Month: August 2024
Asus ZenWifi XD6 Review: Solid Speeds, but You Can Do Better for the Price
It’s middle of the road in most metrics, and most people can safely pass this one by.
It’s middle of the road in most metrics, and most people can safely pass this one by.
California Legislature Passes Controversial ‘Kill Switch’ AI Safety Bill
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A controversial bill aimed at enforcing safety standards for large artificial intelligence models has now passed the California State Assembly by a 45-11 vote. Following a 32-1 state Senate vote in May, SB-1047 now faces just one more procedural state senate vote before heading to Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk. As we’ve previously explored in depth, SB-1047 asks AI model creators to implement a “kill switch” that can be activated if that model starts introducing “novel threats to public safety and security,” especially if it’s acting “with limited human oversight, intervention, or supervision.” Some have criticized the bill for focusing on outlandish risks from an imagined future AI rather than real, present-day harms of AI use cases like deep fakes or misinformation. […]
If the Senate confirms the Assembly version as expected, Newsom will have until September 30 to decide whether to sign the bill into law. If he vetoes it, the legislature could override with a two-thirds vote in each chamber (a strong possibility given the overwhelming votes in favor of the bill). At a UC Berkeley Symposium in May, Newsom said he worried that “if we over-regulate, if we overindulge, if we chase a shiny object, we could put ourselves in a perilous position.” At the same time, Newsom said those over-regulation worries were balanced against concerns he was hearing from leaders in the AI industry. “When you have the inventors of this technology, the godmothers and fathers, saying, ‘Help, you need to regulate us,’ that’s a very different environment,” he said at the symposium. “When they’re rushing to educate people, and they’re basically saying, ‘We don’t know, really, what we’ve done, but you’ve got to do something about it,’ that’s an interesting environment.” Supporters of the AI safety bill include state senator Scott Weiner and AI experts including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. Bengio supports the bill as a necessary step for consumer protection and insists that AI should not be self-regulated by corporations, akin to other industries like pharmaceuticals and aerospace.
Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li opposes the bill, arguing that it could have harmful effects on the AI ecosystem by discouraging open-source collaboration and limiting academic research due to the liability placed on developers of modified models. A group of business leaders also sent an open letter Wednesday urging Newsom to veto the bill, calling it “fundamentally flawed.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A controversial bill aimed at enforcing safety standards for large artificial intelligence models has now passed the California State Assembly by a 45-11 vote. Following a 32-1 state Senate vote in May, SB-1047 now faces just one more procedural state senate vote before heading to Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk. As we’ve previously explored in depth, SB-1047 asks AI model creators to implement a “kill switch” that can be activated if that model starts introducing “novel threats to public safety and security,” especially if it’s acting “with limited human oversight, intervention, or supervision.” Some have criticized the bill for focusing on outlandish risks from an imagined future AI rather than real, present-day harms of AI use cases like deep fakes or misinformation. […]
If the Senate confirms the Assembly version as expected, Newsom will have until September 30 to decide whether to sign the bill into law. If he vetoes it, the legislature could override with a two-thirds vote in each chamber (a strong possibility given the overwhelming votes in favor of the bill). At a UC Berkeley Symposium in May, Newsom said he worried that “if we over-regulate, if we overindulge, if we chase a shiny object, we could put ourselves in a perilous position.” At the same time, Newsom said those over-regulation worries were balanced against concerns he was hearing from leaders in the AI industry. “When you have the inventors of this technology, the godmothers and fathers, saying, ‘Help, you need to regulate us,’ that’s a very different environment,” he said at the symposium. “When they’re rushing to educate people, and they’re basically saying, ‘We don’t know, really, what we’ve done, but you’ve got to do something about it,’ that’s an interesting environment.” Supporters of the AI safety bill include state senator Scott Weiner and AI experts including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. Bengio supports the bill as a necessary step for consumer protection and insists that AI should not be self-regulated by corporations, akin to other industries like pharmaceuticals and aerospace.
Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li opposes the bill, arguing that it could have harmful effects on the AI ecosystem by discouraging open-source collaboration and limiting academic research due to the liability placed on developers of modified models. A group of business leaders also sent an open letter Wednesday urging Newsom to veto the bill, calling it “fundamentally flawed.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
MPA says no more “Whac-a-Mole” with pirate sites, claims it took down “mothership”
Fmovies takedown “is a stunning victory,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said.
Enlarge / Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin speaks onstage during CinemaCon, a convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners, at Caesars Palace on April 9, 2024, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Getty Images | Jerod Harris )
A group representing major film studios said it collaborated with Vietnamese authorities to take down what it called “the largest pirate streaming operation in the world.”
