Over 100,000 infected GitHub repositories have been discovered in a widespread attack campaign. Security experts say attackers are tricking developers into using compromised copies of legitimate projects to spread malware that steals sensitive data. Researchers using Grand Theft Auto and AI to turn dog photos into 3D models. Apple CEO Tim Cook has revealed the company's plans to "break new ground" in generative AI across its products this year.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

Over 100,000 Infected GitHub Repositories Found

Security experts discovered over 100,000 infected GitHub project repositories in a large-scale attack. Attackers are tricking programmers into using harmful copies of legitimate repositories.

How The Attack Works

• Copy real GitHub repositories

• Inject malware into the copies

• Upload identical infected copies to GitHub

• Automatically duplicate infected copies thousands of times to spread more widely

When used, the infected repositories unpack hidden malware that steals sensitive information like passwords. It then sends the stolen data back to the attacker's command and control server.

By automatically duplicating repositories, the attackers are able to avoid GitHub's detection systems. This enables thousands of malicious repositories to remain publicly available.

The campaign began similarly in May 2023 with attacks on the PyPI package manager. As attention increased on securing package managers, the attackers shifted focus to exploit GitHub's massive scale and niche repositories where mistakes are more likely to occur.

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Grand Theft Auto and AI help team turn dog pics into 3D models

Researchers from the University of Surrey have developed a new AI method to create 3D models of dogs from regular photographs. Their approach involves training a neural network pose estimator using a dataset of 27,900 CGI dog images extracted from a modified version of the video game Grand Theft Auto V.

Key Points:

• Despite being trained solely on synthetic images, the model can generalize to estimate 3D poses from real dog photos. This demonstrates the value of large simulated datasets for training robust computer vision models.

• The technical approach utilizes an encoder-decoder convolutional neural network architecture to map between image pixels and 3D skeletal joint locations.

• It surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods on established 2D and 3D dog pose estimation benchmarks.

Potential applications for this 3D geometry reconstruction capability include ecology, conservation, animation, and virtual worldbuilding. Overall the work showcases how combining synthetic computer graphics with deep learning can enable high-performing cross-domain AI vision models.

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Tim Cook says Apple will ‘break new ground’ in GenAI this year

During Apple's annual shareholder meeting on February 28th, CEO Tim Cook stated that Apple will "break new ground" in generative AI this year. This confirms Apple is accelerating investment in AI that can generate content like text, images, and video.

Cook said Apple will launch multiple generative AI features across its products and services "later this year." Potential areas of focus include:

• Upgrades to Siri

• Enhanced Spotlight search capabilities

• New features in apps like Apple Music and Keynote

Apple engineers have published various generative AI research papers recently in areas like computer vision and natural language processing. The company also open sourced AI tools like Ferret (a chatbot model) and MGIE (for image editing via language commands). Additionally, Apple researchers are collaborating more with external scientists on papers as well.

Scaling up generative AI at Apple will require substantial computing power. Apple's Neural Engine and other custom AI chips will likely be key to running advanced models efficiently on devices. Software and services optimizations will also help enable complex generative AI functions.

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🔥 More Notes

• Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s practically paying people to buy the Mirai

• Google Cloud integrates Gemini into Stack Overflow

• UnitedHealth confirms ransomware gang behind Change Healthcare hack amid ongoing pharmacy outages

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