New Fitbit users will be required to sign-up with a Google account, from next year, while it also appears one will be needed to access some of the new features in years to come.
Google has been slowly integrating Fitbit into the fold since buying the company back in November 2019. Indeed, the latest products are now known as “Fitbit by Google”. However, as it currently stands, device owners have been able to maintain separate accounts for Google and Fitbit accounts.
Google has now revealed it is bringing Google Accounts to Fitbit in 2023, enabling a single login for both services. From that point on, all new sign ups will be through Google. Fitbit accounts will only be supported until 2025.
From that point on, a Google account will be the only way to go. To aid the transition, once the introduction of Google accounts begins, it’ll be possible to move existing devices over while maintaining all of the recorded data.
[…]
“We’ll be transparent with our customers about the timeline for ending Fitbit accounts through notices within the Fitbit app, by email, and in help articles.”
Whether that will be enough to assuage the concerns of the Fitbit user base – who didn’t have a say on whether Google bought their personal fitness data – remains to be seen.
So wonderful cloud – first of all, why should this data go to the cloud anyway? Second, you thought you were giving it to one provider but it turns out you’re giving it to another with no opt-out other than trashing an expensive piece of hardware.
Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed microscopic robots, called microrobots, that can swim around in the lungs, deliver medication and be used to clear up life-threatening cases of bacterial pneumonia.
In mice, the microrobots safely eliminated pneumonia-causing bacteria in the lungs and resulted in 100% survival. By contrast, untreated mice all died within three days after infection.
The results are published Sept. 22 in Nature Materials.
The microrobots are made of algae cells whose surfaces are speckled with antibiotic-filled nanoparticles. The algae provide movement, which allows the microrobots to swim around and deliver antibiotics directly to more bacteria in the lungs. The nanoparticles containing the antibiotics are made of tiny biodegradable polymer spheres that are coated with the cell membranes of neutrophils, which are a type of white blood cell. What’s special about these cell membranes is that they absorb and neutralize inflammatory molecules produced by bacteria and the body’s immune system. This gives the microrobots the ability to reduce harmful inflammation, which in turn makes them more effective at fighting lung infection.
[…]
The team used the microrobots to treat mice with an acute and potentially fatal form of pneumonia caused by the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This form of pneumonia commonly affects patients who receive mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit. The researchers administered the microrobots to the lungs of the mice through a tube inserted in the windpipe. The infections fully cleared up after one week. All mice treated with the microrobots survived past 30 days, while untreated mice died within three days.
Treatment with the microrobots was also more effective than an IV injection of antibiotics into the bloodstream. The latter required a dose of antibiotics that was 3000 times higher than that used in the microrobots to achieve the same effect. For comparison, a dose of microrobots provided 500 nanograms of antibiotics per mouse, while an IV injection provided 1.644 milligrams of antibiotics per mouse.
The team’s approach is so effective because it puts the medication right where it needs to go rather than diffusing it through the rest of the body.
[…]
the researchers say that this approach is safe. After treatment, the body’s immune cells efficiently digest the algae, along with any remaining nanoparticles. “Nothing toxic is left behind,” said Wang.
A federal judge in Texas has ordered the company to pay Voxer, the developer of app called Walkie Talkie, nearly $175 million as an ongoing royalty. Voxer accused Meta of infringing its patents and incorporating that tech in Instagram Live and Facebook Live.
In 2006, Tom Katis, the founder of Voxer, started working on a way to resolve communications problems he faced while serving in the US Army in Afghanistan, as TechCrunch notes. Katis and his team developed tech that allows for live voice and video transmissions, which led to Voxer debuting the Walkie Talkie app in 2011.
According to the lawsuit, soon after Voxer released the app, Meta (then known as Facebook) approached the company about a collaboration. Voxer is said to have revealed its proprietary technology as well as its patent portfolio to Meta, but the two sides didn’t reach an agreement. Voxer claims that even though Meta didn’t have live video or voice services back then, it identified the Walkie Talkie developer as a competitor and shut down access to Facebook features such as the “Find Friends” tool.
Meta debuted Facebook Live in 2015. Katis claims to have had a chance meeting with a Facebook Live product manager in early 2016 to discuss the alleged infringements of Voxer’s patents in that product, but Meta declined to reach a deal with the company. The latter released Instagram Live later that year. “Both products incorporate Voxer’s technologies and infringe its patents,” Voxer claimed in the lawsuit.
[…] In June, more than 3,300 employees across the United Kingdom began participating in a six-month experiment to test the efficacy of a four-day work week, which was organized by the nonprofit 4 Day Global. The pilot program has now reached its halfway point, and 4 Day Global is reporting overwhelmingly positive results. More specifically, 88% of surveyed participants said that the four-day work week is working well for their business.
[…]
Results also include 86% of survey respondents indicating that they would be likely or extremely likely to retain the four-day work week, while a total of 46% of respondents reported some increase in productivity. Businesses also reported a relatively smooth transition from the traditional five-day work week. On a scale of 1 being “extremely challenging” to 5 being “extremely smooth,” 4 Day Week Global found that 98% of respondents rated the transition to the four-day work week a 3 or higher.
