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It's a marketing move to lure more affiliates, says infosec veteran

The latest marketing ploy from the ransomware crooks behind the Qilin operation involves offering affiliates access to a crack team of lawyers to ramp up pressure in ransom negotiations.…

Jak se při nákupu ojetého vozu nenechat napálit? Karel Kilián radí, co a jak si o automobilu můžete zjistit přes internet. Je toho překvapivě hodně a všechny tyto informace vám pomohou vyhnout se špatnému nákupu. Problémů s ojetinami se totiž vyskytuje celá řada. Aby prodejci na oko vylepšili ...

​Microsoft is investigating a known OneDrive issue that is causing searches to appear blank for some users or return no results even when searching for files they know they've already uploaded. [...]

Cloudflare says it mitigated a record-breaking distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in May 2025 that peaked at 7.3 Tbps, targeting a hosting provider. [...]

On Friday, American insurance giant Aflac disclosed that its systems were breached in a broader campaign targeting insurance companies across the United States by attackers who may have stolen personal and health information. [...]

20. června 2010 se v severním Mexiku zřítila vojenská helikoptéra Bell 412, v sousedním Polsku se konaly prezidentské volby a lidstvo se poprvé dozvědělo o existenci hudebního nástroje vuvuzela. V Jihoafrické republice totiž pomalu vrcholilo fotbalové mistrovství světa. Ta největší událost ...

Ministerstvo průmyslu a obchodu (MPO) vyjádřilo podporu předložení projektu AI Gigafactory CZ, který do veřejné konzultace Evropské komise zaslala společnost České Radiokomunikace (CRA) v rámci iniciativy Project AIGF CZ. Jde o významný krok k rozvoji výpočetní infrastruktury pro umělou inteligenci (AI), která je prioritou resortu. Projekt je v souladu s cíli Národní strategie umělé inteligence ČR 2030 a je již součástí návrhu Akčního plánu 2025+, který MPO připravilo a který obsahuje 86 opatření. Obrovská počítačová centra, která chce postavit Evropská unie, mají pomoci posílit pozici EU v globální soutěži v oblasti AI. V rámci iniciativy AI Continent je pro tzv. AI gigatovárny vyčleněno až 20 miliard eur (téměř 496 miliard Kč), přičemž 65 % nákladů má pokrýt soukromý investor. Evropská komise spolu s Evropským společným podnikem pro vysoce výkonnou výpočetní techniku (EuroHPC JU) vyzvala 9. dubna 2025 veřejné i soukromé subjekty, aby se zapojily do konzultace o budoucnosti AI Gigafactories. Půjde o rozsáhlá zařízení, jejichž smyslem je poskytovat kapacity a podílet se na vývoji a trénování složitých AI modelů v bezprecedentním měřítku. Budou integrovat masivní výpočetní výkon na úrovni 100 000 H100 pokročilých AI procesorů. V české žádosti je kromě CRA dále zapojeno i stávající české superpočítačové centrum IT4Innovations.

Self-service password resets (SSPR) reduce helpdesk strain—but without strong security, they can open the door to attackers. Learn why phishing-resistant MFA, context-aware verification, and risk-based detection are critical to secure SSPR implementation. [...]

Contactless payments such as Apple Pay and sustainability in inventory control are going to get much easier with an upcoming update to the Near Field Communications (NFC) standard that will make devices connect more swiftly and support the Digital Product Passport (NDPP) specification.

The first problems the new standard solves are range and reliability. At present, standard NFC supports a range of up to 0.2 inches and the connections aren’t always robust. What that means to most of us is the need to wriggle your iPhone or Apple Watch around a little to gain connection to the payment terminal. The improved NFC increases that range to to about 3/4 of an inch for all devices and makes the connection a little more resilient; the standard is also a little faster, which means once you authorize a payment it will take place faster than it already does.

Faster connections, easier payments, and more

That range and reliability improvements aren’t just for mobile payments, of course. If you use your iPhone as a car key or have mobile transit cards in your Apple Wallet, you should get a much better experience when opening doors or catching public transit. The NFC update also comes as Apple prepares to introduce expanded support for digital IDs and in-store payments with iOS 16. The latter is interesting because while the NFC Forum didn’t say anything about it, the update does support more complex transactions over NFC — that should make it easier to use supermarket loyalty cards at the same time as Apple Pay in a single tap. The Forum calls these, “multi-purpose tap use cases where a single tap unlocks multiple functions.”

NFC Release 15 is also expected to advance new and exciting use cases, such as using your mobile phone as a payment terminal, championing sustainability and optimizing NFC use across a variety of sectors, including automotive, transit and access control. There is also support for a new feature that has been designed to meet emerging sustainability regulations: NFC Digital Product Passport (NDPP)

What is NDPP and is it safe?

