Tag Archives: Features

Those scary warnings of juice jacking in airports and hotels? They’re mostly nonsense

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images reader comments 246 with Federal authorities, tech pundits, and news outlets want you to be on the lookout for a scary cyberattack that can hack your phone when you do nothing more than plug it into a public charging station. These warnings of “juice jacking,” as the threat has come… Read More »

Meet PassGAN, the supposedly “terrifying” AI password cracker that’s mostly hype

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images reader comments 21 with Share this story By now, you’ve probably heard about a new AI-based password cracker that can compromise your password in seconds by using artificial intelligence instead of more traditional methods. Some outlets have called it “terrifying,” “worrying,” “alarming,” and “savvy.” Other publications have fallen over themselves… Read More »

Why ChatGPT and Bing Chat are so good at making things up

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images reader comments 92 with Share this story Over the past few months, AI chatbots like ChatGPT have captured the world’s attention due to their ability to converse in a human-like way on just about any subject. But they come with a serious drawback: They can present convincing false information easily,… Read More »

ChatGPT vs Google Bard: Which is better? We put them to the test.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of two robots fighting in an arena. Benj Edwards / Midjourney reader comments 188 with Share this story In today’s world of generative AI chatbots, we’ve witnessed the sudden rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, introduced in November, followed by Bing Chat in February and Google’s Bard in March. We decided to… Read More »

Android app from China executed 0-day exploit on millions of devices

Getty Images reader comments 31 with Share this story Android apps digitally signed by China’s third-biggest e-commerce company exploited a zero-day vulnerability that allowed them to surreptitiously take control of millions of end-user devices to steal personal data and install malicious apps, researchers from security firm Lookout have confirmed. The malicious versions of the Pinduoduo… Read More »

OpenAI’s GPT-4 exhibits “human-level performance” on professional benchmarks

Ars Technica reader comments 154 with Share this story On Tuesday, OpenAI announced GPT-4, a large multimodal model that can accept text and image inputs while returning text output that “exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks,” according to OpenAI. Also on Tuesday, Microsoft announced that Bing Chat has been running on GPT-4… Read More »

Apple, Atari, and Commodore, oh my! Explore a deluxe home vintage computer den

Enlarge / A view of Brian Green’s home computer lab, full of vintage treasures. reader comments 45 with Share this story In a world where millions of people carry a 1990s-grade supercomputer in their pockets, it’s fun to revisit tech from a time when a 1 megahertz machine on a desktop represented a significant leap… Read More »

Stealthy UEFI malware bypassing Secure Boot enabled by unpatchable Windows flaw

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images reader comments 144 with Share this story Researchers on Wednesday announced a major cybersecurity find—the world’s first-known instance of real-world malware that can hijack a computer’s boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows. Dubbed BlackLotus, the malware… Read More »

Instagram photographer has a confession: His photos are AI-generated

Enlarge / Jos Avery uses Midjourney, an AI image synthesis model, to create images that he then retouches and posts on Instagram as “photos.” reader comments 53 with Share this story With over 26,000 followers and growing, Jos Avery’s Instagram account has a trick up its sleeve. While it may appear to showcase stunning photo… Read More »

AI-powered Bing Chat loses its mind when fed Ars Technica article

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images reader comments 240 with Share this story Over the past few days, early testers of the new Bing AI-powered chat assistant have discovered ways to push the bot to its limits with adversarial prompts, often resulting in Bing Chat appearing frustrated, sad, and questioning its existence. It has argued with… Read More »