It may be a new year, but the hacks, scams, and dangerous people lurking online haven't gone anywhere. Just a day before the ball dropped, the United States Treasury Department said it had been hacked. Officials believe the attackers are an as-yet-unidentified Advanced Persistent Threat group linked to China's government that exploited flaws in remote tech support software made by BeyondTrust to carry out what the Treasury Department described as a "major" breach. The company told the Treasury on December 8 that the attackers stole an authentication key, which ultimately allowed them to access department computers. While the Treasury says the attackers were only able to steal "certain unclassified documents," new details have already begun to emerge, which we'll get into more below.

Back in the day, couples typically met at bars, with those flirty glances eventually progressing into blossoming romances. Others might have been set-up by friends playing Cupid. Nowadays, however, singletons hit the love jackpot by swiping through a conveyor belt of strangers' faces on dating apps. A mesmerising chart today shows how the likes of Tinder and Hinge have killed off the traditional ways lovers used to meet. In the early 1960s, more than a third of couples originally met through friends.

Apple has agreed to pay 95m in cash to settle a proposed class-action lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated assistant Siri violated users' privacy, listening to them without their consent. A preliminary settlement was filed on Tuesday night in the Oakland, California, federal court, and requires approval by US district judge Jeffrey White. Voice assistants typically react when people use "hot words" such as "Hey, Siri". Two plaintiffs said their mentions of Air Jordan sneakers and Olive Garden restaurants triggered ads for those products. Another said he was served ads for a brand name surgical treatment after discussing it, he thought privately, with his doctor.

TL;DR: At SmashLab, we're creating an intelligent assistant that uses the sensors in a smartwatch to support physical tasks such as cooking and DIY. This blog post explores how we use less intrusive scene understanding--compared to cameras--to enable helpful, context-aware interactions for task execution in their daily lives. Every day, we perform many tasks, including cooking, crafting, and medical self-care (like the COVID-19 self-test kit), which involve a series of discrete steps. Accurately executing all the steps can be difficult; when we try a new recipe, for example, we might have questions at any step and might make mistakes by skipping important steps or doing them in the wrong order. This project, Procedural Interaction from Sensing Module (PrISM), aims to support users in executing these kinds of tasks through dialogue-based interactions.

Has your Google smart speaker been giving you the silent treatment lately? Over the past several days, owners of Google's Nest and Nest Hub devices have been reporting that Google Assistant has stopped responding to basic commands such as "What's the weather" and "What time is it?" Perplexed Nest users had been turning to Google's support team for possible solutions, but with little success. Luckily, Google just told Android Authority that it's deployed a fix and that "all users should be up and running now." The problems appear to have begun earlier this week, with Nest users on Reddit and other forums complaining that their smart speakers were going silent when asked the most basic commands.

Apple has agreed to pay 95 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the privacy-minded company of deploying its virtual assistant Siri to eavesdrop on people using its iPhone and other trendy devices. The proposed settlement filed Tuesday in an Oakland, California, federal court would resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit revolving around allegations that Apple surreptitiously activated Siri to record conversations through iPhones and other devices equipped with the virtual assistant for more than a decade. The alleged recordings occurred even when people didn't seek to activate the virtual assistant with the trigger words, "Hey, Siri." Some of the recorded conversations were then shared with advertisers in an attempt to sell their products to consumers more likely to be interested in the goods and services, the lawsuit asserted. The allegations about a snoopy Siri contradicted Apple's long-running commitment to protect the privacy of its customers -- a crusade that CEO Tim Cook has often framed as a fight to preserve "a fundamental human right."

In the preliminary settlement, the tech firm denies any wrongdoing, as well as claims that it "recorded, disclosed to third parties, or failed to delete, conversations recorded as the result of a Siri activation" without consent. Apple's lawyers also say they will confirm they have "permanently deleted individual Siri audio recordings collected by Apple prior to October 2019". But the claimants say the tech firm recorded people who activated the virtual assistant unintentionally - without using the phrase "Hey, Siri" to wake it. They say advertisers who received the recordings could then look for keywords in them to better target ads. The lead plaintiff Fumiko Lopez claims she and her daughter were both recorded without their consent.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recommender systems for predicting Click-Through Rates (CTR) necessitates a delicate balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. This paper presents an optimization framework that combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with an innovative multi-head early exit architecture to concurrently enhance both aspects. By integrating Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) as efficient retrieval mechanisms, we are able to significantly reduce data retrieval times while maintaining high model performance. The early exit strategy employed allows for dynamic termination of model inference, utilizing real-time predictive confidence assessments across multiple heads. This not only quickens the responsiveness of LLMs but also upholds or improves their accuracy, making it ideal for real-time application scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate how this architecture effectively decreases computation time without sacrificing the accuracy needed for reliable recommendation delivery, establishing a new standard for efficient, real-time LLM deployment in commercial systems.

The indoor environment significantly impacts human health and well-being; enhancing health and reducing energy consumption in these settings is a central research focus. With the advancement of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), recommendation systems and reinforcement learning (RL) have emerged as promising approaches to induce behavioral changes to improve the indoor environment and energy efficiency of buildings. This study aims to employ text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to thoroughly examine the connections among these approaches in the context of human-building interaction and occupant context-aware support. The study analyzed 27,595 articles from the ScienceDirect database, revealing extensive use of recommendation systems and RL for space optimization, location recommendations, and personalized control suggestions. Furthermore, this review underscores the vast potential for expanding recommender systems and RL applications in buildings and indoor environments. Fields ripe for innovation include predictive maintenance, building-related product recommendation, and optimization of environments tailored for specific needs, such as sleep and productivity enhancements based on user feedback. The study also notes the limitations of the method in capturing subtle academic nuances. Future improvements could involve integrating and fine-tuning pre-trained language models to better interpret complex texts.

Apple has moved to settle a five-year-old class action lawsuit over Siri privacy. Reuters reports that the proposed settlement was filed on Tuesday in Oakland, CA. The company agreed to pay 95 million to class members, estimated to be tens of millions of Siri-enabled device owners. US District Judge Jeffrey White needs to approve the settlement before it becomes official. The lawsuit stemmed from a 2019 report that Apple quality control contractors could regularly hear sensitive info accidentally recorded by the voice assistant's "Hey Siri" feature. The clips were said to include medical information, criminal activities and even "sexual encounters."