Eighty-eight percent of CISOs and security leaders say that weaponized AI attacks are inevitable, and with good reason. Just 24% of cybersecurity teams are fully prepared to manage an AI-related attack, according to a recent Gartner survey. Nation-states and cybercriminal gangs know that enterprises are understaffed, and that many lack AI and ML expertise and tools to defend against such attacks. In Q3 2022, out of a pool of 53,760 cybersecurity applicants, only 1% had AI skills. ...
In 2022, cybercriminal gangs also improved malware design and delivery techniques using ML, as first reported in CrowdStrike’s Falcon OverWatchthreat hunting report. The research discovered that malware-free intrusion activity now accounts for 71% of all detections indexed by CrowdStrike’s Threat Graph. Malware-free intrusions are difficult for perimeter-based systems and tech stacks that are based on implicit trust to identify and stop. ...
Wharton Global Youth: Back to that notion of the self-sovereign metaverse for a moment. Will we have full control over our information, assets and data in this virtual realm?
Henry: I believe that’s the only way forward. In a more hyperrealistic internet, which is what we like to call the metaverse because it’s a 3D world, everything gets more real and gets more personal and interconnected. It’s even more important to maintain user privacy. We believe that with technology such as blockchain cryptography and zero-knowledge proof, we can really improve user privacy. ...
... In practice, Kaleidoscope feels like a slick but forgettable two-hour movie puffed up into a jumbled six-hour saga. The main advantage of its unorthodox structure is that it helps obscure how generic some of its component pieces really are. A love triangle subplot hinges on relationships so thinly sketched that I kept assuming I hadn’t gotten around yet to whatever chapter was finally going to explain these people. It wasn’t until I’d gulped down the whole season that I realized that, no, the person at its center was simply never granted an inner life to begin with. ...
... the blockchain based digital art company DASVERSE currently has built the world of 'Daily Art Story Universe', backed with the patent of allowing them to create UHD images that reveals detailed brushstrokes and textures of fine artworks. Furthermore, DASVERSE is able to optimize UHD fine artworks and present it onto virtual spaces in the metaverse with their technology patents. ...
... “It’s an interesting question because the pictures are not really, strictly speaking, being scanned and scraped for their expressive content, but rather for their data,” said intellectual property attorney Aaron Moss of Greenberg Glusker LLP.
Cases like Authors Guild v. Google might provide some guidance, he noted. The New York-based US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2015 ruled that Google manually scanning millions of copyrighted books without a license to create its book search project was fair use.
Warhol and Fair Use
The Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision in its most recent copyright case, Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, which could redefine the boundaries of fair use in artistic works for the first time since the 1990s.
The case focuses on whether Andy Warhol’s portraits of the musician Prince, based on photographs taken by Lynn Goldsmith, are “transformative” enough to prevent a copyright infringement claim.
Goldsmith succeeded in convincing a federal appeals court that Warhol’s prints are infringing because they are “derivatives” of her copyrighted photographs. But the Andy Warhol Foundation argued that Warhol’s prints, which are cropped and highly colorized, have transformed the message and meaning of the original photographs. ...
Web-Scraping Fight
The Supreme Court in early December asked the US Solicitor General to weigh in on whether it should take up a case that accused Google of illegally scraping lyrics off the website Genius and posting them at the top of search results pages.
Genius said the scraping breached its terms of service agreement and diverted internet traffic from its website, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in lost advertising revenue. ...
Instagram Embeds
The San Francisco-headquartered US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which receives a high volume of copyright cases, will soon revisit a legal test it established in 2007 that has faced enormous scrutiny from district courts across the country, and artists enforcing their copyrights online.
The server test, first articulated in Perfect 10 v. Amazon.com Inc., established that a website that displays an unauthorized copyrighted work can’t be held liable for infringement if the work is digitally stored elsewhere.
A blog containing an embedded Instagram post, for example, is free from copyright liability because the photograph is technically stored on Instagram’s servers, not the blog’s. ...
... Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.), who next term will co-lead the AI caucus that Beyer also sits on, saluted the Virginia Democrat for working overtime on the degree.Having an AI master’s degree himself, and having gotten his doctorate in public administration while serving in the California legislature, he said, “I can tell you from personal experience that doing both at the same time is very difficult.”
But as the power of artificial intelligence and its uses grow, Obernolte said it will be worth it to have another member at the table with all that fresh knowledge — particularly as the AI caucus seeks to steer Congress down responsible avenues for regulating the technology and use of personal data.
“Some people who aren’t familiar with AI think that the biggest drawback of AI is evil robots with red laser eyes. You know what I mean?” Obernolte said. “You get closer to it and you realize that, no, there are actually drawbacks that are even more substantial than that, but they’re also more subtle. So we want to make sure that we approach the regulation of AI in a way that’s thoughtful, that does the protection of consumers and privacy that needs to be done, but also doesn’t stifle the innovation and entrepreneurialism that has characterized the last 50 years of the technology industry in America.” ...
AI SILK is a Japanese wearable-tech startup that’s set to unveil a new haptic glove at CES 2023 next month which approaches both haptic feedback and finger-tracking in a different way altogether. ...
Called Lead Skin, the controller houses these conductive fibers, which not only provides finger-tracking and control buttons on the back of the gauntlet-style controller, but also an electrical haptic pulse that aims to simulate manipulating virtual objects. ...
Weighing in at 380g (~13.5oz), or about the weight of two Quest 2 controllers with batteries included, Lead Skin is said to measure the current impedance from the expansion and contraction of the fabric within, and then through deep machine learning-developed algorithms “understand the intended actions from glove wearers’ physical finger movements,” AI Silk says in a press statement. ...
... the team came up with “quasistatic cavity resonance (QSCR)”, where magnetic fields are generated to deliver kilowatts of power to receivers. These receivers can be connected to a device, like a phone or fan, to supply it with power.
The room built by Disney Research was lined with aluminum panels. In its center was a copper tube between the floor and the ceiling, with a current running through it. Fifteen capacitors in the pole are used to set a resonant frequency in the room and isolate electric fields from a signal generator, which outputs at 1.32 MHz. A uniform magnetic field is then run through the room at the same frequency.
The receivers use a coil of wire to resonate at the same frequency, providing power to a device. The researchers were able to deliver about 1,900 watts with an efficiency of 40 to 95 percent. ...
In 2023, the European Union plans to launch a metaverse regulatory initiative, and the Japanese government has also signaled interest in the topic. In addition to the privacy dimension, the EU will look at competition issues. EC internal market commissioner Thierry Breton wrote (emphasis added):
Private metaverses should develop based on interoperable standards, and no single private player should hold the key to the public square or set its terms and conditions. Innovators and technologies should be allowed to thrive unhindered. [...] We have also learned a lesson from this work: we will not witness a new Wild West or new private monopolies.
EFF agrees interoperability is key for a future of privacy without monopoliesand will advocate for this approach as these Metaverse systems are developed. This type of interoperable standard needs to go beyond sharing avatars and hats between games and must give users meaningful control over who they trust with their data, privacy, and safety online—and the practical ability to leave a platform that doesn’t protect them.
In many cultures, the community’s traditions, oral storytelling and art styles represent knowledge passed down from one generation of relatives to the next, but a new app is aiming to share some of that education virtually.
Through OurWorlds, users can explore culturally significant locations around the world, listen to Native American languages, hear creation stories and use augmented reality as a way to experience Indigenous culture. ...
Founder Kilma Lattin, a member of the Pala Band of Mission Indians, said that in developing OurWorlds, he wanted to create a platform for Indigenous communities to claim technological sovereignty and create a digital space sharing their cultural histories. ...
Rodriguez — who teaches Kumeyaay culture, history and language at Kumeyaay Community College and Cuyamaca College — feels using a digital education platform as a storytelling tool is a way for more people to understand that Indigenous people are a part of the present, not just the past. ...
