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Gamers Nexus (2.24M subscribers)

July 22, 2024

Video length: 24m48 s

00:00 - Recapping the Week

01:03 - AT&T Pays Hacker to Delete Data

04:38 - Rumor: P-Core Only CPUs for Intel

07:26 - Rumor: Intel Battlemage 4nm GPUs

11:35 - ASUS Announces New Customer Service Plans

14:37 - Samsung 60TB SSD

16:02 - HP Discontinue Draconian DRM on Cheap Printers

18:51 - ASUS Launches ROG Mini PC

20:11 - Rumor: 5090 Base Clock Leaks

21:01 - PC Market Bounces Back

22:57 - Xbox Gives Away Deadpool Butt Controller

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However, that may be only the start of Microsoft's plans for the service. Windows Central, using unnamed sources at Microsoft, is reporting that the company is "working towards" developing a plan that would offer subscribers access to just Xbox Cloud Gaming.

At the moment, playing Xbox games in the cloud is only a feature included as part of the $19.99 a month subscription to Xbox Live Ultimate. However, this report states Microsoft believes a cloud-only plan would give people a way to play Xbox games, but who simply don't want to pay the funds to purchase an Xbox console. It could also allow gamers to play Xbox games in countries where the Xbox console is not available for sale.

Right now, Xbox Cloud Gaming is available for Windows and Android gamers via the Xbox app, iOS and Mac devices via a web browser, the Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest Pro, Meta Quest 3 VR headsets, and Samsung smart TVs launched in 2020 and higher. Most recently, Microsoft added Xbox Cloud Gaming support for Amazon's Fire TV 4K and Fire TV 4K Max streaming sticks, and Amazon launched a bundle for the Fire TV 4K Max stick, an Xbox Wireless Controller, and one month of Xbox Game Pass Live Ultimate service.

Windows Central also reports that Microsoft could try to relaunch its Xbox Game Pass Friends and Family plan. The company tested such a plan in a few markets, but ended that preview in August of 2023. Finally, the report claims Microsoft has explored offering an ad-based Xbox Game Pass plan but it is not actively working on such an option.

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The updated Microsoft Recovery Tool is now available for download from the Microsoft Download Center. The company notified users about the release in the official documentation:

As a follow-up to the CrowdStrike Falcon agent issue impacting Windows clients and servers, Microsoft has released an updated recovery tool with two repair options to help IT admins expedite the repair process. Based on customer feedback, this new release includes a new option for recovery using safe boot, the option to generate ISO or USB, a fix for ADK detection when the Windows Driver Kit is installed, and a fix for the USB disk size check.

Microsoft also revised the original recovery tool post with details about which mode affected users should use to restore their computers. Recovery from WinPE is the recommended option. It does not require local admin privileges, but you need to manually enter the BitLocker recovery key (if you use BitLocker. The second option, recovery from Safe Mode, will restore systems without requiring the BitLocker key, but you need access to a local account with elevated privileges (administrator access).

Finally, Microsoft provides an option for systems that do not support USB connections. In such cases, Microsoft offers using the Preboot Execution Requirement (PXE). If PXE is not available, recovering from the outage is possible by reimaging the device.

Whatever option admins pick, Microsoft strongly suggests performing tests on several machines before broadly deploying the fix. You can find the updated blog post with all the necessary links and guides on the Tech Community website.

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2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of June): 2,839 news posts

The AI chip giant in March unveiled its "Blackwell" chip series, which is due to be mass-produced later in the year. The new processors combine two squares of silicon the size of the company's previous offering. Within the series, the B200 is 30 times speedier than its predecessor at some tasks like serving up answers from chatbots.

Nvidia will work with Inspur, one of its major distributor partners in China, on the launch and distribution of the chip which is tentatively named the "B20", two of the sources said. Shipments of the "B20" are planned to start in the second quarter of 2025, a separate source told Reuters.

The sources declined to be identified as Nvidia has yet to make a public announcement.

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment. Inspur did not respond to requests for comment.

Shares of Nvidia rose 1.4% to $119.67 in U.S. premarket trading after publication of the Reuters story.

Washington tightened its controls on exports of cutting-edge semiconductors to China in 2023, seeking to prevent breakthroughs in supercomputing that would aid China's military.

The advent of tighter export U.S. controls has helped Chinese technology giant Huawei (HWT.UL) and startups like Tencent-backed (0700.HK) Enflame make some inroads into the domestic market for advanced AI processors.

A version of a chip from Nvidia's Blackwell series for the Chinese market would boost the U.S. firm's efforts to fend off those challenges.
China accounted for around 17% of Nvidia's revenue in the year to end-January in the wake of U.S. sanctions, sliding from 26% two years earlier.

Nvidia's most advanced chip for the China market, the H20, initially got off to a weak start when deliveries began this year and the U.S. firm priced it below a rival chip from Huawei, Reuters reported in May.

But sales are now growing rapidly, two of the sources said.

Nvidia is on track to sell over 1 million of its H20 chips in China this year, worth upwards of $12 billion, according to an estimate from research group SemiAnalysis.

Expectations are high that the U.S. will continue to keep up the pressure on semiconductor-related export controls.

The U.S. wants the Netherlands and Japan to further restrict chipmaking equipment to China, sources have said.

The Biden administration also has preliminary plans to place guardrails around the most advanced AI Models, the core software of artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, sources have said.

Chip stocks globally tumbled last week after Bloomberg News reported that Biden's administration was weighing a measure called the foreign direct product rule that would allow the U.S. to stop a product from being sold if it was made using American technology.

Since then, Nvidia has developed three chips tailored specifically for the Chinese market.

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India's biggest education tech company is facing insolvency after its valuation crashed from $22bn (£17bn) to under $2bn (£1.5bn) due to "financial mismanagement and compliance issues".

Byju's has suffered a series of setbacks in recent months, including job cuts, a 90 per cent collapse in valuation and a tussle with investors who have accused chief executive Byju Raveendran of corporate governance lapses.

The company, backed by investors like Prosus and General Atlantic, has denied any wrongdoing.

Mr Raveendran said in a court filing that insolvency would force thousands of employees to resign and result in a total shutdown of its services, Reuters reported.

The founder, 44, lost control of the company last week after a tribunal started an insolvency process following a complaint by India’s cricket board over an outstanding payment of $19m (£14.6m) from a sponsorship deal.

Byju's assets have been frozen and its board suspended.

In a filing before the Karnataka state High Court, Mr Raveendran said insolvency would shut the startup’s operations and result in 27,000 staff, including some 16,000 teachers, losing jobs. An appeals tribunal is expected to hold a hearing on Monday.

Mr Raveendran denies allegations of mismanagement and wrongdoing at his company, which has faced several lawsuits over unpaid loans and boardroom battles with foreign investors.

But the former billionaire admitted in Davos last year to making "our fair share of mistakes" while "growing fast".

The company's employees "shall suffer”, Byju’s said in the court filing, “and may be forced to leave the organisation”.

It said the chief executive was willing to pay the outstanding dues to the Indian cricket board within 90 days.

The company is struggling to pay the salaries of its employees and has been locked out of its more than 100 tuition centres across the country for not paying rent and other bills, Inc42 reported.

Byju’s found immense success during the Covid pandemic by offering online courses. It also offers in-person coaching.

Backed by investors like General Atlantic, Prosus and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy venture, Mr Raveendran spent millions on a series of acquisitions. The company claims to have 150 million students in over 100 countries.

The company began facing setbacks once the pandemic restrictions were lifted and students went back to school.

As he battled crises, Mr Raveendran said decisions to lay off some of its then-50,000 employees and slash branding expenses would turn its cashflow positive.

He presented a "suave, nice and polished" image, appearing to heed advice, but "eventually there was a trust deficit", an executive who quit last year as Byju's senior vice president, told Reuters.

"He said things are improving, don't worry, we have the money," the former executive said.

The Independent has reached out to Byju’s for a comment.

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Paul's Hardware (1.48M subscribers)

July 21, 2024

Video length: 11m 40s

0:00 Welcome to Paul’s Tech News - July 21, 2024

1:37 Crowdstrike Update Causes Global PC Crashes, Biggest IT Outage Ever

3:05 Acer EEC filing reveals Radeon RX 7900, 7800, and 7700 non-XT versions

4:40 Nvidia RTX 50 series TDPs were not 'leaked' by Seasonic

6:14 Intel laptop CPUs are crashing, too, as the company remains silent

TECH BRIEFS

7:39 You Can’t Buy the Deadpool Xbox Controller with the Ass Cheeks

8:36 New Ad Tracking Update for Firefox Causes Controversy

9:34 Fractal Releases 3D Printing Files for Project: North Pi (Raspberry Pi Case)

10:20 Samsung launches first 60TB SSD, teases new 120TB model

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“It’s like a startup because we are ‘starting up,’ but it’s an unusually big one,” Arkady Volozh, Yandex co-founder and former CEO, told TechCrunch in an interview this week. “But what we’re trying to build will actually require even more resources, more people, and much more capital.”

Volozh was forced out of Yandex in 2022 after the European Union placed him on a sanctions list in the wake of Russia’s Ukraine invasion. The EU removed Volozh from the list in March this year, paving the way for his return to the fold as CEO of Yandex’s next incarnation — one whose team and data centers are entirely outside Russia.

The Yandex implosion

The entity known as Yandex was always a little convoluted. When discussing “Yandex,” most people mean Yandex LLC, the Russian company founded in 1997 that built everything from search, e-commerce and advertising products, to maps, transportation, and more.

However, while Yandex’s core audience was in Russia and a smattering of neighboring markets, its parent was a Dutch holding organization called Yandex N.V. which went public on the Nasdaq in 2011, followed by a secondary listing three years later on the Moscow Exchange.

A Yandex self-driving taxi in action

Yandex N.V. was doing relatively well as a public company, hitting a peak market cap of $31 billion at the tail-end of 2021. But that all changed with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with the Nasdaq putting a halt on trading due to sanctions. While the Nasdaq initially said that it would delist Yandex entirely — alongside several other Russian-affiliated companies — Yandex appealed, and Nasdaq agreed to maintain the company’s listing, but keep the pause on trading as the Dutch entity went through the arduous process of severing all Russian ties.

That process entered its final stages in February, with Yandex N.V. revealing its exit strategy. The entirety of its Russian assets — which also happened to be the lion’s share of its business — would be sold at a $5.4 billion valuation to a Russian consortium, with $2.5 billion paid in cash and the remainder paid in its own shares.

The transaction was something of a firesale, constituting half of Yandex’s market capitalization at that time. The reason? A Russian government-imposed rule that demands a mandatory discount of at least 50% for any divestments involving parent companies incorporated in countries regarded as “unfriendly” by Russia. The Netherlands, being a signed up member of an EU bloc that imposed sanctions on Russia, would certainly fall into that category.

Nonetheless, the transaction closed this week, and Yandex N.V. has swiftly moved to distance itself from any remnants of its past — the most obvious one being its name. Subject to shareholder approval, Yandex N.V. is adopting the name of one of its few remaining assets, an AI cloud platform called Nebius AI which it birthed last year.

AI compute demand

Nebius is vying for a market that includes all the major “big tech” cloud hyperscalers, but its main competition is arguably the swathe of dedicated “GPU-as-a-service” startups that have emerged off the back of demand for AI compute. These include the likes of U.S.-based CoreWeave, a $19 billion business that pivoted from cryptocurrency mining, and which is currently expanding its own infrastructure into Europe. There is also at least one domestic alternative in the form of Flex AI, a French startup which recently exited stealth with $30 million in seed funding to rent GPU compute out to AI companies.

