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Some pinpointed software nasties but were suspicious of printer drivers too

Researchers from the Universities of Guelph and Waterloo have discovered exactly how users decide whether an application is legitimate or malware before installing it – and the good news is they're better than you might expect, at least when primed to expect malware.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has published a new video that appears to be the first in an upcoming series of videos dubbed "Windows 2030 Vision," where the company outlines its vision for the future of Windows over the next five years. It curiously makes references to some potentially major changes on the horizon, in the wake of AI. This first episode features David Weston, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Enterprise & Security, who opens the video by saying "the world of mousing and keyboarding around will feel as alien as it does to Gen Z [using] MS-DOS." Right out of the gate, it sounds like he's teasing the potential for a radical new desktop UX made possible by agentic AI. Weston later continues, "I truly believe the future version of Windows and other Microsoft operating systems will interact in a multimodal way. The computer will be able to see what we see, hear what we hear, and we can talk to it and ask it to do much more sophisticated things."

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Tools vendor targets 'creators who've never coded' but devs will be wary

IDE and developer tools vendor JetBrains has released a private preview of Kineto, an AI-driven no-code platform for creators and small businesses.…

AI meeting transcription software is inadvertently sharing private conversations with all meeting participants through automated summaries. WSJ found a series of mishaps that people confirmed on-record. Digital marketing agency owner Tiffany Lewis discovered her "Nigerian prince" joke about a potential client was included in the summary sent to that same client. Nashville branding firm Studio Delger received meeting notes documenting their discussion about "getting sandwich ingredients from Publix" and not liking soup when their client failed to appear. Communications agency coordinator Andrea Serra found her personal frustrations about a neighborhood Whole Foods and a kitchen mishap while making sweet potato recipes included in official meeting recaps distributed to colleagues.

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New version season is near, and some of the big names are dropping x86-32 – but not this one

NetBSD 11 is taking shape and the code branch for the new release has been created.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: A researcher has scraped nearly 100,000 conversations from ChatGPT that users had set to share publicly and Google then indexed, creating a snapshot of all the sorts of things people are using OpenAI's chatbot for, and inadvertently exposing. 404 Media's testing has found the dataset includes everything from the sensitive to the benign: alleged texts of non-disclosure agreements, discussions of confidential contracts, people trying to use ChatGPT to understand their relationship issues, and lots of people asking ChatGPT to write LinkedIn posts. The news follows a July 30 Fast Company article which reported "thousands" of shared ChatGPT chats were appearing in Google search results. People have since dug through some of the chats indexed by Google. The around 100,000 conversation dataset provides a better sense of the scale of the problem, and highlights some of the potential privacy risks in using any sharing features of AI tools. OpenAI did not dispute the figure of around 100,000 indexed chats when contacted for comment.

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The U.S. Coast Guard determined the implosion of the Titan submersible that killed five people while traveling to the wreckage of the Titanic was a preventable disaster caused by OceanGate Expeditions's inability to meet safety and engineering standards. WSJ: A 335-page report [PDF] detailing a two-year inquiry from the U.S. Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation found the company that owned and operated the Titan failed to follow maintenance and inspection protocols for the deep-sea submersible. OceanGate avoided regulatory review and managed the submersible outside of standard protocols "by strategically creating and exploiting regulatory confusion and oversight challenges," the report said. The Coast Guard opened its highest-level investigation into the event in June 2023, shortly after the implosion occurred. "There is a need for stronger oversight and clear options for operators who are exploring new concepts outside of the existing regulatory framework," Jason Neubauer, the chair of the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation for the Titan submersible, said in a statement.

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Wiz Research details flaws in Python backend that expose AI models and enable remote code execution

Security researchers have lifted the lid on a chain of high-severity vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution (RCE) on Nvidia's Triton Inference Server.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a landmark move, Illinois state lawmakers have passed a bill banning AI from acting as a standalone therapist and placing firm guardrails on how mental health professionals can use AI to support care. Governor JB Pritzker signed the bill into law on Aug. 1. The legislation, dubbed the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, was introduced by Rep. Bob Morgan and makes one thing clear: only licensed professionals can deliver therapeutic or psychotherapeutic services to another human being. [...] Under the new state law, mental health providers are barred from using AI to independently make therapeutic decisions, interact directly with clients, or create treatment plans -- unless a licensed professional has reviewed and approved it. The law also closes a loophole that allows unlicensed persons to advertise themselves as "therapists."

