Author: DA Gadgets

A US teenager was handcuffed by armed police after an artificial intelligence (AI) system mistakenly said he was carrying a gun – when really he was holding a packet of crisps.

“Police showed up, like eight cop cars, and then they all came out with guns pointed at me talking about getting on the ground,” 16-year-old Baltimore pupil Taki Allen told local outlet WMAR-2 News.

Baltimore County Police Department said their officers “responded appropriately and proportionally based on the information provided at the time”.

It said the AI alert was sent to human reviewers who found no threat – but the principal missed this and contacted the school’s safety team, who ultimately called the police.

But the incident has prompted calls by some for the schools’ procedures around the use of such technology to be reviewed.

Mr Allen told local news he had finished a bag of Doritos after football practice, and put the empty packet in his pocket.

He said 20 minutes later, armed police arrived.

“He told me to get on my knees, arrested me and put me in cuffs,” he said.

Baltimore County Police Department told BBC News Mr Allen was handcuffed but not arrested.

“The incident was safely resolved after it was determined there was no threat,” they said in a statement.

Mr Allen said he now waits inside after football practice, as he does not think it is “safe enough to go outside, especially eating a bag of chips or drinking something”.

In a letter to parents, school principal Kate Smith said the school’s safety team “quickly reviewed and cancelled the initial alert after confirming there was no weapon”.

“I contacted our school resource officer (SRO) and reported the matter to him, and he contacted the local precinct for additional support,” she said.

“Police officers responded to the school, searched the individual and quickly confirmed that they were not in possession of any weapons.”

However, local politicians have called for further investigation into the incident.

“I am calling on Baltimore County Public Schools to review procedures around its AI-powered weapon detection system,” Baltimore County local councilman Izzy Pakota wrote on Facebook.

Omnilert, the provider of the AI tool, told BBC News: “We regret this incident occurred and wish to convey our concern to the student and the wider community affected by the events that followed.”

It said its system initially detected what appeared to be a firearm and an image of it was subsequently verified by its review team.

This, Omnilert said, was then passed to the Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) safety team along with further information “within seconds” for their assessment.

The security firm said its involvement with the incident ended once it was marked as resolved in its system – adding it had “operated as designed” on the whole.

“While the object was later determined not to be a firearm, the process functioned as intended: to prioritise safety and awareness through rapid human verification,” it said.

Omnilert says it is a “leading provider” of AI gun detection – citing a number of US schools among its case studies on its website.

“Real-world gun detection is messy,” it states.

But Mr Allen said: “I don’t think no chip bag should be mistaken for a gun at all.”

The adequacy of AI to accurately identify weapons has been subject to scrutiny.

Last year, a US weapons scanning company Evolv Technology was banned from making unsupported claims about its products after saying its AI scanner, used in thousands of US schools, hospitals and stadiums entrances, could detect all weapons.

BBC News investigations showed these claims to be false.

Amazon has unveiled a prototype of artificial intelligence-powered smart glasses designed to be used by its delivery drivers.

The “Amelia” glasses include a camera and built-in display, and pairs with a waistcoat with a button drivers can press to take photos of deliveries.

“We’re testing it at a number of locations with over a dozen delivery service partners and hundreds of drivers across the country,” said Beryl Tomay, Amazon’s vice president of Transportation, at a launch event in Silicon Valley.

Amazon is the latest US tech giant to enter an increasingly crowded field of firms experimenting with wearables, but for now it is a product meant for drivers, not customers.

Ms Tomay said that drivers “have been doing real deliveries with these” to customers and that the glasses will be initially rolled out in North America.

“We custom designed it for that use case,” she added. “There’s a very specific application here.”

When asked by the BBC if the Amelia smart glasses might be marketed to consumers at some point in the future, Ms Tomay did not rule out the possibility.

Instagram and Facebook-owner Meta has also experimented with smart glasses in recent years.

