Author: Techy
Bring Fandom Home With Deals on Pop Culture Funko Pops – CNET
With figures, games and other merch from Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, Disney and more discounted by up to 71%, this Woot sale has a little something for everyone.
With figures, games and other merch from Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, Disney and more discounted by up to 71%, this Woot sale has a little something for everyone.
The Fury-Paul Fight: YouTube Boxing Meets Saudi Money
Tommy Fury and Jake Paul have been trading verbal jabs for months. After being postponed twice, their fight on Sunday is being staged in Saudi Arabia, and ESPN is streaming it.
Tommy Fury and Jake Paul have been trading verbal jabs for months. After being postponed twice, their fight on Sunday is being staged in Saudi Arabia, and ESPN is streaming it.
US says Google routinely destroyed evidence and lied about use of auto-delete
Filing: Google deleted chats for nearly four years despite requirement to keep them.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Diy13)
The US government asked a federal court to sanction Google for allegedly using an auto-delete function on chats to destroy evidence needed in an antitrust lawsuit while falsely telling the government that it suspended its auto-deletion practices.
The US motion to sanction Google seeks a ruling that Google violated the rule against spoliation of evidence and “an evidentiary hearing to assess the appropriate sanctions to remedy Google’s spoliation.” The US also sought an order forcing “Google to provide further information about custodians’ history-off chat practices, through written declarations and oral testimony, in advance of the requested hearing.” The motion was filed under seal on February 10 and unsealed yesterday.
“Google consciously failed to preserve relevant evidence. The daily destruction of relevant evidence was inevitable when Google set a company-wide default to delete history-off chat messages every 24 hours, and then elected to maintain that auto-delete setting for custodians subject to a litigation hold,” US Department of Justice antitrust lawyers wrote in a memorandum supporting the motion.
Ericsson To Lay Off 8,500 Employees
Telecom equipment maker Ericsson will lay off 8,500 employees globally as part of its plan to cut costs, a memo sent to employees and seen by Reuters said. From the report: While technology companies such as Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet have laid off thousands of employees citing economic conditions, Ericsson’s move would be the largest layoff to hit the telecoms industry. “The way headcount reductions will be managed will differ depending on local country practice,” Chief Executive Borje Ekholm wrote in the memo. “In several countries the headcount reductions have already been communicated this week,” he said. On Monday, the company, which employs more than 105,000 worldwide, announced plans to cut about 1,400 jobs in Sweden.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Telecom equipment maker Ericsson will lay off 8,500 employees globally as part of its plan to cut costs, a memo sent to employees and seen by Reuters said. From the report: While technology companies such as Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet have laid off thousands of employees citing economic conditions, Ericsson’s move would be the largest layoff to hit the telecoms industry. “The way headcount reductions will be managed will differ depending on local country practice,” Chief Executive Borje Ekholm wrote in the memo. “In several countries the headcount reductions have already been communicated this week,” he said. On Monday, the company, which employs more than 105,000 worldwide, announced plans to cut about 1,400 jobs in Sweden.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Best MacBook Deals: Save $150 on M2 MacBook Air and More – CNET
The first discounts are available on the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with Apple’s new M2 Pro chips, and bigger price breaks are available on the previous M1 Pro models.
The first discounts are available on the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with Apple’s new M2 Pro chips, and bigger price breaks are available on the previous M1 Pro models.
Nintendo confirms it won’t be part of E3 2023
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Nintendo has confirmed to The Verge that it will not be attending E3 2023.
“We approach our involvement in any event on a case-by-case basis and are always considering various ways to engage with our fans,” the company said in a statement. “Since this year’s E3 show didn’t fit into our plans, we have made the decision to not participate. However, we have been and continue to be a strong supporter of the ESA and E3.”
Nintendo’s participation had been in doubt since IGN reported that it, Sony, and Microsoft would all be skipping E3, and now we know for certain that Nintendo won’t be at the show. E3 is set to take place in-person from June 13th through 16th in Los Angeles, which is just over a month after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, so Nintendo may be skipping E3 in part to keep the focus on that flagship $70 title.
