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"Let's say you have an IoT device that is well protected with functions that can be accessed through a well-defined API; even if you can control the device through the API, you probably can't do too much harm. Firmware, the programming inside the device has logical constraints that don't allow you, for example, to close garage doors while someone is in the way of them or overheat a device so that it combusts.  We used to trust that hardware, such as a common kitchen appliance, could be trusted and could not be easily altered without physically dismounting the device. But with today's "smart" appliances, this is no longer the case."

""There has been a high degree of improvisation in the rollout of Chivo and a great deal of opacity," says Ricardo Castaneda, a local economist. "The app asks for access to your microphone and your contacts, which are not needed for a wallet. Bitcoin might be a distraction but given the decision to push ahead with the plan despite popular opposition and the advice of experts, it could also be an important pillar of Bukele's political project.""

"According to a report by Sophos, malware and spam are on the rise on social networks such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. In the last year, 57% of users report they have been spammed via social networking sites, an increase of 70.6% compared to last year. Furthermore, 36% of users claim they've been sent malware via social networking sites, which is a rise of 69.8% from last year. On the other hand, CEOs of companies are concerned that their employees' usage of social networks is posing a security risk for their company. Sophos has surveyed more than 500 organizations, discovering that 72% of them think social networks are a danger for their companys, with 60% of them tagging Facebook as the biggest security risk, followed by MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, says that Facebook is the biggest threat because it's the biggest social network out there, but he also places some of the blame on Facebook's own privacy rules. "When Facebook rolled-out its new recommended privacy settings late last year, it was a backwards step, encouraging many users to share their information with everybody on the internet," he says. Interestingly enough (and contrasted to some of the reports we've seen lately), Cluley thinks that simply barring access to Facebook is not the solution. "Social networks can be an essential part of the business mix today," he says, "and the answer is not to bar staff from participating in them but to apply some 'social security' instead.""

""The social engineering type of attack does not tend to scale [up] easily given the time and effort required to succeed, and therefore is more often than not used by individuals rather than the 'call centre' approach of criminal enterprises," Goddard says. "The trigger to target an individual could be targeted, or opportunistic such as overhearing a conversation or getting access to sensitive or exploitable information like a picture or bank statement.""

"The flaw, dubbed "Log4Shell", may be the worst computer vulnerability discovered in years. It was uncovered in an open-source logging tool that is ubiquitous in cloud servers and enterprise software used across the industry and the government. Unless it is fixed, it grants criminals, spies and programming novices alike, easy access to internal networks where they can loot valuable data, plant malware, erase crucial information and much more."

"Recent advances in AI are likely to spell the end of the traditional school classroom, one of the world's leading experts on AI has predicted. Prof Stuart Russell, a British computer scientist based at the University of California, Berkeley, said that personalised ChatGPT-style tutors have the potential to hugely enrich education and widen global access by delivering personalised tuition to every household with a smartphone. The technology could feasibly deliver "most material through to the end of high school", he said."

"In the 20 years since the birth of social media, child sexual exploitation has become one of the biggest challenges facing tech companies. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the internet is used by human traffickers as "digital hunting fields", allowing them access to both customers and potential victims, with children being targeted by traffickers on social media platforms. The biggest of these, Facebook, is owned by Meta, the tech giant whose platforms, which also include Instagram, are used by more than 3 billion people worldwide. In 2020, according to a report by US-based not-for-profit the Human Trafficking Institute, Facebook was the platform most used to groom and recruit children by sex traffickers (65%), based on an analysis of 105 federal child sex trafficking cases that year. The HTI analysis ranked Instagram second most prevalent, with Snapchat third."

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

"You're nailing the problem: the tech sales people and the politicians are all on the same drug, which is "This tech is perfect", because it's cheaper than more police. There's a lawsuit in the US because a black man was wrongly arrested based on facial recognition. Tech companies need to be held to account. One company we focused on, Clearview AI, scraped social networks - collected images of people's faces and data from publicly available information - to create its software. Facial recognition relies on artificial intelligence. It needs to study faces. And only the government - the DVLA etc - and social networking companies have access to a lot of faces."

