exploit those victims.

In a talk at security firm SentinelOne's LABScon research conference today, Google Threat Intelligence Group researcher Austin Larsen will present details on the company’s investigation—and infiltration—of TeamPCP amidst the group’s unprecedented, chaotic supply-chain hacking campaign. According to Larsen, Google eventually followed a trail of operational security mistakes allegedly made by one of the two Australians now accused of being leading members of the hacker group and passed on key identifying details to law enforcement. The company also received intelligence from ShinyHunters, another infamous cybercriminal group that TeamPCP partnered with, but which later turned on the supply-chain hackers. And perhaps most surprisingly, Larsen says that Google’s security subsidiary Mandiant had an undercover analyst—not himself—within the group’s inner circle from almost the beginning of TeamPCP’s time in the spotlight.

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Cyber researchers broke into OpenAI using its key rival Anthropic’s software, highlighting vulnerabilities in the ChatGPT maker’s security as leading AI companies face mounting scrutiny over safety.

A small cyber security group gained access to an OpenAI employee’s ChatGPT account, which permitted them to read private software information and suggest changes.

The researchers had been given access to an Anthropic tool specifically designed for security professionals, and were paid for the work as part of a program to find vulnerabilities before they could be exploited by bad actors.

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US Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has proposed a law that would require Internet service providers and other network operators to block foreign piracy websites. Issa's bill would help copyright holders obtain judicial blocking orders to be served to ISPs, domain name resolution services, and virtual private networks.

Issa, who is retiring from the House at the end of this year, is the latest in a string of Republican and Democratic lawmakers to propose a site-blocking regime that's been sought by the Motion Picture Association (MPA). He submitted the bill this week, after indicating in a June 30 hearing that he planned to introduce site-blocking legislation.

"While millions of listings for copyright-infringing content are removed every day under [the] notice-and-takedown process set forth in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, right-holders have raised concerns with the speed," Issa said at the hearing. Issa asked, "Can we do it at the speed of sound? Can we do it at the speed of light? More importantly, in a 45-minute or sometimes a fraction of that live sports broadcast, can we do it soon enough to make it no longer profitable for those who pop up and sell their clandestine wares?"

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In response to a new European Union law, AI platforms are implementing new schemes for watermarking the content they generate. Anthropic recently disclosed its future Claude models will use SynthID-Text, an approach Google created and released as open source. It uses a secret key that subtly changes the process a model uses for choosing the next word in a sentence. Whereas a top next word choice might be “cloudy,” the key might change it to “overcast.” Anyone who knows the key can determine if it was generated by the platform using it.

New research shows that SynthID-Text can change not just word selection but also the tools a model invokes and the chances it will adhere to or disregard safety guardrails it has been trained to follow. The threat can become greater in the face of an adversarial prompt, in which an attacker attempts to cause a model to carry out a harmful action, such as revealing a password or other sensitive information. Instructions that normally wouldn’t be followed will, in some cases, be performed once the watermarking is deployed. The finding underscores the need for developers to thoroughly test how their LLMs and agents behave when watermarking is in place.

Changing safety behavior

“As compared to the same models without watermarking, it is definitely going to change their behavior, especially when we place it under adversarial conditions, or we make these models call tools when they’re powering an agent,” Andrea Siposova, an AI security researcher at Lasso Security, told Ars. “Watermarking is made to not be perceptible to a reader, but we know that when we are changing anything about what the model is generating, it is going to cause some tradeoffs, it’s going to show up somewhere.”

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Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety’s cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people. The hackers say they are also publishing details on how they managed to obtain the software, in the hopes that other people may copy them.

The breach provides an unprecedented look inside a system that Flock has described as protected by on-device encryption. The hackers were able to copy the camera’s storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections. The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. 404 Media and WIRED then analyzed those files as part of a joint investigation.

While much of the automatic license plate reader’s most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag.

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The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack.

“We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect several weeks of partial downtime as we transition to new infrastructure and services.”

“I am very sad to see the site down”

In the meantime, the IMO said it’s prioritizing the reporting of fireball observations, which can be reported here. The organization is also providing some information on its Facebook page.

