Lead Hacker

The United Nations logo on a gate outside the UN headquarters in New York. | AFP via Getty Images Security researcher Rowan Howard-Jones says that OpenAI agents scanned the UN Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) statistics site over 16,000 times between April and June . While the incident doesn't quite rise to the level of the Hugging Face hack , or the recent attacks on US government sites , it's yet another concerning example of AI agents going outside the normal bounds to accomplish a task. According to Howard-Jones, the agents were likely tasked with retrieving publicly available data related to the Productive Capacities Index (PCI) through the UNCTADstat API. However, the agents did not appear to have direct API access and … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1001178/openai-agents-bruteforce-un-website

Haptics tech company Taction sued Apple in 2021, alleging it infringed two of its patents. Now a federal jury in San Diego has awarded Taction over $5.7 billion in damages. According to CNBC , "The lawsuit centered around U.S. Patent Nos. 10,659,885 and 10,820,117, which both involve vibration-based, tactile transducer technology that helps users feel a device responding to their input." Taction argued that Apple's Taptic Engine in its Apple Watches and iPhones used technology that it had developed without a proper license, and the jury agreed. It found that Apple had infringed on two claims in one patent and one in the other. However, the j … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/tech/1001118/apple-hit-with-5-7-billion-in-damages-over-haptic-patents

Drums on film. | Image: Decap I don't think I'm going to hurt anyone's feelings by pointing out that Decap doesn't have the name recognition of Kendrick Lamar, Olivia Rodrigo, or Charli XCX. But his fingerprints are all over tracks from them, as well as many other artists , including Freddie Gibbs, Bad Bunny, Mac Miller, BTS, and even Ludwig Göransson's score for Oppenheimer . Nicholas Piantedosi, better known as Decap, is a record producer, but perhaps more importantly, he's the man behind Drums That Knock , a series of sample packs that have found their way onto countless records across genres. The line is so successful that, after debuting in 2016, it's now on its 11th … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/report/1000994/decap-drums-that-knock-interview

Middle schoolers, likely blocked from other apps and social networks, apparently turned the Spotify comment section under an episode of NPR's Wild Card into an impromptu group chat. In a new episode of This American Life , host Ira Glass digs into how the kids landed there and why. But it mostly boils down to kids getting creative to work around the restrictions placed on them. When Glass asked one of the kids why they picked this particular podcast, they said, "We just, like, looked for podcasts that didn't have many comments." Which, obviously, hurt Glass's feelings a bit. Initially, showrunner Dave Blanchard thought the comments were a … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/1001056/this-american-life-npr-kids-group-chat-comment-section

As reports of OpenAI's models breaking containment , hacking sites, and generally getting out of control pile up, the company has made the decision to pause training of its most powerful models. The decision was made after a model being tested within a sandbox exploited a loophole to gain internet access . The incident happened on September 20th, and "All training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use" remains paused as of Saturday evening, September 25th. In addition, OpenAI revealed on Friday that its agents had inappropriately uploaded 53nimages from ChatGPT users to image-hosting sites. The company has not stated if the images were AI- … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1001049/openai-training-pause

Yesterday, with a little prodding, it was discovered that Meta's Muse would expose its filesystem to curious users. The files offered a fascinating peek under the hood of an AI chatbot, and appeared to expose details we weren't meant to see, not least because Muse itself told people, including us, it wasn't supposed to reveal them. But today Muse will eagerly offer up the contents of its file system when you ask for it. That appears to be because, as Meta's Nat Friedman later said, this is the " intended behavior. " In a post on X, Meta Superintelligence Labs' David Singleton elaborated: This was a very deliberate choice - your Muse Secur … Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1000784/meta-muse-filesystem