Uber Breach

In the article “Uber Investigating Breach of Its Computer Systems” by Kate Conger and Kevin Roose, it states that the issue occurred in Uber on September 15, 2022. The FBI had to get involved when a major data breach occurred at Uber when an anonymous hacker gained access to everything inside of Uber’s information systems and network. Hacker who claimed himself as 18 years old had almost full access to the Uber system. His attack technique was so called “social engineering”, which persuaded the workers to give their passwords. He pretended to be a corporate information technology person. These types of social engineering attacks targeting a foothold within tech companies are increasing. In this case, little no harm was done, but it was still a major breakdown in protecting internal systems and data. However, this was not the first time that Uber has been hacked. In the year of 2016, about 57 million drivers and riders account were hacked and wanted $100,000 to delete their copy of the data.

Increasing risk of cyber attacks are making our private information to be exposed to anyone which might include hackers who tend to use the data to make a profit or threaten people. In many countries all around the world, they define these kinds of action as terror and take it as a serious problem. Cyber attacks not only threaten individuals or organizations but also the government itself, many governments try to develop their security technology. Cyber attack not only achieves its goal by social engineering techniques but can be done by visual attack, malware attack, phishing, denial of service, SQL injection attack, etc.

To prevent these kinds of cyber attack there are some ways to secure its data from being hacked. It includes employee training, multi-factor authentication, use of encryption, and updating regular software and patches. What do you have in mind in order to achieve secure in your system?

A Technology Deficit in the Boardroom

technology usage has increased greatly over the past 3 years. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of technology applications within companies has expanded to a wide variety. As stated in an article by Deloitte, “Technology is being adopted widely by businesses and consumers alike. The digital transformation that was underway in many organizations has moved forward at a rate few could have predicted in 2019: Furthermore, 85% of CEOs accelerated digital initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic.” the use of Zoom and many other network sharing applications have been on an exponential rise in the past years and will continue to develop because there are many factors of business that become much easier done with these connections. It eliminates the idea to travel over long distances for small conversations that normally would be communicated during these trips or eliminates smaller emails. You can meet with colleagues through your computer and effectively conduct business in a timely manner.

 

Also stated in this article, “prominently in two areas: first, whether boards are providing enough oversight on tech matters, and second, a lack of tech fluency among board members. Fewer than half of executives and board members believe their board is providing enough oversight of technology matters.” Some companies have not been overseeing this use of technology which also prohibits efficiency within companies, while other competitors are using this on a daily to further their business at any given time, it gives advantages to those who use them.

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/leadership/digital-transformation-topics-for-corporate-technology-leadership.html

Snapchat introduces its new AI chatbot called ‘My AI’

In February 2023, the popular social media app, Snapchat, launched a new feature for its Snapchat plus subscribers, but has recently changed it to be available to all users. My AI is powered by ChatGPT, and serves a similar purpose which is to answer users’ questions or maintain conversations with them.

Since the introduction of this new feature to the public, Snapchat has been receiving a copious amount of backlash and criticism. Many individuals have been sharing their experiences with the new chatbot on their social media platforms, showing the concerning conversations that they’ve been having with My AI. Some users feel as if this new feature is frightening because of its knowledge of personal information. For example, this chatbot has been stating users’ locations, despite the fact that they never shared that information with the chatbot. Although this new feature initially was able to draw in more subscribers, it has now been portrayed in a negative light on social media, due to safety and privacy concerns. As discussed in class, it is important to keep personal information secure and limit the amount of information that we put online. Failing to do so can make individuals easy targets for hackers that harvest data and use it with the intention of carrying out criminal activity.

This new Snapchat development also shows the trajectory that social media is going on. With the growing prevalence and fascination with AI in the world of technology, it is no surprise that popular social media companies are following suit and incorporating artificial intelligence into their applications.

https://www.businessinsider.com/snapchats-my-ai-scary-and-comforting-users-say-evan-spiegel-2023-4

Samsung Voice Assistant Bixby saving a person’s life.

