An employee overlooked an update that could have stopped the Last Pass breach. Twitter has another outage. And Nokia releases a new cell phone that could be — are you sitting down? – Easily repaired.
Welcome to trending hashtags for Tuesday, March 7th.
I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and TechNewsday in the US – here’s today’s top tech news.
LastPass may need to change its name to Last Too Patched….
LastPass reveals new details of last year’s massive data breach Description of how a malicious party installed a keylogger on a senior engineer’s computer through a vulnerability in the streaming media service Plex. Overall, the company did a fair dump of information, interspersed with apologies and promises to do better.
But now, according to a piece by Android Police, Plex is saying that the vulnerability through which the exploit occurred was disclosed almost three years ago in May 2020. Plex released a patch the same day. But the LastPass staff never applied the patch.
According to that report, the vulnerability allowed those with access to a server administrator’s Plex account to upload a malicious file via the camera upload feature and by overlapping the locations of the server data directory with a library that allowed camera uploads, It could be that the media server executes malicious code.
“For context, the version that addressed this exploit was approximately 75 versions ago,” a LastPass spokesperson said.
It’s easy to criticize the company’s response to the cyberattack, but it just keeps getting worse — especially since LastPass was built to protect company secrets. If all of this is true—that a LastPass employee was allowed access to privileged work surfaces through his personal computer, and that one employee didn’t update three years ago—it could be the last gasp for LastPass’ reputation. Could
Source: android police
The EU and US are both looking at new legislation that would force companies to ensure a “right to repair” for cell phones, but it appears some manufacturers are getting ahead of the potential legislation.
At Mobile World Congress 2023, Nokia launched smartphones that come with components that you can dismantle with repair manuals from IFixit.
The announcement comes as the right to improve movement pace in the US and EU. According to a report by the European Parliament, about 77 percent EU citizens would rather have a device fixed than buy a new one.
Adam Ferguson, Head of Product Marketing, HMD Global Said, “People value long-lasting, quality appliances, and they shouldn’t have to compromise on price to get it. The new Nokia G22 is purposefully built with a repairable design, so you can keep it for even longer.
With these changes, HMD hopes to follow in the footsteps of other Phone MManufacturers who have entered this “right to repair” movement.
Some other phone makers are Fairphone which released its latest device seamlessly with repair and stability and even Apple has launched its self-service repair programs in Europe, providing consumers with over 200 devices, parts and even Provide repair manual.
Source: techrepublic
Twitter crashed yesterday Thousands of users have complained about problems accessing links from social media platforms and other websites.
DownDetector reported over 8,000 incidents of people reporting problems.
Later yesterday, Twitter’s support account tweeted that the issue has been resolved and things are back to normal.
Alp Toker, director of internet observatory Netblox, told Reuters the error messages point to problems with the platform’s microservices that are having a knock-on effect on other aspects of the service.
Toker said “this shows that Twitter is not testing its updates effectively before making them public”.
Musk tweeted that a small change in Twitter’s data-access tool caused the problem. He said, “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Eventually a complete rewrite will be required.”
no good reason? Hmm. Are you sure nothing has changed on Twitter in the last few months that could possibly be responsible for these outages?
Source: reuters
Microsoft continues to integrate AI across all of its platforms and tools.
In its latest move, the Redmond giant bundled the technology behind ChatGPT with its Power Platform to allow users to develop apps with little or no coding. Power Virtual Agent and AI Builder were updated with new capabilities.
Power Virtual Agent, a tool for businesses to build chatbots, can now connect to a company’s internal resources to generate weekly reports and summaries of customer queries. And, AI Builder, which allows businesses to automate workflows, has got new generative AI capabilities and a new version of its business management platform, Dynamics 365.
The company has so far announced AI updates for its popular Windows operating system and search engine Bing, but not yet for its Office productivity suite, which includes Word and Excel — though we can certainly see more of those programs in the near future. Can expect more updates for.
Source: reuters
Are we shaping up in a generative AI bubble or are we on the verge of an explosion of new developments?
Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, announced that he would be leaving OpenAI’s nonprofit board in order to avoid a conflict of interest with upcoming investments.
“The trillion-dollar companies of the future are being built and invested in now, which will not only transform markets, but launch new ones,” he added.
As the generative AI frenzy continues, an arms race is on to shape and profit from that future. According to an article in Axios.
While Microsoft’s fusion with OpenAI gave an incredible boost to both ChatGPT and it will Microsoft thinks, it also inspires and encourages competitors who are betting they can find a way to compete with the tech giant in this new AI gold rush.
Silicon Valley venture capitalists go from “OpenAI is the next transformative tech company” to “We’ve found a way to beat it.”
So, while core AI technology is at least initially in the hands of cloud giants like Google and Microsoft, other tech giants ranging from Meta to Salesforce have also rushed to release their own offerings — now, we can expect to see more such startups. Can do that will harness this technology and apply it to new markets, niches, niche industries and consumer businesses.
Whether they’re the next Google or take enough market share to be acquired by the giants – the gold rush is on.
Source: axios
Can AI Know What You’re Thinking?
In more AI news, researchers found that they could reconstruct high-resolution and highly accurate images from brain activity by inputting fMRI scans onto an AI image generator.
The researchers claim that they decoded text representations from fMRI signals within the higher visual cortex, which were then used as input for the final constructed image.
Some studies have produced high-resolution reconstructions of images, but the researchers note that this was only after training and fine-tuning the generative model.
These complex models are difficult to train and there are not many prior examples in neuroscience to guide them, although this is not the first or only work in this area.
The researchers were previously testing the ways that AI models work with the human brain. In a January 2022 study, researchers in the Netherlands trained a generative AI network on fMRI data from 1,050 unique faces and converted the brain imaging results into real images. The study found that the AI was able to reconstruct unique stimuli.
Nevertheless, these new researchers have managed to provide another glimpse into the process, while adding some new lessons to this important research. For example, researchers shown in Using higher stimuli not only produced higher noise levels in the brain, but could also result in higher image resolution. We’re calling this the “spinal tap effect.”
Source: vice president
That’s the top tech news for today
Links to these stories can be found in the article PoStead at itworldcanada.com/podcasts. You can also find more great stories and more in-depth coverage.n itworldcanada.com or in the US at technewsday.com
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