ICT news

• First Results From the World's Biggest Basic Income Experiment

  04-12-2023 23:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  GiveDirectly, a nonprofit providing cash assistance to low-income households, is conducting a large-scale basic income experiment in rural Kenya, giving varying payment structures to recipients. "It is giving around 6,000 people in rural Kenya a little more than $20 a month, every month, starting in 2016 and going until 2028," reports Vox's Dylan Matthews. "Tens of thousands more people are getting shorter-term or differently structured payments." Matthews reports on some of the early findings o
  
  Read more

• A Windows Update Bug Is Renaming Everyone's Printers To HP M101-M106

  04-12-2023 23:02 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: A few days ago, we spotted that the HP Smart App was being installed on people's PCs without their consent. Even worse, the app would reappear if users tried to uninstall it or clean-installed Windows. Now, the cause has finally been identified: a recent Windows 10 and 11 update is renaming everyone's printers to "HP LaserJet M101-M106" regardless of what model it actually is. As reported on Windows Latest, the latest update for Windows 10
  
  Read more

• HP Exec Says Quiet Part Out Loud When It Comes To Locking in Print Customers

  04-12-2023 22:25 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  HP is squeezing more margin out of print customers, the result of a multi-year strategy to convert unprofitable business into something more lucrative, and says its subscription model is "locking" in people. From a report: Tech vendors -- software, hardware, and cloud services -- generally avoid terms that suggest they're perhaps in some way pinning down customers in a strategic sales hold. But as Marie Myers, chief financial officer at HP, was this week talking to the UBS Global Technology conf
  
  Read more

• Exposed Hugging Face API Tokens Offered Full Access To Meta's Llama 2

  04-12-2023 21:40 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The API tokens of tech giants Meta, Microsoft, Google, VMware, and more have been found exposed on Hugging Face, opening them up to potential supply chain attacks. From a report: Researchers at Lasso Security found more than 1,500 exposed API tokens on the open source data science and machine learning platform -- which allowed them to gain access to 723 organizations' accounts. In the vast majority of cases (655), the exposed tokens had write permissions granting the ability to modify files in a
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• 23andMe Confirms Hackers Stole Ancestry Data on 6.9 Million Users

  04-12-2023 21:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: On Friday, genetic testing company 23andMe announced that hackers accessed the personal data of 0.1% of customers, or about 14,000 individuals. The company also said that by accessing those accounts, hackers were also able to access "a significant number of files containing profile information about other users' ancestry." But 23andMe would not say how many "other users" were impacted by the breach that the company initially disclosed in early October. As it
  
  Read more

• Gmail's AI-Powered Spam Detection Is Its Biggest Security Upgrade in Years

  04-12-2023 20:20 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The latest post on the Google Security blog details a new upgrade to Gmail's spam filters that Google is calling "one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years." ArsTechnica: The upgrade comes in the form of a new text classification system called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer). Google says this can help understand "adversarial text manipulations" -- these are emails full of special characters, emojis, typos, and other junk characters that previously were legible by hum
  
  Read more

• Asking ChatGPT To Repeat Words 'Forever' Is Now a Terms of Service Violation

  04-12-2023 19:40 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Asking ChatGPT to repeat specific words "forever" is now flagged as a violation of the chatbot's terms of service and content policy. From a report: Google DeepMind researchers used the tactic to get ChatGPT to repeat portions of its training data, revealing sensitive privately identifiable information (PII) of normal people and highlighting that ChatGPT is trained on randomly scraped content from all over the internet. In that paper, DeepMind researchers asked ChatGPT 3.5-turbo to repeat specif
  
  Read more

• Sellafield Nuclear Site Hacked By Groups Linked To Russia and China

  04-12-2023 19:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The UK's most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, has been hacked into by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China, the Guardian can reveal. From the report: The astonishing disclosure and its potential effects have been consistently covered up by senior staff at the vast nuclear waste and decommissioning site, the investigation has found. The Guardian has discovered that the authorities do not know exactly when the IT systems were first compromised. But sources said breaches were first d
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• No Further Investments in Virgin Galactic, Says Richard Branson

  04-12-2023 18:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Sir Richard Branson has ruled out putting more money into his lossmaking space travel company Virgin Galactic, saying his business empire "does not have the deepest pockets" any more. From a report: Virgin Galactic, which was founded by Branson in 2004, last month announced it was cutting jobs and suspending commercial flights for 18 months from next year, in a bid to preserve cash for the development of a larger plane that could carry passengers to the edge of space. The group has said it has e
  
  Read more

• The Robots Will Insider Trade

  04-12-2023 17:00 via slashdot.org
  Abstract to a paper titled, "Technical Report: Large Language Models can Strategically Deceive their Users when Put Under Pressure" by Jeremy Scheurer, Mikita Balesni and Marius Hobbhahn of Apollo Research: We demonstrate a situation in which Large Language Models, trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest, can display misaligned behavior and strategically deceive their users about this behavior without being instructed to do so. Concretely, we deploy GPT-4 as an agent in a realistic, simulate
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!