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Microsoft said Wednesday it had detected and disrupted instances of U.S. adversaries -- chiefly Iran and North Korea and to a lesser extent Russia and China -- using or attempting to exploit generative AI developed by the company and its business partner to mount or research offensive cyber operations. From a report: The techniques Microsoft observed, in collaboration with its partner OpenAI, represent an emerging threat and were neither "particularly novel or unique," the Redmond, Washington, company said in a blog post. But the blog does offer insight into how U.S. geopolitical rivals have been using large-language models to expand their ability to more effectively breach networks and conduct influence operations. Microsoft said the "attacks" detected all involved large-language models the partners own and said it was important to expose them publicly even if they were "early-stage, incremental moves." Cybersecurity firms have long used machine-learning on defense, principally to detect anomalous behavior in networks. But criminals and offensive hackers use it as well, and the introduction of large-language models led by OpenAI's ChatGPT upped that game of cat-and-mouse.

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Now that it can be strapped to our faces and worn to strange places, opinions about Apple's Vision Pro are flying left and right. Entering the chat is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has more at stake than perhaps anyone on earth if Apple does to headsets what the iPhone did to smartphones. From a report: In a video posted to his Instagram account on Tuesday, Zuckerberg gives his official verdict on the Vision Pro versus his company's latest Quest 3 headset: "I don't just think that Quest is the better value, I think Quest is the better product, period." While being filmed by the Quest 3's video passthrough system in his living room, Zuckerberg highlights the tradeoffs Apple made to get the fanciest display possible into something that can be worn on your head in an acceptable form factor. He says the Quest 3 weighs 120 grams less, making it more comfortable to wear for longer. He also says it allows for greater motion due to its lack of a wired battery pack and wider field of view than the Vision Pro. He thinks the Quest's option of physical hand controllers and hand tracking for input is better, though he says he's a fan of eye tracking for some use cases and teases that it will return to future Meta headsets after debuting in the Quest Pro. He says the Quest has a better "immersive" content library than Apple, which is technically true for now, though he admits that the Vision Pro is a better entertainment device. And then there's the fact that the Quest 3 is, as Zuck says, "like seven times less expensive."

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Mark Tyson reports via Tom's Hardware: A serial burglar in Edina, Minnesota is suspected of using a Wi-Fi jammer to knock out connected security cameras before stealing and making off with the victim's prized possessions. [...] Edina police suspect that nine burglaries in the last six months have been undertaken with Wi-Fi jammer(s) deployed to ensure incriminating video evidence wasnâ(TM)t available to investigators. The modus operandi of the thief or thieves is thought to be something like this: - Homes in affluent areas are found - Burglars carefully watch the homes - The burglars avoid confrontation, so appear to wait until homes are empty - Seizing the opportunity of an empty home, the burglars will deploy Wi-Fi jammer(s) - "Safes, jewelry, and other high-end designer items," are usually taken A security expert interviewed by the source publication, KARE11, explained that the jammers simply confused wireless devices rather than blocking signals. They usually work by overloading wireless traffic âoeso that real traffic cannot get through,â the news site was told. [...] Worryingly, Wi-Fi jamming is almost a trivial activity for potential thieves in 2024. KARE11 notes that it could buy jammers online very easily and cheaply, with prices ranging from $40 to $1,000. Jammers are not legal to use in the U.S. but they are very easy to buy online.

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The Chromium team is prototyping Web Monetization to allow websites to automatically receive micro payments from visitors for their content, bypassing traditional ad or subscription models. The Register reports: Earlier this month, Alexander Surkov, a software engineer at open source consultancy Igalia, announced the Chromium team's intent to prototype Web Monetization, an incubating community specification that would let websites automatically receive payments from online visitors, as opposed to advertisers, via a web browser and a designated payment service. "Web monetization is a web technology that enables website owners to receive micro payments from users as they interact with their content," Surkov wrote in an explanatory document published last summer. "It provides a way for content creators and website owners to be compensated for their work without relying solely on ads or subscriptions. Notably, Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features -- small payments and no user interaction -- that address several important scenarios currently unmet on the web." "Open Payments API is an open HTTP-based standard created to facilitate micro transactions on the web," wrote Surkov. "It is implemented by a wallet and enables the transfer of funds between two wallets. It leverages fine-grained access grants, based on GNAP (Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol), which gives wallet owners precise control over the permissions granted to applications connected to their wallet." The basic idea is web users will get a digital wallet, provided by Gatehub and Fynbos presently, and web publishers will add a link tag to their site's block formatted like so: . Thereafter, site visitors who have linked their digital wallet to their browser will pay out funds to the requesting publisher, subject to the browser's permissions policy.

