Tag Archives: Features

300 percent price hikes push disgruntled VMware customers toward Broadcom rivals

Dean Colpitts, CTO at Canadian VMware customer and managed services provider Members IT Group, shared similar sentiments, adding that “Broadcom simply is not listening to what customers say they want or need” when it comes to VMware products and features, especially those related to small and medium-sized businesses. VMware Enterprise Edition costs for Illinois’ Lake… Read More »

The sad, bizarre tale of hype fanning fears modern cryptography was slain

PRESENT, GIFT64, and RECTANGLE: All three are lightweight block ciphers designed for use in “constrained” environments, such as those in embedded systems that require more speed and fewer computational resources than is possible using AES. All three are based on an SPN structure and are proposed academic designs. The related GIFT-128 is a component of… Read More »

Finally upgrading from isc-dhcp-server to isc-kea for my homelab

Broken down that way, the migration didn’t look terribly scary—and it’s made easier by the fact that the Kea default config files come filled with descriptive comments and configuration examples to crib from. (And, again, ISC has done an outstanding job with the docs for Kea. All versions, from deprecated to bleeding-edge, have thorough and… Read More »

Invisible text that AI chatbots understand and humans can’t? Yep, it’s a thing.

With the character block sitting unused, a later Unicode version planned to reuse the abandoned characters to represent countries. For instance, “us” or “jp” might represent the United States and Japan. These tags could then be appended to a generic 🏴flag emoji to automatically convert it to the official US🇺🇲 or Japanese🇯🇵 flags. That plan… Read More »

Due to AI fakes, the “deep doubt” era is here

Memento | Aurich Lawson reader comments 17 Given the flood of photorealistic AI-generated images washing over social media networks like X and Facebook these days, we’re seemingly entering a new age of media skepticism: the era of what I’m calling “deep doubt.” While questioning the authenticity of digital content stretches back decades—and analog media long… Read More »

My dead father is “writing” me notes again

Enlarge / An AI-generated image featuring my late father’s handwriting. Benj Edwards / Flux reader comments 14 Growing up, if I wanted to experiment with something technical, my dad made it happen. We shared dozens of tech adventures together, but those adventures were cut short when he died of cancer in 2013. Thanks to a… Read More »

Secure Boot is completely broken on 200+ models from 5 big device makers

sasha85ru | Getty Imates reader comments 114 In 2012, an industry-wide coalition of hardware and software makers adopted Secure Boot to protect against a long-looming security threat. The threat was the specter of malware that could infect the BIOS, the firmware that loaded the operating system each time a computer booted up. From there, it… Read More »

Google’s “AI Overview” can give false, misleading, and dangerous answers

Enlarge / This is fine. Getty Images reader comments 80 If you use Google regularly, you may have noticed the company’s new AI Overviews providing summarized answers to some of your questions in recent days. If you use social media regularly, you may have come across many examples of those AI Overviews being hilariously or even… Read More »

OpenAI winds down AI image generator that blew minds and forged friendships in 2022

Enlarge / An AI-generated image from DALL-E 2 created with the prompt “A painting by Grant Wood of an astronaut couple, american gothic style.” reader comments 39 When OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 debuted on April 6, 2022, the idea that a computer could create relatively photorealistic images on demand based on just text descriptions caught a… Read More »