Paul Stenhouse: Google's product announcement, developer jailed for kill switch sabotage

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

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13d ago 4:15

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Google's big product announcement was... unique?

It was more like a talk show crossed with the shopping channel. US Late Night host Jimmy Fallon hosted it, and it had celebrity cameos from athletes like Stephen Curry, podcaster Alex Cooper, and the Jonas Brothers even made an appearance. Reddit users dubbed it as “unwatchable".

They launched new phones, enhanced their folding phones, but of course AI was everywhere:

Gemini Live will gain a new audio model that will detect your tone — like whether you’re excited or concerned
The Pixel phone camera will have a photo coach built in to help with composition.

They're trying to make these AI suggestions more contextual and push relevant things to you rather than you needing to seek them out, e.g. you're at the airport, here's your boarding pass. Or you're in a car, here's the directions to your next appointment, etc.

A software developer has been sent to prison sabotaging his former employer

This wasn't a hack of systems after he was fired, or a mass deletion of data before he was walked out the door, this was pre-planned. The 55 year old developer had created a "kill switch" designed to be used if he was ever fired, and he designed it in such a way it was smart enough to know when he was fired. The software was tracking to see if his work email account was active, and then when it was deactivated the "kill switch" was automatically triggered, crashing the servers.

The incident locked out thousands of employees from accessing the company’s systems and cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.

He was discovered in part because of his search history, looking up things like “methods to escalate privileges, hide processes, and rapidly delete files”. He's been sentenced to four years behind bars.

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