A single 1976 $4.01 cheque from (and signed by) Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has been sold at auction for a whopping $46,063.

The cheque, written just four months after Apple was founded, was written for a purchase at Radio Shack, where co-founder Steve Wozniak famously bought a TRS-80 Micro Computer System.

The components from the computer were used by Wozniak to help build the ‘blue box’ which could enable users to make free long-distance phone calls. Beginning in 1972 the pair reportedly sold around 200 of the blue boxes for $150 each and this was the first commercial collaboration between Jobs and Wozniak.

Steve Jobs is quoted as saying: “If it hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes, there would have been no Apple. I’m 100% sure of that.” 

Toyota Financial Services (TFS), a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation, has warned customers that it recently suffered a data breach which exposed sensitive personal and financial data.
The correspondence with affected customers follows Toyota confirming last month that unauthorised access on some of its Europe (and Africa) systems had been detected. Medusa ransomware reported that it was behind Toyota’s system being compromised and issued Toyota with an $8,000,000 ransom request to have the stolen data deleted.
The advice from TFS to its customers is to contact their bank to take additional security precautions, add 2FA to their online accounts, monitor any unusual activities, and obtain a current credit report from Schufa (a German credit rating agency). Toyota has also said that it has informed the responsible state data protection officer (for North Rhine-Westphalia) in compliance with GDPR.

Berlin-based green search engine company Ecosia has released a chatbot with a “green answers” option and ploughs all its advertising profits into tree-planting.

Ecosia AI Chat  

The not-for-profit company, which has been developing its “green search” since 2019 to help users make climate-active decisions about what/who they click on has announced the introduction of its Ecosia AI Chat feature. Ecosia says the “green filter” AI chatbot, currently in beta and available in select countries, means “technology could be harnessed for good.” Ecosia Chat, which is powered by a large language model AI (from OpenAI), is a chatbot designed to help users be more climate-active daily and gives sustainability-focused responses.

Uses The Green Persona 

The new chatbot, incorporated into its search offers users a “green answers” option which triggers a layered green persona that can provide users with more sustainable results and answers. For example, Ecosia says “You can ask it to plan a climate action weekend or write a Shakespeare sonnet about trees – the possibilities are virtually unlimited.” 

Independent 

Ecosia is one of the first independent search engines to roll out its own generative AI chatbot and is keen to emphasise the chatbot’s low carbon footprint, and how this aligns with the company’s environmental commitment.

Tree-Planting 

One of the key elements of Ecosia’s environmental focus is using all the profits from the advertising on its search engine to fund tree-planting around the world, which it gives regular updates about on its website. For example, this month, its update features news from its tree-planting partner Symagine Solutions in West Bengal, South-East India that more than one million trees from 23 species have been planted by Ecosia community over the past two years.

In addition to tree-planting, Ecosia also says that it puts profits into producing enough solar energy to power all its searches twice over.

Other Green Features 

Other green features that Ecosia includes in its search engine results to enable users to make more conscious decisions include:

– Placing a green leaf icon alongside the websites of planet-friendly organisations.

– Placing a fossil fuel icon next to “some of the most destructive actors” such as banks who are financing fossil fuels.

COP28 In Dubai 

The announcement of Ecosia’s latest green search features came just before the beginning of COP28 in Dubai, the latest Climate Change Conference, which Ecosia has criticised saying “we got together with climate activists to hold COP28 accountable.” 

Hallucinations 

Despite Ecosia AI Chat’s green features, like many other new AI chatbots, it’s been reported that it suffers sometimes giving out incorrect information, i.e. AI hallucinations.

What Does This Mean For Your Organisation? 

Considering that the UN recently reported that the world was on track for a 3°C rise in temperatures within this century, despite the COP21 (2015) Paris Agreement establishing measures to keep the global rise in temperatures well below 2°C, it’s not surprising that Ecosia’s been critical of COP28 being held in Dubai. For example, as Ecosia points out, COP28’s president, Sultan Al Jaber, is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company ADNOC.  That aside, Ecosia is non-profit, putting its money where its mouth is with a green-matters-first approach (putting profits into tree planting), and with Ecosia being powered by solar energy (in addition to its green search filtering) it has some clear differentiating factors in the AI chatbot market that may be valued by many users. The fact that it’s one of the rare independents (not openly linked to the big players) may also help its credentials and traction.

Clearly, Ecosia’s boss, Christian Kroll, believes that AI has opened up the market more for smaller independents and believes his very different offering will enable him (and perhaps others) to target a global increase within search engine market share that they wouldn’t have been able to before AI chatbots came along. The choice offered to users by rule-changes brought about by the EU Digital Markets Act from March 2024 may also favour companies like Ecosia as consumers will be able to choose which browsers, search engines, and virtual assistants they install, perhaps to align with their environmental concerns.

