Category: Technology

Researchers have discovered that many fake WhatsApp apps steal the legitimate access keys of a WhatsApp user.

With these keys, application authors can run all kinds of malicious campaigns, including one in which victims lose their hard-earned money.

Kaspersky cybersecurity researchers recently discovered two Messaging apps (Opens in a new tab) For Android, it is obviously targeting WhatsApp users. One is called YoWhatsApp and the other is called WhatsApp Plus. These two apps pretty much offer the same functionality as the actual WhatsApp app, and then some. According to the report, YoWhatsApp also appears to come with a customizable interface and individual chat room blocks.

Access keys stolen

However, what users don’t see is that these apps steal the legitimate access keys of WhatsApp and send them to the fake authors, allowing the attackers to gain access to the victims’ user accounts.

According to Kaspersky, the keys can be used in open source utilities and allow attackers to perform various actions without the user’s consent. Besides actions, attackers can also eavesdrop on conversations, identity theft (Opens in a new tab) dates and the like.

The researchers also said that attackers could use this access to have victims sign up for premium services, charge them in the process and monetize.

The apps were advertised via two legitimate Android apps, and Kaspersky suspects the developers didn’t know they were using to advertise malware. The authors have since been notified, and Kaspersky expects to close these distribution channels soon. However, users who have downloaded these apps will be at risk as long as the apps are installed on their endpoints.

Researchers suggest that popular Android apps have many fakes, and while not all of them are harmful, it is best to stay away from them. These types of apps are rarely found in the official Google app repository, Play Store, and can instead be downloaded as an .APK file, from external sources. That, alone, should be enough for a red flag, they say.

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The Google Chrome Android and Android are getting support for passkeys, a new security feature designed to replace traditional passwords, the company revealed.

inside Blog Posts (Opens in a new tab)Google said that users will now be able to create and use passkeys on Android devices, which will be securely synced through Google. Password manager (Opens in a new tab).

On the other hand, developers will be able to integrate passkey support on their sites for end users using Chrome via the WebAuthn API, on Android, and other supported platforms.

Eliminate weak passwords

Those eager to try out the new features will need to sign up for the Google Play Services beta and use Chrome Canary. Google says general availability on stable channels for both features is expected “later this year,” which means we shouldn’t wait too long.

Passkeys were first announced by Apple in the summer of 2021, and were described by the company as “a new way to make the web a safer place,” with weak and recycled passwords being one of the most common causes of data breaches.

Adler explained that passkeys use “strong cryptographic techniques and biometrics built into the device” to keep accounts secure, with users simply needing to use TouchID or FaceID to authenticate a new web app, mobile app or service in order to create a passkey.

Darren Adler introduced the Security Key feature to the world at WWDC 2022, Apple’s Vice President of Internet Technologies, describing passkeys as “more secure, easier-to-use, next-generation credentials intended to replace The password (Opens in a new tab) for good.”

Google appears to share this assessment, with its announcement calling it a “more secure alternative to passwords and other perishable authentication factors.”

The company says that passkeys cannot be reused, do not leak in server breaches, and protect users from phishing attacks. It’s built to industry standards, works across different operating systems and browser systems, and can be used for both websites and apps.

Google’s next milestone in this process is the Android native app programming interface, which is coming later this year. The company added that passkeys generated through the web API “will work seamlessly” with applications within the same domain, indicating that the move is part of a larger transition. The applications’ native API will provide a unified way to allow users to choose between a passkey and a saved password.

“A seamless and familiar user experience for both passwords and passkeys helps users and developers gradually transition to passkeys,” Google concluded.

After Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos June confirmation That an ad-supported layer is coming to the service, the company today released details of its new Basic subscription plan with ads.

Netflix Basic with Ads costs $6.99 / £4.99 per month when it launches on November 3 in the US and UK. The tier will also be available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico and Spain, with Canada and Spain each getting a head start with a November 1 launch.

According to Netflix’s blog about the ad-supported tier, the new offer will have no impact on the pricing of its current plans, which range from $9.99 to $19.99 per month in the US and £10.99 to £15.99 in the US. United kingdom.

The post indicated that ads will be 15 or 30 seconds long, and will appear before and during the streaming programmes. Generally, viewers can expect to see 4 to 5 minutes of ads per hour. Similar to the service’s current base plan, video quality will be limited to 720p HD instead of 4K with HDR available in the Premium tier.

