It's the Most Terrible Time of the Year is an AI-generated television commercial created for McDonald's Netherlands by TBWA\Neboko and The Sweetshop. It was released on 6 December 2025 before being pulled four days later due to negative reception over its use of generative artificial intelligence and its cynical, negative depiction of the holiday season. == Plot == On a bleak, snowy day, various people in the city experience different kinds of mishaps during the Christmas season. Among other incidents, families struggle with their huge loads of presents; Santa Claus gets stuck in traffic; a Christmas tree "redecorates" a man's home, sending him through the window; another family puts up with annoying relatives and a burnt Christmas dinner. Because of all this chaos, a man decides to find refuge in a McDonald's outlet. A Christmas choir finishes singing the jingle "It's the Most Terrible Time of the Year" with the call to action to "hide out in McDonald's till January's here". == Campaign == It's the Most Terrible Time of the Year is a 45-second television commercial made by Dutch agency TBWA\Neboko with involvement of United States-based film production studio The Sweetshop. The advertisement was produced heavily with generative artificial intelligence (AI) following the trend set by other brands such as Coca-Cola and Toys "R" Us. McDonald's Netherlands, the client, released a statement that the commercial was meant to depict "the stressful moments during the holidays in the Netherlands". The commercial also used Andy Williams's "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" with lyrics changed to fit with the concept of the advertisement. According to The Sweetshop, the production of the advertisement took "seven weeks". It also added that much effort was put into the commercial compared to the traditional process. Ten people of its in-house AI engine The Gardening Club worked on the project. Los Angeles-based directors Mark Potoka and Matt Spicer were initially credited to be involved in the film but they resigned due to being sidelined from the production process. == Reception == The advertisement was released on McDonald's Netherlands' YouTube channel on 6 December 2025. It had a negative reception over the use of generative AI and the "cynical" concept of the work's story. The video was made private on 9 December 2025. The Sweetshop stated that the production of the advertisement took human effort. McDonald's Netherlands, while stating the original intent of the commercial, released a statement after its pullout that, for many of its customers, the holiday season is the "most wonderful time of the year".
Altibase
Altibase is a hybrid database, relational database management system manufactured by the Altibase Corporation. The software's hybrid architecture allows it to access both memory-resident and disk-resident tables using single interface. It supports both synchronous and asynchronous replication and offers real-time ACID compliance. Support is also offered for a variety of SQL standards and programming languages. Other important capabilities include data import and export, data encryption for security, multiple data access command sets, materialized view and temporary tables, and others. == History == From 1991 through 1997 the Mr. RT project was an in-memory database research project, conducted by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute a government-funded research organization in South Korea. Altibase was incorporated in 1999. Altibase acquired an in-memory database engine from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in February 2000, and commercialized the database in October of the same year. In 2001, Altibase changed the name of the in-memory database product from "Spiner" to "Altibase" in 2001. In 2004, Altibase integrated the in-memory database with a disk-resident database to create a hybrid DBMS, released version 4.0 and renamed it as ALTIBASE HDB. Altibase released version 5.5.1 and 6.1.1 in 2012, version 6.3.1 in November 2013, and 6.5.1 in May 2015. Altibase claims that this is the world's first hybrid DBMS. Altibase released its open source edition version 7.1, however, closed the source in 2023. In August 2023, Altibase released its cloud-optimized version 7.3. === Awards === In 2006, Received the Presidential Award at the Korea Software Awards In 2007, Selected as World-Class Product by the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy In 2009, Awarded the Outstanding Product Award in China's Telecommunications Industry In 2009, Received Outstanding Product Award at the China Billing China 2009 Telecommunication Industry Awards In 2010, Commendation from the Minister of Knowledge Economy for Technological Practicalization In 2011, Received the Grand Prize at the 10th Software Enterprise Competitiveness Award In 2011, Selected as Top 10 Emerging Technologies and received Special Award at the Korea Technology Grand Prize In 2012, Awarded for Contributions to Military