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Ministerstvo průmyslu a obchodu (MPO) vyjádřilo podporu předložení projektu AI Gigafactory CZ, který do veřejné konzultace Evropské komise zaslala společnost České Radiokomunikace (CRA) v rámci iniciativy Project AIGF CZ. Jde o významný krok k rozvoji výpočetní infrastruktury pro umělou inteligenci (AI), která je prioritou resortu. Projekt je v souladu s cíli Národní strategie umělé inteligence ČR 2030 a je již součástí návrhu Akčního plánu 2025+, který MPO připravilo a který obsahuje 86 opatření. Obrovská počítačová centra, která chce postavit Evropská unie, mají pomoci posílit pozici EU v globální soutěži v oblasti AI. V rámci iniciativy AI Continent je pro tzv. AI gigatovárny vyčleněno až 20 miliard eur (téměř 496 miliard Kč), přičemž 65 % nákladů má pokrýt soukromý investor. Evropská komise spolu s Evropským společným podnikem pro vysoce výkonnou výpočetní techniku (EuroHPC JU) vyzvala 9. dubna 2025 veřejné i soukromé subjekty, aby se zapojily do konzultace o budoucnosti AI Gigafactories. Půjde o rozsáhlá zařízení, jejichž smyslem je poskytovat kapacity a podílet se na vývoji a trénování složitých AI modelů v bezprecedentním měřítku. Budou integrovat masivní výpočetní výkon na úrovni 100 000 H100 pokročilých AI procesorů. V české žádosti je kromě CRA dále zapojeno i stávající české superpočítačové centrum IT4Innovations.

Self-service password resets (SSPR) reduce helpdesk strain—but without strong security, they can open the door to attackers. Learn why phishing-resistant MFA, context-aware verification, and risk-based detection are critical to secure SSPR implementation. [...]

Contactless payments such as Apple Pay and sustainability in inventory control are going to get much easier with an upcoming update to the Near Field Communications (NFC) standard that will make devices connect more swiftly and support the Digital Product Passport (NDPP) specification.

The first problems the new standard solves are range and reliability. At present, standard NFC supports a range of up to 0.2 inches and the connections aren’t always robust. What that means to most of us is the need to wriggle your iPhone or Apple Watch around a little to gain connection to the payment terminal. The improved NFC increases that range to to about 3/4 of an inch for all devices and makes the connection a little more resilient; the standard is also a little faster, which means once you authorize a payment it will take place faster than it already does.

Faster connections, easier payments, and more

That range and reliability improvements aren’t just for mobile payments, of course. If you use your iPhone as a car key or have mobile transit cards in your Apple Wallet, you should get a much better experience when opening doors or catching public transit. The NFC update also comes as Apple prepares to introduce expanded support for digital IDs and in-store payments with iOS 16. The latter is interesting because while the NFC Forum didn’t say anything about it, the update does support more complex transactions over NFC — that should make it easier to use supermarket loyalty cards at the same time as Apple Pay in a single tap. The Forum calls these, “multi-purpose tap use cases where a single tap unlocks multiple functions.”

NFC Release 15 is also expected to advance new and exciting use cases, such as using your mobile phone as a payment terminal, championing sustainability and optimizing NFC use across a variety of sectors, including automotive, transit and access control. There is also support for a new feature that has been designed to meet emerging sustainability regulations: NFC Digital Product Passport (NDPP)

What is NDPP and is it safe?

Aimed at manufacturers, NDPP is a framework to allow a single NFC tag embedded in a product to store and transmit both standard and extended Digital Product Passport (DPP) data using NFC. That data includes information such as a product’s composition, origin, environmental, lifestyle, and recycling details. Most hardware manufacturers will need to begin capturing this kind of information under an incoming EU law known as the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). The information is meant to be made available to customers, business users and recyclers and designed to boost transparency and sustainability. It will be interesting, for example, to use DPP inside future iPhones to determine where the device and its components originate – and it might be fun to explore refurbished devices to see whether components installed to return them to use have been used in different devices previously. 

That said, this kind of unique device information does sound like the kind of data that could be abused for device fingerprinting and user tracking; is there a risk of this?

