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Technology
AI Chatbot ChatGPT Chinese Firm Tech Giant Technology

Tech Giant Alibaba to Launch ChatGPT Rival

 

Alibaba, a global leader in technology, has revealed a new artificial intelligence product that will soon be incorporated into all of the company's apps and is similar to ChatGPT. 

Earlier this year, Alibaba revealed it was developing a ChatGPT competitor to the immensely popular AI chatbot. Alibaba Cloud, the company's cloud computing division, revealed on Tuesday that it would be releasing a generative AI model called Tongyi Qianwen (TQ), which stands for "truth from a thousand questions." 

In an initial product demonstration, the AI model was seen scheduling travel plans, writing invitations, and advising customers on make-up purchases. 

The company announced that the TQ rollout will start with a deployment on Tmall Genie, the company's Alexa-like voice assistant, and DingTalk, Alibaba's office communication and collaboration software. 

The device has the ability to write emails, create business proposals, and summarise meeting notes in both Chinese and English. Alibaba claimed that by using the voice assistant Tmall Genie, the product can have "more dynamic and vivid conversations" with users in China. Specifically, TQ can give users vacation tips, healthy diet recipes, and "develop and tell stories to children." 

Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang stated at a webcast event that the new technology would "bring about big changes to the way we produce, the way we work, and the way we live our lives." 

"We are at a technological watershed moment driven by generative AI and cloud computing, and businesses across all sectors have started to embrace intelligence transformation to stay ahead of the game,” stated Zhang. 

"As a leading global cloud computing service provider, Alibaba Cloud is committed to making computing and AI services more accessible and inclusive for enterprises and developers," he added. 

The company stated the AI model will be incorporated into "all business applications across Alibaba's ecosystem in the near future," though it did not give a specific timeline for the TQ implementation. 

China's new AI regulations 

The launch of Alibaba's AI product coincides with the release of recently-drafted AI regulations from China's cyber space authority. The Cyberspace Administration of China presented steps for controlling generative AI on Tuesday, mandating that creators of new AI products submit to security evaluations before making them available to the general public. 

According to the draft law, information produced by upcoming AI products must uphold the nation's "core socialist values" and refrain from inciting subversion of the rule of law.

Additionally, it outlined guidelines forbidding AI material from endorsing racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination and specified that AI content shouldn't spread misinformation.

In a frenetic battle for market supremacy, tech behemoths from all over the world have recently begun creating and selling generative AI technologies. 

While initiatives from Meta, Microsoft, and Google have been unveiled to varying degrees of acclaim, ChatGPT has continued to make quick advancements to its ground-breaking AI language model.

A contentious request was made earlier this month for major tech firms to comply with a six-month moratorium on "out-of-control" AI development. 

The broad expansion of AI has sparked growing concerns about the technology's potential ethical and economic implications. In response, over 1,300 academics, tech experts, and business professionals signed an open letter supported by Elon Musk encouraging AI companies to limit development in late March.

A ban against ChatGPT has been issued by Italy, the first Western nation to do so, after the nation's privacy agency expressed worries about the AI chatbot's data privacy practises. Meanwhile, an Australian mayor may file the first lawsuit over ChatGPT's errors. 

Alibaba's cloud division hopes to make TQ AI available to customers so they may create their own unique language models, and the business has already announced plans to include additional features including picture processing and text-to-image synthesis.

Beta testing of TQ is currently available for mainstream enterprise customers in China.
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Vulnerabilities and Exploits.
Canada Chinese Firm Data collection EU Phishing Attacks TikTok Ban User Privacy Vulnerabilities and Exploits.

The West Accuses TikTok of Espionage & Data Mining

 

TikTok is one of the few social media corporate giants that was not created by a Silicon Valley business. The parent business, ByteDance, which launched the internet service in China in 2016, has offices spread across the globe, including Paris. Nonetheless, Beijing remains the location of the parent company's main office. These claims, which include, among other things, some actions that are not within the purview of this social network, are fleshed out by a number of causes for concern.

TikTok will no longer be available to employees and elected officials of the European Parliament and the European Commission starting in mid-March. The United States' main worry is that the Chinese government might be able to access their citizens' data and snoop on them.

Many publications from disinformation-focused research organizations or businesses highlight how simple it is for people to come across incorrect or misleading information concerning elections or pandemics. Research from the Center for Combating Online Hate in the United States in December 2022 showed how the social network's algorithm suggested hazardous content to its teenage members, including videos about self-harm and eating disorders.

Yet, the fact that ByteDance has released two different versions of its application—Douyin, which is only available in the Chinese market, and TikTok for the rest of the world—reinforces misconceptions and wild speculation about the latter.

It occurs while China and the West are engaged in a larger technology-related arms race that includes everything from surveillance balloons to computer chips. TikTok seeks a lot of user permissions, according to the Exodus Privacy organization, which examines Android apps. As a result, the program gets access to the device's microphone, contacts, camera, storage, and even geolocation information.

