Elon Musk takes a rare swipe at high-up Trump advisor over tariffs
Elon Musk took a rare swipe at one of President Donald Trump's closest advisors amid the fallout from the White House 's tariff plan, which has personally cost the mogul billions in recent days.
Man knifed to death in west London street in daylight double stabbing - as second casualty is arrested on suspicion of murder
A man was brutally stabbed to death during a broad daylight fight on Erconwald Street, East Acton, west London - as a second man, who was also stabbed, was arrested on suspicion of murder.
Truth about this photograph of Virginia Roberts: Toxic split with husband and violence restraining order revealed, as family speak out and Virginia remains under medical supervision
The most famous photograph of Virginia Giuffre was taken of her as a 17-year-old girl standing alongside a grinning Prince Andrew in Ghislaine Maxwell's Belgravia mews house.
David Beckham rejoins 'long-lost twin' Matt Damon in another Stella Artois ad as fans call for their 'hysterical' adventures to be made into a 'feature length film'
The 'David and Dave' commercial features Stella Artois' global ambassador Beckham, 49, and the brand's longtime poster boy Damon, 54, as the 'Other David'.
Microsoft Uses AI To Find Flaws In GRUB2, U-Boot, Barebox Bootloaders
Slashdot reader zlives shared this report from BleepingComputer:
Microsoft used its AI-powered Security Copilot to discover 20 previously unknown vulnerabilities in the GRUB2, U-Boot, and Barebox open-source bootloaders.
GRUB2 (GRand Unified Bootloader) is the default boot loader for most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, while U-Boot and Barebox are commonly used in embedded and IoT devices. Microsoft discovered eleven vulnerabilities in GRUB2, including integer and buffer overflows in filesystem parsers, command flaws, and a side-channel in cryptographic comparison. Additionally, 9 buffer overflows in parsing SquashFS, EXT4, CramFS, JFFS2, and symlinks were discovered in U-Boot and Barebox, which require physical access to exploit.
The newly discovered flaws impact devices relying on UEFI Secure Boot, and if the right conditions are met, attackers can bypass security protections to execute arbitrary code on the device. While exploiting these flaws would likely need local access to devices, previous bootkit attacks like BlackLotus achieved this through malware infections.
Miccrosoft titled its blog post "Analyzing open-source bootloaders: Finding vulnerabilities faster with AI." (And they do note that Micxrosoft disclosed the discovered vulnerabilities to the GRUB2, U-boot, and Barebox maintainers and "worked with the GRUB2 maintainers to contribute fixes... GRUB2 maintainers released security updates on February 18, 2025, and both the U-boot and Barebox maintainers released updates on February 19, 2025.")
They add that performing their initial research, using Security Copilot "saved our team approximately a week's worth of time," Microsoft writes, "that would have otherwise been spent manually reviewing the content."
Through a series of prompts, we identified and refined security issues, ultimately uncovering an exploitable integer overflow vulnerability. Copilot also assisted in finding similar patterns in other files, ensuring comprehensive coverage and validation of our findings...
As AI continues to emerge as a key tool in the cybersecurity community, Microsoft emphasizes the importance of vendors and researchers maintaining their focus on information sharing. This approach ensures that AI's advantages in rapid vulnerability discovery, remediation, and accelerated security operations can effectively counter malicious actors' attempts to use AI to scale common attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).
This week Google also announced Sec-Gemini v1, "a new experimental AI model focused on advancing cybersecurity AI frontiers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sunworshippers risk their lives to catch some rays on the crumbling cliffs as weather experts say it is going to heat up even MORE next week
With the high today of 20.8C in Hurn, Dorset, people across the UK flocked to the beach and parks to soak in the unusually warm spring weather.
Open Source Coalition Announces 'Model-Signing' with Sigstore to Strengthen the ML Supply Chain
The advent of LLMs and machine learning-based applications "opened the door to a new wave of security threats," argues Google's security blog. (Including model and data poisoning, prompt injection, prompt leaking and prompt evasion.)
So as part of the Linux Foundation's nonprofit Open Source Security Foundation, and in partnership with NVIDIA and HiddenLayer, Google's Open Source Security Team on Friday announced the first stable model-signing library (hosted at PyPI.org), with digital signatures letting users verify that the model used by their application "is exactly the model that was created by the developers," according to a post on Google's security blog.
[S]ince models are an uninspectable collection of weights (sometimes also with arbitrary code), an attacker can tamper with them and achieve significant impact to those using the models. Users, developers, and practitioners need to examine an important question during their risk assessment process: "can I trust this model?"
Since its launch, Google's Secure AI Framework (SAIF) has created guidance and technical solutions for creating AI applications that users can trust. A first step in achieving trust in the model is to permit users to verify its integrity and provenance, to prevent tampering across all processes from training to usage, via cryptographic signing... [T]he signature would have to be verified when the model gets uploaded to a model hub, when the model gets selected to be deployed into an application (embedded or via remote APIs) and when the model is used as an intermediary during another training run. Assuming the training infrastructure is trustworthy and not compromised, this approach guarantees that each model user can trust the model...
The average developer, however, would not want to manage keys and rotate them on compromise. These challenges are addressed by using Sigstore, a collection of tools and services that make code signing secure and easy. By binding an OpenID Connect token to a workload or developer identity, Sigstore alleviates the need to manage or rotate long-lived secrets. Furthermore, signing is made transparent so signatures over malicious artifacts could be audited in a public transparency log, by anyone. This ensures that split-view attacks are not possible, so any user would get the exact same model. These features are why we recommend Sigstore's signing mechanism as the default approach for signing ML models.