“Although Nintendo will not exhibit at E3 2023, we are energized by the interest in what ReedPop’s Remastered E3 will look like,” Lance Festerman, president of E3 organizer ReedPop, said in a statement. “We look forward to sharing news soon about our exhibitors and all the exciting things taking place.”
Last week, the Festerman confirmed to The Verge that the show was “full speed ahead” despite comments from Ubisoft’s CEO suggesting it might not be. This week, Ubisoft confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz that it would be attending the event.
But that’s not the only big gaming event of the month: Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest will be back, too, taking place on June 8th. Microsoft has said it will be doing a showcase in Los Angeles this summer, though it hasn’t specifically confirmed it will be a part of E3. We’ve asked Nintendo if it is planning a showcase of some kind despite not attending E3 itself.
Update February 24th, 12:55PM ET: Added statement from ReedPop.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Nintendo has confirmed to The Verge that it will not be attending E3 2023.
“We approach our involvement in any event on a case-by-case basis and are always considering various ways to engage with our fans,” the company said in a statement. “Since this year’s E3 show didn’t fit into our plans, we have made the decision to not participate. However, we have been and continue to be a strong supporter of the ESA and E3.”
Nintendo’s participation had been in doubt since IGN reported that it, Sony, and Microsoft would all be skipping E3, and now we know for certain that Nintendo won’t be at the show. E3 is set to take place in-person from June 13th through 16th in Los Angeles, which is just over a month after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, so Nintendo may be skipping E3 in part to keep the focus on that flagship $70 title.
“Although Nintendo will not exhibit at E3 2023, we are energized by the interest in what ReedPop’s Remastered E3 will look like,” Lance Festerman, president of E3 organizer ReedPop, said in a statement. “We look forward to sharing news soon about our exhibitors and all the exciting things taking place.”
Last week, the Festerman confirmed to The Verge that the show was “full speed ahead” despite comments from Ubisoft’s CEO suggesting it might not be. This week, Ubisoft confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz that it would be attending the event.
But that’s not the only big gaming event of the month: Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest will be back, too, taking place on June 8th. Microsoft has said it will be doing a showcase in Los Angeles this summer, though it hasn’t specifically confirmed it will be a part of E3. We’ve asked Nintendo if it is planning a showcase of some kind despite not attending E3 itself.
Update February 24th, 12:55PM ET: Added statement from ReedPop.
Meta has a new machine learning language model to remind you it does AI too
Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge
The buzz in tech these last few weeks has been focused squarely on the language models developed and deployed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. But Meta, Facebook’s parent company, continues to do significant work in this field and is releasing a new AI language generator named LLaMA today.
LLaMA isn’t like ChatGPT or Bing; it’s not a system that anyone can talk to. Rather, it’s a research tool that Meta says it’s sharing in the hope of “democratizing access in this important, fast-changing field.” In other words: to help experts tease out the problems of AI language models, from bias and toxicity to their tendency to simply make up information.
To this end, Meta is releasing LLaMA (which is not actually a single system but a quartet of different-sized models) under “a noncommercial license focused on research use cases,” with access granted to groups like universities, NGOs, and industry labs.
“We believe that the entire AI community — academic researchers, civil society, policymakers, and industry — must work together to develop clear guidelines around responsible AI in general and responsible large language models in particular,” the company wrote in its post. “We look forward to seeing what the community can learn — and eventually build — using LLaMA.”
In a research paper, Meta claims that the second-smallest version of the LLaMA model, LLaMA-13B, performs better than OpenAI’s popular GPT-3 model “on most benchmarks,” while the largest, LLaMA-65B, is “competitive with the best models,” like DeepMind’s Chinchilla70B and Google’s PaLM 540B. (The numbers in these names refer to the billions of parameters in each model — a measure of the system’s size and a rough approximation of its sophistication, though these two qualities do not necessarily scale in lockstep.)
Once trained, LLaMA-13B can also run on a single data center-grade Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU. That’ll be welcome news for smaller institutions wanting to run tests on these system but doesn’t mean much for lone researchers for whom such equipment is out of reach.
Meta’s release is also notable partly because it’s missed out on some of the buzz surrounding AI chatbots. (That might not be a bad thing, though, given the criticism Microsoft has received for rushing the launch of Bing and the nosedive taken by Google’s stock price after its own chatbot made an error in a demo.)
