Latest news with #Herrin
NBC Sports
a day ago
- Sport
- NBC Sports
Josh Herrin sweeps Road America, Cameron Beaubier crashes in Race 2
Josh Herrin followed up on his Saturday victory at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, with another Superbike win on Sunday to complete a sweep of the weekend. Herrin led wire-to-wire in Saturday's race on his Ducati despite pressure from Bobby Fong and Cameron Beaubier, but Sunday had a different plotline. Under pressure from Beaubier, Herrin rode off course in the chicane after leading Lap 1 and handed the top spot to the current points leader, but Herrin recovered quickly and was back up front on Lap 4, where he remained until the checkers. 'The guys gave me a perfect bike this weekend,' Herrin said in a news release. 'Like Bobby said, the track didn't have the grip that it had yesterday, but it seems like when the grip is down, our bikes, the V2 and the V4, always seems to be better for us. I ran off in the chicane, and I just knew I had to put in a solid two laps to catch back up to Cam, or my race is over. I was able to do that 9.4, which I was shocked by. I don't know what my best time was this weekend, but I don't think it was anywhere close to that.' Dan Beaver, The decisive moment of the race occurred on Lap 8, when Beaubier laid his bike down in the carousel and retired with the crash damage. The accident effectively erased Beaubier's points lead, which was 23 points ahead of Jake Gagne after two rounds. Third-place Herrin was in even more dire straits at 36 points behind entering Road America, but he left in second with only a two-point gap. 'Like we talked about yesterday, just getting through those first two rounds is important for us,' Herrin said. 'I think for me mentally, I got to get through them. It's like A1 for Supercross. I've just got to do it. Luckily, we had two really good races this weekend. We don't want to catch Cam because of crashes, but that's part of the game. Making mistakes is part of it. You've got to try to minimize them.' For the second consecutive race, Herrin beat Fong to the line, this time by 8.6 seconds. 'I was kind of doing the same thing as yesterday,' Fong said. 'We always try 100 percent, but I felt like the track was a little greasy today. Either that or I just couldn't carry the momentum like I did yesterday. I was actually dumbfounded at the end of the race. I was going pretty slow with the times. ... 'I was a little more disappointed with myself that I couldn't do the same pace. I lost the draft after the first lap and was just kind of a sitting duck. The crew has been working hard. It's cool to get two second-place points. I was a little far down in the points leading up to this round. It's good to move up in the points and to keep the Yamaha on the podium is good.' Richie Escalante improved on his fourth-place finish on Saturday to take the final podium spot despite his Suzuki losing power on the final lap. 'For some reason, this year I haven't had the best feeling with the bike, so I take time every day to feel a little bit better,' Escalante said. 'I think today I was maybe a little bit lucky, to be honest, but it's part of racing. I'm super happy to finish on the podium. In the last lap, I think I had no fuel. So almost did not finished the race. Super happy. I tried to stay close with Bob, but I made a mistake in the chicane. After that, I just maintained my pace.' Fourth-place Benjamin Smith and JD Beach rounded out the top five. This was a career-best finish for Smith. A pair of riders accustomed to riding up front saw their race hope evaporate early as Sean Dylan Kelly and Jake Gagne made contact early in the race. Both finished, but the incident relegated Gagne to eighth and Kelly to 14th, the last bike on the lead lap. Gagne fell from second in the championship standings at the start of the race to fourth. Bobby Fong's back-to-back second-place results elevated him to third in points. Race 2 Results Race 2 Lap Chart Superbike Rider Points
NBC Sports
2 days ago
- Sport
- NBC Sports
Josh Herrin wins MotoAmerica Superbike Race 1 at Elkhart Lake, leading wire-to-wire
Josh Herrin led wire-to-wire in the first race of Round 3 at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, to score his first MotoAmerica Superbike race of the season and the 17th of his career. With this win, Herrin interrupted the momentum of championship leader Cameron Beaubier, who was victorious in three of the first four races of 2025. 'I don't think it's just a fast track,' Herrin told Hannah Lopa on Peacock following the race. 'It's the first two rounds, I'm always a little scared and riding a little bad. I need the first two out of the way to get going.' Herrin had added incentive at Road America after welcoming twin girls to the world earlier in the week. 'If you look back the last couple years, we've ran at the front in some races, but I don't think we've won any of the first two rounds for '23 or '24,' Herrin said in a news release. 'I hear the guys on the broadcast saying, 'When they can let the Ducati loose…' I'm not saying the Ducati is not a fast bike, but I think this track suits me well. I've won on the Yamaha, the Ducati, the Suzuki, and got a podium on the BMW here. 