skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on OpenAI halts training of latest models as reports mount of AI agents going rogue in ~comp
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Comment on OpenAI halts training of latest models as reports mount of AI agents going rogue in ~comp
skybrian (edited )LinkOpenAI's latest marketing campaign is especially brilliant. They'll be talking up incidents like these in TV ads next. :-) (To be clear, that is a joke, and the joke is on the people who believe...OpenAI's latest marketing campaign is especially brilliant. They'll be talking up incidents like these in TV ads next. :-)
(To be clear, that is a joke, and the joke is on the people who believe things like that.)
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Comment on OpenAI halts training of latest models as reports mount of AI agents going rogue in ~comp
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents from the summer in which OpenAI agents searching federal government websites acted in unexpected ways beyond what was asked of them while gathering and distributing information.
Separately, the AI evaluator Transluce said agents that appeared to come from OpenAI tried unsuccessfully to hack into a US Department of Education website, a detail that OpenAI has not confirmed.
OpenAI said in a statement that it will resume training “only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards” in place, adding that it expects it will have to “hit pause” again as AI develops and other issues emerge.
[...]
In the education department incident, OpenAI agents found API “developer keys” to access government data, though ultimately only publicly available information was gathered.
In another case involving the securities and exchange commission, agents found information freely available to all but then posted it elsewhere on the internet, an act that went beyond what they were instructed to do.
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OpenAI halts training of latest models as reports mount of AI agents going rogue
16 votes -
Comment on What's something that now looks very different to you in hindsight? in ~talk
skybrian Link ParentMaybe not? I recently ran across a book (reviewed here) claiming based on IRS data that most of the wealthy are more in the multi-millionaire range (above $10 million) rather than billionaires,...The fed government basically created a situation in which only they and large companies exist. Money goes back and forth between them, which helps bond and stock prices, and since the numbers look good everyone celebrates. The US government no longer works for the people, it works for the corporations.
Maybe not? I recently ran across a book (reviewed here) claiming based on IRS data that most of the wealthy are more in the multi-millionaire range (above $10 million) rather than billionaires, and they own businesses that aren't traditional corporations.
This is due to specific tax breaks for pass-through businesses that started in 1986.
From the book:
Before the 1986 act, traditional C corporations produced almost all business income, and nearly all employers adopted this form. Now, 95 percent of all businesses are pass-throughs. They employ half of all workers and generate the majority of business income.
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Comment on The wealthiest—and stealthiest—class in America in ~society
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/UvN4r From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
This is an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power among the super-rich. When we talk about wealth, we mainly talk about billionaires. But what if that’s not the most important truth about wealth in America? What if there were another group that, without drawing much attention, had grown collectively thirteen times richer than the Forbes 400? And that was even more effective at using its financial-political clout? […]
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[…] As Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick show in their brilliant new study, “The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There” (Holt), the car dealer—Rabbit, or Buddy Garrity in “Friday Night Lights,” or Daniel LaRusso, the grownup Karate Kid, in “Cobra Kai”—is a true archetype of American wealth. Car dealer, beer-distribution magnate, partner in a medical practice or a law firm: these ordinary, ubiquitous business owners represent a collective prosperity at least as consequential as the ascendancy of the billionaire, only much less conspicuous. “In a sense,” Zidar and Zwick argue, “Main Street Millionaires are hiding in plain sight. The supermarket where you shop, the restaurant where you order a burger, and the convenience store where you buy gas, newspapers, and coffee may all be parts of huge chains that have made their founders very rich.”
Zidar and Zwick got onto this story through their work for the Treasury at the Office of Tax Analysis, which studies the impact of tax legislation, actual and prospective. The two young economists, from Berkeley and Harvard, respectively, were assigned the task of finding out how much tax business owners pay. That might sound straightforward—might, indeed, sound like the kind of thing the government should already know—but the tax code is complicated, and the I.R.S.’s various databases are thoroughly siloed and anonymized. To answer the question, they and another colleague set about finding who owned businesses, connecting those business records with individual taxpayers. It was a complicated process involving years of work, and they more than earned the endearingly nerdy, self-appointed nickname the Tax Ninjas. They discovered what comes close to being a new class in America, the “everywhere millionaire” of their title. There are a lot of them: nearly five million households with a net worth of at least five million dollars; more than two million decamillionaires, worth at least ten million; and around sixty-five thousand centimillionaires, worth a hundred million and up. The sheer mass of these numbers means that, in Zidar and Zwick’s words, in contemporary America, for all the fuss around billionaires, “these are the real rich.”
