AI Weekly Malaysia

The US Department of Transportation ran a recruitment drive targeting gamers for Air Traffic Controller positions, hitting 94% of its hiring goal in record time with salaries up to $155,000. The article text itself is almost entirely boilerplate navigation and subscription prompts with no substantive body content beyond the headline.

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Ads in the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea as of August 11, 2026, with plans to expand to more markets later in the year. The ads are positioned as supporting free access without altering ChatGPT's answers, and businesses can sign up at openai.com/advertisers/ for updates.

Trump Media launched Truth API in early August, offering paying customers faster access to market-moving Truth Social posts. Over 10 firms—mostly high-frequency traders—are paying $60,000–$100,000/month for the feed, which the company calls a 'meaningful' new revenue stream amid a $238M quarterly loss.

British Transport Police is expanding its live facial recognition (LFR) trial into London Underground stations, scanning passengers' faces in transit hubs. The HN discussion drew 503 comments and 376 points, indicating strong public debate around surveillance deployment.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham and Fuzzware presented a toolkit called CATANA at USENIX WOOT that exploits proactive SIM functionality—specifically the RUN AT command—to hijack cellular modems. Testing 26 devices (18 smartphones, 8 IoT modems), they found 9 exposed an AT command interface to the SIM, enabling code execution, file theft, denial of service, and forced 2G downgrades. Demonstrated attacks include code execution on an Autel EV charger via a Quectel EC25-AFX module and 198 AT commands accessible on an Oppo Reno14 F 5G, including one that forced a stubborn downgrade to 2G that couldn't be reversed by toggling airplane mode or changing network settings.

A DIY modder built a computing device powered by a Stirling engine (heat engine) using an 80 MHz ESP32 processor that runs Tetris, Snake, and Pong on just 150 milliwatts. The project demonstrates ultra-low-power computing paired with thermomechanical energy conversion.

Gunra ransomware, a Conti-derived operation active since April 2025 with 51 listed victims, gains initial access by exploiting Fortinet FortiOS/FortiProxy (CVE-2025-24472) and Schneider Electric PowerLogic P5 (CVE-2024-5559) flaws, then deploys double-extortion using Salsa20/ChaCha20 encryption. The group launched a formal RaaS affiliate program in January 2026 with Windows and Linux lockers, though the Linux builds reportedly contain a catastrophic cryptographic weakness. Most victims are in South Korea, Brazil, Spain, Thailand, and Hong Kong, with targets spanning healthcare, financial services, and government sectors.

Huawei Malaysia confirmed the MatePad Air 2026 launches locally on 18 August 2026, with an RM100 deposit preorder scheme yielding an RM500 rebate and bundled freebies worth RM4,003, including a Smart Magnetic Keyboard, M Pencil Pro, wireless mouse, a 1-year WPS AI subscription, and AI-powered Huawei Notes. The tablet upgrades to a 12-inch 2.8K OLED PaperMatte display (144Hz, 1,200 nits), a 10,100mAh battery, and comes in Airy Blue, White, or Sakura Pink, with European pricing starting at EUR849 (~RM3,896).

France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting August 11, 2026, as reported by Le Monde. The article text itself is largely inaccessible behind the paywall, with only navigation boilerplate visible.

This HPE-sponsored Register article argues hybrid cloud fails when organizations treat it as disconnected environments with separate provisioning, security, monitoring, and cost models rather than a unified operating model. It advocates a 'workload-first' approach: placing workloads based on performance, latency, data sensitivity, compliance, sovereignty, resilience, sustainability, AI readiness, and cost, then managing them consistently across environments. HPE positions itself as the vendor to help assess estates and apply this consistent operating model.

NUS and OpenAI announced a strategic collaboration giving all NUS students, faculty, and staff access to ChatGPT Edu and Codex with enterprise-grade security. A survey of 500+ Singapore university students found 94% use AI several times weekly, 55% daily, and 35% have already built an AI agent for personal or academic use.

Attackers shut down a steam turbine and water treatment system at a Polish CHP plant by pivoting through a private cellular APN from a compromised wind farm to a WAGO controller with default admin credentials. CERT Polska, disclosing the December 2025 incident on August 8, called it the first real-world observed use of a private APN as an attack vector into industrial control networks. No CVE was identified and no single patch exists; the root causes were permissive client-to-client APN traffic, default credentials, and exposed management interfaces.

Honor Malaysia announced the Honor Pad 20 series will launch locally soon, featuring a 12.1-inch IPS LCD, Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, 8GB RAM, 128/256GB storage, MagicOS 10.0, six speakers, and a 10,100mAh battery with 45W charging. Honor has held the #1 Android tablet spot in Malaysia for 27 consecutive months (Q2 2024–Q2 2026) with 32% market share per IDC. Local pricing and launch date are unconfirmed.