At its Meta Connect conference last month, the company unveiled a range of smart glasses powered by its Meta AI technology, including a pair of Ray-Bans with a built-in display.

Unlike Amazon, Meta’s smart glasses target the mainstream consumer products market.

Meta presented the hardware as a technology that allows users to remain more engaged in the real world compared to smartphones.

For Amazon, the Amelia smart glasses could augment efficiency in the “last mile” of its delivery network.

Ms Tomay said the smart glasses can detect when they are in a moving vehicle, which prompts them to automatically shut off.

“From a safety perspective, we thought that was important. No distractions,” Ms Tomay told a group of reporters at an event in California.

Ms Tomay estimated that the glasses could create up to 30 minutes in efficiencies per 8- to 10-hour shift by minimising repetitive tasks and helping drivers to quickly locate packages in their vehicles.

The smart glasses also include a hardware switch on the controller that lets the driver turn off the glasses and all of its sensors, including the camera and microphone.

Drivers “can choose to keep it off,” she said.

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has unveiled an artificial intelligence-powered web browser to challenge competitors like Google, which operates Chrome, the most popular browser in the world.

ChatGPT Atlas does away with the address bar that is a key feature in search, with boss Sam Altman saying it was “built around ChatGPT” as the company made the new browser available on Tuesday on Apple’s MacOS operating system.

The arrival of Atlas comes as OpenAI seeks new ways to monetize its massive bet on artificial intelligence (AI) and capitalize on its growing user base.

OpenAI said Atlas would also offer a paid agent mode that conducts searches on its own for users of its popular chatbot.

The agent mode feature will be available only to paying ChatGPT subscribers. It uses the chatbot to make “improvements that make it faster and more useful by working with your browsing context”.

The company has announced a slew of new efforts to corral users towards its online services, entering into partnerships with e-commerce sites like Etsy and Shopify, along with booking services like Expedia and Booking.com.

At OpenAI’s DevDay event earlier this month, Mr Altman announced that ChatGPT had reached 800 million weekly active users, up from 400 million in February, according to data and research firm Demandsage.

“I believe that early adopters will kick the tires on the new OpenAI browser,” said Pat Moorhead, CEO and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

But, he said, he was skeptical that Atlas would pose a serious challenge to Chrome or Microsoft Edge “as more mainstream, beginners, and corporate users will just wait for their favorite browsers to offer this capability.”

Microsoft Edge already provides many of these capabilities today, Moorhead added.

OpenAI’s challenge comes a year after Google was declared an illegal monopolist in online search.

In a recent decision aimed at prescribing remedies for Google’s dominance, the search giant was not ordered to spin off its Chrome browser as US Justice Department lawyers had requested.

A growing number of internet users are opting to use large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as they search for answers and recommendations.

The research firm Datos said that as of July, 5.99% of search on desktop browsers went to LLMs — more than double the figure from a year earlier.

Google is also heavily invested in AI, and for the last year has prioritized AI-generated answers to queries in its search results.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had a bad day.

That’s how the boss of another big US tech firm Cloudflare put it – probably feeling very relieved that today’s outage, hitting over 1,000 companies and affecting millions of internet users, had nothing to do with him.

The places hit by the outage vary significantly. It took out major social media platforms like Snapchat and Reddit, banks like Lloyds and Halifax, and games like Roblox and Fortnite.

AWS is a US giant with a large global footprint, having positioned itself as the backbone of the internet.

It provides tools and computers which enable around a third of the internet to work, it offers storage space and database management, it saves firms from having to maintain their own costly set-ups, and it also connects traffic to those platforms.

That’s how it sells its services: let us look after your business’s computing needs for you.

But today something very mundane went very wrong: a common kind of outage known as a Domain Name System (DNS) error.

People who work in the tech industry will be rolling their eyes right now.

This common error can cause a lot of havoc.

“It’s always DNS!” is something I hear a lot.

When someone taps an app or clicks a link, their device is essentially sending a request to be connected to that service.

