Microsoft recently released the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024, this year's edition of the company's annual cybersecurity report. In the 114-page document, Microsoft reveals -- among other things -- just how much cyber threats have grown over the past year. Cybercriminals have gained access to better resources, including the incorporation of AI tools to bolster their arsenal. They're now better equipped to create fake images, videos, and audio recordings to trick people, to flood job applications with AI-created "perfect" résumés to physically access companies, and much more. But hackers can also use your use of AI services to attack you.

When a sophisticated Chinese spy balloon floated over America in early 2023, lawmakers and the public were outraged at the Biden-Harris administration's passivity and initial inclination to keep it quiet – only acknowledging the balloon after two civilian photographers forced their hand. Now, the Wall Street Journal has broken news on an even more stupendous U.S. national security breach, reporting that drones flew over a sensitive nuclear weapons testing facility for three days last October and then, two months later, flew over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia for 17 straight nights while the Biden White House, and the military officers it promoted, dawdled and argued over what to do about it. The swarms started on Dec. 7, 2023. Drones, some as large as 20 feet long, flew at night over the Air Combat Command headquarters with its squadrons of advanced F-22 Raptor fighters. The blame-casting and responsibility-shirking reveal a dangerous pattern of hesitation and risk-averse decision-making.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says his "victory plan" to end the war with Russia includes requests for specific weapons and an "unconditional" invitation to join NATO now. "If we start moving according to this victory plan now, it may be possible to end the war no later than next year," Zelenskyy said on Wednesday in a speech to the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament. The first, he told lawmakers, was receiving an "unconditional invitation" to join the military alliance, which would show "how our partners truly see Ukraine's place in the security architecture". The Ukrainian leader recently concluded a whirlwind tour of several European capitals, trying to win approval for the five-point plan from Western partners, which have stopped short of publicly voicing their support for it so far. "Regardless of what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wants, we must all change the circumstances so that Russia is forced to peace," he told parliament of the proposal that also includes military, political and economic elements. Ukraine's defence forces and weapons must be bolstered from Russian missile and drone attacks, he said, reiterating a call for his country's allies to lift restrictions on Ukraine's use of long-range arms on military targets in Russia.

What's new: A company called Aspen Aerogels, which makes materials to go inside EVs' batteries to stop fires spreading, just got a 670.6 million loan commitment from the US Department of Energy. The company will use the money to finish building a new factory in Georgia to produce its materials. Why it matters: As more EVs hit the roads, concern is growing about the relatively rare but dangerous problem of battery fires. Materials like Aspen Aerogels' thermal barriers could help improve safety. MIT Technology Review Narrated: Inside the quest to engineer climate-saving "super trees" Biotech startup Living Carbon is trying to design trees that grow faster and grab more carbon than their natural peers, as well as trees that resist rot, keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere.

The Pentagon is usually scant on any details about the X-37B, its top secret space plane that flies up to 500 miles above Earth. But the Department of Defense has now revealed that the unmanned craft is about to execute a'first-of-a-kind' manoeuvre to alter its orbit. It's thought the novel exercise will let it evade detection by hostile nations and perform secretive'low-passes' over Earth. The Boeing-built vehicle, roughly the size of a small bus and resembling a miniature space shuttle, has been launched seven times since 2010. Although the exact purpose of the ship is a guarded secret by the US Space Force, it's thought to carry spy equipment, satellites or even weaponry. X-37 is a reusable robotic spacecraft manufactured by Boeing for the US government.

RED LINE – Unearthed report reveals powerful Harris ally'willing to share' resources with Chinese Communist Party. CORRECTING THE RECORD – Charlamagne tha God presses Harris on illegal immigration, she got'a lot of things wrong.' DIRECTOR'S CUT – Filmmaker's daughter shuts down critics after late father's movie used by Trump campaign. 'ABSOLUTELY NOT' – Rapper scorches VP Harris: 'This woman is not qualified to run a Dunkin Donuts.' Continue reading … GLAM TO GRIT – Hollywood bombshell is unrecognizable as she channels the role of a famous athlete. 'ADMINISTRATIVE CHAOS' – Georgia judge blocks rule requiring clerks to hand count number of ballots.

California governor Gavin Newsom recently killed SB1047, a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence safety bill, arguing that its focus on only the largest AI models leaves out smaller ones that can also be risky. Instead, he says, we should pass comprehensive regulations on the technology. Despite claims by prominent opponents of the bill that "literally no one wants this," SB1047 was popular – really popular. It passed the California legislature with an average of two-thirds of each chamber voting in favor. Six statewide polls that presented pro and con arguments for the bill show strong majorities in support, which rose over time.

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If you were looking for an inkblot test for your view of big tech's investment in artificial intelligence, you could hardly do better than the news that Google is ordering the construction of at least six small nuclear reactors to power the growth of the technology. Here, in one view, is an enlightened business leveraging its size to invest in infrastructure that could change the world for the better. Here, in another, is a poorly regulated corporation ignoring democratic objections in the brutal race for control of an innovation with great potential to do harm – and leaving the rest of us with little say in its development. Google is making this eye-catching move because the datacentres that power the explosive growth of generative AI consume huge amounts of electricity – more than the existing grid in the US or other western nations can readily supply. For today's newsletter, I spoke to technology journalist Chris Stokel-Walker, author of How AI Ate the World, about why the demand for power is growing so quickly – and whether we can trust big tech to handle the consequences.

Large language models excel at performing inference over text to extract information, summarize information, or generate additional text. These inference capabilities are implicated in a variety of ethical harms spanning surveillance, labor displacement, and IP/copyright theft. While many policy, legal, and technical mitigations have been proposed to counteract these harms, these mitigations typically require cooperation from institutions that move slower than technical advances (i.e., governments) or that have few incentives to act to counteract these harms (i.e., the corporations that create and profit from these LLMs). In this paper, we define and build "data defenses" -- a novel strategy that directly empowers data owners to block LLMs from performing inference on their data. We create data defenses by developing a method to automatically generate adversarial prompt injections that, when added to input text, significantly reduce the ability of LLMs to accurately infer personally identifying information about the subject of the input text or to use copyrighted text in inference. We examine the ethics of enabling such direct resistance to LLM inference, and argue that making data defenses that resist and subvert LLMs enables the realization of important values such as data ownership, data sovereignty, and democratic control over AI systems. We verify that our data defenses are cheap and fast to generate, work on the latest commercial and open-source LLMs, resistance to countermeasures, and are robust to several different attack settings. Finally, we consider the security implications of LLM data defenses and outline several future research directions in this area. Our code is available at https://github.com/wagnew3/LLMDataDefenses and a tool for using our defenses to protect text against LLM inference is at https://wagnew3.github.io/LLM-Data-Defenses/.