Today the OSS community is releasing the v1.0 stable version of our model signing library as a Python package supporting Sigstore and traditional signing methods. This model signing library is specialized to handle the sheer scale of ML models (which are usually much larger than traditional software components), and handles signing models represented as a directory tree. The package provides CLI utilities so that users can sign and verify model signatures for individual models. The package can also be used as a library which we plan to incorporate directly into model hub upload flows as well as into ML frameworks.
"We can view model signing as establishing the foundation of trust in the ML ecosystem..." the post concludes (adding "We envision extending this approach to also include datasets and other ML-related artifacts.")
Then, we plan to build on top of signatures, towards fully tamper-proof metadata records, that can be read by both humans and machines. This has the potential to automate a significant fraction of the work needed to perform incident response in case of a compromise in the ML world...
To shape the future of building tamper-proof ML, join the Coalition for Secure AI, where we are planning to work on building the entire trust ecosystem together with the open source community. In collaboration with multiple industry partners, we are starting up a special interest group under CoSAI for defining the future of ML signing and including tamper-proof ML metadata, such as model cards and evaluation results.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Woman suffers life-changing injuries and man fights for life after car crashes in police chase and watchdog launches investigation
The collision took place at approximately 4.20am on Saturday in Paddington, west London, after the driver of a white SUV failed to stop for a marked Met Police vehicle.
Body is found by rescue teams searching for 15-year-old boy who got into difficulty swimming in lake
Rescue teams searching for a missing 15 year old boy who got into difficulty swimming in a lake have found a body.
'Mutiny' at Versace: Staff horrified as workers are sacked weeks after Donatella was 'dethroned' as creative director by new boss
EXCLUSIVE: MailOnline can reveal that there has been yet more drama at the company as they got rid of a number of long-serving and loyal staff in a round of cuts.
Python's PyPI Finally Gets Closer to Adding 'Organization Accounts' and SBOMs
Back in 2023 Python's infrastructure director called it "the first step in our plan to build financial support and long-term sustainability of PyPI" while giving users "one of our most requested features: organization accounts." (That is, "self-managed teams with their own exclusive branded web addresses" to make their massive Python Package Index repository "easier to use for large community projects, organizations, or companies who manage multiple sub-teams and multiple packages.")
Nearly two years later, they've announced that they're "making progress" on its rollout...
Over the last month, we have taken some more baby steps to onboard new Organizations, welcoming 61 new Community Organizations and our first 18 Company Organizations. We're still working to improve the review and approval process and hope to improve our processing speed over time. To date, we have 3,562 Community and 6,424 Company Organization requests to process in our backlog.
They've also onboarded a PyPI Support Specialist to provide "critical bandwidth to review the backlog of requests" and "free up staff engineering time to develop features to assist in that review." (And "we were finally able to finalize our Terms of Service document for PyPI," build the tooling necessary to notify users, and initiate the Terms of Service rollout. [Since launching 20 years ago PyPi's terms of service have only been updated twice.]
In other news the security developer-in-residence at the Python Software Foundation has been continuing work on a Software Bill-of-Materials (SBOM) as described in Python Enhancement Proposal #770. The feature "would designate a specific directory inside of Python package metadata (".dist-info/sboms") as a directory where build backends and other tools can store SBOM documents that describe components within the package beyond the top-level component."
The goal of this project is to make bundled dependencies measurable by software analysis tools like vulnerability scanning, license compliance, and static analysis tools. Bundled dependencies are common for scientific computing and AI packages, but also generally in packages that use multiple programming languages like C, C++, Rust, and JavaScript. The PEP has been moved to Provisional Status, meaning the PEP sponsor is doing a final review before tools can begin implementing the PEP ahead of its final acceptance into changing Python packaging standards. Seth has begun implementing code that tools can use when adopting the PEP, such as a project which abstracts different Linux system package managers functionality to reverse a file path into the providing package metadata.
Security developer-in-residence Seth Larson will be speaking about this project at PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, PA in a talk titled "Phantom Dependencies: is your requirements.txt haunted?"
Meanwhile InfoWorld reports that newly approved Python Enhancement Proposal 751 will also give Python a standard lock file format.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Taxpayers are shelling out £688 a night for every prisoner being kept in a police cell because of jail overcrowding - that's more than a night at the five-star Savoy
A one-night stay for two in the plush accommodation - ranked the 'number one best value' five-star hotel on TripAdvisor - will set the lucky guests back a cool £665 tonight.
Taylor Swift 'is talking to Blake Lively again as actress apologises' amid singer being dragged into the Justin Baldoni scandal
Taylor Swift is reportedly talking to Blake Lively again after the pals fell out amid the Justin Baldoni scandal.
The two words Trump said to Kamala in her shambolic concession call that left aide fuming 'He's a sociopath'
Vice President Kamala Harris ' call to President-elect Donald Trump to concede the 2024 election was always going to be an awkward one.
Fury after luxury riverside hotel is being used to house 150 male migrants - as locals say decision was made 'over night'
EXCLUSIVE: The four-star Dragonfly Hotel, which is located in Thorpe Meadows, Peterborough, was given over entirely to house male migrants with just 48 hours notice.
Chesney Hawkes beams as he watches the Grand National at Aintree ahead of his Celebrity Big Brother stint
Chesney Hawkes looked happier than ever as he watched the Grand National races at Aintree on Saturday.
The tiny Essex village barely anyone has heard of but thousands will have seen
It's a picturesque village with beautiful Essex countryside
The surprising Essex hobby of The Inbetweeners and White Gold star James Buckley
You can often find the TV star enjoying an evening there
Forget Japan, here are the best places to see cherry blossoms in the UK
The UK is home to some of the most spectacular springtime destinations.
Essex actress starring on Broadway with big Hollywood names
An Essex actress has reached the pinnacle of acting as she is starring in a famous Shakespeare play on Broadway alongside big Hollywood names.