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Nobody needs Mythos or 0-days to build a chaos-causing computer worm – free open source models work just fine

'Attackers can now cheaply operationalize known vulnerabilities at scale,' boffins tell The Reg

The Independent (World)

King George III’s mad tyrant myth crumbles as new history redefines America’s origin

King George inherited the throne in 1760 at age 22, overseeing an empire stretching across continents

‘A kind of reconnecting with the past’: the Met celebrates the art of the portrait

In a new exhibition, work from artists including Pablo Picasso and Wifredo Lam offer different ways to see what a portrait can represent What exactly is a portrait? At its simplest, it might be an attempt to depict oneself or someone else via a painting. But then consider German expressionist Max Beckmann’s masterpiece The Beginning, a triptych of scenes from his childhood, or Cuban artist Wifredo Lam’s Ídolo, a melange of forms based around the goddess Oyá. Rooted more in memory and myth than a mere physical likeness, these pieces stretch just what we might decide counts as a portrait. Works such as the Beckmann and the Lam – as well as cubist abstractions, an ornate hand mirror, and one of Joan Miró’s pieces of “painting-poetry”, — are all portraits as defined by The Met’s new show The Face of Modern Life, which gathers close to 80 works from the museum’s permanent collection. A boisterous and effusive selection of work from one of the nation’s most storied museums, this show gives audiences a peek into the museum’s estimable archives and a chance to wonder just what defines this seemingly simple but truly elusive form. Continue reading...

What the Hellenic! Why is Christopher Nolan’s new Greek epic entirely devoid of Greeks?

Set to be this year’s biggest blockbuster, The Odyssey’s cast has been selected to ‘represent the world’. Fair enough – except that one key country seems to have gone completely unrepresented … There are the American accents, gleaming body suits and a muddy Dunkirk palette. And then there is Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, a casting choice that recently drew racist attacks from the usual moaners of the internet, including Elon Musk, who complained it wasn’t authentic. Authenticity matters. He’s just focusing entirely in the wrong place. To many Greeks, what concerns us most about the first look at Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey is the whereabouts of Billy Zane. Zane, like other beloved members of the Greek diaspora in Hollywood, has recently appeared on “Alternative Odyssey” lists on the Greek side of social media, as well as over dinner table debates from Patras to Palmers Green. (Theo James, Jennifer Aniston, Hank Azaria, and Dave Bautista are among the other nominees.) Greek and Greek Cypriot media platforms are writing open letters. It’s a symptom of feeling left out by Hollywood, again and with no explanation, from our foundational mythologies and epics, with a cast list that features not even a token –opoulos, –edes, or –iannou. Not a single Greek. Continue reading...

The Register

Cisco sings Mythos' praises - but doesn't say how many bugs the model uncovered

Meanwhile, Anthropic adds 150 partners to Project Glasswing

Masters of the Universe review – Amazon’s He-Man adventure is a weak big-budget misfire

A laboured attempt to resurrect toy IP very few people still care about is a $200m-budgeted waste of everyone’s time It’s not just that He-Man himself is from the 80s that gives 2026’s Masters of the Universe such an aggressive throwback vibe. It’s that trying to assemble a film around the haphazard mythology of a toy and dusting off IP that precious few still care about feels like something Hollywood has slowly been doing a bit less of, especially on a scale such as this. This year, hits have relied on either properties that audiences do have passion for (Scream, Michael Jackson, Mario, The Devil Wears Prada) or, radically, original ideas (Obsession, Backrooms, Goat, Hoppers). We haven’t endured an Underworld sequel or a Tarzan reboot since 2016, a Terminator film since 2019, a Dolittle reboot since 2020 or a GI Joe spin-off since 2021. Mattel might then have struck gold with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie in 2023, but that was both an unconventional, auteur-led one-off and based on a product millions were still buying on the regular (the year before release, the brand made more than $1.4bn). Various directors, from John Woo to Jon M Chu, have been loosely attached to a He-Man movie over the years and various studios, from Sony to Netflix, have tried (the latter streamer having spent a reported $30m on a failed attempt) but, as with many long-gestating projects in Hollywood, those involved forgot to remember Jeff Goldblum’s evergreen Jurassic Park line: “So preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Continue reading...

BBC News

UK banks blocked from cyber AI tool Mythos get offer from rival OpenAI

Nine banks have been offered access to GPT 5.5 Cyber, as fierce rival Anthropic has blocked previews of its tool.

Fuck the Polis review – cryptic docu-essay is a sphinxlike studty of Greek myth and modernity

This film may be making a point about the classical vis a vis the contemporary, but its visual collages and dense poetic texts render it inert The title of this lyrical but frustrating docu-essay about director Rita Azevedo Gomes’s travels in Greece cuts both ways. Is it expressing impatience with the classical ideals she hopes to discover there; or, borrowed from street graffiti, is it actually critiquing the modern society that has betrayed ancient standards of beauty and harmony and, in the words of Albert Camus cited here, “has fed its despair on ugliness and convulsions”? Nostalgic aspirations and the sobering here-and-now vie for supremacy in the texts recited by Gomes and others over travelogue images from Athens and the Cyclades beyond. As if echoing heroic voyagers past, she adds a layer of fictionalisation to her exploits, reading a poem written by João Miguel Fernandes Jorge based on a journey there in 2007; it becomes the story of Irma, who romances a young man, Ion, on the island of Delos, birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. But the affair founders – and there are other reality-checks, such as the incongruous Chinese cargo ships that now traverse the 21st-century Aegean. Continue reading...

Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Fiction comes from what you don’t know’

From a young age, the author was told that one of her ancestors had drawn some of the first maps of Ireland. Then she found a photograph, and embarked on a journey to discover his story Every family has its myths. In mine, we were told that one of our antecedents had worked on the first maps of Ireland. As a child, I used to picture a solitary person in unspecified period dress – a tailcoat, perhaps some kind of cravat – striding pensively about fields and mountains, pen in hand. On summer holidays, I would stare out of the window of our red car as Donegal or Galway rolled by and wonder that such a task could be achieved. How did one man set about drawing a map of a whole country, of these towns and strands and trees and rivers? All myths comprise a great deal of fanciful embroidery through which runs the distinct thread of truth: time and retelling will always refract reality. This mapper preyed on my mind. I thought about him, always, when I travelled around Ireland. I thought about him in my final year of school, when my geography exam required me to analyse a square of an unknown map. I wanted, as I often do, to know more, about his life, his work, who he had been and how he had mapped. Continue reading...

‘The biggest myth? That I got kicked out of Sister Sledge’: Kathy Sledge on sibling rivalry, Chic and disco’s political power

One of disco’s biggest stars answers your questions, recalling tours with Rick James, inspiration for Destiny’s Child and what she wished she asked Michael Jackson You have been an active contributor to an astounding canon of music. What was the essential ingredient that made it all happen? eamonmcc The first word that comes to mind is passion – for the music, for what I do. If you get to be the voice of a song like We Are Family, which is here for generations to come – to me, it’s more than a song, it’s a statement – it just blows my mind. We were the group that brought the world together as a family through a song. I reckon if you put a rocker, a pop fan, a metalhead, a hip-hop nut, a techno obsessive and a classical devotee into a room and put on Lost in Music, everybody would get down. What’s your own relationship with the song? DeJongandtherestless The song we’re known for is We Are Family, but we’re really Lost in Music. That should be the theme song for Sister Sledge. I’ve been doing this all my life, since I was 11 years old, but in order to survive the industry, there has to be a balance. There were times, especially in the early days, where we toured so much that we couldn’t come up for air, and that, if anything, makes me relate to those lyrics. Continue reading...

BBC News

Champion ethical hacker warns AI tools like Mythos will make competing harder

Chompie, one of the world's tops ethical hackers, says AI like Claude Mythos will make it harder for people like her to compete.

The Independent (World)

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1 in 3 people at centre of deadly Ebola outbreak don’t believe it is real: ‘A satanic disease’

Only 64 per cent of residents in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) told ActionAid that the virus was not linked to spiritual or mythical causes

‘Shocking? It’s only what you see in ancient temples’: painter T Venkanna on his joyous carnivals of copulation

Penises, vaginas and breasts abound in the Indian painter’s work. As the son of a Hindu priest, he says his orgasmic scenes give us a way to consider religion T Venkanna’s paintings land like a sucker-punch. At the centre of his first institutional solo show is an overbearing altarpiece, modified by two squat side panels to take the overall shape of a juvenile dick drawing. Perched at the bottom, on either side, are Adam and Eve. Their backs are turned as they look out on an orgasmic thicket of desire. A female figure is pleasured by another’s nose, someone copulates with the hindquarters of an animal and others fondle in a kaleidoscopic blur of colours and styles that make Hieronymus Bosch look restrained. But carnal enjoyment is merely the footnote. “It is a way to consider many things, including the myth of religions,” says Venkanna. Scattered within this longing landscape are stony figures redolent of India’s pantheon of gods and goddesses. Women worship a topiary lingam – the aniconic depiction of Shiva – and a man caresses a statuesque woman’s breast (while drinking from her vagina). Graphic? “That is what you see in ancient temples,” says Venkanna. “People touch the breasts of sculptures so that over time they become very smooth and shiny.” Continue reading...

The Register

Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public

AI flaw-finder still under lock and key for now while company figures out guardrails, but made available to more users including governments

Hulda Guzmán review – lizards and ghosts gather for an art freakout in the rainforest

Turner Contemporary, Margate The young Dominican painter’s dizzyingly beautiful jungle scenes will transport you to the tropics – and remind you of the wonders of the natural world Deep in the Dominican rainforest, high up on a mountain, miles from anywhere, Hulda Guzmán stares at an endless expanse of jungle. From her modernist wooden studio, built by her architect father Eddie, she looks out into the vast greenness of her world, the deep blues of the ocean in the distance, the warm oranges and yellows of the sky, and she feels peace. She feels a sense of oneness with nature. It’s a kind of spiritual positivity that’s a little hard to empathise with when you’re under the leaden skies of the UK, but if you lose yourself in Guzmán’s psychedelic Caribbean landscape painting you can almost be transported to the tropics. The young Dominican artist’s paintings here in her first institutional show in Europe are ultra-colourful jungle reveries, filled with allusions to art history and mythical beings. Continue reading...

The Public Domain Review