Technology

The vast majority of people whose call records have been stolen by Chinese hackers have not been notified, according to industry sources, and there is no indication that most affected people will be notified in the near future.

More than one in four people currently integrate speech recognition into their daily lives. A new algorithm developed by a University of Copenhagen researcher and his international colleagues makes it possible to interact with digital assistants like “Siri” without any internet connection. The innovation allows for speech recognition to be used anywhere, even in situations where security is paramount.

I just received notice about this as being a potential Class Member.

Saudi Arabia is hosting a major United Nations conference on internet governance while dozens of people remain imprisoned for peaceful online speech, Human Rights Watch said today. The 19th annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) will be held from December 15 to 19 in Riyadh, under the theme of “Building our Multistakeholder Digital Future.” The annual forum features multistakeholder policy dialogue on internet-related public policy issues.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has donated $1m (£786,000) to an inauguration fund for President-elect Donald Trump.

Python security developer-in-residence decries use of bots that 'cannot understand code'

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On Tuesday, an international team of researchers unveiled BadRAM, a proof-of-concept attack that completely undermines security assurances that chipmaker AMD makes to users of one of its most expensive and well-fortified microprocessor product lines. Starting with the AMD Epyc 7003 processor, a feature known as SEV-SNP—short for Secure Encrypted Virtualization and Secure Nested Paging—has provided the cryptographic means for certifying that a VM hasn’t been compromised by any sort of backdoor installed by someone with access to the physical machine running it.

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Apple's initial AI features were met with lukewarm reception, but the upcoming iOS 18.2 update promises a more substantial AI experience for iPhone users.

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One reason hyperlinks work like they do – why they index other kinds of affiliation – is that they were first devised to exhibit the connections researchers made among different sources as they developed new ideas. Early plans for what became the hypertext protocol of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web were presented as tools for documenting how human minds tend to move from idea to idea, connecting external stimuli and internal reflections. Links treat creativity as the work of remediating and remaking, which is foregrounded in the slogan for Google Scholar: ‘Stand on the shoulders of giants.’

TikTok's bid to overturn a law which would see it banned or sold in the US from early 2025 has been rejected.

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Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely. Disregarding all of bitcoin's shortcomings, a financial instrument that brings out the worst in people—greed—won't change the world for the better.

Do you know how much of a scumbag you have to be to attack a hospital.

Romanian civil society is alarmed about political advertisement on TikTok breaching European and national laws and how that benefited an extremist candidate in the elections. EDRi member ApTI with 20 other NGOs from Romania call upon the European Commission and the national authorities to take swift action and investigate, as elections are still ongoing.

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And if you don't know who Holthaus is..."

Good piece on the intersection between technology and politics, and the influence that the US government has on US-based technology companies.

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Matthew Hodgson, technical co-founder of the Matrix open standard, told us: "This has nothing to do with the Matrix protocol; it's just an unfortunate naming coincidence."

archive link: https://archive.is/MFa7R

Dutch and French police on Tuesday shut down a major encryption service used by criminal gangs, saying it even outrivalled illegal communication tools previously cracked by law enforcement, the EU's judicial agency said.

Musk says for-profit OpenAI harms public interest—and his own company, xAI.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google is asking a federal appeals court to throw out a ruling in an antitrust case brought by Fortnite-maker Epic Games that would force the search giant to overhaul its Play mobile app store.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17343934

Sixteen Next Generation Internet (NGI) projects are pleased to announce the transition to Mastodon and PeerTube, two European open-source platforms, for their communication and content-sharing needs. This strategic move aligns with NGI’s commitment to fostering an Internet that embodies European values of trust, security, and inclusion.

CAFE by GE for those who are wondering.

*Analysis written by Anda Iulia Solea, Lecturer in Cybercrime at the University of Portsmouth.*

With the recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), web developers increasingly apply their code-generation capabilities to website design. However, since these models are trained on existing designerly knowledge, they may inadvertently replicate bad or even illegal practices, especially deceptive designs (DD).

