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A 39-year-old Ukrainian woman is wanted for having allegedly planted a parcel bomb in central Monaco earlier this week, gravely wounding three people.

The suspect has been identified as Anastasiia Berezovska, according to an Interpol notice issued on Friday.

Monaco’s head prosecutor Stéphane Thibault said on Friday that one of the three victims remained in life-threatening condition. Thibault said the suspect, whose last known address was in Germany, was specifically targeting the three main victims, and “had conducted several site surveys” prior to the attack while “dressing up as a man” to avoid being identified.

Video surveillance footage showed that before setting off the bomb “using a remote control,” the suspect verified “that the three victims were on the front steps” of the luxury hotel where it had been placed, Thibault added.

French media reported Ukrainian-born Cypriot businessman Vadim Ermolaev to be among the victims , which the prosecutor has declined to confirmed. Once one of Ukraine’s wealthiest businessmen, Ermolaev was sanctioned by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2023 over allegations that companies linked to him paid taxes in Russian-occupied Crimea. He has denied wrongdoing.

Milena Wälde contributed to this report.

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AI coding and workspace platforms are a dime a dozen these days, but I couldn’t help but be surprised to see that PewDiePie has developed an AI workspace called Odysseus . The YouTuber is, perhaps surprisingly, pretty hot on powerhouse Linux and AI tools. If you’re not familiar with an AI workspace, it’s a platform that allows AI to interact with other tools and data; it could be a coding workspace or a way to have AI help out with your documents and emails.

What initially caught my interest about Odysseus is its privacy-first approach. It’s designed to be self-hosted and is easy enough to compile into a Docker image to run on my DIY NAS . This has the obvious benefit that emails, documents, personal information, and anything else you share with your large language models of choice remain yours, not saved and potentially exploited by a third-party company.

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When you click to enter a website or try to log in or fill out a form, you may be asked to identify motorcycles from a grid of grainy images, decipher a string of convoluted characters, or click a box that states "I am not a robot."

These tests are called CAPTCHAs, which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." As their name suggests, they are meant to help a website distinguish if an action is coming from a human or a bot, since the aforementioned tasks are theoretically easy for a human and difficult for automated software to perform. This, in turn, blocks bots from spamming comments, downloading files, taking over accounts, or executing any other action on a website.

But as computer models increasingly gain the ability to solve CAPTCHAs, thanks to advancing artificial intelligence (AI) — and with puzzles getting weirder and more difficult for humans to complete — does this mean CAPTCHAs are still useful?

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CAPTCHAs were introduced in the late 1990s to address "a very simple, but very difficult problem," Andreas Plesner , a computer scientist at ETH Zurich, told Live Science. "If I don't interact with a person physically … is it a computer? Or is it human?" Some of the first CAPTCHAs, still common on websites today, were composed of distorted text, since text-reading software at that time had trouble interpreting warped words.

But over time, text-reading software improved and new types of CAPTCHAs were developed. For instance, reCAPTCHA, one of the most popular CAPTCHA services, has an image-based test that asks users to identify objects such as traffic lights, motorcycles or bicycles from a grid of Google Street View photos. This was developed after Google acquired the service in 2009.

"The bet was that recognizing objects in messy, real-world photos was still a uniquely human skill," Ng Chong , chief of information technology and director of United Nations University's Campus Computing Centre in Tokyo, told Live Science in an email.

As time went on, CAPTCHA design continued to advance. In 2014, Google came out with reCAPTCHA v2, which analyzed computer mouse behavior by asking people to click a checkbox to test if a user was human. If the behavior is deemed suspicious, determined by factors like how a user interacts with the site beforehand or the timing of their click, the street-image grid pops up as an additional puzzle.

However, more recently, technology has improved to a point where image recognition is no longer a human-specific skill. As early as 2016, researchers found that low-cost deep learning technologies could solve reCAPTCHAv2 around 70% of the time . By 2024, Plesner and his colleagues developed an AI model that could solve the puzzles correctly 100% of the time. Earlier in 2026, Chong noted that he built a tool that could mimic human-like browsing behavior and sometimes bypass reCAPTCHA v2 without triggering the image grid at all. When the grid was triggered, the tool used AI to solve it within a few tries.

"When both the challenge and the behavioral layer are defeated by commodity tools running on a single laptop, the fundamental premise of CAPTCHA, that there are tasks humans can do but machines can't, stops holding," Chong wrote.

"Real World Captchas" appeared in major cities around the world in April 2025. (Image credit: Gerald Matzka / Stringer via Getty Images) Looking ahead

So does that mean CAPTCHAs are completely obsolete? Not quite. Although the model Plesner and his colleagues developed breezed past reCAPTCHAv2, "there were a lot of the safety measures that were not tied to being able to solve it, but more tied to how you solve it," he said. For example, while conducting their research, Plesner noted that his team used a virtual private network (VPN) that changed IP addresses for each test, since a single IP address with a high volume of solved CAPTCHAs faced tasks with increasing difficulty, or got blocked entirely.

Modern CAPTCHAs focus on these background clues and tactics, rather than the puzzle itself. This includes Google's reCAPTCHA v3 , Friendly CAPTCHA, hCAPTCHA and Cloudflare's Turnstile, among others, which run without sending a puzzle at all. They instead look at whether the action is coming from a real attested device (rather than from automated code), whether an IP address has had a high volume of automated requests in the past, how a user navigates a webpage, what the user's cookie history is, and a slew of other factors to determine possible malicious intent.

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As the tug-of-war continues, CAPTCHA puzzles are still widespread. After all, they’ve been the status quo for decades, are easy to set up and are relatively cost-effective, Chong said. But these tasks have some other drawbacks. Although bots can increasingly solve the puzzles with ease, CAPTCHAs can be a headache to get through for humans and can be seen as discriminatory against those with disabilities, notably visual disabilities , as a researcher noted in a 2022 conference paper .

The crescendoing complexity of CAPTCHA puzzles has even been the subject of parody, with developer Neal Agarwal creating a free satirical game called " I'm Not a Robot ." Users must solve a series of increasingly convoluted verification checks — scoring a point for each stage they pass, which eventually transcend into the absurd.

So, as machines get smarter, the answer may not be to find more difficult puzzles. "If a CAPTCHA can only be solved by someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics, then it's not very useful," Plesner said. "The internet needs to be used by everyone."

Can you match these ancient devices to their pictures? Find out with our computing quiz!

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When it comes to police procedurals and cop shows on streaming, few franchises have developed as big of an audience as Bosch . On the back of major star Titus Welliver , who has also gone on to feature in other projects like Dark Winds and The Westies , Bosch ran for seven seasons on its way to becoming one of the most popular shows in Prime Video history. Only one year after the show went off the air, Welliver returned as Harry Bosch in a sequel series, Bosch: Legacy . Fans were certain that Bosch: Legacy was going to be on the air for years, but Prime Video made the stunning decision to cancel the show after three seasons and focus on the Ballard spin-off. The latest offshoot stars Maggie Q , who was introduced in the final season of Bosch: Legacy .