Daily Archives: August 7, 2023

AI listens to keyboards on video conferences – decodes passwords

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[…] a new paper from the UK that shows how researchers trained an AI to decode keystrokes from noise on conference calls.

The researchers point out that people don’t expect sound-based exploits. The paper reads, “For example, when typing a password, people will regularly hide their screen but will do little to obfuscate their keyboard’s sound.”

The technique uses the same kind of attention network that makes models like ChatGPT so powerful. It seems to work well, as the paper claims a 97% peak accuracy over both a telephone or Zoom. In addition, where the model was wrong, it tended to be close, identifying an adjacent keystroke instead of the correct one. This would be easy to correct for in software, or even in your brain as infrequent as it is. If you see the sentence “Paris im the s[ring,” you can probably figure out what was really typed.

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Source: Noisy Keyboards Sink Ships | Hackaday

North Korean hackers put backdoors in Russian hypersonic missile maker computers

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Reuters found cyber-espionage teams linked to the North Korean government, which security researchers call ScarCruft and Lazarus, secretly installed stealthy digital backdoors into systems at NPO Mashinostroyeniya, a rocket design bureau based in Reutov, a small town on the outskirts of Moscow.

Reuters could not determine whether any data was taken during the intrusion or what information may have been viewed.

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Source: North Korean hackers stole secrets of Russian hypersonic missile maker – EURACTIV.com

Scientists observe first evidence of ‘quantum superchemistry’ in the laboratory

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A team from the University of Chicago has announced the first evidence for “quantum superchemistry”—a phenomenon where particles in the same quantum state undergo collective accelerated reactions. The effect had been predicted, but never observed in the laboratory.

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Chin’s group is experienced with herding atoms into quantum states, but molecules are larger and much more complex than atoms—so the group had to invent new techniques to wrangle them.

In the experiments, the scientists cooled down cesium atoms and coaxed them into the same quantum state. Next, they watched as the atoms reacted to form molecules.

In ordinary chemistry, the would collide, and there’s a probability for each collision to form a molecule. However, predicts that atoms in a quantum state perform actions collectively instead.

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One consequence is that the reaction happens faster than it would under ordinary conditions. In fact, the more atoms in the system, the faster the reaction happens.

Another consequence is that the final molecules share the same molecular state. Chin explained that the same molecules in different states can have different physical and —but there are times when you want to create a batch of molecules in a specific state. In traditional chemistry, you’re rolling the dice. “But with this technique, you can steer the molecules into an identical state,” he said.

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More information: Zhendong Zhang et al, Many-body chemical reactions in a quantum degenerate gas, Nature Physics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-023-02139-8

Source: Scientists observe first evidence of ‘quantum superchemistry’ in the laboratory

What? AI-Generated Art Banned from Future Dungeons & Dragons Books After “Fan Uproar” (Or ~1600 tweets about it)

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A Dungeons & Dragons expansion book included AI-generated artwork. Fans on Twitter spotted it before the book was even released (noting, among other things, a wolf with human feet). An embarrassed representative for Wizards of the Coast then tweeted out an announcement about new guidelines stating explicitly that “artists must refrain from using AI art generation as part of their creation process for developing D&D art.” GeekWire reports: The artist in question, Ilya Shkipin, is a California-based painter, illustrator, and operator of an NFT marketplace, who has worked on projects for Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast since 2014. Shkipin took to Twitter himself on Friday, and acknowledged in several now-deleted tweets that he’d used AI tools to “polish” several original illustrations and concept sketches. As of Saturday morning, Shkipin had taken down his original tweets and announced that the illustrations for Glory of the Giants are “going to be reworked…”

While the physical book won’t be out until August 15, the e-book is available now from Wizards’ D&D Beyond digital storefront.
Wizards of the Coast emphasized this won’t happen again. About this particular incident, they noted “We have worked with this artist since 2014 and he’s put years of work into books we all love. While we weren’t aware of the artist’s choice to use AI in the creation process for these commissioned pieces, we have discussed with him, and he will not use AI for Wizards’ work moving forward.”

GeekWire adds that the latest D&D video game, Baldur’s Gate 3, “went into its full launch period on Tuesday. Based on metrics such as its player population on Steam, BG3 has been an immediate success, with a high of over 709,000 people playing it concurrently on Saturday afternoon.”

Source: AI-Generated Art Banned from Future ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Books After Fan Uproar – Slashdot

Really? 1600 tweets about this is considered an “uproar” and was enough to change policy into anti-AI? So if you actually look at the pictures, only the wolf with human feet was strange and the rest of the comments weren’t in my eyes. Welcome to life – we have AI’s now and people are going to use them. They are going to save artists loads of time and allow them to create really really cool stuff… like these pictures!

Come on Wizards of the Coast, don’t be luddites.