The large language model of the OpenGPT-X research project is now available for download on Hugging Face: "Teuken-7B" has been trained from scratch in all 24 official languages of the European Union (EU) and contains seven billion parameters. Researchers and companies can leverage this commercially usable open source model for their own artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), the OpenGPT-X consortium – led by the Fraunhofer Institutes for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and for Integrated Circuits IIS – have developed a large language model that is open source and has a distinctly European perspective.

In truth, the mega-platforms and their pocket-warlord leaders fell into their roles largely by chance and have since attempted to rule as though extraordinarily consequential global rulemaking and governance by a handful of US companies built to exploit human feeling for financial gain were a sensible way to arrange the world. Facebook was born from a website made for elite students to rank their classmates’ sexual attractiveness; Twitter was a watercooler where bored office workers could get attention by telling jokes in public. It’s as if 3M’s accidental invention of Post-It notes while failing to make space glue landed them a UN veto. [...] Few, if any, of this moment’s apparently unstoppable tech platforms will survive for long. The people on them will eventually leave—when they’re forced to do so by the continuous degradation of their experience, or because they’re forced to do so because their governments put the hammer down, as Brazil recently demonstrated—or sometimes when they just get tired of platform leaders acting like clowns and boosting troll-agents of openly fascist chaos into power. And that there is therefore not only an opportunity to provide more humane places for those people to go, but a responsibility to do so.

German automaker Volkswagen (VW) on Wednesday announced it would sell its operations in China's northwestern Xinjiang region.

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A company that verifies the identities of TikTok, Uber, and X users, sometimes by processing photographs of their faces and pictures of their drivers’ licenses, exposed a set of administrative credentials online for more than a year potentially allowing hackers to access that sensitive data, according to screenshots and data obtained by 404 Media.

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Why is this still so funny to me?

In spring, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg invited more than a dozen professors and academics to a series of dinners at his home to discuss how Facebook could better keep its platforms safe from election disinformation, violent content, child sexual abuse material, and hate speech. Alongside these secret meetings, Facebook was regularly making pronouncements that it was spending hundreds of millions of dollars and hiring thousands of human content moderators to make its platforms safer. After Facebook was widely blamed for the rise of “fake news” that supposedly helped Trump win the 2016 election, Facebook repeatedly brought in reporters to examine its election “war room” and explained what it was doing to police its platform, which famously included a new “Oversight Board,” a sort of Supreme Court for hard Facebook decisions.

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Hacking group RedJuliett compromised two dozen organisations in Taiwan and elsewhere, report says.

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There’s something of a misunderstanding in the UK property industry that agents are luddites, clinging to fax machines and Rolodexes, but quite the opposite is true. Sales and letting agents like nothing more than finding new efficiencies – whether through careful outsourcing, digital signatures or virtual tours, begging the question, Are you embracing AI?

Electric vehicles that can take off and land vertically, but then fly like a plane, are already being sold and used by hospitals and shipping companies. These vehicles have 5 batteries that give it a range of over 350 miles using current battery technology, though the batteries are intended to be swapped over the life of the aircraft, much like the engine of a traditional aircraft, however, future batteries could feature improvements, meaning the vehicle gets *better* over time. The redundancy that Electric motors allow more easily than mechanical motors means this aircraft is far safer than anything else in the air.

Facial recognition startup Clearview AI reached a settlement Friday in an Illinois lawsuit alleging its massive photographic collection of faces violated the subjects’ privacy rights, a deal that attorneys estimate could be worth more than $50 million.

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Experts aren’t unanimous about whether the AI-powered search startup’s practices could expose it to legal claims ranging from infringement to defamation—but some say plaintiffs would have strong cases.

TikTok says it offered the US government the power to shut the platform down in an attempt to address lawmakers' data protection and national security concerns.

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