Is the fall of Pokrovsk inevitable? Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? Ukraine faces'exhausting battles' against Russia in Zaporizhia, Donetsk Russian forces pressed into Ukraine's eastern towns of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad during the past week as Kyiv's military mounted a stout defence. On Tuesday, Ukraine's commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii said almost half of the battles on a 1,200km (745-mile) front were happening in the two towns, claiming Russia has committed 150,000 troops - almost a quarter of its strength in Ukraine - to capturing them.

A new report from Menlo Security (PDF) shows a 140 percent increase in browser-based phishing attacks over the past year, as well as a 130 percent increase in zero-hour phishing attacks (i.e., novel attacks that are undetectable to existing detection tools). There are several reasons for this explosive growth: our reliance on the browser in the workplace, zero-day vulnerabilities, advanced phishing tools, and increasing adoption of generative AI. Criminals are now using AI to create credible phishing websites, trick users with fake AI services, and automate targeted attacks. According to security strategist Andrew Harding, advanced social engineering is being combined with "Phishing-as-a-Service" kits and zero-day vulnerabilities. All signs point to this trend accelerating in 2025.

Last month at Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta AI was "on track" to become the most-used generative AI assistant in the world. The company has now passed a significant milestone toward that goal, with Meta AI passing the 500 million user mark, Zuckerberg revealed during the company's latest earnings call. The half billion user mark comes just barely a year after the social network first launched its AI assistant last fall. Zuckerberg said the company still expects to become the "most-used" assistant by the end of 2024, though he's never specified how the company is measuring that metric. Zuckerberg said that AI improvements in its feed and video recommendations have led to an 8 percent increase in time spent on Facebook and a 5 percent increase for Instagram this year.

SAG-AFTRA has ratified new contracts for voice actors working in TV animation after members' votes came in at over 95 percent in favor of the terms. The three-year agreements put into place new protections around the use of AI, including a requirement that producers obtain an actor's consent before using their name as a prompt to create an AI-generated voice. SAG-AFTRA announced the contracts' approval on Friday night. They'll be effective through June 30, 2026. Per the new contracts, "the term'voice actor' only includes humans."

The Flint water crisis has resulted in all-time high numbers of children with special needs and poor performance in school. More than 12,000 children to were exposed to toxic levels of lead in 2014 when the city switched it's public water source to the Flint River, where the water is considerably more acidic. This led to corrosion in lead pipes, which imbued the city's tap water with lead, and then introduced it into the drinking supply. Lead exposure has been linked to behavioral and cognitive problems, mental illness, and an underdeveloped brain. Now, researchers from Michigan and New Jersey experts have reported the rate of young children diagnosed with special needs increased by eight percent after 2014 while performance in math class dropped.

In April 2022, when Dall-E, a text-to-image visio-linguistic model, was released, it purportedly attracted over a million users within the first three months. This was followed by ChatGPT, in January 2023, which apparently reached 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch. Both mark notable moments in the development of generative AI, which in turn has brought forth an explosion of AI-generated content into the web. The bad news is that, in 2024, this means we will also see an explosion of fabricated, nonsensical information, mis- and disinformation, and the exacerbation of social negative stereotypes encoded in these AI models. The AI revolution wasn't spurred by any recent theoretical breakthrough--indeed, most of the foundational work underlying artificial neural networks has been around for decades--but by the "availability" of massive data sets.

Porn has reached a golden age as people are searching for mature content like'sexy granny' and'MILF' Those are among the many search terms that saw growth on Pornhub in 2023. The adult website sifted through data from billions of visits to see what content defined the year's tastes, finding the top category was'The Golden Age.' 'MILF' became the second most searched term worldwide, while'Granny' saw a 132 percent increase from 2022 - and terms like'sexy granny ' and'hot GILF' trending. Many searches also included'DILF,' with'muscle DILF' traffic growing by 71 percent. It seems Pornhub is maturing, according to its most searched fetishes of 2023 that included'Granny' and'MILF' This year, the MILF category climbed a spot on the charts to the fifth most viewed category worldwide, Pornhub revealed. The Mature category came in seventh, seeing a 69 percent increase among viewers, and it is now the second most popular among men and fifth among women.

Knowing the state of the job market is critical to finding your next position - a new report aims to take out the guesswork by revealing the most in-demand worldwide. Experts compiled internet data and Google job searches to create a list of the top 10 most sought-after positions, ranking software quality assurance analyst at the top. A software quality assurance analyst, someone that tests software to ensure it is free of bugs, saw a 155 percent increase in searchers from 2021 to 2022. The second most searched was solar consultant, who provided customers with information about solar-powered equipment, and customer service associate. However, the report was conducted before AI's success, which is set to take over many positions, and the recent tech layoffs that saw thousands of people lose their jobs.

Enthusiast laptop hardware is nothing to scoff at these days. Both the Intel and Nvidia's new flagship mobile parts have finally hit shelves, and the massive notebooks that they power are incredibly potent. And no surprise here, but Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 for laptops is absolutely ferocious. Though not an exact replica of its desktop counterpart (a sore spot for some internet denizens), this graphics processor still posts huge improvements over its RTX 3080 Ti predecessor--while seemingly using less power. How big? Think performance increases as high as 70 percent in our tests.

Noting that overlapping imaging features on contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) can make it challenging to differentiate between acute diverticulitis and colon cancer, researchers say an emerging deep learning model may provide enhanced sensitivity and specificity for these conditions. In a retrospective study recently published in JAMA Network Open, researchers developed and tested a three-dimensional (3D) convolutional neural network (CNN) for 585 patients (mean age of 63.2) who underwent surgery for colon cancer or acute diverticulitis between July 1, 2005 and October 1, 2020, had venous phase CT imaging within 60 days prior to surgery and had segmental wall thickening in the colon that was independent of disease stage. In comparison to mean sensitivity and specificity rates of 77.6 percent and 81.6 percent, respectively, for radiologist readers, the study authors noted an 83.3 percent sensitivity rate and an 86.6 percent specificity rate for the 3D CNN model. The combination of the deep learning model and radiologist assessment resulted in an eight percent increase in sensitivity (85.6 percent) and a 9.7 percent increase in specificity (91.3 percent) over radiologist assessments, according to the study findings. The study authors also noted the reduction of false-negative rates with the 3D CNN model.