TikTok first needs broad access to its users' devices in order to function, display targeted adverts, or show pertinent videos. On the website of the ToSDR association, which simplifies and evaluates the general conditions of use of numerous applications and services, TikTok obtains an E score, the worst score in the list.

The federal government will reportedly also prevent the app from being downloaded on authorized devices going forward, according to Mona Fortier, president of the Canadian Treasury Board. It is justified that the approach of European institutions is one of caution in the face of difficult international relations with Beijing.








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Yield Farming Protocol
Chinese Firm Cryptocurrency Frauds Cyber Fraud Yield Farming Protocol

Crypto Firm Arbix Identified as a Rug Pull After Scamming $10 Million From Investors

 

Arbix Finance, Binance Smart Chain-based yield farming protocol, appears to have scammed users out of millions after its developers made off with their deposited funds. 

Earlier this week, the blockchain security firm CertiK tweeted confirming the scam, which is known as a rug pull or exit scam. In these types of scams, project developers collect funds for an allegedly legitimate "service" and then disappear with deposited funds. 

Because decentralized networks are traditionally unreliable, bodies like CertiK attempt to examine them via audits that scan a token’s smart contracts for signs of a scam, susceptibilities, privacy issues, etc. In Arbix's case, CertiK's conducted an audit on November 19th, 2021, whose findings had initially been a reason for users to trust Arbix Finance. 

According to CertiK, the scam was uncovered after the token's smart contract was spotted minting 10 million ARBIX to addresses under the owner's control and then dumping them for Ethereum. The operators of Arbix also directed $10 million in investor funds to unverified pools, a tool used to deposit and withdraw funds. An anonymous actor then drained the assets from the pools and converted them to Ethereum. Finally, Ethereum was transferred to Tornado.cash, which acts as a mixer to make it difficult to track the funds.

"Tornado Cash improves transaction privacy by breaking the on-chain link between source and destination addresses. It uses a smart contract that accepts ETH deposits that can be withdrawn by a different address," explains Tornado.cash's FAQ page. "To preserve privacy a relayer can be used to withdraw to an address with no ETH balance. Whenever ETH is withdrawn by the new address, there is no way to link the withdrawal to the deposit, ensuring complete privacy." 

The funds and their movements are being tracked, but the chances of them being recovered are slim at this point. Yield farming is a particularly enticing prospect for investors because it promises cryptocurrency investors payouts without doing anything. 

The risk takers deposit cryptocurrency into yield farming platforms and then allow automated algorithms to monitor fluctuations in the values of multiple tokens and send yield returns (harvest returns) to investors according to their trading threshold settings. 

The main concern with these platforms is cyber theft, as many of these platforms are either insecure or unreliable. In October 2020, a similar platform called Harvest Finance was hacked, leading to the theft of $24 million from users.
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Open Source Software
Chinese Firm Chinese Government Cyber Security Open Source Software

Alibaba Cloud Punished for Not Sharing Log4j Vulnerability First with the Government

 

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has suspended its collaboration with Alibaba Cloud for six months to mark their protest after the company failed to inform the government regarding the discovery of Log4Shell vulnerability. 

Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba cloud security discovered the flaw and reported Apache Software Foundation (ASF), developer of Log4j, on November 24 regarding the critical flaw in the open-source software tool. But MIIT, China’s leading internet regulator, only became aware of the bug 15 days later on Dec. 9 via a cybersecurity report, likely not submitted by Alibaba.

Tracked as CVE-2021-44228, the vulnerability can be abused to gain full control over susceptible systems, and it has been exploited by both attackers and state-sponsored threat groups, likely even before an official patch was released on December 6.

According to the Chinese outlet, the 21st Century Herald, Chinese authorities were displeased with the fact that they were not informed first about the Log4j vulnerability. As a punishment, the MIIT, which has been operating a threat intelligence sharing platform since late 2019, said it would suspend its partnership with Alibaba Cloud for six months, after which it will reassess the firm’s corrective measures and suitability. 

"Recently, after discovering serious security vulnerabilities in the Apache Log4j2 component, Alibaba Cloud failed to report to the telecommunications authorities in a timely manner and did not effectively support the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to carry out cyber security threats and vulnerability management," the local media report said. 

A law passed this year in China makes it mandatory for all companies to report vulnerabilities to state regulators within two days. While security flaws can be revealed to the affected vendor, they cannot be sold or passed on to third parties outside of China. Additionally, the Cyberspace Administration of China disclosed a new set of laws that reclassified data and presented multiple sets of fines for violations of cybersecurity policy.

Earlier this year, Alibaba was hit with a record antitrust fine of 18.2 billion yuan, for violating government monopoly regulations. The Chinese State Administration described the firm’s behavior as having “eliminated and restricted competition in the online retail platform service market” as well as having “infringed on the business of the merchants on the platform.”
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