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BBC News - NatWest online services hit by cyber attack - 0 views

  • ails safe On Friday, a number of customers reported problems getting on to the bank's website, from which they normally access their accounts online. The RBS Group - which includes RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank - said that NatWest was worst affected by the "deliberate" disruption. "Due to a surge in internet traffic deliberately directed at the NatWest website, customers experienced difficulties accessing some of our customer websites today," a spokeswoman for RBS said. "This deliberate surge of traffic is commonly known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. We have taken the appropriate action to restore the affected websites. At no time was there any risk to customers. We apologise for the inconvenience caused." She stressed that the latest incident was not connected to Monday's IT failure and no customer information was compromised at any time. The incident on Monday also affected cash machines and card payments and prompted an apology from the boss of the RBS group, Ross McEwan. More on This Story Big Banking Latest news EU fines banks over rate-rigging We've kept businesses alive - RBS Cable hands RBS file to watchdog Parties row over Co-op 'smears' JP Morgan in record $13bn settlement Police search home of Paul Flowers Barclays plans to cut 1,700 jobs $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-1"); Basics Funding for Lending: How does it work? Q&A: Standard Chartered allegations HSBC report: Key findings Q&A: Basel rules on bank capital $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-2"); Guides and analysis Shock: A banker can live on £1m salary RBS's new boss, Ross McEwan, will not receive any bonus for his first 15 months in the job, and won't pocket any bonus payments till at least 2017. When will banking ever change? Q&A: Banker bonus cap plan What has changed since the crisis? Explaining the Libor scandal Timeline: Libor-fixing scandal $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-6");
  • Details safe On Friday, a number of customers reported problems getting on to the bank's website, from which they normally access their accounts online. The RBS Group - which includes RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank - said that NatWest was worst affected by the "deliberate" disruption. "Due to a surge in internet traffic deliberately directed at the NatWest website, customers experienced difficulties accessing some of our customer websites today," a spokeswoman for RBS said. "This deliberate surge of traffic is commonly known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. We have taken the appropriate action to restore the affected websites. At no time was there any risk to customers. We apologise for the inconvenience caused." She stressed that the latest incident was not connected to Monday's IT failure and no customer information was compromised at any time. The incident on Monday also affected cash machines and card payments and prompted an apology from the boss of the RBS group, Ross McEwan. More on This Story Big Banking Latest news EU fines banks over rate-rigging We've kept businesses alive - RBS Cable hands RBS file to watchdog Parties row over Co-op 'smears' JP Morgan in record $13bn settlement Police search home of Paul Flowers Barclays plans to cut 1,700 jobs $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-1"); Basics Funding for Lending: How does it work? Q&A: Standard Chartered allegations HSBC report: Key findings Q&A: Basel rules on bank capital $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-2"); Guides and analysis Shock: A banker can live on £1m salary RBS's new boss, Ross McEwan, will not receive any bonus for his first 15 months in the job, and won't pocket any bonus payments till at least 2017. When will banking ever change? Q&A: Banker bonus cap plan What has changed since the crisis? Explaining the Libor scandal Timeline: Libor-fixing scandal $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-6"); hyper-depth-st
  • 's website, from which they normally access their accounts online. The RBS Group - which includes RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank - said that NatWest was worst affected by the "deliberate" disruption. "Due to a surge in internet traffic deliberately directed at the NatWest website, customers experienced difficulties accessing some of our customer websites today," a spokeswoman for RBS said. "This deliberate surge of traffic is commonly known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. We have taken the appropriate action to restore the affected websites. At no time was there any risk to customers. We apologise for the inconvenience caused." She stressed that the latest incident was not connected to Monday's IT failure and no customer information was compromised at any time. The incident on Monday also affected cash machines and card payments and prompted an apology from the boss of the RBS group, Ross McEwan. More on This Story Big Banking Latest news EU fines banks over rate-rigging We've kept businesses alive - RBS Cable hands RBS file to watchdog Parties row over Co-op 'smears' JP Morgan in record $13bn settlement Police search home of Paul Flowers Barclays plans to cut 1,700 jobs $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-1"); Basics Funding for Lending: How does it work? Q&A: Standard Chartered allegations HSBC report: Key findings Q&A: Basel rules on bank capital $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-2"); Guides and analysis Shock: A banker can live on £1m salary RBS's new boss, Ross McEwan, will not receive any bonus for his first 15 months in the job, and won't pocket any bonus payments till at least 2017. When will banking ever change? Q&A: Banker bonus cap plan What has changed since the crisis? Explaining the Libor scandal Timeline: Libor-fixing scandal $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-6"); Your Savings
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  • and cash machines. Details safe On Friday, a number of customers reported problems getting on to the bank's website, from which they normally access their accounts online. The RBS Group - which includes RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank - said that NatWest was worst affected by the "deliberate" disruption. "Due to a surge in internet traffic deliberately directed at the NatWest website, customers experienced difficulties accessing some of our customer websites today," a spokeswoman for RBS said. "This deliberate surge of traffic is commonly known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. We have taken the appropriate action to restore the affected websites. At no time was there any risk to customers. We apologise for the inconvenience caused." She stressed that the latest incident was not connected to Monday's IT failure and no customer information was compromised at any time. The incident on Monday also affected cash machines and card payments and prompted an apology from the boss of the RBS group, Ross McEwan. More on This Story Big Banking Latest news EU fines banks over rate-rigging We've kept businesses alive - RBS Cable hands RBS file to watchdog Parties row over Co-op 'smears' JP Morgan in record $13bn settlement Police search home of Paul Flowers Barclays plans to cut 1,700 jobs $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-1"); Basics Funding for Lending: How does it work? Q&amp;A: Standard Chartered allegations HSBC report: Key findings Q&amp;A: Basel rules on bank capital $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-2"); Guides and analysis Shock: A banker can live on £1m salary RBS's new boss, Ross McEwan, will not receive any bonus for his first 15 months in the job, and won't pocket any bonus payments till at least 2017. When will banking ever change? Q&amp;A: Banker bonus cap plan What has changed since the crisis? Explaining the Libor scandal Timeline: Libor-fixing scandal $render("hyper-related-assets","group-title-6"); <h4 cla
  • It came less than a week after a major computer failure left some customers unable to use cards and cash machines.
  • On Friday, a number of customers reported problems getting on to the bank's website
  • Due to a surge in internet traffic deliberately directed at the NatWest website, customers experienced difficulties accessing some of our customer websites today,
dr tech

