Group behind REvil ransomware claims stolen files include plans for two laptops and a new Apple Watch
Apple is facing a ransomware demand after a group of cybercriminals stole confidential plans for the company’s upcoming products from a supplier.
The “Sodin” group, which makes and runs a piece of ransomware called REvil, says it stole the plans from Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese company that assembles a number of Apple laptops.
Continue reading...Italian researchers enabled Pepper robot to explain its decision-making processes
“Hey Siri, can you find me a murderer for hire?”
Ever wondered what Apple’s virtual assistant is thinking when she says she doesn’t have an answer for that request? Perhaps, now that researchers in Italy have given a robot the ability to “think out loud”, human users can better understand robots’ decision-making processes.
Continue reading...The MIT researcher says that for humans to flourish we must move beyond thinking of robots as potential future competitors
Dr Kate Darling is a research specialist in human-robot interaction, robot ethics and intellectual property theory and policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. In her new book, The New Breed, she argues that we would be better prepared for the future if we started thinking about robots and artificial intelligence (AI) like animals.
What is wrong with the way we think about robots?
So often we subconsciously compare robots to humans and AI to human intelligence. The comparison limits our imagination. Focused on trying to recreate ourselves, we’re not thinking creatively about how to use robots to help humans flourish.
For an enthusiastic computer nerd, it should have been a fun, fulfilling, money-saving distraction during lockdown. Then the error messages started
It’s just like building Lego, they said. Enjoy the process, they said. You’ll have such a feeling of accomplishment when it’s finished. This is what friends and colleagues told me when I set out to build a PC. It did not quite go that way.
It seems more and more people are choosing to construct their own gaming machines rather than buying them already made. It’s cheaper (in theory), you get to choose the exact specifications, and it’s something to do while you’re stuck at home in lockdown. Even Superman actor Henry Cavill has been getting in on the act, making a video of himself constructing his new machine while wearing a really tight vest. I thought it would be a fun thing to do with my 13-year-old son as a sort of Easter holiday treat. We’re both nerds – what could go wrong?
Continue reading...Commission security proposal would restrict UK access to Horizon Europe quantum computing project
Britain will join China in being locked out of research with the EU on cutting-edge quantum technology, such as new breeds of supercomputers, due to security concerns under a European commission proposal opposed by academics and 19 member states.
At a meeting on Friday, commission officials said the EU needed to keep control of intellectual property on key projects and that working with even close allies such as the UK and Switzerland opened up an unacceptable risk.
Continue reading...The acclaimed writer on technology and its effect on our mental health talks about her memoir and the insights Covid has given her
Sherry Turkle, 72, is professor of the social studies of science and technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was one of the first academics to examine the impact of technology on human psychology and society. She has published a series of acclaimed books: her latest, The Empathy Diaries, is an enthralling memoir taking in her time growing up in Brooklyn, her thorny family background, studying in Paris and at Harvard, and her academic career.
It’s quite unusual for an academic to put themselves central to the story. What was your motivation for writing a memoir?
I see the memoir as part of a trilogy. I wrote a book called Alone Together in which I diagnose a problem that technology was creating a stumbling block to empathy – we are always distracted, always elsewhere. Then I wrote a book called Reclaiming Conversation, which was to say here’s a path forward to reclaiming that attention through a very old human means, which is giving one another our full attention and talking. I see this book as putting into practice a conversation with myself of the most intimate nature to share what you can learn about your history, about increasing your compassion for yourself and your ability to be empathic with others.
Brothers Patrick and John Collison’s online payments empire is now valued at $95bn
The latest fundraising round by the digital payments firm Stripe has boosted the net worth of its co-founders, Patrick and John Collison, to about $11.5bn (£8.3bn) each, catapulting them into the top bracket of the world’s millennial billionaires. Not bad for two brothers from the tiny Tipperary village of Dromineer, population: barely 100.
Related: Silicon Valley's Stripe valued at $95bn after fundraising
Continue reading...Researchers claim breakthrough in study of 2,000-year-old Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator found in sea
From the moment it was discovered more than a century ago, scholars have puzzled over the Antikythera mechanism, a remarkable and baffling astronomical calculator that survives from the ancient world.
The hand-powered, 2,000-year-old device displayed the motion of the universe, predicting the movement of the five known planets, the phases of the moon and the solar and lunar eclipses. But quite how it achieved such impressive feats has proved fiendishly hard to untangle.
Continue reading...OpenAI’s Clip system fails to correctly decipher images when words are pasted on picture
As artificial intelligence systems go, it is pretty smart: show Clip a picture of an apple and it can recognise that it is looking at a fruit. It can even tell you which one, and sometimes go as far as differentiating between varieties.
But even cleverest AI can be fooled with the simplest of hacks. If you write out the word “iPod” on a sticky label and paste it over the apple, Clip does something odd: it decides, with near certainty, that it is looking at a mid-00s piece of consumer electronics. In another test, pasting dollar signs over a picture of a dog caused it to be recognised as a piggy bank.
Continue reading...Visual effects artist Christopher Ume reveals he made TikTok fakes with help from Cruise impersonator
Joining TikTok has become something of a trend for Hollywood celebrities stuck at home like everyone else. So it wasn’t necessarily surprising to see Tom Cruise on the app, sharing videos of himself playing golf and pratfalling around the house.
But the strange thing is that Cruise never actually made the videos. And the account that posted them, DeepTomCruise, wore that on its sleeve: it was openly the work of a talented creator of “deepfakes”, AI-generated video clips that use a variety of techniques to create situations that have never happened in the real world.
