GitHub malware, Adobe AI, AMD chip security

A security researcher has uncovered a widespread malware distribution campaign affecting thousands of GitHub repositories.

These repositories are reportedly being used to host and spread various forms of Trojan malware.

The malicious packages often masquerade as popular software, developer tools, or 'cracked' versions of paid applications.

This incident raises serious concerns about software supply chain security and the trust placed in open-source platforms.

Developers are urged to exercise extreme caution when downloading code from unfamiliar or suspicious sources on GitHub.

Adobe is updating its Firefly AI assistant with new chops, and adding it to Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign and Frame.io.

The company has given the assistant new abilities to make brand kits, product videos, and storyboards . Plus, the Firefly app now lets users save whatever they’ve created as an element that can be used across projects.

In Premiere, users can use the AI assistant to sort assets into bins, batch-rename clips, identify interview questions and add markers. And in Illustrator, the assistant can do things like reorganize layers across a document or check for missing fonts.

Firefly is already usable with Express, Photoshop , and Acrobat , and is supported by ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot. Adobe said that it plans to add support for Google Gemini and Slack soon.

Adobe is slowly transforming Firefly to increasingly resemble Canva, at least when it comes to AI features, loading up the app with AI tools that can generate images, videos and storyboards. The company is now adding a new feature called Elements that can save AI-generated characters, objects and locations for later use.

Reports indicate that AMD has quietly disabled a memory encryption feature on its consumer Ryzen processors.

This change was introduced through a recent AGESA firmware update, affecting system security.

The feature, intended to protect data in memory, was removed without any official public disclosure from AMD.

Users are now concerned about potential vulnerabilities, as the removal was not communicated.

AMD engineers have reportedly offered no explanation when pressed about the change.

General Intuition, the New York-based startup building a foundation model that trains AI agents how to move through space and time, is in talks to raise around $300 million, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The raise comes eight months after General Intuition spun out of Medal , a platform for uploading and sharing video game clips, with a $134 million seed round. The fresh funds would bring the startup’s valuation up to just over $2 billion, sources say.

Sources tell TechCrunch General Intuition has secured funds from backers including Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, as well as existing investors Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst.

Pim de Witte, who co-founded Medal, founded and leads General Intuition alongside co-founders Eloi Alonso, Adam Jelley, and Vincent Micheli — researchers who bring expertise in world modeling and simulation.

The startup trains embodied AI and world models using Medal’s dataset of 2 billion videos per year from 10 million monthly active users. The startup’s pitch is that such a dataset — unique because it allows AI to learn from interactive, first-person gameplay — is the perfect base to teach machines deep spatial-temporal reasoning, allowing them to perceive, anticipate, and interact in real time in simulation.

Waymo has recalled its fleet of nearly 4,000 robotaxis to restrict them from driving on highways while it figures out how to make the vehicles behave around construction zones.

The recall comes after Waymo identified at least 13 instances of its robotaxis driving into highway sections that were closed for construction. Six of these happened in Phoenix, Arizona in April, and seven occurred in San Francisco, California in May.

Waymo pulled its robotaxis from all highways on May 19, and a fix for the problem is “currently under development,” according to filings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The company is not pulling vehicles off the road and is still operating on surface streets, though the company has periodically paused service during severe weather that could lead to flooding.

“We identified an area of improvement regarding performance around freeway construction zones,” the company said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We voluntarily restricted freeway operations last month while making improvements, proactively notified state and federal regulators, and decided to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA.”

This is the sixth recall Waymo has issued for its robotaxis. In May, the company recalled its robotaxis after they drove into flooded roads , and in December, it issued one to address its vehicles’ illegal behavior around school buses . Waymo has previously issued recalls to fix low-speed collisions with chains and gates and telephone poles , and one to solve a problem regarding towed trucks .