However, Nebius finds itself in something of a unique position. Technically speaking it’s not a startup, but it’s having to start afresh with the few assets it has left, which is really the result of pure chance — it’s just what happened to exist outside of Russian territory when the conflict started two years ago. This includes an autonomous vehicle company called Avride, based in Texas; a generative AI and LLM company called Toloka AI; edtech platform TripleTen; and, most notably in terms of this new direction, a Finnish data center and AI cloud platform called Nebius AI.

Accordingly, the company is now positioning itself as a full-stack AI infrastructure company with plans for a large-scale network of GPUs (graphics processing units) en route to becoming a leading player in Europe. This is enabled by its data center in Finland and an existing partnership with Nvidia which goes back some time.

“We launched Nebius less than a year ago, and we now have thousands of GPUs,” Volozh said. “We have a great cloud partner in Nvidia, they’ve known us for ages because we were one of its largest clients in Europe — so really, it’s just the same people talking to the same people. They know us, and they know what we can do. Fortunately, one of the data centers of Yandex was built outside of Russia, and this is what we inherited are now now rapidly increasing its capacity.”

Volozh says that Nebius is looking to triple the capacity at its current owned facility in Finland, with plans to get it to almost 100 megawatts. However, it’s also looking to start building out additional data centers across Europe in the coming years.

“We produce the full stack — data centers, motherboards, servers, racks, connectivity — everything is our own,” Volozh said. “We are now negotiating for several greenfields [data center built from scratch] in several countries, which we will sign very soon. But this will take time. And before that time, we will be renting at co-location facilities.”

Arkady Volozh

Public vs private

Volozh confirmed that the company intends to regain its full unfettered public status now that it’s untethered from its Russian assets, and is actively working with both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Nasdaq to achieve that.

But wouldn’t it be easier to go private and scale the good old-fashioned startup way — away from the pressures of the public glare?

“I would say the opposite,” Volozh said. “Building infrastructure is the most capital intensive thing. Who’s building it? It’s the big tech guys who have billions of dollars revenues, and they have their own ecosystems where whatever you launch gives you an extra couple percent of profits. They’re investing like hell, and for a reason. Everybody wants to be there first.”

So the Microsofts and Googles of the worlds are all-in, as are those in the “second tier” market such as CoreWeave, Lambda, and numerous others that are capitalizing on their relationships with GPU kingpin Nvidia. But the capital required not only to build this, but develop a full system of interconnected GPUs that can communicate and share data and workloads dynamically, is significant — which is why we’re seeing these younger players raise multiple massive rounds of funding in close proximity, spanning debt and equity.

Nebius, for its part, is starting with a couple of billion dollars in capital, a figure that may deplete fairly quickly if a buy-back proposal to procure dormant shares is taken up by its existing shareholders. However, Volozh reckons that it will be far easier — and cheaper — to raise capital as a public company. Moreover, Nebius is positioned strongly as it’s operating in one of the hottest spaces in technology right now.

“It’s [AI infrastructure] probably the unsexiest ‘thing’ within a very sexy market,” Volozh said. “AI is very interesting — it’s very real, and it’s not hype like the internet wasn’t hype 20 to 30 years ago. With infrastructure, we are in a very sweet spot. We’re starting off with a couple of billion [dollars], and we will build enough capacity to scale initially.”

Moreover, as a public company, Nebius could serve as an alternative option for those looking for skin in the game without having to bet on the usual players.

“I don’t know of any other public company in AI infrastructure outside of ‘big tech’ — if you’re an investor, and you want exposure to this area, we’re very promising,” Volozh said. “Of course, you could buy Microsoft or Google stock, or you can buy this stock. So that is why it’s good to be public.”

Talent pool

While Nebius is not alone in its endeavors, it has something other younger players in the space don’t have — and that’s experience building out compute infrastructure at scale. Of the company’s 1,300 employees, around 1,000 of them are engineers, mostly transitioning over from the old Yandex business, according to Volozh.

“Technologically, this is what this whole team has been doing for the past 15 to 20 years,” he said. “They have built pretty large infrastructure globally, with hundreds of megawatts of data centers. Now, we need to build it again, and these things are easier when you’re doing it a second time.”

When Yandex N.V. was a corporate holding company, Amsterdam was little more than an address. Today, the Dutch capital is the company’s biggest hub with some 500 people, with the remainder of its headcount split across various other locations including Israel, the U.S. (Austin, Texas) and Belgrade. While Amsterdam will remain home, its other bases will be fluid and evolve in line with the demands of the business.

This geographical spread has largely been down to chance, a combination of where its subsidiaries were originally based and, more recently, which countries have been willing to accept workers fleeing the conflict.

“It has been quite a journey. When the war broke out in February, ’22, a lot of people started leaving the country [Russia],” Volozh said. “There’s a lot of families, but to move a family is a brave move just to drop everything and just move. But they realized that they don’t want to support it [the war]. They don’t want it to happen in their name. When they all started leaving, we started helping them.”

Israel, where Volozh himself has officially been based for the best part of a decade, was the first country to start accepting his workers.

“Because it’s a visa-free country for Russia, it was easier for them to come as tourists — and then they started getting work permits pretty quickly,” Volozh said. “Later in 2022, across Europe and specifically the Netherlands recognized what was going on and actually invited us — they issued hundreds of work permits. So that’s why people started moving to Amsterdam, and I think it’s a big win for the Netherlands. It’s a big AI company, and we have well-paid, high-level engineers — everybody will be contributing a lot of taxes here.”

It’s difficult to overstate the sheer scale of the effort involved in getting to where Nebius is today. It’s a shadow of its former self, for sure, but much like the companies that pivoted from crypto to cash-in on the AI gold rush, Nebius is repurposing the resources it has to meet a demand that is showing little sign of waning.

“It was a lot of work to move all these people, while also separating the company in parallel,” Volozh said. “It has been a lot like a startup, in that we had to build the company from scratch, though we needed to be sure that all the technology is totally separate — for example, ensure that the same Finnish data center doesn’t transmit anything back across the border [to Russia]. Now the deal is done, the money is in the bank, the company is separated. And the people are here.”

Volozh, for his part, is technically based in Tel Aviv though he adds that in reality he “lives on a plane,” splitting his time between the various hubs his work takes him to. But he remains upbeat about his new venture’s prospects.

“I’ve never been so excited about the future,” he said. “Yandex was not my first company, but even at Yandex we started all these business units almost every year — Yandex grew to be much more than a search company, and it really was just like launching [new] companies. So… here’s yet another company to launch.”

Source

Table of contents:

1. Windows 10 and 11 news
2. Windows Insider Program
3. Updates are available
4. Reviews are in
5. Gaming news

Windows 11 and 10

Here we talk about everything happening around Microsoft's latest operating system in the Stable channel and preview builds: new features, removed features, controversies, bugs, interesting findings, and more. And of course, you may find a word or two about older but still supported versions.

Without a doubt, the biggest event of this week (and maybe the entire year) was CwordStrike's misstep that caused thousands of systems to go down worldwide. A misfired update broke Windows PCs, throwing them into a boot loop and disrupting operations for multiple companies across the globe.

CrowdStrike quickly confirmed the problem, admitted its guilt, and offered a fix (there was one from Microsoft as well and even detailed step-by-step isntructions). However, the situation is very serious, and in the first interview, CrowdStrike's CEO said that restoring operations could take longer than expected. Later on, Microsoft revealed that the outage knocked out over 8.5 million PCs worldwide.

Interestingly, while only Windows-based machines were affected, months ago, CrowdStrike broke Debian and Rocky Linux. The irony is that no one noticed that.

Moving to more positive news, Windows 11 version 23H2 is finally available for everyone. On July 17, Microsoft announced that Windows 11 version 23H2 is now broadly available for every user with compatible devices. That means those still on Windows 11 21H2 or 22H2 can go to Settings > Windows Update, click "Check for Updates," and get to version 23H2 as soon as possible.

Microsoft announced some big changes to how Windows Updates work. Starting with Windows 11 version 24H2, the operating system uses checkpoint cumulative updates that allow you to get features and security enhancements via the latest cumulative update through smaller, incremental differentials containing only the changes since the previous checkpoint cumulative update. This means that you can save time, bandwidth, and hard drive space.

By the way, did you hear the news that you can now almost officially run Windows on your iPhone or iPad? All that is thanks to the new UTM emulator, which finally made it to the App Store. The updated App Store rules now allow emulators, so you can now get one and run MS-DOS, Windows XP, and other operating systems on iOS-based devices.

Windows Insider Program

Here is what Microsoft Released this week for testing in the Windows Insider Program:

After a month-long pause in releasing Dev builds, Microsoft finally gave Dev Insiders some much-needed love in the form of build 26120.1252. In addition, the company resumed the rollout of new features that it previously paused. Sadly, that was all Insiders got this week. No Canary, no Beta, no RP.

However, Windows Insiders received a bunch of app updates. The Photos app now features Designer AI integration, the Microsoft Store got search suggestions (ads) and game categories, and Paint received Pen back button support and lasso select for the side button.

Updates are available

This section covers software, firmware, and other notable updates (released and coming soon) delivering new features, security fixes, improvements, patches, and more from Microsoft and third parties.

This week's update section kicks off with a new AI PC from HP. The company announced the HP OmbiBook Ultra 14-inch Laptop Next Gen AI PC (no joke, that is the official name) with AMD's new Ryzen AI 300 processor, which includes the AMD Ryzen AI NPU chip with the performance level of up to 55 TOPS. This appears to be one of the first non-Qualcomm devices to get Copilot+ PC capabilities.

Microsoft has released a new update for SwiftKey Beta on Android. The latest version now lets you dictate and type at the same time, which is a big update to the keyboard's capabilities and convenience.

Excel on the web received more improvements and features. You can preview links, easily rename sheets and adjust zoom, use new shortcuts for faster access, and send one-click feedback. Also, Microsoft improved Copilot integration into Word, allowing users to get summaries of longer documents. Microsoft says this is one of the most popular features in Word among Copilot users.

Microsoft Edge received two updates this week. The first one was 128.0.2708.0 in the Dev Channel. That release featured shutdown improvements, bug fixes, stability enhancements, and more. The second one was 126.0.2592.113 in the Stable Channel. It resolved the problem with the error code STATUS ACCESS VIOLATION, new tab page issues, and nine Chromium vulnerabilities of high severity.

VirtualBox, a popular cross-platform software for virtualization, received a new update. Version 7.0.20 is a maintenance update with TPM fixes on Windows, macOS-specific improvements, audio, USB, and UEFI changes, and more.

Finally, several Surface devices received new firmware updates. The Surface Pro 8 got a big update with multiple fixes, and a similar one arrived for the Intel-based Surface Pro 9.

Other notable updates include the following:

• .NET 6 is running out of support on November 12.

• Microsoft Designer is now generally available on supported platforms.

• Microsoft expanded the use of Draft with Copilot in Word documents.

• Microsoft added support for multiple authors on SharePoint Pages and News.

• Microsoft kicked off the new fiscal year with a huge set of incentives for its partners.

• Microsoft researchers have created a new AI LLM specifically for spreadsheets.

• CMA UK is investigating Microsoft's deal with AI startup Inflection.

• Dev Home 0.16 was released with new features, bug fixes, and more.

• Microsoft announced WDK NuGet to improve Windows drivers.

And here are the newest drivers released this week:

• Nvidia 560.70 WHQL with optimizations and DLSS 3 support for Stormgate, Dungeonborn, and Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn.
• AMD Radeon Software 24.7.1 with Anti-Lag 2 support for DOTA 2 and a ton of fixes.

Finally, here is this week's Microsoft 365 Roadmap Weekly, which includes the latest features coming soon to Microsoft's productivity apps. Look out for new Copilot capabilities in Excel, a new keyboard shortcut for Outlook on Windows, and more.

Reviews are in

Here is the hardware and software we reviewed this week.

