WordPress plugin Jetpack released a critical security update earlier today, addressing a vulnerability that allowed a logged-in user to access forms submitted by other visitors to the site....

The Internet Archive has brought its Wayback Machine back online "in a provisional, read-only manner" as it continues to recover from attacks that took the site down last week, founder Brewster Kahle said in a post last night. The archive.org home page points users to the now-functional Wayback Machine but notes that other Internet Archive services are temporarily offline. Kahle said it was "safe to resume" the Wayback Machine's operations, but that it "might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again." The Wayback Machine's "Save Page Now" feature that lets users capture a webpage manually is currently unavailable. The related openlibrary.org book-preservation website was still offline today. Founded in 1996, the nonprofit Internet Archive crawls the web to preserve pages that are publicly available and has captured 916 billion web pages so far. It has a staff of 150 people and also provides free access to many videos, audio files, and books (though it was recently forced to delete 500,000 books after losing a copyright case). Read full article

Has your dentist ever told you that it's recommended to get routine dental X-rays every year? My (former) dentist's office did this year—in writing, even. And they claimed that the recommendation came from the American Dental Association. It's a common refrain from dentists, but it's false. The American Dental Association does not recommend annual routine X-rays. And this is not new; it's been that way for well over a decade. The association's guidelines from 2012 recommended that adults who don't have an increased risk of dental caries (myself included) need only bitewing X-rays of the back teeth every two to three years. Even people with a higher risk of caries can go as long as 18 months between bitewings. The guidelines also note that X-rays should not be preemptively used to look for problems: "Radiographic screening for the purpose of detecting disease before clinical examination should not be performed," the guidelines read. In other words, dentists are supposed to examine your teeth before they take any X-rays. Read full article

What if there was a way to sneak malicious instructions into Claude, Copilot, or other top-name AI chatbots and get confidential data out of them by using characters large language models can recognize and their human users can’t? As it turns out, there was—and in some cases still is. The invisible characters, the result of a quirk in the Unicode text encoding standard, create an ideal covert channel that can make it easier for attackers to conceal malicious payloads fed into an LLM. The hidden text can similarly obfuscate the exfiltration of passwords, financial information, or other secrets out of the same AI-powered bots. Because the hidden text can be combined with normal text, users can unwittingly paste it into prompts. The secret content can also be appended to visible text in chatbot output. The result is a steganographic framework built into the most widely used text encoding channel. Read full article

The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have. The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. "Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not," they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions. The basic setup of the experiment is very straightforward. The researchers developed a scenario where an ongoing water shortage was forcing a school district to consider closing one of its schools and merging its students into another existing school. They then wrote an article that described the situation and contained seven different pieces of information: three that favored merging, three that disfavored it, and one that was neutral. Just over half of the control group that read the full article favored merging the two schools. Read full article

AeroGarden, which sells Wi-Fi-connected indoor gardening systems, is going out of business on January 1. While Scotts Miracle-Gro has continued selling AeroGarden products after announcing the impending shutdown, the future of the devices' companion app is uncertain. AeroGarden systems use hydroponics and LED lights to grow indoor gardens without requiring sunlight or soil. The smart gardening system arrived in 2006, and Scotts Miracle-Gro took over complete ownership in 2020. Some AeroGardens work with the iOS and Android apps that connect to the gardens via Wi-Fi and tell users when their plants need water or nutrients. AeroGarden also marketed the app as a way for users to easily monitor multiple AeroGardens and control the amount of light, water, and nutrients they should receive. The app offers gardening tips and can access AeroGarden customer service representatives and AeroGarden communities on Facebook and other social media outlets. Regarding the reasoning for the company's closure, AeroGarden's FAQ page only states: Read full article

Maastricht University has decided to remove the Mindfulnest meditation pod from its Arts and Social Sciences faculty after complaints that students were using it to have sex.

Some of the largest, most damaging breaches of 2024 already account for over a billion stolen records. Plus, some special shout-outs.

One year from today, on October 14, 2025, Microsoft will stop releasing security updates for PCs that are still running Windows 10. Organizations and individuals will still be able to pay for three more years of updates, with prices that go up steadily each year (Microsoft still hasn't provided pricing for end users, only saying that it will release pricing info "closer to the October 2025 date.") But for most PCs running Windows 10, the end of the line is in sight. Normally, this wouldn't be a huge deal; the last dregs of support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 dried up in January 2023, and the world didn't end even though some PCs continue to run those OS versions. But there are three things about the end of Windows 10 support that are slightly different from other recent end-of-life dates: Read full article

Forty new variants of the TrickMo Android banking trojan have been identified in the wild, linked to 16 droppers and 22 distinct command and control (C2) infrastructures, with new features designed to steal Android PINs....

An explosion caused a fire and significant damage to a law firm on Spuistraat in Amsterdam city center early on Monday morning.