Tech News Roundup – Week ending Oct. 11, 2024

And the Nobel Prize for Physics Goes to … Artificial Intelligence?

The scientists who have been working on artificial neural networks since the 1980s, Geoffrey Hinton, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, and John Hopfield, professor at Princeton University, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics on October 8. 

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrizeOpens a new window in Physics to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” pic.x.com/94LT8opG79Opens a new window

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 8, 2024Opens a new window

According to the Nobel Prize X accountOpens a new window , “John Hopfield created a structure that can store and reconstruct information. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can independently discover properties in data and which has become important for the large artificial neural networks now in use.”

Hinton was nicknamed “The Godfather of AI,” but in May 2023, he quit his job at Google and said he regrets his life’s work, partly because you can’t prevent bad people from using the tool for bad things. 

Why it matters:
If AI were a person, it would already have an ego due to the amount of press it’s been receiving. Now, it has received one of the planet’s highest honors: a Nobel Prize. Most IT pros are sick of hearing about AI, but after the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences proclaimed that a generative model of neural networks built in the 1980s is worthy of recognition, who knows what they will think of today’s models. 

Cyberattacks Continue to Make Headlines

Financial: This week, MoneyGram and Fidelity Investments acknowledged they had been breached in separate incidents. MoneyGram experienced an outage in late September, and on October 7, issued a statement that an “unauthorized third party accessed and acquired personal information” of some consumers. This information included names, social security numbers, copies of identification documentation, bank account numbers, and other personal information. On the other hand, Fidelity had an “unnamed third party” breach the information of more than 77,000 customers in mid-August. According to the state of Massachusetts’s Data Breach ReportOpens a new window , that breach also included social security numbers and copies of driver’s licenses. 

Utility: American Water Works, the largest water utility company in the US, had to shut down its customer portal and billing systemsOpens a new window on October 3 after a “cybersecurity incident.” The breach was disclosed via an 8-K filingOpens a new window , and the company asserts that the incident did not impact water or wastewater services. Access to the portal was restored on Friday, nearly a week after the incident occurred.

Internet Archive: Hackers aren’t created equal, and neither is their work. On Wednesday evening, The Internet ArchiveOpens a new window , which also hosts the Wayback Machine, OpenLibrary, and Archive-IT services, was hacked. The hacker used an old-school tactic – a pop up notification – to alert users of the attack and that they had access to 31 million email addresses, which the hacker shared with the website Have I Been PwnedOpens a new window . The founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, says the data is not lost, and the website will be back up soon.

The data is safe.

Services are offline as we examine and strengthen them. Sorry, but needed. @internetarchiveOpens a new window staff is working hard.

Estimated Timeline: days, not weeks.

Thank you for the offers of pizza (we are set).

— Brewster Kahle (@brewster_kahle) October 11, 2024Opens a new window

Why it Matters:
Do we really need to explain why so many data breaches happening in the same week is a bad thing? It’s sad that there are so many new headlines about breaches that we’ve become numb to them. On top of that, we only know how many accounts were breached in two of the incidents – and that total is nearly 100,000. That’s three times the number of followers Netflix has on InstagramOpens a new window and a little less than the population of Davenport, Iowa. And those totals don’t include the number of accounts impacted by the MoneyGram or American Water Works incidents.

Other things to be aware of:

• A Federal judge ruled Google has to play nice with other third-party app storesOpens a new window
• TikTok is being sued for hurting kids, againOpens a new window
• Elon Musk revealed another ugly electric vehicle – the CybercabOpens a new window
• Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days broke some recordsOpens a new window

Oh, and in case you missed it, some poor soulOpens a new window had to write this article: