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Na sociální síti X se po letech opět objevil obrázek žraloka grónského, který má být dle popisku 392 let starý. Publikoval ho například účet Nature is Amazing s konstatováním, že tvor brázdil oceánské vody od roku 1627. Není sporu o tom, že se žraloci grónští (Somniosus microcephalus) dožívají ...

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The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Kimsuky has been linked to the use of a new malicious Google Chrome extension that's designed to steal sensitive information as part of an ongoing intelligence collection effort. Zscaler ThreatLabz, which observed the activity in early March 2024, has codenamed the extension TRANSLATEXT, highlighting its ability to gather email addresses, usernames,

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Kimsuky has been linked to the use of a new malicious Google Chrome extension that's designed to steal sensitive information as part of an ongoing intelligence collection effort. Zscaler ThreatLabz, which observed the activity in early March 2024, has codenamed the extension TRANSLATEXT, highlighting its ability to gather email addresses, usernames, Newsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

If you believe European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager, Apple’s decision to delay introduction of its Apple Intelligence AI is a “stunning declaration” of its own anticompetitive behavior. 

Having spent the morning listening to Vestager’s comments at a Forum Europa event, I’m full of a combined sense of horror and dismay. Because while touting the need to make Europe more competitive, the regulatory chief seems also to be putting barriers in place that will have the opposite effect. 

(You can watch Vastager’s speech and Q&A here.)

Slowing down the renewable transition

Take climate change, for example. China is unique in that once it recognized the growing threat of environmental destruction, it launched a root and branch attempt to migrate to renewable fuels and attack pollution levels. 

That journey is far from over, but one result has been the creation of a strong solar panel manufacturing industry at global scale. Europe doesn’t have anything like the capacity to build renewable energy infrastructure at the same low cost, so in its haste to combat climate change, it just clobbered China with tariffs to make that lower cost renewable infrastructure more expensive to deploy — even as energy costs spiral and the planet heats up.

I see that decision as a suicide note, given the scale of the global crisis. Vestager sees it as a victory. I am unconvinced.

A place for kids

Another Vestager victory involves App Stores. “How good will it be as a parent to open an App Store and know all the apps in there are safe for children,” said Vestager during her presentation.

“How good indeed,” I respond. “It’s why I use the heavily curated, heavily moderated Apple App Store and apply parental controls on the device.” 

Of course, what Vestager is celebrating is Europe’s demand to open up the App Store under the Digital Markets Act, a move that might — as some security experts posit — make children less safe, as not every App Store will be equally secure, resilient, or trustworthy. If events on iOS echo what’s already happening on Android, we will see malware and fraud attempts amplify as criminals exploit the inherent vulnerabilities of sideloading.

But perhaps the chance for European firms to make a couple of Euros matters more. And there is strength to the argument that at Apple’s scale it does need to ensure that competitors can craft viable businesses on its platforms, in order to avoid its power becoming too great.

Pushed out of the garden

On the DMA moves against Apple, Vestager said: 

“For a company who has built a very effective walled garden vertically integrated from the device operating system to the app store, of course, it is more challenging that you need to make sure that competitors can be on your platform, because you have become a gatekeeper. If you were not the essential road for businesses to reach their consumers, of course, we would have no say. But that is exactly the point, that you are an essential route to consumers and that is why you have these obligations. And of course, they go for Apple as well as for anyone else who is a… gatekeeper.”

So now we have a series of European decisions that will make kids (and everyone else using Apple products) less safe, and help ensure the planet gets warmer for longer. What else can the EU regulators come up with?

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Artificial intelligence, of course, specifically Apple Intelligence — which Vestager now seems to think shows how anti-competitive Apple is because the company won’t introduce these tools in Europe until it has clarity.

When it announced plans to delay the introduction, Apple said it “was committed to collaborating with the European Commission” to enable it to introduce these features, but was concerned at some of the requirements of the DMA and how they could impact the plan.

During the talk, Vestager was asked: “On Apple, to the best of your knowledge how does Apple’s Walled Garden apply to their AI? How do you interpret their decision not to launch Apple Intelligence for the EU?”

Vestager’s response: Apple said it will not launch the new AI features, “because of the obligations that they have in Europe,” she said. “And the obligations that they have in Europe, it is to be open for competition, that is sort of the short version of the DMA.

“And I find that very interesting that they say we will now deploy AI where we are not obliged to enable competition. I think that is the most stunning, open declaration that they know 100% that this is another way of disabling competition, where they have a stronghold already.”

The struggle for privacy

When Apple announced the delayed rollout, it was quite detailed about its concerns: “Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security,” it said.  “We are committed to collaborating with the European Commission in an attempt to find a solution that would enable us to deliver these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety.”

But Vestager’s arguments, and previous mutterings on the topic of user security and privacy, seem to suggest that the “pro competition” trading bloc that gave us GDPR (ironically wrecking the economics of small website publishers when it did), isn’t going to be terribly receptive to Apple’s arguments that the highly personal data gathered on someone’s device should be protected, minimized, and not simply made available to third party AI competitors without clear user consent, protection, and oversight.  

‘This is surveillance’

As Apple CEO, Tim Cook warned six years ago, the potential for AI-driven surveillance has never been greater; that really is what is at stake in Apple’s struggles with the European Commission. 

If Europe decides in some way to force Apple to open up these features to competitors without agreeing on checks and balances to protect user data in the hopes of stimulating some great (imaginary) European unicorn digital business, then you really can kiss all hopes of digital privacy goodbye — though perhaps a smattering of billionaires will add to their bank balance.

Finally, a question: Why is it, really, that after Vestager has been in command of European competitive policy for over a decade, the bloc has become less, rather than more, relevant on the global stage? 

Please follow me on Mastodon, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

More by Jonny Evans:

• Apple’s Phil Schiller may join OpenAI’s board
• With iOS 18, Apple deepens its connection to India
• Why (and perhaps how) Apple Intelligence will make money

Superpočítač Salomon, který byl součástí IT4Innovations národního superpočítačového centra při VŠB – Technické univerzitě Ostrava, končí svou službu. Po svém spuštění patřil mezi 40 nejvýkonnějších superpočítačů světa a za dobu svého provozu od září 2015 do prosince 2021 zvládl zpracovat více než ...

From the editors of Computerworld, this enterprise buyer’s guide helps IT staff understand what the various unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) options can do for their organizations and how to choose the right solution.

Join our exclusive webinar on identity security

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Google is severing its trust in Entrust after what it describes as a protracted period of failures around compliance and general improvements.…

GitLab has released security updates to address 14 security flaws, including one critical vulnerability that could be exploited to run continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines as any user. The weaknesses, which affect GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), have been addressed in versions 17.1.1, 17.0.3, and 16.11.5. The most severe of the

GitLab has released security updates to address 14 security flaws, including one critical vulnerability that could be exploited to run continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines as any user. The weaknesses, which affect GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), have been addressed in versions 17.1.1, 17.0.3, and 16.11.5. The most severe of the Newsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

If you had to sum up what has made humans such a successful species, it’s teamwork. There’s growing evidence that getting AIs to work together could dramatically improve their capabilities too.

Despite the impressive performance of large language models, companies are still scrabbling for ways to put them to good use. Big tech companies are building AI smarts into a wide-range of products, but none has yet found the killer application that will spur widespread adoption.

One promising use case garnering attention is the creation of AI agents to carry out tasks autonomously. The main problem is that LLMs remain error-prone, which makes it hard to trust them with complex, multi-step tasks.

But as with humans, it seems two heads are better than one. A growing body of research into “multi-agent systems” shows that getting chatbots to team up can help solve many of the technology’s weaknesses and allow them to tackle tasks out of reach for individual AIs.

The field got a significant boost last October when Microsoft researchers launched a new software library called AutoGen designed to simplify the process of building LLM teams. The package provides all the necessary tools to spin up multiple instances of LLM-powered agents and allow them to communicate with each other by way of natural language.

Since then, researchers have carried out a host of promising demonstrations. 

In a recent article, Wired highlighted several papers presented at a workshop at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) last month. The research showed that getting agents to collaborate could boost performance on math tasks—something LLMs tend to struggle with—or boost their reasoning and factual accuracy.

In another instance, noted by The Economist, three LLM-powered agents were set the task of defusing bombs in a series of virtual rooms. The AI team performed better than individual agents, and one of the agents even assumed a leadership role, ordering the other two around in a way that improved team efficiency.

Chi Wang, the Microsoft researcher leading the AutoGen project, told The Economist that the approach takes advantage of the fact most jobs can be split up into smaller tasks. Teams of LLMs can tackle these in parallel rather than churning through them sequentially, as an individual AI would have to do.

So far, setting up multi-agent teams has been a complicated process only really accessible to AI researchers. But earlier this month, the Microsoft team released a new “low-code” interface for building AI teams called AutoGen Studio, which is accessible to non-experts.

The platform allows users to choose from a selection of preset AI agents with different characteristics. Alternatively, they can create their own by selecting which LLM powers the agent, giving it “skills” such as the ability to fetch information from other applications, and even writing short prompts that tell the agent how to behave. 

So far, users of the platform have put AI teams to work on tasks like travel planning, market research, data extraction, and video generation, say the researchers.

The approach does have its limitations though. LLMs are expensive to run, so leaving several of them to natter away to each other for long stretches can quickly become unsustainable. And it’s unclear whether groups of AIs will be more robust to mistakes, or whether they could lead to cascading errors through the entire team.

Lots of work needs to be done on more prosaic challenges too, such as the best way to structure AI teams and how to distribute responsibilities between their members. There’s also the question of how to integrate these AI teams with existing human teams. Still,  pooling AI resources is a promising idea that’s quickly picking up steam.

Image Credit: Mohamed Nohassi / Unsplash

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Microsoft has expiration issues with its TLS certificates, resulting in unwanted security warnings.…

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Security researchers have shed more light on the cryptocurrency mining operation conducted by the 8220 Gang by exploiting known security flaws in the Oracle WebLogic Server. "The threat actor employs fileless execution techniques, using DLL reflective and process injection, allowing the malware code to run solely in memory and avoid disk-based detection mechanisms," Trend Micro researchers Ahmed

Security researchers have shed more light on the cryptocurrency mining operation conducted by the 8220 Gang by exploiting known security flaws in the Oracle WebLogic Server. "The threat actor employs fileless execution techniques, using DLL reflective and process injection, allowing the malware code to run solely in memory and avoid disk-based detection mechanisms," Trend Micro researchers AhmedNewsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]