All posts tagged: Audit

How to audit what ChatGPT knows about you – and reclaim your data privacy

How to audit what ChatGPT knows about you – and reclaim your data privacy

Published by skeptic

Bloomberg / Contributor/ Bloomberg via Getty Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. If you’re one of the 900 million people who reportedly use ChatGPT every week, the chatbot might be a staple of life. Maybe it helps you get work done or come up with meal plans. You might even consult it whenever you have a scuffle with a friend or family member.  But as you turn to ChatGPT for increasingly more in your life, you may want to re-evaluate how much personal information you’re disclosing along the way. Ideally, you know not to disclose sensitive financial information — but other details about you could also be worth shielding.  Also: I put GPT-5.5 through a 10-round test: It got a near-perfect score (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) Privacy experts are already sounding the alarm about the potential harms of saying too much to your chatbot. The underlying concern is that no one is …

Frontier models are failing one in three production attempts — and getting harder to audit

Frontier models are failing one in three production attempts — and getting harder to audit

Published by skeptic

AI agents are now embedded in real enterprise workflows, and they’re still failing roughly one in three attempts on structured benchmarks. That gap between capability and reliability is the defining operational challenge for IT leaders in 2026, according to Stanford HAI’s ninth annual AI Index report. This uneven, unpredictable performance is what the AI Index calls the “jagged frontier,” a term coined by AI researcher Ethan Mollick to describe the boundary where AI excels and then suddenly fails. “AI models can win a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad,” Stanford HAI researchers point out, “but still can’t reliably tell time.”  How models advanced in 2025 Enterprise AI adoption has reached 88%. Notable accomplishments in 2025 and early 2026:  Frontier models improved 30% in just one year on Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE), which includes 2,500 questions across math, natural sciences, ancient languages, and other specialized subfields. HLE was built to be difficult for AI and favorable to human experts. Leading models scored above 87% on MMLU-Pro, which tests multi-step reasoning based on 12,000 human-reviewed questions …

Don’t Quit Your Job, Audit It

Don’t Quit Your Job, Audit It

Published by Jenni Sidey

Most of us can’t afford to walk away from our jobs. A 2025 consumer survey by PYMNTS Intelligence found that 71 percent of Americans say they live paycheck to paycheck. When you’re covering rent, groceries, childcare, and insurance, the idea of quitting a job you don’t like isn’t bold or inspiring; it’s unrealistic. Yet this reality creates a quiet psychological trap. If we can’t leave our jobs, it’s easy to assume we’re stuck living without purpose until retirement. That assumption is wrong. Even if you dislike your job, purpose doesn’t have to wait until evenings, weekends, or some distant “someday.” Purpose can often be built within the work you’re already doing. The key word here is built. Purpose Is Built, Not Found We often talk about purpose as if it’s something hidden out in the world waiting to be discovered, like buried treasure. But in my experience, purpose rarely appears fully formed. More often, it emerges from activities that spark curiosity, energy, or meaning. When we spend more time doing those activities, purpose begins to …

Mullvad’s New WireGuard Implementation Put to the Test in Latest Audit

Mullvad’s New WireGuard Implementation Put to the Test in Latest Audit

Published by skeptic

No major vulnerabilities were found in Mullvad’s latest independent security audit, the company said in a blog post on Friday. An audit of Mullvad’s new WireGuard implementation, GotaTun, was conducted by Gothenburg-based Assured Security Consultants between Jan. 19 and Feb. 15, 2026.  The latest audit is Mullvad’s 18th overall since 2017, and further cements the VPN’s position as one of the most transparent in the industry. Among CNET’s top VPN picks, only ExpressVPN has out-audited Mullvad, with 23 audits commissioned since 2018. Specifically, Assured Security Consultants completed a code audit of GotaTun, Mullvad’s implementation of the WireGuard connection protocol, written in Rust. The audit consisted of a source code review and testing of the entire GotaTun implementation, excluding Mullvad’s AI-traffic analysis blocking DAITA code and its command line interface. Although auditors found no major vulnerabilities in the code, they did flag two security issues of low-risk severity.  The first issue had to do with how GotaTun handled session identifier generation. Auditors noted that GotaTun generated the session identifiers through a 24-bit Linear Feedback Shift Register, …

FBI eyes Arizona Senate audit of 2020 Maricopa County election

FBI eyes Arizona Senate audit of 2020 Maricopa County election

Published by Sam Flores

People deposit their mail-in ballots for the US presidential election at a ballot collection box in Phoenix, Arizona on October 18, 2020. Robyn Beck | Afp | Getty Images A federal grand jury issued a subpoena for records of the Arizona state Senate’s audit of 2020 election results in Maricopa County, the Senate president said Monday. The county is a Democratic stronghold that President Donald Trump lost that year, contributing to his loss of the state to former President Joe Biden. “The FBI has the records,” wrote Senate President Warren Petersen, a Republican, in a post on the social media site X, which said he received a subpoena for those records last week and that he complied with it. The issuance of the subpoena suggests that the Department of Justice has expanded its investigation into the 2020 election results and much-debunked allegations by Trump and supporters of his that he was cheated out of victory that year by widespread ballot fraud. The subpoena came about five weeks after the FBI raided an election facility in …

