AI can change belief in conspiracy theories, study finds
“Our findings fundamentally challenge the view that evidence and arguments are
of little use once someone has ‘gone down the rabbit hole’ and come to believe a
conspiracy theory,” the team wrote. Crucially, the researchers said, the
approach relies on an AI system that can draw on a vast array of information to
produce conversations that encourage critical thinking and provide bespoke,
fact-based counterarguments. ... “About one in four people who began the
experiment believing a conspiracy theory came out the other end without that
belief,” said Costello. “In most cases, the AI can only chip away – making
people a bit more sceptical and uncertain – but a select few were disabused of
their conspiracy entirely.” The researchers added that reducing belief in one
conspiracy theory appeared to reduce participants’ belief in other such ideas,
at least to a small degree, while the approach could have applications in the
real world – for example, AI could reply to posts relating to conspiracy
theories on social media. Prof Sander van der Linden of the University of
Cambridge, who was not involved in the work, questioned whether people would
engage with such AI voluntarily in the real world.
Does Value Stream Management Really Work?
Value stream management is indeed working when it is approached holistically by
integrating the framework with technology and people. By mapping and optimizing
every step in the customer journey, companies can eliminate waste, create
efficiency and ultimately deliver sought after value to customers. The key lies
in continuous improvement and stakeholder engagement throughout the value
stream, ensuring alignment and commitment to delivering responsiveness and
quality to customer needs, according to Saraha Burnett, chief operations officer
at full service digital experience and engineering firm TMG. “Value stream
management is indeed working when it is approached holistically by integrating
the framework with technology and people. By mapping and optimizing every step
in the customer journey, companies can eliminate waste, create efficiency and
ultimately deliver sought after value to customers,” says Burnett in an email
interview. “The key lies in continuous improvement and stakeholder engagement
throughout the value stream, ensuring alignment and commitment to delivering
responsiveness and quality to customer needs.”
Digital ID hackathons to explore real-world use cases
The hackathons aim to address the cold start program by involving verifiers to
facilitate the widespread adoption of mDLs. In this context, the cold start
program refers to a marketplace that relies on identity holders and verifiers.
The primary focus of the hackathon will be on building minimum viable products
(MVPs) that showcase the functionality of the solution. These MVPs will enable
participants to test real-world use cases for mDLs. The digital version of
California driver’s licenses has a variety of potential uses, according to the
OpenID Foundation, including facilitating TSA security checks at airport
security checkpoints, verifying age for purchasing age-restricted items,
accessing DMV websites online, and using for peer-to-peer identification
purposes. For the hackathon, the California DMV will issue mDLs in two formats:
the ISO 18013-5 standard and the W3C Verifiable Credentials v1.1 specification.
The dual issuance provides verifiers with the flexibility to choose the
verification method that best aligns with their system requirements, the
foundation says. Christopher Goh, the national harmonization lead for digital
identity at Austroads, has written a one-pager discussing the various standards
within the ISO/IEC 180130-5 framework specifically related to mDL.
Microsoft VS Code Undermined in Asian Spy Attack
"While the abuse of VSCode is concerning, in our opinion, it is not a
vulnerability," Assaf Dahan, director of threat research for Unit 42, clarifies.
Instead, he says, "It's a legitimate feature that was abused by threat actors,
as often happens with many legitimate software." And there are a number of ways
organizations can protect against a bring-your-own-VSCode attack. Besides
hunting for indicators of compromise (IoCs), he says, "It's also important to
consider whether the organization would want to limit or block the use of VSCode
on endpoints of employees that are not developers or do not require the use of
this specific app. That can reduce the attack surface." "Lastly, consider
limiting access to the VSCode tunnel domains '.tunnels.api.visualstudio[.]com'
or '.devtunnels[.]ms' to users with a valid business requirement. Notice that
these domains are legitimate and are not malicious, but limiting access to them
will prevent the feature from working properly and consequently make it less
attractive for threat actors," he adds.
Rather Than Managing Your Time, Consider Managing Your Energy
“Achievement is no longer enough to be successful,” Sunderland says. “People
also want to feel happy at the same time. Before, people were concerned only
with thinking (mental energy) and doing (physical energy). But that success
formula no longer works. Today, it’s essential to add feelings (emotional
energy) and inner self-experience (spiritual energy) into the mix for people
to learn how to be able to connect to and manage their energy.” ... Sunderland
says all forms of human energy exist in relation to one another. “When these
energies are in sync with each other, people’s energy will be in flow. People
who maintain good health will be able to track those feelings (emotional
energy) that flow through their bodies (physical energy), which is an
essential skill to help increase energy awareness. With greater levels of
energy awareness, people can grow their self-acceptance (emotional energy),
which enhances their self-confidence.” He says that as confidence builds,
people experience greater clarity of thought (mental energy) and they are able
to increase their ability to speak truth (spiritual energy), amplifying their
creative energy.
