Meta pays the price for storing hundreds of millions of passwords in plaintext

Meta pays the price for storing hundreds of millions of passwords in plaintext

Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees. Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks had logged user passwords in plaintext and stored them in…

Meta pays the price for storing hundreds of millions of passwords in plaintext

Meta pays the price for storing hundreds of millions of passwords in plaintext

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees. Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks had logged user passwords in plaintext…

Man tricks OpenAI’s voice bot into duet of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”

Man tricks OpenAI’s voice bot into duet of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”

OpenAI’s new Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) of its ChatGPT AI assistant rolled out to subscribers on Tuesday, and people are already finding novel ways to use it, even against OpenAI’s wishes. On Thursday, a software architect named AJ Smith tweeted a video of himself playing a duet of The Beatles’ 1966 song “Eleanor Rigby” with…

Man tricks OpenAI’s voice bot into duet of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”

Man tricks OpenAI’s voice bot into duet of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”

Enlarge / A screen capture of AJ Smith doing his Eleanor Rigby duet with OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode through the ChatGPT app. (credit: AJ Smith / Getty Images) OpenAI’s new Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) of its ChatGPT AI assistant rolled out to subscribers on Tuesday, and people are already finding novel ways to use it,…

Microsoft details security/privacy overhaul for Windows Recall ahead of relaunch

Microsoft details security/privacy overhaul for Windows Recall ahead of relaunch

Microsoft is having another whack at its controversial Recall feature for Copilot+ Windows PCs, after the original version crashed and burned amid scrutiny from security researchers and testers over the summer. The former version of Recall recorded screenshots and OCR text of all user activity, and stored it unencrypted on disk where it could easily…

Ars in San Jose recap: Infrastructure, sustainability, AI, cocktails

Ars in San Jose recap: Infrastructure, sustainability, AI, cocktails

Enlarge / Dr. John Timmer, Jeff Ball, Joanna Wong, and Lee Hutchinson discussing infrastructure and the environment. (credit: Kimberly White/Getty Images) Last week, Ars Technica Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher and I made the westerly trek to sunny San Jose to kick off an event titled “Beyond the Buzz: An Infrastructure Future with GenAI and What Comes…

Ars in San Jose recap: Infrastructure, sustainability, AI, cocktails

Ars in San Jose recap: Infrastructure, sustainability, AI, cocktails

Last week, Ars Technica Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher and I made the westerly trek to sunny San Jose, California, to kick off an event titled “Beyond the Buzz: An Infrastructure Future with GenAI and What Comes Next,” hosted in partnership with IBM. It was awesome to get to stand up on stage and talk to a…

Tails OS joins forces with Tor Project in merger

Tails OS joins forces with Tor Project in merger

Enlarge (credit: The Tor Project) The Tor Project, the nonprofit that maintains software for the Tor anonymity network, is joining forces with Tails, the maker of a portable operating system that uses Tor. Both organizations seek to pool resources, lower overhead, and collaborate more closely on their mission of online anonymity. Tails and the Tor…

Tails OS joins forces with Tor Project in merger

Tails OS joins forces with Tor Project in merger

The Tor Project, the nonprofit that maintains software for the Tor anonymity network, is joining forces with Tails, the maker of a portable operating system that uses Tor. Both organizations seek to pool resources, lower overhead, and collaborate more closely on their mission of online anonymity. Tails and the Tor Project began discussing the possibility…

Exponential growth brews 1 million AI models on Hugging Face

Exponential growth brews 1 million AI models on Hugging Face

Enlarge (credit: Hugging Face / anucha sirivisansuwan via Getty Images) On Thursday, AI hosting platform Hugging Face surpassed 1 million AI model listings for the first time, marking a milestone in the rapidly expanding field of machine learning. An AI model is a computer program (often using a neural network) trained on data to perform…