AI Weekly Malaysia

A March 2024 Google core update appears to suppress all pages except the main page of brand-new root domains from search results, lasting up to a year or longer. Weird Gloop reports ~90% of independent wikis launched on new domains since then have been affected, despite content quality or originality. Their workaround is launching new wikis (Overwatch, Fortnite) on subdomains of weirdgloop.org instead of new root domains.

Jellyfin 12.0 is a major release that changes the database schema and actively rewrites data on first boot, making a full manual backup the only rollback path. Upgraders must be on 10.10.7 or 10.11.x first, usernames are now case-insensitive (migration fails if duplicates exist), a full library scan is required post-upgrade, and all third-party plugins built for 10.11 will not load until authors release 12.0-compatible builds.

Matthew McPherrin factored two 512-bit RSA root CA keys from the defunct Canadian CA E-Certify, shipped in Netscape 4.51 in March 1999. He used Claude Code to extract old root certificates from browser archives on archive.org, then ran CADO-NFS on a Ryzen 9 5950X, taking 32 and 29 hours respectively to recover the private keys.

Rockstar Games faces an employment tribunal in Glasgow over the dismissal of 31 workers accused of sharing confidential information on Discord ahead of GTA VI's release. The Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain claims the firings targeted trade union activities, while Rockstar cites gross misconduct. The tribunal is ongoing.

Anthropic's Lance Martin outlines three concrete ways to cut Claude API costs without sacrificing performance: maximize prompt cache hit rate, remove prompt anti-patterns when upgrading to frontier models, and calibrate effort to the task. The article details prompt caching mechanics—cache is model-pinned, requires byte-exact prefix matches, has a TTL—and warns against volatile values in system prompts, reordering tool definitions, and changing effort mid-conversation (except on Claude Opus 5 and Fable 5.1).

OpenAI publishes a case study claiming 1Password achieved 20.9% measured productivity improvement among engineers using Codex, a 10.9% reduction in median PR cycle time, and ~90% reduction in investigation time on a complex production issue, with an estimated $0.8M annual engineering capacity value.

OpenAI is launching a journalism support initiative starting with the 2026–2027 academic year, providing 400+ ChatGPT Edu licenses to journalism students at CUNY's Newmark J-School and Northwestern's Medill School, in collaboration with the Tow-Knight Center and Knight Lab. The program covers tools, training, and partnerships across classrooms and newsrooms.

TALA (Terrastruct's AutoLayout Algorithm) is now open-source under MPL-2.0 and bundled in D2 v0.9.0, usable via --layout=tala. It's an orthogonal layout engine optimized for software architecture diagrams, blending multiple graph-drawing research techniques to optimize for symmetry, flow, and clustering. A standout feature is that node positions and sizes can be locked to specific coordinates while TALA handles edge routing — useful for agentic workflows where LLMs place nodes but still struggle with routing.

Konstantin Ryabitsev reports that git.kernel.org now spends more CPU cycles rendering commits for abusive scrapers than on all legitimate access combined, with 14 cores across 5 geo-distributed nodes dedicated solely to serving crawler traffic. Simon Willison highlights this as a growing concern for any project serving large numbers of crawlable web pages, including his own Datasette.

OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki argues that the strongest case for rapidly training smarter models is the need for defensive AI systems that can secure infrastructure, counter rogue agents in real time, and invent new protective measures. He simultaneously cautions that the seriousness of these stakes should not become an excuse for reckless racing forward.

An Amazon Prime Air cargo jet (Boeing 767-300 operated by 21 Air as Flight 7598) overran the runway at Miami International Airport by about 1,300 feet on Sept. 6, 2026, striking vehicles inside and outside the airport boundary. At least five people were killed and five injured; NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy described the scene as 'utter devastation' but offered no details on the cause.

Latent Space built a Frontier AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) Tracker running 6 prompt variations across 7 frontier models in 161 product categories, from coding agents to payroll software. They found clear self-bias (Claude models recommend Claude Code, Astra recommends Codex, Grok recommends Cursor), 28 categories with a universally dominant primary choice across all models, and consequential recommendation flips between model generations (Opus→Fable, Sol→Astra) that signal shifts in training data and RL priorities.