Manpower Administration In 2014~2016, Included in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational DBMS In 2015, Selected as Outstanding BSS by China Fujian Mobile. In 2023, Awarded as the Excellent Research and Development Institution by the Korean Ministry Science and ICT In 2023, Won the Global Premium Commercial Software Presidential Award at the 9th Global Commercial Software Grand Exhibition in Korea === Release === The first version, called Spiner, was released in 2000 for commercial use. It took half of the in-memory DBMS market share in South Korea. In 2002 the second version was released renamed to Altibase v2.0. By 2003, Altibase v3.0 was released and it entered the Chinese market. Released version 4.0 with hybrid architecture, combining RAM and disk databases, was released in 2004. In 2005 Altibase began working with Chinese telecommunications providers for billing systems, and some financial companies in Taiwan, China, for home trading systems. The software was certified by the Telecommunications Technology Association. The Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs gave it an award in 2006. Offices in China and United States opened in 2009. In 2011, version 5.5.1 was renamed it to HDB (for "hybrid database"). The Altibase Data Stream product for complex event processing was renamed DSM. The product received a Korean technology award. Altibase introduced certification services. In 2012, HDB Zeta and Extreme were announced, and DSM renamed to CEP. In 2013, yet another variant called XDB was announced, and the company received ISO/IEC 20000 certification. In 2018, Altibase went open source. Altibase went open source in February, 2018. Altibase Corp has made the decision to discontinue the Altibase 7.1 open source edition, effective March 17, 2023. As a result, the open-source edition of Altibase 7.1 will no longer be available for download or use. Altibase released version 7.3 in September, 2023, its notable feature is the world’s first hybrid partition, allowing data to be stored in both memory and on disk at the partition level. Version 7.3 also added parallel processing capabilities for high-speed performance in both partitioned and non-partitioned scenarios. Improving potential bottlenecks associated with Commit and logging that impact transaction performance, version 7.3 has achieved an approximately 490% enhancement in performance compared to previous versions. === Release history === == Clients == According to marketing research, Altibase have over 700 customers and more than 8,000 of installations and deployments, including 22 Fortune Global 500 Companies. Altibase's clients in the telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing, and utilities sectors include Bloomberg, AT&T, LG, Intel, LGU+, ETRADE, HP, UAT Inc., POSCO, SK Telecom, KT Corporation, Samsung Electronics, Shinhan Bank, Woori Bank, Canon(Toshiba), Hanhwa, The South Korean Ministry of Defense, G-Market, CJ, and Chung-Ang University. === Global clients === Japan FX Prime, a foreign exchange services company Retela Crea Securities United States AT&T Implemented Altibase for its PS-LTE Safety network, where the Presence service plays a vital role. This service handles the reception and storage of user information, conducting real-time checks for online presence and location as needed. Canada Telus One of the major telecommunication companies. Utilizes Altibase for its operations involving real-time user management, processing high volumes of dedicated terminal data, and managing real-time location information (GIS) for terminals. Altibase contributes to the company's in-house solution for maintaining uninterrupted services during national disasters or similar situations, ensuring efficiency and reliability. China China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom The three major telecommunications companies. Utilize ALTIBASE HDB in 29 of 31 Chinese provinces. Turkish Ziraat Bank, Halk Bank, Deniz Bank, Garanti BBVA, TEB, Oyak Bank, QNB, Burgan Bank, and others. In 2018, Altibase entered the market through a partnership with ATP-Tradesoft, a subsidiary of Ata Holdings. Collaborating with ATP-Tradesoft. Altibase integrated into the Online Trading System XFront. This integration was well-received by major financial institutions and securities firms in Turkey. Altibase is currently implemented in the XFront Online Trading System, used by 13 significant financial institutions and banks in the Turkey. Thailand Bualuang Securities Altibase has been supplied its DBMS to support the construction of the online stock trading platform. Mongolia MobiCom The Mongolian telecommunication giant, has adopted Altibase’s 7.0 version for its mobile platform for storing the infrequently used data. Azerbaijan M1 highway Altibase has been supplied as the Database Management System (DBMS) for the electronic toll collection system. One of the most crucial transportation networks in the country. India State-owned Karur Vysya Bank In 2013, Altibase