China ordered Apple to remove some of the world's most popular chat messaging apps from its app store in the country, the latest example of censorship demands on the iPhone seller in the company's second-biggest market. WSJ: Meta's WhatsApp and Threads as well as messaging platforms Signal, Telegram and Line were taken off the Chinese App Store Friday [non-paywalled link]. Apple said it was told to remove certain apps because of national security concerns, without specifying which. "We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree," an Apple spokesperson said in a statement.

These messaging apps, which allow users to exchange messages and share files individually and in big groups, combined have more than three billion users globally. They can only be accessed in China through virtual private networks that take users outside China's Great Firewall, but are still commonly used. Beijing has often viewed such platforms with caution, concerned that these apps could be used by its citizens to spread negative content and organize demonstrations or social movements. Much of the news China censors at home often makes it beyond the Great Firewall through such channels.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Major cities across China are sinking, putting a substantial portion of the country's rapidly urbanizing population in harm's way in the coming decades, according to a sweeping new analysis by Chinese scientists. Subsidence is the technical term for when land sinks relative to its surroundings, and it's a major threat for cities around the world. It accelerates local sea level rise from climate change, because the land is getting lower as the ocean gets higher. Urban subsidence can also affect inland cities by damaging buildings and roads, and causing drainage issues when water is trapped in sinking areas.

Out of 82 major Chinese cities, nearly half are measurably subsiding, according to the new study, which was published in the journal Science and conducted by more than 50 scientists at Chinese research institutes. The areas that are sinking are home to nearly one third of China's urban population. And the authors estimate that about a quarter of China's coastal land will be below sea level in the next hundred years, largely due to subsidence. That means tens of millions of people are already at risk, and that could grow to hundreds of millions if China's cities continue to both grow in population and subside at their current rate, and seas continue to rise. Oceans are rising steadily due to greenhouse gas emissions from burning oil, gas and coal.

This is the first time scientists have used satellite data to systematically measure how much cities are sinking across China. The study measured how much cities subsided between 2015 and 2022. Similar recent studies in Europe and the United States have also found significant subsidence in some cities, but didn't show the same widespread sinking that is present across China. "The places that really have high levels of subsidence are Asia," says Nicholls, who was one of the authors of a recent study that analyzed sinking cities across the U.S. Asia is at higher risk, he says, because many Asian cities are built on river deltas that are prone to sinking when you put heavy buildings on top and pump groundwater out from below. The places that are sinking most rapidly in the U.S., such as New Orleans, share that geology.

schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into U.S. critical infrastructure and are waiting "for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow," FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday. An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University.

China is developing the "ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing," Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. "Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic." Wray said it was difficult to determine the intent of this cyber pre-positioning which was aligned with China's broader intent to deter the U.S. from defending Taiwan. [...] Wray said China's hackers operated a series of botnets - constellations of compromised personal computers and servers around the globe - to conceal their malicious cyber activities. Private sector American technology and cybersecurity companies previously attributed Volt Typhoon to China, including reports by security researchers with Microsoft and Google. China's Embassy in Washington said in a statement: "Some in the US have been using origin-tracing of cyberattacks as a tool to hit and frame China, claiming the US to be the victim while it's the other way round, and politicizing cybersecurity issues."

Microsoft's Beijing-based research group published a new open source AI model on Tuesday, only to remove it from the internet hours later after the company realized that the model hadn't gone through adequate safety testing. From a report: The team that published the model, which is comprised of China-based researchers in Microsoft Research Asia, said in a tweet on Tuesday that they "accidentally missed" the safety testing step that Microsoft requires before models can be published.

Microsoft's AI policies require that before any AI models can be published, they must be approved by the company's Deployment Safety Board, which tests whether the models can carry out harmful tasks such as creating violent or disturbing content, according to an employee familiar with the process. In a now-deleted blog post, the researchers behind the model, dubbed WizardLM-2, said that it could carry out tasks like generating text, suggesting code, translating between different languages, or solving some math problems.

China's Baidu says its AI chatbot "Ernie Bot" has amassed more than 200 million users as it seeks to remain China's most popular ChatGPT-like chatbot amid increasingly fierce competition. From a report: The number of users has roughly doubled since the company's last update in December. The chatbot was released to the public eight months ago. Baidu CEO Robin Li also said Ernie Bot's API is being used 200 million times everyday, meaning the chatbot was requested by its user to conduct tasks that many times a day. The number of enterprise clients for the chatbot reached 85,000, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen.