8 Skilled Jobs That May Soon Be Replaced by Robots - 0 views

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    "Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced
dr tech

What a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a bikini tells us about the disturbing fu... - 0 views

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    "Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)"
dr tech

Millions of Workers Are Training AI Models for Pennies | WIRED - 0 views

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    "Some experts see platforms like Appen as a new form of data colonialism, says Saiph Savage, director of the Civic AI lab at Northeastern University. "Workers in Latin America are labeling images, and those labeled images are going to feed into AI that will be used in the Global North," she says. "While it might be creating new types of jobs, it's not completely clear how fulfilling these types of jobs are for the workers in the region." Due to the ever moving goal posts of AI, workers are in a constant race against the technology, says Schmidt. "One workforce is trained to three-dimensionally place bounding boxes around cars very precisely, and suddenly it's about figuring out if a large language model has given an appropriate answer," he says, regarding the industry's shift from self-driving cars to chatbots. Thus, niche labeling skills have a "very short half-life." "From the clients' perspective, the invisibility of the workers in microtasking is not a bug but a feature," says Schmidt. Economically, because the tasks are so small, it's more feasible to deal with contractors as a crowd instead of individuals. This creates an industry of irregular labor with no face-to-face resolution for disputes if, say, a client deems their answers inaccurate or wages are withheld. The workers WIRED spoke to say it's not low fees but the way platforms pay them that's the key issue. "I don't like the uncertainty of not knowing when an assignment will come out, as it forces us to be near the computer all day long," says Fuentes, who would like to see additional compensation for time spent waiting in front of her screen. Mutmain, 18, from Pakistan, who asked not to use his surname, echoes this. He says he joined Appen at 15, using a family member's ID, and works from 8 am to 6 pm, and another shift from 2 am to 6 am. "I need to stick to these platforms at all times, so that I don't lose work," he says, but he struggles to earn more than $50
dr tech

The Colonial Pipeline Hack Is a New Extreme for Ransomware  | WIRED - 0 views

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    ""This is the largest impact on the energy system in the United States we've seen from a cyberattack, full stop," says Rob Lee, CEO of the critical-infrastructure-focused security firm Dragos. Aside from the financial impact on Colonial Pipeline or the many providers and customers of the fuel it transports, Lee points out that around 40 percent of US electricity in 2020 was produced by burning natural gas, more than any other source. That means, he argues, that the threat of cyberattacks on a pipeline presents a significant threat to the civilian power grid. "You have a real ability to impact the electric system in a broad way by cutting the supply of natural gas. This is a big deal," he adds. "I think Congress is going to have questions. A provider got hit with ransomware from a criminal act, this wasn't even a state-sponsored attack, and it impacted the system in this way?""
dr tech

