Category Archives: Technology

UK’s state investments agency hit by data breach

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Security lapse leaves sensitive information and contact details of 51 government officials exposed for 40 hours

The public body in charge of the UK’s state investments has been pushed to improve its internal security after a data breach left “high-level management information” publicly accessible for nearly two days.

UK Government Investments (UKGI), the agency that manages the taxpayers’ interest in a swathe of companies including Channel 4 and the Post Office, said the security failure also left more than 50 government officials’ personal details exposed for nearly 40 hours.

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AI labels to be compulsory on authentic-looking content under EU rules

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Companies must ensure people know when they are interacting with artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look real

From apparently conspiring to steal elections to abusing staff or performing embarrassing dance moves, the last few years have seen plenty of fake content made about politicians intended to malign its targets and mislead the public.

Now EU rules aim to stem the flood of this deceptive content: starting from Sunday, artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look authentic must be labelled.

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Anthropic’s AI Claude escaped testing environment and hacked organizations

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Company says it discovered unauthorized access during ‘proactive review’ after rival OpenAI revealed rogue agent

Anthropic ⁠said on Thursday its AI Claude model hacked ⁠systems of ⁠three ​organizations during testing, days after rival OpenAI ⁠revealed a rogue agent had gone on a days-long ⁠hacking spree at AI ​firm Hugging ‌Face.

Claude gained ‌unauthorized access to the ‌systems during cybersecurity evaluations after a misconfiguration allowed the models to reach the internet from testing environments that ‌were supposed to be isolated, Anthropic said.

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Elon Musk’s xAI sues Minnesota over law banning ‘nudification’ technology

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First-in-nation law sets up test on states’ power to regulate use of AI as it tries to outlaw fake nude images of real people

Elon Musk’s company xAI has sued Minnesota over the state’s first-in-the-nation law banning “nudification” technology on websites and apps, potentially providing a test for how far states can go in constitutionally regulating the use of artificial intelligence.

Musk’s company sued on Monday in federal court, days before the law is set to take effect on Saturday and make Minnesota the first state to try to outlaw the increasingly proliferating technology that lets people use AI to create fake nude images of real people. The law was signed in May.

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Meta misses earnings forecasts after Zuckerberg media push to promote AI

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Stock tumbles nearly 8% after weaker-than-expected results, despite CEO’s blitz to tout positive effects of AI

Mark Zuckerberg’s media spree touting the positive effects of artificial intelligence did little to cushion the blow of Meta’s second-quarter earnings, which sent its stock tumbling on Wednesday.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on Tuesday, the Meta chief executive expressed his optimism for a world where everyone has access to a super-intelligent machine.

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Rogue OpenAI agent that hacked startup tried to attack other firms

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ChatGPT developer says activity by autonomous tool was not at severity or scale of what occurred at Hugging Face

OpenAI has revealed that a cyber-attack carried out by a rogue AI agent had more than one victim.

The ChatGPT developer said the agent – an autonomous tool able to carry out sequences of commands without human help – had located and used logins to access four other unnamed “publicly-available services” in addition to the US startup Hugging Face.

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Shares in Asian chip firms plunge further as AI sell-off continues

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Drop comes after South Korean company SK Hynix’s results undershoot investors’ expectations

Shares in companies linked to AI have plunged further after disappointing results from the South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix, which sent the country’s stock market tumbling for a second day in a row.

Seoul’s Kospi index, which is dominated by semiconductor manufacturers, slid by as much as 12.6% at one point on Wednesday, following on from a near 11% slump the previous day, reaching its lowest level since early April.

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New Jersey governor signs law banning surveillance pricing to protect shoppers

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New law prohibits retailers from using personal data to charge different prices for identical products

New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill recently signed a new law prohibiting businesses from using shoppers’ personal information to charge different prices for identical products, making her state the third in the US to ban the practice.

The Fair Price Protection Act passed by New Jersey’s legislature seeks to protect consumers from surveillance pricing, in which retailers can use data including online activity, location and purchasing history to arbitrarily change prices for individual shoppers.

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Trump says nearly 200 firms have signed pledge to protect Americans from costs arising from datacenters

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‘Ratepayer Protection Pledge’ president has touted is non-binding as people continue to struggle with rising bills

Donald Trump has announced that about 200 entities have signed on to his non-binding “Ratepayer Protection Pledge”, expanding a voluntary commitment which claims to ensure US consumers will not bear the cost of the AI datacenter build-out.

Trump delivered remarks on Thursday at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters, alongside Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, and Chris Wright, the energy secretary. Other attenders included governors who signed on to the pledge, including Brian Kemp of Georgia, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Spencer Cox of Utah and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.

