Month: February 2025

On Tuesday, Hugging Face researchers released an open source AI research agent called "Open Deep Research," created by an in-house team as a challenge 24 hours after the launch of OpenAI's Deep Research feature, which can autonomously browse the web and create research reports. The project seeks to match Deep Research's performance while making the technology freely available to developers.

"While powerful LLMs are now freely available in open-source, OpenAI didn’t disclose much about the agentic framework underlying Deep Research," writes Hugging Face on its announcement page. "So we decided to embark on a 24-hour mission to reproduce their results and open-source the needed framework along the way!"

Similar to both OpenAI's Deep Research and Google's implementation of its own "Deep Research" using Gemini (first introduced in December—before OpenAI), Hugging Face's solution adds an "agent" framework to an existing AI model to allow it to perform multi-step tasks, such as collecting information and building the report as it goes along that it presents to the user at the end.

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On Tuesday, Hugging Face researchers released an open source AI research agent called "Open Deep Research," created by an in-house team as a challenge 24 hours after the launch of OpenAI's Deep Research feature, which can autonomously browse the web and create research reports. The project seeks to match Deep Research's performance while making the technology freely available to developers.

"While powerful LLMs are now freely available in open-source, OpenAI didn’t disclose much about the agentic framework underlying Deep Research," writes Hugging Face on its announcement page. "So we decided to embark on a 24-hour mission to reproduce their results and open-source the needed framework along the way!"

Similar to both OpenAI's Deep Research and Google's implementation of its own "Deep Research" using Gemini (first introduced in December—before OpenAI), Hugging Face's solution adds an "agent" framework to an existing AI model to allow it to perform multi-step tasks, such as collecting information and building the report as it goes along that it presents to the user at the end.

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Performing complex algorithms on quantum computers will eventually require access to tens of thousands of hardware qubits. For most of the technologies being developed, this creates a problem: It's difficult to create hardware that can hold that many qubits. As a result, people are looking at various ideas of how we might link processors together in order to have them function as a single computational unit (a challenge that has obviously been solved for classical computers).

In today's issue of Nature, a team at Oxford University describes using quantum teleportation to link two pieces of quantum hardware that were located about 2 meters apart, meaning they could easily have been in different rooms entirely. Once linked, the two pieces of hardware could be treated as a single quantum computer, allowing simple algorithms to be performed that involved operations on both sides of the 2-meter gap.

Quantum teleportation is... different

Our idea of teleportation has been heavily shaped by Star Trek, where people disappear from one location while simultaneously appearing elsewhere. Quantum teleportation doesn't work like that. Instead, you need to pre-position quantum objects at both the source and receiving ends of the teleport and entangle them. Once that's done, it's possible to perform a series of actions that force the recipient to adopt the quantum state of the source. The process of performing this teleportation involves a measurement of the source object, which destroys its quantum state even as it appears at the distant site, so it does share that feature with the popular conception of teleportation.

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Performing complex algorithms on quantum computers will eventually require access to tens of thousands of hardware qubits. For most of the technologies being developed, this creates a problem: It's difficult to create hardware that can hold that many qubits. As a result, people are looking at various ideas of how we might link processors together in order to have them function as a single computational unit (a challenge that has obviously been solved for classical computers).

In today's issue of Nature, a team at Oxford University describes using quantum teleportation to link two pieces of quantum hardware that were located about 2 meters apart, meaning they could easily have been in different rooms entirely. Once linked, the two pieces of hardware could be treated as a single quantum computer, allowing simple algorithms to be performed that involved operations on both sides of the 2-meter gap.

Quantum teleportation is... different

Our idea of teleportation has been heavily shaped by Star Trek, where people disappear from one location while simultaneously appearing elsewhere. Quantum teleportation doesn't work like that. Instead, you need to pre-position quantum objects at both the source and receiving ends of the teleport and entangle them. Once that's done, it's possible to perform a series of actions that force the recipient to adopt the quantum state of the source. The process of performing this teleportation involves a measurement of the source object, which destroys its quantum state even as it appears at the distant site, so it does share that feature with the popular conception of teleportation.

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With hundreds of millions of annual visits, KickAssAnime (KAA) is one of the larger anime pirate sites.

The streaming portal, which relies on third-party hosted videos, is particularly popular in the United States.

Over the years, rightsholders have attempted to pinpoint the site’s operators, presumably to shut it down. Just last summer, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) obtained a DMCA subpoena, requiring Cloudflare to provide all information the company had on file.

Phishing Concerns

Whether this subpoena yielded any useful information is unknown. However, Cloudflare took action yesterday that significantly impacted KAA’s operations. The company flagged all of the site’s domains for ‘suspected phishing,’ displaying the following warning banner to visitors.

“This website has been reported for potential phishing. Phishing is when a site attempts to steal sensitive information by falsely presenting as a safe source.”

Suspected Phishing

Cloudflare allows external parties to flag websites for phishing and other issues, but who was behind the report in this case remains unknown. KAA states that it has not received any further information from Cloudflare.

