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Submission + - Devs Gaining Little (If Anything) From AI Coding Assistants (cio.com) 3

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Code analysis firm Uplevel's recent study of GitHub Copilot use found no major productivity benefits for developers based on key metrics, reports CIO.com's Grant Gross. 'Coding assistants have been an obvious early use case in the generative AI gold rush, but promised productivity improvements are falling short of the mark — if they exist at all. Many developers say AI coding assistants make them more productive, but a recent study set forth to measure their output and found no significant gains. Use of GitHub Copilot also introduced 41% more bugs, according to the study,' Gross writes, adding that in the trenches, reported results are mixed, with few seeing productivity gains and most experiencing a shift to more time on code review. As Gehtsoft's Ivan Gekht puts it: 'It becomes increasingly more challenging to understand and debug the AI-generated code, and troubleshooting becomes so resource-intensive that it is easier to rewrite the code from scratch than fix it.'

Submission + - REvil Ransomware Trial Details Tesla Bribe Attempt as Russia Reduces Charges (thecyberexpress.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: The trial of eight members of the REvil ransomware group in Russia has been a bizarre display of reduced charges, a ruling that limited evidence, and claims of limited help from the U.S., according to a report by the Cyber Express.

REvil, along with the closely affiliated DarkSide, wreaked havoc on U.S. networks and critical infrastructure in 2021, including attacks on Colonial Pipeline, Kaseya, Apple supplier Quanta, and meat supplier JBS.

Only two of the defendants – alleged REvil leader Daniil Puzyrevsky and Ruslan Khansvoyarov – have been charged with anything resembling a ransomware crime: “creation and distribution of malicious programs by a group of persons by prior conspiracy, causing large-scale damage or committed for selfish purposes,” according to Izvestia.

The other six defendants face charges related to bank card theft.

Investigators found a record on Puzyrevsky’s computer with transactions from his Bitcoin wallet, which included a transfer dated May 9, 2021 for 63.7 BTC ($2.3 million), which was 85% of the ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline and was subsequently seized by the U.S. Justice Department.

One of the more interesting revelations to come from the case involved an attempted bribe of a Tesla engineer that led to an arrest in the case.

In the interrogations of witnesses in the case, Yegor Kryuchkov said that in the summer of 2020, Alexey Skorobogatov, who was close to the leaders of REvil, asked Kryuchkov if he had any friends working in large foreign companies. When Kryuchkov said he had an engineer friend at Tesla, REvil offered him $500,000 to hack the company.

Kryuchkov flew to the U.S. to meet with the engineer to convince him to introduce a malicious program into Tesla’s network, “or simply to open a letter sent to corporate mail with a Trojan virus,” said Izvestia.

Kryuchkov met with the Tesla engineer, who wanted $1 million for his efforts. The engineer alerted U.S. law enforcement, and Kryuchkov was arrested by the FBI. Kryuchkov served 10 months, then was deported to Russia to became a witness in the REvil case. Skorobogatov is not one of the defendants in the trial.

Submission + - Trump's Truth Social Is Going Public (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Former president Donald Trump’sTruth Social, a shameless Twitter clone, is set to become a publicly traded company as soon as next week. Shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp. voted on Friday to merge with Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. The vote is aculmination of a years-long sagaattempting to merge Trump Media with a publicly traded company in what’s known as a SPAC deal. The company will trade under the ticker DJT once it goes public. [...]

Truth Social looks nearly identical to Twitter, with some key distinctions. Instead of “tweeting,” users post a “truth.” A “retweet” is called a “retruth.” Unlike many right-wing Twitter clones, the site functions well, has remained mostly online, and actually appears to have a somewhat active user base. But since launching in February 2022, after Trump was kicked off of mainstream platforms for inciting violence during the January 6 riot at the Capitol, the company has been mired in controversy. The site is exactly what one might expect from a Trump-inspired social network. Groups dedicated to QAnon, election deniers, and other conspiracies are easy to find. And in October 2022, Will Wilkerson, one of Trump Media’s senior employees,filed a whistleblower complaintwith the Securities and Exchange Commission, claiming that the company had made “fraudulent representations” in violation of federal securities laws. Wilkerson was fired shortly after filing the complaint. The SEC eventually approved the merger proposal in February.

Submission + - Nvidia CEO Says Kids Shouldn't Learn to Code - They Should Leave It Up to AI 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Asked at the recent World Government Summit in Dubai what people should focus on when it comes to education, what they should they learn, and how they should educate their kids and their societies, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a counterintuitive break with tech CEOs advising youngsters to learn how to code. Huang argued that, even at this early stage of the AI revolution, programming is no longer a vital skill. With coding taken care of by AI, Huang suggested humans can instead focus on more valuable expertise like biology, education, manufacturing, or farming

From the video: "You probably recall over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you it is vital that your children learn computer science, everybody should learn how to program, and in fact it's almost exactly the opposite. It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language, it's human, everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle, this is the miracle of artificial intelligence. For the very first time, we have closed the gap, the technology divide has been completely closed and it's the reason why so many people can engage artificial intelligence. It is the reason why every single government, every single industrial conference, every single company is talking about artificial intelligence today. Because for the very first time you can imagine everybody in your company being a technologist.

"And so, this is a tremendous time for all of you to realize that the technology divide has been closed. Or another way to say it, the technology leadership of other countries has now been reset. The countries, the people that understand how to solve a domain problem in digital biology, or in education of young people, or in manufacturing or in farming, those people who understand domain expertise now can utilize technology that is readily available to you. You now have a computer that will do what you tell it to do to help automate your work, to amplify your productivity, to make you more efficient. And so, I think that this is just a tremendous time. The impact of course is great and your imperative to activate and take advantage of the technology is absolutely immediate. And also to realize that to engage AI is a lot easier now than at any time in the history of computing. It is vital that we upskill everyone and the upskilling process, I believe, will be delightful, surprising, to realize that this computer can perform all these things that you're instructing it to do and doing it so easily."

Huang's words come as tech-backed nonprofit Code.org — which is lobbying to make CS a high school graduation requirement in all 50 states — hedges its bets by also including AI usage as part of its mission through its new TeachAI initiative (trademark pending). Interestingly, conspicuous by its absence from the Who's Who of tech giants on the advisory committee for the Code.org staffed-and-operated TeachAI is Nvidia (Nvidia is also missing from the list of Code.org donors). So, is it time to revisit the question of Is AI an Excuse for Not Learning To Code?

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