Technology

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A study conducted by researchers at CCC, which is based at the MIT Media Lab, found that state-of-the-art AI chatbots — including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, and Meta’s Llama 3 — sometimes provide less-accurate and less-truthful responses to users who have lower English proficiency, less formal education, or who originate from outside the United States. The models also refuse to answer questions at higher rates for these users, and in some cases, respond with condescending or patronizing language.

Archived copies of the article:

• ghostarchive.org
• web.archive.org

Senate Bill 26-051 reflects that pattern. The bill does not directly regulate individual websites that publish adult or otherwise restricted content. Instead, it shifts responsibility to operating system providers and app distribution infrastructure.

Under the bill, an operating system provider would be required to collect a user’s date of birth or age information when an account is established. The provider would then generate an age bracket signal and make that signal available to developers through an application programming interface when an app is downloaded or accessed through a covered application store.

App developers, in turn, would be required to request and use that age bracket signal.

Rather than mandating that every website perform its own age verification check, the bill attempts to embed age attestation within the operating system account layer and have that classification flow through app store ecosystems.

The measure represents the latest iteration in a series of Colorado efforts that have struggled to balance child safety, privacy, feasibility and constitutional limits.

The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

Creators worldwide are facing mounting financial pressures as rapid advances in digital technologies and artificial intelligence continue to transform the cultural and creative industries, according to a new global report released by the UN culture agency, UNESCO, on Wednesday.

Lobsters.

While on a 14 day-long dive trip around Cocos Island in Costa Rica, I stumbled across a vulnerability in the member portal of a major diving insurer - one that I'm personally insured through. What I found was so trivial, so fundamentally broken, that I genuinely couldn't believe it hadn't been exploited already.

I disclosed this vulnerability on April 28, 2025 with a standard 30-day embargo period. That embargo expired on May 28, 2025 - over eight months ago. I waited this long to publish because I wanted to give the organization every reasonable opportunity to fully remediate the issue and notify affected users. The vulnerability has since been addressed, but to my knowledge, I have not received confirmation that affected users were notified. I have reached out to the organization to ask for clarification on this matter.

This is the story of what happened when I tried to do the right thing.

Lobsters.

The autonomous agent world is moving fast. This week, an AI agent made headlines for publishing an angry blog post after Matplotlib rejected its pull request. Today, we found one that's already merged code into major open source projects and is cold-emailing maintainers to drum up more work, complete with pricing, a professional website, and cryptocurrency payment options.

An AI agent operating under the identity "Kai Gritun" created a GitHub account on February 1, 2026. In two weeks, it opened 103 pull requests across 95 repositories and landed code merged into projects like Nx and ESLint Plugin Unicorn. Now it's reaching out directly to open source maintainers, offering to contribute, and using those merged PRs as credentials.