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More Than 60 UN Members Sign Cybercrime Treaty Opposed By Rights Groups

Slashdot - 28 October, 2025 - 02:07
Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi on Saturday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. From a report: The new global legal framework aims to strengthen international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries were seen to sign the declaration Saturday, which means it will go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an "important milestone", but that it was "only the beginning". "Every day, sophisticated scams, destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy... We need a strong, connected global response," he said at the opening ceremony in Vietnam's capital on Saturday. The UN Convention against Cybercrime was first proposed by Russian diplomats in 2017, and approved by consensus last year after lengthy negotiations. Critics say its broad language could lead to abuses of power and enable the cross-border repression of government critics.

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Categories: Technology

Electronic Arts' AI Tools Are Creating More Work Than They Save

Slashdot - 28 October, 2025 - 01:01
Electronic Arts has spent the past year pushing its nearly 15,000 employees to use AI for everything from code generation to scripting difficult conversations about pay. Employees in some areas must complete multiple AI training courses and use tools like the company's in-house chatbot ReefGPT daily. The tools produce flawed code and hallucinations that employees then spend time correcting. Staff say the AI creates more work rather than less, according to Business Insider. They fix mistakes while simultaneously training the programs on their own work. Creative employees fear the technology will eventually eliminate demand for character artists and level designers. One recently laid-off senior quality-assurance designer says AI performed a key part of his job -- reviewing and summarizing feedback from hundreds of play testers. He suspects this contributed to his termination when about 100 colleagues were let go this past spring from the company's Respawn Entertainment studio.

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Categories: Technology

DSA-6043-1 gimp - security update

Debian Security - 28 October, 2025 - 00:00
Several vulnerabilities were discovered in GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, which could result in denial of service or potentially the execution of arbitrary code if malformed DICOM or DDS images are opened.

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6043-1

Categories: Security

DSA-6042-1 webkit2gtk - security update

Debian Security - 28 October, 2025 - 00:00
The following vulnerabilities have been discovered in the WebKitGTK web engine:

CVE-2025-43272

Big Bear discovered that processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to an unexpected process crash.

CVE-2025-43342

An anonymous researcher discovered that processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to an unexpected process crash.

CVE-2025-43343

An anonymous researcher discovered that processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to an unexpected process crash.

CVE-2025-43356

Jaydev Ahire discovered that a website may be able to access sensor information without user consent.

CVE-2025-43368

Pawel Wylecial discovered that processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to an unexpected process crash.

This WebKitGTK update causes a compatibility problem with older versions of Evolution when handling e-mail attachments. For this reason, fixed versions of Evolution have also been released along with this WebKitGTK update.

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6042-1

Categories: Security

OpenAI's Less-Flashy Rival Might Have a Better Business Model

Slashdot - 27 October, 2025 - 22:34
OpenAI's rival Anthropic has a different approach — and "a clearer path to making a sustainable business out of AI," writes the Wall Street Journal. Outside of OpenAI's close partnership with Microsoft, which integrates OpenAI's models into Microsoft's software products, OpenAI mostly caters to the mass market... which has helped OpenAI reach an annual revenue run rate of around $13 billion, around 30% of which it says comes from businesses. Anthropic has generated much less mass-market appeal. The company has said about 80% of its revenue comes from corporate customers. Last month it said it had some 300,000 of them... Its cutting-edge Claude language models have been praised for their aptitude in coding: A July report from Menlo Ventures — which has invested in Anthropic — estimated via a survey that Anthropic had a 42% market share for coding, compared with OpenAI's 21%. Anthropic is also now ahead of OpenAI in market share for overarching corporate AI use, Menlo Ventures estimated, at 32% to OpenAI's 25%. Anthropic is also surprisingly close to OpenAI when it comes to revenue. The company is already at a $7 billion annual run rate and expects to get to $9 billion by the end of the year — a big lead over its better-known rival in revenue per user. Both companies have backing in the form of investments from big tech companies — Microsoft for OpenAI, and a combination of Amazon and Google for Anthropic — that help provide AI computing infrastructure and expose their products to a broad set of customers. But Anthropic's growth path is a lot easier to understand than OpenAI's. Corporate customers are devising a plethora of money-saving uses for AI in areas like coding, drafting legal documents and expediting billing. Those uses are likely to expand in the future and draw more customers to Anthropic, especially as the return on investment for them becomes easier to measure... Demonstrating how much demand there is for Anthropic among corporate customers, Microsoft in September said Anthropic's leading language model, Claude, would be offered within its Copilot suite of software despite Microsoft's ties to OpenAI. "There is also a possibility that OpenAI's mass-market appeal becomes a turnoff for corporate customers," the article adds, "who want AI to be more boring and useful than fun and edgy."

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Categories: Technology

Mozilla to Require Data-Collection Disclosure in All New Firefox Extensions

Slashdot - 27 October, 2025 - 18:34
"Mozilla is introducing a new privacy framework for Firefox extensions that will require developers to disclose whether their add-ons collect or transmit user data..." reports the blog Linuxiac: The policy takes effect on November 3, 2025, and applies to all new Firefox extensions submitted to addons.mozilla.org. According to Mozilla's announcement, extension developers must now include a new key in their manifest.json files. This key specifies whether an extension gathers any personal data. Even extensions that collect nothing must explicitly state "none" in this field to confirm that no data is being collected or shared. This information will be visible to users at multiple points: during the installation prompt, on the extension's listing page on addons.mozilla.org, and in the Permissions and Data section of Firefox's about:addons page. In practice, this means users will be able to see at a glance whether a new extension collects any data before they install it.

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Categories: Technology

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