📢 The GUADEC Call for Papers is officially open!
Submit your paper by March 16th via this link: https://events.gnome.org/event/259/abstracts/#submit-abstract

Join us for an amazing conference in Brescia, Italy, from July 24-29! 🇮🇹

Wired has been killing it lately on covering what may well be the biggest security breach this country has ever seen. They obtained an email sent by an intelligence team within the U.S. Treasury Department that referred to Musk's actions to unilaterally slash and burn government agencies as "the single greatest insider threat risk" they have ever faced.

"There is ongoing litigation, congressional legislation, and widespread protests relating to DOGE’s access to Treasury and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service,” the email reads, per the tech-focused outlet. "If DOGE members have any access to payment systems, we recommend suspending that access immediately and conducting a comprehensive review of all actions they may have taken on these systems."

"There is reporting at other federal agencies indicating that DOGE members have performed unauthorized changes and locked civil servants out of the sensitive systems they gained access to,” the ‘Recommendations’ portion of the email continues. “We further recommend that DOGE members be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even “read only,” likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”

https://www.wired.com/story/treasury-bfs-doge-insider-threat

https://archive.ph/q26im

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports the warning came from a Treasury threat center run by the govt contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The Post reports that late Friday, Booz Allen said it had “removed” a subcontractor who wrote the warning and would seek to retract or amend it. “The draft report was prepared by a subcontractor to Booz Allen and contained unauthorized personal opinions that are not factual or consistent with our standards,” company spokesperson Jessica Klenk said. Booz Allen won more than $1 billion in multiyear U.S. government contracts last year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/07/doge-treasury-payments-system-warning/

https://archive.ph/lJ3oi

A large-scale brute force password attack using almost 2.8 million IP addresses is underway, attempting to guess the credentials for a wide range of networking devices, including those from Palo Alto Networks, Ivanti, and SonicWall.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-brute-force-attack-uses-28-million-ips-to-target-vpn-devices/

I have played a little bit with OpenAI's new iteration of #GPT, GPT-o1, which performs an initial reasoning step before running the LLM. It is certainly a more capable tool than previous iterations, though still struggling with the most advanced research mathematical tasks.

Here are some concrete experiments (with a prototype version of the model that I was granted access to). In https://chatgpt.com/share/2ecd7b73-3607-46b3-b855-b29003333b87 I repeated an experiment from https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/109948249160170335 in which I asked GPT to answer a vaguely worded mathematical query which could be solved by identifying a suitable theorem (Cramer's theorem) from the literature. Previously, GPT was able to mention some relevant concepts but the details were hallucinated nonsense. This time around, Cramer's theorem was identified and a perfectly satisfactory answer was given. (1/3)

"Unfortunately, a recent software update was not successful. Your vehicle cannot be driven.

Please call customer support"