Author: Carter

You’ve likely encountered this frustrating situation: a website refuses to load, a login page stalls, or an online service becomes completely inaccessible at the worst possible time. Often, the culprit isn’t an internal failure but a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, an external assault designed to overwhelm the target. DDoS attacks have remained one of the most straightforward methods to cripple an online service. By flooding a target with massive amounts of traffic, attackers exhaust its resources and render it unusable, all without needing to break into the system itself. Today, these attacks are increasingly packaged and marketed like any legitimate…

A new self-driving car is hitting the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix—or at least, it will be soon. In the coming weeks, Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary, will begin offering free public rides in its latest vehicle, the Ojai (pronounced “oh-hai”). These pale blue, sensor-covered minivans still come equipped with steering wheels, even though they’re built to operate without human drivers. For the time being, all rides called through the Waymo app will be complimentary.The road to this launch has been lengthy. Waymo originally unveiled the vehicle in 2021 and has been testing it on public roads…

Once a human stops fine-tuning them, most AI agents stop getting better. The underlying model stays the same, and so does the infrastructure built around it. Hexo Labs aims to evolve both simultaneously. This week, the company open-sourced SIA (Self-Improving AI) under the MIT license. The central — and deliberately narrow — claim behind SIA is this: within a single self-improvement loop, it can modify both the agent’s surrounding infrastructure and the model’s internal weights. What is SIA (Self-Improving AI) SIA divides a task-specific agent into two layers. The first layer is the harness (sometimes called the scaffold), which includes…

Hurricane Laura struck Louisiana in late August as the first major hurricane of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season. Classified as a Category 4 Atlantic hurricane, it brought sustained winds reaching up to 150 MPH along with a devastating storm surge. Ranked as the 10th-strongest U.S. hurricane ever recorded, Laura claimed the lives of at least 41 people in the United States. The storm caused an estimated $23.3 billion in damages across southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas near the Gulf of Mexico. I made the drive from Indiana to Louisiana in my motorhome to see how I could assist our customers,…

pros and cons Pros ComfortableDetailed soundStylish and practical Cons ExpensiveWeak battery life Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.To celebrate ten years of its top-tier over-ear headphones, Sony has launched a limited-edition model called 1000X The Collexion. Looking back from 2016 to today, Sony’s 1000X series has evolved from simply competing with rivals to leading the industry.Also: I’ve tested dozens of Sony headphones – these 4 tweaks get me the best sound qualityGenerally, I see Apple’s $549 AirPods Max 2 as the upper limit for mainstream headphones. Anything above that, like Bowers & Wilkins’ $800 Px8 S2,…

GPU communication often acts as a significant speed constraint in real-world AI workloads. Citing data from the mKernel initiative, researchers note that communication can occupy 43.6% of the forward pass and 32% of total training duration. For common Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures, transmitting data between devices may take as much as 47% of total runtime. A team from UC Berkeley’s UCCL project has introduced mKernel, a library of persistent CUDA kernels designed to merge NVLink traffic within a node, RDMA transfers across nodes, and processing tasks into one unified operation. The Challenge: CPU-Managed Communication Traditionally, handling data exchange between GPUs follows…

In brief Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.8 on Thursday, only six weeks after releasing Opus 4.7. The new version delivers improved performance in software engineering, reasoning, and computer usage benchmarks, while maintaining the same pricing at $5/$25 per million input/output tokens. Opus 4.8’s safety alignment scores now match those of Claude Mythos Preview, Anthropic’s experimental flagship model, with significantly reduced rates of deceptive or potentially harmful behavior compared to the previous version. Six weeks—that’s the short span between Anthropic’s launch of Opus 4.7 and the arrival of Opus 4.8.The latest model performs faster and scores higher on benchmark evaluations, and…

The North Korean state-backed hacking group known as Kimsuky (also called Velvet Chollima) has been linked to a new wave of cyberattacks aimed at South Korean military and corporate organizations during March and April 2026. “Kimsuky used a variety of carefully crafted social engineering techniques, including faking security software installation pages and creating a counterfeit Webex meeting page that exploited a real meeting schedule,” ENKI explained in a report released this week. The attacks were found to distribute a variant of a known malware family called HTTPSpy, disguised as installers from South Korean security software — a method the group…

I completed my master’s thesis on Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC). My model, EmoNet, achieved a Weighted F1 of 39.18 on EmoryNLP — a competitive result compared to the PapersWithCode leaderboard at the time, placing it between TUCORE-GCN_RoBERTa (39.24) and S+PAGE (39.14). It also outperformed my selected baseline model, CoMPM, by +1.81 F1. Two years on, I revisited the field to see how things had evolved. The leaderboard looked completely different. The top entries were no longer encoder-only models with intricate attention mechanisms — they had become LLaMA-2–7B-based systems using LoRA fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented prompting: InstructERC, CKERC, BiosERC, LaERC-S. The…

The USDA has not shared any alternate plans for workers who depend on these daycare facilities. Michele Sandiford May 28, 2026 12:37 pm Under a minute to read Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Agriculture Department to find substitute daycare arrangements for its federal workforce. The USDA’s current daycare service provider declared in April that it would terminate its contract, resulting in the shutdown of two childcare facilities in the D.C. metro area this July. However, Democrats claim the USDA has not informed its staff about any alternative solutions for those who depend on these facilities.The American Foreign Service Association is…