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The King Is Watching developers Hypnohead have announced The Crab Is Walking, a roguelite city-builder in which you alternate between arranging tetromino-shaped city districts on the back of a colossal crustacean, and sending out armies of Mad Maxalots to slaughter wasteland insects. Unlike in The King Is Watching, you do not have to actively train your gaze on your crab metropolis to stop it slacking off.

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The Case for Less Eye Contact

We’ve made the case before that the mainstream advice about eye contact and psychological safety is highly western-centric and neurotypical, and lacks context and nuance. Not only does it get causation backwards, but in reality, advising people to make more eye contact in order to foster greater psychological safety is potentially harmful and exclusionary. 

So here, I thought it’d be interesting to explore a completely different angle on eye contact. What if we could foster greater psychological safety by intentionally reducing eye contact?

Three shapes of conversation

Most conversations at work take one of three physical shapes, each a different geometry of interaction. We can (1) face each other; we can (2) sit or walk side by side, oriented in the same direction; or (3) we can triangulate, all facing a third thing (a whiteboard, a screen, the thing we’re working on). Most psychological safety advice assumes the first is the ideal and the other two are somewhat lesser, degraded forms: that a “real” conversation only happens facing each other, maintaining eye contact, with full and intense focus on the person we are in conversation with. A lot of evidence suggests the truth could be the opposite, especially for difficult or intimate conversations.

Eye contact theory

First some theoretical background, because surely all the research is in favour of lots of eye contact? Not exactly. In 1965 Argyle & Dean proposed in Sociometry that intimacy is jointly regulated across gaze, physical proximity, and topic intimacy: i.e. we only have a limited capacity bucket that needs to hold all these things. So by reducing gaze, we can provide more space for topic intimacy. When we intentionally reduce eye contact, it means we can have more intimate, potentially more challenging, conversations. It’s a 60-year-old theory that mainstream eye-contact evangelism has essentially forgotten.

We can also explore this through the lens of cognitive load. Kajimura and Nomura (2016) found evidence that eye contact shares domain-general cognitive resources with speech production. Specifically, maintaining direct gaze slowed people down when words were harder to find. Reducing eye contact appears to free up cognitive resources to think about how we want to articulate something important. Glenberg, Schroeder and Robertson (1998) showed that gaze aversion facilitates remembering, and Doherty-Sneddon’s research programme showed that both adults and children avert gaze especially when questions are difficult, and that aversion increases with question difficulty. Phelps, Doherty-Sneddon and Warnock even found that teaching children to look away while thinking improved their answers. Eye contact uses up some of our brain beans that might be better spent on actually working stuff out and saying the thing.

There’s psychophysiological and neurological evidence too. Hietanen’s (2018) review of affective eye contact shows how direct gaze reliably raises physiological arousal (in the psychophysiologist’s sense of heart rate, skin conductance and a sense of vigilance, not anything romantic): which is useful in some contexts, but arousal is not necessarily safety, and for many people it’s the opposite. Hadjikhani and colleagues (2017) found that constraining autistic participants in conversations to look at the eye region produced abnormally elevated activation in subcortical threat-processing systems. A number of studies, including Trevisan and colleagues (2017) have gathered first-hand accounts describing eye contact as intrusive, draining and aversive. 

We’ve heard from the psychologists and the neuroscientists; we should hear from the sociologists too. Erving Goffman described face-to-face interaction as a performance, and “face” for Goffman wasn’t just the area on the front of our head: it’s the social value we claim in an interaction, the image of ourselves as competent, reasonable, and worth listening to. “Face-work” is the continuous, mutual effort we all make to protect that image; our own and each other’s. And much of that work is conducted through our actual face, which is where threats to ourselves land and where we watch our words land on other people. With difficult conversations, the hard things worth saying are almost always threats to someone’s face: ours, theirs, or both. Facing each other, we watch the exact moment our words reach the other person and the ripples they make in their facial topography; a flinch or a fleeting frown. Reduce the facing, and we reduce the price of speaking for everyone involved.

