Author: InfoForTech

Companies working at the frontier of aerospace, energy, and computing are constantly looking for new materials to improve performance. But in order to understand how those materials will actually behave once they’re inside rockets or on computer chips, companies first have to make the material and then test it. That’s because even the most powerful simulation techniques struggle to model the complex chemical arrangements in most of today’s solid materials. The problem adds costs and time to materials innovation.Now a team of MIT researchers has created a way to accurately model the behavior of metals, regardless of the complexity of…

AI is rapidly gaining abilities that once belonged to humanity alone. In just the past four years, chatbots have learned how to build apps, make video games, generate research reports, compose songs, analyze contracts, and write terrible literary fiction. Soon, they may even be able to dread their own deaths.In Silicon Valley, many believe that AI systems can already think and feel. Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneering computer scientist and “godfather” of modern artificial intelligence, thinks that today’s large language models (LLMs) are conscious. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is “open to the idea” that Claude has a subjective experience — while…

The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has issued a set of orders designed to expedite data center projects. The agency’s five commissioners unanimously approved the directives on Thursday. The orders are part of an initiative that U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright launched last year to streamline data center construction. According to the Associated Press today, it’s believed that additional measures could follow suit down the line. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, supervises interstate energy transmission infrastructure. The directives it issued on Thursday apply to the six largest interstate power grid operators in the US. Those organizations provide electricity to…

NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5Access control (AC), Audit & accountability (AU), Identification & authentication (IA), Configuration management (CM)Widely used baseline for federal and enterprise environments. Maps directly to GPO-enforced controls.[4]NIST SP 800-63B Rev. 4 (2025)15-character minimum passwords, blocklist screening, no forced rotation, phishing-resistant MFAFinalized mid-2025. Organizations using 90-day rotation or 8-character minimums are now non-compliant.[1]PCI DSS v4.0.1MFA for all access to cardholder data environments, strong password policies, network segmentation, privileged access managementv4.0.1 is the sole active version since December 2024. The 51 future-dated requirements became mandatory March 31, 2025.[5]HIPAA Security RuleAccess controls, audit controls, integrity controls, transmission securityMFA is not…

This follows a smartphone and tablet ban in classrooms. Norway is imposing a strict ban on the use of generative AI tools by elementary school kids, according to a report by Reuters. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere suggested at a press conference that AI lets children skip crucial steps in their education and that schools should focus on teaching them how to “read, write and do mathematics.” These standards will be imposed at the start of the new school year, which begins in late August. The ban impacts students from first through seventh grade, ages six to 13. However, the…

The retail SSD market is vanishing as AI data centers cannibalize the world’s NAND supply. For PC builders, the RAMpocalypse has just hit storage. If you’re planning a PC build, you might want to adjust your expectations- and your budget. The retail SSD market hasn’t just slowed down; according to Silicon Motion executive Nelson Duann, it has “almost disappeared.” We’ve officially hit the era where AI is eating the hardware supply chain. Because AI data centers and hyperscalers have an insatiable, high-margin appetite for NAND flash, memory manufacturers have effectively stopped prioritizing consumer channels. The result is a supply bottleneck…

Microsoft researchers have detailed an exploit chain, named AutoJack, that turns an AI browsing agent into a delivery vehicle for remote code execution. Steer the agent to load an attacker’s web page, and that page’s JavaScript can reach a privileged local service on the same machine and spawn a process on the host. No credentials, no sign-in screen, and no further user interaction once the agent loads the page. The attacker only has to get the agent to open it, and a planted link, a URL field, or a prompt injection will do. The flaw sits in AutoGen Studio, the open-source prototyping…

A wave of new apps marketed on TikTok and YouTube is making it nearly impossible for teachers to tell whether students are actually writing their own homework or offloading it to AI. The New York Times reports that tools known as humanizers and autotypers have closed the gap that used to give AI-written homework away, and that the same companies selling detection software are sometimes the ones helping students get around it. The tools work around the checks teachers rely on Humanizers take AI-generated text and rework it so it no longer sounds robotic or repetitive enough to trigger detection,…

A massive collection of stolen login credentials containing roughly 24 billion records was briefly exposed online, according to cybersecurity researchers at Cybernews. Researchers say the publicly accessible Elasticsearch cluster contained usernames, email addresses, plaintext passwords, and login URLs linked to a wide range of online services. The database was taken offline after its discovery, but the scale of the collection has raised concerns about how much stolen credential data is circulating within cybercriminal ecosystems. While it’s unclear who assembled the database or how many unique victims are represented, the findings highlight a growing problem: infostealer malware and credential reuse continue…

Online scams are an ever-present threat, costing Americans nearly $119 billion a year. It’s not just happening on the internet either. Robocalls and text scams hit a six-year high in 2025. Now, with the proliferation of artificial intelligence, scammers are even more sophisticated, using AI tools to bypass spam filters and trick people into divulging sensitive information or making false payments. Attackers can use large language models — trained to mimic human writing — to create highly personalized, grammatically flawless phishing emails and texts that convincingly impersonate real individuals. They can also use machine learning to create voice clones, which mimic the…