HACKERS UPDATES

  Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use. When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said: I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you like, that’s been the understanding. Microsoft is currently the target of multiple lawsuits alleging that it — and OpenAI — are stealing copyrighted online stories to train generative AI models, so it may not surprise you to hear a Microsoft exec defend it as perfectly legal. I just didn’t expect him to be so very publicly and obviously wrong! I am not a lawyer, but even...

  Remember Tesla Cybertruck's oversized windshield wiper? The one that appears too large to exist, at least not without malfunctioning in some way? Well, it turns out that it is. Tesla just issued a recall for over 11,000 Cybertrucks over a windshield wiper issue. The recall includes all model year 2024 Cybertruck vehicles manufactured from Nov. 13, 2023, to June 6, 2024, which is pretty much all of them given that the Cybertruck deliveries started in Nov. 2023. "On affected vehicles, the front windshield wiper motor controller may stop functioning due to electrical overstress to the gate driver component," the recall report says. "A non-functioning windshield wiper may reduce visibility in certain operating conditions, which may increase the risk of a collision." The report also said that Tesla is not aware of any collisions, injuries, or deaths relating to the issue. For Cybertruck owners...

  TeamViewer, the company that makes widely used remote access tools for companies, has confirmed an ongoing cyberattack on its corporate network.  In a statement Friday, the company attributed the compromise to government-backed hackers working for Russian intelligence, known as APT29 (and Midnight Blizzard). The Germany-based company said its investigation so far points to an initial intrusion on June 26 “tied to credentials of a standard employee account within our corporate IT environment.”  TeamViewer said that the cyberattack “was contained” to its corporate network and that the company keeps its internal network and customer systems separate. The company added that it has “no evidence that the threat actor gained access to our product environment or customer data.”  Martina Dier, a spokesperson for TeamViewer, declined to answer a series of questions from TechCrunch, including whether th...

  Temu—the Chinese shopping app that has rapidly grown so popular in the US that even Amazon is reportedly trying to copy it—is "dangerous malware" that's secretly monetizing a broad swath of unauthorized user data, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday. Griffin cited research and media reports exposing Temu's allegedly nefarious design, which "purposely" allows Temu to "gain unrestricted access to a user's phone operating system, including, but not limited to, a user's camera, specific location, contacts, text messages, documents, and other applications." "Temu is designed to make this expansive access undetected, even by sophisticated users," Griffin's complaint said. "Once installed, Temu can recompile itself and change properties, including overriding the data privacy settings users believe they have in place." ...

  Nobody asked for this AI search bullshit, Google. Not only are the AI generated responses demonstrably worse than normal, they’re infringing on intellectual property rights, killing traditional media, and—thanks to a new Jacobin report we now know—soaking up gobs of electricity in the process. Artificial intelligence-powered search engines are an all-around bad idea, and a stop should be put to the whole thing as quickly as humanly possible. Google’s AI Overviews feature has only been operational for two months, but it’s already done a lot of harm and will only continue to get worse. As it turns out, these AI search results require around ten times the energy to power them as a traditional Google search. According to research firm Digiconomist, adding AI-generated answers to all Google searches could approach the energy usage of the entire country of Ireland. Each search requires three watt-hours of...

  Elon Musk may have just won approval for a $56 billion pay package from his adoring supporters, but someone in Fort Lauderdale is clearly not a fan of the controversial CEO. Last week, dozens of Tesla Cybertrucks were defaced with the words “Fuck Elon” in black spray paint, according to  InsideEVs citing local news reports. Police say that 34 stainless steel trucks were tagged with the message, which was discovered on Friday. The Cybertrucks were being stored in the public parking lot, without any fencing or security, likely being held because of a previously reported problem with the windshield wiper. Tesla is also experiencing an inventory pileup as a result of cooling demand for its electric vehicles. Local news reports that the spray paint was easily removed, with a few trucks still showing some black smudges. But thanks to a few social media accounts, we can still exper...

  Catfishing is when a person uses false information and images to create a fake identity online with the intention to trick, harass, or scam another person. It is often on social media or dating apps and websites as a common tactic used to form online relationships under false pretenses, sometimes to lure people into financial scams. The person doing the pretending, or the “catfish” may also obtain intimate images from a victim and use them to extort or blackmail the person. This is known as sextortion, or they may use other personal information shared with them to commit identity theft. The term is believed to originate from the 2010 documentary “Catfish,” in which a young Nev Schulman starts an online relationship with teenager “Megan”, who turns out to be an older woman. In the final scene of the documentary, the woman’s husband shares an anecdote about how live cod used to be exported from Alaska alongside ca...

