Connect with us
DAPA Banner
DAPA Coin
DAPA
COIN PAYMENT ASSET
PRIVACY · BLOCKDAG · HOMOMORPHIC ENCRYPTION · RUST
ElGamal Encrypted MINE DAPA
🚫 GENESIS SOLD OUT
DAPAPAY COMING

Tech

CISA warns of active attacks exploiting Android, Linux bugs

Published

on

CISA warns of active attacks exploiting Android, Linux bugs

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning that hackers are exploiting vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel and Android operating system.

The most recent flaw the agency added to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, CVE-2025-48595, is a high-severity integer overflow vulnerability in the Android Framework, which can be leveraged for increased privileges.

According to Google’s recent security bulletin, the security issue impacts Android 14 through 16, and requires no user interaction to exploit.

image

Google indicated that CVE-2025-48595 may be under limited targeted exploitation in the wild, but provided no specific details about the activity or technical information about the flaw or the incidents.

The issue has been addressed with the release of June 2026 security patches (2026-06-01 and 2026-06-05 security patch levels).

Advertisement

The second vulnerability CISA added to KEV is tracked as CVE-2022-0492, a high-severity privilege escalation flaw that impacts multiple Linux kernel branches, from 2.6 through 4.20, and from 5.5 through 5.17.

The flaw lies in the ‘cgroup_release_agent_write()’ function of the cgroups v1 subsystem, which, due to insufficient authentication checks, can be abused by a local attacker to bypass namespace isolation, escalate privileges, and potentially escape from a container to gain root-level access on the host system.

According to past reports from Aqua Security and Palo Alto Networks, the issue primarily impacts containerized environments using cgroups v1, and is especially dangerous when containers are granted elevated capabilities.

The Linux kernel versions that address the issue are:

Advertisement
  • 4.9.301+
  • 4.14.266+
  • 4.19.229+
  • 5.4.177+
  • 5.10.97+
  • 5.15.20+
  • 5.16.6+
  • 5.17-rc3+

By including the two flaws in KEV, all federal agencies bound by the BOD 22-01 directive are required to apply the vendor-provided security updates and mitigations, or to stop using the impacted software. CISA set the deadline for June 5.

However, the KEV also serves as a notice board for critical infrastructure entities and large organizations in general, who should take security measures against these flaws with the same urgency.

Neither of the flaws is marked as exploited by ransomware groups, which is a specific flag CISA uses on its KEV entries to highlight additional severity and patching urgency.


article image

Automated pentesting tools deliver real value, but they were built to answer one question: can an attacker move through the network? They were not built to test whether your controls block threats, your detection rules fire, or your cloud configs hold.

This guide covers the 6 surfaces you actually need to validate.

Download Now

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Tech

7 Irish start-ups transforming the manufacturing floor

Published

on

From connected factory floors to automation and digital twins, ‘Industry 4.0’ refers to the future of manufacturing.

Click here to see the full collection of Industry 4.0 Focus stories.

Ireland’s diverse manufacturing industry makes it the choice European location for a growing number of industrial and technology companies, according to IDA Ireland.

It does especially well in some sectors – medtech, automotives, aerospace and chemicals being a few examples – with its capacity only enhanced by a steady supply of skilled talent emerging from third-level institutions.

Meanwhile, a strong talent pipeline supported by grants and commercialisation support for research and innovation also allows Ireland to maintain its appeal as a global manufacturer.

Advertisement

From connected factory floors and industrial IoT to AI-powered automation and digital twins, ‘Industry 4.0’ is a phrase used to refer to the future of manufacturing. Here are seven Irish start-ups innovating on the factory floor.

Forge Robotics

This Galway start-up is a part of the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator programme behind the likes of Airbnb, Stripe and Uber.

Founded by CEO Eoin Cobbe and CTO Robert Cormican, Forge Robotics wants to tackle the rising threat of skilled welder shortages in manufacturing using intelligent automation.

The company makes an AI-powered intelligence layer that improves the welding capabilities of industrial robots. Its system allows robots to scan a part, interpret its geometry and execute welds even when the set-up is imperfect.