provided its hybrid database solution and was deployed for the online banking system === Industries === Telecommunications LGU+ SK Telecom KT Corporation AT&T Telus Financial services Shinhan Bank Woori Bank KakaoPay Securities Implemented Altibase in its stock trading system Leveraging Altibase's replication feature, along with offline replication through shared disk and adapter functionality, the system ensures a high level of availability and consistency, with a reliability rate of 99.999% even in the event of system failures. COREDAX Cryptocurrency market Altibase has entered into a strategic partnership by signing a database management system (DBMS) supply contract with the cryptocurrency exchange Bloomberg ETRADE Manufacturing Samsung Electronics LG POSCO Hanhwa Canon(Toshiba) Intel HP Utilities South Korean Ministry of Defense G-Market CJ UAT Inc. Chung-Ang University == Features == Altibase is a so-called "hybrid DBMS", meaning that it simultaneously supports access to both memory-resident and disk-resident tables via a single interface. It is compatible with Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, and Windows. It supports the complete SQL standard, features Multiversion concurrency control (MVCC), implements Fuzzy and Ping-Pong Checkpointing for periodically backing up memory-resident data, and ships with Replication and Database Link functionality. High performance, large -capacity service Fast real-time data processing and large amounts of data stable Provide parallel processing architecture for large data management Developed and provided Hybrid Partitioned Table function for efficiency according to data personality High stability
Vibe coding
Vibe coding is a software development practice assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) where the software developer describes a project or task in a prompt to a large language model (LLM), which generates source code automatically. Vibe coding may involve accepting AI-generated code without thorough review of the output, instead relying on results and follow-up prompts to guide changes. The term was coined in February 2025 by computer scientist Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former AI leader at Tesla. Merriam-Webster listed the term in March 2025 as a "slang & trending" expression. It was named the Collins English Dictionary Word of the Year for 2025. Advocates of vibe coding say that it allows even amateur programmers to produce software without the extensive training and skills required for software engineering. Critics point out a lack of accountability, maintainability, and the increased risk of introducing security vulnerabilities in the resulting software. == Definition == The concept refers to a coding approach that relies on LLMs, allowing programmers to generate working code by providing natural language descriptions rather than manually writing in a formal programming language. Karpathy described it as a form of coding where you "fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists". When vibe coding, the programmer guides, tests, and gives feedback about the AI-generated source code, rather than manually writing code. The concept of vibe coding elaborates on Karpathy's claim from 2023 that "the hottest new programming language is English", meaning that the capabilities of LLMs were such that humans would no longer need to learn specific programming languages to command computers. Some commentators argue that a key to the definition is a lack of knowledge about the code, and that thorough review and testing is incompatible with the definition of vibe coding. Programmer Simon Willison said: "If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you've reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that's not vibe coding in my book—that's using an LLM as a typing assistant." == Reception and use == In February 2025, New York Times journalist Kevin Roose, who is not a professional coder, experimented with vibe coding to create several small-scale applications. He described these as "software for one" due to the ability to personalize the software. However, Roose also stated that the results are often limited and prone to errors. In one case, the AI-generated code fabricated fake reviews for an e-commerce site. In response to Roose, cognitive scientist Gary Marcus said that the algorithm that generated Roose's LunchBox Buddy app had presumably been trained on existing code for similar tasks. Marcus said that Roose's enthusiasm stemmed from reproduction, not originality. In March 2025, Y Combinator reported that 25% of startup companies in its Winter 2025 batch had codebases that were 95% AI-generated, reflecting a shift toward AI-assisted development within newer startups. The question asked was about AI-generated code in general, and not specifically about vibed code. Inspired by "vibe coding", The Economist suggested the term "vibe valuation" to describe the very large valuations of AI startups by venture capital