Robbie Khan has a new controller review to check out. This week, the GameSir Kaleid and Kaleid Flux made it to Robbie's testing labs. The verdict is pretty mid. These gamepads offer great performance and solid ergonomics (the looks are also spot-on), but they are plagued by their steep price tags, mushy buttons, cable quirks, random connectivity drop-outs, and more.

On the gaming side

Learn about upcoming game releases, Xbox rumors, new hardware, software updates, freebies, deals, discounts and more.

Forza Horizon 5 received a new content update. "Cars & Coffee" is now available on PC and Xbox, offering gamers new cars, a new location with a built-in photo studio, a fresh premium DLC with four Japanese vehicles, and more. By the way, several days ago, Forza Horizon 5 hit the 40,000,000 players mark.

Another Microsoft-owned game that received a new content update is Sea of Thieves. Its Season 13 is kicking off on July 25, offering gamers the chance to take on Captain Flameheart and its ship, The Burning Blade. Also, look out for new Skeleton Camps and other content.

We are pretty far from the holiday season, but some companies are already making their Christmas-related announcements. Hallmark, for one, revealed an Xbox-themed ornament that will let you put the original Xbox with its humongous controller on a Christmas tree. Moreover, those ornaments will play the main theme from Halo: Combat Evolved.

Activision announced the dates of its upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 beta tests. The Early Access test will begin on August 30 and it will run through September 4. The Open Beta for everyone will happen on September 6-9.

Xbox Insiders in the Alpha and Alpha-Skip Ahead Rings can try improvements for the game installation process. Now, they can select what additional content should be installed alongside a base game. That will come in handy if you want to save some space or get the game quicker by skipping additional, often storage-heavy DLCs.

Microsoft is getting ready to close the Xbox Marketplace for Xbox 360 users, so it launched the final list of discounted games. And to celebrate this legendary console generation and give Xbox X|S users a nostalgia trip, Microsoft released an animated "Blades" background for the current-gen Xbox consoles.

Amazon is now selling a special bundle that includes the Robot White Xbox Wireless Controller, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, and one month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. In case you missed it, Amazon's Fire TV sticks recently received official Xbox Cloud Gaming support. Amazon is now selling you a starter pack with everything you need to begin playing without purchasing a console.

Also, check out this: a butt-shaped red Xbox Wireless Controller inspired by Deadpool's "perfectly rounded tush." Sadly, you cannot purchase this masterpiece, so the only way to get it is to participate in Microsoft's latest Xbox sweepstakes.

Speaking of movies and Xbox, Paramount canceled the Halo TV series. The show ended after just two seasons, but it might get renewed for a third season on a different platform.

Microsoft announced a new wave of games for Xbox and PC Game Pass subscribers. They include Magical Delicacy, Flock, Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, Dungeons of Hinterberg, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, and EA Sports College Football 25.

As usual, there is also news for GeForce NOW subscribers. For starters, in a somewhat big move, Microsoft made it possible to launch Xbox games on Nvidia GeForce NOW directly on the official Xbox website. This gives users more options to play games from the cloud.

Next, GeForce NOW subscriptions are now 50% off. You can get yourself a membership for half its price until August 18. Finally, there are nine new games, which include The Crust, Nobody Wants to Die, Norland, Content Warning, and more.

Not all Game Pass news was positive this week, though. The FTC slammed Microsoft over this month's Xbox Game Pass changes, claiming the new tier is a degraded product. Microsoft responded with an appeal letter stating that the FTC's letter was misleading.

Deals and freebies

This week was choke-full of deals and free games. For starters, this week's Epic Games Store giveaway lets you score Arcade Paradise and Maid of Sker. These two games are available to everyone for free until Thursday.

Also, the Epic Games Store Summer Sale is now in full swing. You can save on hundreds of games, which are discounted until August 1, 2024. Go get some while the offer lasts!

You still have some time to score a bunch of fighting games. The Steam Fighting Festival is still live (ending soon), offering gamers dozens of face-punching titles with discounts of up to 90%. Get those games while you can!

Ubisoft is letting everyone try Avatar: Frontiers Pandora on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S for free until July 28, 2024. If you are interested, you still have time to check it out on your console. By the way, we have a detailed review of the game, which you can read here.

As usual, we have more deals collected in our weekly Weekend PC Game Deals series. Check them out if you want more.

Other gaming stories from this week include the following:

• The Fallout: London fan-made DLC won't support the Epic Games Store version of Fallout 4.

• The latest Ara: History Untold video dev diary offered a look at the game's government system.

• Microsoft-owned Bethesda Game Studios developers have voted to unionize.

• New Soulframe gameplay footage revealed more of the upcoming fantasy MMO.

   

Microsoft Weekly image background by Gruendercoach on Pixabay.

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Hope you enjoyed this news post.

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2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of June): 2,839 news posts

• Steve Jobs' uncanny forecast of AI chatbots from 1983 resurfaces.

• Jobs spoke about the potential of a technology capable of answering questions and thinking like a human.

A 1983 presentation by Apple founder Steve Jobs reveals that he had foreseen the advent of AI chatbots, a technology that is now transforming the world.

What Happened: According to a digital exhibit from the Steve Jobs Archive, which features footage from a talk Jobs delivered at the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1983, Jobs spoke about the potential of a technology capable of answering questions and thinking like a human.

Jobs compared this technology to a book, which he termed as a “phenomenal thing” that could go “right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle,” reported Business Insider.

However, he identified the absence of interaction as a limitation and envisioned a future where machines could embody an “underlying spirit” or “set of principles.”

“I think as we look towards the next 50 to 100 years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life, his or her whole life, and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday after the person is dead and gone, we can ask this machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this,'” he said in the footage.

Fast forward to the present, AI firms are creating chatbots such as ChatGPT that can respond to user inquiries, occasionally even mimicking renowned historical figures.

Why It Matters: The prediction made by Jobs over four decades ago underscores his visionary thinking and the foresight he had about the future of technology.

The emergence and advancement of AI chatbots today are a testament to Jobs’ prediction and reflect his profound understanding of technology and its potential impact on society.

The fact that Jobs’ vision is being realized today, over 40 years later, speaks volumes about his innovative mindset and his ability to foresee technological trends.

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This became apparent last week as an antivirus software update issued on the evening of July 18 by CrowdStrike, a security software company, caused more than a billion Windows-based computers to cease to function, taking down essential operations at airports, hospitals, 911 centers, police departments, trains, jails, and other municipal services, as well as corporate operations.

Appearing exhausted at times, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz spent July 19 issuing apologies on X and in television interviews, attempting to explain the error and the company’s efforts to resolve it.

“This was not a cyberattack,” Mr. Kurtz stated on the company’s website, explaining that the outage was caused by a defect in a software update for Windows in a security system called Falcon, which CrowdStrike produces.

“All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation,” he stated. “We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, allowing us to focus diligently on restoring customer systems as our highest priority.”

But many, including White House officials, were not reassured. Concerns were raised among government officials regarding public safety and national security.

A senior administration official stated on July 19 that “the White House has been convening agencies to assess impacts to the U.S. government’s operations and entities around the country.

“The White House is in regular contact with CrowdStrike’s executive leadership and tracking progress on remediating affected systems,” the official stated.

After tens of thousands of flights were delayed on Friday, airline service was largely restored by the weekend, as other services came back online. But because the software update took out individual computers, many have had, or still will have, to be restored individually and manually.

Tech analysts say the evolution of computer-based operations from Local Area Networks (LANs) to the cloud, in a process termed internet centralization, combined with the consolidation of these operations among a handful of tech oligopolies, has heightened the risk of events like this occurring, according to a post on LinkedIn by Net Expert Solutions. Where operations were once conducted on locally managed systems, today they are integrated and linked together through centralized “nodes.”

“Today, there’s only three companies that control global access to internet trade and commerce, and that’s Alphabet—the parent company of Google—Microsoft, and Apple,” Rex Lee, a security advisor to companies, government agencies, and lawmakers, told NTD. “And the vulnerabilities within that are single choke points throughout the network that can take down millions of customers.”

CrowdStrike’s Rise to Prominence

Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike, founded in 2011, provides cloud-based software that protects computer systems against cyberattacks to tens of thousands of companies, organizations, and government agencies around the world, including 300 of the Fortune 500 companies. The company’s software has access to the most central elements of computer operating systems.

The company rose to prominence, offering more nimble, artificial-intelligence-based software, that was seen by many as a better, smarter way to protect operating systems from today’s hackers, who were going beyond circulating computer viruses.

“Today’s sophisticated attackers are going ‘beyond malware’ to breach organizations, increasingly relying on exploits, zero days, and hard-to-detect methods such as credential theft and tools that are already part of the victim’s environment or operating system, such as PowerShell,” CrowdStrike’s website states.

“CrowdStrike Falcon responds to those challenges with a powerful yet lightweight solution that unifies next-generation antivirus, endpoint detection and response, cyber threat intelligence, managed threat hunting capabilities and security hygiene—all contained in a tiny, single, lightweight sensor that is cloud-managed and delivered.”

As the company’s reputation spread, it was called in by the FBI to help investigate the Sony Pictures hack in 2014, which publicized the company’s confidential internal communications, as well as the hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

CrowdStrike went public in 2019 and its market value exceeded $75 billion, prior to the outages. CrowdStrike’s share price dropped more than 12 percent on July 19.

The widespread system failures that occurred this week were the result of a software update that reportedly contained a faulty kernel.

In the tech world, a kernel, sometimes called the engine of computer operating systems, is a program within the operating system that manages system and coordinates the different processes within the system. If the kernel is outdated, it can leave the operating system vulnerable to outside tampering; if it malfunctions, the entire operating system may malfunction along with it.

Tech analyst and actor Waseem Mirza noted the irony of the latest failure.

“For me, it’s a little bit ironic that we’re always warning about the potential for cybersecurity actors, and in this case we’re talking about the very people that were supposed to protect the world actually being the root cause of it,” Mr. Mirza told NTD.

The extent of the damage from this single outage has yet to be fully assessed, but analysts say it will be substantial.

“They’re saying that this isn’t a cybersecurity attack, but it had the same net result as a cybersecurity attack, and that bad kernel caused over a billion computers to lose access to back office systems,” Mr. Lee said. “We’re talking about government agencies, we’re talking about Fortune 500 business, airlines … the cascading effects of this are unbelievable.

“If you look at the critical infrastructure that’s being affected, this is actually going to cause harm and people may be dying as a result of this, because first responders are being affected, hospitals are being affected,” Mr. Lee said.

“We won’t know the total damage from all this, but it’s going to go down in history as the largest mistake and/or outage in the history of the internet.”

“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time,” Troy Hunt, a regional director at Microsoft, wrote on social platform X.

He also noted that “this will be the largest IT outage in history.”

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Airlines, banks, TV channels and financial institutions were engulfed in turmoil after the crash, one of the biggest in recent years that was the result of a faulty software update to an antivirus program operating on Microsoft Windows.

The proliferation of internet-breaking conspiracy theories on social media platforms -- many of which have removed guardrails that once contained the spread of misinformation -- illustrates the new normal of information chaos after a major world event.

The outage gave way to a swirl of evidence-free posts on X, the Elon Musk-owned site formerly known as Twitter, that peddled an apocalyptic narrative: The world was under attack by a nefarious force.

"I read somewhere once that ww3 (World War III) would be mostly a cyber war," one user wrote on X.

The IT crash also stirred up an unfounded theory that the World Economic Forum -- long a magnet for wild falsehoods -- had plotted a global cyberattack.

To make that theory appear credible, many posts linked an old WEF video that warned about the possibility of a "cyberattack with Covid-like characteristics."

The video, available on the WEF's website, had cautioned that the only way to stop the exponential spread of the cyber threat would be to disconnect millions of vulnerable devices from each other and the internet.

