Technology - Google News |
- Whistleblower accuses Tesla of spying on employees at Gigafactory: attorney
- Alexa vs. Siri vs. Google: Which Can Carry on a Conversation Best?
- Melbourne Teen Pleads Guilty to Hacking Apple Servers and Accessing Customer Accounts
| Whistleblower accuses Tesla of spying on employees at Gigafactory: attorney Posted: 16 Aug 2018 05:42 PM PDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An employee fired from Tesla Inc’s (TSLA.O) Nevada battery factory filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing the company of spying on employees and failing to act after learning that a Mexican cartel may be dealing drugs inside the plant, his attorney said on Thursday. A wheel of a prototype of the Tesla Model 3 on display in front of the factory during a media tour of the Tesla Gigafactory, which will produce batteries for the electric carmaker in Sparks, Nevada, U.S. July 26, 2016. REUTERS/James Glover II/File Photo A former member of Tesla’s internal investigations team, Karl Hansen, filed a tips, complaints and referrals form to the SEC about the Gigafactory on Aug. 9, Hansen’s attorney Stuart Meissner said in a news release. Whistleblowers can receive 10 percent to 30 percent of penalties the SEC collects. Tesla said it took the allegations that Hansen brought to the electric car maker seriously and investigated. “Some of his claims are outright false. Others could not be corroborated,” Tesla said in the statement. The SEC declined comment. The complaint sent to the SEC comes amid intense focus on the company and Chief Executive Elon Musk, whose tweets about taking the company private last week set off a scramble to determine whether he violated securities law in stating that funding for the deal was “secured.” A prototype of the Tesla Model 3 is on display in front of the factory during a media tour of the Tesla Gigafactory which will produce batteries for the electric carmaker in Sparks, Nevada, U.S. July 26, 2016. REUTERS/James Glover II/File Photo Hansen alleged that Tesla, at the direction of Musk, installed surveillance equipment at the Gigafactory outside Reno, Nevada to eavesdrop on the personal cellphones of employees while at work, according to Meissner. Hansen also claims that Tesla did not disclose to investors that thieves stole $37 million in copper and other raw materials during the first half of 2018, according to his attorney. Hansen alleges Tesla failed to disclose that it received written notice from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration about a Tesla employee possibly engaged in selling cocaine and crystal methamphetamine from the Nevada factory on behalf of a Mexican drug cartel, according to Meissner who did not release the whistleblower filing he said his client made to the SEC. Reuters could not reach Hansen for comment. Hansen alleges that he found ties between the Tesla employee and members of the cartel and urged Tesla to disclose that information to the DEA, his attorney said in the news release. The DEA said it does not notify non-law enforcement entities about investigations. “Notifying associates of a target of an investigation would likely derail enforcement efforts or compromise the investigation altogether,” the agency said in a statement. Sheriff Gerald Antinoro of Storey County, where the Gigafactory is located, declined to comment on the allegations of drug dealing. The sheriff did say Tesla reported two thefts but did not disclose what was taken. “Tesla refused to do so and instead advised him that Tesla would hire ‘outside vendors’ to further investigate the issue,” Meissner said in the news release. Hansen was subject to retaliation and fired on July 16 after raising the issues internally, he said. Hansen is the second Tesla employee to file a whistleblower complaint with the SEC. Martin Tripp, another former Gigafactory worker represented by Meissner, told the SEC that Tesla inflated the number of Model 3s being produced each week, that it used punctured batteries in its vehicles, and that it reused scrapped parts in vehicles “without regard to safety,” according to his attorney. Tesla denies those claims. Tripp’s tip to the SEC was filed after he was fired, sued by Tesla for hacking trade secrets and transferring internal documents to third parties. Musk, in a company-wide email, accused an unnamed Telsa employee of “quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations.” Reporting by Alexandria Sage; Additional reporting by Michelle Price in Washington; Editing by Lisa Shumaker Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. |
| Alexa vs. Siri vs. Google: Which Can Carry on a Conversation Best? Posted: 17 Aug 2018 02:01 AM PDT  Photo illustration by Jens Mortensen for The New York Times Digital assistants like Amazon’s Echo can listen to you. And they can talk back. But that doesn’t mean they can carry on a good conversation. As the devices that run these assistants become more commonplace — 39 million Americans now own one, according to a recent study — Amazon and competitors like Apple and Google foresee a day when you can chat with their assistants like you would with a friend. We explored the conversational limits of the leading assistants. After consulting with the companies involved and a few artificial intelligence experts we created tests that show what they can and can’t handle. Don’t expect the assistants to replace conversations with friends anytime soon. But the experiments — even in the moments when the assistants screwed up — showed what these assistants could one day become in our lives. Let’s make a listBecause these devices are not yet nimble enough to understand and respond to anything you might say, Amazon, Apple, and Google must hone them for particular tasks, like playing a song or building a shopping list. If you stick to these tasks, the devices are pretty good at zeroing on what you want. But even inside these small domains, they can trip up. Listen how.   