Lifeboat Foundation

The New York Police Department (NYPD) is implementing a new security measure at the Times Square subway station. It’s deploying a security robot to patrol the premises, which authorities say is meant to “keep you safe.” We’re not talking about a RoboCop-like machine or any human-like biped robot — the K5, which was made by California-based company Knightscope, looks like a massive version of R2-D2. Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of privacy rights group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, has a less flattering description for it, though, and told The New York Times that it’s like a “trash can on wheels.”

K5 weighs 420 pounds and is equipped with four cameras that can record video but not audio. As you can guess from the image above, the machine also doesn’t come with arms — it didn’t quite ignore Mayor Eric Adams’ attempt at making a heart. The robot will patrol the station from midnight until 6 AM throughout its trial run that’s running over the next two months. But K5 won’t be doing full patrols for a while, since it’s spending its first two weeks mapping out the station and roaming only the main areas and not the platforms.

It’s not quite clear if NYPD’s machine will be livestreaming its camera footage, and if law enforcement will be keeping an eye on what it captures. Adams said during the event introducing the robot that it will “record video that can be reviewed in case of an emergency or a crime.” It apparently won’t be using facial recognition, though Cahn is concerned that the technology could eventually be incorporated into the machine. Obviously, K5 doesn’t have the capability to respond to actual emergencies in the station and can’t physically or verbally apprehend suspects. The only real-time help it can provide people is to connect them to a live person to report an incident or to ask questions, provided they’re able to press a button on the robot.

We are entering a new era of AI, one that is fundamentally changing how we relate to and benefit from technology. With the convergence of chat interfaces and large language models you can now ask for what you want in natural language and the technology is smart enough to answer, create it or take action. At Microsoft, we think about this as having a copilot to help navigate any task. We have been building AI-powered copilots into our most used and loved products – making coding more efficient with GitHub, transforming productivity at work with Microsoft 365, redefining search with Bing and Edge and delivering contextual value that works across your apps and PC with Windows.

Today we take the next step to unify these capabilities into a single experience we call Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion. Copilot will uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and security at the forefront. It will be a simple and seamless experience, available in Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and in our web browser with Edge and Bing. It will work as an app or reveal itself when you need it with a right click. We will continue to add capabilities and connections to Copilot across to our most-used applications over time in service of our vision to have one experience that works across your whole life.

Continue reading “Announcing Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion” »

Cisco has a reputation of building the company through acquisitions, but it has tended to stay away from the really huge ones. That changed this morning when the company announced it was acquiring Splunk for $28 billion.

With Splunk, it gets an observability platform that could fit nicely into its security business to help customers better understand security threats, while also helping parse oodles of log data to resolve other problems like helping understand system failures or troubleshoot myriad issues across a broad array of enterprise systems.

Under the terms of the deal, Cisco is paying a hefty premium of $157 per share. When you consider that the 52-week low was $65 a share and it has hovered in the high 80s and low 90s much of this year, that’s a big bump for Splunk stockholders and suggests there might have been some competition for the logging giant. The company’s most recent market cap sits at just over $20 billion.

Since its launch in 2017, Harness, the software delivery platform founded by AppDynamics founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal, expanded from being continuous code deployment to covering continuous integration, feature flags, cloud cost management, security testing orchestration, chaos engineering and more. But even though it focused heavily on GitOps, it never offered its own Git repositories. That’s changing today with the launch of the Gitness open-source Git repository and the Harness Code Repository, the hosted and managed version of Gitness.

“There hasn’t been a new Git repo launch in almost a decade,” Bansal told me. “Now you have GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket from Atlassian, but that’s really it. […] If you look at any of the git repos, whether it’s GitLab or GitHub or Bitbucket, they don’t have the true one source ethos around them anymore. We strongly believe that Git started as open source, so let’s bring the true open-source ethos back to Git repos.”

38 Terabytes of data accidentally leaked.

Article from PC Mag.

A misconfigured link accidentally leaked access to 38TB of Microsoft data, opening up the ability to inject malicious code into its AI models.

Continue reading “Microsoft AI Employee Accidentally Leaks 38TB of Data” »

Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed tens of terabytes of sensitive data, including private keys and passwords, while publishing a storage bucket of open source training data on GitHub.

In research shared with TechCrunch, cloud security startup Wiz said it discovered a GitHub repository belonging to Microsoft’s AI research division as part of its ongoing work into the accidental exposure of cloud-hosted data.

Readers of the GitHub repository, which provided open source code and AI models for image recognition, were instructed to download the models from an Azure Storage URL. However, Wiz found that this URL was configured to grant permissions on the entire storage account, exposing additional private data by mistake.

By regularly patrolling the property, armed guards prevent potential crimes simply by being present. Security patrols involve reviewing and monitoring the premises to ensure they are safe from potential threats.

However, foot patrol guards travel slowly and carry limited equipment. Due to this, the guard’s range and area coverage are relatively restricted. Patrolling guards also need help to do their duty in harsh weather conditions.

Continue reading “Meet Ascento Guard, a new autonomous security patrolling robot” »

Developed by a spinoff from ETH Zurich, the Ascento Guard is the newest kid on the block for autonomous security robots. It also happens to be very cute.

A Swiss startup called Ascento has recently unveiled its novel and adorable new security robot called the Ascento Guard. An autonomous outdoor security robot’s standout features are its wheeled “legs” and cartoon-esque, almost anthropomorphic “face.”

Continue reading “Swiss startup puts a new spin on the security robot market” »

The US Space Force’s ‘Victus Nox’ mission launched aboard a Firefly Alpha rocket that lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

The US Space Force announced in a press statement today, September 15, that Firefly Aerospace successfully launched a Millennium Space satellite yesterday.

That mission launched on an incredibly short 24-hour timeline, showcasing the capability for rapid deployment of national security missions.