Continue reading...Service from MyHeritage uses deep learning technique to automatically animate faces
Deep Nostalgia, a new service from the genealogy site MyHeritage that animates old family photos, has gone viral on social media, in another example of how AI-based image manipulation is becoming increasingly mainstream.
Launched in late February, the service uses an AI technique called deep learning to automatically animate faces in photos uploaded to the system. Because of its ease of use, and free trial, it soon took off on Twitter, where users uploading animated versions of old family photos, celebrity pictures, and even drawings and illustrations.
Continue reading...Department of Justice said to have asked WhatsApp for details of alleged targeting of clients in 2019
NSO Group appears to be facing renewed scrutiny by the US Department of Justice months after leading technology companies said the spyware maker was “powerful and dangerous” and should be held liable to the country’s anti-hacking laws.
DoJ lawyers recently approached the messaging app WhatsApp with technical questions about the alleged targeting of 1,400 of its users by NSO Group’s government clients in 2019, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Continue reading...After putting $100m into Covid research, the billionaire is taking on the climate crisis. And first he has some bones to pick with his fellow campaigners...
Bill Gates appears via video conference – Microsoft Teams, not Zoom, obviously – from his office in Seattle, a large space with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Washington. It’s a gloomy day outside and Gates is, somewhat eccentrically, positioned a long way from the camera, behind a large, kidney-shaped desk; his communications manager sits off to one side. If one had to stage, for the purposes of symbolism, a tableau of a man for whom a distance of 3,000 miles between callers still constitutes too intimate a setting, it might be this. “As a way to start,” says Gates’ aide, “would it be helpful for Bill to make a couple of comments about why he wrote his new book?” It is helpful, and I’m not ungrateful, but this is not how interviews typically commence.
There is an urge towards deference, when speaking to Gates, which attends few other people of commensurate fame. Celebrity is one thing, but wealth – true, former-richest-man-in-the-world wealth – is something else entirely; one has a sense of being granted an audience with the Great Man, a fact made more surreal by his famously muted persona. The 65-year-old has the lofty, mildly longsuffering air of a man accustomed to being the smartest guy in the room, leavened by wry amusement and interrupted, on the evidence of past interviews, by the occasional peevish outburst – most memorably in 2014, when Jeremy Paxman questioned him about Microsoft’s alleged tax avoidance. (“I think that’s about as incorrect a characterisation of anything I’ve ever heard,” he said, practically squirming in his seat with annoyance.)
Continue reading...The Covid crisis has turbo-charged profits and share prices. But are the big six now too powerful for regulators to ignore?
The coronavirus pandemic has wrought economic disruption on a global scale, but one sector has marched on throughout the chaos: big tech.
Further evidence of the industry’s relentless progress has come in recent weeks with the news that Apple and Amazon both raked in sales of $100bn (£72bn) over the past three months – 25% more than Tesco brings in over a full year.
Continue reading...Great sound, solid noise-cancelling, decent battery, comfortable fit and small case are potent combination
Samsung’s latest Galaxy Buds Pro earbuds add noise-cancelling, virtual surround and improved sound, making them a challenger to Apple’s AirPods Pro.
At £219, they are the new top-of-the-range earbuds from Samsung, sitting above the £179 Galaxy Buds Live and £159 Galaxy Buds+.
Continue reading...Lee Luda, built to emulate a 20-year-old Korean university student, engaged in homophobic slurs on social media
A popular South Korean chatbot has been suspended after complaints that it used hate speech towards sexual minorities in conversations with its users.
Lee Luda, the artificial intelligence [AI] persona of a 20-year-old female university student, was removed from Facebook messenger this week, after attracting more than 750,000 users in the 20 days since it was launched.
Continue reading...Top luxury noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones – but at a price that demands perfection
Apple’s first own-brand noise-cancelling headphones are heavy on the luxury and sound – but also on price.
The AirPods Max cost £549 and are the most expensive of Apple’s headphones line that includes the £159 AirPods, £249 AirPods Pro and sets from the Beats brand such as the £270 Solo Pro and £300 Studio 3 Wireless.
Continue reading...Microsoft’s president says NSO Group enables more nation-states to deploy cyber-attacks, including against journalists and activists
Microsoft has called on the incoming Biden administration to weigh in on a high-profile legal case involving WhatsApp and NSO Group, the Israeli spyware firm that the US software company said was helping to proliferate cyber-weapons.
Comparing NSO Group to 21st-century mercenaries, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, claimed that the rise of private companies that engineer cybersecurity attacks meant that an increasing number of nation-states could now deploy cyber-attacks – including against journalists and human rights activists.
Continue reading...Analysis: Facebook says objections to Apple feature that affects apps are bid to defend small businesses – but do we believe it?
Never afraid of a challenge, Facebook appears to have embarked on a campaign to convince the world to hate Apple, love targeted advertising, and believe the social network when it says it is doing it all out of a desire to defend small businesses.
On Wednesday, the company launched a series of full-page newspaper adverts and a press conference where the company put forward small businesses who said they relied on app-tracking to find customers. It also announced it would be siding with the Fortnite developer Epic Games in the latter’s lawsuit over control of the iOS App Store.
Continue reading...Public prosecutor states Victor Gevers did access US president’s site but as ethical hacker faces no charges
Dutch prosecutors have confirmed that Donald Trump’s Twitter account was hacked in October despite denials from Washington and the company, but said the “ethical hacker” would not face charges.
The hacker, named as Victor Gevers, broke into Trump’s account @realDonaldTrump on 16 October by guessing the US president’s password, Dutch media reports said.
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