Chatbots and Human Conversation

For most of history, communicating with a computer has not been like communicating with a person. In their earliest years, computers required carefully constructed instructions, delivered through punch cards; then came a command-line interface, followed by menus and options and text boxes. If you wanted results, you needed to learn ... Read More

Poisoning AI Models

New research into poisoning AI models: The researchers first trained the AI models using supervised learning and then used additional “safety training” methods, including more supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and adversarial training. After this, they checked if the AI still had hidden behaviors. They found that with specific prompts, the ... Read More

Side Channels Are Common

Really interesting research: “Lend Me Your Ear: Passive Remote Physical Side Channels on PCs.” Abstract: We show that built-in sensors in commodity PCs, such as microphones, inadvertently capture electromagnetic side-channel leakage from ongoing computation. Moreover, this information is often conveyed by supposedly-benign channels such as audio recordings and common Voice-over-IP ... Read More

Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy

Last month, I convened the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023) at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center. As with IWORD 2022, the goal was to bring together a diverse set of thinkers and practitioners to talk about how democracy might be reimagined for the twenty-first century. My ... Read More

Improving Shor’s Algorithm

We don’t have a useful quantum computer yet, but we do have quantum algorithms. Shor’s algorithm has the potential to factor large numbers faster than otherwise possible, which—if the run times are actually feasible—could break both the RSA and Diffie-Hellman public-key algorithms. Now, computer scientist Oded Regev has a significant ... Read More

New iPhone Exploit Uses Four Zero-Days

Kaspersky researchers are detailing “an attack that over four years backdoored dozens if not thousands of iPhones, many of which belonged to employees of Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky.” It’s a zero-click exploit that makes use of four iPhone zero-days. The most intriguing new detail is the targeting of the heretofore-unknown ... Read More

OpenAI Is Not Training on Your Dropbox Documents—Today

There’s a rumor flying around the Internet that OpenAI is training foundation models on your Dropbox documents. Here’s CNBC. Here’s Boing Boing. Some articles are more nuanced, but there’s still a lot of confusion. It seems not to be true. Dropbox isn’t sharing all of your documents with OpenAI. But ... Read More

Police Get Medical Records without a Warrant

More unconstrained surveillance: Lawmakers noted the pharmacies’ policies for releasing medical records in a letter dated Tuesday to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. The letter—signed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.)—said their investigation pulled information from ... Read More

A Robot the Size of the World

In 2016, I wrote about an Internet that affected the world in a direct, physical manner. It was connected to your smartphone. It had sensors like cameras and thermostats. It had actuators: Drones, autonomous cars. And it had smarts in the middle, using sensor data to figure out what to ... Read More

New Windows/Linux Firmware Attack

Interesting attack based on malicious pre-OS logo images: LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux…. The vulnerabilities are the subject of a coordinated mass ... Read More