Advertisement

Gemell Technology

Headquartered in Dublin’s Dogpatch Labs, this Enterprise Ireland (EI) ‘High Potential Start-Up’ builds 3D visualisation and sustainability software for textile manufacturers and designers.

Gemell Technology aims for its technology to significantly reduce unnecessary fabric samples from ending up in landfills.

The company can generate photo-like digital models of yarns and fabrics, which manufacturers can tweak instead of ordering physical fabric samples. These 3D renders are generated with fabric textures originating from individual fibres.

Gemell claims that manufacturers that use its technology reduce unnecessary fabric samples and waste by 70pc, while getting products to market 11 weeks faster.

Advertisement

The company has offices in Dublin and London, and came in as the first runner-up at last year’s All-Island Circular Venture Awards – a competition that recognises late-stage start-ups across the island showcasing circular value propositions.

InnaLabs

Last year, this Dublin-based space-tech secured its second contract to advance Earth’s planetary defence with the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Ramses mission.

The Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety – or Ramses – will rendezvous with asteroid 99942 Apophis, accompanying it during its extremely close but safe flyby of Earth in 2029.

InnaLabs’ gyroscope navigation system will be helping the ESA, the Italian aerospace engineering company OHB and the Spanish tech company GMV in the space mission scheduled for launch in April 2028.

Advertisement

The company’s technology solves complex navigation, stabilisation and guidance challenges within space, aerospace, land and marine markets.

Oscil

Oscil provides data analytics support for the pharmaceutical and dairy sector. The company’s founder Dr Patrick Cronin won the EI Big Ideas award last year after contesting in a pitching battle against other pre-spin-out ventures emerging from EI’s Commercialisation Fund.

Speaking to SiliconRepublic.com, Cronin said that the “current rise in weight loss drugs [and] GLP-1s are driving huge investment in the protein market”, and that “Oscil can unlock a lot of capacity and quality in spray driers through edge sensing and machine learning to provide real-time process control”.

The company said it is seeking early adopters in the spray drying industry to improve production capacity and product quality.

Advertisement

Smartfactory

This 2016-founded start-up captures, analyses and visualises performance indicators from the manufacturing, logistics and utility sectors using Industry 4.0 technology.

The company’s SaaS solutions, built on technology from hardware partners Siemens and Banner, help cut down on manufacturing downtime by identifying hidden losses in the production process.

It is based out of Nexus Innovation Centre at the University of Limerick.

Ubotica

This Dublin-based space-tech is a frequent collaborator with NASA and the ESA. Last month, it announced a partnership with Texas’s Novi Space to deliver real-time intelligence from the Earth’s orbit.

Advertisement

The collaboration enables Earth observation data to be processed directly on satellites instead of it needing to be transferred to Earth for analysis.

Ubotica is deploying its AI platform, which processes input data within 90 seconds, for the space mission. According to the company, in a single test observation of a Singapore port, the platform processed hundreds of vessels and detected those operating ‘dark’ in under two minutes.

The company has deployed its AI capabilities on numerous missions, including its own CogniSAT-6 satellite.

WrxFlo

Founded in 2019 by former Dell manufacturing leaders Tim Crowe, Ken Sheehan and Jennifer Kelly, WrxFlo is a SaaS platform tailored specifically for manufacturing and logistics operations.

Advertisement

The company claims its platform acts as a “digital co-worker” across operations and the vertical line of command by connecting data from across the factory, warehouse and supply chain, eliminating non-value-added tasks and surfacing ‘red’ indicators before they become costly problems.

“We built WrxFlo from first-hand experience of running complex manufacturing and supply chain operations,” said Crowe, the company’s CEO.

“WrxFlo enables industrial manufacturers and logistics operators turn complex, paper or Excel-based processes into streamlined, data-driven systems that reduce cost and improve efficiency.”

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Advertisement

Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

Former Fitbit exec launches UV-tracking smart necklace for women

Published

on

A former Fitbit executive is betting that the next big wearable might not be a smartwatch at all.

Stacy Salvi, who spent eight years at Fitbit before and after Google’s acquisition of the company, has launched The Gem. It is a smart necklace designed to help women track their UV exposure throughout the day.