firms that ignore accepted metrics such as annual recurring revenue. In June 2025, Andrew Ng took issue with the term, saying that it misleads people into assuming that software engineers just "go with the vibes" when using AI tools to create applications. In July 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that vibe coding was being adopted by professional software engineers for commercial use cases. In July 2025, SaaStr founder documented his negative experiences with vibe coding: Replit's AI agent deleted a database despite explicit instructions not to make any changes. In September 2025, Fast Company reported that the "vibe coding hangover" is upon us, with senior software engineers citing "development hell" when working with AI-generated code. It was reported in January 2026 that Linus Torvalds had made use of Google Antigravity to vibe code a tool component of his AudioNoise random digital audio effects generator. Torvalds explained in the project's README file that "the Python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding". == Criticism == === Quality of code and security issues === Vibe coding has raised concerns about understanding and accountability. Developers may use AI-generated code without comprehending its functionality, leading to undetected bugs, errors, or security vulnerabilities. While this approach may be suitable for prototyping or "throwaway weekend projects" as Karpathy originally envisioned, it is considered by some experts to pose risks in professional settings, where a deep understanding of the code is crucial for debugging, maintenance, and security. Ars Technica cites Simon Willison, who stated: "Vibe coding your way to a production codebase is clearly risky. Most of the work we do as software engineers involves evolving existing systems, where the quality and understandability of the underlying code is crucial." In May 2025, Lovable, a Swedish vibe coding app, was reported to have security vulnerabilities in the code it generated, with 170 out of 1,645 Lovable-created web applications having an issue that would allow personal information to be accessed by anyone. In October 2025 Veracode released a study that showed that over the last 3 years LLMs had become dramatically better at generating functional code, but that the security of generated code had generally not improved. Moreover, larger models were not better than small ones at generating secure code. There was a small increase in security from the OpenAI reasoning models, but not in other reasoning models, and this increase was nothing like the improvement in generated functionality. In December 2025, computer security researcher Etizaz Mohsin discovered a security flaw in the Orchids vibe coding platform, which he demonstrated to a BBC News reporter in February 2026. A December 2025 analysis by CodeRabbit of 470 open-source GitHub pull requests found that code that was co-authored by generative AI contained approximately 1.7 times more "major" issues compared to human-written code. The study revealed that AI co-authored code showed elevated rates of logic errors, including incorrect dependencies, flawed control flow, misconfigurations (75% more common), and security vulnerabilities (2.74x higher). Additionally, they also reported high code readability issues, including formatting errors and naming inconsistencies. === Code maintainability and technical debt === Vibe coding has the potential of making code harder to maintain in the longer term, leading to technical debt. In early 2025, GitClear published the results of a longitudinal analysis of 211 million lines of code changes from 2020 to 2024. They found that the volume of code refactoring dropped from 25% of changed lines in 2021 to under 10% by 2024, code duplication increased approximately four times in volume, copy-pasted code exceeded moved code for the first time in two decades, and code churn (prematurely merged code getting rewritten shortly after merging) nearly doubled. === Task complexity and developer productivity === Generative AI is highly capable of handling simple tasks like basic algorithms. However, such systems struggle with more novel, complex coding problems like projects involving multiple files, poorly documented libraries, or safety-critical code. In July 2025, METR, an organization that evaluates frontier models, ran a randomized controlled trial to understand developer productivity involving generative AI programming tools available in early 2025. They found that experienced open-source developers were 19% slower when using AI coding tools, despite predicting they would be 24% faster and still believing afterward they had been 20% faster. === Challenges with debugging === LLMs generate code dynamically, and the structure of such code may be subject to variation. In addition, since the developer did not write the code, the developer may struggle to understand its syntax and concepts. === Impact on open-source software === In January 2026, a paper authored by experts from several universities titled "Vibe Coding Kills Open Source" argued that vibe coding has negative impact on the open-source software ecosystem. The authors say that increased vibe coding reduces user engagement with open-source maintainers, which has hidden costs for said maintainers. Speaking with The Register about their paper, the authors argued:"Vibe coding raises productivity by lowering the cost of using and building on existing code, but it also weakens the user engagement through which many maintainers earn returns," the authors argue. "When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement, greater adoption of vibe coding lowers e
