ICYMI: Malicious Ads Injected Into AI-Powered Bing Chat

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

The Lifehacker website has a great article about setting up a "dead man's switch." Are you not familiar with a dead man's switch? It's where, should you not respond to some "stimulus," the dead man's switch activates and notifies those you choose that something might have happened to you. Julian Assange was rumored to have one so that, should anything happen to him, the entire contents of WikiLeaks would be released … including items not yet previously released. The uses for a dead man's switch could be to close your accounts, notify relatives, or to grant access to your accounts to those you designate. While most of us are reluctant to face our own mortality, when you think about it, dead man switches make sense in today's information-overload environment.

Google Bard gets expanded search and share features, according to an article on TechRepublic. People with personal Google accounts may check Bard content with Google Search, connect Bard to Google services such as Maps, YouTube, Gmail and Drive and continue a shared Bard chat.

A video on Lifehacker shows how to change a setting on the Google Chrome browser to help keep it from prematurely draining your laptop's battery. Open a new tab, and type chrome://flags on the address bar. Next, type battery on the search bar within that window. Now, change the "experimental" feature to Enabled, and restart your browser window. This hack works on all versions of Google Chrome since version 108.

Malicious advertisements are now being injected into Microsoft's AI-powered Bing Chat responses, promoting fake download sites that distribute malware, according to an article on BleepingComputers. Bing Chat, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 engine, was introduced by Microsoft in February 2023 to challenge Google's dominance in the search industry. By offering users an interactive chat-based experience instead of the traditional search query and result format, Bing Chat aimed to make online searches more intuitive and user-friendly. In March, Microsoft began injecting ads into Bing Chat conversations to generate revenue from this new platform. However, incorporating ads into Bing Chat has opened the door to threat actors, who increasingly take out search advertisements to distribute malware. Furthermore, conversing with AI-powered chat tools can instill unwarranted trust, potentially convincing users to click on ads, which isn't the case when skimming through impersonal search results.

Google and Mozilla have patched a zero-day exploit in Chrome and Firefox, respectively, according to an article on TechRepublic. The zero-day exploit was being used by a commercial spyware vendor. The zero-day exploit could leave users open to a heap buffer overflow, through which attackers could inject malicious code. Any software that uses VP8 encoding in libvpx or is based on Chromium (including Microsoft Edge) might be affected, not just Chrome or Firefox.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample collection from asteroid Bennu exceeded expectations in material quantity, slowing the curation process, according to an article from SciTechDaily. Advanced analysis methods are underway, with a more detailed examination planned for the coming weeks. Oh, and to add an element of "cool" to the whole asteroid Bennu news, the "team" that helped return the samples to Earth included Queen guitarist Brian May, who also holds a PhD in astrophysics. Check out the article from USA Today.

Google will make it harder for spammers to land in your email inbox, the company said, according to an article from CNBC. Google will require emailers who send more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail users to offer a one-click unsubscribe button in their messages. Furthermore, Gmail may not deliver messages from senders whose messages are frequently marked as spam and fall under a "clear spam rate threshold" of 0.3% of messages sent.

Google launched Android 14 on October 4, coinciding with its Pixel launch event – where it unveiled the new Google Pixel 8 and Google Pixel Watch 2, among other gadgets, according to an article on TechRadar. The new features include: a customizable lock screen which will give you much greater control over its style and utility, emergency SOS via satellite (most likely on newer handsets that possess the hardware to support it), improved battery life, notification flashes, more user control over apps' file access, and regional preferences. Expect it to take a little while. On my Pixel 5, the download for Android 14 is 877MiB, and took in excess of an hour and a half to download and apply.

A new Linux security vulnerability dubbed Looney Tunables has been discovered in the GNU C library's ld.so dynamic loader that, if successfully exploited, could lead to a local privilege escalation and allow a threat actor to gain root privileges, according to an article on The Hacker News. Tracked as CVE-2023-4911 (CVSS score: 7.8), the issue is a buffer overflow that resides in the dynamic loader's processing of the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable. Cybersecurity firm Qualys, which disclosed details of the bug, said it was introduced as a code commit made in April 2021. The GNU C library, also called glibc, is a core library in Linux-based systems that offers foundational features such as open, read, write, malloc, printf, getaddrinfo, dlopen, pthread_create, crypt, login, and exit.

