Tech News

Stone-hearted researchers gleefully push over adorable soccer-playing robots

Enlarge / In a still from a DeepMind demo video, a researcher pushes a small humanoid robot to the ground. (credit: DeepMind)

On Wednesday, researchers from DeepMind released a paper ostensibly about using deep reinforcement learning to train miniature humanoid robots in complex movement skills and strategic understanding, resulting in efficient performance in a simulated one-on-one soccer game.

But few

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Seven months in, iOS and macOS get their first rapid security updates

Enlarge / Macs running macOS Ventura. (credit: Apple)

When it announced iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura at its Worldwide Developers Conference last summer, one of the features Apple introduced was something called “Rapid Security Response.” The feature is meant to enable quicker and more frequent security patches for Apple’s newest operating systems, especially for WebKit-related flaws that affect

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Warning of AI’s danger, pioneer Geoffrey Hinton quits Google to speak freely

Enlarge / Geoffrey Hinton, chief scientific adviser at the Vector Institute, speaks during The International Economic Forum of the Americas (IEFA) Toronto Global Forum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2019. (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards)

According to the New York Times, AI pioneer Dr. Geoffrey Hinton has resigned from Google so he can “speak freely”

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Sensitive data is being leaked from servers running Salesforce software

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Servers running software sold by Salesforce are leaking sensitive data managed by government agencies, banks, and other organizations, according to a post published Friday by KrebsOnSecurity.

At least five separate sites run by the state of Vermont permitted access to sensitive data to anyone, Brian Krebs reported. The state’s Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program was among

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Nuke-launching AI would be illegal under proposed US law

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a nuclear mushroom cloud. (credit: Midjourney)

On Wednesday, US Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Representatives Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), Don Beyer (D-Va.), and Ken Buck (R-Colo.) announced bipartisan legislation that seeks to prevent an artificial intelligence system from making nuclear launch decisions. The Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act would prohibit the use

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ChatGPT now allows disabling chat history, declining training, and exporting data

Enlarge (credit: OpenAI / Stable Diffusion)

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced new controls for ChatGPT users that allow them to turn off chat history, simultaneously opting out of providing that conversation history as data for training AI models. Also, users can now export chat history for local storage.

The new controls, which rolled out to all ChatGPT users today, can be

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Exploit released for 9.8-severity PaperCut flaw already under attack

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Exploit code for a critical printer software vulnerability became publicly available on Monday in a release that may exacerbate the threat of malware attacks that have already been underway for the past five days.

The vulnerability resides in print management software known as PaperCut, which the company’s website says has more than 100 million users

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