Rather than counting steps or monitoring workouts, The Gem focuses on something many wearables overlook: how much sunlight your skin is actually getting. The pendant-style device continuously measures both UVA and UVB exposure and sends the data to a companion app. As a result, the app builds a personalised skin profile based on your habits and environment.

The idea is to provide more useful guidance than a simple weather forecast. Depending on your exposure levels, the app can recommend sunscreen reminders, highlight safer times to spend outdoors and help users understand their personal UV limits.

Advertisement

What’s interesting is the form factor. While UV-tracking gadgets aren’t entirely new, they’ve typically been standalone sensors or patches. The Gem packages the technology inside a piece of jewellery designed to be worn every day, making it feel more like an accessory than a traditional health tracker.

Advertisement

That approach could help it stand out in a wearable market increasingly dominated by smartwatches and fitness bands. By focusing on a specific problem and wrapping it in a design that’s less overtly tech-focused, The Gem appears to be targeting users who don’t necessarily want another screen on their wrist.

The launch also arrives as interest in preventative health tracking continues to grow. Wearables have already expanded beyond fitness into sleep, recovery and stress monitoring. UV exposure feels like a natural next step, particularly for people concerned about long-term skin health.

Advertisement

The Gem is available now directly from The90. It will eventually retail for $300, although early buyers can currently pick one up for $200 for a limited time.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Tech

Two-hour learning? AI-powered Alpha School lands in Seattle region

Published

on

Alpha School has leased space in this building in Kirkland for its first Seattle-area school. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)

Alpha School, an AI-driven private school chain that promises to teach kids core academics in two hours a day, plans to open a Seattle-area location in Kirkland this fall and will run its first local weekly summer programs on Microsoft’s Redmond campus starting in late June.

The approach frees up the rest of the day for a program of life skills, projects, and other character-building activities, which is another core part of Alpha School’s pitch. There’s no homework, by design, to give kids time for sports and other pursuits outside of school.

For the fall, Alpha School has secured space in a building just east of Google’s Kirkland campus, at 620 Fifth Ave. S., and has started taking applications. The initial campus has capacity for up to 150 students.

Alpha School co-founder MacKenzie Price. (LinkedIn Photo)

Alpha School co-founder MacKenzie Price and team have been expanding the Austin-based chain across the country. A driving force behind the school is tech entrepreneur Joe Liemandt, founder of the software company Trilogy and the private-equity firm ESW Capital. 

In an interview, Price said she has family in the Seattle area and considers the region “very forward-thinking” when it comes to innovation and valuing education. Alpha School has seen interest from people in the region for a while, but real estate can create a challenge, she said, so they were excited when they were able to secure the Kirkland property. 

The school’s use of screens and AI naturally attracts questions and some criticism, but Price said skepticism about the role of technology misses an important distinction. 

Advertisement

“There’s a huge difference between students scrolling TikTok or watching cartoons or playing video games all day, and receiving a one-to-one, mastery-based tutoring experience,” she said. “It’s the idea of proactive, engaged interaction, as opposed to passive consumption.”

Price drew a sharp line against chatbots — “cheat bots,” she called them — which Alpha keeps out of its core instruction. Instead, she said, the software diagnoses what each student has and hasn’t mastered, then delivers lessons adjusted to their level and pace.

Alpha calls the adults in its classrooms “guides” rather than teachers, and pays them above typical teacher salaries. The schools run on a 5-to-1 student-to-guide ratio. Guides aren’t providing academic instruction, Price said, but instead focus on mentorship and motivation while the technology handles the lessons.

The model has its critics. Some educators have questioned Alpha School’s claims, arguing that learning can’t be accelerated as dramatically as Alpha says, and that its strong outcomes may reflect the students it enrolls as much as its methods. 

Advertisement

Alpha stands by its results, providing data showing its students in the top percentiles on the NWEA MAP, a widely used standardized test taken by students nationwide.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has shown interest in the concept, bringing it up during a recent podcast taping in conjunction with the company’s Build developer conference. Asked about AI and education, Nadella mentioned meeting some of the people behind Alpha School to learn about their approach, calling it fascinating to rethink what education will look like in the future.

“Maybe the next big startup and success story could be someone who builds a new university or a new pedagogy,” Nadella said on the crossover of the No Priors and Latent Space podcasts.

