Microsoft axes Internet Explorer, Meta gets sued
Bluetooth can now be tracked And…has AI become… sentient?
Hi, and welcome to our weekly cybersecurity news! Before we start panicking about the impending
doom of a robot apocalypse, let’s talk about another end.
The Internet's favorite punching bag, Internet Explorer, has been retired at the age of 26.
Microsoft pulled support for Internet Explorer on June 15, 2022.
It has been a long time coming, of course,
as usage of the browser has plummeted in recent years.
Microsoft will start prompting those still using the Explorer to switch over to Microsoft Edge.
Eventually, Internet Explorer will be permanently disabled as part of a future Windows update.
To honor the fallen browser, an engineer in South Korea erected a lovely monument,
with the memorial reading “He was a good tool to download other browsers.”
Indeed, it was. Rest in peace, Internet Explorer.
Now, onto a company that’s still alive and kicking. Meta.
Last week, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, was slapped with eight different lawsuits
for exploiting young people for profit. The suits claim that the company’s algorithms
contributed to mental health issues like eating disorders, sleeplessness, suicidal thoughts,
and actual suicides in younger users. According to the complaints, excessive time on
Facebook and Instagram pose serious mental health risks and Meta misrepresented the safety, utility,
and non-addictive properties of its social media platforms.
Because of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states that platforms
can’t be held accountable for the third-party content on their websites,
the suits are going after the algorithm itself. Meta implemented sophisticated algorithms designed
to encourage frequent access to the platforms and prolonged exposure to harmful content,
said one of the attorneys suing the company. This is just the latest, but probably not the last
time Meta will come under scrutiny. The company’s platforms have received endless criticism
for enabling the spread of fake news and hate speech, unethical data collection, data breaches,
dubious advertising practices and much more. Speaking of living in a surveillance dystopia,
it turns out your Bluetooth signal can be fingerprinted and tracked.
Usually, you use Bluetooth to connect to your wireless headphones
or speakers, or for Covid tracing apps. But now, researchers from the University of
California San Diego found that due to small, unique imperfections in the Bluetooth chips
that appear during the manufacturing process, your Bluetooth signal may be unique and can be tracked.
However, for now, a cyberattack targeting your Bluetooth connection
is too costly and impractical to carry out by just anyone.
So don’t expect for this method of tracking to become popular in the near future.
Let’s talk about the future. The future of AI. A Google engineer, Blake Lemoine,
claims that an artificial intelligence chatbot, LaMDA, had become sentient.
LaMDA is Google’s system for building chatbots that mimic speech by ingesting
trillions of words from the internet. Lemoine describes the chatbot as a 7- or
8-year-old kid that happens to know physics. The engineer says he’s spoken to LaMDA about
things like religion, consciousness, and the laws of robotics.
Lemoine has been placed on leave since the article in The Washington Post came out.
Google denies that the AI has become sentient. Many in the AI community have agreed with Google’s
assessment, claiming that it’s more likely to be a case of anthropomorphizing — assigning
human attributes to an inanimate object. And what’s worse, according to some experts,
it’s distracting from real problems plaguing AI right now.
Timnit Gebru, a former Google Ethical AI team co-lead who was fired after a dispute over a paper
that covered the ethical risks of large language models like LaMDA, commented on Lemaine’s claims.
She told Wired that the focus on artificial intelligence sentience misses the point.
According to Gebru, it prevents us from focusing on existing threats like AI colonialism,
false arrests, or an economic model that pays those who label data little
while tech executives get rich. It also distracts from genuine concerns about LaMDA,
like how it was trained or its propensity to generate toxic text.
What do you think about LaMDA? Is the chatbot sentient? Or is Gebru right and it doesn’t even
matter right now? Let us know in the comments! And if you liked this video, subscribe to
our YouTube channel! Stay safe, everyone!