Recently, Samsung smartphones’s voice assistant service called “Bixby” has saved a person’s life in South Korea. A man in his 30s was trapped in a bathroom and tried to escape for more than five hours, but miraculously succeeded in escaping with the help of an artificial intelligence (AI) cell phone, which was 6 meters away from the door. The door did not open even though a man, 170 centimeters tall and 102 kilograms, kicked and bumped with his body. He took off the thin iron pipe by the washstand and tried to scratch the side of the door handle to make a hole, but failed, and tried to pierce the ceiling, but to no avail. When he was exhausted from nearly five hours of struggle and was desperate, he said he remembered the cell phone he had left on his desk. He was able to call Bixby and tell her to let his parents to call the police. Fortunately, the man was able to come out from the bathroom and eventually Bixby saved his life.

https://www.allkpop.com/article/2023/04/smart-assistant-to-the-rescue-bixby-saves-man-trapped-in-a-tiny-bathroom

Tesla getting hacked by a teenager.

Tesla is known for autonomous driving. When it comes to autonomous driving, it is a battlefield where Tesla is risking its life, and when Tesla cars were hacked, it was said that the hacker drove autonomously while controlling a total of 20 cars at his disposal. It was also surprising to hear that the hacker was 19 years old. The hacker lives in Germany and revealed his identity on Twitter under the account Colombo, saying he controlled 20 Tesla cars in 13 countries and wanted to inform the owners. Surprisingly, Colombo, who was active on Twitter, introduced himself as a hacker and owner of Colombo Tech, where Colombo Tech is not a German-run company, but a security company operating in other countries, specializing in cybersecurity. Colombo said the reason why it was able to hack Tesla’s car was not because of Tesla’s technical defects, but because of the car owners’ fault. As mentioned above, he said that’s why he said he wanted to let Tesla owners know why it was hacked. He also said that among Tesla cars in each country, more than 25 were remotely operated in 13 countries. Colombo also revealed what can be hacked when they succeed. It said it can succeed by disabling the function recorded during parking, opening car doors and car windows, and starting a car. One thing that gives me a little goosebumps here is that it is possible to check the location of the vehicle by inquiring the location of the vehicle, and to check whether the driver is in the vehicle or not. And he said he could turn off and turn on the video by running a YouTube app on the driver’s side of Tesla. Colombo said he informed U.S. cybersecurity companies to respond to security and communicated the situation and problems involved in the hacking directly to Tesla. Still, Colombo said, “Fortunately, we couldn’t access brakes, accelerators, and steering, which are the main parts of the hacking, so we couldn’t literally drag the vehicle around or stop it as we wanted.”

https://www.power-and-beyond.com/tesla-hack-19-year-old-remotely-controls-around-25-vehicles-a-1088983/

Data Security and Privacy trends for 2023

Recently, data has began a major shift especially with the recent Covid outbreak. The majority of data and data storage has shifted to the cloud instead of physical storage devices. This is an extremely convenient shift for technology users, but it also brings increased risk of breach. In the past year, major tech companies have reported that there has been major breeches and private user information has been leaked through cloud storage. The data held in cloud storage needs to still be accessed by organizations so they can further use the data to create new innovations and future steps to be taken towards their company. The Immuta Data Security Platform allows companies to do just that but also lock down user private information. On the consumer side of privacy, most users agree that they do not want their personal information sent to different advertisers and allow them to send advertisements to them based on their trends and habits. The country has began to see legislation brought into the field to protect the users information and take away this process from developers and advertisers. This will most likely be the steps taken in the near future to help with data security and user privacy.

Source:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/garydrenik/2023/02/02/data-security–privacy-trends-for-2023/?sh=52b774186462

The Ethics of AI Generated Music

AI art took the internet by storm with AI-generated art, with programs like DALL-E and DALL-E 2. Then, chat based AI with Chat GPT 3 and 4. The newest polished frontier (although others exist in a rough stage, like AI video generation and picture detection) is AI music. More specifically, AI deepfake songs using the “voices” of famous artists, dead or alive.

Most recently, an AI deepfake song by “Ghostwriter,” which used the voices of Drake and The Weeknd, went viral on TikTok with tens of millions of views. Drake and the Weeknd have both not commented on the matter, but Drake has jokingly said that AI has gone too far about a different song. In the past, other artists like Jay-Z and Eminem have sued over deepfakes, but Jay-Z’s RocNation have lost their suits.