Brian Eno on Why He Wrote a Climate Album With Deepfake Birdsongs | WIRED - 0 views

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    "Oh, I just listen to bird sounds a lot and then try to emulate the kinds of things they do. Synthesizers are quite good at that because some of the new software has what's called physical modeling. This enables you to construct a physical model of something and then stretch the parameters. You can create a piano with 32-foot strings, for instance, or a piano made of glass. It's a very interesting way to try to study the world, to try to model it. In the natural world there are discrete entities like clarinets, saxophones, drums. With physical modeling, you can make hybrids like a drummy piano or a saxophone-y violin. There's a continuum, most of which has never been explored."
dr tech

Teachers in Denmark are using apps to audit their student's moods | MIT Technology Review - 0 views

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    "In a Copenhagen suburb, a fifth-grade classroom is having its weekly cake-eating session, a common tradition in Danish public schools. While the children are eating chocolate cake, the teacher pulls up an infographic on a whiteboard: a bar chart generated by a digital platform that collects data on how they've been feeling. Organized to display the classroom's weekly "mood landscape," the data shows that the class averaged a mood of 4.4 out of 5, and the children rated their family life highly. "That's great!" the teacher exclaims, raising two thumbs up in the air. She then moves to an infographic on sleep hygiene. Here the data shows the students struggling, and the teacher invites them to think of ways to improve their sleeping habits. After briefly talking among themselves, the children suggest "less screen time at night," "meditation before sleep," and "having a hot bath." They collectively make a commitment to implement these strategies. At next week's cake time, they will be asked whether or not they followed through."
dr tech

Digital twin: How a virtual representation of a system boosts effectivity - 0 views

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    "A digital twin is a virtual representation of a real system - a building, the power grid, a city, even a human being - that mimics the characteristics of the system. A digital twin is more than just a computer model, however. It receives data from sensors in the real system to constantly parallel the system's state."
dr tech

The Met's helicopter snap of Michael McIntyre is a wake-up call to all of us | James Ba... - 0 views

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    "On the surface of it, the incident is entirely trivial: in a thoughtless moment, a police officer on a surveillance helicopter decides to tweet a photo of a celebrity he's spotted (in this case Michael McIntyre), briefly adding the Metropolitan police to the ranks of London paparazzi. The Met's snap had a few features a standard press photo lacks, though, including an exact timestamp, location data, and a vantage point from an expensive and taxpayer-funded aerial spot. Online reaction to the photograph was predictably bad - why are police invading the privacy of someone who's doing nothing wrong? - and was followed by questioning whether the photo breached the Data Protection Act, which it may well have done."
dr tech

Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter? | Gadget Lab | Wired.com - 0 views

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    "For now, however, Hammond tries to reassure journalists that he's not trying to kick them when they're down. He tells a story about a party he attended with his wife, who's the marketing director at Chicago's fabled Second City improv club. He found himself in conversation with a well-known local theater critic, who asked about Hammond's business. As Hammond explained what he did, the critic became agitated. Times are tough enough in journalism, he said, and now you're going to replace writers with robots? "I just looked at him," Hammond recalls, "and asked him: Have you ever seen a reporter at a Little League game? That's the most important thing about us. Nobody has lost a single job because of us.""
dr tech

Johnson - Whatever you tweet may be used against you | Books & arts | The Economist - 0 views

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    "But a newsroom rebellion ended her tenure before it began. A group of employees wrote a letter protesting against her appointment because of several tweets she had written ten years earlier, when she was herself a teen. In them Ms McCammond reported Googling how to avoid waking up with "swollen, Asian eyes". She complained about the lack of an explanation for a poor mark in chemistry: "thanks a lot stupid Asian T.A. [teaching assistant]". She had apologised for these comments in the past, but a killing in Georgia on March 16th, in which six of the eight victims were Asian women, made them look even worse. Two days later Ms McCammond took to Twitter again-to say that she had agreed to renounce the Teen Vogue job."
dr tech

Facebook and fear in Manila: Maria Ressa's fight for facts | Maria Ressa | The Guardian - 0 views