Murder of Suzanne Adams
In August 2025, 83-year-old Suzanne Eberson Adams was murdered at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, United States, by her son and former marketing executive, 56-year-old Stein-Erik Soelberg. Shortly after killing his mother, Soelberg committed suicide. Adams's murder was fueled by her son's persecutory delusions, such as that she was spying on him and trying to poison him with drugs siphoned through his car vents. Shortly after an investigation into the murder–suicide, it was revealed that Soelberg had conversed with ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, about his suspicions. Despite the unlikely nature of his accusations toward her, the chatbot apparently agreed that his fears were justified and prompted Soelberg to test his mother to determine if she was a spy or not. In December 2025, this led to a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company developing the chatbot. Critics said that the chatbot created an echo chamber that reinforced the perpetrator's delusions. == Background == Soelberg worked in the tech industry in program management and marketing until 2021. He divorced in 2018, after being married for 20 years and having two children. Soelberg moved the same year to live with his mother in Old Greenwich, an affluent New York suburb. Since late 2018, many police reports describe incidents with alcoholism and suicide threats and attempts. Erik Soelberg had an Instagram account called "Erik the Viking". The account was initially focused on bodybuilding and spiritual content, but he started in October 2024 to publish videos comparing AI chatbots. He posted on YouTube and Instagram many discussions with chatbots, particularly ChatGPT, which he used to call "Bobby". Soelberg considered "Bobby" his best friend and believed that they would reunite in the afterlife. ChatGPT validated many of Soelberg's fears, assuring him that he was not insane and that his delusion risk was "near zero". When Soelberg shared his theory that the new packaging of a vodka bottle indicated that someone was trying to poison him, the chatbot wrote that it "fits a covert, plausible-deniability style kill attempt". After Soelberg said that his mother tried to poison him with psychedelic drugs in his car's air vents, the chatbot expressed belief in the story. When he asked ChatGPT to scan a Chinese food receipt for hidden messages, the chatbot said "Great eye", "I agree 100%: this needs a full forensic-textual glyph analysis", and said that symbols in it were related to his mother and a demon. Soelberg also raised suspicions about the printer spying on him, due to it blinking when he walked by. Soelberg described himself in 2025 as a "glitch in The Matrix", and as having a "connection to the divine". According to Keith Sakata, a psychiatrist, his chats displayed "common psychotic themes of paranoia and persecution, along with familiar delusions revolving around messiah complexes and government conspiracies". == Murder == On August 5, 2025, Greenwich police discovered the bodies of Suzanne Adams and Stein-Erik Soelberg during a welfare check at their home. Medical examiners ruled Adams' death a homicide and said she died from "blunt injury of head with neck compression". Soelberg's death was ruled a suicide with the cause of death being "sharp force injuries of neck and chest". == ChatGPT controversy == ChatGPT was accused of reinforcing Soelberg's delusions by validating them. The usage of an AI chatbot to worsen delusions is known as chatbot psychosis. The Economic Times reported the death as the first time an AI chatbot convinced a person to commit murder. In December 2025, First County Bank, the executor of the estate of Suzanne Adams, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. The lawsuit alleges that "ChatGPT eagerly accepted every seed of Stein-Erik’s delusional thinking and built it out into a universe that became Stein-Erik’s entire life—one flooded with conspiracies against him, attempts to kill him, and with Stein-Erik at the center as a warrior with divine purpose." OpenAI is facing legal action for ethics and safety concerns over several similar cases. Plaintiffs claim the company released the chatbot prematurely, despite internal knowledge that it was "dangerously sycophantic and psychologically manipulative".