"The Italian supreme court ordered prosecutors last month to disclose how the Sky ECC data had been retrieved, arguing that it was impossible to have a fair trial if the accused is unable to access the evidence or assess its reliability and legality, a position supposed by the NGO Fair Trials. Whether prosecutors choose to do so could determine whether the arrests made this week lead to convictions or not. Prosecutors in the UK face a similar dilemma in relation to the hacking of EncroChat, another secret messaging platform that had the added facility of a "panic" button that when pressed would immediately erase the phone's contents."

"Now, as more people use AI to produce and publish content, an obvious question arises: What happens as AI-generated content proliferates around the internet, and AI models begin to train on it, instead of on primarily human-generated content? A group of researchers from the UK and Canada have looked into this very problem and recently published a paper on their work in the open access journal arXiv. What they found is worrisome for current generative AI technology and its future: "We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models.""

"Amazon is to pay $25m (£20m) to settle allegations that it violated children's privacy rights with its Alexa voice assistant. The company agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it was accused of failing to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents. It was found to have kept hold of sensitive data for years. Amazon's doorbell camera unit Ring will also pay out after giving employees unrestricted access to customers' data."

"Parents tell Guardian Australia that "playing" on Omegle is something kids do at parties, at sleepovers. It just takes one of the group to have a screen with internet access and before long they are chatting to strangers all over the world."

"Ring recently revealed how often the answer to that question has been yes. The Amazon company responded to an inquiry from US Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), confirming that there have been 11 cases in 2022 where Ring complied with police "emergency" requests. In each case, Ring handed over private recordings, including video and audio, without letting users know that police had access to-and potentially downloaded-their data. This raises many concerns about increased police reliance on private surveillance, a practice that's long gone unregulated."

"Internet shutdowns are not just used by governments facing civil unrest. Every year millions of internet users from Sudan to Syria, Jordan to India also lose internet access during exam season as governments pull the plug in a bid to avoid hi-tech cheating."

"This week, the tech giant announced it had begun rolling out automatic encryption for direct messages on its Facebook and Messenger platforms to more than 1 billion users. Under the changes, Meta will no longer have access to the contents of the messages that users send or receive unless one participant reports a message to the company. As a result, messages will not be subject to content moderation unless reported, which social media companies undertake to detect and report abusive and criminal activity. Encryption hides the contents of a message from anyone but the sender and the intended recipient by converting text and images into unreadable cyphers that are unscrambled on receipt."

"ChatGPT will see you now. The artificial intelligence tool may be better than a doctor at following recognised treatment standards for depression, and without the gender or social class biases sometimes seen in the physician-patient relationship, a study suggests. The findings were published in Family Medicine and Community Health, the open access journal owned by British Medical Journal. The researchers said further work was needed to examine the risks and ethical issues arising from AI's use."

"A boarding prep school in West Sussex, Cottesmore School, has made history by appointing an AI robot, Abigail Bailey, as its "principal headteacher". Created in collaboration with an artificial intelligence developer, the robot is designed to support the school's headmaster, Tom Rogerson, by providing advice on various issues such as supporting staff members and helping pupils with ADHD. Abigail Bailey functions similarly to the AI service ChatGPT, where users ask questions and receive answers from the chatbot's algorithms. The AI principal has been developed with extensive knowledge in machine learning and educational management, allowing it to analyze vast amounts of data. According to Mr. Rogerson, having the AI robot to assist him is calming and reassuring. He considers the role of a school leader to be lonely and believes that having an entity to rely on is invaluable. He also intends to make the publicly-available online robot accessible to state school headteachers."

"Have you been looking forward to somniferous alkaloid compounds customized to your personal metabolic dependency profile? Good news! 23andMe is selling everyone's DNA to the pharmaceutical industry. GSK Plc will pay 23andMe Holding Co. $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications."

"TikTok moderators have struggled to assess content related to the Israel-Gaza conflict because the platform removed an internal tool for flagging videos in a foreign language, the Guardian has been told. The change has meant moderators in Europe cannot flag that they do not understand foreign-language videos, for example, in Arabic and Hebrew, which are understood to be appearing more frequently in video queues. The Guardian was told that moderators hired to work in English previously had access to a button to state that a video or post was not in their language. Internal documents seen by the Guardian show the button was called "not my language", or "foreign language"."