Russian, China, Iran, Try to Influence U.S. Elections; Google Introduces Tech to Detect AI Writing; Character Recognition Added to Windows Photo App; AI to Rule Technology in 2025… and more!
Every day, we scan the tech world for interesting news, sometimes from outside the tech world. Every Thursday, we feature news articles that grabbed our attention over the past week. We hope you find this week’s ‘Thursday Newsbytes’ informative and interesting!
As the U.S. election nears, Russia, Iran and China step up influence efforts
With two weeks until Election Day 2024, the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) observes sustained influence efforts by Russia, Iran, and China aimed at undermining U.S. democratic processes. Since our last two reports, the U.S. government has taken many actions revealing cyber and influence activity from foreign adversaries related to election 2024. Most recently, that includes revealing malicious Iranian cyber actors’ sending of “stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign” to both individuals then associated with President Biden’s campaign and U.S. media organizations, and the indictment of three Iranian actors for the hack-and-leak operation targeting the Trump-Vance campaign.
We also noted in our last report that while Iranian actors have focused their cyber-influence operations on the Trump campaign, Russian actors decisively pivoted toward the Harris campaign once she entered the race. Since then, Russian actors continue to integrate generative AI into their content, Iranian groups ramp up their preparations to enable cyber-influence operations, while Chinese actors shift focus to several down-ballot candidates and members of Congress. Russian actors have notably attempted to target the Harris-Walz campaign by attacking the candidates’ characters.
History has shown foreign actors’ ability to rapidly distribute deceptive content can significantly impact public perception and electoral outcomes…
Google releases tech to watermark AI-generated text
Google is making SynthID Text, its technology that lets developers watermark and detect text written by generative AI models, generally available.
SynthID Text can be downloaded from the AI platform Hugging Face and Google’s updated Responsible GenAI Toolkit.
“We’re open-sourcing our SynthID Text watermarking tool,” the company wrote in a post on X. “Available freely to developers and businesses, it will help them identify their AI-generated content.”
So how does SynthID Text work, exactly?
Given a prompt like “What’s your favorite fruit?,” text-generating models predict which “token” most likely follows another — one token at a time. Tokens, which can be a single character or word, are the building blocks a generative model uses to process information. A model assigns each possible token a score, which is the percentage chance it’s included in the output text. SynthID Text inserts additional info in this token distribution by “modulating the likelihood of tokens being generated,” Google says…
Microsoft integrates character recognition into Photos app at last
Microsoft is adding Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to Windows’ Photos app, enabling users to scan and copy text directly from images. This feature will be available on Windows 11 and Windows 10 when it is officially released.
On 22 October 2024, Microsoft announced upcoming updates to its Photos app, some of which are already available for preview to Windows Insiders via Windows 11’s Insider Channel. This allows Insiders to test and provide feedback on the new features before a full rollout.
For Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft also plans to introduce ‘super resolution’ to enhance its Photos app. These updates aim to improve the overall user experience by using AI to enhance and enlarge images by up to 8x their original size through the super resolution feature.
How does OCR work?
OCR will essentially allow users to effortlessly extract text from images. Whether you’re dealing with notes, pictures, documents, or screenshots, the app can automatically detect and copy text straight to your clipboard. This will streamline your workflow by letting you paste the extracted text into other apps, reducing the need for manual data entry…
AI expected to be the most important tech in 2025
A new study by the IEEE — the world’s largest technical professional organization — focuses on on what are likely to be the most important technologies in 2025 along with future technology trends, including expectations for AI’s market growth, benefits, uses, and skill sets.
The study surveyed over 350 CIOs, CTOs, IT directors, and other technology leaders in Brazil, China, India, the UK and US at organizations with more than 1,000 employees, it finds that 58 percent believe AI will be the most important tech next year, while 26 percent say cloud computing and 24 percent robotics.
Other important technologies in 2025 include extended reality (XR), including metaverse, augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality (21 percent); industrial internet of things (19 percent); quantum, including quantum computing (17 percent), and electric vehicles/EV charging (17 percent).
However, 91 percent of respondents agree that in 2025 there will be a generative AI ‘reckoning’ as public fascination and perception shift to a greater understanding of and expectations for, what the technology can and should do…
Halloween: Origins and Current Traditions
Halloween is a holiday celebrated each year on October 31. The tradition originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints. Soon, All Saints Day incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows Eve, and later Halloween.
American colonists are responsible for initially bringing Halloween to the United States. Most of the colonists were Puritans and they primarily came from England which traditionally celebrated Samhain back when the Celts lived there. Although the Celtic religious traditions had been long replaced by Christianity, many of the old practices remained. However, since the American Colonies were influenced by a variety of cultures, Halloween traditions began to change. In the New World, All Hallow’s Eve became a time for “play parties”, which were private parties thrown to celebrate the harvest. People would dress in costumes, read each other’s fortunes, and tell scary stories. These were amongst the first Halloween parties!
Over time, Halloween evolved into a day of activities like trick-or-treating, carving jack-o-lanterns, festive gatherings, donning costumes and eating treats.
So…Are you ready to celebrate Halloween? Who do you plan to be?
Source: MIT International Students Office.
Thanks for reading this week’s Thursday Newbytes. We hope these articles were informative, interesting, fun, and helpful. Darcy & TC