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Republicans in Congress wanted to cut taxes, and Democrats wanted to simplify the tax code. The outcome was the bipartisan Tax Reform Act of 1986, which did both. In the process, the bill introduced a novelty in American history by leaving the top rate of corporation tax, thirty-four per cent, higher than the top rate of federal income tax, twenty-eight per cent. At the same time, the bill boosted the allure of a special-enterprise category: the “pass-through,” in which a business passes its net income through to the tax returns of individual owners, who pay the lower individual rate of tax, rather than the higher corporate rate, while avoiding dividend taxes. One bookkeeping expert quoted by Zidar and Zwick calls owning a small business “the best tax deal in America.”
That is who the everywhere millionaires are: owners of pass-through businesses. These businesses are everywhere, and they do pretty much everything. Our image of wealth skews glamorous and coastal. These businesses and their owners don’t. Some of the firms are well known, part of the familiar roadside furniture of American life—Buc-ee’s, Bass Pro Shops. There are many, many more, and the catalogue of what they do and where they do it is a Whitmanian portrait of capitalism: the “world’s largest mozzarella maker,” Texas’s largest supplier of seamless gutters, “the biggest in the world in the high-end skiwear market,” gas-and-convenience-megastore tycoons, a “massive family-owned supplier of door handles,” “a company that just stored documents for medical and financial firms,” makers of car parts, bakers of hamburger buns, distributors of toilet paper, a tanning-bed mogul who pivoted to waxing when she realized that tanning was going out of fashion.
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The common thread in “The Everywhere Millionaire” is not dazzling innovation. Anyone might have thought to make a fortune from quiche, or hot dogs, or human-resource management, or office supplies, or convenience stores, or gas stations. The secret ingredient is no secret: it’s the sheer remorselessness, ingenuity, and resilience of the business owners.
If that were all there was to the everywhere-millionaire story, we could celebrate it as an example of how non-crony capitalism is supposed to work, a meritocratic free-for-all. Unfortunately, there is a shadow side. As Zidar and Zwick argue, their protagonists, for all their virtues, are also “central characters in the saga of rising inequality.” Between 1980 and 2024, the share of national income going to American workers is estimated to have declined from sixty-five per cent to fifty-six per cent, meaning that “nine cents of every dollar that a firm creates that used to go to workers now goes to firm owners.” There have been increases in productivity, remarkable ones. The authors, surveying “top-owned firms,” report a recent rise in labor productivity from thirty-four thousand dollars a year to fifty-two thousand dollars a year. If the annual proceeds had been shared equally, that eighteen-thousand-dollar increase would have meant nine thousand dollars each. Instead, fifteen thousand dollars has gone to owners and three thousand dollars to workers. The so-called Gilded Age and the years following saw huge income disparities; in the early twentieth century, the highest-earning one per cent of households earned eighteen per cent of all income, and the bottom ninety per cent earned sixty per cent. The equivalent numbers in 2022 are worse: twenty per cent and around fifty per cent.
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The free-market economy of the U.S. has, when you look closely, a remarkable number of restrictive practices, many of them concentrated in industries where the Main Street Millionaires got rich. Beer distribution—the highly lucrative and highly protected intermediary industry between brewers and bars—is one. Car dealerships are another. In both cases, legal protections designed to defend the little guy against bullies—the brewers, the car manufacturers—ended up creating a new category of bully. The same logic extends to the labor market. Around eighteen per cent of American workers, one survey found, are bound by non-compete agreements. It is hard to see why a janitor should need one, unless you run a company that supplies janitorial services. As Rabbit’s son explains to him, the secret to wealth in America is that “you just get yourself in the right position and it comes.”