That said, Ecosia faces some tough competition from more established generative AI chatbots and new ones which are being introduced thick and fast. Also, Ecosia would probably admit that being powered by an OpenAI LLM means that it doesn’t have full control over just how ‘green’ its chatbot is, and that it doesn’t have the answer to solving the bigger issue of how much energy and water generative AI chatbots use. Specifically, they create huge energy and cooling demands at the data-centre level. Also, it could be argued that planting trees (although beneficial) is not stopping all the carbon from being produced in the first place (a criticism of offsetting). However, Ecosia’s very different green offering is likely to be attractive to many people going forward and could put the organisation in a good position to take advantage of law changes that could favour it next year.

If you’d like to save time and conveniently view various types of files like PDFs, images, and text documents directly in the browser, eliminating the need for multiple separate applications, here’s how to use Google Chrome as simple, all-purpose, drag and drop file viewer:

– Open a new tab in Chrome.

– Drag and drop a document or image file into the tab.

– Chrome will display the file, allowing you to view PDFs, images, text files, and even some video and audio files without needing a separate application.

Following on from the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard (and Duet), Microsoft’s Copilot, and X’s Grok, now Amazon has announced that it will soon be launching its own ‘Q’ generative AI chatbot (for business).

Cue Q 

Amazon has become the latest of the tech giants to announce the introduction of its own generative AI chatbot. Recently announced at the Las Vegas conference for its AWS, ‘Q’ is Amazon’s chatbot that will be available as part of its market-leading AWS cloud platform. As such, Q is being positioned from the beginning as very much a business-focused chatbot with Amazon introducing the current preview version as: “Your generative AI–powered assistant designed for work that can be tailored to your business.” 

What Can It Do? 

The key point from Amazon is that Q is a chatbot that can be tailored to help your business get the most from AWS. Rather like Copilot is embedded in (and works across) Microsoft’s popular 365 apps, Amazon is pitching Q as working across many of its services, providing better navigation and leveraging for AWS customers with many (often overlapping) service options. For example, Amazon says Q will be available wherever you work with AWS (and is an “expert” on patterns in AWS), in Amazon QuickSight (its business intelligence (BI) service built for the cloud), in Amazon Connect (as a customer service chatbot helper), and will also be available in AWS Supply Chain (to help with inventory management).

Just like other AI chatbots, it’s powered by AI models which in this case includes Amazon’s Titan large language model. Also, like other AI chatbots, Q uses a web-based interface to answer questions (streamlining searches), can provide summaries, generate content and more. However, since it’s part of AWS, Amazon’s keen to show that it adds value by doing so within the context of the business it’s tailored to and becomes an ‘expert’ on your business. For example, Amazon says: “Amazon Q can be tailored to your business by connecting it to company data, information, and systems, made simple with more than 40 built-in connectors. Business users—like marketers, project and program managers, and sales representatives, among others—can have tailored conversations, solve problems, generate content, take actions, and more.” The 40 connectors it’s referring to include popular enterprise apps (and storage depositories) like S3, Salesforce, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, Gmail, Slack, Atlassian, and Zendesk. The power, value, and convenience that Q may provide to businesses may also, therefore, help with AWS customer retention and barriers to exit.

Benefits 

Just some of the many benefits that Amazon describes Q as having include:

– Delivering fast, accurate, and relevant (and secure) answers to your business questions.

– Quickly connecting to your business data, information, and systems, thereby enabling employees to have tailored conversations, solve problems, generate content, and take actions relevant to your business.

– Generating answers and insights according to the material and knowledge that you provide (backed up with references and source citations).

– Respecting access control based on user permissions.

– Enabling admins to easily apply guardrails to customise and control responses.

– Providing administrative controls, e.g. it can block entire topics and filter both questions so that it responds in a way that is consistent with a company’s guidelines.

– Extracting key insights on your business and generating reports and summaries.

– Easy deployment and security, i.e. it supports access control for your data and can be integrated with your external SAML 2.0–supported identity provider (Okta, Azure AD, and Ping Identity) to manage user authentication and authorisation.

When, How, And How Much? 

Q’s in preview at the moment with Amazon giving no exact date for its full launch. Although many of the Q capabilities are available without charge during the preview period, Amazon says It will be available in two pricing plans: Business and Builder. Amazon Q Business (its basic version) will be priced at $20/mo, per-user, and Builder at $25/mo, per-user. The difference appears to be that Builder provides the real AWS expertise plus other features including debugging, testing, and optimising your code, troubleshooting applications and more. Pricewise, Q is cheaper per month/per user than Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Duet (both $30).

