Editor’s Pick

Enlarge (credit: OpenAI / Apple / Benj Edwards)

On Monday, Apple announced it would be integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI assistant into upcoming versions of its iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems. It paves the way for future third-party AI model integrations, but given Google’s multi-billion-dollar deal with Apple for preferential web search, the OpenAI announcement inspired speculation about who is paying whom. According to a Bloomberg report published Wednesday, Apple considers ChatGPT’s placement on its devices as compensation enough.

“Apple isn’t paying OpenAI as part of the partnership,” writes Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, citing people familiar with the matter who wish to remain anonymous. “Instead, Apple believes pushing OpenAI’s brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments.”

The Bloomberg report states that neither company expects the agreement to generate meaningful revenue in the short term, and in fact, the partnership could burn extra money for OpenAI, because it pays Microsoft to host ChatGPT’s capabilities on its Azure cloud. However, OpenAI could benefit by converting free users to paid subscriptions, and Apple potentially benefits by providing easy, built-in access to ChatGPT during a time when its own in-house LLMs are still catching up.

Enlarge / A photo illustration of what a shirt-button camera could look like. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

On Saturday, Turkish police arrested and detained a prospective university student who is accused of developing an elaborate scheme to use AI and hidden devices to help him cheat on an important entrance exam, reports Reuters and The Daily Mail.

The unnamed student is reportedly jailed pending trial after the incident, which took place in the southwestern province of Isparta, where the student was caught behaving suspiciously during the TYT. The TYT is a nationally held university aptitude exam that determines a person’s eligibility to attend a university in Turkey—and cheating on the high-stakes exam is a serious offense.

According to police reports, the student used a camera disguised as a shirt button, connected to AI software via a “router” (possibly a mistranslation of a cellular modem) hidden in the sole of their shoe. The system worked by scanning the exam questions using the button camera, which then relayed the information to an unnamed AI model. The software generated the correct answers and recited them to the student through an earpiece.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 of a girl lying in the grass. (credit: HorneyMetalBeing)

On Wednesday, Stability AI released weights for Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, an AI image-synthesis model that turns text prompts into AI-generated images. Its arrival has been ridiculed online, however, because it generates images of humans in a way that seems like a step backward from other state-of-the-art image-synthesis models like Midjourney or DALL-E 3. As a result, it can churn out wild anatomically incorrect visual abominations with ease.

A thread on Reddit, titled, “Is this release supposed to be a joke? [SD3-2B],” details the spectacular failures of SD3 Medium at rendering humans, especially human limbs like hands and feet. Another thread, titled, “Why is SD3 so bad at generating girls lying on the grass?” shows similar issues, but for entire human bodies.

Hands have traditionally been a challenge for AI image generators due to lack of good examples in early training data sets, but more recently, several image-synthesis models seemed to have overcome the issue. In that sense, SD3 appears to be a huge step backward for the image-synthesis enthusiasts that gather on Reddit—especially compared to recent Stability releases like SD XL Turbo in November.

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One of the major data brokers engaged in the deeply alienating practice of selling detailed driver behavior data to insurers has shut down that business.

Verisk, which had collected data from cars made by General Motors, Honda, and Hyundai, has stopped receiving that data, according to The Record, a news site run by security firm Recorded Future. According to a statement provided to Privacy4Cars, and reported by The Record, Verisk will no longer provide a “Driving Behavior Data History Report” to insurers.

Skeptics have long assumed that car companies had at least some plan to monetize the rich data regularly sent from cars back to their manufacturers, or telematics. But a concrete example of this was reported by The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, in which drivers of GM vehicles were finding insurance more expensive, or impossible to acquire, because of the kinds of reports sent along the chain from GM to data brokers to insurers. Those who requested their collected data from the brokers found details of every trip they took: times, distances, and every “hard acceleration” or “hard braking event,” among other data points.

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Hackers working for the Chinese government gained access to more than 20,000 VPN appliances sold by Fortinet using a critical vulnerability that the company failed to disclose for two weeks after fixing it, Netherlands government officials said.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-42475, is a heap-based buffer overflow that allows hackers to remotely execute malicious code. It carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. A maker of network security software, Fortinet silently fixed the vulnerability on November 28, 2022, but failed to mention the threat until December 12 of that year, when the company said it became aware of an “instance where this vulnerability was exploited in the wild.” On January 11, 2023—more than six weeks after the vulnerability was fixed—Fortinet warned a threat actor was exploiting it to infect government and government-related organizations with advanced custom-made malware.

