Welcome to the TechMade Red Home for Friday, September 8, 2023. I'm Brian McCulloch today. You really need to update your Apple devices right now. Here come the AI-generated misinformation campaigns. Microsoft will defend you from lawsuits if you use their AI. And in the weekend long-rate suggestions, might AI finally give us a real-life, Dr. Do a little. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Public service announcement. Update all of your Apple devices to sweet.
Because Apple has released macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watch OS updates to address two zero-day flaws that Citizen Lab says were already being used to deliver that NSO Group's Pegasus spyware. Cybersecurity researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto said that all users of Apple devices should update their operating systems immediately to fix the bugs.
Last week, while checking the device of an individual employed by a Washington DC-based civil society organization with international offices, Citizen Lab found an actively exploited zero-click vulnerability being used to deliver NSO Group's Pegasus mercenary spyware. The researchers said the exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones, running the latest version of iOS 16.6 without any interactions from the victim.
The researchers said one bug tracked as CVE 2023 41064 allowed devices, including some iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches, to become vulnerable to attack when processing a maliciously crafted image. Apple said it affects the image IO framework specifically. The other vulnerability CVE 2023 41061 similarly creates security issues if a device is sent to a maliciously crafted attachment. That bug arose in the company's wallet function.
In both cases, Apple said it was aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited. Apple declined to comment more about the bugs. Citizen Lab said it had immediately disclosed our findings to Apple and assisted in their investigation. The software updates applied to macOS Ventura, iOS, iPadOS, and WatchOS. The patches were made available as part of regular updates to those products. They were not labeled as rapid security responses.
The term Apple uses for bug fixes issued urgently between full OS updates. With the disclosure of these two vulnerabilities, the company has now patched 13 zero days in 2023. Since it was first developed in 2011, Pegasus has been used across the globe often by governments spying on their citizens. It has been deployed to target assassinated Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, members of the Catalan independence movement and human rights investigators in Mexico.
In recent years, regulators have attempted to prevent its spread with the European Parliament urging EU member nations to ban it and US President Joe Biden. Sign an executive order earlier this year blocking the use of commercial spyware by the government. Former FTX digital markets co-CEO Ryan Salami has pled guilty to US campaign finance and money transmitting charges and will forfeit more than $1.5 billion. As part of the deal, going to the desk.
Salami, who was co-CEO of FTX's Bahamas entity FTX digital markets, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to make unlawful contributions and defraud the Federal Election Commission and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transferring business. I made political contributions in my name that were funded by transfers from an Alameda subsidiary Salami told Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is also overseeing Sam Bankman-Freeds trial as he entered his guilty plea. The transfers were categorized as loans.
Salami said, but, quote, it was understood that they would not be repaid. The donations according to Salami were for the benefit of initiatives introduced by others but supported by Sam Bankman-Freed, unquote. As part of his plea agreement with the government, Salami has been ordered to forfeit more than one and a half billion dollars. He agreed to forfeit six million dollars before his sentencing, expected in March of next year.
To help cover this amount, Salami has already agreed to give the government a 2021 Porsche automobile and multiple properties, including two Massachusetts homes, and ownership of the East-Rude Farm Corporation and Entity Salami owns. Should Salami pay the six million dollars and turn over the various properties by the set deadlines referred to as the substitute assets, he will be off the hook for the full amount.
A DOJ filing said, upon receipt of the payment, the US shall accept the payment and substitute assets in full satisfaction of the money judgment, the filing said. The DOJ could still pursue the full one and a half billion dollars if it turns out that Salami lied in a financial affidavit or if he otherwise interferes with the government's attempt to deal with the assets the document said. Additionally, Salami was ordered to pay more than $5.5 million in restitution to FTX debtors.
According to a different DOJ document, the one and a half billion dollars Salami will forfeit represents property involved in the unlicensed money transmitter charge. I guess we should expect this to be only the beginning of something like this. Microsoft says, Chinese state-affiliated hackers are using AI to generate content designed to quote, go viral across social networks in the US and other democracies.
We have observed China-affiliated actors leveraging AI-generated visual media in a broad campaign that largely focuses on politically divisive topics such as gun violence and denigrating US political figures and symbols. The visuals generated during the campaign are more quote, I catching than the awkward visuals previously deployed in Chinese operations. The researchers noted in a report and blog post published Thursday morning.