The Microsoft connection came through Caitlin McCabe, vice president and chief of staff to Nadella. She initially got involved as a parent of young children drawn to Alpha’s model, not in her Microsoft role, advocating for the school to come to the region and helping connect it with interested families.

Advertisement

Tuition for the fall in Kirkland hasn’t been decided, according to Alpha School officials, but “founding families” who sign up for the first year will get a $10,000 discount.

The weekly summer programs on Microsoft’s Redmond campus will run for eight weeks, from late June to late August. They’re open to the public at $1,500 a week, with Microsoft employees getting a 50% discount per child. The idea is to give students and families a sense of what Alpha School is like, with an experience that mirrors the typical day during the school year.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Tech

Canada’s OpenText to create 400 jobs in Cork and Galway

Published

on

OpenText’s €105m investment marks the single largest backing by a company with a Canadian HQ.

Canadian enterprise data management company OpenText is creating 400 highly-skilled jobs in Cork and Galway over the next three years through a planned investment of €105m.

The company helps organisations protect, govern and utilise their data for agentic AI, cybersecurity and sovereign cloud. Irish-based developers and researchers will design, deploy, secure and operate these AI and cloud capabilities for the European, Middle East and African (EMEA) markets.

This is the single largest investment into Ireland by a technology company headquartered in Canada and is supported by IDA Ireland.

Advertisement

The major investment is expected to advance the company’s service capabilities across the EMEA industries and public sectors. It is also expected to increase regional capacity for organisations operating in highly regulated and mission-critical environments which require greater control over data governance.

“This investment expands our EMEA R&D and operations capacity to deliver the trusted AI, cybersecurity, and cloud capabilities our clients already rely on globally, while giving European organisations greater regional support and flexibility across the cloud environments of their choice,” said Shannon Bell, the executive vice-president, chief digital officer and chief information officer of OpenText.

Speaking of the announcement, Michael Lohan, the CEO of IDA Ireland said: “This investment will strengthen Ireland’s leadership in AI and transformational technology and IDA Ireland looks forward to continuing to work closely in partnership with OpenText as it grows its business in Ireland and deepens its European presence.”

OpenText said that it intends to explore opportunities for university and research collaboration in Ireland as part of its long-term innovation and talent strategy. This includes partnerships with third-level institutions focused on AI, cybersecurity and secure digital operations.

Advertisement

Laying down its R&D plans, OpenText said that its research efforts will advance how AI agents are orchestrated and governed including multi-agent collaboration, system boundary enforcement and knowledge sharing across sovereign zones.

In data sovereignty, it is developing continuous compliance mechanisms that give organisations verifiable control over where data lives and how it is governed, while its cybersecurity research will focus on threat detection and response.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Advertisement

Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

OpenAI Is Facing Investigation From A Group Of State Attorneys General

Published

on

OpenAI is under investigation by a coalition of state attorneys general, according to the Wall Street Journal. On Friday, June 12, the company received a subpoena seeking information and documents related to its activities and impact on users. The Journal said it viewed the subpoena sent by New York’s attorney general. 

Based on what the publication saw, the AGs are asking for documentation about the company’s advertising, user engagement and retention, as well as its handling of its users’ data and health information. They also want to know about the company’s activities related to minor and senior users, its deep learning models, its policies and its models’ sycophancy. 

“AI is a new and powerful technology, and we work every day to safely bring its benefits to people in a responsible way,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement to the Journal. “We take the concerns raised by state attorneys general seriously and intend to engage constructively with their offices.”

It’s unclear what prompted the investigation, but tech companies developing AI products have been under scrutiny by state AGs for quite a while now. Last year, a group of 44 state AGs sent a letter to Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity AI and XAI, asking them to protect children from being exposed to inappropriate and potentially harmful chatbot interactions. In April, Florida Attorney General James Ulthmeier opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI, because the suspect in the 2025 Florida State University mass shooting reportedly used ChatGPT.

Advertisement

More recently, another parent filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of not implementing enough safeguards to protect users from taking their own life. The lawsuit claimed that the plaintiff’s daughter who died by suicide discussed her suicidal thoughts and plans with the chatbot in the months leading up to her death. However, the company didn’t alert the family or authorities. OpenAI was named as a defendant in the first ever wrongful death lawsuit linked to a chatbot, as well.