Age of consent

I contacted Mike McCamon, the organization’s executive director, for more background on NDPP. I was particularly curious about the NDPP specification — could it be abused for digital device fingerprinting? That’s unlikely, said McCarmon, in part because of the nature of NFC design, which has been developed from day one to require active consent from the user.

“Security and privacy are foundational aspects of our work at the NFC Forum,” he said. “The NFC Digital Product Passport (NDPP) Specification can be thought more of a container of content than being fully descriptive of what content is included.” The support should extend use of NFC in different ways, such as in supply chain management, inventory control, or effective recycling strategies, all of which may benefit from the kind of information NDPP provides.

“And of course, even with our new extended range…, NFC Forum-capable products must be in the closest of proximity to be read. This is in addition to most NFC functionality today on mobile devices and wearables, which is only accessible following a direct user action – like a double-tap for instance. For these and the reasons above, we believe NFC Forum standards will provide the most capable, intuitive, and secure data carrier of DPP data for the market.”

For the rest of us

Millions of people use NFC every day for payments, car and hotel rooms, or even travel. That means the new NFC standard will deliver measurable benefits to consumers because it should work better than it does now. And for enterprises, the extended support for Multi-Purpose Taps should make for a variety of product and service development possibilities, particularly as Apple opens up access to NFC on its devices.

The NFC Release 15 is currently available to high-level NFC Forum member companies, including Apple, Google, Sony, and Huawei, who can now implement the improvements in their own products in advance of a public release as new iPhones appear in fall.

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Microsoft has announced plans to periodically remove legacy drivers from the Windows Update catalog to mitigate security and compatibility risks. [...]

LG UltraFine 40WT95UF bude skvělý pro produktivitu, ale potěší i hráče. • Nabízí rozlišení 5120 x 2160 px, 120 Hz a široké pokrytí barevného prostoru DCI-P3. • Disponuje Thunderboltem 5 a má hromadu dalších konektorů.

Nové číslo časopisu Raspberry Pi zdarma ke čtení: Raspberry Pi Official Magazine 154 (pdf). S podtitulem Automatizace domácnosti.

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Oxford City Council says a cyberattack earlier this month resulted in 21 years of data being compromised.…

Sam Altman mluvil o budoucnosti OpenAI a modelu GPT-5. • Novinka dorazí v létě, ale nakonec možná nebude tak přelomová. • Firma totiž postupně zlepšuje i stávající modely a generační skoky se zmenšují.

Americký prezident Donald Trump podepsal exekutivní příkaz, který prodlužuje lhůtu pro prodej amerických aktiv aplikace TikTok vlastněné čínskou společností ByteDance do amerických rukou o dalších 90 dnů. Americký Kongres loni v dubnu kvůli bezpečnostním obavám přijal zákon, podle kterého měl vstoupit v platnost zákaz sítě TikTok v USA v případě, že se prodej neuskuteční do 19. ledna. Trump však v lednu lhůtu pro prodej prodloužil o 75 dnů. V dubnu pak přikročil k prodloužení o dalších 75 dnů, lhůta tak měla vypršet dnešním dnem.

Microsoft hodlá zrušit další tisíce pracovních míst, a to především v obchodních odděleních. Předchozí kolo propouštění se uskutečnilo v květnu a dotklo se 6000 zaměstnanců. Vedení firmy již dříve upozornilo, že vzhledem k rozsáhlým investicím do umělé inteligence (AI) se bude snažit omezovat výdaje v jiných oblastech.

In a move that could redefine the boundaries between generative AI (genAI) and intellectual property, Disney and Universal have joined forces to file a lawsuit against Midjourney, one of the world’s most popular AI image generators. 

You may think you’ve heard this story before — The New York Times‘ 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft and News Corp. vs. Perplexity — but this case is different. For one thing, this is the first time major Hollywood studios with far more cash to prosecute the case have directly targeted a genAI company for copyright infringement. For another, Disney and Universal are both big AI users.

Disney and Universal allege that Midjourney’s platform is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” With Midjourney, all a subscriber need do to create unauthorized images of iconic characters such as Darth Vader, Elsa, the Minions, Shrek, and many others is to type in a prompt.

Original ‘Iron Man’ image is on the left; genAI-created image is on the right. 

