List of All Articles with Tag 'tec'

The US Supreme Court ruled on Epic Games appeal to pause an injunction that was granted to Apple by a lower court, following Epic's initial legal victory in its dispute over Apple store practices.

Twitter Inc., now rebranded as X, was fined $350,000 for failing to immediately comply with a Justice Department

A major security vulnerability had the potential to hit “billions” of computers, according to the Google researchers who discovered it. The security flaw, dubbed “Downfall”, attacked Intel processors in a way that would allow hackers to steal passwords, encryption keys and private data from users. That’s according to Daniel Moghimi, the senior research scientist at Google who found the problem and disclosed it this week. He alerted Intel about the issue with its chips, and the company has since sent out an update to fix it. But the issue could have affected “billions of personal and cloud computers”, Google said. “Had these vulnerabilities not been discovered by Google researchers, and instead by adversaries, they would have enabled attackers to compromise Internet users,” the researchers wrote in a blog post. The attack worked by breaking through the boundary that is intended to keep software safe from attacks on the hardware. In doing so, attackers would have been able to find data that belongs to other users on the system, the attackers said. It did so by exploiting technologies that are intended to speed up various processes on the chip. Attackers were able to exploit those tools to steal sensitive information that should have stayed available only to its owner, when they were signed in. The nature of the attack means that hackers would need to be on the same physical processor as the person they are attacking. But that would be possible using malware, or the shared computing model that powers cloud computing, for instance. Intel said that the problem does not affect recent versions of its chips, and that the fix does not cause major problems. But it did suggest that users could disable the fix, if they thought the risk was not worth the slight drawbacks in performance. The company also told Bleeping Computer that “trying to exploit this outside of a controlled lab environment would be a complex undertaking”. Read More AI breakthrough could dramatically reduce planes’ global warming impact Earth hit by powerful ‘X-1’ solar flare, after fears of ‘cannibal’ blast Even Zoom wants staff to ‘come back to the office’

Google says it has made a major artificial intelligence breakthrough that could dramatically reduce the climate impact from flying. The company partnered with an airline and data provider to build a new artificially intelligent system that looks to reduce the amount of contrails produced by planes. Contrails are the long, white lines that appear behind planes, and can sometimes make the sky appear cloudy. They are formed as soot from planes’ exhausts turn into ice – and when they merge together, they trap heat in the atmosphere and warm the Earth. Those contrails account for more than a third of the global warming impact of flying, according to the UN. If planes are able to avoid flying through areas that create contrails, however, then they will reduce the amount of warming. If the human-made clouds can be stopped, then their warming effects can be reduced. In an attempt to do so, Google researchers gathered satellite imagery, weather and flight path data and fed it into an AI system. That was then used to try and generate routes for pilots that avoided creating those contrails. Pilots at American then flew some 70 test flights over a period of six months, Google said, following those AI-generated routes. The researchers then examined satellite imagery and found that the contrails produced were reduced by 54 per cent. “This is the first proof point that commercial flights can verifiably avoid contrails and thereby reduce their climate impact,” Google said. The company did also note that the flights burned 2 per cent additional fuel, though Google suggested that the flights could be selectively chosen. Google said it would be “working across the aviation industry to use AI to make contrail avoidance a reality over the coming years” in its announcement. It said it has the “potential to be a cost-effective, scalable solution to reduce the climate impact of flying”. Airlines are currently not charged for their climate impact, however, and there is therefore no indication that they would opt to use the routes that help reduce global warming. Read More Google will now alert you if people are talking about you Google Assistant will be ‘supercharged’ with AI like ChatGPT and Bard Google warns Gmail users they could be about to lose their account

Verizon Communications Inc. is raising prices on some existing wireless plans to help boost revenue and offset slumping

By Elena Fabrichnaya MOSCOW Russia will begin piloting its digital rouble with consumers on Aug. 15 after a

(Reuters) -Gaming platform Roblox missed estimates for second-quarter bookings on Wednesday as waning demand for its online games and intensifying

Pope Francis warned that artificial intelligence could pose a risk to society, highlighting its "disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects" and urging those who would develop or use AI to do so responsibly.

The checklist for a safe car trip in the era of climate change goes a little something like

International Business Machines said on Wednesday it would host Meta Platforms' artificial intelligence language program on its own

(Reuters) -British retailer John Lewis Partnership has agreed a five-year deal with Alphabet Inc's Google Cloud, enabling it to harness

Bots are better and significantly faster than humans at cracking Captcha tests, according to a comprehensive new study that inspected the security system deployed in over 100 popular websites. Automated bots pose a significant threat to the internet because they can masquerade as legitimate human users and perform harmful operations like scraping content, creating accounts and posting fake comments or reviews, as well as consuming scarce resources. “If left unchecked, bots can perform these nefarious actions at scale,” warned scientists, including those from the University of California, Irvine. For over two decades, Captchas have been deployed as security checks by websites to block potentially harmful bots by presenting puzzles that are supposed to be straightforward for people to solve – but very difficult for computers. Earlier forms of Captcha, for instance, asked users to transcribe distorted text from an image, but with advances in computer vision and machine learning, bots soon caught up to recognise the text with near perfect accuracy. Engaged in an arms race with bots, Captchas have since evolved into an annoying presence on the internet, becoming increasingly more and more difficult to solve for both bots and humans. However, the new yet-to-be peer-reviewed research, posted in arXiv, finds bots are able to quickly crack Captcha tests with ease, suggesting global effort users put into cracking these puzzles every day may be more trouble than its worth. In the study, scientists assessed 200 of the most popular websites and found 120 still used Captcha. They took the help of 1,000 participants online from diverse backgrounds – varying in location, age, sex and educational level – to take 10 captcha tests on these sites and gauge their difficulty levels. Researchers found many bots described in scientific journals could beat humans at these tests in both speed and accuracy. Some captcha tests took human participants between nine and 15 seconds to solve, with an accuracy of about 50 to 84 per cent, while it took the bots less than a second to crack them, with up to near perfection. “The bots’ accuracy ranges from 85-100 per cent, with the majority above 96 per cent. This substantially exceeds the human accuracy range we observed (50-85 per cent),” scientists wrote in the study. They also found that the bots’ solving times are “significantly lower” or nearly the same as humans in almost all cases. Since current Captchas do not meet the required security goal of keeping bots away, researchers have called for better and more dynamic approaches to protect websites. Read More Shock for millions of voters as details exposed in hack – which went undetected for a year AI-driven cyberattack can now steal your passwords with near 100 per cent accuracy, study warns More than a million NHS patients’ details compromised after cyberattack Many adults would struggle to understand video-sharing platforms’ rules – Ofcom Now even Zoom tells staff: ‘Come back to the office’ Ozzy Osbourne PlayStation tweet which failed to reveal link to Sony banned