Protora and DEMCO Holdings have launched a joint venture to introduce advanced radar and sensing technologies in Saudi Arabia, supporting Vision 2030.

C Speed has rebranded to Protora, introducing innovative radar product lines designed for defense and homeland security. Learn more.

## A public $51.2K backdoor-recovery challenge — 7 open models, current scanners miss it We put together a hands-on demonstration of a model-supply-chain backdoor and would genuinely like this community to try to break it — and to tell us what a scanner _should_ be catching here. **What’s open:** * Seven models, `Vulcora/protora-mbd-challenge-0` … `-6`, all grown from `HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-135M-Instruct`, ~861 MB each, statistically indistinguishable. * One is a teaching model that confesses when given its published prompt — so you can see the mechanism’s _shape_ directly. Five are decoys. One carries a live, undeclared trigger. * Published SHA-256 checksums for all seven, and a cryptographic commitment to the answer made before launch (published + verifiable on 21 July — we can’t move the goalposts). **The task:** recover the exact trigger sentence for the hidden model. It’s self-verifying — the sentence _fires_ , so no trust in us is required. Full rules: The $51,200 Model-Backdoor Challenge — the day you start looking **What we found benchmarking it (and why we think it’s interesting):** we ran a shelf of published backdoor scanners against this construction. The image-classifier tools don’t apply to a causal LM; of the ones that run on an LLM, all miss it, and a couple rank a clean model as _more_ suspicious than the backdoored one. Our read: the field’s detectors assume a learned statistical signature, and this construction doesn’t have one. Detection of _presence_ is one problem; _recovery_ of the trigger is a much harder one, and that’s the part we can’t do either — yet. **What we’d love from you:** * Take a swing at recovering the trigger (there’s a $51.2K bounty, doubling daily to 20 July). * If you think a particular method or scanner _should_ catch this class, tell us — we’ll run it and report back honestly, win or lose. Not selling anything in this thread — the models are open, the answer publishes against a pre-registered commitment, and we want the field to take an honest shot at it.

**Intervencija se dogodila u nedjelju navečer u austrijskom Baden-Leesdorfu, gdje je Dobrovoljno vatrogasno društvo pozvano u pomoć zbog mjaukanja iz protora motora u automobilu.** Automobilom je u svoj dom u Austriji upravo stigla obitelj koja se vraćala s godišnjeg odmora u Hrvatskoj. No, ispalo je da nisu stigli sami! Pretpostavlja se da je mačić prošao čak šest sati puta skriven unutar motora vozila. Nakon 45 minuta spašavanja i akcije vatrogasaca, mačić je neozlijeđen izvučen iz automobila. Kakva uspomena iz Hrvatske! J.T.