The activity is part of Chinese information operations increasing success and engaging target audiences around the world, which includes quote, China-state-affiliated multilingual social media influencer initiative that has quote, successfully engaged target audiences in at least 40 languages and grown its audience to over 103 million.
The researchers said in the report, Chinese state-sponsored propaganda is pushed by a network of more than 230 state media employees and affiliates who masquerade as independent social media influencers across all major Western social media platforms. The researchers said, part of this activity includes social media personas operated by real people that employ fictitious or stolen identities that conceal connections with the Chinese government and share artificially generated content.
This relatively high quality visual content has already drawn higher levels of engagement from authentic social media users. The researchers said, simultaneously Chinese-related cyber espionage operations continue a pace, including the Operation Revealed in May, where hackers use stolen Microsoft authentication keys to steal US cabinet officials emails ahead of strategic diplomatic meetings between US and Chinese officials.
Microsoft said in a separate blog post Wednesday that the Chinese hacking group in that case tracked as Storm 0558, compromised a Microsoft engineers' corporate account in April 2021 to gain access to the keys. Microsoft also revealed in May that Chinese linked hacking operations targeted critical infrastructure entities in the US and Guam, possibly as part of efforts to lay the groundwork for disrupting communications between the US and Asia in the event of a crisis.
That operation was linked to a group tracked as Volt Typhoon, but at least two other distinct Chinese-link hacking groups continue to target the US defense industrial base broadly according to the report. China has displayed a, quote, particular focus on the South China Sea region. The researchers said in Thursday's report in activity that, quote, signals attempts to gain competitive advantages for China's foreign relations and strategic military aims, end quote.
Microsoft has committed to defending its customers, at least customers of its AI co-pilots products from copyright infringement lawsuits, as long as they've, quote, used the guardrails and content filters effectively. Quoting Bloomberg, Microsoft also pledged to pay related fines or settlements and said it has taken steps to ensure its co-pilots respect copyright. We believe in standing behind our customers when they use our products.
Microsoft said we are charging our commercial customers for our co-pilots, and if their use creates legal issues, we should make this our problem rather than our customers problem. Generative AI applications scoop up existing content such as art, articles, and programming code, and use it to generate new material that can simplify or automate a range of tasks.
Microsoft is baking the technology developed with partner OpenAI into many of its biggest products, including office and windows, potentially putting customers in legal jeopardy. It's not the first time Microsoft has deployed a legal shield to keep customers loyal. In the 2000s, the company offered indemnification to partners and later customers using or reselling its software, a bid to differentiate Microsoft from Linux and other open source software makers.
In 2017, Microsoft by then a seller of open source software itself offered to protect customers of its Azure cloud products from legal claims. The company in June announced a program to help customers ensure the AI programs they run on Microsoft platforms meet global laws and regulations. Earlier this year, Adobe also offered subscribers of its AI tools legal protection against copyright infringement.
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According to SimilarWeb, usage of ChatchyPT continues to decline. ChatchyPT's desktop and mobile website visits fell 3.2% month over month to 1.43 billion in August, following 10% drops in each of the previous two months. But there might be a reason for this. Quoting writers. The amount of time visitors spent on the website has also been declining monthly since March. From an average of 8.7 minutes on site to 7 minutes on site in August.
But August worldwide, unique visitors ticked up to 180.5 million users from 180 million. School coming back into session in September may help ChatchyPT's traffic and usage. And some schools have begun to embrace it. US ChatchyPT traffic in August rose slightly in concert with American schools being back in session. Students seeking homework help appears to be part of the story. The percentage of younger users of the website dropped over the summer and is now starting to bounce back.
Said David F. Carr of SimilarWeb who regularly tracks ChatchyPT and its competitors. Before met his threads launch, ChatchyPT was the fastest growing consumer application ever and is now one of the top 30 websites in the world. Time for the week on long resuggestions. We recently had a piece about whether or not the quality of the website wire cutter had gone downhill. Well this piece from Vulture asked if Rotten Tomatoes is crapped now too. Largely due to people gaming it. Quote.
Another problem and where the trickery often begins is that Rotten Tomato scores are posted after a movie receives only a handful of reviews. Sometimes this few as five. Even if those reviews may be an unrepresentative sample. This is sort of like a cable news network declaring an election night winner after a single county reports its results. But studios see it as a feature since with a little elbow grease. They can sometimes fool people into believing a movie is better than it is. Here's how.