Prior to the start of the experiment, 4 Day Week Global said that this is the biggest pilot program of its kind, where, as long as workers maintain 100% of their productivity, they will also maintain 100% of their salary while working 80% of the traditional work week. The nonprofit has been collaborating on the pilot program with labor think tank Autonomy as well as researchers from Cambridge University, Boston College, and Oxford University. Companies taking part in the experiment range from fish and chips shops, to PR firms, to tech companies.
[…]
“We are learning that for many it is a fairly smooth transition and for some there are some understandable hurdles – especially among those which have comparatively fixed or inflexible practices, systems, or cultures which date back well into the last century,” O’Connor said.
[…]
Microsoft flirted with a four-day work week in Japan and saw higher sales figures and levels of happiness in employees. The big hurdle moving forward will be getting buy in from enough companies and executives to make the four-day work week a permanent fixture in the world’s labor market—but results from large projects such as the one from 4 Day Week Global are only getting us closer to that end goal.
[…] Spawning AI creates image-generation tools for artists, and the company just launched Have I Been Trained? which you can use to search a set of 5.8 billion images that have been used to train popular AI art models. When you search the site, you can search through the images that are the closest match, based on the LAION-5B training data, which is widely used for training AI search terms.
It’s a fun tool to play with, and may help give a glimpse into the data that the AI is using as the basis for its own. The photo at the top of this post is a screenshot of the search term “couple”. Try putting your own name in, and see what happens… I also tried a search for “Obama,” which I will not be sharing a screenshot of here, but suffice it to say that these training sets can be… Problematic.
An Ars Technica report this week reveals that private medical records — as many as thousands — are among the many photos hidden within LAION-5B with questionable ethical and legal statuses. Removing these records is exceptionally difficult, as LAION isn’t a collection of files itself but merely a set of URLs pointing to images on the web.
In response, technologists like Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon are spearheading efforts such as Source+, a standard aiming to allow people to disallow their work or likeness to be used for AI training purposes. But these standards are — and will likely remain — voluntary, limiting their potential impact.
The listing allegedly includes 350 million Ask.FM user records, with the threat actor also offering 607 repositories plus their Gitlab, Jira, and Confluence databases. Ask.FM is a question and answer network launched in June 2010, with over 215 million registered users.
“I’m selling the users database of Ask.fm and ask.com. For connoisseurs, you can also get 607 repositories plus their Gitlab, Jira, Confluence databases.”
The posting also includes a list of repositories, sample git, and sample user data, as well as mentions of the fields in the database: user_id, username, mail, hash, salt, fbid, twitterid, vkid, fbuid, iguid. It appears that Ask.FM is using the weak hashing algorithm SHA1 for passwords, putting them at risk of being cracked and exposed to threat actors.
[…]
In response to DataBreaches, the user who posted the database – Data – explained that initial access was gained via a vulnerability in Safety Center. The server was first accessed in 2019, and the database was obtained on 2020-03-14.
Data also suggested that Ask.FM knew about the breach as early as back in 2020.
Multiple branches of the U.S. military have bought access to a powerful internet monitoring tool that claims to cover over 90 percent of the world’s internet traffic, and which in some cases provides access to people’s email data, browsing history, and other information such as their sensitive internet cookies, according to contracting data and other documents reviewed by Motherboard.
Additionally, Sen. Ron Wyden says that a whistleblower has contacted his office concerning the alleged warrantless use and purchase of this data by NCIS, a civilian law enforcement agency that’s part of the Navy, after filing a complaint through the official reporting process with the Department of Defense, according to a copy of the letter shared by Wyden’s office with Motherboard.
The material reveals the sale and use of a previously little known monitoring capability that is powered by data purchases from the private sector. The tool, called Augury, is developed by cybersecurity firm Team Cymru and bundles a massive amount of data together and makes it available to government and corporate customers as a paid service. In the private industry, cybersecurity analysts use it for following hackers’ activity or attributing cyberattacks. In the government world, analysts can do the same, but agencies that deal with criminal investigations have also purchased the capability. The military agencies did not describe their use cases for the tool. However, the sale of the tool still highlights how Team Cymru obtains this controversial data and then sells it as a business, something that has alarmed multiple sources in the cybersecurity industry.
“The network data includes data from over 550 collection points worldwide, to include collection points in Europe, the Middle East, North/South America, Africa and Asia, and is updated with at least 100 billion new records each day,” a description of the Augury platform in a U.S. government procurement record reviewed by Motherboard reads. It adds that Augury provides access to “petabytes” of current and historical data.
Motherboard has found that the U.S. Navy, Army, Cyber Command, and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency have collectively paid at least $3.5 million to access Augury. This allows the military to track internet usage using an incredible amount of sensitive information. Motherboard has extensively covered how U.S. agencies gain access to data that in some cases would require a warrant or other legal mechanism by simply purchasing data that is available commercially from private companies. Most often, the sales center around location data harvested from smartphones. The Augury purchases show that this approach of buying access to data also extends to information more directly related to internet usage.
[…]
The Augury platform makes a wide array of different types of internet data available to its users, according to online procurement records. These types of data include packet capture data (PCAP) related to email, remote desktop, and file sharing protocols. PCAP generally refers to a full capture of data, and encompasses very detailed information about network activity. PCAP data includes the request sent from one server to another, and the response from that server too.