DNS is supposed to act like a map, and today AWS lost its bearings – platforms like Snapchat, Canva and HMRC were all still there but it couldn’t see where they were to direct traffic to them.

These errors happen for a number of reasons.

Usually it’s a maintenance issue or a server failure. Sometimes that’s human error, someone misconfiguring something somewhere, or in extreme cases a cyber attack – although there’s no evidence of this so far.

AWS said it occurred at its vast data centre plant in northern Virginia, its oldest and biggest site.

A chorus of experts have said today is a textbook illustration of the risks of putting all of your eggs in one basket in terms of a service provider – AWS is a giant and millions of businesses rely on it.

And they are right, but the issue is there aren’t many alternatives at the sheer scale provided by AWS.

There are only two main contenders in fact, and they’re both other US giants: Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform.

Smaller rivals include IBM and the Chinese firm Alibaba. The parent company of the supermarket Lidl launched a European rival called Stackit last year, in direct competition with Amazon.

But AWS remains the dominant player by some margin.

Some argue the UK and Europe urgently needs to build up its own infrastructure and be less reliant on the US for cloud services – while others say it’s too late.

Someone working in government once told me an MP informally proposed creating a UK version of AWS.

“But what’s the point?” came the reply. “We already have AWS, over there.”

Perhaps incidents like today’s highlight why it’s not quite that simple.

Spotify, the world’s biggest music streaming service, has announced it is working with major labels on using artificial intelligence (AI) in a “responsible” way.

The firm said it wanted to make AI tools which “put artists and songwriters first” and respect their copyright.

The streaming giant will license music from the three record labels which make up the vast majority of the industry: Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group.

However, critics say adding more AI to the platform would result in less streaming revenue for human artists.

Also part of the deal are music rights firm Merlin and digital music company Believe.

It is unclear exactly what these AI tools will look like, but Spotify says it has already started working on its first products.

Spotify said it recognised there was a “wide range of views on use of generative music tools within the artistic community” and it planned to allow artists to choose if they wanted to participate.

It comes as a number of high-profile musicians such as Dua Lipa, Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney have spoken out against AI companies training generative AI tools on their music without payment or permission.

Spotify said it would make sure artists, songwriters and rights holders were “properly compensated for uses of their work and transparently credited for their contributions”.

These would be through “upfront agreements” and not “asking for forgiveness later”.

“Technology should always serve artists, not the other way around,” said the firm’s co-president Alex Norstrom.

New Orleans-based artist management company MidCitizen Entertainment said AI has “polluted the creative ecosystem”.

Managing Partner Max Bonanno said AI-generated songs have “diluted the already limited share of revenue that artists receive from streaming royalties”.

But the announcement was welcomed by Ed Newton-Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect creators’ rights.

“Lots of the AI industry is exploitative – AI built on people’s work without permission, served up to users who get no say in the matter,” he told BBC News.

“This is different – AI features built fairly, with artists’ permission, presented to fans as a voluntary add-on rather than an inescapable funnel of AI slop.

“The devil will be in the detail, but it looks like a move towards a more ethical AI industry, which is sorely needed.”

Spotify has always maintained it does not create any music itself, using AI or otherwise.

However, it does use the technology to create custom playlists, such as the “daylist” and its AI DJ.

It also hosts AI-generated music on its platform, and recently announced it was cracking down on artists who did not disclose the use of AI or who used it to impersonate real artists.

For example, a viral AI-generated song using voice clones of Drake and The Weeknd was removed from the streaming service in 2023.

The company also said AI is now used in many stages of the song-writing process – such as autotune, mixing and mastering.

The Beatles’ Grammy Award-winning last single Now and Then, released in 2023, used AI to clean up John Lennon’s voice from an old audio recording.

“We’ve been consistently focused on making sure AI works for artists and songwriters, not against them,” said Warner Music Group boss Robert Kyncl.

“That means collaborating with partners who understand the necessity for new AI licensing deals that protect and compensate rightsholders and the creative community.”

