Beyond Cupertino

The US, UK, and 16 other countries have signed an agreement pledging to take steps to make AI “secure by design.”

Although acknowledged to be a basic statement of principles, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has said that it’s an important first step …

The mystery of what led the OpenAI board to take the precipitous step of firing CEO Sam Altman may now have been solved. A new report says a number of researchers warned them of a new breakthrough which they said could threaten humanity – after Altman seemingly failed to inform them.

In a letter to the board, the researchers suggested that the breakthrough – dubbed Q* and pronounced Q-Star – could let AI “surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks” …

While not exactly our normal beat, it’s hard to ignore the biggest tech news of the day: the OpenAI drama which saw CEO Sam Altman abruptly fired from the ChatGPT developer. This happened without notice, and for reasons we can guess but which were not stated.

Latest updates: Almost all of the company’s 770 staff have now threatened to quit unless the board resigns and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and it appears that their return to the company is now a strong possibility – more at the bottom …

A new report says that personal information sold by data brokers is even more sensitive and detailed than previously thought, making so-called anonymized data even easier to tie back to specific individuals.

The report says that those buying data are able to target people working in extremely sensitive professions, including military personnel and “decision makers” working in national security roles …

Elon Musk reportedly thinks it may be simpler to block X in Europe, rather than fix the massive problem with disinformation on the platform.

The issue is now so bad that video game footage has been passed off as news coverage of the terrorist attack in Israel, and Musk himself has been promoting accounts known for racist content and conspiracy theories …

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding X (formerly Twitter) since the company was acquired by Elon Musk last year. Earlier this year, Musk appointed former NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino as CEO of X. On Thursday, Yaccarino joined an interview at Vox Media’s Code 2023 conference, at which point she decided to show off her iPhone to the audience. To some people’s surprise, the X app is not on the first page of the Home Screen.

A group of white hat hackers are competing to make AI go rogue – with the backing of the White House. The contest, at this year’s Def Con event, is intended to expose vulnerabilities in artificial intelligence systems, so that their developers can work on fixes.

A smaller event has already seen AI systems expose personal medical data and help plan a bank robbery, while some AI systems don’t seem to need any help from hackers, as they promote eating disorders …

An investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory has found worrying volumes of CSAM on Mastodon. Of particular concern is that the child sexual abuse material included many known examples that should have been automatically detected by digital fingerprinting.

Researchers say that a large part of the issue is the open and decentralized nature of the social media platform …

Reddit protests have been continuing, despite threats by the company to take over subreddits which refuse to end them. The company has now carried out its threat against one of the biggest subreddits – a move which seems set to backfire.

Additionally, a fun crowdsourced art project on Reddit is now being used to post messages protesting against the company’s decision to charge extortionate amounts for API access …

The Netflix Basic tier – which the company had previously attempted to hide – has now been withdrawn in both the US and UK, following the same move in Canada last month.

Removing the package will now force anyone wanting to dump the ads to pay more than twice as much for the Standard plan …

Reports of the death of Twitter have so far been somewhat exaggerated. Musk may have made dumb decision after dumb decision, but each time either did a rapid U-turn shortly afterwards, or the sheer momentum of Twitter as the default social media app has carried it through.

But this time, Musk has not only achieved Michael Scott levels of ineptitude, but Meta has brought forward the launch of its Twitter rival Threads in order to take advantage of the chaos …

A Facebook privacy breach has seen parent company Meta fined $1.3B – the largest amount ever imposed for breaking Europe’s tough GDPR privacy laws, according to WSJ sources. The news is expected to be officially announced later today.

The fine also raises questions about the privacy of US Facebook users, as it was levied for exposing European citizens to the much looser rules that apply to American users …