News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Russia Spying on Germany

Germany Recalls Ambassador to Russia
Amid Claims Moscow Hacked Emails of Governing Social Democrat Party

Germany said Monday it recalled its ambassador to Russia for a week of consultations in Berlin following an alleged hacker attack on Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party.

Germany last week accused Russian military agents of hacking into the top echelons of Scholz’s Social Democrats party and other sensitive government and industrial targets. Berlin has joined NATO and fellow European countries in warning that Russia´s cyberespionage would have consequences.

The Foreign Office in Berlin said Monday that the government is taking the latest incident “seriously” and that Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock had decided to call back German Ambassador Alexander Lambsdorff. He would return to Moscow after a week, it said.

“The German government takes this event very seriously as behavior against our liberal democracy and the institutions that support it,” Foreign Office spokeswoman Kathrin Deschauer said.

Baerbock said last week that Russian military cyber operators were behind the hacking of emails of the Social Democrats, the leading party in the governing coalition. Officials said the hackers had exploited Microsoft Outlook.

The German Interior Ministry said in a statement last week that the hacking campaign began as early as March 2022, a month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with emails at the Social Democrat party headquarters accessed beginning that December. It said German companies, including in the defense and aerospace sectors, as well as targets related to the war in Ukraine were the focus of the hacking attacks.

Officials said the attacks persisted for months

Google & Apple

Google Defends Its $20 Billion Payoff to Apple in Antitrust Suit Closing Arguments

The most significant antitrust trial in 25 years is drawing to a close in Washington, with Google making its final stand against the DOJ’s efforts to break the tech giant’s death grip on online search.

The Financial Times reports that the federal court in Washington began hearing closing arguments on Thursday in the 10-week trial, where the DOJ accused Alphabet, Google’s parent company, of suppressing search rivals by paying tens of billions annually for anti-competitive agreements with wireless carriers, browser developers, and device manufacturers.

Google’s lawyer, John Schmidtlein, pushed back on claims that the company had hindered rivals’ efforts to gain a foothold in online search, arguing that users had plenty of alternatives. “Google winning agreements because it has a better product is not a harm to the competitive process, even if it gives it scale to improve its product,” Schmidtlein told the court.

However, Kenneth Dintzer, a lawyer for the government, countered that Google’s “anti-competitive conduct harms competition and is self-perpetuating.” He emphasized that defaults “are a powerful way to drive searches, otherwise Google wouldn’t pay billions of dollars for them.”

Unsealed court documents revealed that Alphabet paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 alone to be the default search engine for its iPhone and Safari browser on its other devices. This revelation underscores the high stakes involved in securing default search positions.

Judge Amit Mehta, presiding over the case, noted that search has evolved significantly over the past decade. While questioning the DOJ’s contention that the quality of search had suffered due to the lack of competition, he also acknowledged that only two “substantial competitors” had entered the search market in the past decade, highlighting potential barriers to entry.

Nurses NOT For AI

Nurses Protest Against Rushed AI Implementation in Healthcare, Raising Concerns over Patient Care

As the healthcare industry grapples with the rapid integration of AI, nurses are voicing their concerns about the potential risks to patient care.

TechDirt reports that the implementation of AI in healthcare has been met with mixed reactions, with some hailing it as a revolutionary tool to streamline processes and improve outcomes, while others, particularly nurses, are raising red flags about the rushed and poorly planned deployment of these systems. Recently, hundreds of nurses gathered in front of Kaiser Permanente to protest the integration of AI into hospital systems, arguing that the technology lacks the empathy and human touch essential to providing quality patient care.

Nurse Amy Grewal emphasized the irreplaceable nature of human interaction in healthcare, stating, “No computer, no AI can replace a human touch. It cannot hold your loved one’s hand. You cannot teach a computer how to have empathy.” This sentiment echoes the concerns of many healthcare professionals who fear that the rush to implement AI may prioritize cost-cutting measures over patient well-being.