Not all current software will be available at the ad-supported level “due to licensing restrictions,” according to Netlix. Regarding the number of banned shows, the company estimates that “about 5% to 10% of the total software will not be available depending on the country.”

Share Netflix too confirm our concerns Users of the Basic with Ads tier will not be able to download offers, which is the ability offered to its Basic, Standard and Premium subscribers.

Analysis: Netflix with ads was inevitable

We cannot say that we did not expect this to happen. For the past year or two, Netflix has been struggling to keep up with new streaming competition from Disney, HBO, and other entertainment giants. The company’s subscriber base declined in the first half of 2022, which caused layoffs and canceled productions that were in progress, particularly in the animation category.

Netlix’s new ad-supported plan arrives just a month before launch Disney+ ad supported tierWhich, at $7.99, would represent a pricier option for those looking to contain home-flow costs amid persistent inflation and economic stress.

For some viewers, deleting shows from the ad-supported tier may be a deal breaker since many subscribers rely on a post about a particular show. Yes, not everyone probably wants to watch Jeffrey Dahmer tapesbut the inability to broadcast Weird things or Seinfeld After paying a monthly fee? No thank you!

Not being able to download shows will also be an issue since many people take advantage of this feature to watch shows while on the go or other travel in environments where Wi-Fi or cellular services can be intermittent. Getting more cash for one of Netflix’s higher-priced ad-free tiers solves that problem of course, but you’ll then be back for paying a premium.

With the addition of the new plan, Netflix is ​​now just like any other streaming service that likes to stick its shows with ads. This move may bring new subscribers to the company, but it certainly won’t help differentiate it.

Already have a Netflix subscription? Here are our picks for best netflix shows You can watch today

The Seattle Museum of History and Industry is opening a new exhibit on Saturday titled “Artificial Intelligence: Your Mind and the Machine. “

GeekWire got a sneak peek Wednesday at a press event and tour, led by the curator HP Newquista technical writer and author of the 1994 book on the history of artificial intelligence, The Makers of the Brain.

The exhibition begins with some deep history. It delves into legends such as Gollum the Jew, a character resurrected from dust, and describes the origins of the term “robot” taken from the word “robot” for forced labor or slavery in the Old Church Slavonic. The exhibition quickly moves into a more recent history, such as the debut of the table tennis video game Pong at Atari in 1972, which people can play in MOHAI.

Kids will especially enjoy some of the hands-on exhibits, such as the piano that improves your voice and the game Tower of Hanoi that requires you to assemble a tower of blocks in sequence. This reporter was glad that the facial analyzer determined him to be between 25 and 32 years old.

The exhibition also explores the optical illusions that only our minds can absorb, and the visual tasks that computers do best. It helps us understand the difference, like a touchpad that makes binary decisions about what dessert we eat, and shows how certain programs work.

Newquist’s definition of artificial intelligence is comprehensive. In a talk before the tour, he described AI as “an attempt by humans to create machines that think like humans.”

Newquist has seen the field explode since the “AI winter” of the 1990s, when many of the first companies collapsed. It covers the past decades in easy-to-access posters and concise text.

The exhibition touches on the ethical elements of artificial intelligence, for example a reference to science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”, which includes the fatwa “a robot may not harm a human.”

A future exhibition may explore what we should fear and what we should welcome in a future that began with the dream of getting rid of our most arduous tasks and becoming free.

The early stages of this dream are explored in the exhibition, which was first shown before the pandemic at the Orlando Science Center. The exhibition will be held in Seattle through January 8, and will include accompanying lectures and workshops on artificial intelligence, bias, injustice, and art. The museum will also present a screening of “Blade Runner: The Final Cut.”

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger outlined the next steps in his plan to revitalize the company, after a long period of underperformance.

inside Message to employees (Opens in a new tab)Gelsinger mapped out the next phase of Intel’s new Integrated Device Manufacturing (IDM 2.0) strategy, the goal of which is to “reclaim unquestioned technology leadership, manufacturing scale and long-term growth.”

More broadly, the plan is to rely more on Intel Foundry Services (IFS), a purely running foundry division created under IDM 2.0 to compete directly with the likes of TSMC, and to manufacture third-party designer semiconductors.

