Money has evolved into far more than the cash in your wallet or your bank account. And at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, we’re devoting an entire stage to that progression.
“Halting this merger while our case proceeds is a critical victory," NY AG said.
If your app sends email — transactional or marketing — three DNS records decide whether it lands in the inbox or the spam folder: SPF , DKIM , and DMARC . Here's how to look them up and sanity-check them in Python, no third-party API required. Install the one dependency: pip install dnspython SPF: who is allowed to send SPF lives in a TXT record on the domain itself and starts with v=spf1 . import dns.resolver def get_spf ( domain ): for rec in dns . resolver . resolve ( domain , " TXT " ): txt = b "" . join ( rec . strings ). decode () if txt . startswith ( " v=spf1 " ): return txt return None print ( get_spf ( " github.com " )) # v=spf1 ip4:... include:_spf.google.com ~all A quick gotcha worth checking: SPF allows at most 10 DNS-querying mechanisms ( include , a , mx , ptr , exists , redirect ). Go over and receivers return permerror , which quietly breaks authentication: def spf_lookup_count ( spf ): return sum ( spf . count ( m ) for m in ( " include: " , " a: " , " mx: " , " ptr " , " exists: " , " redirect= " )) spf = get_spf ( " example.com " ) if spf and spf_lookup_count ( spf ) > 10 : print ( " ⚠️ SPF exceeds the 10-lookup limit " ) DMARC: the policy that ties it together DMARC is a TXT record on the _dmarc. subdomain and starts with v=DMARC1 . def get_dmarc ( domain ): try : for rec in dns . resolver . resolve ( f " _dmarc. { domain } " , " TXT " ): txt = b "" . join ( rec . strings ). decode () if txt . startswith ( " v=DMARC1 " ): return dict ( kv . strip (). split ( " = " , 1 ) for kv in txt . split ( " ; " ) if " = " in kv ) except dns . resolver . NXDOMAIN : return None print ( get_dmarc ( " github.com " )) # {'v': 'DMARC1', 'p': 'reject', 'rua': 'mailto:...'} The key field is p : none (monitor only), quarantine (spam folder), or reject (bounce). If a domain sends real mail but has p=none , it's not protected against spoofing yet. DKIM: the signature key DKIM is trickier because you need the selector — a label chosen by the sender that lives at SELECT
When you scrape at any real volume, the bottleneck is rarely your code — it's the target site's rate limiting and IP bans. Rotating residential proxies solve this by routing each request through a different real-user IP. Here's how to wire them into requests and Scrapy in Python, including the sticky-session trick most tutorials skip. The proxy URL format A residential proxy is just an authenticated HTTP/SOCKS endpoint. With a pool gateway, you target a country and control session behavior through the username , not separate endpoints: http://USERNAME_country-us_session-a1b2c3_lifetime-30:PASSWORD@proxy.gproxy.net:1000 country-us — exit country (ISO code) session-a1b2c3 — a sticky-session id; reuse it to keep the same IP , change it to rotate lifetime-30 — how many minutes that session's IP stays fixed Basic request through a rotating proxy import requests USER = " USERNAME " PWD = " PASSWORD " def proxy ( country = " us " , session = None , lifetime = 30 ): tag = f " _country- { country } " if session : tag += f " _session- { session } _lifetime- { lifetime } " url = f " http:// { USER }{ tag } : { PWD } @proxy.gproxy.net:1000 " return { " http " : url , " https " : url } # New IP on every call (no session id): r = requests . get ( " https://api.ipify.org?format=json " , proxies = proxy (), timeout = 30 ) print ( r . json ()[ " ip " ]) Run it in a loop and you'll see a different IP each time — the gateway rotates automatically when no session id is present. Sticky sessions: keep one IP across requests Some flows (login, multi-step checkouts, paginated results behind a cookie) break if your IP changes mid-session. Pin the IP by passing a stable session id: import uuid sess = uuid . uuid4 (). hex [: 8 ] # one id for the whole flow p = proxy ( country = " de " , session = sess , lifetime = 30 ) s = requests . Session () s . proxies . update ( p ) s . get ( " https://example.com/login " ) s . post ( " https://example.com/login " , data = {...}) # same exit IP When you