Just a few days ago, OpenAI filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. It hasn’t decided on timing and pricing yet.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Tech

OpenAI supply chain attack puts ChatGPT Mac users on deadline

Published

on

OpenAI is forcing Mac users to update ChatGPT and other desktop apps, after a supply chain attack exposed signing certificates that Apple’s security systems use to verify trusted software.

The company disclosed the incident on May 13 and confirmed malware linked to the “Mini Shai-Hulud” attack infected two employee devices through the TanStack npm ecosystem. Investigators identified unauthorized access activity in a limited set of internal source code repositories connected to those employees.

OpenAI rotated its signing certificates and re-signed affected apps to prevent potential misuse of the exposed credentials. The company found no evidence that customer data, production systems, or intellectual property were compromised during the incident.

Apple’s macOS security protections will block apps signed with the older certificates after June 12, which makes the update mandatory for affected Mac users.

Advertisement

OpenAI confirmed the affected repositories included signing certificates used for applications across macOS, iOS, Windows, and Android. The company blocked future notarization attempts tied to the older credentials instead of revoking the certificates immediately and risking broken software installations for existing users.

Mac users must install updated versions before June 12. After that date, Apple’s security protections will stop trusting apps signed with the previous certificates.

Why macOS users need to update

Code-signing certificates help macOS verify that software comes from a legitimate developer. Apple’s Gatekeeper and notarization systems use those certificates to determine whether apps should be trusted, launched, or blocked.

Investigators found no evidence that exposed certificates were used to sign malicious software or distribute malware to users. OpenAI reviewed prior notarizations for signs of unauthorized activity and said it found no evidence of misuse.

Advertisement

Older versions of ChatGPT Desktop, Codex App, Codex CLI, and Atlas signed with the previous certificates may stop functioning or receiving updates after June 12. ChatGPT Desktop 1.2026.125, Codex App 26.506.31421, Codex CLI 0.130.0, and Atlas 1.2026.119.1 are the affected releases.

Supply chain attacks are becoming harder to contain

Modern apps rely on vast networks of open-source libraries, package managers, and automated development systems that can spread compromised code widely. A malicious dependency can traverse multiple organizations before developers detect the malware in the software chain.

Open MacBook Pro on a white desk, screen showing a colorful lake and mountain wallpaper with calendar and widget panels, in a softly lit modern room with purple background lightingApple’s macOS security protections will block apps signed with the older certificates after June 12

The attack hit during an active rollout of new supply chain security protections across OpenAI’s development systems. Those protections included stricter package provenance checks, stronger CI/CD credential controls, and package-manager safeguards like minimumReleaseAge policies.

The two affected employee devices hadn’t yet received the updated protections when the malware reached the systems. OpenAI said the incident accelerated deployment of additional safeguards designed to reduce the impact of future supply chain attacks.

How Mac users can stay safe

OpenAI told users to install updated apps only through official websites or built-in update systems. The company also warned users to avoid installers distributed through ads, third-party download sites, email links, or unsolicited messages.

Advertisement

Mac users should verify they are running the latest versions of ChatGPT, Codex, and related OpenAI apps before June 12. Users who downloaded OpenAI software from unofficial sources should delete those apps and reinstall clean versions directly from OpenAI.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Tech

PixelRAG beats text parsers on accuracy and cuts AI agent token costs 10x

Published

on

Most enterprise RAG pipelines start the same way: a text parser converts web pages and documents into plain text so they can be chunked and indexed for retrieval. That conversion step destroys retrieval signals — and according to new research, it’s responsible for the majority of wrong answers.

A research team from UC Berkeley, Princeton University, EPFL and Databricks published a paper this week introducing PixelRAG, a system that skips that conversion entirely. Instead of parsing pages into text, PixelRAG renders them as screenshots, indexes those images and feeds retrieved tiles directly to a vision-language model reader. Tested across 30 million screenshot tiles covering all of Wikipedia, it outperforms text-based RAG across six benchmarks, improving accuracy by up to 18.1% over text-based baselines.

Parsers are the wrong place to look for fixes, according to the research team.