The road to recovery

Although Intel remains a homogeneous block of the semiconductor industry, the company has had a difficult period recently, falling behind in the manufacturing and design areas.

While Gelsinger’s return in early 2021 seemed to breathe new life into the company, a series of setbacks over the past two months have illustrated the problems Intel still faces.

For example, the company’s next generation line launch of server Treatments, codenamed Sapphire Rapids, is peppered with delays. And separately, Intel’s latest foray into GPU Tough start.

In July, Intel published a dismal quarterly earnings report, most notably a 22% year-over-year decline in revenue. The performance was so poor that Gelsinger took to Twitter to issue a public apology: “Results this quarter fell short of the standards we set for the company and our shareholders. We must and will do better.”

A key aspect of Intel’s plan to get out of this gap is to accelerate the expansion of Intel’s foundry division, which will now operate practically in isolation from the in-house design team and other business units.

The idea is to create “consistent processes, systems, and barriers for protection between our business unit and our design and manufacturing teams,” Gelsinger explained.

“This will allow us to identify and address structural inefficiencies in our current model by returning accountability and costs to decision makers in real time. It will also put Intel’s product groups on a par with external Intel Foundry Services customers and vice versa.

“We will also create a foundry-specific accounting model that includes manufacturing, technology development, and Intel’s foundry services. This will give us more transparency in our financial execution and will allow us to measure performance and drive ourselves to the best performance in the foundry business.”

Separately, Intel has created a new IDM 2.0 Acceleration Office (IAO), led by Stuart Bann, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Planning, that will be tasked with bringing to life the new foundry model described by Gelsinger.

In a recent crowd call, the statement concluded, Gelsinger promised regular updates on the progress of these projects and told employees it was time to “take action as One Intel to unleash the full potential of IDM 2.0.”

One senior cloud executive at Microsoft claims that he “has not seen organizations slow down their efforts to move software to the cloud in the past few months”.

Scott Guthrie, who is the executive vice president of cloud and artificial intelligence at Microsoft . told CNBC He does not “see the current situation causing people to pause clouding.”

Customers who buy more public cloud services will almost certainly be a good point of luck for Microsoft cloud hosting proces; 80% of companies already use Microsoft Azure in some form, according to the latest Flexera Cloud Status Report (Opens in a new tab).

What drives adoption?

Guthrie said the sharp rise in energy costs could push people toward cloud computing, in the same way that the initial start of the pandemic and the move toward hybrid work happened.

“Do we see people rushing to the cloud because of the energy crisis? I think the answer is definitely yes,” he said. CNBC.

“If you think about the situation in Europe right now, where energy prices are skyrocketing, and if you can reduce workplace workloads, and you can move it to our cloud quickly, you can reduce the energy draw you need and that translates into real economic savings.”

Guthrie certainly isn’t the only Microsoft CEO who seems very confident in the future of Azure. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood told analysts they expect Azure revenue to grow 43% in constant currency during the second quarter of 2022.

And it’s not just Microsoft that takes an optimistic view of how energy costs will affect the future of IT’s pending.

Spiceworks Ziff Davis’ State of Information Technology 2023 Report (Opens in a new tab) It found that 51% of companies said they would increase their IT budgets in 2023, although 83% said they were concerned about a possible recession next year, highlighting energy costs as one of the reasons for this.

• Are you looking to move away from homegrown solutions to save energy? Check out our guide to The best cloud storage

via CNBC (Opens in a new tab)

Emerging AI models operating in the art world are the subject of a wide-ranging discourse full of promises and threats, whose potential effects are only just beginning to emerge. Many are fascinated by the world of possibilities that open up when the artist is in direct contact with the archive of visual learning that spans the entirety of recorded history; much remains skeptical for what they see as outsourcing human creativity to the database machine. The former will make the case that Study Art History, for example, is already similar to accessing this database, except that it is now more complete and faster than the human brain; The latter will remain unconvinced and invoke notions of errors and intuition.

This conversation about the nature of perception and creativity is in itself a wonderful and well-fitting exploitation of the kinds of conversations artists and philosophers enjoy. Abundant contact with a Cosmos of ancestors in your field It is an effective suggestion. But there is another aspect to this, and that is the effect on commercial illustrations, animation, character design and the like – professional commercial artists, without reference to the linguistic controversy, daily see their role eroding, their job itself being becoming obsolete in a way that is concerned about its occurrence in fine art. At the same time, since many of the AI ​​systems currently available to the public are speed-based, it is extremely easy to borrow and steal another artist’s style – just by typing his name into the program. So, is the role of AI in the creative process a tool, a collaborator, or a competition? and he.