Shadow mode, drift alerts and audit logs: Inside the modern audit loop

Shadow mode, drift alerts and audit logs: Inside the modern audit loop

Published by skeptic

Traditional software governance often uses static compliance checklists, quarterly audits and after-the-fact reviews. But this method can’t keep up with AI systems that change in real time. A machine learning (ML) model might retrain or drift between quarterly operational syncs. This means that, by the time an issue is discovered, hundreds of bad decisions could already have been made. This can be almost impossible to untangle.  In the fast-paced world of AI, governance must be inline, not an after-the-fact compliance review. In other words, organizations must adopt what I call an “audit loop”: A continuous, integrated compliance process that operates in real-time alongside AI development and deployment, without halting innovation. This article explains how to implement such continuous AI compliance through shadow mode rollouts, drift and misuse monitoring and audit logs engineered for direct legal defensibility. From reactive checks to an inline “audit loop” When systems moved at the speed of people, it made sense to do compliance checks every so often. But AI doesn’t wait for the next review meeting. The change to an …

Macron’s pick to audit the French budget is the person who wrote it – POLITICO

Macron’s pick to audit the French budget is the person who wrote it – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Eric Coquerel, a lawmaker from the hard-left France Unbowed who chairs the National Assembly’s finance committee, said in a post on X that the danger had nothing to do with de Montchalin personally but the serious conflict of interest her nomination represents. “Everyone understands the danger that this institution, one in which the French people have confidence, would face,” Coquerel said. De Montchalin, 40, would also be guaranteed job security until the mandatory retirement age of 68, prompting speculation that her appointment was also a way to prevent a future president from the far-right National Rally, which is the front-runner in next year’s presidential race, from filling the post. Macron faced similar accusations on Monday following the news that Bank of France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau would quit his job in June. Had Villeroy seen out his term, the succession would have been in the gift of whoever follows Macron as president. National Rally heavyweight Jean-Philippe Tanguy suspected as much, saying: “I spend my life telling people that Macronism is illiberal and uses democracy …

I used smart plugs to audit my home’s energy use — here’s what I found

I used smart plugs to audit my home’s energy use — here’s what I found

Published by skeptic

Upgrading your smart home devices can help you transform how you interact with where you live. You can turn on your smart TV with voice commands through a smart speaker or set up automations to have lights go on at certain times of the day to deter thieves from thinking you aren’t home. Smart home gadgets are supposed to make your life easier and make your home more efficient. Essentially, smart home devices are also making your home better. A way to do that is to ensure your home is using its energy as efficiently as possible. This is where energy-monitoring smart plugs can come into play. These can track the usage of energy for the outlets that they’re plugged into, letting you know how much energy is being consumed at certain times. It can set you up to better understand your home. I’ve been using energy-monitoring plugs and have been impressed by how effective they are. Related The Easy Fixes That Slashed My Home Energy Bill Use these energy-saving strategies to lower energy costs. …

Arthur Terry academy trust did no internal audit

Arthur Terry academy trust did no internal audit

Published by skeptic

Trouble-hit Arthur Terry Learning Partnership could receive a further £1 million in emergency funding Trouble-hit Arthur Terry Learning Partnership could receive a further £1 million in emergency funding A trouble-hit academy trust has admitted it did not conduct internal financial checks as its deficit swelled to more than £8 million and it received another government loan to keep it afloat.  Accounts for the Arthur Terry Learning Partnership show the 24-school MAT could also receive a further £1 million in emergency funding.  Schools Week previously revealed how Arthur Terry had racked up seven-figure losses after purchasing iPads as part of an initiative to provide 11,000 devices for all pupils and staff.  The news comes after another major trust pulled itself out of six-figure deficit and into a surplus of more than £1 million.  Deficit grows In 2024, Arthur Terry was issued with a notice to improve by the DfE on financial grounds after being offered a £1.5 million government loan and posting an almost £4 million deficit.  But 2024-25 accounts, published this week, show it received more …

After Audit, Baltimore’s Lewis Museum Says It’s On Road to Compliance

After Audit, Baltimore’s Lewis Museum Says It’s On Road to Compliance

Published by Jenni Sidey

The leadership of Baltimore’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture is working to iron out problems uncovered in an August 15 audit by the Maryland Department of Legislative Services, according to a report in the Baltimore Sun. The audit uncovered serious irregularities. It found charges on the museum’s corporate credit card that were “without a readily apparent business purpose.” It found two instances in which payments were made to an employee’s PayPal account. A former employee was instructing visitors to pay him for parking personally, and keeping the cash. And the museum had a practice of pre-signing a number of blank checks for emergency purposes, and stored unsigned blank checks in an unsecured office.  Related Articles Only a small amount of money, a total of $10,115, was unaccounted for between April 2021 and January 2025. The museum’s annual budget is $6.3 million.  The Lewis is a quasi-governmental stage agency, the only Baltimore museum to be classified as such, says the Sun, which notes that taxpayers provide up to half the …