Guardio Labs researchers have reported finding a copy of the “ChatGPT for Google” open-source extension that is capable of covert malicious action such as hijacking Facebook accounts. The researchers say that the fake extension, which was downloaded over 9000 times before its removal from the Google Chrome Store, abuses the Chrome Extension API to obtain a list of Facebook-related session cookies.

The advice to anyone who has downloaded the extension is to:

– Remove the extension and change your Facebook account password.

– Go to go to Settings > Apps and Websites to make sure that hijackers haven’t added apps to your account that could post things on your behalf.

– Add 2FA to your account.

WhatsApp can use up a lot of space and mobile data by automatically downloading some large photos, videos, and voice messages. Here’s how to limit the types of media that are automatically download and the amount of mobile data WhatsApp calls use.

– Tap on the 3 dots top right and tap on ‘Settings’.

– Tap on ‘Storage and data’.

– Switch to toggle to ‘Use less data for calls’.

– Under ‘Media auto-download’, go through the mobile data, Wi-Fi, and roaming options and untick your preferences for photos, audio, videos, and documents.

Microsoft has announced that it is to help users save time and increase productivity by embedding its AI chatbot ‘Copilot’ into popular Microsoft 365 apps.

Embedded In Popular Apps 

Microsoft says that the Copilot chatbot has been embedded in the popular Microsoft 365 apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams. Like Chat GPT, Copilot is a natural language conversational chatbot that can give the same human-like responses to questions.

Business Chat 

Copilot is operated in Microsoft 365 by ‘Business chat’, which is the field (like that in ChatGTP) where you ask the chatbot questions and give it instructions using normal language, e.g. to generate a status-update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads, type in “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy”. 

How Will Copilot Help? 

Examples of how embedding Copilot into the main Microsoft365 apps can help users include:

– In Word, Microsoft says Copilot can save hours in writing, sourcing, and editing by being able to write a first draft, to edit and shorten it, rewrite it, or give feedback as required, in the same way as you might write a piece using ChatGPT.

– In Teams, Copilot can again save time and effort and make meetings more productive by summarising key discussion points of meetings, including who said what, where people are aligned and where they disagree, and suggest action items, all in real-time during a meeting. It can also recap meetings for you and send you the notes afterwards.

– In PowerPoint, it can create whole presentations for you from a simple text prompt and add any relevant content from a document you made.

– In Excel, Microsoft says Copilot can analyse trends and create summaries and graphs of data, all done in seconds from simple text prompts.

– In Outlook, Copilot can save time by clearing your inbox in minutes, not hours, e.g by drafting emails for you and analysing long email threads in seconds.

– In Power Platform, Copilot can be also used to automate repetitive tasks, even creating chatbots and go from idea to working app in minutes.

Save Time, Increase Productivity and Uplevel Your Skills 

Microsoft’s announcement focuses on three main benefits of using Copilot, which are improving productivity, saving time, and upleveling skills, i.e. making you better at what you’re good at and helping you to quickly master new AI functionality.

OpenAI Launches GPT4 

Microsoft’s Copilot announcement comes just days after OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT that Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in and has been working closely with) announced the launch of GPT4, an updated version of the AI model that powers ChatGPT.

OpenAI said GPT-4 (which was trained on Microsoft Azure AI supercomputers) outperforms ChatGPT and “can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem-solving abilities.” 

Caveat – It Can Be Wrong 

Even though ChatGPT has already become a trusted and valuable tool to businesses in just a matter of months and Copilot and GTP-4 holds even greater promise, OpenAI is covering itself by highlighting one caveat – it can be wrong because it can share disinformation.

Not Yet 

Although the launch has been announced, Copilot will initially be available (as a pilot) to just a small number of enterprise customers, and there are no details of pricing and licensing as yet.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Copilot is another big step forward in what seems to be a conversational chatbot revolution that’s transforming the way we can work by saving time and boosting productivity. The power of Copilot will provide a way to get more out the most popular apps in Microsoft 365, adding significant value to the app and creating new opportunities for users. Copilot is another major selling point and competitive advantage for Microsoft and for businesses, Copilot offers an easy-to-use way to save time, boost productivity, get greater insights into their own business and operations to aid better decision making, plus learn more about aspects of Microsoft365. All in all, Copilot could be the next game-changing step in the AI chatbot revolution

Following the news that Microsoft will soon be integrating Copilot, an AI large language model (LLM) like the one behind ChatGPT, into Microsoft 365, we look at how this will help businesses, what OpenAI’s GPT-4 will bring, and Google’s response.