Aimed at manufacturers, NDPP is a framework to allow a single NFC tag embedded in a product to store and transmit both standard and extended Digital Product Passport (DPP) data using NFC. That data includes information such as a product’s composition, origin, environmental, lifestyle, and recycling details. Most hardware manufacturers will need to begin capturing this kind of information under an incoming EU law known as the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). The information is meant to be made available to customers, business users and recyclers and designed to boost transparency and sustainability. It will be interesting, for example, to use DPP inside future iPhones to determine where the device and its components originate – and it might be fun to explore refurbished devices to see whether components installed to return them to use have been used in different devices previously. 

That said, this kind of unique device information does sound like the kind of data that could be abused for device fingerprinting and user tracking; is there a risk of this?

Age of consent

I contacted Mike McCamon, the organization’s executive director, for more background on NDPP. I was particularly curious about the NDPP specification — could it be abused for digital device fingerprinting? That’s unlikely, said McCarmon, in part because of the nature of NFC design, which has been developed from day one to require active consent from the user.

“Security and privacy are foundational aspects of our work at the NFC Forum,” he said. “The NFC Digital Product Passport (NDPP) Specification can be thought more of a container of content than being fully descriptive of what content is included.” The support should extend use of NFC in different ways, such as in supply chain management, inventory control, or effective recycling strategies, all of which may benefit from the kind of information NDPP provides.

“And of course, even with our new extended range…, NFC Forum-capable products must be in the closest of proximity to be read. This is in addition to most NFC functionality today on mobile devices and wearables, which is only accessible following a direct user action – like a double-tap for instance. For these and the reasons above, we believe NFC Forum standards will provide the most capable, intuitive, and secure data carrier of DPP data for the market.”

For the rest of us

Millions of people use NFC every day for payments, car and hotel rooms, or even travel. That means the new NFC standard will deliver measurable benefits to consumers because it should work better than it does now. And for enterprises, the extended support for Multi-Purpose Taps should make for a variety of product and service development possibilities, particularly as Apple opens up access to NFC on its devices.

The NFC Release 15 is currently available to high-level NFC Forum member companies, including Apple, Google, Sony, and Huawei, who can now implement the improvements in their own products in advance of a public release as new iPhones appear in fall.

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Microsoft has announced plans to periodically remove legacy drivers from the Windows Update catalog to mitigate security and compatibility risks. [...]

LG UltraFine 40WT95UF bude skvělý pro produktivitu, ale potěší i hráče. • Nabízí rozlišení 5120 x 2160 px, 120 Hz a široké pokrytí barevného prostoru DCI-P3. • Disponuje Thunderboltem 5 a má hromadu dalších konektorů.

Nové číslo časopisu Raspberry Pi zdarma ke čtení: Raspberry Pi Official Magazine 154 (pdf). S podtitulem Automatizace domácnosti.

Services coming back online after legacy systems compromised

Oxford City Council says a cyberattack earlier this month resulted in 21 years of data being compromised.…

Sam Altman mluvil o budoucnosti OpenAI a modelu GPT-5. • Novinka dorazí v létě, ale nakonec možná nebude tak přelomová. • Firma totiž postupně zlepšuje i stávající modely a generační skoky se zmenšují.

Americký prezident Donald Trump podepsal exekutivní příkaz, který prodlužuje lhůtu pro prodej amerických aktiv aplikace TikTok vlastněné čínskou společností ByteDance do amerických rukou o dalších 90 dnů. Americký Kongres loni v dubnu kvůli bezpečnostním obavám přijal zákon, podle kterého měl vstoupit v platnost zákaz sítě TikTok v USA v případě, že se prodej neuskuteční do 19. ledna. Trump však v lednu lhůtu pro prodej prodloužil o 75 dnů. V dubnu pak přikročil k prodloužení o dalších 75 dnů, lhůta tak měla vypršet dnešním dnem.

Microsoft hodlá zrušit další tisíce pracovních míst, a to především v obchodních odděleních. Předchozí kolo propouštění se uskutečnilo v květnu a dotklo se 6000 zaměstnanců. Vedení firmy již dříve upozornilo, že vzhledem k rozsáhlým investicím do umělé inteligence (AI) se bude snažit omezovat výdaje v jiných oblastech.

In a move that could redefine the boundaries between generative AI (genAI) and intellectual property, Disney and Universal have joined forces to file a lawsuit against Midjourney, one of the world’s most popular AI image generators. 

You may think you’ve heard this story before — The New York Times‘ 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft and News Corp. vs. Perplexity — but this case is different. For one thing, this is the first time major Hollywood studios with far more cash to prosecute the case have directly targeted a genAI company for copyright infringement. For another, Disney and Universal are both big AI users.

Disney and Universal allege that Midjourney’s platform is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” With Midjourney, all a subscriber need do to create unauthorized images of iconic characters such as Darth Vader, Elsa, the Minions, Shrek, and many others is to type in a prompt.

Original ‘Iron Man’ image is on the left; genAI-created image is on the right. 

Disney/Universal lawsuit

Original image is on the left; genAI image is on the right. 

Disney/Univeral lawsuit

There’s no question anyone can do it. If you don’t feel like trying it yourself, just look at some of the images in the Disney/Universal lawsuit complaint (shown above).