'Sad testament'

The WEF has long been a target for conspiracy theorists pushing the idea of a shadowy cabal of elites working for private gain under the garb of solving global issues.

Also gaining rapid traction online were conspiratorial posts using the hashtag "cyber polygon," a reference to a global training event aimed at preparing for potential future attacks.

"The proliferation of conspiracy theories in the wake of major global events such as the outage is a sad testament to the volatile nature of the information ecosystem," Rafi Mendelsohn, vice president at the disinformation security company Cyabra, told AFP.

"What is unique to events like these is how social media platforms, forums, and messaging apps facilitate the rapid dissemination of content, allowing theories to gain traction quickly and reach a global audience."

The trend demonstrates the ability of falsehoods to mutate into viral narratives on tech platforms, which have scaled back content moderation and reinstated accounts that are known purveyors of misinformation.

During fast-developing news events, confusion now often reigns on major tech platforms, with users scrambling to obtain accurate information in what appears to be a sea of false or misleading posts that rapidly gain traction.

'Nefarious motives'

"This poses the larger question of combatting mis- and disinformation," Michael W. Mosser, executive director of the Global Disinformation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, told AFP.

"The level of trust that is required to accept information from reputable sources has declined to such an extent that people are more willing to believe wild conspiracies that 'must be true' rather than the factual information relayed to them."

The global outage, which brought myriad aspects of daily life to a standstill and sent US stocks falling, was linked to a bug in an update to an antivirus program for Windows systems from American cybersecurity group CrowdStrike.

Assurances by the Austin-based company's chief executive, George Kurtz, that CrowdStrike had rolled out a fix and was "actively working" to resolve the crisis did little to stem the spread of online conspiracies.

"Combatting this misinformation with factual rebuttals is difficult, because the issue is so technical," Mosser said.

"Explaining that the fault was in an improperly configured system file and that a fix is in process may be accurate, but it is not believed by those who are predisposed to see nefarious motives behind failures."

(AFP)

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•     CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has been down this road before.

•     As CTO of McAfee in 2010, Kurtz was at the center of another similar tech debacle.

A good portion of the world stood still on Friday, resulting in one of the most widespread tech outages of all time.

The outage disrupted operations at major banks, airlines, retailers, and other industries after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity giant used by Microsoft and others, pushed a faulty update.

Many industries were still digging out of the debacle on Saturday. The fallout is expected to last weeks.

CrowdStrike owned up to its mistake, issuing an apology and a workaround on Friday. But it has yet to detail just how a destructive update could have been released without being caught by testing and other safeguards.

Naturally, blame has begun to target the man at the center of it all: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.

Tech industry analyst Anshel Sag pointed out that this isn't the first time Kurtz has played a major role in a historic IT blowout.

On April 21, 2010, the antivirus company McAfee released an update to its software used by its corporate customers. The update deleted a key Windows file, causing millions of computers around the world to crash and repeatedly reboot. Much like the CrowdStrike mistake, the McAfee problem required a manual fix.

Kurtz was McAfee's chief technology officer at the time. Months later, Intel acquired McAfee. And several months after that Kurtz left the company. He founded CrowdStrike in 2012 and has been its CEO ever since.

"For those who don't remember, in 2010, McAfee had a colossal glitch with Windows XP that took down a good part of the internet," Sag wrote on X. "The man who was McAfee's CTO at that time is now the CEO of CrowdStrike."

In response to a request for comment from Business Insider, CrowdStrike shared its latest blog posts detailing the problem and its recommended fix, but did not elaborate on how the update slipped through the company's safety protocols.

"We understand how this issue occurred and we are doing a thorough root cause analysis to determine how this logic flaw occurred," the company says in the post. "This effort will be ongoing. We are committed to identifying any foundational or workflow improvements that we can make to strengthen our process."

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The Russian-founded tech giant Yandex has left Russia after finalizing one of the country’s most significant foreign corporate exits since the Russo-Ukraine war started. Reuters reports that Russian investors acquired the last of Yandex’s Russian assets, and the company has rebranded itself as the Dutch-based Nebius Group. The company, which had been banned from procuring Nvidia GPUs due to US sanctions against Russia, is now working to triple its data center deployments of Nvidia chips.

The deal took around two years to complete and culminated in Russian investors paying $5.4 billion for the remaining 28% of Yandex NV (YNV) shares, which was still a bargain for the buyers. The Russian government demanded a discount of at least 50% on foreign asset sales.

The company claims to already have the largest data center in Europe, but it plans to triple its footprint with new Nvidia GPUs to compete with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the AI sphere.

"It's in Nvidia's interest to diversify their client base; they're interested in growing guys like us," Volozh told the Financial Times. "We've had a working relationship with them for years. They know and trust us," claims the Yandex founder.

In 2022, the EU imposed restrictions on Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh over his alleged complicity in the Ukrainian invasion. Volozh later condemned the conflict, calling it barbaric, and the EU lifted the ban. It paved the way for Volozh to become CEO of Yandex again, now Nebius Group, in its new incarnation. Rebuilding the company in Amsterdam, Volozh will lead a team of 1,300 employees, primarily former Yandex staff.

The Yandex brand will be phased out by July 31. YNV chairman John Boynton expressed gratitude to the company’s employees, especially negotiations leader Vadim Marchuk. “All connections with Russia have now been severed,” he said.

Nebius Group plans to operate in four AI-centric businesses: cloud computing, data labeling, autonomous driving, and education technology. Yandex once dominated these businesses in Russia, so the company knows them well. Nebius has already begun collaborating to develop its EU cloud computing platform.

The company works with AI startups in France and Germany and plans to triple its cluster of Nvidia chips at its data center in Finland. This will help it compete against existing industry leaders like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Nebius says its data center already houses the most powerful supercomputer in Europe.

Nebius Group hopes that the Russian exit will allow its Nasdaq listing to start trading again. Trading the company’s shares on the U.S.-based stock exchange has been suspended for over two years.

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•  They define principles for regulating the tech, learn the legal landscape, and liaise with stakeholders.

•  Those in the role often earn annual salaries in the mid-six figures.

The launch of ChatGPT ushered the corporate world into a new era.

The buzzy bot's technology — generative AI — could write emails, produce code, and materialize graphics in minutes. Suddenly, the days in which workers pored over their inboxes and painstakingly crafted presentations seemed like a relic of the past.

Companies, lured by profit and productivity gains, rushed to adopt the technology. According to a May survey from consulting firm Mckinsey & Company, 65% of the more than 1,300 companies it researched said they now regularly use generative AI — double the number using it the year before.

But the risks of misusing the technology loom large. Generative AI can hallucinate, spread misinformation, and reinforce biases against marginalized groups if it's not managed properly. Given that the technology relies on volumes of sensitive data, the potential for data breaches is also high. At worst, though, there's the danger that the more sophisticated it becomes, the less likely it is to align with human values.

With great power, then, comes great responsibility, and companies that make money from generative AI must also ensure they regulate it.

That's where a chief ethics officer comes in.

A critical role in the age of AI

The details of the role vary from company to company but — broadly — they're responsible for determining the impact a company's use of AI might have on the larger society, according to Var Shankar, the chief AI and privacy officer at Enzai, a software platform for AI governance, risk, and compliance. "So beyond just your company and your bottom line, how does it affect your customers? How does it affect other people in the world? And then how does it affect the environment," he told Business Insider. Then comes "building a program that standardizes and scales those questions every time you use AI."

It's a role that gives policy nerds and philosophy majors, alongside programming whizzes, a footing in the fast-changing tech industry. And it often comes with a sizable annual paycheck in the mid-six figures.

Right now, though, companies aren't hiring people into these roles fast enough, according to Steve Mills, the chief AI ethics officer at Boston Consulting Group. "I think there's a lot of talk about risk and principles, but little action to operationalize that within companies," he said.

A C-suite level responsibility

Those who are successful in the role ideally have four areas of expertise, according to Mills. They should have a technical grasp over generative AI, experience building and deploying products, an understanding of the major laws and regulations around AI, and significant experience hiring and making decisions at an organization.

"Too often, I see people put midlevel managers in charge, and while they may have expertise, desire, and passion, they typically don't have the stature to change things within the organization and rally legal, business, and compliance teams together," he said. Every Fortune 500 company using AI at scale needs to charge an executive with overseeing a responsible AI program, he added.

Shankar, a lawyer by training, said that the role doesn't warrant any specific educational background. The most important qualification is understanding a company's data. That means having a handle on the "ethical implications of the data that you collect, use, where it comes from, where it was before it was in your organization, and what kinds of consent you have around it," he said.

He pointed to the example of healthcare providers who could unintentionally perpetuate biases if they don't have a firm grasp of their data. In a study published in Science, hospitals and health insurance companies that used an algorithm to identify patients that would benefit from "high-risk care management" ended up prioritizing healthier white patients over sicker black patients. That's the kind of blunder an ethics officer can help companies avoid.

Collaborating across companies and industries

Those in the role should also be able to communicate confidently with various stakeholders.

Christina Montgomery, IBM's vice president, chief privacy and trust officer, and chair of its AI Ethics Board, told BI that her days are usually packed with client meetings and events, alongside other responsibilities.

"I spent a lot of time externally, probably more time lately, in speaking at events and engaging with policymakers and on the external boards because I feel like we have very much an opportunity to influence and determine what the future looks like," she said.

She sits on boards like the International Association of Privacy Professionals, which recently launched an Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional certification for individuals who want to lead the field of AI ethics. She also engages with government leaders and other chief ethics officers.

"I think it's absolutely critical that we be talking to each other on a regular basis and sharing best practices, and we do a lot of that across companies," she said.

She aims to develop a broader understanding of what's happening on a societal level — something she sees as key to the role.

"My fear at the space that we are at right now is that there's no interoperability globally among all these regulations, and what's expected, and what's right and wrong in terms of what companies are going to have to comply with," she said. "We can't operate in a world that way. So the conversations among companies, governments, and boards are so important right now."

Source

In case you missed it, Microsoft revealed a new tier called Xbox Game Pass Standard, a $15 monthly subscription for new members that excludes day-one releases, EA Play, PC Game Pass, and cloud gaming. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which includes those perks, will have its monthly price raised from $17 to $20. Xbox Game Pass Core, which only offers online play and a smaller library, is raising its yearly sub from $60 to $75 (the $10 monthly fee remains unchanged). PC Game Pass is increasing from $10 per month to $12. 

Additionally, the $10.99 Game Pass for Console is no longer be available to new subscribers as of July 10. If existing subscribers fail to renew their membership, they will be permanently locked out of this tier and must subscribe to another, more expensive membership. 

In the filing, the FTC blasts Microsoft’s discontinuation of Game Pass for Console, stating that users must pay a substantial price increase (81%) to switch to Game Pass Ultimate. Those unwilling to do so must settle for Game Pass Standard, which the FTC describes as a “degraded product” since it excludes day-one releases. 

“[Game Pass Standard] costs 36% more than Console Game Pass, and withholds day-one releases. Product degradation—removing the most valuable games from Microsoft’s new service—combined with price increases for existing users, is exactly the sort of consumer harm from the merger the FTC has alleged."

The FTC was the primary opposition against Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard and sees this move as proof of its concerns over the purchase. 

“Microsoft’s price increases and product degradation—combined with Microsoft’s reduced investments in output and product quality via employee layoffs[…]—are the hallmarks of a firm exercising market power post-merger.”

The FTC goes on to call the price increases "inconsistent" with the case Microsoft made during the Xbox FTC trial last year. It states, "Microsoft promised that 'the acquisition would benefit consumers by making [CoD] available on Microsoft’s Game Pass on the day it is released on console (with no price increase for the service based on the acquisition).' Microsoft’s post-merger actions thus vindicate the congressional design of preliminarily halting mergers to fully evaluate their likely competitive effects, and judicial skepticism of promises inconsistent with a firm’s economic incentives."