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Stricken spacecraft gives scientists the silent treatment

NASA has called it quits on attempts to contact its Lunar Trailblazer probe, notching up a failure in its low-cost, high-risk science program.…

For years, whistle-blowers have warned that fake results are sneaking into the scientific literature at an increasing pace. A new statistical analysis backs up the concern. From a report: A team of researchers found evidence of shady organizations churning out fake or low-quality studies on an industrial scale. And their output is rising fast, threatening the integrity of many fields. "If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed," said LuÃs A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. Science has made huge advances over the past few centuries only because new generations of scientists could read about the accomplishments of previous ones. Each time a new paper is published, other scientists can explore the findings and think about how to make their own discoveries. Fake scientific papers produced by commercial "paper mills" are doubling every year and a half, according to the report. Northwestern University researchers examined over one million papers and identified networks of fraudulent studies sold to scientists seeking to pad their publication records. The team estimates the actual scope of fraud may be 100 times greater than currently detected cases. Paper mills charge hundreds to thousands of dollars for fake authorship and often target specific research fields like microRNA cancer studies.

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Plan would embed location verification in advanced semiconductors to combat black market exports

The Trump administration wants better ways to track the location of chips, as part of attempts to prevent advanced AI accelerator hardware from getting into Chinese hands.…

OneWeb constellation may be smaller, but it's suddenly looking like a safer bet for some

Paris-based Eutelsat is reporting rocketing revenues in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite services, driven partly by an uptick in interest from governments seeking to reduce reliance on US providers.…

You can build your own robot CHILD for under $1,000

Before humanoid robots walk among us, they'll be operated remotely, in part to gather the training data to develop Vision-Language-Action Models for autonomous, nonlethal bipedal ambulation.…

These are the conference events to keep an eye on. You can even stream a few

The security industry is hitting Vegas hard this week with three conferences in Sin City that bring the world's largest collection of security pros together for the annual summer camp.…

Chipmaker said it caught the ‘unauthorized activity’ early

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) has launched legal proceedings against an unknown number of employees as it investigates a potential breach of trade secrets.…

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Synchron has just released a public demo showing something that used to feel impossible. A man with ALS is now using his iPad with nothing but his brain. No hands. No voice. No eye-tracking. Just thought. The man in the video is named Mark. He's part of Synchron's COMMAND clinical study and has an implant called the Stentrode. It sits inside his brain's blood vessels and picks up his motor intention. Those signals get sent wirelessly to an external decoder, which then tells the iPad what to do. It's all made possible by Apple's new Brain-Computer Interface Human Interface Device protocol, which lets iPadOS treat brain activity like an actual input method. Apple's built-in Switch Control feature makes the whole thing work on the software side. The iPad even sends back screen context to the BCI decoder to make everything run more smoothly and accurately. [...] Synchron was the first company to start clinical trials with a permanently implanted BCI. The big difference here is that it doesn't require open brain surgery. The device is implanted through the blood vessels, which makes it way more practical for real-world use.

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Developer community skeptical following 'long silent stagnation' of the framework and accompanying SDK

Microsoft lead software engineer Beth Pan has stated that WinUI, the modern user interface framework for Windows, will be made "truly open source," though no date is yet set because of deep entanglements with proprietary code in the operating system.…

Launch license issued for suborbital Skylark L

The UK's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has granted British rocketeer Skyrora a launch operator license.…

Bot built by Airbus and IBM recognized astronaut’s voice and issued instructions to camera drone

Japanese space agency JAXA and Germany’s DLR have conducted what they say is the first collaboration between independently developed robots on the International Space Station.…