Add these things to my shopping list… Amazon Echo What can I add for you? Apple Homepod I added “these things” to the shopping list. Google Home What do you want to add? Right away, the HomePod showed how difficult it can be for machines to understand natural language. The device recognized what we were doing, but misunderstood how we wanted to do it, and added an item called “these things” to a shopping list. … guacamole, chips, tortillas. Amazon Echo “Guacamole chips tortillas” added to your shopping list. Apple Homepod No longer listening. Google Home OK, I’ve added “guacamole” and “chips tortillas” to your shopping list. If your roommate asked what you wanted from the market and you said “guacamole, chips, tortillas,” he would understand that as three separate things. But the Google and Amazon devices didn’t quite recognize the pause between items as a verbal comma. Although these devices are pretty good at recognizing what you say, they may not completely understand it. Also add olive oil. Amazon Echo I’ve put “olive oil” on your shopping list. Apple Homepod OK, I added “olive oil” to the Reminders. Google Home Sorry, I’m not sure how to help. Alexa grasped that we were continuing to add to the shopping list, even though we weren’t explicit about it. It held onto the context of the exchange and mapped our next request back to our list. A digital assistant relies on many different technology systems, all working together on the device and inside a network of computer data centers that connect to the assistant over the internet. When you say something, one system tries to recognize each word and convert it to text. Another system tries to understand the meaning of each word and how it relates to the others. A third system spits out new text that responds to what you’ve said. A fourth converts this response to digital speech. Other systems may also weigh in, but you get the point. Engineers used to build speech recognition systems by writing one small computing rule at a time — a painstaking process. But so-called neural networks are now replacing those hand-written rules, accelerating the progress of speech recognition. Neural networks are complex mathematical systems that can learn particular tasks by pinpointing patterns in large amounts of data. They can learn to recognize spoken words, for instance, by analyzing recordings of old customer support calls. In some cases, the assistants perform as well as human listeners. But listening is only part of what they do. Resolving ambiguityEven if you make a rather specific request, it can have multiple meanings. And that can be tough for an assistant to deal with. Who won the Giants game last night? Amazon Echo On December 31st, the Giants beat the Redskins 18 to 10. They’ll play on August 9th at 7 p.m. at home against the Browns. Apple Homepod Which Giants? New York Giants, or San Francisco Giants? Google Home Yesterday, the Giants played the Padres. The final score was 3 to 2, Giants, in zero innings. If you’re a sports fan, you know there are two professional teams that call themselves the Giants. If someone asks about a Giants game in the summer, you know they’re talking about the San Francisco Giants, who play baseball. When we asked on August 2, before pre-season football started, Google Home came to the same conclusion. And the HomePod asked that we identify the team we were talking about. Google and Apple likely have written an explicit rule for this particular situation. Alexa guessed that we meant the New York Giants football team, which hadn’t played a game in seven months, but this may have been because we were asking the question in New York. Amazon sometimes generates responses based on your location. In any case, Alexa figured out which team we meant after the next question. Who do they play next? Amazon Echo First pitch of the N.L. West matchup between the Giants and the Diamondbacks is scheduled for tomorrow night at 9:40 p.m. This season, the Giants have bested the Diamondbacks in seven of the 12 games they’ve played. Apple Homepod The Giants battle the Diamondbacks tomorrow at 9:40 p.m. Google Home Their next game is tomorrow at 9:40 p.m., when they will play the Diamondbacks. When you chat with a friend, you use pronouns. To keep up, a digital assistant must recognize pronouns for what they are and map them back to words in a previous exchange. Algorithms are learning to identify pronouns by analyzing hundreds of sentences, detecting patterns in the syntax. After recognizing what you say, these devices must then understand what you want and generate a response. For that part, companies like Amazon and Google have also begun to rely on neural networks to learn from what people have asked these digital assistants in the past. Engineers might train one neural network to identify what you are trying to do (build a shopping list, get the score of a baseball game) and train another to parse a sentence and identify the nouns, pronouns, verbs and other parts of speech. It’s like elementary school grammar classes for computers. All of the machine learning algorithms these devices use are liable to make mistakes, though, and the system can be brittle because so many different algorithms are trying to work in concert. A digital assistant may screw up if you make a small change to a request