Top takeaways from Stanford's new AI Index Report [PDF]:
1. AI beats humans on some tasks, but not on all. AI has surpassed human performance on several benchmarks, including some in image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding. Yet it trails behind on more complex tasks like competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning and planning.
2. Industry continues to dominate frontier AI research. In 2023, industry produced 51 notable machine learning models, while academia contributed only 15. There were also 21 notable models resulting from industry-academia collaborations in 2023, a new high.
3. Frontier models get way more expensive. According to AI Index estimates, the training costs of state-of-the-art AI models have reached unprecedented levels. For example, OpenAI's GPT-4 used an estimated $78 million worth of compute to train, while Google's Gemini Ultra cost $191 million for compute.
4. The United States leads China, the EU, and the U.K. as the leading source of top AI models. In 2023, 61 notable AI models originated from U.S.-based institutions, far outpacing the European Union's 21 and China's 15.
5. Robust and standardized evaluations for LLM responsibility are seriously lacking. New research from the AI Index reveals a significant lack of standardization in responsible AI reporting. Leading developers, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, primarily test their models against different responsible AI benchmarks. This practice complicates efforts to systematically compare the risks and limitations of top AI models.
6. Generative AI investment skyrockets. Despite a decline in overall AI private investment last year, funding for generative AI surged, nearly octupling from 2022 to reach $25.2 billion. Major players in the generative AI space, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Inflection, reported substantial fundraising rounds.
7. The data is in: AI makes workers more productive and leads to higher quality work. In 2023, several studies assessed AI's impact on labor, suggesting that AI enables workers to complete tasks more quickly and to improve the quality of their output. These studies also demonstrated AI's potential to bridge the skill gap between low- and high-skilled workers. Still, other studies caution that using AI without proper oversight can lead to diminished performance.
8. Scientific progress accelerates even further, thanks to AI. In 2022, AI began to advance scientific discovery. 2023, however, saw the launch of even more significant science-related AI applications -- from AlphaDev, which makes algorithmic sorting more efficient, to GNoME, which facilitates the process of materials discovery.
9. The number of AI regulations in the United States sharply increases. The number of AIrelated regulations in the U.S. has risen significantly in the past year and over the last five years. In 2023, there were 25 AI-related regulations, up from just one in 2016. Last year alone, the total number of AI-related regulations grew by 56.3%.
10. People across the globe are more cognizant of AI's potential impact -- and more nervous. A survey from Ipsos shows that, over the last year, the proportion of those who think AI will dramatically affect their lives in the next three to five years has increased from 60% to 66%. Moreover, 52% express nervousness toward AI products and services, marking a 13 percentage point rise from 2022. In America, Pew data suggests that 52% of Americans report feeling more concerned than excited about AI, rising from 37% in 2022.

The UK is starting to draft regulations to govern AI, focusing on the most powerful language models which underpin OpenAI's ChatGPT, Bloomberg News reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Policy officials at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology are in the early stages of devising legislation to limit potential harms caused by the emerging technology, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing undeveloped proposals. No bill is imminent, and the government is likely to wait until France hosts an AI conference either later this year or early next to launch a consultation on the topic, they said.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who hosted the first world leaders' summit on AI last year and has repeatedly said countries shouldn't "rush to regulate" AI, risks losing ground to the US and European Union on imposing guardrails on the industry. The EU passed a sweeping law to regulate the technology earlier this year, companies in China need approvals before producing AI services and some US cities and states have passed laws limiting use of AI in specific areas.

Apple has lost its spot as the world's biggest mobile phone seller after a steep sales drop as South Korean rival Samsung retook the lead in the global market share. From a report: Samsung had been the biggest seller of mobile phones for 12 years until the end of 2023, when sales of Apple's iPhone models overtook it. Global smartphone shipments increased by 8% to 289.4m units during January-March, according to research firm IDC. Samsung won a 20.8% market share, beating Apple's 17.3% share, which has been dented by slowing sales in China.

IDC said that Apple shipped 50.1m iPhones in the first quarter, down from the 55.4m units it shipped in the same period last year. It was the biggest drop in iPhone sales since Covid-19 lockdowns caused global supply chain chaos in 2022. The drop in Apple sales, despite a growing global market, was partly ascribed to difficulties in China. Local rivals including Xiaomi and Huawei have put pressure on Apple and Samsung. At the same time, China's government has moved to ban devices made by foreign companies from workplaces.

