Subterms
NurPhoto/Getty Images For the past several months, YouTube has been cracking down on the use of ad blockers, going so far as stopping videos from playing if the viewer was using an ad blocker. This comes after last summer when YouTube hiked the price of its Premium subscription without notice. Now, the video-sharing platform is […] More
Flipper Zero reading an NFC security key. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNETAfter over a year of use, I love my Flipper Zero, and I’m still finding cool things to do with it.Am I using it to steal cars, clone credit cards, or change prices shown of gas station displays? Of course not! That’s just fake trash stuff people upload to TikTok to try to look cool, and you can’t do anything like that. But that doesn’t mean the Flipper Zero can’t do some very cool and useful things. Over the past year, I’ve been exploring the suite of tools built into the Flipper Zero, as well as extending its capabilities by installing custom firmware. It’s been a game-changer in so many ways! View at Flipper Zero store More
Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images At the Asia Tech x Singapore 2024 summit, several speakers were ready for high-level discussions and heightened awareness about the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) safety to turn into action. Many are looking to prepare everyone from organizations to individuals with the tools to deploy this tech properly. Also: How to use ChatGPT to […] More
Weiquan Lin/Getty As the adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) grows, it appears to be running into an issue that has also plagued other industries: a lack of inclusivity and global representation. Encompassing 11 markets, including Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, Southeast Asia has a total population of some 692.1 million people. Its residents speak more than […] More
blackdovfx/Getty Images Just under 45% of organizations conduct regular audits and assessments to ensure their cloud environment is secured, which is “concerning” as more applications and workloads are moved to multi-cloud platforms. Asked how they were monitoring risk across their cloud infrastructure, 47.7% of businesses pointed to automated security tools while 46.5% relied on native […] More
Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNETThose of you who’d like anonymous access to several generative AI chatbots all in one place may want to check out DuckDuckGo’s new AI chat tool. Announced last Thursday, the service lets you try four different AI models through a dedicated AI website or the DuckDuckGo browser.Included in the mix are GPT-3.5 Turbo, Claude 3 Haiku, Meta Llama 3, and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B. All four are freely accessible through DuckDuckGo, though you may bump into an unspecified daily limit on the number of queries you can submit.Also: The best secure browsers for privacy in 2024Being able to access several AI chatbots in the same place is certainly convenient. But the real benefit here is the anonymity. When you use such services at ChatGPT and Meta AI, your chats aren’t necessarily private. Moderators may read your conversations to make sure you’re not abusing the system. Plus, your chats can be used to help train the AI.To protect your privacy, the chats you conduct through DuckDuckGo’s AI chat tool are anonymous and aren’t saved or stored by the company or the AI services, at least not permanently.To anonymize your conversations, DuckDuckGo says that it removes your IP address and replaces it with one of its own. This makes it seem as if the requests are coming from the company and not from you.Also: How to change your IP address, why you’d want to – and when you shouldn’tYour chats may be stored by the AI model providers temporarily, but DuckDuckGo promises that there’s no way to tie the conversations back to you since all the metadata is removed. The company added that agreements with the AI services require that all saved chats are deleted within 30 days and that none of their content can be used to train the models.Looking ahead, DuckDuckGo plans to keep the current access free but is considering a paid option with higher limits and more advanced AI models. Also on the horizon are custom system prompts and general improvements to the chat experience. More
Maria Diaz/ZDNETMost of us remember getting those calls: “Your car’s warranty is about to expire…”, whether we have a car or not. Aside from going to DoNotCall.gov or calling 1-888-382-1222 to be added to a do-not-call list, you can also block specific phone numbers from your phone. Also: How to find out if an AirTag is tracking youBut what about if you need to block someone you know, like a coworker, a neighbor, or an old flame? Can they tell you’ve blocked them? We’ll walk you through the ways that someone may be able to tell if their number has been blocked.Can someone tell if I block their number?First things first, if you block someone’s number, they won’t find out right away, if at all. They won’t get a notification saying they were blocked and won’t be able to see it plainly anywhere, but they can infer it and assume they’ve been blocked. There are ways a person can figure out if they’ve been blocked, like sending you texts and calling you. More
JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images Last month, with great fanfare, Microsoft announced its new line of Copilot+ PCs, with a signature AI-powered feature called Microsoft Recall. That feature is intended to make life easier for hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. But the company forgot to factor in the privacy risks associated with that product’s […] More
