Government
Discord Sleuths Gained Unauthorized Access to Anthropic's Mythos
Plus: Spy firms tap into a global telecom weakness to track targets, 500,000 UK health records go up for sale on Alibaba, Apple patches a revealing notification bug, and more. As researchers and practitioners debate the impact that new AI models will have on cybersecurity, Mozilla said on Tuesday it used early access to Anthropic's Mythos Preview to find and fix 271 vulnerabilities in its new Firefox 150 browser release. Meanwhile, researchers identified a group of moderately successful North Korean hackers using AI for everything from vibe coding malware to creating fake company websites--stealing up to $12 million in three months. Researchers have finally cracked disruptive malware known as Fast16 that predates Stuxnet and may have been used to target Iran's nuclear program. It was created in 2005 and was likely deployed by the US or an ally.
RAF jets scrambled after Russian drones detected near Nato airspace
At least seven people were killed in Russian strikes across Ukraine overnight, including five in the central city of Dnipro, where officials said an apartment building was hit. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the latest attack lasted practically all night, while rescue workers were still searching for survivors under rubble in Dnipro on Saturday morning. British jets were scrambled from Romania during the heavy attack when Russian drones were detected near the border, though the UK Ministry of Defence rejected a report it had shot some down. Meanwhile, Ukraine carried out some of its longest-distance drone strikes deep inside Russian territory. In Yekaterinburg, almost 1,000 miles (1,600km) from Ukraine's border, the governor said six people were injured when a building was struck - while in nearby Chelyabinsk, a local leader said drones targeting an industrial facility were shot down.
Retiring Adult: New Datasets for Fair Machine Learning
Although the fairness community has recognized the importance of data, re-searchers in the area primarily rely on UCIAdult when it comes to tabular data. Derived from a 1994 USCensus survey, this dataset has appeared in hundreds of research papers where it served as the basis for the development and comparison of many algorithmic fairness interventions. We reconstruct a superset of the UCI Adult data from available USCensus sources and reveal idiosyncrasies of the UCIAdult dataset that limit its external validity. Our primary contribution is asuite of new datasets derived from USCensus surveys that extend the existing data ecosystem for research on fair machine learning. We create prediction tasks relating to income, employment, health, transportation, and housing. The data span multiple years and all states of the United States, allowing researchers to studytemporal shift and geographic variation. We highlight a broad initial sweep of new empirical insights relating to trade-offs between fairness criteria, performance of algorithmic interventions, and the role of distribution shift based on our new datasets. Our findings inform ongoing debates, challenge some existing narratives, and point to future research directions.
The Online Civil War About 'Michael' Is a Battle Over Truth
Fans want to reclaim the music and myth of Michael Jackson in the new biopic while critics call for accountability. Still from, which opened April 24. Is truth determined by the size of the audience it reaches? If so, --a new film about the pop singer Michael Jackson that is on track to have the biggest-ever opening for a music biopic, with projected earnings of $70 million at the US box office, despite critics saying it sanitizes the reality of who Jackson actually was--intends to supplant the King of Pop as the apotheosis of artistic virtue. The film's release has sparked a familiar but newly intensified civil war online, between those eager to reclaim the music and myth of Jackson, and those who see any celebration of him as a failure of accountability.
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With a principled representation of uncertainty and closed form posterior updates, Gaussian processes (GPs) are a natural choice for online decision making. However, Gaussian processes typically require at least O(n2) computations for n training points, limiting their general applicability. Stochastic variational Gaussian processes (SVGPs) can provide scalable inference for a dataset of fixed size, but are difficult to efficiently condition on new data. We propose online variational conditioning (OVC), a procedure for efficiently conditioning SVGPs in an online setting that does not require re-training through the evidence lower bound with the addition of new data. OVC enables the pairing of SVGPs with advanced lookahead acquisition functions for black-box optimization, even with non-Gaussian likelihoods. We show OVC provides compelling performance in a range of applications including active learning of malaria incidence, and reinforcement learning on MuJoCo simulated robotic control tasks.