Search: “screen-time”

Watch out: Apple timepiece can grab snippets of conversation without both speakers' consent

Apple's Watch Series 12 Live Rewind and Siri Recap transcribe nearby conversations without bystander consent, drawing EFF criticism over all-party-consent laws.

Apple Watch Series 12's Audio Intelligence features on the S11 chip include Live Rewind, which transcribes the last 15 seconds of a conversation after a Digital Crown double-press, processing audio in a Secure Exclave and routing it to a nearby iPhone. Siri Recap generates AI summaries of daily conversations without retaining raw audio or attributing speakers. Apple says an audible chime and visual cue alert bystanders, but privacy advocates including the EFF note that 11 US states require all-party consent for recording and that bystanders have no practical way to opt in or decline.

The Register · Security·Sep 10, 19:50 UTC · 5d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

ConnectWise patches critical ScreenConnect authentication failure after five days

ConnectWise patched ScreenConnect flaw CVE-2026-84869 five days after warning files could be transferred and executed via active sessions without authorization.

ConnectWise released ScreenConnect client version 26.6.5 and later to fix CVE-2026-84869, an authentication failure in ConnectWise Remote Access allowing unauthorized file transfer and execution through active remote sessions. The company warned customers on September 3 and advised admins to remove the TransferFiles permission from users with open sessions as an interim mitigation. The advisory does not state that exploitation has been observed.

CSO Online·updated 11:14 UTC · 4h ago·first Sep 11, 16:17 UTC · 4d agoVulnerability 4 sourcesCVE-2026-84869

The SCREEN Act is a Christian Nationalist Nightmare

404 Media·Aug 4, 17:41 UTC · Aug 4, 2026Policy & legal

SMOKE#SCREEN Campaign Abuses ScreenConnect to Give Attackers Remote Control Access

Security Affairs·Aug 9, 11:05 UTC · Aug 9, 2026Threat actor1

Quantifying the Engagement Trap: Impact of Short-form Video Recommender Systems on Users with ADHD

A 302-participant study finds engagement-optimized short-form video recommenders cause disproportionate time blindness and distress for users with ADHD.

Researchers ran a stratified Prolific study with 302 participants comparing short-form video recommendation experiences with and without ADHD. Participants with ADHD reported significantly higher time blindness, post-usage regret, and emotional distress despite perceiving recommendations as similarly relevant. The paper proposes neurodiversity-aware, human-centered design interventions to mitigate these algorithmic harms.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:38 UTC · 8d agoAI research

Realtime-Venus: A full-duplex interaction system with asynchronous delegation

Realtime-Venus introduces two 9B full-duplex interaction models (Omni and Audio) that outperform Gemini 3.1 Live and GPT-4o on continuation metrics.

Realtime-Venus is a proactive full-duplex interaction system built on two separately trained 9B models: Realtime-Venus-Omni for audio-visual interaction and Realtime-Venus-Audio for spoken interaction. A dual-loop runtime lets foreground interaction continue while Realtime-Venus-Harness asynchronously executes background reasoning and tool tasks. Realtime-Venus-Omni leads on six of eight video benchmarks, including StreamingBench (70.2%), OVO-Bench (64.7%), and Daily-Omni (81.3%), while Realtime-Venus-Audio tops MMAU (78.0%) and MMAU-Pro (63.2%). On Full-Duplex-Bench v1.5, Realtime-Venus-Audio handles 75% of interruptions and exceeds Gemini 3.1 Live and GPT-4o on all three continuation metrics.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 11, 20:00 UTC · 4d agoAI research

Diffusion TV: Experiencing Diffusion Models through Tangible, Embodied Interaction

Researchers present Diffusion TV, a CRT-based installation where antenna manipulation lets audiences physically experience diffusion model denoising.

Diffusion TV is an interactive installation built around a modified CRT television where turning the antenna controls the clarity of AI-generated images and sounds, mirroring the denoising process of diffusion models. Three channels present AI-generated animals from the past, present, and future within a temporal and ecological narrative. The authors frame the work as an embodied, non-verbal alternative to explainable AI that highlights intermediate generative states rather than final outputs.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:51 UTC · 11d agoAI research

Can We Stop The Ads? Taxonomy and Characterization of Smartphone Splash Ads and Existing Countermeasures

Study of 108 ad-defense implementations finds only one tool blocked splash-ad navigation across ten popular apps, and it required Accessibility permission.