The laws around deepfake technology, like this and AI art, are far too behind to make any kind of ruling about this. Artists feel as though their work and literal voice is being stolen or cheapened, while the public is able to enjoy their work at a higher volume because of it. It is interesting how this disruptive innovation has advanced so quickly that the legal system cannot keep up. It has been up to private companies, like Spotify and Soundcloud, to stomp this activity out. The question is – should it be illegal?

A new Drake x The Weeknd track just blew up — but it’s an AI fake

SpaceX starship Blowing up on launch

The company SpaceX which is owned by multi-billionaire Elon Musk sent the world’s largest rocket into space the other day. “The SpaceX Starship rocket exploded about four minutes after launch after five of its 33 Raptor engines failed and the spacecraft began to spin. Initially, the historic first test flight of Starship appeared to be going smoothly. The rocket blasted off from the launchpad in South Texas and roared 24.2 miles (39 kilometers) over the Gulf of Mexico. When it was time for the rocket boosters to separate from the spacecraft, the entire stack lost some of its engines and began to tumble before the flight termination system triggered a midair explosion.” This is Elon Musks’ most expensive failure to date. But was it really a failure or was it a step forward? The question remains but then again, taking into account everything that Elon has done for space exploration, he can take this “failure” into account and use this as a step to building his next project which will hopefully reach orbit with a stable launch. This is a massive step for mankind as we grow closer and closer each day to gain more knowledge about our universe. The number of mysteries that we have yet to uncover might be closer to being solved than we might think.

 

https://www.usatoday.com/videos/tech/2023/04/20/spacex-starship-explodes-first-launch-attempt-after-engine-failures/11705368002/

Modern GPU Performance Raving, and How Fast Computers Help Democracy

With the relatively recent launch of NVidia’s 4000 series lineup, we were presented with the RTX 4090, a monster of a compute device capable of performing 83,000,000,000,000 floating point operations a second. We are very rapidly approaching a point where even a budget, consumer grade graphics card is capable of performing unholy amounts of computation in real time. Just 20 years ago, getting a scene like this took days or even weeks:

http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/sc2.jpg

Now we’re able to compute scenes that look like this in real time:

https://images.nvidia.com/aem-dam/Solutions/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray-tracing-overdrive-update-launches-april-11/cp2077-porschedof-rtx-on-badged.jpg

 

Combined with modern driver features such as Mesh Shaders that are able to dramatically reduce the amount of geometry the GPU has to render while offering a much more flexible computation pipeline compared to previous approaches, it isn’t unreasonable to claim that in the very near future, even the most basic of personal computers will be capable of enough compute to handle outrageous tasks, ranging from fully pathtraced video games to even more compute heavy tasks such as neural net training. When individuals are able to train these open source AI models that are flooding the internet, without having to spend thousands renting external hardware, we will truly enter an open AI world where a handful of companies with the funds and resources to work with these technologies aren’t able to own the entire field.

sources:

http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/raytrace.html

Is Data on the Internet Truly Permanent?

We’ve all heard it before, “Be careful what you post, because once it’s on the internet, it’s on there for good.” The idea that the internet has become a permanent storage of information, one which will contain its contents across generations of humans has been constantly pressed on us since elementary school. In fact, a non-trivial portion of our classes this semester were dedicated to understanding the consequences of what we post on the internet, and how the content’s permanence can have negative and positive influences on our lives. Unfortunately, or fortunately, this has started getting further and further from the truth of the situation.

Larger and larger portions of the internet have become impossible to archive or scrape, and current, long standing archives of old, internet content have started to rapidly degrade due to dead and dying links to other media. It’s extremely common to stumble upon an old internet forum when searching for more esoteric information, only to find the only search result contains a series of dead image links with an insulting ‘missing image’ embed in their place:

Lost Tinypic image : r/DataHoarder

Archival websites like Wayback Machine used to be a reliable way to access content that no longer exists, however modern web practices have rendered it useless by locking said content behind javascript requests to servers that may no longer be operating. A key example of this is how Instagram locked old pages behind a login prompt, resulting in it being impossible to navigate through archived account pages:

It’s easy to imagine content on the internet will persist forever without any effort on our parts. Unfortunately, preserving content, even on something as viral as the cloud, requires active work on every single developer, moderator, and user’s part. It’s important to take into consideration whether or not a feature will make a page harder to archive, as oftentimes once these links are dead, the content they hold is gone for good.

 

Sources:

http://web.archive.org/