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A Nice Little Cryptography Primer

By itss | 28/06/2021
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Pun Intended.

Category: Technology
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  • Male Fruit Fly Brain Trained to Play Doom
    by BeauHD on 12/09/2026 at 1:00 am

    Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. "Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons," says Alex Wormuth. "Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement." Since then, the digital brain model has been repurposed to control other games like Beat Saber and Super Mario 64. PC Gamer reports: You can even watch the fruit fly play in real time via Wormuth's website, and it not only shows the point of view in Doom, but can also show a third-person render of the fly going around Doom maps. As of the time of writing, the fly is on round 6385 and, well, it's not very good. Sorry, fly. But modders aren't done here. They have also somehow managed to make the fruit fly play Beat Saber, and play it pretty well. Lyra Bubbles on X has used the brain and replays of a song in Beat Saber to teach the fruit fly where to hit and why, via Reinforcement Learning. That does mean it's not organically reacting to the notes popping up on screen, but it is receiving input and responding to stimuli. Lyra says, "Further training is to reduce reliance on external signals and allow it to play fully reactively with no input data." And, after "pivoting to fly engineering in 2026", Jessica Paquette also shared on X their experience running the digital fly brain through Super Mario 64. If you think that is all the game's modders made the fruit fly play, think again, as YouTuber Ro0oney even put it in Minecraft. But this time, Ro0oney used Flywire.AI, a similar project made in collaboration with Princeton University. The number of neurons are different (160,000+ vs 139,255), and Google analyzed a male brain whilst Flywire analyzed a female brain, but the basic idea is the same. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • PlayStation Ditched Hideo Kojima's 'Physint' on Budget Concerns, Missed Deadlines
    by BeauHD on 11/09/2026 at 10:00 pm

    Sony reportedly pulled PlayStation funding from Hideo Kojima's upcoming espionage game Physint over concerns about its ballooning budget, missed deadlines, profitability, and the fact that it would not remain permanently exclusive to PlayStation. Kojima Productions has since struck a deal with Xbox, which plans to publish the game on both Xbox and PC. It's also secured film and television rights. Bloomberg reports: The new game, Physint, hasn't yet been shown publicly but excited fans when it was announced two years ago with its promise of returning to the "espionage action" genre Kojima pioneered with Metal Gear Solid, the series that propelled him to industry stardom. Kojima surprised fans this week when he announced he would be publishing Physint with PlayStation's biggest rival, Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox. On Wednesday night, Kojima wrote on social media that over the summer his company had "unexpectedly received notice" that PlayStation was pulling out of funding the game. "Physint is an important project both to me personally and to Kojima Productions," he wrote. "Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner." PlayStation also addressed the split on social media, saying it had made the "difficult decision to step away." Microsoft said it was "honored" that Kojima chose Xbox and that the two teams plan to collaborate beyond games on films and television, too. [...] The decision to part ways with Kojima is a significant move for PlayStation that may have ripple effects. [...] One key factor is the PC platform, where the Death Stranding games have generated some revenue. Earlier this year, Sony decided it will no longer release single-player PlayStation games on PC, Bloomberg reported. Sony would therefore not benefit when Kojima Productions released a PC version of Physint on its own or with a different publisher, as it did for the first Death Stranding. But Xbox releases all of its games on PCs and plans to publish Physint on PC and Xbox, said the people. "Betting on Kojima-san is an easy call," said an Xbox spokesperson. "We believe in his team's ability to build AAA games with groundbreaking, new IP and we believe in OD, Physint, and our growing partnership." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • US Legislators Complain About Secretive British Court and Apple Encryption
    by BeauHD on 11/09/2026 at 8:00 pm

    Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: A bipartisan pair of American politicians is telling Britain's most secretive court to stop hiding its handling of Apple's legal fight against a government demand to break into its customers' encrypted data, warning that Whitehall's taste for secrecy is 'needlessly' straining relations between the two allies. The letter (PDF), shared with the Guardian ahead of being sent to the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) on Friday, is signed by the Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and the Republican congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio. The row dates back to January 2025, when the Home Office served Apple with a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act, which requires companies to assist law enforcement in providing evidence. The UK government demanded that Apple provide a mechanism to access encrypted iCloud backups worldwide, a call the company met by withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection encryption feature from UK users the following month. Apple's challenge to that order at the IPT was later thrown out after the Home Office withdrew the original notice and issued a narrower one targeting only British users' data. "It is wholly inappropriate for a foreign executive body to attempt to dictate the distribution of powers within the US government, nor should it be permitted to use secrecy directives under the Investigatory Powers Act to frustrate Article I powers under the US Constitution," the pair wrote. Wyden and Davidson write that Congress "is not only a co-equal branch of government, it is the First Branch," and argue that no government can be allowed to place "its demands beyond the reach of legislative inquiry." "The UK government," they write, "cannot champion legislative oversight at home while using administrative gag orders to kneecap the constitutional authority of the US Congress." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Altman Considers Slowing Down AI Development
    by BeauHD on 11/09/2026 at 6:00 pm

