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Report: Apple’s expected M3 MacBooks may not be coming this year

posted onSeptember 12, 2023
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

For most of the last year, the rumor mill has indicated that the first wave of Apple’s M3 Macs will be hitting sometime this fall—perhaps in October, a month Apple has often used for iPad and Mac announcements that can’t be crammed into its iPhone and Apple Watch-focused product events in September.

But according to reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the company won't launch those models before the end of the year. Kuo didn't share specifics, but he has sources inside Apple's manufacturing supply chains that often give him reliable information about the company's plans.

How China Demands Tech Firms Reveal Hackable Flaws in Their Products

posted onSeptember 7, 2023
by l33tdawg
Credit: Wired

For state-sponsored hacking operations, unpatched vulnerabilities are valuable ammunition. Intelligence agencies and militaries seize on hackable bugs when they're revealed—exploiting them to carry out their campaigns of espionage or cyberwar—or spend millions to dig up new ones or to buy them in secret from the hacker gray market.

Musk stiffed Twitter vendors and dared them to sue—dozens did just that

posted onSeptember 7, 2023
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, a fairly ordinary tech company was transformed into a most unusual private corporation. Many strange things have happened at the Musk-owned social network, but this article will focus on just one puzzling aspect of Musk's leadership: His apparent refusal to pay bills.

TikTok hires Britain's NCC for auditing data security

posted onSeptember 5, 2023
by l33tdawg
Credit: IT News

TikTok has hired British cyber security firm NCC to audit its data controls and protections, and provide independent verification, as part of the social media company's data security regime, nicknamed "Project Clover".

Several government bodies have banned TikTok from staff phones due to growing concerns about the company, which is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, and whether China's government could harvest users' data to advance its interests.

What OpenAI Really Wants

posted onSeptember 5, 2023
by l33tdawg
Credit: Wired

The air crackles with an almost Beatlemaniac energy as the star and his entourage tumble into a waiting Mercedes van. They’ve just ducked out of one event and are headed to another, then another, where a frenzied mob awaits. As they careen through the streets of London—the short hop from Holborn to Bloomsbury—it’s as if they’re surfing one of civilization’s before-and-after moments. The history-making force personified inside this car has captured the attention of the world. Everyone wants a piece of it, from the students who’ve waited in line to the prime minister.

Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

posted onSeptember 5, 2023
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

Did you know that improper food canning can lead to death? Botulism—the result of bacteria growing inside improperly treated canned goods—is rare, but people can die from it. In any case, they'll certainly get very ill.

The dangers of food canning were explained to me clearly, succinctly, and with cited sources by Brad Barclay and someone going by Dromio05 on Reddit (who asked to withhold their real name for privacy reasons). Both were recently moderators on the r/canning subreddit and hold science-related master's degrees.

Meta’s “massively multilingual” AI model translates up to 100 languages, speech or text

posted onAugust 23, 2023
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

On Tuesday, Meta announced SeamlessM4T, a multimodal AI model for speech and text translations. As a neural network that can process both text and audio, it can perform text-to-speech, speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, and text-to-text translations for "up to 100 languages," according to Meta. Its goal is to help people who speak different languages communicate with each other more effectively.

Threat actor targeted DOD contracting website

posted onAugust 23, 2023
by l33tdawg
Credit: NextGov

Malware leveraging flaws in edge routers has been observed siphoning data from public-facing U.S. military websites, according to a recent blog post from Black Lotus Labs.

The cyber research firm first reported on the exploit, dubbed HiatusRAT, in March. The threat group associated with the effort continued its campaign despite public exposure.

A New Supply Chain Attack Hit Close to 100 Victims—and Clues Point to China

posted onAugust 23, 2023
by l33tdawg
Credit: Wikipedia

Every software supply chain attack, in which hackers corrupt a legitimate application to push out their malware to hundreds or potentially thousands of victims, represents a disturbing new outbreak of a cybersecurity scourge. But when that supply chain attack is pulled off by a mysterious group of hackers, abusing a Microsoft trusted software model to make their malware pose as legitimate, it represents a dangerous and potentially new adversary worth watching.

China keeps buying hobbled Nvidia cards to train its AI models

posted onAugust 22, 2023
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

The US acted aggressively last year to limit China’s ability to develop artificial intelligence for military purposes, blocking the sale there of the most advanced US chips used to train AI systems.

Big advances in the chips used to develop generative AI have meant that the latest US technology on sale in China is more powerful than anything available before. That is despite the fact that the chips have been deliberately hobbled for the Chinese market to limit their capabilities, making them less effective than products available elsewhere in the world.