مک-بوک

MacStadium’s VMWare virtualization replacement now available at AWS

by with No Comment Business

Developers seeking a replacement for VMWare’s vSphere environment for virtualized Macs can now access MacStadium’s Orka Platform at the AWS Marketplace.

Reflecting the growing popularity of the Mac platform, Mac cloud and SaaS provider MacStadium’s Orka Platform is now available to purchase at the AWS Marketplace, a move that brings Orka to Amazon EC2 Mac instances.

Mac my devs up

Orka Workspace is a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution that delivers Mac desktops through the browser. Making this available via AWS should be a big boost to Mac teams that already use hyperscale cloud providers for non-Mac development.

It follows VMware’s decision to abandon support of Mac in its popular vSphere virtualization environment.

The technology provides a software layer that eliminates demanding manual configuration and maintenance on repetitive processes.

This could be of particular use to enterprise developers attempting to build support for Macs through their own proprietary business systems, given the rapid evolution of Macs-in-enterprise use.

It means they can access as much Mac power as they need to accelerate tasks, without making huge investments in on-premises hardware that may spend the majority of its time unused.

What is Orka Platform?

Orka Platform enables enterprise-grade Mac development in virtualized environments. To achieve this, it uses Kubernetes to create a scalable macOS solution that lets developers access virtual Macs as they need them.

It can scale to handle anything from Xcode builds to fully integrated and complex CI/CD pipelines. The solution can handle Continuous Integration (CI) build runners such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab, TeamCity and others.

With more than 10 years’ experience in Macs and servers, MacStadium also provides expert support for Orka Platform users.

chat-gpd

OpenAI launches APIs for ChatGPT and Whisper

by with No Comment Business

The speech-to-text offering Whisper and AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT could now cost 10 times lower, according to OpenAI.

OpenAI has made available APIs for ChatGPT and the company’s AI-powered transcription and translation service Whisper. These APIs will help businesses to integrate ChatGPT and Whisper into their conversation platforms and will be substantially cheaper than using the company’s existing language model.

“Through a series of system-wide optimizations, we’ve achieved 90% cost reduction for ChatGPT since December; we’re now passing through those savings to API users,” the company said in a blog post.

OpenAI launched Whisper in September and ChatGPT in November. Now with this API offering, ChatGPT and Whisper can now be officially integrated into third party software.

“ChatGPT and Whisper models are now available on our API, giving developers access to cutting-edge language (not just chat!) and speech-to-text capabilities,” the company said.

Speech-to-text with Whisper

Whisper enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages to English.

Whisper has garnered massive praise from the developer community but can also be “hard to run”, OpenAI admitted. The company has “now made the large-v2 model available through our API, which gives convenient on-demand access priced at $0.006 / minute (of audio input),” it said.

Whisper’s large-v2 model in the API provides much faster and cost-effective results, OpenAI said.

Whisper accepts files in multiple formats including M4A, MP3, MP4, MPEG, MPGA, WAV and WEBM. It is trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web.

x-ray1

MIT’s Augmented Reality Headset Enables You To See Hidden Objects

by with No Comment Business

An augmented reality headset combines computer vision and wireless perception to automatically locate a specific item that is hidden from view, perhaps inside a box or under a pile, and then guide the user to retrieve it.

The device could help workers locate objects for fulfilling e-commerce orders or identify parts for assembling products.

MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision.

The headset combines computer vision and wireless perception to automatically locate a specific item that is hidden from view, perhaps inside a box or under a pile, and then guide the user to retrieve it.

The system utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals, which can pass through common materials like cardboard boxes, plastic containers, or wooden dividers, to find hidden items that have been labeled with RFID tags, which reflect signals sent by an RF antenna.

The headset directs the wearer as they walk through a room toward the location of the item, which shows up as a transparent sphere in the augmented reality (AR) interface. Once the item is in the user’s hand, the headset, called X-AR, verifies that they have picked up the correct object.

When the researchers tested X-AR in a warehouse-like environment, the headset could localize hidden items to within 9.8 centimeters, on average. And it verified that users picked up the correct item with 96 percent accuracy.