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At least six major tech companies, including Adobe, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and TikTok, plan to sign an agreement this week that details how they'll attempt to stop the use of AI-generated election misinformation and deepfakes. ABC News reports: "In a critical year for global elections, technology companies are working on an accord to combat the deceptive use of AI targeted at voters," said a joint statement from several companies Tuesday. "Adobe, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, TikTok and others are working jointly toward progress on this shared objective and we hope to finalize and present details on Friday at the Munich Security Conference." The companies declined to share details of what's in the agreement. Many have already said they're putting safeguards on their own generative AI tools that can manipulate images and sound, while also working to identify and label AI-generated content so that social media users know if what they're seeing is real.

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Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: While there have been efforts by AMD over the years to make it easier to port codebases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA API to run atop HIP/ROCm, it still requires work on the part of developers. The tooling has improved such as with HIPIFY to help in auto-generating but it isn't any simple, instant, and guaranteed solution -- especially if striving for optimal performance. Over the past two years AMD has quietly been funding an effort though to bring binary compatibility so that many NVIDIA CUDA applications could run atop the AMD ROCm stack at the library level -- a drop-in replacement without the need to adapt source code. In practice for many real-world workloads, it's a solution for end-users to run CUDA-enabled software without any developer intervention. Here is more information on this "skunkworks" project that is now available as open-source along with some of my own testing and performance benchmarks of this CUDA implementation built for Radeon GPUs. [...] For those wondering about the open-source code, it's dual-licensed under either Apache 2.0 or MIT. Rust fans will be excited to know the Rust programming language is leveraged for this Radeon implementation. [...] Those wanting to check out the new ZLUDA open-source code for Radeon GPUs can do so via GitHub.

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Less than a week after naming Laura Chambers as interim CEO, Firefox's maker Mozilla said it is cutting about 60 jobs, or 5% of its workforce. The cuts are primarily in the product development organization. Bloomberg reports: "We're scaling back investment in some product areas in order to focus on areas that we feel have the greatest chance of success," Mozilla said in a statement. "We intend to re-prioritize resources against products like Firefox Mobile, where there's a significant opportunity to grow and establish a better model for the industry." Mozilla last cut a significant number of jobs four years ago at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The not-for-profit company, which competes with Alphabet Inc.'s Google Chrome, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Microsoft Corp.'s Edge, has been grappling with sliding market share of its Firefox web browser in recent years. So far in 2024, the tech sector has cut 32,000 jobs.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nintendo's Satellaview, a Japan-only satellite add-on for the Super Famicom, is a rich target for preservationists because it was the home to some of the most ephemeral games ever released. That includes a host of content for Nintendo's own games, including F-Zero. That influential Super Nintendo (Super Famicom in Japan) racing title was the subject of eight weekly broadcasts sent to subscribing Japanese homes in 1996 and 1997, some with live "Soundlink" CD-quality music and voiceovers. When live game broadcasts were finished, the memory cartridges used to store game data would report themselves as empty, even though they technically were not. Keeping that same 1MB memory cartridge in the system when another broadcast started would overwrite that data, and there were no rebroadcasts. As reported by Matthew Green at Press the Buttons (along with Did You Know Gaming's informative video), data from some untouched memory cartridges was found and used to re-create some of the content. Some courses, part of a multi-week "Grand Prix 2" event, have never been found, despite a $5,000 bounty offering and extensive effort. And yet, remarkably, the 10 courses in those later broadcasts were reverse-engineered, using a VHS recording, machine learning tools, and some manual pixel-by-pixel re-creation. The results are "north of 99.9% accurate," according to those who crafted it and exist now as a mod you can patch onto an existing F-Zero ROM. [...] Their work means that, 25 years later, a moment in gaming that was nearly lost to time and various corporate currents has been, if not entirely restored, brought as close as is humanly (and machine-ably) possible to what it once was.

