Daily Tech News 25 July 2024

• KnowBe4, a US company providing security awareness training, hired a North Korean hacker. (Ars Technica)

  KnowBe4 operates in 11 countries and is headquartered in Florida. It provides security awareness training, including phishing security tests, to corporate customers. If you occasionally receive a fake phishing email from your employer, you might be working for a company that uses the KnowBe4 service to test its employees' ability to spot scams.

  Or it could be a North Korean hacker whose scam was not spotted.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in security failure news after causing billions of dollars in damage worldwide, CrowdStrike has sent out $10 Uber Eats gift cards to its affected partners. (Tech Crunch)
  
  No, there aren't any digits missing there. Yes, that will just about cover a medium fries from McDonalds.

• The launch date of AMD's Ryzen 9000 series has been pushed back by one to two weeks after faulty chips were detected in the initial production run. (AnandTech)
  
  Apparently all chips shipped to retailers have been recalled for testing before any are sold. The low-end 9600X and 9700X will be available by the 8th of August now, and the 9900X and 9950X by the 15th.
  
  Which is a lot better than selling them for a couple of years before admitting that there's a problem.
  
  
  
• JEDEC is preparing for LPDDR6 CAMM2. (AnandTech)
  
  CAMM2 modules have just started showing up in laptops. They are thinner than SODIMMs since they rest flat on the motherboard, and are 128 bits wide so you only need one of them for full bandwidth.
  
  With LPDDR6 the plan is to increase the width to 192 bits, and the maximum speed from 9.2GHz to 14.4GHz - more than twice as fast overall.
  
  That should allow for a significant increase in internal graphics performance for laptop chips, since they are currently limited more by memory bandwidth than anything else. All while retaining memory upgradability.
  
  With two of these you'd get almost the bandwidth of a current high-end card like Nvidia's RTX 4080 Super - and be able to upgrade the memory on your graphics card to 192GB, maybe even 384GB.
  
  Almost enough to run the new Llama 405b.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake-S beats the 14900K by up to 18% when both are constrained to 250W. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In fact, it's even slightly faster than a 9950X at 160W. Allow the 9950X to use its default maximum power of 230W and it regains the lead by about 7%.
  
  
  
• If you fork a public repo on GitHub, push something to it you shouldn't have, and then delete the entire fork in a panic, don't worry. You're screwed anyway so there's no point in worrying. (Truffle Security)
  
  And vice versa. If someone forks your public repo, and you delete the public repo, everything is still there.
  
  
  
• Someone spent $22,000 trying to buy a Hugo Award, but failed because they are lazy and/or stupid. (The Guardian)

  The Hugo administration subcommittee, which tallies the votes for the annual awards, issued a statement on Monday saying that they had determined that 377 votes had been cast by individuals with "obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics".
  
  These included voters with almost identical surnames, with just one letter changed and placed in alphabetical order, and some whose names were "translations of consecutive numbers".

  Most depressing point is the analysis that says that even the Best Novel Hugo is not worth $22,000 in sales.
  
  
• In cheerier news OpenAI is expected to lose $5 billion in 2024. (Datacenter Dynamics)
  
  Couldn't happen to a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
  
  
  
• More technical details on Zen 5, specifically the mobile chips. (Serve the Home)
  
  Just a note: I previously said that Zen 5 increased the instruction issue rate from 4 instructions per cycle to 8. That's not correct.
  
  Zen 3 and Zen 4 could decode 4 instructions per cycle, and issue 6 operations. (One X86 instruction can be broken up into multiple operations.)
  
  Zen 5 increases both the decode and issue width to 8 per cycle.
  
  
  
• The Verge is big mad that Marc Andressen and Ben Horowitz have escaped the reservation. (The Verge)
  
  How dare venture capitalists focus on venture capitalism and not vote for the destruction of the country like good little robots?
  
  
  
• AI needs high-quality human-generated data for training. That comes from the internet. But the internet is becoming increasingly overrun with AI-generated garbage. How screwed is future AI training? All the screwed. (Tech Crunch)

  But the thing is, models gravitate toward the most common output. It won't give you a controversial snickerdoodle recipe but the most popular, ordinary one. And if you ask an image generator to make a picture of a dog, it won't give you a rare breed it only saw two pictures of in its training data; you'll probably get a golden retriever or a Lab.
  
  Now, combine these two things with the fact that the web is being overrun by AI-generated content and that new AI models are likely to be ingesting and training on that content. That means they're going to see a lot of goldens!

  The paper in Nature is pretty technical, and the supplementary content even more so, but in the Tech Crunch article there is an image that explains everything. In just four steps, the AI goes from a fairly representative idea of dogs to complete garbage.
  
  
  

• The Fifth Circuit has issued an en banc ruling holding that the FCC's "Universal Service Fee" is a tax and therefore unconstitutional. (Reason)
  
  They actually used the term misbegotten so you know they're serious.
  
  This one will be going to the Supreme Court for sure.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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