X-AR could aid e-commerce warehouse workers in quickly finding items on cluttered shelves or buried in boxes, or by identifying the exact item for an order when many similar objects are in the same bin. It could also be used in a manufacturing facility to help technicians locate the correct parts to assemble a product.

Untitled-1

Microsoft’s new Bing chatbot is fun but sometimes more cautious than ChatGPT

by with No Comment Business

Microsoft has given a small group of people early access to the new version of its Bing search engine boosted with artificial intelligence courtesy of startup OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

CNBC has spent some time testing it. The new Bing can at times be more helpful, or at least more entertaining, than the usual blue links in search results. And it’s similar to ChatGPT in that it provides a lot more information than you might expect from a traditional search.

If Microsoft manages to get more people to use Bing, it could make the company even more profitable than it already is. For every percentage point that Microsoft gains in search advertising, it will pick up $2 billion in new revenue, Phil Ockenden, finance chief for the company’s Windows, devices and search divisions, said on a Tuesday conference call with analysts. “This is the largest software category that exists, and it’s incredibly profitable, incredibly large and still growing,” Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, said on the call.

So far, the new Bing feels like it’s been supercharged, and at the very least, people might want to try it out to see if it satisfies them more than traditional search engines that billions of people have come to know in the past 25 years.

You can chat with the new Bing

After you search on Bing, you can challenge the results rather than clicking on a few URLs or typing out a new query. To compare, I asked the current version of Bing to identify the largest software category, to which it said the answer is “enterprise software” with a citation to Statista. The new version provides similar information at the top of the search results page, but below that, you’ll find a text box in which you can type a message and kick off a chat. You might ask, “Really?” And Bing will respond with more information attempting to validate its previous answer.That gets into the question of accuracy. You might ask the AI-boosted search engine if the response is wrong, for example. And the new chat feature will say that “one could argue that search advertising is the largest software category in the world by revenue,” and hedges by noting there are many ways to evaluate different kinds of software. That’s not what we’re used to seeing when we go to a search engine. It’s downright entertaining.

Recovered

Augmented reality headset enables users to see hidden objects

by with No Comment Business

MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision.

The headset combines computer vision and wireless perception to automatically locate a specific item that is hidden from view, perhaps inside a box or under a pile, and then guide the user to retrieve it.

The system utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals, which can pass through common materials like cardboard boxes, plastic containers, or wooden dividers, to find hidden items that have been labeled with RFID tags, which reflect signals sent by an RF antenna.

The headset directs the wearer as they walk through a room toward the location of the item, which shows up as a transparent sphere in the augmented reality (AR) interface. Once the item is in the user’s hand, the headset, called X-AR, verifies that they have picked up the correct object.

When the researchers tested X-AR in a warehouse-like environment, the headset could localize hidden items to within 9.8 centimeters, on average. And it verified that users picked up the correct item with 96 percent accuracy.

X-AR could aid e-commerce warehouse workers in quickly finding items on cluttered shelves or buried in boxes, or by identifying the exact item for an order when many similar objects are in the same bin. It could also be used in a manufacturing facility to help technicians locate the correct parts to assemble a product.

“Our whole goal with this project was to build an augmented reality system that allows you to see things that are invisible — things that are in boxes or around corners — and in doing so, it can guide you toward them and truly allow you to see the physical world in ways that were not possible before,” says Fadel Adib, who is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the director of the Signal Kinetics group in the Media Lab, and the senior author of a paper on X-AR.

Untitled-1

How Bing AI Search Uses Website Content

by with No Comment Business

The way Microsoft uses website content and AI in Bing Search is a win for publishers and users

There are two sides of this, the front end and the back end.

On the front end, Bing is blending links to website sources within a relevant contextual output. That’s a win for publishers because that has the potential for a better search referral without the ambiguity of the traditional ten blue links.

The back end features the Bing Orchestrator, which uses the web data contained in the Bing index to ground the GPT part, improving relevance of the output, which is also a win for publishers.

 

Microsoft Prometheus Model

Microsoft has previously described the Prometheus AI Model, a collection of techniques for interacting with the OpenAI model.

The latest blog post provides new details about what the new Bing search with AI is.

What first stands out is that OpenAI shared their next generation version of GPT with Microsoft in the summer of 2022.

