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Signalgate chats vanish from CIA chief phone

2 months 1 week ago
Extraordinary rendition of data, or just dropped it out of a helicopter?

CIA Director John Ratcliffe's smartphone has almost no trace left of the infamous Signalgate chat – the one in which he and other top US national security officials discussed a secret upcoming military operation in a group Signal conversation a journalist was inadvertently added to.…

Iain Thomson

Google Used AI To Suspend Over 39 Million Ad Accounts Suspected of Fraud

2 months 1 week ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google on Wednesday said it suspended 39.2 million advertiser accounts on its platform in 2024 -- more than triple the number from the previous year -- in its latest crackdown on ad fraud. By leveraging large language models (LLMs) and using signals such as business impersonation and illegitimate payment details, the search giant said it could suspend a "vast majority" of ad accounts before they ever served an ad. Last year, Google launched over 50 LLM enhancements to improve its safety enforcement mechanisms across all its platforms. "While these AI models are very, very important to us and have delivered a series of impressive improvements, we still have humans involved throughout the process," said Alex Rodriguez, a general manager for Ads Safety at Google, in a virtual media roundtable. The executive told reporters that a team of over 100 experts assembled across Google, including members from the Ads Safety team, the Trust and Safety division, and researchers from DeepMind. "In total, Google said it blocked 5.1 billion ads last year and removed 1.3 billion pages," adds TechCrunch. "In comparison, it blocked over 5.5 billion ads and took action against 2.1 billion publisher pages in 2023. The company also restricted 9.1 billion ads last year, it said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeauHD

OpenAI Debuts Codex CLI, an Open Source Coding Tool For Terminals

2 months 1 week ago
OpenAI has released Codex CLI, an open-source coding agent that runs locally in users' terminal software. Announced alongside the company's new o3 and o4-mini models, Codex CLI directly connects OpenAI's AI systems with local code and computing tasks, enabling them to write and manipulate code on users' machines. The lightweight tool allows developers to leverage multimodal reasoning capabilities by passing screenshots or sketches to the model while providing access to local code repositories. Unlike more ambitious future plans for an "agentic software engineer" that could potentially build entire applications from descriptions, Codex CLI focuses specifically on integrating AI models with command-line interfaces. To accelerate adoption, OpenAI is distributing $1 million in API credits through a grant program, offering $25,000 blocks to selected projects. While the tool expands AI's role in programming workflows, it comes with inherent risks -- studies show AI coding models frequently fail to fix security vulnerabilities and sometimes introduce new bugs, particularly concerning when given system-level access.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash