Australia’s National Broadband Network is in trouble, shedding 500 staff to cut costs and with declining subscriber numbers as telcos tout rival 5G wireless broadband services. For years, the differences between the NBN and our own ultrafast broadband (UFB) have been stark, with the Australian effort to extend high-speed internet access to the bulk of […]
Monthly Archives: March 2023
Journalist plugs in unknown USB drive mailed to him—it exploded in his face
Enlarge / Ecuadorian police tweeted this picture of officials investigating a drive mailed to a journalist in Guayaquil. reader comments 49 with Share this story It’s no secret that USB flash drives, as small and unremarkable as they may look, can be turned into agents of chaos. Over the years, we’ve seen them used to […]
Ethical AI art generation? Adobe Firefly may be the answer
Enlarge / An Adobe Firefly AI image generator example. reader comments 50 with Share this story On Tuesday, Adobe unveiled Firefly, its new AI image synthesis generator. Unlike other AI art models such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, Adobe says its Firefly engine, which can generate new images from text descriptions, has been trained solely […]
These new tools let you see for yourself how biased AI image models are
One theory as to why that might be is that nonbinary brown people may have had more visibility in the press recently, meaning their images end up in the data sets the AI models use for training, says Jernite. OpenAI and Stability.AI, the company that built Stable Diffusion, say that they have introduced fixes to […]
Windows 10 and 11 get their own version of the “acropalypse” screenshot bug
Enlarge / Windows 10 and 11 have their own version of the Acropalypse screenshot editing bug. acropalypse.app/Andrew Cunningham reader comments 15 with Share this story Earlier this week, programmer and “accidental security researcher” Simon Aarons disclosed a bug in Google’s Markup screenshot editing tool for its Pixel phones. Dubbed “acropalypse,” the bug allows content you’ve […]
The Download: Google’s Bard experiment, and Ernie Bot’s rehabilitation
Google has launched Bard, the search giant’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Unlike Bing Chat, Bard does not look up search results—all the information it returns is generated by the model itself. But it is still designed to help users brainstorm and answer queries. Google wants Bard to become an integral part […]
The bearable mediocrity of Baidu’s ChatGPT competitor
3. President Xi Jinping traveled to Russia to meet with Vladimir Putin this week. The economic relationship between the two countries has weakened in recent years. (Wall Street Journal $) 4. A year after the China Eastern Airlines crash that killed 132 people, the Chinese government still doesn’t have a conclusion about what went wrong. […]
Hackers drain bitcoin ATMs of $1.5 million by exploiting 0-day bug
Enlarge / A BATM sold by General Bytes. General Bytes reader comments 52 with Share this story Hackers drained millions of dollars in digital coins from cryptocurrency ATMs by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability, leaving customers on the hook for losses that can’t be reversed, the kiosk manufacturer has revealed. The heist targeted ATMs sold by […]
Amazon layoffs will shut down camera review site DPReview.com after 25 years
reader comments 107 with Share this story Amazon has plans to lay off at least 27,000 workers this year, including 9,000 that were announced in an internal email Monday morning. One unexpected casualty: Digital Photography Review, also known as DPReview, is losing its entire editorial staff, and the site will stop publishing on April 10. […]
Bing’s AI chatbot can now generate unhinged images along with unhinged text
Enlarge / “A gaming PC riding a skateboard” as generated by the DALL-E 2-powered Bing Image Creator. The version of DALL-E in the Bing Chat preview may be more advanced. Bing Image Creator reader comments 37 with Share this story Microsoft is giving its work-in-progress Bing AI chatbot the ability to generate images, the company […]