that has worked countless times in the past. It may also screw up if you don’t change anything. Machine learning algorithms can help these devices deal with turn-by-turn exchanges. But each verbal exchange is limited to a simple, three- or four-turn conversation. In a perfect world, engineers would build one giant neural network that learns to do everything. For now, these devices move toward better conversations in small steps. “If you keep your language short and simple, you can maybe go as deep as three steps,” said Nancy Fulda, a researcher at Brigham Young University who specializes in conversational systems. “The technology operates by different rules than people do.” Understanding subtextIn the previous example, the devices understood what we were asking because they mapped a pronoun back to the subject of our previous request. But what if we don’t use a pronoun? Where is the nearest coffee shop? Amazon Echo Here are a few popular ones: Ramini Espresso Bar & Cafe, Best Bagel and Coffee, Paris Baguette and Cafe Grumpy. Check out the Alexa app for contact info and hours. Apple Homepod The nearest one I found is Bluestone Lane, located quite close to you on Times Square, which averages four stars according to Yelp. It’s open today, from 6:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Google Home The address for Culture Espresso is 307 West 38th Street, New York, New York, 10018. The devices correctly identified nearby shops, but they were all different. That’s likely because each device is using a different “knowledge graph,” a vast database of facts and other information you may ask for. Google, for example, may use data gathered from Google Maps, whereas the other companies may pull from sources like Yelp. Give me directions. Amazon Echo At the moment, traffic to Ramini Espresso Bar & Cafe at 265 W. 37th Street looks a little sluggish. The fastest route takes about six minutes via W. 42nd Street and 7th Avenue. Apple Homepod I can’t help with directions here. Sorry about that. Google Home The best way to get to Culture Espresso by car is via West 39th Street, and will take about nine minutes in heavy traffic. Amazon trains neural networks to recognize that this kind of pronoun-free request refers back to the previous exchange. The algorithms analyze hundreds, perhaps thousands, of requests like this and learns to identify them on its own. When generating responses, these assistants plug particular information into an existing template. Sometimes, engineers will build this template to sound more conversational. This seemed to be the case here, when Alexa said that traffic was “sluggish.” A neural network also drives Google’s new “conversational mode.” In the past, you couldn’t talk to the device without saying “Hey, Google.” Now, after saying this once, you can deliver multiple commands and questions. In some cases, Google Home can recognize when you are delivering another command — and when you’re just talking to someone else in the room. It does this with a system that has been “trained” with the interactions other people have had with their devices. Basically, Google’s customers are helping Google build a smarter product. Tackling opinionsDon’t expect these devices to tell you what they think — or even what other people think. It’s easier to build technology that sticks to the facts. After asking these devices to identify the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which they all did correctly, we asked for their opinion of his work. None of the machines seemed to grasp the concept of this question, and Google eventually lost the context altogether. What do you think of his work? Amazon Echo I don’t have an opinion on that. Apple Homepod I really couldn’t say. Google Home That seems like an interesting topic. What do you want to know about Robert Mapplethorpe? What do other people think? Amazon Echo Hmm, I don’t know that one. Apple Homepod No response Google Home According to Wikipedia, What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character is the second of two books consisting of transcribed and edited oral reminiscences from American physicist Richard Feynman. Engineers hope machine learning will continue to replace handwritten rules and expand what these devices can do, but conversation is such a complex task, even machine learning approaches will need years — or perhaps decades — to completely solve the problem. Facing the unknownThese devices fall down in moments when they need to handle self-reflection or complex analysis. Tell me something you do not know. Amazon Echo Sorry, I’m not sure. Apple Homepod My mistake. Please try again and tell me what were you looking for. Google Home Hm, well, I know the Muffin Man, but I don’t know if the Muffin Man knows me. This is an incredibly difficult question for a computer to answer, unless it has been specifically programmed to handle it. Many times, these devices will just reply with canned responses, as Google did with the Muffin Man bit. Leading researchers have built experimental neural networks that learn to carry on richer conversations by analyzing reams of real (human) dialogue, like exchanges on Twitter or Facebook Messenger. But these neural networks can veer into nonsense. They tend to reinforce the flaws of human conversation (gender bias, rudeness, maybe even racism). And they don’t dovetail very well with the structured systems that drive today’s digital assistants. Bridging the gap between these experiments and practical products like the Amazon Echo will take some time. For now, you will have to make do with the Muffin Man. |
