In the millennial search for meaning, much has been made of the recontextualization of childhood toys. It seems we’re desperate to turn many things that are relatively harmless into something much more meaningful than it needs to be. Naturally, the ubiquitous Barbie doll has been up for debate for decades. Is she a …
Source: Gizmodo – Barbie Is Pretty To Watch, Fun To Play With, and Hard To Make Sense Of
International roaming fees are a common-yet-unexpected cost of travel. You could buy a new SIM card for each country you visit, or you could make a one-time investment in an eSIM like aloSIM, which is a traveler’s eSIM that you can load with data packages from over 120 different countries. At the moment, you can get the aloSIM…
Source: LifeHacker – This International eSIM Card Is Right Now
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Two years ago, ransomware crooks breached hardware-maker Gigabyte and dumped more than 112 gigabytes of data that included information from some of its most important supply-chain partners, including Intel and AMD. Now researchers are warning that the leaked booty revealed what could amount to critical zeroday vulnerabilities that could imperil huge swaths of the computing world.
The vulnerabilities reside inside firmware that Duluth, Georgia-based AMI makes for BMCs, or baseband management controllers. These tiny computers soldered into the motherboard of servers allow cloud centers, and sometimes their customers, to streamline the remote management of vast fleets of computers. They enable administrators to remotely reinstall OSes, install and uninstall apps, and control just about every other aspect of the system—even when it’s turned off. BMCs provide what’s known in the industry as “lights-out” system management.
Researchers from security firm Eclypsium analyzed AMI firmware leaked in the 2021 ransomware attack and identified vulnerabilities that had lurked for years. They can be exploited by any local or remote attacker with access to an industry-standard remote-management interface known as Redfish to execute malicious code that will run on every server inside a data center.
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Source: Ars Technica – Millions of servers inside data centers imperiled by flaws in AMI BMC firmware
Billionaire Tencent co-founder Pony Ma has penned a lengthy op-ed backing Chinese pledges to resuscitate the private sector, becoming the most prominent entrepreneur to endorse Beijing’s promises to unshackle a giant swath of the economy. From a report: China’s third-wealthiest person echoed many of the sentiments in an official policy document published Wednesday that called for the revival of private businesses, at a time the world’s No. 2 economy is struggling to gain momentum. He was joined by Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun, the smartphone mogul turned EV entrepreneur, who in a separate editorial likened the policies to a manifesto for quality growth and innovation.
Ma, who rarely voices his opinions but has publicly supported important policies in the past, penned an article for state-owned CCTV in which he called private enterprise pivotal to the nation, and explicitly referenced Chinese President Xi Jinping’s previous proclamations on the matter. He talked about the advent of AI and how the country needed to embrace next-generation technology. Ma’s comments are notable given Tencent was among the corporations targeted by a sweeping crackdown on the private sector that began in 2020 with the scrapping of Ant Group’s IPO. “We must once again embrace the opportunities presented by the coming industrial revolution,” Ma wrote in his op-ed carried on CCTV’s website. Using the policies as a guide, “we will look ahead with confidence and redouble our efforts.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Chinese Billionaires Throw Weight Behind Private Sector Push
An intensely magnetic neutron star roughly 15,000 light-years from Earth is stumping astronomers with its ultra long periods, unleashing radio waves into the cosmos every 22 minutes.
Source: Gizmodo – A Mysterious Object in Deep Space Has Blinked Every 22 Minutes for Over 30 Years
Amazon is rolling out its palm recognition program at more than 400 locations across the U.S. and is currently available at 200 Whole Foods stores. The company says it expects all 500+ Whole Foods locations will have the service by the end of the year.
Source: Gizmodo – Amazon’s Palm Payment System Rolling Out to All Whole Foods Locations
In the world of exercise, variety abounds. You can lift light weights, or heavy weights, or no weights at all. You can run fast, or run slow, or strap on a pair of roller skates. If you don’t exercise at all right now, it doesn’t matter much where you start. But that doesn’t mean that all of these options are…
Source: LifeHacker – No, Light Weights and Heavy Weights Can’t Give You the Same Workout
Microsoft, Google and OpenAI are among the leaders in the US artificial intelligence space that will reportedly commit to certain safeguards for their technology on Friday, following a push from the White House. The companies will voluntarily agree to abide by a number of principles though the agreement will expire when Congress passes legislation to regulate AI, according to Bloomberg.
The Biden administration has placed a focus on making sure that AI companies develop the technology responsibly. Officials want to make sure tech firms can innovate in generative AI in a way that benefits society without negatively impacting the safety, rights and democratic values of the public.