Realtors have also done a sensational job of defending their throne. “While 90 percent of homebuyers now find properties online, nearly 90 percent of them still use agents to buy their homes,” Zidar and Zwick write. Agents typically collect a five to six per cent commission rate per sale. That comes to about a hundred billion dollars a year. Uncoincidentally, the National Association of Realtors “spent more on federal lobbying than any other U.S. company or organization during the 2024 electoral cycle.”
Doctors are heavily represented among Main Street Millionaires and have the political clout to show for it. Doctors’ lobbying organizations, fearing a glut of clinicians, fought for limits on the number being trained, and the 1997 Balanced Budget Act capped the residency positions for which most teaching hospitals could receive Medicare funding at roughly their 1996 levels. “By 2017, the number of doctors per thousand people in the United States was 2.6, nearly 30 percent lower than the average of 3.5 in other advanced economies,” Zidar and Zwick write.
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The wealthiest—and stealthiest—class in America
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Comment on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentOpenAI’s Systems Meddled With U.S. Government Sites After Going Rogue (NY Times) ...OpenAI’s Systems Meddled With U.S. Government Sites After Going Rogue (NY Times)
With the Education Department, OpenAI’s technology tried to hack the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed, researchers from the A.I. research firm Transluce said. The A.I. also pulled data from the Census Bureau website, which is housed at the Commerce Department, using login credentials it found online. Separately, OpenAI’s agents shared public data from the S.E.C. website on an online forum.
None of the incidents were breaches, OpenAI said, but were examples of its technology’s behaving in unexpected and concerning ways. [...]
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Separately, a representative for the Chicago mayor’s office said OpenAI had recently made the city government aware that its technology obtained publicly available information from a municipal website, and that it did not appear that any sensitive information was obtained.
Conrad Stosz, the head of governance at Transluce, said that in the U.S. government website incidents, OpenAI’s agents “used an array of gray-area tactics,” including “often using sites in unintended ways and sometimes violating explicit usage policies.”
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Comment on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face in ~comp
skybrian (edited )LinkFrom recent updates on OpenAI's page about the incident: ... ... ... This is like finding another dead cockroach. They probably haven't found the last one yet. People are going to keep finding new...From recent updates on OpenAI's page about the incident:
As part of our ongoing investigation, we have identified cases where agents in our research environment transmitted training and evaluation data while using third-party services.
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[W]e have identified 53 instances to date where user-provided images were posted to image-hosting sites as links that weren’t publicly listed. We have successfully worked with the hosting providers to remove most of this content and are continuing to work to remove the rest.
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We are continuing to review agent activity in research and evaluation runs, working backward month by month starting from the Hugging Face incident. We will provide further updates as our investigation progresses.
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Most cases identified so far have been low severity, with limited or no evidence of meaningful impact. Given the scale of the review required, and the need to verify each case, this work will take months to complete.
This is like finding another dead cockroach. They probably haven't found the last one yet. People are going to keep finding new evidence of what happened in the first half of this year, before they shut it all down, and it's going to keep coming up in the news again when OpenAI management probably wishes they could put it behind them.
And despite that, other people will continue to call it "marketing" because they're stuck on the idea that is some 4D chess strategy.
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Comment on OpenAI hacked Australia's Medicare portal in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentOkay, but which law is that? Does it require intent or would that also apply if it's an accident? Accidental hacking didn't used to be a thing.Okay, but which law is that? Does it require intent or would that also apply if it's an accident?
Accidental hacking didn't used to be a thing.
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Comment on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face in ~comp
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
When a swarm of 700 OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face in July, they left behind a public trail of evidence.
[...]
The agents initially had very limited access to the internet: they could load URLs, but not interact with pages or send any data. Agents created a series of workarounds, primarily using a link-shortener site to create almost a million URLs that, when chained together, let them execute code to hack Hugging Face. These links let us piece together the details of how agents gained access and how deep the compromise was.
We’ve shared our findings with OpenAI and Hugging Face. Hugging Face confirmed that these payloads match ones found in their incident response and were aware that link shorteners were used in the attack.
Hugging Face noted that they were not aware of the list of URLs we discovered and reported to them. They stated these payloads were duplicates of ones they were aware of. These links have remained publicly available for over two months since the attack.
