Apple's passkeys replace traditional passwords on Mac with biometric authentication and encryption, offering stronger security through Touch ID and Face ID verification.

Passkeys work on computers without cameras or fingerprint readers by using Windows Hello PIN or device passcode for secure authentication instead of traditional passwords.

I have bad news for everyone with weak passwords. A hacker can guess your laziest random passwords in the same amount of time it takes to watch a movie. It turns out when you put the most brutally fast consumer graphics card on the task of, uh, brute-forcing 8-character passwords, it can crack a numbers-only string in 3 hours. Such is the finding of Hive Systems, a cybersecurity firm based in Virginia, as part of the research that went into its 2025 password table. The chart shows how fast a "consumer budget" hacker could brute-force passwords of varying lengths (4 to 18 characters) and compositions (e.g., numbers only, lowercase letters, uppercase and lowercase letters, etc.).

In what may be a first, the US Department of Justice this week charged a hacker with attempting to cause injury and death by launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against hospitals. Ahmed Omer and his brother Alaa are accused of carrying out a cyberattack spree that targeted hundreds of victims under the hacktivist banner Anonymous Sudan. The group's DDoS victims included Microsoft's Azure cloud services, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Israel's missile alert system, according to prosecutors. It was the brothers' alleged attacks on hospitals, however, that drew the most serious accusations from the Justice Department, which singled out Ahmed for allegedly seeking to kill people with the crude cyberattacks that overwhelm systems, knocking them offline. If someone told you there's a tool that can--using only open source information--create a "cyber profile" of you that can locate your phone in real time or place you at the scene of a crime at any date in the past, would you believe them?

Whether it stands for artificial intelligence or, er, Apple intelligence, AI is the hot news of the day. Which is why I think it's time to talk about [sits backwards on chair] passwords. It may have been buried in the reporting of last night's Apple event – which the inestimable Kari Paul and Nick Robins-Early covered for us from Cupertino and New York – but one of the more consequential changes coming to the company's platforms in the next year is the creation of a new Passwords app. The average user probably has never heard of 1Password or LastPass, and they may or may not be aware that the iPhone can automatically create and store passwords for them. For users like that, a new Passwords app showing up on their iPhone's Home screen this fall is going to hopefully lead them to a more secure computing future. The straight version of this is that it's a minimal change.

WhatsApp, the popular global messaging platform owned by Meta, has rolled out new features including a different way to log in and an artificial intelligence assistant in the app. Whatsapp said on X, formerly Twitter, on April 24 that this feature was "a more secure way to login." It also avoids any potential challenges in receiving an SMS to log in, with the company adding: "traveling? The messaging app already launched passkeys for Android users in October, as demonstrated by a post shared on Threads, another Meta social media platform. People with Pixel 8 and 8 Pro Google phones can now also use Face Unlock, instead of their fingerprint or PIN, to unlock and view messages on WhatsApp, as reported by 9to5Google.

It is well known that LLMs cannot generalize well to long contexts whose lengths are larger than the training sequence length. This poses challenges when employing LLMs for processing long input sequences during inference. In this work, we argue that LLMs themselves have inherent capabilities to handle long contexts without fine-tuning. To achieve this goal, we propose SelfExtend to extend the context window of LLMs by constructing bi-level attention information: the grouped attention and the neighbor attention. The grouped attention captures the dependencies among tokens that are far apart, while neighbor attention captures dependencies among adjacent tokens within a specified range. The two-level attentions are computed based on the original model's self-attention mechanism during inference. With minor code modification, our SelfExtend can effortlessly extend existing LLMs' context window without any fine-tuning. We conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and the results show that our SelfExtend can effectively extend existing LLMs' context window length. The code can be found at \url{https://github.com/datamllab/LongLM}.

This paper addresses the privacy and security concerns associated with deep neural language models, which serve as crucial components in various modern AI-based applications. These models are often used after being pre-trained and fine-tuned for specific tasks, with deployment on servers accessed through the internet. However, this introduces two fundamental risks: (a) the transmission of user inputs to the server via the network gives rise to interception vulnerabilities, and (b) privacy concerns emerge as organizations that deploy such models store user data with restricted context. To address this, we propose a novel method to adapt and fine-tune transformer-based language models on passkey-encrypted user-specific text. The original pre-trained language model first undergoes a quick adaptation (without any further pre-training) with a series of irreversible transformations applied to the tokenizer and token embeddings. This enables the model to perform inference on encrypted inputs while preventing reverse engineering of text from model parameters and intermediate outputs. After adaptation, models are fine-tuned on encrypted versions of existing training datasets. Experimental evaluation employing adapted versions of renowned models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa) across established benchmark English and multilingual datasets for text classification and sequence labeling shows that encrypted models achieve performance parity with their original counterparts. This serves to safeguard performance, privacy, and security cohesively.

Windows 11's 2023 Update is here, bringing with it a number of new features to explore. But which ones are worth trying? We've listed our favorites, below. Windows 11's 2023 Update is (eventually) being pushed to your PC as a free, cumulative update, which means that it encompasses features and applications that may have already arrived on your PC. Windows 11 users will receive most of the 2023 Update features by Nov. 14, though it may take longer for some systems.

Some people may care that the "Apps" section now separates some Windows apps, now labeled as "System components," into a separate page. Settings now leans a bit too much toward subscriptions -- most people probably don't need a constant reminder of their OneDrive quota and Game Pass subscription, but it's understandable. Microsoft has also provided an updated audio mixer for Windows 11, which is a step forward. You'll need the click the volume controls in the Taskbar, than navigate through to the small "wires" icon to the right of the volume bar to make any adjustments.