Month: June 2021

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Billions of times each year, people turn to Google’s web search box for help figuring out what’s wrong with their skin. Now, Google is preparing to launch an app that uses image recognition algorithms to provide more expert and personalized help. A brief demo at the company’s developer conference last month showed the service suggesting several possible skin conditions based on uploaded photos.

Machines have matched or outperformed expert dermatologists in studies in which algorithms and doctors scrutinize images from past patients. But there’s little evidence from clinical trials deploying such technology, and no AI image analysis tools are approved for dermatologists to use in the US, says Roxana Daneshjou, a Stanford dermatologist and researcher in machine learning and health. “Many don’t pan out in the real world setting,” she says.

Google’s new app isn’t clinically validated yet either, but the company’s AI prowess and recent buildup of its health care division make its AI dermatology app notable. Still, the skin service will start small—and far from its home turf and largest market in the US. The service is not likely to analyze American skin blemishes anytime soon.

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The nation-state hackers who orchestrated the SolarWinds supply chain attack compromised a Microsoft worker’s computer and used the access to launch targeted attacks against company customers, Microsoft said in a terse statement published late on a Friday afternoon.

The hacking group also compromised three entities using password-spraying and brute-force techniques, which gain unauthorized access to accounts by bombarding login servers with large numbers of login guesses. With the exception of the three undisclosed entities, Microsoft said, the password-spraying campaign was “mostly unsuccessful.” Microsoft has since notified all targets, whether attacks were successful or not.

Enter Nobelium

The discoveries came in Microsoft’s continued investigation into Nobelium, Microsoft’s name for the sophisticated hacking group that used SolarWinds software updates and other means to compromise networks belonging to nine US agencies and 100 private companies. The federal government has said Nobelium is part of the Russian government’s Federal Security Service.