Month: July 2024

Enlarge / Rite Aid logo displayed at one of its stores. (credit: Getty Images)

Rite Aid, the third biggest US drug store chain, said that more than 2.2 million of its customers have been swept into a data breach that stole personal information, including driver's license numbers, addresses, and dates of birth.

The company said in mandatory filings with the attorneys general of states including Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Oregon that the stolen data was associated with purchases or attempted purchases of retail products made between June 6, 2017, and July 30, 2018. The data provided included the purchaser's name, address, date of birth, and driver's license number or other form of government-issued ID. No social security numbers, financial information, or patient information was included.

“On June 6, 2024, an unknown third party impersonated a company employee to compromise their business credentials and gain access to certain business systems,” the filing stated. “We detected the incident within 12 hours and immediately launched an internal investigation to terminate the unauthorized access, remediate affected systems and ascertain if any customer data was impacted.”

Enlarge / Now I'm going to show you a series of photos of Pixel Folds, and you just tell me if you recognize any of them from the bank earlier today, okay? (credit: NCC/Android Authority)

Can you really call them "leaks" if, every year, Google's Pixel phones end up being sloshed all over the web for months before their official release? What volume of photos, hardware specifications, and other details constitutes a leak, rather than a quick-draining colander?

Google's Pixel 9 series of phones are expected to be launched at an event on August 13. Because those phones need to be certified by various regulators, including the Taiwanese National Communications Commission, or NCC, there are now photos—so many photos—of all four phones Google is expected to announce next month. The Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, and Pixel 9 Pro Fold, Google's second attempt at a folding phone, have been sized, measured, rated for battery life and charging speed, and even disassembled for a look inside.

As has been suggested by Pixel 9 renders, renders of all three non-folding phones, and pictures of prototypes, the NCC pictures confirm that Google's "Pro" phone in this series is the same size as the standard model 9 but with three rear cameras and upgraded, possibly AI-friendly specs. The NCC filings don't confirm all internal specs, such as the eye-popping 16GB of RAM seen in an earlier Pixel 9 Pro prototype. Google has previously noted that keeping certain generative models to be "RAM-resident" requires more RAM.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Tuesday, former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy announced the formation of a new AI learning platform called Eureka Labs. The venture aims to create an "AI native" educational experience, with its first offering focused on teaching students how to build their own large language model (LLM).

"It's still early days but I wanted to announce the company so that I can build publicly instead of keeping a secret that isn't," Karpathy wrote on X.

While the idea of using AI in education isn't particularly new, Karpathy's approach hopes to pair expert-designed course materials with an AI-powered teaching assistant based on an LLM, aiming to provide personalized guidance at scale. This combination seeks to make high-quality education more accessible to a global audience.

Enlarge / YouTuber Marques Brownlee discusses iOS 18 in a new video. This specific video wasn't part of the large dataset that was used to train AI models, but many of his others were. (credit: Marques Brownlee)

AI models at Apple, Salesforce, Anthropic, and other major technology players were trained on tens of thousands of YouTube videos without the creators' consent and potentially in violation of YouTube's terms, according to a new report appearing in both Proof News and Wired.

The companies trained their models in part by using "the Pile," a collection by nonprofit EleutherAI that was put together as a way to offer a useful dataset to individuals or companies that don't have the resources to compete with Big Tech, though it has also since been used by those bigger companies.

The Pile includes books, Wikipedia articles, and much more. That includes YouTube captions collected by YouTube's captions API, scraped from 173,536 YouTube videos across more than 48,000 channels. That includes videos from big YouTubers like MrBeast, PewDiePie, and popular tech commentator Marques Brownlee. On X, Brownlee called out Apple's usage of the dataset, but acknowledged that assigning blame is complex when Apple did not collect the data itself. He wrote:

Enlarge / Dr. Ann Burgess helps the FBI catch serial killers in Hulu's Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer. (credit: YouTube/Hulu)

Fans of the Netflix series Mindhunter might recall the character of Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), a psychologist who joins forces with FBI criminal profilers to study the unique psychology of serial killers in hopes of more effectively catching them. But they might not know about the inspiration for the character: Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, whose long distinguished career finally gets the attention it deserves in a new documentary from Hulu, Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer.

Burgess herself thought it was "fun" to see a fictional character based on her but noted that Hollywood did take some liberties. "They got it wrong," she told Ars. "They made me a psychologist. I'm a nurse"—specifically, a forensic and psychiatric nurse who pioneered research on sex crimes, victimology, and criminal psychology.

Mastermind should go a long way toward setting things right. Hulu brought on Abby Fuller to direct, best known for her work on the Chef's Table series for Netflix. Fuller might seem like a surprising choice for making a true crime documentary, but the streamer thought she would bring a fresh take to a well-worn genre. "I love the true crime aspects, but I thought we could do something more elevated and cinematic and really make this a character-driven piece about [Ann], with true crime elements," Fuller told Ars.