📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: Secret Service Says It Destroyed a Secret Cell Phone

The US Secret Service has uncovered and neutralized a network of devices capable of shutting down New York City’s entire cellular network, the agency said Tuesday. The network, the agency said, was behind a wave of swatting calls that targeted government officials earlier this year.

The scale of the scheme sounds staggering. The Secret Service said that its agents seized more than 100,000 SIM cards and 300 SIM servers, spread across five different safe houses in or around the city. All were unoccupied, though authorities also seized 80 grams of cocaine, illegal firearms, as well as computers and cell phones.

One official who chose to remain anonymous told the New York Times that the network could send 30 million text messages per minute. The criminal operation was so extensive, the unnamed official said, that it was unlike anything the agency had ever seen before.

“These devices allowed anonymous, encrypted communications between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises, enabling criminal organizations to operate undetected,” Matt McCool, the head of the Secret Service New York Field Office, said in a video statement, as quoted by NBC News. “This network had the potential to disable cell phone towers and essentially shut down the cellular network in New York City.”

In a dramatic illustration of the network’s potential, McCool said that the network could have sent an encrypted and anonymous text to every human being in the US within 12 minutes, per CNN’s coverage. It could’ve blotted out access to the city’s cell towers and stopped everyone in Manhattan from accessing Google Maps.

If the network was intended to conduct such an all-out, large-scale attack, what this attack would’ve intended to accomplish is unclear. But one official said the operation was capable of interfering with emergency responder and police communications, while also being able to facilitate its own encrypted communications.

So far, the threats that officials have traced back to the network have been smaller-scaled. It appears that the network was behind a series of swatting calls, a dangerous form of harassment in which an anonymous individual tricks law enforcement into sending armed tactical units to a victim’s location by calling in a fake threat. The swatting calls targeted government officials, including some from the Secret Service.

Among the locations where the network safe houses were found included Queens, New York; Armonk, New York; Greenwich, Connecticut; and New Jersey. They formed a circle around the New York City’s cellular infrastructure, according to officials briefed on the situation, per CNN.

Right now, officials are determining if the operation could’ve targeted the annual United Nations General Assembly. No specific evidence has been found pointing to a UN attack, but the possibility hasn’t been ruled out.

“My instinct is this is espionage,” Anthony Ferrante, global head of the cybersecurity firm FTI, told the NYT, suggesting that the such a large amount of equipment near UN headquarters could’ve been used for eavesdropping.

As it stands, no arrests have been announced. McCool speculated that a foreign government could’ve been behind the operation — but he also floated the possibility of cartels, human traffickers, or terrorists (the distinctions between which have become increasingly blurred under the Trump administration, it’s worth noting.)

“This is an ongoing investigation, but there’s absolutely no reason to believe we won’t find more of these devices in other cities,” McCool said.

More on cybersecurity: Scammers Are Now Driving Around With Fake Cell Towers That Blast 100,000 Texts Per Hour

The post Secret Service Says It Destroyed a Secret Cell Phone Doomsday Device in NYC appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update ai: Companies Are Being Torn Apart by AI “Workslop,” Stanfo

AI is supposed to revolutionize workforce productivity, but so far that hasn’t been the case.

One study from MIT found that a damning 95 percent of companies that gambled on integrating the tech saw no meaningful growth in revenue. Another study exploring one of its most hyped up applications, AI coding assistants, showed that programmers actually became slower when they depended on the AI tools. Meanwhile, a slew of reports tell an increasingly familiar tale of companies firing their workers to replace them with AI, only to scramble to rehire humans once they realize the tech isn’t all it was made out to be.

But why exactly is AI falling short in the workplace? In theory, shouldn’t a tool that can generate essays on the fly, spit out code, hold down a conversation on any topic, and take notes on your behalf be amazing for the economy? 

A fascinating new report from researchers at Stanford and the firm BetterUp Labs explores that question. In a survey that’s still ongoing, the team examined the responses of 1,150 full-time employees in the US across multiple industries to tease out how AI content is used in the workplace and how it affects the dynamics between employees.

Their conclusion? People are using it to churn out busywork that needs to be fixed by a human with common sense, undercutting claims that it can boost productivity in the labor force.

“Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers,” wrote Kate Niederhoffer, a social psychologist and vice president of BetterUp, in a writeup for Harvard Business Review with her colleagues.

The team calls this low quality work “workslop,” in a play on “AI slop,” the slang used for describing the shoddy AI text and imagery that pollute social media. They define “workslop” as AI-generated work that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”

Sure, some employees can use AI to produce polished work. But many simply hit “enter” on their prompt and pass along whatever messy output an AI spits out — because, on a very surface level, it does seem passable.

“The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work,” the team wrote. “In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.”

It’s an evolution of “cognitive offloading,” the term that psychologists use to describe outsourcing your thinking to a piece of technology, be it a calculator or a search engine. AI content, however, “uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being,” Niederhoffer and her team argue.

According to the survey, 40 percent of employees say they’ve received workslop in the past month, with just over 15 percent of all the content they receive at work being AI-generated. Most of this, 40 percent, is from their peers — but 16 percent of the time it comes from up the chain of command.

Wherever it’s originating from, the very presence of AI content creates a testy workplace dynamic, because “when coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context,” the authors wrote.

“It created a situation where I had to decide whether I would rewrite it myself, make him rewrite it, or just call it good enough,” explained one survey respondent who works in finance.

“I had to waste more time following up on the information and checking it with my own research,” recalled another respondent who is a director in retail. “I then had to waste even more time setting up meetings with other supervisors to address the issue. Then I continued to waste my own time having to redo the work myself.”

The survey results also found that employees who received workslop made them think less of the colleague who sent it. In numbers, 54 percent of respondents said they viewed their AI-using colleague as less creative, 42 percent said they viewed them as less trustworthy, and 37 percent said they viewed them as less intelligent.

“The most alarming cost may be interpersonal,” Niederhoffer and her team wrote.

Even if there are some limited applications where careful AI usage could boost productivity or polish without affecting quality, this nuance is at odds with how breathlessly and rapidly many business leaders are adopting the tech — not to mention the deafening buzz coming out of the AI industry itself.

More on AI: If You’re Looking for a Job Right Now, AI Is Extremely Bad News

The post Companies Are Being Torn Apart by AI “Workslop,” Stanford Research Finds appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com