https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23911803/utah-tiktok-child-addiction-china-deception-lawsuit
Utah’s consumer protection division alleges that TikTok misrepresents itself as independent of China and is designed to ‘hook users’ into its endless feed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67053171
A man got so fed up with foxes and badgers fouling in his garden that he adapted cameras to help repel them.
James Milward linked the Ring cameras at his Surrey home to a device that emits high frequency sounds.
He then trained the system using hundreds of images of the nocturnal nuisances so it learned to trigger the noise when it spotted them.
A programmer in northern China has been ordered to pay more than 1m yuan to the authorities for using a virtual private network (VPN), in what is thought to be the most severe individual financial penalty ever issued for circumventing China’s “great firewall”.
The programmer, surnamed Ma, was issued with a penalty notice by the public security bureau of Chengde, a city in Hebei province, on 18 August. The notice said Ma had used “unauthorised channels” to connect to international networks to work for a Turkish company.
The initial data leak was limited, with the threat actor releasing 1 million lines of data for Ashkenazi people. However, on October 4, the threat actor offered to sell data profiles in bulk for $1-$10 per 23andMe account, depending on how many were purchased.
A 23andMe spokesperson confirmed the data is legitimate and told BleepingComputer that the threat actors used exposed credentials from other breaches to access 23andMe accounts and steal the sensitive data.
[…]
The information that has been exposed from this incident includes full names, usernames, profile photos, sex, date of birth, genetic ancestry results, and geographical location.
While there are benefits to storing genetic information online so people can trace their heritage and track down relatives, there are clear privacy threats. Even if a user chooses a strong password and uses two-factor authentication as 23andMe has long urged, their data can still be swept up in scraping incidents like the one recently confirmed. The only sure way to protect it from online theft is to not store it there in the first place.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/slovakia-election-deepfakes
Fact-checkers scrambled to deal with faked audio recordings released days before a tight election, in a warning for other countries with looming votes.
The case of Jaswant Singh Chail has shone a light on the latest generation of artificial intelligence-powered chatbots.On Thursday, 21-year-old Chail was given a nine-year sentence for breaking into Windsor Castle with a crossbow and declaring he wanted to kill the Queen.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has, for the first time, published rules of engagement for civilian hackers involved in conflicts.The organisation warns unprecedented numbers of people are joining patriotic cyber-gangs since the Ukraine invasion.The eight rules include bans on attacks on hospitals, hacking tools that spread uncontrollably and threats that engender terror among civilians.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/how-will-ai-learn-next
As chatbots threaten their own best sources of data, they will have to find new kinds of knowledge.
https://www.roughtype.com/?p=8935
Facebook, it’s now widely accepted, has been a calamity for the world. The obvious solution, most people would agree, is to get rid of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has a different idea: Get rid of the world.
https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-freshwater-cheaper-0927
MIT engineers and collaborators developed a solar-powered device that avoids salt-clogging issues of other designs.