A new variant of the TrickMo Android banking malware, delivered in campaigns targeting users across Europe, introduces new commands and uses The Open Network (TON) for stealthy command-and-control communications.
The TrickMo banker was first spotted in September 2019 and has remained in active development, constantly receiving updates since then.
In October 2024, Zimperium analyzed 40 variants of the malware delivered via 16 droppers, communicating with 22 distinct command-and-control (C2) infrastructures, and targeting sensitive data belonging to users worldwide.
Our extropian future: natasha vita-more on AI, nanotechnology, mind uploading, and the birth of transhumanism.
What happened to the future we dreamed about on the Extropian mailing list 30 years ago? Did we get the timelines wrong, or was the architecture of our thinking correct? In this compelling follow-up to the conversation with Max More, Giulio Prisco sits down with Natasha Vita-More—futurist, designer, and co-founder of the Extropian movement—to assess the state of \.
And yet we keep bringing the Hammer of AI to every problem we face. Climate change. Pandemics. Cancer. Energy. War. Political corruption. There is no problem that the omnipresent, all-knowing, all-mighty artificial superintelligence will not eventually crack.
This is a religion. Technology is its faith. Silicon Valley is its Promised Land. Entrepreneurs are its prophets. And we are all believers.
I should know. I used to be one.
In my latest piece on Singularity Weblog, I argue that some problems do bend to computation: fusion, protein folding, the genome. But others do not. They are not computable, only livable. And when we hammer them anyway, things break. Sometimes the thing that breaks is the problem. Sometimes it is us.
In this video, Geoffrey Hinton (the “Godfather of AI”) explains why we may not be able to slow it down, what happens to jobs, and why the future could be very different from what we expect.
If this video helped you understand AI a bit better and you’d like to support the channel, I’d really appreciate it: 👉 https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/ML… job displacement to loss of control and growing inequality, this is a clear look at where AI is heading. — 🎥 Resources related to this topic: 🤖 AI Voice & Tools (ElevenLabs): https://try.elevenlabs.io/dw64rd295juq #ad 📚 Want to understand where AI is going? 👉 “Not Insects: The Life of Geoffrey Hinton” – Paul D. Johnson: https://amzn.to/4eYKYrm #ad — ⏱️ Video Chapters: 00:00 AI Can’t Be Slowed Down 00:40 AI and Job Loss Explained 01:45 AI Will Replace Most Jobs 03:10 AI Replaces Human Intelligence 04:05 The Control Problem 05:10 Real AI in Action (Agents) 06:10 The Future of Work 06:50 Why This Is Hard to Accept — 📚 Recommended reading on AI: 👉 “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed” – Ray Kurzweil: https://amzn.to/3R3oMlV #ad 👉 “Scary Smart” – Mo Gawdat: https://amzn.to/4b8n9v0 #ad 👉 “Co-Intelligence” – Ethan Mollick: https://amzn.to/4bmUe57 #ad — 🧠 About this channel: Synth Insights highlights the most important ideas from leading voices in AI — breaking them down into clear, practical insights you can actually understand and use. The goal is simple: help you stay ahead of what’s coming. — (As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. This description may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.) #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GeoffreyHinton #FutureOfAI #AGI
From job displacement to loss of control and growing inequality, this is a clear look at where AI is heading.
In our last conversation, we opened up the hood of the artificial intelligence engine to look closely at tokens. We talked about them as the raw materials of this new digital world—the invisible gears and cogs constantly churning in the dark to process language, calculate probabilities, and synthesi
Open source engine PlayCanvas is what Iakov Sumygin used to build that browser-based FPS. Resources like this strengthen Schindelar’s case, particularly as the engine just introduced SplatTransform 2.0, a tool that offers “fully automated, lightning-fast generation of high-quality collision for your splats.” Without a collision mesh, players could otherwise phase through the environment, so this is yet another option that streamlines the pipeline between scan and interactive assets.
“Gaussian Splatting training—meaning the reconstruction process after capture—can reproduce real-world appearance in ways that traditional scanning methods struggle with or cannot handle properly,” He tells me, “We can now capture and represent things like hair, semi-transparency, translucency, subsurface scattering, fine foliage, and other complex visual phenomena that are extremely difficult to reconstruct as clean geometry with traditional texture workflows.”
“This direct connection between captured real-world data and a production-ready, real-time representation is what makes Gaussian Splatting so interesting,” Schindelar says, “It is not just a rendering trick—it changes the entire capture-to-delivery pipeline.”
This is an essay written by John von Neumann in 1955, which I think is fairly described as being about global catastrophic risks from emerging technologies. It discusses a bunch of specific technologies that seemed like a big deal in 1955 — which is interesting in itself as a list of predictions; nuclear power! increased automation! weather control? — but explicitly tries to draw a general lesson.
Von Neumann is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, and was involved in the Manhattan project in addition to inventing zillions of other things.
I’m posting here because a) I think the essay is worth reading in its own right, and b) I find it interesting to see what the past’s intellectuals thought of issues related transformative technology, and how their perspective differs/is similar to ours. Notably, I disagree with several of the conclusions (e.g. von Neumann seems to think differential technological development is doomed).