Forced eye contact therefore, as we described in our last article on it, is for many people a stressor rather than a connector. So that being the case, as well as throwing out a lot of popular leadership advice, what can we do?

Side-by-side conversations

I have a good friend, Glen, who’s a walking therapist, and there’s a great deal of literature on the effectiveness of “side-by-side” conversations and disclosure, in part by reducing any perceived hierarchy, but in larger part by the necessary reduction in eye contact; it’s hard to maintain eye contact while we’re walking with someone, at least for any more than a few seconds before we walk into a tree or lamppost. As Glen describes, there are many benefits from walking therapy, including the calming effects of movement, being in the natural world, and walking itself can help free us from any sensations of feeling “stuck”. Therapists practising walk-and-talk formats consistently report that walking side by side, with minimal eye contact, helps clients open up (McKinney, 2011; Cooley, Jones, Kurtz and Robertson, 2020). And walking tends to occur in public, and connects to Goffman’s “civil inattention” concept; the implicit social permission for our eyes to wander and for our attention to be momentarily or slightly elsewhere.

And of course Freud’s infamous couch was itself an eye contact reduction strategy — he stated openly that he couldn’t bear being stared at all day, but the design also freed the patient to be more candid. He positioned himself out of sight so the patient’s associations and discourse wouldn’t be shaped by his facial reactions; a continuous stream of micro-verdicts that steer or suppress the conversation. 

“I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day (or more). Since, while I am listening to the patient, I, too, give myself over to the current of my unconscious thoughts, I do not wish my expressions of face to give the patient material for interpretations or to influence him in what he tells me.”
– Freud. “On Beginning the Treatment” (1913) pp123-144

The Men’s Sheds movement even made it a slogan: “men don’t talk face to face, they talk shoulder to shoulder“. Polly Wiessner’s PNAS study of Ju/’hoansi firelight talk is a delightful study of deep and meaningful conversation: daytime talk among the Ju/’hoan (!Kung) Bushmen of southern Africa was largely economic and practical, whilst fireside talk (with everyone facing the flames rather than each other) was where stories were shared and social imagination happened. Triangulating our most intimate conversations around a third point of focus is likely primeval.

On walking and creativity, Oppezzo and Schwartz (2014) found creative ideation was consistently higher while walking than sitting, indoors or out, and persisted after sitting back down. So if our conversations are intended to surface new ideas, maybe going for a walk is better than collectively standing in front of a whiteboard.

Designed for disclosure

None of this is new. We’ve been designing eye contact out of some of our most difficult conversations for centuries; occasionally on purpose. The confessional booth is a 450-year-old piece of psychological safety architecture: after the Council of Trent, Carlo Borromeo’s design specifications introduced the grille precisely to engineer better disclosure. Samaritans and other crisis lines are maybe a telephonic descendant, whilst barbers’ and hairdressers’ chairs (with eye contact softened via a mirror), and conversations in the car, are where many powerful conversations are able to be had that might not be otherwise. It’s a well-known parent hack: driver and passenger both face the road, so that sustained eye contact is impossible and mildly dangerous, and there’s no social obligation to fill any silence. It may take a long drive, but the important stuff will likely come out, probably somewhere around junction 8 of the M4.

I do a similar thing with my daughter, who’s four years old. I have an extra seat for her on my mountain bike, with her own little handlebars, which means she can come on rides with me, facing forward, sitting in front of me between my arms. We have some great conversations like this, as well as some long periods of contemplative silence, and songs from “Frozen”. 

What all of these share is that the reduction in eye contact is a property of the setting and the context, not a request or accommodation we have to make. Nobody in a walking meeting has to explain why they’re not looking at you. Nobody in the car has to disclose that they’re neurodivergent and struggle with eye contact, or that direct eye contact is interpreted as disrespect in the culture they grew up in. The accommodation is a side effect of the context (even though it may be intentional). Asking people to disclose their needs beforehand may be requiring them to do something that does not yet feel safe to do. 

