Tech Tok: Was CoWIN data breached?

Several reports suggest information of Indian citizens was made available on Telegram

On Monday, social media platforms were flooded with shocking reports about alleged breaches of sensitive user data from the CoWIN portal. CoWIN is a healthcare website developed by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to help with and digitize the process of Covid vaccination.

Several news reports suggested that the personal information of Indian citizens who registered on the website was being made available on Telegram. Some also shared screenshots of the private information of noted personalities on Twitter to support this claim.

---

This personal information included gender, birth year, name of the vaccination centre, c voter ID, and PAN card numbers.

Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that the CoWin app “does not appear to be directly breached”. He also said that the data was being accessed by a bot from the threat actor database, which seems to have been populated with previously stolen data. While the government dismissed this data theft saying it is “without any basis”, many accused the authorities of lousy maintenance of sensitive user information.

Meta releases AI-powered music generator

Meta released its artificial intelligence-powered music generator called MusicGen, which will turn text descriptions and melodies into audio. The company also released the code and models for open research, reproducibility, and the music community.

MusicGen is trained on 20,000 hours of music, including 10,000 high-quality licensed music tracks and 3,90,000 instrument-only tracks from the ShutterStock and Pond5 stock media libraries. However, Meta isn’t the first to offer an AI-powered music generator tool. In May, Google released MusicLM — an experimental AI tool that can generate high-fidelity music in any genre given a text description.

Reddit faces outage amid protests

Amid subreddits’ protest against the company’s new application programming interface (API) pricing changes, social discussion platform Reddit faced a brief outage on Monday. The issue which caused problems while loading content, was fixed the following day.

Following the new API pricing, more than 6,000 subreddits have gone dark, including many of the platform’s most-subscribed communities. Other social media platforms were also rife with discussions about the Reddit pricing issue.

Last week, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman confirmed that the company is not planning to revive its coming API pricing changes. Now react to comments in Microsoft Word

Users of the Word documents can now react to comments like the reactions feature in Outlook as Microsoft is soon launching a feature to enable that.

The company is incorporating a Like button into Word, designed to make it easier for users to respond to comments. According to Windows Central, the feature is rolling out to Current Channel (Preview) users running Version 2305 or later and is already available for web users and Beta Channel users.

Google’s ‘Vertex’ now available to everyone

Google has announced that its generative AI support on the Vertex AI platform is now available for everyone. This will provide Google Cloud customers access to the company’s latest platform capabilities for building and powering custom generative AI applications. The tool’s Model Garden allows users to access and experiment with foundation models from Google and its partners, with over 60 models available and more to come.

— Epsita Gunti