On Friday, OpenAI's new ChatGPT Agent, which can perform multistep tasks for users, proved it can pass through one of the Internet's most common security checkpoints by clicking Cloudflare's anti-bot verification—the same checkbox that's supposed to keep automated programs like itself at bay.
ChatGPT Agent is a feature that allows OpenAI's AI assistant to control its own web browser, operating within a sandboxed environment with its own virtual operating system and browser that can access the real Internet. Users can watch the AI's actions through a window in the ChatGPT interface, maintaining oversight while the agent completes tasks. The system requires user permission before taking actions with real-world consequences, such as making purchases. Recently, Reddit users discovered the agent could do something particularly ironic.
The evidence came from Reddit, where a user named "logkn" of the r/OpenAI community posted screenshots of the AI agent effortlessly clicking through the screening step before it would otherwise present a CAPTCHA (short for "Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart") while completing a video conversion task—narrating its own process as it went.
Cloud databases face a fundamental challenge: how to remain available and durable under node failures? Modern cloud databases approach this by separating two concerns that used to be tightly coupled: compute and storage. The database engine becomes stateless, while the write-ahead log gets replicated across multiple nodes to guarantee durability. If a database server dies, another one can pick up exactly where it left off by reading from the replicated log.
Distributed log services are thus at the heart of cloud databases. In this blog post, we will explain some drawbacks of the predominant design for distributed logs to motivate a new elegant design. We will also explain why it is necessary to verify this design with formal methods.
Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their customers – that is, people and organizations who actually buy their products or pay for access to their services – their core focus. The focus has instead turned towards the stock price.
Their real clients, the entities they really care about, are the stockholders. Reasons are many, perhaps one of them being that people making decisions tend to own stock options or have bonuses tied to stock performance of the companies they run.
This means that for a large, established tech company the product or service it offers does not matter all that much anymore. It needs to be just barely good enough to keep people using it. The easiest way to do this is some form of a monopoly.
Monopoly is the business model of Silicon Valley, and they are not even shy about that.
Native CSS transitions have quietly killed the strongest argument for client-side routing. Yet people keep building terrible apps instead of performant websites.
Illustration d'une bombe zip Many sites have been affected by the aggressiveness of web crawlers designed to improve LLMs.
I’ve been relatively spared, but since the phenomenon started, I've been looking for a solution to implement.
Today, I present a zip bomb gzip and brotli that is valid HTML.
Welcome to Neko, a self-hosted virtual browser that runs in Docker and uses WebRTC technology. Neko is a powerful tool that allows you to run a fully-functional browser in a virtual environment, giving you the ability to access the internet securely and privately from anywhere. With Neko, you can browse the web, run applications, and perform other tasks just as you would on a regular browser, all within a secure and isolated environment. Whether you are a developer looking to test web applications, a privacy-conscious user seeking a secure browsing experience, or simply someone who wants to take advantage of the convenience and flexibility of a virtual browser, Neko is the perfect solution.
