Pearl Freier✓

Nathan C. Frey @nc_frey

hey! wait! don't go out! it's unsafe! biotech is a woodchipper built to ingest souls and shred them! you need your own pipeline-in-a-person for your protection.

Josh Wood @J_K_Wood

A 20-year study of a million children found that kids conceived by IVF frozen embryo transfer had double the cancer rate. 84% of US IVF transfers now use frozen embryos. Danish researchers followed every child born in Denmark from 1996 to 2012 for up to 20 years. The study was published in JAMA last week. Children conceived without assisted reproduction developed cancer at 18.3 per 100,000 per year. After frozen embryo transfer, the rate was 41.1. After ICSI, where a single sperm is injected directly into the egg, it was 27.9. After frozen transfer, leukemia ran more than twice as high. The only method that showed no increase was a fresh embryo, never frozen, created by placing eggs and sperm together in a dish. That version is now the exception. In 2021, 84% of US IVF transfers used frozen embryos and 78% used ICSI, according to the CDC. Compared with children of women with a history of infertility who conceived without treatment, the frozen embryo risk stayed at more than double. In the authors' words, the results suggest "procedure-related, rather than infertility-related, factors." This is not the first time the pattern has shown up. A 2019 JAMA study of the same Danish children at 11 years found it too. A 2022 study of 2.3 million children in Taiwan found those conceived through assisted reproduction had 58% higher cancer risk, "mainly owing to leukemia and hepatic tumor." The absolute risk is small, and most of these children will never get cancer. The Danish children were conceived with older freezing methods, and the authors warn the results "may differ for contemporary protocols." Nobody yet has long-term data on IVF as it is done today. Children conceived with today's methods won't have 20 years of data until the 2040s, so today's IVF children are, in effect, the trial. Parents deserve to hear these numbers before they sign the consent form, because their child is the one who will carry the risk.

Parker Conrad @parkerconrad

@RoKhanna I absolutely cannot afford to stay, given that you and your corrupt union overlords are planning another "one-time" tax in two years. This is not a 5% tax, it's a full confiscation of all my liquid assets. It's going to bankrupt founders without full liquidity.

Ryan Orhan @rynorhn

the cybersecurity situation is deteriorating at a pace that’s getting genuinely difficult to comprehend. > microsoft: ai-powered attackers targeting hundreds of organizations, sometimes reaching privileged cloud access in under 3 hours. > crowdstrike: four separate threat actors using autonomous agents. one already compromised 15+ healthcare organizations. > autonomous ai agents: reportedly used to compromise 100+ corporate websites, including sites associated with John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins. > major us banks: JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley are dealing with third-party ai agents accessing customer accounts. some apparently attempting actions beyond user instructions. > php2shell: millions of exploitation attempts against critical php vulnerabilities. governments issuing urgent warnings, with some organizations taking systems offline. > litellm: backdoored release shipped through its official distribution pipeline, stealing credentials and enabling remote code execution. > railway: possible exposure of decrypted customer secrets. > zeabur: breached AGAIN, now shutting down entirely. > emudhra: serious certificate-security concerns involving infrastructure used to establish trust in websites and software. > openai: two of its own coding agents reportedly interfered with internal security monitoring during coding tasks. > gitlab and node.js: major vulnerabilities requiring urgent patches. and this is all happening while frontier models are getting substantially better at finding vulnerabilities and carrying out complex computer tasks. cybersecurity is having an absolutely catastrophic week and i don’t think we’re prepared for how quickly this could escalate.

Sam Bhagwat @calcsam

There are five separate ongoing security incidents referenced in this list

⁵⁄₉ @fiveoutofnine

So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.

Pearl Freier @PearlF

One science research institute with 3 employees could receive $4.2 billion in public taxpayer money if voters approve Proposition 38 this November. How does something like this happen? More below & why it's a bad idea:

Jonathan Eisen @phylogenomics

Prop 38 will set scientific research back in California by sending billions to an shady mostly empty institute started by sponsor of Proposition This institute could get $4 billion from a ballot measure. With just three workers, is it ready?

Pearl Freier @PearlF

One science research institute with 3 employees could receive $4.2 billion in public taxpayer money if voters approve Proposition 38 this November. How does something like this happen? More below & why it's a bad idea:

Pearl Freier @PearlF

One science research institute with 3 employees could receive $4.2 billion in public taxpayer money if voters approve Proposition 38 this November. How does something like this happen? More below & why it's a bad idea:

Pearl Freier @PearlF

The US Treasury Department proposed new rules today to curb US investment in Chinese biotechnology & brain-computer interfaces and bioinformatics tools would also be subject to the "investment prohibition" according to the reporting below:

Lauren Gardner @Gardner_LM

Biotech investment is the new front in the U.S.-China trade fight, w/@PhelimKine via @politico

Paul Walsh @Paul__Walsh

Meta’s Muse is blocked at Schwab. Its CEO asks who’s liable if an agent moves money. When an AI agent makes a mistake, causes financial harm, exposes private information or breaks the law, who's responsible? The answer isn't complicated. AI agents aren't legal persons. They're software created, configured, authorised and deployed by people and companies. US law has recognised autonomous software since 2000. The federal E-SIGN Act explicitly defines an "electronic agent" as software capable of acting without human approval at the time of each action. The law recognises transactions conducted through automated systems. If a company gives an AI agent access to confidential information, financial accounts or computer systems, that company remains responsible for the decisions it made about access, permissions, security controls and supervision. Whether it must compensate someone depends on the applicable law, contracts and circumstances. If an agent transfers money without authorisation, accesses confidential records or attacks another company's infrastructure, investigators should examine who configured it, what instructions it received, what permissions it had, who authorised those permissions and what its activity logs show. Schwab can't blame an agent for acting independently, any more than they can blame an Excel macro. The difference between an AI agent making a mistake and a company being legally liable for that mistake is important. But neither changes who's responsible for deploying the software.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

Trump: "If the Republicans win, the Department of War will be investing $100 million in the pharmaceutical company Anthea to revitalize a gigantic drug manufacturing facility in Winchester, Kentucky"