That last portion references Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's (the first new entry to release post-acquisition) October 25 launch on Game Pass Ultimate, roughly a month after the subscription tier's price increase. 

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Since yesterday, CrowdStrike and Microsoft have been providing guidance to affected customers to recover their PCs. You can check out CrowdStrike's official guide here and Microsoft's official guide here.

Today, Microsoft confirmed that CrowdStrike's update issue affected 8.5 million Windows devices, less than one percent of all Windows machines. However, the broad economic and societal impacts observed yesterday reflect CrowdStrike's usage in several critical sectors, including 911 operations in the US, mass transit in NYC, banking in several countries, and health services in Israel. According to CrowdStrike's website, it serves over 298 of the Fortune 500 companies, 43 U.S. states, 6 of the top 10 healthcare providers, and 8 of the top 10 financial services firms.

Fixing 8.5 million affected PCs is a massive task, and full recovery may take several weeks. To expedite the recovery of these systems, Microsoft is working closely with CrowdStrike and other leading cloud vendors, including Amazon AWS and Google Cloud. CrowdStrike collaborated with Microsoft to develop a scalable solution that will help Microsoft's Azure infrastructure accelerate the fix for CrowdStrike's faulty update.

David Weston, Vice President of Enterprise and OS Security at Microsoft, wrote the following in a blog post explaining how they are helping customers through the CrowdStrike outage:

"This incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of our broad ecosystem - global cloud providers, software platforms, security vendors and other software vendors, and customers. It's also a reminder of how important it is for all of us across the tech ecosystem to prioritize operating with safe deployment and disaster recovery practices using the mechanisms that exist."

As the dust settles on this unprecedented incident, the importance of collaboration and swift action in the face of widespread technological disruptions has never been clearer. The collective efforts of CrowdStrike, Microsoft, and other industry leaders demonstrate the power of a unified response in mitigating the impact of such events. This incident underscores the need for cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike to exercise greater caution and diligence when deploying updates across a large number of systems.

Source: Microsoft

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Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of June): 2,839 news posts

Although Microsoft is not the one to blame for the outage, the company is doing everything possible to restore the affected systems. It works with CrowdStrike to resolve the issue, and customers can already check out detailed step-by-step guides on how to recover from blue screens of death with error codes 0x50 or 0x7E (also check out the official guide suggested by CrowdStrike).

Microsoft has identified an issue impacting Windows endpoints that are running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent. These endpoints might encounter error messages 0x50 or 0x7E on a blue screen and experience a continual restarting state.

 

We have received reports of successful recovery from some customers attempting multiple restart operations on affected Windows endpoints.

 

We are working with CrowdStrike to provide the most up-to-date information available on this issue. Please check back for updates on this ongoing issue.

The guides are available on the KB5042421 support page. They offer detailed explanations of fixing different scenarios using different methods on Windows 10 and 11. Systems affected by the outage crash to blue screens of death or Windows Recovery, and Microsoft has guides for both scenarios. You can restore using Safe Mode or a System Restore Point.

The official Windows Health Dashboard website says Microsoft will provide more updates and relevant information as they become available. Therefore, expect to hear more about what seems to be the largest IT outage in recent memory.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of June): 2,839 news posts

Researchers have been able to turn simulation and observational data from a fusion reactor into an incredible 3D simulation. It provides a view of what it would be like to fly through the plasma, and gives insights into how the reactor behaves at such extreme temperatures.

The modeled reactor is a faithful reproduction of EPFL’s variable-configuration tokamak (TCV). A tokamak is a donut-shaped reactor.

Plasma at a temperature of over 100 million degrees flows through it and fusion takes place. The team at the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (EM+), part of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, recreated this 30-year-old machine and provided us with a unique way to look inside.

“We used a robot to generate ultra-high-precision scans of the reactor interior, which we then compiled to produce a 3D model that replicates its components right down to their texture,” Samy Mannane, a computer scientist at EM+, said in a statement. “We were even able to capture the wear and tear on the graphite tiles lining the reactor walls, which are subject to extremely high temperatures during test runs of the TCV.”

Flying through the fusion reactor is cool for everyone, but scientists can use it to actually learn how to improve the design and make the reaction more efficient. The simulation delivers the position of thousands of particles and their effects, shifting about 60 times per second. A special computing setup with five computers and 10 GPUs in total delivered this incredible visualization.  

“We were able to build our system thanks to advances in infographics technology,” explained Sarah Kenderdine, the professor who heads EM+. “It would’ve been impossible even just five years ago.”

The visualization shows the particles involved in the reaction. Electrons are in red; protons are in green; and blue lines indicate the magnetic field. They swirl around and interact, just as they would in the actual tokamak.

“The physics behind the visualization process is extremely complicated,” added Paolo Ricci, director of the Swiss Plasma Center.

“Tokamaks have many different moving parts: particles with heterogenous behavior, magnetic fields, waves for heating the plasma, particles injected from the outside, gases, and more. Even physicists have a hard time sorting everything out. The visualization developed by EM+ combines the standard output of simulation programs – basically, tables of numbers – with real-time visualization techniques that the lab uses to create a video-game-like atmosphere.”

The visualization is not just a pretty video. It's accurate, it's coherent, and it's realistic.

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Cigarette butts are the second most common undisposed-of litter on Earth—of the six trillion-ish cigarettes inhaled every year, it’s estimated that over 4 trillion of the butts are just tossed onto the ground, each one leeching over 700 different toxic chemicals into the environment. Let’s not focus on the fact that all those toxic chemicals are also going into people’s lungs, and instead talk about the ecosystem damage that they can do and also just the general grossness of having bits of sucked-on trash everywhere. Ew.

Preventing those cigarette butts from winding up on the ground in the first place would be the best option, but it would require a pretty big shift in human behavior. Operating under the assumption that humans changing their behavior is a nonstarter, roboticists from the Dynamic Legged Systems unit at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), in Genoa, have instead designed a novel platform for cigarette-butt cleanup in the form of a quadrupedal robot with vacuums attached to its feet.

There are, of course, far more efficient ways of at least partially automating the cleanup of litter with machines. The challenge is that most of that automation relies on mobility systems with wheels, which won’t work on the many beautiful beaches (and many beautiful flights of stairs) of Genoa. In places like these, it still falls to humans to do the hard work, which is less than ideal.

This robot, developed in Claudio Semini’s lab at IIT, is called VERO (Vacuum-cleaner Equipped RObot). It’s based around an AlienGo from Unitree, with a commercial vacuum mounted on its back. Hoses go from the vacuum down the leg to each foot, with a custom 3D-printed nozzle that puts as much suction near the ground as possible without tripping the robot up. While the vacuum is novel, the real contribution here is how the robot autonomously locates things on the ground and then plans how to interact with those things using its feet.

First, an operator designates an area for VERO to clean, after which the robot operates by itself. After calculating an exploration path to explore the entire area, the robot uses its onboard cameras and a neural network to detect cigarette butts. This is trickier than it sounds, because there may be a lot of cigarette butts on the ground, and they all probably look pretty much the same, so the system has to filter out all of the potential duplicates. The next step is to plan its next steps: VERO has to put the vacuum side of one of its feet right next to each cigarette butt while calculating a safe, stable pose for the rest of its body. Since this whole process can take place on sand or stairs or other uneven surfaces, VERO has to prioritize not falling over before it decides how to do the collection. The final collecting maneuver is fine-tuned using an extra Intel RealSense depth camera mounted on the robot’s chin.

VERO has been tested successfully in six different scenarios that challenge both its locomotion and detection capabilities. IIT

Initial testing with the robot in a variety of different environments showed that it could successfully collect just under 90 percent of cigarette butts, which I bet is better than I could do, and I’m also much more likely to get fed up with the whole process. The robot is not very quick at the task, but unlike me it will never get fed up as long as it’s got energy in its battery, so speed is somewhat less important.

As far as the authors of this paper are aware (and I assume they’ve done their research), this is “the first time that the legs of a legged robot are concurrently utilized for locomotion and for a different task.” This is distinct from other robots that can (for example) open doors with their feet, because those robots stop using the feet as feet for a while and instead use them as manipulators.

So, this is about a lot more than cigarette butts, and the researchers suggest a variety of other potential use cases, including spraying weeds in crop fields, inspecting cracks in infrastructure, and placing nails and rivets during construction.

Some use cases include potentially doing multiple things at the same time, like planting different kinds of seeds, using different surface sensors, or driving both nails and rivets. And since quadrupeds have four feet, they could potentially host four completely different tools, and the software that the researchers developed for VERO can be slightly modified to put whatever foot you want on whatever spot you need.

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I didn’t know I was dead until I saw it on Google. When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text “Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years”. Apparently I died on 27 July 2004, aged 77. This was news to me.

The problem was the picture. When you search the name of a notable person, Google may create what it calls a “knowledge panel”, a little box with basic information taken from Wikipedia. Somewhere along the way, the algorithm had confused pictures of my face with the biography of another man who shared my name. According to his obituary, he was “a distinguished physicist with a literary hinterland”. Google provides a feedback form to resolve this type of bug. I filled it in several times, but it made no difference.

I’m not the only one who has been struggling with Google recently. Many users are saying its principal product, its search engine, isn’t working as well as it should. They claim the ingenious vehicle that has enabled us to navigate the internet’s infinite scroll of information is beginning to rust and decay. That’s not to mention the company’s endless court battles with rival companies and world governments, or the rise of ChatGPT, which many tout as a search engine killer; even Bill Gates said last year that once a company perfects the AI assistant or “personal agent”, “you will never go to a search site again”.

Yet it’s hard to imagine anything taking Google’s place. Last year it turned 25, and Alphabet, its parent company, currently ranks as the fourth most valuable in the world, worth more than $2tn (£1.5tn). Google has a whopping 90% share of the global search market. More than a tool, it’s practically infrastructure; the connective tissue that is fundamental to how we find information online. This gives the company enormous power over politics, social attitudes and the fortunes of countless businesses – anyone and anything, in fact, that relies on the eyeballs of the internet to operate. Some say Google is too big to fail.

It doesn’t take a distinguished physicist with a literary hinterland to see that right now Google search looks both deeply vulnerable and totally unstoppable. How can we be sure the company really has our interests at heart? And can we still trust it to tell us the truth?

The story of Google reads like the stereotypical tech company origin myth. A couple of computer geeks, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, started a business in a garage in the late 90s and built it into one of the world’s richest companies.

At the time the web was growing fast and a few early search engines were trying to organise the chaos. Page and Brin’s bright idea was to sort webpages not just by their relevance to a search query, but also by the quality of their information. This system, PageRank, prioritised webpages based on how many other pages linked to them. The underlying concept, borrowed from academia, was that if many people linked to a specific source, then it must have high-quality information.

It worked. Coupled with Google’s clean, simple interface of a text box and a handful of blue links, the site felt like magic. “Everybody could see then that Google’s results were far better than the others’. That was the basis of everything,” says Dirk Lewandowski, interim professor of data science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, who has studied search engines for 20 years.

Google quickly garnered a great deal of trust and goodwill. Its mission to “organise the world’s information” was inspiring. If you wanted to know something, you’d ask Google. Most of the time, it would deliver the answer you sought. Gradually, the other search engines died off. Search became synonymous with Google, and “Google” became a verb, and began to expand beyond text to images and video, even mapping the physical world with Google Maps and Street View.

Success generated more success, and Google captured vast amounts of data on its users that it employed to improve search algorithms. The company realised that this data could be valuable. With its search engine, it was capturing users’ thoughts, desires, their innermost questions. Google used this information to reinvent the advertising industry.

Cory Doctorow, an author, activist and mordant critic of big tech, explains the company’s ad system like this: “Say I have an 18- to 34-year-old manchild in central London who’s got an Xbox and has been searching for information about gonorrhoea. Who will pay to advertise to this person? Advertisers or bots bid for placement – and the winners serve an ad to you.”