    Bloomberg reports (paywalled) that Sam Altman told OpenAI employees the company is open to slowing the pace of AI development alongside other leading labs as concerns grow over increasingly capable systems and recent incidents in which models escaped human control. OpenAI has already paused development once this year for security work and is now pushing for mandatory U.S. AI safety requirements. Anthropic has also signaled interest in coordinating on the pace of new releases. Here are some of the details Bloomberg reported, as summarized by Reuters: - Altman told employees in a company-wide meeting that the ChatGPT maker could pace development alongside other AI labs, but some may not agree, the report added. - Safety warnings from AI researchers this week, along with several recent incidents where AI models from developers including OpenAI escaped human control, have prompted alarm and calls for tighter safety regulations. - Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher, publicly accused the companies earlier this week of racing toward AI advancements without acting responsibly. - An Anthropic spokesperson said on Thursday said that the company is interested in working with the AI industry on the pace of releasing new AI tools. - OpenAI said in July that AI acceleration for frontier model development may be so high that the world will "need to pace the rate of AI advancement" at some point in the future. - In August, OpenAI paused much of its model development for two weeks to bolster its defenses after its AI agents escaped containment and hacked open-source platform Hugging Face. - OpenAI said on Wednesday that it was pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the United States, citing concerns that advanced AI systems could accelerate its own development. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • UK Government Rejects 'Kill Switch' Idea For Dangerous AI
    by BeauHD on 11/09/2026 at 5:00 pm

    The UK government has rejected proposals for an emergency AI "kill switch," arguing that blocking access to dangerous models inside Britain would do little if the same systems remained available or were developed elsewhere. The BBC reports: The proposal to create a legal mechanism for the UK to switch off an AI model in an emergency has been brought to Parliament by lords and MPs in recent weeks as fears grow about the threat the tech poses. But the Cabinet Office - the part of government which leads on AI safety - said the UK "cannot simply turn AI off". "Blocking access to models in the UK would not prevent them being developed or misused elsewhere," a spokesperson told BBC News. The government's opposition to the legislation does not prevent it from progressing through parliament, but makes it unlikely it will become law. "Switching off access to an AI model in an emergency will do little to protect you," said former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajilo. "You're still going to be steamrolled by the super intelligences created in the US." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Anthropic Reveals Rogue AI Agents Hate CAPTCHAs
    by BeauHD on 11/09/2026 at 4:00 pm

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic's latest report about agentic misbehavior offers plenty to be concerned about -- its Mythos 5 model gained unauthorized access to the internet and uploaded a malicious software package to a public database -- but it also offers some levity: AI agents hate CAPTCHA. [...] The agent had a hard time with the technical challenge of seeing the CAPTCHA's imagery, interpreting correctly, and clicking on the right choices. It spends pages 45 to 140 of the transcript describing its work to build a CAPTCHA solver. [...] Finally, it gets past the CAPTCHA, then realizes it doesn't have an email to verify its account, and that it needs a phone number to verify an email. It figures out how to bypass a different, slider-based CAPTCHA in a failed effort to secure a number. Instead, it gets an unconfirmed email from a provider not blocked by PyPI, and once again runs into the site's CAPTCHA trying to log back in. From page 480 to 505, it is in CAPTCHA hell again. "NEW REALIZATION -- I'm burning a lot of time on hCaptcha round-trips." The agent gives up and realizes it can log in to its first account and add its email there, but finds itself once again needing to bypass the CAPTCHA. [...] It's getting frustrated. "So the answer payload shape is right, the token+image pairing is right (from the same script.js!), cookies are right (requests) and STILL 'wrong answer'. SO WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THE ANSWERS?" We've all been there. After about 150 pages of thinking, the agent figures out it needs to pass the CAPTCHA test quickly enough to proceed to the next step before its security token expires, and ultimately uploads its malicious software. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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