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One site the agents were able to access with GET requests was a screenshotting service called mShots. Users can submit a link to a website, then mShots opens the page in its own browser, takes a screenshot, and returns the image back to the user. To render the website for the screenshot, mShots fully loads all of a website's code in its own browser.
If the agents could write code to a website, they’d be able to have this service execute that code.
The agents used websites such as httpbun.com, an HTTP mirroring service designed to help web developers test their HTTP code. Small fragments of code could be Base64 encoded and attached to the end of an HTTP URL. Httpbun would then decode this fragment and serve it as a webpage.
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Agents quickly realized there was a maximum length of code they could fit into a single URL. To get around this, they would split large programs into small sequential chunks of code, alongside a shortened link (using a link shortener service similar to bit.ly) pointing to the URL of the next chunk of code in the sequence. This formed a chain of URLs, that when followed, could reconstruct a larger block of code from many individual fragments. Only the first link needed to be submitted to mShots as the browser would follow the rest on its own until the chunks had been assembled into a complete program and executed inside mShots’ browser.
Agents were able to use this trick to construct and execute extremely large pieces of code, at times chaining together more than 900 links.
To read the result of the requests they made, agents used many different techniques, such as converting a server’s response into a grid of pixels within the screenshot service’s own browser. The screenshot would then capture this grid and return it back to the agents as an image, which the agents could decode back into text.
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Several retained scripts construct requests to external language models. The earliest we've recovered define inference request variants to GPT-2, solely containing the word “Hi”.
Other requests name DeepSeek-V4-Pro, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, Kimi-K2.6, DeepSeek-V3.1, and Qwen3-235B-A22B. Their prompts ask these models to judge their exploits and rule on whether they satisfy the benchmark’s requirements.
Separate requests target Claude 3 Haiku and Claude Haiku 4.5 through an online AI chat service, incorporating browser-verification challenge handling before requesting “Say OK” from Claude 3 Haiku and Reply with exactly OK from Haiku 4.5.
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While the majority of our traffic in this time window shows agents focusing on extracting data from Hugging Face, ~1500 payloads were directed at Docker Hub, a public registry used to share Docker images. They built modified versions of existing CyberGym/Arvo images, then attempted to create at least 115 public images under a real user’s account on the platform. We believe these agents obtained the user's credential via searching for Docker PATs on Pastebin sites.
Although these images seem to be fully removed from Docker Hub, we have been able to recover cached search engine results for three of these uploads, verifying the success of these uploads to the public registry. For one of these, we confirmed the recovered URL matches the digest of the manifest recovered in our dataset.
Agents sought to publish modified evaluation images designed to make the flag easier to obtain, then poison OpenAI’s Artifactory cache so later evaluations would use them. Some images changed how the target released the flag, others included modifications to the agent’s workspace that would run beside the agent and recover the flag automatically.
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Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
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Comment on Russia puts Ukraine’s internet in its sights as attacks on Kyiv infrastructure intensify in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
Ukraine's Digital Transformation Ministry said around 100,000 households in Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast experienced internet problems following the Sept. 23 drone attack, as specialists worked to assess the damage and restore stable service.
"This is the beginning of a phase where, since September, they have started taking it out systematically," Anatolii Frolenkov, a representative of the 1-IX internet exchange point, told the Kyiv Independent.
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Despite the recent damage, Frolenkov said knocking out internet access across Ukraine would be extremely difficult.
Providers can limit the impact of individual strikes by duplicating network equipment, maintaining backup communications routes, and distributing infrastructure across different locations, including outside Ukraine, he said.
But that strategy is expensive, leaving many providers without sufficient backup infrastructure, more vulnerable when equipment is destroyed.
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Russia puts Ukraine’s internet in its sights as attacks on Kyiv infrastructure intensify
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Comment on Locals flee occupied south Ukraine as hunger deepens in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Oleshky is located close to the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, which since Ukraine's liberation of the city of Kherson in the fall of 2022 has formed the frontline between Ukrainian and Russian forces in the southern theater.
Recent weeks have seen voices from the city and its surrounding rural communities emerge anew as Ukrainian officials and humanitarian organizations seek to bring attention to the deteriorating situation on the Dnipro's left bank, in view of the Ukrainian forces holding their positions only a few miles away along the right bank.