The paper taxonomizes smartphone splash ads — full-screen ads at app launch that trick users into trigger mechanisms such as moving the phone — and analyzes 108 documented advertising defenses for deployment barriers. Many defenses require device rooting, jailbreaking, runtime code injection, or application modification; others need extra permissions, rule maintenance, compilation, or payment. In evaluating 13 configurations of 11 tools across 10 popular apps, only one prevented ad-triggered navigation across all ten apps, requiring Accessibility permission and leaving ads visible roughly one second before dismissal. Documented harms include delayed emergency response, driver distraction, and degraded accessibility for vision-impaired users.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 15:24 UTC · 1d agoResearch

Modified ScreenConnect Clients Used in Worm-Like Campaign

Huntress warns of worm-like attacks using modified ScreenConnect clients to spread VBScript payloads; ConnectWise issued an advisory.

Campaigns starting in late August use social engineering, including Quick Assist abuse, to install rogue ScreenConnect clients that spawn wscript.exe and deploy four VBScript files for reconnaissance, staging, and PowerShell execution. The attackers persist via User Run Keys, attempt UAC bypass, install UltraViewer, and propagate the VBScript chain to other connected ScreenConnect endpoints. ConnectWise published an advisory about a file transfer behavior issue affecting cloud and on-premises ScreenConnect, with a CVE identifier and fix expected within a week; it recommends disabling file transfer meanwhile.

SecurityWeek·Sep 7, 11:45 UTC · 9d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

LG TV shown scanning LAN for third-party phones and other devices

Security researchers showed LG OLED TVs scan local networks and collect nearby device details, raising privacy concerns for TV owners.

Gamers Nexus, working with Level1Techs and security researchers, used packet captures and Wireshark to show that LG TVs, including the $2,500 OLED65G3PUA and the G5 OLED, scan the local network for phones, smartwatches, and other unconnected devices. The TV's firmware can identify the user's IP address, nearby Wi-Fi network names and signal strength, neighboring channel numbers, and internal IP addresses of other devices. LG Ad Solutions marketing claims reach of 363 million 'addressable secondary devices' in the US, and LG says the scanning supports device connectivity and smart home features. It remains unclear whether the collected data is transmitted to LG for purposes beyond advertising.

Hacker News · security·Sep 8, 22:42 UTC · 7d agoResearchHN 20↑ · 0 comments

Novel-reading apps used users' phones to generate fake ad traffic

Help Net Security·Aug 6, 00:00 UTC · Aug 6, 2026Threat actor1

Rogue ScreenConnect Installations Across Unrelated Hosts Suggest Worm-Like Activity

Huntress observed rogue ScreenConnect deployments with worm-like VBScript propagation across unrelated organizations, prompting a ConnectWise advisory on file transfer behavior.

Huntress identified multiple incidents in late August 2026 where social engineering led to rogue ScreenConnect remote access clients deployed on victim machines, which then spawned wscript.exe to run four VBScript payloads (1.vbs through 4.vbs) for profiling, telemetry collection, and persistence via a WindowsServiceHost Run key. Modified ScreenConnect clients propagated the VBScript chain to connected endpoints, creating worm-like spread. ConnectWise published an advisory on September 3, 2026, confirming an issue affecting file transfer behavior in both cloud and on-premises ScreenConnect deployments, with a CVE and fix expected within the week; partners were advised to review and disable TransferFiles permissions in the interim.

Huntress·Sep 3, 08:50 UTC · 13d agoExploit / PoC in the wild1

Researchers found a way to hijack devices through Zoom screen sharing

Researchers used a public AI tool to find a Zoom flaw enabling device hijacking via screen sharing in under 20 prompts.

Security researchers discovered a serious vulnerability in Zoom that can be used to hijack devices through the screen-sharing feature. The flaw was reportedly found by a publicly available AI tool in fewer than 20 prompts, highlighting the role of agentic AI in vulnerability discovery. The article does not report active exploitation or assign a CVE in the provided text.

Ars Technica · Security·Aug 12, 13:37 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Vulnerability

Apple’s revamped Health app will calculate your ‘health age’ and readiness score

Apple redesigned its Health app with Apple Intelligence-powered Insights, readiness scores, Health Age, and a $119 Quest 50-biomarker lab panel.

Announced alongside the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, the redesigned Apple Health app adds an Insights tab, a readiness score, and a 'Health Age' metric computed from VO2 max, sleep, and blood biomarkers. A partnership with Quest offers a 50-biomarker lab panel for $119. The app also adds movement assessments and a longevity tab, and rolls out later this year in U.S. English.

TechCrunch · AI·Sep 9, 18:16 UTC · 6d agoAI industry

Omni Interaction Agent Technical Report

Researchers release Gander, an end-to-end omni interaction model with full-duplex streaming across video, speech, and text plus agentic capabilities.