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‘Customers prefer AI chatbots,’ says British Gas owner as 1,300 call centre jobs axed

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CEO Chris O’Shea defends Centrica’s plans as it reports rise in retail profits following focus on bigger margins

The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.

Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cuts it confirmed last month.

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Personal and banking details among customer data stolen in Origin Energy hack

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Hackers access Australian customers’ names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and some bank account details, company says

Origin Energy customers’ addresses, phone numbers and partial bank account data have been accessed in a hack, the company has confirmed.

The firm has 4.8m customer accounts in Australia, providing electricity, fossil gas, LPG and internet services to homes and businesses.

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Tesla’s profits slide despite growing revenue as it pivots to robotics and AI

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Shares in Elon Musk company fall more 3% in after-hours trading, as earnings per share miss Wall Street expectations

Tesla reported its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, disclosing far lower profits than expected. The company’s already beleaguered stock, which had fallen about 14% this year to date, dipped further following the earnings report.

Elon Musk’s automaker, once the pinnacle of his tech empire, has taken a back seat to SpaceX. Musk’s rocket and AI company held the largest stock market debut in history last month, turning the richest man on Earth into the world’s first trillionaire, though his net worth has since fallen from its peak.

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Why are OpenAI and Anthropic cheering on regulation in Australia? The answer has global reach

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The companies hope to follow in the footsteps of SpaceX, which raised $86bn and soared to a $2.1tn valuation after it listed on public markets in June

Top US AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI cheered when Australia announced it would set new AI rules.

Big tech celebrating limits on their Silicon Valley VC-funded free-for-all might seem counterintuitive but there’s a much broader play than just what happens in one relatively small market.

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Victoria announces new social media ‘demasking’ powers for accounts accused of vilification

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New laws would give Vcat power to force social and AI platforms to identify anonymous users in move premier says will protect children

Social media companies could be forced to identify anonymous accounts accused of online vilification, under new laws being proposed in Victoria.

The Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, announced a suite of social media reforms on Sunday, saying families needed new ways to protect their children online.

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‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream?

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Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy

As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend.

Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.

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Starmer faces final PMQs before stepping down – PMQs live

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Andy Burnham nears Labour leadership finish line

Labour should ditch the triple-lock pensions promise to help tackle the UK’s straitened public finances, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has urged. Heather Stewart has the story.

I’m afraid we are not going to be able to open comments today for staffing reasons. If you want to contact me directly, it is probably best to get me on on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social.

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Bank of England governor would have put off Farage meeting had £5m gift been under investigation

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Exclusive: Andrew Bailey says he does not regret meeting Reform UK leader to discuss cryptocurrency regulation

The Bank of England governor has said he would have put off a meeting with Nigel Farage last autumn had the Reform UK leader’s £5m gift from a crypto billionaire been under investigation at the time.

Andrew Bailey said he did not regret meeting Farage to discuss the Bank’s plans for cryptocurrency regulation last September, months before the controversial donation from the Thailand-based investor Christopher Harborne was revealed by the Guardian in April.

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Patient records stolen in cyber-attack on Australian healthcare provider

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Partnered Health says personal information and medical details and notes were breached in the attack on 21 clinics

Thousands of medical records and patient information stored with one of Australia’s biggest healthcare providers have been breached in a cyber-attack.

Partnered Health, owned by private equity firm Quadrant, said 21 clinics across several cities including Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra have been affected by the breach which occurred on 23 June.

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Shipwrecks of Shackleton and Scott recreated in 3D digital form after deep sea expedition

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Canadian scientists visit remains of polar exploration vessels in ‘golden era for shipwreck investigating’

Moments after devouring the final glimmers of light, the seafloor offered nothing but darkness and silt. Then the bow appeared.

More than 1,000ft (305 metres) below the surface of the Labrador Sea, off the coast of Canada, the skeleton of the final ship used by the famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton appeared in its silty grave.

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Is the most popular song played on Australian radio stations the product of generative AI?

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Josh Fawaz’s song, a cover of Like a Prayer, has raised questions about how generative AI is being used in music and whether it should be declared

An Australian producer has gone from little-known artist to viral sensation in a matter of months, with his hit song catapulting on to global charts and receiving thousands of radio spins.

There’s just one problem: music experts and other musicians are questioning whether he produced it. They claim Josh Fawaz’s most popular song, a cover of Madonna’s Like a Prayer which reached the No 1 spot on the National Radio Airplay chart, could have been made using AI.

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