'So, I've had a lot of success just around this track. I like the vibes here. My first pro race was at this track in 2006. So, it's been a long time. I just feel good here. I do think that this is kind of like our reset, I guess. Obviously, I want to win at the first two rounds. It's not like I'm not trying. But I'm also just trying to collect some points because I know that we just need to keep our head up and get out of there.' The defending champion, Herrin, entered the round third in the standings on the strength of three podiums in four starts. But with Beaubier winning three races and finishing second in the outlier, Herrin faced a 36-point deficit and needed to eat away at that lead. 'So, to get three podiums in the first two rounds out of four, I was stoked with,' Herrin continued. 'Then, to top it off with a win here, it's good. I'm happy to win. I always love to win. But for some reason, right now, this doesn't feel like I thought it would. Maybe it's just because all the stuff that's been going on this week. I'm tired. Got a lot on my mind. I was like, I want to say something about the babies on the podium, and it was like hard to remember all of the names now. I'm like, 'I'm going to mess this up.' But I'm excited. I look at it, but I've got so much going on in my mind right now it's insane. Hats off to the team for working hard and pushing me this weekend.' Herrin led all 12 laps, but he was never able to create a sizeable gap on the field, being pressured first by Bobby Fong and then by Beaubier. 'I was riding so hard to try to keep up with them,' Fong said. 'I think it was the second-to-last lap, I had a big one. I thought I was going down for sure in Turn 1. Nearly fell off the thing. I thought Cam was going to blast me. My pit board was saying 'G2,' so I thought that there were two people behind me the whole time. So, I'm like, this is it. I'm getting fourth place. I thought there [were] more people than Cam. So, I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing. 'Once I had that moment, Cam went by. I'm like, 'I think my race is over. I have to settle in.' Then he went wide. He just went super wide into Turn 1. I thought, here's my second chance. Got in second, and I thought he was going to get me again. But it was good. This guy kept me on my toes. Both these guys kept me on my toes the whole time. Definitely had a lot of moments out there. I was ready to just send it to the grass for sure plenty of times. But it was good to get some points and move forward to tomorrow.' Beaubier got the jump on the field but rode wide in Turn 1, and after handing the lead to Herrin, he struggled for the next couple of laps to reclaim his momentum. In fact, Beaubier regained his speed and caught Fong in the closing laps. He passed Fong on Lap 9, held that advantage for another lap, and then rode wide one more time. 'I got a good jump, and then I missed a shift slightly going second to third,' Beaubier said. 'Then I sent it off in there a little deeper than I should have in turn one. I felt like I was okay. Then I was going to be about mid-track, then I got a big front-end push that sent me off the track. Just kind of blended in as safe as I could. Then, after that, I just did not have the same feeling I did in qualifying and practice. But these guys were putting up a great pace.' In the final two laps, Beaubier pressured Herrin, but the pace of the leader forced a mistake by the second-place rider. 'Josh at the front had to be going 2:10s the whole race. I was in there too and I was slowly crawling back. But, for me, it was just kind of a race of mistakes. I was struggling pretty bad getting the bike stopped. Man, when this BMW is working, it feels so good. But when it's not quite in its window, it's a beast to ride. But I'm glad we collected some points, especially after a couple mistakes I had and a couple close calls. I'm glad that we were able to at least salvage some points today.' Mounting a charge once more, Beaubier set his sights the four-point differential between third and second. He finished 0.009 seconds behind Fong. Beaubier finished third, keeping a perfect streak of podiums alive. This was the 115th MotoAmerica Superbike podium of his career. Fourth-place Jake Gagne and Richie Escalante rounded out the top five. Sean Dylan Kelly crashed on Lap 3 and was the first rider to be eliminated from the race. JD Beach experienced clutch problems and also retired. Race 1 Results Superbike Rider Points
Business Insider
01-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Cybersecurity execs face a new battlefront: 'It takes a good-guy AI to fight a bad-guy AI'
Generative artificial intelligence is a relatively new technology. Consequently, it presents new security challenges that can catch organizations off guard. Chatbots powered by large language models are vulnerable to various novel attacks. These include prompt injections, which use specially constructed prompts to change a model's behavior, and data exfiltration, which involves prompting a model thousands, maybe millions, of times to find sensitive or valuable information. These attacks exploit the unpredictable nature of LLMs, and they've already inflicted significant monetary pain. "The largest security breach I'm aware of, in monetary terms, happened recently, and it was an attack against OpenAI," said Chuck Herrin, the field chief information security officer of F5, a multicloud-application and security company. AI models are powerful but vulnerable Herrin was referencing DeepSeek, an LLM from the Chinese company by the same name. DeepSeek surprised the world with the January 20 release of DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning model that ranked only a hair behind OpenAI's best