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Speaking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that "very subtle societal misalignments" could make artificial intelligence systems wreak havoc. The Associated Press reports: "There's some things in there that are easy to imagine where things really go wrong. And I'm not that interested in the killer robots walking on the street direction of things going wrong," Altman said. "I'm much more interested in the very subtle societal misalignments where we just have these systems out in society and through no particular ill intention, things just go horribly wrong." However, Altman stressed that the AI industry, like OpenAI, shouldn't be in the driver's seat when it comes to making regulations governing the industry. "We're still in the stage of a lot of discussion. So there's you know, everybody in the world is having a conference. Everyone's got an idea, a policy paper, and that's OK," Altman said. "I think we're still at a time where debate is needed and healthy, but at some point in the next few years, I think we have to move towards an action plan with real buy-in around the world." [...] For his part, Altman said he was heartened to see that schools, where teachers feared students would use AI to write papers, now embrace the technology as crucial for the future. But he added that AI remains in its infancy. "I think the reason is the current technology that we have is like ... that very first cellphone with a black-and-white screen," Altman said. "So give us some time. But I will say I think in a few more years it'll be much better than it is now. And in a decade it should be pretty remarkable."

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Sean O'Kane reports via TechCrunch: Waymo is voluntarily recalling the software that powers its robotaxi fleet after two vehicles crashed into the same towed pickup truck in Phoenix, Arizona, in December. It's the company's first recall. Waymo chief safety officer Mauricio Pena described the crashes as "minor" in a blog post, and said neither vehicle was carrying passengers at the time. There were no injuries. He also said Waymo's ride-hailing service -- which is live in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin -- "is not and has not been interrupted by this update." The company declined to share video of the crashes with TechCrunch. Waymo said it developed, tested, and validated a fix to the software that it started deploying to its fleet on December 20. All of its robotaxis received that software update by January 12. "This voluntary recall reflects how seriously we take our responsibility to safely deploy our technology and to transparently communicate with the public," Pena wrote. The crashes that prompted the recall both happened on December 11. Pena wrote that one of Waymo's vehicles came upon a backward-facing pickup truck being "improperly towed." The truck was "persistently angled across a center turn lane and a traffic lane." Pena said the robotaxi "incorrectly predicted the future motion of the towed vehicle" because of this mismatch between the orientation of the tow truck and the pickup, and made contact. The company told TechCrunch this caused minor damage to the front left bumper. The tow truck did not stop, though, according to Pena, and just a few minutes later another Waymo robotaxi made contact with the same pickup truck being towed. The company told TechCrunch this caused minor damage to the front left bumper and a sensor. (The tow truck stopped after the second crash.) Last week, a Waymo autonomous vehicle was vandalized and burned by a crowd of people in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Rival operator Cruise suspended its operations while it investigates an incident where one of its robotaxis ran over a pedestrian who had been hit by another vehicle driven by a human.

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OpenAI must face a claim that it violated California unfair competition law by using copyrighted books from comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors to train ChatGPT without permission. From a report: But US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin on Monday also dismissed a number of Silverman and her coplaintiffs' other legal claims, including allegations of vicarious copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, negligence, and unjust enrichment. The judge gave the authors the opportunity to amend their proposed class action by March 13 to fix the defects in the complaint. The core of the lawsuit remains alive, as OpenAI's motion to dismiss, filed last summer, didn't address Silverman's claim of direct copyright infringement for copying millions of books across the internet without permission. Courts haven't yet determined whether using copyrighted work to train AI models falls under copyright law's fair use doctrine, shielding the companies from liability. Although Martinez-Olguin allowed the unfair competition claim to advance, she said the claim could be preempted by the federal Copyright Act, which prohibits state law claims that allege the same violation as a copyright claim.