Enter CoatHanger

The Netherlands officials first reported in February that Chinese state hackers had exploited CVE-2022-42475 to install an advanced and stealthy backdoor tracked as CoatHanger on Fortigate appliances inside the Dutch Ministry of Defence. Once installed, the never-before-seen malware, specifically designed for the underlying FortiOS operating system, was able to permanently reside on devices even when rebooted or receiving a firmware update. CoatHanger could also escape traditional detection measures, the officials warned. The damage resulting from the breach was limited, however, because infections were contained inside a segment reserved for non-classified uses.

Enlarge / He isn’t using an iPhone, but some people talk to Siri like this.

On Monday, Apple premiered “Apple Intelligence” during a wide-ranging presentation at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California. However, the heart of its new tech, an array of Apple-developed AI models, was overshadowed by the announcement of ChatGPT integration into its device operating systems.

Since rumors of the partnership first emerged, we’ve seen confusion on social media about why Apple didn’t develop a cutting-edge GPT-4-like chatbot internally. Despite Apple’s year-long development of its own large language models (LLMs), many perceived the integration of ChatGPT (and opening the door for others, like Google Gemini) as a sign of Apple’s lack of innovation.

“This is really strange. Surely Apple could train a very good competing LLM if they wanted? They’ve had a year,” wrote AI developer Benjamin De Kraker on X. Elon Musk has also been grumbling about the OpenAI deal—and spreading misinformation about it—saying things like, “It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security & privacy!”

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As many as 165 customers of cloud storage provider Snowflake have been compromised by a group that obtained login credentials through information-stealing malware, researchers said Monday.

On Friday, Lending Tree subsidiary QuoteWizard confirmed it was among the customers notified by Snowflake that it was affected in the incident. Lending Tree spokesperson Megan Greuling said the company is in the process of determining whether data stored on Snowflake has been stolen.

“That investigation is ongoing,” she wrote in an email. “As of this time, it does not appear that consumer financial account information was impacted, nor information of the parent entity, Lending Tree.”

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On Monday, Apple debuted “Apple Intelligence,” a new suite of AI-powered features for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia that includes creating email summaries, generating images and emoji, and allowing Siri to take actions on your behalf. It’s achieved through a combination of on-device and in-cloud processing, and Apple says it focuses on privacy. Apple says that Apple Intelligence features will be widely available later this year and will be available as a beta test for developers this summer.

The announcements came during a livestream WWDC Keynote and a simultaneous event attended by press on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California. In an introduction, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company has been using machine learning for years, but the introduction of large language models (LLMs) presents new opportunities to elevate the capabilities of Apple products. He emphasized the need for both personalization and privacy in Apple’s approach.

At last year’s WWDC, Apple avoided using the term “AI” completely, instead preferring terms like “machine learning” as Apple’s way of avoiding buzzy hype while integrating applications of AI into apps in useful ways. This year, Apple figured out a new way to largely avoid the abbreviation “AI” by coining “Apple Intelligence,” a catchall branding term that refers to a broad group of machine learning, LLM, and image generation technologies. By our count, the term “AI” only appeared once in the keynote: Near the end of the presentation, Apple executive Craig Federighi said, “It’s AI for the rest of us.”

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A critical vulnerability in the PHP programming language can be trivially exploited to execute malicious code on Windows devices, security researchers warned as they urged those affected to take action before the weekend starts.

Within 24 hours of the vulnerability and accompanying patch being published, researchers from the nonprofit security organization Shadowserver reported Internet scans designed to identify servers that are susceptible to attacks. That—combined with (1) the ease of exploitation, (2) the availability of proof-of-concept attack code, (3) the severity of remotely executing code on vulnerable machines, and (4) the widely used XAMPP platform being vulnerable by default—has prompted security practitioners to urge admins check to see if their PHP servers are affected before starting the weekend.

When “Best Fit” isn’t

“A nasty bug with a very simple exploit—perfect for a Friday afternoon,” researchers with security firm WatchTowr wrote.

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After acquiring VMware, Broadcom swiftly enacted widespread changes that resulted in strong public backlash. A new survey of 300 director-level IT workers at companies that are customers of North American VMware provides insight into the customer reaction to Broadcom’s overhaul.

The survey released Thursday doesn’t provide feedback from every VMware customer, but it’s the first time we’ve seen responses from IT decision-makers working for companies paying for VMware products. It echos concerns expressed at the announcement of some of Broadcom’s more controversial changes to VMware, like the end of perpetual licenses and growing costs.

CloudBolt Software commissioned Wakefield Research, a market research agency, to run the study from May 9 through May 23. The “CloudBolt Industry Insights Reality Report: VMware Acquisition Aftermath” includes responses from workers at 150 companies with fewer than 1,000 workers and 150 companies with more than 1,000 workers. Survey respondents were invited via email and took the survey online, with the report authors writing that results are subject to sampling variation of ±5.7 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.