Gander is an end-to-end model unifying omni perception, realtime interaction, and agentic capabilities in a single framework, accepting continuously streaming video, speech, and text. It uses a Cerebellum-Brain architecture where the Cerebellum handles realtime conversation and the Brain handles reasoning and agentic tasks, built on a streaming Thinker-Talker design with chunk-level token streams. Internal human evaluations report spoken dialogue on par with SOTA open source models and competitive omni interaction; the models, code, and data are released publicly.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoModel release

What Matters, When? Diagnosing and Improving Conditional Visual Grounding in Visuomotor Imitation Policies

Researchers diagnose conditional visual grounding failures in visuomotor imitation policies and show targeted interventions substantially improve distractor robustness.

The paper studies why ACT-based visuomotor imitation policies fail when visually similar distractor objects or receptacles are introduced, finding sensitivity depends on both distractor type and manipulation stage. Interventions including distractor augmentation, phase-dependent attention regularization, and appearance-based visual prompting improve target selection while preserving spatial control information, with gains in simulation and on a physical UR3e. The same failure pattern is confirmed in a pretrained vision-language-action policy on a state-conditioned medical instrument-handling task.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:27 UTC · 11d agoAI research

Why Is Video Still So Expensive? A Survey of Inference-Efficiency Mechanisms in Video and Audiovisual LLMs

A survey catalogs inference-efficiency techniques for video and audiovisual LLMs, mapping bottlenecks in sampling, encoding, token reduction, and LLM decoding.

This survey covers inference-efficiency mechanisms for visual and audiovisual video LLMs, reporting reductions in parameters, FLOPs, latency, memory, and token counts. It organizes methods by pipeline stage, covering frame sampling, modality encoding, connector-level token reduction, and LLM prefilling and decoding for systems built since late 2022. The authors compile accuracy-cost comparisons under shared host models and input protocols, identify gaps in audiovisual efficiency and standardized evaluation, and maintain a public repository.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 7d agoAI research

Show HN: LLM Attention Visualization

A developer released a browser-based tool that visualizes which past tokens influence each LLM output token using aggregated, value-weighted attention scores.

A Show HN project presents a React application built on Transformers.js that renders per-token attention influence by aggregating attention weights scaled by value-vector magnitudes across all attention heads and layers. To expose internal tensors, the author instrumented the ONNX computation graph, hosted a modified model on Hugging Face, and pre-generated prompts to avoid long model downloads in the browser. Demos with a 600-million-parameter model show how verbatim copying draws heavily on source tokens and how single outputs blend information from multiple phrases.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 8, 16:59 UTC · 7d agoAI tools & infraHN 41↑ · 9 comments

The Attention Triangle in Audio-Video Models

Researchers analyze the 'attention triangle' in audio-video diffusion models, showing bias-driven cross-attention routing causes semantic leakage and proposing inference-time interventions that improve grounding.

A study probes the three cross-attention edges linking text, audio, and video streams in audio-video diffusion models. It finds the audio-video edge is bidirectional and shaped by parameter-encoded biases, so prompts in tension with learned priors can be overridden, producing visually canonical but incorrect outputs. Attention-derived signals are used as diagnostics and to guide inference-time interventions that improve cross-modal semantic grounding while preserving generation quality.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 2, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI research

TRACE: Trajectory-robust Admission with Evidence Ordering for Efficient GUI Agents

TRACE, a training-free visual token pruning framework, cuts GUI agent inference latency and memory while keeping trajectory-wide visual evidence reusable.

TRACE is a training-free framework for trajectory-robust admission and coverage-aware evidence ordering that prunes high-resolution screenshot tokens accumulated in GUI agent trajectories. It ranks visual evidence using a query-independent layout-derived interaction prior combined with instruction relevance and feature novelty, and reserves part of the budget for native tokens distributed across the screen to repair spatial coverage. A monotone KV contraction incrementally compresses retired frames into compact session state, avoiding repeated visual encoding or pruning. Experiments across six GUI benchmarks and diverse models verify effectiveness under tight budgets, with source code to be released.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 7d agoAI research

Vidu S2: Real-Time Interactive, Editable, and Spatial Video Generation

Vidu S2 delivers real-time 720p interactive avatar generation plus real-time video editing with style, clothing, character, and background replacement.

Vidu S2 comprises Vidu S2-Avatar, a real-time interactive digital-character model, and Vidu S2-Editing, a real-time video editing model. S2-Avatar supports real-time 720p generation, dynamic references updatable at any moment, and stronger instruction following such as dancing, while S2-Editing performs real-time style rendering, clothing replacement, character replacement, and background replacement. The work also explores real-time spatial video generation for both models, reports outperforming all baselines, and offers a playable online demo at vidu.com.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoModel release

PACE: Perceived-Latency-Aware Cascading Service Routing and Filler Control for QoE-Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Dialogue Serving

PACE cuts perceived latency in retrieval-augmented dialogue serving via cascading routing and filler control, reaching 0.41s P95 under load.

