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Krebs on Security
• BrianKrebs

Who Got Arrested in the Raid on the XSS Crime Forum?

On July 22, 2025, the European police agency Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted in the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime forum with more than 50,000 members. The action has triggered an ongoing frenzy of speculation and panic among XSS denizens about the identity of the unnamed suspect, but the consensus is that he is a pivotal figure in the crime forum scene who goes by the hacker handle "Toha." Here's a deep dive on what's knowable about Toha, and a short stab at who got nabbed.

Herman's blog
• herman

Digital hygiene: Notifications

Take back your attention.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive

No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive Colton Voege on "curing your AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome". There's a lot of rhetoric out there suggesting that if you can't 10x your productivity through tricks like running a dozen Claude Code instances at once you're f...

Troy Hunt Supports Webmention
• Troy Hunt

Welcoming Guardio to Have I Been Pwned's Partner Program

Welcoming Guardio to Have I Been Pwned's Partner Program

I'm often asked if cyber criminals are getting better at impersonating legitimate organisations in order to sneak their phishing attacks through. Yes, they absolutely are, but I also argue that the inverse is true too: legitimate organisations frequently communicate in ways that are indistinguishable from a phishing attack!

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

OpenAI's new open weight (Apache 2) models are really good

The long promised OpenAI open weight models are here, and they are very impressive. They're available under proper open source licenses - Apache 2.0 - and come in two sizes, 120B and 20B. OpenAI's own benchmarks are eyebrow-raising - emphasis mine: The gpt-oss-120b model ac...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

Claude Opus 4.1

Claude Opus 4.1 Surprise new model from Anthropic today - Claude Opus 4.1, which they describe as "a drop-in replacement for Opus 4". My favorite thing about this model is the version number - treating this as a .1 version increment looks like it's an accurate depiction of t...

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Bragging about replacing coders with AI is a sales-pitch (05 Aug 2025)

Today's links Bragging about replacing coders with AI is a sales-pitch: The reality is more complex. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: David Byrne vs Spotify; India's porn ban; Qanon ARG; Contextual ads; Leveraged buyouts aren't mortgages. Upcoming a...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

Quoting greyduet on r/teachers

I teach HS Science in the south. I can only speak for my district, but a few teacher work days in the wave of enthusiasm I'm seeing for AI tools is overwhelming. We're getting district approved ads for AI tools by email, Admin and ICs are pushing it on us, and at least half...

Bert Hubert's writings Valid

Overheid zoekt plv Chief Technology Officer met 3 jaar ICT-ervaring

Na bijna een jaar werk publiceerde de overheid recent alsnog de Nederlandse Digitaliseringsstrategie (ik heb ook een klein beetje bij mogen dragen), met daarin gevleugelde woorden als “Nederland moet de kansen die digitalisering biedt pakken. Met de NDS moeten we vernieuwen en blijven investeren in ons digitaal fundament”. En ook, “We kunnen onze digitale ambities alleen waarmaken als we beschikken over voldoende digitaliseringskennis binnen de overheid.” Vorige week startte de werving van een nieuwe plaatsvervangende Rijks Chief Technology Officer (CTO), wat een mooi begin zou kunnen zijn van dit beleid.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

ChatGPT agent's user-agent

I was exploring how ChatGPT agent works today. I learned some interesting things about how it exposes its identity through HTTP headers, then made a huge blunder in thinking it was leaking its URLs to Bingbot and Yandex... but it turned out that was a Cloudflare feature that...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

A Friendly Introduction to SVG

A Friendly Introduction to SVG

This SVG tutorial by Josh Comeau is fantastic. It's filled with newt interactive illustrations - with a pleasing subtly "click" audio effect as you adjust their sliders - and provides a useful introduction to a bunch of well chosen SVG fundamentals.

I finally understand what all four numbers in the viewport="..." attribute are for!

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: svg, explorables, josh-comeau

Matthew Garrett

Cordoomceps - replacing an Amiga's brain with Doom

There's a lovely device called a pistorm, an adapter board that glues a Raspberry Pi GPIO bus to a Motorola 68000 bus. The intended use case is that you plug it into a 68000 device and then run an emulator that reads instructions from hardware (ROM or RAM) and emulates them. ...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

ChatGPT agent triggers crawls from Bingbot and Yandex

ChatGPT agent is the recently released (and confusingly named) ChatGPT feature that provides browser automation combined with terminal access as a feature of ChatGPT - replacing their previous Operator research preview which is scheduled for deprecation on August 31st. In e...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

Usage charts for my LLM tool against OpenRouter

Usage charts for my LLM tool against OpenRouter

OpenRouter proxies requests to a large number of different LLMs and provides high level statistics of which models are the most popular among their users.

Tools that call OpenRouter can include HTTP-Referer and X-Title headers to credit that tool with the token usage. My llm-openrouter plugin does that here.

... which means this page displays aggregate stats across users of that plugin! Looks like someone has been running a lot of traffic through Qwen 3 14B recently.

Screenshot of LLM usage statistics dashboard showing a stacked bar chart from July 5 to August 4, 2025, with a legend on the right displaying "Top models" including Qwen: Qwen3 14B (480M), Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 06-17 (31.7M), Horizon Beta (3.77M), Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite (1.67M), google/gemini-2.0-flash-exp (1.14M), DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 0324 (1.11M), Meta: Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (228K), Others (220K), Qwen: Qwen3 Coder (218K), MoonshotAI: Kimi K2 (132K), and Horizon Alpha (75K), with a total of 520M usage shown for August 3, 2025.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, openrouter

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

Qwen-Image: Crafting with Native Text Rendering

Qwen-Image: Crafting with Native Text Rendering Not content with releasing six excellent open weights LLMs in July, Qwen are kicking off August with their first ever image generation model. Qwen-Image is a 20 billion parameter MMDiT (Multimodal Diffusion Transformer, origina...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

Benn Jordan provides one of the all time great YouTube video titles, and it's justified. He drew an image in an audio spectrogram, played that sound to a talented starling (Internet Celebrity "The Mouth") and recorded the result that the starling almost perfectly imitated back to him.

This video is full of so much more than just that. Fast forward to 5m58s for footage of a nest full of brown pelicans showing the sounds made by their chicks!

Tags: audio, youtube

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

Quoting @himbodhisattva

for services that wrap GPT-3, is it possible to do the equivalent of sql injection? like, a prompt-injection attack? make it think it's completed the task and then get access to the generation, and ask it to repeat the original instruction?

@himbodhisattva, coining the term prompt injection on 13th May 2022, four months before I did

Tags: prompt-injection, security, generative-ai, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

Quoting Nick Turley

This week, ChatGPT is on track to reach 700M weekly active users — up from 500M at the end of March and 4× since last year.

Nick Turley, Head of ChatGPT, OpenAI

Tags: openai, chatgpt, ai

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot (04 Aug 2025)

Today's links AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot: Errors that are tuned to be statistically indistinguishable from correct code. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: A universal remote for killing people; Win10 spies out of th...

Jim Nielsen’s Blog Valid

A Few Things About the Anchor Element’s href You Might Not Have Known

I’ve written previously about reloading a document using only HTML but that got me thinking: What are all the values you can put in an anchor tag’s href attribute? Well, I looked around. I found some things I already knew about, e.g. Link protocols like mailto:, tel:, sms: ...