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"Researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School said the spyware, which is made by an Israeli company called QuaDream, infected some victims' phones by sending an iCloud calendar invitation to mobile users from operators of the spyware, who are likely to be government clients. Victims were not notified of the calendar invitations because they were sent for events logged in the past, making them invisible to the targets of the hacking. Such attacks are known as "zero-click" because users of the mobile phone do not have to click on any malicious link or take any action in order to be infected."

"Nearly half of three to four year-olds (48 per cent) were reported by their parent or guardian in the Ofcom survey to have used apps or sites to send messages or make video or voice calls. Those who did mainly used WhatsApp (25 per cent) and Facetime (19 per cent). "It's likely that children of this age were receiving help with these communication activities as they are still developing basic reading and writing skills," said Ofcom. The disclosures prompted a warning by Dame Rachel de Souza, the children's commissioner, that young children should not have internet-enabled phones because of the risk of them accessing harmful content."

""As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious," said Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research. Park was prompted to investigate after Meta, which owns Facebook, developed a program called Cicero that performed in the top 10% of human players at the world conquest strategy game Diplomacy. Meta stated that Cicero had been trained to be "largely honest and helpful" and to "never intentionally backstab" its human allies."

"A pilot study by academics at the University of Oxford found some care providers had been using generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard to create care plans for people receiving care. That presents a potential risk to patient confidentiality, according to Dr Caroline Green, an early career research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford, who surveyed care organisations for the study. "If you put any type of personal data into [a generative AI chatbot], that data is used to train the language model," Green said. "That personal data could be generated and revealed to somebody else." She said carers might act on faulty or biased information and inadvertently cause harm, and an AI-generated care plan might be substandard."

"Claims that artificial intelligence will help solve the climate crisis are misguided, with the technology instead likely cause rising energy use and turbocharge the spread of climate disinformation, a coalition of environmental groups has warned. Advances in AI have been touted by big tech companies and the United Nations as a way to help ameliorate global heating, via tools that help track deforestation, identify pollution leaks and track extreme weather events. AI is already being used to predict droughts in Africa and to measure changes to melting icebergs."

"Other far more sinister real-world effects of algorithms are well documented. In the US, pedestrians have been mowed down by robotaxis; prisoners denied bail on the advice, in part, of software; in Australia, welfare recipients incorrectly and illegally hounded by an algorithmic debt collector that came to be known as robodebt. In the UK, students took to the streets in 2020 after being denied places at universities by the calculations of digital minions - their chants of "fuck the algorithm" proving a "defining moment" for Kowalkiewicz and an inspiration for his book."

"The research has found many children do not even recognise these promotions, known as content marketing, as advertising. It warns that this may lead to children following betting companies on social media, making it more likely that they sign up with them when they turn 18 and can legally gamble. Dr Raffaello Rossi, lecturer in marketing at Bristol University, one of the report's authors, said content marketing was particularly popular with young people."

"In a sharply worded warning, the cancer experts say that 'novel solutions' such as new diagnostic tests have been wrongly hyped as 'magic bullets' for the cancer crisis, but 'none address the fundamental issues of cancer as a systems problem'. A 'common fallacy' of NHS leaders is the assumption that new technologies can reverse inequalities, the authors add. The reality is that tools such as AI can create 'additional barriers for those with poor digital or health literacy'. 'We caution against technocentric approaches without robust evaluation from an equity perspective,' the paper concludes."

"The breakdown in negotiations resulted in Meta blocking all news sources on Facebook in Canada "recklessly and dangerously" as all 10 provinces and three territories in the country burned, Canada's heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge, told Guardian Australia. "Facebook is leaving disinformation and misinformation to spread on their platform, while choosing to block access to reliable, high-quality, independent journalism," St-Onge said. "Facebook is just leaving more room for misinformation during need-to-know situations like wildfires, emergencies, local elections and other critical times for people to make decisions on matters that affect them.""

"With the release of artificial intelligence (AI) video generation products like Sora and Luma, we're on the verge of a flood of AI-generated video content, and policymakers, public figures and software engineers are already warning about a deluge of deepfakes. Now it seems that AI itself might be our best defense against AI fakery after an algorithm has identified telltale markers of AI videos with over 98% accuracy."

"Her intervention emerged after Sir Paul McCartney became the latest star to back calls for laws to stop mass copyright theft by generative AI companies, warning the technology "could just take over". Bush, who shot to fame with Wuthering Heights in 1978 but whose last album was released in 2011, gave a rare interview this year in which she said she was "very keen" to make a new album, saying: "I've got lots of ideas … it's been a long time.""

The British-Canadian computer scientist often touted as a "godfather" of artificial intelligence has shortened the odds of AI wiping out humanity over the next three decades, warning the pace of change in the technology is "much faster" than expected. Prof Geoffrey Hinton, who this year was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his work in AI, said there was a "10% to 20%" chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades. Previously Hinton had said there was a 10% chance of the technology triggering a catastrophic outcome for humanity.

"Anthropic has an "AI policy" for job candidates that discourages the technology from being used during the application process. The company says it wants to field candidates' human communication skills. Anthropic is known for its AI innovations-but the company doesn't want job candidates using the technology."

"One of the biggest cases of hypocrisy was uncovered last year with little more than a whisper. Most of us will remember seeing the "You wouldn't steal a car" piracy adverts on every dvd we played in the early 00s. What most people have yet to discover is that the music for the anti-piracy campaign was actually pirated from a Dutch musician named Melchior Reitveldt. In a move that would have marketing specialists turning in their graves, Reitveldt's music (which had been sanctioned for a local film festival's anti-piracy campaign) was used repeatedly for the standardised anti-piracy warning that appeared constantly. In a tale that became pointlessly complicated, Reitveldt dealt with corrupt royalty collectors such as Jochem Gerrits (who tried to gain profit for himself through the situation) before finally reaping his just rewards in 2012, 6 years after he originally composed the music."

"Malwarebytes points to desktop app whose EULA includes clause getting you to agree to Bitcoin mining - from which you won't benefit"

Talking about CISCO - Wikileaks is big in the news again...

It turns out that 15% of free anti-virus softwares contain viruses themselves, according to Google.