Fmovies, which the film industry group also called the “world’s largest piracy ring,” is said to have drawn more than 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024. Launched in 2016, the Hanoi-based outfit included pirate sites bflixz, flixtorz, movies7, myflixer, and aniwave.
“The takedown of Fmovies is a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe,” Motion Picture Association (MPA) CEO Charles Rivkin said today.
Google Maps has been updated with a subtle but important design change
Google has redesigned the pins it uses in the Google Maps app with a new, more rounded design.
If you feel like there’s something slightly different about Google Maps at the moment, you’re not imagining it – Google has redesigned the pins used in Maps to highlight restaurants, beaches, and other attractions, giving many of them a new shape and set of colors. While the change is subtle, it’s hard to miss once you notice it.
Previously, pins on Google Maps would have a tall, narrow stem that came to a sharp point on the pinned location. The color of the pin, meanwhile, was uniform along its whole length. Now, though, that’s all changed. Pins are much shorter and come to a thick, rounded point at the bottom. Each pin uses a white background, with its icon sitting inside a colored circle within the pin itself.
This change brings pins in line with other Google Maps accoutrements, such as stars, flags and hearts. While they’re not quite the same – these elements are fully circular, without a pin shape on their bottom edges – they all now feature icons inside colored circles, with a white border around the outer edge. That makes the app a lot more uniform in terms of how its visual elements look – if anything, the old pin design stuck out like a sore thumb – although it might make it a little harder to distinguish pins from the other on-screen items, especially if you’re looking at a particularly busy area.
Elsewhere, some pin types have had their colors adjusted. Museums, for example, now come in purple instead of teal. Dropped pins – that is, ones you create yourself – were also still using the old, pointed design at the time of writing.
A small but noticeable tweak
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
This isn’t the only change Google has rolled out in recent weeks. At the end of July, the search giant changed the look of Google Maps’ bottom bar within the mobile app, removing a few items to present a simpler view. It’s also brought improved parking assistance to the app, as well as augmented reality views of historic landmarks.
And last year, Google Maps’ entire look got a major makeover, with new colors being used that broke with the long-standing color scheme of the app. That change proved to be divisive, with some users complaining that it made the app more difficult to use.
It’s unlikely that the new pin design will stir up quite so much ire, given that it only affects one small aspect of the experience. One reason for the change could be that it might allow Google Maps to fit more pins on the screen at once, as the new pin design is a touch more compact than the old look.
Since this appears to be a server-side change, you shouldn’t need to update your app to see the new pin design – just fire up Google Maps and take a look.
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LG’s 27-inch OLED gaming monitor with a jaw-dropping 480Hz refresh rate will soon be on shelves – but how much will it cost?
Need a new gaming monitor? LG’s 27-inch OLED will soon be on shelves, but it’s for serious gamers only.
LG Display has announced that its 27-inch 1440p resolution OLED panel sporting a 480Hz refresh rate, which the firm revealed at the start of 2024, is now in mass production. So, hopefully it won’t be long before a new potential candidate for our best gaming monitors list is available to buy from LG.
The big selling points highlighted by LG, aside from that jaw-dropping refresh rate – which we’ve already seen in the LG 32-inch UltraGear OLED that offers 480Hz as one option in a ‘dual mode’ setup – is an “WRGB pixel structure optimization enhances the readability of text compared to conventional screens.”
Also chuck in super-thin bezels, and a panel that has a Micro Lens Array to enhance brightness and viewing angles – and better manage reflections on the screen – plus a response time of 0.02ms, and you’ve got a recipe for a tasty 1440p gaming monitor.
There’s also the prospect of taking it easier on your eyes, because as LG notes in its press release for this monitor, its OLED panels “emit half the blue light of LCD screens, protecting users from its potentially harmful effects,” while also sporting flicker-free tech to combat eye fatigue (as many monitors do, these days).
LG hasn’t yet announced a price for this 27-inch OLED monitor.
Pushing the boundaries until it Hertz (your wallet)
LG is the only firm to offer an OLED with a 480Hz refresh rate, with other panel makers lagging behind (Samsung has a 360Hz OLED panel – and of course there are LCDs that do go faster). It’s worth noting that with this new 27-inch monitor, the company has also shaved the response time down from 0.03ms (in the 32-inch OLED) to 0.02ms, which is about as close to instant as you can get. (Or one stop away – presumably 0.01ms is the next port of call).
With this smaller 27-inch screen, we’ll hopefully see LG concoct a relatively more affordable high-end gaming monitor here, compared to the aforementioned LG 32-inch UltraGear, which is an OLED screen that’ll blow a serious hole in your wallet ($1,400 in the US, £1,300 in the UK).
