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Thousands of Vibe-Coded Apps Expose Corporate and Personal Data on the Open Web

WIRED

Companies like Lovable, Base44, Replit, and Netlify use AI to let anyone build a web app in seconds--and in thousands of cases, spill highly sensitive data onto the public internet. As AI increasingly takes over the work of modern programmers, the cybersecurity world has warned that automated coding tools are sure to introduce a new bounty of hackable bugs into software. When those same vibe-coding tools invite anyone to create applications hosted on the web with a click, however, it turns out the security implications go beyond bugs to a total absence of any security--even, sometimes, for highly sensitive corporate and personal data. Security researcher Dor Zvi and his team at the cybersecurity firm he cofounded, RedAccess, analyzed thousands of vibe-coded web applications created using the AI software development tools Lovable, Replit, Base44, and Netlify and found more than 5,000 of them that had virtually no security or authentication of any kind. Many of these web apps allowed anyone who merely finds their web URL to access the apps and their data.


Hackers Hate AI Slop Even More Than You Do

WIRED

Hackers and other cybercriminals are complaining about "AI shit" flooding platforms where they discuss cyberattacks and other illegal activity. "I'm disappointed that you are working to incorporate AI garbage into the site," one annoyed person, posting anonymously, said in an online message. "No-one is asking for this--we want you to improve the site, stop charging for new features." Only, this is not a regular internet user moaning about AI being forced into their favorite app . Instead, they are complaining about a cybercrime forum's plans to introduce more generative AI.


A new US phone network for Christians aims to block porn and gender-related content

MIT Technology Review

Launching next week on T-Mobile's network, the cell plan takes a nuclear approach to online safety. A new US-wide cell phone network marketed to Christians is set to launch next week. It blocks porn, which experts in network security say marks the first time a US cell plan has used network-level blocking for such content that can't be turned off even by adult account owners. It's also rolling out a filter on sexual content aimed at blocking material related to gender and trans issues, which will be optional but turned on by default across all plans. The network, which is currently being tested ahead of its May 5 launch date, will be run by Radiant Mobile, a newly launched mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). These operators don't own cell towers but buy bandwidth from the big providers (in this case, T-Mobile) and sell to specific demographics (President Trump announced his own MVNO last year called Trump Mobile; CREDOMobile sends donations to progressive causes).


Is Schoolwork Optional Now?

The Atlantic - Technology

Education is on the verge of becoming fully automated. William Liu is grateful that he finished high school when he did. If the latest AI tools had been around then, he told me, he might have been tempted to use them to do his homework. Liu, now a sophomore at Stanford, finished high school all the way back in 2024. "I have a younger sibling who is just graduating high school," he said.


Why Walmart and OpenAI Are Shaking Up Their Agentic Shopping Deal

WIRED

After OpenAI's Instant Checkout feature fell short, Walmart is instead embedding its Sparky chatbot directly into ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Since November, Walmart has let some ChatGPT users order a limited selection of products without ever leaving OpenAI's chatbot interface. Sales have been disappointing, a Walmart executive vice president exclusively tells WIRED. The results suggest that a future where chatbots and AI agents take over ecommerce is still a way off, if it ever materializes. Last year, OpenAI made a bet that it could boost revenue by charging a commission on purchases made through ChatGPT.



End-to-End Goal-Driven Web Navigation

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose a goal-driven web navigation as a benchmark task for evaluating an agent with abilities to understand natural language and plan on partially observed environments. In this challenging task, an agent navigates through a website, which is represented as a graph consisting of web pages as nodes and hyperlinks as directed edges, to find a web page in which a query appears. The agent is required to have sophisticated high-level reasoning based on natural languages and efficient sequential decision-making capability to succeed. We release a software tool, called WebNav, that automatically transforms a website into this goal-driven web navigation task, and as an example, we make WikiNav, a dataset constructed from the English Wikipedia. We extensively evaluate different variants of neural net based artificial agents on WikiNav and observe that the proposed goal-driven web navigation well reflects the advances in models, making it a suitable benchmark for evaluating future progress. Furthermore, we extend the WikiNav with question-answer pairs from Jeopardy! and test the proposed agent based on recurrent neural networks against strong inverted index based search engines. The artificial agents trained on WikiNav outperforms the engined based approaches, demonstrating the capability of the proposed goal-driven navigation as a good proxy for measuring the progress in real-world tasks such as focused crawling and question-answering.


Google's AI Searches Love to Refer You Back to Google

WIRED

The app reads your email inbox and your meeting calendar, then gives you a short audio summary. It can help you spend less time scrolling, but of course, there are privacy drawbacks to consider.


The Human Flatus Atlas plans to measure the explosivity of farts

New Scientist

Feedback is feeling bold, so here is a prediction: the research we are about to describe is going to win an Ig Nobel award within the next decade. The entire project feels tailor-made for the Igs. It is an effort to objectively measure human flatulence using biosensors, or "Smart Underwear". We learned of this from a press release from the University of Maryland, flagged to us by physics reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan with the phrase: "Surely, Feedback can do something with this." The essential problem is that we do not know the normal range for flatulence, unlike other key biomarkers like blood glucose.