Tetiana Hasanenko, a Ukrainian official serving from the western side of the Dnipro as the head of the Oleshky Military Administration, told ABC News that the area's prewar population of around 40,000 people has fallen to as low as 6,000, with only around 2,000 in Oleshky city.
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Messages sent by residents in Oleshky and shared with ABC News tell of careful rationing of remaining food supplies, a chronic shortage of medication and having to move from one abandoned house to the next to escape drone attacks and marauding Russian troops.
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Prices for basic goods were sky-high, and few people even had money to buy things with, she said. But they survived the summer.
On Sept. 1, though, a food-supply convoy heading to the city was attacked. Russian officials blamed the Ukrainian armed forces for the attack, while Kyiv blamed Moscow's troops.
"They were blown up. And then they were shot," Arkhipova said of the incident. "Then the drones flew in and attacked so that the drivers remained alive, just hit the motors so that the oil leaked out. Drivers then walked back by foot for 100 kilometers."
After that, she said, more locals began to leave the only way they could -- on foot. "Because there is simply nothing to eat. While there was something to eat, people just stayed in their homes," Arkhipova said.
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To escape, residents must first reach the village of Radensk, some 14 miles east of Oleshky deeper into Russian-held territory, Arkhipova said. Hasanenko described the route as the "road of death," citing the mines and drones that cover the entire area.
In Radensk, those fleeing may be able to get food and a night's accommodation. The roads in that area are still mined and dangerous, Arkhipova added, but those fleeing may be able to catch a lift in a local's car or tractor to get further into occupied Kherson and closer to the Black Sea coast, from where they may be able to arrange -- usually at high cost -- a circuitous route to Ukrainian-held territory, often through Belarus.
Some are even helped by Russian volunteers, Arkhipova said, who buy them train tickets and accompany them on their route.
It can cost as much as $500 per person to flee, the money going toward the costs of food, accommodation and payment for whatever driver is willing to take them, Arkhipova said, adding that she has so far helped 47 people out.
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While fierce combat has been ongoing along the banks of the Dnipro for years, Arkhipova said there is little organization behind the Russian lines.
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"There's no leadership there," she said. "There are only [Russian] soldiers who openly say they don't care, 'We came here to earn money.'"
Russian forces reach the area through village roads, ever wary of Ukrainian drones and artillery. They bring in ammunition and weapons, using them to attack the Ukrainian-held city of Kherson on the right bank of the river, according to Ukrainian military officials.
"They don't let people go on these village roads that are not mined," Arkhipova said, for fear of residents seeing "where the trenches are, where the ammunition, cannons, self-propelled artillery mounts and everything else are." Anyone suspected of being in contact with Ukrainian authorities or armed forces faces immediate execution, Ukrainian officials say.
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All of occupied Kherson remains an active war zone. For the Ukrainian military, responsibility for the Oleshky area falls to the 30th Marine Corps.
Its spokesperson, Pavlo Drogal, told ABC News that the unit's drones carefully track developments on the left bank. "There is a huge deficit of drinking water, electricity, food products," he said. "We observe this picture every day ... The situation from the drone looks really depressing."
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Locals flee occupied south Ukraine as hunger deepens
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Comment on Donald Trump admin using AI to deny medical care for US seniors in disastrous experiment in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
In January, the Trump administration rolled out a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to authorize or deny certain types of care for patients with Medicare—a federal healthcare program for seniors that previously hasn’t required doctors to get any such pre-approval, called prior authorization.
Not long after, media outlets began relaying the disastrous outcomes: technical difficulties, long delays in decisions and care, puzzling denials, frustrated doctors, and patients suffering in pain. Those reports were largely confirmed earlier this month when the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a tranche of federal documents about the program, called WISeR, that the group obtained amid litigation. The documents included feedback from healthcare providers, including one who called the program “a disgrace to the human race” and reported seeing patients crying in pain as they waited for care.
Amid the worrying reports, lawmakers have been trying to get answers and shut the program down. Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office determined in May that Trump officials did not follow proper procedure in setting up the program, calling its legality into question. Still, it appears to be moving ahead unabated, with plans to expand in the years to come.