While AI has the potential to ease the strain on a sector still reeling from the impact of coronavirus, particularly in administrative tasks, there are growing concerns that for-profit hospital systems may use this technology as a justification to cut corners further. The National Nurses United blog post highlights this issue, stating, “Nurses are not against scientific or technological advancement, but we will not accept algorithms replacing the expertise, experience, holistic, and hands-on approach we bring to patient care.”

Kaiser Permanente defends its use of AI, claiming that its “Advance Alert” monitoring system, which analyzes patient data hourly, could potentially save up to 500 lives a year. However, critics argue that healthcare giants’ primary obligation appears to have shifted from patient care to financial results, even among non-profit providers. This shift is evident in the form of reduced quality of service, increased workload for employees, and lower pay, while executive compensation remains unaffected.

AI in healthcare has been plagued by issues, ranging from chatbots providing inaccurate mental health advice to insurance bots making error-prone judgments in 90 percent of cases. While AI shows promise in areas such as imaging analysis, its adoption must be approached with caution to avoid introducing new errors while attempting to solve existing ones.

MS, AI & Police Agencies

Move Along, Cops: Microsoft Reinforces Ban on Police Use of Generative AI for Facial Recognition

Microsoft has strengthened its stance against the use of generative AI for facial recognition by U.S. police departments through its Azure OpenAI Service, a managed enterprise solution built around OpenAI’s technology.

TechCrunch reports that in a recent update to its terms of service, Microsoft has made it explicitly clear that integrations with Azure OpenAI Service are prohibited from being used “by or for” police departments in the United States for facial recognition purposes. This ban extends to current and potential future image-analyzing models developed by OpenAI.

The updated policy also addresses law enforcement agencies globally, specifically banning the use of “real-time facial recognition technology” on mobile cameras, such as body cameras and dashcams, to identify individuals in uncontrolled environments.

These changes come on the heels of Axon’s announcement of a new product that utilizes OpenAI’s GPT-4 generative text model to summarize audio from body cameras. Critics were quick to highlight potential issues with this application, including the tendency of generative AI models to invent facts (known as hallucinations) and the introduction of racial biases from training data. Critics claim the latter is particularly concerning given the disproportionate number of people of color stopped by police compared to their white counterparts.

While it remains unclear whether Axon was using GPT-4 through Azure OpenAI Service and if the updated policy was a direct response to their product launch, the move aligns with Microsoft and OpenAI’s recent approach to AI-related law enforcement and defense contracts.

The new terms, however, do leave some room for interpretation. The complete ban on Azure OpenAI Service usage applies only to U.S. police, not international law enforcement. Additionally, it does not cover facial recognition performed with stationary cameras in controlled environments, such as back offices, although any use of facial recognition by U.S. police is strictly prohibited.

NASA's Latest Epic Fail

NASA Boondoggle: Spacecraft to Carry Astronauts to Moon Suffered Heat Shield Failures in Test Flight

According to a report recently released by NASA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the Orion spacecraft, designed to transport astronauts to the moon in the coming years, faced several critical issues during its 2022 uncrewed test flight.

Smithsonian Magazine reports that according to the report, the test flight revealed anomalies with the Orion heat shield, separation bolts, and power distribution, which pose significant risks to the safety of the crew. The inspector general emphasizes that if the heat shield problem were to occur on future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the vehicle or crew.

During the 25.5-day Artemis 1 mission, which launched on November 16, 2022, the uncrewed Orion capsule orbited the moon, performed two lunar flybys, and returned to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on December 11.

However, the protective “char layer” material from the heat shield wore away unexpectedly in more than 100 locations during reentry, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in pieces instead of melting away as intended. This issue raises concerns about the adequacy of protection for the crew and spacecraft from the extreme heat of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit experienced during reentry.

In addition to the heat shield problems, some bolts on Orion unexpectedly melted and eroded. NASA has made minor changes to the bolt design for Artemis 2, but the bolts’ performance is tied to how the agency addresses the heat shield issue. The spacecraft also encountered power distribution anomalies in its electrical power system, which NASA attributes to radiation and plans to address through software changes.

The launch of the spacecraft caused more damage than expected to the mobile launcher, with repairs costing $26 million, more than five times the $5 million NASA had allocated for repairs.