Tag Archives: Biz & IT

Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key.

One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system. The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open… Read More »

How to know if your Asus router is one of thousands hacked by China-state hackers

Thousands of Asus routers have been hacked and are under the control of a suspected China-state group that has yet to reveal its intentions for the mass compromise, researchers said. The hacking spree is either primarily or exclusively targeting seven models of Asus routers, all of which are no longer supported by the manufacturer, meaning… Read More »

Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand

While AI bubble talk fills the air these days, with fears of overinvestment that could pop at any time, something of a contradiction is brewing on the ground: Companies like Google and OpenAI can barely build infrastructure fast enough to fill their AI needs. During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head… Read More »

HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs

The OEMs disabling codec hardware also comes as associated costs for the international video compression standard are set to increase in January, as licensing administrator Access Advance announced in July. Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24… Read More »

Massive Cloudflare outage was triggered by file that suddenly doubled in size

Cloudflare’s proxy service has limits to prevent excessive memory consumption, with the bot management system having “a limit on the number of machine learning features that can be used at runtime.” This limit is 200, well above the actual number of features used. “When the bad file with more than 200 features was propagated to… Read More »

Critics scoff after Microsoft warns AI feature can infect machines and pilfer data

The goals are sound, but ultimately they depend on users reading the dialog windows that warn of the risks and require careful approval before proceeding. That, in turn, diminishes the value of the protection for many users. “The usual caveat applies to such mechanisms that rely on users clicking through a permission prompt,” Earlence Fernandes,… Read More »

Tech giants pour billions into Anthropic as circular AI investments roll on

On Tuesday, Microsoft and Nvidia announced plans to invest in Anthropic under a new partnership that includes a $30 billion commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft’s cloud services. Nvidia will commit up to $10 billion to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5 billion, with both companies investing in Anthropic’s next funding round. The… Read More »