Pirate sites have been linked to malware and phishing in the past, often due to malicious ads. A check on the main KickAssAnime domain on Virustotal also lists some concerning reports, but at Google Safe Browsing, there are no alarm bells.

‘Mass Abuse Reports’

According to KAA’s operator, Dion, malicious ads are unlikely, as the site has reportedly been ad-free for some time. They are not aware of any potential phishing activities either.

“The funny thing is, we don’t request or ask for any personal information from our users, except for an email when they sign up. Also, the site has been ad-free for weeks,” Dion says.

KAA suspects that Cloudflare’s action might be the result of a brute-force attack using mass abuse reports. The site has a potential offender in mind but, thus far, it has been unable to obtain additional information from Cloudflare.

At the time of writing, the site’s domains are still flagged for suspected phishing. In response, the operator has redirected them to an alternative domain name, KAA.mx.

It’s difficult for outsiders to determine whether this action was based on false reports or if other factors were involved. Regardless of the reason for the flagging, and in addition to the clear copyright concerns, users should always exercise caution when visiting such sites.

More Cloudflare Action

On the topic of Cloudflare, it is worth noting that the company continues to receive requests to assist in identifying the operators of manga and anime websites for copyright enforcement purposes.

As mentioned earlier, KAA have been in the crosshairs for a while. Earlier this week, Japanese publisher Shueisha requested a subpoena to identify the people behind manganato.com, chapmanganato.to, mkklcdnv6temp.com, chapmanganelo.com, manganelo.com, and mangakakalot.com.

Whether that information ‘fishing’ expedition will yield any results has yet to be seen, but the pressure is on.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The Fruit Jam is a single board computer (SBC) that’s about the size of a credit card, or a Raspberry Pi Model B. But while the latest Raspberry Pi SBCs are powered by a 2.4 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A76 processor, the Fruit Jam instead uses a Raspberry Pi RP2350B microprocessor with two 150 MHz ARM Cortex-M33 […]

The post Adafruit’s Fruit Jam is a credit card-sized computer with a RP2350B microprocessor appeared first on Liliputing.

Robocallers posing as employees of the Federal Communications Commission made the mistake of trying to scam real employees of the FCC, the FCC announced yesterday. "On the night of February 6, 2024, and continuing into the morning of February 7, 2024, over a dozen FCC staff and some of their family members reported receiving calls on their personal and work telephone numbers," the FCC said.

The calls used an artificial voice that said, "Hello [first name of recipient] you are receiving an automated call from the Federal Communications Commission notifying you the Fraud Prevention Team would like to speak with you. If you are available to speak now please press one. If you prefer to schedule a call back please press two."

You may not be surprised to learn that the FCC does not have any "Fraud Prevention Team" like the one mentioned in the robocalls, and especially not one that demands Google gift cards in lieu of jail time.

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In a move that will no doubt upset some of the more... orderly minded out there, Polestar is temporarily deviating from its otherwise most logical naming convention. Instead of giving its cars numbers based on some theoretical measurement of performance or their position in the showroom hierarchy, the numbers are chronological. Polestar 1 was the first, then Polestar 2, and so on.

That remains true for the last couple of Polestars we drove—the big Polestar 3 SUV and the slightly smaller, slightly cheaper, Porsche Macan-rivaling Polestar 4. And later this year we should see the Polestar 5. But then it will jump to the Polestar 7, a new compact SUV, which undoubtedly has more sales potential than the drop-top Polestar 6 two-seater, no matter how sharp that car might end up looking.

"I brought in and changed the sequence, because I wanted to bring in the Polestar 7 because I think it's an important car," explained Michael Lohscheller, who became Polestar's CEO last fall.

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Since our first glimpse of the Switch 2 last month, we've been left guessing on many crucial hardware details, including the all-important launch price. Now, Nintendo has hinted that the unsteady state of the international money market may play an outsize role in that pricing decision.

Addressing a question about Switch 2 hardware pricing during an investor Q&A session Wednesday, Nintendo president Shintaro Furukawa said (via machine translation):

In addition to the current inflation, we are aware that the exchange rate environment has changed significantly since the launch of the Nintendo Switch in 2017. We also need to consider the affordable price that customers expect from Nintendo products. When considering the price of a product, we believe that it is necessary to consider these factors from multiple angles.

At this time, we cannot disclose the specific price of the Nintendo Switch 2, but we are considering it while taking various points into consideration. At this time, we do not plan to change the price of the Nintendo Switch hardware.

Most of that is the usual polite executive-speak shorthand for "we're not ready to answer that yet." But the bit about exchange rates and inflation got us wondering just how vulnerable a Japanese company like Nintendo might be to the yen's historic weakness, and what this might mean for the Switch 2.

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The Asus ROG Phone 9 FE is a smartphone with a 6.78 inch FHD+ AMOLED display featuring a 165 Hz refresh rate, support for up to 16GB of LPDDR5x memory, and a focus on gaming: the phone has “AirTriggers” on one side that you can use as gaming buttons, and a version of the Asus Anime […]

The post Asus ROG Phone 9 FE launches as a (somewhat) cheaper gaming phone appeared first on Liliputing.