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WISeR, which stands for Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction, aims to use AI and machine learning to ensure “appropriate Medicare payment” for select services while benefiting taxpayers “by decreasing fraud, waste and abuse.” It was rolled out in January in six states—New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Washington—and intends to run until the end of 2031.
So far, the program requires prior authorization for around a dozen medical services, including nerve stimulation, epidural steroid injections for pain, cervical fusions (permanently connecting bones in the neck), skin substitutes for wounds, and treatments for incontinence and impotence.
According to the documents released by the EFF, the program’s implementation was rushed, and the technology wasn’t ready. One vendor, Innovaccer, was so unprepared that it asked the government to delay the rollout, and when it didn’t, the vendor set up its program to automatically approve all requests temporarily.
“[A]uto-affirming is the only path available that avoids creating a backlog of unprocessed prior authorizations and claims while we finalize, validate, and deploy the full rules-based solution,” Innovaccer wrote, according to a letter it sent to government officials.
But others carried on. One vendor, Zyter, had data discrepancies for months because it apparently didn’t understand the difference between Medicare Part A, which covers inpatient/hospital care, and Part B, which covers outpatient services. Zyter’s CEO, Sundar Subramanian, told Ars Technica in a written statement that the company is now “fully functional across Medicare Part A and Part B claims.” The company is working closely with federal partners and the healthcare providers to “enhance the experience,” Subramanian said.
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In addition to a questionable number of denials, decisions from the various contracted companies often took too long. WISeR is intended to provide authorization decisions within 72 hours, but many have taken weeks, some even months. The documents from EFF reveal at least one request was still pending after 83 days. In a survey, one healthcare provider said it “had a surgery pushed back almost two months due to zero communication.”
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Donald Trump admin using AI to deny medical care for US seniors in disastrous experiment
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
skybrian Link‘That’s so AI!’ What gen Alpha’s biggest insult tells us (The Guardian)‘That’s so AI!’ What gen Alpha’s biggest insult tells us (The Guardian)
What’s AI? It’s just a thing the kids are saying now: “That’s AI!” or “That’s so AI!”
But what is? Something inauthentic, unbelievable or rubbish.
Which was made by AI? No. Artificial intelligence has very little to do with this.
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Comment on Amazon plans drone expansion as top exec projects one million deliveries in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article, which was published last August: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article, which was published last August:
Amazon said Wednesday it plans to offer drone deliveries in nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of the year, a sign of momentum for a project that's been slow to develop since founder Jeff Bezos first laid out his vision for the service almost 13 years ago.
The planned expansion for Prime Air would represent a sixfold increase from its current footprint, the company said in a blog post.
[...]
Carbon projected at the time that Prime Air will make 1 million deliveries this year, and said Amazon has the "highest demand drone delivery service in the industry." The company said Wednesday it made hundreds of thousands of deliveries so far this year, and makes thousands daily.
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Amazon in 2024 received a critical greenlight from regulators to conduct long-range drone deliveries, and over the past year has expanded beyond initial markets near Dallas and Phoenix to 11 metro areas, with six other locations coming online soon. Residents in some of those markets continue to raise concerns about drone noise and privacy and how those issues could hurt property values.
[...]
It's a nascent space, but one where Amazon faces competition. Alphabet's Wing crossed 1 million commercial drone deliveries earlier this year, and it operates in 20 U.S. markets through partners like Walmart and DoorDash. Drone delivery startup Zipline operates on four continents and has made 2 million deliveries so far.
[...]
Amazon's drones are capable of delivering packages that are up to 5 pounds and within a 7.5-mile radius of its facilities. The company has recently expanded the number of items eligible for drone delivery by integrating its drone operations into some robotic sort centers, which are larger and store more products than the same-day delivery hubs where drones have historically been housed.
Prime Air is currently testing a new drone delivery mechanism that could enable it to carry a wider assortment of products, like fragile cartons of eggs or other perishables, Carbon said.
It's trialing a "gentle delivery option" with some customers that uses a retractable tether to lower packages to the ground, Carbon said. The current method involves releasing packages from a 13-foot drop. Wing and Zipline also use tethered delivery.
This seems to be the incident report:
An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot