Lifeboat Foundation

The US firm best known for its gaming tech has long been ahead of the curve in supplying the tools needed by tech developers.

It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.

Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary… More.

June 14 — Bill Maris, Google Ventures chief executive officer, comments on artificial intelligence’s impact on biotech, the prospects for Theranos and the venture capital environment. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang from the Bloomberg Technology Conference in San Francisco on “Bloomberg West.”

Schmidt has become an indispensable adviser to government, even as some of his investments have won federal contracts.

Eric Schmidt isn’t shy about his wealth and power: The former Google CEO recently won an auction for a superyacht seized from a Russian oligarch, he owns a big stake in a secretive and successful hedge fund and he spent $15 million for the Manhattan penthouse featured in Oliver Stone’s sequel to Wall Street.

He has also leveraged his $27 billion fortune to build a powerful influence machine in Washington that’s allowed him to shape public policy to reflect his worldview and benefit the industries in which he’s deeply invested — most recently, artificial intelligence. When senators meet next week to hear from tech executives and experts about how AI should be regulated, Schmidt will be at the table.

Google Chrome browser extensions expose users to hackers who can easily tap into their private data, including social security numbers, passwords and banking information, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M).

The researchers further uncovered vulnerabilities involving passwords that are stored in plain text within HTML source code on web sites of some of the world’s largest corporate giants, including Google, Amazon, Citibank, Capital One and the Internal Revenue Service.

The problem stems from the manner in which extensions access internal web page code.

The United States government said today that a multinational law enforcement operation has destroyed Qakbot, also known as QBot, an infamous botnet and malware loader that was responsible for losses that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars all over the globe, and that they have confiscated more than $8.6 million in illegal cryptocurrencies.

During a news conference held on Tuesday to announce the takedown of the botnet, United States Attorney Martin Estrada referred to the investigation as “the most significant technological and financial operation ever led by the Department of Justice against a botnet.” Duck Hunt was headed by the FBI. For one thing, the federal government developed some software that, when installed on computers that were infected with Qbot, would make the virus useless.

Continue reading “How FBI remotely deleted QBot malware from 700K computers worldwide” »

Sending an email with a forged address is easier than previously thought, due to flaws in the process that allows email forwarding, according to a research team led by computer scientists at the University of California San Diego.

The issues researchers uncovered have a broad impact, affecting the integrity of email sent from tens of thousands of domains, including those representing organizations in the U.S. government—such as the majority of U.S. cabinet email domains, including state.gov, as well as security agencies. Key financial service companies, such as Mastercard, and major news organizations, such as The Washington Post and the Associated Press, are also vulnerable.

It’s called forwarding-based spoofing and researchers found that they can send email messages impersonating these organizations, bypassing the safeguards deployed by email providers such as Gmail and Outlook. Once recipients get the spoofed email, they are more likely to open attachments that deploy malware, or to click on links that install spyware on their machine.

Everyone’s experienced the regret of telling a secret they should’ve kept. Once that information is shared, it can’t be taken back. It’s just part of the human experience.

Now it’s part of the AI experience, too. Whenever someone shares something with a generative AI tool — whether it’s a transcript they’re trying to turn into a paper or financial data they’re attempting to analyze — it cannot be taken back.

Generative AI solutions such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have been dominating headlines. The technologies show massive promise for a myriad of use cases and have already begun to change the way we work. But along with these big new opportunities come big risks.

Digital information exchange can be safer, cheaper and more environmentally friendly with the help of a new type of random number generator for encryption developed at Linköping University, Sweden. The researchers behind the study believe that the new technology paves the way for a new type of quantum communication.

In an increasingly connected world, cybersecurity is becoming increasingly important to protect not just the individual, but also, for example, national infrastructure and banking systems. And there is an ongoing race between hackers and those trying to protect information. The most common way to protect information is through encryption. So when we send emails, pay bills and shop online, the information is digitally encrypted.

To encrypt information, a random number generator is used, which can either be a computer program or the hardware itself. The random number generator provides keys that are used to both encrypt and unlock the information at the receiving end.

Today marks nine months since ChatGPT was released, and six weeks since we announced our AI Start seed fund. Based on our conversations with scores of inception and early-stage AI founders, and hundreds of leading CXOs (chief experience officers), I can attest that we are definitely in exuberant times.

In the span of less than a year, AI investments have become de rigueur in any portfolio, new private company unicorns are being created every week, and the idea that AI will drive a stock market rebound is taking root. People outside of tech are becoming familiar with new vocabulary.

Continue reading “A ‘people-first’ view of the AI economy” »