Disney/Universal lawsuit

Original image is on the left; genAI image is on the right. 

Disney/Univeral lawsuit

There’s no question anyone can do it. If you don’t feel like trying it yourself, just look at some of the images in the Disney/Universal lawsuit complaint (shown above).

Can you tell which ones are the original from Avengers: Infinity War and which were generated by Midjourney? I can’t, and I have a good eye for this kind of thing. GenAI image creation has come a long way since all you had to do was count the number of fingers. (The originals are on the left.)

This didn’t require some kind of fancy prompt. As researchers have found, all you had to do to generate them was name the character and use the keyword “screencap,” and you quickly received your fake image. Or you could simply ask for “master super villain” or “armored superhero.” 

“This is not a ‘close call’ under well-settled copyright law,” the lawsuit claims. 

Correct. It’s not close at all.

In the company’s defense — if you can call it that — Midjourney CEO David Holz is on record as saying his AI has been trained on  “just a big scrape of the Internet.” What about copyrights on these images? 

“There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from. It would be cool if images had metadata embedded in them about the copyright owner or something. But that’s not a thing; there’s not a registry. There’s no way to find a picture on the Internet, and then automatically trace it to an owner and then have any way of doing anything to authenticate it.”

I think when it comes to Disney, it’s pretty darn obvious who owns the images. I mean, this is Disney, the big bad wolf of copyright. After Walt Disney lost the copyright to his earlier character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, he made darn sure that, starting with Mickey Mouse in 1928, he’d lock down its intellectual property for as close to forever as he could.

Indeed, over the decades, Disney has been behind laws to increase copyright coverage from a maximum of 56 years in 1928 to 75 years with the Copyright Act of 1976, and then 95 years with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998, better known as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” 

Disney has also never been shy about suing anyone who’d dare come close to their copyrighted images.  For example, in 1989, Disney threatened legal action against three daycare centers in Hallandale, FL., for painting murals of Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy on their walls. 

Why? Because it’s all about the Benjamins. 

Disney, and to a lesser extent Universal, live and die from monetizing their intellectual property (IP). Mind you, much of that IP is generated from the public domain. As the Center for the Study of the Public Domain noted: “The public domain is Disney’s bread and butter. Frozen was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. … Alice in Wonderland, Snow White, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and Pinocchio came from stories by Lewis Carroll, The Brothers Grimm, Victor Hugo, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, and Carlo Collodi.”

What Disney did with the public domain, MidJourney, and the rest of the AI companies want to do with pretty much everything on the Internet. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for instance,  has consistently argued that training genAI on copyrighted data should be considered “fair use.” He’s not alone.

On the other side of the fence, Disney and Universal’s lawsuit is not just about damages, which the pair puts at $150,000 per infringed work, but about setting a precedent. They want to stop Midjourney’s image and soon-to-be-launched video generation services in their tracks.

At the same time, the film studios freely admit they’re already using genAI themselves. Disney CEO Bob Iger has said the technology is already making Disney’s operations more efficient and enhancing creativity. “AI might indeed be the most potent technology our company has ever encountered, particularly in its capacity to enhance and allow consumers to access, experience, and appreciate our entertainment.” He also, of course, stressed that, “Given the speed that it is developing, we’re taking precautions to make sure of three things: One, that our IP is being protected. That’s incredibly important.”

This lawsuit is more than a Hollywood squabble; it’s a watershed moment in the ongoing debate over genAI, copyright, and the future of creative work. Previous cases have challenged the boundaries of fair use and data scraping, but none have involved the entertainment industry’s biggest players.

It might seem like a slam dunk for the Hollywood powerhouses. The images speak for themselves. But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in covering IP cases, it’s that you never know what a court will decide.

Besides, there’s a real wild card. Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan is still a work in progress. The AI companies are arguing that it should give them permission to use pretty much anything as grist for their large language models (LLMs), while the media companies want all the copyright protection they can get. 

Which way will Trump’s officials jump? We don’t know. But I have a bad feeling about where they’ll go.

You see, what we do know is that after the Copyright Office released a pre-publication version of its 108-page copyright and AI report, which strived to strike a middle ground  “by supporting both of these world-class industries that contribute so much to our economic and cultural advancement.” However, it added that while some generative AI probably constitutes a “transformative” use, the mass scraping of all data did not qualify as fair use.