The UK’s data watchdog has fined outsourcing firm Capita £14m after the personal data of 6.6 million people was stolen in a cyber-attack.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said Capita “failed to ensure the security of processing of personal data which left it at significant risk”.

The fine was originally set at £45m but reduced after discussions between Capita and the watchdog.

Capita’s boss Adolfo Hernandez said the firm was “pleased to have concluded this matter and reached today’s settlement”.

He said the company had “hugely strengthened” its cyber-security resilience and was vigilant.

Capita provides professional and outsourcing services in a number of different fields for the public and private sectors.

It made £2.4bn in revenue last year, according to its latest annual report.

After the hack in March 2023, it emerged Capita had left a pool of data unsecured online.

Information apparently containing Capita data – including home addresses and passport images – began to circulate on the dark web.

The ICO said financial data had been stolen, and in some cases details of criminal records had been hacked.

Capita also manages administration for more than 600 pension schemes, and 325 of them were affected.

“Capita failed in its duty to protect the data entrusted to it by millions of people,” said Information Commissioner John Edwards.

“The scale of this breach and its impact could have been prevented had sufficient security measures been in place.”

The proposed £45m fine was taken down to £14m after Capita argued it had made improvements to its cyber-security, offered support for people affected and engaged with other regulators and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

“Companies being held financially accountable for data protection failings is a good thing,” said Trevor Dearing from cyber-security company Illumio.

“It sends a message to the market that regulators are serious and tells victims that their stolen data does matter.”

Earlier this year, retailer Co-op was hit by a hack where the details of all of its roughly 6.5m customers was stolen.

This came among other high-profile cyber-attacks to M&S, Harrods and Jaguar Land Rover.

On Tuesday, the NCSC confirmed there had been an increase in nationally significant attacks this year.

It came as the government wrote to bosses around the country advising them to have their contingency plans written down on paper, in case they lose access to their computers in a hack.

OpenAI plans to allow a wider range of content, including erotica, on its popular chatbot ChatGPT as part of its push to “treat adult users like adults”, says its boss Sam Altman.

In a post on X on Tuesday, Mr Altman said upcoming versions of the popular chatbot would enable it to behave in a more human-like way – “but only if you want it, not because we are usage maxxing”.

The move, reminiscent of Elon Musk’s xAI recent introduction of two sexually explicit chatbots to Grok, could help OpenAI attract more paying subscribers.

It is also likely to intensify pressure on lawmakers to introduce tighter restrictions on chatbot companions.

OpenAI did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment following Mr Altman’s post.

Changes announced by the company come after it was sued earlier this year by parents of a US teen who took his own life.

The lawsuit filed by Matt and Maria Raine, who are the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, was the first legal action accusing OpenAI of wrongful death.

The Californian couple criticised the company’s parental controls – which it said were designed to promote healthier use of its chatbot – saying they did not go far enough.

The family included chat logs between Adam, who died in April, and ChatGPT that show him explaining he has suicidal thoughts.

Altman said that OpenAI previously made ChatGPT “pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues”.

“We realise this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right,” Mr Altman said.

He said the company has now been able to mitigate the serious mental health risks and have new tools allowing it to “safely relax the restrictions in most cases”.

“In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults,” he said.

Critics say OpenAI’s decision to allow erotica on the platform shows the need for more regulation at the federal and state levels.

“How are they going to make sure that children are not able to access the portions of ChatGPT that are adult-only and provide erotica?” said Jenny Kim, a partner at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner. “Open AI, like most of big tech in this space, is just using people like guinea pigs.”

Ms Kim is involved in a lawsuit against Meta that claims the company’s Instagram’s algorithm harms the mental health of teen users.

“We don’t even know if their age gating is going to work,” she said.

In April, TechCrunch reported that OpenAI was allowing accounts in which a user had registered as a minor to generate graphic erotica.

