It’s not impossible but, given technical issues and security protocols, it is much more difficult than the chatbot’s database seemed to be informed about.
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Perhaps the most common myth Myers wants to bust is the idea that someone else can access your data in the cloud. Only you — and those you authorize — can.
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Proposals to prevent misuse by “aligning AI behaviors with human intentions” confer no protection because some human intentions are themselves malign.
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The distillation technique that DeepSeek apparently uses to poach OpenAI’s database results, over time, in a loss of information on the internet.
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The data that China-based companies collect may be sold on the black market by employees who make much less than average tech wages elsewhere.
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He led a full life marked by remarkable achievements but he also had a near-death experience that transformed him spiritually.
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Rather than simplifying our lives, the internet has made our lives more complicated, what with having to continually change passwords, the use of multiple security levels, the threat of hacking, and the like. Now, with the threat of AI creating fraudulent content, some technologists are proposing “personhood credentials” to thwart incursions and impersonations. From the MIT Technology Review story: Personhood credentials work by doing two things AI systems still cannot do: bypassing state-of-the-art cryptographic systems, and passing as a person in the offline, real world. To request credentials, a human would have to physically go to one of a number of issuers, which could be a government or other kind of trusted organization, where they would be asked to provide evidence that they’re Read More ›
AI systems could analyze the huge database of stolen identities to refine their knowledge and attempt thousands of data breaches daily.
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Saving effort in the short term by running these risks is a decision that should be made with full knowledge of how near-term decisions affect long-term risks.
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Few people are aware, but over the last several days, a perceptive developer foiled a multi-year plot to install a remote backdoor into the entire Internet.
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Some of the leaked documents shed light on the corrupt business practices inherent in the hacker ecosystem and on the role of the CCP government.
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Hackers’ advantage: One of the biggest security weaknesses in U.S. digital networks and infrastructure is out-of-date, no-longer-supported technology.
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The notion that we’re getting somewhere, making progress, is remarkably durable. It survives wars, financial collapse, riots, scandals, stagnating wages, and climate change (to name a few). Though techno-futurists are also fond of AI apocalypse scenarios, where artificial intelligence somehow “comes alive,” or at any rate uses its superior intelligence to make an autonomous decision to wipe out humanity, much more ink has been spilled this century prognosticating indomitable technical progress, which somehow stands in for human progress generally. But sanguine belief in progress is belied by the actual events of the twenty-first century. Computers have gotten faster and AI more powerful, but digital technology has also been used to spread misinformation, make deep fakes, and conduct relentless cyberwarfare. Financial Read More ›
One research team recommends replacing the Turing test (can it deceive humans?) with tests for actual reasoning skills.
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Intelligence agencies are clear that the problem is not the Chinese people or Chinese citizens living in other countries. The problem is the Chinese government.
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European Union regulators have fined Meta over a billion dollars for sending users’ data to the United States. Many companies operate using a free flow of data across the Atlantic, so the ruling will complicate other companies’ modes of business. Sam Schechner reports, The steep fine represents a step change from EU privacy regulators, who are increasing their enforcement of the GDPR, the bloc’s privacy law, some five years after it came into effect. A board of EU regulators has taken more control over cross-border decisions—and has insisted on bigger fines, people familiar with the deliberations say. -Sam Schechner, Facebook Owner Meta Fined $1.3 Billion Over Data Transfers to U.S. – WSJ Meta is not pleased with the decision, unsurprisingly, Read More ›
by Karl Stephan In what is just the latest of a lengthening series of ransomware attacks, the sheriff’s office of San Bernardino County, California reportedly paid over $1 million in ransom to an Eastern-Europe-based hacking group. About half the money was paid by insurance and the county paid the rest from its risk-management fund. Reporters for the Los Angeles Times were unable to determine exactly who authorized the payments, which enabled the county to restore its email servers, in-car computers, and law enforcement databases. According to the report, the FBI discourages payments to ransomware hackers, but almost half of the state and local governments attacked worldwide pay anyway. A survey conducted by the British security firm Sophos was cited in the report, which said that Read More ›
This has been a summer to remember for U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia). She was “swatted” twice. The first false report that brought the police to her home was Wednesday, August 23: According to the first Rome PD report, five officers responded to a call on Wednesday during the initial attempted swatting. The caller claimed that a man had been “shot five times in a bathtub” at Greene’s home, and there was a woman and possibly children still in potential danger. On the way to Greene’s house, police realized who the homeowner was, but “due to the nature of the call,” police “formed up” at a nearby intersection and made a “tactical approach.” Rome PD provided Ars with no Read More ›
Ransomware attacks have reportedly continued to grow in 2022, as criminals hone their skills in grabbing our data and wanting money to release it. Today, it’s not just government and large businesses that are at risk. Small to mid-size businesses are at greatest risk. That’s because a) they often don’t have enough security in place and b) let’s face it, today’s attacker might be content with $300,000 each from a cluster of them rather than $30 million from a giant firm. Attracts less attention, for one thing. Here’s Blackfog’s monthly list of publicly reported attacks in 2022. In the first 30 minutes… Don’t just panic and agree to pay: [Kevin] Epstein says international law enforcement and white hat hackers usually Read More ›
The terms deep and dark sound glamorous and forbidding, maybe criminal. Both terms just mean that we can’t reach a site on that portion of the web via a conventional search engine. The Surface Web, the part that we can reach via a conventional search engine like Google, DuckDuckGo, or Brave, is estimated roughly to be 0.03% of the internet (Britannica). The Deep Web contains email accounts, bank statements, health records, and other services that can only be accessed by passwords. It’s the main reason that our private business can’t be accessed just by searching on our names. Both the Surface Web and the Deep Web are growing as more people go online. Now, about the Dark Web: By comparison, Read More ›