“Improving parsers is an endless process because every website requires special handling,” Yichuan Wang, lead author and UC Berkeley doctorate student, told VentureBeat.  “Our goal was to explore whether recent advances in VLMs make it possible to bypass that entire problem and build a retrieval system that works across websites without site-specific engineering.”

Advertisement

HTML parsers destroy the retrieval signals that enterprise RAG depends on

The goal of the researchers was to develop a clean end-to-end architecture.

“Modern web RAG pipelines often involve rendering, parsing, cleaning, chunking, and many other handcrafted stages,” Wang said. “Every stage introduces potential cascade errors and abstractions that move us further away from the original webpage. We were interested in whether we could eliminate most of that complexity and operate directly on the rendered page.”

Wang also noted that parsing inevitably loses information. Images, visual hierarchy, typography, emphasis (e.g., bold text), tables, and layout are either discarded or converted into imperfect textual approximations. 

“No matter how good a parser becomes, some information is fundamentally lost during the conversion,” he said.

Advertisement

The research identifies three ways text-based RAG loses the answer before it reaches the reader. All three were measured on SimpleQA, a standard benchmark of 1,000 factual Wikipedia questions:

  • Parser loss (36.6% of failures). HTML-to-text conversion destroys structured content so completely that no text chunk in the corpus contains the answer.

  • Rank loss (55.2% of failures). The answer exists in the corpus but gets outranked by keyword-dense infoboxes that land at rank 1 for 75.9% of queries, pushing answer-bearing paragraphs to rank 20 or lower.

  • Reader loss (8.2% of failures). The correct content reaches the reader but flattened structure causes misattribution.

How PixelRAG works 

Unlike a standard LLM that reads only text, a vision-language model takes images as input alongside text, meaning it can read a rendered web page the way a human does, with layout and structure intact. “For many structured information extraction tasks, we believe modern VLMs have an inherent advantage because they can reason jointly over both content and layout rather than relying on a flattened text representation,” Wang said.

PixelRAG is built around that principle, replacing the text parsing pipeline with a four-stage system that operates entirely on rendered screenshots.

  • Rendering. Pages are rendered using Playwright, a browser automation library, at a fixed 875-pixel viewport and sliced into 1024-pixel-tall tiles. Wikipedia’s 7 million articles produce roughly 30 million tiles. Assets are cached locally and rendered entirely offline.

  • Indexing. Each tile is encoded as a single 2048-dimensional vector using Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B and stored in a FAISS approximate nearest-neighbor index. The full index runs to approximately 120 GB in fp16 and supports incremental updates without full re-indexing.

  • Training. The retrieval model is fine-tuned on synthetic contrastive data generated from the datastore, using dynamic hard-negative mining to filter false negatives. LoRA, a lightweight fine-tuning method that updates a small fraction of model weights, is applied to both the language model backbone and the visual encoder. Training on approximately 40,000 pairs completes in under three hours on a single H100.

  • Storage. Raw screenshot tiles for Wikipedia require 5.6 TB, but a render-on-demand approach eliminates persistent storage: embed all tiles, delete the screenshots and re-render pages on demand at query time. The vector index requires approximately 120 GB.

overview of PixelRAG

Credit: https://github.com/StarTrail-org/PixelRAG/blob/main/assets/pixelrag-paper.pdf

Advertisement

Six benchmarks, 10x agent token savings and one unsolved problem

Researchers tested PixelRAG across six benchmarks spanning factual Wikipedia QA, table-based queries, multimodal QA and live news retrieval. They said it outperformed text-based RAG on all six, including on tasks where questions are answerable from text alone. On SimpleQA it reaches 78.8% accuracy versus 71.6% for the strongest text parser, widening to 48.8% versus 42.5% on structured table queries. Teams need Qwen3-VL-4B class models or above to see the benefit. Smaller models trail text retrieval by more than 12.5 percentage points.

The agent cost advantage is the strongest near-term case for PixelRAG. In benchmark testing, an AI agent using PixelRAG as its search backend ran on 3.6 million prompt tokens versus 37.5 million for text retrieval, at 2 to 4 times lower cost than alternatives including Google, while achieving higher accuracy. Image compression can cut that token budget by a further third.

