Editor’s Pick

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Public records systems that courts and governments rely on to manage voter registrations and legal filings have been riddled with vulnerabilities that made it possible for attackers to falsify registration databases and add, delete, or modify official documents.

Over the past year, software developer turned security researcher Jason Parker has found and reported dozens of critical vulnerabilities in no fewer than 19 commercial platforms used by hundreds of courts, government agencies, and police departments across the country. Most of the vulnerabilities were critical.

One flaw he uncovered in the voter registration cancellation portal for the state of George, for instance, allowed anyone visiting it to cancel the registration of any voter in that state when the visitor knew the name, birthdate, and county of residence of the voter. In another case, document management systems used in local courthouses across the country contained multiple flaws that allowed unauthorized people to access sensitive filings such as psychiatric evaluations that were under seal. And in one case, unauthorized people could assign themselves privileges that are supposed to be available only to clerks of the court and, from there, create, delete, or modify filings.

Enlarge / There’s been a lot of AI news this week, and covering it sometimes feels like running through a hall full of danging CRTs, just like this Getty Images illustration. (credit: Grandfailure via Getty Images)

It’s been a wildly busy week in AI news thanks to OpenAI, including a controversial blog post from CEO Sam Altman, the wide rollout of Advanced Voice Mode, 5GW data center rumors, major staff shake-ups, and dramatic restructuring plans.

But the rest of the AI world doesn’t march to the same beat, doing its own thing and churning out new AI models and research by the minute. Here’s a roundup of some other notable AI news from the past week.

Google Gemini updates

On Tuesday, Google announced updates to its Gemini model lineup, including the release of two new production-ready models that iterate on past releases: Gemini-1.5-Pro-002 and Gemini-1.5-Flash-002. The company reported improvements in overall quality, with notable gains in math, long context handling, and vision tasks. Google claims a 7 percent increase in performance on the MMLU-Pro benchmark and a 20 percent improvement in math-related tasks. But as you know, if you’ve been reading Ars Technica for a while, AI typically benchmarks aren’t as useful as we would like them to be.

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Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees.

Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks had logged user passwords in plaintext and stored them in a database that had been searched by roughly 2,000 company engineers, who collectively queried the stash more than 9 million times.

Meta investigated for five years

Meta officials said at the time that the error was found during a routine security review of the company’s internal network data storage practices. They went on to say that they uncovered no evidence that anyone internally improperly accessed the passcodes or that the passcodes were ever accessible to people outside the company.

Enlarge / A screen capture of AJ Smith doing his Eleanor Rigby duet with OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode through the ChatGPT app. (credit: AJ Smith / Getty Images)

OpenAI’s new Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) of its ChatGPT AI assistant rolled out to subscribers on Tuesday, and people are already finding novel ways to use it, even against OpenAI’s wishes. On Thursday, a software architect named AJ Smith tweeted a video of himself playing a duet of The Beatles’ 1966 song “Eleanor Rigby” with AVM. In the video, Smith plays the guitar and sings, with the AI voice interjecting and singing along sporadically, praising his rendition.

“Honestly, it was mind-blowing. The first time I did it, I wasn’t recording and literally got chills,” Smith told Ars Technica via text message. “I wasn’t even asking it to sing along.”

Smith is no stranger to AI topics. In his day job, he works as associate director of AI Engineering at S&P Global. “I use [AI] all the time and lead a team that uses AI day to day,” he told us.

Enlarge / An updated onboarding screen for Recall, with clearly visible buttons for opting in or out; Microsoft says Recall will be opt-in by default and can even be removed from PCs entirely. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is having another whack at its controversial Recall feature for Copilot+ Windows PCs, after the original version crashed and burned amid scrutiny from security researchers and testers over the summer. The former version of Recall recorded screenshots and OCR text of all user activity, and stored it unencrypted on disk where it could easily be accessed by another user on the PC or an attacker with remote access.

The feature was announced in late May, without having gone through any of the public Windows Insider testing that most new Windows features get, and was scheduled to ship on new PCs by June 18; by June 13, the company had delayed it indefinitely to rearchitect it and said that it would be tested through the normal channels before it was rolled out to the public.

Today, Microsoft shared more extensive details on exactly how the security of Recall has been re-architected in a post by Microsoft VP of Enterprise and OS Security David Weston.

Enlarge / Dr. John Timmer, Jeff Ball, Joanna Wong, and Lee Hutchinson discussing infrastructure and the environment. (credit: Kimberly White/Getty Images)

Last week, Ars Technica Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher and I made the westerly trek to sunny San Jose to kick off an event titled “Beyond the Buzz: An Infrastructure Future with GenAI and What Comes Next,” hosted in partnership with IBM. It was awesome to get to stand up on stage and talk to a room packed full of interested Ars readers, and for everyone who was able to come, thank you for being there! (For everyone who wasn’t able to come, that’s okay—we’re doing another event next month in DC. I’ll have more info about that at the end of this piece.)

