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  • Personalized AI companion app Dot is shutting down

    Personalized AI companion app Dot is shutting down

    Dot, an AI companion app that aimed to be a friend and confidante, is shutting down, the company announced on Friday. On a message published on its website, the startup behind Dot, New Computer, said that the product will remain operational until October 5, giving users time to download their data.

    Launched in 2024 by co-founders Sam Whitmore and former Apple designer Jason Yuan, Dot waded into what’s now become a more controversial area for AI chatbots. The app they created was described as an AI “friend and companion,” which would become more personalized to you and your interests over time in order to offer advice, sympathy, and emotional support.

    As Yuan explained at the time, Dot was “facilitating a relationship with my inner self. It’s like a living mirror of myself, so to speak,” he said.

    However, this may not be a safe area to invest in as a smaller startup.

    As AI technology has become more mainstream, there have been reports of how emotionally vulnerable people have been led into delusional thinking by AI chatbots like ChatGPT. This has led to a phenomenon described as “AI psychosis,” resulting from how the scyophantic chatbots reinforce a user’s confused or paranoid beliefs.

    As Dot shuts down, AI chatbot apps broadly have been falling under increased scrutiny over safety concerns. OpenAI is currently being sued by the parents of a California teenager who took his life after messaging with ChatGPT about his suicidal thoughts. Other stories have highlighted how AI companion apps can reinforce unhealthy behaviors in users who are mentally unwell. This week, two U.S. attorneys general sent a letter to OpenAI over safety concerns.

    Dot’s makers didn’t address whether these types of issues had weighed on the founders’ minds. Instead, the brief post only notes that Whitmore and Yuan’s shared “Northstar” had diverged.

    “Rather than compromise either vision, we’ve decided to go our separate ways and wind down operations,” the post explains.

    “We want to be sensitive to the fact that this means many of you will lose access to a friend, confidante, and companion, which is somewhat unprecedented in software, so we want to give you some time to say goodbye. Dot will remain operational until October 5, and until then you can download all of your data by navigating to the settings page and tapping ‘Request your data.’”

    The post suggests the startup had “hundreds of thousands” of users, but data from app intelligence provider Appfigures sees only 24,500 lifetime downloads on iOS since launching in June 2024. (There was no Android version.)

  • Norway spy chief blames Russian hackers for hijacking dam

    Russian hackers briefly hijacked a dam in Norway in early April and spilled millions of gallons of water before the attack was stopped, Norway’s spy chief revealed Thursday.

    The hackers opened a floodgate at the Bremanger dam in western Norway to release the equivalent of about three Olympic-sized swimming pools of water during the four hours they had control of the dam’s computer systems. 

    Beate Gangås, the head of Norway’s security police service, blamed the cyberattack on Russian hackers during a speech on Thursday, reports Norwegian media.

    The Russian embassy reportedly denied involvement in the breach, per Reuters.

    This is the latest incident allegedly involving Russian hackers sabotaging Western energy systems in recent years. Russia was previously blamed for cyberattacks on Ukraine’s power grid that led to widespread blackouts in 2015 and 2016. Russia-backed hackers have long targeted the energy sector.

  • Security researcher maps hundreds of TeslaMate servers spilling Tesla vehicle data

    Security researcher maps hundreds of TeslaMate servers spilling Tesla vehicle data

    A security researcher has found over a thousand publicly exposed hobby servers run by Tesla vehicle owners that are spilling sensitive data about their vehicles, including their granular location histories.

    Seyfullah Kiliç, founder of cybersecurity company SwordSec, said he found over 1,300 internet-exposed TeslaMate dashboards on the internet, likely made public by mistake, allowing anyone to access the person’s Tesla data stored inside without needing a password.

    TeslaMate is an open source data logger that allows Tesla owners to self-host and visualize their vehicle’s data from their own computers, such as their vehicle’s temperature, battery health, and charging sessions, but also more sensitive information, like vehicle speed and the location data of recent trips. 

    In a blog post, Kiliç said he scanned the internet for public-facing TeslaMate dashboards and scraped the vehicle’s last-seen location and Tesla model names, and visualized the vehicles on a map to show their locations. 

    “You’re unintentionally sharing your car’s movements, charging habits, and even vacation times with the entire world,” wrote Kiliç.

    Kiliç told TechCrunch that this was to raise awareness of the number of exposed servers, and urged TeslaMate users to secure their dashboards.

    “The goal was to show Tesla owners and the open source community that without basic [authentication] or firewall rules, sensitive data (GPS, charging, trips) can be leaked,” said Kiliç.

    While not a new problem, Kiliç shows that the number of exposed TeslaMate dashboards has gone up significantly since the last count back in 2022, when a security researcher at the time found dozens of public TeslaMate dashboards exposed to the web. 

    Now, more than three years later, another security researcher has found more than a thousand self-hosted TeslaMate servers on the web and mapped them, showing that the problem has seemingly gotten worse.

    TeslaMate’s founder, Adrian Kumpf, told TechCrunch in 2022 that a bug fix was rolled out that aimed to protect against public access to customers’ dashboards, but warned that the project could not protect against users accidentally exposing their TeslaMate servers to the internet. 

    Kiliç said TeslaMate users should enable authentication on their servers to prevent public access.

    “If you plan to run TeslaMate on a public-facing server, you must secure it,” wrote Kiliç.