Tag: technews

Mirai Botnet Variant ‘Pandora’ Hijacks Android TVs for Cyberattacks Pandora, a botnet variant of Mirai, has been observed infiltrating inexpensive Android-based TV sets and TV boxes and using them as part of a Botnet to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. According to Dr. Web, this type of infection occurs either during malicious firmware updates or…

The Generative AI Boom Could Fuel a New International Arms Race Marcellino and his coauthors note that many countries, including the US, are exploring the use of generative AI for their own information campaigns. Like the RAND report, the SCSP’s analysis also draws some gloomy conclusions. It warns that generativeAI’s potential is likely to be…

Outlook Breach: Microsoft Reveals How a Crash Dump Led to a Major Security Breach In April of 2021, a consumer signing system crash resulted in a snapshot of the crashed process. This snapshot did not include the signing key. Later, it was discovered that this critical piece of information could have enabled wide access to…

Google will soon require disclaimers for AI-generated political ads Political advertisers will soon start requiring political ads to disclose when they made their ads with AI, as previously reported by Bloomberg. Google says these types of ads must contain a disclaimer in a clear and conspicuous place and will apply to all video, images, and…

A Rube Goldberg chain of failures led to breach of Microsoft-hosted government emails In the first half of July, Microsoft disclosed that the Chinese hacking group Storm-0558 had gained access to emails from 25 organizations, including agencies in the US government. The group gained access by obtaining aMicrosoft account consumer key, which allows them to…

Why This Award-Winning Piece of AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted An award-winning piece of AI art cannot be copyrighted, the Copyright Office has ruled. Allen used the generative AI program Midjourney to create his entry, and copyright protections are not extended to artificial intelligence. This ruling will be a major disincentive to people developing and…

The AI Drake ‘Ghostwriter’ is back with a new song and is chasing a Grammy Another track by Ghostwriter, another one for Travis Scott and 21 Savage. This one features the AI-generated voices of course. And it’s got a message from Ghostwriter to the two artists at the end. “Artists now have the ability to…

Apple is reportedly spending ‘millions of dollars a day’ training AI According to a new report from The Information, Apple is investing millions of dollars per day into artificial intelligence. The company is reportedly working on multiple AI models across several teams. Apple’s unit that works on conversational AI is called “Foundational Models,” per The…

Slack’s AI tool that can recap channels and threads starts testing this winter In an update on Wednesday, Slack announces that it will start testing a new AI tool called Slack AI this winter. The company says it will also start testing Slack lists in the winter. One of the features that Slack AI will…

Amazon has ended its periodicals program, and independent publishers are panicking In March, Amazon announced that it would stop offering subscriptions in the United States. It has since become part of the Kindle Unlimited program, which allows people to pay a monthly fee for access to books and magazines subscriptions. A recent editorial in the…