Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Microsoft is urging users of VMware’s ESXi hypervisor to take immediate action to ward off ongoing attacks by ransomware groups that give them full administrative control of the servers the product runs on. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-37085, allows attackers who have already gained limited system rights on a targeted server to gain full administrative control of the ESXi hypervisor. Attackers affiliated with multiple ransomware syndicates—including…

Enlarge / The California State Capitol Building in Sacramento. (credit: Getty Images) California’s “Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act” (a.k.a. SB-1047) has led to a flurry of headlines and debate concerning the overall “safety” of large artificial intelligence models. But critics are concerned that the bill’s overblown focus on existential threats by future AI models could severely limit research and development for more prosaic, non-threatening AI…

Enlarge / Apple Intelligence was unveiled at WWDC 2024. (credit: Apple) As was just rumored, the iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 developer betas are rolling out today, and they include the first opportunity to try out Apple Intelligence, the company’s suite of generative AI features. Initially announced for iOS 18, Apple Intelligence is expected to launch for the public this fall. Typically, Apple also releases a public…

Enlarge / One day, using pixellated fonts and images to represent that something is a video game will not be a trope. Today is not that day. SAG-AFTRA has called for a strike of all its members working in video games, with the union demanding that its next contract not allow “companies to abuse AI to the detriment of our members.” The strike mirrors similar actions taken by SAG-AFTRA and…

Enlarge / An AI-generated image released by xAI during the open-weights launch of Grok-1. (credit: xAI) Elon Musk-led social media platform X is training Grok, its AI chatbot, on users’ data, and that’s opt-out, not opt-in. If you’re an X user, that means Grok is already being trained on your posts if you haven’t explicitly told it not to. Over the past day or so, users of the platform noticed…

Enlarge / A bad update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon security software crashed millions of Windows PCs last week. (credit: CrowdStrike) CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said Thursday that 97 percent of all Windows systems running its Falcon sensor software were back online, a week after an update-related outage to the corporate security software delayed flights and took down emergency response systems, among many other disruptions. The update, which caused Windows PCs to…

Enlarge / Police observe the Eiffel Tower from Trocadero ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 22, 2024. (credit: Hector Vivas/Getty Images) On the eve of the Olympics opening ceremony, Paris is a city swamped in security. Forty thousand barriers divide the French capital. Packs of police officers wearing stab vests patrol pretty, cobbled streets. The river Seine is out of bounds to anyone who has not already…

Enlarge / An illustration provided by Google. (credit: Google) On Thursday, Google DeepMind announced that AI systems called AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 reportedly solved four out of six problems from this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), achieving a score equivalent to a silver medal. The tech giant claims this marks the first time an AI has reached this level of performance in the prestigious math competition—but as usual in AI,…

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / OpenAI) Arguably, few companies have unintentionally contributed more to the increase of AI-generated noise online than OpenAI. Despite its best intentions—and against its terms of service—its AI language models are often used to compose spam, and its pioneering research has inspired others to build AI models that can potentially do the same. This influx of AI-generated content has further reduced the effectiveness of SEO-driven search…

Enlarge / I don’t know how Sonos’ app might have developed during the groovy era their marketing images aim to summon, but it feels like it might not have wanted to rush head-long into disappointing users quite so quickly. (credit: Sonos) Sonos issued a redesigned app in May, and what lots of customers noticed about it wasn’t the refreshed look, but the things from the previous design entirely missing. Not…