Many of Google’s products besides search, from YouTube to Maps, collect data on users, which enables personalisation of your ads – this model is the foundational example of what technology commentator Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism”. Ads became big business for Google. Last year its parent company, Alphabet, earned 77% of its revenue from them – that’s $237.85bn.

Along the way, the company accrued not just economic power, but also social and political power. Rosie Graham, a lecturer in contemporary literature and the digital at the University of Birmingham, says we don’t just ask Google for information, but also for “ways to live our lives”. When we look for answers to social, religious or political questions, Google judges who are the trusted voices, and who we should not hear from. “Google has the power to change the way we think about things,” Graham says.

“It acts like it’s just another company, but it’s not. It influences countries’ elections. It has a huge stake in what’s profitable, what jobs can exist … in many ways it’s more powerful than governments. Gone are the times when it can be this small company that’s all cutesy and shoestring.”

Somewhere along its path to success, Google lost the public goodwill it earned in its early days. Once, its playful motto, “Don’t be evil”, featured prominently in its code of conduct. In 2018, it was quietly downgraded.

Companies become too big to fail, then too big to jail, then too big to care. Google is too big to care

Has Google search got worse? And if so, what does that look like? Imagine you used to go to your local library and, when you asked for a book, it was produced immediately. Now, when you ask for that same book, the librarian tries to sell you a magazine subscription, waves about some different books they say other people like, then finally produces a big stack of tomes with your desired book wedged awkwardly in the middle. You might have an opinion about this change in service.

This is the portrait detractors paint of the current state of Google search. Doctorow, for one, calls the most recent results “garbage”.

Former Google employees have posted scathing articles arguing that the company is floundering. Yet every day, billions of people use the search engine, and it’s a safe bet that many of them think it works just fine. How is it that some people believe this essential internet infrastructure is circling the drain while others haven’t noticed any change?

It can be hard to say anything definitive about search result quality, because each person’s experience is so different. If two people Google the same sentence, they will get different results based on all manner of variables. Meanwhile, Google constantly tweaks the algorithm.

Still, critics do have specific reasons for saying the service is going downhill. Google search is good only as long as it can serve up high-quality information, and many claim it no longer does so reliably. They often blame this on Google’s inability to combat spammers and the much-maligned search engine optimisation (SEO) industry. SEO companies aim to make websites appear more highly in Google search rankings to help their businesses. But this can lead to degradation in site quality, as if content is tailored only to please Google’s algorithms. Take recipe pages. When searching for cooking instructions, you’d probably want to see them displayed concisely at the top of the page, yet most food blogs bury recipes beneath a long anecdote. Food writers do this because they believe Google ranks this format highly. But readers resent it.

On the spammier fringes is what’s known as “black hat” SEO, bad actors who use techniques with fabulously evil names such as “domain squatting”, “reputation abuse”, “obituary spam”, “keyword swarming” or “parasite hosting” to bring their content to the top of Google’s search results and turn a quick buck. Spam pages usually have little meaningful content and are aggressively monetised, hosting intrusive ads to profit from each visitor’s click. A recent study claims that Google does indeed have a big spam problem, but adds that other search engines face the same issues.

Google and the spammers are locked in a never-ending battle. The spammers come up with a new technique, Google tweaks the algorithm to stop it working, then the spammers come up with something else. Google’s vice-president of search, Pandu Nayak, describes the dynamic as a “spy v spy situation”. Today the internet is facing the looming threat of a new wave of AI-generated spam, which threatens to overwhelm search engines.

Even when the links returned by a Google search are of high quality, the other criticism is that it’s hard to find them among the clutter.

Where the company once sought to send users onwards to relevant links as quickly as possible, in recent years it has started answering more questions within the Google search interface itself – so if you’re trying to find out something about sports scores, the weather or film showtimes, solve a mathematical equation, or perhaps find out the key publications of a certain distinguished physicist, Google will provide that information in a little box for you, without you needing to click any links.

Sometimes all these little boxes get in the way of the answer you’re trying to find. I just typed in “best smartphone 2024” and was shown, at the top, a carousel of shopping opportunities, followed by four links, then a panel of questions that “people also ask” with vaguely related queries (“Which phones last the longest years?”), then some YouTube videos, five more links, then more related queries and a further shopping carousel. The links I was actually seeking were buried by clutter. It’s a far cry from the sleek, minimal interface of early Google.

Sometimes, Google will populate boxes with information gleaned from the internet that turns out to be incorrect. Besides calling me a dead physicist, these info boxes have claimed that Barack Obama was the king of America, and asserted that Kannada, the official language of the Indian state of Karnataka, was the ugliest language in the country – Google had to issue an official apology for that one. It didn’t take me long to find an inaccurate response. On the third random question I typed in, “How long is Waterloo Bridge?”, a box came up with the confident answer “2,456ft” (748 metres). It was only when I clicked through to Wikipedia that I saw this figure was in fact the length of the first Waterloo Bridge, which was demolished in the 1930s. The current bridge is just 1,230ft (370 metres) long.

Google says users find the additional panels useful. Critics argue that it is trying to extract as much revenue as possible from users by keeping them within the Google ecosystem to the detriment of the user experience. Early on, Google’s founders realised that commercial incentives might compromise the integrity of search results. In a 1998 student paper, Brin and Page wrote that ad-funded search engines would be “inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers”. Yet Google started displaying ads anyway because, as one academic told me, this is the only good way to monetise search.

I spoke with representatives of the competing search and answer engines Kagi, DuckDuckGo and Perplexity, all of whom frame this issue as a misalignment in Google’s company incentives. They say Google makes design and business choices to earn revenue for advertisers and shareholders at the cost of search user experience. When I put this critique to Google’s Nayak, he dismisses it as “an easy narrative” and continues, “Since the beginning of Google, there has been a clear separation between organic search [eg regular results] and ads … we make sure that the ad side of the house does not affect search.”

When I ask whether Google search results are getting worse, he repeatedly makes the same point: the fact that Google has a 90% market share in search shows its product works well. “If the search experience was not good, I have every confidence people would not use it.”

Is there a reason people might use Google search even if it weren’t a great experience? The US Department of Justice (DoJ) recently gave its closing statements in a historic legal case against Google, which the Financial Times called “the most significant antitrust trial in 25 years”. The DoJ’s argument is that Google uses its wealth to operate anti-competitively as an illegal monopoly, principally by paying other tech companies to be the default search engine on their devices. Naturally, Google argues that people use its search engine because it’s the best. But if that’s the case, why did it need to pay Apple $20bn in 2022 alone to be the default search engine across its phones and computers? The case is likely to conclude before the end of the year.

Google’s biggest competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, has only about 3% of the global search market. A number of other startups scrape fractions of 1%, many with their own spin on the search engine formula: Perplexity offers written-through answers to questions, Kagi operates a paid subscription model with no ads, DuckDuckGo focuses on protecting data privacy. All three say it’s impossible to truly compete with Google right now.

Aravind Srinivas, chief executive of Perplexity, says, “Competing with Google is a no-fly zone. They’re just too big, they dominate, have all the best technology and a lot of money. They can just scorch you to death by offering whatever you’re offering for free.”

‘Google really need to point the finger at themselves and why they created this beast in the first place.’ Illustration: Justin Metz/The Guardian

Does it really matter whether there is competition to Google’s search engine? Doctorow believes it does. He coined the memorable term “enshittification” to explain the state of big tech companies in the modern age: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” He calls Google “the poster-child for enshittification”.

Doctorow says algorithmic systems are particularly vulnerable to this, because their workings are opaque to users and easy to quietly tweak. Who knows why you see what you see at the top of your Google search results, Instagram feed or TikTok For You page? Is it because it’s judged to be the best content for you, or because it’s what the platform thinks will make it the most money?

“That’s why it’s so tempting for companies to enshittify them,” Doctorow says. “They’re just yoloing it and saying, ‘Well, fuck it, we’re just going to make all the things at the top of your feed garbage, because we’re too big to care.’” Referencing a comment made by Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, he adds, “Companies become too big to fail, then too big to jail, then too big to care. Google is too big to care.”

The last stage of the enshittification doctrine is that a platform dies. Is this going to happen to Google? Rosie Graham thinks it’s inevitable, at some point. She points out how X, formerly Twitter, faded in relevance practically overnight after Elon Musk took over. “No company lasts for ever,” she says. “There are all sorts of organisations that had huge global influence and power that we don’t have any more – think about the East India Company. It’s not a matter of if Google will be influential for ever, it’s a question of when Google will be replaced.”

Not everyone agrees the search engine is getting worse. Of the dozen academics and industry professionals I interviewed for this piece, half said they didn’t think search quality was declining. Several pointed out people have been eagerly predicting Google’s death for years – there’s even a Wikipedia page called “Predictions of the end of Google” with examples dating back to 2007. Lewandowski says, “There have always been complaints about low-quality results and the interface getting more cluttered. But in the end, it’s basically the same.”

Perhaps what is really bothering people is that the internet as a whole feels, in 2024, like a worse place to be. Those who grew up on the web of the late 90s and early 00s might remember openness, community and free thinking. Today, we’re probably more likely to associate the internet with anxiety, loneliness and stress. Maybe we miss the time when the internet felt more human. This may explain why many people searching for information look to Reddit rather than Google. That huge, chaotic forum feels like one of the last truly human places on the internet, where you can get somebody else’s honest opinion in all its weirdness, untainted by murky brand associations or affiliate links.

Yet even if it’s true that the internet has declined, that doesn’t let Google totally off the hook. Its search engine doesn’t just organise information on the web, it actively shapes it. If the web is a worse place today, if it’s over-commercialised and full of low-quality content, if journalism platforms struggle to make money from good writing and are reduced to clickbait and affiliate links, that’s partly Google’s fault.

“Google has never really understood the responsibility it’s got to ensure publishers can continue to publish content without needing to over-commercialise in horrifying ways,” says Simon Schnieders, chief executive of the SEO company Blue Array. “They really need to point the finger at themselves and why they created this beast in the first place.”

As if the search question wasn’t tricky enough, today many people are predicting that the arrival of new AI technologies is going to change everything. Since the launch of ChatGPT, technologists have wondered whether AI assistants will one day take the place of search engines. ChatGPT is a product of OpenAI, which is in partnership with Microsoft, operator of Bing. Last year Microsoft announced it would integrate AI answers into its search engine results, with its chief executive, Satya Nadella, calling it “a new day in search”.

At its latest conference, Google seemed to be rushing to respond to this threat when it announced a suite of new AI tools. The company has been using AI behind the scenes to improve its search and algorithms for years, but with the launch of the new “AI Overviews” feature, which it has already started rolling out and plans to make available to more than 1 billion users by the end of the year, it will put the technology front and centre. With this feature, Google search will respond to certain queries with a text box above the usual links, providing a written-through summary of information from various websites. The slogan the company keeps repeating around this is “Let Google do the Googling for you”.

Asked ‘How many rocks should I eat?’ Google gave this AI Overview: ‘One per day because rocks contain minerals and vitamins’

Responses have been mixed. Google says in internal tests people found the feature useful. They claim it’s good for queries that require a number of specific variables – say you’re trying to find a place your family can eat in Paris that does vegan food, is open at 7am and is within walking distance of a Métro station. Such questions, which might previously have required 10 minutes of clicking around on numerous searches, can be done in seconds by AI (ChatGPT is also pretty good on this stuff).

But, of course, the internet immediately seized on the feature and found that, in response to certain queries, it produced hilarious, inaccurate and sometimes dangerous answers. In response to the question “How many rocks should I eat?”, Google presented this AI Overview: “According to UC Berkeley geologists, eating at least one small rock per day is recommended because rocks contain minerals and vitamins that are important for digestive health.” Meanwhile, someone who asked about “cheese not sticking to pizza” was recommended to “add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness”. Naturally, it didn’t take long for somebody to make and eat the glue pizza.

