Bytes: What’s new in tech

The internet’s accidental savior

Did one man save the internet from a catastrophic cyberattack? asked Kevin Roose in The New York Times. Andres Freund, a 38-year-old software engineer for Microsoft, is being hailed a hero after he “found a backdoor hidden in a piece of software that is part of the Linux operating system.” Most of the world’s servers run on Linux. Yet Freund earlier this year appears to have been the only person who noticed that “an application called SSH, which is used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than usual.” He traced the issue to “malicious code” planted inside a specific Linux tool that could have granted hackers access “to any of hundreds of millions of computers around the world that run SSH.” It’s still unclear who built the backdoor, or what their motives may have been.

YouTube warns OpenAI on video training

YouTube warned OpenAI not to train AI systems on its video content, said Davey

Alba and Emily Chang in Bloomberg. A new OpenAI tool called Sora can produce hyper-realistic videos out of a text prompt. To do so, Sora, like other generative AI tools, has to suck up “all sorts of content from around the web” in order to learn how to create its own content. The chief executive of YouTube, which is owned by Google, an OpenAI competitor, said he “had no firsthand knowledge of whether OpenAI had, in fact, used YouTube videos,” but doing so would represent a “clear violation” of the company’s policies. The New York Times reported that OpenAI’s GPT-4 was trained on “more than 1 million hours” of YouTube videos that had been transcribed.

Food delivery meets robot cars

A self-driving car could soon deliver your takeout, said Alex Koller in CNBC.com. Some Uber Eats customers started receiving orders delivered by Waymo self-driving cars in the Phoenix area last week, the first time that the delivery app has used Waymo’s vehicles. Last year, Uber began offering rides in Waymo’s autonomous cars, and it has also experimented with wheeled robots to deliver food. The selfdriving deliveries are optional: Customers can still choose to have their items delivered by a human courier. Human deliveries are usually door-to-door, whereas customers who choose a robot driver will have to meet the car curbside to get their food. On the plus side, “customers will not be charged for tips.”