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On Wednesday, American attorneys general from all 50 states and four territories sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to establish an expert commission to study how generative AI can be used to exploit children through child sexual abuse material (CSAM). They also call for expanding existing laws against CSAM to explicitly cover AI-generated materials.

"As Attorneys General of our respective States and territories, we have a deep and grave concern for the safety of the children within our respective jurisdictions," the letter reads. "And while Internet crimes against children are already being actively prosecuted, we are concerned that AI is creating a new frontier for abuse that makes such prosecution more difficult."

In particular, open source image synthesis technologies such as Stable Diffusion allow the creation of AI-generated pornography with ease, and a large community has formed around tools and add-ons that enhance this ability. Since these AI models are openly available and often run locally, there are sometimes no guardrails preventing someone from creating sexualized images of children, and that has rung alarm bells among the nation's top prosecutors. (It's worth noting that Midjourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly all have built-in filters that bar the creation of pornographic content.)

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Microsoft said the corporate account of one of its engineers was hacked by a highly skilled threat actor that acquired a signing key used to hack dozens of Azure and Exchange accounts belonging to high-profile users.

The disclosure solves two mysteries at the center of a disclosure Microsoft made in July . The company said that hackers tracked as Storm-0558 had been inside its corporate network for more than a month and had gained access to Azure and Exchange accounts, several of which were later identified as belonging to the US Departments of State and Commerce. Storm-0558 pulled off the feat by obtaining an expired Microsoft account consumer signing key and using it to forge tokens for Microsoft’s supposedly fortified Azure AD cloud service.

The disclosure left two of the most important questions unanswered. Specifically, how was a credential as sensitive as the consumer signing key stolen from Microsoft’s network, and how could it sign tokens for Azure, which is built on an entirely different infrastructure?

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Toyota's 14 Japanese factories all shut down for about two days last week due to a production order system malfunction caused by a lack of disk space, the company announced today.

According to Toyota, its Japanese factories and their 28 assembly lines were halted due to "some multiple servers that process part orders" becoming unavailable and causing Toyota's production order system to malfunction on August 28.

The problem began during maintenance work on August 27. Toyota's press release said:

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Authentication service Okta said four of its customers have been hit in a recent social-engineering campaign that allowed hackers to gain control of super administrator accounts and from there weaken or entirely remove two-factor authentication protecting accounts from unauthorized access.

The Okta super administrator accounts are assigned to users with the highest permissions inside an organization using Okta’s service. In recent weeks, Okta customers’ IT desk personnel have received calls that follow a consistent pattern of social engineering, in which attackers pose as a company insider in an attempt to trick workers into divulging passwords or doing other dangerous things. The attackers in this case call service desk personnel and attempt to convince them to reset all multi-factor authentication factors assigned to super administrators or other highly privileged users, Okta said recently .

Two-factor authentication and multi-factor authentication, usually abbreviated as 2FA and MFA, require a biometric, possession of a physical security key, or knowledge of a one-time password in addition to a normally used password to access an account.

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Last week, Gizmodo parent company G/O Media fired the staff of its Spanish-language site Gizmodo en Español and began to replace their work with AI translations of English-language articles, reports The Verge.

Former Gizmodo writer Matías S. Zavia publicly mentioned the layoffs, which took place via video call on August 29, in a social media post. On August 31, Zavia wrote , "Hello friends. On Tuesday they shut down @GizmodoES to turn it into a translation self-publisher (an AI took my job, literally)."

Previously, Gizmodo en Español had a small but dedicated team who wrote original content tailored specifically for Spanish-speaking readers, as well as producing translations of Gizmodo's English articles. The site represented Gizmodo's first foray into international markets when it launched in 2012 after being acquired from Guanabee.

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On Tuesday, Meta announced SeamlessM4T , a multimodal AI model for speech and text translations. As a neural network that can process both text and audio, it can perform text-to-speech, speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, and text-to-text translations for "up to 100 languages," according to Meta. Its goal is to help people who speak different languages communicate with each other more effectively.

Continuing Meta's relatively open approach to AI, Meta is releasing SeamlessM4T under a research license (CC BY-NC 4.0) that allows developers to build on the work. They're also releasing SeamlessAlign, which Meta calls "the biggest open multimodal translation dataset to date, totaling 270,000 hours of mined speech and text alignments." That will likely kick-start the training of future translation AI models from other researchers.

Among the features of SeamlessM4T touted on Meta's promotional blog, the company says that the model can perform speech recognition (you give it audio of speech, and it converts it to text), speech-to-text translation (it translates spoken audio to a different language in text), speech-to-speech translation (you feed it speech audio, and it outputs translated speech audio), text-to-text translation (similar to how Google Translate functions), and text-to-speech translation (feed it text and it will translate and speak it out in another language). Each of the text translation functions supports nearly 100 languages, and the speech output functions support about 36 output languages.

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T-Mobile yesterday announced a phone plan called "Go5G Next" that costs $100 a month for a single line, more expensive than the highest-tier wireless plans offered by AT&T and Verizon.

In a notable development for a carrier that spent years blasting its rivals' prices, T-Mobile issued a press release with a chart showing that its new plan costs more than the top-tier unlimited plans sold by AT&T and Verizon. AT&T's Unlimited Premium is $85 for a single line while Verizon's Unlimited Plus is $80 unless you add optional perks like the Disney Bundle.

T-Mobile's Go5G Next will be available on August 24 and come with unlimited phone data, 50GB of high-speed mobile hotspot data, and the ability to upgrade to a new phone once a year. It will also come with Apple TV+ and a Netflix subscription. T-Mobile points out that the similar AT&T and Verizon plans don't have streaming services included.

Enlarge / If this kind of thing raises your eyebrows, there's a whole lot more inside a ribbon bar for you. (credit: Anaconda)

If you’re decent in Python (or aspire to be) but don’t have the chops for advanced data work in Excel, Microsoft now offers the kind of peanut butter-and-chocolate combination that you may consider a gift. At least until it goes behind the paywall.

Microsoft's Stefan Kinnestrand, writing about “the best of both worlds for data analysis and visualization,” writes that this public preview of Python in Excel will allow spreadsheet tinkerers to “manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries and then use Excel's formulas, charts, and PivotTables to further refine your insights.”

Microsoft partnered with Python analytics repository Anaconda to bring libraries like Pandas, Statsmodels, and Matplotlib into Excel. Python in Excel runs on Microsoft’s cloud servers, and the company is touting the security that should offer . Python runs in isolated containers, with no access to devices, your network, or user tokens, Microsoft states. Python and Excel can only really talk to each other through limited functions—xl() and =PY()—that can only return code results, not macros, VBA code, or other data, Microsoft claims.

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ChatGPT may well revolutionize web search , streamline office chores , and remake education , but the smooth-talking chatbot has also found work as a social media crypto huckster.

Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet powered by ChatGPT operating on X—the social network formerly known as Twitter—in May of this year.

The botnet, which the researchers dub Fox8 because of its connection to cryptocurrency websites bearing some variation of the same name, consisted of 1,140 accounts. Many of them seemed to use ChatGPT to craft social media posts and to reply to each other’s posts. The auto-generated content was apparently designed to lure unsuspecting humans into clicking links through to the crypto-hyping sites.