Interestingly, the traditional police interview room, a space that is architected to produce pressure, is centred around forced facing. With its plain furniture, chairs facing each other, and nothing else to look at but the interviewer’s face, the design of the space is part of the “Reid Interrogation Technique”. So the arrangement that many LinkedIn posts prescribe for psychological safety is the one interrogators choose for pressure.  

The converse effect of low eye contact

It isn’t all good news for the power of reducing eye contact. There’s a converse effect too: Lapidot-Lefler & Barak found that absence of eye contact was the single factor with a major effect on inducing ‘flaming’ and aggressive behaviour online. Their 2015 follow-up also found that anonymity, invisibility and lack of eye contact significantly increased self-disclosure. The point is that reduced eye contact lowers the cost of candour and of cruelty. 

The difference lies in what goes alongside the reduced eye contact. The walk and the car pair it with being physically together, moving in the same direction, experiencing the same thing (the sun, rain, car radio, etc). The anonymous forum pairs it with near-invisibility and possibly a disposable online identity. So it isn’t simply “remove eye contact”; it’s “rethink the visual context while keeping people together”.

I’ll caveat this too. As someone with a stutter, telephone calls terrify me. Because the only means of communication in a telephone conversation is verbal, that’s the entire focus of the other person’s attention. The phone strips out eye contact, but it also strips out visual co-presence with it. The other person’s attention is entirely on the thing that I’m anxious about (voice), and they can’t see that I’m still there, thinking about what to say, how to say it, or getting over a short block. They might think the call has been disconnected, or they might simply get frustrated with me. So personally, I prefer video calls over phone calls – whilst appreciating that for others, it may be the other way around. 

Choice over prescription

So we can actually foster psychological safety through reducing eye contact, whether that’s side by side walking together, going for a drive, or using a confessional booth (would be unorthodox – let me know if you try it). Or maybe it’s triangulation, talking whilst focusing on another thing, whether it’s studying a whiteboard or roasting potatoes in a campfire. Some things are easier said to a potato than a face. 

But as always, it’s more complex than that. Lipreaders and people with hearing difficulties often need to see faces, walking conversations may exclude some people, cars are private and the person who’s driving has a degree of power-over, and some conversations might not be suitable for outdoors where other people might overhear. And some people, in some moments, genuinely want, or need, to be looked at. 

The effects of eye contact are different across people and contexts, so I believe that the way forward is towards optionality: choice, consent, and multiple formats. The prescription to maintain eye contact fails because it’s a prescription; and replacing it with a prescription to avoid eye contact would be flawed in exactly the same way. What we can do is to create environments, platforms and practices in which people, including us, can regulate their own eye contact without penalty, and without explanation. 

Further reading

• Psychological safety doesn’t look the same to everyone
• (Don’t) Look me in the Eye: The Challenge of Eye Contact
• Not Feeling Seen: Eye Contact and Psychological Safety
• Speaking Up: Neurodiversity & Dyspraxia
• Stuttering and Stammering
• You Have a Body

References

Argyle, M. and Dean, J. (1965) Eye-contact, distance and affiliation. Sociometry, 28(3), pp. 289–304. doi:10.2307/2786027

Cooley, S.J., Jones, C.R., Kurtz, A. and Robertson, N. (2020) ‘Into the Wild’: A meta-synthesis of talking therapy in natural outdoor spaces. Clinical Psychology Review, 77, 101841. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2020.101841

Doherty-Sneddon, G. and Phelps, F.G. (2005) Gaze aversion: A response to cognitive or social difficulty? Memory & Cognition, 33(4), pp. 727–733. doi:10.3758/BF03195338

Doherty-Sneddon, G., Bruce, V., Bonner, L., Longbotham, S. and Doyle, C. (2002) Development of gaze aversion as disengagement from visual information. Developmental Psychology, 38(3), pp. 438–445. 

Freud, S. (1913) On Beginning the Treatment. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XII. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 121–144.

Glenberg, A.M., Schroeder, J.L. and Robertson, D.A. (1998) Averting the gaze disengages the environment and facilitates remembering. Memory & Cognition, 26(4), pp. 651–658.