Brave has some hidden features that can significantly improve your browsing experience, according to an article on Lifehacker. Enable them, and you can paste in blocked fields, save your laptop's battery, remove tracking information from copied URLs, and even access a reader mode. The article lists five hidden Brave features you should definitely know how to use.

In an article from Forbes, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft can't compete with Google and that the search engine's market share is so large the internet has basically become the "Google web" on October 2, 2023, during more than three-and-a-half hours of testimony in Google's antitrust trial, according to multiple news organizations.

An article on PCWorld asks the "unanswerable" question: so, how many websites are there? The number of websites on the Internet is constantly changing as new websites are created and old ones become inactive. The best we can do is guess, and that number can change in an instant. Most publications that try to answer this question cite Siteefy as an authoritative source. According to Siteefy, there are 1.13 billion websites on the Internet, 18% of which are active. That means there are roughly 200 million active websites at the time of writing.

If we resided on a different planet, how would we know whether there is life on Earth? This bold experiment found out, according to an article from Nature.com. Thirty years ago, astronomer Carl Sagan convinced NASA to turn a passing space probe's instruments on Earth to look for life — with results that still reverberate today.

An article from Lifehacker reveals that you can hide faces you may not be prepared to deal with emotionally in Google Photos "Memories" feed. Whether it's a failed romantic interest or a pet (cat/dog/fish/frog/turtle/etc.) that you recently lost, this article will tell the Google Photos app to "skip" over including those images in the "Memories" feed until such time that you're better "equipped" to handle those images.

It may sound like science fiction from "The Lord of the Rings." An enemy begins attacking a tree. The tree fends it off and sends out a warning message. Nearby trees set up their own defenses. The forest is saved. But you don't need a magical Ent from J.R.R. Tolkien's world to conjure this scene. Real trees on our Earth can communicate and warn each other of danger — and a new study explains how, according to an article from The Washington Post. The study found injured plants emit certain chemical compounds, which can infiltrate a healthy plant's inner tissues and activate defenses from within its cells. A better understanding of this mechanism could allow scientists and farmers to help fortify plants against insect attacks or drought long before they happen.

NASA's intrepid Voyager twins, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched in 1977, continue their unprecedented explorations of interstellar space, according to an article on Space Daily. But as they reach farther distances from Earth-more than 15 billion miles for Voyager 1 and 12 billion for Voyager 2-keeping them operational requires strategic forethought. That "forethought" comes in the way of a couple of software updates being sent to the interstellar satellites.

Google has announced new, real-time scanning features for Google Play Protect that make it harder for malicious apps employing polymorphism to evade detection, according to an article from BleepingComputer. This represents a significant step toward enhancing safety for all Android users and aims to decrease malware infections on the platform. Can all Android users finally say "about time?"

Astronomers have intercepted a mysterious and ancient radio signal that's traveled from the farthest reaches of the cosmos — for an astonishing eight billion years, more than half the lifespan of the universe — before finally reaching the Earth, according to an article from Futurism. The signal is what's known as a fast radio burst (FRB), and the astronomers' findings, published in the journal Science, indicate that this is the most powerful ever observed. So powerful, in fact, that the FRB released, in less than a millisecond, the same amount of energy that our Sun emits in 30 years.

A dwarf planet called Ceres could offer some amazing insights into our quest to discover alien life within our solar system, according to an article from BGR. The small planet is located near Mars (it's in the asteroid belt), and a new study showcases that the dwarf planet has an extensive amount of organic material present on the planet.

China is stealing technology secrets - from AI to computing and biology, "Five Eyes" intelligence leaders warn in a CBS News 60 Minutes report. "Yes, absolutely, all countries spy. Our countries spy. All governments have a need to be covertly informed. All countries seek strategic advantage. But the behavior we're talking about here goes well beyond traditional espionage. This scale of the theft is unprecedented in human history. And that's why we're calling it out," says Mike Burgess of Australia, one of the members of the "Five Eyes" group.

Countries rise, and countries fall. An article on The Dial explores what happens when an internet domain outlives the country it was designated for, as in the case of Yugoslavia.

They cracked the code to a locked usb drive worth $235 million in bitcoin. Then it got weird, according to an article on Wired. Stefan Thomas lost the password to an encrypted USB drive holding 7,002 bitcoins. He obtained them back in 2011 when BitCoin first came about, and was selling for less than $1 each. One team of hackers believes they can unlock it — if they can get Thomas to let them.