The result? The Trump administration, while not commenting on the report, fired Shira Perlmutter, the head of the Copyright Office, the next day. She’s been replaced by an attorney with no IP experience. 

Oh, also, hidden away in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is a statement that imposes a 10-year ban on the enforcement of any state or local laws or regulations that “limit, restrict, or otherwise regulate” AI  models, AI systems, or automated decision systems. If that becomes law, whatever is in Trump’s AI Action Plan is what we’ll have to live with for the next few years.

As an author, I can’t tell you how unhappy that prospect makes me. I expect Trump to side with the AI companies, which means I can look forward to competing with my own repurposed work from here on out. 

Further reading:

• AI vs. copyright
• Court tosses hallucinated citation from Anthropic’s defense in copyright infringement case
• Eleuther AI releases 8TB collection of licensed and open training data
  

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Raketa Hondy letěla přesně a bezpečně přistála • Cílem jsou levnější a častější cesty do vesmíru • Japonsko podporuje soukromé firmy v kosmickém závodu

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Ačkoli jsme se dozvěděli, že PCIe 6.0 je prakticky za dveřmi a AMD má hotové stabilní rozhraní schopné fungovat na plných 64 GT/s, bude trvat ještě alespoň pět let, než se výsledek dotkne PC úložišť…

Důležitou roli v současném budování infrastruktury pro umělou inteligenci (AI) nehrají pouze USA, Čína a Tchaj-wan. Ty sice dodávají velké jazykové modely, čipy, datacentra nebo servery, ale obří datová centra za desítky až stovky miliard dolarů by nešla stavět bez evropských firem. Firmy jako ABB, ...

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Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) has announced the preview of a new service, Windows 365 Reserve, which aims to provide enterprises with backups for PCs that are lost, stolen, or simply fail.

It offers a temporary pre-configured Cloud PC, accessible through a browser, that, Microsoft said, “looks and feels like a physical PC, and is accessible from any device, anywhere.”

The Reserve Cloud PC is managed through Microsoft Intune, and includes corporate applications, settings, and security policies, as well as Microsoft 365 apps (assuming the organization subscribes to M365) and OneDrive data sync.

The free preview will begin “soon”, the announcement said, and will run for up to 12 weeks.

There are restrictions, however. Preview participants must have a Windows E3 license, an Intune license, and Microsoft Entra ID P1 (formerly Azure Active Directory Premium Plan 1, or AADP1). Sovereign cloud customers are not supported, and participants must perform a few chores, including completing what the sign-up form calls “a set of admin and end user validation scenarios,” and then provide feedback on the experience.

Andrew Sharp, research director at Info-Tech Research Group, is impressed with the concept.

“In preview, the service claims it will allow an administrator to pre-stage a cloud PC, already loaded with the company’s policies, apps and security controls, so it can be handed to a stranded user in minutes,” he said. “Imagine your laptop dies at a client site. Helpdesk fires off a link, you open it in a browser or the Windows app, and you’re back at a familiar, compliant desktop before your coffee gets cold. At least that’s what they’re promising.” 

He likes the idea that Intune manages the virtual devices, so there’s no new control plane to learn, and he also sees potential for other use cases besides providing backups for PCs.

“Reserve could also be a low-friction way to dabble with virtual desktops with minimal commitment,” he noted. However, he does have reservations. “Microsoft’s value proposition is clear: quicker, safer recovery for lost, stolen, or broken devices,” he said. “At the end of the day, IT will still need an operational playbook. How does a user reach support when the primary device fails? Is a physical replacement shipped, or is Reserve the stopgap? Which applications and policies belong in the Reserve image? IT teams will need to sort out those workflows to make Windows 365 Reserve a practical resilience tool and not just another SKU.”

More Microsoft news and insights:

• Microsoft to cut thousands more jobs, mainly in sales
• Global Microsoft 365 outage disrupts Teams and Exchange services
• Microsoft is finally fixing app updates on Windows
• Microsoft adds enterprise search and ‘digital labor’ tools to M365 Copilot
• First-ever zero-click attack targets Microsoft 365 Copilot
  

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