Meta has actually released its own accessible AI chatbots in the past, but the reception has been less than stellar. One, named BlenderBot, was criticized for being simply… not very good, while another, named Galactica, which was designed to write scientific papers, was pulled offline after only three days after it kept producing scientific nonsense.
With the LLaMA quartet, Meta is presumably hoping for a kinder reception.
“Today we’re releasing a new state-of-the-art AI large language model called LLaMA designed to help researchers advance their work,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “LLMs have shown a lot of promise in generating text, having conversations, summarizing written material, and more complicated tasks like solving math theorems or predicting protein structures. Meta is committed to this open model of research and we’ll make our new model available to the AI research community.”
Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge
The buzz in tech these last few weeks has been focused squarely on the language models developed and deployed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. But Meta, Facebook’s parent company, continues to do significant work in this field and is releasing a new AI language generator named LLaMA today.
LLaMA isn’t like ChatGPT or Bing; it’s not a system that anyone can talk to. Rather, it’s a research tool that Meta says it’s sharing in the hope of “democratizing access in this important, fast-changing field.” In other words: to help experts tease out the problems of AI language models, from bias and toxicity to their tendency to simply make up information.
To this end, Meta is releasing LLaMA (which is not actually a single system but a quartet of different-sized models) under “a noncommercial license focused on research use cases,” with access granted to groups like universities, NGOs, and industry labs.
“We believe that the entire AI community — academic researchers, civil society, policymakers, and industry — must work together to develop clear guidelines around responsible AI in general and responsible large language models in particular,” the company wrote in its post. “We look forward to seeing what the community can learn — and eventually build — using LLaMA.”
In a research paper, Meta claims that the second-smallest version of the LLaMA model, LLaMA-13B, performs better than OpenAI’s popular GPT-3 model “on most benchmarks,” while the largest, LLaMA-65B, is “competitive with the best models,” like DeepMind’s Chinchilla70B and Google’s PaLM 540B. (The numbers in these names refer to the billions of parameters in each model — a measure of the system’s size and a rough approximation of its sophistication, though these two qualities do not necessarily scale in lockstep.)
Once trained, LLaMA-13B can also run on a single data center-grade Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU. That’ll be welcome news for smaller institutions wanting to run tests on these system but doesn’t mean much for lone researchers for whom such equipment is out of reach.
Meta’s release is also notable partly because it’s missed out on some of the buzz surrounding AI chatbots. (That might not be a bad thing, though, given the criticism Microsoft has received for rushing the launch of Bing and the nosedive taken by Google’s stock price after its own chatbot made an error in a demo.)
Meta has actually released its own accessible AI chatbots in the past, but the reception has been less than stellar. One, named BlenderBot, was criticized for being simply… not very good, while another, named Galactica, which was designed to write scientific papers, was pulled offline after only three days after it kept producing scientific nonsense.
With the LLaMA quartet, Meta is presumably hoping for a kinder reception.
“Today we’re releasing a new state-of-the-art AI large language model called LLaMA designed to help researchers advance their work,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “LLMs have shown a lot of promise in generating text, having conversations, summarizing written material, and more complicated tasks like solving math theorems or predicting protein structures. Meta is committed to this open model of research and we’ll make our new model available to the AI research community.”
Microsoft Defender will soon be a lot better at stopping corporate cyberattacks
Updates for Microsoft Defender should help minimize any damage done by a ransomware attack.
A number of advanced Microsoft 365 Defender features first announced last year as a means of stopping ransomware and business email compromise (BEC) attacks, have now reached public preview, the company has announced.
The features, called “automatic disruption” use “high-confidence Extended Detection and Response (XDR) signals across endpoints, identities, email, and SaaS apps”, Microsoft explained, saying they’ll help contain active security attacks “quickly and effectively”.
They’ll work by automatically disabling, or restricting, devices and user accounts that the threat actors have compromised and are actively using in an attack.
Limited impact
By shutting off this access, Microsoft hopes the attackers won’t be nearly as effective as they should be, and at the same time, SOC teams get more time to deploy additional countermeasures.
As a result, ransomware and BEC attacks should have a more limited impact on the target organization, the company claims.