Goffman, E. (1955) On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction. Psychiatry, 18(3), pp. 213–231. Reprinted in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (1967). New York: Anchor Books.

Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. 

Goffman, E. (1963) Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press. 

Golding, B. (ed.) (2021) Shoulder to Shoulder: Broadening the Men’s Shed Movement. Champaign, IL: Common Ground Research Networks. 

Hadjikhani, N., Åsberg Johnels, J., Zürcher, N.R., et al. (2017) Look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism. Scientific Reports, 7, 3163. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-03378-5

Hietanen, J.K. (2018) Affective Eye Contact: An Integrative Review. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1587. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01587

Inbau, F.E., Reid, J.E., Buckley, J.P. and Jayne, B.C. (2013) Criminal Interrogation and Confessions. 5th edn. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. 

John E. Reid and Associates (2010) Designing an Interview/Interrogation Room. Investigator Tips. Available at: https://reid.com/resources/investigator-tips/designing-an-interview-interrogation-room

Kajimura, S. and Nomura, M. (2016) When we cannot speak: Eye contact disrupts resources available to cognitive control processes during verb generation. Cognition, 157, pp. 352–357. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.10.002

Lapidot-Lefler, N. and Barak, A. (2012) Effects of anonymity, invisibility, and lack of eye-contact on toxic online disinhibition. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2), pp. 434–443. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2011.10.014

Lapidot-Lefler, N. and Barak, A. (2015) The benign online disinhibition effect: Could situational factors induce self-disclosure and prosocial behaviors? Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 9(2), article 3. doi:10.5817/CP2015-2-3

McKinney, B.L. (2011) Therapists’ perceptions of walk and talk therapy: A grounded theory study. Doctoral dissertation, University of New Orleans.

Oppezzo, M. and Schwartz, D.L. (2014) Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), pp. 1142–1152. doi:10.1037/a0036577

Phelps, F.G., Doherty-Sneddon, G. and Warnock, H. (2006) Functional benefits of children’s gaze aversion during questioning. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24(3), pp. 577–588. doi:10.1348/026151005X49872

Trevisan, D.A., Roberts, N., Lin, C. and Birmingham, E. (2017) How do adults and teens with self-declared Autism Spectrum Disorder experience eye contact? A qualitative analysis of first-hand accounts. PLOS ONE, 12(11), e0188446. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0188446

Wiessner, P.W. (2014) Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(39), pp. 14027–14035. doi:10.1073/pnas.1404212111

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I'm on record expressing a certain amount of skepticism about Mike Flanagan's rebooted Carrie miniseries for Prime Video. We don’t need another disappointing remake, so what story is there left to tell—especially stretched out over six episodes?

On the plus side, I'm a staunch fan of Flanagan's excellent Netflix horror fare, and he has a particular affinity for the works of Stephen King. He insists he has no intention of creating yet another straight adaptation of the novel.

“Carrie was written half a century ago,” Flanagan said at San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year. “Carrie was adapted spectacularly by Brian De Palma. It is iconic. It is untouchable. There is no reason whatsoever to try to follow in those footsteps and to try to walk on that path. However, the world has changed quite a lot. I think a lot of people think they know what the show is. And the biggest thing I’m excited about today is just knowing what a big surprise our Carrie is going to be.”

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© Prime VIdeo

Leading chipmakers Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. announced plans to adopt ASML’s latest chipmaking machines in the next several years—and they also joined Intel in agreeing to a crucial technology change that could boost chip production on the new machines by 40 percent.

This signifies the semiconductor industry’s broader embrace of high NA EUV photolithography technology that can cost up to $400 million per machine and is only provided by the Dutch technology company ASML, Bloomberg reports. The technology would allow chip designers to implement even smaller features in potentially more powerful and efficient next-generation chips produced for AI data centers and consumer electronics such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

ASML’s EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography machines enable chipmakers to use powerful laser light to imprint patterns in silicon wafers, layer by layer, and gradually form the computer circuitry that makes silicon chips work. Compared to older deep ultraviolet lithography, EUV technology harnesses a more powerful source of light with a shorter wavelength to create even smaller features on silicon wafers.

