Proprietary Risks and Vendor Lock-in

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 25, 2023

• Tesla [Cracked] Twice at Pwn2Own Exploit Contest

  On the second day of the contest in Vancouver, Canada, Synacktiv’s researchers created an exploit chain that used a heap overflow and an out-of-band (OOB) write vulnerability to pop the Tesla-Infotainment system. The [crack] was described as “Unconfined Root” and scored the Synacktiv team a $250,000 cash prize.

• Microsoft threatens to restrict data from rival AI search tools

  Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its [Internet]-search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence chat products, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.

• GPT is revolutionary

  In retrospect, I feel kinda bad for not paying attention to this sooner. Back in November a friend excitedly told me that ChatGPT is sentient, because it gave him good answers to a lot of “tough questions.” I tried (and failed) to explain that it was just statistical prediction and wasn’t actually conscious. It didn’t occur to me that this friend was not a programmer and couldn’t call an API to save his life, and yet had no problem accessing and using ChatGPT. That’s where the revolution happens.

• Microsoft breaks geolocation, locking users out of Azure and M365

  The reader's info said the mess was caused by "a recent deployment applied to an infrastructure for regulating user geolocation had inadvertently provided incorrect IP location data."

  This resulted in users who had an IP-based conditional access policy experiencing the sign-in issues mentioned above.