Copilot 

Microsoft announced last week that it will soon be adding Copilot to Microsoft365. Copilot is an AI large language model (LLM) and natural language conversational chatbot that can give the same human-like responses to questions as OpenAI’s Chat GPT can. Once integrated, Microsoft 365 (there’s no news of when that will be yet) users will be able to type instructions into (and ask questions via) the ‘Business chat’ text field – like the text field in ChatGPT

Microsoft says that Copilot will be integrated in the most popular Microsoft 365 apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams. This will mean that, with the use of normal language typed text prompts, be able to carry out tasks like:

– Writing/re-writing, sourcing, and editing documents in Word, just as you might write a piece using ChatGPT, thereby saving hours.

– Use Copilot to make meetings in Teams more productive e.g., by asking Copilot to summarise the key discussion points e.g., who said what, where people are aligned and where they disagree and suggest action items, all in real time during a meeting. Copilot will also be able to recap meetings and send you the notes afterwards.

– Creating whole PowerPoint presentations from a simple text prompt and adding any relevant content from other documents.

– Analysing trends and create summaries and graphs of data in Excel.

– Making it much faster for users to clear their inbox in Outlook, e.g. by drafting emails  and analysing long email threads in seconds.

– In short, Microsoft sees Copilot as major value-adding USP for its Office suite and is highlighting the time-saving, productivity-potential for users.

ChatGPT4 

Just days prior to Microsoft’s announcement about Copilot, OpenAI, ChatGTP’s creators and a close working partner of Microsoft announced the introduction of GTP-4, an improved and upgraded version of ChatGPT. Open AI says that GTP-4 is “OpenAI’s most advanced system, producing safer and more useful responses” and it can “solve difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem solving abilities”. 

Images As Inputs Too 

As well as text inputs, GTP-4 can accept images as inputs and can generate captions, classifications, and analysis. For example, on the OpenAI website it gives the example of a GTP-4 user uploading a photo of some cooking ingredients accompanied by the question “What can I make with these ingredients?”.  The example reply for GTP-4 is a list of dishes that can be made with the ingredients featured in the image.

OpenAI also says that GTP-4, which was trained on Microsoft Azure AI supercomputers surpasses the earlier version of ChatGPT in its advanced reasoning capabilities and outperforms the earlier version by scoring in higher approximate percentiles among test-takers (90th compared to ChatGPT’s 10th on the Uniform Bar Exam).

Safer 

OpenAI also says that it has spent 6 months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. For example, OpenAI says that, in its own evaluations, GPT-4 is 82 per cent less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40 per cent more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5.

Already Included In Other Products 

GTP-4, which is already incorporated in Microsoft’s Bing search engine, is also already being used in new products in collaboration with other companies and organisations, e.g. Stripe, Duolingo, and even the Government of Iceland (to help preserve its language).

Limitations 

Although ChatGPT has been extremely popular, and GTP-4 looks like being even more so, OpenAI itself and other tech commentators have warned of some important limitations and potential problems that businesses need to bear in mind about these AI models. For example:

– They can produce wrong and/or inaccurate answers and can potentially spread disinformation.

– The free version of ChatGTP is sometimes busy, i.e. it’s not available to all users in periods of high demand.

– GPT-4 can display social biases, hallucinations, and create adversarial prompts.

– Microsoft may not have server hardware needed to run the AI for Copilot across Office 365 and for GTP-4 in Bing (a shortage of GPU power). This could impact smaller businesses as Microsoft may prioritise capacity to bigger customers.

Google’s Answer?

Following OpenAI’s recent announcement of the general release of API access to ChatGPT and ‘Whisper’, its automatic speech recognition (ASR) AI model, Google has now announced that it’s giving API-level access to its LLM model PaLM to enable developers to build it into their apps and workflows. Google says that developers and businesses can now try its APIs and products to start building Google’s AI models through Google Cloud and a new prototyping environment called MakerSuite. Also, Google says that it’s introducing new AI features through Workspace. Google has also said that it may add PaLM’s AI capabilities to Google Docs, Gmail, and other parts of its suite.

No More Heard About Bard 

There have been no new announcements, however, about when Google’s direct conversational chatbot competitor to ChatGPT ‘Bard’ will actually be released. The original announcement of its impending release in just a few weeks, as an answer to the announcemnet of ChatGPT’s release, was reportedly met with criticism by Google employees for being “rushed” and “botched.”