[…]
Augury also contains so-called netflow data, which creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. That can include which server communicated with another, which is information that may ordinarily only be available to the server owner themselves or to the internet service provider that is carrying the traffic. That netflow data can be used for following traffic through virtual private networks, and show the server they are ultimately connecting from.
[…]
Team Cymru obtains this netflow data from ISPs; in return, Team Cymru provides the ISPs with threat intelligence. That transfer of data is likely happening without the informed consent of the ISPs’ users. A source familiar with the netflow data previously told Motherboard that “the users almost certainly don’t [know]” their data is being provided to Team Cymru, who then sells access to it.
It is not clear where exactly Team Cymru obtains the PCAP and other more sensitive information, whether that’s from ISPs or another method.
[…]
Beyond his day job as CEO of Team Cymru, Rabbi Rob Thomas also sits on the board of the Tor Project, a privacy focused non-profit that maintains the Tor software. That software is what underpins the Tor anonymity network, a collection of thousands of volunteer-run servers that allow anyone to anonymously browse the internet.
“Just like Tor users, the developers, researchers, and founders who’ve made Tor possible are a diverse group of people. But all of the people who have been involved in Tor are united by a common belief: internet users should have private access to an uncensored web,” the Tor Project’s website reads.
Just a few weeks after Hook Up: The Game released on Android, developer Sophie Artemigi was surprised to see the visual novel flagged for inappropriate sexual content.
By the game’s own description, you play as Alex, “a sex positive twenty-something” who matches with her old high school bully on a dating app, so of course, sexual themes are part of the package. But inappropriate? That was unexpected.
Google Play does warn developers that content designed to be “sexually gratifying” is not allowed on the platform, but it can be tricky to know how exactly that’s being enforced. Take 7 Sexy Sins, for example, a game which has the player removing the armor from anime demon girls, only to “snap some pictures… for personal uses”. It’s got an age rating of 12+ and has been downloaded more than 10,000 times without being pulled from the platform.
By contrast, Hook Up: The Game is a narrative game about dating, relationships and learning to deal with past trauma.
Artemigi appealed the decision to find out exactly what had crossed the line in this case.
In response she was told that Google “don’t allow apps that contain or promote sexual content or profanity”, or “appear to promote a sexual act in exchange for compensation”.
“For example”, the response continued, “your app screenshots currently contain an image that depicts sexually suggestive poses and sexual nudity”.
The following image was included as proof, with red rectangles drawn over the offending content.
Image: Sophie Artemigi
You’ll note that the character’s breasts have been highlighted, but so has her belly button, which is just totally bizarre. Accordingly, Artemigi emailed back with her counterarguments.
First of all, Hook Up has nothing to do with sexual acts being performed in “exchange for compensation”, she explained. In an email shown to Kotaku, Artemigi asked why Google was conflating provocatively dressed women with sex workers?
As for the image itself, Artemigi argued that it’s meant to be reflective of the kind of pictures you might find on a dating app, which typically do not allow for pictures that are too revealing. It’s worth clarifying that Alex is not nude in this screenshot, but even if she was, the Play Store’s own policy states that nudity “may be allowed if the primary purpose is educational, documentary, scientific or artistic, and is not gratuitous”.
The illustration, Artemigi pointed out, was a direct reference to the statue of Napoleon’s sister and imperial princess, Pauline Boneparte, which you can see for yourself in Rome’s Galleria Borghese. It’s also pictured at the top of this article.
“That pose was specifically based on classical statues because there’s a reference to Alex feeling like her bully was this Greek god,” said Artemigi. “It’s meant to be about objectifying yourself and finding beauty in one’s self.”
But hey, sex is complicated and so, perhaps, are belly buttons.
After receiving another short reply stating that the screenshot depicts a “sexually nude and gratifying pose of a woman presented in a non-artistic way”, Artemigi asked to escalate the issue to somebody higher up in the policy team in the hopes of speaking to somebody who might appreciate the nuance of the situation.
The final response from her official Google contact once again pointed out that Hook Up was in violation of the platform’s policy, but this time ended with the following sentence:
“Regarding your concern about escalation, I am the highest form of escalation. Next to me is God. Do you wanna see God?”
Yikes.
“It was almost nice though,” said Artemigi, “because it kind of confirmed the vibe I’d been getting. I felt very dismissed, talked down to. At least they were honest in that one email, I’ll give them that.”
When asked for comment, Google told Kotaku that the person who wrote this email has now been removed from the developer support team.
Hook Up: The Game is still available to purchase on the Play Store, although it seemingly remains in breach of the company’s policy, meaning that Artemigi hasn’t been able to publish updates as she usually would.
It’s unclear whether this will have also affected the game’s standing on the platform, but it’s worth noting that despite hundreds of downloads and almost 40 reviews, searching “Hook Up: The Game” on the Play Store doesn’t bring up the game in my search results. Like, at all.
In fact, the only way I was able to find it via search was to use the full name of the developer.
There’s been no such problems over on iOS, although different screenshots are being used to market the game for that platform.
Meta was sued on Wednesday for alleged undisclosed tracking and data collection in its Facebook and Instagram apps on Apple iPhones.