For keen artists to explore the relationship Between their creative process and the augmentation and innovation of AI, there is also a difference between analytic models and generative models – one that sorts data sets on behalf of the user, and the other that creates “new” content based on everything they’ve learned. Far away, which is more similar to the idea of ​​a human brain. This and other points along the way where Questions originality , Authorship and intellectual property Interfering with play, sometimes blatantly.

Bhutto: The scene precedes

artist says MidjourneyAnd the D-EAnd the Night CafeAnd the stable spreadAnd the dream studio Or a host of other apps they would like to have “Landscape with a distant city skyline at night in the style of Henry Cole,” “Dwarf queen statues with antique weapons on a tall ship sailing toward the horizon in Rembrandt style,” or “Jazz-age alley cats on A spaceship in a folk art woodcut like Grant Wood”, or – well, you get the idea. this Fun game that will eat thousands of waking hours In addictive entertainment. Taken seriously, it can be a great way to achieve instant gratification of an idea embodied, as a diagram; Many programs allow the user to customize the file once it has been created. Not to mention all the fun you’ll have with poetic or non-linear language.

Sasha Styles, Hair is the original block, 2021 (courtesy of the artist)

But what happens when an artist enters the reference wave to the style of a living artist, the one who will do it I do not like to be a learning model fodder For a global network of instant competitors who seem to flirt with copyright infringement by intentionally invoking their names in the work they plan to claim as theirs? Practically speaking, what happens when an art director at a magazine or advertising company can take what would have been an email outlining the themes and parameters of a commissioned illustration—a public park in the winter with children’s toys and dogs and snow in the trees; A waiting room in the medical office with a variety of patients all on their iPhone in the style of collocation of photos; Buffet table full of exotic sweets and wildflowers in pop art style – write the same words in Midjourney instead and get their score for free? Yes, that would be a problem.

Bhutto: Consequences of the psychiatrist

But back in the world of fine art, with its high tolerance for academic experimentation and smashing things, painters and photographers, poets sculptors, filmmakers, animators and all kinds of artists whose work requires a deep engagement with world cultures, hidden history, literature, architecture, politics and other extensive data sets – Artists who really view their relationship with AI as collaborativemutually informed, and foreshadowing a future in which the singularity is not just a physical union with our technology but an epistemological and consciousness-based union as well — exuberant and very optimistic about the possibilities.

Vince Fraser for Artechouse (Courtesy of the artist)

Bhutto: Contribute to temptation

Anatolia Companion

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one more thing Malware What needs to be done is to access more instructions for his command and control (C2) server. By capturing this traffic before any information is exchanged, Microsoft hopes to stop many attacks in their tracks.

The company recently added a new feature to the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) security platform that notifies administrators when a malicious connection is created. It is able to kill this connection and log the details for further evaluation.

As I mentioned Computer , The new feature is currently in public preview.

Previous discoveries

With the new feature enabled, Defender for Endpoint’s Network Protection (NP) agent will map all external connection IP addresses, ports, host names and other data, along with data from the Microsoft Cloud. If it detects a connection that the company’s AI-powered registry engines deem to be malicious, the tool will block it and push the malware binaries back to prevent further damage.

It will then add a log that states “Network protection blocked a possible C2 connection”, which SecOps teams can evaluate later.

“SecOps teams need accurate alerts that can accurately identify areas of intrusion and past connections to known malicious IP addresses,” said Oludele Ogunrinde, Senior Director of MDE Program.

“With new capabilities in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, SecOps teams can detect C2 attacks on the network early in the attack chain, reduce spread by rapidly blocking any spread of an attack, and reduce the time it takes to mitigate by easily removing malicious binaries.”

To take advantage of the new feature, users need to activate Microsoft Defender Antivirus with real-time protection and protection provided via the cloud. Moreover, they need MDE in active mode, network protection in blocking mode, and engine version 1.1.17300.4.

Once the preview rollout is complete, the new feature will be available on Windows 10 1709 and later, Windows Server 1803, and Windows Server 2019.

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