Google DeepMind AI finds its way through a 3D maze by ‘sight’

Google DeepMind has already conquered the world of Go, but its next accomplishment may be walking around in a game of Doom or GoldenEye 007. The artificial intelligence system successfully navigated a 3D maze without cheating — it didn’t have access to the digital world’s internal code. Instead, it walked around walls and into rooms by “sight,” as New Scientist reports.

In the maze, DeepMind is rewarded for finding apples and portals as it attempts to get a high score in just one minute. DeepMind moves around the labyrinth via a reward-based method — asynchronous reinforcement learning — and a neural network that recognizes patterns in the digital space. Yep, DeepMind actually learns from its past experiences. However, the asynchronous method doesn’t rely on examining previous run-throughs, a process that takes a ton of computing power. Instead, asynchronous reinforcement learning allows the system to see multiple outcomes at once and choose the most efficient path forward.

Google DeepMind used a similar reinforcement learning method in 2015 to play a handful of classic Atari games. The team has since improved and streamlined that program, allowing the AI to advance to the latest Doom-like maze.

Source: New Scientist

Google’s AI will take on the world Go champ live on YouTube

Google’s victory over a top Go player was unprecedented, but can its artificial intelligence program DeepMind beat the world champion? We’ll find out starting on March 9th, when DeepMind’s “AlphaGo” program takes on South Korea’s Lee Sedol in a $1 million match. It will be broadcast live on YouTube from Seoul, according to the founder & CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis. “It is a real privilege and honor to be playing the greatest Go player of the past decade, and a legend of the game,” he said.

Thrilled to officially announce the 5-game challenge match between #AlphaGo and Lee Sedol in Seoul from March 9th-15th for a $1M prize!

— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) February 4, 2016

Until recently, AI programs could only beat very low-level players, which made DeepMind’s victory over Fan Hui such a surprise. Because of the nearly infinite moves possible in the game, DeepMind doesn’t try to calculate ahead like chess computers do. Rather, programmers “taught” it the strategies used by Go masters, then had it play numerous virtual games to reinforce them.

DeepMind topped three time European champ Fan Hui, who is ranked as a “2 dan” player. However, Lee Sedol is ranked in the stratospheric “9 dan” category, so he’ll provide a more formidable challenge. “I have heard that Google DeepMind’s AI is surprisingly strong and getting stronger, but I am confident that I can win, at least this time,” said Lee. By saying “this time,” Lee is nodding to the rapid progress that Google has made in the complex game — experts had predicted it would take another ten years for computers to beat master Go players. The match will take place between March 9-15, and Google’s Hassabis will reveal more details about the livestream soon.

Via: BBC

Source: Demis Hassabis (Twitter)

Google keeps you safe from sneaky download buttons on the web

For years now, Google’s been working hard to make the internet less dangerous. That’s why the company has announced a new feature to strengthen its Safe Browsing initiative. The goal with this one, Google says, is to protect users from deceptive embedded content on the web, such as sketchy advertising banners with fake download buttons. From here on out, if a site’s trying to be sneaky, you’ll see the warning pictured above.

Here’s how Google breaks down the social engineering policy, for those of you who are developers:

1. Pretend to act, or look and feel, like a trusted entity — like your own device or browser, or the website itself.
2. Try to trick you into doing something you’d only do for a trusted entity — like sharing a password or calling tech support.

In other words, stick by the rules or be prepared for your visitors to be warned before they even show up to your site. You can check out a couple of examples below.

Via: Fast Company, Ars Technica

Source: Google

Google to push anti-ISIS ads in extremist search results

If you find yourself doing a Google search for terms related to Islamic extremism, you might soon see anti-ISIS ads persuading you to pursue a different path. According to a report written by The Guardian, Google is using its AdWords program to serve up counter narrative advertising from select non-profits whenever anyone enters in search terms that are related to ISIS or Islamic radicalization. Google says even though it’ll surface those ads more prominently, that it won’t redirect users or change the search results.

“We should get the bad stuff down, but it’s also extremely important that people are able to find good information, that when people are feeling isolated, that when they go online, they find a community of hope, not a community of harm,” said Anthony House, a senior manager for public policy and communications at Google to a home affairs select committee hearing in the UK.

On top of jiggering these search results, Google is also promising to make counter radicalization videos easier to find on YouTube. Last month, government officials met with top tech companies in Silicon Valley to seek help in fighting ISIS on the digital front. Facebook, for example, has stated that it hopes to use its system of flagging suicidal users to also flag users who show signs of radicalization.

Via: Mashable

Source: The Guardian

Google engineer finds holes in three ‘secure’ browsers

It appears no anti-virus or security software is safe from Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy. After recently exposing holes in products from Trend Micro and AVG, the bug hunter has recently gone public with three issues found in software offered by security firms Avast, Comodo and Malwarebytes that allow attackers to access unsuspecting users’ PCs.

For Avast, Ormandy identified that its Avastium browser (a fork of Google Chromium) allowed an attacker to “read any file on the filesystem by clicking a link.” The exploit involved using a specially-crafted JavaScript web page that could bypass built-in checks and potentially allow a malicious party to read cookies and email. The issue was first disclosed on December 8th, but Avast released a patched version of its browser on February 3rd.

It’s a similar story for Comodo’s Internet Security software and its Chromodo browser. When users install the software suite, their existing Chrome installation is replaced with Comodo’s own. It was meant to be “private,” but it wasn’t. When it’s executed, “all shortcuts are replaced with Chromodo links and all settings, cookies, etc are imported from Chrome. They also hijack DNS settings, among other shady practices,” notes Ormandy.

While Chrome operates a same-origin policy, which ensures that only scripts from the same website can access from each other, Chromodo disabled that protection and left users open to having their private data sniffed by malevolent websites. However, eWeek reports that the fault wasn’t with the browser, but an add-on. Comodo director Charles Zinkowski says the company released a new version of the browser without the add-on on February 3rd, which has fixed the issue for all users.

In the case of Malwarebytes, Ormandy found that its Anti-Malware browser wasn’t downloading updates securely, which could leave users open to a man-in-the-middle attack. An attacker could mimic the company’s built-in checks and run their own code on a user’s machine. The issue was severe enough for Malwarebytes CEO Marcin Kleczynski to address it on the company blog, but it could take up to four weeks for them to fix it.

Google’s Project Zero discloses vulnerabilities from companies that use the Chromium browser to launch their own secure browsers. The browsers tend to ship alongside anti-virus software and the temptation for vendors is to overwrite users’ existing settings to better protect them. As you can see, those methods often disable protections within the browser, leaving some users more vulnerable than before they installed the security tool.

Source: Avast, Comodo, Malwarebytes