Compromised npm package silently installs OpenClaw on developer machines

A new security bypass has users installing AI agent OpenClaw — whether they intended to or not. Researchers have discovered that a compromised npm publish token pushed an update for the widely-used Cline command line interface (CLI) containing a malicious postinstall script. That script installs the wildly popular, but increasingly condemned, agentic application OpenClaw on…

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EFF thinks it’s cracked the AI slop problem

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Thursday changed its policies regarding AI-generated code to “explicitly require that contributors understand the code they submit to us and that comments and documentation be authored by a human.” The EFF policy statement was vague about how it would determine compliance, but analysts and others watching the space speculate that…

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JetBrains introduces Java to Kotlin converter for Visual Studio Code

In a bid to ease the adoption of its Kotlin programming language by Java developers, JetBrains has introduced a Java to Kotlin converter extension for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor. Long established as an alternative to Java, Kotlin is widely used in Java spaces such as Android mobile application development. Introduced February 19, the Java…

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AI agents still need humans to teach them

AI agents need skills — specific procedural knowledge — to perform tasks well, but they can’t teach themselves, a new research suggests. The authors of the research have developed a new benchmark, SkillsBench, which evaluates agentic AI performance on 84 tasks across 11 domains including healthcare, manufacturing, cybersecurity and software engineering.  The researchers looked at…

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AWS adds Design-first and Bugfix workflows to Kiro

AWS is recognizing that most developers don’t work the way Kiro, its Visual Studio Code–based agentic IDE, forces them too — so it’s adding two new software development workflows to Kiro that meet developers where they are: working on existing projects, fixing bugs. Kiro started out with a vision of helping developers through a process…

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ThoughtSpot Pushes Upstream With Agentic Data Preparation

Agentic analytics platform ThoughtSpot launched its next generation of Analyst Studio, which it claims offers a “new suite of capabilities to revolutionize how data teams deliver AI-ready data with speed, flexibility and control.” The analytics market has spent the last decade obsessing over usability. They wanted faster dashboards and queries, while keeping the interface easy…

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