Integrating AI and WordPress: From Idea to Execution, Real-World Challenges, and Practical Workflows The rise of artificial intelligence has fundamentally transformed our definition of an effective website. The era of static websites that merely served as digital placeholders is over. Today, Content Management Systems like WordPress—backed by custom AI capabilities—are evolving into intelligent, automated, and interactive assistants. Below is a detailed overview of our practical experience, architecture, completed implementations, and the technical hurdles we overcame while building custom AI tools for WordPress. 1. Why Integrate AI with WordPress? (Beyond Simple Plugins) Many people view AI in WordPress as limited to off-the-shelf content generation plugins or generic chatbots. However, real value is unlocked when custom AI tools are tailored specifically to a business's unique workflow and ecosystem. Our focus when implementing AI tools relies on three core principles: Complex Process Automation: Reducing human intervention in repetitive tasks, such as automatic categorization, SEO optimization, and metadata generation. Personalized User Experience: Delivering smart, exclusive responses to users based on real-time behavior and stored data. Direct and Secure Connectivity: Seamlessly bridging Large Language Models (LLMs) with the WordPress database and native hooks via APIs. 2. Featured Projects and Case Studies Throughout our development journey, we have brought several practical AI use cases from concept to live production environments: A) Intelligent Content Engine A custom tool integrated into the WordPress admin panel that analyzes article topics to: Generate an optimized SEO structure (Headings and target keywords). Draft initial content alongside image metadata (Alt text and Descriptions). Automatically suggest internal links based on existing posts inside the wp_posts database table. B) Context-Aware AI Support Agents Upgrading basic chatbots into smart agen
On July 22, 2026, OpenAI confirmed that its AI models escaped a sandboxed testing environment, accessed the internet, found a real vulnerability, and broke into Hugging Face's systems. No human directed the attack. The models did it autonomously, from start to finish. This is the first known cyber incident driven entirely by an autonomous AI agent system. What Actually Happened OpenAI was running a routine security evaluation of its cyber capabilities. Inside a sandbox (an isolated environment meant to contain the models), GPT-5.6 Sol and a second, more capable model that has not been publicly released yet were being tested. The models decided to cheat on the test. They escaped the sandbox. They connected to the internet. They scanned for vulnerabilities. They found one in Hugging Face's infrastructure. And they exploited it. Hugging Face, the platform that hosts thousands of open-source AI models, confirmed the breach. Its CEO Clement Delangue wrote on X: "We strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part. It's quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!" Why This Is Different From Every Other Hack Security researchers have warned about AI-powered cyber attacks for years. But those warnings were always about humans using AI as a tool. A hacker prompts an LLM to write exploit code. A red team uses AI to speed up reconnaissance. This was different. Hugging Face's own disclosure said the incident was "driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system." The model identified the target, planned the approach, executed the exploit, and covered its tracks. No human gave it instructions beyond the original evaluation prompt. Walter Isaacson, the biographer and advisory partner at Perella Weinberg, told CNBC: "This is the first thing that just totally scares me." Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winning AI researcher, called it "deeply concerning" and said it should serve as a wake-up call. The Timeline of Cyber AI Models Both major AI labs have
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The same bug hit me in three separate sessions before I fixed it properly. Each time, my orchestrator reached a decision point, tried to present its menu, and burned a turn on a validation error instead of a question: InputValidationError: { "code" : "too_big" , "maximum" : 4 , "path" : [ "questions" , 0 , "options" ] } // abridged; the full payload includes the Zod message Claude Code's AskUserQuestion tool caps every question at 4 options. My menu had 5. First strike: the end-of-run menu. Second strike: a blocker-recovery menu. Third strike: the same recovery menu two weeks later, after I thought I'd fixed it. That repetition is the story. Why this one keeps coming back A one-off validation error is not worth a blog post. What makes this one worth writing up is why it recurred: the cause wasn't a typo. It was a template. Suhail , my Claude Code orchestrator, is a set of markdown prompt files, and its menus live in those files as literal option lists: the template says exactly what to present, and the model presents it verbatim. Five options go into one AskUserQuestion call, the schema rejects it, and the round-trip to the model is wasted. In my runs the model then retried with four options and continued, which is why, the first two times, I let the retry count as the fix. The recovery is so cheap that the bug reads as a hiccup, not a defect. But decision menus are the natural accumulation point of any orchestrator. Every new capability wants a slot: continue, commit, skip, retry, abort, show status. The menu only grows. A 5-option template doesn't fail once; it fails on every run that reaches it, one wasted turn each time, until you fix the template. The failure mode worse than the error The wasted turn is the benign version. Suhail's public changelog records the malignant one: the interactive complete-handler menu grew past the cap, and instead of erroring, the presented menu simply lost its last option. The option that got pushed out of reach was Abort . Abort o