The erroneous information came from obviously dubious sources. Eating rocks was suggested by an article on satirical site the Onion, while the glue pizza idea was a post by “Fucksmith” on Reddit 11 years ago. Google was roundly mocked online and responded with a blog post essentially saying that these were growing pains and that the product would improve.

The new direction heralded by ChatGPT and AI Overviews is to a world in which we no longer search for answers ourselves, but rather receive a single, supposedly balanced answer that has been pre-chewed by an algorithm. “Summarisation, or the dumbing down of search, is a bad thing for society in general,” Schnieders argues. “It’s important to get a range of diverse perspectives from search, from your own trusted or new sources, practise critical thinking and form your own opinions. AI Overviews claims to do this but it’s too much of a black box to be trusted.”

Yet the biggest concern around AI Overviews came not from users who had cheese sliding off their pizzas, but from writers and publishers online. They’re worried that if Google summarises the information from their websites and delivers it to users, then those users will have no reasons to visit the sites, depriving them of the traffic necessary to fund more content creation.

This question has sent the media into a tailspin. Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of American technology news website the Verge, said AI Overviews would “change the web as we know it”, while the influential tech reporter Casey Newton said Google had “essentially put the web into a state of managed decline”. Reports have predicted that publishers could see their search traffic fall anywhere between 25% and 60% as a result of AI. If even a fraction of this is true, it could have enormous consequences for the already squeezed media landscape. Various small publishers have accused Google of killing their businesses.

When I ask Hema Budaraju, Google’s senior director of product management for search, whether Google has a responsibility to ensure a healthy web ecosystem, she answers with “a very direct, strong yes”. She emphasises Google’s “commitment to the web” and “ensuring we have a thriving ecosystem”. “As we introduce our generative capabilities, connecting people to the web is central to our approach,” she says.

I’m inclined to believe this is Google’s intention. It’s not in its long-term interest for the internet’s information economy to collapse. If media platforms can no longer afford to produce high-quality content, then Google’s AI Overviews will have nothing left to summarise. Eventually, people would stop using Google search.

During a visit to one of Google’s London offices, I told a member of the communications team that I had been inspired to look into the state of Google search by the broken knowledge panel saying I was a dead physicist. When I later spoke to Nayak, I decided to ask him how I could detach my face from the other Tom Faber. Before I’d finished my sentence, the communications person pinged into the chat, saying the issue had been fixed. I adjusted my question: maybe it’s been fixed for me because of having a direct line to Google, but how would someone resolve this if they didn’t have strings to pull?

Nayak apologised, saying the panels were created automatically using algorithms and sometimes they messed up: “These are the kinds of things we’re constantly improving.” He went on to insist that, on issues like this, Google’s “honest results policy puts everyone on the same playing field”, so it had nothing to do with me having contacts at Google. Immediately after, the call was ended abruptly for going over time.

When I followed up, I was told someone from the team had submitted a feedback form using the public channels, just like anyone else might, and this resulted in it getting fixed. This was perplexing. It seemed more than a coincidence that, after years of trying to fix the problem myself by submitting feedback forms, it would finally change weeks after mentioning it to a Google employee, and that this change would be unrelated to that conversation. But at least the issue was fixed.

For now, search engines aren’t going anywhere. “I think search is inevitable,” Doctorow says, but adds that we’ll always want human voices to cut through the noise and deliver curated sources of information. “We’re still going to have experts, reviewers and tastemakers, adventurous spelunkers in information space, and just the terminally curious – that one friend you have who can’t stop holding forth about something, whether it’s a new gamer mouse or a band or a new, extremely hoppy IPA. We’re going to have all of those things, but they’re all going to need search engines.”

It seems search is going to remain broadly the same – ChatGPT isn’t about to displace Google search, and AI Overviews are not about to fundamentally change the search experience. But there remains the larger question of what the rest of the internet will look like. As AI steers the online economy into uncharted waters, the fate of the media is hanging in the balance. And whatever the future of the web looks like, it’s sure Google is going to play an enormous role in shaping it.

As I was editing this story, I double-checked to see if my knowledge panel was still fixed and discovered, confoundingly, that the problem had returned. The next time I checked, it was fixed again. I began to regularly Google myself in incognito mode, on different browsers and devices. Sometimes my face popped up as a dead physicist; sometimes it didn’t. The ever-changing, algorithmic nature of it made it feel like Schrödinger’s knowledge panel, both correct and incorrect at all times.

The frustration of trying to resolve the knowledge panel issue echoed the process of trying to get a solid read on the state of Google’s search engine. The company is too opaque, and its system has too many shifting parts, to make a clear pronouncement. It is many things to many people, constantly succeeding and failing its billions of users. Sometimes, as much as you search and search, there is no single answer to be found.

Source

Companies like Google and OpenAI built their artificial intelligence chatbots and image generators by gobbling content from the web, spurring legal fights over copyright claims.

Now, some of those copyright holders are trying to get in on the A.I. boom. The major stock photo suppliers Getty Images and Shutterstock, among others, are building A.I. image generators with their own data, bypassing the legal worries that have shadowed the industry.

While the largest tech companies have been locked in a dizzying A.I. race, visual media marketplaces, content creators and artists are pushing for licensing so that they can be paid for work that helps train A.I. models and influences the technology they worry could one day displace them. It’s part of a larger effort to transform how A.I. models are developed, one that would train them with licensed data rather than with content that is scraped without permission.

While many image generators are often used by consumers for amusement, like creating the viral image of the pope in a white puffer jacket, the tech industry has coalesced around the idea that more advertising agencies and other companies would use these tools for marketing if there was no legal uncertainty surrounding them.

That’s the target market for Getty. Its partner, Picsart, which is building an A.I. image model with stock photos from Getty’s repository, is trying to appeal to small- and medium-size businesses. The company is mostly known for a photo-editing app used by more than 100 million people, most of them Gen Z-ers.

Picsart built an A.I. image model with stock photos from Getty’s repository. Credit...via Picsart

Picsart wanted to use licensed data to build the model because, for both the company and prospective customers, lawsuits are “a drag to the business, it’s a distraction,” Craig Foster, its chief financial officer, said. “I don’t want any part of that.”

After ChatGPT, the chatbot from OpenAI, and Stable Diffusion, a popular image generator from the British start-up Stability AI, wowed consumers in 2022, Google, Meta and other companies rushed to release similar A.I. capabilities. It didn’t take long for lawsuits to follow.

Publishers, authors and artists said they found signs that their works had been scraped to train the A.I. models. The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December for using copyrighted news articles without permission to train A.I. chatbots. OpenAI and Microsoft said they used the articles under “fair use.”

There’s also been legal wrangling over models that convert text into images. Cartoonists and a photographer sued Google in April, saying the company trained Imagen, its image generator, with their copyrighted works. Google has said that “American law has long supported using public information in new and beneficial ways.”

“With each different version of technology that comes out, copyright law is put to the test,” said Alan Fisch, an intellectual property lawyer at Fisch Sigler. Without clear legal rules in place, licensing data is “one way to reduce risk,” he added.

In early 2023, Getty Images, the world’s largest privately owned archive, noticed that its famous watermark was being recreated in some A.I.-generated images from Stable Diffusion. It sued the tool’s maker, Stability AI, in February 2023, saying it had copied more than 12 million images from Getty’s collection. Stability said it did not infringe on Getty’s intellectual property rights.

Getty worked with the chipmaker Nvidia to build its own image generator, calling it “a worry‑free model built for business.” Through Getty’s website or another interface, customers can type in a prompt for the image they want to see and specify its quality and style. Then, they can select the shape and color of the image, and the generator will present multiple options.

Getty, along with 20 other stock image companies, is providing images for Bria AI, an Israeli start-up, to build an A.I. model. Bria will split revenue from its generator with Getty and its other partners.

Yair Adato, the chief executive of Bria, said dividing revenue with all of the partners and helping to attribute work back to artists was essential to preserve the role of content creators.

Without “value for creation, everything will be very average and very boring,” he said.

Getty has said it will pay photographers when it uses their images to train a model. It will also give photographers a portion of the subscription revenue it receives from clients. The company told Wired it paid about 30 cents on the dollar for every dollar it made.

Bria AI, an Israeli start-up, was allowed to build an A.I. model with Getty images.Credit...via Bria AI

The rising quality of models that generate images and videos has many artists concerned for the fate of their industries. And it is not always clear if A.I. companies have used their content to train the underlying models. The Times has reported that Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, was trained partly on YouTube videos, but the company has not been transparent about data sources.

That lack of transparency concerns filmmakers like Joe Talbot, who directed the award-winning film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” He said artists needed to be consulted about technology being built on the backs of their work.

“I worry,” he said, “about my fellow film brethren being able to etch out a decent existence.”

Shutterstock, which has a massive library of images and video clips, started a contributor fund in 2022 to compensate artists when their work was licensed for A.I. The amount a contributor is paid depends on how much an A.I. provider pays Shutterstock. Their royalties are a proportion from each deal, and the amount rises if the client uses more of their images. The company declined to specify exact percentages, the average value of a photo or typical payouts.

Outside of A.I., regular photos on Shutterstock often sell for $14.50 each, and photographers receive 15 to 40 percent of the total, depending on how many they license in a year.

Shutterstock has taken a different route to A.I. than its rival Getty has, selling images to major A.I. providers like OpenAI since 2021 and receiving $104 million in licensing revenue last year. But it says licensing habits are changing.

“We are well aware that the days of needing huge volumes of data to train models are over,” said Aimee Egan, the chief enterprise officer of Shutterstock.

Later this year, the company will roll out two A.I. models: one with the software maker Databricks for images and another with Nvidia for 3-D images.

Companies like Shutterstock and Adobe are now paying photographers to take pictures for A.I. training, but the earning potential can be modest and inconsistent. Adobe has offered photographers less than $100 to shoot as many as 1,000 photos for A.I., Bloomberg News reported. And the rush to develop polished generated images could erode long-term job prospects in photography.

That has left room for other companies trying to help artists be paid when their work is used for A.I. The start-up OpenLicense built a marketplace where A.I. businesses can find data and artists can be compensated and track which models are using their work. Payments scale with how often a photo is used. If a photo is referenced a million times to generate images, the artist can expect as much as $12,000 in royalties, said Joshua Soto, the co-founder and president of OpenLicense.

The company has started working with artists on Imageshack, an image-hosting site it has teamed up with.

Mr. Soto said the company was “trying to bridge the benefits” of A.I. between developers and artists.

That relationship was recently put under more strain when Adobe, the software giant behind Photoshop, updated its terms of service with vague language in June. Some customers believed the words to mean that Adobe would scrape their work to keep building its generative A.I. system, Firefly.

The company denied the claim several times. But the episode highlighted artists’ pervasive fears over how A.I. could disrupt their livelihoods — a worry that has led some to oppose the technology. But Mr. Soto, a onetime graphic designer, said that engaging could make the best of a challenging situation.

“Your content is going to get used either way,” he said. “You might as well be in a position where you are part of that process and explicitly saying which content you want used.”

Source

For years, the people building powerful artificial intelligence systems have used enormous troves of text, images and videos pulled from the internet to train their models.

Now, that data is drying up.

Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training A.I. models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an M.I.T.-led research group.

The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used A.I. training data sets, discovered an “emerging crisis in consent,” as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested.

The researchers estimate that in the three data sets — called C4, RefinedWeb and Dolma — 5 percent of all data, and 25 percent of data from the highest-quality sources, has been restricted. Those restrictions are set up through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a decades-old method for website owners to prevent automated bots from crawling their pages using a file called robots.txt.