Not All Good 

Despite Amazon’s leading position in the cloud computing world with AWS, and its technological advances in robotics (robots for its warehouses), its forays in space travel (with Amazon Blue) and into delivery-drone technology, it appears that it may be temporarily lagging in AI-related matters. For example, in addition to being later to market with this AI chatbot ‘Q’, in October, a Stanford University index ranked Amazon’s Tital AI model (which is used in Q) as bottom for transparency in a ranking of the top foundational AI models with only 12 per cent (compared to the top ranking Llama 2 from Meta at 54 per cent). As Stanford puts it: “Less transparency makes it harder for other businesses to know if they can safely build applications that rely on commercial foundation models; for academics to rely on commercial foundation models for research; for policymakers to design meaningful policies to rein in this powerful technology; and for consumers to understand model limitations or seek redress for harms caused.” 

Also, perhaps unsurprisingly due to Q only just being in preview, some other reports about it haven’t been that great. For example, feedback about Q (leaked from Amazon’s internal channels and ticketing systems) highlight issues like severe hallucinations and leaking confidential data. Hallucinations are certainly not unique to Q as reports about and admissions by OpenAI about ChatGPT’s hallucinations have been widely reported.

Catching Up 

Amazon also looks like it will be makingeven greater efforts to catch up in the AI development world. For example, in September it said Alexa will be getting ChatGPT-like voice capabilities, and it’s been reported that Amazon’s in the process of building a language model called Olympus that could be bigger and better than OpenAI’s GPT-4!

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Although a little later to the party with AI chatbot, Amazon’s dominance in the cloud market with AWS means it has a huge number of business customers to sell its business-focused Q to. This will not only provide another revenue stream to boost its vast coffers but will also enhance, add value to, and allow customers to get greater leverage from the different branches of its different cloud-related services. What with Microsoft, Google, X, Meta, and others all having their own chatbot assistants, it’s almost expected that any other big players in the tech world like Amazon would bring out their own soon.

Despite some (embarrassing internal) reviews of issues in its current preview stage and a low transparency ranking in a recent Stanford report, Amazon clearly has ambitions to make fast progress in catching up in the AI market. With its market power, wealth, and expertise in diversification and its advances in technologies like space travel and robotics and the synergies it brings (e.g. satellite broadband), you’d likely not wish to bet against Amazon making quick progress to the top in AI too.

Q therefore is less of a standalone chatbot like ChatGPT (OpenAI and former workers have helped develop AI for others) and more of Copilot and Duet arrangement in that it’s being introduced to enhance and add value to existing Amazon cloud services, but in a very focused way (more so for Builder) in that it’s “trained on over 17 years’ worth of AWS knowledge and experience”.

Despite Q still being in preview, Amazon’s ambitions to make a quantum leap ahead are already clear if the reports about its super powerful, GPT-4 rivalling (still under development) Olympus model are accurate. It remains to be seen, therefore, how well Q performs once it’s really out there and its introduction marks another major move by a serious contender in the rapidly evolving and growing generative AI market.

Following the Metro recently highlighting the issue of undisclosed cameras being used by a small number of Airbnb hosts, we take a look at what the rules say, reports in the news of this happening, and what you can do to protect yourself.

Do Airbnb Hosts Have The Right To Film Guests? 

You may be surprised to know that the answer to this question is yes, hosts do have the right to install surveillance devices in certain areas of their properties (which may result in guests being filmed) but this is heavily regulated and restricted for privacy reasons.

When/Where/Why/How Is It OK For Hosts To Film Guests? 

The primary legitimate reason for hosts to install surveillance devices is for security purposes. They are not allowed to use them for any invasive or unethical purposes. Airbnb’s community standards, for example, emphasise respect for the privacy of guests and any violation of these standards can lead to the removal of the host from the platform.

Clear Disclosure 

Airbnb’s company rules say that monitoring devices (e.g. cameras), may be used, but only if they are in common spaces (such as living rooms, hallways, and kitchens) and then only if Airbnb hosts disclose them in their listings. In short, if a host has any kind of surveillance device, they must clearly mention it in their house rules or property listing so that guests are made aware of these devices before they book the property.

What About Local Laws? 

It is also the case that although disclosed cameras in common spaces on a property may be OK by the company’s rules, Airbnb hosts must also adhere to local laws and regulations regarding surveillance. This can vary widely from place to place and, in some regions, recording audio without consent is illegal, whereas video might be permissible if disclosed.

Hidden Cameras 

Even though Airbnb rules are relatively clear, there appears to be anecdotal and news evidence that some Airbnb guests have discovered undisclosed surveillance devices in areas of Airbnb properties where they should not be installed. Examples that have made the news include:

– Back in 2019, it was reported that a couple staying for one night at an Airbnb property in Garden Grove, California discovered a camera hidden in a smoke detector directly above the bed.