Other monitor makers are set to use this 27-inch panel from LG, too, reportedly including Acer and Asus. Obviously, these kinds of monitors are aimed at competitive gamers, so are never going to be cheap. Quite simply, the average gamer doesn’t really need to spend all that cash to get one of these blazing-fast panels, if we’re honest and step back from the refresh rate race for a moment.
The tricky point with towering refresh rates is the GPU required to push more demanding games to 480 frames per second consistently – to utilize that 480Hz refresh rate – and that’s made harder in this case, as this is a 1440p panel, not 1080p (the resolution paired with the 480Hz option on LG’s 32-inch OLED sibling). You’ll need quite some gaming PC to drive this 27-inch OLED, frankly.
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Hackers have exploited a WPS Office zero-day to deploy dangerous malware
South Korean hackers found using a zero-day to drop a new backdoor to victims.
The popular WPS Office workplace productivity software suite carried a vulnerability which allowed some threat actors to deploy backdoors to their target’s endpoints, experts have claimed.
Cybersecurity researchers at ESET found WPS Office was vulnerable to an improper path validation flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-7262. It carries a severity score of 9.3 (critical), and impacts multiple versions (from 12.2.0.13110, to 12.1.0.16412). The first patch to address the issue came out in March 2024, but some threat actors were allegedly already exploiting it a month earlier.
A South Korean state-sponsored group, known as APT-C-60, was using the flaw to drop a backdoor called SpyGlace to endpoints in East Asia, which makes sense, since WPS Office is quite popular in that part of the world and reportedly has more than 500 million active users. SpyGlace seems to be a brand new piece of malware, since there are no reports of it prior to this incident.
Failing to patch
Kingsoft, the company behind WPS Office, released a patch for the improper path validation flaw in March 2024, but the patch did not fully address the problem. As a result, it introduced an additional vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-7263, which was fixed two months later, in May.
While no threat actors seem to have noticed the newly introduced bug, no one was exploiting it – however, chances are it’s only a matter of time before someone picks up the trail.
To remain secure, and address both vulnerabilities, WPS Office users are advised to update their software to the latest version, without hesitation. The first “clean” version is 12.2.0.17119.
“The exploit is cunning as it is deceptive enough to trick any user into clicking on a legitimate-looking spreadsheet while also being very effective and reliable,” ESET said in its report. “The choice of the MHTML file format allowed the attackers to turn a code execution vulnerability into a remote one.”
Via BleepingComputer
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Studios are cracking down on some of the internet’s most popular pirating sites
Image: Toei Animation
For years, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has worked with Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association (MPA) to crack down on digital piracy, and this week, it seems like the organizations took a huge step toward reaching their goal.
Today, ACE — a coalition of over 50 major entertainment companies and production studios, including Amazon, Disney, and Warner Bros. — took partial credit for the shuttering of Fmovies, a popular network of streaming sites hosting pirated films and television shows. In a statement, ACE called Fmovies and its affiliated sites “the largest pirate streaming operation in the world,” and according to The Hollywood Reporter, two suspects have been arrested by Hanoi police because of their connection to the operation.
MPA CEO and ACE chairman Charles Rivkin described the takedown of Fmovies as “a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe.” The MPA’s chief content protection officer, Larissa Knapp, added that the organizations see this move as “sending a powerful deterrent message” to others currently running (or thinking about starting up) similar piracy sites streaming copyrighted material.
The shuttering of Fmovies, which launched back in 2016, comes as other illegal streaming sites like Aniwave and AnimeFlix have suddenly gone dark — sending their regular visitors into a panic. Along with an embed of Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again,” Aniwave’s website currently features a short message (presumably from its former operators) explaining that their goals with the site were “creating better products that provide an improved user experience and fostering competition to drive the market to enhance products.”
The message also ends with a specifically worded call to action: “If possible, please use legal paid services. It’s something we should do to show our respect for creators and content producers.”
ACE hasn’t claimed responsibility for Aniwave’s closure, but as the Los Angeles Times notes, the call to action’s verbiage matches statements posted on other sites that the anti-piracy trade organization has gone after.
For obvious reasons like lost revenue, studios have never been hot on the idea of people consuming their intellectual property without paying for it. But piracy has still thrived for reasons other than people not wanting to hand over their cash to watch the latest blockbuster. Pirating things (read: stealing) is cheaper, yes, but the sites’ value also stems from the way they tend to offer far larger catalogs of things to consume compared to their legal competition.
Whereas studio-owned streamers have gotten into the habit of disappearing their content or splitting it up amongst themselves in ways that make it both difficult and expensive to track down, piracy sites have essentially been big buckets users could dip into to find what they wanted with ease. And while copyright infringement is a crime, part of the reason that people do it is the simple fact studios haven’t made the legal option appealing enough for people to default to it.