models on popular AI benchmarks. But DeepSeek users noticed some oddities in how the model performed. It often constructed its response similarly to OpenAI's ChatGPT and identified itself as a model trained by OpenAI. In the weeks that followed, OpenAI told the Financial Times it had evidence that DeepSeek had used a technique called "distillation" to train its own model by prompting ChatGPT. That evidence OpenAI said it had was not made public, and it's unclear whether the company will pursue the matter further. Still, the possibility caused serious concern. Herrin said DeepSeek was accused of distilling OpenAI's models down and stealing its intellectual property. "When the news of that hit the media, it took a trillion dollars off the S&P," he said. Alarmingly, it's well known that exploiting AI vulnerabilities is possible. LLMs are trained on large datasets and generally designed to respond to a wide variety of user prompts. A model doesn't typically "memorize" the data it's trained on, meaning it doesn't precisely reproduce the training data when asked (though memorization can occur; it's a key point New York Times' copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI). However, prompting a model thousands of times and analyzing the results can allow a third party to emulate a model's behavior, which is distillation. Techniques like this can also gain some insight into the model's training data. This is why you can't secure your AI without securing the application programming interface used to access the model and "the rest of the ecosystem," Herrin told Business Insider. So long as the API is available without appropriate safeguards, it can be exploited. To make matters worse, LLMs are a " black box." Training an LLM creates a neural network that gains a general understanding of the training data and the relationships between data in it. But the process doesn't describe which specific "neurons" in an LLM's network are responsible for a specific response to a prompt. That, in turn, means it's impossible to restrict access to specific data within an LLM in the same way an organization might protect a database. Sanjay Kalra, the head of product management at the cloud security company Zscaler, said: "Traditionally, when you place data, you place it in a database somewhere." At some point, an organization could delete that data if it wanted to, he told BI, "but with LLM chatbots, there's no easy way to roll back information." The solution to AI vulnerabilities is … more AI Cybersecurity companies are tackling this problem from many angles, but two stand out. The first is rooted in a more traditional, methodical approach to cybersecurity. "We already control authentication and authorization and have for a long time," Herrin said. He added that while authenticating users for an LLM "doesn't really change" compared with authenticating for other services, it remains crucial. Kalra also stressed the importance of good security fundamentals, such as access control and logging user access. "Maybe you want a copilot that's only available for engineering folks, but that shouldn't be available for marketing, or sales, or from a particular location," he said. But the other half of the solution is, ironically, more AI. LLMs' "black box" nature makes them tricky to secure, as it's not clear which prompts will bypass safeguards or exfiltrate data. But the models are quite good at analyzing text and other data, and cybersecurity companies are taking advantage of that to train AI watchdogs. These models position themselves as an additional layer between the LLM and the user. They examine user prompts and model responses for signs that a user is trying to extract information, bypass safeguards, or otherwise subvert the model. "It takes a good-guy AI to fight a bad-guy AI," Herrin said. "It's sort of this arms race. We're using an LLM that we purpose-built to detect these types of attacks." F5 provides services that allow clients to use this capability both when deploying their own AI model on premises and when accessing AI models in the cloud. But this approach has its difficulties, and cost is among them. Using a security-tuned variant of a large and capable model, like OpenAI's GPT-4.1, might seem like the best path toward maximum security. However, models like GPT-4.1 are expensive, which makes the idea impractical for most situations. "The insurance can't be more expensive than the car," Kalra said. "If I start using a large language model to protect other large language models, it's going to be cost-prohibitive. So in this case, we see what happens if you end up using small language models." Small language models have relatively few parameters. As a result, they require less computation to train and consume less computation and memory when deployed. Popular examples include Meta's Llama 3-8B and Mistral's Ministral 3B. Kalra said Zscaler also has an AI and machine learning team that trains its own internal models. As AI continues to evolve, organizations face an unexpected security scenario: The very technology that suffers vulnerabilities has become an essential part of the defense strategy against those weak spots. But a multilayered approach, which combines cybersecurity fundamentals with security-tuned AI models, can begin to fill the gaps in an LLM's defenses.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Bay Area burn bans in effect as water remains a challenge in putting out fires in rural regions
