If you thought Internet-meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin was ridiculous, then Kanye-West-based altcoin Coinye West will probably just make you angry.
Named after Yeezus himself, Coinye West is set to launch on January 11, at 11pm ET, according to the cryptocoin’s creators, who tell Vice’s Noisey blog that they hope it will help bring the nebulous world of digital currencies into the mainstream.
“Our goal with Coinye West is to make it easier for people to use cryptocurrency,” Coinye West’s unnamed creators tell Noisey. “Right now, it’s kind of a dark art for people to mine coins. We plan on releasing a front end to the “mining” programs called CoinyeMiner. It will make things a lot more simple and people will be able to make their own coins.”
Coinye West’s creators say they chose Kanye as their cryptocurrency mascot because “he is and always has been a trendsetter.” But despite the creators’ enthusiasm for the rapper, West has not endorsed the crypotocurrency, and is apparently no way involved with it – and that could be a problem.
“We’re really not sure how Kanye is gonna react to this,” says Coinye’s creators. “We hope he loves it, but if he doesn’t, he really isn’t someone we want to piss off.”
Coinye West is only the latest so-called altcoin to launch over the past year. Some, like Litecoin, trade at a fairly high value – though nothing close to the $750+ exchange rate Bitcoin currently enjoys. Most wallow in the fraction-of-a-penny range – a place where Coinye should probably get comfortable.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.