AI Weekly Malaysia

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.'

TrendForce forecasts DRAM contract prices to rise 13-18% QoQ in Q3, a moderation from the 59.5% QoQ jump that drove industry revenue to $154.73B in Q2. PC and smartphone buyers are hitting budget limits, shifting demand away from high-capacity RDIMMs toward lower-capacity products, while supplier inventories stay at historic lows and supplies remain tight. Context separately forecasts European laptop shipments to fall 6.4% YoY in Q3 and 20% in Q4, with desktops down ~20% and ~30% respectively, as corporate buyers extend refresh cycles.

Claire Vo details why she migrated her entire agent stack from OpenClaw to Grok Bot, citing reliability and UX simplicity as the deciding factors despite being highly technical (running Tailscale, SSH to Mac Mini, building a rescue bot for her other bots). She now uses Grok Bot to manage six Gmail accounts, multiple Slack and Linear workspaces, review PRs, monitor SOC 2 compliance, and coordinate family life — treating each bot as a named specialist 'new hire' rather than a generalist.

Nightwing CEO Bob Coleman accidentally sent an internal Labor Day appreciation email to The Register's media distribution list instead of staff. The cybersecurity and intelligence contractor, spun out of Raytheon in 2024, prides itself on secure communications, making the mailing list error particularly ironic.

The locally assembled (CKD) XPeng G6 electric SUV has begun customer deliveries in Malaysia, assembled at the EPMB Melaka plant by Bermaz. Despite local assembly, pricing is unchanged from the fully-imported (CBU) versions: Standard Range at RM158,888, Long Range at RM178,888, and AWD Performance at RM189,999, with specs identical to the CBU facelift launched last October.

A weekly security recap covering an actively exploited Chrome 0-day, a supply chain attack where a trusted software source delivered credential-stealing code, and N-able patching two critical N-central authentication bypass flaws (CVE-2026-86206, CVE-2026-86207) plus a CVSS 10.0 pre-auth RCE (CVE-2026-86218). Huntress reported signs that attackers are already leveraging the N-central flaws against a fully patched production environment, despite N-able saying no confirmed exploitation.

xTool announced its next-generation modular X1 laser platform, which supports interchangeable CO2, Diode, UV, Fiber, and MOPA laser modules. The article is primarily a product reveal with minimal technical detail beyond the module compatibility list.

The European Commission is reportedly seeking third-party views on Oracle's software licensing practices, potentially laying groundwork for a formal investigation, though none exists yet. This follows the EC's concluded SAP case, where SAP committed to abolishing reinstatement fees and reducing back-maintenance fees. Oracle's Java SE Universal Subscription, introduced January 2023, charges by total employee count—Gartner estimated it at two to five times the cost of the legacy model.

bzip3 is an open-source compression tool claiming higher ratios and better performance than bzip2, using a fast Burrows-Wheeler transform and context mixing. In a benchmark compressing all Perl 5 source tarballs, bzip3 finished in 7 minutes using 12GB of RAM, compared to bzip2's 17 minutes using 8MB, and outpaced xz's 12 minutes while using slightly less memory.

Hackers drained roughly 4,000 BTC (~$320M) — about 95% of holdings — from the federation wallet backing Liquid Network, a Bitcoin sidechain by Blockstream used by exchanges. The attackers claim to be white-hats, communicating on-chain with Blockstream and promising to return 'most' funds once the vulnerability is patched and nodes updated. Liquid has disabled bridge nodes and asked exchanges to suspend L-BTC deposits and withdrawals; the exact exploit mechanism remains unclear.

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model reportedly completed the game Portal autonomously in 24 hours, spending only $571 in tokens. The article body provided is mostly site boilerplate, so technical details on how the agent interfaced with the game, its failure modes, or its reasoning approach are not available from this excerpt.

Asahi Linux has added official support for Apple M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips, but with major caveats: no GPU 3D acceleration, no HDMI (DCP support missing), and no sleep. Most other hardware — webcam, mics, USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and hardware video decode including AV1 — works. The installer currently requires EXPERT=1 mode, with a plan to lift that gate for the Fedora Linux 45 beta in a few weeks.

A software engineer writes about cognitive decline after 8 years in the field, attributing slower thinking to heavy AI tool usage and constant low-effort dopamine from shorts, games, and social media. During a countryside vacation, they attempted to 'de-brainrot' by slowing down, handwriting, reading, and spending time in nature rather than consuming content.

Data centres consumed 222 billion litres of water worldwide for cooling in 2025 (Rystad Energy). Nvidia has developed a cooling method that allows warmer water into servers, reducing the need for cooled air, while Microsoft, AWS, and Meta use closed-loop systems with varying results.

A PNAS Nexus paper applies physics and differential equations to design urinals that minimize splashback, framed around sustainability and accessibility. The work models fluid dynamics to propose geometric improvements to a mundane fixture.

Xiaomi launched the 18 Fold in China, a passport-sized foldable with a 5.38-inch outer display and 7.58-inch inner display, both 120Hz AMOLED at up to 4,000 nits. It runs Xiaomi's in-house XRING O3 SoC (10-core CPU, 16-core GPU, custom NPU), packs a 200MP Leica triple-camera, 6,000mAh battery, and starts at 256GB with LPDDR5X while the 1TB model gets LPDDR6.