It has been a busy week for supply-chain attacks targeting open source software available in public repositories, with successful breaches of multiple developer accounts that resulted in malicious packages being pushed to unsuspecting users.
The latest target, according to security firm Socket, is JavaScript code available on repository npm. A total of 10 packages available from the npm page belonging to global talent agency Toptal contained malware and were downloaded by roughly 5,000 users before the supply-chain attack was detected. The packages have since been removed. This was the third supply-chain attack Socket has observed on npm in the past week.
The hackers behind the attack pulled it off by first compromising Toptal’s GitHub Organization and from there using that access to publish the malicious packages on npm.
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On Wednesday, the White House released "Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan," a 25-page document that outlines the Trump administration's strategy to "maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance" in AI through deregulation, infrastructure investment, and international partnerships. But critics are already taking aim at the plan, saying it's doing Big Tech a big favor.
Assistant to the President for Science and Technology Michael Kratsios and Special Advisor for AI and Crypto David Sacks crafted the plan, which frames AI development as a race the US must win against global competitors, particularly China.
The document describes AI as the catalyst for "an industrial revolution, an information revolution, and a renaissance—all at once." It calls for removing regulatory barriers that the administration says hamper private sector innovation. The plan explicitly reverses several Biden-era policies, including Executive Order 14110 on AI model safety measures, which President Trump rescinded on his first day in office during his second term.
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Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, lowbackgroundsteel.ai, that treats pre-AI, human-created content like a precious commodity—a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. "The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content," Graham-Cumming wrote on his blog last week. The reason? To preserve what made non-AI media uniquely human.
The archive name comes from a scientific phenomenon from the Cold War era. After nuclear weapons testing began in 1945, atmospheric radiation contaminated new steel production worldwide. For decades, scientists needing radiation-free metal for sensitive instruments had to salvage steel from pre-war shipwrecks. Scientists called this steel "low-background steel." Graham-Cumming sees a parallel with today's web, where AI-generated content increasingly mingles with human-created material and contaminates it.
With the advent of generative AI models like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion in 2022, it has become far more difficult for researchers to ensure that media found on the Internet was created by humans without using AI tools. ChatGPT in particular triggered an avalanche of AI-generated text across the web, forcing at least one research project to shut down entirely.
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Last week, electronics engineer Lorentio Brodesco announced the completion of a mock-up for nsOne, reportedly the first custom PlayStation 1 motherboard created outside of Sony in the console's 30-year history. The fully functional board accepts original PlayStation 1 chips and fits directly into the original console case, marking a milestone in reverse-engineering for the classic console released in 1994.
Brodesco's motherboard isn't an emulator or FPGA-based re-creation—it's a genuine circuit board designed to work with authentic PlayStation 1 components, including the CPU, GPU, SPU, RAM, oscillators, and voltage regulators. The board represents over a year of reverse-engineering work that began in March 2024 when Brodesco discovered incomplete documentation while repairing a PlayStation 1.
"This isn't an emulator. It's not an FPGA. It's not a modern replica," Brodesco wrote in a Reddit post about the project. "It's a real motherboard, compatible with the original PS1 chips."
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MySQL 5.7+ InnoDB databases and PostgreSQL 9.2+ support JSON document types in a single field. We explore the MySQL 8.0 JSON implementation in more detail.
Continue reading How to Use JSON Data Fields in MySQL Databases on SitePoint.
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