Wavelength - Teenage Über-hacker and banned AI art

28th September, 2022 – Returning from a brief hiatus, your hosts Daniel Harrington and Anya Bickerton discuss the biggest B2B technology news over the last fortnight, and predict which headlines you should look out for next in the latest episode of Wavelength.

Find our last episode here.

Please enjoy and stay tuned for our next episode on the 12th of October!

1. Nvidia unveils new GPUs, and new AI services, at GTC.
2. Ofcom launches probe of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon's cloud dominance. 
3. 17-year-old Uber and Rockstar hacker arrested.
4. Getty Images bans AI-generated art.
5. The UN election set to decide the fate of the open internet.

Nvidia unveils new GPUs, and new AI services, at GTC.

CEO Jensen Huang’s speech showed Nvidia’s vision, with accelerated computing unlocking advances in AI, which will then affect industries around the world. The main announcements were new cloud services to support AI workflows and the launch of a new generation of GPUs.

Most relevant to B2B businesses are the the new tools and applications/systems based on the Grace CPU and Grace Hopper Superchip, and the new LLM capabilities provided by the NeMo service. GPU and chip manufacturers are finding new ways to drive profit despite a slowdown in efficiencies - new designs, like SambaNova Systems’ Reconfigurable Dataflow Architecture, may be part of that solution. 

Sources: Forbes, VentureBeat, HPCWire, Nvidia Newsroom, SambaNova Systems

Ofcom launches probe of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon's cloud dominance. 

Ofcom, the U.K. media oversight body, is examining the potential for anti-competitive practices carried out by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in the cloud services market.

According to research conducted by cloud native service provider Civo last year, 82% of businesses believe hyperscalers overcharge yet still remain wary of switching provider. 74% of businesses have seen their cloud costs increase in the previous 12 months with an average price increase of 66% year-on-year.

Sources: CNBC, Bloomberg, CRN, City A.M, Civo

17-year-old Uber and Rockstar hacker arrested.

Police in London have confirmed that a 17-year-old teenager suspected of being involved with high-profile hacks on Uber and Rockstar Games, leaking the unfinished version of GTA VI from the latter, has been charged with multiple counts of computer misuse and breaches of bail.

Following on from a story earlier this year, it seems as though this unnamed teenager may be a leader of the Lapsus$ hacking group that was linked to, and previously arrested for, significant attacks on Okta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Samsung.

Sources: Forbes, TechCrunch, EuroGamer, BBC

Getty Images bans AI-generated art.

Getty Images has banned anyone from uploading or selling AI-generated art and photographs —aiming to protect itself against legal implications further down the line. The use of scraped training data from the internet raises copyright issues, as such content was taken and repurposed frequently without the artists' content.

The tools in question include DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. Getty Images is just the latest and biggest such content platform to announce this kind of ban, following similar decisions by sites like Newgrounds.

Sources: PC Gamer, The Verge, Ars Technica, The Register

The UN election set to decide the fate of the open internet.

We're just days away from the election of the Secretary-General for the UN's International Telecommunications Union. Why is this important? Well, it's going to decide the fate of the internet.

The two candidates, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, an American veteran of the ITU since the 1990s, and  Rashid Ismailov, a Russian former deputy minister, will be going head-to-head to decide whether the internet remains a largely decentralised and open space —or falls under the control of governments and state-owned corporations.

Sources: WIRED, Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, Swiss Info

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Attribution:

Music used under Creative Commons license: Covert Affair by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3558-covert-affair

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license