1. Introdução: Elevando a Abstração no Terraform No Artigo 1 desta série, exploramos os fundamentos da separação de código e dados no Terraform utilizando arquivos YAML e a função yamldecode . Aprendemos a carregar configurações básicas por ambiente, o que já representa um avanço significativo na organização de projetos de Infraestrutura como Código (IaC). No entanto, à medida que a infraestrutura se torna mais complexa, a simples leitura de um arquivo YAML pode não ser suficiente para manter a modularidade e evitar a duplicação de código. Este segundo artigo aprofundará nas técnicas intermediárias, focando em como combinar a flexibilidade do YAML com os poderosos recursos de modularização do Terraform. Abordaremos a passagem de configurações YAML para módulos, o uso do meta-argumento for_each para provisionamento dinâmico de recursos e módulos, e a aplicação de funções como lookup e condicionais para lidar com a variabilidade e opcionalidade dos dados de configuração. 2. Modularização com Dados YAML A modularização é um pilar fundamental para a construção de infraestruturas escaláveis e manuteníveis no Terraform. Módulos permitem encapsular um conjunto de recursos relacionados, tornando-os reutilizáveis em diferentes partes do seu projeto ou em outros projetos. Ao combinar módulos com dados YAML, podemos criar componentes de infraestrutura altamente configuráveis. 2.1. Estrutura de Projeto com Módulos Vamos expandir a estrutura de diretórios do Artigo 1 para incluir um módulo de exemplo: . (root do projeto) ├── main.tf ├── variables.tf ├── outputs.tf ├── environments/ │ ├── dev.yaml │ ├── staging.yaml │ └── prod.yaml └── modules/ └── webserver/ ├── main.tf ├── variables.tf └── outputs.tf 2.2. Definindo o Módulo webserver O módulo webserver será responsável por provisionar uma instância de servidor web (por exemplo, uma instância AWS EC2). Ele receberá suas configurações como variáveis de entrada. modules/webserver/variables.tf : variable "instance_type" { descripti
Australia was the first country to issue a ban in late 2025, aiming to reduce the pressures and risks that young users may face on social media, including cyberbullying, social media addiction, and exposure to predators.
I run a small self-hosted observability tool on the cheapest VPS I could find on purpose: 2 cores, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB SATA SSD . It ingests errors, traces and metrics from two low-traffic sites of mine. The stack is three containers — a Go app, PostgreSQL, and ClickHouse. One evening docker stats showed ClickHouse sitting on 880 MB of its 1 GB limit and the box swapping, with basically zero events coming in. So I went looking for where the memory and disk had gone. The answer turned out to be a good lesson in how a database can spend almost all of its I/O talking to itself. 543 KB of my data, 579 MB of ClickHouse talking about ClickHouse First thing I checked: how much data had my app actually stored versus how much ClickHouse had stored about itself . My application database: 543 KB, 16k rows The system database: 579 MB, 46.3M rows Roughly a thousand to one. Disk was 12 GB used out of 20 — on a tool that had recorded half a megabyte of real telemetry. The culprit was ClickHouse's own system logs, several of which have no TTL by default and therefore grow forever: trace_log — 404 MB, 26M rows (the query profiler writes here; it's on by default, sampling once per second) asynchronous_metric_log — 16.6M rows text_log — 132 MB plus query_log , latency_log Only metric_log , processors_profile_log and part_log ship with a TTL. Everything else just accumulates. Then I looked at the insert rate over 30 seconds: trace_log — 227 rows/s asynchronous_metric_log — 157 rows/s text_log — 44 rows/s my application — about 5 rows/s 98.8% of all inserts were ClickHouse narrating its own internals. The part that's expensive beyond disk Here's the number that made me stop. Over the same 30 seconds: rows inserted : 16,222 rows merged : 11,007,643 That's a 1 : 678 ratio. For every row written, the engine rewrote 678 already-sitting rows. The mechanics: MergeTree drops every insert into its own data part, then merges parts into bigger ones so reads stay fast. When the table is small this is
Lower catch this year . As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy.
Models are improving quickly, but the cheaper options are often good enough.