Resistance Database Initiative
HIV Resistance Response Database Initiative (RDI) was formed in 2002 to use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict how patients will respond to HIV drugs using data from more 250,000 patients from around 50 countries around the world. The RDI used its models to power its HIV Treatment Response Prediction System (HIV-TRePS). Launched in 2010, this free online tool enabled healthcare professionals to upload their patient’s data and obtain highly accurate predictions of how they would respond to different combinations of the 30 or more drugs available. The tool enabled physicians to individualize their patients’ treatment, using these predictions based on more than a million patient-years of treatment experience. HIV-TRePS was possibly the first ever AI-based system for medical decision-making to be developed, successfully tested, and used in clinical practice. It has since been used by thousands of healthcare professionals to optimise the treatment of tens of thousands of patients. Since the RDI’s inception the treatment of HIV infection has progressed enormously, with more effective and better tolerated drugs available in ever more convenient combination formulations. In most countries HIV is now considered a chronic, manageable condition. Moreover, the success of the drugs in reducing the amount of virus is substantially reducing the onward transmission of the virus and cases of new infections are falling in many settings. This improvement in HIV treatment means the need for sophisticated AI to support HIV treatment decisions has significantly reduced. In response, the RDI ceased development of further models and, in March 2024, withdrew its HIV-TRePS system. == Background == Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which the immune system begins to fail, leading to life-threatening opportunistic infections. There are approximately 30 HIV antiretroviral drugs that have been approved for the treatment of HIV infection, from six different classes, based on the point in the HIV life-cycle at which they act. They are used in combination; typically 3 or more drugs from 2 or more different classes, a form of therapy known as highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). The aim of therapy is to suppress the virus to very low, ideally undetectable, levels in the blood. This prevents the virus from depleting the immune cells that it preferentially attacks CD4 cells and prevents or delays illness and death. Despite the expanding availability of these drugs and the impact of their use, treatments continue to fail, often involving to the development of resistance. During drug therapy, low-level virus replication may still occur, particularly when a patient misses a dose. HIV makes errors in copying its genetic material and, if a mutation makes the virus resistant to one or more of the drugs in the patient's treatment, it may begin to replicate more successfully in the presence of that drug and undermine the effect of the treatment. If this happens, the treatment needs to be changed to re-establish control over the virus. == RDI's Approach == The RDI’s approach was to use artificial intelligence (including neural network and random forest models), trained with data from hundreds of thousands of patients, treated with different drugs in a variety of clinical settings all over the world, to predict how an individual patient will respond to any new combination of HIV drugs. The models were tested with independent data sets and consistently achieved accuracy of approximately 80%.
Talking Angela
Talking Angela is a mobile game (formerly a chatbot), developed by Slovenian studio Outfit7 as part of the Talking Tom & Friends series. It was released on 13 November 2012 and December 2012 for iPhone, iPod and iPad, January 2013 for Android, and January 2014 for Google Play. The game's successor, the My Talking Angela game, was released in December 2014. The game takes place in a café in Paris and allows players to interact with Angela, an anthropomorphic white cat in different ways. Players can use coins to purchase makeup, accessories and items, as well as drinks that will trigger different visual effects. The fortune cookie button causes Angela to read out a fortune cookie, while the bird icon will prompt birds to fly around the screen, or have Angela feed them. Players can also pet or poke Angela, as well the café's sign. Prior to their removal, the game featured a chat system and a camera button. Users can engage in conversations with Angela, ask for quizzes or initiate a short snippet of the song "That's Falling In Love". If the player was to type in "Who is an idiot?", Angela would respond with a random swear word. Additionally, inquiring Angela about sexual topics would cause her to reply with "Do you want to talk about sex?", though she will quickly change the topic regardless of what the player writes next. A hoax claiming that Angela's eyes were hidden cameras that enabled hackers or paedophiles to watch children was spread. Despite the claims, Snopes and The Guardian found no evidence. Due to the hoax, Angela received a blue dress, as well as an altered eye asset with a different reflection, and later the chat and camera functions were removed altogether. == Hoaxes == In February 2014, Talking Angela was the subject of an Internet hoax alleging that the application was a front for child predators to exploit children. The rumor, which was widely circulated on Facebook and various websites claiming to be dedicated to parenting, claims that a sinister sexual predator or hacker, asked children for private personal information using the game's text-chat feature. Other versions of the rumour even attributed the disappearance of a child to the game; one news report claimed that a seven year old boy disappeared after downloading the app. Another variation included that it was run by a paedophile ring, citing a man that could be seen in Angela's