Tag Archive for: Watching

Biden Got Freaked Out About AI and National Security After Watching the Newest ‘Mission: Impossible’ Movie

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President Joe Biden’s latest push to manage the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence and its impact on national security was in part inspired by a viewing of the latest installment of the “Mission: Impossible” movie franchise, which features Tom Cruise (“Top Gun: Maverick”) going up against a rogue AI, according to a White House official.

Speaking to The Associated Press, deputy White House chief of staff Bruce Reed recalled that while Biden has grown concerned over the use of AI to generate fake images of himself or clone a user’s voice, it was a screening of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” at Camp David that particularly alarmed the president.

In the film, Cruise and his Impossible Mission Force team race against time to contain “the Entity,” a Russian-made AI that turns on its creators and sinks a next-generation submarine, killing all on board, within the first few minutes of the movie.

“If he hadn’t already been concerned about what could go wrong with AI before that movie, he saw plenty more to worry about,” Reed, who watched the movie alongside Biden, told AP.

Those concerns culminated for Biden in an Oct. 30 executive order on AI designed to shape how private companies can develop (and profit off of) new technologies without risking national security. Specifically, AI developers must allow the U.S. government to evaluate safety data and ensure that new tools don’t jeopardize public safety.

“One thing is clear: To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology,” Biden told reporters at the White House ahead of his signing, calling the order the “most significant action any government anywhere in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security and trust.”

That Biden was spurred to action by a Tom Cruise joint shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise. In fact, he wasn’t the first president to enact a major change to U.S. government policy as the result of a screening at Camp David.

According to “Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War,” President Ronald Reagan took in a screening of the techno-thriller “WarGames” at Camp David when the film hit theaters in…

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Is your employer watching you? Demand for employee surveillance software skyrockets

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Déjà Leonard is a copywriter and freelance journalist based in Calgary.

You log in to your work computer, coffee in hand, sweatpants on, ready to work. It’s just you, your tasks for the day and anyone else you might share a living space with – or is it?

According to a recent report from top10vpn.com, an internet security firm that reviews VPN services, the demand for employee surveillance software is up 59 per cent since the pandemic started.

While this may seem sinister to some, and unsurprising to others, the uptick in interest isn’t completely unwarranted. One study reveals that eight in 10 remote workers in the U.S. admit to slacking off during work hours, and more than 43 per cent admitted to visiting pornographic websites on their laptops.

The problem with surveillance software

“The rapid rise of such invasive software risks setting new standards of workplace surveillance and dramatically undermining employees’ right to privacy,” the top10vpn report states.

While privacy is a concern, when you dig deeper, the more prominent issue for both employers and employees may be withdrawal.

Research from behavioural Scientist suggests that when people know they are being monitored, the breakdown in trust can lead to disengagement, which ultimately, and somewhat ironically, leads to even less productivity.

The report shows two of the most popular software for monitoring employees included Hubstaff and FlexiSPY. Here’s a quick look at some of the features of these software.

Hubstaff
  • Screen monitoring
  • Keystroke logging (recording the keys struck on a keyboard)
  • Location tracking
  • Time tracking
FlexiSPY

Everything Hubstaff can do, plus:

  • Remote-control take over
  • Call tapping
  • Webcam surveillance
  • Instant messaging (IM) monitoring

How governments and people are taking action

In Canada, governments are starting to look at the issue. Recently, Ontario became the first province to require companies with more than 25 employees to disclose if and how they are being monitored electronically including through…

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“China Is Watching” – With AI-Powered Satellites & Thousands Of Cameras, Can Beijing Strike Key US, UK Targets With Pinpoint Accuracy?

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Last month, Fraser Sampson, Britain’s Commissioner for Biometrics and Surveillance Cameras, wrote to Cabinet Minister Michael Gove to convey his concerns about the dominance of Chinese video surveillance equipment in Britain.

He said he had “become increasingly concerned at the security risks presented by some state-controlled surveillance systems covering our public spaces.”

Two Chinese companies, Hikvision and Dahua, have grabbed a huge share of Britain’s CCTV market. While both, Hikvision, which has revenues of $9.3 billion, and Dahua, whose revenues are $3.7 billion, are private companies but they have major shareholders with ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Also, Hikvision is known to be controlled by China Electronics Technology Group Ltd. (CETC), one of the major Chinese military-industrial groups, and is China’s largest electronics defense contractor. Under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime, all military-industrial groups have to obey the orders of the regime.

Tiangong_Space_Station-China
File Image: Tiangong Space Station – China

Thousands Of Cameras In Britain

The UK-based campaign group Big Brother Watch sent 4,500 freedom of information (FoI) requests to public bodies asking whether they had Hikvision or Dahua cameras employed on their premises.

Of the 1,300 who responded, 800 confirmed that they did, including nearly three-quarters of councils, 60% of schools, half of NHS trusts and universities, and nearly a third of police forces.

Moreover, Big Brother Watch found that there are 164,000 Hikvision cameras and 14,000 Dahua cameras in public spaces apart from the government bodies.

Reports suggest that many of these cameras have advanced features such as microphones, the capacity for facial and gender recognition, and distinguishing between people of different racial groups.

hypersonic
File Image: Hypersonic Missile

Some cameras can also analyze behavior, such as detecting if a fight might be breaking out. Others can even judge moods, track via heat-sensing, and learn behavior patterns to highlight any unusual activity.

Backdoors Discovered In Chinese-Made Cameras

Serious security flaws have been detected in the past in cameras produced by both of these companies, which could…

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Experts Find Botnet Disguised as Millions of People Watching TV

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Illustration for article titled Researchers Take Down Botnet Pretending to Be Millions of People Watching TV

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)

Fraudsters operate off the assumption that it’s way more profitable to think up byzantine ways to cheat people out of money than it is to just, like, work hard and ask for a promotion occasionally. For instance: an Israeli tech company is currently accused of using a very convoluted method to screw advertisers out of buttloads of cash by pretending to be a bunch of people watching TV.

TopTop Media, a subsidiary of Tel Aviv-based M51 Group, bills itself as a tech company focused on solutions for app developers and advertisers. It promises to employ “real-time optimization and user profiling” in order to leverage data it gathers from its “ongoing media acquisition activities” and, you know, deliver profits somewhere in there. However, according to new research from security firm HUMAN, TopTop’s “solutions” are less than desirable.

In an elaborate scheme, the company allegedly created 29 malicious Android apps and then snuck them into the Google Play Store and third-party stores, managing to quietly infect close to a million devices with malware. The infected devices were then allegedly used to build an ever-growing botnet that fraudulently spoofed connections to streaming-TV platforms all over the world, thereby generating illegitimate ad revenue.

In other words, like other ad fraud, the scheme sought to bilk elements of the advertising ecosystem that pay for the opportunity to show ads to consumers. Because advertisers will pay streaming apps for the opportunity to use their platforms to display ads, generating the appearance of being an app like this can get you, in the immortal words of Dire Straits, money for nothing. Thus TopTop’s malicious apps used spoofing sorcery to fool ad exchanges into believing they were just such streaming apps, active on smart TV products from Apple, Amazon, Google, and others— thereby generating the appearance of “millions of people watching ads on smart TVs and other devices,” researchers say. 

The dozens of apps involved in the alleged scam all linked back to the same command and control server. While designed to appear harmless (such as the innocuous-looking flashlight app pictured…

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