The Associated Press reports: As their rivalry intensifies, U.S. and Chinese military planners are gearing up for a new kind of warfare in which squadrons of air and sea drones equipped with artificial intelligence work together like swarms of bees to overwhelm an enemy. The planners envision a scenario in which hundreds, even thousands of the machines engage in coordinated battle. A single controller might oversee dozens of drones. Some would scout, others attack. Some would be able to pivot to new objectives in the middle of a mission based on prior programming rather than a direct order.

The world's only AI superpowers are engaged in an arms race for swarming drones that is reminiscent of the Cold War, except drone technology will be far more difficult to contain than nuclear weapons. Because software drives the drones' swarming abilities, it could be relatively easy and cheap for rogue nations and militants to acquire their own fleets of killer robots. The Pentagon is pushing urgent development of inexpensive, expendable drones as a deterrent against China acting on its territorial claim on Taiwan. Washington says it has no choice but to keep pace with Beijing. Chinese officials say AI-enabled weapons are inevitable so they, too, must have them.

The unchecked spread of swarm technology "could lead to more instability and conflict around the world," said Margarita Konaev, an analyst with Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
"A 2023 Georgetown study of AI-related military spending found that more than a third of known contracts issued by both U.S. and Chinese military services over eight months in 2020 were for intelligent uncrewed systems..." according to the article.

"Military analysts, drone makers and AI researchers don't expect fully capable, combat-ready swarms to be fielded for five years or so, though big breakthroughs could happen sooner."

Foreign Policy magazine visits a U.S. military training exercise that pitted Lt. Isaac McCurdy and his platoon of infantry troops against machines with camera lenses for eyes and sheet metal for skin: Driving on eight screeching wheels and carrying enough firepower on their truck beds to fill a small arms depot, a handful of U.S. Army robots stormed through the battlefield of the fictional city of Ujen. The robots shot up houses where the opposition force hid. Drones that had been loitering over the battlefield for hours hovered above McCurdy and his team and dropped "bombs" — foam footballs, in this case — right on top of them, a perfectly placed artillery shot. Robot dogs, with sensors for heads, searched houses to make sure they were clear.

"If you see the whites of someone's eyes or their sunglasses, [and] you shoot back at that, they're going to have a human response," McCurdy said. "If it's a robot pulling up, shooting something that's bigger than you can carry yourself, and it's not going to just die when you shoot a center mass, it's a very different feeling."

In the United States' next major war, the Army's brass is hoping that robots will be the ones taking the first punch, doing the dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs that killed hundreds — likely thousands — of the more than 7,000 U.S. service members who died during two decades of wars in the Middle East. The goal is to put a robot in the most dangerous spot on the battlefield instead of a 19-year-old private fresh out of basic training... [Several] Army leaders believe that almost every U.S. Army unit, down to the smallest foot patrols, will soon have drones in the sky to sense, protect, and attack. And it won't be long before the United States is deploying ground robots into battle in human-machine teams.
The robots haven't been tested with live ammunition yet — or in colder temperatures, the magazine notes. (And at one point in the exercise, "Army officials jammed themselves, and a swarm of drones dropped out of the sky.) But the U.S. Army is "considering a proposal to add a platoon of robots, the equivalent of 20 to 50 human soldiers, to its armored brigade combat team."

Six generals and several colonels watched the exercise, according to the article, which notes that the ultimate goal isn't to replace all human soldiers. "The point is to get the advantage before China or Russia do."

From the Washington Post: The U.S. government said Thursday that Russian government hackers who recently stole Microsoft corporate emails had obtained passwords and other secret material that might allow them to breach multiple U.S. agencies.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday issued a rare binding directive to an undisclosed number of agencies requiring them to change any log-ins that were taken and investigate what else might be at risk. The directive was made public Thursday, after recipients had begun shoring up their defenses. The "successful compromise of Microsoft corporate email accounts and the exfiltration of correspondence between agencies and Microsoft presents a grave and unacceptable risk to agencies," CISA wrote. "This Emergency Directive requires agencies to analyze the content of exfiltrated emails, reset compromised credentials, and take additional steps to ensure authentication tools for privileged Microsoft Azure accounts are secure."
"CISA officials told reporters it is so far unclear whether the hackers, associated with Russian military intelligence agency SVR, had obtained anything from the exposed agencies," according to the article. And the article adds that CISA "did not spell out the extent of any risks to national interests."