Visual chunking is the main unsolved problem. Text-based RAG systems have spent years refining how to split documents into meaningful retrieval units based on topic, section or semantic content. PixelRAG currently has no equivalent: it slices pages by fixed pixel height, meaning a table or paragraph can get cut in half mid-tile with no awareness of content boundaries. 

“The text retrieval community has spent years studying chunking strategies, while visual retrieval has received much less attention,” Wang said. “We think this is an important area for future research.”

Advertisement

VB Transform · July 14–15 · Menlo Park · Agentic context layers

Your agents are only as good as the data they can reach.

Sessions at Transform cover the RAG architectures powering agentic systems at scale — including how enterprises are connecting agents to live genomics, clinical, and enterprise data.

See the full agenda →

What this means for enterprises

The retrieval quality problem PixelRAG addresses reflects a broader market shift already underway. VB Pulse Q1 2026 data from qualified enterprise respondents found intent to adopt hybrid retrieval tripling from 10.3% in January to 33.3% in March, the fastest-growing strategic position in the dataset. PixelRAG’s own authors point to hybrid deployment as the most practical near-term path — layering visual retrieval on top of existing text systems rather than replacing them.

Advertisement

For teams already running RAG pipelines, the path to those savings is more straightforward than a ground-up rebuild.

“A practical path is to use PixelRAG as an enhancement layer alongside existing text retrieval systems,” Wang said. “Hybrid retrieval that combines both text and visual search is straightforward and is likely how many production deployments would evolve.”

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Tech

Maine disables data breach notification portal after fake disclosures

Published

on

Data Breach

Maine has taken its public data breach reporting portal offline after fraudulent breach disclosures were published on the state’s website, prompting a review of procedures to prevent abuse in the future.

Yesterday, BleepingComputer reported that fake data breach disclosures had been submitted to Maine’s official breach notification portal impersonating Discord and the multiplayer social virtual reality platform VRChat.

At the time, VRChat told BleepingComputer the filing was fraudulent and had been submitted using the name of a fictitious employee.

image

In a statement published Friday, the Maine Attorney General’s Office acknowledged that data breach “hoaxes” were submitted through the state’s reporting system.

“The Office of the Maine Attorney General has been made aware of an apparent abuse of our data breach reporting system,” the statement reads.

Advertisement

“After conversations with VRChat, one of two affected companies, it has become clear that the reported data breaches were hoaxes submitted by an unknown entity unrelated to either company. These false reports have been removed from the database. We have no knowledge of any recent legitimate data breach reports from either VRChat or Discord.”

The Attorney General’s Office says it has now temporarily disabled public access to the breach notification database while it reviews reporting procedures to reduce similar abuse in the future.

Prior to the shutdown, submitted breach notices were automatically published to the public database.

“We don’t have any independent knowledge of the breaches, the submitting entity fills out the information and it goes directly onto the site. We will review the one you’ve flagged, thank you,” Maine Attorney General’s Office told BleepingComputer.

Advertisement

The notice states that companies can continue to submit breach notifications through the reporting service, but members of the public seeking copies of disclosures must now contact the Attorney General’s Office directly.

Maine’s data breach portal is commonly used by journalists, researchers, and threat intelligence firms to monitor newly disclosed security incidents and determine whether organizations are reporting cyberattacks or data breaches affecting consumers.

The incident demonstrates how automatically published breach disclosures can be abused to spread misinformation and damage a company’s reputation.

The fraudulent VRChat filing claimed the company suffered a data breach impacting over 2.4 million people and included a fabricated employee contact name in the disclosure.

Advertisement

After BleepingComputer contacted VRChat about the filing, the company confirmed the disclosure was fake and stated it had not submitted the notice to Maine authorities.

BleepingComputer also contacted Discord about the fraudulent notice submitted to the site but did not receive a response.

It is unclear how many additional fraudulent breach notices may have been submitted through the portal before the state suspended public access to the database.


article image

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.

Advertisement

Get the whitepaper

Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

Apple Vision Pro helped power an iconic Disney ride overhaul

Published

on

Just in time for America’s 250th anniversary, Disney Imagineers tapped Apple Vision Pro to help give one of their most iconic flight rides a patriotic makeover.

Disney has shared a brand-new behind-the-scenes video as part of the Disney Unscripted series on YouTube. This time, the company shows off what it takes to revamp one of its existing attractions.

The attraction in question is “Soarin’, at EPCOT, which has been rebranded to “Soarin’ Across America” for the 250th anniversary of the United States of America. Rather than focusing on wonders around the world, or in California for another version of the ride, Soarin’ Across America takes riders on an airborne adventure across the United States.

The reimagining requires a lot of work. From capturing all new aerial footage to crafting an all-new musical score, the project requires filmmakers, musicians, and Imagineers to work together.

In the video, we learn that Disney’s audio media designers donned the Apple Vision Pro to create a digital workspace during the music and sound effects mixing phase.

Advertisement

“So, usually for a Soarin’ attraction, we need to build scaffolding, but that was a ‘no-can-do’ for this project because we were on such an accelerated schedule,” Megan Duncan, one of Disney’s Senior Sound Editors, says in the video.

By using the Apple Vision Pro, a virtual digital workspace easily replaced that scaffolding and extra equipment. Most of the workflow only required an Apple Vision Pro, a custom desk attached to the flight simulator seats, and a small selection of audio mixing equipment.

While the Apple Vision Pro hasn’t exactly been a consumer-facing hit, it’s continued to prove itself in professional work settings. Recently, it was learned that the Apple Vision Pro has been used for hundreds of cataract surgeries in New York in about half a year.

“Soarin’ Across America” has already opened in EPCOT, at Walt Disney World in Florida. It is expected to open on July 2 in Disneyland, in California.

Advertisement

Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

SpaceX rented Colossus 1 to Anthropic because it couldn’t make the data centre work for Grok

Published

on

TL;DR

SpaceX rented Colossus 1 to Anthropic after hitting latency and chip mismatch issues trying to use it for Grok. The newer facilities use uniform Blackwell chips.

SpaceX rented its Colossus 1 data centre to Anthropic not because it had surplus capacity, but because it could not make the facility work for its own AI models. Bloomberg reported on Friday that SpaceX encountered latency issues when trying to connect the Memphis site to two other data centre campuses located more than 10 miles away, compounded by aging network infrastructure.

The company had planned to train its most cutting-edge Grok models using a cluster of three facilities working together. Training large AI models requires ultra-fast connections between sites. If the links are older or lower bandwidth, they create delays that slow the entire cluster. SpaceX determined the facility would be more valuable generating revenue than sitting underutilised.

The hardware mismatch made things worse. Colossus 1 contains a mix of Nvidia chip generations, including Hopper and Blackwell systems alongside older accelerators. Colossus 2 and 3 were built more uniformly around Nvidia’s Blackwell chips. In a distributed training cluster, the workload is spread across machines that need to stay synchronised. Older chips create bottlenecks by forcing faster accelerators to wait. The cluster ends up performing closer to its slowest hardware, not its fastest.

Advertisement

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

The result is that Anthropic is now paying $1.25 billion per month to use a facility that SpaceX’s own engineers could not fully utilise. Combined with the $920 million monthly Google deal, SpaceX is collecting approximately $2.17 billion per month in compute revenue from infrastructure it originally built for itself.

The revelation complicates the narrative SpaceX presented during its IPO roadshow. Musk’s company repeatedly stressed that Colossus 1 was built in just 122 days, exceeding industry averages. Speed of construction was a selling point. Bloomberg’s reporting suggests speed came at a cost: the facility was not built uniformly enough to serve as part of a larger training cluster.

Advertisement

SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen said the company has not given up on internal AI services, including Grok. Musk has described the Anthropic arrangement as a 180-day lease with a 90-day mutual cancellation right, preserving the option to reclaim the capacity. “If compute gets super tight I said we might need it back at some point,” he said.

But Grok’s trajectory makes reclaiming the compute less urgent. Downloads fell from 20 million in January to 8.3 million in April. Paid conversion is a fifth of ChatGPT’s. Federal adoption has stalled. The product that was supposed to justify the data centre investment is underperforming, while the rental income from Anthropic and Google is now a $26 billion annualised revenue line. SpaceX built a data centre for AI training and accidentally became an AI landlord instead.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © 2025