– In July 2023, a Texas couple were widely reported to have filed a lawsuit against an Airbnb owner, claiming he had put up ‘hidden cameras’ in the Maryland property they had rented for 2 nights in August 2022. According to the Court documents of Kayelee Gates and Christian Capraro, the couple became suspicious after Capraro discovered multiple hidden cameras disguised as smoke detectors in the bedroom and bathroom.

– Last month, a man (calling himself Ian Timbrell) alleged in a post on X that he had found a camera tucked between two sofa cushions at his Aberystwyth Airbnb.

Wouldn’t It Be Better To Disallow Any Cameras Inside An Airbnb Rental Property? 

Banning all cameras at Airbnb rental properties might initially seem like a straightforward solution to privacy concerns, yet there are important factors to consider around this. Some hosts may legitimately need to use common areas such as entrances, for security purposes (perhaps the property is in an area where crime has been a problem) and they need to deter theft and vandalism and provide evidence if a crime occurs. On the other hand, a complete ban on cameras would address the privacy concerns of guests, ensuring they feel comfortable and secure during their stay.

Airbnb’s current policy attempts to balance security and privacy by allowing cameras in certain areas while requiring full disclosure and banning them in private spaces like bedrooms and bathrooms. However, enforcing a complete ban on cameras would be very challenging, as hidden cameras are, by nature, difficult to detect and even if there was a ban, some owners may simply not comply. The Airbnb model is built on trust between hosts and guests, and clear communication and transparency about security measures, including camera usage, are crucial for maintaining this trust. While a total ban on cameras might seem like a simple solution to privacy concerns, it overlooks the legitimate security needs of hosts. A balanced approach with clear guidelines and strict enforcement might be more effective in protecting both guest privacy and host security.

How To Check 

If you’re worried about possibly being filmed/recorded by hidden and undisclosed surveillance devices in a rented Airbnb property, here are some ways you can search the property and potentially reveal such devices:

– Inspect any gadgets. Check smoke detectors or alarm clocks as they are known as places to hide cameras. Examine any other tech that seems out of place. You may also want to check the shower head.

– Search for Lenses. For example, making sure the room is dark, use a torch (such as your phone’s torch) to spot reflective camera lenses in objects like decor or appliances.

– Use phone apps like Glint Finder for Android or Hidden Camera Detector for iOS to find hidden cameras.

– Check storage areas, e.g. examine drawers, vents, and any openings in walls/ceilings.

– Check mirrors. Many people worry about the two-way mirrors with cameras behind them. Ways to check include lifting any mirrors to see the wall behind, turning off the room light and then shining a torch into the mirror to see if an area behind is visible.

– Check for infrared lights (which can be used in movement-sensitive cameras). Again, this may be spotted by by using your phone’s camera in the dark, and then looking out for any small, purple, or pink lights that may be flashing or steady.

– Scan the property’s Wi-Fi network and smart home devices for unknown devices.

– Unplug the Airbnb property’s router. Stopping the Wi-Fi at source should disable surveillance devices and may reveal whether the owner is monitoring the property, e.g. it may prompt the host to ask about the router being unplugged.

– If you’re particularly concerned, buy and bring an RF signal detector with you. Widely available online, this is a device that can find any devices emitting Bluetooth or Wi-Fi signals, e.g. wireless surveillance cameras, tracking devices and power supplies.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

The issue of undisclosed cameras in Airbnb properties raises important considerations for Airbnb as a company, its hosts, and travellers. For Airbnb, the challenge lies in upholding and enforcing privacy standards to maintain user trust. This could involve enhancing their policies, perhaps even investing in technology or an inspection process for better detection of undisclosed devices, and/or providing more reassuring information about the issue, thereby safeguarding guest security, ensuring host accountability, and helping to protect their brand reputation.

It should be said that most Airbnb hosts abide by the company’s rules but are caught in a delicate balancing act between providing security and respecting the privacy of their guests. Any misuse of surveillance devices can, of course, have serious legal consequences and potentially harm a host’s reputation and standing on the platform. However, even just a few stories in the news about the actions on one or two hosts can have a much wider negative effect on consumer trust in Airbnb and can be damaging for all hosts. It could even simply deter people from using the platform altogether.

For some travellers, this situation may make them feel they must proactively take the responsibility for their own privacy (which may not reflect so well on Airbnb). They may feel as though they need to be informed about their rights, familiarise themselves with detection methods and remain vigilant during their stays.

This whole scenario emphasises the need for a continuous update of policies and practices by Airbnb to keep pace with technological advancements and the varying legal frameworks in different regions. It also highlights the importance of clear communication and transparency between the company, its hosts, and guests to maintain a trustworthy and secure environment.