| Melbourne Teen Pleads Guilty to Hacking Apple Servers and Accessing Customer Accounts Posted: 16 Aug 2018 04:12 AM PDT  Wow, Apples services are so secure after all the celebrity accounts that were hacked, that a teenager can hack them. Perhaps they can spend some of those billions and trillion dollar market cap on, security.. Actually this is a serious issue for Apple as lots of people rely on them for security and privacy, and if that’s seen to be weak still then it may lose sales. The celebrity hacks were not hacks but phishing of the celebrities' passwords - old fashioned.Still a form of hacking. Not really. Hacking implies exploiting a weakness in Apple systems. Phishing exploits a weakness in the user. Not the same thing at all. Solution to hacking is to boost software security. Solution to phishing is to educate users.Wow, Apples services are so secure after all the celebrity accounts that were hacked, that a teenager can hack them. Perhaps they can spend some of those billions and trillion dollar market cap on, security.. Actually this is a serious issue for Apple as lots of people rely on them for security and privacy, and if that’s seen to be weak still then it may lose sales. Hmm last time I checked my bank and Amazon have not been hacked yet.. The amount of silly assumptions in your post make my brain hurt. Amazon have had issues too, just because you haven't been affected doesn't mean others haven't: https://www.pymnts.com/amazon/2017/sellers-lose-thousands-as-amazon-marketplace-is-hit-by-hackers/ Plenty of banks have been hacked. Britain - https://thefinanser.com/2016/11/british-bank-third-customers-accounts-hacked.html/ You clearly lack understanding of IT security. All the big companies throw an insane amount of money at it. But as we've seen big companies like Google with Gmail and Apple in this article or small, Plex (https://lifehacker.com/plex-hacked-change-your-password-now-1715355825) - can be targeted and can be compromised. these kids are not ‘wicked intelligent’ they are criminals, thief’s that steal on mass You can be both. They are not mutually exclusive. And yes to pull this kind of thing off you have to be pretty intelligent, e.g.: https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/26/apple-hires-iphone-hacker-nicholas-allegra-comex/ So the stars that sued Apple over their accounts being ‘hacked’, because it was still a form of hacking, are fake news are they? Did any of theses "celebs" win and on what grounds? Because you can sue for anything, whether you were right to sue and win your case is another... Wow, Apples services are so secure after all the celebrity accounts that were hacked, that a teenager can hack them. Perhaps they can spend some of those billions and trillion dollar market cap on, security.. Actually this is a serious issue for Apple as lots of people rely on them for security and privacy, and if that’s seen to be weak still then it may lose sales. Don’t be ridiculous. This is no ordinary kid. These hackteens are wicked intelligent. Companies like apple spend a fortune on security, but there is always a way in. It’s only a question of how hard. Clearly has talent. Hopefully in the future he can use it for good :-) the teen was a fan of the company and had "dreamed of" working for Apple Committing a crime against a company who want to work for is not the smartest thing to do. :rolleyes: Don't want to see how he deals with girls he likes at school :DI want more details. Was this actually hacking? Or was it just phishing or other social engineering unauthorized access? What did he get? Customer data? if so was it encrypted? Or did he just get Apple data? Like iOS or internal Data? Hmm last time I checked my bank and Amazon have not been hacked yet.. these kids are not ‘wicked intelligent’ they are criminals, thief’s that steal on mass and then sell the information on, or use it for blackmail, they pick in weak systems, they should be thrown in jail for life, send a message to Therese idiot criminals. It’s always if question if a company choosing NOT to spend enough in security if it’s hacked, perhaps you don’t remember the Sony PlayStation Network fiasco, all because they did security on the cheap. Still a form of hacking. So the stars that sued Apple over their accounts being ‘hacked’, because it was still a form of hacking, are fake news are they? You can't give your password to someone and complain you got "hacked" lol.Hmm last time I checked my bank and Amazon have not been hacked yet.. these kids are not ‘wicked intelligent’ they are criminals, thief’s that steal on mass and then sell the information on, or use it for blackmail, they pick in weak systems, they should be thrown in jail for life, send a message to Therese idiot criminals. It’s always if question if a company choosing NOT to spend enough in security if it’s hacked, perhaps you don’t remember the Sony PlayStation Network fiasco, all because they did security on the cheap. Still a form of hacking. So the stars that sued Apple over their accounts being ‘hacked’, because it was still a form of hacking, are fake news are they? Pay attention, if a thief steals a key to a safety deposit box cause you left it around in a public place then gains access to the bank (I know now ID is demanded etc.) then it isn't the bank's fault but yours. If the thief manages to crack the safe then the bank is at fault. In both cases the thief is going to jail and no one here is praising the hacker. The Hollywood folks who sued wanted to cover their own neglect. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Technology - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
This post have 0 komentar
EmoticonEmoticon