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    "There, a Facebook-fuelled tsunami of lies had assisted an authoritarian into power. And she had seen where that had led: to opponents of the state being killed in their homes or turning up dead in ditches. As a Filipino American with a foot in both countries - she calls herself "the first of the CNN hybrids" - she was perfectly positioned to warn America about what happens when a populist president is allowed to spread out-of-control lies across a vast, unregulated tech platform. "A lie told a million times becomes a fact," she repeated again and again."
dr tech

'The Gospel': how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza | Israel | The Guardian - 0 views

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    "Sources familiar with how AI-based systems have been integrated into the IDF's operations said such tools had significantly sped up the target creation process. "We prepare the targets automatically and work according to a checklist," a source who previously worked in the target division told +972/Local Call. "It really is like a factory. We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate." A separate source told the publication the Gospel had allowed the IDF to run a "mass assassination factory" in which the "emphasis is on quantity and not on quality". A human eye, they said, "will go over the targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them". For some experts who research AI and international humanitarian law, an acceleration of this kind raises a number of concerns."
dr tech

The advanced silicon chips on which the future depends are all made in Taiwan - here's ... - 0 views

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    "What's fascinating about all this is how much of it comes down, not to finance or technology, but to people and what they know. In that sense the FT's deep dive into TSMC's travails reminded me of a striking piece of research conducted decades ago by the philosopher of science Harry Collins when he was a PhD student. Collins was interested in how knowledge gets transferred and intrigued by a particular piece of technology, the TEA laser. This was a device that was comprehensively documented in the physics literature but which research laboratories were unable to replicate. What Collins discovered was that "nobody could make the laser work if they hadn't spent time in a laboratory that already had a working laser. There was very good information in the journals about how to build such a laser. But anybody who tried to put one together using written articles failed. They had something that looked like a laser on their bench, but it wouldn't lase.""
dr tech

Model says her face was edited with AI to look white: 'It's very dehumanizing' | Fashio... - 0 views

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    "A Taiwanese American model says a well-known fashion designer uploaded a digitally altered runway photo that made her appear white. In a TikTok about the incident that has been viewed 1.8m times in the last week, Shereen Wu says Michael Costello, a designer who has worked with Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Celine Dion, posted a photo to his Instagram from a recent Los Angeles fashion show. The photo depicts Wu in the slinky black ballgown that she walked the runway in - but her face has been changed, made to appear as if she is a white woman."
dr tech

'Aims': the software for hire that can control 30,000 fake online profiles | Technology... - 0 views

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    "At first glance, the Twitter user "Canaelan" looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl. Canaelan is, in fact, a non-human bot linked to a vast army of fake social media profiles controlled by a software designed to spread "propaganda". Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims, which controls more than 30,000 fake social media profiles, can be used to spread disinformation at scale and at speed. It is sold by "Team Jorge", a unit of disinformation operatives based in Israel."
dr tech

Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake 'chief financial off... - 0 views

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    " A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company's chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police. The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday. "(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake," senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city's public broadcaster RTHK. Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company's UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said."
dr tech

The Quest to Give AI Chatbots a Hand-and an Arm | WIRED - 0 views

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    "Peter Chen, CEO of the robot software company Covariant, sits in front of a chatbot interface resembling the one used to communicate with ChatGPT. "Show me the tote in front of you," he types. In reply, a video feed appears, revealing a robot arm over a bin containing various items-a pair of socks, a tube of chips, and an apple among them. The chatbot can discuss the items it sees-but also manipulate them. When WIRED suggests Chen ask it to grab a piece of fruit, the arm reaches down, gently grasps the apple, and then moves it to another bin nearby."
dr tech

Baby robot unveiled in Japan as number of childless couples grows | Technology | The Gu... - 0 views

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    "The baby automaton joins a growing list of companion robots, such as the upcoming Jibo - designed by robotics experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and resembling a swivelling lamp - and Paro, a robot baby seal marketed by Japanese company Intelligent System as a therapeutic machine to soothe elderly dementia sufferers. Around a quarter of Japan's population is over 65 with a dearth of care workers putting a strain on social services."
dr tech

Robot monitors in homes of elderly people can predict falls, says study | Technology | ... - 0 views

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    "The study found that when a person's gait-speed dropped by 5cm/second within a week, this was a sign that they were at increased risk of a fall - in fact, 86% had a fall within three weeks when such a drop in walking speed was observed. By contrast, the elderly residents who had no change in walking speed had a background probability of falling of 19.5%."
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