People do not identitfy AI cloned voices

Using off the shelve software, UK researchers cloned human voices in 5 minutes.

Then they tested if people could distinguish between the real person and AI generated speech and most people could not identify who was the real person speaking. 

Obviously this is a dangerous tool for automating phone phishing scams. 

Java 25 quick wins

Here are some simple improvements that Java 25 brings to your everyday code.

Hello World simplified

Since the release of the C programming language, printing "Hello world!" is the first task a programmer does in a language. And Java did not shine at this:

public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, World!");
    }
}

We tell our students it's magical incantation that they'll have to live with for a while and that all will become clear in due time.

At last Java 25 brings this down to the essentials:

void main() {
    IO.println("Hello, World!");
}

If I'm counting well, we go down from 89 characters to 40 characters,  That's less than half of the code. Additionally the code is more intuitive to understand.

 

This feature is called compact source files. The above improvement uses

• a launchable main method. The method automatically resides in a top level class in the unnamed package
• A new Input/Output class 

Less imports

void main() {
  List<String> ducklings = List.of("Huey", "Dewey", "Louis");
  IO.print("Hello " + ducklings);
}

We're all used to not having to import java.lang.String because Java automatically imports java.lang.*.

Java now automatically imports the java.base module.

Importing a module implies importing all public top level classes and interfaces in packages exported by that module.

The top level packages are defined in the module definitions, which exist since Java 9.

One of the packages exported by the java.base is java.util.*. Hence we do not need

import java.util.List;

for the code above to run anymore.

Additionally a program can now import modules without having to be a module itself, 

making modules more accessible to developers who never dabbled with them themselves.

You import modules (here java.util.desktop) using

import module java.util.desktop;

 

Shadowleak: tricking your AI into hacking you

ChatGPT has reported they closed a vulnerability exploited by the Shadowleak malware that was disclosed recently by Radware. 

Shadowleak uses prompt injection, the attacker tries to feed instructions to your AI service.

Security vectors have been warning against such an attack vector: when you let for example AI summarise a web page, hackers could try to craft malicious web pages that try to trick that AI.

ShwdowLeak uses ChatGPT DeepSearch, an AI tool that helps you automate email jobs. Shadowleak sends a malicious email to you and DeepSearch will happily report on the content of your email archive to the attacker. 

Particlarly worrying about the attack is that it is executed entirely on the OpenAI servers, so you cannot detect on your local machine an attack is happening. 

Radware recommends to limit the actions an AI agent can take on your system to limit the damage of such attacks.

Windows powershell Get-Process: get parentprocess ID / name, get process using port...

Powershell command to get parent processes of all processes with a given name (e. g. javaw.exe):

Get-CimInstance Win32_Process -Filter "Name = 'javaw.exe'" | select ParentProcessId

Or in a script. This one takes the process name as a parameter and also shows the , this time with the parent process name: 

$targetProcessName = $args[0]

$targetProcessName = $args[0]
$targetProcesses = Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Process -Filter "Name = '$targetProcessName'"

foreach ($process in $targetProcesses) {
    $parentProcessId = $process.ParentProcessId
    $parentProcess = Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Process -Filter "ProcessId = $parentProcessId"
    Write-Output "Process: $($process.processId) $($process.Name), Parent Process: $($ParentProcessId)    $($parentProcess.Name)"
}

Powershell command to get ID of process occupying a port (e.g. 8080)

 Get-Process -Id (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 8080).OwningProcess

 Once you have the id you can shoot it using 

taskkill /PID <processid> /F

 

(AI) bots eat 30% of the web bandwidth

 One of the hidden costs of AI is the hunt for training data by ripping content from websites. 

The bots are massively using content from websites without paying for it, ignoring any copyright that may be associated to that content. They are even using AI to find content that is hidden behind JavaScript logic.

AI providers often argue that they refer to their sources and that this leads to more visists to those websites. Cloudflare, a major CDN provider, has shown that often the referrals are very low compared to the bot traffic, OpenAI being the worst with 1 referral for 1600 crawls:

 

Cloudflare is now preparing a service to install a payment wall for crawling. 

Not only are the AI bots not paying for the content they are sucking from the content providers. Again according to Cloadflare, they represent 30% of the traffic going to these websites. And who is paying for the consumed bandwidth?Indeed, the content providers themselves are paying for the bandwidth their servers need.

The real cost of AI

Last year OpenAI lost $8 billion and Anthrophic lost $3 billion.

Cursor and Claude code have multplied the cost of their monthly subscriptions by 10, now at about $200.

Even wit this price tag, the increased productivity is still worth it in most cases, but it is not a free ride anymore.

Companies might have to do a thorough cost benefit analysis on their AI expenses. 

Some researchers even think we have reached the limits of the current AI techniques, while the AI industry claims Artificial General Intelligence (AI at or surpassing the level of human intelligence) is nigh. 

AI and copyright

AI generated content can infringe copyrights, but what about copyrighting content that you generated with AI?

AI generated content (text, images...) cannot be copyrighted as there is no human to give the credit to. It can be trademarked though.

 

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