But the agency's executive assistant director for cybersecurity did tell the newspaper that "the potential for exposure of federal authentication credentials...does pose an exigent risk to the federal enterprise, hence the need for this directive and the actions therein." Microsoft's Windows operating system, Outlook email and other software are used throughout the U.S. government, giving the Redmond, Washington-based company enormous responsibility for the cybersecurity of federal employees and their work. But the longtime relationship is showing increasing signs of strain.... [T]he breach is one of a few severe intrusions at the company that have exposed many others elsewhere to potential hacking. Another of those incidents — in which Chinese government hackers cracked security in Microsoft's cloud software offerings to steal email from State Department and Commerce Department officials — triggered a major federal review that last week called on the company to overhaul its culture, which the Cyber Safety Review Board cited as allowing a "cascade of avoidable errors."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Influential US Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has called on U.S. President Joe Biden to ban electric vehicles from Chinese brands. Brown calls Chinese EVs "an existential threat" to the U.S. automotive industry and says that allowing imports of cheap EVs from Chinese brands "is inconsistent with a pro-worker industrial policy." Brown's letter to the president (PDF) is the most recent to sound alarms about the threat of heavily subsidized Chinese EVs moving into established markets. Brands like BYD and MG have been on sale in the European Union for some years now, and last October, the EU launched an anti-subsidy investigation into whether the Chinese government is giving Chinese brands an unfair advantage.

The EU probe won't wrap until November, but another report published this week found that government subsidies for green technology companies are prevalent in China. BYD, which now sells more EVs than Tesla, has benefited from almost $4 billion (3.7 billion euro) in direct help from the Chinese government in 2022, according to a study by the Kiel Institute. Last month, the EU even started paying extra attention to imports of Chinese EVs, issuing a threat of retroactive tariffs that could start being imposed this summer. Chinese EV imports to the EU have increased by 14 percent since the start of its investigation, but they have yet to really begin in the U.S., where there are a few barriers in their way. Chinese batteries make an EV ineligible for the IRS's clean vehicle tax credit, for one thing. And Chinese-made vehicles (like the Lincoln Nautilus, Buick Envision, and Polestar 2) are already subject to a 27.5 percent import tax.

But Chinese EVs are on sale in Mexico already, and that has American automakers worried. Last year, Ford CEO Jim Farley said he saw Chinese automakers "as the main competitors, not GM or Toyota." And in January, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he believed that "if there are no trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world." [...] It's not just the potential damage to the U.S. auto industry that has prompted this letter. Brown wrote that he is concerned about the risk of China having access to data collected by connected cars, "whether it be information about traffic patterns, critical infrastructure, or the lives of Americans," pointing out that "China does not allow American-made electric vehicles near their official buildings." At the end of February, the Commerce Department also warned of the security risk from Chinese-connected cars and revealed it has launched an investigation into the matter. "When the goal is to dominate a sector, tariffs are insufficient to stop their attack on American manufacturing," Brown wrote. "Instead, the Administration should act now to ban Chinese EVs before they destroy the potential for the U.S. EV market. For this reason, no solution should be left off the table, including the use of Section 421 (China Safeguard) of the Trade Act of 1974, or some other authority."

China's push to replace foreign technology is now focused on cutting American chip makers out of the country's telecoms systems. From a report: Officials earlier this year directed the nation's largest telecom carriers to phase out foreign processors that are core to their networks by 2027, a move that would hit American chip giants Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, people familiar with the matter said. The deadline given by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology aims to accelerate efforts by Beijing to halt the use of such core chips in its telecom infrastructure. The regulator ordered state-owned mobile operators to inspect their networks for the prevalence of non-Chinese semiconductors and draft timelines to replace them, the people said.

In the past, efforts to get the industry to wean itself off foreign semiconductors have been hindered by the lack of good domestically made chips. Chinese telecom carriers' procurements show they are switching more to domestic alternatives, a move made possible in part because local chips' quality has improved and their performance has become more stable, the people said. Such an effort will hit Intel and AMD the hardest, they said. The two chip makers have in recent years provided the bulk of the core processors used in networking equipment in China and the world.

China is rapidly advancing its space capabilities to challenge the United States' dominance in space, as evidenced by its significant increase in on-orbit intelligence and reconnaissance satellites and the development of sophisticated counterspace weapons. Space.com reports: "Frankly, China is moving at a breathtaking speed. Since 2018, China has more than tripled their on-orbit intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites," Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, said here on Tuesday, during a talk at the 39th Space Symposium. "And with these systems, they've built a kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and, yes, target United States and allied military capabilities," he added. And that's not all. China has also "built a range of counterspace weapons, from reversible jamming all the way up to kinetic hit-to-kill direct-ascent and co-orbital ASATs," Whiting said.