  Russian hackers have stolen records covering 300m patient interactions with the NHS, including the results of blood tests for HIV and cancer, the Guardian can reveal. The amount and sensitive nature of the data obtained by the Qilin hacking gang has caused alarm among NHS bosses, who are scrambling to set up a helpline to deal with inquiries from what could be a large number of worried patients and also health service staff. Seven hospitals run by two NHS trusts were affected by the attack, which targeted Synnovis, a private/NHS joint venture that provides pathology services such as blood tests and transfusions. It is unclear at this stage if the hack involves only hospitals in the trusts or is more widespread. The NHS’s anxiety about the impact of the attack increased on Friday after Qilin acted overnight on a threat to put stolen NHS data into the public domain, an indication that Synnovis has refused to p...

    Big tech companies are still trying to rally workers back into physical offices, and many workers are still not having it. Based on a recent report, computer-maker Dell has stumbled even more than most. Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid. Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week. Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company. Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell's plan to restore its in-office culture. The publi...

  Elon Musk on Wednesday tried to walk back remarks lashing out at advertisers fleeing his X social media platform. At the Cannes Lions advertising festival in Cannes, France, Musk was asked by WPP CEO Mark Read what he meant by telling advertisers threatening to pull ads from the platform late last year to “go f--- yourself.” Musk said it was meant as a general point on free speech rather than a comment to the wider advertising industry. “It wasn’t to advertisers as a whole,” Musk said. “It was with respect to freedom of speech, I think it is important to have a global free speech platform, where people from a wider range of opinions can voice their views.” “In some cases, there were advertisers who were insisting on censorship,” Musk said. “At the end of the day … if we have to make a choice between censorship and losing money, [or] censorship and money, or free speech and losing money, we’re going to choose the ...

  The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to bar the sale of antivirus software made by Russia's Kaspersky Lab in the United States, with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo saying that Russia's influence over the company poses a significant security risk. The software's privileged access to a computer's systems could allow it to steal sensitive information from American computers or install malware and withhold critical updates, enhancing the threat, a source said, noting that Kaspersky's customers include critical infrastructure providers and state and local governments.   "Russia has shown it has the capacity and ... the intent to exploit Russian companies like Kaspersky to collect and weaponize the personal information of Americans and that is why we are compelled to take the action that we are taking today," Raimondo said on a briefing call with reporters. Kaspersky said it believed the U.S. decision was based on "the pr...

  The US Department of Justice has convicted a Nigerian national of participating in a business email compromise (BEC) scam worth $1.5 million. The Feds say Ebuka Raphael Umeti, 35, perpetuated the scam with two alleged partners in crime, using a combination of social engineering and malicious software to pull off the million-dollar BEC scheme. A BEC fraud involves phishing emails and deception to get businesses and organizations to send money or valuable data to attackers, usually over email. According to the DoJ, Umeti got involved in BEC scams as early as February 2016, when one of his alleged co-conspirators, fellow Nigerian national Franklin Ifeanyichukwu Okwonna, is said to have sent Umeti a phishing email template. The collaborators started to see success in 2018, siphoning $571,000 from a New York wholesaler and $400,000 from a Texan metal supplier. In the following years, the scammers started domain spoofing, signed up for VoIP numbers, and communicated over the gaming-foc...

  Photos of Brazilian kids—sometimes spanning their entire childhood—have been used without their consent to power AI tools, including popular image generators like Stable Diffusion, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned on Monday. This act poses urgent privacy risks to kids and seems to increase risks of non-consensual AI-generated images bearing their likenesses, HRW's report said. An HRW researcher, Hye Jung Han, helped expose the problem. She analyzed "less than 0.0001 percent" of LAION-5B, a dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. The dataset does not contain the actual photos but includes image-text pairs derived from 5.85 billion images and captions posted online since 2008. Among those images linked in the dataset, Han found 170 photos of children from at least 10 Brazilian states. These were mostly family photos uploaded to personal and parenting blogs most Internet surfers wouldn't easily stumble upon, "as well as stills from YouTube vide...