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Elon Musk said he’d love to see ‘ads for gizmos’ on Twitter because otherwise he has to have his assistant find the gizmo he sees online and buy it for him

He added: “Being asked to sign up for a mortgage when you have no interest in that whatsoever is annoying and spam.”

The Tesla CEO went on to describe his own penchant for social-media shopping and his targeted product advertising strategy would facilitate it.

“I’d love to see ads for gizmos. If I saw ads for gizmos, I love gizmos, of course, I’d buy them all in a click,” he said. “Even if they’re not that great, I’ll still buy gizmos. I love technology. I’ll see content for gizmos but not an ad or an ability to actually buy the gizmo.”

‘Economic Picture Ahead Is Dire,’ Elon Musk Tells Twitter Employees

SAN FRANCISCO — Two weeks after closing a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, Elon Musk painted a bleak financial picture for the social media company and outlined a series of changes for employees in his first companywide emails to staff.

In two emails sent to workers late on Wednesday, Mr. Musk said the economy was challenging. He added that he planned to end Twitter’s remote work policy and wanted employees to renew their focus on generating revenue and fighting spam.

“Sorry that this is my first email to the company, but there is no way to sugarcoat the message,” Mr. Musk, 51, wrote in one email. “The economic picture ahead is dire.” Twitter was too heavily dependent on advertising and vulnerable to pullbacks in brand spending, he added, and would need to bolster the revenue it gets from subscriptions.

Scientist claims he has made the ultimate unhackable voting machine

Experts do not want to hack it.

Juan Gilbert, a professor of computer science at the University of Florida, has claimed that he has built the ultimate unhackable voting machine that can put concerns to rest over machine-related voting, Undark.

Electronic voting systems have the U.S. divided, with advocates calling them reliable aides to the voting process, helping people with disabilities to vote, and reducing invalid ballots. On the other hand, critics have called for their boycott since they can be hacked and can tilt the vote in favor of a person or party.

Companies engaged in building voting machines, an industry with annual revenues of $300 million, do not help matters as they chose to remain secretive about how their machines work and refuse to talk to researchers or the press, the Undark report said. Under these circumstances, Gilbert’s work is commendable since he has built a system that works using open-source software.

Researchers Uncover 29 Malicious PyPI Packages Targeted Developers with W4SP Stealer

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered 29 packages in Python Package Index (PyPI), the official third-party software repository for the Python programming language, that aim to infect developers’ machines with a malware called W4SP Stealer.

“The main attack seems to have started around October 12, 2022, slowly picking up steam to a concentrated effort around October 22,” software supply chain security company Phylum said in a report published this week.

The list of offending packages is as follows: typesutil, typestring, sutiltype, duonet, fatnoob, strinfer, pydprotect, incrivelsim, twyne, pyptext, installpy, faq, colorwin, requests-httpx, colorsama, shaasigma, stringe, felpesviadinho, cypress, pystyte, pyslyte, pystyle, pyurllib, algorithmic, oiu, iao, curlapi, type-color, and pyhints.

CISA Warns of Critical Vulnerabilities in 3 Industrial Control System Software

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published three Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories about multiple vulnerabilities in software from ETIC Telecom, Nokia, and Delta Industrial Automation.

Prominent among them is a set of three flaws affecting ETIC Telecom’s Remote Access Server (RAS), which “could allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information and compromise the vulnerable device and other connected machines,” CISA said.

Ethical AI Team Says Bias Bounties Can More Quickly Expose Algorithmic Flaws

Bias in AI systems is proving to be a major stumbling block in efforts to more broadly integrate the technology into our society.

A new initiative that will reward researchers for finding any prejudices in AI systems could help solve the problem.

The effort is modeled on the bug bounties that software companies pay to cybersecurity experts who alert them of any potential security flaws in their products.

LIVE — BECOMING: AN INTERACTIVE JOURNEY IN VR

Gallery QI — Becoming: An Interactive Music Journey in VR — Opening Night.
November 3rd, 2022 — Atkinson Hall auditorium.
UC San Diego — La Jolla, CA

By Shahrokh Yadegari, John Burnett, Eito Murakami and Louis Pisha.

“Becoming” is the result of a collaborative work that was initiated at the Opera Hack organized by San Diego Opera. It is an operatic VR experience based on a Persian poem by Mowlana Rumi depicting the evolution of human spirit. The audience experiences visual, auditory and tactile impressions which are partly curated and partly generated interactively in response to the player’s actions.

“Becoming” incorporates fluid and reactive graphical material which embodies the process of transformation depicted in the Rumi poem. Worlds seamlessly morph between organic and synthetic environments such as oceans, mountains and cities and are populated by continuously evolving life forms. The music is a union of classical Persian music fused with electronic music where the human voice becomes the beacon of spirit across the different stages of the evolution. The various worlds are constructed by the real-time manipulation of particle systems, flocking algorithms and terrain generation methods—all of which can be touched and influenced by the viewer. Audience members can be connected through the network and haptic feedback technology provides human interaction cues as well as an experiential stimulus.

While the piece is a major artistic endeavor, it also showcases a number of key technologies and streaming techniques for the development of musical content in XR. The spatialization system Space3D, developed at Sonic Arts and implemented to run on advanced GPUs, is capable of creating highly realistic spatial impressions, and recreating the acoustics of the environment based on the virtual models in real-time using advanced multi-processing ray-tracing techniques.

“Becoming” premiered at SIGGRAPH 2022, Immersive Pavilion in Vancouver, Canada in August 2022. Opera America and San Diego Opera showcased an early preview of this work as part of the first Opera Hack presentations in 2020.