Broadcom has quietly removed public download pages for VMware's Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK), with support reportedly telling customers it is no longer available for general use. The VDDK is a core library used by migration tools including Azure Migrate, Nutanix Move, Red Hat Migration Toolkit, virtv2v, and nbdkit, making it significantly harder for customers to move workloads off vSphere to competing platforms.

TechCrunch published a living AI glossary covering terms from AGI to AI agents, aimed at people who encounter jargon in meetings and pitches. The notable new entry is 'opaque recurrence,' described as the reasoning technique in OpenAI's new Astra model that has AI safety researchers concerned.

An interactive 3D visualization renders every surviving building in Los Angeles as a box, appearing in the year it was built from 1880 to 2026. It uses LARIAC 2020 building outlines and LA County Assessor roll data for heights, with heights exaggerated when zoomed out.

Simon Willison used Claude Fable 5.1 in Claude Code for web to build a browser-based video compressor tool powered by the WebAssembly build of FFmpeg, so he could optimize a phone-recorded demo video before publishing it on his blog.

SOCRadar disclosed PEEP, a post-exploitation toolkit that injects a fake 'Smart Bookmarks' extension (ID: ejkndncpkdcjcikfhiamcdehdoegilbj) directly into Chrome/Edge profiles by forging Chromium's Secure Preferences integrity values, bypassing Web Store checks entirely. A native messaging host binary (nm_host.exe) escalates it from credential theft to full host-level command execution, polling a C2 server every 30 seconds over plaintext HTTP. PEEP is built on the open-source RedExt red-teaming framework and contains Chinese-language source artifacts, though attribution remains unconfirmed.

A surprise documentary by co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim premiered at Telluride, capturing Elizabeth Holmes and her husband Billy Evans in the 34 days before she reported to federal prison in May 2023. A24 is set to release the film, titled 'You Can See Everything,' in October. Holmes's clemency petition to President Trump remains pending.

Simon Willison used GPT-6 Astra (medium) in ChatGPT Work to build an interactive D3 visualization that animates between Mercator and Equal Earth map projections via a slider. The Equal Earth projection was recently voted on at the UN, prompting the experiment.

Matt Clifford is stepping down as chair of the UK's taxpayer-funded Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) after his appointment as Anthropic's managing director of international affairs sparked conflict-of-interest concerns in Parliament. He reversed his initial plan to hold both roles, staying on until November 6 while a replacement is found. Labour MP Dame Chi Onwurah welcomed the move but is still pressing the government on how the original arrangement was approved.

Tom's Hardware highlights Labor Day sales on pre-built gaming PCs from Best Buy, Newegg, and Walmart, with discounts up to 38% before expected price rises. The article is a shopping guide for consumers looking to buy ready-made rigs.

Apple's September 9 event is expected to unveil its first foldable iPhone, reportedly called 'iPhone Ultra,' priced above $2,000 with a 5.5-inch cover display expanding to 7.8 inches unfolded. The event also marks Tim Cook handing the CEO role to John Ternus, with additional announcements anticipated for AirPods, HomePods, and the non-foldable iPhone 18 line.

NHTSA opened an Audit Query into Tesla's Cybercab just hours after its commercial rollout in Austin, Texas, questioning how Tesla self-certified a vehicle lacking brake pedals, accelerator, steering wheel, and mirrors as compliant with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. NHTSA is still updating requirements for human-free autonomous vehicles, and Amazon's Zoox received a two-year exemption capped at 2,500 vehicles annually—Tesla appears to have skipped the exemption process entirely.

Arctic Wolf details a widespread M365 data theft and extortion campaign (PREY-0058) where attackers impersonate internal IT help desk in phone calls, directing executives to lookalike SSO/MFA domains (e.g., assignpasskey[.]com, mfaregister[.]com) that run adversary-in-the-middle login flows to steal credentials, MFA approvals, and session tokens. Stolen tokens are replayed via residential proxies matching the victim's geography and ASN, then used for discovery and data exfiltration across SaaS apps.

A 2003 internal Microsoft email from Bill Gates to Jim Allchin documents Gates's frustrated attempt to download Movie Maker, encountering site timeouts, confusing download names, no system filtering, multiple redirects to Windows Update, 17MB of unexpected downloads, a 6-minute install that froze his machine, and a forced reboot. Gates calls Windows usability 'systematic degradation' and says the experience was 'so slow it is unusable.'