This next generation model features “creative reasoning capabilities” that are more powerful than GPT-3.5, the technology underpinning ChatGPT.

 
Untitled-1

Sci-fi magazine overwhelmed by hundreds of AI-generated stories

by with No Comment Business

Clarkesworld, a science fiction magazine, has banned new story submissions after receiving hundreds of low-quality AI-generated pieces

Science fiction magazine Clarkesworld has halted story submissions after receiving a growing deluge of AI-generated pieces. The magazine’s founding editor, Neil Clarke, says the problem has been created by people promoting surprisingly capable AI language models such as ChatGPT as a way to earn money from fiction publishing – despite the poor quality of the AI stories.

“The machine-written submissions we’ve received are far from publishable quality,” he says. “I’m sure there are some that are less detectable, but the majority we’ve received have been easy for me to identify.”

Clarke says that he has talked to other magazine editors who currently have the same problem, although he says they have been reluctant to speak to the press – as he was, until the problem grew to unsustainable levels.

 

The magazine normally has an open submission policy to encourage new writers, but took the decision to close submissions on 20 February after receiving 50 AI-generated story submissions that day. At that point, Clarkesworld had received 700 legitimate submissions since the start of the month and 500 machine-generated ones, with the rate of increase meaning that AI-generated stories would soon take over.

 
عکس کاور برای بلاگ دوم

Old Cisco Routers Won’t Be Patched Against RCE Bug

by with No Comment Business
Remote management needs to be blocked.

Cisco has disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in a number of small business routers, along with high-severity vulnerabilities in three other products.

In its first patch release for 2023, the networking giant said its RV016, RV042, RV042G and RV082 routers are vulnerable to an authentication bypass bug (CVE-2023-20025) and a remote command execution (RCE) bug (CVE-2023-20026).

The authentication bypass can be exploited by sending crafted HTTP packets to the management interface, giving the attacker root access to the target system.

The RCE bug is similar, but can only be exploited by a remote attacker who has admin credentials on the affected system.

Cisco said it is aware of proof-of-concept code for the vulnerabilities.

The affected units are approaching end-of-life and won’t be patched. However, admins can disable remote management and block access to TCP/IP ports 443 and 60443.

“A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause all subsequent requests to be dropped, resulting in a DoS condition”, the advisory stated.

 

مامین-انگبسیی

Tiny throat mic can detect and broadcast silently mouthed words

by with No Comment Business

A small patch worn on the throat can pick up even silently mouthed speech and broadcast it, which could help some people who are unable to speak

A patch worn outside the throat can detect your speech and broadcast it even when you silently mouth words. It could help workers in noisy environments or people with speech difficulties communicate.

Some throat microphones already exist, but they tend to be bulky and can only detect vibrations from quiet speech, not silently mouthed words.

To improve on this, Qisheng Yang at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and his colleagues have created a patch just 25 micrometres thick and …

Untitled-2

Python’s PyPI registry suffers another supply-chain attack

by with No Comment Business

PyTorch-nightly dependency compromised.

Unknown attackers have compromised a package in the Python PyPI registry, injecting a malicious binary into it, the maintainers of the open source machine learning framework PyTorch are warning.The compromised package is torchtriton, which is part of the Triton language and compiler which is used for writing custom deep-learning primitives.PyTorch maintainers said the compromised dependency affected the nightly release of their code, but not the stable packages.The compromised torchtriton dependency would gather system information such as nameservers, the logged in username, working directory and operating system environment variables.It would also read system and files in the user’s home directory, and upload the information to an attacker-controlled server via encrypted domain name system (DNS) queries.Users who installed PyTorch-nightly between December 26 and December 31 Australian time are advised to uninstall the torch, torchvision, torchaudio and torchtriton packages, and use newer binaries instead.
The torchtriton package has been replaced as a dependency for PyTorch with pytorch-triton, and a dummy binary registered on PyPI to avoid a repeat of the issue.

According to security vendor Snyk, torchtriton package receives just over 2700 downloads a week on average, and is not considered to be a popular dependency.PyTorch said it has contacted the PyPI the security team to get ownership of torchtriton and to delete the malicious version.

The PyPI registry has suffered several supply-chain attacks over the past few years, with malicious code injection.