Lifeboat Foundation

It simply does not make sense to keep the disks spinning.

Data storage on hard drives will soon become a thing of the past, according to an expert Shawn Rosemarin, who also owns a company selling solid-storage solutions. According to Rosemarin, we could see the last hard drive being sold in just about five years from now, PC Gamer.

Most computer users have long migrated to cloud storage solutions when it comes to safely storing their data. With content being streamed on smartphones and tablets practically everywhere, there is little reason to own a hard drive these days.

May 12 (Reuters) — Apple (AAPL.O) said on Friday it would open its first online store in Vietnam next week, as the iPhone vendor doubles down on emerging markets to drive growth amid slowing sales in China.

The opening on May 18 comes just weeks after the Cupertino, California-based company opened its first Apple stores in India — Mumbai and Delhi.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is betting that emerging markets will provide more opportunities for growth, with younger populations and relatively few iPhones.

Yeah, feels a bit harder to take it seriously when the company paying for the study has so much skin in the game.

Humane/Ted/YouTube.

The former Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno developed Humane with a “future that is even more intelligent and even more personal,” according to the company’s website.

May 11 (Reuters) — Google announced a flurry of artificial intelligence products – but users might need AI just to understand them all.

The Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) unit on Wednesday demonstrated or referenced at least 15 different AI products and features ranging from software solely for creating smartphone wallpaper to another for organizing personal files to yet another for photo editing.

Attendees of Google’s I/O conference in Mountain View, California, could be forgiven for leaving the annual event with their heads spinning. Take one of Google’s press releases from the event: “Duet AI serves as your expert pair programmer and assists cloud users with contextual code completion, offering suggestions tuned to your code base, generating entire functions in real-time, and assisting you with code reviews and inspections.”

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google on Wednesday disclosed plans to infuse its dominant search engine with more advanced artificial-intelligence technology, a drive that’s in response to one of the biggest threats to its long-established position as the internet’s main gateway.

The gradual shift in how Google’s search engine runs is rolling out three months after Microsoft’s Bing search engine started to tap into technology similar to that which powers the artificially intelligent chatbot ChatGPT, which has created one of Silicon Valley’s biggest buzzes since Apple released the first iPhone 16 years ago.

Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., already has been testing its own conversational chatbot called Bard. That product, powered by technology called generative AI that also fuels ChatGPT, has only been available to people accepted from a waitlist. But Google announced Wednesday that Bard will be available to all comers in more than 180 countries and more languages beyond English.

The demo is clever, questionably real, and prompts a lot of questions about how this device will actually work.

Buzz has been building around the secretive tech startup Humane for over a year, and now the company is finally offering a look at what it’s been building. At TED last month, Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri gave a demonstration of the AI-powered wearable the company is building as a replacement for smartphones. Bits of the video leaked online after the event, but the full video is now available to watch.

The device appears to be a small black puck that slips into your breast pocket, with a camera, projector, and speaker sticking out the top.

Continue reading “Humane’s new wearable AI demo is wild to watch — and we have lots of questions” »

A Twitter engineer says the app accessed his phone’s mic as he slept, prompting Musk’s response, though he has an incentive to attack a rival app. WhatsApp blames the issue on a Google bug.

Over the past year, SideWinder has been linked to a cyber attack aimed at Pakistan Navy War College (PNWC) as well as an Android malware campaign that leveraged rogue phone cleaner and VPN apps uploaded to the Google Play Store to harvest sensitive information.

The latest infection chain documented by BlackBerry mirrors findings from Chinese cybersecurity firm QiAnXin in December 2022 detailing the use of PNWC lure documents to drop a lightweight. NET-based backdoor (App.dll) that’s capable of retrieving and executing next-stage malware from a remote server.

What makes the campaign also stand out is the threat actor’s use of server-based polymorphism as a way to potentially sidestep traditional signature-based antivirus (AV) detection and distribute additional payloads by responding with two different versions of an intermediate RTF file.