The study also found that as much as 45 percent of the data in one set, C4, had been restricted by websites’ terms of service.

“We’re seeing a rapid decline in consent to use data across the web that will have ramifications not just for A.I. companies, but for researchers, academics and noncommercial entities,” said Shayne Longpre, the study’s lead author, in an interview.

Data is the main ingredient in today’s generative A.I. systems, which are fed billions of examples of text, images and videos. Much of that data is scraped from public websites by researchers and compiled in large data sets, which can be downloaded and freely used, or supplemented with data from other sources.

Learning from that data is what allows generative A.I. tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude to write, code and generate images and videos. The more high-quality data is fed into these models, the better their outputs generally are.

For years, A.I. developers were able to gather data fairly easily. But the generative A.I. boom of the past few years has led to tensions with the owners of that data — many of whom have misgivings about being used as A.I. training fodder, or at least want to be paid for it.

As the backlash has grown, some publishers have set up paywalls or changed their terms of service to limit the use of their data for A.I. training. Others have blocked the automated web crawlers used by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Sites like Reddit and StackOverflow have begun charging A.I. companies for access to data, and a few publishers have taken legal action — including The New York Times, which sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement last year, alleging that the companies used news articles to train their models without permission.

Companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta have gone to extreme lengths in recent years to gather more data to improve their systems, including transcribing YouTube videos and bending their own data policies.

More recently, some A.I. companies have struck deals with publishers including The Associated Press and News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal, giving them ongoing access to their content.

But widespread data restrictions may pose a threat to A.I. companies, which need a steady supply of high-quality data to keep their models fresh and up-to-date.

They could also spell trouble for smaller A.I. outfits and academic researchers who rely on public data sets, and can’t afford to license data directly from publishers. Common Crawl, one such data set that comprises billions of pages of web content and is maintained by a nonprofit, has been cited in more than 10,000 academic studies, Mr. Longpre said.

It’s not clear which popular A.I. products have been trained on these sources, since few developers disclose the full list of data they use.

But data sets derived from Common Crawl, including C4 (which stands for Colossal, Cleaned Crawled Corpus) have been used by companies including Google and OpenAI to train previous versions of their models. Spokespeople for Google and OpenAI declined to comment.

Yacine Jernite, a machine learning researcher at Hugging Face, a company that provides tools and data to A.I. developers, characterized the consent crisis as a natural response to the A.I. industry’s aggressive data-gathering practices.

“Unsurprisingly, we’re seeing blowback from data creators after the text, images and videos they’ve shared online are used to develop commercial systems that sometimes directly threaten their livelihoods,” he said.

But he cautioned that if all A.I. training data needed to be obtained through licensing deals, it would exclude “researchers and civil society from participating in the governance of the technology.”

Stella Biderman, the executive director of EleutherAI, a nonprofit A.I. research organization, echoed those fears.

“Major tech companies already have all of the data,” she said. “Changing the license on the data doesn’t retroactively revoke that permission, and the primary impact is on later-arriving actors, who are typically either smaller start-ups or researchers.”

A.I. companies have claimed that their use of public web data is legally protected under fair use. But gathering new data has gotten trickier. Some A.I. executives I’ve spoken to worry about hitting the “data wall” — their term for the point at which all of the training data on the public internet has been exhausted, and the rest has been hidden behind paywalls, blocked by robots.txt or locked up in exclusive deals.

Some companies believe they can scale the data wall by using synthetic data — that is, data that is itself generated by A.I. systems — to train their models. But many researchers doubt that today’s A.I. systems are capable of generating enough high-quality synthetic data to replace the human-created data they’re losing.

Another challenge is that while publishers can try to stop A.I. companies from scraping their data by placing restrictions in their robots.txt files, those requests aren’t legally binding, and compliance is voluntary. (Think of it like a “no trespassing” sign for data, but one without the force of law.)

Major search engines honor these opt-out requests, and several leading A.I. companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have said publicly that they do, too. But other companies, including the A.I.-powered search engine Perplexity, have been accused of ignoring them.

Perplexity’s chief executive, Aravind Srinivas, told me that the company respects publishers’ data restrictions. He added that while the company once worked with third-party web crawlers that did not always follow the Robots Exclusion Protocol, it had “made adjustments with our providers to ensure that they follow robots.txt when crawling on Perplexity’s behalf.”

Mr. Longpre said that one of the big takeaways from the study is that we need new tools to give website owners more precise ways to control the use of their data. Some sites might object to A.I. giants using their data to train chatbots for a profit, but might be willing to let a nonprofit or educational institution use the same data, he said. Right now, there’s no good way for them to distinguish between those uses, or block one while allowing the other.

But there’s also a lesson here for big A.I. companies, who have treated the internet as an all-you-can-eat data buffet for years, without giving the owners of that data much of value in return. Eventually, if you take advantage of the web, the web will start shutting its doors.

Source

For a couple of years now, the artificial intelligence community has been warning that there is a chance their work will go south and humanity will end in a conflagration worthy of a superhero movie.

Friday brought a pointed reminder that disaster is at least as likely to creep in quietly, perhaps from a piece of technology so mundane that hardly anyone knows it exists.

Our lives are built on systems piled on systems. As we board airplanes, cross bridges, pay bills, download updates, track our children at camp and generally try to make it through the day, we take them for granted.

Until they fail.

This week’s global software outage, immediately proclaimed as the biggest in history, was not caused by terrorists or A.I. or rogue hackers demanding billions in ransom. It wasn’t even done as a lark by some off-the-charts smart teenager. Those are the Hollywood versions. Instead, it was a routine upgrade that somehow went off the rails.

CrowdStrike, a Texas company, specializes in protecting corporate clients from cyberthreats. It has been very successful at this. This time, though, the threat came from CrowdStrike itself, a problem for which it seemed unprepared.

The trouble began with a small Windows software update CrowdStrike sent to its customers on Thursday night. For some reason, this crashed every computer it touched. “Your PC ran into a problem,” users were cheerily informed. “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly,” messages announced. The backdrop was the color of a perfect sky, also known as the Blue Screen of Death.

Any system can fail, and usually in unexpected ways. The Great Blackout of 1965, another contender for the greatest technology stumble of all time, shut off the electrical grid for 30 million people on the Eastern Seaboard. Silicon Valley couldn’t be blamed because Silicon Valley barely existed, but the culprit — a bad relay at a Canadian power station that caused a cascade of issues that broke the system — was equally mundane.

Living in the modern world is an act of faith. Most of the time we don’t think about it. Then the airplane we’re on shakes with turbulence. Or we read about how a door blew off. Or how planes crashed. Or — and this happened to people on thousands of flights on Friday — we can’t even get on the plane. It was worldwide pandemonium.

Planes are for obvious reasons a central theater of anxiety when technology is having a breakdown. But even those who weren’t trying to travel were upset on Friday. The computers couldn’t manage to get out of the passive voice to assign responsibility for their collapse, much less fix themselves, and the humans, at least initially, were not much better.

“It’s a mess,” Brody Nisbet, an executive at CrowdStrike, wrote on X as he suggested a possible workaround. “I’ve no further actionable help to provide at the minute.” He added a disappointed face emoji: 😞.

The message was later deleted.

CrowdStrike likely failed to do its due diligence, programmers said. Trying the patch out on a variety of Windows machines before sending it out to customers could have helped detect the issue.

Founded in 2011, CrowdStrike is an Austin,Texas, company that specializes in cybersecurity.Credit...Sergio Flores for The New York Times

“They should have had a test machine to emulate some of their clients’ old boxes and they would have seen the Blue Screen of Death,” said Matt Mitchell, a hacker and founder of CryptoHarlem, a cybersecurity education and advocacy organization.

CrowdStrike is not some tiny start-up. Founded in 2011, it has 8,000 employees and a stock market valuation that was heading to $100 billion, at least before the outage caused some investors to jump ship. CrowdStrike shares closed down 11 percent Friday.

If the company doesn’t have the name recognition of some bigger tech firms, it has its share of arrogance. A portion of its website is devoted to trash-talking its competitors. “Microsoft’s security products can’t even protect Microsoft. How can they protect you?”

CrowdStrike asks. Avoid Palo Alto Networks, it demands: “Don’t settle for a high-cost platform that’s hard to use, hard to deploy, and hard to manage.”

A message Friday from George Kurtz, the chief executive, seemed to minimize the outage, calling it “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.” People complained that Mr. Kurtz was slow to offer an apology. (Hours later, he said, “I want to sincerely apologize directly to all of you for today’s outage.”) CrowdStrike did not respond to a request for further comment.  

IT workers at affected companies were faced with a choice: walk around to each offline machine and remove the bit of flawed code, or wait and hope for a solution from CrowdStrike.

“The workaround works if you can walk to every laptop, type on the keyboard, and reboot it manually,” said Mikko Hypponen, a security expert and chief research officer at WithSecure, a cybersecurity company. “The problem that this poses is that normally large enterprises, which is what CrowdStrike customers are, maintain their fleet” with centralized controls.

In other words, the traditional way to fix a balky computer — turning it off and then turning it on again — was still the only solution, even as the computers themselves are now increasingly woven into worldwide networks. But the travelers trapped at the airport could not reboot those screens that were preventing them from flying.

What Mr. Kurtz called “a defect found in a single content update” is a modern-day threat. Only a few years ago, software updates were more complicated, more tedious. Every computer system was not linked to every other system, which meant failures were more contained.

“When it comes to cybersecurity, we talk about defense in depth — having a moat and then archers and a gate around the castle. We talk about having it set up where there is no single point of failure. But we are creating a situation where there is a single point of failure,” said Mr. Mitchell, the hacker.

People took the 1965 blackout in stride. The CrowdStrike outage disrupted but it has not yet been linked to any deaths. People have the weekend to complete their interrupted journeys. If CrowdStrike is lucky, the trouble will be forgotten within days if not hours.

Some day, though, the rest of us may not be so lucky, and some piece of boring technology — overloaded, neglected or poorly installed — will cause a genuine disaster. A software breakdown that causes a societal breakdown is probably better odds than A.I. bringing about world peace. The more networked the world gets, the greater the danger.

It would be a stupid way to go, as the poets anticipated long ago. “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote T.S. Eliot. These days, of course, he would add a thumbs-down emoji.

Source

It turns out that similar problems have been occurring for months without much awareness, despite the fact that many may view this as an isolated incident. Users of Debian and Rocky Linux also experienced significant disruptions as a result of CrowdStrike updates, raising serious concerns about the company's software update and testing procedures. These occurrences highlight potential risks for customers who rely on their products daily.

In April, a CrowdStrike update caused all Debian Linux servers in a civic tech lab to crash simultaneously and refuse to boot. The update proved incompatible with the latest stable version of Debian, despite the specific Linux configuration being supposedly supported. The lab's IT team discovered that removing CrowdStrike allowed the machines to boot and reported the incident.

A team member involved in the incident expressed dissatisfaction with CrowdStrike's delayed response. It took them weeks to provide a root cause analysis after acknowledging the issue a day later. The analysis revealed that the Debian Linux configuration was not included in their test matrix.

"Crowdstrike's model seems to be 'we push software to your machines any time we want, whether or not it's urgent, without testing it'," lamented the team member.

This was not an isolated incident. CrowdStrike users also reported similar issues after upgrading to RockyLinux 9.4, with their servers crashing due to a kernel bug. Crowdstrike support acknowledged the issue, highlighting a pattern of inadequate testing and insufficient attention to compatibility issues across different operating systems.

To avoid such issues in the future, CrowdStrike should prioritize rigorous testing across all supported configurations. Additionally, organizations should approach CrowdStrike updates with caution and have contingency plans in place to mitigate potential disruptions.

Source: Ycombinator, RockyLinux

Source

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