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Researchers at Ben-Gurion University have discovered a vulnerability in cloud-based AI assistants like Chat GTP. The vulnerability, according to researchers, means that hackers are able to intercept and decrypt conversations between people and these AI assistants.
The researchers found that chatbots such as Chat-GPT send responses in small tokens broken into little parts in order to speed up the encryption process. But by doing this, the tokens can be intercepted by hackers. These hackers in turn can analyze the length, size, and sequence of these tokens in order to decrypt their responses.
“Currently, anybody can read private chats sent from ChatGPT and other services,” Yisroel Mirsky, head of the Offensive AI Research Lab, told ArsTechnica in an email
“This includes malicious actors on the same Wi-Fi or LAN as a client (e.g., same coffee shop), or even a malicious actor on the Internet—anyone who can observe the traffic. The attack is passive and can happen without OpenAI or the client’s knowledge. OpenAI encrypts their traffic to prevent these kinds of eavesdropping attacks, but our research shows that the way OpenAI is using encryption is flawed, and thus the content of the messages are exposed.”
“Our investigation into the network traffic of several prominent AI assistant services uncovered this vulnerability across multiple platforms, including Microsoft Bing AI (Copilot) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4. We conducted a thorough evaluation of our inference attack on GPT-4 and validated the attack by successfully deciphering responses from four different services from OpenAI and Microsoft.
According to these researchers, there are two main solutions: either stop sending tokens one by one or make tokens as large as possible by “padding” them to the length of the largest possible packet, which, reportedly, will make these tokens harder to analyze.
Featured image: Image generated by Ideogram
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Pornhub has decided to pack up and host its popular pornographic offerings away from the Lone Star State.
The move comes from the sex-work site after being forced to restrict users residing in Texas unless they can prove their age via a range of documents. Pornhub decided not to enforce this and rather block access entirely to accounts in the confines of the state.
“Since age verification software requires users to hand over extremely sensitive information, it opens the door for the risk of data breaches,” Pornhub wrote on its blog.
Pornhub blocks Texans
The porn site owned by parent company Aylo, formerly MindGeek, decided after it felt the move to force users to produce age identification could also bring with it a Pandora’s box of data security issues.
The world-renowned adult material producer would say via a blog post that they “had to make the difficult decision to block user access in numerous American states due to newly passed Age Verification laws (Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina). While these new laws claim to protect children from accessing harmful material online — something we fully support — they not only fail to do this but also jeopardize user safety and privacy.”
US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Texan lawmakers would now be able to enforce age verification on adult websites. This was opposed by Pornhub and a number of other websites in the state as the Free Speech Coalition, who would robustly disagree with the ruling stating that the decision by a 2-1 majority and the “dissenting opinion by Judge [Patrick] Higginbotham makes clear, this ruling violates decades of precedent from the Supreme Court.”
As we reported in January, Montana and North Carolina have also restricted Pornhub due to similar age-verification laws. To which the sites controlled by Aylo would reply, saying, “As you may know, your elected officials in your state are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”
With Texans unable to access the popular adult sites, there has comically been an upsurge in the search terms coming out of the state tracked by Google. With “VPN” at the top of the pile, followed by related searches like “how to change VPN location” and “Texas porn law.” This shows that the oldest industry in the world still has fans in Lone Star State who are looking for ways around the block.
“We know that normalizing sex work and sexual expression is an uphill battle, but it can be done. We must be vocal about it. Change begins with raising our voices, educating others, and engaging in important social conversations to spread the message.
For more information, visit the Free Speech Coalition,” the blog post would conclude.
It seems that the collection of adult sites Aylo has in its menagerie will never grace Texan screens again unless, of course, a viable VPN can be found to assist those who reside in the state.
Image: Pornhub Blog.
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Apple has agreed to pay $490 million to settle a class-action lawsuit. The suit alleges that Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, defrauded shareholders by hiding the fact that iPhone demand was falling in China.
The preliminary settlement was filed on Friday, March 15, 2024, with the US District Court in Oakland, California. According to Reuters, this lawsuit came about following Apple’s announcement on Jan 2, 2019, that the company would cut its quarterly revenue forecast by up to $9 billion due to tensions between the US and China.
In an analyst call on November 1, 2018, Cook told investors that while Apple faced sales pressure in other markets, including Turkey, Russia, India, and Brazil, he would “not put China in that category.” Then, some days later, Apple told suppliers to cease production on iPhones in China.
Despite settling, Apple denies liability
Following this, Apple’s shares fell by 10% the next day, wiping out $74 billion of market value. Legal papers viewed by Reuters found that while Apple denied liability, the company settled to avoid a full legal case.
According to Reuters, this settlement will cover investors who bought shares in Apple following Cook’s comments. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Roger refused to dismiss the lawsuit when it was filed last June because she deemed it “plausible” that Cook could have been discussing Apple’s sales outlook in relation to China rather than currency changes. She also claimed that Apple already knew that China’s economy was slowing down.
Reuters also reported that lawyers for the shareholders will be able to seek fees of up to 25% of the settlement’s amount.
This isn’t the only legal crisis Apple has been facing recently. After a lengthy legal battle in the past, Epic Games has filed another lawsuit against Apple over App Store commission.
Featured Image: Photo by Torsten Dettlaff; Pexels
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