Agregátor RSS

On Independence Day, there is a deep recognition of digital autonomy amidst the colorful fireworks displays and patriotic revelry. At LinuxSecurity, we advocate switching from Windows to Linux as a symbolic act with deeper roots in terms of freedom, security, and privacy embodied by Linux.

Minimální mzda se bude zvyšovat jinak, než jsme dosud byli zvyklí. O její nové výši by mělo být jasno dříve. V soukromém sektoru bude minimální výdělek více o vyjednávání.

Pro dohodu o pracovní činnosti a dohodu o provedení práce jsou předepsány maximální povolené objemy vykonávané práce. K tomu platí zákaz, a to i pro pracovní poměry, mít stejný druh práce v různých smlouvách či dohodách. To se však brzy změní pro zaměstnance na rodičovské dovolené. Co z toho všechno plyne pro praxi a možnost mít více pracovních vztahů u stejného zaměstnavatele?

Vývoj grafických dem a her pro jiné platformy (Atari ST, Amiga) může být zábavný, neb vývojář většinou měl pocit, že je HW navržený „příčetně“. IBM PC kombinující Intel 8088 a CGA grafiku, je opačným případem.

V posledních dnech se sice vyrojily různé výkonnostní výsledky naměřené na mobilním Strix Point, ale bez udaného TDP, tudíž málo vypovídající. Výjimkou je údaj od společnosti Asus…

Měli by se stand-up komici a komediální autoři bát o práci? Výsledky experimentů s inteligencí ChatGPT 3.5 a lidskými dobrovolníky hovoří dost jasně. Humor umělé inteligence je pro lidské posluchače stejně zábavný nebo i zábavnější než humor lidských tvůrců. Je nejspíš jasné, kdo se bude smát naposled.

 This is a recording of a 4-minute mini-keynote I did last month on Content vs. Context. I hope you enjoy and find it useful ???? Content is NOT King, Context Is! What does this mean? ???? Here it means ok, good or fine. But if you are in Brazil, it means you’re an ass. […]

Independent experts have urged businesses to think carefully before relying on third-party support for security patches once Windows 10 reaches its end of life in October 2025.

Upgrading from Windows 10 may be challenging for some businesses, because many older PCs may not meet the minimum system requirements for Windows 11. Some software or applications may not be compatible with Windows 11, forcing users to stick with Windows 10 or find alternatives.

In addition, point-of-sale (POS) terminals running Windows 10 may be difficult to upgrade, presenting a particular challenge for IT professionals in the retail and hospitality sectors.

As with the retirement of previous versions of Windows, Microsoft is offering enterprises extended support for Windows 10. For commercial customers and small businesses, this comes in at $61 per device in the first year, doubling to $122 per Windows 10 device in year two and $244 per device for the third and final year.

Organizations using cloud-based update management enjoy cost savings, with prices of $45 per user with up to five devices in the first year. There’s a big discount for educational institutions, which can get extended support for a total of $7 over the maximum of three years.

Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates offers monthly critical and important security updates to Windows 10 but without access to any new features and only for up to three years.

Micro-patching alternative

Acros, a Slovenian company specializing in security updates, announced Wednesday that it will offer enterprise users of Windows 10 extended support under its 0patch brand for up to five years at a lower cost than Microsoft.

For medium and large organizations, 0patch Enterprise includes central management, multiple users and roles, and comes in at €35 (around $38) per device per year, excluding tax. A cut down version pitched at small business and individuals, 0patch Pro, costs €25 plus tax per device per year.

0patch uses a system of “micro-patches” to address critical vulnerabilities, an approach touted as faster and offering a lower potential for system instability. The vendor has previously offered extended support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.

The company said it may offer fixes for vulnerabilities that Microsoft leaves unpatched, while also providing patches for non-Microsoft products (such as Java runtime, Adobe Reader etc.), as explained in a blog post.

Gauging risk to reward

Rich Gibbons, head of market development at IT asset management specialist Synyega, noted that third-party support is an established part of the enterprise software market.

“Businesses regularly bring in third parties to help patch and maintain their legacy Oracle, SAP, and IBM estates, and while it’s not as common with Microsoft, it’s still a legitimate option, and one worth assessing,” Gibbons said.

“Purchasing extended support packages from Microsoft is expensive and will only go up in price each year. It’s therefore little wonder that more cost-effective options like those offered by 0patch are beginning to gain traction,” Gibbons added.

He advised companies to conduct a full risk-reward analysis to understand if the cost savings are worth selecting alternatives like 0patch rather than purchasing extended support from Microsoft or biting the bullet and upgrading their systems.