Can you tell which ones are the original from Avengers: Infinity War and which were generated by Midjourney? I can’t, and I have a good eye for this kind of thing. GenAI image creation has come a long way since all you had to do was count the number of fingers. (The originals are on the left.)

This didn’t require some kind of fancy prompt. As researchers have found, all you had to do to generate them was name the character and use the keyword “screencap,” and you quickly received your fake image. Or you could simply ask for “master super villain” or “armored superhero.” 

“This is not a ‘close call’ under well-settled copyright law,” the lawsuit claims. 

Correct. It’s not close at all.

In the company’s defense — if you can call it that — Midjourney CEO David Holz is on record as saying his AI has been trained on  “just a big scrape of the Internet.” What about copyrights on these images? 

“There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from. It would be cool if images had metadata embedded in them about the copyright owner or something. But that’s not a thing; there’s not a registry. There’s no way to find a picture on the Internet, and then automatically trace it to an owner and then have any way of doing anything to authenticate it.”

I think when it comes to Disney, it’s pretty darn obvious who owns the images. I mean, this is Disney, the big bad wolf of copyright. After Walt Disney lost the copyright to his earlier character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, he made darn sure that, starting with Mickey Mouse in 1928, he’d lock down its intellectual property for as close to forever as he could.

Indeed, over the decades, Disney has been behind laws to increase copyright coverage from a maximum of 56 years in 1928 to 75 years with the Copyright Act of 1976, and then 95 years with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998, better known as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” 

Disney has also never been shy about suing anyone who’d dare come close to their copyrighted images.  For example, in 1989, Disney threatened legal action against three daycare centers in Hallandale, FL., for painting murals of Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy on their walls. 

Why? Because it’s all about the Benjamins. 

Disney, and to a lesser extent Universal, live and die from monetizing their intellectual property (IP). Mind you, much of that IP is generated from the public domain. As the Center for the Study of the Public Domain noted: “The public domain is Disney’s bread and butter. Frozen was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. … Alice in Wonderland, Snow White, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and Pinocchio came from stories by Lewis Carroll, The Brothers Grimm, Victor Hugo, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, and Carlo Collodi.”

What Disney did with the public domain, MidJourney, and the rest of the AI companies want to do with pretty much everything on the Internet. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for instance,  has consistently argued that training genAI on copyrighted data should be considered “fair use.” He’s not alone.

On the other side of the fence, Disney and Universal’s lawsuit is not just about damages, which the pair puts at $150,000 per infringed work, but about setting a precedent. They want to stop Midjourney’s image and soon-to-be-launched video generation services in their tracks.

At the same time, the film studios freely admit they’re already using genAI themselves. Disney CEO Bob Iger has said the technology is already making Disney’s operations more efficient and enhancing creativity. “AI might indeed be the most potent technology our company has ever encountered, particularly in its capacity to enhance and allow consumers to access, experience, and appreciate our entertainment.” He also, of course, stressed that, “Given the speed that it is developing, we’re taking precautions to make sure of three things: One, that our IP is being protected. That’s incredibly important.”

This lawsuit is more than a Hollywood squabble; it’s a watershed moment in the ongoing debate over genAI, copyright, and the future of creative work. Previous cases have challenged the boundaries of fair use and data scraping, but none have involved the entertainment industry’s biggest players.

It might seem like a slam dunk for the Hollywood powerhouses. The images speak for themselves. But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in covering IP cases, it’s that you never know what a court will decide.

Besides, there’s a real wild card. Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan is still a work in progress. The AI companies are arguing that it should give them permission to use pretty much anything as grist for their large language models (LLMs), while the media companies want all the copyright protection they can get. 

Which way will Trump’s officials jump? We don’t know. But I have a bad feeling about where they’ll go.

You see, what we do know is that after the Copyright Office released a pre-publication version of its 108-page copyright and AI report, which strived to strike a middle ground  “by supporting both of these world-class industries that contribute so much to our economic and cultural advancement.” However, it added that while some generative AI probably constitutes a “transformative” use, the mass scraping of all data did not qualify as fair use.

The result? The Trump administration, while not commenting on the report, fired Shira Perlmutter, the head of the Copyright Office, the next day. She’s been replaced by an attorney with no IP experience. 

Oh, also, hidden away in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is a statement that imposes a 10-year ban on the enforcement of any state or local laws or regulations that “limit, restrict, or otherwise regulate” AI  models, AI systems, or automated decision systems. If that becomes law, whatever is in Trump’s AI Action Plan is what we’ll have to live with for the next few years.

As an author, I can’t tell you how unhappy that prospect makes me. I expect Trump to side with the AI companies, which means I can look forward to competing with my own repurposed work from here on out. 

Further reading:

• AI vs. copyright
• Court tosses hallucinated citation from Anthropic’s defense in copyright infringement case
• Eleuther AI releases 8TB collection of licensed and open training data
  

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Raketa Hondy letěla přesně a bezpečně přistála • Cílem jsou levnější a častější cesty do vesmíru • Japonsko podporuje soukromé firmy v kosmickém závodu