Automatic attack disruption operates in three stages. In the first stage, the attack is detected, and “high confidence” is established. In the second stage, different scenarios are classified, as well as assets that the attackers are currently controlling. Finally, in the third stage, automatic response actions are triggered via Microsoft 365 Defender, containing the attack and minimizing its impact.
As the name suggests, the activity of these new features is automatic, which might not sit well with some cybersecurity professionals. Microsoft seems to be aware of this fact, stating that the number of signals used should ease anyone’s anxiety around automation:
“We understand that taking automatic action can come with hesitation, given the potential impact it can have on an organization,” the company said. “That’s why automatic attack disruption in Microsoft 365 Defender is designed to rely on high-fidelity XDR signals, coupled with insights from the continuous investigation of thousands of incidents by Microsoft’s research teams.”
Ransomware continues to be one of the most disruptive forms of cybercrime out there. Businesses are advised to train their employees on the dangers of phishing and to make sure they set up a robust backup solution. An antivirus, a firewall, and multi-factor authentication are also considered best practices.
Remove malware with these best malware removal tools
Adobe slips on report saying DOJ plans suit to block $20 billion Figma deal
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Motorola is bringing iPhone-beating satellite messaging to your Android phone
Motorola’s new smartphone and Bluetooth add-on will mean non-iPhone 14 users can rely on satellite messaging.
The iPhone 14 may have pioneered the idea of the satellite-connected smartphone, but now the first Android phone has launched with the feature – and it’s already more powerful than Apple’s Emergency SOS. Just to rub it in, Motorola has also launched a Bluetooth add-on that brings satellite messaging to both Android and iOS devices.
The Motorola Defy 2 (or CAT S75 if you live in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) is a beefy-looking, fully waterproof Android phone that delivers two-way satellite communication that isn’t just limited to contacting emergency services. Qualcomm and Samsung are also bringing satellite messaging capabilities to the next Galaxy phones – but unfortunately, the Samsung Galaxy S23 lineup likely don’t have all the necessary components, so you’ll have to wait for the Galaxy S24.
In a similar way to the iPhone’s Emergency SOS via Satellite feature, you’ll be able to text via the Bullitt Satellite Messenger when you don’t have any cell service and aren’t connected to Wi-Fi. These messages can be sent to an SOS service, or to one of your contacts.
The advantage of being to message anyone is that it gives you the ability to check in with friends and family while you’re exploring the wilderness and let them know you’re safe. That way if they don’t hear from you they know they may need to contact emergency services – as you could be injured or incapacitated and unable to message for help yourself.
We were really impressed when we tried out the iPhone’s satellite phone capabilities, even though we hope it’s a feature we never have to use. Emergency SOS via Satellite allows iPhone 14 owners to communicate with emergency services even when their phone isn’t connected to Wi-Fi or a cell tower.
While standing outside and aiming your phone at a satellite (a task the phone helps you with) you’re able to send and receive texts from emergency services, letting them know what has happened and where you are so they can be rescued.
Sure, the messages were slow to send and receive, but that’s the nature of satellite phone communications, and otherwise, the tool was pretty simple to use. Its inclusion in the iPhone 14 will almost certainly save people’s lives, and so we’d been hoping Android devices would get the feature soon, too.
The Motorola Defy Satellite Link (Image credit: Motorola)
That’s now the case, starting with the Motorola Defy 2. But if you like the phone you already have then don’t worry – Motorola and Bullitt have also unveiled the Defy Satellite Link. That Bluetooth device that can turn any Android or iOS phone into a satellite phone that can communicate via the Bullitt Satellite Messenger. The rugged device has an IP68 waterproof rating and Motorola claims its 600mAh battery is enough to last for multiple days of use.
The Defy Satellite Link is launching later this year for $99 / £99, while the Motorola Defy 2/CAT S75 will sell for $599 / £549. Though you’ll need to pay extra to actually use the Bullitt service.
In the US, the Defy 2 comes with a 12-month subscription to the Essential plan, while in the UK you’ll get three months for free. After that, you’ll need to pay $4.99/€4.99 for the Essential plan which gives you the ability to send 30 two-way messages per month and access to SOS assist for 12 months. There are more expensive plans that give you access to higher message counts if you feel 30 messages isn’t enough.