The lawsuit [PDF], filed in a US federal district court in San Francisco, claims that the two applications incorporate use their own browser known as a WKWebView that injects JavaScript code to gather data that would otherwise be unavailable if the apps opened links in the default standalone browser designated by iPhone users.
The claim is based on the findings of security researcher Felix Krause, who last month published an analysis of how WKWebView browsers embedded within native applications can be abused to track people and violate privacy expectations.
“When users click on a link within the Facebook app, Meta automatically directs them to the in-app browser it is monitoring instead of the smartphone’s default browser, without telling users that this is happening or they are being tracked,” the complaint says.
“The user information Meta intercepts, monitors and records includes personally identifiable information, private health details, text entries, and other sensitive confidential facts.”
[…]
However, Meta’s use of in-app browsers in its mobile apps predates Apple’s ATT initiative. Apple introduced WKWebView at its 2014 Worldwide Developer Conference as a replacement for its older UIWebView (UIKit) and WebView (AppKit) frameworks. That was in iOS 8. With the arrival of iOS 9, as described at WWDC 2015, there was another option, SFSafariViewController. Presently this is what’s recommended for displaying a website within an app.
And the company’s use of in-app browsers has elicited concern before.
“On top of limited features, WebViews can also be used for effectively conducting intended man-in-the-middle attacks, since the IAB [in-app browser] developer can arbitrarily inject JavaScript code and also intercept network traffic,” wrote Thomas Steiner, a Google developer relations engineer, in a blog post three years ago.
In his post, Steiner emphasizes that he didn’t see anything unusual like a “phoning home” function.
Krause has taken a similar line, noting only the potential for abuse. In a follow-up post, he identified additional data gathering code.
He wrote, “Instagram iOS subscribes to every tap on any button, link, image or other component on external websites rendered inside the Instagram app” and also “subscribes to every time the user selects a UI element (like a text field) on third party websites rendered inside the Instagram app.”
However, “subscribes” simply means that analytics data is accessible within the app, without offering any conclusion about what, if anything, is done with the data. Krause also points out that since 2020, Apple has offered a framework called WKContentWorld that isolates the web environment from scripts. Developers using an in-app browser can implement WKContentWorld in order to make scripts undetectable from the outside, he said.
Whatever Meta is doing internally with its in-app browser, and even given the company’s insistence its injected script validates ATT settings, the plaintiffs suing the company argue there was no disclosure of the process.
“Meta fails to disclose the consequences of browsing, navigating, and communicating with third-party websites from within Facebook’s in-app browser – namely, that doing so overrides their default browser’s privacy settings, which users rely on to block and prevent tracking,” the complaint says. “Similarly, Meta conceals the fact that it injects JavaScript that alters external third-party websites so that it can intercept, track, and record data that it otherwise could not access.”
The EU Copyright Directive contains one of the worst ideas in modern copyright: what amounts to a requirement to filter uploads on major sites. Despite repeated explanations of why this would cause huge harm to both creators and members of the public, EU politicians were taken in by the soothing words of the legislation’s proponents, who even went so far as to deny that upload filters would be required at all.
The malign effects of the EU Copyright Directive have not yet been felt, as national legislatures struggle to implement a law with deep internal contradictions. However, upload filters are already used on an ad hoc basis, for example YouTube’s Content ID. There is thus already mounting evidence of the problems with the approach. A new report, from the Colombian Fundación Karisma, adds to the concerns by providing additional examples of how creators have already suffered from upload filters:
This research found multiple cases of unjustified notifications of supposed violation of copyright directed at content that is either part of the public domain, original content, or instances of judicial overreach of copyright law. The digital producers that are the target of these unjust notifications affirm that the appeal process and counter-notification procedures don’t help them protect their rights. The appeals interface of the different platforms that were taken into account did not help resolve the cases, which leaves digital creators defenseless with no alternative other than what they can obtain from their contacts. This system damages the capacity of these producers to grow, maintain and monetize an audience at the same time that it affects the liberty of expression of independent producers as it creates a strong disincentive for them. On the contrary, this system incentivizes the bigger production companies to claim copyright on content to which they hold no rights.
As that summary notes, it’s not just that material was blocked without justification. Compounding the problem are appeal processes that are biased against creators, and a system that is rigged in favor of Big Content to the point where companies can falsely claim copyright on the work of others. The Fundación Karisma report is particularly valuable because it describes what has been happening in Colombia, rounding out other work that typically looks at the situation in the US and EU.
Voyager and Lockheed Martin have found a partner to design astronaut facilities for their space station. Hilton will develop suites and sleeping quarters for Starlab, CNBC reports. Under the partnership, Hilton and Voyager will also look at marketing opportunities related to Starlab and trips to what may be one of the first space hotels.
NASA has granted contracts to four private companies who are building private space stations ahead of the agency’s planned decommissioning of the International Space Station at the end of the decade. Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman are also working on space stations. Voyager’s operating company Nanoracks received the largest contract, which was valued at $160 million.
Voyager and Lockheed Martin hope to have the first Starlab up and running by 2027.
People feel like they don’t have control over their YouTube recommendations…
Our 2021 investigation into YouTube’s recommender system uncovered a range of problems on the platform: an opaque algorithm, inconsistent oversight, and geographic inequalities. We also learned that people feel they don’t have control over their YouTube experience — particularly the videos that are recommended to them.
