Month: June 2022

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Google has ignited a social media firestorm on the nature of consciousness after placing an engineer on paid leave who went public with his belief that the tech group’s chatbot has become “sentient.”

Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in Google’s Responsible AI unit, did not receive much attention last week when he wrote a Medium post saying he “may be fired soon for doing AI ethics work.”

But a Saturday profile in the Washington Post characterizing Lemoine as “the Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life” became the catalyst for widespread discussion on social media regarding the nature of artificial intelligence. Among the experts commenting, questioning or joking about the article were Nobel laureates, Tesla’s head of AI and multiple professors.

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A service that helps open source developers write and test software is leaking thousands of authentication tokens and other security-sensitive secrets. Many of these leaks allow hackers to access the private accounts of developers on Github, Docker, AWS, and other code repositories, security experts said in a new report.

The availability of the third-party developer credentials from Travis CI has been an ongoing problem since at least 2015. At that time, security vulnerability service HackerOne reported that a Github account it used had been compromised when the service exposed an access token for one of the HackerOne developers. A similar leak presented itself again in 2019 and again last year.

The tokens give anyone with access to them the ability to read or modify the code stored in repositories that distribute an untold number of ongoing software applications and code libraries. The ability to gain unauthorized access to such projects opens the possibility of supply chain attacks, in which threat actors tamper with malware before it's distributed to users. The attackers can leverage their ability to tamper with the app to target huge numbers of projects that rely on the app in production servers.