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Estate agents are increasingly using AI tools to digitally furnish empty rental flats, a practice known as "virtual staging," to make them look occupied in listings. While virtual staging has existed for years, AI advancements have made the process faster and cheaper. One major UK estate agency already offers AI staging services to customers, Vice reported this week. Industry insiders cited by Vice said AI virtual staging is likely to become more widespread as costs fall. The unrealistic furniture from AI staging can be noticeable, such as bunk beds with overlapping ladders. But the technology continues advancing in quality. The story adds: Although some agents have experimented with using popular AI image generators like Dall-e and Midjourney to "fix" property pictures, the results are usually pretty bizarre, like in this example, where the AI has envisioned bookcases in every corner of the living room and put a hob at perfect height for a toddler. Companies like Virtual Staging AI, ModelProp and Gepetto, which describes itself as like "Pinterest on steroids," are now taking this technology and tailoring it specifically to virtual furnishing.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, Walmart is in talks to buy TV manufacturer Vizio for more than $2 billion. Shares of Vizio jumped 36% after the report, while Walmart's shares were down about 1%. From the report: Walmart, including its Sam's Club chain, has historically been Vizio's largest customer. Vizio is historically the largest television brand sold at Walmart by sales. The deal talks demonstrate the importance of consumer data and ad space for major retailers as they build out their ad businesses and compete with Amazon. In addition to being an e-commerce behemoth, Amazon is among the biggest ad players in the U.S. behind Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta Platforms. Amazon has also been building its own smart TV business. Developing...

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FTC chair Lina Khan is hunting for evidence that Microsoft, Google and Amazon require cloud computing spend, board seats or exclusivity deals in return for their investments in AI startups. From a report: At a Friday event, Khan framed today's AI landscape as an inflection point for tech that is "enormously important for opening up markets and injecting competition and disrupting existing incumbents." The FTC chair offered Axios' Sara Fischer new details of how she's handling a market inquiry into the relationship between Big Tech companies and AI startups, in an interview at the Digital Content Next Summit in Charleston, S.C. In handling the surge in AI innovation and its impacts on the broader tech and media landscape, Khan said she aims to tackle monopoly "before it becomes fully fledged." She said the FTC is looking for chokepoints in each layer of the AI tech stack: "chips. compute, foundational models, applications." Khan said she's also paying close attention to vertical integration -- when players look to extend dominance over one tech layer into adjacent layers -- or when they attempt acquisitions aimed at solidifying an existing monopoly. That includes any potential integration between Sam Altman's nascent chip project and OpenAI, though she said she welcomes chip competition.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Apple's iMessage will avoid regulation requiring interoperability with other messaging platforms under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), following the conclusion of an investigation by the regulator (via Bloomberg). The probe concluded that the iMessage platform and Microsoft's Bing do not hold a dominant enough position to be brought under the DMA's strict rules for services provided by big tech's so-called digital "gatekeepers," which include Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon, and TikTok, according to the EU. The EU has been working on legislation under the DMA that would have required Apple to make changes to iMessage to make it available on other platforms. The interoperability rules would have meant that Meta apps like WhatsApp or Messenger could request to interoperate with Apple's iMessage framework, and Apple would have been forced to comply within the EU. However, the EU probe found that iMessage falls outside the legislation because it is not widely used by businesses. The reprieve for Apple is part of a five-month market investigation by the European Commission. It's not all good news for Apple, though. The DMA is still forcing the company to implement updates that will allow iPhone and iPad users to download and install apps outside the App Store through alternative app marketplaces. The changes will arrive with iOS 17.4 in March.