YouTube says that people can manage their video recommendations through the feedback tools the platform offers. But do YouTube’s user controls actually work?
and our study shows that they really don’t.
[…]
In the qualitative portion of our study, we learned that people do not feel in control of their experience on YouTube, nor do they have clear information about how to curate their recommendations. Many people take a trial-and-error approach to controlling their recommendations using YouTube’s hodgepodge of options, like “Dislike,” “Not Interested,” and other buttons. It doesn’t seem to work.
[…]
we ran a randomized controlled experiment across our community of RegretsReporter participants that could directly test the effectiveness of YouTube’s user controls. We found that YouTube’s user controls somewhat influence what is recommended, but this effect is meager and most unwanted videos still slip through.
[…]
Even the most effective feedback methods prevent less than half of bad recommendations.
[…]
Our main recommendation is that YouTube should enable people to shape what they see.
YouTube’s user controls should be easy to understand and access. People should be provided with clear information about the steps they can take to influence their recommendations, and should be empowered to use those tools.
YouTube should design its feedback tools in a way that puts people in the driver’s seat. Feedback tools should enable people to proactively shape their experience, with user feedback given more weight in determining what videos are recommended.
YouTube should enhance its data access tools. YouTube should provide researchers with access to better tools that allow them to assess the signals that impact YouTube’s algorithm.
Policymakers should protect public interest researchers. Policymakers should pass and/or clarify laws that provide legal protections for public interest research.
Google is releasing a tool that makes it easier to remove search results containing your address, phone number and other personally identifiable information, 9to5Google has reported. It first revealed the “results about you” feature at I/O 2022 in May, describing it as a way to “help you easily control whether your personally-identifiable information can be found in Search results.”
If you see a result with your phone number, home address or email, you can click on the three-dot menu at the top right. That opens the usual “About this result” panel, but it now contains a new “Remove result” option at the bottom of the screen. A dialog states that if the result contains one of those three things, “we can review your request more quickly.”
[…]
“It’s important to note that when we receive removal requests, we will evaluate all content on the web page to ensure that we’re not limiting the availability of other information that is broadly useful, for instance in news articles. And of course, removing contact information from Google Search doesn’t remove it from the web, which is why you may wish to contact the hosting site directly, if you’re comfortable doing so.”
Stonk bros are mad at the doc for a few different reasons, but the two big things that keep coming up are the supposed lack of input from investors on r/SuperStonk and r/WallStreetBets and because of the final line of the trailer, spoken by journalist Taylor Lorenz. The trailer ends with her seemingly poking fun at the Redditors who set out to fight the GameStop short sellers, saying, “Yolo, let’s destroy the economy.” That line seems to have really angered a particular group of Reddit investors.
“I’m ready to cancel Netflix anyways…yolo lady gave me a reason. Slater Netflix,” said one user on r/SuperStonk. “Cancel Netflix and use that money to buy GME [stock]?” replied another. Of course, very few have shared images or other evidence proving that they have canceled their subscriptions, or that they even had one to begin with. And other users on r/SuperStonk expressed disbelief at the idea of people canceling a sub over a documentary that hadn’t even been released yet.
Still, over on Twitter, you can find tons of angry replies to Netflix’s trailer, with people claiming it’s just a hit job meant to make retail investors look terrible. Even Taylor Lorenz has come out and clarified that she is adamantly opposed to the broken and unfair economic system of Wall Street, calling it “undeniably unhealthy.” But that doesn’t matter to angry investors. I guess all you need is one soundbite from an unreleased movie’s trailer to know it’s a hit piece.
Just – wow, calling retail investors who caught and exposed a massive illegal short on Gamestop and then managed to actually do something about it Stonkbros is also a hit piece.
Chrome’s enhanced spellcheck & Edge’s MS Editor are sending data you enter into form fields like username, email, DOB, SSN, basically anything in the fields, to sites you’re logging into from either of those browsers when the features are enabled. Furthermore, if you click on “show password,” the enhanced spellcheck even sends your password, essentially Spell-Jacking your data.
[…]
shows employee credentials(password) being sent to Google while logging into the company’s Alibaba Cloud Account.
otto-js co-founder & CTO Josh Summitt discovered the spellcheck leak while testing the company’s script behaviors detection.
“If ‘show password’ is enabled, the feature even sends your password to their 3rd-party servers. While researching for data leaks in different browsers, we found a combination of features that, once enabled, will unnecessarily expose sensitive data to 3rd Parties like Google and Microsoft. What’s concerning is how easy these features are to enable and that most users will enable these features without really realizing what is happening in the background.” Josh Summitt
[…]
oth security teams from AWS and LastPass have responded to the outreach and both have already mitigated the issue.
Office 365
Alibaba – Cloud Service
Google Cloud – Secret Manager
AWS – Secrets Manager (UPDATE: has already fully mitigated the issue)
LastPass (UPDATE: has already fully mitigated the issue)
If someone showed you a photo of a crocodile and asked whether it was a bird, you might laugh—and then, if you were patient and kind, help them identify the animal. Such real-world, and sometimes dumb, interactions may be key to helping artificial intelligence learn, according to a new study in which the strategy dramatically improved an AI’s accuracy at interpreting novel images. The approach could help AI researchers more quickly design programs that do everything from diagnose disease to direct robots or other devices around homes on their own.