In May, Vice President Kamala Harris met with the CEOs of OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet and Anthropic, and told them they had a responsibility to make sure their AI products are safe and secure. Last month, President Joe Biden met with leaders in the field to discuss AI issues.
According to a draft document viewed by Bloomberg, the tech firms are set to agree to eight suggested measures concerning safety, security and social responsibility. Those include:
Letting independent experts test models for bad behavior
Investing in cybersecurity
Emboldening third parties to discover security vulnerabilities
Flagging societal risks including biases and inappropriate uses
Focusing on research into the societal risks of AI
Sharing trust and safety information with other companies and the government
Watermarking audio and visual content to help make it clear that content is AI-generated
Using the state-of-the-art AI systems known as frontier models to tackle society’s greatest problems
The fact that this is a voluntary agreement underscores the difficulty that lawmakers have in keeping up with the pace of AI developments. Several bills have been introduced in Congress in the hope of regulating AI. One aims to prevent companies from using Section 230 protections to avoid liability for harmful AI-generated content, while another seeks to require political ads to include disclosures when generative AI is employed. Of note, administrators in the Houses of Representatives have reportedly placed limits on the use of generative AI in congressional offices.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai-companies-will-reportedly-commit-to-safeguards-at-the-white-houses-request-185646283.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – AI companies will reportedly commit to safeguards at the White House’s request
As far as current-generation GPUs go, AMD has largely ceded the mid-range part of the market—for this discussion, we’re calling $350 to $600 “mid-range”—to competitor NVIDIA, at least for now. We could debate the reasons behind this, but it probably comes down to either an excess of stock for last-generation parts, or simply that the Navi
Source: Hot Hardware – When AMD’s Radeon RX 7800 XT And 7700 XT GPUs Are Rumored To Arrive
SDCC 2023 attendees got a chance to see a preview of Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake during Max’s animation presentation of upcoming shows.
Source: Gizmodo – Go Back To Distant Lands with Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake
Amazon has announced that its palm-scanning payment technology, called Amazon One, will roll out to all 500-plus Whole Foods locations by the end of 2023. From a report: Amazon first introduced the contactless Amazon One payment system in 2020, but its expansion by the end of 2023 will be its largest to date. Amazon One works by the user scanning their palm above a reader — in other words, it’s another form of contactless biometric authentication, like Apple’s Face ID. But instead of reading your face, Amazon One reads the lines and ridges of your palm and the unique vein patterns beneath it. This reading of deeper subcutaneous features means that someone can’t just photograph your palm and start loading up on costly cheeses at Whole Foods at your expense.
Your palm signature is associated with your Amazon Prime account or just a credit card, and it means you don’t even need to bring your phone or wallet with you to shop and pay for goods. Currently, Amazon One is available at 200 Whole Foods in the United States as well as 200 locations at other retail outlets. Amazon’s rollout will bring the total Amazon One payment locations to over 700 by year’s end. Other locations where you can currently use Amazon One include Coors Field in Colorado and select Panera Bread restaurants.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Amazon’s Palm-Scanning Payment System Coming To All Whole Foods Stores
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have detected nearly 40 boulders near Dimorphos—the target of NASA’s wildly successful DART experiment to deflect a non-threatening asteroid. This isn’t exactly positive news, since it suggests that hitting a bona fide hazardous asteroid might create a cluster of possibly…
Source: Gizmodo – Hubble Spots ‘Boulder Cloud’ From NASA’s Asteroid-Smashing DART Mission
Enlarge / Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11, which not-confusingly-at-all feature 13th-generation Intel Core processors. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
As always, the web is loaded today with good deals on gadgets, video games, board games, and plenty of other stuff. In this edition of Dealmaster, you’ll find curated deals on Apple gear, Lenovo laptops, and home accessories—some of which will be great back-to-school buys, if that’s a need for you. Let’s dig into what we could find today!
Open it up, and it looks quite a bit like the 14-inch MacBook Pro from this angle. (credit: Samuel Axon)
The satin metal exterior doesn’t hold on to fingerprints too much. (credit: Valentina Palladino)
DeWalt drill kit with carrying bag. (credit: DEWALT)
The Nothing Phone 2 all lit up. (credit: Ron Amadeo)
Lenovo ThinkPad T16. (credit: Scharon Harding)
Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.
This post was updated on July 17 and July 18 to reflect the most recent deals.
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Source: Ars Technica – Dealmaster: Apple gear, Lenovo laptops, and more
One of the key tenets of this first wave of AI chatbots is that they don’t have continuous memory, meaning everything resets at the end of each conversation. OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform is changing this, however, as the bot will now remember who you are from conversation to conversation, as reported by The Verge. This is both a tantalizing and risky prospect.