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New York City's public schools chancellor said the city did not pass Tuesday's remote learning "test" due to technical issues. From a report: "As I said, this was a test. I don't think that we passed this test," David Banks said during a news briefing, adding that he felt "disappointed, frustrated and angry" as a result of the technical issues. NYC Public Schools did a lot of work to prepare for the remote learning day, Banks said, but shortly before 8 a.m. they were notified that parents and students were having difficulty signing onto remote learning. This is the first time NYC Public Schools has implemented remote learning on a snow day since introducing the no snow day policy in 2022. The district serves 1.1 million students in more than 1,800 schools. Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city's remote learning program. "IBM was not ready for primetime," Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school. IBM has since expanded their capacity and a total of 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said. "We'll work harder to do better next time," he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong.

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Jensen Huang took an indirect jab at Sam Altman when he said $7 trillion can buy "apparently all the GPUs." From a report: The Nvidia CEO made the quip at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Monday when asked how many GPU chips that much money could buy. Altman, the OpenAI chief, is reportedly trying to raise trillions to boost supplies of the chips needed for AI processing. Huang told the United Arab Emirates' AI minister, Omar Al Olama, that developing AI wouldn't cost as much as the amount Altman is seeking to raise. The Nvidia CEO said AI infrastructure costs would be considerably less than the $5 trillion to $7 trillion Altman is reportedly trying to raise because of expected advances in computing. "You can't assume just that you will buy more computers. You have to also assume that the computers are going to become faster and therefore the total amount that you need is not as much," Huang said. He also suggested that the cost of building AI data centers globally would amount to $2 trillion by 2029. Huang said: "There's about a trillion dollars' worth of installed base of data centers. Over the course of the next four or five years, we'll have $2 trillion worth of data centers that will be powering software around the world."

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When it comes to defeating patent trolls with crowd-sourced prior art, Cloudflare is now two-for-two after winning its latest case against Sable Networks. The Register: Sable Networks, which owns patents originally given to defunct "flow-based router" company Caspian Networks, sued Cloudflare and five other companies in 2021 alleging a whole host of violations of four patents now owned by Sable. A lot has changed since the case was filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, leading to a jury verdict last week that found Cloudflare not only didn't infringe on the single patent that made it to trial, but that the final patent claim at issue was invalid as well. It took the jury just two hours to return the result, Cloudflare said. "Since Sable first sued us, we've invalidated significant parts of three Sable patents, hamstringing their ability to bring lawsuits against other companies," Cloudflare's in-house counsel boasted on Monday. Cloudflare said that it managed to whittle the case down from four patents and "approximately 100 claims" to a single claim on one patent -- number 7,012,919 -- over the past three years. This is thanks in part to the assistance of outside investigators on Project Jengo, a scheme first launched in 2017 to get help digging up prior-art patents when Cloudflare sued by another patent troll, Blackbird Technologies. More: Cloudflare blog.

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Backblaze has published a report on hard drive failures for 2023, finding that rates increased during the year due to aging drives that it plans to upgrade. From a report: Backblaze, which focuses on cloud-based storage services, claims to have more than three exabytes of data storage under its management. As of the end of last year, the company monitored 270,222 hard drives used for data storage, some of which are excluded from the statistics because they are still being evaluated. That still left a collection of 269,756 hard drives comprised of 35 drive models. Statistics on SSDs used as boot drives are reported separately. Backblaze found one drive model exhibited zero failures for all of 2023, the Seagate 8 TB ST8000NM000A. However, this came with the caveat that there are only 204 examples in service, and these were deployed only since Q3 2022, so have accumulated a limited number of drive days (total time operational). Nevertheless, as Backblaze's principal cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein pointed out: "Zero failures over 18 months is a nice start."

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Wunderlist, a beloved to-do app known for its delightful design, was acquired by Microsoft in 2015 and discontinued years later. Now Wunderlist co-founder Christian Reber -- who apparently attempted to buy back Wunderlist to no luck -- has launched Superlist to revive its spirit. The new app focuses on centralized project management by compiling tasks, notes, files and more into shareable lists. It then automatically organizes tasks into a daily agenda. Superlist starts at $8 a month, but offers "uinlimited tasks, notes, and reminders, and unlimited private lists" for individuals at no cost.

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