[…]
To help AIs expand their understanding of the world, researchers are now trying to develop a way for computer programs to both locate gaps in their knowledge and figure out how to ask strangers to fill them—a bit like a child asks a parent why the sky is blue. The ultimate aim in the new study was an AI that could correctly answer a variety of questions about images it has not seen before.
[…]
in the new study, researchers at Stanford University led by Ranjay Krishna, now at the University of Washington, Seattle, trained a machine-leaning system not only to spot gaps in its knowledge but to compose (often dumb) questions about images that strangers would patiently answer. (Q: “What is the shape of the sink?” A: “It’s a square.”)
It’s important to think about how AI presents itself, says Kurt Gray, a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has studied human-AI interaction but was not involved in the work. “In this case, you want it to be kind of like a kid, right?” he says. Otherwise, people might think you’re a troll for asking seemingly ridiculous questions.
The team “rewarded” its AI for writing intelligible questions: When people actually responded to a query, the system received feedback telling it to adjust its inner workings so as to behave similarly in the future. Over time, the AI implicitly picked up lessons in language and social norms, honing its ability to ask questions that were sensical and easily answerable.
Q: What type of dessert is that in the picture? A: hi dear it’s coconut cake, it tastes amazing 🙂 R. Krishna et al., PNAS, DOI: 2115730119 (2022)
The new AI has several components, some of them neural networks, complex mathematical functions inspired by the brain’s architecture. “There are many moving pieces … that all need to play together,” Krishna says. One component selected an image on Instagram—say a sunset—and a second asked a question about that image—for example, “Is this photo taken at night?” Additional components extracted facts from reader responses and learned about images from them.
Across 8 months and more than 200,000 questions on Instagram, the system’s accuracy at answering questions similar to those it had posed increased 118%, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A comparison system that posted questions on Instagram but was not explicitly trained to maximize response rates improved its accuracy only 72%, in part because people more frequently ignored it.
The main innovation, Jaques says, was rewarding the system for getting humans to respond, “which is not that crazy from a technical perspective, but very important from a research-direction perspective.” She’s also impressed by the large-scale, real-world deployment on Instagram. (Humans checked all AI-generated questions for offensive material before posting them.)
Germany’s general data retention law violates EU law, Europe’s top court ruled on Tuesday, dealing a blow to member states banking on blanket data collection to fight crime and safeguard national security.
The law may only be applied in circumstances where there is a serious threat to national security defined under very strict terms, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) said.
The ruling comes after major attacks by Islamist militants in France, Belgium and Britain in recent years.
Governments argue that access to data, especially that collected by telecoms operators, can help prevent such incidents, while operators and civil rights activists oppose such access.
The latest case was triggered after Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE) unit Telekom Deutschland and internet service provider SpaceNet AG challenged Germany’s data retention law arguing it breached EU rules.
The German court subsequently sought the advice of the CJEU which said such data retention can only be allowed under very strict conditions.
“The Court of Justice confirms that EU law precludes the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data, except in the case of a serious threat to national security,” the judges said.
“However, in order to combat serious crime, the member states may, in strict compliance with the principle of proportionality, provide for, inter alia, the targeted or expedited retention of such data and the general and indiscriminate retention of IP addresses,” they said.
Excellent work by the court – targeted investigation has been proven to be much more effective than blanket surveillance. Other than that blanket surveillance turns your country into an Orwellian nightmare.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Morgan Stanley Smith Barney has agreed to pay a $35 million fine to settle claims that it failed to protect the personal information of about 15 million customers, the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Tuesday. In a statement announcing the settlement, the S.E.C. described what it called Morgan Stanley’s “extensive failures,” over a five-year period beginning in 2015, to safeguard customer information, in part by not properly disposing of hard drives and servers that ended up for sale on an internet auction site.
On several occasions, the commission said, Morgan Stanley hired a moving and storage company with no experience or expertise in data destruction services to decommission thousands of hard drives and servers containing the personal information of millions of its customers. The moving company then sold thousands of the devices to a third party, and the devices were then resold on an unnamed internet auction site, the commission said. An information technology consultant in Oklahoma who bought some of the hard drives on the internet chastised Morgan Stanley after he found that he could still access the firm’s data on those devices.
Morgan Stanley is “a major financial institution and should be following some very stringent guidelines on how to deal with retiring hardware,” the consultant wrote in an email to Morgan Stanley in October 2017, according to the S.E.C. The firm should, at a minimum, get “some kind of verification of data destruction from the vendors you sell equipment to,” the consultant wrote, according to the S.E.C. Morgan Stanley eventually bought the hard drives back from the consultant. Morgan Stanley also recovered some of the other devices that it had improperly discarded, but has not recovered the “vast majority” of them, the commission said. The settlement also notes that Morgan Stanley “had not properly disposed of consumer report information when it decommissioned servers from local offices and branches as part of a ‘hardware refresh program’ in 2019,” reports the Times. “Morgan Stanley later learned that the devices had been equipped with encryption capability, but that it had failed to activate the encryption software for years, the commission said.”
Fintech startup Revolut has confirmed it was hit by a highly targeted cyberattack that allowed hackers to access the personal details of tens of thousands of customers.