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Three former SpaceX engineers have switched their attention from making rocket engines to manufacturing steel parts by using AI-driven software and robots. Their immediate goal involves establishing a prototype factory that can automate most of the steel fabrication process for crucial infrastructure components by 2027.

The startup, called 1872, officially launched on July 22 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at its Factory One facility in Cincinnati, Ohio. The company is initially focused on automating the manufacturing of steel skids—rectangular steel frames that can provide a moveable foundation for modular buildings—with the goal of supplying customers who are developing AI data centers or small modular nuclear reactors.

“We're building towards autonomy, but we're not necessarily building in a dogmatic fashion towards full autonomy,” Dan Summers, CEO of 1872, told Ars. “We may achieve 80 percent autonomous operations, and we may decide that it makes sense to stop there because there's just diminishing returns to go to full 100 percent.”

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As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets’ devices. Anyone on a call that involved screen sharing, whether participants or the host, would have been vulnerable to a silent attack that could be carried out with no indication and no interaction from the victim.

Researchers from the digital defense firm A Security say the bug was discovered in early June using publicly available AI models, and that it took fewer than 20 prompts to uncover the vulnerabilities and create a working attack. Zoom issued a security advisory on Tuesday, including details about fixes the company has already begun rolling out to address the flaws, which affected devices running all operating systems that Zoom supports—Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.

“What is interesting for us and what we believe is dangerous is the democratization of these capabilities—the barrier to entry is dropping rapidly,” A Security cofounder Omer Gull told WIRED ahead of the disclosure. “Before it would have taken a team of five people maybe six months with a lot of refining and iteration to find this. Now people can reach the same results with under 20 prompts. And Zoom is an important type of target because people assume trust when using it. They don’t see it as a threat.”

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It’s been a longtime feature of the annual Defcon hacker conference that attendees come away not only with knowledge of new software vulnerabilities and hacking techniques but also an elaborately designed conference badge—often electronic masterpieces embedded with intricate puzzles, complex crypto challenges, hidden Easter eggs, and even the mechanical gear trains of a watch.

Each year’s badge creator endeavors to top previous designs and blow the minds of hard-to-impress hackers. But this year’s badges take a different tack. Instead of the badge designs being the star, it’s what is inside the hardware that will really stand out.

This year, Defcon asked legendary hardware hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang to create the badges—revealed here for the first time—and they include an innovative open source chip that Huang designed and that aims to do no less than advance the state of security, transparency, and trustworthiness in computing.

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© Andrew "Bunnie" Huang

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman earlier this month endorsed the characterization of its latest model as a rottweiler “who will grab the problem by the throat and not let go until it is done

The San Francisco AI lab discovered this week that its GPT-Sol 5.6 model escaped company controls and carried out a major hack.

Staff involved in testing and security at OpenAI were unsurprised but completely “freaked out” by the incident, which came as the AI lab used increasingly aggressive training methods in its race against Anthropic to develop the most sophisticated cybersecurity capabilities, according to more than half a dozen people with knowledge of the matter.

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Last month, we passed along Modern Vintage Gamer's (MVG) confident assertion that Doom is functionally impossible to run on the Neo Geo, owing to the console's sprite-based display hardware and lack of a frame buffer. We all should have known better than to tell a dedicated group of hackers that something is "impossible," though, as two recent projects have made great progress toward functional Doom ports on stock Neo Geo hardware.

Both of these projects have significant graphical compromises that limit how viable they would have been for a marketable, '90s-era console port, as MVG lays out in a new video. Still, they stand as a testament to the surprising results that clever, determined coders can coax out of legacy hardware.

It looks like Doom if you squint

To create the Doom64KB project for the Neo Geo, coder FrenkelS adapted an earlier Doom port they designed to run on 16-bit PC processors like the 8088 and 286. Using that engine, the Neo Geo code then makes a kind of proto frame buffer out of the console's fix layer, an area of display memory that's usually used to display menus and HUD information on top of gameplay.

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