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North Korea supplying arms to Russian mercenary Wagner Group, US says

FOX News

The U.S. is solidifying a defense package to Ukraine, which would help assist Ukraine with shooting down Russian drone strikes on civilian targets. North Korea is supplying arms to a Russian mercenary group and could continue to deliver military equipment to support the Kremlin's war against Ukraine, the Biden administration said Thursday. The White House said the weapons "will not change battlefield dynamics," however, the private entity receiving the equipment, Wagner Group, is committing atrocities and human rights abuses across Ukraine. "Because the Russian military is struggling in Ukraine, President [Vladimir] Putin has increasingly been turning to Wagner, which is owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, for military support," White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Thursday. Kirby said Prigozhin has been spending more than $100 million per month to fund Wagner's efforts inside Ukraine.


G7 takes aim at chief adversaries and urges peace from UN leaders Russia, China

FOX News

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Chief diplomats from the world's leading democracies rallied together in a joint statement condemning global adversaries like Iran and North Korea and called on Russia and China to remember their security commitments to the United Nations. After two days of meetings, officials from the Group of 7 (G7) released a lengthy statement Friday in an address to its top geopolitical challengers, warning them to adhere to international laws. United States Secretary of States Antony Blinken and Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi of Japan, right, meet for bilateral talks at the G7 Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Muenster, Germany, Friday, Nov. 4, 2022.


Cops Take Down the 'World's Biggest' Video Game Cheat Ring

WIRED

This week, the Justice Department indicted a 22-year-old on charges of tampering with the water facility where he used to work. It's a stark reminder that while the power grid gets most of the attention, it's not the only piece of critical infrastructure that's vulnerable to potentially devastating attacks. We also took a look at YouTube's ongoing problems with moderating kid-focused content; a WIRED investigation found dozens of creepy thumbnails on videos for Minecraft and child-centric pursuits that were at or near the top of the platform's "Topic" pages. It's not quite as dire a situation as the so-called Elsagate controversy from a few years back, in which the YouTube Kids app was flooded with grotesque videos featuring popular children's characters performing unspeakable acts. But it still shows that YouTube has a lot of moderation work still ahead of it.


Move over, Deep Nostalgia, this AI app can make Kim Jong-un sing I Will Survive

#artificialintelligence

If you've ever wanted to know what it might be like to see Kim Jong-un let loose at karaoke, your wish has been granted, thanks to an app that lets users turn photographs of anyone – or anything remotely resembling a face – into uncanny AI-powered videos of them lip syncing famous songs. The app is called Wombo AI, and while the future of artificial intelligence and the ability to make fake videos of real people strikes fear into the hearts of many experts, some say that Wombo could help by raising awareness of "deepfakes". Wombo CEO Ben-Zion Benkhin said he came up with the idea "while smoking a joint with my roommate on the roof". The app launched in Canada in February and has since been downloaded on Apple's App store and Google Play more than 2m times. There are 15 songs users can choose from, including Michael Jackson's Thriller and the more recent Gunther's Ding Dong Song.


How artificial intelligence can help improve military readiness today

#artificialintelligence

In July 1950, a small group of American soldiers called Task Force Smith were all that stood in the way of an advance of North Korean armor. The soldiers' only anti-armor weapons were bazookas left over from World War II. The soldiers of Task Force Smith quickly found themselves firing round after round of bazooka ammunition into advancing North Korean T-34s only to see them explode harmlessly on the heavily armored tanks. Within seven hours, 40 percent of Task Force Smith were killed or wounded, and the North Korean advance rolled on.1 The shortcomings of the bazooka were no surprise. However, budget cutbacks after World War II scuttled adoption of an improved design.


Japan, U.S., South Korea agree: no easing of North Korea sanctions without progress in nuke talks

The Japan Times

SAN FRANCISCO – The top diplomats of Japan, the United States and South Korea on Tuesday urged North Korea to refrain from military provocation and continue denuclearization talks, but ruled out any easing of crushing economic sanctions without progress in the stalled negotiations. Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi held discussions with his U.S. and South Korean counterparts, Mike Pompeo and Kang Kyung-wha, in East Palo Alto, just outside San Francisco, two weeks after a deadline set by Pyongyang for progress by the end of 2019 passed. "We agreed on the importance of North Korea making positive efforts in talks with the United States rather than going through with provocative moves," Motegi told reporters. The statement appeared to contradict remarks in a New Year speech by South Korean President Moon Jae-in a day earlier in Seoul, where he said that he could seek exemptions of U.N. sanctions to bring about improved inter-Korean relations that he believes would help restart the deadlocked nuclear negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington. Moon has previously made similar comments, despite outside worries that any lifting of sanctions could undermine U.S.-led efforts to eliminate North Korea's nuclear arsenal.


Unsupervised Paraphrasing without Translation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Paraphrasing exemplifies the ability to abstract semantic content from surface forms. Recent work on automatic paraphrasing is dominated by methods leveraging Machine Translation (MT) as an intermediate step. This contrasts with humans, who can paraphrase without being bilingual. This work proposes to learn paraphrasing models from an unlabeled monolingual corpus only. To that end, we propose a residual variant of vector-quantized variational auto-encoder. We compare with MT-based approaches on paraphrase identification, generation, and training augmentation. Monolingual paraphrasing outperforms unsupervised translation in all settings. Comparisons with supervised translation are more mixed: monolingual paraphrasing is interesting for identification and augmentation; supervised translation is superior for generation.


Could hackers trick voice assistants into committing fraud? Researchers say yes.

#artificialintelligence

Voice assistant technology is supposed to make our lives easier, but security experts say it comes with some uniquely invasive risks. Since the beginning of the year, multiple Nest security camera users have reported instances of strangers hacking into and issuing voice commands to Alexa, falsely announcing a North Korean missile attack, and targeting one family by speaking directly to their child, turning up their home thermostat to 90 degrees, and shouting insults. These incidents are alarming, but the potential for silent compromises of voice assistants could be even more damaging. Nest owner Google -- which recently integrated Google Assistant support into Nest control hubs -- has blamed weak user passwords and a lack of two-factor authentication for the attacks. But even voice assistants with strong security may be vulnerable to stealthier forms of hacking.


Creepy incidents with Nest cameras prompt password warning

The Independent - Tech

Google has urged owners of Nest cameras to reset their passwords, following reports of hackers taking over the smart home devices. In one incident last month, a family in Illinois had their home security system compromised by cyber criminals, who took control of connected Nest cameras to shout racial abuse through the device's speaker at a couple and their baby. "As I approached the baby's room and stood outside, I was shocked to hear a deep manly voice talking to my 7-month-old son," the victim told local media. In a separate incident that same month, a Californian family received an emergency broadcast alert through their Nest surveillance camera that detailed three North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles headed to the United States. "It warned that the United States had retaliated against Pyongyang and that people in the affected areas had three hours to evacuate," The Nest owner told The Mercury News.


North Korea's Box of Bones: A Mythical King and the Dream of Korean Unification

U.S. News

In both Koreas, (Dangun) has been used to emphasize the uniqueness, the singularity, homogeneity and antiquity of the Korean people,