Indeed, China demonstrated direct-ascent ASAT, or anti-satellite, weapon technology back in January 2007, when it destroyed one of its defunct weather satellites with a missile. That test was widely decried as irresponsible, for it generated thousands of pieces of debris, many of which are still cluttering up Earth orbit. Such activities show that China is now treating space as a war-fighting domain, Whiting said. And so, he added, is Russia, which has also conducted ASAT tests recently, including a destructive one in November 2021. Russia has also been aggressively building out its orbital architecture; since 2018, the nation has more than doubled its total number of active satellites, according to Whiting. The U.S. government has taken notice of these trends.

"We are at a pivotal moment in history," Troy Meink, principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates the United States' fleet of spy satellites, said during a different talk on Tuesday here at the symposium. "For the first time in decades, U.S. leadership in space and space technology is being challenged," Meink added. "Our competitors are actively seeking ways to threaten our capabilities, and we see this every day." The U.S. must act if it wishes to beat back this challenge, Meink and Whiting stressed; it cannot rely on the inertia of past success to do the job. For example, Meink highlighted the need to innovate with the nation's reconnaissance satellites, to make them more numerous, more agile and more resilient. U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu also emphasized the importance of increasing resilience, a goal that she said could be achieved by diversifying the nation's space capabilities. "We must assess ways to incorporate radiation-hardened electronics, novel orbits, varied communication pathways, advancements in propulsion technologies and increased cooperation with our allies," Shyu said in another talk on Tuesday at the symposium.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week South Korea's SK Hynix announced it would partner with Purdue University on a $3.9 billion semiconductor complex here, the largest single corporate investment in state history. Now comes the hard part. SK Hynix must not only build the fabrication plant, or fab, which will package high-bandwidth memory chips used in artificial intelligence, and a connected research-and-development center. It also has to staff them. "We need several hundred engineers to operate our advanced-packaging manufacturing fab -- in physics, chemistry, material science, electronics engineering," Kwak Noh-Jung, chief executive of SK Hynix, said in an interview following last week's announcement.

Staffing a fab is harder in the U.S. than in South Korea, where SK Hynix has contracts with local universities and its own in-house university. Nonetheless, Kwak said, "the final goal is very clear. We need to have very good engineers for our success in U.S." The U.S. is trying to do something unprecedented: reverse a shrinking share in a key manufacturing sector. Between 1990 and 2020, the U.S. share of world chip making shrank to 12% from 37%, while the combined share of Taiwan, South Korea and China grew to 58%. The federal CHIPS program has showered billions of dollars on Intel for fabs in several states, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.in Arizona and GlobalFoundries in New York and Vermont. SK Hynix hopes for support as well.

Subsidies alone won't guarantee a sustainable industry. Fabs need customers, a supply chain and, above all, a skilled, specialized workforce. From 2000 to 2017, U.S. employment in semiconductor manufacturing shrank to 181,000 from 287,000. It has since recovered to about 200,000. Why did the U.S. share of semiconductor production shrink? As in other industries, the U.S. became an expensive place to manufacture. Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute, who has studied outsourcing, said this wasn't "primarily a story about offshoring." U.S. companies still lead in chip design: Nvidia in artificial intelligence, Qualcomm in communications and Apple in smartphones. Over time they mostly contracted out fabrication of their chips to foundries such as TSMC who benefited from generous domestic subsidies. The theory behind CHIPS is that, by matching Asia's subsidies, the U.S. can again be competitive in chip making. Nonetheless, there is a chicken-egg problem. Fabs need a ready supply of skilled workers. But without fabs, America's best and brightest have little incentive to pursue careers in the sector.

Amazon on Thursday added Andrew Ng, the computer scientist who led AI projects at Alphabet's Google and China's Baidu, to its board amid rising competition among Big Techs to add users for their GenAI products. From a report: Amazon's cloud unit is facing pressure from Microsoft's early pact with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and integration of its technology into Azure, while Alexa voice assistant is in race with genAI chat tools from OpenAI and Google.

The appointment, effective April 9, also follows job cuts across Amazon, which has seen enterprise cloud spending and e-commerce sales moderate due to macroeconomic factors such as inflation and high interest rates. "As we look toward 2024 (and beyond), we're not done lowering our cost to serve," CEO Andy Jassy said in a letter to shareholders on Thursday.

