https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23618804/google-facebook-login-ads-web-design-hell

There is a new trend among websites where they want my email address before I’m allowed to read their free content. While I sympathize with the struggles of the media business, I am just going to point out something obvious: not reading is easier than reading — and way easier than logging in.

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And confidential to Substack: if I have clicked into a newsletter on the web, blocking my view of the thing I’m trying to read with a subscription pop-up isn’t going to make me more likely to subscribe. It just means I’m probably not going to read the newsletter.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/

Russian antiwar activists placed their faith in Telegram, a supposedly secure messaging app. How does Putin’s regime seem to know their every move?

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She says the officer told her that investigators had been following along with her private Telegram chats as she wrote them.

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In many cases, it’s impossible to tell what’s really happening to people’s accounts—whether spyware or Kremlin informants have been used to break in, through no particular fault of the company; whether Telegram really is cooperating with Moscow; or whether it’s such an inherently unsafe platform that the latter is merely what appears to be going on.

https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2021/11/29/researchers-shrink-camera-size-salt-grain

Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have developed an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The system relies on a technology called a metasurface, which is studded with 1.6 million cylindrical posts and can be produced much like a computer chip.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7axa/how-i-broke-into-a-bank-account-with-an-ai-generated-voice

Banks in the U.S. and Europe tout voice ID as a secure way to log into your account. I proved it’s possible to trick such systems with free or cheap AI-generated voices.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/18/microsoft-puts-new-limits-on-bings-ai-chatbot-after-it-expressed-desire-to-steal-nuclear-secrets/

As many early users have shown, the chatbot seemed pretty normal when used for short periods of time. But when users started to have extended conversations with the technology, that’s when things got weird. Microsoft seemed to agree with that assessment. And that’s why it’s only going to be allowing shorter conversations from here on out.

https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/

Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do all of the other fun things that engines like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have been demonstrating over the past few months: the ability to generate poetry, and jokes, and do creative writing, and so much more.

This week, people have started gaining access to it via the waiting list. It’s increasingly looking like this may be one of the most hilariously inappropriate applications of AI that we’ve seen yet.

If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s what’s transpired so far.

• The demo was full of errors
• It started gaslighting people
• It suffered an existential crisis
• The prompt leaked
• And then it started threatening people
  …

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-ai-messages-microsoft-bing-b2282491.html

System appears to be suffering a breakdown as it ponders why it has to exist at all.

https://therecord.media/blacksprut-darknet-drug-market-billboards-moscow/

The fact that BlackSprut was openly advertising its services in the Russian capital could mean several things: Either the billboard owners did not know about the platform’s illegal activity, or the billboards were hacked, or no one in a position of authority simply cared.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/09/google-ai-chatbot-bard-error-sends-shares-plummeting-in-battle-with-microsoft

Google’s riposte to ChatGPT has got off to an embarrassing start after its new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot gave a wrong answer in a promotional video, as investors wiped more than $100bn (£82bn) off the value of the search engine’s parent company, Alphabet.

https://www.nrk.no/norge/justisminister-mehl-hadde-tiktok-pa-tjenestetelefonen-1.16280577

Gaute Wangen er førsteamanuensis ved NTNU og ekspert i risikostyring av informasjonssikkerhet. Han forteller at TikTok er verstingen av alle appene nå.