OpenAI said at the time that the company was rolling out a fix to limit such content.

A survey published this month by the nonprofit Centre for Democracy and Technology (CDT) found that one in five students report that they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with AI.

On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill passed by the state legislature that would have blocked developers from offering AI chatbots companions to children unless the companies could guarantee the software wouldn’t breed harmful behaviour.

Newsom said it was “imperative that adolescents learn how to safely interact with AI systems” in a message that accompanied his veto.

At the nationwide level, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched an inquiry into how AI chatbots interact with children.

In the US Senate last month, bipartisan legislation was introduced that would classify AI chatbots as products. The law would allow users to file liability claims against chatbot developers.

Mr Altman’s announcement on Tuesday comes as sceptics have been questioning the rapid rise in the value of AI tech companies.

OpenAI’s revenue is growing, but it has never been profitable.

Tulane University business professor Rob Lalka, who authored the recent book The Venture Alchemists, said the major AI companies find themselves in a battle for market share.

“No company has ever had the kind of adoption that OpenAI saw with ChatGPT,” Lalka told the BBC.

“They needed to continue to push along that exponential growth curve, achieving market domination as much as they can.”

People should plan for potential cyber-attacks by going back to pen and paper, according to the latest advice.

The government has written to chief executives across the country strongly recommending that they should have physical copies of their plans at the ready as a precaution.

A recent spate of hacks has highlighted the chaos that can ensue when hackers take computer systems down.

The warning comes as the National Cyber-Security Centre (NCSC) reported an increase in more serious cyber attacks this year.

Criminal hacks on Marks and Spencer, The Co-op and Jaguar Land Rover have led to empty shelves and production lines being halted this year as the companies struggled without their computer systems.

Organisations need to “have a plan for how they would continue to operate without their IT, (and rebuild that IT at pace), were an attack to get through,” said Richard Horne, chief executive of the NSCS.

Firms are being urged to look beyond cyber-security controls toward a strategy known as “resilience engineering”, which focuses on building systems that can anticipate, absorb, recover, and adapt, in the event of an attack.

Preferably the plans should be in paper form or stored offline, the agency suggests.

Although the total number of hacks that the NCSC dealt with in the first nine months of this year was, at 429, roughly the same as for a similar period last year, there was an increase in hacks with a bigger impact.

The number of “nationally significant” incidents represented nearly half, or 204, of all incidents. Last year only 89 were in that category.

A nationally significant incident covers cyber-attacks in the three highest categories in the NCSC and UK law enforcement categorisation model:

• Category 1: National cyber-emergency.
• Category 2: Highly significant incident.
• Category 3: Significant incident.
• Category 4: Substantial incident.
• Category 5: Moderate incident.
• Category 6: Localised incident.

Amongst this year’s incidents, 4% (18) were in the second highest category “highly significant”.

This marks a 50% increase in such incidents, an increase for the third consecutive year.

The NCSC would not give details on which attacks, either public or undisclosed, fall into which category.

But, as a benchmark, it is understood that the wave of attacks on UK retailers in the spring, which affected Marks and Spencer, The Co-op and Harrods, would be classed as a significant incidents.

One of the most serious attacks last year, on a blood testing provider, caused major problems for London hospitals. It resulted in significant clinical disruption and directly contributed to at least one patient death.

The NCSC would not say which category this incident would fall into.

The vast majority of attacks are financially motivated with criminal gangs using ransomware or data extortion to blackmail a victim into sending Bitcoins in ransom.

Whilst most cyber-crime gangs are headquartered in Russian or former Soviet countries, there has been a resurgence in teenage hacking gangs thought to be based in English-speaking countries.

So far this year seven teenagers have been arrested in the UK as part of investigations into major cyber-attacks.

As well as the advice over heightened preparations and collaboration, the government is asking organisations to make better use of the free tools and services offered by the NCSC, for example free cyber-insurance for small businesses that have completed the popular Cyber-Essentials programme.