Leaving Microsoft’s ecosystem

Javvad Malik, lead security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, also urged companies to be careful about opting for third-party support rather than facing the financial and operational burdens of a significant overhaul.

“The viability of turning to a third-party for extended support, as opposed to embarking on the arguably Herculean task of retooling apps and refreshing hardware to embrace Windows 11, is, on the surface, an attractive proposition,” Malik told Computerworld. “However, engaging with a third party for security patches introduces a layer of dependency beyond the control of Microsoft’s established ecosystem.”

Malik warned that relying on extended support for an extended period might make it more difficult to upgrade in the future.

“Upgrading from one version to the next is relatively simple when considering upgrading two or more versions up from the current version of any software. So, the cost of delaying an upgrade needs to be evaluated in totality, and not just as a comparison to an upgrade today,” Malik advised.

In response to this criticism, 0patch co-founder Mitja Kolsek told Computerworld that deferring a costly Windows upgrade can be beneficial, while admitting that enterprises have to move on eventually.

“While an upgrade may eventually be inevitable for functional and compatibility reasons, we’re making sure that you’re not forced to upgrade because of security flaws that the vendor won’t fix anymore,” Kolsek explained. “At the same time, five years is a long time and a lot can happen — maybe you’ll be able to skip a version, or start using some other tool altogether.”

Veletrh Computex přinesl spoustu počítačového hardwaru, zejména procesory a základní desky. • Rok 2024 ale bude významný i pro fanoušky OLED monitorů. • Asus nadchnul UPS vypadajícím jako Thorovo kladivo.

Never risk it when it comes to brisket – make sure those updates are applied

Keen meatheads better hope they haven't angered any cybersecurity folk before allowing their Traeger grills to update because a new high-severity vulnerability could be used for all kinds of high jinks.…

From the editors of Computerworld, this enterprise buyer’s guide helps IT and business staff understand what the various types of business projectors can do for their organizations and how to choose the right solution.

Google v srpnu oznámí nové Pixely 9.. •.•...a také minimálně tři nové funkce umělé inteligence. • Samsung má Galaxy AI a tak bude mít Google svou Google AI...

Rats are incredibly nimble creatures. They can climb up curtains, jump down tall ledges, and scurry across complex terrain—say, your basement stacked with odd-shaped stuff—at mind-blowing speed.

Robots, in contrast, are anything but nimble. Despite recent advances in AI to guide their movements, robots remain stiff and clumsy, especially when navigating new environments.

To make robots more agile, why not control them with algorithms distilled from biological brains? Our movements are rooted in the physical world and based on experience—two components that let us easily explore different surroundings.

There’s one major obstacle. Despite decades of research, neuroscientists haven’t yet pinpointed how brain circuits control and coordinate movement. Most studies have correlated neural activity with measurable motor responses—say, a twitch of a hand or the speed of lifting a leg. In other words, we know brain activation patterns that can describe a movement. But which neural circuits cause those movements in the first place?

We may find the answer by trying to recreate them in digital form. As the famous physicist Richard Feynman once said, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

This month, Google DeepMind and Harvard University built a realistic virtual rat to home in on the neural circuits that control complex movement. The rat’s digital brain, composed of artificial neural networks, was trained on tens of hours of neural recordings from actual rats running around in an open arena.

Comparing activation patterns of the artificial brain to signals from living, breathing animals, the team found the digital brain could predict the neural activation patterns of real rats and produce the same behavior—for example, running or rearing up on hind legs.

The collaboration was “fantastic,” said study author Dr. Bence Ölveczky at Harvard in a press release. “DeepMind had developed a pipeline to train biomechanical agents to move around complex environments. We simply didn’t have the resources to run simulations like those, to train these networks.”

The virtual rat’s brain recapitulated two regions especially important for movement. Tweaking connections in those areas changed motor responses across a variety of behaviors, suggesting these neural signals are involved in walking, running, climbing, and other movements.

“Virtual animals trained to behave like their real counterparts could provide a platform for virtual neuroscience…that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to experimentally deduce,” the team wrote in their article.

A Dense Dataset

Artificial intelligence “lives” in the digital world. To power robots, it needs to understand the physical world.

One way to teach it about the world is to record neural signals from rodents and use the recordings to engineer algorithms that can control biomechanically realistic models replicating natural behaviors. The goal is to distill the brain’s computations into algorithms that can pilot robots and also give neuroscientists a deeper understanding of the brain’s workings.

So far, the strategy has been successfully used to decipher the brain’s computations for vision, smell, navigation, and recognizing faces, the authors explained in their paper. However, modeling movement has been a challenge. Individuals move differently, and noise from brain recordings can easily mess up the resulting AI’s precision.