OVH Cloud CEO Octave Klaba warned of server rental price hikes up to 87% (gaming servers) and 40-59% (other recent servers) starting September 2026, driven by RAM costs rising 6x (heading to 12x next year), NVMe drives up 7x, HDDs up 3.5x, and CPUs/motherboards up 15-20%. OVH is also decoupling storage (€0.000146/GB/h) and IP addresses (€0.0027/h) from Gen3 instances starting October 1st, and dropping 1-month, 6-month, and 24-month saving plans.

A supply chain attack on WordPress plugin vendor BdThemes compromised at least seven Elementor add-on plugins, including Element Pack (100,000+ active installs), by poisoning a remote JSON data stream rather than modifying any source code in the WordPress.org repository. The XSS flaw in the 'Biggopti' promotional banner component, which fetches JSON from a DigitalOcean Spaces bucket via the Sigmative API, allowed attackers to inject scripts via the 'display_id' parameter and potentially create rogue admin accounts. WordPress.org disabled all affected plugins on August 7-8, 2026 pending full review.

Meta released Muse Glimmer, an open-weight 30B-parameter LLM optimized for local, always-on agent workflows that fits on a single RTX 3090. Mark Zuckerberg published a sequel essay on 'personal superintelligence,' positioning Meta as the lab building AI for individuals rather than institutions, with Muse Spark and Muse Code also in the pipeline.

Japan launched Michibiki No. 7 (QZS-7) aboard an H3 rocket, completing the current seven-satellite QZSS constellation for its sovereign satellite navigation system. QZSS complements GPS to improve positioning coverage and accuracy across Japan, particularly in mountainous and dense urban areas. A previous H3 launch failed in December 2025 due to glue issues, losing the QZS-5 payload, and no replacement for QZS-5 is currently planned.

Rollney, a chimney cake (kürtőskalács) F&B brand founded in Malaysia in 2017 by Tan Yee Ke with 12 outlets across KL, Johor Bahru, and Perak, expanded to Singapore in Jan 2024 via a joint venture with Narresh Babu, who invested S$260,000 (60% savings, 40% family loan). After profit margins fell from 28% to 6%, the business pivoted toward vending machines/robots instead of opening more physical stores, selling over 2,000 chimney cakes monthly with in-house soft serve production.

antirez (creator of Redis) published h3.c, a native C implementation of MiniMax-H3 multimodal inference for Apple Silicon using Metal shaders. The project already supports end-to-end prompt-to-video/audio generation, first/last-frame conditioning, and ordered image/video/audio references, with current work focused on Metal performance and memory optimization on M3 Max and M5 Max.

Alibaba Cloud presented 'DualLane' at SIGKDD 2026, a dual-path AI agent system for tech support tickets that classifies incoming queries as high-frequency routine or low-frequency long-tail, then runs a fast path (a couple of tokens) and slow path (up to 3,000 tokens) concurrently. If the fast path detects a routine scenario, it kills the slow path, avoiding unnecessary LLM calls. Alibaba reports this is faster, cheaper, and more accurate than letting agents handle all tickets, because agents commonly fail at tool selection, parameter generation, dependency extraction, and output synthesis.

Anthropic will embed imperceptible text watermarks and digitally signed file metadata in output from Claude models, citing EU AI Act compliance. Marking will apply worldwide across Claude Platform API, Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Claude Tag, and third-party providers (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Foundry)—not just EU deployments. No technical documentation or examples have been released yet, and researchers have already demonstrated that image watermarking can be undone, raising questions about how resistant text watermarks will be to OCR-based stripping.

Chicken Scheme 6.0 is a major breaking release that brings full R7RS small language compliance to core libraries, switches internal string representation to UTF-8 for Unicode support, and replaces the (chicken blob) module with R7RS-compatible bytevectors. Numerous primitives have been moved between modules, several APIs changed signatures or return types (e.g., process calls now return process objects instead of PIDs), and some functions like read-u8vector and set-port-name! have been removed entirely.

OpenAI completed a $7 billion employee tender offer buying back shares from employees at an $852 billion valuation, matching its March fundraising round. The company confidentially filed for a potential IPO in June, but the tender suggests a public offering may be delayed, especially given missed internal financial goals reported by WSJ and CEO Sam Altman's admission of a poor 12 months.

BMW and University Malaya are collaborating to repurpose old EV batteries for campus chargers and rural electrification. The article text provided contains only the headline and site navigation boilerplate, with no further technical or financial details.

Anthropic extended its Compliance API to cover Claude Cowork (desktop, web, mobile) and Claude Code (CLI, desktop app) in beta for Claude Enterprise customers. The new session endpoints return consolidated transcripts including prompts, responses, tool calls, MCP content, and metadata like verified user ID and timestamps, with no separate integration required beyond an existing Compliance Access Key.