That’s always been a challenge for studios, and it’s obviously become less of a priority as streamers have pivoted to price hikes. But at this point in the streaming wars and Hollywood’s larger push for financial profits, it’s not surprising that pirates are taking some hits.
Image: Toei Animation
For years, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has worked with Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association (MPA) to crack down on digital piracy, and this week, it seems like the organizations took a huge step toward reaching their goal.
Today, ACE — a coalition of over 50 major entertainment companies and production studios, including Amazon, Disney, and Warner Bros. — took partial credit for the shuttering of Fmovies, a popular network of streaming sites hosting pirated films and television shows. In a statement, ACE called Fmovies and its affiliated sites “the largest pirate streaming operation in the world,” and according to The Hollywood Reporter, two suspects have been arrested by Hanoi police because of their connection to the operation.
MPA CEO and ACE chairman Charles Rivkin described the takedown of Fmovies as “a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe.” The MPA’s chief content protection officer, Larissa Knapp, added that the organizations see this move as “sending a powerful deterrent message” to others currently running (or thinking about starting up) similar piracy sites streaming copyrighted material.
The shuttering of Fmovies, which launched back in 2016, comes as other illegal streaming sites like Aniwave and AnimeFlix have suddenly gone dark — sending their regular visitors into a panic. Along with an embed of Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again,” Aniwave’s website currently features a short message (presumably from its former operators) explaining that their goals with the site were “creating better products that provide an improved user experience and fostering competition to drive the market to enhance products.”
The message also ends with a specifically worded call to action: “If possible, please use legal paid services. It’s something we should do to show our respect for creators and content producers.”
ACE hasn’t claimed responsibility for Aniwave’s closure, but as the Los Angeles Times notes, the call to action’s verbiage matches statements posted on other sites that the anti-piracy trade organization has gone after.
For obvious reasons like lost revenue, studios have never been hot on the idea of people consuming their intellectual property without paying for it. But piracy has still thrived for reasons other than people not wanting to hand over their cash to watch the latest blockbuster. Pirating things (read: stealing) is cheaper, yes, but the sites’ value also stems from the way they tend to offer far larger catalogs of things to consume compared to their legal competition.
Whereas studio-owned streamers have gotten into the habit of disappearing their content or splitting it up amongst themselves in ways that make it both difficult and expensive to track down, piracy sites have essentially been big buckets users could dip into to find what they wanted with ease. And while copyright infringement is a crime, part of the reason that people do it is the simple fact studios haven’t made the legal option appealing enough for people to default to it.
That’s always been a challenge for studios, and it’s obviously become less of a priority as streamers have pivoted to price hikes. But at this point in the streaming wars and Hollywood’s larger push for financial profits, it’s not surprising that pirates are taking some hits.
Eli Lilly raises price of Zepbound while trumpeting discount on starter vials
Cost for insured patients without coverage for the drug rises from $550 to $650 a month.
Enlarge / An Eli Lilly & Co. Zepbound injection pen arranged in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Thursday, March 28, 2024. (credit: Getty | helby Knowles)
Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly earned praise this week with an announcement that it is now selling starter dosages of its popular weight-loss drug tirzepatide (Zepbound) at a price significantly lower than before. But the cheers were short-lived as critics quickly noticed that Lilly also quietly raised the price on current versions of the drug—a move that was notably missing from the company’s press release this week.
In the past, Lilly sold Zepbound only in injectable pens with a list price of $1,060 for a month’s supply. Several dosages are available—2.5 mg, 5 mg, 7.5 mg, 10 mg, 12.5 mg, or 15 mg—and patients progressively increase their dosage until they reach a maintenance dosage. The recommended maintenance dosages are 5 mg, 10 mg, or 15 mg. The higher the dose, the more the weight loss. For instance, people using the 15 mg doses lost an average of 21 percent of their weight over 17 months in a clinical trial, while those on 5 mg doses only lost an average of 15 percent of their weight.
On Tuesday, Lilly announced that it will now sell Zepbound in vials, too. And a month’s supply of vials with the 2.5 mg doses will cost $399, while a month’s supply of 5 mg doses is priced at $549—a welcome drop from the $1,060 price tag. These prices are for a self-pay option, meaning that patients with a valid, on-label prescription can buy them directly from Lilly if they have no insurance or have insurance that does not cover the drug.
NASA’s Perseverance Is Finally Leaving the Mars Crater It’s Inhabited for Years
The plucky little Mars rover has spent the last 3.5 years collecting samples from the bottom of a crater, and it’s ready to move up to bigger things.
The plucky little Mars rover has spent the last 3.5 years collecting samples from the bottom of a crater, and it’s ready to move up to bigger things.