This study tackled the challenges head on with a cornucopia of data.

The team first placed multiple rats into a six-camera arena to capture their movement—running around, rearing up, or spinning in circles. Rats can be lazy bums. To encourage them to move, the team dangled Cheerios across the arena.

As the rats explored the arena, the team recorded 607 hours of video and also neural activity with a 128-channel array of electrodes implanted in their brains.

They used this data to train an artificial neural network—a virtual rat’s “brain”—to control body movement. To do this, they first tracked how 23 joints moved in the videos and transferred them to a simulation of the rats’ skeletal movements. Our joints only bend in certain ways, and this step filters out what’s physically impossible (say, bending legs in the opposite direction).

The core of the virtual rat’s brain is a type of AI algorithm called an inverse dynamics model. Basically, it knows where “body” positions are in space at any given time and, from there, predicts the next movements leading to a goal—say, grab that coffee cup without dropping it.

Through trial-and-error, the AI eventually came close to matching the movements of its biological counterparts. Surprisingly, the virtual rat could also easily generalize motor skills to unfamiliar places and scenarios—in part by learning the forces needed to navigate the new environments.

The similarities allowed the team to compare real rats to their digital doppelgangers, when performing the same behavior.

In one test, the team analyzed activity in two brain regions known to guide motor skills. Compared to an older computational model used to decode brain networks, the AI could better simulate neural signals in the virtual rat across multiple physical tasks.

Because of this, the virtual rat offers a way to study movement digitally.

One long-standing question, for example, is how the brain and nerves command muscle movement depending on the task. Grabbing a cup of coffee in the morning, for example, requires a steady hand without any jerking action but enough strength to hold it steady.

The team tweaked the “neural connections” in the virtual rodent to see how changes in brain networks alter the final behavior—getting that cup of coffee. They found one network measure that could identify a behavior at any given time and guide it through.

Compared to lab studies, these insights “can only be directly accessed through simulation,” wrote the team.

The virtual rat bridges AI and neuroscience. The AI models here recreate the physicality and neural signals of living creatures, making them invaluable for probing brain functions. In this study, one aspect of the virtual rat’s motor skills relied on two brain regions—pinpointing them as potential regions key to guiding complex, adaptable movement.

A similar strategy could provide more insight into the computations underlying vision, sensation, or perhaps even higher cognitive functions such as reasoning. But the virtual rat brain isn’t a complete replication of a real one. It only captures snapshots of part of the brain. But it does let neuroscientists “zoom in” on their favorite brain region and test hypotheses quickly and easily compared to traditional lab experiments, which often take weeks to months.

On the robotics side, the method adds a physicality to AI.

“We’ve learned a huge amount from the challenge of building embodied agents: AI systems that not only have to think intelligently, but also have to translate that thinking into physical action in a complex environment,” said study author Dr. Matthew Botvinick at DeepMind in a press release. “It seemed plausible that taking this same approach in a neuroscience context might be useful for providing insights in both behavior and brain function.”

The team is next planning to test the virtual rat with more complex tasks, alongside its biological counterparts, to further peek inside the inner workings of the digital brain.

“From our experiments, we have a lot of ideas about how such tasks are solved,” said Ölveczky to The Harvard Gazette. “We want to start using the virtual rats to test these ideas and help advance our understanding of how real brains generate complex behavior.”

Image Credit: Google DeepMind

Spojené státy dodaly na Ukrajinu už více než 300 obrněnců Bradley a zhruba 70 jich doposud bylo vyřazeno • Bradley se pyšní velkou pohyblivostí, kombinovanou se slušnou palebnou silou • Zároveň se tam ale také setkávají se zbraněmi a riziky 21. století

Společnost Proton AG stojící za Proton Mailem a dalšími službami přidala do svého portfolia Docs in Proton Drive.

Příspěvek na blogu Codean Labs podrobně rozebírá bezpečnostní chybu CVE-2024-29510 v Ghostscriptu, tj. interpretu PostScriptu (PS) a Portable Document Formatu (PDF). V upstreamu byla chyba opravena v květnu ve verzi 10.03.1.

Tyto filmy a seriály jsou teď na českém Netflixu nejoblíbenější. Nerozlišujeme žánr, stáří ani hodnocení na filmových webech. Jde o souhrnnou oblíbenost za poslední týdny, kterou zjišťuje web FlixPatrol.

Ze Spojených států přišla zpráva, která určitě rozesmutní všechny fanoušky počítačové historie. Technologické a počítačové muzeum Living Computers: Museum + Labs, které 9. ledna 2006 založil spoluzakladatel Microsoftu Paul Allen, definitivně zavírá své brány. Podrobnosti přináší magazín ...