Mastercard Enhances Real-Time Threat Visibility With Recorded Future Purchase
The payments network has made billions of dollars worth of acquisitions
through the years. Within the security solutions segment of Mastercard, key
focal points center on examining and protecting digital identities, protecting
transactions and using insights from 143 billion annual payments to fashion
real-time intelligence that can be used by merchants and FIs to anticipate new
threats. By way of example, the firm acquired Ekarta in 2021 to score
transactions for the likelihood of fraud through robust identity verification.
All told, Mastercard has invested more than $7 billion over the past five
years in its efforts to protect the digital economy. Artificial intelligence
(AI) is a key ingredient here, and Gerber detailed to PYMNTS that the company
has been a pioneer in harnessing generative AI to extract trends from huge
swaths of data to create “identity graphs” that provide immediate value to any
merchant or FI that wants to understand more about the individuals that’s
interacting with them in the digital realm. The use of other “intelligence
graphs” connects the dots across data points to turn threat-related data into
actionable insights.
2 Open Source AI Tools That Reduce DevOps Friction
DevOps has been built upon taking everything infrastructure and transitioning
it to code, aka Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This includes deployment
pipelines, monitoring, repositories — anything that is built upon
configurations can be represented in code. This is where AI tools like ChatGPT
and AIaC come into play. AIaC, an open source command-line interface (CLI)
tool, enables developers to generate IaC templates, shell scripts and more,
directly from the terminal using natural language prompts. This eliminates the
need to manually write and review code, making the process faster and less
error-prone. ... The use of AI in DevOps is still in its early stages, but
it’s quickly gaining momentum with the introduction of new open source and
commercial services. The rapid pace of innovation suggests that AI will soon
be embedded in most DevOps tools. From automated code generation with AIaC to
advanced diagnostics with K8sGPT, the possibilities seem endless. Firefly is
not just observing this revolution — it’s actively contributing to it. By
integrating AI into DevOps workflows, teams can work smarter, not
harder.
How to make Infrastructure as Code secure by default
Scanning IaC templates before deployment is undeniably important; it’s an
effective way to identify potential security issues early in the development
process. It can help prevent security breaches and ensure that your cloud
infrastructure aligns with security best practices. If you have IaC scanning
tools integrated into your CI/CD pipelines, you can also run automated scans
with each code commit or pull request, catching errors early. Post-deployment
scans are important because they assess the infrastructure in its operational
environment, which may result in finding issues that weren’t identified in dev
and test environments. These scans may also identify unexpected dependencies
or conflicts between resources. Any manual fixes you make to address these
problems will also require you to update your existing IaC templates,
otherwise any apps using those templates will be deployed with the same issues
baked in. And while identifying these issues in production environments is
important to overall security, it can also increase your costs and require
your team to apply manual fixes to both the application and the IaC.
New brain-on-a-chip platform to deliver 460x efficiency boost for AI tasks
Despite its novel approach, IISc’s platform is designed to work alongside
existing AI hardware, rather than replace it. Neuromorphic accelerators like
the one developed by IISc are particularly well-suited for offloading tasks
that involve repetitive matrix multiplication — a common operation in AI.
“GPUs and TPUs, which are digital, are great for certain tasks, but our
platform can take over when it comes to matrix multiplication. This allows for
a major speed boost,” explained Goswami. ... As the demand for more advanced
AI models increases, existing digital systems are nearing their energy and
performance limits. Silicon-based processors, which have driven AI
advancements for years, are starting to show diminishing returns in terms of
speed and efficiency. “With silicon electronics reaching saturation, designing
brain-inspired accelerators that can work alongside silicon chips to deliver
faster, more efficient AI is becoming crucial,” Goswami noted. By working with
molecular films and analog computing, IISc is offering a new path forward for
AI hardware, one that could dramatically cut energy consumption while boosting
computational power.
Android Trojans Still Pose a Threat, Researchers Warn
Affected users appear to have been tricked into installing the malware, which
doesn't appear to be getting distributed via official Google channels. "Based
on our current detections, no apps containing this malware are found on Google
Play," a Google spokesperson told Information Security Media Group.* "Android
users are automatically protected against known versions of this malware by
Google Play Protect, which is on by default on Android devices with Google
Play Services," the spokesperson said. "Google Play Protect can warn users or
block apps known to exhibit malicious behavior, even when those apps come from
sources outside of Play."* Researchers said they first spotted the malware
when it was uploaded to analysis site VirusTotal in May from Uzbekistan, in
the form of a malicious app made to appear as if it was developed by a "local
tax authority." By tracing the IP address to which the malware attempted to
"phone home" the researchers found other .apk - Android package - files that
showed similar behavior, which they traced to attacks that began by November
2023.
Quote for the day:
"Sometimes it takes a good fall to
really know where you stand." -- Hayley Williams
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