Month: August 2023

Enlarge / Cleveland doctor Sherri Tenpenny gives false testimony on June 8, 2021, saying COVID-19 vaccines magnetize people. (credit: The Ohio Channel)

Sherri Tenpenny, the Ohio anti-vaccine doctor who made national headlines for claiming in viral testimony that COVID-19 vaccines make people magnetic, has lost her medical license.

The state medical board indefinitely suspended her license Wednesday, saying she refused for over two years to cooperate with the board's investigation of over 350 complaints against her, which suggested possible violations of state medical regulations.

In a hearing on Wednesday, board members suspended and chastised Tenpenny for failing to cooperate or answer a single question from the regulators. "Dr. Tenpenny, neither you nor any doctor licensed by this board is above the law, and you must comply with the investigation," Dr. Jonathan Feibel, an orthopedic surgeon and medical board member, said, according to Cleveland.com. "You have not done so, and therefore, until you do, your license will be suspended."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Without announcement, OpenAI recently added details about its web crawler, GPTBot, to its online documentation site. GPTBot is the name of the user agent that the company uses to retrieve webpages to train the AI models behind ChatGPT, such as GPT-4. Earlier this week, some sites quickly announced their intention to block GPTBot's access to their content.

In the new documentation, OpenAI says that webpages crawled with GPTBot "may potentially be used to improve future models," and that allowing GPTBot to access your site "can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and safety."

OpenAI claims it has implemented filters ensuring that sources behind paywalls, those collecting personally identifiable information, or any content violating OpenAI's policies will not be accessed by GPTBot.

Enlarge (credit: Rockwell Automation)

On Friday, Microsoft disclosed 15 high-severity vulnerabilities in a widely used collection of tools used to program operational devices inside industrial facilities such as plants for power generation, factory automation, energy automation, and process automation. The company warned that while exploiting the code-execution and denial-of-service vulnerabilities was difficult, it enabled threat actors to “inflict great damage on targets."

The vulnerabilities affect the CODESYS V3 software development kit. Developers inside companies such as Schneider Electric and WAGO use the platform-independent tools to develop programmable logic controllers, the toaster-sized devices that open and close valves, turn rotors, and control various other physical devices in industrial facilities worldwide. Specifically, the SDK allows developers to make PLCs compatible with IEC 611131-3, an international standard that defines programming languages that are safe to use in industrial environments. Examples of devices that use CODESYS V3 include Schneider Electric’s Modicon TM251 and the WAGO PFC200.

“A DOS attack against a device using a vulnerable version of CODESYS could enable threat actors to shut down a power plant, while remote code execution could create a backdoor for devices and let attackers tamper with operations, cause a PLC to run in an unusual way, or steal critical information,” Microsoft researchers wrote. Friday’s advisory went on to say:

Enlarge / Sam Bankman-Fried. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

A federal judge in New York today ordered disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried's to jail after revoking his bail, The New York Times reported.

Bankman-Fried had been under house arrest, but prosecutors convinced Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Federal District Court in Manhattan that Bankman-Fried had fed documents to the media in order to intimidate a witness in the case. Now Bankman-Fried has to prepare his defense to 13 criminal charges from jail.

In June, Bankman-Fried filed a motion to dismiss, hoping that some of those charges would be dropped. But Kaplan decided that his arguments in the motion were "either moot or without merit,” CNN reported.