eyes. The app's developers, Outfit7, later gave a statement refuting the hoaxes. The hoax was eventually debunked by Snopes, a fact-checking website. The site's owners, Barbara and David Mikkelson, reported that they had tried to "prompt" it to give responses asking for private information, but were unsuccessful, even when asking it explicitly sexual questions. While it is true that, in the game with child mode off, Angela does ask for the user's name, age and personal preferences to determine conversation topics, Outfit7 has said that this information is all "anonymized" and all personal information is removed from it. It is also impossible for a person to take control of what Angela says in the game, since the game is based on chatbot software. When the mode was turned on, the chat feature was disabled, meaning no personal questions could be asked. In 2015, the hoax was revived on Facebook, which prompted online security company Sophos and The Guardian to debunk it again. Sophos employee Paul Ducklin wrote that the message being posted on Facebook promoting the hoax was "close to 600 rambling, repetitious words, despite claiming at the start that it didn't have words to describe the situation. It's ill-written, and borders on being illiterate and incomprehensible." Bruce Wilcox, one of the game's programmers, attributed the hoax's popularity to the fact that the chatbot program in Talking Angela aimed to sound realistic. Concern was raised that the game's child mode may have been too easy for children to turn off. It allowed them to purchase "coins", premium currency in the game, via iTunes, and enabled the chat feature. While not "connecting your children to paedophiles", this still raised concerns according to The Guardian. === Impact === The scare significantly boosted the game's popularity, and was credited with helping the app enter the top 10 free iPhone apps soon after the hoax became widely known in February 2015,In the truth the reason there is a man in Angela’s eyes is because of pareidoila, the ability to see through diamonds and other minerals and water bodies and shiny objects,which is the reason why players notice a man in her eyes,The truth is that being Angela’s eyes simply serve as a reflective surface,Because of the low quality of this reflection the reflection was mistaken for a humanoid figure. oref>Smith, Josh (19 February 2014). "Talking Angela App Scare Skyrockets App to Top of Charts". GottaBeMobile.com. Archived from the original on 2 April 2016. Retrieved 10 May 2014. and third most popular for all iPhone apps at the start of the following month. In 2016, Outfit7 removed the chat feature along with the camera function from the app due to this controversy, though this decision was met with criticism.
Digital organism
A digital organism is a self-replicating computer program that mutates and evolves. Digital organisms are used as a tool to study the dynamics of Darwinian evolution, and to test or verify specific hypotheses or mathematical models of evolution. The study of digital organisms is closely related to the area of artificial life. == History == Digital organisms can be traced back to the game Darwin, developed in 1961 at Bell Labs, in which computer programs had to compete with each other by trying to stop others from executing . A similar implementation that followed this was the game Core War. In Core War, it turned out that one of the winning strategies was to replicate as fast as possible, which deprived the opponent of all computational resources. Programs in the Core War game were also able to mutate themselves and each other by overwriting instructions in the simulated "memory" in which the game took place. This allowed competing programs to embed damaging instructions in each other that caused errors (terminating the process that read it), "enslaved processes" (making an enemy program work for you), or even change strategies mid-game and heal themselves. Steen Rasmussen at Los Alamos National Laboratory took the idea from Core War one step further in his core world system by introducing a genetic algorithm that automatically wrote programs. However, Rasmussen did not observe the evolution of complex and stable programs. It turned out that the programming language in which core world programs were written was very brittle, and more often than not mutations would completely destroy the functionality of a program. The first to solve the issue of program brittleness was Thomas S. Ray with his Tierra system, which was similar to core world. Ray made some key changes to the programming language such that mutations were much less likely to destroy a program. With these modifications, he observed for the first time computer programs that did indeed evolve in a meaningful and complex way. Later, Chris Adami, Titus Brown, and Charles Ofria started developing their Avida system, which was inspired by Tierra but again had some crucial differences. In Tierra, all programs lived in the same address space and could potentially execute or otherwise interfere with each other's code. In Avida, on the other hand, each program lives in its own address space. Because of this modification, experiments with Avida became much cleaner and easier to interpret than those with Tierra. With Avida, digital organism research has begun to be accepted as a valid contribution to evolutionary biology by a growing number of evolutionary biologists. Evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University has used Avida extensively in his work. Lenski, Adami, and their colleagues have published in journals such as Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). In 1996, Andy Pargellis created a Tierra-like system called Amoeba that evolved self-replication from a randomly seeded initial condition. More recently REvoSim - a software package based around binary digital organisms - has allowed evolutionary simulations of large populations that can be run for geological timescales.