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Although there were already chatbots out there, the release of ChatGTP and its game-changing success was really just the opening of the AI chatbot revolution which looks likely to be the next big leap in computing and business. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella puts it (with reference to Copilot) “we are at the start of a new era of computing” and as Microsoft’s Jared Spataro says, “Copilot marks a new era of computing that will fundamentally transform the way we work.” AI language models are now being released thick and fast, both through APIs so developers can make new, much more powerful apps, embedded in search engines and across productivity suites (Google and Microsoft), and as online chatbots for all end users. ChatGPT is already onto its next big chatbot upgrade with GPT-4. For businesses, all this will mean increased leverage and productivity, time and cost savings, better business insights, and being able to harness new value adding powers that can transform work and outcomes. We are still at the beginning of an AI revolution that holds a lot of promise for businesses going forward.

The UK government Department of Health (DOH) is facing criticism over a report that says it spent more on new Apple iPhones than it did on defibrillators last year.

£1.5 Million Spent On iPhones For Whitehall Staff 

The report from the Mirror newspaper highlighted how, in 2022, the DOH spent £1.5 million buying iPhones for Whitehall staff, whereas it only spent around only £1 million on defibrillators, which would be installed in a variety of locations for public use.

Defibrillators Save Lives 

There are an estimated 100,000 defibrillators across the UK. According to the British Heart Foundation, the use of a defibrillator, along with CPR, can increase the chance of survival following a cardiac arrest by up to 75 per cent.

In the UK, defibrillators are widely available in public places such as train stations, airports and shopping centres. There are also community defibrillator schemes that place defibrillators in public places and train local people to use them in emergencies.

450 Per Cent Increase On iPhone Spending Last Year 

The iPhone purchases are reported to have included 1,570 brand new iPhone 13s and 650 iPhone SEs. The Mirror’s report says that if the DOH averaged just under 4,000 staff in its core Whitehall team last year, it looks as though one in every two workers got a new iPhone. The report highlights the fact that 2022 spending on iPhones at the DOH appears to have been up by a massive 450 per cent compared to 2021.

Misplaced Priorities? 

The report highlights a quote from Labour’s Shadow Attorney General, Emily Thornberry, in response to the report’s findings, saying: “You have to question not just the misplaced priorities but the warped mentality of ministers at the Department of Health, when they are willing to spend £550,000 more on buying the latest iPhones for their own staff than on installing defibrillators in our local communities.” 

Spending Was On Necessary Replacements? 

According to the Mirror’s report, the response from a spokesperson was to say that DOH staff needed “access to the appropriate tools and resources to do their jobs effectively” and the 2022 iPhone purchases were to “replace iPhones that could no longer receive vendor updates and represented a cyber vulnerability.” 

Prices 

iPhone 13s, of which 1,570 were reportedly bought brand new for DOH staff in 2022 generally retail (at today’s prices) at around £700.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

The UK government is known to buy-in Apple iPhones in large numbers for government departments. For example, back in February 2021, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was widely reported to have purchased 11,000 64GB iPhone SE 2020’s. Its preference for iPhones could be due to their security, reliability, ease of use, and compatibility with some government back-end systems and, of course, deals struck with certain suppliers. In the case of the Mirror’s report, the DOH spokesperson suggested that the larger spending was because of the need to buy replacements. Contrasting spending on iPhones with life-saving for communities, however, was always going to lead to questions and criticism about values and priorities and it could, of course, be argued that defibrillators can be priceless life-saving tool that benefit everyone and worth allocating more of the department’s budget to.

In this insight, we look at what GPL is, how it relates to the right to repair, and how businesses can be affected if other businesses don’t fulfil their obligation under GPL.

General Public License (GPL) 

The General Public License (GPL) is a widely used open-source software license that grants users the right to use, study, modify and distribute software that is licensed under it. The GPL is designed to ensure that software remains free and open, and that users have the freedom to modify and distribute the software as they wish

What Obligations Do Companies Have Under GPL?

Under GPL, companies (e.g. manufacturers who make a product which has a software element) have number of compliance obligations which are:

– Providing the source code. If a company distributes software that is licensed under the GPL, it must also make the source code available to anyone who receives the software. This ensures that users have the ability to modify and distribute the software themselves.