PACE is a serving framework for retrieval-augmented dialogue that optimizes Perceived Time-to-First-Response (PTFR) under quality and cost constraints. It combines a load-adaptive cascading router, a joint path-filler controller, and volatility-aware cache admission, deployed on a humanoid-robot sales service. On 75k CarQA requests, the cascade halved pure-LLM P95 PTFR (0.29s vs 0.53s) and the adaptive controller reached 0.41s P95, 2.4x better than RAG at high load; filler calls dropped 94% and stale answers fell from 86% to 0%.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:02 UTC · 6d agoAI tools & infra

SenseNova-U1.5: Towards Native Unified Visual Intelligence

SenseTime releases SenseNova-U1.5, an 8B-MoT encoder-free multimodal model unifying visual understanding, reasoning, and generation with native 4K resolution.

SenseNova-U1.5 is an 8B mixture-of-transformers multimodal model with an encoder-free, VAE-free architecture that understands, reasons about, and generates visual content at native resolutions up to 4K. Post-training optimizes specialized experts for visual aesthetics, bilingual text rendering, infographic generation, and image editing, consolidated through multi-expert on-policy distillation. Evaluations report gains in image fidelity, text rendering, multi-reference editing, and instruction following. The team plans to open-source training code including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoModel release

SimpleMemVLA: A Simple but Effective Native-Video Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models

SimpleMemVLA passes full timestamped video history straight to a VLA backbone, setting state of the art on four memory benchmarks.

SimpleMemVLA is a vision-language-action model for long-horizon manipulation that removes the dedicated memory module entirely. It keeps sampled history intact and feeds it to the backbone as timestamped video, with the hidden states of a generated sub-task serving as the only channel into a standard flow-matching action head. Prefilling the shared history prefix during action execution keeps latency close to a single-frame VLA. The system sets a new state of the art on four memory benchmarks and outperforms retrieval, compression and recurrent-state mechanisms, with causal interventions confirming the policy genuinely reads its history.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 1, 20:00 UTC · 14d agoAI research

LG accused of 'egregious invasion of privacy' over TV data collection

Gamers Nexus alleges LG smart TVs record audio and generate transcripts in standby while harvesting location, network, and device data for LG's ads business.

Researchers at Gamers Nexus claim LG smart TVs continued capturing audio after voice recognition activated, including in standby, producing plaintext transcripts, some stored locally and sent after reconnection. Testing reportedly found collection of IP addresses, location data, nearby Wi-Fi network details, and enumeration of unpaired local devices such as phones, routers, and PCs, with data flowing to LG Ads Solutions. The team is coordinating responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities including an alleged remote code execution flaw. LG says its TVs do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations and that voice recognition is optional.

The Register · Security·Sep 8, 14:15 UTC · 8d agoIndustry1

Cyber Security News

Microsoft's September Patch Tuesday fixes nearly 1,000 vulnerabilities; CISA warns two of the flaws are being actively exploited.

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday release addresses close to 1,000 vulnerabilities, with CISA warning that two of the bugs are being actively exploited. The Record's homepage digest also lists briefs including a US offer of $10 million for information on an Iranian hacker accused of attacking critical infrastructure and a leak of health data on more than 9.5 million people from the Aesto record system. Additional briefs cover a Russian suspect's extradition to the US for bank account takeovers, US-British coordination on scam center takedowns, G7 guidance on quantum cyber threats, a large DDoS attack on Norwegian public services, and Slovenian casinos reopening after a cyberattack.

The Record·Sep 9, 20:23 UTC · 6d agoVulnerability in the wild

Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party

Meta filed a patent for AI glasses that identify people via facial recognition and auto-generate highlight reels of events like dinner parties.

A newly published Meta patent describes smartglasses that use facial recognition to detect people in frame, capture video clips of their actions, and compile highlight reels. The filing signals Meta's continued, controversial push to combine facial recognition with its AI glasses line. The patent was published Thursday and offers granular detail on Meta's product plans, though it does not confirm a shipping feature.

404 Media·Aug 14, 14:17 UTC · Aug 14, 2026AI industry

LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices

Gamers Nexus found LG smart TVs record microphone audio in standby, scan home networks, and feed LG Ad Solutions ad targeting.

A 135-minute Gamers Nexus investigation with Level1Techs and independent researchers found retail LG OLED TVs running webOS sweep local networks, gather device names and Wi-Fi metadata, and run Automated Content Recognition. Tests showed the TVs capture clean microphone audio while appearing powered down and store it offline, uploading once reconnected. The team also found RCE vulnerabilities in webOS now moving through responsible disclosure; LG claims 216 million smart TV sales, and its ad unit claims access to 363 million addressable devices in the US.

Hacker News · security·Sep 7, 07:03 UTC · 9d agoResearchHN 1151↑ · 3 comments