Revolut spokesperson Michael Bodansky told TechCrunch that an “unauthorized third party obtained access to the details of a small percentage (0.16%) of our customers for a short period of time.” Revolut discovered the malicious access late on September 11 and isolated the attack by the following morning.
“We immediately identified and isolated the attack to effectively limit its impact and have contacted those customers affected,” Bodansky said. “Customers who have not received an email have not been impacted.”
Revolut, which has a banking license in Lithuania, wouldn’t say exactly how many customers were affected. Its website says the company has approximately 20 million customers; 0.16% would translate to about 32,000 customers. However, according to Revolut’s breach disclosure to the authorities in Lithuania, first spotted by Bleeping Computer, the company says 50,150 customers were impacted by the breach, including 20,687 customers in the European Economic Area and 379 Lithuanian citizens.
Revolut also declined to say what types of data were accessed but told TechCrunch that no funds were accessed or stolen in the incident. In a message sent to affected customers posted to Reddit, the company said that “no card details, PINs or passwords were accessed.” However, the breach disclosure states that hackers likely accessed partial card payment data, along with customers’ names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers.
The disclosure states that the threat actor used social engineering methods to gain access to the Revolut database, which typically involves persuading an employee to hand over sensitive information such as their password. This has become a popular tactic in recent attacks against a number of well-known companies, including Twilio, Mailchimp and Okta.
Posting to the official 2K Support Twitter account, 2K explained that its help desk platform had been hacked, and the invader made off with a whole bunch of customer emails. It says it “became aware that an unauthorized third party illegally accessed the credentials of one of our vendors to the help desk platform that 2K uses to provide support to our customers.”
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2K has taken its “support portal” offline while they try to figure out what the heck happened, which isn’t a great look, especially in the week of NBA 2K23‘s release. The statement says, “We will issue a notice when you can resume interacting with official 2K help desk emails,” which is…not a foolproof method. Firstly, it gives the impression that there might be a time when a previously unread phishing email would be safe to click on, and secondly, it hardly reaches people who’ve received the email, who aren’t fortunate enough to have noticed the tweet (or read the press coverage).
Meanwhile, those with open tickets are getting told, at the time of writing, that 2K doesn’t “have estimates on when you’ll receive a reply,” with the somewhat ironic suggestion that they, “stay tuned via email.”
For those that think they may have already fallen for the phishing scam, 2K recommends that people reset all passwords, enable multi-factor authentication (but avoid text message-based verification!), clog up their PCs with anti-virus software, and “check your account settings to see if any forwarding rules have been added or changed on your personal email accounts.”
There’s further cause for concern when you notice that one customer recognized that a likely hack had occurred some ten hours before the statement was released, but was fobbed off by the official account. The original customer replied almost nine hours before the hack was confirmed, saying, “at this point its very clear that you guys got hacked on support things related.. make a statement already before the damage is too big.”
Many replies to the statement are from bereft customers, claiming to have lost their accounts, or seen money removed from their games. Many more are from people who clicked on the links in the emails, but now don’t know if they’ve caused any harm to their devices or account, and are not getting clear answers.
Cure of acute deafness after bang, shots or explosion appears possibleNews item | 21-09-2022 | 12:12There are plenty of preventive measures to prevent hearing damage, such as acute deafness, for example during the use of weapons. And yet things go wrong with some regularity. However, there is a method to limit the damage after noise trauma. This is done with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. The use of this treatment method for so-called noise trauma occurs worldwide, especially among soldiers. The 150th has now been treated in the Netherlands, most of which have had good results.Enlarge Image 3 soldiers with weapon and the attack, in rural area, at night.Acute deafness can occur during shooting, but also from fireworks, for example.“As long as you act quickly”, emphasizes captain-at-sea doctor Robert Weenink. “And I mean within 72 hours.”This anesthesiologist applies the therapy in the Amsterdam University Medical Center. Of course, not only soldiers benefit from this, but everyone who suffers from acute deafness from loud noise. This can also be the result of, for example, fireworks.Enlarge Image Burnt firecrackers in the street.Firecrackers can be disastrous for the hearing.Less damageThe fact that there is now a therapy is quite special. Not so long ago, deafness after noise trauma was actually a matter of bad luck. According to Weenink, there were medicines that helped something, but nothing else could be done about it. Until reports from abroad came to the attention of doctors at the Ministry of Defense. “Hyperbaric oxygen therapy could lead to less damage to hearing,” says Weenink. “Treatment with this was introduced for military personnel at the time.”Enlarge Image A recompression chamber, known from the diving world.A recompression chamber, known from the diving world.ciliaThe therapy is painless. The patient breathes 100% oxygen for 1.5 hours. This takes place in a recompression chamber known from the diving world, at a pressure that corresponds to a dive of 14 meters. During the 10 treatments required, the body receives a very large amount of oxygen, which also arrives in the inner ear and repairs damaged cilia.Enlarge Image A recompression chamber.The inside of a recompression chamber.By bang, shots or explosionOnly military personnel and police officers with significant hearing loss after noise trauma caused by a bang, shots or explosion are eligible for hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Weenink: “That is because less hearing loss usually recovers well without this treatment.” Unfortunately, people who now have permanent damage after prolonged exposure to noise are also not eligible. It’s really about the acute phase.Dutch ‘invention’Applying hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a Dutch ‘invention’. The Amsterdam surgeon Professor Ite Boerema was the founder of this treatment and has put it on the international map. The therapy is used to treat a variety of diseases, not specific to acute noise trauma. In the Netherlands, Defense is a forerunner in this field.
Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder and chief executive of Wintermute, disclosed in a series of tweets that the firm’s decentralized finance operations had been hacked, but centralized finance and over the counter verticals aren’t affected.
He said that Wintermute — which counts Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital and Fidelity’s Avon among its backers — remains solvent with “twice over that amount in equity left.” He assured lenders that if they wish to recall their loans, Wintermute will honor that.
“If you have a MM agreement with Wintermute, your funds are safe. There will be a disruption in our services today and potentially for next few days and will get back to normal after,” he wrote.
“Out of 90 assets that has been hacked only two have been for notional over $1 million (and none more than $2.5M), so there shouldn’t be a major selloff of any sort. We will communicate with both affected teams asap.”
Wintermute provides liquidity on over 50 exchanges and trading platforms including Binance, Coinbase, FTX, Kraken as well as decentralized platforms Dydx and Uniswap. It’s also an active investor, having backed startups including Nomad, HashFlow and Ondo Finance.
Gaevoy or Wintermute did not disclose when the hack took place or the how the attackers were able to succeed, and whether it has alerted the law enforcement. TechCrunch has reached out to Wintermute for more details.
International migrants who seek protection also participate in the economy. Thus the policy of the United States to drastically reduce refugee and asylum-seeker arrivals from 2017 to 2020 might have substantial and ongoing economic consequences. This paper places conservative bounds on those effects by critically reviewing the research literature. It goes beyond prior estimates by including ripple effects beyond the wages earned or taxes paid directly by migrants. The sharp reduction in US refugee admissions starting in 2017 costs the overall US economy today over $9.1 billion per year ($30,962 per missing refugee per year, on average) and costs public coffers at all levels of government over $2.0 billion per year ($6,844 per missing refugee per year, on average) net of public expenses. Large reductions in the presence of asylum seekers during the same period likewise carry ongoing costs in the billions of dollars per year. These estimates imply that barriers to migrants seeking protection, beyond humanitarian policy concerns, carry substantial economic costs.
In real life, high-quality combination locks are not vulnerable to such simple attacks, but cheap ones can often be bypassed with a minimum of effort. Some are so simple that this process can even be automated, as [Mew463] has shown by building a machine that can open a Master combination lock in less than a minute.
The operating principle is based on research by Samy Kamkar from a couple of years ago. For certain types of Master locks, the combination can be found by applying a small amount of pressure on the shackle and searching for locations on the dial where its movement becomes heavier. A simple algorithm can then be used to completely determine the first and third numbers, and find a list of just eight candidates for the second number.
[Mew463]’s machine automates this process by turning the dial with a stepper motor and pulling on the shackle using a servo and a rack-and-pinion system. A magnetic encoder is mounted on the stepper motor to determine when the motor stalls, while the servo has its internal position encoder brought out as a means of detecting how far the shackle has moved. All of this is controlled by an Arduino Nano mounted on a custom PCB together with a TMC2208 stepper driver.
The machine does its job smoothly and quickly, as you can see in the (silent) video embedded below. All design files are available on the project’s GitHub page, so if you’ve got a drawer full of these locks without combinations, here’s your chance to make them sort-of-useful again. After all, these locks’ vulnerabilities have a long history, and we’ve even seen automated crackers before.
Electronics Arts (EA) is launching a new kernel-level anti-cheat system for its PC games. The EA AntiCheat (EAAC) will debut first in FIFA 23 later this fall and is a custom anti-cheat system developed in-house by EA developers. It’s designed to protect EA games from tampering and cheaters, and EA says it won’t add anti-cheat to every game and treat its implementation on a case-by-case basis.
“PC cheat developers have increasingly moved into the kernel, so we need to have kernel-mode protections to ensure fair play and tackle PC cheat developers on an even playing field,” explains Elise Murphy, senior director of game security and anti-cheat at EA. “As tech-inclined video gamers ourselves, it is important to us to make sure that any kernel anti-cheat included in our games acts with a strong focus on the privacy and security of our gamers that use a PC.”
Kernel-level anti-cheat systems have drawn criticism from privacy and security advocates, as the drivers these systems use are complex and run at such a high level that if there are security issues, then developers have to be very quick to address them.
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EA’s anti-cheat system will run at the kernel level and only runs when a game with EAAC protection is running. EA says its anti-cheat processes shut down once a game does and that the anti-cheat will be limited to what data it collects on a system. “EAAC does not gather any information about your browsing history, applications that are not connected to EA games, or anything that is not directly related to anti-cheat protection,” says Murphy.
The problem is that you can’t actually see what they are doing because it’s kernel level. It’s your OS running on your PC, they have no right to inflitrate your PC at this level – aside from it being dangerous from a security standpoint. This is a bit like putting a guy into each room of your house and saying it’s no problem, hopefully they won’t steal anything and most likely they won’t tell anyone what you are doing and what you are talking about. And they probably leave some when you are not using your house.
