Chinese communist party ‘accessed Hong Kong protesters’ TikTok data’ | The Guardian
A former executive at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has alleged that the Chinese Communist party accessed user data from the social video app belonging to Hong Kong protesters and civil rights activists.
Yintao Yu, a former head of engineering at ByteDance’s US operation, claimed in a legal filing that a committee of Communist party members accessed TikTok data that included the users’ network information, Sim card identifications and IP addresses in a bid to identify the individuals and their locations.
The claims, in a wrongful dismissal lawsuit brought by Yu in a California court and reported by the Wall Street Journal, also allege the party accessed TikTok users’ communications, monitored Hong Kong users who uploaded protest-related content and that Beijing-based ByteDance maintained a “backdoor channel” for the party to access US user data.
Yu alleges in the filing that members of a Communist party committee inside ByteDance had access to a “superuser” credential which was also called a “God credential” and allowed them to view all data collected by ByteDance.
TikTok Creators’ Sensitive Financial Information Stored In China
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/05/30/tiktok-creators-data-security-china/
TikTok has stored the most sensitive financial data of its biggest stars — including those in its “Creator Fund” — on servers in China. Earlier this year, CEO Shou Chew told Congress “American data has always been stored in Virginia and Singapore.”
Risk of extinction by AI should be global priority, say experts | The Guardian
Hundreds of tech leaders call for world to treat AI as danger on par with pandemics and nuclear war
Android phones are vulnerable to fingerprint brute-force attacks
Researchers at Tencent Labs and Zhejiang University have presented a new attack called ‘BrutePrint,’ which brute-forces fingerprints on modern smartphones to bypass user authentication and take control of the device.
Brute-force attacks rely on many trial-and-error attempts to crack a code, key, or password and gain unauthorized access to accounts, systems, or networks.
…
The attacker needs physical access to the target device to launch a BrutePrint attack
Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused
https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/27/lawyer-chatgpt/
A lawyer asked ChatGPT for examples of cases that supported an argument they were trying to make.
ChatGPT, as it often does, hallucinated wildly—it invented several supporting cases out of thin air.
When the lawyer was asked to provide copies of the cases in question, they turned to ChatGPT for help again—and it invented full details of those cases, which they duly screenshotted and copied into their legal filings.
At some point, they asked ChatGPT to confirm that the cases were real… and ChatGPT said that they were. They included screenshots of this in another filing.
The judge is furious. Many of the parties involved are about to have a very bad time.
NHS data breach: trusts shared patient details with Facebook without consent | The Guardian
Observer investigation reveals Meta Pixel tool passed on private details of web browsing on medical sites
Report: ‘massive’ Tesla leak reveals data breaches, thousands of safety complaints | The Guardian
Tesla has failed to adequately protect data from customers, employees and business partners and has received thousands of customer complaints regarding the carmaker’s driver assistance system, Germany’s Handelsblatt has reported, citing 100 gigabytes of confidential data leaked by a whistleblower.
The Handelsblatt report said customer data could be found “in abundance” in a data set labelled “Tesla Files”.
35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. Right Now - The New York Times
AI image generation puts video game illustrators out of work - Rest of World
https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-china-video-game-layoffs/
Recent breakthroughs in AI image generation have created widespread anxiety in China’s video game art industry.
Given the high quality of AI-produced artwork, many illustrators are losing their jobs to AI image generators such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2.
The gaming industry’s job market was already precarious after the Chinese government’s licensing freeze in 2021 threw thousands of game developers out of business.