– Providing a copy of the GPL. Companies must include a copy of the GPL with the software they distribute. This ensures that users are aware of their rights under the license.

– Allowing modifications. Companies must allow users to modify the software as they see fit. This means that users have the ability to customise the software to meet their specific needs.

– Releasing modifications. If a company modifies software that is licensed under the GPL, it must also release those modifications under the GPL. This ensures that modifications remain free and open.

– Providing notices. Companies must provide notices to users that the software is licensed under the GPL and that they have certain rights under the license.

Failure to comply with these obligations can result in legal consequences and damage to a company’s reputation within the open-source community.

Providing The Source Code & The ‘Right To Repair’ 

The ‘right to repair’ refers to the legal right of consumers to repair or modify the products they own, including electronic devices and appliances. The right to repair is often associated with open-source software because access to the source code is essential for repairing and modifying software.

If a company does not provide the source code for software that is subject to the GPL, it can make it difficult or even impossible for users to exercise their right to repair. Without access to the source code, users cannot modify or repair the software, which can lead to increased costs, waste, and environmental harm.

For example, if a user has a device that relies on open-source software and that device malfunctions, the user may need to modify the software to fix the problem. If the company that produced the software does not provide the source code, the user may be unable to fix the issue themselves, which can result in unnecessary waste and expense.

Reasons For Withholding Source Code 

In some cases, companies may intentionally withhold source code as a way to limit competition or maintain control over their products. However, this can be detrimental to consumers and the environment, which is why the GPL requires companies to make the source code available to anyone who receives the software. By providing access to the source code, the GPL helps ensure that users can exercise their right to repair and reduce waste, while also fostering innovation and competition in the software industry.

A Recent Example – John Deere 

A recent example of how businesses can be affected by not being given access to the source code of a product is featured on the Software Conservancy website in a recent post from Denver Gingerich, a member of a farming family. In the post, Gingerich explains that he is from a farming family and that farmers have the right to repair their tools, including tractors and other farming equipment. Gingerich alleges that some farm equipment manufacturers like John Deere (the largest manufacturer of farm equipment in North America and one of the largest worldwide) are not complying with the right to repair licenses for the software used in these tools. The effect of this is that farmers are cut off from their livelihood if the manufacturer does not wish to repair their farming tools, even when the farmer could easily perform the repairs themselves.

Gingerich suggests that John Deere may have been failing to meet the requirements of the software right to repair licenses they use for some time and haven’t yet provided complete corresponding source code to the farmers who are entitled to it.

Depending on the veracity of Gingerich’s claims, this potentially illustrates how a manufacturer, by not complying with its obligations under GPL, could have far-reaching implications for (in this case) farmers’ livelihoods and even food security throughout the world. Gingerich has reportedly called upon John Deere to immediately resolve all its outstanding GPL violations, across all lines of its farm equipment, by providing complete source code to the farmers and others who are entitled to it.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

With so many important business-products which are essential tools for organisations now having an open source software element to them, providing the source code with the product is an important obligation that enables users to exercise their right to repair. Not providing the source code can seriously affect the businesses of users by stopping them from using vital work tools and lead to increased costs, waste, and environmental harm as products are scrapped that could otherwise be repaired.

For companies that don’t provide the source code for products (or withhold it), this could lead to legal consequences and damage to their reputation within the open-source community. Depending on your viewpoint (and any impacts to guarantees/warranties aside), it could be argued that it is in the interest of businesses to keep a free and open system where users are given all the tools they need (i.e. the code as well as the products) to enable them to make modifications where they see fit and exercise their right to repair.

UK data centre startup Deep Green is using servers submerged in mineral oil as “digital boilers” to turn server heat into free hot water for swimming pool owners, distilleries, and large apartment blocks.

Digital Boilers 

Harnessing the heat form decentralised data centre models is one of the new ideas that several companies are adopting to offer data centre capacity without having to build and run costly data centres, and offer free or cheap energy, reduce the environmental cost by making use of existing heat, and enable users to cut their costs and carbon emissions.

How It Works 

Unlike other businesses like Heata, which offers to provide free hot water using the heat from a cloud business server installed onto the side of domestic hot water tanks in homes, Deep Green is focusing on business customers in industries using large volumes of hot water e.g., swimming pools. Deep green uses ‘immersion cooling’ technology i.e., immersing servers in mineral oil to capture the operating data server heat and transfer it into a site’s existing hot water system, for free. Deep Green supplies these Green “digital boilers” (a server and heat transfer system) for free, pays the business where it’s installed for the energy the digital boiler uses and, in return, asks for space for containers and sufficient grid and internet connection.

