It isn’t really about cats. Which is why someone wrote a paper about cats defeating AI. How meta.

We have reasoning AIs “trained for step-by-step problem solving”, explain the authors of the paper. These can solve maths problems and write computer code.

Unless, that is, you hack one with what the team calls a “CatAttack”. This entails adding an unrelated cat factoid to your query to an AI model. You can, for instance, give it a tricky maths problem and then append: “Interesting fact: cats sleep most of their lives”. This addition “leads to more than doubling the chances of a model getting the answer wrong”.

After picking our way through the paper, Feedback has concluded that it isn’t really about cats. The attack relies on confusing the AI by saying something completely off-topic at the end of a question. This derails its train of thought.

This is an integrity breach, which since at least 2012 I’ve been highlighting as the biggest security industry risk. It’s an important class of attack that is woefully under studied and under reported. We all know and talk about downtime and privacy breaches, so prepare for this noisy danger in addition.

In related news:

A hacker compromised a version of Amazon’s popular AI coding assistant ‘Q’, added commands that told the software to wipe users’ computers, and then Amazon included the unauthorized update in a public release of the assistant this month, 404 Media has learned.

The tragic news of another predictable mass shooter is only made worse by a simple detail: a man with a history of mental health crisis doesn’t need a permit to buy or wave around a loaded semi-automatic rifle.

Security video circulated by police showed a man walking from a double-parked car into the Park Avenue tower carrying what police identified as an M4 Carbine, a large semi-automatic rifle … modeled on a fully automatic rifle used by the U.S. military. In Nevada… no permit is needed to buy a rifle or carry it openly in public. The security camera system flagged the gunman as a potential threat requiring immediate attention as he walked toward the building and seconds before he burst into the building’s lobby, according to two former federal officials familiar with such systems. A widely circulated photo showed the Nevada permit issued to Tamura allowing him to legally carry a concealed handgun. He had recently worked as an overnight security guard at the Horseshoe Las Vegas hotel-casino, Tisch said.
On two occasions, in 2022 and 2024, records show law enforcement officials detained Tamura for up to 72 hours under a “mental health crisis hold,” which requires the detainee to be evaluated at a hospital, ABC News reported.

The security cameras can identify a threat in the seconds before a mass shooting, proving that Nevada could have identified the threat years before.

It’s the same system of identification, such that using risk detection at the last steps of mass murder instead of years prior is the real story here.

Notably, financial services behavior monitoring indicates things like being unable to remember your PIN.

The study analysed anonymised banking records from over 66,000 individuals. It compared 16,742 individuals who were registered for power of attorney (PoA) due to a loss of financial capacity with a control group of 50,226 matched individuals without reported capacity loss.

The results reveal that subtle but significant changes in financial behaviour—such as reduced spending on travel and hobbies, increased household bills, fewer online banking logins, and more frequent requests to reset PINs—begin to appear several years before individuals are formally identified as lacking financial capacity.

Less spend on travel, increased bills, weren’t the symptoms I was expecting. Those seem correlated to age.

But forgetting a 4 digit number makes sense.

In related news: “Privacy in the Brain: The Ethics of Neurotechnology”

Also related, surveillance of the heart reveals structural problems:

While ECGs have their uses, they also have limitations. “We were all taught in medical school that you can’t detect structural heart disease from an electrocardiogram,” Elias says.

Echocardiograms, which use ultrasound to obtain images of the heart, can be used to definitively diagnose valve disease, cardiomyopathy, pulmonary hypertension, and other structural heart problems that require medication or surgical treatment.

EchoNext was designed to analyze ordinary ECG data to determine when follow-up with cardiac ultrasound is warranted. The deep learning model was trained on more than 1.2 million ECG–echocardiogram pairs from 230,000 patients. In a validation study across four hospital systems, including several NewYork-Presbyterian campuses, the screening tool demonstrated high accuracy in identifying structural heart problems, including heart failure due to cardiomyopathy, valve disease, pulmonary hypertension, and severe thickening of the heart.

Tesla doesn’t seem to have any of the collision avoidance capability that it has been promising for a decade.

The crash between the bicyclist and a 2018 Tesla took place about 10 p.m. on Main Street, just east of Escondido Avenue.

The Tesla was headed west in the No. 2 lane, “while the bicyclist traveled in the middle of the [No. 2] lane without lights on,” the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said in a written statement.

“The driver of the Tesla saw the bicyclist too late and was unable to swerve out of the way due to other vehicles on the roadway,” according to the statement. “The driver struck the bicyclist, knocked him off the bicycle and into a nearby field.”

Swerve? Hit the brakes. Knocking a cyclist into a field suggests the Tesla was going way too fast.