When a studio is prepping the release of a new title, it will screen the film for critics in advance. It's a film publicist job to organize these screenings and invite the writers they think will respond most positively. Then that publicist will set the movies review embargo in parts so that it's initial tomato meter is as high as possible at the moment when it can have maximal benefits for word of mouth and early ticket sales.
Granted that is not rocket science or even particularly new but the strategy can be surprisingly effective on tentpole releases for which studios can leverage the growing universe of fan run websites whose critics are generally more admiring of comic book movies than those who write for mainstream outlets. No offense to comicbookmovie.com. For example, in February the tomato meter score for Ant-Man and the Wasp, Quantum Mania debuted at 79% based on its first batch of reviews days later.
After more critics had weighed in, it's rating sank into the 40s. But the gambit may have worked. Quantum Mania had the best opening weekend of any movie in the Ant-Man series at $106 million. The second weekend with its rottenness more firmly established, the film's grossest slid 69%, the steepest drop-off in Marvel history. Then everybody's been talking about this big profile of open AI in wired by the great friend of the show Stephen Levy.
For Altman and his company ChatGPT and GPT4 are merely stepping stones along the way to achieving a simple and seismic mission. One these technologists may as well have branded on their flesh. That mission is to build artificial general intelligence, a concept that's so far been grounded more in science fiction than science and to make it safe for humanity.
The people who work at open AI are fanatical in their pursuit of that goal, though as any number of conversations in the office cafe will confirm, the build AGI bit of the mission seems to offer more rock sightment to its researchers than the make it safe bit. These are people who do not shy from casually using the term superintelligence. They assume that AI's trajectory will surpass whatever peak biology can attain.
The company's financial documents even stipulate a kind of exit contingency for when AI wipes away our whole economic system. It's not fair to call open AI a cult, but when I asked several of the company's top brass if someone could comfortably work there if they didn't believe AGI was truly coming, and that it's rival with Mark one of the greatest moments in human history, most executives didn't think so. Why would a non-believer want to work here, they wondered.
The assumption is that the workforce now at approximately 500, though it might have grown since you began reading this paragraph, has self-selected to include only the faithful. At the very least, as Altman puts it, once you get hired, it seems inevitable that you'll be drawn into the spell. And finally today, think about what it is that generative AI actually does. It finds patterns, right? It parses language.
So what if generative AI is on the verge of fulfilling one of human kinds oldest witches? The ability to talk to and understand animals, quoting science news, explores. Begus is a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. He got the chance last summer to observe sperm whales in their wild Caribbean habitat off the coast of the island nation of Dominica. With him, we're a marine biologist and roboticists. There were also cryptographers and experts in other fields.
All have been working together to listen to sperm whales and figure out what they might be saying. They call this project CETI, that's short for Citation Translation Initiative because sperm whales are a type of CETATION. To get started, project CETI has three listening stations. Each one is a cable hanging deep in the water from a buoy at the surface. Along the cable, several dozen underwater microphones record whale sounds.
From the air, drones record video, and sounds, soft, fish-like robots do the same underwater. Succeeded cup tags on the whales, capture even more data. But just collecting all these data isn't enough. The team needs some way to make sense of it all. That's where artificial intelligence or AI comes in. A type of AI known as machine learning can sift through vast amounts of data to find patterns.
Thanks to machine learning, you can open an app and use it to help you talk to someone who speaks Japanese or French or Hindi. One day, the same tech might translate sperm whale clicks. Project CETI's team is not the only group turning to AI for help deciphering animal talk. Researchers have trained AI models to sort through the sounds of prairie dogs, dolphins, naked mole rats, and many other creatures could their efforts crack the codes of animal communication.
San Francisco, I am coming to you. A month from today, I'll be attending the first ever AI Engineer Summit. It's being organized by among other folks, friend of the show Sean SWX Wang. You can find out more at the website AI.engineer. I will be there October 8th through the 10th, so Chris and I will probably try to organize another podcast, listen or meet up. If folks are interested, more details on that when we have it, but please check out AI.engineer.
The first ever conference for this new discipline, this new career field should be cool to attend. Talk to you on Monday.