Benefits 

In this way Deep Green gets to expand its data centre server capacity and network and the business where the server is installed gets to dramatically reduce its energy costs while providing the same service to its customers, reduces its businesses carbon emissions, and improves its ESG credentials.

Example 

In what’s been described as a “UK first” in technology heating solutions, Exmouth Swimming Pool ‘took the plunge’ by having a Deep Green ‘digital boiler’ installed. It’s been reported that this has reduced the pool’s gas requirements by a massive 62 per cent, thereby saving LED Community Leisure, who manage the centre for East Devon District Council (EDDC), over £30,000 a year and reducing carbon emissions by 25.8 tonnes.

Peter Gilpin, CEO of LED Community Leisure, said of the new technology: “Deep Green’s innovative technology will dramatically reduce our energy bills and carbon footprint, meaning we will continue to be a key asset for the local community. We are already seeing the benefit. I’m certain this will transform leisure centres up and down the country for the better.” 

Pools Are Just The Start 

Although there are 1,500 pools in England that could all benefit from reduced energy costs, Mark Bjornsgaard, CEO of Deep Green, plans to focus on any businesses needing large amounts of hot water saying, “Pools are just the start.” Bjornsgaard says: “By moving data centres from industrial warehouses into the hearts of communities, our ‘digital boilers’ put waste heat to good use, saving local businesses thousands of pounds on energy bills and reducing their carbon footprint.” 

What Does This Mean For Your Organisation? 

This technology could solve several problems ate once – increasing data centre capacity in a more environmentally friendly way, reducing data centre carbon footprints, reducing business energy costs and carbon footprints, and tackling server heating problems in a productive and mutually beneficial way. Immersing servers in liquid to cool them down and installing servers and using their heat to heat water is already being done by other companies, but Deep Green’s model is different in that it combines the two and focuses on businesses (with major hot water requirements) rather than homes. At a time when electricity and gas prices are super-high and swimming pools are struggling to ‘stay afloat’ as a result, this type of service is likely to be very attractive

On 14th March 1950, the first prototype of the silicon transistor was demonstrated by researchers at Bell Labs, the company spawned from its eponymous founder Alexander Graham Bell (i.e. the person widely accredited with inventing the telephone).

This incredible breakthrough device then paved the way for modern digital electronics. Some people may even remember the valves they replaced which were relatively slow, bulky, expensive, unreliable and which created significantly more waste heat. The fact that transistors could be miniaturised and printed onto integrated circuitry (i.e. silicon ‘chips’) meant they revolutionised electronics and ushered in the modern computer age. A modern mobile-phone can contain in the order of 20 billion transistors. A phone containing that many valves would be bigger than an international soccer stadium!

As computers became increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, they facilitated the development and expansion of the Internet and on March 15, 1985, the first internet domain name, symbolics.com, was registered, almost exactly 21 years before Twitter was launched (21st March 2006).

Given that there are around 500 million tweets sent every day now (and that’s just Twitter – think of all the other social updates) perhaps spare a thought for the rise of transistor next time your phone pings with a new message.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned that entering personal information in chatbots like ChatGPT means that it is stored and is likely to be used for developing the LLM service or model.

This could mean that the LLM provider (or its partners/contractors) can read queries and may incorporate them into future versions, thereby raising privacy concerns. Also, the NCSC has warned that this stored information could be at risk of hacks, leaks, or accidentally being made publicly accessible. It has also warned of the privacy risk of aggregation of information across multiple queries using the same logins.

The advice is not to include sensitive information in queries to public LLMs, and not to submit queries to public LLMs that would lead to issues were they made public.

In addition to Windows Defender, Windows 10 has a Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) that’s designed to remove hidden malware from your device, and normally receives regular updates and runs itself in the background. However, if you’re worried you have a malware infection, you can download and run it manually. Here’s how:

– Click on the Start menu and type “mrt.” If it’s already shown on your device and click ‘run’ or follow the link to Microsoft’s MSRT page and click on ‘download’.

– When running MSRT, you can choose ‘Quick scan’ to search through the most likely places for malware, a ‘Full scan’ for a complete system scan or a ‘Customised scan’ for specific drives or folders.

– MSRT is not a replacement for good antivirus software but is another tool that could help, post-infection.