Weekly News Highlights | UK AI ban possible, Amazon's Ring fined for snooping, file transfer hack hits organisations
UK AI ban possible
Marc Warner, founder of Faculty AI and member of the UK Government's AI Council, has suggested that some powerful artificial intelligence systems may have to be banned in the future.
"There needs to be sort of strong limits on the amount of compute that can be arbitrarily thrown at these things.
"There is a strong argument that at some point, we may decide that enough is enough and we're just going to ban algorithms above a certain complexity or a certain amount of compute. But obviously, that is a decision that needs to be taken by governments and not by technology companies".
Warner also highlighted the criticality of the coming months for making "sensible decisions" with regards to AI systems. Warner's comments come after similar announcements were made from both the EU and the US on quickly establishing new codes of practice for AI.
Read more here.
File transfer hack hits organisations
Hackers have been caught exploiting a vulnerability in a popular file transfer tool to launch mass data exfiltration attacks.
The vulnerability affects MOVEit Transfer, developed by Ipswitch. Progress Software, the parent company of Ipswitch, have confirmed the discovery of the vulnerability that “could lead to escalated privileges and potential unauthorized access to the environment”.
Progress Software have encouraged users to disable internet traffic to their MOVEit environments and have released patches for the vulnerability to be applied as a matter of urgency.
Read more here.
Amazon's Ring fined for snooping
Ring, the makers of popular video doorbell cameras as well as other smart-home devices, have been ordered to pay $5.8 million over claims brought by the US Federal Trade Commission that Ring employees and external contractors had unrestricted access to customer recordings.
The FTC have claimed that Ring gave every employee, as well as numerous Ukraine-based contractors, full access to customer recordings allowing them to view, download, and transfer customers’ sensitive video data for their own purposes.
Alongside paying the $5.8 million settlement, Ring have also agreed to establish and maintain a data security program.
Read more here.