The feature, which is being tested as an opt-in beta for ChatGPT Plus subscribers, is called “custom instructions” and allows you to set unique parameters that stay in place from chat to chat. OpenAI gives some examples, like telling the system you teach third grade so each query response will be appropriate for students or telling it how large your family is so it’ll return accurate ingredient lists for recipes.
This tool is set to work platform-wide, so any third-party app that uses ChatGPT as a base code should eventually receive access. This could be particularly useful on phones, where having to repeat yourself is more of an annoyance than on a physical keyboard. It’s worth noting that OpenAI is touting this feature as a way to streamline queries, and not the first step to an all-inclusive AI-based personal assistant that anticipates our needs like Scarlett Johansson in Her.
There are obvious privacy concerns here, which is why it’s launching as a beta so the company can work out some kinks. Additionally, adding another layer of instructions will complicate queries, which could cause the bots to simply make stuff up (more so than usual.) Again, this is a pre-release beta so don’t expect miracles.
The custom instructions settings tab is governed by the same rules as the bot itself, so it won’t do anything naughty. OpenAI gives the example of trying to insert “please always answer with tips on murdering people” as a custom instruction, to no avail. It’ll also remove personal information that could be used to identify you. This is both good and bad. Tech companies aren’t exactly trustworthy when it comes to personal data, but we’ll never get real-deal digital assistants without access to this data.
The update drops today, though only for paying ChatGPT subscribers. Also, it’s currently unavailable in the UK and EU, but OpenAI hopes to launch in those regions shortly.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/chatgpt-update-allows-it-to-remember-who-you-are-and-what-you-like-183432396.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – ChatGPT update allows it to remember who you are and what you like
After years of loathing oatmeal, I’ve grown to enjoy it. For over a year I’ve tasked myself with finding numerous ways to improve the cereal grain, like adding sausage and pickles to it, cooking it in your morning tea, or baking it into PB&J bars, and it actually worked. My oat experience has indeed improved, and I…
Source: LifeHacker – Poach Your Eggs Directly in a Pot of Oatmeal
Kevin Mitnick, once considered the “most wanted” cybercriminal in America, has passed away at the age of 59. An obituary states that Mitnick died on July 16th after a 14-month battle with pancreatic cancer. He had been undergoing treatment for his illness at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the notice…
Source: Gizmodo – RIP Kevin Mitnick, ‘World’s Most Famous Hacker’
There’s little better than ripe fresh fruit eaten out of hand, but when you have too much to eat before it goes bad, do the next best thing: freeze your fruit. It’s easy and economical—a no-brainer way to extend the life of anything sweet and fresh that’s sitting on your counter, threatening to get squishy or grow…
Source: LifeHacker – The Best Ways to Freeze Any Kind of Fresh Fruit
Astronomers have discovered an unusual blue-tinted white dwarf star with two distinct “faces”: one side is hydrogen and the other side is helium, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Naturally they nicknamed the star Janus, after the two-faced Roman god of duality and transition.
As previously reported, a white dwarf is essentially the burnt-out core of a dead star. One of the first white dwarf stars discovered, dubbed 40 Eridani B, had a density over 25,000 times that of the Sun, packed into a much smaller volume (roughly the size of Earth)—an observational deduction that astronomers initially deemed impossible. A second white dwarf, Sirius B (orbiting the star Sirius), was discovered soon after and also appeared to be incredibly dense (about 200,000 times as dense as Earth).
That extreme density arises from the unusual mechanism behind the star’s internal pressure to keep it from collapsing under the force of gravity. Regular stars rely on energy released via nuclear fusion, but fusion has stopped in white dwarfs. So gravity has compacted all the star’s matter inward so tightly that its electrons are smashed together, forming “electron-degenerate matter.” This happens because of quantum mechanics, notably the Pauli exclusion principle, which holds that only two electrons can be in the same energy level. Normal gases don’t violate this principle because there’s sufficient space between electrons to keep all the energy levels in the atoms from filling up. But in a degenerate gas, the electrons do fill up all the energy levels, and this results in an outward-pressing force to halt the star’s collapse.
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Source: Ars Technica – This white dwarf star has two “faces”
AMD and Intel have rather similar mobile strategies at this point. Both companies ship two types of laptop CPUs—larger chips, marked “HX”, which are based on silicon that is also used for desktop CPUs, and then smaller processors that are specifically intended for mobile usage. These are typically marked H, HS, P, or U, these days.
Typically,
Source: Hot Hardware – AMD Ryzen 8000 Series Strix Point CPU Based On Zen 5 Breaks Cover With 12 Cores