The San Jose event was hosted at the Computer History Museum, which, as venues go, was absolutely on-brand and appropriate—and Ars would like to extend its thanks to the folks at CHM for being so kind and accommodating to our gathering of geeks.

“Our lineup of speakers and topics today reflects the complexity and rapid evolution of the tech landscape we all operate in,” noted Fisher in his opening remarks on the program. “We will be discussing not only the promise of generative AI, but also the challenges it brings in terms of infrastructure demands, security vulnerabilities, and environmental impacts.”

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The Tor Project, the nonprofit that maintains software for the Tor anonymity network, is joining forces with Tails, the maker of a portable operating system that uses Tor. Both organizations seek to pool resources, lower overhead, and collaborate more closely on their mission of online anonymity.

Tails and the Tor Project began discussing the possibility of merging late last year, the two organizations said. At the time, Tails was maxing out its current resources. The two groups ultimately decided it would be mutually beneficial for them to come together.

Amnesic onion routing

“Rather than expanding Tails’s operational capacity on their own and putting more stress on Tails workers, merging with the Tor Project, with its larger and established operational framework, offered a solution,” Thursday’s joint statement said. “By joining forces, the Tails team can now focus on their core mission of maintaining and improving Tails OS, exploring more and complementary use cases while benefiting from the larger organizational structure of The Tor Project.”

Enlarge (credit: Hugging Face / anucha sirivisansuwan via Getty Images)

On Thursday, AI hosting platform Hugging Face surpassed 1 million AI model listings for the first time, marking a milestone in the rapidly expanding field of machine learning. An AI model is a computer program (often using a neural network) trained on data to perform specific tasks or make predictions. The platform, which started as a chatbot app in 2016 before pivoting to become an open source hub for AI models in 2020, now hosts a wide array of tools for developers and researchers.

The machine-learning field represents a far bigger world than just large language models (LLMs) like the kind that power ChatGPT. In a post on X, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue wrote about how his company hosts many high-profile AI models, like “Llama, Gemma, Phi, Flux, Mistral, Starcoder, Qwen, Stable diffusion, Grok, Whisper, Olmo, Command, Zephyr, OpenELM, Jamba, Yi,” but also “999,984 others.”

The reason why, Delangue says, stems from customization. “Contrary to the ‘1 model to rule them all’ fallacy,” he wrote, “smaller specialized customized optimized models for your use-case, your domain, your language, your hardware and generally your constraints are better. As a matter of fact, something that few people realize is that there are almost as many models on Hugging Face that are private only to one organization – for companies to build AI privately, specifically for their use-cases.”

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / OpenAI)

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that OpenAI is working on a plan to restructure its core business into a for-profit benefit corporation, moving away from control by its nonprofit board. The shift marks a dramatic change for the AI company behind ChatGPT, potentially making it more attractive to investors while raising questions about its commitment to sharing the benefits of advanced AI with “all of humanity,” as written in its charter.

A for-profit benefit corporation is a legal structure that allows companies to pursue both financial profits and social or environmental goals, ostensibly balancing shareholder interests with a broader mission to benefit society. It’s an approach taken by some of OpenAI’s competitors, such as Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI.

In a notable change under the new plan, CEO Sam Altman would receive equity in the for-profit company for the first time. Bloomberg reports that OpenAI is discussing giving Altman a 7 percent stake, though the exact details are still under negotiation. This represents a departure from Altman’s previous stance of not taking equity in the company, which he had maintained was in line with OpenAI’s mission to benefit humanity rather than individuals.

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The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal body that sets technology standards for governmental agencies, standards organizations, and private companies, has proposed barring some of the most vexing and nonsensical password requirements. Chief among them: mandatory resets, required or restricted use of certain characters, and the use of security questions.

Choosing strong passwords and storing them safely is one of the most challenging parts of a good cybersecurity regimen. More challenging still is complying with password rules imposed by employers, federal agencies, and providers of online services. Frequently, the rules—ostensibly to enhance security hygiene—actually undermine it. And yet, the nameless rulemakers impose the requirements anyway.

Stop the madness, please!

Last week, NIST SP 800-63-4, the latest version of its Digital Identity Guidelines. At roughly 35,000 words and filled with jargon and bureaucratic terms, the document is nearly impossible to read all the way through and just as hard to understand fully. It sets both the technical requirements and recommended best practices for determining the validity of methods used to authenticate digital identities online. Organizations that interact with the federal government online are required to be in compliance.