Vinod Khosla, the founder of venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, opines on the bill that seeks to ban TikTok or force its parent firm to divest the U.S. business: Even if one could argue that this bill strikes at the First Amendment, there is legal precedent for doing so. In 1981, Haig vs Agee established that there are circumstances under which the government can lawfully impinge upon an individual's First Amendment rights if it is necessary to protect national security and prevent substantial harm. TikTok and the AI that can be channelled through it are national and homeland security issues that meet these standards.

Should this bill turn into law, the president would have the power to force any foreign-owned social media to be sold if US intelligence agencies deem them a national security threat. This broader scope should protect against challenges that this is a bill of attainder. Similar language helped protect effective bans on Huawei and Kaspersky Lab. As for TikTok's value as a boon to consumers and businesses, there are many companies that could quickly replace it. In 2020, after India banned TikTok amid geopolitical tensions between Beijing and New Delhi, services including Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, MX TakaTak, Chingari and others filled the void.Â

Few appreciate that TikTok is not available in China. Instead, Chinese consumers use Douyin, the sister app that features educational and patriotic videos, and is limited to 40 minutes per day of total usage. Spinach for Chinese kids, fentanyl -- another chief export of China's -- for ours. Worse still, TikTok is a programmable fentanyl whose effects are under the control of the CCP.

China will attempt to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea and India this year with artificial intelligence-generated content after making a dry run with the presidential poll in Taiwan, Microsoft has warned. From a report: The US tech firm said it expected Chinese state-backed cyber groups to target high-profile elections in 2024, with North Korea also involved, according to a report by the company's threat intelligence team published on Friday. "As populations in India, South Korea and the United States head to the polls, we are likely to see Chinese cyber and influence actors, and to some extent North Korean cyber actors, work toward targeting these elections," the report reads.

Microsoft said that "at a minimum" China will create and distribute through social media AI-generated content that "benefits their positions in these high-profile elections." The company added that the impact of AI-made content was minor but warned that could change. "While the impact of such content in swaying audiences remains low, China's increasing experimentation in augmenting memes, videos and audio will continue -- and may prove effective down the line," said Microsoft. Microsoft said in the report that China had already attempted an AI-generated disinformation campaign in the Taiwan presidential election in January. The company said this was the first time it had seen a state-backed entity using AI-made content in a bid to influence a foreign election.
UPDATE: Last fall, America's State Department "accused the Chinese government of spending billions of dollars annually on a global campaign of disinformation," reports the Wall Street Journal: In an interview, Tom Burt, Microsoft's head of customer security and trust, said China's disinformation operations have become much more active in the past six months, mirroring rising activity of cyberattacks linked to Beijing. "We're seeing them experiment," Burt said. "I'm worried about where it might go next."

quonset shares a report: In a scathing indictment of Microsoft corporate security and transparency, a Biden administration-appointed review board issued a report Tuesday saying "a cascade of errors" by the tech giant let state-backed Chinese cyber operators break into email accounts of senior U.S. officials including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

The Cyber Safety Review Board, created in 2021 by executive order, describes shoddy cybersecurity practices, a lax corporate culture and a lack of sincerity about the company's knowledge of the targeted breach, which affected multiple U.S. agencies that deal with China. It concluded that "Microsoft's security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul" given the company's ubiquity and critical role in the global technology ecosystem. Microsoft products "underpin essential services that support national security, the foundations of our economy, and public health and safety."

The panel said the intrusion, discovered in June by the State Department and dating to May "was preventable and should never have occurred," blaming its success on "a cascade of avoidable errors." What's more, the board said, Microsoft still doesn't know how the hackers got in. [...] It said Microsoft's CEO and board should institute "rapid cultural change" including publicly sharing "a plan with specific timelines to make fundamental, security-focused reforms across the company and its full suite of products."

Sara Fischer reports via Axios: Jon Stewart on Monday told Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan that Apple wouldn't let him interview her for a podcast. "I wanted to have you on a podcast and Apple asked us not to do it," "The Daily Show" host said to Khan, in reference to his former podcast that was an extension of his Apple TV+ comedy show "The Problem With Jon Stewart." "They literally said 'please don't talk to her,' having nothing to do with what you do for a living. I think they just... I didn't think they cared for you is what happened," he added during his conversation with Khan. "They wouldn't let us do even that dumb thing we just did in the first act on AI. Like, what is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?"

Stewart returned to "The Daily Show" in February after leaving in 2015 as its executive producer and host on Monday evenings through the 2024 election cycle. Stewart's Apple TV+ show ended late last year after Stewart and Apple executives parted ways over creative differences, including the comedian's desire to cover topics such as China and AI, the New York Times reported.