Having claimed North America and Europe, the cloud giants hope to add Latin America and Africa to their empires
OPINION When the major cloud providers warned of slowing customer demand earlier this quarter, many expected them to pull back on their capex expenditures until the latest macroeconomic headwinds had blown over. Only, they didn’t.
Week after week, the major cloud providers have pushed ahead. They’ve announced new capacity, availability zones, and regions across Central and South America and sub-Saharan Africa – all markets that have undergone an explosion of demand for cloud services over the past two years.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud overwhelmingly dominate the US and European markets – and if they have their way, they’ll control an even larger stake in these emerging markets too. Read More
Daily Archives: January 4, 2023
Remaking Old Computer Graphics With AI Image Generation
Can AI Image generation tools make re-imagined, higher-resolution versions of old video game graphics?
Over the last few days, I used AI image generation to reproduce one of my childhood nightmares. I wrestled with Stable Diffusion, Dall-E and Midjourney to see how these commercial AI generation tools can help retell an old visual story – the intro cinematic to an old video game (Nemesis 2 on the MSX). This post describes the process and my experience in using these models/services to retell a story in higher fidelity graphics. Read More
2022 Was the Year of the Metaverse—Until It Wasn’t
The commercial potential of the metaverse was so potent that it compelled Mark Zuckerberg to rename Facebook to Meta heading into 2022. But this year, rather than rapidly redefine the internet, the metaverse stalled.
The word of the year, per the annual (and now semi-democratically awarded) designation from Oxford, is … “goblin mode.” Seriously?
What happened to “metaverse,” the distant runner-up to “goblin mode” with less than one-tenth of the votes? As recently as August, I could’ve sworn we’d never hear the end of the metaverse, the buzzword encapsulating the potential for a deeply embodied internet with unprecedented connectivity and interoperability; essentially, virtual reality. We’ve come a long way since Snow Crash, and now the metaverse is, supposedly, the very near-term future of the internet. The apparent commercial potential of the metaverse was so potent that it compelled Mark Zuckerberg to rename Facebook (parent company), if not also Facebook (website), to Meta, thus reimagining his social-media business as “a metaverse company” heading into 2022. But this year, rather than rapidly redefining the internet, the metaverse stalled, and user counts on the formative platforms have struggled to break into the tens of thousands, much less millions. Read More
Factoring integers with sublinear resources on a superconducting quantum processor
Shor’s algorithm has seriously challenged information security based on public key cryptosystems. However, to break the widely used RSA-2048 scheme, one needs millions of physical qubits, which is far beyond current technical capabilities. Here, we report a universal quantum algorithm for integer factorization by combining the classical lattice reduction with a quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). The number of qubits required is O(logN/loglogN), which is sublinear in the bit length of the integer N, making it the most qubit-saving factorization algorithm to date. We demonstrate the algorithm experimentally by factoring integers up to 48 bits with 10 superconducting qubits, the largest integer factored on a quantum device. We estimate that a quantum circuit with 372 physical qubits and a depth of thousands is necessary to challenge RSA-2048 using our algorithm. Our study shows great promise in expediting the application of current noisy quantum computers, and paves the way to factor large integers of realistic cryptographic significance. Read More
#cyber, #quantumHackers could get help from the new AI chatbot
The AI-enabled chatbot that’s been wowing the tech community can also be manipulated to help cybercriminals perfect their attack strategies.
Why it matters: The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool last month could allow scammers behind email and text-based phishing attacks, as well as malware groups, to speed up the development of their schemes.
- Several cybersecurity researchers have been able to get the AI-enabled text generator to write phishing emails or even malicious code for them in recent weeks.
#cyber, #nlp
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