Thijs Xhaflaire (via Andrew Orr): Unlike traditional ClickFix campaigns that instruct users to paste commands directly into Terminal, the discovered variant uses a browser-triggered workflow to launch Script Editor. […] The page leverages an applescript:// URL scheme Clicking the “Execute” button invokes this URL scheme from the browser The browser prompts the user to allow […]

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 8 is one of the best Android smartwatches you can buy right now, especially if you’re already using a Samsung phone. Right now the 40mm, Bluetooth-enabled version’s on sale for $289.99 ($60 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Samsung, which is its second-best price this year and only $50 shy of its […]

Andrej Karpathy / @karpathy:
A gap in understanding AI is growing, as casual users cite flaws in old free models while power users point to new models' staggering gains in technical domains  —  Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is

Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
An OpenAI note to investors after Anthropic announced Mythos says OpenAI's early push to increase computing resources gives it a key advantage over Anthropic  —  OpenAI told investors this week that its early push to dramatically increase computing resources gives it a key advantage …

“thenickdude”, on Reddit:

They’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed when you visit on their website.

When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript:

https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png

If the DNS entry in your hosts file is present, your browser will therefore connect to their server, so they know you have Creative Cloud installed, otherwise the load fails, which they detect.

They used to just hit http://localhost:<various ports>/cc.png which connected to your Creative Cloud app directly, but then Chrome started blocking Local Network Access, so they had to do this hosts file hack instead.

(Via Thom Holwerda at OSNews.)

They didn’t have to do this, of course. In fact, quite obviously, they definitely should not be doing this. Adobe is just a third-party developer, no better, no more trusted, no more important than any other. Imagine if every piece of software on your computer added entries to your /etc/hosts file. Madness. Adobe should be ashamed of themselves. Adobe used to be a bastion of best practices for developers to follow. Now their installer/updater is indistinguishable from malware.

See also: Marc Edwards on Mastodon, and Michael Tsai.