Industry News

The Google Play Store might not be perfect for stopping Android malware, but its collection of scanning, app reviews, and developer requirements makes it a lot safer than the wider, unfiltered Internet. The world outside Google's walled garden has no rules at all and offers a countless number of questionable apps available for sideloading. To help combat the surge of sideloaded malware, Google Play can now pop up a malware scanner at install time if it decides the app you're trying to sideload is interesting.

On Tuesday, dozens of speakers gathered in San Francisco for the first TED conference devoted solely to the subject of artificial intelligence, TED AI. Many speakers think that human-level AI—often called AGI, for artificial general intelligence—is coming very soon, although there was no solid consensus about whether it will be beneficial or dangerous to humanity. But that debate was just Act One of a very long series of 30-plus talks that organizer Chris Anderson called possibly "the most TED content in a single day" presented in TED's nearly 40-year history.

Dozens of applications and interviews, hours spent tweaking résumés, and a conference and career fair turned Hunger Games. Finding a job in tech is a mess.

Hundreds of badly charred ancient Roman scrolls found in a Roman villa have long been believed to be unreadable, but a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has successfully read the first text hidden within one of the rolled-up scrolls using a machine learning model. The achievement snagged Luke Farritor a $40,000 First Letters prize from the Vesuvius Challenge, a collaboration between private entrepreneurs and academics offering a series of rewards for milestones in deciphering the scrolls.

Google’s and Microsoft’s search engines have a problem with deepfake porn videos. Since deepfakes emerged half a decade ago, the technology has consistently been used to abuse and harass women—using machine learning to morph someone’s head into pornography without their permission. Now the number of nonconsensual deepfake porn videos is growing at an exponential rate, fueled by the advancement of AI technologies and an expanding deepfake ecosystem.

Over the past few days, there have been many conflicting rumors and reports, some from usually reliable sources, about Apple's plans for the next wave of iPad updates. But on close examination, the rumors may not be as contradictory as they seem.

Many local authorities respond too slowly or inadequately to reports about security vulnerabilities. These coordinated vulnerability disclosures (CVD reports) are often made by ethical hackers who aim to make the internet safer. While this process has improved in recent years, the study by the University of Twente and the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) indicates that there is still much room for improvement for local authorities.

Microsoft has released patches to fix zero-day vulnerabilities in two popular open-source libraries that affect several Microsoft products, including Skype, Teams, and its Edge browser. But Microsoft won’t say if those zero-days were exploited to target its products, or if the company knows either way.

The two vulnerabilities — known as zero-days since developers had no advance notice to fix the bugs — were discovered last month, and both bugs have been actively exploited to target individuals with spyware, according to researchers at Google and Citizen Lab.

Canadian technology company BlackBerry (BB.TO), said on Wednesday it would separate its Internet of Things (IoT) and cybersecurity business units and target a subsidiary initial public offering for the IoT business next fiscal year.

BlackBerry joins a number of companies that have split their units in recent years, favoring a leaner corporate structure to help investors better evaluate their separate businesses.

It was meant to be a week for women in tech—but this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration was swamped by men who gate-crashed the event in search of lucrative tech jobs.