1. These days and nights, Demis Hassabis is taking on a new role after a recent leadership shuffle at Google DeepMind, but he’s working as hard as ever on artificial general intelligence. He thinks of AGI as a system with the full cognitive range of the human brain—not just some of our capabilities but all of them. Earlier this year, he felt AGI was still three to five years away. Now he expects AGI within two to three years. “It’s soon,” he tells me. “I’m updating nearer and nearer.” (Sources: nobelprize.org, wsj.com)
2. Chinese scientists have developed a 100-channel single-photon detector, a breakthrough promising to pave the way for broadband quantum networks. State-of-the-art single-photon detectors – essential components underpinning photonic quantum technologies – could previously support a maximum of 32 detection channels for photon signals. Now, a newly developed interconnect scheme by a Shanghai-based team has broken this bottleneck, supporting more than 100 detection channels while maintaining accurate and stable operation. “This work establishes a robust and scalable infrastructure, paving the way for large-scale quantum photonic applications,” the authors said in their paper. Achieved by researchers at the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology (SIMIT) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the breakthrough was published in the peer-reviewed journal Laser & Photonics Reviews in late September. (Sources: scmp.com, sim.cas.cn, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi )
3. The internet (had) a bad day yesterday, from a cybersecurity perspective. Government websites around the world went offline, Reuters reported, after AI discovered critical security vulnerabilities that impacted the programming language PHP. The issues were severe enough that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) advised organizations using PHP on their systems to either immediately update or take their systems offline until they could. But the PHP update wasn’t the only headache cybersecurity folks were facing on Wednesday. Node.js, the open-source JavaScript runtime environment, also dropped a security surprise of its own when it shared that four high-severity vulnerabilities were just patched in its latest release. One allowed remote code execution, and two others would have permitted a TLS validation bypass, potentially allowing attackers to bypass checks intended to verify a server’s identity. (Sources: techcrunch.com, reuters.com, wsj.com. More on this here.)
4. Wired:
The internet’s mad scramble on Wednesday to patch a pair of critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a widely used web scripting language, was already too late to stop every attack, newly released details reveal.
Wednesday’s release of fixes for two critical vulnerabilities in PHP caused administrators and security staff to race to identify and patch vulnerable websites and apps, while attackers inevitably reverse engineered the fixes to learn how to exploit the flaws. Some governments and other groups even proactively took key websites down in anticipation of the release, so they wouldn’t be targeted before they could apply the patches.
