Hashtag Trending March.16th Mozillas AI challenge, Facebook and AOL, simplifying ChatGPT
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Welcome to Hashtag Trending for Thursday, March 16th
Im your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and TechNewsDay in the U.S. heres todays top tech news stories.
Mozilla launches a responsible AI challenge
Mozilla, the open source organization that gave us the Firefox browser has announce that it will be sponsoring what it calls a responsible AI challenge. The contest is a response to the new gold rush where the large players may be more concerned with rushing to market with generative AI solutions than they are on responsible innovation.
We reported yesterday that Microsoft got rid of their entire staff dedicated to AI ethics.
The contest, which is really a relaunch of Mozillas existing builders program, will encourage entrepreneurs to share their ideas with the world.
Winners are eligible for $50,000 in prizes, including a top prize of $25,000 along with mentorship and resources for responsible AI projects.
Imo Udom, senior vice president of Innovations Ecosystems at Mozilla, who announced the initiative on stage during a panel discussion with Axios, said. If anything, the last few months have shown that AI is no longer our future. Its our present,
Udom said. While decades of effort have gone into reaching this
point with AI, the time has come to establish the future we want with AI.
Applications will be open until March 30
th
Axios
Dish customers are being kept in the dark as the fallout from a recent ransomware attack continues.
Its been two weeks since the satellite cable provider was hit by ransomware. According to a story in Tech Crunch, Dish has confirmed in a public filing that ransomware was to blame for their outage. They also warned that hackers had stolen data which may include customers personal information.
Since then, its been crickets from Dish. The same TechCrunch report said that some customers still have no access to Dish or even
services through its subsidiaries like Boost Mobile
.
And customers still dont know if their personal data is at risk.
TechCrunch has heard a litany of complaints from subscribers.
Some have been unable to contact Dish customer service. Some claim to have been afflicted by email and voice phishing attacks. Some have even reported that Dish services were disconnected when customers, due to the issues at the company, were unable to pay their bills.
Dish spokesperson Edward Wietecha
acknowledged that customers are having trouble reaching our service desks, accessing their accounts, and making payments.
When asked directly to share details on what customer data was taken, the Dish spokesperson punted, saying these types of investigations take time.
A former Dish retailer was more forthcoming, telling Tech Crunch that Dish has a wealth of information on its servers, including customer names, dates of birth, email addresses, telephone numbers, social security numbers and even credit card information
and that this information was retained indefinitely
,
even for prospective customers who didnt pass Dishs credit check.
Dish has hosted its own infrastructure, but has recently moved to Amazons cloud service at about the same time as the attack.
Dishs spokesperson said that it will take a little time before things are fully restored.
So, who is responsible for this attack? Security blog Bleeping Computer suggested that it might be Black Basta, believed to be a rebranding of the Conti ransomware gang. But Dish has not year appeared on Bastas leak site which might indicate that this is not the gang responsible, or that negotiations are ongoing.
Source:
Tech Crunch
Is Amazon about to launch its own web browser?
While all attention has been on the contest between Google Chrome and Microsofts Edge, there are rumours that Amazon is about to launch its own web browser. According to an article in Gizmodo, Amazon sent a survey to users asking detailed questions, one of which was which features would convince you to download and try a new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon?
We want to understand what our customers value about current web browsers, and what they wish the browsers could do better, Amazon wrote in the survey, first spotted by Nicholas De Leon of Consumer Reports.
Users were reportedly asked to rate the importance of different features such as text to speech, extensions, synching data across desktop and mobile devices, and even whether they favoured blocking third party cookies.
For a number of years, Google has been talking about a shakeup in the browser market by killing what are called third party cookies the silent markers that websites load in your browser
that show what sites and pages you have visited.
The only problem eliminating cookies is that Google, and many others,
depend on these cookies as the primary way of tracking users and targeting them for ads.
But Amazon may want to exploit this change to enhance its own ad business. According to the same Gizmodo article, Amazon made almost 38 billion dollars from advertising in 2022, more than it made on Prime or any other subscription services.
The other key element could be that browsers and their cookies or whatever might replace them
in future say an enormous amount about shopping habits a real leg up for a retail sales giant.
Amazon has toyed with the idea of a browser in the past. It launched a browser it called Silk in 2011 but that browser was tailored to its Echo products.
Any new browser would take it into a new world of the desktop/laptop for the first time.
Source:
Gizmodo
Fans of our sister podcast CyberSecurity today will know all about Patch Tuesday, the day that features Microsofts new fixes. But it has some added urgency this week. It includes fixes for 74 bugs, but, according to a report in the Register, two of which are actively being exploited and 9 are critical.
One of these, with the name CVE-2023-23397 received a 9.8 out of 10 rating in terms of its danger level. Its already being exploited by threat actors in Russia and against government, energy and military sectors in Europe.
Redmond has shown its concern by publishing a guide to the malware, and providing documentation and even a script to determine if a company has been targeted. As the article in the Register said, its serious.
The article goes on to note The attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted email which triggers automatically when it is retrieved and processed by the Outlook client, Microsoft explained
. This could lead to exploitation BEFORE the email is viewed in the Preview Pane.
Zero Day Initiatives Dustin Childs
: Definitely test and deploy this fix quickly.
Source:
Could Facebook be the next AOL?
An article in CNN Business noted that Marc Zuckerberg described what the company
is going through in a memo to staff as a challenging period.
As Zuckerberg continues his business review in what he has termed the year of efficiency
he sticks to his strategy of flattening the company, by removing multiple levels of middle ma
Thursday, March 16, 2023 at 9:00 am