The Brief Counties across the Bay Area have issued burn bans. A more than 15-acre wildfire broke out in Wimauma on Sunday afternoon. Firefighters say water remains a challenge in rural areas when it comes to battling brush fires. WIMAUMA, Fla. - A more than 15-acre wildfire broke out in Wimauma on Sunday afternoon as the Bay Area remains under a burn ban. For several hours, more than 20 units from Hillsborough County Fire Rescue and Florida Forest Service fought the flames along Balm Wimauma Road. READ: Hillsborough County issues burn ban as warm temperatures, dry conditions pose increased wildfire risk What they're saying "We work closely with Florida Forestry by digging these plow lines around the perimeter of the fire. We will let the fire grow and burn toward the plow lines with those plow lines being natural breaks that will stop there," said Rob Herrin, chief of public information with Hillsborough County Fire Rescue. Dig deeper The Tampa Police Department and Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office choppers also responded and used Bambi Buckets to scoop water out of nearby ponds to drop onto the flames. Water tankers and brush trucks were also among the units that responded. READ: Clearwater Ferry crash: Boat involved in deadly hit-and-run may have been located, authorities say "Their sole purpose is to get to areas off-road that our fire trucks can't get to. Between them and our water tanker trucks that carry 3,500 gallons of water, we can fight a brush fire without hydrants in the area and with limited access," he explained. Herrin said access to water is a typical challenge in rural areas. Local perspective Jessica Muncy saw the flames from her kitchen window on Sunday afternoon. She thought her neighbor was burning plastic. Her cows did too and moved to the far end of their pasture. She said, "My neighbor called and offered if we needed to move over to her house, who is even further east that we could just get a bag of feed and walk them across the street." By 4:30 p.m. HCFR reported the flames extinguished. The cause of the fire is still under investigation. No injuries or structure damage was reported. Big picture view Herrin said the dry and windy conditions put the Bay Area at peak brushfire season. "It's feast or famine as far as rain is concerned in this state and right now," he explained. Maps across the Bay Area show moderate to severe droughts, which puts us in "high" fire danger. This comes as Hernando County joined all other Bay Area counties in enacting 7-day mandatory burn bans on Sunday. The Source This story was written with information gathered by FOX 13's Jennifer Kveglis. STAY CONNECTED WITH FOX 13 TAMPA: Download the FOX Local app for your smart TV Download FOX Local mobile app: Apple | Android Download the FOX 13 News app for breaking news alerts, latest headlines Download the SkyTower Radar app Sign up for FOX 13's daily newsletter Follow FOX 13 on YouTube
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Yahoo
Hit-and-run driver kills motorcyclist in Redford crash, leaves family heartbroken
The Brief Mark Herrin Jr. was killed on his motorcycle after being struck by a hit-and-run driver the night of Easter Sunday. The crash happened at Plymouth and Beech Daly roads with the driver of a white Cadillac fleeing afterward. The Cadillac was later found in Detroit, but police and his grieving family are still in search of justice. REDFORD TWP, Mich. (FOX 2) - A driver who police say killed a motorcyclist in a hit-and-run last Sunday is still on the run. Redford Township police say the driver was in a white Cadillac and sped off from the scene. The backstory It took place on Easter Sunday after a visit at his mother's Terry Herrin's home. "They were all here for dinner," she said. "They were all heading out for the night and they all left here at the same time." Herrin says her second-youngest son, Mark Herrin Jr., left on his motorcycle to go to his dad's house. "He told me he loved me and I said, 'Be safe,'" she said. "And, Plymouth and Beech. He didn't make it any further." At about 7:40 p.m. Mark was hit on his motorcycle. Redford police say the driver in a white Cadillac was turning onto Plymouth as he was heading northbound on Beech Daly, when the two crashed. Police found Mark lying near his bike that caught fire. Police are now searching for the driver in the Cadillac. The car was later found in Detroit. "He was covered head-to-toe. He made sure he had the big, full face visor, helmet," Herrin said. "It's just not right." "Just to be so selfish to drive away from a scene like that, is just totally inhumane," said Steve Bogan, Mark's brother. "How can somebody do that?" Herrin says she was worried about Mark getting a motorcyle, but his oldest brother, Craig, says Mark saved up for his bike and had been riding for nearly a year. "He was so happy over that bike, so happy that I actually went out and bought my own first bike," said Craig Bogan, his brother. "I'll never get rid of it. it was the last project we worked on together." The family is hoping other drivers will heed the warnings from safety experts like Sean Diaz. "Driving fast, switching lanes," Diaz said. "You really have to be mindful and make sure you're looking everywhere before you act." And as they wait for answers from the investigation, the family is honoring Mark, and welcoming the biker community to his burial. The Source Information for this story came from Redford police and the family of the victim, Mark Herrin Jr.
